It’s not just ‘wokeness’ | Comic Books
The American comic book industry’s real problem isn’t the stories and it isn’t the politics. It’s that the industry stopped prioritizing readers decades ago, and once you know the history, everything else starts to make sense.
I’ll be the first to say the industry isn’t in a good spot. But the content is one piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. Here’s the part that doesn’t get discussed enough.
In the 1970s the direct market took hold. That’s a specialty system basically unique to North America: publisher to distributor to retailer, where the shop buys at a steep discount and the books are non-returnable. That single change ended comics as a disposable thing you grabbed off a spinner rack and built a secondary market around them instead.
By the late 80s the variant cover showed up, and in the 90s it got completely out of control. Five covers on one X-Men issue moving millions of copies. Polybags. Gimmicks that had nothing to do with anybody actually reading the book. Publishers went bankrupt in that bust and the tactics never went away, because if you’re a shot caller looking at those numbers, why wouldn’t you reboot constantly and ship dozens of variants of the same issue? You aren’t selling to someone who wants to read it. You’re selling to a collector.
Fast forward to 2026 and most of that is still in place. I’m not knocking publishers for chasing what pays when readers aren’t turning up in the numbers they used to. But the big two set the tone, the mid majors run similar playbooks, and that’s the whole Western market.
Compare it to manga. Over there the anime sells the manga and the manga sells the anime. That synergy doesn’t exist here. Anime by itself usually doesn’t make its money back, which is why it’s funded by a committee of companies who know it moves the print. In the West the adaptations are loose, the investment is enormous, and the economics still point back at collectors.
Our approach at Rippaverse is different. A fixed number of covers, no 20 variants of the same book, and a cheaper reader copy so people stick around for what’s actually inside it. We’ve done over $16 million in total sales doing it that way.
The reason I made this one is that people flatten it into a single cause. It isn’t just the price. It’s foundational, and that foundation was laid decades before any of the current fights started.
Rippaverse books ship direct: https://rippaverse.com
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