Where are the new comic book fans?
It's easy to access comic books nowadays, so why aren't there a lot of new fans? – MSN Screenrant
The demand for comics hasn’t been strong because, frankly, comics haven’t been seen as "cool."
Over the past decades as superhero films churned up incredibly high box office numbers and the faces of Batman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, et al., spread onto every conceivable product that can be sold, the core item that makes superheroes "work" is the comic book itself. The other mediums are all derivative and whether one reads or does not read comic books, the awareness and even the impact of comic books is extruded through all these other mediums. But, comes the obvious question, with all that money raining down on the derivatives, why haven't comic book sales skyrocketed? Instead there's been a systematic decline for the two main engines of superherodom, Marvel and DC Comics (but it is usually stated that independent publications have gained ground, tho not enough to cover the losses from the big two). Somehow comic books are a multi-billion dollar industry except for the actual selling of comics themselves.
The easy explanation is the "distraction" of the internet, TV, and gaming have all eaten away at that portion of the potential audience that might otherwise be buying comic books and reading them. There's also the phenomenon of what's called "reading proficiency" which translates into a growing number of people who are simply functionally illiterate, a hair-splitting term in which an illiterate person is counted as "literate" in a narrow sense, but certainly not in a way that includes the ability to read comic books. Comic books (in the past) have been considered a bridging tool to get kids and young people to improve their reading and comprehension skills on the way to reading books and newspapers (that pre-internet juggernaut that is still with us in other forms), but the ability to read at some level is needed in order to enjoy comic books without the task of decoding what's going on in the dialogue, a challenge of engagement and participation that TV and gaming generally doesn't require, and so has a clear advantage.
But with the decline in comic book sales, there is the ironic "exception" that intrudes into the issue with a wholly different puzzle: manga sales. Like a "control" object within a scientific experiment, manga has blossomed into a worldwide phenomenon, and recently it was announced that digital manga sales had crossed the 700 billion yen line, and if that incredible number is combined with the hundreds of millions of sales for printed manga, the sheer inability of American-style comics to compete is something that goes beyond what is and isn't "cool."
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Original Page March 10, 2025