I thought stuff before the 30s was just comic strip reprints. Interesting. Anyone have any good links or articles on the ~1890 British comic industry?

Dips in sales doesn't reflect the quality of the comics, but it does reflect what people want or are willing to spend money one. You say people want soap operas and always have, except soap operas have all but disappeared in modern American entertainment-all the major networks use dot fill the entire afternoon of programming with soaps, and then prime time soaps, then the Soap Opera network rebroadcast them for people to watch and a cottage industry of magazines covering the soaps emerged, and now for the most part, it's all gone-daytime soaps died because American consumers interest in soaps as an entertainment form dried up.

You say people only want remakes and sequels without looking at the fact that most of them flop horribly and perform well below expectations, the ones that do seem to do well usually have something new to offer-a new story featuring old favorite characters, a new twist, a new set of characters whatever, the ones that fail are the ones that rehash or stick to the tired old tropes without bringing anything new to the table.

What is selling (which reflects what people are willing to pay for and that is the true test of what they want, not what they say they want and don't shell out for) is entertainment that is digestible a story that runs, has water cooler talk type shock twists and eventually gets resolved by the end of the movie, the end of the season or the end of the season. They are willing to go along on an extended story as long as it has a payoff at the end (whether season finale, series finale, end of movie, etc. The neverending stuff ends unsuccessfully because people lose interest and find other things that do satisfy them.

Sales does not equal quality. But quality does not mean people will want it. Sales reflect what people are actually willing to get, which if it's not a necessity (And entertainment isn't), is what they want. So you see comics quality as increasing over time, I see it as a product that is moving away form what people wanted and were willing to pay for.

Production costs go up, the the root cause of the increase in modern comics is economics of scale. They are selling thus making fewer units so the cost per unit goes up. That's what happens with niche products that either lost or never had a larger mass audience. Comics lost their mass audience when they decided to focus on their hardcore core niche audience. They changed their business model to the direct market which lowered their risk and maximized profits in the short term, but long term strangled the future growth of the industry by cutting it off form its feeder audiences.

Doesn't matter how good you think something is, if it doesn't appeal to a wide enough audience, it won't sell well enough to be viable as a mass product, and prices will spiral as it becomes a niche product selling to a smaller and smaller audience. The smaller the audience gets, the higher the prices go, the higher the prices get, the smaller the audience gets. They've entered a vicious circle and doing more of the same will only continue that vicious circle's spiral of contraction. Yes, they've survived 80 years, but the comic market as it is currently constituted (i.e. the direct market selling through specialty shops only) has only been around for about 2 decades and it has been 2 decades of shrinking markets and audience attrition. Entropy has taken its toll on the direct market, and comics may well survive, but the market form it has been distributed in the US for the past 20 may not. People equate comics with the direct market. That's something that has only been true for the last 20-25 years, not for the lifeblood of comics. Comics don't need the direct market to survive, it has done so before without it, and does so in other market outside the US without it. Comics is a growth industry among publishers outside the direct market. Image is growing sales in bookstores outside the direct market. The direct market needs comics to survive, not the other way around, except catering to the direct market (which is primarily big 2 super-hero books and their perpetual status quo never ending stories) is sucking the lifeblood out of comics as a whole.

The distribution and sales model for comics books that existed when they started in the US in the 1930s died in the late 1980s and was buried in the 90s. Something new had emerged to take its place, i.e. the direct market, but it changed the business of comics. Now that model for sales and distribution is dying on the vine, but those who cling to it are fighting against anything rising to take its place. TO say comics have survived is true, but misleading. The business of bringing comics to market has seen it's fair share of deaths, rebirths, and changes, with casualties abounding in it, form publishers, to distributors, to news vendors, to comic shops who have all paid the price for the failure of "comics" to evolve its buisiness model with the changing times. The art form will endure, the industry however, may be on life support.

-M

Comics top the best seller list for children's books all the time. Big NAte, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Percy JAckson adaptaions etc. Kids still love comics and read comics, just not big 2 super-hero comics who are not produced for kids but for the hardcore fan audience of the direct market. Super-hero comics are sold to or for kids so kids don't want them, but they do want comics in general because comics that are sold to and for kids do very well, unless they are produced by Marvel or DC these days because those never reach outlets where kids could/would buy them.

-M

And let's not forget when Bone was burning up the sales chart for the collected editions by Scholastic.  And I've bought a lot of "Board books" for my grandson that have Batman and other DC characters.  

Well, first off, in the UK we don't traditionally differentiate between newspaper strips and any other form of comics the way you do. Any form of sequential art is just 'comics', really (we also don't traditionally use the phrase 'comicbook', just 'comic'). But in any case, British comics originated not with reprints of newspaper strips but as an outgrowth of illustrated magazines, originally satirical magazines aimed at the (adult) working classes in the early 1800s, and later the illustrated "story papers" aimed at kids; their development into what we would recognise today as comics was gradual, but by the time Comic Cuts was launched in 1890 it was pretty much complete (Comic Cuts and its rival Illustrated Chips both contained a mix of new, original strips created in Britain and unlicensed reprints of mostly American newspaper strips). Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, which first appeared in 1884, was possibly the first comic magazine to feature a recurring character (Sloper first appeared in Judy in 1867) and was still aimed at semi-literate adults, but by the time of the first world war, British comics were pretty much exclusively aimed at the under tens. That only really started to change in the 1950s when most of the story papers (aimed at older kids) were converted into comics. Before that, it was generally considered that kids started off on comics but graduated to more text heavy publications when they were into double figures agewise.

More information here: britishcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Early_British_Comics_(1800s_to_1930s)

For those of you that missed out, there will be a second print of DC Rebirth coming out June 8. This one will be squarebound and retail for $5.99.