<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div><font face="Calibri">Mr Leach,</font></div><div><font face="Calibri"></font> </div><div><font face="Calibri">How come Disney comincs sells so bad in the US compared to the good numbers in Europe, among them Norway?</font></div><div><font face="Calibri">Ever since I first picked down a copy of Whitman's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font><font face="Calibri">Donald Duck and WDC&S around 30 years ago at a newsstand, and was allowed to buy one of them, I have been an eager reader and collector of the US Disney Comics, and followed up with subscriptions when Gladstone took over... There ought to be a huge potential over there! I mean, you population is above 300 millions, we are not even five, and Donald Duck weekly sells a few 100 thousands, every week!</font></div><div><font face="Calibri"></font> </div><div><font face="Calibri">Erlend, Norway</font></div></span></blockquote></div><br><div><div>Famelien,</div><div><br></div><div>Your question's not an easy one. In my own case I'd read a lot of Disney comics as a kid (in the 1960s), but by the time I was a teenager they'd fallen off my reading radar. Working on the Disneys at Gladstone gave me a whole new appreciation for them, but by then the hope of their regaining more than marginal interest to American comic book readers was dimming fast.</div><div><br></div><div>Some quick and dirty history: after World War II sales of comics books starting trending downward in the US. One response to this was to revive the superhero genre, which is generally agreed to have started in earnest with a new version of The Flash published by DC in 1956. This kicked off what is now known as The Silver Age, an era that certainly did revive superheroes--so much so that the genre pretty much dominated the comic book medium in the US from that point onward. (Lines like Disney and Archie and Harvey weren't out of the game by any means, but they did get pushed more and more to the margins as The Silver Age ran on.) This dominance was further bolstered by the advent, in the early 1970s, of the direct-market retail distribution model. This model served super-hero fans above all others, since these were the bulk of American readers (including yours truly) who still wanted comic books--by that time most of the US population had largely forgotten that comic books were even being published.</div><div><br></div><div>By 1986 superheroes had to all intents and purposes become the US comic book business, leaving bare scraps of market share to all other genres. But here's the kicker: that sales slide for comic books in the US that started back in the mid-1940s was never really halted, let alone turned around, so every genre had to struggle for a slice of an ever-dwindling pie. The sales we considered disappointing at Gladstone for our Disney's back in the late 1980s would be welcomed today by even DC and Marvel for more than a few of their superhero titles.</div><div><br></div><div>Countless articles and even books have been written about why the American reading public soured on comic books so long ago and, on the whole, never got back their taste for them. In the final analysis it follows that Disney comics suffered right along with the rest.</div><div><br></div><div>Gary</div></div></body></html>