Is Disney going to shut down Marvel Comics?

[Rosebunse]

Why are people so obsessed with this idea that Marvel is dying? Marvel is doing well, especially compared to other publishers.

And frankly, I can't see anyone at Disney really wanting to. The company makes money and, well, Disney is heartless, but just getting rid of Marvel makes no sense.

[Drops Of Venus]

>Marvel is the top-selling comic publisher every month for well over a year.
>Marvel is going to shut down cuz they're failing

Lol sure

That's what I keep saying. If Marvel Comics is ''on the brink of going bankrupt'' like some people are acting like, then what does that say about the rest of the industry? Shouldn't we be hearing rumors of every other publisher out there shutting down? But no, it seems like ONLY Marvel is crashing and burning, according to some people. It really makes no sense.

[catbellysqueezer]

Not as long as Donny Cates, Al Ewing, and Kelly Thompson are still writing for them.

[Tendrin]

This is literally coming from the salty doofus from CosmicBookNews, who got it from parasitic incompetent Jude Terror, who made it up because that's all he's capable of doing, to the point that now Joe Quesada has had to outright state that a panel is literally just a panel.

I just burst out laughing. Thanks for that.

[PhoenixThanos]

I can't see Marvels' comics section going under but I have to admit I do shake my head at some of the titles they publish.

[leokearon]

Interesting way to celebrate 80 years...

[dreyga2000]

Got this from Quora

This is a case where I was going to pontificate on a subject, then I did some research and discovered that my initial thoughts were wrong. Comic book sales are actually growing in North America, however the number of comics sold are decreasing. Let's take a closer look.


​


Market Size, Then and Now

According to ComicChron, which has statistics going back to the 60s, since 1997 year-to-year sales of comics have more than doubled.

In 1997 the estimated size of the market was $300-320 million, today it is $780 million, and that doesn't count digital sales which are exploding. In 2014 digital sales were $540.38 million.

If you do the math that's $1.320 billion last year, which is four times what the comic industry was making nearly 20 years ago.

I'm sure some of that is inflation, but there's no way you could account for a quadruple jump in market share with inflation.


Unit Sales, Then and Now

The actual number of individual comics sold has decreased since 1997.

In 1997 the top 300 comics sold every month generated 100.32 million copies. 2014 generated 82.65 million copies. It's important to note that trade paperback collections are up over five times though, and again, these figures do not reflect digital sales.


So, How Are Comic Companies Making More Money With Less Sales?

If you've been to a comic store lately, I'm sure some of you already know what I'm about to say. The cost of comics has increased over the past two decades, and that accounts for the increase in total sales.

The average cost of a comic in 1997 was $2.62 and now it's $3.77... actually not as bad as I imagined. If you compare those costs to other forms of entertainment, I think comics have performed respectably.


Are Comic Books Dying?

No. In fact, they are thriving.

While single issues of printed comics has decreased by 20% in the last 20 years, comic book companies have tripled their market size through trade paperback sales, digital sales and increasing prices.

What none of this takes into account is the fact that comic books are even more valuable as an "idea generator" for other mediums, such as video games and movies.

Even if comics were dying, they would still be highly prized as a cheap method of content creation that the movie and video game industries would keep afloat through licensing deals.


​


Remove the big comic book companies from the mix, and you still have valuable comic properties like "The Walking Dead", "The Crow", "300", "Kingsman: The Secret Service", "The Men in Black" and far too many other projects to list here.

Comic books are are both visual and literary, and can bring ideas to life in ways that no other medium can. They are relatively cheap to produce and can be created by as few as one person with the time and passion to get their work out to a wider audience.

Comics aren't going anywhere.

One final note. I realize that I didn't cover world sales of comics, but that would only increase the amount of money and the number of companies creating content. I've bought comics from Japan and India before and that further strengthens the overall market.

[DragonsChi]

That's what I keep saying. If Marvel Comics is ''on the brink of going bankrupt'' like some people are acting like, then what does that say about the rest of the industry? Shouldn't we be hearing rumors of every other publisher out there shutting down? But no, it seems like ONLY Marvel is crashing and burning, according to some people. It really makes no sense.

DC fired a large portion of it's staff and if reducing it's number of books to 22 this year.

I was doing more research on the bump in sales for Marvel in January ,due to my excitement, and I'm finding out that almost 59% of comics sold to stores where just variant covers. Meaning that the "sales" they gave us don't really reflect growth. If it true. Need to do more research on the whole thing.

This is from the ComicsPRO annual membership meeting Feb 27, 2019:

First and foremost, a lot of that blame for that lies with the very people in this room.

Honestly, publishers and creators will only do what they think they can get away with. I’m going to spend a bit talking about publisher behavior in a minute, but, to a person, we enabled those behaviors! THEY can’t and won’t publish material unless WE buy it! Every single order form we turn in is a vote for the future that we want, and a lot of us have been voting actively against our best interests for many years.

I can’t especially blame the publishers for trying to meet our “demand”: if you could get an extra 20% in sales by paying $500 to an artist, and doing a plate change at the printer, why wouldn’t you? But, as with absolutely everything in the post-Heroes World Direct Market, we lack absolutely anyone willing to stand up and say “No, that’s a little too far”; to protect us against our own worst impulses. All Markets need brakes and guardrails.

We have, as I see it, two major problems at the publisher level: one of content, and one of the amount of product. In terms of content, while I think that we’re at a golden age of comics right now, with more amazing material being published than ever before, the base level of quality of our core periodical product in the direct market – the driver of sales and success in our market, both in the superhero universe material as well as most licensed and creator-owned titles – is at a near-historical nadir.

I am not at all convinced that over the last two decades or so that even the minimum amount of effort has been put into developing editorial staff and support at the largest publishers. Most Editors are desultory at best at that skill set: instead publishers have been emphasizing traffic management and corporate synergy as the most important skills to develop. Comics are written to fill arbitrary holes in production schedules, rather than to be the best stories they can be. Creators are encouraged to write for page counts of pre-scheduled collections, rather than crafting each individual periodical release to be satisfying in and of itself, and only allowing the best of that material to go on to permanent book format collection.

Content is, of course, the thing we retailers can impact the least. “Make better comics” has long been a battle cry, but its out of our direct wheelhouse. Perhaps the cry should be to “Make better EDITORS”?

There are also, plainly, entirely too many SKUs in the market. At the front of the process how did we enter a world where they’re offering us twelve different “Spider-Man” branded comics in a single four week period? When exactly did we cross the Rubicon that suggested that bi-weekly or faster production was the right way to make comics, how customers actually want to purchase comics? Please listen: we are destroying and devaluing our “Blue Chip stocks” rather than drawing in the vast muggle audience to purchase our products.

Publishers are treating the customers as “super fans” who are bottomless ATM machines. But every working retailer in this room can tell you that this doesn’t match the reality of our customers: the people who want (or even can afford) this endless barrage of material clumping down the pipeline is narrowing and hollowing out month after month, and is soon going to hit a number that is probably not sustainable for any of us. I still clearly remember the days when I couldn’t order less than ten copies of anything Marvel might produce: I’m even talking Star Comics like Planet Terry and Royal Roy. If it had the Marvel logo on it, it sold. But today? At my store there’s almost a quarter of Marvel’s output from month to month I no longer have the customer interest to even shelf a single copy.

Want a clear and current example of Marvel’s preposterous “flood the zone” strategy? “War of the Realms” is supposed to be their major Q2 project in 2019, but in the first month alone they’re asking us to buy into TWO issues of the series being released with no sales data, as well as FOUR different tie-in-mini-series. All six of these comics (which are built around a six issue storyline) will require final orders from us before we’ve sold a single comic to an actual reader. Is there anyone in this room thinks that this is good? That this is sustainable? That this will sell more comics to more readers? That this will sell any copies to people who aren’t already on board Marvel’s periodicals already?

I say to you: we do not need plans or programs that are aimed at selling more comics to the same customers – they really can’t afford and don’t want any more titles to buy – our focus as an industry should be on making our periodical releases more attractive to more new readers, and to grow our base, not simply exploit the existing one.

By the same token, the SKU explosion has expanded out past just number of series, but also into the number of covers and variants we offer on those comics. In January 2019, I counted a staggering fifty-nine percent of the SKUs offered were variants and alternate covers! FIFTY. NINE. PERCENT. This is, in no way, a healthy state of affairs, and it exists at every level of the market: from the top at Marvel, where the aforementioned “War of the Realms” had seventeen different covers on the first issue at initial solicitation, and they’ve also added another eight more at FOC (after, of course, we’ve presold our sets and such) – all of this on a SIX DOLLAR comic. A customer who actually wanted all 25 copies of that one single release would be asked to spend nearly $150. On a single issue of a single comic. This is not a tenable or rational place for us to be as buyers of non-returnable goods – even at a wholesale price of like $68 is far too insane for us to any risk. This is predatory behavior on the behalf of the largest publisher.

It isn’t just Marvel, of course; this rot and weakness penetrates down to the smallest publishers too: Zenescope and Dynamite and Archie and Action Lab, to name just a few, all seem utterly incapable of producing comics without 2-5 covers apiece, while organizations like Avatar and Boundless and American Mythology appear to have strategies utterly pinned on releasing up-priced variants of the same material for multiple months forward. None of these models are sustainable, none of them increase the number of READERS by even one.

Listen to me, publishers: this behavior needs to stop! If you can’t sell enough copies of your comic to fit your business goals with one single cover, then you probably shouldn’t be publishing it in the first place!

Too many SKUs, whether from title count or from variant expansion, are actively harmful to the market: they take time and energy and resources from things we could be doing to SELL more comics. Not just from your retailer customers, but from the distribution pipeline as well – the more individual SKUs Diamond has to touch, at quantities that (nationally!) can measure in the mere hundreds, the more likely they are to make mistakes, the more likely we are to have overs, shorts and damages, wasting more money and time from everyone and stressing the entire system that much more.

Be clear: I am not arguing for the abolition of Variants altogether; they have a great deal of value and of worth when used intelligently, strategically and with restraint, but putting five covers on some mediocre comic that you’re not even expecting to get over 10k in the national market on the main cover is a path that is leading us straight to doom. http://comicsprogress.com/full-text-...dustry-speech/

[Wiccan]

I think what people are not thinking enough is that Marvel Comics shutting down would be a huge PR nightmare to Marvel Studios and Marvel Entertainment. Even if the comics weren't making money, obviously other Marvel stuff is, and shutting down the source of it, that has been going for 80 years, it's gonna lose them much more money than it will gain.

[DragonsChi]

I think what people are not thinking enough is that Marvel Comics shutting down would be a huge PR nightmare to Marvel Studios and Marvel Entertainment. Even if the comics weren't making money, obviously other Marvel stuff is, and shutting down the source of it, that has been going for 80 years, it's gonna lose them much more money than it will gain.

People wont care.

People like us will be in an uproar but the average movie going and cartoon watching audience only consumes Marvel through those mediums. What a lot of us hate to admitting is that Superhero comics has always been a niche medium. And the industry has done very little to change that. Our numbers are too low and lack any real type of organization to save a comic company in protest.

I can give them some credit that they are trying new things today but the problem there is that they are rejecting the core of what make comics great and its being run by several people who never had interest in the comics before they worked at Marvel. Today Marvel comics is flooded with unqualified people. Can they bring the industry to new heights? Time will tell but they have had about 5 years and so far, again from what research I have, it just seems their goal is to continue to abuse shop owners to inflate their numbers.

[Holt]

This is literally coming from the salty doofus from CosmicBookNews, who got it from parasitic incompetent Jude Terror, who made it up because that's all he's capable of doing, to the point that now Joe Quesada has had to outright state that a panel is literally just a panel.

Yeah. That site has an axe to grind and their "scoop" about Marvel closing down literally turns into a rant about how he stopped buying comics when they cancelled Richard Rider's book, and the comments are almost entirely people saying dumb **** like "Go woke, go broke!" and "SJW politics killed Marvel!"

It's people with an agenda.

[Wiccan]

People wont care.

People like us will be in an uproar but the average movie going and cartoon watching audience only consumes Marvel through those mediums. What a lot of us hate to admitting is that Superhero comics has always been a niche medium. And the industry has done very little to change that. Our numbers are too low and lack any real type of organization to save a comic company in protest.

I can give them some credit that they are trying new things today but the problem there is that they are rejecting the core of what make comics great and its being run by several people who never had interest in the comics before they worked at Marvel. Today Marvel comics is flooded with unqualified people. Can they bring the industry to new heights? Time will tell but they have had about 5 years and so far, again from what research I have, it just seems their goal is to continue to abuse shop owners to inflate their numbers.

First of all: Marvel Comics is doing fine. They're probably not doing as great as before, but they're far, like really far from doing as bad as Comicsgate people are trying to convince you. Seriously, it's crazy that you don't realize how overdramatic you're being. ("they are rejecting the core of what make comics great"... C'mon). For better or worse, they're still at the top, they're doing better than... Everyone? Worst case scenario they're actually a little behind DC.

Of course people will care. Even if they don't actually read the comics, if they know about the Marvel brand, learning that the source material for the movies and everything is getting shut down, it's terrible publicity. It's gonna look like "Marvel" as a whole is doing bad, not just the comics branch. Some people might even think everything "Marvel" is over and done. It's also less merchandise, characters to promote(yeah, Marvel does promote and make merchandise of non-MCU characters, look at Marvel Rising), games(with the ones that currently exist possibly shutting down without new comics characters and stuff to add on updates + the damage of the Marvel brand in the minds of fans who don't literally just watch the movies casually). It's a lot more money lost just by shutting down Marvel Comics than those physical sales number you see onlnie.

There's also the matter of inspiration from the movies. Could the movies survive on their own? Yeah, sure. But do they want that? I don't think so. As others have mentioned, the Black Order was used on Infinity War less than 5 years after their creation. Carol is debuting as Captain Marvel, the title she got in the comics in 2012, with a costume based on the one she got on that run, and with the whole movie and version of the character being inspired by that run to the point where the writer, KSD, was a consultant on the movie. Feige has said himself he wants to use Kamala Khan, who was created in 2014. Outside Marvel Studios, look at Spider-Verse, with recent creations like Miles and Spider-Gwen.

[Killerbee911]

It is just speculation which doesn't make anysense because Marvel would downsize first and go digital before shutting down. If the rumor said Marvel was downsizing and going digital except for trades. I might believe that. Marvel will streamline before it would shutdown. I mean

1.Spiderman
2.Avengers
3.X-men
4. Captain America
5.Iron Man
6.Thor
7.Hulk
8. Wolverine
9. Some teen book
10.Some cosmic book

It hard for me to believe that if they reduced the redundant books the core stuff wouldn't make major money still.I am sure more than 10 books would be extremely profitable

[Digifiend]

It's fake news. I just saw this on Facebook. The source is a website called cosmicbook.news. An obvious fake website.

[DragonsChi]

First of all: Marvel Comics is doing fine. They're probably not doing as great as before, but they're far, like really far from doing as bad as Comicsgate people are trying to convince you. Seriously, it's crazy that you don't realize how overdramatic you're being. ("they are rejecting the core of what make comics great"... C'mon). For better or worse, they're still at the top, they're doing better than... Everyone? Worst case scenario they're actually a little behind DC.

Of course people will care. Even if they don't actually read the comics, if they know about the Marvel brand, learning that the source material for the movies and everything is getting shut down, it's terrible publicity. It's gonna look like "Marvel" as a whole is doing bad, not just the comics branch. Some people might even think everything "Marvel" is over and done. It's also less merchandise, characters to promote(yeah, Marvel does promote and make merchandise of non-MCU characters, look at Marvel Rising), games(with the ones that currently exist possibly shutting down without new comics characters and stuff to add on updates + the damage of the Marvel brand in the minds of fans who don't literally just watch the movies casually). It's a lot more money lost just by shutting down Marvel Comics than those physical sales number you see onlnie.

There's also the matter of inspiration from the movies. Could the movies survive on their own? Yeah, sure. But do they want that? I don't think so. As others have mentioned, the Black Order was used on Infinity War less than 5 years after their creation. Carol is debuting as Captain Marvel, the title she got in the comics in 2012, with a costume based on the one she got on that run, and with the whole movie and version of the character being inspired by that run to the point where the writer, KSD, was a consultant on the movie. Feige has said himself he wants to use Kamala Khan, who was created in 2014. Outside Marvel Studios, look at Spider-Verse, with recent creations like Miles and Spider-Gwen.

1. I'm not being overdramatic. I'm not even in a fuss about. If Marvel closed the comic side of it's doors today there would be a buzz for probably less than a week and then people will shrug and move on. The average person on the street is not reading or care about these books. There are probably more people under the impression that comic books are no longer being made than those who actually know where their local comic books shop is in their own town.

2. I'm of the current belief that Comicsgate and SJW's are a hate groups (at least until proven otherwise) please do not associate them with me.

3. Just because some one is at the top of a declining industry doesn't mean you are winning. Saying that doesn't mean anything. If you have 4 people in a boat who can't swim and the boat flips over is the last person to hit water making out better than the first? No, it's faulty logic.

4. Movie and Merch at this point don't need to depend on comics. Most of merch being sold is pretty much the same characters who have had deals forever. They also do not need the comics to come out with new merch or "new characters" to Movie and Animated audiences. Marvel's bench is so deep Disney can mine it for the next 30-50 years and be fine.With most of the characters seeming new to the world at large. They don't need the comics for that.

5. Books are in the top 100 today that are only making sales of $20,000 per unit. Just 10-12 years back if your title was selling that low it was canceled.

Some on the forum like to shift expectations and I get it. But at least be honest with yourself. Disney bought Marvel not for it's comics but for what it can do with their IP's in movies, animated features, merchandise, and attraction/amusement rides and entertainment. If the comic side is not profitable it will get cut. No manner of bad press will save that.