English 
Japanese 
- Steve Ditko Copyright Settlement
- Publisher Page-Rates Even Lower
- Dying Comics, Again
- Mark Millar
- Retailer Problems Laid Out
The links above are articles showcasing what I’m about to talk about but they all come down to one simple thing..
Oh no! Comics are dying!
Again!
Retailers are having record LOW sales! Publisher’s page rates are dropping! Whatever are we gonna do?!
Will Eisner famously said that he had been watching comics ‘die’ for his entire career. A career that lasted a good 60-70 years. And it’s still happening. About once every couple of months a metric from somewhere comes out and people start saying the sky is falling….again. The problem is publishers and retailers are not asking themselves the right questions. And those questions are problematic because they could shake the foundation of what they’ve been building for the last 30-40 years. The publishers are not creating material that young readers want anything to do with. The state of superhero comics is that they’re building stories for a demographic that is 30-50 year old’s (or older) and are aging out of comics. Young people are NOT reading superhero comics.
I recently visited a Barnes & Noble, just to kill some time, and as you can see from my pics, the superhero side is 3 shelves worth of comics.
The Manga side is ENORMOUS. It starts with the high-end, hardcovers and such and ends with a Blue-ray rack of animated films and tv shows based on the manga within the store.
Why? Because manga offers a WIDE variety of genres to read. Romance, slice-of-life, sci-fi, heroic, coming-of-age and more. They are not relegated to 1 genre like Superhero Comics.
Again, North American comics publishers are not creating material that young people want to read, or even find ‘cool’ to check out.
The other thing is MARKETING. This is one thing that isn’t spoken of. Almost like it’s a secret to NOT talk about it, but NONE of the major publishers actually market what they’re selling. I’m talking about Out-of-the-Box type thinking when it comes to marketing. They leave it for the already over-worked retailers/local comic shop owners that they’ve been so reliant on over the last 30 years to do it for them. And it is not working. It’s dwindling at an alarming pace
The North American Market has its problems. And they are vast. But their biggest problem is not one they can fix. It’s a cultural problem.
Americans don’t read.
Period.
Especially not for amusement and rarely even for education. They just don’t. The evidence is all around you and even the major publishers like Random House, Simon&Shuster, or Harper Collins are reporting record low sales.
Americans don’t read. European and Asians DO read. A LOT.
As evidenced by this article showing that they sold 2 MILLION copies between 2 popular titles over there. Why? Because half the adults over there read these comics on a regular basis.
In this digital age of information moving and flowing faster than we can process it, it seems like the world is bleaker than ever.
Not so.
Everything is changing. Business models are changing. Consumption of entertainment is changing. People are changing. And change can be scary.
So we have to roll with the punches and change as well. This is where Flipside Comics comes in. We are a sequential art herald using all available means to broadcast our product across the planet.
That’s right, the PLANET. The globe. To every living human, if possible.
To simply think about the North American comic market is just thinking too small. Comics are all over the earth, from the widely respected European market to the monumental manga market in Asia.
Outreach is our goal and we’re here to think BIG.
We’ve taken and are taking steps to ensure that everyone can read our site and our content. It’s imperative that you all be able to reach us and read what is going on here. Technology is advanced enough that just about anything can get translated into every spoken language on earth. The same will go for our content and print sales as well.
Like I said, we’re here to think BIG. 🙂
