Given the condition of the market, this venture required careful, reasoned planning. The Comic-Book Industry is an infant industry based on a fledgling medium. These comics exist now, have existed for years, and are currently multiplying every months in wider and wider varieties, bur they have not been reaching their potential readers. Instead, for over two decades, we have allowed ourselves to be sidetracked to a single genre of limited appeal, which is why the percentage of the American and UK population currently reading comics is so pathetically tiny. This is not an inherent weakness in the medium, but a culpable weakness in our industry, which, in its apathy, timidity, and its total failure to grasp basic principles of market economics, has so far failed to transform a subculture into a thriving, universally enjoyed medium.
Different audiences enjoy different films, and different ears enjoy different music.
Those industries cater for this demand by publishing, marketing and selling such a variety of material that almost everyone in the modern world buys records, visits the cinema, reads books. But in the Comic-Book Industry almost NO ONE buys a comic, because this industry caters to no one but that tiny, tiny percentage of the population who would ever contemplate reading about superheroes. The equivalent would be if the Music Industry sold nothing but Rap. Certainly those who enjoyed Rap would be buying the stuff, but no else would be buying any music at all. The would starve the music industry of billions the dollars they currently enjoy and which we in the comic-book industry are losing out on every year.