Why American Comics are Dying? Answered

 

American comics these days are not doing so great, both marvel and dc comics are struggling against the consistent success of japanese manga, and it is worth taking a look on why american comics are not keeping their old fans and having a problem in acquiring new ones.

1- american comics are not marketed well
It is very obvious that both marvel and dc comics are not interested in having a decent budget to market their comics, and above that, they usually don’t making the first issues of each series they own free for public so that if someone is interested in checking out some different batman or spider-man series he have to buy the first issues to check if they have quality writing and decent art, compare that to japanese manga where it is expected to find the first and last three chapters of any manga available on Shonen Jump apps like “manga plus” or “shonen jump app”.
Some companies like Image comics for example have many of their creator owned comics first issues available for free on their website, but they are the exception not the rule.

2- american comics pages size are too big
One of the things many readers are not talking about is that american comics don’t translate well when it comes to the digital version, with most of people using 6-7 inches phones and only few having tablets, and even most of people who have tablet don’t have tablet above 10 inches it doesn’t make sense that american comics still being made for the 10.4 inches page size, reducing page sizes to 7 inches makes much more sense, that way your comics will be readable on a phone without zooming in most of the time, and when you read it on the tablet it will look exactly like the printed edition of the series. Not only that, but also it will take so much less storage space on the cloud servers for companies and when some one buy drm free comics or download some offline comics from kindle or google play and like of them, it will also takes much less time to download and way less space to store on his devices.
Some services like kindle for example started having this panel by panel feature to read comics, but honestly it doesn’t cut it, many comics have weird reading order in each page, and when the app zoom in each panel it takes away from the art in the page, and alot of times it doesn’t do its job in first place when the panels in the comics are designed vertically not horizontally.

3- no decent regional pricing for most countries
While it is ok to pay 10-15$ for a comic volume in the U.S.A, it really doesn’t make sense to price them that high for almost every country with no regard to the average salary in those countries, it is a wasted partial revenue for the big companies.
The good news is a company called Alterna comics makes the digital version of their comics only cost .99 cents per issue, which is way more affordable for comics readers all over the world, but still only one small company can’t make a big influence on the average price of comics internationally.

4- so many discontinuations and number ones
When a comic series starts to underperform in terms of sales they stop the series overall, take a break and start a new series with a new number one issue with the old series name. I know that number one issue sell a lot better than number 257 issue, but it highly confuse the reader, it is much a better idea to just change the writer or the artist if their work started dropping in quality and hire a new one and advertise that the new writer or artist will be taking the lead to write a new exciting arc for the series. It is more important to make readers have a convenient buying and reading experience than making short term gains that will lead to long term losses due to inconvenience and irrelevance of action and consequence of old material which happen all the time in marvel and D.C comics.