jasonderoga86

Looks like Marvel and DC have not only dealt the deathblow to the American comics industry in story development and character integrity, but also to the business end of things. Comic bookshops are closing up at a breakneck pace primarily due to mountains of unsellable back order boxes taking up more space on the shelves and generally the stores themselves than actual new product, and since the new product consists mostly of Marvel and DC stuff that lacks what made it great for so long, nobody's interested there, either. Their respective cinematic universes are flailing right now, breathing what could very well be their last (well, DC's live action film universes more than Marvel's; the DCEU bled out dry with a whimper, it seems). The other big piece of the comics business world is distribution. For decades the only "legitimate" distribution method for comics has been Diamond Comics Distributors, due to their near-full reach of comic bookshops nationwide and worldwide. In the early 2000's Diamond secured an oligopoly over the market by vicariously promoting Big Two comics, as the Big Two's respective brand values provided a near-infinite potential for making big bank. As a result, only the Big Two could meet the sales threshold Diamond required of them to be listed in their Previews catalog, with was then monthly solicited to comic bookshops to get an idea of what would really sell. Othe publishers like Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Oni Press have a harder time getting into Previews due to inferior brand value compared to the Big Two, thus it's MUCH harder for them to reach the sales benchmark, and they get much smaller ad space. Small publishers aren't even considered, since they have basically no brand values in Diamond's eyes. And the worst part is the market itself that Diamond uses, called the "direct market". This distro model runs on a nonreturnable basis, meaning unsold product can't be sent back to Diamond. Even a huge stock of a comic or comic series that totally flopped in sales has to be logged away into a "back order box" for storage. That's why real bookstores don't take in comics from any publisher; if they can't sell the product, they can't send the unsold stock back to Diamond for a payment in exchange, their stuck with the magazines. As they'll likely sit on the shelves forever, blocking space that could be used for actually sellable stuff, the store owners would have no choice but to destroy the unsold comics. It's really a terrible business market, but a lot last it's starting to prove inefficient and is dying out while new distributors are popping up, and they have returnability options for all bookstores, not just comic bookshops. The only difference is that retail bookstore chains -- like your typical Barnes and Noble -- will accept only bookbound comics/trade paperbacks/graphic novels.