https://www.comicsbeat.com/comics-arent-dying-but-they-are-changing-and-thats-got-people-scared/
Comics aren't dying, but they are changing : And that's got people scared.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/comics-arent-dying-but-they-are-changing-and-thats-got-people-scared/
not giving you clicks, post the contents here or frick off
Here's the archive, so Heidi doesn't get the ad click.
http://archive.today/2023.12.15-213522/https://www.comicsbeat.com/comics-arent-dying-but-they-are-changing-and-thats-got-people-scared/
>Graphic novels
Oh, you mean manga? Yeah, manga is doing great. The American comic book industry, not so much.
I just want good comics.
Manga is the same shit, different butthole.
Maybe you need to change up mediums. Books are doing well.
I already read books. I want good comics.
Unfortunately, your not gonna get them from Marvel or DC. Check out indie stuff. And Seinen manga not Shonen manga.
Stop saying indie you massive homosexual. Image, boom, IDW, dark horse, dynamite, ect are not indie. They’re literally publishers.
Oh ok then, check out the indiegogo or RIPPAVERSE then you ungrateful moron. Is that better?
Nah I’d rather you stop calling non-big 2 comics indie. Indie comics are all dogshit these days.
I'd like to see a deep breakdown of that graphic novel chunk. Like how much of that is trades, manga, and actual graphic novels.
It’s been a pretty wild week in comics – the kind of wild that only anxiety and fear can bring about. After years of steady sales growth, comics retail – and most US retail – has hit a rough patch. The signs are everywhere, but getting accurate information without getting into a lot of drama has been especially tough this week. So I’m just going to lay out some links and some quotes and try to paint a picture as best I can.
But before I start, here’s a quote from Comics Scene magazine in 1983 from Joe Simon, courtesy of Brigid Alverson (https://twitter.com/BrigidAlverson/status/1735292681033564530)
>“Comic books as we know them have run their course,” said Simon, the co-creator of Captain America and one of the most successful and prolific of Golden Age creators. “When you’re only printing 250,000 copies of Superman [as opposed to 1.2 million in its heyday], you have to see the handwriting on the wall.”
As the quote acknowledges, Superman once sold 1.2 million copies a month. Comichron has known listings from the 60s on, but not this gaudy number, which was most likely from the 40s, a period when comics routinely sold a million copies a month. It was also a time when there was no internet, barely any TV, and banana was an exotic vegetable, so there’s no comparing that number to today’s sales.
What does the quote tell us? That the “comics are dying” (https://www.comicsbeat.com/retailer-warns-that-comics-are-dying-again/) narrative is persistent and has a long history. It also tells us that overall periodical comics sales have been declining for a long time since their peak in the 40s and 50s (pre Fredric Wertham) with occasional bursts of million sellers since then. (http://www.terryhoknes.com/bestsellingcomics1990.htm) (UPDATE: I’m told to take this last link with the salt grain, but they give you some idea of what has sold.)
The “comics are dying” story has also been a sales pitch for various independent creators for more than five years. The above graphic, from Milton Griepp’s presentation at NYCC 2023, has been much quoted to show that comics objectively were not dying for the last five years.
OH BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COMICS PERIODICALS??? you are asking right now. WELL, it isn’t as easy to get the numbers on that but a chart from the same presentation shows the orange bar representing periodicals sales levels fluctuating over the last period, while graphic novels sales (including manga) soared.
(Op image goes here
)
John Jackson Miller has estimates for the entire market that go to 2021, (https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html) when the addition of new distributors (Lunar, PRH) made getting numbers harder. I’ve added in Griepp’s 2022 estimate of $435 million in periodical comics sales and made this little chart: (pic related)
No matter what people have been telling you, periodical comics sales weren’t dying during the pandemic. They were definitely declining BEFORE the pandemic, but not crashing cataclysmically.
But that was then and this is 2023, a time when inflation, economic uncertainty, and companies that cut thousands of jobs just so they can, (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/business/hasbro-job-cuts.html) have made discretionary spending a lot harder. Rising rents have squeezed out not just independent stores, but large retail chains. It’s a mess out there. Despite that, Americans love to buy things, and holiday spending seems to be trending upwards. (https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-economy-november-2023-retail-sales-b6f8d713)
All of which is to add some context, because none of this happens in a vacuum. So what do we know about 2023 comics sales? They are definitely down, and estimates seem to be hover around 20%. At the ICv2 White Paper in October, Griepp listed some sales data for 2023:
• 2023 YTD graphic novel sales in book channel down 19% in units, per Circana
• Manga in book channel down 27%
• 2023 YTD graphic novel dollar sales in comic stores down 7%
• 2023 YTD comic sales down 7%
As you can see from the above, sales slipped even more in bookstores than in comics shops! But we hear about distressed comics shops a lot more, especially in this fourth quarter. Even sales titans like Dog Man and Wimpy Kid are down.(https://www.comicsbeat.com/sales-charts-wimpy-kid-sales-decline/) I’m sure Circana’s Kristen McLean has a better way to put things, but it seems that people just bought a lot of books during the pandemic and now they are buying other things – and the economy in general is just weak.
So what’s really going on out there? To find that out, we should hear from retailers, so here’s a round-up of the most talked about essays:
Of course there’s Phil Boyle’s piece (https://icv2.com/articles/columns/view/55531/comic-stores-2023-its-nearly-2024-im-more-concerned) that kicked most of this talk off. I talked about that here. (https://www.comicsbeat.com/retailer-warns-that-comics-are-dying-again/) Boyle had some very well expressed concerns that unfortunately were derailed by a few culture war comments (a lesson he learned well, as we’ll see below), and sparked much more discourse.
Know why comic periodicals are only ever given as a retail amount, not actual number of copies sold? Because these stats count units shipped. These numbers represent every comic sold, warming the shelves, destroyed, *and* repossessed by Diamond from a bankrupt store and reshipped to another. That last thing is significant. It's the real reason DC left Diamond - Diamond had been extending credit to new retailers on DC's behalf. They close, and DC doesn't get paid.
Comics right now are essentially like phonebooks. Far fewer people use them, but they keep printing more so they could tout the high circulation. If Bookscan stats were counted the same way comics are, they would be twice as large.
These comics industry reports aren't real. The only thing we can glean from them is that UPS had another good year shipping toilet paper.
>while graphic novels sales (including manga) soared
>(including manga)
Every time
The top selling graphic novels are consistently non-manga. It's why the article referenced Dav Pilkey and the Wimpy Kid books .
Uhh....
>the first non kid book western product is five nights at freddies
wow, even in a industry where lefties control 99% of every publisher right wing christian conservatives till btfo them easily.
just imagine how great this industry would be if it were not for lefty rats
>Epstein
>Baby-Sitters Club
Oomph, how unfortunate.
Diary of a wimpy kid isn’t a comic and how does dav pilkey selling well spell a sustainable future for comics? Notice there isn’t a single title meant for people 15-40
>how does dav pilkey selling well spell a sustainable future for comics
Heidi and her friends are just playing word games. They act as if this is all one industry, as if they're going to get jobs at Viz if western publishers go under.
Oh I know, I tell people this all the time. Pilkey and Manga succeeding doesn’t mean they’ll get more gigs. It means the industry will shrink. And she knows that, make no mistake. The people begging for the direct market to collapse are just doing it out of spite now. They know the woke shit failed, the refuse to let sales reflect that.
Kids reading comics ARE what makes it sustainable.
Scholastic bookfairs and ten year olds are going to do more for the industry than 40 year olds at the LGS. We are basically returning to the 1930s-1950s dynamic where the biggest audience for comics is children. I don't think that's a "problem." I think if anything it's the market correcting itself after am overfocus on the adult market. I bet those YA Kami Garcia OGNs sell better than the Teen Titans ongoing.
No, it isn’t. They buy a few comics at book fairies because they don’t want to read prose, then they get into video games and maybe a manga or two in their teens then they watch sports or Netflix.
That’s the track kids are on.
Also what comics would they be reading when they’re 15-40 if all the comics are gay memoirs and children’s books? That ISNT sustainable.
We need Dog Man VS Chainsaw Man
>DOG MAN
>CAT KID
>DOG MAN
>CAT KID
I've never even heard of the things topping this list.
>it's just like how american animation is nothing but Peppa Pig and Dora while anime destroy everything else,
America still has a big share of the adult animated market with Family Guy, American Dad, The Simpsons, South Park, ect. Limiting American animation to Dora the Explorer is silly when most anime is aimed at the same adult audiences that the American animations I just mentioned are. America still make a lot of animated shows, its just that people obsessed with japanese animation don't know about any of them and therefore assume they don't exist.
From the maker of Captain Underpants?
>From the maker of Captain Underpants?
DOGMAN or CATKID?
Both.
Cat Kid is a spinoff of Dog Man.
I think.
Huh. One author having two different series on the top 10 best selling list is quite a feat.
I always thought captain underpants was dumb though, even as a kid.
You've never heard of it because it's made for actual 7 year olds and not comic book manchildren/speculators.
To be fair I really only read old Dell or Gold Key comics at this point so I'm not really up to date with new comics, but if it really sold a million copies I'm just suprised I've never seen it posted here before.
Cinemaphile demographics are usually adult aimed comics (which is kinda what leads to all this "comics are dying!" stuff. The Type of superhero comics adults tend to read are doing poorly but kids ogns and manga are doing very very well.)
>most anime is aimed at the same adult audiences that the American animations
One Piece, My Hero Academia, Naruto and Dragonball are for teenagers, absolutely not the same target audience as adult comedy shows such as Family Guy
and noticed how your examples are all limited to the same exact kind of show? Meanwhile Anime got romance, comedy, sports, horror etc, it's not limited to the same Simpson and Dora wannabes over and over
>I've never even heard of the things topping this list.
Because you are an adult. Kids comics sell like golddust.
That's inflation dummy
And perpetually inflated cover price to the diminishing audience. I really like Ewing, Thor is one of my favorite characters, and I'm a fricking mark for this shit, but frick if I'm gonna pay 4.99 for a monthly book.
Cope
This article is trying to damage control the big 2 but it only made me realize how DC and Marvel used to be a big deal decades ago only making their current state as a very niche and despised hobby even more pathetic
I don't think it's damage controlling the big 2. I think it is arguing that even though the big 2 are slipping in sales, it doesn't mean the entire industry is failing because the industry is more than just the big 2.
by that post
It looks like the "industry" is nothing but comics for toddlers, it's just like how american animation is nothing but Peppa Pig and Dora while anime destroy everything else, hell even the toddler books and shows are still tiny if you start looking at the worldwide sales statistics
So people are correct in dismissing comics as kiddie shit after all.
If that's the case why are we seeing such a strong retailer revolt, besides an economic downturn. It just seems to me that a lot of the people online have more interest in attaching a political tag to this conversation to shut it down, with unprovoked attacks. I'm guessing that the message of comics are dying just might make people not want to buy them which is what scares them.
Because retailers often anchor their sales on Big 2. I think we are seeing the industry as a whole shift away from the LGS business model so of course LGS' are you to talk about how they are suffering. They are selling horses and the model T just came out .
>I don't think it's damage controlling the big 2
It's specifically damage-control for herself and comic writers who attacked retailers. The fact the industry is bigger than the big 2 has no bearing on their own performances, because *they* are the big 2. This is like Atari saying things are fine because the Playstation is selling great.
This is an open invitation for comic retailers to drop more comics. Which they should consider, especially after what Mark Waid just said.
How is Heidi the big 2?
I'm talking about all the writers that jumped on retailers and Millar, at her instigation. And while Heidi does not work for Marvel and DC directly, she is completely dependent on Western comics for ad revenue and readership. No one goes to her blog to read about manga news. Frankly, no one even mentions her here except for the occasional dumb hot take and when she asserts herself in the culture war like this.
The fact that marvel comics sales data counts as a "culture war" issue is a sign of huge problems in our society.
It's not the data itself, but the way they responded to someone calling out poor sales. Which is the same way they respond to anyone pointing out problems in anything: attack and malign the person into silence.
Not everything is inherently political. It's the people involved who are. Mark Waid just said he'd rather the industry fail, than appease the "alt-right." How is anyone supposed to take that in any way other than political?
>rightoids constantly screeching bullshit and pretending their boogeymen are responsible for a comics situation unchanged for 30 years regardless of story content
Yeah how dare he shit on your pet extremist narratives. That kind of politics isn't allowed! Only yours.
How dare he do anything but blow his homosexual ass brains out
My kidney stone is acting up, someone else please finish the "storytime."
Everything Heidi says is a lie. I wouldn't trust her saying the sky is blue today.
I fricking hope she kills herself
Can I have sex with her? Or if she dies, can I have sex with the corpse?
I hope everyone at DC kills themselves
Except Zdarsky. I've grown to like Zdarsky's Batman.
Frick Zdarsky.
Give me the graph without manga now.
>it's "lets count manga and children books as comics to own the chuds" argument again
you people are so boring and formulaic. the npc label is the most fitting description of a group since the 1930s
I thought the memes of dog man saving and carrying the industry were just memes
No it’s quite literally the ONLY western comic selling sustainable numbers. They drove normal people away with gender queer and all that type of shit
>Only western comic selling
Tell that to the Wings of Fire graphic novels, the Babysitter club graphic novels, the Wimpy Kid Books, every Reina Teilmeiger book, the DC YA books...
You already got BTFO in the Waid thread homosexual
What drove people away was semi-continuity nonsense where characters had to coexist in same universe and exchange writers, with each one being able to take story in some other direction that wouldn't matter because it would be retconned by following writer. People stopped caring about what happened to characters and therefore about comics in general.
>he doubted
literally all numbers for comics are made up and self reported with no basis on reality. they no longer report actual sales. they can just say they printed x amount and report that. 99% is just pulped trash that no one even buys. literal pulp. never sold or offered. print contracts require certain levels be bought/printed. they are just printing shit and pulping it. billion dollar franchises selling 5000 copies of their comic to a third of a billion population is insane and will be a dead system in a few years.
Isn't graphic novels just Scholastic comics for kids?
That and manga. And even then it’s mostly just pilkey and manga.
Are Scholastic and Shuesha the new Big 2?
>MY 10YO BLITHELY WALKED BY A COMIC SHOP LAST WEEKEND. THEY DON’T CARRY HER YA OGNS; WHAT SHE’D SPEND ON A FEW FLOPPIES COVERS A MONTH OF MARVEL UNLIMITED + DC INFINITE IT’S ABSURD TO ME TO LISTEN TO AN AGING GROUP OF FANS AND CREATORS TALK ABOUT WHAT COMICS MUST DO TO STAY AFLOAT.
>COMICS ARE EVERYWHERE. I’VE NEVER SEEN SO MANY KIDS READING COMICS IN MY LIFE. WHEN MARVEL & DC MAKE COMICS FOR KIDS (AS OGNS) THEY REAP THAT. STORES CAN, TOO. KIDS ARE COMICS FLUENT. THEY’RE ABUZZ WHEN A NEW DOG MAN OR AMULET DROPS. THEY LOVE ADAPTATIONS OF BOOKS LIKE PERCY JACKSON. THEY DIG MULTIPLE SPIDER-PEOPLE.
>A LCS SHOULD BE AS EXCITING TO A KID AS A CANDY SHOP OR A LEGO STORE.
>LCS SHOULDN’T BE MUSEUMS FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED.
>ULTIMATELY, LCS ARE SPECIALITY BOOK SHOPS. IT’S HARD FOR BOOK SHOPS. I’M ALREADY LOST TO THEM. I HAVE FULL SHELVES, A LIBRARY CARD, A CREDIT CARD, AND THE INTERNET. BUT THERE’S A GENERATION OF READERS WHO WANT TO SEE THEMSELVES AND THEIR FRIENDS IN BOOKS. THEY’RE NOT LOST. YET
>I DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT RETAIL. I’M ALSO NOT SAYING THAT ALL COMICS SHOULD BE WRITTEN FOR KIDS. OH, AND I’M ONE OF THESE MIDDLE-AGED FOLKS, TOO. WHAT I DO KNOW FROM BEING AT BOTH FAILED AND SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES IS THAT YOU IGNORE THE NEXT GENERATION OF CONSUMERS AT YOUR PERIL
>I WAS AT A US HEALTH INSURER WHEN INDIVIDUAL PLANS HIT. I WAS AT AN ANALYTICS START-UP WHEN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE HIT. I’VE SEEN BUSINESSES CATCH A WAVE OR BE SWEPT UNDER. YOU MUST PLAN FOR FUTURE BUYERS. THAT’S WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN FOLKS DEMAND COMICS REGRESS IN ANY WAY.
Sounds like some fat black homosexual said this or some fat boomer c**t who doesn’t let her kid read good comics.
I’m honestly sad someone like this is in charge of a child. Their kid will, luckily, either hate and be estranged for them or, unluckily, be even worse than they are.
>Lopibats is genuinely autistic
Good god have a nice day namegay
>OP? yeah, he's our best customer. we love that guy!
Don't mind me. Just singlehandedly saving the "comic book" industry
Scholastic-sama, I kneel.
tbtbh you should be kneeling for them buying out schools to have a pseudo day-off when they came, shit was cash
This. I was never even a book nerd as a kid (took up vidya at a young age) but looking at the book fair was always better than whatever nonsense they were teaching us in class at the time.
Scholastichads rise up!
I used to have my parents buy me a lot of calvin and hobbes and garfield books at schoolastic bookfair's when I was in elementary school, so maybe you're onto something.
Gettin real frickin tired of this "Dav Pilkey sells a lot, so DC and Marvel selling like shit doesn't matter, chud!" cope.
It doesn't. DC and Marvel comics could go out of business tommorrow and we would still have plenty of comics to read. We don't need them. The industry doesn't need them. No industry "needs" any company. That's just "too big to fail" nonsense.
Would probably be better off without them at this point.
Good fricking riddance. Big Two are cancer holding the industry back.
Brevoort retweeted this pretending that Marvel sales aren't worse than ever.
Just retweeted an SJW dismissing retailers concerns saying that no Big 2 book released in 5 years is an evergreen seller which hurts their businesses. Tom hates comic shop owners.
Link
>physical comics outselling digital comics
Excellent.
I just want a non-pozzed indie comic to blatantly ripoff the X-Men.
You know what I think i'm gonna pick up a copy of Dog Man, captain underpants was really fun and its always good to have something to read thats easier to digest.
I don't care how much the cancel pigs want to cry about and deflect the blame from themselves. I hope the industry dies and each of them with the ones that murdered Frank Castle to starve in the streets.
>manga is killing comics but If i call it something different maybe ill confuse people
Does this include sales from Webtoons & Tapas? If not then the entire report is useless.
I don't think so. Most of their information comes from NPD Bookscan, which tracks sales by ISBN. I don't really know how digital platforms for webtoons are organized, but I doubt many of them are using the more traditional methods that data aggregators use.
There's no single report that can really capture the entire comics market in a satisfactory way. Having some data is not useless, but you'll never get the whole picture. Also, for the specific argument the article is making "comic sales are better than you think" then missing data does not discredit that. If anything it means they're understating things because they don't have additional sales info from digital platforms.
>Having some data is not useless
They don't have any real data for 2022. It's an extrapolation that favors coastal stores because they're more likely to have POS.
Comichron, for all its shortcomings, at least had enough ethical concerns to stop doing these reports altogether. This is ICv2 on its own. The comics data should never be presented right next to the boostore data. They're not of comparable quality, nor do they share methodology.
>Brevoort
>Literally one of the people with the most pull at Marvel right now
>CB is just a figurehead who was bullied into compliance with his Shogun Yoshida trainwreck stories
>He literally says "the industry is just changing" (disingenuous to suggest capeshit is the whole industry, but anyway)
>Sites that usually run good relations for Big Two immediately say "comics are just changing" to the letter
Why now that's a coincidence if I ever saw one
Good news everyone we started counting manga as comics and suddenly sales skyrocketed
All the money goes to the publishers and the japanese and it only creates a higher motivation to cancel everything being written by a western artist
>But professor that means that all the people working on comics, especially the ones we hired because if their minority status will live lives of poverty
Well yes, but if we raise a stink we will create a manga subside so some of the money that comes from manga being bought by manga fans will finance the comics nobody buys or knows about
>Isn't that extremely anti ethical? You are stealing money from a person from another country with a lower standard of living to keep producing something nobody wants just so people have a place to live and an allowance, you are also using paper and plastic and gas to move it around creating unnecessary burden on the planet
It's my latest invention. Capitalism plus, it's like the old capitalism but we we keep all the useless people alive with fake jobs with fake titles
The absolute state of Cinemaphilemics
>Comics aren't dying, but they are changing to a state of being dead
"Big 2 super comics" is not the same thing as "comics."
>this thread again
Get fricking used to it, the most important thing by far that's happening in comics is the fact that American comic industry is in its death throes.
>no one ever talks about the good comics that exist outside the big 2
>just the shit ones and the shit industry and obsess over the creator cucks at marvel/dc
>no one here actually likes the medium of comics and just wants to dance around the fire because culture wars
>no one ever talks about the good comics that exist outside the big 2
Because they're largely irrelevant in impact compared to Marvel and DC books. Bad indie business practices can't destroy the industry nearly on the same level that bad Big 2 business practices can
>just the shit ones and the shit industry and obsess over the creator cucks at marvel/dc
Because they're shit and their cuck creators are rewarded for creating them them with even more work. All of which is accelerating the death of the industry.
>no one here actually likes the medium of comics and just wants to dance around the fire because culture wars
On the contrary, I think homosexuals like yourself who want to ignore the burning house their supposedly favorite medium has become hate comics way more than the people who actually address the issues want to see the fire put out before it's too late and everything's gone to ash.
NTA but DC and Marvel having a monopoly over this fricking industry was an awful idea and everyone should have seen this coming 60 years ago, 2 companies having control over everything was inevitably going to end badly
Even if Marvel and DC improve somehow FOR NOW, how long until a couple of new shitty CEO frick up everything and stay in power for 20 to 30 years? People need to move the fricking on from Marvel and DC, read something else.
It's not control, it's reach, market penetration. They're a gateway to sales for smaller publishers. Manga selling well doesn't mean that a customer might also pick up any random book from Dark Horse or Boom, especially just through national retail chains. But if people are already in the direct market store to buy X-Men and those other books are right next to it on the shelf there's a greater chance it gets sold.
>But if people are already in the direct market store to buy X-Men and those other books are right next to it on the shelf there's a greater chance it gets sold.
Or they can buy the other X-men book and the Wolverine solo book, and the Spider-Man book. Marvel basically force you to read 10 fricking books per week to have any idea what is going on, you either read them all or you miss all of them
Bullshit. I know because I've been reading the Krakoa books the whole time. Sure there's connectivity, but each book is telling it's own story. I dropped X-men and X-Force a million years ago and have only missed out on shit writing.
>and everyone should have seen this coming 60 years ago,
They wouldn't have. All you know is the mythical history of the comics industry and survivorship bias.
Marvel did extremely well in the 60s, but they were limited in the number of titles they could produce until the late 60s. And in the 70s things got so bad that they could've gone under if it weren't for the Star Wars license and the X-Men
Not really since marvel and DC are still rich enough to last for a multiple years.
"Graphic novels" includes manga, doesn't it?
>Graphic Novels
I really, truly hate this fricking term. It's a god damn motherfricking manga. Call a spade a spade.
Really it's Manga and now they even count scholastics and indie books. Which is funny because for years comics people hated indie artist, manga and scholastics viewing them as fake comics or too juvenile or the types that couldn't make it in the industry. Now Books like FNAF and Captain underpants outsell most of the comic industry and the same with manga.
A manga is a type of graphic novel in that list.
Also the biggest graphic novel sellers are Pilkey, Telmeiger and the Wimpy Kid guy.
>Those spikes in 2021 and 2022
If you look at Hibb’s bookstore sales breakdown for those years, you’ll see Viz shoot to the top past everyone else by a large margin.
Leftytroons deny all leftytroon shit is dying because it's a gigantic rebuke against the entire leftytroon ideology.
They aren't half the population, they're like 0.0001% of the population, and the rest of us should kill them.