Comic Books--Past and Future 3

This is a continuation of the discussion I began here: 

 At the end of the first part of this discussion, I said that other media could tell violent stories about people with superpowers better than comic books can....and the proof is in the huge success of the Marvel films and even the somewhat lesser success of the DC movies and TV series. The audiences for these alleged "spin-offs" from the print versions of these characters and concepts are orders of magnitude greater than the readership of the comic books (even if you take the readership of all the comics as a whole).

Most people, if you say "Captain America," will picture Chris Evans, not a drawing by Jack Kirby or one of the more recent artists to handle that character. If you say "Superman," they will picture Christopher Reeve, not Curt Swan's elegant drawings of the Man of Steel. I'd wager a significant portion of the audience for these movies has never even picked up a comic book, let alone read one. This does not bode well for the publishers of those comic books--especially since they are now owned by the companies that make the movies.

It didn't and doesn't have to be that way. Yes, the direct market--the individual comic-book stores and the distributors who service them--rescued the industry from near-certain collapse when the newsstand system that had sustained it fell, hit by recession, changing demographics, and a shift from a mass transit commuting style to the individual car (among other things). But the direct market should have been only a "stopgap" maneuver, a way to keep things going until a different distribution system evolved. Such a system did evolve for the rest of the magazine industry: They found their way into bookstores and supermarkets, in part by changing their price points and packages, making their product as worthy of sales space as breakfast cereals and canned corn.

But the comics industry fell in love with the "confirmed sale" that the non-returnable direct market represented. A sale to a comic-book store was final; the retailer didn't return the unsold product, he put it in his "back-issue" stock. Of course, in time, that actually meant diminishing sales. The retailer didn't have space for lots of back issues of every title...so he started ordering only what he knew he could sell...and the title that was selling 100,000 copies per issue was soon selling only 40,000. (Eventually, the retailer might cut back all the way to only his "subscription" sales on many titles--ordering only for those customers who had told him they would buy every issue of that series.)

So now, with few exceptions, the only place you can find monthly periodicals of comic-book material is in a comic-book store. And if you aren't actually looking for comic books, you have no reason to go there. The idea of comic books as something you'd pick up while strolling through the grocery store, or waiting for the bus, was lost.

And with that was lost the idea of comic books for a general audience...now they were only for fans.

More on this later as well.