This is definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many other nations have a wider audience for comics, but in the US we've followed your advice so long that all the audiences that aren't adolescent males have been pushed away. Which leads to where we are: comic book companies chasing after a tiny fraction of their potential audience, because they can't make comics for anyone else, because not enough others are hbothering to look for comics anymore. They'd have to rebuild other audiences from scratch, having burned through them all.
> When the vast majority of their output is targeting a mostly male demographic, and being sold almost exclusively in an environment that attracts mostly men, that may be so. But it is a situation of their own making by making their product offering so niche.
I think you've got the order of things mixed up. No company intentionally wants to cut their customer base in half. They've tried to attract female readers. They'd be stupid not to! Women just aren't attracted to comic books.
And don't forget that comics _used_ to be sold in book stores, gas stations, etc. Now they aren't. You know why? Because across the board hardly anyone, relatively speaking, reads comic books. They're niche because they're just not that popular in general.
> ... in the US. Unsurprisingly, given that they mostly sell products not targeting women... in the US.
Because in the US, women don't care about comic books. It's a chicken and egg debate for the ages, clearly.
> The main titles have narrowed their focus even more compared to the 80's and are now overly sexualized and aimed squarely at men in a very narrow age bracket.
They're aimed at the people who are left reading comic books: men who grew up reading comic books. Who are now adults. Kids don't read comic books and don't care to. It's been that way for quite a while. I'm willing to bet the comic book companies have done a little market research before going in this direction rather than intentionally alienating younger readers.
> and then you wonder "where are the other sections? Where's the comedy stuff? Where's the rest of the newpaper strip collections? Where are the westerns? Where are the rest of the serious graphic novels?
If those genres sold well, there'd be more of them.
> Maybe in the US.
Well, we're talking about comics in the US here aren't we?
And this is a huge problem for Marvel and DC, as if they don't address the decline in popularity with children, the US comics market is set for continued decline.
They can't continue to reap the benefits of that market segment if they don't ensure there's ongoing recruitment into it.
> You say there is some kind of hidden audience that would buy comics if they just stopped portraying female characters the same way they portrayed spiderman? In sure there are some people that feel that way, but I don't there would be enough of those to support the industry, because, again, the internet and other mediums are just wrecking their business.
You don't need to listen to me—read the responses in this very thread from HN readers in other countries, which have a much more broad comic book readership. It's filled with them! Just from a cursory glance, we have responders from France, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, as well as yes, Japan—and the enormous webcomic industry. The idea that nobody would ever buy comics except for adolescent males is both foolish and false. The evidence against it is tremendous.
> we started off as a successful company but we've been bleeding users and losing demographics, so we're going to cater exclusively to those demographics that still use our product, even if it further alienates everybody else
If your problem is intractable then it's probably a good idea. When your demographic is getting older and not being replaced by a younger generation you're in trouble. Comic books can't compete with tablets, phones, cable TV, etc. for the attention of kids. It's not like it was in the 80s and earlier.
The interesting thing about the comic book companies is they have a lot of IP that's part of the collective consciousness and they've diversified by making shitloads of movies and TV shows that are hugely popular. The comics though? Relatively speaking no one is reading them.
It's not that simple. This is a cultural issue. Go outside the US and see what comics sell.
The best selling comic in Norway for decades was Donald Duck.
These days the most popular comics in Norway are Pondus - a comedy series about a pub landlord (previously bus driver) and his friend who sells music (after previously spending years on the dole) - and Nemi, a series about a 20-something female goth, written by a woman. While Donald Duck still sells fairly well.
The best selling French-language comic is usually Spirou, a periodical that features mostly comics targeted at children.
You'll find country after country where the most popular comics have little to no sexualized content.
Now, I enjoy US superhero comics too, but as I noted elsewhere: There's been a drastic change in them to in the last 20 years or so. They used to target boys, not men. And they used to be a lot more innocent.
Sure, they probably target their core audience, but the thing to keep in mind, and that it seems like Marvel at least may be waking up to: Maybe this focus on "men who don't get much female attention" is why the comic audience in the US is so tiny compared to the comic reading audiences in Europe or Japan for example?
And it's interesting to ask why, when kids elsewhere do, and when US kids used to.
> I'm willing to bet the comic book companies have done a little market research before going in this direction rather than intentionally alienating younger readers.
Why would assume this, given how badly they've repeatedly misread their markets, and how badly they've been managed (e.g. Marvels bankruptcy)? They've over and over done stupid, short-sighted things to alienate both readers and collectors (e.g. their attempts to drive up sales from collectors with tons of variant covers) that publishers elsewhere have not. Not least their failure to get their titles more eyeballs by getting them into other sales venues (growing up Norway, I'd been reading comics for something like 10 years before I ever set foot in a dedicated comics store, as comics were everywhere so there was no need to).
And they're the ones that are small bit players of questionable success.
> If those genres sold well, there'd be more of them.
If those genres existed in reasonable numbers in English language translations, being sold in more places like the small number of comics stores, maybe the people who would have enjoyed them would realise that comics are for them too.
Sometimes developing your market means taking risks. The European publishers understands this. They are not just chasing the big successes and milking them dry. You won't see 5 Spiderman titles. Instead you regularly see variety magazines headlined by major, well-selling characters with guest series they hope to develop filling up a substantial portion of the magazines (the French language Pilote and Spirou perhaps being the most well known internationally), or short runs on entirely new series they are taking a gamble on.
Many, many of these titles are never profitable. Many of them are outright gambles that there's little expectation will be profitable. Many of them are only able to stay profitable because of the main title is a massive draw. But some of those guest series become breakout successes of their own, carrying magazines filled with new guest series continuing to develop new markets and new fan bases.
Both of the biggest Norwegian series at the moment started life as strips and then had bit-parts with a few pages here and there in bigger magazines, until they'd developed enough popularity. When they got their own magazines, they were initially propped up by "tried and true but not quite big enough for their own magazine" series.
Several current Norwegian comic artists started their careers submitting fan-art to magazines in the 80's, then got invited to publish a page or two, eventually got their own little series with a few pages in a bigger magazine each month, and ended up with their own magazines.
And if you think "that's fine, but it's not breaking new ground", consider that many of these series are very different from each other. You'd find cutting political satire alongside Beetle Bailey (Billy). There was comedic parodies in The Phantom (Fantomet). And so on. A lot of material that'd never have a market in the 80's, got a market because the publishers found it worthwhile to publish a few pages in not-very-related magazines to test the market and get reader feedback. Other material got a market because they "rounded out" magazines and draw fan bases that'd buy a magazine they'd not otherwise consider, even if a specific series will not stand on its own.
This is where you should look to figure out how to develop a culture for comics, as these are the methods that have been successful - even with potential markets a tiny fraction of the US -, while Marvel and DC and the smaller US publishers have struggled.
> Well, we're talking about comics in the US here aren't we?
Are we? I'm not, exactly because contrasting the US market to the European and Japanese markets reveal so many interesting differences that helps see the article in context.
>This article should feature a bunch of blank photos representing the comics that don't exist. Those are the problem. It's ok to have super sexed-up comics in the store, but it's really sad that's all they have.
It's a vicious cycle. Comic book stores sell products that appeal to adolescent men, because their customers are adolescent men, because comic book stores sell products that appeal to adolescent men.
You can easily find English-language translations of the kind of Manga you describe, or of Franco-Belgian comics, but most American comic book stores won't make any effort to stock them, because they don't expect to sell them.
Here in Europe the comics market is more diverse, but that's as much an accident of history as anything else. For "normal" comic shops to exist, you need both a tradition of "normal" comics and a market for them, neither of which really exists in the US. You had Stan Lee and Siegel & Shuster, we had Hergé, Franquin and Peyo, and from there we diverged.
I think you're missing the point that in other parts of the world people (kids, adults, men, women) do read comic books. In those other parts of the world, where comic books are read by all sorts of people, they are not so overtly sexualized as those in the USA.
Maybe you're right that non-young-male-Americans are genetically incapable of liking comic books as a medium, but it seems more likely that Americans are no different from Europeans, and would like comics if they just made comics for them.
> Comics were never supposed to be educational or have any non-entertainment value and primary tarted at hormones soaked male teens.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.
Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don't think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I'm old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they'll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won't be the same as what I grew up with.
> First of all, you're making the assumption that our popular comics are popular because of sexualized content (i.e., no MJ with big tits = no one is gonna read Spiderman; doubtful).
No, I am not. I am pointing out there is a correlation between sexualized content and sales numbers in the US today. In fact, I've pointed out elsewhere that perhaps this is one of the reasons the US comic audience is so small:
The main titles have narrowed their focus even more compared to the 80's and are now overly sexualized and aimed squarely at men in a very narrow age bracket. It's worth considering in that context that their sales numbers in Europe have plummeted, and that most of the Marvel titles are now relegated to English-language imports in comic stores, whereas in the 80's and into the 90's they were translated into far more languages and did well in many other countries. E.g. growing up in Norway, I could buy Spiderman, Hulk, Batman, X-Men and Superman at least in translated versions in any grocery store, with additional ones popping up for shorter runs now and again. These days you only see shorter runs that survive on the hype around the movies now and again. Meanwhile comics as a whole are still doing well in Europe.
> Second: Japanese Manga. When you put it in perspective, a couple scantily-clad women, eh... could be a lot worse!
There's a lot worse in Europe too. The point is not that there are no sex in European comics - there are European comics that are outright porn - but that the extremely narrow focus of the mainstream part of the US comic market is a US peculiarity. Like Manga is a Japanese peculiarity. But as someone else has pointed out: Japanese comics stores too has a much wider variety - Manga aimed at adults is not nearly as defining for the Japanese comic market as Marvel and DC superhero comics are for the US.
From a European point of view, going to a US comic store is like finding a section of a comic store isolated by itself. You go through all of the superhero comics - with a few other things - and then you wonder "where are the other sections? Where's the comedy stuff? Where's the rest of the newpaper strip collections? Where are the westerns? Where are the rest of the serious graphic novels?" And yes: "where are the 'adult' - as in fully of nudity - comics?"
> You might want to dig up some of your old comics.
I have. It's exactly why I wrote what I wrote.
> It's because they're the only ones left reading comic books! Kids don't read them and don't care.
I wonder how many of Comixology's issues also track the downfall of the American Comicbook Industry. Marvel, DC and other American Comicbook companies aren't exactly setting the world on fire with their sales. There have been months where a single manga volume will outsell the entire American industry.
It is not the males pushing people away from comics. It's exactly the opposite. This is a group engaged in an activity which has long been looked down upon. Reading comics was seen as merely childish. Men embraced it, get called basement dwellers and just go on enjoying the things they enjoy. Then someone sees they are having a good time in spite of decades of being called childish and now suddenly they are sexist for excluding others. These were commonly the guys getting excluded and the comic book store has been their refuge.
> But HN is a tiny minority. It is barely a drop in the ocean.
It is, although the comments aren't HN readers talking about themselves—the comments are HN readers talking about what comic book readership in their country looks like. To pick a random example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8898345. Pay attention to what the author is saying: not "I read X", but "the best selling comic in Norway for decades was Donald Duck", "The best selling French-language comic is usually Spirou".
> You have to realize that this is afterall a business - the fact that there are very few comics that do portray what you're talking about disagrees with your "tremendous evidence".
The fact that there are very few comics in the US. There are very many such comic books outside of the US, and they sell well. My point is, the way the US comic book market looks is not inevitable; instead it's a result of many years of poor decisions by the US comic book publishers to appeal to a single niche.
Or to turn your phrase back on you: it's a business for comic producers all over the world. However, elsewhere they have found success selling to audiences that US comic book producers have long neglected. I know given how popular US cultural products are, it's easy to assume that things outside the US look just like things inside the US, but that's not always the case. HN has an international readership; check out what they say to see what things are like in other countries.
reply