2025 is shaping up to be a blockbuster year for the comics industry, building on strong sales in 2024 and the surprising reversal of some long-term trends. ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp outlined the changes and discussed the outlook for the future during his presentation of the ICv2 White Paper during the ICv2 Insider Talks at New York Comic Con on October 9, 2025 (see “ICv2 White Paper to Cover Shifts“).
The big news for 2024 was that growth resumed after a year of decline, with comics and graphic novel sales totaling $1.935 billion (see “Pro: Comics and Graphic Novel Sales Up in 2024“). Sales of comics and graphic novels soared during the COVID pandemic of 2020 and continued to grow in 2021 and 2022, then fell in 2023. “I thought we were going to see a head and shoulders pattern, where we peaked and were going to drop back down,” Griepp said. “Well, that didn’t happen.” Instead, the market seems to be staying near the post-COVID high point, with sales in 2024 up 73% from 2019, and the trend is continuing into 2025.
2024: Changing Channels, Changing Formats
Dollar sales in comic shops went up by about 13.3% in 2024, while sales in the book channel dropped slightly, leading to the gap between the two narrowing for the first time in 15-20 years.
The spread between graphic novels and comics narrowed in 2024 for the first time in years, another reversal of a longtime trend. While graphic novels still account for over 76% of dollar sales, graphic novel sales increased by only 1.3% year over year, while comics grew by 12.2%.
2025: Boom Times for the Direct Market
2025 is shaping up to be a good year for comic shops, with sales from January through August by stores using the ComicHub POS system up 27% compared to the same period in 2024. That’s double the 13.3% increase from 2023 to 2024. The 2025 increases in graphic novel and comic sales were nearly identical, and the uptick was slightly higher in the first four months of the year, at 29%, than in the May-August period, when it was 25%.
Much of that increase can be attributed to an influx of new readers in the direct market. In interviews with retailers, Griepp said, they reported that they are constantly seeing new customers asking how they can get into comics. Publishers are encouraging them with series that are easy to jump into, including DC’s Absolute line, Marvel’s Ultimate comics, and Image’s Energon and Invincible universes. “All of these things are bringing new readers into comic stores in numbers that we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Griepp said.
The back issue market also appears to be shifting from collectors to readers, with retailers reporting that sales of slabbed comics are down and sales of inexpensive reader copies are up.
The Un-Graying of the Comics Audience
Retailer interviews also indicate that Gen Z has arrived in comic shops in record numbers this year, reversing another longtime trend as the comics audience gets younger. “The reason for this is inexpensive, accessible, high-quality content,” Griepp said. “They’re buying Absolute, but things like the DC and Marvel digest format books are also popular.” Both manga and graphic novels for young readers have boomed in the past 15 years, and readers who are “graduating” from manga and Dog Man are discovering periodical comics.
Graphic Novels in Comic Shops: Successes and Challenges
Graphic novel sales are up in the direct market, and the top sellers are the same titles that are appealing to new comic shop customers: Invincible, Absolute, Ultimates, and the Energon universe.
“There is a problem, though,” Griepp said, “which is that the success is hampered by the fact that there’s not always availability to comic stores of the graphic novels they want to get. And I think there’s two reasons for that. One, obviously the chaos in distribution that’s been happening since the beginning of this year, and then also just the surprise that publishers are experiencing in how well some of their books are selling, and so they’re not necessarily prepared in terms of the amount of inventory they have available.”
Digital: More Platforms, More Comics, More Readers!
The digital sector is more active than it has been in years, thanks to the growth of Webtoon and other vertical-scroll platforms; Webtoon raised $365 million in 2024 on a $2.9 billion valuation, and vertical-scroll comics are a key format for existing as well as new comics (see “Disney and Webtoon Team Up“). GlobalComix offers a broad range of publishers (see “GlobalComix Gets Marvels Day and Date“), has both subscription and download-to-own options, and has some comics in vertical scroll formats. The DSTLRY team has just launched a new platform, Neon Ichiban (see “Neon Ichiban“), which incorporates digital collectibles, and Crunchyroll has just relaunched its digital manga service (see “Crunchyroll”).
The Distribution Dilemma
The most notable negative factor of 2025 is the aftermath of the Diamond bankruptcy. “There’s been a lot of financial damage to publishers,” Griepp said. “Publisher access to the comic store channel has been disrupted. That’s especially affected book houses, the manga publishers, and smaller comic publishers… Retailers faced a lot of challenges this year in trying to adapt to all these changes and where they got books, and what books they could get and when they could get them. And the data flow has been tremendously disrupted, because Diamond used to serve as a single source for data on the comics medium in comic stores, and that’s now gone.”
In the end, though, he said, “Despite all the bad things that are happening because of the Diamond bankruptcy, I do believe the new distribution structure will be preferable to what I will refer to as a sclerotic Diamond monopoly.”
It’s a New World After All
In short, Griepp said, the comics industry has really transformed over the past 20 months. “We’ve got a new world where comics are growing faster than graphic novels,” he said. “Comic stores are growing faster than the book channel. We’ve got growth from readers instead of just collectors. We’ve got younger comic consumers. got new audiences coming in from sources like web novels and webtoons. We’ve got manga as a force. We’ve got digital stirring. We’ve got distribution transforming and the data flow rebuilding. That, to me, puts us in a totally different world than we were a year or 18 months ago.”
Griepp concluded with some questions that will determine whether or not the boom in comic stores continues “I would say one big question is, what do publishers do with the lessons of the last year?” he said. “One key lesson is accessibility: If you create a book that’s easy for people to get into, they’re more likely to buy it and tell their friends.” Then they need to keep it available in the format readers want, and most importantly, pay attention to new readers.
Another question is whether they can continue to bring fresh, creative stories to the medium. “How do publishers nurture the kind of creativity that has created successes like Invincible and the Ultimate line and like Absolute in particular and build on that in the future by making good relationships with their creators?” he asked.
Distribution continues to be a challenge. “I talked about how I think the future can be better than the past,” Griepp said, “but there’s huge costs happening in terms of the transition for publishers and for retailers. Can the transformation pay for the cost? And how long does that take?
For the full, in-depth version of this article with the presentation deck and audio, click here!
Source: ICv2
