Originally Posted by
seismic-2
Marvel and DC comics are sold through specialty stores that are often seedy on the outside, are dingy on the inside, are crowded with slovenly middle-aged men, and are not places that are kid-friendly. The only customers for that product are the same group of guys who have been patronizing those stores for decades and are now gradually aging out of the hobby. It has to be the same group of guys, because no one could possibly pick up most of the main titles and have a clue what's going on, unless they had already read years' worth of issues of those same titles and many others that form the background for the current stories. To keep this core audience coming back, DC and Marvel rely on a constant stream of super-mega-crossover "events" that disrupt all the continuing stories and that end up back where they started. This seems to be the only thing that the Big Two know how to do, since hype has long replaced creativity as the means for selling the books. The parent corporations regard the comics as simply intellectual properties for retail marketing and especially for movie and TV adaptations, since they apparently know of no way to make the comic books themselves be anything other than a mere footnote on the Disney and ATT balance sheets. Meanwhile, companies like Scholastic sell graphic novels to kids at book fairs, in "real" bookstores, and via Amazon, routinely racking up numbers beyond anything that DC or Marvel would even dare dream of.