Why Can’t Marvel or DC Sell Graphic Novels?

It’s pretty well understood that over the last forty years, the sales of comic books in America have shifted inexorably from “floppy” pamphlets to graphic novel collections. To understand this shift, one must first know that it follows a thirty-year decline of comic book sales at newsstands as the medium became one of the last lingering vestiges of the pulp magazine market that had dominated fiction sales from the mid-19th century until being wiped out in the mid-20th century by television and paperback novels. With their distribution system collapsing, comic books only survived the 1970s because of the creation of the direct market. The direct market not only allowed Marvel and DC to survive with much smaller sales than they’d enjoyed in their heyday, it let small publishers and solo creators effectively distribute their creations. The result was a renaissance in North American comic book storytelling which carried the medium to new creative heights. The history of the direct market…