The iPad Could Revolutionize the Comic Book Biz—or Destroy It | Magazine: American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That’s the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week’s crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a “pull list” on file, books they’ve asked to be set aside so they’ll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It’s a tradition.
To be more specific, it’s a dying tradition. The Wednesday crowd is the old-school audience, collectors who are willing to shell out $3 or $4 for a stapled-together pamphlet that they’ll put in a plastic bag with acid-free cardboard and store in a long white box. Those customers have been trickling away for years.
None of this would matter much at the mega-corporate level if comics were just a few hundred thousand readers and a few thousand retail stores. But North American comics have effectively become the R&D department for a whole lot of higher-stakes media, from movies and television shows to videogames and Broadway musicals. Without periodical comic books, there’s no The Walking Dead, no Thor, no The Dark Knight Rises, no Wonder Woman T-shirts or Spider-Man lunch boxes or Smallville soundtracks. The February issue of Green Lantern sold a mere 70,000 or so copies—but the franchise has also spawned a $150 million movie.