Digital comics are allegedly still a big deal

Publisher's Weekly wrote about the market of digital comics, and says it's ostensibly improving after a slump:

Less than three years ago, the lights on digital comics seemed to be getting dim. In November of 2023, Amazon announced the impending shutdown of the Comixology app—the platform that had accounted for the large majority of digital comics sales from every major U.S. publisher for the past 10 years.

But a new digital landscape was quietly developing, as both longstanding comics publishers and upstart digital retailers carved out new approaches to producing, selling, and reaching an audience for online comics. Could 2026 be the year that the comics industry fully comes into its digital era? We talked with publishers and retailers to find out.

The problem is that no sales figures, even digitally based, seem to turn up in this item, and that's the common modern weakness in such puff pieces. Though it does say here that:

Meanwhile, at Sweet Shop, another new retail platform that launched in beta in late 2025, Kenny Meyers has a different approach. In contrast to Neon Ichiban’s suite of features, Meyers believes that the key to digital success is to keep the app and market as simple as possible.

“There’s a lot more to [digital comics] than gimmicks,” Meyers says. “People just want, in my opinion, very simple, elegant ways to discover comic books.”

If the digital market avoids gimmicks like multiple variant covers, that's a good thing, but do people want entertainment value? That's what seems to be missing here. And then, once again, they sugarcoat DC/Marvel sales:

DC Comics has hardly been a late bloomer when it comes to digital comics. The company sold its first single-issue digital comic more than 15 years ago, and was among the first publishers to embrace day-and-date digital sales. In 2007, they even (briefly) attempted to launch a digital-first slate of all-original titles—the short-lived Zuda imprint.

Today, DC is coming off a heady year of growth, fueled by sales of its new Absolute Universe imprint and the surprising success of its digest-sized DC Compact Comics. By the end of 2025, the publisher even overtook Marvel in comics shop market share for the first time in years.

And as new readers came to DC, new digital sales followed. “We're finding an almost equal number of new readers coming in through physical and digital at the same time,” general manager Anne DePies says. “And once the digital readers come in, we've had meaningful success in seeing that they are purchasing across our ecosystem.”

Like other comic companies, DC doesn’t provide public figures for its total volume or revenue on digital sales, but DePies says that digital’s relative share of DC sales has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. That’s true of most other major publishers as well: at Dark Horse, VP of publishing sales Mark Bernardi says that digital readership leveled out to around 5% of sales many years ago, and has stayed in place ever since. At IDW, the share is a stable 10%. Image is a bit of an outlier; publisher and chief creative officer Eric Stephenson says digital sales have never recovered from a slide that started when Amazon bought Comixology.

I'm sorry, but failure to provide any public sales figures, which has been the norm for several years now, does nothing to convince. The ICV2 page they point at doesn't give sales figures either, and 5-10 percent is nothing to marvel at. Mainly because again, no sales figures are offered, yet they clearly hope everybody will take their word at face value. Any sales figures provided for the Absolute line were also laughable, as I recall. None of which matters to a puff publisher like Publisher's Weekly, unfortunately.

I'm sure the digital market has potential for the independent market, however. Perhaps provided, of course, that it's not a company like IDW turning out the products, seeing how far they've fallen in quality over the past decade. Yet there's suggestions the digital market, in the end, is doing no better than the print market, certainly if there's no genuine quality to accompany it.