Brian Hibbs released
his annual report on NPD book sales figures a couple of weeks ago and uh, it's clear they have to do
something as graphic novels as a whole are experiencing growth unlike anywhere in publishing worldwide. Collectively the industry grew by 68.25%, an unprecedented increase even in the eyes of a lifelong autistic retailer like Hibbs.
However this isn't really grounds for old comic nerds like Nicieza, Marz or Waid to start dabbing on the Comicsgaters seeing as these massive gains in readership and market is being made by children's comics and manga, scooping up the millions of readers these idiots argued for years didn't exist as an excuse for their own inability to engage or retain an audience.
Sales of manga increased by a staggering 280% in 2021. By contrast, out of the top 750 graphic novels sold over the course of 2022 - a record low of 17 were DC. Marvel had zero. Indeed, the traditional outlet for "western comics" , the direct market,
shrank by 2% according to Comichron. Is Ron Marz going to start writing manga suddenly in his mid 50s? Is Fabian Nicieza going to switch over to making scripts for graphic novel adaptations of the Babysitters Club? Probably not.
Some other stuff noted in Hibbs' report :
- Dav Plikey, author of young children's fare like Dogman and Catboy, alone continues to sell more comics (5.25 million in 2021) than all of Marvel (1.03M) and DC (1.95M) combined.
- Scholastic only entered the comics industry in 2005 and is now 40% of the market, 4 times the size of the next largest Western competitor. Growing at 43% this year, their rise shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down.
- After Scholastic, the next ranking Western comic publishers are traditional book publishers HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and MacMillan, who are handily muscling out the indigenous comic publishers and their outmoded, obsolete practices for what's turning out to be a brisk business.
- Factoring in their sales of translated manga like Berserk, Dark Horse is a bigger publisher than Marvel at this point.
Marvel's presence outside of hole in the wall comic book outlets is a non-entity, managing to place
zero graphic novels in the top 750 titles sold in 2021 and that, as Hibbs notes, Marvel is selling less comics today as it did in 2007 while the surrounding market has
tripled in size since then. While Marvel may still dominate competitors in the direct market and local comic book shops with its wide array of variant covers supplied by guys like Mark Brooks, the shrinking proportion of sales that floppies represent makes this an increasingly irrelevant metric. The only Marvel property to crack the top 750 of non-direct market sales was
Miles Morales: Shock Waves, and that was licensed and published by IDW. Or with Hibbs lending his own professional estimation of Marvel's performance:
tl;dr comics 2021:
Overall: +64.8%
Scholastic: +43%
Manga overall: +280%
Direct Market:
-1%
Comicsgate:
-25.6%
Dynamite Entertainment:
-26%
