Flashbacks, Histories and Disappointments (from August 2020)

I’m running low on “historical” content to share, but this is another that I wrote for Comfort Food Comics, but unfortunately there wasn’t a place for it back then and it never saw the light of day! But like George Lucas, it’s time to once again plunder the archives and remaster unnecessarily for my present day audience!

It’s important to note that all the figures I quote are from research I performed back in 2020, so whilst I imagine they differ somewhat four years later, I don’t think they’re going to be that different to affect the point I was trying to make. That said, if I was to do this again, I’d be sure to provide citations to my research. Anyway, shall we?

I had a whole different idea for where this article was going to go when I started writing it. I wanted to talk about one of the first issues I read when I was becoming a fan, namely Batman: Legend of the Dark Knight #115 (1999), a perfect Batman adventure, but then my introduction got away from me, and I went… international? So, please bear with me, and maybe next time I’ll actually get around to talking about one of my earliest comfort food comics.

It’s strange the stories that stay with you. I think it depends on when you read them, and where you were at that moment in time.

When I first got into comics, I didn’t fully comprehend what I was reading. I got my start reading my dad’s old annuals, collecting stories from The Hotspur (1933) and The Victor (1961), these vintage action and adventure “story papers” from his youth. One of the few iconic, wholly British creations in comics, Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, got his start in the Eagle (1950), and I grew up reading his adventures battling the Mekon and his Treen armies thanks to my dad’s original fandom.

When I visited my grandparents at the weekends, I’d comb through their vast bookshelves to find a Beano (1938) or Dandy (1937) annual I’d never seen before, anything that was bright and vibrant and exciting. I’d comb over things I’d read a hundred times previous because I couldn’t get enough of it. These formative years for me informed everything that came after, and I wouldn’t change a moment of it.

Anyway, I mention the British market, because we tend to forget that comics aren’t just what DC and Marvel produce on a monthly basis. There’s a rich history of international comics that have, at times and continue to be, proven more popular and more profitable than their American counterparts.

How many languages has Hergé’s Tintin (1929) been translated into? I checked, and the answer is seventy, with sales of more than 200 million copies worldwide. Who grew up with a copy of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix (1959) on their bookshelf? That series has sold approximately 370 million copies and has been translated into over one hundred different languages and dialects. Over in Italy, Angela and Luciana Giussani’s Diabolik (1962) series has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide (also, I never knew the character Diabolik was created by two sisters. That’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?), and let’s not forget the mind-blowing phenomena that is Japan’s manga output.

Did you know that Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (1997) has sold over 470 million copies since its start? Hajime Isayama’s Attack On Titan (2009) has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide in ten years. And there have only been thirty collected editions released. Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (1987) has 131 volumes and has over 120 million in sales.

There’s a societal acceptance of manga in the Japanese mainstream, similar to how there’s still an air of the ‘real’ around wrestling for them. You’ve probably seen the photos of salaryman riding the underground home, reading their copies of the latest work from their favourite mangaka? It’s not something you’d see while riding the subway home in London or New York (though I’m ready to be proven wrong).

When was the last time DC Comics could make that claim for any of their output? Did you know that Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), a video game that sold over two million units in the first three weeks of its release, was in part based on Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), the most successful Batman book of all time? The most up to date sales figures I could find said it’s sold more than 600,000 copies, while the video game has sold over 9 million copies. The only Bat-book that gets close to that is Batman 10 Cent Adventure #1 (2002), which has apparently sold over 700,000 copies, but compare a 10 cent cover price to Arkham Asylum’s original price of $15. Taking into account inflation, $15 is equivalent to $30-odd in today numbers.

Marvel had a bit more luck in 1991 with the release of X-Men #1, a spin-off of the long-running Uncanny X-Men series that started in the sixties. When it was announced, pre-order sales were over 8 million copies. This was aided by the fact that there were four covers that linked together to present a complete image, so people wanted that on their shelves. It’s still the highest selling single-issue comic of all time. And I believe that’s more due to the speculator market that was becoming prevalent, a specific moment in time that everything came together and made that issue a massive success. The speculator market didn’t last. Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996. Five years after X-Men #1 hit the stands.

A year later, DC Comics released Superman #75 (1992), famous for involving the death of Superman at the hands of the monstrous Doomsday. That hit 5 million in pre-orders and went on to sell 6 million individual issues. It topped the charts for the year, but neither company have been able to replicate the successes of these releases from nearly thirty years ago.

Across the globe in different languages and formats, over fifteen thousand individual volumes (be them individual issues or collected editions) feautiring Superman have sold 600 million units. On the Marvel side of things, Avengers-related books near six thousand volumes released and sold 172 million units.

Compare that to Attack On Titan and be baffled. The west just doesn’t have the same relationship with comic books that everywhere else does. Why can’t publishers translate the massive, multi-billion successes of the films based on their comics into individual issue sales? Why aren’t there copies on Batman on everybody’s shelves, ready for their eventual grandchildren to reach that age where they, as I did, want to find something cool to read during a visit? It’s cool to go see Avengers: Endgame, but is it cool to read Avengers #33 (2020) by Jason Aaron and Javier Garrón?

Regardless of your answer (hey, we’re all cool kids here, we all enjoy a random issue of Avengers, right?), one thing is clear: The comics market isn’t as successful as it should be. Sure, their IP generate billions at the theatres, but why don’t they generate that kind of revenue in the bookshops and comic stores? And how do we fix that?

To Be Continued…