Despite the fact that comic book movies, TV shows, and video games are as popular as ever, sales of comic books themselves continue to decline. Marvel and DC never really recovered from the crash in the 90s. Some commentators, mostly white right-wingers, say the decline is due to characters like Miles Morales up there and that comics are being “preachy.”

Well. comics have always been preachy. Heck, comic book superheroes were fighting Hitler in fiction before our government was fighting Hitler in real life. Superman had a whole radio series where he fought the KKK and displayed their general ridiculousness and various secret codes obtained by the FBI. The X-Men are an allegory for the various Civil Rights Movements. Every sentence I just wrote would be called “wokeness” today. So obviously wokeness isn’t the problem.
So what is killing comic books? Let’s look.

2. American Comic Books Are Confusing
Let’s compare comics with manga. Mangas sell more in America than American comic books. Some would say that’s because manga isn’t “woke.” I would say that’s nonsense. Most new comic book fans aren’t shopping for comics based on politics or lack thereof. They shop for accessibility. The reason manga sells better is that it’s accessible.
Think about it comic book fans. If some random relative saw a Spider-Man movie and asked you which Spider-Man issue to start with, you couldn’t just say Spider-Man Issue 1. There are so many different iterations of Spider-Man and other heroes from so many multiverses out there that no casual fan or anyone new knows where to begin. Meanwhile, if someone sees an anime they happen to like on Netflix or Toonami, they could go get issue 1 of that manga and follow a straight line to wherever they are.
That’s the situation the American comics industry has been in. Existing only as a testing ground for ideas to use in TV and movies.
Meanwhile, manga thrives. Why? There’s variety. You may not like manga like Naruto or My Hero Academia. But there’s manga for basically every genre you can think of. You have sports, you have romance, you have horror. You even have stories of non-super-powered people going through everyday life.
4. American Comic Books Never Change Anything
And here is the real crux of the American comic book industry’s problem. The stories never end. Until all the companies that own and could own the rights to classic comic book characters fold, you will never see a final superhero comic that doesn’t eventually get rebooted to retcon that ending.
We learn in elementary school that all stories have three elements. A beginning, a middle, and an end. By this metric, I’m not sure American comic books have ever told a complete story. There’s never a true conclusion. Only reboots. Nobody wants to be the guy that writes the story of Superman retiring and passing the torch to the next generation.
So instead we get multiverses threatening to collide and destroy themselves unless a magic reboot happens. Thus putting the characters back to where they were when they started and anyone who was incidentally killed is now alive, time has reverted and they can run through more or less the same story beats. But only now they have a smaller audience each time they do it. Especially when they do it for insipid reasons.
A Story Without Ending is Noise
But let’s compare that, not to manga, but to the rest of comic-book media.
Those of us who followed the MCU from the start loved Iron Man as he went from self-centered billionaire playboy philanthropist to the guy who gave his life without a second thought. But that story of self-sacrifice wouldn’t mean anything if he could be resurrected at any time.
Which is not to say that the MCU didn’t do reboots. But the reboots closed out stories and had consequences. Tony Stark is dead. Steve Rogers is dead. Peter Parker, in the process of trying to create a reset button, screwed up his own life and now must enter the challenges of adulthood as he deals with rebuilding his life.
And gradually, as the actors reach an age where they can’t do action movies anymore, we will see the rest of the original Avengers retire or die. And we will remember it when we see it.
But comic books don’t do this. The most that ever happens is the guy who hit the Reset Button lives with having hit the Reset Button until he stops moping about it (which happens quickly).
And then fans stop caring because it all becomes noise.
And that, not wokeness or political messaging real or imagined is why print comics are dying.