RECESSION AND THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY 203

The Recession and the American Comic Book Industry:

From Inelastic Cultural Good to Economic Integration
Bart Beaty
University of Calgary

The American comic book was born in the 1930s, peaked in the 1950s, suffered 50 years of
declining fortunes, and began to rebound in the 2000s. Throughout the greater part of its history,
the relative success of the comics industry was rarely dictated by the general state of the economy
but rather was shaped by a narrowly defined niche market that operated in isolation from other
cultural industries. This situation has changed dramatically over the past decade. In recent years,
globalization and media conglomeration have transformed comics and integrated them fully into
larger industry systems. The result has been a renewal that allowed comics to have weathered
the most recent recessionary storm, while, for good or ill, ending the autonomous outsider status
that the comics industry has long enjoyed.
The American comic book debuted in 1933 and, as one of the first media forms geared specif-
ically at young people, has enjoyed exponential sales growth its first two decades. In 1936 only
four comic books were published featuring original material. By 1952, when the industry reached
its zenith, that number was 3,161, and total circulation was estimated at more than a billion copies
annually (Gabilliet, 2010, p. 46). By the mid-1950s, however, a period characterized by growing
economic prosperity and a surging youth-oriented culture, the comic book market had crashed.
Seemingly unmoored from the economic logic of the age of Eisenhower, comics were overcome
by a series of technological, political, and economic transformations. The rapid adoption of tele-
vision into middle class American homes lured away much of comics youthful audience. Public
concerns over the potentially negative impact of comic books on juveniles led to increased mon-
itoring of comic books by adults and to changes in the content of comic books themselves. The
transformation of magazine distribution curtailed the space for comic books on Americas news-
stands. Thus, in the midst of the baby boom of the 1950s, when youth-targeted media like comic
books might have been expected to skyrocket in popularity, sales plummeted. By 1960, the num-
ber of comic books released hovered around 1,500, less than half of its peak eight years prior,
and the industry entered a decades-long period of economic contraction that would winnow the
number of publishers, curtail employment opportunities, and see the survivors pursue a single
lucrative genre superheroes to the near-total exclusion of other alternatives.
Arguably, the comic book industry survived only because it could produce superhero nar-
ratives more cheaply and convincingly than could pre-CGI Hollywood film and television. By
the 1970s, Marvel (whose roster of characters included Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, and
the Hulk) and DC (publishers of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) dominated what
remained of the newsstand comic book market. Later in the decade, specialty comic book stores,
utilizing a system of nonreturnable distribution, had opened the door for smaller publishers while
204 BEATY

also reinforcing a very narrow conception of the audience for comics themselves: prepubescent
boys. The narrow conceptualization of the audience was exacerbated by a war for market share
between Marvel and DC that stretched from 1975 to 1978, the result of which was a market
flooded with hundreds of new, poor quality superhero titles. At the same time, the low profit
margins of comics, coupled with the decline of mom and pop style newsstands and corner
stores, transformed comics from a mass media market to a niche media market.
By the 1980s, the system of comic book specialty stores known as the direct market had
become the most important sales outlet for the industry. Catering almost exclusively to young
males, stores often incorporated other narrowly focused entertainments, such as role-playing
games and action figures. The unexpected success of Kevin Eastman and Peter Lairds superhero
spoof Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1984 generated a raft of imitators seeking to cash in
on their quick success. By 1987, the resulting glut had bankrupted many stores who purchased
these cheap knock-offs on a nonreturnable basis. Only a few years later, a second, larger glut
befell the industry. In an effort to expand market share, Marvel and DC adopted techniques
from the collectible sports card market. They released many popular titles with multiple covers
and included trading cards inside comic books in order to foster a speculator frenzy that would
drive avid consumers to purchase multiple copies of the same comic book. While these tactics
resulted in remarkable short-term sales boosts, the long-term effect was devastating. Audiences
soon grew tired of poor quality products and gimmick packaging and abandoned comic stores in
droves. The resulting devastation shuttered several distributors, and in 1996 market leader Marvel
Comics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In retrospect, then, it is clear that few of the setbacks faced by the comics industry have been
directly tied to an economic recession. In fact, the economic downturn of the early-1990s coin-
cided with an era of unbridled and unsustainable growth in the comics market, and the rapid
deflation of that market was more a result of industry overreliance on short-term faddishness and
unpopular products than of larger economic forces. In brief, for the first 60 years of their exis-
tence, American comic books seemed to run on an economic logic of their own. For a readership
addicted to serialized adventure narratives, comics were a remarkably inelastic cultural good.
The threats faced by the industry were primarily internal and stemmed from an ill-considered
tendency to flood the market with derivative products in the wake of unexpected successes.
One result of the comics market implosion of the early-1990s was that it recalibrated the
industry to better reflect transformations affecting the media and cultural industries more gen-
erally. In the wake of the speculation crash, comics became a commodity within larger media
systems. One major change was to channel comics toward the traditional book market in the
hopes that it would provide greater long-term sustainability. Comic books traditionally were con-
sidered a bad fit for bookstores because of their slim format, low cost, and monthly frequency.
Graphic novels, book length compilations of those same comic books with a more marketing-
friendly name, were a different story. As recently as 15 years ago it was unusual to encounter
bookstores that carried comics other than collections of newspaper comic strips such as Peanuts,
Doonesbury, or Calvin and Hobbes. By the turn of this century, graphic novel sections appeared
at most major book retailers. This expansion had as much to do with the integration of comics
into the cultural industries as it did with the nature of the form itself. Animated television series
such as Sailor Moon and Pokemon fuelled an explosive interest in Japanese manga comics in
the late-1990s. Hollywood summer blockbuster films such as X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man
in 2002 cemented the superhero as the predominant staple of Hollywood summer blockbusters
 RECESSION AND THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY 205

through to this day, and reignited interest in the comics on which they were based. Marvel and
DC capitalized on their vast back catalogs by releasing graphic novel versions of old super-
hero comics to bookstores, catering to an increasingly nostalgic baby boom audience and also
to a new generation of readers exposed to the characters via the multiplex. The final element
in the bookstore puzzle has been the rise of the literary graphic novel, which is indebted to
the more personal storytelling traditions of the underground comix movement in the late six-
ties. Following on the success of Art Spiegelmans Maus, one of the best-selling comic books
in American history, a generation of self-consciously serious cartoonists has adapted the comics
form to traditions more in keeping with contemporary literary fiction. The intersecting retail suc-
cesses of manga, superhero collections, and high-minded graphic novels have integrated comics
into the general publishing industry so that they no longer exists outside of the general economy
as they did for decades.
Given the tri-partite expansion of the comics industry over the course of the 2000s, assessing
the issue of the impact of the current global economic crisis on the comic book industry remains
difficult. While it is clear, for example, that sales of manga in translation have declined during the
current recession, the reasons are potentially more complex than simply reduced leisure spend-
ing. BookScans 2009 report on comics sales to bookstores indicates that while manga remains
the dominant comics product in the market, there has been a sharp decline from preceding years.1
In 2009, retail sales of manga in bookstores declined from $108 million to $81 million, or 26%.
The reasons for this decline are not self-evident, and potential explanations abound. First, the
manga market, like black-and-white comics in the 1980s and gimmicky superhero comic books
in the 1990s, has been glutted with titles, many of which are low quality. Second, a tremendous
proportion of manga sales are driven by a small number of titles, including Kishimoto Masashis
Naruto (whose 46 volumes amounted to 971,000 copies sold in 2009, or about 12% of the total
manga market in 2009), Tite Kubos Bleach, and Natuski Takayas Fruits Basket, each of which is
deep in its narrative cycle and into a period of diminishing sales potential. Third, manga is expe-
riencing a generational shift. With a readership predominantly composed of teenagers, manga is
particularly prone to rapidly shifting tastes, which have seen recent perennial bestsellers such as
Ken Akamatsus Love Hina and Clamps Chobits fall out of fashion. Finally, the sheer amount of
space Naruto requires more than 11 lineal feet to keep a copy of each volume in stock may
impede its profitability for bookstores at a time when interest in manga appears to be waning.
The superhero industry, the stalwart backbone of the American comics market since the 1960s,
has seen some gains in the bookstore market despite the downturn. DCs dollar sales in the
bookstore market have quadrupled since 2003 to more than $37 million in 2009 as the number
of books it has provided to these outlets has steadily grown. On the other hand, Marvels sales
to bookstores declined in 2009 to just over $19 million, reflecting its trend of flat or declining
revenue over the past few years. What is clear is that comics have become intricately bound to the
economic logics of the Hollywood blockbuster. DC (a subsidiary of Time-Warner) and Marvel
(purchased by Disney in 2009) are no longer independent companies but are publishing arms
of major international media conglomerates. Increasingly, they derive much of their profits from
licensing characters for circulation in films, toys, and video games rather than from comic book

1 BookScans data are proprietary but were published on the web by comics retailer Brian Hibbs, whose number
crunching, particularly of manga sales, was instructive in this analysis (Hibbs, 2009).
206 BEATY

production. To this end, it can be argued that the contemporary American superhero comic book
industry has become a loss-leader for the larger movie industry. When even low-profile comic
book series such as Kick Ass and The Losers become the basis for Hollywood films, comics
appear as little more than development exercises in the context of a synergistic business culture.
The ability of comics to drive filmmaking and, consequently, for movies to drive the sales of
comics can be evidenced in the sales of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen. Originally
published in 1986, it became the top-selling comic in bookstores in 2009 following the release
of the film. To this end, superhero comics have become as fully integrated into the logics of
the entertainment economy as their publishers are into multinational conglomerates, with the
particularities of any given recession having less impact than the corporations ability to generate
high-profile media events.
The final category of contemporary comics production, the literary-style graphic novel, is also
the one that is most difficult to evaluate in a short-term context as it is, in economic terms, the
slightest of the three categories and, therefore, the one most prone to exaggerated year-to-year
changes. While the idea of long form comics has a considerable history, they emerged as a sig-
nificant marketing category only in the 2000s, with the bookstore success of cartoonists Alison
Bechdel, Dan Clowes, Marjane Satrapi, Chris Ware, and so forth. So complete is the transfor-
mation from magazine-style serialization to novel-length publication that the most acclaimed
graphic novels of 2009 are not even published by comic book companies. David Mazzuchellis
Asterios Polyp is a 344-page novel about an architect published by Pantheon, Robert Crumbs
The Book of Genesis is a 224-page literalization of the Bible published by W. W. Norton, and Joe
Saccos Footnotes in Gaza is a 432-page work of creative nonfiction about Palestine published by
Metropolitan Books. The success of these books, each of which was published to nearly univer-
sal critical acclaim with rave reviews in venues that once would have laughed off the concept of
serious comic books, was noteworthy. Crumb, the renowned father of underground comics, sold
more than 68,000 copies of his Genesis in 2009 and Mazzuchellis Asterios Polyp, essentially
a first novel, sold more than 12,000 (Saccos book was released in the last week of December
2009 and thus did not have significant sales for the year). At the same time, one has to wonder
how much more traction could have been made in this category were it not for the recession.
That is to say, the literary graphic novel industry has been building toward this type of success
for decades, and its profile has peaked in recent years with frequent reviews and articles in the
New York Times and advertisements for books by the likes of Adrian Tomine in Harpers and
The New Yorker. While it is clear that the recession did not inflict deep damage on the highest
profile works, a widespread conjecture within the comics industry is that it arrived at exactly the
wrong moment in the rising trajectory of the serious comics movement and may have helped
stall whatever momentum had already arisen.
Ultimately it is difficult to assess the impact of the recession on the comic book industry as
signals are so mixed. Manga is clearly on a decline, but whether that is attributable to generational
burnout or economic malaise is unclear. Superhero titles spike due to Hollywood attention, but
have otherwise simply maintained sales levels from the mid-1990s, and are still at an historic
low relative to the boom periods of the 1960s and 1940s. The literary graphic novel, increasingly
an aspect of the book trade rather than the comics industry, is such a recent category that it is
difficult to contextualize its growth, although momentum is steadily upward. It seems that new
economic models will allow the comics industry to weather this economic downturn relatively
unscathed. As the comics industry is increasingly integrated into the economies of other cultural
 GLOBAL RECESSION IN BOLLYWOOD 207

industries, however, it is arguable that comics will lose its privileged place outside the dominant
economic logics and its fortunes will be more closely tied to that of other industries. It also
suggests that the concept of a distinctly identifiable comics market will become harder to
sustain.

REFERENCES

Gabilliet, J.-P. (2010). Of comics and men: A cultural history of American comic books (B. Beaty & N. Nguyen, Trans).
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hibbs, B. (2009, April 26). Looking at Bookscan: 2009. ComicBookResources. Retrieved from http://www.
comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=24818

Narratives of the Global Recession in Bollywood

Shanti Kumar
University of TexasAustin

In this essay, I focus on some of the many arguments put forth by journalists, bloggers, actors,
directors, producers, and industry analysts to explain the impact of the global recession on Indian
cinema. Given the massive scale and scope of the global financial meltdown since 20082009, it
would seem like a foregone conclusion to suggest that the recession has had an enormous effect
on Indias commercial Hindi film industry, often called Bollywood. However, nothing is ever so
straightforward in the world of Bollywood. Narratives of the global recession in Bollywood have
been as diverse and varied as the stories that are told in the hundreds of movies made in India
every year.
Chidanand Rajghatta (2007) of the Times of India wonders if the reason there are so many
conflicting reports about the global recession in Bollywood is that there is no consensus among
economists on what a recession means in purely economic terms. Rajghatta jokes that many
economists thus resort to gut-level definitions, such as a recession is when your neighbor loses
his job; a depression is when you lose your job too. All jokes aside, Rajghatta argues that in the
Indian film industry, there are some who seriously believe that the recession a major problem but
only for US-based production houses in Hollywood which have lost much money in the current
financial crisis. Others in the Indian film industry, particularly those in corporate production
houses who have invested heavily in both Hollywood and Bollywood, clearly see the effects of
the global recession at their doorsteps. The variation in responses is aptly captured by Rajghattas
title Recession Ahead for US? where US refers to the United States of America but could
easily be read as us in India, when in the latter part of the essay Rajghatta asks the question,
So will the contagion touch India?
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