Lost Readership

Does anyone have any figures regarding the drop in readers that comics in general experienced during and immediately after the speculator's boom?

I'm curious because I'm wondering how a title like Avengers or Superman (or fill in the blank with any mainstream title from the Big 2) went from selling a couple hundred K to now only doing 55K. Where exactly did the readers go? And when did they all start leaving?

They left around the time the speculator boom ended. Conventional wisdom, in a nutshell, is that publishers lost sight of the actual readers and instead published comics aimed at the speculators. Since that destroyed the underlying market, and the speculators had always had totally unrealistic expectations of how prices on back issues would rise, eventually the bubble burst and the speculators left as well - leaving a hardcore of beleaguered readers behind who had suffered through the nineties but still hadn't left.

Of course, others would argue that this entire analysis assumes that superhero comics are the comics industry, and fails to account for the massive growth which manga has seen over the same period - but that's mainly from new readers altogether, rather than existing readers

Back in the mid 80's the #1 seller was Uncanny XMen, which sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 425-450k per issue. Superman by comparison was selling around 100k per issue. Now it sells somewhere around 45-50k while Uncanny XMen sells slightly less than 100k per issue. Marvel was selling something on the order of four times the number of comics DC was selling, so that 100k figure which Superman was selling was pretty much at the top of their scale, while I think every title Marvel was selling exceeded that number. There was a lot of disclosure about these numbers when DC and Marvel started up their royalties programs.

Where all the readers went is something open to discussion, but I think a lot of people were finally put off for a series of reasons. One of which was the gimmicky covers and ubiqutous cross overs marvel always ran. Now I think readership is so low because unlike the 70's and 80's, comic books are not ubiquetess. You don't see them in the drug stores or the book stores (although you see small TPB/GN sections). You don't hear about comics in the mainstream and a generation has now grown up basicly without comics being in their blood. How Marvel/DC/Image and others combat that is open to debate... but whatever the outcome, I don't think bringing people back into the fold will be easy and don't believe it will happen with the publishers competeing with one another in doing it.

Aren't the mainstream comic industry and the Manga industry pandering to different market places though? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I see Manga as being read predominaetly by children?? Would that be an accurate statement? I wonder.

There are also more publishers, from what I can see, at the moment. You have Image books, Dark Horse books and CrossGen along with Marvel and DC. People have far more choices than the 70's and 80's in terms of superhero books.

Then you have good quality independents which are more readily available than they were. Books like Bone are really good and you should check it out. Manga has become more popular as the geeks from '80s have grown up and started demanding more of these type of books, which has filtered down to others.

Couple all this with the speculator nonsense and you have a few possible reasons why comics do not sell as much as they used too.

Oh and I think kids and people in general are reading far less of anything now than they ever did.

Well, I think distribution is one of the key reasons for the drop in numbers....and that's because comics are such a low priced item.

Think about it. The mass market distributors, where comics used to be, are usually handling items that are larger, both in size and and in profitability. Those bigger items will therefore get more attention in handling and distribution.

This drove comics into the direct market; in the mid 80s to late 90s, there were four to five times more direct market shops than there are now. Ergo, the shrinkage of distribution points is a major, major reason why the circulation numbers are so low.

One of the solutions is to increase the number of distribution points. The way to do that is NOT to lower prices; it's probabley better to raise the price and the format size so that comics can compete with other periodicals. Trying to bring back the 1960s is a non-starter, because it ignores why the mass market left comics in the first place.

Perhaps I'm wrong but I had the impression there were more publishers in the 70's and 80's than now. Lots of little publishers back then...

Well, I don't know about anyone else but, personally, I went to the Philippines.

Seriously though, people are going to movies like never before, they're watching 100 plus channels on cable, they're playing games on the internet, their PCs, their Playstations and their Gameboys, they're buying videos and DVDs and tapes and CDs and they're downloading anything imaginable onto their PCs thanks to filesharing programs. There is so much choice in entertainment nowadays that you can't just look at the comics industry as isolated from all that. Hell, for all we know a significant number of readers have gone on to read actual novels, which would explain why Jemas and Quesada want to take the 'comic' out of comic books so that they'd have more of an air of respectability and they wouldn't lose readers quite so easily. We don't really know. Hell, for all we know things like Pokemon and Harry Potter had a negative effect with kids going on to read Japanese manga and/or actual novels and skipping the step of reading about Superman and Spiderman altogether. Certainly it is true that manga, starting from zero, has had a phenomenal success in the American market.

The publishers traded higher sales for non-returnability. Now, the majority of comics are sold to the direct market, where in return for a higher discount, retailers have to keep whatever they buy. In the days you're talking about, publishers sold to newsstands, which got their publications in front of many more people, but where they had to print 3x what they actually sold.

At the same time the industry were pandering to the speculators, causing a precipitous decline in the quality of the product, the books were being made much harder to get. Where once comics could be bought at nearly any drug store, supermarket, convenience store, they were being pulled from those outlets and dropped into the comic book store 'ghetto.' What you had was an increasingly lousy product that was being made harder and harder to get