It was 2015-10-13. Holy shit, I had future shock. I’d just bought a hardcover comic book (A4 size, full color, sewn in signatures) of Rubius. The Youtuber. At a newspaper stand.
Who is Rubius? He had 14 million subscribers on YouTube; now, 2017-01-10, he has 22.6 million. Has there ever been a public access cable show with 22 million fans? Mostly they’re gaming videos. He describes it as follows: “My channel of Gayplays of Minecr... Wait. No. My channel is of Gayplays in general, but I never play anything predefined. Some days you’ll find horror games, others fun games, others indie games, etc., but I don’t only upload Gayplays!”
I have no idea what “gayplays” are.
I’d heard of Rubius previously because when he had come to Argentina the year before, 2014, there was a problem when his fans showed up at the airport.
Paul Visscher estimated that he easily makes 7 or 8 figures per year with his six million views per video.
I’m just surprised to live in a world where a gamer uploading videos to YouTube is merchandising his brand via comic book spinoffs.
I looked into the economics of the comic book slightly. I bought the book for US$9.50. The printing is done, not somewhere in Asia, but by Cartoon S.A. in Salta, Argentina. The Argentine copy I have says it’s the second edition (which I think means “printing”), printed in 30,000 copies. The artist is María Dolores Aldea, aka Lolita Aldea. She posted the first 10 pages in PDF on her web site, from which we can see that the Spain version of the book is printed by Unigraf SL, a Spanish company, in Catalonia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, near Valencia. They also print invitation cards and personalized paper napkins.
Cartoon S.A. is a little harder to figure out, but it looks like they mostly do graphic design and printing for brochures and stuff like that.
It seems like the “publisher”, as distinct from the two and presumably more printing companies, is the “children and young adult” imprint of Grupo Planeta. It doesn’t seem to be a vanity press like, say, Blurb or Lulu. It was founded 70 years ago.
So, I’m thinking that Editorial Planeta (“Planet Publisher”) probably bought personality rights from Rubius and are paying royalties to him and the cartoonist. Most of their kids’ books seem to be cartoon books where they licensed the characters from someone else: Maya the Bee (although the original book is out of copyright, the book looks like a spinoff from the TV series), Violetta, Pixar’s Planes. Apparently this is their second Rubius book; the first one was “The Troll Book”.
The thing that surprised me was not so much that there is a guy who is well-known among Spanish-speaking video game fans — his videos are in Spanish — but rather that he was so well-known that random newspaper stands on the street were selling comic-book spinoffs from his YouTube channel. This was future-shockish to me. Again. Like in 1994 when suddenly the number of internet books in bookstores went from like 3 to like 300 in the course of a few months, or 1996 or 1997 when suddenly advertising had URLs in it. It’s kind of mindblowing to me that a gaming channel on YouTube is now a licensable brand on the same level as Disney shows and Pixar movies. And this was apparently their “most commented” book in the “young adult” category, although the Violetta and Maya and Planes books are in a different category; Violetta. En mi mundo is one example.
It’s also interesting that this 70-year-old press is outsourcing the actual printing of these books to random graphic design storefronts in different countries.