“In November, there was a change in the senior management team of Marvel Comics, marking the latest stage in a bitter fight between creators and fans of one of the world’s most famous brands. To those who had been observing the conflict, this new development was easy to see coming.
Marvel’s survival gamble
In their postwar heyday, comics were a limited range of low-cost items widely stocked in general stores and sold to casual readers; nowadays, comics are a broad range of slightly more expensive items stocked in few specialist stores (and online) and sold to dedicated followers, often for the collector market. Despite shrinkage, the comics market in North America is worth annually about $500million in individual comic-book sales, excluding online and book sales. Although sales in 2011 were healthy, executives in comic-book production were nervous about their readership. The typical superhero-comic purchaser was a 40-year-old white male – a demographically shrinking and ageing profile not being replenished by new young buyers. Economic recession (which started in 2008) hastened the closure of many bricks-and-mortar outlets. Digital versions were cheap to distribute but did not satisfy the strong collecting-reselling-trading culture of comic-book fandom.
Anticipating a consumer crisis – and undermined by poor business decisions (including sale of film rights to leading characters, such as the X-Men) – Marvel looked for solutions…”
Read the full article online on Spiked, 29 December 2017 here: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/comic-fans-take-on-identity-politics/20675#.WkZ9kVVl_IU
alexanderadamsart 