A few more thoughts on the matter-

Right now the most successful publisher in terms of growing sales and growing their market appears to be Image Comics. Curiously, they are the only publisher that is not also a content provider. They do no create the content-they publish, market and sell the content provided by independent contractors.

Part of Marvel & DC's problem is they have conflated the publishing and content creation sides of their business models. They create content to their publishing model, not publish content that is created in the manner it needs to be best put out there. Contest is not their starting point and their business model does not serve the content or the audience, it serves the business needs of their publishing. However, DC and Marvel are better designed to be content providers than publishers. Most of their management's background is in content design and editorial, not in actual publishing.

Second, the publishing model is predicated upon the direct market. However, the direct market was created at a time when neither super-heroes no comic books were mainstream as they are now and it's infrastructure is not designed to serve a mainstream audience. It is designed to serve a hardcore niche audience, and almost all publishing decisions by the publishers, and hence content creation decisions by the companies who do both, have to serve the direct market model which does not serve a mainstream audience, but a niche one. Books designed for the direct market are not mainstream products, they are niche products and very few of them are able to cross-over into the mainstream market and succeed. When the direct market was designed and implemented, comics were a very large niche business (but still a niche business). Bookstores very rarely carried anything in the comic format except strip collections and few experimental products-The Fireside Books from Simon & Shuster, some of the Pocket Books reprinting Marvel stuff, the Tempo books reprinting DC stuff, the Elfquest albums, etc. that while comics were explicitly designed in format for the book trade. Comics didn't sell tot he mainstream and with rare exceptions, super-heroes weren't popular with the mainstream audiences (the Hulk TV series, the Donner Superman films, etc. were the few and far between exceptions where super-heroes crossed into the mainstream. The direct market was designed to funnel business to the hardcore audience that supported comics, not to put comic product into the mainstream.

Time passed and things changed. Super-heroes went mainstream via the success in movies and television. Comics gained respectability in the mainstream through things like Maus winning the Pulitzer, Sandman winning the World Fantasy Award, the creation of the trade paperback market, books like Understanding Comics proselytizing to readers, etc. Just as the direct market was shedding the last vestiges of the mainstream outlet for comics in newsstands, comics themselves began to move onto the mainstream radar. By the time super-heroes and the comic became fully mainstream, the direct market had consumed the industry and enclosed it well within its niche as the direct market suffered its own upheaval leaving Diamond the only distributor standing in the direct market.

The direct market however, as publishers learned to their dismay was subject to entropy. It shed readers/consumers faster than it gained them, and without the pipeline from the mainstream via newsstands and such, the flow of new to replace the old slowed to a trickle. It serviced that hardcore audience well, but it did not serve growing that audience well at all. The audience became much more inbred and the content followed suit.

When comic characters began to emerge in the mainstream and gain acceptance-spearheaded by the 1898 Batman film by Tim Burton, and things like the Bruce Timm animated Batman (and other DC shows) and the Fox X-Men cartoon that not only had exposure in the traditional Saturday morning kids slots but both also had prime time airings (X-Men much more limited in such than Batman:TAS though), and then within a decade in the cinema with the beginnings of the Marvel movies with X-Men, Spider-Man et. al; and when comics format products began to emerge into the mainstream, big 2 comics in the direct market themselves had lost the ability to function in the mainstream because of the infrastructure of the direct market and the content creation paradigm that had emerged to serve it.

Publishers now want to cash in on the mainstream cache of super-heroes and the comic medium but cannot because the market which had served them so well (the direct market) now bottlenecks them and serves as an albatross around their neck. The monthly 32 page pamphlet priced at $#-$5 is not mainstream product. It is not really a viable format for the mainstream consumer who didn't grow up with it and become a part of the hardcore niche audience. The never ending story continuity porn that big2 super-hero comics became as they transmuted into a product designed for the niche audience of the direct market is not a mainstream product and is not viable for a mainstream consumer (and let me add, history and backstory, legacy and tradition are not the problems for the mainstream audience, but the incestuous sacred cow continuity has become and the stranglehold it has on publishing decisions is something that will neither be understood or accepted by a mainstream audience-even things like reboots and DCYou initiatives stem form a reaction of to the sacred cow of continuity and are informed by it and that creates one of the obstacles to bridging into the mainstream).

Right now, I think the biggest problem with big 2 publishing plans and content creation is that they are trying to please everyone by serving 2 masters and failing to please/serve anyone.

They realize that the direct model in some ways hampers mainstream success and have settled on the concept of jumping on points/accessibility to try to bridge that gap. Yes the content they produce is still beholden to niche hardcore audience.

The new #1 is an attempt to please the mainstream/potential new audience by giving them a starting point. But the content is really the same old story that has been geared to the core niche audience of the direct market since forever, packaged in the same old format that has served the direct market forever, etc.

So the content and format do not serve the mainstream and the lack of legacy numbering/continued runs or whatever upsets the niche hardcore market and serves as jumping off points as well. Again, you can't please everyone and in attempting to do so, they are really pleasing no one.

I feel they either need to accept the niche for what it is and just publish for that niche audience until the economy of scale gets so small that the viability of doing so causes them to cease operations, i.e. milk that niche hardcore audience for as long as they can until it dries up, or blow up the whole thing and look for a new publishing model altogether In fact, stop being publishers and just focus on being content creators and let the infrastructure of their parent companies find the best way to bring the product to market as a print product. That may mean the end of the monthly comic, the end of Diamond and the lcs I know. Or it could transform them into a business model that suits the 21st century not one rooted in the late middle 20th century. Because even the attempts at going digital by the big2 are weighted by the albatross of the direct market model that forces them to overcharge for digital product (i.e. the same as print on release day).

They need to focus on creating the best content for the audience (mainstream and fans) and let the business people and the publishing experts who are succeeding in bringing content to market in the 21st century figure out the best way to format, market, distribute and sell that product to reach as large an audience as possible.

As part of publicly held companies Marvel & DC do have an obligation to their shareholders to make their product as profitable as hey can, and that means growing sales and audience. They are held back by the niche market, and a lot of that is the attitude the niche market has thinking Marvel and DC are their bitches and owe them to serve their desires because they are loyal fans or whatever. And that' simply not the case. If Marvel and DC are anybody's bitches, it's the shareholders.

The biggest obstacle though is the risk/reward factor. Setting up a new publishing model and the infrastructure to serve it is a big investment. IT could have big rewards, but it could completely alienate that core audience. Even if the core audience remains on board, there will be a learning curve and a time lag before the growth pays for the investment, if it does. Marvel and DC themselves don't have the resources to take that risk. The parent companies may not value publishing enough to make the capital investment and ride the risk wave long enough to make the endeavor.

Marvel & DC's parent companies make a lot of money from super-heroes through the movies, the tv shows, the kids books and the other merchandising of the characters. Other publishers(like the big 5) make enough revenue off of selling comics (or graphic novels) that they are willing to establish graphic novel lines/imprints under their umbrella to sell/distribute their wares from contracted content creators (i.e. cartoonists, writers/artists, etc.) to the mainstream audience outside the direct market without the benefit of revenue streams from movies, tv or toys. No one seems to think the direct market model for super-hero comics is worth investing in to see it if can grow. It's not mainstream enough even though super-heroes and comics are. It wasn't designed to be mainstream, and it doesn't have what it takes to make the transition to mainstream as the direct market is currently constituted.

-M

I think the biggest difference between the big two and current Image is that Image is all about creator owned books when the big two still push their corporatly owned IPs... In France, there aren't any corporatly owned popular characters being published, or at least none with success. And creators currently have no interest in creating new IPs for DC, Marvel or Valiant when Image is more than happy to publish their own stuff and is ready to help with the international licensing. DC and Marvel have failed to transitoin from thinking local to international with the comics publishing, and so for many years.
Think about it : brand loyalty wors for products, but not that well for works of art. We see even here people stating their sticking to one company, but do you see anyone in the mainstream stating they'd stick to Paramount movies or Virgin Records? Image doesn't do its big sales on the direct market, as is evident with the monthly sales charts, your own visits to LCSs, or most of your own pull lists for the matter.
Big corporations are more likely to fund their own IPs with big budgets and huge star power, which is why te brand awareness of Supes, Bats, X Family and such is so huge in the mainstream, the marketing departments puts it everywhere. On the other hand, hte current US comics that sells the most in the world that hasn't yet crossed over to other medias than comics is Saga, and it is nowhere in the mainstream medias, those ones owned by those same big corporations. Yet, it is far beyond what it could have hopped for. Image barely publishes any pure super hero comics anymore (they're at least far from the majority), Boom, IDW, Fantagraphics, ans the likes are in the same boat, and all of them have turned their main focus from the direct market some time ago, realizing that the international is where their business lies (Sweden has 9 million people and sold over 20000 copies of the latest Mouse Guard).
People willing to pay money for books htey want to read themselves are craving for talent when superheroes fans are craving for continuity.
If that equation is mostly right, it comes to no shock that the big two and superheroes struggle to attracked the best talent. Sure you can find for some time a top selling writer on Batman or a few other books featuring mainstream Icons, but it's not that easy : the biggest selling comic writer of today (Kirkman) has stated that you will never ever find him writing again corporatly owned titles, and guys like Rucka and Brubaker won't either as soon as they manage to launch successfull enough properties. As fans but mostly as readers, we saw that happen with the launch of the big two and the current Marvel soft-reboot. Only Snyder and or Lemire managed to make books in need gain traction, and barely so in the long run. And you can see that Snyder is almost out of the door now. Lemire is a cartoonist with a style far from mainstream, so he needs to work around more to find working relations with artists that can sell books as Matt Kindt is also currently doing (don't be surprised to soon see books from Kindt or Lemire with Mico Suayan, Clayton Crain or Lewis Larosa at Image!).
Superhero movies cost a lot, and as only big corporations can fund those and will rather do so with characters they own and control. The talented comic creators have little interest in creating pure superhero material as it's more likely they can find cross-media success with Sci-Fi, adventure, romance, drama, war or comedy. So I guess we're just seing the begining of the end of what we've growned acustomed to call mainstream superhero books. They will surely always be there, or at least always the most iconic IPs, but the talent and creativity will be elsewhere but for rare exceptions. In his own way, Mark Millar continues to create superhero stories and seemingly manages to bring some of those to the big screen, but we can all see he doesn't do it in a direct market/big corpo way (his books are almost always late, short and self contained, and the movies he's co-created are at best at the fringes of superheroes as we usually accept those, they metatextualy play around the existing concept).
So in my opinion, on a long term strategy, the big two should just leave the big Icons to other medias apart from very special occasions and focus on new creator owned IPs with exclusive access, from the very best creators.
Comics are never gonna be mainstream again, as new generation kids often think reading is boring outside their social media addictions. And it's not comics responsability (or power) to adress that situation, it's just the sad way it is. If DC had been publishing Saga as a creator owned comic, there would already be a movie or a TV series and it could be as popular as the Hunger Games. But decades of habit and greed has prevented them from doing so, and it might very well be the cause of their demise in the long run.

Ah, you missed a distinction which makes both topics interesting to connect : you said " Image is producing X,Y and Z and they are readily consumed by the larger population, so why aren't the books of Marvel and DC not being consumed despite the properties popularity in other mediums?"
Well, I was highlighting the Image comics NOT having yet crossed to any other mediums and yet enjoying more popularity than comics featuring heroes enjoying mainstream popularity, which is even more saying.

And it is not a question whether DC and Marvel comics are mainstream publishers (which they technicaly are) but whether they were putting out mainstream products (which they seem to not be anymore, as is debated here, with attempts at explanations), or so I understood.

That they have mainstream appeal is not the question here, as it is undeniable they have, at least the potential. The conversation here indeed is if the big two books are mainstream products, or at least it is the debate I thought was at hand here. and the context of the here debated mainstream context has already been established : superheroes are a mainstream concept. The question only was if superheroes comic books still were mainstream products, a question which was raised since the numbers and observations we have seem to indicate otherwise, despite all the cross media supprt they get, and when IP's such as Saga don't share the same cross over appeal and manage to far outsell corporatly owned superheroes comic books in the world.

And sure mainstream can slightly mean different things from land to land, but lets be realistic, Judge dredd is not mainstream in the UK, The Incal isn't mainstream in France and Cerebus isn't mainstream in the US, yet, all comic fans more or less know what those are. So it's not about countries respective cultures but about what comic audiences thought for years was mainstream and what the mainstream audience finds mainstream.

And again, I insist that putting Walking dead and saga in the same catagory doesn't work as Walking dead is comics/TV/videogames/apparel/books/food/etc, when Saga is just comics. Walking dead is the same as Daredevil, except its creator owned, which isn't something that people can have an understanding of unless they learn about it, so it doesn't make any difference in perception. Which is why I was later talking about publishing models.

It's a global market, so there's no point in separating trade and floppies in global reach. In cheer amount of people, more of them currently read new Walking Dead comics than Batman ones (probably not as many with Saga yet, as it is not yet a multi-media IP). Everyone uneder 50 knows about Supes, Bats, X-Men or The Walking dead in the western world, and probably most of them in the rest of the world. Therefore those characters are mainstream. Yet, the sales of the comics they originated from when talking superheroes just don't translate even relatively with their current mainstream appeal. So hte debate indeed is if superheroes comic books are mainstream, to which you might have an analysis or another, and also expand by analyzing the distribution (which I wasn't doing) and publication models (which I was). It's a global problem and therfore needs global analysis. As stated, I believe that superhero comics is a dying form, while it's a growing one on TV and film, and that the reasons for this lay in the publishing philosophy of the big two, focusing on corporate IPs that talented creators don't need anymore to rise their profile, not as much as they used to anyways. Therefore, the quality of corporate superhero comics is bound to drop as they fail to attract the best editorial and creative talents outside of the occasional "coup". People might be sheep, but people who are readers less so. You can only sell that many superhero soap operas to people who already get that from TV and enjoy reading Victor Hugo or Tom Clancy. Film and TV has proved itself more than capable of telling those superhero stories to mainstream audiences, so why should they invest energy, time and money to seek out comics that tell the same stories but often with less talented creative teams?
Saga isn't as easy to translate into movies or TV, firstly because of the costs it would involve, secondly because of the mature topics it embraces. Therefore, if you're interested in the story, you only have the comic books to get it. That doesn't make it a mainstream work, mind you, but compared to a niche of superhero books that sells less and mostly to people around 30-40 years old, I'd say that compared to all of the widly available other types of comic books (drama, adventure, comedy, etc, be it euro, us or asian) superhero comic books are not as widly accepted and read, hterfore it's not wrong to disqualify thse as being mainstream. That is at least my opinion.

I can also easily back it up as when I lend a comic book to a friend who doesn't read comics, if it's a superhero one, I'll always need to give him more context then with any other one, which is a good tell of how not mainstream those are for a mainstream population, wherever they are.

You're not counting the MANY subsequent re-prints of #1 (it charted for months) or the trade (which is a better comparison to Asterix anyway)... I'm not sure if that counts copies sold by Disney stores (I know they sell it at all the gift shops at tourist spots)... I've even seen Star Wars comics at Dollar Tree and Five below. If anything Marvel and DC put out is Mainstream, it's Star Wars.

Then there's libraries. Libraries can by the Asterix book. They wait for the trades (often the Hard Covers) for Star Wars. That's ALOT of sales, I'd think.

Anyway, a couple things:

I think the biggest problem with single issues these days is price. You don't get alot of entertainment for your $3.99. If they were $2, they'd sell more. Obviously, the marketing types feel that $3.99 and selling 50K copies is more profitable then selling them for $1.99 and perhaps selling more. Then there's the availability thing.

I would love to see someone print a cheap newsprint comic to retail for $1.99 (or even $1.50) and see if it works in grocery stores and Walmart. Marvel did the .99 titles WAY back but they didn't reach the alternate distribution channels.

I think trades are also seen as less 'nerdy' than a comic, for whatever reason. Then there's the 'getting a whole story' thing, which some people get upset about. My wife will rarely read comics, because she HATES cliffhangers. I think if you want more casual buys, you need to have more one-and-done stories.

Plus, there's the PERCEPTION that buying even 1 comic is a long term commitment. Buying a little golden book or early reader for $3.99 is a one time buy.. buying Spiderman #1 implies you're going to buy the kid more, you know?


Another thing you mentioned.. while no SINGLE superhero title or trade does that well.. lots of superhero books sell in total... maybe it's just a matter of taking a look at is as 'DCU' and 'Marvel U' rather than 'Superman Vol. 2'

After all, when considering if, say Game of Thrones or Walking Dead was mainstream, I'd consider all the volumes, since it's one property.  Perhaps in looking at this, we should consider the Marvel and DC Superhero universes each a single property as well.