Marvel Comics’ boss says it was lost in 2023, but are building a roadmap for its future using a new way to understand who's reading

Everyone gets lost once in a while. In a way, that’s the only way to find something - and to find yourself. And the best first step is to realize what you are missing, and that no different for me, you, or Marvel Comics.

At a recent closed-door industry event, longtime Marvel publisher Dan Buckley said that following the pandemic and the decentralization of comics distribution due to the decline of what was the biggest print comics distributor (Diamond) and biggest digital comics distributor (Amazon’s ComiXology) in North America, the company was unsure of its health and the comics indistry’s health as a whole.

“As all you know, changes in distribution have made it very hard for us to figure out where we, the industry, are compared to where we have been,” said Buckley during the ComicsPRO keynote address. “And this is requiring us to reach out to others to determine the following: What is the size of the industry? Do we have the right definition of the industry? Is the industry growing or retracting? How are each of our products performing in the marketplace?”

From the late ‘90s until 2020, Diamond Comic Distributors was a defecto monopoly - being the exclusive distributor of print comics for Marvel, DC, Image Comics, and all of their closest rivals. While having it centralized in the hands of one single privately-run family business had some negatives, it also allowed sales data to be tracked through one single pipeline. Through Diamond’s publicly released sales charts and deeper data given out to some publishers, companies - especially Marvel - were attuned to their release on the first of every month. Some Marvel insiders told me during this time that some execs at Marvel were too focused on the company’s competitive ranking with DC in these charts.

But with the decentralization of print comic book distribution to now three major pipelines (Penguin Random House, Lunar Distribution, and Diamond still, to a lesser extent), the sales data is siloed, proprietary, and unavailable for quantitative measurement and comparison on any level beyond small sample sizes.

“A little over a year ago we realized that we were unsure of where we actually were from an industry and company perspective, said Buckley. “Yes, we know our sales numbers, but we need context to actually set a meaningful course forward.”

Since then, Marvel and some other companies - publishers, retailers, and more - have bandied together in several efforts including the ComicsPRO-led program COMET Standard to collate sales data from various publishers and sales avenues to better understand what’s going on in comics - posssibly even better than they did under the defacto Diamond monopoly from the first 20 years of the 21st Century.

“Working with a team here at ComicsPro and others, we've been committed to finding better ways for all of us to continue improving and standardizing the access to data again, said