![]() Shops and publishers alike started shutting down as they had all bitten off more than they could chew. Who would buy back issues when everyone has three copies of the same book? How could they sell ten year old back issues when all the speculators had multiple copies to sell? A fifty-cent bin doesn’t pay the bills. This left publishers and shops in a predicament. They cut their losses and stopped buying. Eventually the speculators realized that rarity drove up the prices of old books and all these multiple copies weren’t going to sell. ![]() This left a lot of shops with dead stock they couldn’t move. ![]() Stores were ordering numerous copies to appease the speculators and no one ever really knew what was going to be hot. Instead of letting speculators clean out shelves and selling out of the product, the industry just published more and more copies. The logic was, if you saw a guy selling a copy of Amazing Fantasy #1 for $50,000 in 1991, just imagine what six mint condition copies of the first appearance of Carnage would get you in 2021. It meant retiring to a beach house in fifty years. The idea was that buying a bunch of these today meant paying for your kid’s college tuition in twenty years. These buyers would scoop up multiple copies of a single comic that seemed like it would have any resale value twenty years down the road. In reality, plenty of them were probably fans as well. Many comic fans will probably tell you that the speculators weren’t fans at all – they were non-fans that were scooping up as many comics books as they could in the hopes that they’d see a large return on their investment. It was these folks that were probably most responsible for killing comics in the 1990s. Unfortunately, while the direct market was rising, something else was also happening… This seems like a good thing and by itself it probably would have been. In addition to first issues, they also hunted down universe changing events like the first appearance of Galactus. This reinvigorated a love for comics among adults and they began hunting down milestones from their childhood like Amazing Fantasy #1 or the first issue of Action Comics, and they paid serious cash for the nostalgia. This meant that back issues and all those hard to find rarities were accessible and being sold in these specialty comic book shops. In addition to the direct market allowing comic book fans to find each other, this particular branch of sales didn’t have to return what they didn’t sell like a newsstand would. ![]() Specialty stores became places where comic book fans could meet and convene and the stores themselves weren’t bogged down by the Comics Code. One of the major causes of the Comic Book Crash in the 1990s was the establishment and rise of the direct market. Keep reading to see what some of those reasons may have been. That might be because they remember the infamous crash of the comic book industry in the 1990s and some of the reasons that led to it. It’s almost as if the industry knew that they shouldn’t be getting too excited and going all in. However, the success of Rebirth didn’t lead to the printing of millions of copies of every issue and flooding the shelves. Even the best selling Marvel books have a hard time selling 60,000 these days.ĭC released Rebirth last year and that issue sold millions of copies. There was a time in the 1990s when just about every comic book was selling 50,000 copies and a comic wasn’t considered a hit until it sold 250,000 copies. Whatever the reason, the market should be able to right itself as it isn’t the monster it was before it crashed in the 1990s. There was some walking back on this statement by Marvel and many individuals and shop owners who have looked into the matter are blaming the sales slump on a number of other things, namely business tactics being used by the two big publishers. Marvel recently came under fire when diversity in their books was blamed for a run of poor sales. While their film and television projects seem to be going strong, their print end is seeing some problems. There’s been a lot of talk over the past year and a half about Marvel and DC comics seeing a slump in sales.
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