The problem is the medium not the characters.

I have come to a conclusion that people love the capes they just dont like comics. It hard to separate the two because of the close association between the two. When people see Superman they think of comic books but they won’t buy a comic. My question is why?

They only conclusion I can come up with is that they just don’t like reading comics. Most devoted comic fans at least those on message boards seem to think that the publishers are the problem ( with continuity dense stories) or the price of the comics ( soon to be $3.99) themselves. I think people don’t like or get the medium so changes in story content or a drop in price won’t fix the problem.

Looking at some numbers from this past year The Dark Knight movie as of this week has earned $531,006,084, Iron Man earned $318,313,199. Marvel comics makes twice as much money from licensing than it does from publishing (In other words they make more money selling Spider-man toys and t-shirts than they do on the comic book). This tells me that its money in comic book characters and that comics are a smaller piece of the pie than we think.

Smallville is averaging around 4.5 million viewers a week which translates to to around 18 million viewers a month. If you compare it to comic sales you will see a disconnect. According to Diamond which distributes around 90% of comic in the US, the top 300 books combined for a total of 5,765,870 issues in November, 18 million viewers for one show vs 6 million in book sales for all comics, to me it indicates that comic readers are a small group in comparison to people who have a interest in the characters. I keep thinking about the Ian Fleming’s James Bond character he wrote twelve novels and two short stories, I have a feeling most Bond fans have never read these novels. They love the character and the films and yet they have little interest in the novels. Its gotten to the point where the novels only come up in trivia contests. I would hate to see that happen to comics.

Any suggestions on how we can get more people to read comics or is it a loss cause ?

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Posted under Comics

This post was written by Lobo on January 12, 2009

2 Comments so far

Anthony January 14, 2009 7:36 am

I think you are totally correct. People who read comic books are a dying breed. I think its only going to get worse as the price increases. I remember when I was a younger teenager and was into buying comics, the prices were like 75 cents to $1.50. I understand inflation, but its hard for teens today, who spend their allowances on video games, to spend almost 4 dollars on a comic book. And most of us comic fans who are adults, not including fanboys, can bring ourselves to buy comic books, even though we'll spend 5 dollars on a mocha cafe latte.

Another example is that the people who went to see Hulk and Incredible Hulk were either Ed Norton fans or remembered Bill Bixby as David Banner. Fans of Steven King and Michael Criton movies have probably never read any of their books. I am not talking about fanatics or avid readers, but the mainstream. It's the mainstream consumer market which drives the amount that these movies make. Take the Dark Knight. It's probably going to go down as the most successful, critically acclaimed, widely known comic book movie, and the majority of people who went to see it have probably never picked up the comic book.
BF January 15, 2009 7:58 am

I think the one flaw in the television comparison is that television is that its no upfront cost to watch a televison show. Thats why I think digital its the future. A cheaper price and easier access may change the trend. Basically im waiting on itunes for comics.