However, it gets worse for DC Comics, as he writes, “DC had a pretty bad year, with their lowest sales since 2004 – down 25% from 2022 in the bookstore market – even with their highest ever number of titles in the total list. In 2023 they had only 14 titles in the Top 750; in 2013, ten years ago, they had 130. That is a huge and troubling drop – but maybe laying off nearly your entire sales and marketing team is not a great strategy for growth? If someone had been been making a concerted effort to dismantle DC Comics, they couldn’t have been more surgical – luckily, DC still has talented execs like Marie Javins, Jim Lee, Annie de Pies and the rest of the staff who have thwarted those plans. And from what we’re hearing, 2024 will see some more moves to reverse this concerning trend.”
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Ironically that actual market existed all along just never in the ways it was hyped.
When I first got into comics it was because an ex was buying them weekly and I'd read what she had picked up that week. The titles she was buying? The 2001 New X-Men run by Grant Morriston which basically kicked off with the Genosha genocide. The same plot the current X-Men 97 has gone scraping after because none of the modern writers are competent.
The current Krakoa comics are ending with a reboot happening very soon and JFC the writing is so fucking bad everyone involved needs fired and blacklisted from working on comics ever again. Gerry Duggan is continuing to prove he has no fucking idea what or who he is writing about, contradicting decades of character history, ignoring both his own and the larger comics continuity, and pissing off everyone reading the story. While sometimes there would be shills or simps for certain characters in some issues the collective opinion of Duggan's work on the X-Men right now is one of disdain and rejection.
The worst part is a lot of the problems are Marvel fucking over actual writers and throwing away long term story plans in favour of stale, shitty bit pieces that do nothing except virtue signal and tank interest in the series.