How One Company Caused The Collapse of the Comic Book Industry

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]In 2011, the impending doom of the American comic book industry was completely ignored. It started when a Korean artist published a horror comic online. It looked like any other comic except one thing. You scroll through it.

[00:00:13]But a Marvel executive said the format was a fad and that print would remain king. Now, today, this format is the most popular comics format on the planet. So much so that in September of 2025, Disney signed a deal to put over 35,000 comics onto the platform called Webtune. So, how do the major players in the comic industry with a 90-year head start, the biggest characters in entertainment history and a distribution system that has been running since the 1980s end up losing the comic wars? To understand that, we've got to first talk about the format difference. The difference between a printed comic and a web tune is pretty fundamental. In print, the surprise mechanism is a page turn. It's a fixed beat every two pages, and every comic artist has worked within that constraint for 90 years. But in web tune, obviously, there are no pages. The surprise is the scroll reveal, and the reader controls the speed. This new format is creating a new way to engage.

[00:01:06]Solo leveling might be the most popular action comic in the world. The fight scenes aren't drawn across two page spreads. They're drawn on an image column over a 100,000 pixels tall. You scroll through the impact, the debrisze, the silence, and then you get the reveal. And the man who drew every one of those fight scenes was the artist named Dubu, and we'll come back to him.

[00:01:24]Now, the difference between a flip and a scroll might not seem too different, but in 2023, there was a peer-reviewed study, and it showed the difference between a flip page and scroll reading.

[00:01:35]The study found that scroll readers carried less cognitive burden and had more breathing room between panels. The scroll just doesn't feel better to the human. it's actually measurable that it is better. And this was mind-blowing to me by somebody who makes their own print comic. So, I'll agree it's hard to adapt to innovation. But what's hard to agree with is Marvel and DC putting band-aids on a rapidly growing problem. A standard Marvel DC comic cost around $3 in the early 2000s. But by 2024, over half of Marvel's monthly titles were $5 or higher, and they were only still 32 pages long. five bucks for a few minutes of reading on a format that hasn't gotten bigger or longer or added anything in decades. It just cost a few more every year. Compare that to manga where you get like 250 pages for 12 to $15. Now, Todd McFarland has been pointing this out for years. At New York City Comic-Con in 2024, he said, "For 2050 bucks when we were younger, you used to walk out a comic book store with a pretty thick bag full of comic books.

[00:02:31]Now you can just count them on your fingers." Meanwhile, Webtune did two things that are sneaky. First, they made their content available to consume for free and incorporated microtransactions once people are reading the story.

[00:02:43]Second, the creators made their stories with more substance. See, in comics, the stories began to get stretched out. Get your mind out of the gutter. A plot that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would have knocked out in one issue was getting dragged across six at like $5 each.

[00:02:57]That's $30 for one story that takes 6 months to come out. And they didn't make it easy. Marvel and DC would publish crossover events. They actually did 40 between 2015 and 2026. Each one requires you to buy tying issues across multiple series just to follow what's happening.

[00:03:11]It's great for sales, but it's not great for building the audience. And it's proven by 2021, manga had taken 76 of all adult fiction graphic novel units sold in bookstores. The top 20 graphic novel charts didn't have a single superhero title on it. The entire list was manga. and they were losing readers because they couldn't find a sustainable model even though it was right in front of them. But losing readers was only half of the collapse. The system for getting comics into stores was going under two. This is the cost of not adapting quick enough and relying on the way things were when everything is changing around you. The stores selling comic books got their inventory from one company, Diamond Comic Distributors. And it had a near monopoly on getting comics from publishers to stores for decades.

[00:03:55]And then uh that pesky little thing, don't know if you heard about it, COVID shut down everything in March of 2020 and Diamond stopped shipping entirely for 2 months. No comics went to any store in the country. And it's the first time that happened in modern history. DC left Diamond in 2020. Marvel left in 2021. And because Marvel and DC left, Diamond had to file for Chapter 11 in January of 2025. And that was the day the American comic book distribution was done. Now, you might be thinking, Marvel and DC, why don't you make a digital platform? Well, they did, and others did, too. But they had a problem. Now, the digital platforms were supposed to pick up where Diamond left off.

[00:04:31]Comicsology launched in 2007 as the iTunes of Comics, but Amazon bought it and did what they did, gut it, removed inapp purchases, kill the interface, and laid off about 200 staff, and shut down the standalone app in its entirety. The best feature from Comicsology was the guided view. It was a clever pan and zoom across the traditional page layouts, but traditional is the key word. It took pages designed for print and tried to make them work on a phone instead of building the comics from the phone to the start or adapting them to the scroll. I very much enjoyed reading them that way, but Marvel couldn't really figure it out. Like Marvel tried going native vertically with Infinity Comics. They published over a thousand chapters in 4 years, but it still wasn't enough. After 4 years of trying digitally, they had to pay web tunes to do it for them. And even DC, who looked at their own platform, did the math, and went to Webtune directly. And their first title, which you know was actually pretty successful, Batman Wayne Adventures, hit 600,000 subscribers in the first month. So if you're hearing all this and you're thinking, okay, maybe Webtune is the hero of the story.

[00:05:33]They have disrupted the comic book industry, but they have they have taken in the stragglers. Something else is going on. An anonymous web tune creator told Anime News Network in 2025 that in some markets, neighbor takes up to 90% of overseas revenue. In October 2024, a Korean labor union filed a dispute because the CEO took roughly a 30 million compensation package after the IPO. While the creators whose work built the platform got nothing comparable.

[00:05:59]Dubu, the artist we talked about earlier who drew solo leveling, you know, every fight scene, every level up reveal, every one of those 100,000 pixel image columns that made people lose their mind, he drew an entire chapter every single week for years on a schedule that never let up. One of the most popular action comics in the world. And it was one artist who sat at a desk page after page after page, scroll after scroll after scroll in this case. But he passed of cerebral hemorrh widely attributed to the demands of weekly serialization through web tunes. So our best option right now for the comic industry digitally anyways is is maybe not the best. But what I've taken away from this is what is really next. And I think somebody has actually figured out the comic book industry and it's really viz and shown jump. Of course, the answer is always Maca. They take the web comic, they make it into a book, they make an anime, and get a print run selling millions making merchandise on top of that. This is the new normal. I mean, Laura Olympus went from the free web tune series to a number one New York Times bestseller. And now it's going to be an animated series by Amazon. Even Tower of God went from web tune to anime to English print run through Penguin Random House. And even dungeon crawler Carl went from book to web tune and now it's getting a liveaction adaptation. I believe though IP pipeline used to run through American comic books to Hollywood but now is starting to run through vertical scroll to anime to print to streaming. It's just unfortunate that American publishers aren't building the pipeline. They're just licensing content from the companies that did it. And all while this is happening, the American side continues to tell itself everything is fine. I do want to make one point about something happening. I don't think people don't want print comics. Manga sales prove it. It's also seen in the Kickstarter funding numbers. Around 77% of Kickstarter comics are funded. I was one of those people with my comic anthology print is not debt. And while I was running that campaign, what I realized is what people are craving are new interesting stories, not companies who rely on the same old formula. I think I realized while recording this voiceover, it actually wasn't Webtune who destroyed the American comic book industry. It was the lack of innovation.

[00:08:02]I choose to believe that someone out there, whether it's me or my talented friends or a stranger out there with a dream, someone will learn to pick the pieces up and create something new that resonates with readers and bring life back into the America comic book industry. Until then, let me tell you about Print is Not Dead. It's a 120 page comic anthology with over 20 different stories inside. It was illustrated by over 20 different artists from all around the world, all written by myself, inspired by Manga Digest and Stephen King short story collections. But it's not just horror. It's also action, fantasy, sci-fi, comedy, and more. I like to say it's a little bit of everything for everyone. If my book sounds interesting to you, click this link right here to Shop Print is not dead. I'll be hand signing every book that anybody buys and giving some free stickers away. If you want to keep hanging out, click this video on the screen. YouTube thinks you'll like it.

[00:08:50]By the way, my name is Elijah. Nice to see you again if you're coming back. And if you're not coming back, well, nice to meet you.