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As the resident comic book guy, I should comment on the recent revelation superman is about to renounce his American citizenship because he is tired of his actions being associated with American policy. In other words, truth and justice are now separate from the American way as far as he is concerned.

First and foremost, this is a stunt to boost sales. A tasteless stunt, but a stunt nevertheless. Sales for comic books have taken a huge dive in recent years. They sell half as much as they did a decade ago. There are a lot of reasons for this--cover prices rising much higher than inflation, the popularity of Pokemon cards, and kids reading Harry Potter instead. But what you can really trace the problem back to is collector speculation over stunts like this. In other words, comics publishers never learn.

I was at my peak as a comics fan back in 1990 when it became an industry driven more by superstar artists than characters. There were a handful of artists who were able to sell just about any comic by drawing the issue. Marvel Comics, the company who was fortunate enough to employ most of these artists, got the idea to give each of these artists a new title featuring a major, popular character to both draw and write for themselves.

To make the launch of these new titles special, each one had a gimmick. There were multiple covers, trading cards included, hog rams on the covers--all sorts of peculiar variations. Collectors brought up multiple copies of these issues in all variations tas speculation on their value. To illustrate, the Amazing Spider-Man was the best selling title featuring the character, selling 400,000 copies per month in 1990. When Todd McFarlane, arguably the hottest artist in comics at the time, launched the adjective free Spider-Man #1 in the summer of 1990, it was sold with three different covers: a black, a silver, and a scarce platinum cover. Marvel sold five million copies. A years later, their were six variations of Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 for which marvel sold eight million.

The problem is that the same 400,00 regular readers were buying up all the millions of copies expecting to eventually make a mint off them. Anyone who understood supply and demand knew that was foolhardy, but comic publishers do not care about the secondary market like fans do. They kept pumping out comics with all sorts of special gimmicks while creating ’events” to justify them. Remember that Superman has been dead? Batman had his back broken? Captain America was murdered? Spider-man revealed his secret identity to the world? Now Superman is renouncing his citizenship. After being dead, for a while, no less.

The gravy train did not last for publishers. By about 1994 oor so, collectors started seeing those millions of copies of comics they had boxes of in the closet flooding the market. Comics stores could not give them away because everyone had at least ten copies they wre trying to unload themselves. Including me, in all honest. Fans left the hobby in droves even as publishers attempted to adjust to their misjudgment. Even a publisher of new comics needs to watch what is happening in the secondary market.

These days comics have been relegated to maintaining the copyrights in order to license characters out for movies, toys, and fast food premiums. The only reason Disney bought Marvel comics was to produce film projects and have Spider-Man appear at Disneyland. The content of comics is pretty much irrelevant beyond keeping characters in the public’s awareness. Hence, we are back to stunts in order to do so.

If history is any indication, two things will happen. One, Superman will return to status quo once interest in his citizenship renunciation dies down. Two, publishers making so much money off licensing fees they can consider publishing comics a loss leader can ignore how fans feel about these gimmicks. There is nothing anyone can do about it other than lament the rapid death of the comic book industry.