Marvel Comics has been having a rough time of things in 2026 for numerous reasons and the Eisner Award nominations didn’t help. The Eisners, for those who don’t know, are basically the Academy Award of the comic industry, named after legendary creator of the Spirit Will Eisner. This year, DC unsurprisingly (at least for me) got the most nominations with 14. Next down is Image Comics, home of the most popular creators doing their passion projects, and they got 12. And the House of Ideas, once the bestselling company in superhero comics and the birthplace of the most popular franchise in history, got 3. That’s right, 3. This is not good at all.
Videos by ComicBook.com
2025 saw Marvel finally fall from the top of the sales charts. DC Comics has been on fire since the summer of 2024, when the DC All-In publishing initiative birthed the Absolute Universe, slowly but surely pushing Marvel’s bestselling books out of the top of the sales charts. Fans love what DC has been doing over the past two years, the company rebuilding their reputation for excellence and putting out the best comics, month in and month out. Marvel, on the other hand, has seen even their usual sure things – the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the new Ultimate Universe – flail. Marvel isn’t in the best place right now and there’s a simple reason for that, something that DC learned in the last couple of years – listen to the fans.
Marvel’s Current Slide Down the Charts Was Inevitable
I’m going to start by saying something controversial – Marvel hasn’t deserved to be the bestselling company, strictly from a storytelling standpoint, for about a decade now. The post–Secret Wars reboot was the start of this. Much of the talent that they had been building up since the late ’00s – Hickman, Fraction, DeConnick, Remender, Gillen – all left for Image. While we still had Al Ewing, Kelly Thompson, Jeff Lemire, and several other big names at the House of Ideas, this brain drain meant that a lot of B-list creators got put into positions that they weren’t ready for.
The event cycle had ballooned into a monstrosity by this point (between 2012 and 2015, there five major event books revolving just around the Avengers, while the other offices also did their own events and crossovers). While the years since 2016 haven’t been empty of great Marvel books – Immortal Hulk, Zdarsky/Checchetto’s Daredevil, MacKay’s ongoing Moon Knight saga, Avengers: Twilight – they were few and far. Fans got more and more unhappy as the years went on and the House of Ideas completely ignored their complaints about the books they were paying for. It often felt like Marvel was trying to coast off just being Marvel, instead of actually trying to put out the best stories possible.
DC went through a similar thing in the late ’10s/early ’20s, but they were able to pull out of it for one reason – they listened to the fans complaints and fixed the problem. Marvel and DC had a lot of success in the ’00s being more editorially controlled, but this had led both companies to putting out a stagnant product. DC was able to fix this with two major steps – replacing the people at the top (except for Jim Lee; he’s a treasure) and giving the fans what they wanted. 2023’s Dawn of DC publishing initiative was everything that fans could have wanted after a couple of years of just being Batman’s Detective Comics Comics (at one point in 2021, there were less then ten non-Batman ongoings; I’m pretty sure there were only about five or six at the most, while there were numerous Batman-related ongoings and minis; even the Black Label was looked at as the Batman Label). The company feels like they’re letting creators create, all whole learning from the success of manga and the indies.
Marvel, on the other hand, is still run by the same people who were around 20 years ago. The company is notoriously dismissive of fan concerns – just look at the way that Tom Brevoort or Nick Lowe talk to fans who don’t love everything happening in the X-Men and Spider-Man books – and the editor in chief once pretended to be Japanese so he could collect two checks. While things have gotten better in the last few months – Will Moss’s Marvel Heroes office is putting out stellar books like Captain America (Vol. 14), Mortal Thor, Iron Man (Vol. 7), and Avengers: Armageddon (put them all on your pull stat) – the company overall is floundering. Fans are tired of paying premium prices (Marvel books are always the most expensive) for books that actively antagonize the fandom at times (hi, there “From the Ashes” and Wells’s Amazing Spider-Man run). Right now, no one is completely happy about Marvel as a company and Eisner voters let their displeasure be known with a paucity of nominations.
Marvel Can Pull Out of This Rather Easily
The comic industry is cyclical, in a lot of ways. Sometimes Marvel is on top and sometimes DC is, but this time feels different. The House of Ideas has planted the seeds of this over the last decade by ignoring anyone who told them, “Hey, we don’t like this, can we have something else?” DC Comics is the real House of Ideas right now and it’s proving it with its sales and awards success. You can tell that everyone there wants to put out the best work possible and take the DC Multiverse in wonderful new directions. Marvel feels like it’s going through the motions, trying to make stories that can be packed with MCU synergy on the off chance that a movie fan actually becomes a comic reader.
DC was going in this direction in 2021 and 2022, and they were able to stop and change direction. They did this by listening to the complaints, then getting the best talent they could and letting them create. It was as simple as that. Fans noticed the energy, enjoyed the stories, and suddenly DC is back on top. Marvel can very easily do this as well. Sure, they’ll have to overcome their reticence to actually pay creatives what they’re worth in order to get some exclusive creator contracts, but there’s no reason for Marvel’s fans to be this unhappy, this long. There are still great books from great creators being published by the company; they have the tools to become a creative force again, which will lead sales up. 3 nominations isn’t bad, but it’s not where Marvel should be.
What do you think about Marvel’s current direction? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
