Here's a good example of a very temporary reboot sales boost:

The first time Captain America was EVER rebooted was in 1996, following a long period of sales decline, coinciding with indifferent writing and art (excluding the last few issues by Waid and Garney). Issue 1 had a big boost in sales, but with Liefeld doing a horrid job on art and writing the sales dropped LOWER than before the reboot after a few issues. Low quality trumped a low number on the cover. This could have been a learning point for Marvel, but they weren't nearly that smart- all they seemed to take away was the single issue sales boost. 🤦‍♂️

An important point to remember is that the print periodical is no longer the only path to market for a story, but one of many paths to market. Therefore many business strategies that made sense in a periodical only business no longer apply, and thinking of comics solely as a periodical business is an outdated manner of thinking. It is also no longer the format most people will seek out after the initial window of release (i.e. the month it was released) has passed. Most readers, looking for a story after it was released (and not buying it as it is serialized) will seek it out in other formats than the print periodical, and this is only going to become more the norm moving forward as we are about two generations removed now from folks who looked to periodicals for anything-news, entertainment, etc. and those who were raised on periodicals age out and die off. The world has changed and the market has changed, so business strategies have to evolve with it. Something that may have worked well in 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005 or even 2015 may not work at all in 2025 and likely won't work anywhere near as well. The only constant is change, and a comic industry that doesn't evolve with the changes in the market and customer expectations can only stagnate and succumb to entropy.

Everyone riffs on kids are reading comics but not Marvel and DC. Which is true, but the salient point here is kids aren't reading periodicals and Marvel and DC haven't moved past periodicals to be a draw for kids who want to read comics. When they do things is formats outside periodicals that are designed to succeed in the current marketplace and place them where kids can get them, they do well. Marvel did extremely well through Scholastic at schools when they had book-oriented (as opposed to periodical oriented) products featuring Kamala Khan, Dinosaur Girl, Miles Morales, etc. However the traditional older periodical buying comic base rejected those formats. DC did extremely well with the kids and YA products where they recruited several well known YA authors to right them. And the number one market they had for those books was libraries, as they launched those lines at the annual conference of the American Library Association. Libraries bought into them big and circulation of those books to YA readers (i.e. kids) was very robust according the the ALA reports afterwards. The new compact line of trades from DC, $9.99 in the smaller more manga like volume size featuring 10-12 issues worth of stuff that is mostly standalone series or arcs, has done very well since it launched earlier this year. Bookstores ordered big and reordered quickly as they flew off shelves. Libraries ordered big. But again, many traditional periodical oriented fans grumbled about the format, the smaller size, etc.

The mainstream comic audience has left periodicals behind. Traditional comic fans (now a niche market) have not. Many seem to cling to them and their whole thinking about comics revolves solely around the dinosaur format of the print periodical. Marvel and DC remain behind the curve of the mainstream market on this, in large part because of that segment of their customer base.

-M

Again I would argue that the manga stories allow characters to develop, grow, change, and reach resolutions. The concept brought to periodical comics, was part of what made Marvel seem innovative in the 60s, Peter Parker aged as the stories were told etc. high school to college to grad school, etc. and DC would eventually follow suit, but then comics became trapped by the Stan Lee maxim that fans don't want change, only the illusion of change, and reactions to storylines that did effect change (characters dying to be replaced by legacy characters, new status quo's etc.) bore that out as any periodical comic fans resisted and rejected those kind of changes to the status quo, so you began to have things get recycled with everything put back into place at the end of every story. Comics were no longer dynamic and evolving and characters could no longer change and grow form the conflicts they overcame. But this took place long before comics became corporate and more IP farms. That was something the corporate entities inherited, not brought to comics. That was a by-product of the generation of comic fans becoming comic creators and the rise to primacy of the sacred cow of continuity, not a function of corporate comics. Now corporations recognized that you don't mess with your successful IP by changing it (just ask Coca Cola what happens when you do it badly), so once they were involved that resistance to change become entrenched in an institutional way, but it's not that comics go too corporate to change, it's that they stopped changing to please the longterm fanbase who wanted things to be like they were when they first discovered comics-the problem is that that was a sliding scale and different for different segments of the fan base so by trying to please everyone, they pleased no one and lost the very thing that was drawing people to the story-cool dynamic characters who grew and evolved through their stories. But stories need beginnings, middles and ENDS. The resolution is what makes or breaks the story. Because the fan base wouldn't accept change or ends, super-hero storytelling became stagnant. Manga, YA graphic novels, and breakout non-big 2 books like Walking Dead or Saga succeed because they tell a dynamic story that has an actual ending as a destination. Even books like Watchmen and Sandman, that have achieved evergreen status in the comic market-have that as a feature, and it is one of the reasons for their enduring appeal and continued sales success. Even Marvel and DC stories told in other mediums, especially the MCU, feature that dynamic. It's a big reason why those stories resonate with audiences and why when they come to periodical comics they don't stick around-not because they can't find which #4 someone was talking about, but because the stories do not have endings or satisfying resolutions that impact the characters in terms of growth and development. It's what good stories need to do to satisfy the audience. It's what periodical comics from Marvel and DC usually fail to do. So even if by some miracle, someone finds a comic shop and actually buys a periodical comic-they're not getting a satisfying storytelling experience, even if they read a whole arc. That's not a corporate problem, that's a we have to tell one never ending story and keep the characters the way the fanbase discovered them because our audience won't accept anything else problem. And the bigger problem is that isn't going to attract new customers to replace those customers who age out or die off. Which is exactly where Marvel and DC are right now. A format and a storytelling ethos that are geared to generations past and do not appeal to current audiences, and you are never going to get those different segments to attracted to the same type of products or stories. That's the divide that is limiting the growth or comics right now.

-M

MRPs_Missives wrote this:



I agree with that. I’ve derived much satisfaction from most finales of TV shows. Or a film series. I mean, Back to the Future would be the one I’d mention the most in such a debate. I like the arc told over three films, and I wonder, if it had been a comic back then instead of a film series, we’d now be on something like the 480th issue, with Marty forever attempting to get back home, or Marty once again having to take the DeLorean out to rescue Doc from another hazard.

I do sometimes think about this while reading some modern comics. The lack of ending depresses me a little. Okay, don’t take the word “depresses” too literally (I’m not losing sleep over it), but this whole “never-ending battle” approach means we’ll never see a resolution. (I know there can and have been non-canonical final stories)

Also, and this is me being a pedant, as I was reading a modern Spidey arc recently, it got me thinking about how these characters are living long lives. Very long lives. I know we have to account for the difference between comicbook time and real time, but years ago, on Twitter, someone shared an infographic which stated Spider-Man had had 17,000+ stories written about him. Now, to have 17,000 adventures means he’s been doing it a long time. It’s not an exact mathematical sum, but if we presume he has 2-3 adventures a week, by my count, give or take he has had 48+ years of adventures. The only way you can fit 17,000 adventures into his life, while taking into account the 365-day year, is via 48 or so years of crime-fighting.

Not too important, I know, but superheroes certainly are having long, long lives…

I’m glad people are recognizing that kids are reading comics, just not the way we read comics. I bought all the Bone trades for my Grandson and he loved them. And he asked for My Hero Academia books for birthdays and Christmas. So comics. Just not “our” comics. Though, to be fair, about the only new comics I buy with any regularity are Brubaker and Phillips’ graphic novels.