Just How Many Hardcore Superhero Fans Are There?

Recently writing about the popularity of superheroes in contemporary culture I emphasized that this was a matter of film above all, and in particular of superheroes being convenient material for big-budgeted sci-fi/fantasy action-adventure franchises—and, moreover, that the films are of a kind that most experience at a lower neurological level than conventional dramatic pleasure, rather than a clear expression of the appeal of the idea of the superhero.

One way of testing the supposition would seem to be to look at just how many people enjoy superhero content in other media, where the premise, characters, story are more important, more clearly "the draw," than in those big-screen movies with their sensory bombardments. Of course, this is difficult to assess because there is less comprehensive commercial data about other forms of media--with the situation with regard to TV and books less satisfying than in regard to film, and the picture offered of the comic book market from which these superheroes almost exclusively hail, and in which really hardcore superhero fans could be expected to most clearly show their interest, is even less satisfying than that.

Still, the slight information we have on the matter suggests that real comic book readers are few. It is plausible that only 1 in 3 persons reads comics, while perhaps fewer than 1 in 10--or even much fewer than 1 in 10--read comics with any regularity. Moreover, the term can hide a fair amount of diversity in the content these days, with "graphic novels," manga and the like containing quite other content. The result is that even among younger age cohorts those who really keep up with comics may be a mere 2 percent of the population.

This seems to me to be ample confirmation of the smallness of the really hardcore interest in superheroes--and the essentially superficial character of the superhero boom. Were the economics of the blockbuster to change (as had seemed possible for a while amid the plummeting box office grosses of the pandemic and the failure of video-on-demand to compensate), or were something else to turn up that fit its parameters better (I can't imagine what, but all the same I don't rule it out), we would probably see the prominence of the superhero in contemporary culture contract in a hurry.