Is the comic book dead?

[logan_run]

Super heroes movies are popular but are people still reading comics??

 

[Onyx]

The comic market has been growing every year:

Comichron: Industry-wide Comics and Graphic Novel Sales for 2016

 

[TheDustyZebra]

How could the comic book possibly be dead when two out of every three movies in the theater these days are from comic books?

Unless everyone just expects the next adventure to be on the big screen now. But really, they can't make movies that fast.

 

[Overread]

If anything the digital age and tablets benefit comics in a big way. Big glossy screens that you can zoom in on - ideal for comics esp those with high quality artwork. Whilst ereaders are still sort of playing catch up in the visual quality; tablets and comics are right there already.

There's also a huge range of online comics now which are often funded through ads/patron/direct sales.

 

[Onyx]

How could the comic book possibly be dead when two out of every three movies in the theater these days are from comic books?

Unless everyone just expects the next adventure to be on the big screen now. But really, they can't make movies that fast.

But the movies are mostly adaptations of old comic books. I just watched 2014's X-Men Days of Future Past, which was a story from 1981. The Infinity War comes from a 1991 series. If there was never a comic published again there would still be movie material for the next thousand years.

 

[Onyx]

Most comics movies are arguably nostalgia projects. Very few comic adaptations are from contemporaneous source material, and when they are no one seems to be aware of the source - like A History Violence. I don't know if something like Wonder Woman would make any sense to produce or see in a theater if it wasn't part of culture from long repetition.

Even manga/anime adaptations seem to require decades of fan base before either Japan or the West try to make live action versions, and most are failures - Gatchaman, Robotech, Patlabor, Gundam, Ghost In The Shell, Airbender, Akira, Guyver, Alita, Gantz. People need to be pretty invested in a comic character before they will believe that the material is worth seeing a live action version - especially when the whole thing rests on really high budget special effects.

Really, Blade was a real stand-out in being a very successful super hero comic adaptation that didn't leverage a huge existing fan base or pop culture status. There isn't much to compare it to, except maybe The Crow.

 

[logan_run]

Comics are still around but exist mostly to be advertisements for films.

 

[Onyx]

Comics are still around but exist mostly to be advertisements for films.

Comic books are in one of the biggest growth periods of all time, and not because of the handful of DC and Marvel titles that have been made into films. Manga also has a growing international popularity.

 

[Overread]

Manga is growing indeed and I'd wager if the French comic industry could make some more noise they'd sell a lot better too - I see quite a few French ones on comixology and they blow the American ones out of the water in terms of the artistic quality and detail. They are also far more varied; in many ways the DC/Marvel system is so similar and so chocked at following formulas that its hard to split them up (heck to the average non-fan I suspect most can't even name which heroes belong to which parent company)

 

[Anushka Mokosh]

No. I would say it is growing with more and more internet comic projects that end up being published after gaining following. Especially true for many deviantArt artists. Stjepan Šejić comes to mind with his Sunstone project which he did for years as an anonymous stint before it exploded and he turned it into a proper project and published it.

@Overread makes a good point with manga, but I would also add to the ever-growing following Korean webcomics have been gaining over the years. Popularity of Tower of God for instance rivaled that of Naruto at some points. The digital market for comics is exploding.

 

[logan_run]

I like to self publish a comic..

 

[picklematrix]

Correct me if im wrong, but isnt it specifically marvel comics that are struggling sales wise?

 

[chongjasmine]

I enjoy reading comics.
But then, I also enjoy reading mangas.