I've tweeted about this before, so if you're bored by talk of the economics of comics, ignore this thread.
Proposition: comics aren't for kids anymore and haven't been for kids in decades.
Evidence: Price and access.
Proposition: comics aren't for kids anymore and haven't been for kids in decades.
Evidence: Price and access.
Price: For most of the Golden and Silver and part of the Bronze Age, the price of ten comics was equivalent to about an hour's pay at minimum wage. In the 1960s, I was paid a minimum wage of $1.50 (in NY) and a comic cost about 15 cents. Similar ratios in the 70s and early 80s.
Price: Today, ten comics cost about $40. Show me the state where the minimum wage is $40 an hour and we'll all move there.
No child or teen today can afford the kind of comics Jones I indulged in the '60s by shoveling snow, mowing lawns, and painting houses.
No child or teen today can afford the kind of comics Jones I indulged in the '60s by shoveling snow, mowing lawns, and painting houses.
Even adults can't keep up. Marvel in the '60s published 10 superhero books a month, DC between 20-30. Today there are a hundred titles a month between all publishers and a serious fan spends upward of $100-200 to keep up. That's adult money.
Access: Golden, Silver and Bronze Age comics were available at thousands of neighborhood newsstands and small mom and pop grocery stores. There are few if any neighborhood newstands or mom and pop stores anywhere anymore.
Comics are now available almost exclusively at specialty shops which in most cases require, at the least, access to a car or an adult willing to drive a car. Regardless of how welcoming such shops are to new readers, they're still out of the way for casual discovery.
Conclusion: These circumstances have been in place since at least the '90s. That's almost 30 years. No one under 30 has any experience with the discovery of cheap comics "in the wild"-- several lost generations of potential new readers.
Today's comics aren't capable for reasons of price and access to reach entirely new readers. The only way a general audience experiences comics mythology today is through film and television. They arrive at comics as a secondary experience.
Since general audiences are made up of a wide variety of people, almost all of them NOT "comic book nerds," their expectations of what comics "should be" are not the expectations of today's primary comic book audience.
The conflict we're seeing between some self-styled diehard fans is a purely revanchist reaction to change, change driven by the fact that comic books themselves are having to adapt to the arrival of a new, general audience.
For decades, price and access has corralled comic book readers into a self-selected ghetto of diehard "fans" (but some of whom define a group more in common with a crack den). The arrival of the TV and movie general audience is disruptive to that ghetto.
Whether comics can ever again be a mass media with regular monthly sales in the hundreds of thousands for individual titles is debatable-- price and access remain a barrier issue. But one thing is certain...
...the ghetto is being "invaded" and the hardcore inhabitants aren't happy. Ultimately their unhappiness doesn't matter. Change is inevitable. Adapt or die.
