Comic Market Grows in 2013

According to the ICv2 White Paper into Print and Digital Trends, the comic book industry as a whole continued to grow in 2013, with digital's growth beginning to level off, although it's still more significant than the growth seen in print during the same period. Graphic novel sales as a whole are up 6 percent during the first nine months of the year, spurred on by the continuing success of Image Comics and Skybound's The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard. The Hollywood Reporter says that digital's 25 percent market increase in 2013 is significantly below the 300 percent growth it saw in both 2012 and 2011 (In 2010, the digital market underwent a dramatic tenfold increase) -- although some of that may be attributed to an overall drop in eBook sales as a whole over the year. It's equally likely that digital comics are simply leveling off because they weren't widely available for the most popular publishers until at least 2010 and so are running on a radically different track than are ebooks in general.