The highest-grossing film franchise in history is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whose $23 billion worldwide box office revenue more than doubles that of the No. 2 “Star Wars” franchise. When you include “Avengers” and “Spider-Man,” superhero stories account for three of the top five film franchises. Add “X-Men,” “Batman,” and “DC Extended Universe” to the mix, and they take half of the top 10 spots and six of the top 11.
Superhero films are certainly thriving, but those 10- and 11-figure movie franchises are based on comic books that used to cost a dime. Are graphic novels thriving, too, or did superhero movies rise at the expense of the comic books that birthed them?
Quantifying Comic Book Sales Has Always Been an Inexact Science
There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
ust one company, Diamond, founded in 1982, distributed nearly all comic books from publishers large and small to retail shops around the country in what came to be known as the “direct market” system. All inventory that Diamond moved from publishers to comic shops was non-returnable, so all copies were counted as sales regardless of whether or not retail customers ever actually bought them.
Today, 90% of all comic books are still sold through independent retail shops, with newsstands and digital services like Amazon Kindle accounting only for single-digits.
The Billion-Dollar Comic Book Business Continues To Boom
According to Publisher’s Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It’s no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
Should You Invest in Comic Books?
Collecting comic books as a hobby is something anyone can do. Investing in comics books as a financial strategy, on the other hand, requires knowledge, skill, experience and a whole lot of luck. Similar to sports trading cards, a handful of ultra-rare and highly coveted comics in mint condition have fetched hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars at auction. A few examples are “Action Comics” No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) and “Detective Comics” No. 27 (the first appearance of Batman), both of which were worth multi-millions in 2019, according to Superworld Comics.
