What is the histogram of age for current Marvel and DC purchasers? I'd think it skews heavily over 40, so making decisions based on the preferences of imaginary 18-35 year old consumers would be foolish.

Bingo!  This isn't really hard to understand.  Look at retailers like Sears as a classic example.  They did nothing to appeal to a younger demographic (or a more urban demographic) until it was far too little far too late. Now that wasn't the only problem.  But you can see it time and again.  You either adapt to new realities, be they demographic or technological or you cease to operate as a viable industry.  Comics can cater to people who have 20-30 years left to live and buy...and die an even slower and more painful death.  Or they can attempt to remain a viable industry which means catering to people who aren't in the last half of their existence.  

If Marvel and DC wanted a slice of the youth market in comic books, they would be making the kind of comic books which are selling to youth. High page count, low art detail, scattered fart jokes. There's nothing wrong with Dog Man or Elephant and Piggie, but they are a different product. My six year old told me that super heroes are stupid.

DC is making inroads into the youth reader market with the Ink and Zoom imprints aimed at the same customer base as the Dog Boy books, and they have attracted a number of successful young adult authors to do stuff for them. The success of this venture has nothing to do with the direct market though, it will be the book trade and libraries that will determine it's success or failure. The direct market, and periodical comics as a whole, are going to be irrelevant to the future of comics in the marketplace outside of continuing to cater to older collectors until they die off. The direct market was never intended to be a growth market or one that attracted new readers. When Phil Seuling and company established the direct market, it was to sell books to customers who already knew what they wanted. The failure of the industry came when they decided to solely rely on the direct market model to sell their goods, i.e. to sell books to customers who already knew what they wanted, and while they did extremely well with that for a time, that time has passed and the issue is that they haven't done anything to ensure their future place in the market in all that time. They (and fans) seem to subscribe to the Field of Dreams model of "if you build it, they will come" the problem being not enough people came to sustain that field and the dream was revealed to be just that, a dream, not a reality.

Marvel doesn't seem to be looking for that next generation of "readers" they (and Disney) have their next generation of customers in other media forms (children's books featuring Marvel characters and young reader books featuring Marvel characters far outsell and are far more available in the mass market than actual comics, plus animation, TV series, movies, video games etc. that print publication and in particular comic books, have become a tiny and almost irrelevant piece in the marketplace to sell their characters and products. They've even licensed out their young reader comics to another publisher (IDW). They seem content to sell dinosaur products to a niche dinosaur market while developing revenue streams for younger audiences in other media. DC is at least marginally still trying to build a young reader audience as well as pursuing customers in other medias. They launched Ink and Zoom, they continue to produce and sell some young reader comics (their Scooby Doo books for example), and are looking at different ways to put their comics in the mass market (the Wal Mart 100 Page Giants for example). It may all be far too little far too late though. You cannot correct 30 years of neglect overnight. It will take time for them to rebuild an audience and time is one thing the quarterly earnings report culture of modern business does not allow for.

Comics themselves will never go away, but comics as we are used to seeing them might. Comics started on the newsstands, and now the newsstands are gone. Comics moved to the direct market, but the shelf life of that market may be expiring too. Digital platforms are growing, but aren't significant in and of themselves yet for comics. Who knows what the next iteration of delivering stories in panels and pages will look like. It may not be periodicals. It may not be in print. And it may not feature super-heroes, but comics will continue to evolve and survive. The new audience likely wants something the existing audience doesn't. Welcome to the evolution of entertainment media in the modern world. There is a path forward, but it's not in trying to turn back to the clock to appeal to an audience that isn't large enough to sustain things the way they were when those practices were relevant or in failing to recognize and admit the market has changed and the industry needs to adapt to the new realities. The problem is the older customer base is not adapting either, and clinging to the older platforms, dividing an already small market into tow niche markets instead of a small growing market that has a chance at viability. The older customer base is not going to grow. It's preferred formats and products will not increase in sales enough to be viable products in the new marketplace, but neither the old (too small and shrinking) or the new (growth is too slow) in and of itself is big enough to survive long, and the publishers cannot afford to to lose either segment of the market but cannot affordably or realistically appease both. So the comic industry is currently caught betwixt and between and it's not an enviable position. The longer they cling tot he older segment, the more they will turn off the new, but they have turned off so many of the new already there might not be enough of a starting base to make the change viable. They have no infrastructure in to bring product to the market in a way new audiences want it, but the existing infrastructure cannot meet the needs of the new audience because it is modeled on outmoded ways of doing business and delivering goods to market. Comic shops themselves are failing faster than new shops are opening and each failed shop is lost sales in the existing market because there is not enough shops to redistribute the goods to and maintain sales levels because there are large swaths of the world (or country if you want to limit it to the US market that have no shops to service customers and make products available anyways.

and yet amidst all of this, people choose to worry about how the product is numbered.

-M

This is it! This is what I've been getting at.

Who wants to spend time looking for the correct Thor or Vader trade? It can be hard to narrow the search down online. We get there, but it's time that could be better spent.

Ouch. Might I suggest not pursuing a career in public relations?



And that's their choice. That's how capitalism works -- they lost my support, so they lose my money. If they don't think they need my money, that's all well and good. I will never run out of classic comics to read that provide me with the kind of entertainment I want at a price I am willing to pay. I think the Big Two are short-sighted for not wanting the $150 I was spending on comics each month a decade back, but they don't owe me anything.

That being said, if some rogue publisher comes around and does try to offer uninterrupted continuity and a numbering system that reflects that, I'd be very happy to offer them my money. For a while, I thought that's what Valiant was going to be. Then they started marketing like the competition. Oh well. Profits and all that. Cool. You do you. I'll do me.



America has never actually been a true Democracy. That doesn't change the fact that it's an ideal we keep striving for. Comics began as a business and remain a business, but '60s and '70s Marvel did fulfill that ideal of uninterrupted continuity and legacy, reflected with continuous numbering. It's why tolworthy can argue that Fantastic Four #1-300 is one uninterrupted (Great American) novel. That's the kind of thing I and many like me are looking for in comics. That the comic industry isn't interested in delivering that is fine, but I won't accept that it's an unrealistic fantasy.



Knowing the behind the scenes stories, seeing how the business works and drives decisions, does not mean you have to lose sight of the magic. There are precious few runs that maintained their integrity and vision across 100+ issue runs, but there are some. And there are smaller runs within the larger ones (say Batman #307-399 and the corresponding 'Tec issues) that achieved this too.

Seeing the strings doesn't mean there isn't still magic to be found in watching the puppet show. The cynical viewpoint isn't the only valid viewpoint.

But, to the larger point, if the comic industry doesn't care about my dollar, they don't get my dollar, and I'm totally fine with that. I suffer from no self-delusion in refusing to buy into their bullsh*t, and they have every right not to care whether I buy their product or not. We don't have to do business.