Why Comic Book Sales are Actually Falling

Despite the fact that comic book movies, TV shows, and video games are as popular as ever, sales of comic books themselves continue to decline. Marvel and DC never really recovered from the crash in the 90s. Some commentators, mostly white right-wingers, say the decline is due to characters like Miles Morales up there and that comics are being “preachy.”

Well. comics have always been preachy. Heck, comic book superheroes were fighting Hitler in fiction before our government was fighting Hitler in real life. Superman had a whole radio series where he fought the KKK and displayed their general ridiculousness and various secret codes obtained by the FBI. The X-Men are an allegory for the various Civil Rights Movements. Every sentence I just wrote would be called “wokeness” today. So obviously wokeness isn’t the problem.

So what is killing comic books? Let’s look.

1. The Comic Book Store

Every adult in this niche has their favorite comic book store. But the thing is, the largest primary audience for comic books and comic book-related media is children. Long ago, comic book publishers understood that and put comic books in places where kids could easily get to them. Places like corner stores and drug stores a kid might walk by or get sent to on an errand.

But then the comic book store came. Suddenly, comics were yanked off the shelves of the easily accessible pharmacies and corner stores and placed in an out-of-the-way comic book store that is a 20–30 minute drive away from most kids’ houses. And since kids can’t drive, they have to ask their parents to take them to the comic book store. And most working parents aren’t going to use up an hour to buy a short book that will only get read once. If kids are lucky, they might find comics in the local library. But there’s no guarantee they’ll find the issue they need to continue the story of the character they’re interested in.

And as adults get older, they find themselves less and less able to make the trip when they have adult responsibilities to tend to. So the comic book industry has to attract new fans. Only there’s a problem.

2. American Comic Books Are Confusing

Let’s compare comics with manga. Mangas sell more in America than American comic books. Some would say that’s because manga isn’t “woke.” I would say that’s nonsense. Most new comic book fans aren’t shopping for comics based on politics or lack thereof. They shop for accessibility. The reason manga sells better is that it’s accessible.

Think about it comic book fans. If some random relative saw a Spider-Man movie and asked you which Spider-Man issue to start with, you couldn’t just say Spider-Man Issue 1. There are so many different iterations of Spider-Man and other heroes from so many multiverses out there that no casual fan or anyone new knows where to begin. Meanwhile, if someone sees an anime they happen to like on Netflix or Toonami, they could go get issue 1 of that manga and follow a straight line to wherever they are.

Then there are crossovers. While they do make the universe more fleshed out, it also makes it more confusing. If you’re just following one character you happen to really like, you can’t just read exclusively his books to get his full story. You also have to buy a few other characters’ books that you may or may not have access to or even like.

The comics industry chose this approach because these crossovers usually sell well among die-hard fans, they create a major barrier to entry for new fans.

3. The American Comics Industry Only Makes One Kind of Book

Let’s continue our comparison to manga for a moment. List all the American comic books you know of. What do most, and quite possibly all of them have in common?

They’re all superhero comics. That or the collected reprints of newspaper funny comics.

American comics are the only medium that tells only one kind of story. Imagine if a streaming service only had one singular kind of show. In fact, we don’t actually have to imagine. It happened. Warner Brothers created their own streaming service, DC Universe. It had all the various DC Comics Shows on there and several new ones. It failed because it only had one kind of show. Anyone who wasn’t into superheroes had no reason to buy it. So it couldn’t sustain itself.

That’s the situation the American comics industry has been in. Existing only as a testing ground for ideas to use in TV and movies.

Meanwhile, manga thrives. Why? There’s variety. You may not like manga like Naruto or My Hero Academia. But there’s manga for basically every genre you can think of. You have sports, you have romance, you have horror. You even have stories of non-super-powered people going through everyday life.

4. American Comic Books Never Change Anything

And here is the real crux of the American comic book industry’s problem. The stories never end. Until all the companies that own and could own the rights to classic comic book characters fold, you will never see a final superhero comic that doesn’t eventually get rebooted to retcon that ending.

We learn in elementary school that all stories have three elements. A beginning, a middle, and an end. By this metric, I’m not sure American comic books have ever told a complete story. There’s never a true conclusion. Only reboots. Nobody wants to be the guy that writes the story of Superman retiring and passing the torch to the next generation.

So instead we get multiverses threatening to collide and destroy themselves unless a magic reboot happens. Thus putting the characters back to where they were when they started and anyone who was incidentally killed is now alive, time has reverted and they can run through more or less the same story beats. But only now they have a smaller audience each time they do it. Especially when they do it for insipid reasons.

Take for example Spider-Man’s One More Day. This story had Peter Parker, after having married Mary-Jane, give up his marriage to a demon in exchange for saving Aunt May, who had gotten shot. The marriage, that so many Spidey fans wanted to see for a decade or more, is demonically annulled and nobody remembers when Peter goes back to being single.

And why did this happen? Because the writers didn’t want to evolve the character. Instead of showing a Peter Parker dealing with the trials of being a husband and balancing his Great Responsibility to New York with the responsibility of being a husband or perhaps eventually a father.

But Marvel saw the possibility of new stories being told and dropped a demon-shaped hammer on it pretty quickly because they were afraid that comic book readers wouldn’t “get” the trials a married Spider-Man might face. Instead, they got disappointed fans that figured that following comics was pointless because anything they read would inevitably be zapped away anyhow.

A Story Without Ending is Noise

But let’s compare that, not to manga, but to the rest of comic-book media.

Those of us who followed the MCU from the start loved Iron Man as he went from self-centered billionaire playboy philanthropist to the guy who gave his life without a second thought. But that story of self-sacrifice wouldn’t mean anything if he could be resurrected at any time.

Which is not to say that the MCU didn’t do reboots. But the reboots closed out stories and had consequences. Tony Stark is dead. Steve Rogers is dead. Peter Parker, in the process of trying to create a reset button, screwed up his own life and now must enter the challenges of adulthood as he deals with rebuilding his life.

And gradually, as the actors reach an age where they can’t do action movies anymore, we will see the rest of the original Avengers retire or die. And we will remember it when we see it.

But comic books don’t do this. The most that ever happens is the guy who hit the Reset Button lives with having hit the Reset Button until he stops moping about it (which happens quickly).

And then fans stop caring because it all becomes noise.

And that, not wokeness or political messaging real or imagined is why print comics are dying.