I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:

• Dullness – Many series, even some that I’m very fond of like Brightest Day from DC are rather dull. For Brightest Day I have faith that the chief writer, Geoff Johns, is simply warming up for some stupendous issues-to-come but so far it’s shaped a lot like a Stephen King novel, huge wads of detail with action all piled up at the end. There are some titles that I won’t even touch because they are monumentally bad. I won’t name any as to not injure people who feel passionately about their favorite comic and start a flame-out.
• Impenetrability – Marvel Entertainment is chiefly centered when I bring up this point. Unless you establish serious time to your comic book experience you find the bleeding edge zooms away from you quite quickly. What I mean by impenetrability is that there are entire stories that I have yet to read, and by the time I’ve got both time-opportunity and funds-opportunity the number of comics you’d have to read to get the whole story is monumentally large. It feels a lot like it does when I wander through a library. A good metaphor for these feelings is the confusion/starvation of a shark in the middle of a cloud of tuna. There is no real place to start, there are too many options, there isn’t any handy map or checklist so you can enjoy a storyline as it was intended to be told, so you end up not reading anything. The entire oeuvre becomes impenetrable. I don’t start because I don’t know where to start and I don’t have the time or money to properly enjoy the unfolding story being told.
• Digital Shrink – Comics are leaking out through channels that have nothing to do with the distributor or the publisher channels whatsoever. People are scanning comics and posting them for free online to the detriment of all the hard-working people who spent time and energy creating the material in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword and I’ve written about this in the past as well. These digital copies being free is only incidental damage, there is a lesson as to why these formats are so popular and it has very little to do with it being ‘free’. It comes down to format choice. Ever since April 2010, when I first laid my hands on my iPad, it became my go-to-device for reading both digital books *AND* digital comic books. There are companies like Comixology which are doing their best, but the publishers have to pay lip service to their distributors and their brick-and-mortar children, the comic book stores. The reason that digital comics haven’t been a cash-cow for comic book companies has everything to do with incomplete, inconstant, and inconsistent vending by publishers. I don’t want to buy paper comic books anymore. I want to subscribe to all my favorite titles digitally and I’m fine with coughing up a credit card number, setting subscription preferences (pull lists) and buzzing around the one central Comic Book app that ties everything together. That would get at least $20-40 a week out of me instead of my current $2.99 a week strategy.

Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.

You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.