I think you are confusing fan with customer, and the idea of collector muddies it up even more. I don't think comic fans are declining, in fact with the popularity of comic characters and super-heroes in mass pop culture, I think it is growing. But I think the number of Wednesday Warriors, i.e. people who go every Wednesday (or get their books from mail order once a month) from American comic shops, i.e. customers, is dwindling as no one book can support regular sales of 100K anymore (the last book to do so was Snyder's Batman that has a 3 year run as a 100k seller (barely).

Part of it is accessibility. There are roughly 5000 Diamond accounts spread out over 50 states (and that includes things like DCBS and Westfield that have no physical location and things like a Hot Topic or something that sells comic merchandise bought from Diamond but not actual comic books-not sure if Hot Topic buys from Diamond but I do know of a handful of pop culture type stores that have Diamond accounts but never buy comics or trades). If you look at the area I live in between Dayton and Columbus there are roughly 20-25 comic shops I could go to within an hour's drive. Yet someone like Slam has said where he lives, there are zero shops within an hour's drive. There could be lots of fans in Slam's areas but they have little opportunity to become customers unless they do online/mail order.

The problem is the direct market was never set up to service a mass audience, or to grow it's customer base. It was established to service the regular customers i.e. the hardcore customer base and collector. The business model was meant to service that portion of the customer base whose sales followed a regular pattern and bought no matter what. It existed alongside the feeder program for comics customers, i.e. the newsstands. But the direct market ended up cannibalizing newsstand sales too and when the newsstand market disappeared, it lost its feeder program to create new generations of readers and customers. The only places to get comics now were in places where there were already lots of customers, but that was a patchwork across the US. It wasn't a problem in other countries, things like a new Asterix graphic album have millions of preorders in Europe, but Europe didn't operate on the same business model as the US did. Neither did much of Asia.

But the direct market business model continued to dominate the US comic business and for a short time it thrived, until attrition began to chip away at its customer base and the lack of a feeder program didn't create replacement customers. Things like the speculator bust were part of the entropy attritioning the number of customers and showed the weaknesses inherit in the business model. The hope was movies would serve as the new feeder program, but that never really materialized as movies and monthly pamphlets are entirely different animals-movies present a self-contained complete story. Sure some are series (i.e. have sequels) but a fan of movies is used to getting a complete story all in one shot. Monthly printed comics don't do that. The customers for each are different and one doesn't necessarily feed the other. Movies created a lot of fans, but not a lot of customers for monthly comic books.

Customers are dwindling because the current business model in the US for comics is not designed to grow the business (it's designed to service existing customers hence non-returnability, pre-ordering stuff sight unseen 3 months in advance, short shelf life for products, high niche market prices for the products, etc.) and isn't accessible for large swaths of the population who could be potential customers. Specialty destination stores are passe in the current market. Look at all the specialized retailers in products with much broader appeal than monthly comic books that are shuttering stores and have shrinking sales number, while larger big box stores that offer everything and online sales cannibalize those customer dollars.

Here's the catch 22 for comic retailers and growing business-according to Brian Hibbs, to be profitable and cover all expenses outside of just the product itself, comic retailers need to sell 4 out of every 5 copies they order. But to grow your business you have to have product on the shelves for new customers to see and sample, but if you only sell 3 copies of a book you cannot have an extra copy on the shelf or you won't make any money form the 3 you sold. If there are 5000 Diamond accounts, a book has to sell 25K units to retailers to sell 20K to end customers to be profitable. SO any book under the 25K sales level is not likely to ever have shelf copies. What complicates things is that, not all Diamond accounts are equal. DCBS, Westfield, Mile High, Midtown, Thing From Another World, Lonestar and other national mail order accounts buy up a large percentage of the copies that Diamond sells, maybe as much as 50% of the entire orders, which means that the rest of those local shops are ordering much smaller quantities of the books, so it is more likely the 50K level a book has to be at before you are likely to see shelf copies of it that are not going to end up costing the retailer any chance of profits on what he sells. If you look at the Diamond charts, 50K doesn't even cover the top 20 books most months. So how do you grow your business in that model? It's too risky to order more copies than you are guaranteed to sell, so there are no copies for any potential new customer to buy even if they happen to come in through the door or a specialty shop that exists only in certain parts of the country. Some publishers are experimenting with returnability on first issues (or even first trades) but that has had mixed results (retailers still have to pony up the initial costs of the books and get credit/refund for what doesn't sell but that still ties up liquid capital they need to operate in the short term). Some point to things like Free Comic Book Day as growth outreach, and to an extent it is, but those books aren't free to retailers. They pay anywhere from a dime to 50 cents for every book they give away and if the people coming in for free books don't buy something else or become regular customers, they lose money on top of having to pay extra staff to handle to crowds on those days. Some shops can translate FCBD in to revenue, others lose money, and rarely do the "new" customers coming ion for free stuff translate into new regular customers to grow the business. Often they are people making the rounds to as many shops to get as many of the freebies as they can, some will then flip them on ebay for a profit for people who can't get to a shop or have no shops in their area and want the books.

So I can't tell you how many fans there are. In many ways it's an irrelevant question. The relevant question I think for what you seek is how many customers for monthly comic books are there? Those regular customers might be fans, or might not, they might be speculators, they might be disgruntled former fans who keep buying out of habit, they might be libraries buying books for their stacks, they might be anything, the fan aspect is not the crucial thing here, it is the willingness to buy the product on a regular basis. And that number is not very big and not growing.

-M