Maybe it;s just the USA that stopped reading Spider-Man. He still seems to be selling in huge numbers world wide!

"Marvel Comic's Spider-Man [is] one of the world's most recognizable and celebrated Super Heroes. Fifteen million Spider-Man comics are sold each year in 75 countries and in 22 languages, and a comic strip... is syndicated... in 500 newspapers worldwide." (From a Dec.'98 PRNewswire story)

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Divide that by 12, factor in multiple titles, and that number seems relatively small to me. The number of Spider-Man readers worldwide would be less than the viewership of a low rated UPN show.

The more I searach the net for answers about comics the more conflicting statements come my way. To give you a for instance on the one hand in the UK comics aimed at the very young (under 8) still sell very well. Some comics like the Beano sell over 110,000 copies a week and yet 2000AD (Judge Dredd et al) is struggling on 20,000 per week. The market for kids of 8 to15 has completely vanished.

One of the most depressing things I have read so far though was this:

I think it's also down to the fact that most youngsters don't know what comics are any more -- certainly not adventure comics, anyway. Jason Kingsley, owner of 2000AD, once told me they were doing a promotion at a skateboard event one time and a teenager picked up one of the freebies and started to flick through it. The conversation went something like this:

"What's this?"
"It's a comic."
"Cool... what's a comic?"
"It's a magazine that tells stories with words and pictures. The story's told using speech balloons, see--"
"What a brilliant idea! Who thought of that! It's really cool!"

So, not only are publishers trying to sell comics to people who know what they are and convince them they're comic is worth buying, they've also got a hard slog actually selling comics as a medium by all accounts -- certainly to the teenage audience who would be the most likely to buy them and make them hip.

I really don't see how you are saying that I am defining a potential comic reader as someone with the same tastes as me. I think potential comic readers who have GOOD taste would have similar taste to me though. But I probably have an overinflated sense of how good my taste is though.

By potential comic book reader, I thought I was pretty clear with this, is someone who would be in some way receptive to reading comics. If you have a room of 100 people and flat out ask them "what would it take to convince you to take up this hobby?" and 85 of them say "I am completely uninterested. Sure, when I was 7 years old I had a Batman lunchbox and Shazam underoos. I can name most of the superfriends, and I thought Jack Nicholson was great in that Batman movie. But I am just here for the refreshemnts. I am really not interested in comic books." then what interest is the consensus of those 85 people when it comes to talking about how the comic books are written? What those 85 people think of when you say "Captian America" means exactly SQUAT.

Of the 15 people in that room they might say "I will give it a shot, read a few of these books and tell you what might interest me." All of them might say that the Heroes Reborn Captain America, New Avengers, and the recent Defenders mini series were great stuff and that they might be interested in starting to read comics regularly based on those books, and that Peter David's Hulk, JBs FF, Miller's Daredevil, Shooter's Avengers, and Wolfman's Titans were all pretty dull and they wouldn't be interested in getting into comics if they were all like that. Those would be valid opinions that would need to be considered. I personally think that those are terrible decisions that I couldn't disagree with strongly enough, but they would be opinions of people that have an impact on the industry.

I do think that at some point charachters CAN bet uncomfortably far away from the concept.

The Hulk for example as a CONCEPT, not a charachter, is some big guy smashing stuff. The whys and wherefores of the "mr Hyde" perspective, vs the "inner child" interpretation, dumb vs smart, hero vs villian, whatever, are really all less important than that. And THAT is probably why the movie didn't go over so well.

People can have a passing familiarity with something, and still not be interested in it in the slightest.

I could pick out the Eifel Tower, and tell you how to pronounce "the Louvre". I know that Napoleon was one of the most brilliant military leaders in history. I know all sorts of vague, general facts about France. That does NOT mean that I have any interest in it as a hobby. I have no interest in going there. If someone was trying to sell a monthly travel guide to france, or a compellation of French poetry, I would NOT be the person that they should be worrying about as far as what my perception of the French Rvolution is, despite the fact that I have had some exposure to things French.