Readers moving away from superhero comics in america?

[gaastra]

Comics trades and grsphic novels and mangas are selling great in America but it's not superheroes that are selling if forbes is telling the truth!


https://community.cbr.com/showthread.ph ... uperheroes

So we are back in the 1950s again. In the 50s everything sold better then heroes. They still had superman, batman, wonder woman and captain marvel but dell comics and ec comics (before the comic code) ruled. Disney comics, west comics, space comics, teen romance, archie type comics, scary and crime comics were kings. Also comics for a time outsold books in America! Uncle scrooge outsold superman. batman and wonder woman at the time.


Look at the newest smile book. It came in first place on the book charts and that dogman kids trade made the top 10 also! My little niece knows the smile books and bone and i'm shocked by this the smurfs trades are hits at my library in the kids section!

One piece may pass batman in sales and if you count the japan shonen jump it has passed batman in sales!

https://www.comicsbeat.com/raina-telgem ... this-week/


https://comicbook.com/anime/2019/03/06/ ... ord-manga/

[EricJ]

Well, there's a reason for that TOO--
Comics, like a lot of other uber-fan media (eg. games, horror, cartoons) have fallen into a fan "gentrification" that caters more and more to the isolated tastes of what the core fan thinks it "should" be about, and farther away from what actually sells or hooks new interest.
Marvel, still on a fan high from discovering girl "readers", has been turning all its heroes into girl-demographic, which has been turning off the older readers, and DC still caters to angry edgelord R-obsessed DC fans who think the entire Universe revolves around the Joker.
As a result, the biggest mainstream selling titles are the breakout manga hits, which sell in more mainstream bookstores, as there are fewer and fewer comic-collector stores to be found.

And, of course, that most US comics are now sold as digital PDF's anyway.

[Randall]

Actual monthly comic sales* are still dominated by superheroes, as well as (until recently) The Walking Dead. But I am glad that graphic novel sales show much greater diversity.

*Monthly sales are fairly bad right now. The latest Superman relaunch titles now ship about 50,000 units, and Spidey doesn't fare much better. Batman does 80,000- 100,000. Some months, nothing in the industry sells 100,000, a far cry from the old days when Superman, Captain Marvel, and Walt Disney Comics and Stories could each sell over a million every month.

[gaastra]

My books a million had two long rolls of graphic novels with marvel getting on side of the bookcases and dc getting the other side and a small area for non heroes and manga stuff. Over the years marvel and dc are now sharing a roll that was for dc only and non hero stuff has spread out into one side taking more room from marvel and dc. The other side that used to be just marvel is now all manga. The whole long roll of bookcases are manga only! There are tons of them! The kids comics have their own area in the kids section now with smile, bone, pokemon manga, my little pony, baby mouse, big nate, splatoon, and dogman front in center and the marvel and dc books other then marvels oz books pushed to the side! They still have them but they are not the main draw!

Also the "on sale for $4 area" it's always marvel and dc heroes. You get the strange oddball manga no one heard of also at times but most of them are marvel and dc heroes! Even ms marvel is not safe and was there half off! They had a roll of dc hardcovers for $3 last time I was there! (grabbed a bunch of dc hardcovers like justice league and even batman!) Even books that just came out a few months ago was in the half off area! You don't see many non hero trades in the area much. (blast it books a million I want transformers classics for half off! Sigh.)

[Ben]

Took me a while to work out that Books A Million was a place.

[gaastra]

From another site looks like bleeding cool has a update on the story! Looks like bookstores have just past comic shops and for the first time bookstores sell more comics then comicshops do!

The two biggest sellers? Non hero kids and teen comics like smile and dogman and mangas both outselling hero comics!

On the plus side hero comics while not first do still sell at the bookstores so batman and Spider-Man are still selling trades! So hero comics will still be there. They are just not in the top spot right now.




https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/10/14 ... ic-stores/

ICV2 recently ran a presentation to the comic book industry, ICv2 Insider Talks 2019 – The Future of Comics in the Age of Streaming, with a keynote speech from founder Milton Grieppthat had two major takeaways.

The first is that kids comics – stuff like Dav Pilkey‘s Dogman, Raina Telegemeir‘s Guts andShannon Eric Hale‘s Friends, all combined, now sell more graphic novels/collections than superheroes do. No wonder the likes of Moon Girl, DC Superheroes, Titans: Raven and Ms Marvel want to try and get a crossover slice of that pie. In bookstores, manga and kids material has jumped 30% in sales in bookstores and over 100% in comic stores.

The second is the bookstores will overtake comic book stores for all comic book sales by the end of 2019. Now, there are more general bookstores than speciality comic book stores. But comic stores have a far wider range of material, and mostly contain content that isn’t available in bookstores – at least not yet.

Last year 2018, all other channels than comic stores combined, including bookstores, digital and newsstand, managed to sell more comics than comic book stores for the first time since the rise of the direct market and the decline of the newsstand. But for 2019 it looks like bookstores will be able to do it on their own.

In bookstores, graphic novel sales have risen by double digits. But in comic stores, totting up sales of comics and graphic novels, the total is very very slightly down in the previous year.

Either way, this would be a first time for bookstores to sell more comics than comic stores.

[Randall]

Interesting. The industry has been working to make this happen for years. It bodes well for cartoonists in general.

[AlexPhilip]

Yeah, I read my comics in either trade/collected format or digital. In this day and age, people need to stop saying comics are dying because single issue purchases on Wednesdays from specialty comic shops are going down. It's ridiculous to base that assumption on a dying tradition.

[GeffreyDrogon]

It's just like independent animation. Online consumption formats like Webtoons have been doing significant damage to comic book stores like what YouTube has done to independent animation.

[Ben]

I would have thought YouTube has only helped independent film and animation exponentially? Many films have had their start or been promoted this way, with large view counts.

[Tarnished]

Come on, it's no wonder that people are moving away from superheroes comics in America. People are starting to forget about comics in general (and I'm not talking about japanese manga). Mangas are already a whole culture in case you didn't know. I mean, what's the point of reading comics if you can watch movies or play pc games? Games like csgo that allows you to trade cs:go skins are now more popular than ever. There're also plenty of other games like fortnite, dota etc . The list can go on forever.