The Fall of the Comic Book

"According to Van Lente, one factor affecting the rising price of comics is the steady decline of the audience. 'For me it’s the starkest example of how comics when they were first conceived were completely different then than they are now. Comics were originally priced cheap not only so kids could get them, but because you made your money in bulk.' Oft-cited estimates of the Market Research Company of America show that, in 1945, roughly half of all Americans read comic books, including 95% of all boys, and (and!) 91% of all girls, between the ages of six and eleven. 'In 1947,' Van Lente added, 'one out of every three periodicals sold in the United States was a comic book. That’s 180 million comics in one year.' To experience market penetration like that, you’d pretty much have to be the Internet. And if you glance at these lists of circulation figures for the time, you see that by 1946 you have four different comic book titles that were selling more than a million copies per month. (Whereas now, there are only three titles clearing (barely) two hundred thousand copies monthly.) So in comparing the 40s with now, we’re comparing a time when comic books were hands-down no-joke the undisputed dominant paradigm of entertainment for American children to now, a time when the characters and storylines of comics constitute a very American mythology while the vehicles that brought them there, the comic books themselves, sit off to the side. They are, after all, just one medium of a bucket-full lined up to entertain the kids these days."

Brent Cox at The Awl compares comic-book sales today to the heyday of the 1940s.