2014: the most profitable month ever (what? did I read that right?)
The top selling comics today sell one tenth of what they used to sell. There are 30,000 towns in America, and one sale per town puts a comic near the top ten sellers. The worst selling comics are often below ten thousand issues. So the publishers must be bankrupt, right? No: they have ten times as many titles, and charge three or four times as much per issue (after adjusting for inflation). In August the Christian Science Monitor reported "July 2014 is the most profitable month ever in comic book history, and comics are only getting bigger." And of course the movies and merchandising bring in many, many times that revenue. Stan Lee worked out of a single office, but now Marvel has a big flashy global headquarters. The future looks even brighter: the movies are raising awareness of superheroes, and the industry is slowly learning how to sell via the Internet, which solves the distribution problem, always the biggest problem in comics. Comic sales are so small that it would not be difficult to double them and double them again if they get it right.
The bottom line is that the comics industry is mature, and so it knows how to make money.
So why am I such a pessimist? Because these are "just comics." All the fans tell me that. They are "just comics" and should not be taken too seriously. They are not on the same level as real literature. They contradict themselves, they expect readers to lose interest in a few years, they are short term fun, with a bit of sex and violence mixed in, or else they pander to nostalgia. They are small stories with small ambition. These are not the comics that inspired me and millions like me in the 1960s to 1980s. For a brief period in the 1960s some people dared to believe that superhero comics could be real literature, to the highest standards. Those days have gone. The dream is dead, at least in the superhero genre. At least in my opinion.
And there it is, in a nutshell.
Stuff like "Marvel Monsters" four pre-Marvel styled single issues and
collected hardcover, or the 12 issue Giffen/Larsen
FANTASTIC FOUR: THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMIC MAGAZINE tribute, or the Didio/Giffen 8-issue
OMAC series (2011), or the current
KAMANDI CHALLENGE, all exploit an existing fanbase that reverently look back to an era when comics were good, and give the faintest nostalgic taste of when comics were good, but are at best hollow exploitations of those fans, that make no attempt or pretense to match or surpass those great comics from 30 or 40-plus years ago.
