a factor that i don't think really gets brought up enough in terms of the decline of American superhero comics and the inability of that branch of the comics industry to find new readers is demographics. as much as we talk about rising prices, the direct market ghetto, impenetrable continuity, more "adult" subject matter, more competition (manga, video games), it may be that there are fewer young people reading comics simply because there are fewer young people, period.
in 1960, there were 64.5 million people in the US under the age of 18, representing 35.7% of the population. by 1970, there were 69.8 million, representing 34% of the population. this is the peak of the Silver Age and, not coincidentally, the childhood era of the Baby Boomers. by 1980, there were fewer children in absolute terms at 63.7 million, and in percentage terms at 28% of the population. this is pretty much the bottom of the trough, but it also corresponds with the arrival of video games, home computers, and the beginnings of larger exposure to Japanese anime and manga, so American comics were not in a position to have dominated that wave.
it's also worth noting that the percentage of young people who are nonwhite has increased significantly over the same period. in 1980, at the bottom of the age distribution group, 16.9% of the overall population and 25.1% of the under-25 population was nonwhite. by 2000, that had increased to 24.8% of the overall population and a whopping 38.9% of under-25s. considering that pretty much all the major flagship characters of both big American comics publishers are white couldn't have helped here.
when you combine these changes with all the facts about the shift to the direct market, the rise of alternative media like video games, and the decline of every other mass-market medium and the rise of niche marketing, i think there's a pretty good case to be made that many of the changes in content may be kind of secondary in the big picture. a lot of people have been holding out hope that a return to older storytelling styles could bring back the circulation numbers of the Silver Age, but i'm not sure that that's true. the children who bought those books don't exist anymore, and the children that remain are both culturally different and fewer in number.
what would this mean for the American comics industry if it were true? |
