Who was demanding an Amazing Spider-Man feature in Amazing Fantasy when they published it? You put out books and they find an audience or they don't. The issue with modern comics is not that they are not good enough to find an audience and last, it's that there is no audience to find. There is no audience for new material in periodical format. The only consumers of that format left only want to buy the things they have been habitually buying for decades. No new audiences have come to that format in decades, so no new properties are going to find an audience because the products released do not reach a mass market audience where new consumers could be found. The remaining audience for periodical comics has shown again and again through their buying habits they are neophobic creatures of habit. The only new books finding audiences these days are books published in formats other than the monthly periodical and targeted at audiences outside the niche direct market customer base.

If the comic buying market of the 21st century existed in the 1960s, the launch of the Marvel Universe would have been an abject failure and books like Fantastic Four and Spider-Man would have been cancelled in less than 2 years due to lack of sales. Thankfully they launched at a time when comic fans weren't the only market for comic books and had a chance to find an audience and thrive rather than falling on the deaf ears of habitual comic buyers who do not invest in characters or stories that they haven't been buying since the beginning of their time as comic consumers.


-M

I've said it before and it's still true-comic fans get the books that their buying habits (not their internet postings) deserve.


-M

Obviously the retailers who are DC's actual customers are since the books are non-returnable continue to order them. How many reach end customers, we'll never know, but retailers who know what they are doing would make sure they have at least an 80% sell through to achieve break even status on the titles (when all operating expenses for operating a store are factored in, numbers based on info given by Brian Hibbs in various Titling at Windmills columns over the years). Since many shops order to sell through before the following week's books come on for 80-90% of the titles in the monthly catalog (i.e. pulls + average 1st week shelf sales), I would surmise with the exception of buy ins for variants or overbuys/overships to achieve better discounts that the vast majority of books outside the top 30-50 titles never see the shelves and are preorder sales only, and the vast majority of copies ordered even of the top sellers in the charts wind up in the hands of end customers. The net take, if publishers are making them, people are buying them (again barring overbuys to get variants order thresholds or discounts that wind up costing the retailer little or nothing and which they can sell in bargain bins as pure profit even at $1).

-M

So almost to the level of the number of Batman books, minis, specials, trades, OGNs etc. that DC put out between '89 and '93 during the height of Batmania.., after the Burton film

-M

PS it seems proportionately more now because DC's overall output in much less, so it's a greater percentage of the line, but it's not out of whack with the number of Batbooks being put out overall at that time.

Experiments like those happen when sales on the top books are enough to prop up the line and account for the occasional failure, and when the overall size of the line is bigger broadening the revenue generation. The market isn't healthy enough to have a broad line and the top sellers don't sell enough to make a cushion, so every book that does get made has to achieve a certain level of revenue generation. It's a risk-averse market, especially when retailers, who shoulder all the risk in ordering books, have to order to sell through numbers in the first week, meaning nothing has a shelf-like to find an audience. If it isn't preordered, it isn't sold. New books need to have a shelf life to find an audience. That is not a market reality currently. So there is no risk involved in publishing experiments to see if they will find an audience, no risk because it is a guaranteed failure with no chance of success in current market conditions, so no one is going to publish a guaranteed money loser. You need a broad audience with growth potential to take a risk in publishing books like that. That type of market hasn't existed at all in the last 5-7 years. The risk books are books that have a chance of finding an audience outside the direct market, likely aimed at the YA market even if they come out in the direct market-books like BOOM's Something is Killing the Children and such. Ms. Marvel got lucky, caught the tail end of last window for finding an audience about 10 years ago, AND even then it found its audience through Scholastic sales of trade collections, not through direct market periodical sales.

-M

Provided that Wonder Man is sporting the red safari jacket outfit, I'd read the hell out of that...

You forgot the Wonder Twins!