The American comic book industry, once a cultural powerhouse, has been struggling for survival in recent decades. Here is a story from last year about Marvel and DC cutting artists’ pay by 90%. Fast forward to this week, and we now have fresh reports of convention attendees groaning at a Spider-Man editor’s every word.
While many trace the comic book crash to a pattern of customer relations disasters over the past decade, the industry’s problems run far deeper than the censorship controversies, out-of-touch storytelling, and endless reboots since the 2010s.
In truth, the seeds of the comic book crash were planted as far back as the 80s. And by the 1990s, American comics had already taken a mortal blow. Today, the industry clings to life, reliant on Hollywood blockbusters while forfeiting the youth market to a more agile competitor: Japanese manga.
Let’s do the autopsy.
While the 1980s are often remembered as an age of innovation for American comics thanks to enduring works like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, it was also when major cracks began to show in the industry. Emblematic of these issues was Marvel Comics’ firing of editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in 1987.
Shooter, though a controversial figure, played a pivotal role in stabilizing Marvel throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Under his leadership, the company maintained high editorial standards and fostered a creative environment that produced legendary storylines and iconic new characters. Shooter also prioritized business decisions, like shipping books on time, that kept the company solvent during a turbulent market. His ousting signaled editorial oversight taking a backseat to short-term sales tactics, setting the stage for today’s mismanagement.
After Shooter’s departure, Marvel and DC whipsawed between increasingly erratic publishing strategies. One notable example was the reliance on crossover events: massive, multi-title storylines which required that readers buy a wagonload of books to get the whole story. While profitable at first, big crossover fatigue eventually set in, souring readers on the medium as a whole.
But that series of missteps only softened comics publishers up for a fatal blow: the 1990s Collector Bubble
If the 1980s sowed the seeds of decline, the 1990s reaped full-blown disaster. This was the decade of the collector bubble, when speculators flooded the market, buying up comics not to read them, but in the hope they’d appreciate in value. Publishers, sensing quick money, fed the frenzy with gimmicks like variant covers, foil-stamped issues, and so-called “first editions” which they printed in absurdly high quantities.
Related: The Ages of Comics
At its peak, the comic book market appeared to be booming, but it was all smoke and mirrors. The demand was artificial, and once the bubble burst, retailers and publishers were left in financial ruin. Many comic book stores went under, Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996, and the industry never fully recovered.
In the fallout from this ground zero event, American comic book publishing has largely abandoned the print storytelling business. Today, the Big Two are far more concerned with mining their intellectual property for blockbuster movies than selling comic books.
Yes, Marvel’s cinematic universe has generated billions of dollars, but that success hasn’t trickled down to the comic book market. In fact, comic sales continue to decline as fewer young readers get into the scene to begin with. The sharp dichotomy between cape flicks’ popularity and the public’s resounding disinterest in the source material reveals that the Big Two have lost touch with their readership. Comics, once the breeding ground for innovative storytelling, have become mere IP farms for Hollywood.
Related: Comics’ Death of a Thousand Cuts
As Marvel and DC fumbled through decades of bad decisions, a quiet revolution took place. Japanese manga, long a staple of youth entertainment in Japan, began capturing the imaginations of American readers. In the aughts, manga entered the U.S. market in full force, offering what American comics no longer could: affordable, accessible stories not stuck in rigid genre boxes.
As a result, manga didn’t just cater to superhero fans. It appealed to virtually every interest from sports to cooking, from high school dramas to epic fantasy. While Marvel and DC continued to churn out convoluted superhero sagas that warned off new readers, manga offered easily digestible volumes with clear and innovative stories.
Walk into any bookstore these days, and you’ll see that manga has sealed its conquest of the US youth market. Japanese comics take up row after row, while the American comic book section—if there even is one—has been relegated to the corner. Manga’s success highlights just how badly the Big Two failed the two most recent generations of readers.
The American comic book crash didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of decades of poor business decisions, typified by Jim Shooter’s firing and short-sighted pandering to speculators. And while Marvel and DC are staying afloat thanks to a flood of Hollywood licensing fees, their actual publishing operation is withering on the vine.
Meanwhile, manga has swooped in to capture the hearts and wallets of young American readers with the kind of creativity, variety, and accessibility that the Big Two lost long ago. The Big Two’s future looks bleak unless fundamental changes are made—and fast. Otherwise, American comics may be reduced to nostalgic artifacts of a once-thriving industry.
The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.
Why I stopped buying comics is simple. I collected them in the 90s to read, from 93 through 96, but I grew up. Then I bought a few collected volumes in the early 2000s, but very few floppies. I think the main reason they are a failure now is (1) too liberal, (2) full color glossy paper which costs more to print than back in day’s dot matrix color newsprint whatever its called, which causes (3) too expensive for kids. The industry is relying on adults who never grew up but got stuxk in “college humor” for the rest of their life, and who are liberal. But even they will eventually get tired of collecting these things. Manga has the advantage of being black and white so easier and cheaper to print which can keep the price down, and their sucess or failure is already tested in a foreign country in serializing magazine form, as well as in their final book form. We don’t even get the ones that failed over here. Another point of the full color glossy paper of the modern comic, the art doesn’t deserve it; but even if it did, floppy comics are ephemeral and should be cheap since very little story appears in each, whether its good or not. That its bad writing and bad art exaccerbates the probelm, but even with good writing and good art, once you pass $3 a floppy, the industry is doomed to eventually fail, and are they at $6 now or is it $8?
You and I followed a similar arc.
The average age of comic book readers from 1933 to about 1960 was between 8-13 years old, though many ages read comic books.
First Comics did an informal poll of readers in the late 80s and found that median age had gone to between 18 and 24 years old.
From 2022 to 2024, surveys show that the median age is now 34 to 37 years old.
The mainstream portion of the medium is aging out.
I never really read comic books when I was a kid, so forgive me if my impressions are off-base, but:
What strikes me as the central shortcoming of American/Western comic books is that they ended up singularly focused on superheroes to the exclusion of almost everything else. And the nature of Western superheroes is, for the most part, a sort of revolving status-quo soap-opera sort of plot, where dramatic stuff happens and relationships change but the characters and their abilities remain fairly static.
This is in contrast to manga, especially shonen/seinen manga, which are almost the opposite. Take for instance Dragon Ball, where characters developing new abilities and powers is a central aspect of it. When I discovered Dragon Ball Z in middle school, it was completely revolutionary and unlike any Western superhero content I knew (mostly animated adaptations of superhero stuff.)
Whether fair or not, this creates the impression that manga is much more dynamic and compelling than western comics. Plus, manga extends over a vast range of genres, from the drift car racing culture of Initial D to the swordfighting of Rurouni Kenshin to romantic drama; which didn’t exactly characterize Marvel or DC Comics when I was growing up. I know that further back, American comics were a lot more diverse with detective stories, romance, and so on, but it’s been superheroes all the way down for as long as most of us born after 1980 can remember.
Mainstream American comics just can’t compete with the diversity and creativity of manga, and since interest in superhero adaptations seems to have cratered since Avengers Endgame Part II came out, that well appears to have just about run dry.
Back in the day, pretty much every major player in the comics industry thought that superheroes were a passing fad. By all accounts, they should have been. It’s hard to believe now, but a Current Year household name like X-Men flopped in its initial 1960s run.
Comics used to be very diverse in genre, especially from 1933 to 1949. Superheroes were out of favor by 1949, with Crime, Romance, Horror, and various subgenres of Adventure being the staples until 1954 and the Comics Code Authority. The industry neutered itself with over-regulation due to the public’s reaction over its excesses in the Crime and Horror comic book genres. The Code however was an excellent fit for Superheroes, which flourished in the Silver Age between 1956 and 1970. After 1967 (DC) and 1968 (Marvel), both of the large very active comic book companies were part of corporations, so creative decisions were less driven by innovation and more by past performance, IP lock-down, and in-place contractual obligations. Superheroes were thus locked in place and have been stagnating ever since in the American comics scene.
Man of the Atom on Substack wrote a whole series on how the comics industry destroyed itself, and it’s an absolutely fascinating read. Basically when the Boomers came in, they destroyed everything about the way comic stories were told, because they hated the family. https://atomvalleybulletin.substack.com/p/comics-history-recap-and-summary
MotA is always on point!
I got a slight chuckle out of manga being described as “agile.” Manga, and by extension anime (as most anime is adapted from manga), is not without its problems. One of the reasons I abandoned anime back in 2008 is that it doesn’t take too long to discover just how formulaic the writing can be. While western comics have the problem of using the same characters for nearly a century, one could argue that manga has the problem of using the same stories for just as long.
I distinctly recall myself and a friend discussing our shared anime ennui over a game of pool, where we both groused about how predictable and boring anime had become. And to prove our point, we were able to spitball a fairly detailed concept for a shonen anime centred around a 14 year old boy who decides to start playing billiards. It’s a shame neither of us know how to draw, because a cursory search found only a single solitary manga about billiards.
Yes, anime became formulaic and repetitive in the aughts. The point is, manga started capturing American comics’ market a decade before that. And US comics companies knew it.
I’m old enough to remember the big deal made over American artist Adam Warren getting tapped to draw Dirty Pair; not to mention manga style ripoffs like Battle Chasers.
It’s mostly forgotten now, but back during the Bubble Economy, upstart studios could get Yakuza funding to make the wildest stuff imaginable. Then the turn of the millennium came, and the industry started playing it safe. Something happened between those two points. If only we had a name for it …
Thanks for the hat tip link, Brian!
You earned it!
I feel like this outcome was always gonna happen, given how the early history of Comic Books in America is essentially being a front business for various mobsters, much like Early Hollywood and so many other industries in New York and other cities with major immigrant strongholds.
Oddly enough, the mob seemed to run these businesses better than the current Death Cult management. Look at the 1970s New York indie film scene.
It’s funny you should mention Jim Shooter, who was so good at his job that Doug Moench, Jim Byrne, Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Roy Thomas, and Gene Colan all left to go work for DC because of Shooter.
More broadly, though, Shooter gave us the gift of Secret Wars I and II, which established the model for all those big company-wide crossovers that sell gangbusters but everybody claims to hate. He did this explicitly to sell toys, and it worked. People with real money noticed. That’s why speculators started circling Marvel and the Direct Market in general.
Shooter claims now that he was always against the Direct Market (even though books like ElfQuest, Love and Rockets, Cerebus, TMNT, TDKR, and Watchmen wouldn’t have been possible without it) but that’s a convenient editing of his past. DAZZLER #1 was a Direct Market joke at the time (she became cool later, thanks to Chris Claremont), and whose idea was that? Jim Shooter’s.
In this case, the past is the prologue for the DOA of comics in the US. But the question is how do you fix these issues?