Robert Kirkman Proved Marvel and DC Wrong And The Manga Numbers Show Why!

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]If you've been following the channel, you know I'm not a huge fan of Robert Kirkman. I think uh he's a woke monstrosity that's represents the worst of problems in the comic industry, but he's also done something very smart and he is a shrewd businessman unlike a lot of people in the comic book industry. Uh that is for his benefit and a lot and some people around him benefit. It also hurts some creators. I've talked to some who have actually kind of been trampled over him by his uh sort of ambitions that have come along the way. but he's got a idea that is really really intelligent, really really smart and it shows that he's leaps and bounds ahead of Marvel and DC and what he's trying to do on the business end and this is why his stuff might have a chance at surviving and outlasting a lot of the other stuff that's hitting in culture today. Let's get into this news in just a moment. My name is John Dela Rose, everybody. I am a comic book creator myself and I'll be launching a new omnibus of my series Flying Sparks very, very soon. Now, for signing up for my newsletter so I can notify you when that comes out, guys. It's going to be a 450 page plus book. Uh, you get the first volume of this. You can check it out before it even gets there. Three free books for signing up. Sign up in the description below. It's the best deal on the entire internet. I can't wait to get these into your hands, my friends. Let's get into this news. Sign up in the description below so you don't miss some great independent comics. And let's see what Robert Kirkman's saying. So, Robert Kirkman walked into Comics Pro 2026 this week and explained why manga is eating American comic books alive. how Invincible already proved how to make things work. This is pretty interesting right here, guys. And I think it's a huge, huge story. One Japanese magazine outs sells American best comics of 2025 every single week. Weekly Shonen Jump moved 1 million copies per issue in 2025. The highest selling American comic of that year was Deadpool Batman crossover at 500,000 units total. A Batman issue sold nearly 900,000 copies in 1966. American comics were a mass medium. They became a collector's niche.

[00:01:52]While the big two spent decades chasing diversity headlines and reboot cycles that drove away readers, manga went the other direction. The global manga market sits at 11 to 19 billion in 2024, growing at about 18 to 20% annually.

[00:02:05]Analysts project it reaches 21 to 86 billion within the decade. Here's what Kirkman says about this. He says, "What I'm seeing with Invincible, the way that the animated series is fueling the sales on the trade and direct market is something to me that's signaling that there's a potential to build something really exciting within this industry that will sustain us for years and years and years. Everybody talks about manga and how successful manga is, but that thing that makes manga so successful is that manga to anime pipeline. This is huge, guys. He's figured it out. With Invincible, we're seeing you can with American comics do that exact same thing. The manga to anime pipeline is not complicated. A manga serializes for years, building reader base cheaply. The anime hits. Millions of viewers who never touched the volume go back to the source material. Sales on the books published a decade earlier than surge.

[00:02:49]The IP branches into games, merchandise, and films. Demon Slayer, Jiu-Jitsu, Kaisen, One Piece, Naruto. The anime doesn't replace the manga. It sells more of it. The source material is the product, and the adaptation is the advertisement. Kirkman built Skybound Entertainment in 2010 around that logic before most of the industry understood it. Creator owned rights controlled adaptations retained upside. He ran the play with The Walking Dead first, 15 seasons on AMC, the highest rated basic cable drama in television history. The back catalog sold millions of copies.

[00:03:18]The franchise extended into games, merchandise, multiple spin-off series, and Kirkman kept ownership through all of it. He then he made Invincible. The comic ran 146 issues from 20 uh 2003 to 2018 at Image, selling roughly 3 million copies before the Amazon series existed.

[00:03:33]Now, there were periods of Inensible guys where it wasn't selling that great and he was just going forward with it anyway. He really had a vision of his creativity there, which is interesting.

[00:03:42]While he made some creative choices I really don't particularly like, his business sense really was pretty well.

[00:03:47]When the animated show launched in 2021, over 100,000 graphic novels sold within the first months of the premiere. Amazon sold out of the compendiums entirely.

[00:03:55]The first issue hit $2,500 on the secondary market. The new readers found the show and wanted the comics, and the comics were in print and ready. Kirkman fed that demand with new material.

[00:04:04]Invincible universe spin-offs Battlebeast number one. Reunited the creative team sold over 400,000 copies, three printings in under a month, which was the best new comic launch of 2025.

[00:04:13]He told Comics Pro how it works next.

[00:04:15]Invincible is an animated series that adapts comic books very closely. It's doing very, very well. And the streaming services are so excited about an adult animation that they're rolling out entire divisions trying to do that. And I think of it more as comic books are adapted in this way because having done Invincible, comics being adapted into animation really is the most seamless transition. I feel like the two mediums are just made for each other. And I think that there's a future where we can have comics and animation pipeline that will fuel this entire industry in a completely unprecedented way. We're already seeing the beginnings of it now.

[00:04:46]Now, Marvel and DC have spent years doing the opposite. They licensed IPs to studios that treated the source comics as a rough outline, made whatever they wanted, and then when the shows got cancelled and the films bombed, the comics made no trade bump, no new readers, no lasting value in the adaptation. The property just took damage. On the flip side, One Piece has sold over 530 million volumes worldwide.

[00:05:05]The anime ran for 25 years so far. Uh, readers who discovered it through Netflix live action series went back and bought the volumes published in 1997.

[00:05:13]The back catalog never goes cold because the IP never produc stops producing new entry points. Kirkman is building that machine in American comics. His track record is the only proof of concept the industry has. The two properties, two full cycles of that prop line working exactly as designed in a third likely incoming as invincible extends into new seasons live action films in development at Universal. This is pretty interesting and the numbers have been telling his stories for years. Shown in Jump out sells America's biggest issue every week two to one. and Kirkman's backpack catalog spin-off has sold everything released in 2025. This comic industry should be taking notes if they want to survive. Now, that's what I don't know why Marvel and DC can't figure things out. We've got all the MCU movies. We've got the DCU movies. None of it matches up with the comics. And this has been complained about back all the way going back to the Spider-Man movies with Tobey Magcguire. Those were the first like giant hit that really started the train going uh for Marvel and the like as it all went down the pipeline. And retailers always complain that there just wasn't something that really matched it going forward. The comics don't match the MCU universe. They've changed enough of it that like you can't go in and just read the same story line because it's something that's some new Hollywood adaptation that they've done their own thing with. Even now, even as Spider-Man Brand New Day lifts the name of Brand New Day from Spider-Man comics, which we'll get into more tomorrow, it really doesn't feel or seem like it has anything to do with that Spider-Man Brand New Day material. So, what the heck are they even doing with this stuff? It's like they don't understand how this works whatsoever. And Kirkman, because he's a person who is his own creator, who writes his own books, I think understands it to a different level where he's got it and he's like, "Okay, uh, I want my story in the comic books to look exactly like I wrote it because I wrote it a specific way intentionally." The people who are in Hollywood now, when they see a Dan Lee property, they're like, "This is some hokey 60s garbage. We don't want to write it like that. we want to do our own thing for it for modern audiences.

[00:07:08]And I think that disconnect and that difference in the way that they're doing things is the reason that Kirkman is actually doing very very well despite the fact that he's actually got a lot of the wokeness and the same political problems that are going on in Invincible and in the show that I've actually you know talked about quite a bit. Uh and it's still actually still doing well despite that stuff because it still has that authenticity of the writer that that's coming from it as well. And that's where uh I think the comic industry needs to realize they need to get back to their roots and actually just try the storytelling the way that it was designed to be. I don't know that they're actually going to get this through their heads at Marvel and DC. We see what's coming with Supergirl and Lantern coming later [snorts] this year.

[00:07:45]Absolute disaster and Avengers Doomsday is going to be a big jumbled mess despite all the hype of it. But at the same time, there is a blueprint here and it's the manga to anime pipeline just like Kirkman is saying. So props to him.

[00:07:56]As much as like I said, I don't like a lot of his writing. I do think he's a very good businessman. knows exactly what he's doing and knows how to save comics. That is one way forward. What do you think? Leave a comment down below with what you think about this. Please hit the like and subscribe button, guys.

[00:08:09]We have our comics to omnibus pipeline coming very, very shortly here. I can't wait to get this into your hands. Sign up for my newsletter so you don't miss it. We'll be back soon.