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.
I get the comic industry has had declining sales going back a long time but giving the middle finger to actual fans, hiring women who hate comics to write, and believing there were waves of female fans just waiting to read comics.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When I go to the comic store the manga section has all the women since Manga markets to a variety of audiences. Super hero comics have always and will always appeal to men generally speaking and the back issue section is the most popular for super hero comics. Eric July once said that marvel and dc execs need to go to a comic book store and see who actually buys them.
I used to have almost 20 comic subs through Midtown that were mailed to me monthly. Now I have zero subs and just buy older comics
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.