A Comic Shift : Readers’ Switch to Other Media Tempers Show’s Upbeat Mood

Spiderman and other comic book characters scaled new commercial heights at the Comic-Con International comic book convention here this week, but not even their superhuman strength could reverse a steady decline in comic book sales.

Spiderman is among a raft of comic book heroes who are crossing over into cyberspace, CD-ROMs and other forms of new media as comic sales stagnate. The venerable Marvel Entertainment character, who already stars in the top-rated Saturday morning cartoon show, signed a deal earlier this week with America Online to star in the Internet’s first interactive “cyber comic.”

As sales of comics have dropped 10% from their peak year in 1993, the pressure has mounted to be the next Batman, The Mask or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all comic book characters that inspired successful movies and TV series.

The San Diego convention, which began modestly in 1969 as a meeting ground for hobbyists and collectors, has become an increasingly important industry scene where TV and movie producers troll for characters.

Attendance at the convention, the biggest of its kind in comic books, is expected to exceed 30,000 when it closes Sunday. The show features 650 exhibits and fills the San Diego Convention Center to the rafters.

The upbeat mood at this show, abuzz with news and rumors of glitzy entertainment deals, was tempered by the inescapable fact that kids, comics’ traditional core readership, are turning increasingly to electronic media for entertainment.

Caught in the shift are comic creators such as Steve Darnall of Chicago, who in the past might have been content to let his “Empty Love Stories” characters slowly develop a print audience. But with readership stagnating, Darnall says he and other authors feel an urgency to make television, movie or electronic media deals.

“Creators I know are saying that if the comic book market won’t support them, then they’ll find someplace that will,” said Darnall, 31, who quit a job at a comics trade magazine to launch his own book published by Slave Labor Graphics of San Jose. He describes his work as a parody of the romance comics of the 1950s and 1960s.

For most consumers, the convention is the place to seek comic collectibles and merchandise. And though prices of many comic books are down from the peak of a couple of years ago, those for classics such as a 1947 Uncle Scrooge comic ($1,200) or a 1974 Incredible Hulk book ($325) are still high, said Larry Shapiro, who this year launched his Northridge-based Collective Detective, a search firm specializing in comics, baseball cards and movie posters.

But the really big money changing hands here involves entertainment deals. America Online and Marvel Entertainment used the show to trumpet their new weekly Spiderman “cyber comic,” debuting July 18. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

America Online sees the Spiderman comic as a way of attracting youthful subscribers while New York-based Marvel Entertainment, a public company controlled by financier Ronald Perelman, sees the Internet deal as one more way of lucratively licensing its characters.

“Producers are always looking for characters, and comics have always been a rich source of meat,” said Bert Gould, executive vice president of marketing at Marvel, who held a similar position at Fox, where he helped assemble the network’s Saturday morning kids’ programming, much of it based on comic characters.

Tiny Slave Labor Graphics, which publishes 20 comic books, signed a deal at the convention with Fox Children’s Network to animate its Dr. Radium character, Slave Labor President Dan Vado said.

DC Comics, a unit of Time-Warner that owns the Batman and Superman characters, also hyped a new movie to be released next year starring Orlando Magic basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and based on the Steel comic character.

But if readership keeps declining, the development of future comic characters could be in jeopardy. After peaking at $1 billion in 1993, largely on the strength of a speculative frenzy by collectors, annual comic book sales have leveled off to about $700 million, according to Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer.

Comic book stores that advertise in telephone directories now number about 8,600 nationwide, down from 9,500 five years ago, according to William E. Cole, a Randolph, Mass.-based manufacturer of comic book preservation supplies.

“Comics have a problem now because kids are going to video and computer games,” Cole said.

Still, the convention’s exhibit booths are crammed with artists and publishers who hope their characters will be the next Superman. Brian Demers, a graphics design student at Northern Arizona University, is trying to get his foot in the door. He was one of 300 comic creators who stood in line to show their portfolios and story boards to John “Lewie” Lewandowski, Marvel’s submissions editor.

“I’m just trying to break into comics,” said Demers, adding that, yes, he’s already thinking about television and movies as well.