Amazon and the Future of the Superhero

American comic books, like the superheroes that fill their pages, must occasionally reinvent themselves. In 1938, not long after the format débuted in the United States, Superman appeared in Action Comics’ first issue. That began a golden age of comic books that lasted until the fifties, when postwar tastes shifted to favor genres like science fiction and horror, and comic-book authors came up with more complex characters, such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, and groups like the X-Men and the Avengers. Comic books transformed again in the seventies and eighties, offering up darker story lines that reflected social issues. This period brought us works like Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” and Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One,” and lasted almost until the end of the Cold War.

More recently, changes in the comic-book world have had less to do with the superheroes themselves and more with how they’re sold. The digital age of comic books began quietly, when, in 2009, a startup called ComiXology launched its first digital-comics reader. Two years earlier, the company had begun hosting an online community for fans and selling comic shops a service that allowed them to list their inventories online. By the time ComiXology launched its digital-comics app, which is like an iTunes store for downloadable comics, sales of top-selling print comics had dwindled to about a quarter of a million copies per year; for comparison, an issue of X-Men sold seven million copies in the early nineties. Now, ComiXology sells digital comic books and graphic novels for Android, iOS, Kindle, and Windows 8 devices, as well as for its own Internet reader. The company makes money by taking a cut of each digital edition that it distributes on behalf of comic-book publishing companies.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it will acquire ComiXology for an undisclosed amount. Amazon gains the top digital-comics platform and all of its users, along with a huge amount of content from seventy-five different publishers, including the exclusive rights to distribute digital content for DC on iOS devices and the rights to “The Walking Dead”—last year’s top-selling print comic—across all digital platforms. In an article about Amazon earlier this year, George Packer explored whether the company’s aggressiveness has been good for books. It is worth considering a similar question in this case: Is Amazon good for comic books?

David Steinberger, the chief executive officer and co-founder of ComiXology, said in a statement that the deal with Amazon would “accelerate a new age for comic books and graphic novels.” He didn’t, however, specify whether that age would involve paper. Sales of comic books began to fall in the nineties, with a lot of casual readers losing interest after the deaths of Batman and Superman. The past few years have seen a slight improvement, thanks in part to the success of films based on comic books and television programs like “The Walking Dead.” U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers of print comic books saw a sales increase of more than ten per cent last year, and print sales still far outnumber digital downloads. Still, it is likely that, at a certain point, growth in digital comics will overtake print, relegating it to a niche market purely for collectors. Over the past five years, downloads of digital comics have steadily increased, and the tablets, e-readers, and smartphones needed to view them have become ubiquitous. Their pixel densities approach the limits of what Lois Lane, if not Superman, could perceive.

Being part of a large and aggressive corporation like Amazon could accelerate the growth of ComiXology, and help get more digital comics onto more devices. When Amazon expanded the market for e-books with the Kindle, sales of print books suffered. But there are reasons to believe that Amazon’s impact on the print comic-book world may not be felt as suddenly or as deeply. ComiXology has always worked closely with comic-book stores; today, it even partners with them to sell digital comics through retailers’ Web sites. The company also offers a service that helps customers locate shops in their area. If Amazon chooses to deepen these relationships, rather than cutting retailers out completely, it is possible that print and digital comics may continue to grow together—at least in the short term. Amazon does have some incentives to do this: in comic retailers, the company may find an untapped opportunity to sell its Kindle devices.

Photograph: Joby Sessions/Tap Magazine/Getty