The top-selling single issue of Summer 2025 was Image’s Invincible: Battle Beast #1, which was launched with a blind-bag program that included surprise comics and variant covers (see “‘Battle Beast’ Orders ‘Nearly 400,000’“). “Retailers are telling us that pack rippers, who are used to ripping Pokémon packs or Magic: The Gathering packs or trading card packs, come in and buy five blind bag comics to see what this whole rarity scheme is like and can they get one of the rare ones,” Griepp said. “And then they read the book, and then they come back and buy the subsequent issue. So although collectability got them to make the first purchase, the follow-up is that readers are being made by the audience that’s being attracted by these blind bags.”
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.
Those younger readers are also hungry to make connections. “There’s a huge search for community among Generation Z, and they’re not finding it online, and they’re looking for ways to assemble in person to a greater degree than they have in the past,” Griepp said. “That community can be found in comic stores, and that’s what comic stores excel at: interacting with their customers.”
These readers have grown up in a world where comic characters are ubiquitous in popular culture, thanks to Marvel movies and other media. Griepp theorized that the slowdown in media adaptations is contributing to the uptick in readers. “I think there’s a case to be made that once they got hooked on those characters, now that there’s fewer opportunities to see the movies or superhero based television shows, perhaps that’s one reason why they’re going to comic stores now,” Griepp said. “So it’s not necessarily a bad thing that there’s fewer superhero movies and television shows than there were five years ago.”
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. Here’s the chart of the top-selling graphic novels through ComicHub in Summer 2025:
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Source: ICv2
