I Agree (Somewhat)…

Scott Snyder over at DC Comics said something interesting that I actually somewhat agree with, but I think it needs more context. Writing on his Substack, Snyder pointed out that the economics of comics right now aren’t supporting long, slow-burn runs in a profitable way. He said it’s a harder marketplace for those kinds of series than it was eight or nine years ago. He speculated it might be a byproduct of streaming and shorter attention spans. And while there might be some truth to that — people have more entertainment options than ever and attention is more fragmented — I think the bigger issue goes back much further and runs much deeper.
The core problem is that the American comics industry cultivated an audience of collectors rather than readers. This didn’t start eight or nine years ago. This has been building for a long time. The hyper-emphasis on variant covers — twenty variants for a single issue — the constant reboots to chase number-one sales spikes, the speculator-driven market that prizes return on investment over story engagement — all of that shaped the customer base into what it is today. The dominant audience in American comics right now is made up largely of people who care more about what a book is worth than what happens in it.
And that’s the audience publishers cultivated by design. From the publisher’s standpoint, reboots and variants are how you make the numbers work in the short term. Sales spike on number ones. Variants drive collector purchases. But the long-term consequence is an audience that isn’t invested in stories. They’re invested in return on investment. So when enthusiasm for a new series hits, how long does it last? Are people even talking about the story, or are they waiting for the next number one and calculating what their books are worth?
At the Rippaverse, we approach this differently because we have to. We don’t have legacy characters with decades of history. We’re a newer publisher building from scratch, so we’re playing by a different set of rules. Our format is different — we don’t release traditional floppies. Our books have a floor of 56 pages, some going up to 96. We do offer full variants for the collector side of the market, but we also have mass print reader copies at accessible price points — $13.99 for a 56-page book. We try to service both sides, but we don’t hyper-focus on the collector market. Our priority is the reader. The person who’s actually invested in the story, who wants to know what happens next, who cares about the characters.
I think the industry needs to get back to the basics. Focus on the stories. Focus on the readers. For too long, the emphasis has been on impressing peers, chasing collector dollars, and engineering short-term sales spikes. If you want people invested in your stories long-term, you have to actually prioritize the people reading them. So I agree with Snyder’s observation — but the context is that this problem was built over decades, and the solution starts with who you’re actually trying to serve.