Why superhero movie don't boost sales of superhero comics

Why do anime and film adaptations of manga and indy comics such as Naruto and Scott Pilgrim help spur sales of those titles while superhero films, such as the  Iron Man or X-Men movies, don't seem to boost sales for those books much at all?

It's a case of comics confusion, suggests Journalista:

If the Naruto anime left you interested enough in the story to go to a bookstore and check out the manga, you’d find more of the same: The anime stays as close as possible to manga-ka Masashi Kishimoto’s original concepts, and Kishimoto is in turn the consistent driving force behind the creation of the comics version, regardless of who spotted the blacks or drew a particular forest background. So long as you first bought the Naruto volume with the big “1″ on the spine, liked it and followed it with the one labeled “2,” you’re pretty much guaranteed to be satisfied by the results.

If the X-Men films convinced you to pick up your first X-Men graphic novel, however, you’d be in for an entirely different experience. Your first exposure would depend upon which author’s version of the series you pulled out of the stack, be it Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar or Chuck Austen, and the artwork would likely change from one artist to another within the book’s pages. If you remained interested enough by what you read to buy a second one, that second volume would be as much of a crapshoot as the first, unless you very carefully observed which names were on the spine each time you invested your hard-earned dollars on a new book. 

I think that's a pretty good argument. Journalista goes on to blame much of this also on "the replaceable nature of the writers and artists, as dictated by the work-for-hire business practices upon which Marvel depends," but I think there are a number of additional factors at work:

• The continuing problem of continuity. Crack open most superhero books and you need to know 20-40 years of the title characters' previous history to fathom what's going on.
• Many people don't understand where to find or how to read comics these days. Blame the direct market. If you could find X-Men (or Iron Man or Spider-Man or Batman, etc.) comics in the grocery or drug store, and the comics made sense to new readers, you'd likely sell a lot more copies. But instead, we have to depend on people finding and visiting comic book shops, figuring out which of the seven monthly X-titles to try, none of which they'll like, because the stories don't make sense and are nothing like those in the movies.

Those of us who were around in the days when nearly all kids read comics have made these points time and time again and I'm no doubt preaching to the choir here. But it continues to frustrate me that the comics publishers don't seem to know how to market their products apart from in movies and toys.

Here's how to sell more comics:

1. Sell them in places where they'll get seen.
2. Create comics that are fun to read and easy to understand.
3. If you have the benefit of a big feature film, capitalize on it by making the comics palatable to those who enjoyed the movies.

A lot of fanboys won't like that third step. But, let's face it, many of the superhero movies of late are truer to the original characters than are the current comics. A movie grabs the elements that make Superman or Batman or the X-Men compelling and run with them. They celebrate the hero's mythology while many current comics try to tear it apart.