Thursday 14 January 2010

It's not just me then.

This post by J. Caleb Mozzocco laments the dearth of comics shipping this week that Caleb is interested in buying. Basically, there's nothing for him this week. And the way things are heading with me, that's likely to happen more and more in my case too.

And that kind of chimes with something I've been pondering, and wondering if I can be arsed to blog about, which is that, based on no real evidence whatsoever apart from anecdotal and a cursory glance at Diamond's monthly sales figures, the audience for monthly pamphlet-format comic books is eroding markedly. Now, this is something that people have been saying for years, and if you look at the Diamond sales, the figures aren't remarkably different to how they were a few years back, before Civil War and subsequent 'events' artificially distended the figures. A good indicator is usually what the titles around the 100 mark on the charts are selling, which is just over 20K, the same as it has been for years.

But I don't think that's the whole picture. As I say, anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of people are either moving to trade paperbacks, or simply just stopping buying comics in any form altogether. The recent Marvel price hike has put a lot of people off, and it seems to me any drop-off in sales is being disguised by the extra revenue the price hike brings in.

I dunno. I'm feeling somewhat divorced from comics anyway now, so it's hard for me to care too much. But I think, in a few years' time, we'll reach a point where we'll either see a wholesale shift to graphic novels, or Diamond will collapse and that'll be that.

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