We have been there James. I would say, if you love comics, abandon the Big Two and look at the other publishers. My pull list is mostly Image and Dark Horse, there are still many good books out there.

No shame in this, my friend. Tastes change, circumstances change, interests change.

At one point, back when I was in college and working in a comic book shop, my monthly pull list was close to 30 titles. I was buying every X-title, multiple Spider-Man books, and a whole bunch of second-tier books. Today? 4 books a month: Captain America, X-Men, Marauders, and Firefly.

I have 1000s of books and stories that I've collected over the years that have sat unread, and I am trying to work my way through those. I read 90+ "classic" comics in January, every one of them a first-time read. In the past three years, I have read the entirety of Thor (including the Journey into Mystery stories), Defenders, Hero for Hire/Power Man/Power Man & Iron Fist, Master of Kung Fu, post-Crisis Flash, and the first 75 issues of Mike Grell's run on Green Arrow. Currently reading Iron Man from the beginning, while working in some late-Silver/early-Bronze Age Batman and Detective and some Silver Age Wonder Woman.

Read what you like. Buy what you like. Don't give the industry money if you aren't enjoying what they're producing. Do the hobby the way YOU want to do it, not the way they want you to.

Great post by James. What embarrassed you specifically, James?

Read what you want. You don't owe any company or any character anything. You owe it to yourself to read good stories and give yourself enjoyment.

As with any era there is good and there is a whole lot of bad. Sturgeon's Law applies always. I do agree with Kirby101 that there are a lot of good books out there, but you also need to keep in mind that you are simply not the target demographic for comics publishers.

The only "mainstream" books on my pull list now are Archie titles.

These days, I get most of my comics from Kickstarter! There are a ton of indie creators bypassing the direct market and bringing comics directly to readers through Kickstarter. I love the energy and enthusiasm, but mostly, the huge diversity of voices, genres, styles, and stories being told.

Just a thought! If you still love the form but can't find the content, give it a look, you might find something cool.

This is something I've been wondering about more and more recently - does anyone know who is the target demographic these days - at least for superhero comics in, say, North America?  For the longest time, obviously it would have been kids and eventually college aged (or army aged) students, but it seems as if the publishers have given up on trying to entice at least the younger kids back into the field and since I'd personally estimate that the average ten year old hasn't bothered with comics in something like twenty years, then that leaves us forty, fifty, and older customers being the only ones interested enough in the hobby to keep it afloat.  I mean, aiming to please 40/50 year olds might not seem like a sound business practice, but if those are the people still buying comics regularly, that might just have to be who DC, Marvel, etc has to cater to.  

I keep hearing that the movies and TV series don't bring in new readers and I suspect that comics are a sort of difficult hobby to stumble upon these days what with them no longer being readily available at convenience stores, etc, so if there is a younger crowd buying these things, where are they coming from?  Am I underestimating the power of online reading/paperback sales through book stores/something else?

graphic novels in the young adult market is the fastest growing segment of the book trade as a whole, let alone the comics industry. Young kids and young adults love comics and buy them in bunches, just not in periodical format or featuring super-heroes. However, DC's young adult offerings featuring super-heroes (what was their Ink and Zoom lines) are doing very, very well. Their Raven book was a New York Times Best Seller and has had multiple printings (I think its on its fourth) in less than a year since its release. Trades (particularly Ms. Marvel and Dinosaur Girl) sell very well through Scholastic to kids in school. Again, not monthly periodical serialized stories but comics in book form aimed at a young adult market. The direct market, however, selling dinosaur formats in niche locations only frequented by people who already know they like that product and already consumers of that product is never going to be a growth market finding new audiences. It was never meant to be, it was designed to service existing customers, and when the outreach market of newsstands went away, the comics industry never bothered to design a new outreach market , which is why they lost the youth market, achieved entropy and are now a shrinking niche market servicing a regressive consumer base who won't support formats or content that have evolved with the times.

Kids still love comics, hey are just not interested in a dinosaur format that serializes stories in periodicals. The comics industry has seen what sells and have tried to evolve the content to appeal to that growth market, the problem is that they are packaging and selling it in a format that does not appeal to that market and selling it in niche destination shops that does not serve that customer base, who do not frequent such places. The other horn of the dilemma is that the small shrinking existing customer base who does want their product in that format does not want the type off content that appeal to what is the growth market, and comic publishers in the direct market are caught on the horns of that dilemma. Moving to a product and format that appeals to the growth market will cause them to lose a lot of their existing customer base and pretty much sound the death knell for the direct market which has been their main path to market for the past couple of decades. Sticking with the content and format the existing customer base prefers will mean they will not find purchase in the growth market and their existing customer base will continue to shrink from the entropy of an aging customer base with little to no new customers coming in to replace those who die, age out, lose interest, have changed financial circumstances, etc. Most attempts to produce two types of products, one to appeal to the existing customer base and one to tap into the growth market are shouted down by entrenched entitled fans and direct market retailers as a betrayal, as they fell all product produced should be targeted towards them and funneled through their market, which has only hastened the entropy effect on the existing market. Catering to the existing market (the 40/50 years olds) simply puts an expiration date on this iteration of the comics industry and the direct market, and causes the industry to miss out on yet another generation of new readers-they've missed 3 by my count so far since the loss of newsstands as a viable path to market). Tapping into what is the growth market (sales of GN in the book trade rose 16.9% in 2019, mostly fueled by books in the YA field) will give comics a new life but just might be the death knell of the periodical comic and the direct market.

Marvel for its part is doubling down on the direct market it seems, and not producing anything for the growth market (except for the Marvel Action Heroes line licensed out to IDW). DC is exploring the growth market and after initial success, they are revising their approach a bit to better manage that market after learning from their initial foray, altering the pace of releases and how they market the books outside the direct market. They are also continuing to outreach to mass market customers with books in Walmart and Target in a different format ($5-$10 Giants with a mix of new and reprint stories), but have begun offering some of those to the Direct Market (the Walmart books are available through comic shops a month after they are released in Walmart with new cover art, but the Target oneshots are still Target exclusives). IDW has tried to reach into the book trade, but were bleeding money in 2019 and estimates are they wont be profitable again until 2021 (of they survive that long) as they make the transition of their business practices to adapt to the new realities of where the growth sectors are in the market, and the other bigger indy publishers continue to chug along as they always have (Image has done well in the book trade all along with their collected editions and some of their marquee creators are moving towards producing OGN rather than serialized first collected later trades).

When its all boiled down though, the bottom line is that kids and young adult comics are the only sector of the industry where there is growth. The industry is in transition, and not all the publishers will survive that transition, and when all is said and down, comics will survive (and in some cases thrive), but the industry and the products will look different than what we have been used to.

-M