been a lot of discussion lately about the concerning state of comics - floppies - comic shops - the direct market.
I think a lot about DC's 100 Page Giant Comics that were exclusive to Walmart.
100 page anthologies - new lead stories with reprints in the backups. About a dozen or so books in the lineup. Distributed to a big box retailer outside of the typical comic shops.
Seemed like a lot of suggestions that people here suggest as ways to help comics...
... And yet the Walmart initiative failed
What went wrong?
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I spent $800 on comics in the past 3 weeks and wouldn't buy that trash.
Based, you bought every single One Piece chapter
That would at most be around 600
>One Piece
I don't eat crayons. But I do need to finish my DB collection.
>DB collection
so you eat charcoal
seethe one piss gay
cope, motherfricker
if i wanted weeaboo shit, i'd go to Youtube
And if i wanted capeshit, i'd go to the garbage dump
Walmart put them in section no one looks at and not with the magazines.
>Seemed like a lot of suggestions that people here suggest as ways to help comics.
like Cinemaphile knows anything about a running business
they're better off pushing their digital subscription thing and trying more graphic novels for big box bookstores or something to try and compete with manga. direct market is dying and going back to news stands/grocery stores etc ain't gonna work either
this too. my local Walmart had them in one checkout lane with the pokemon cards far far away from the magazine rack or the book section.
one issue of new stuff
the rest are reprints
The thing is, manga doesn't primarily sell in walmart or big box stuff. It's primarily online via stuff like Amazon with comic book shops being the secondary. Like, lack of advertisement. Sure, word of mouth is great but only if you got a new "Dark Knight" and the closest thing to that in recent memory was Batman: White Knight. For the good to great stuff, you NEED to advertise your shit.
Putting them with the TCGs was the smart move as people, and more importantly kinds and teens, actually shop that section. Toys would have been better but would have run into more competition for space. Real problems were lack of advertising and presence, the modern six issue story format not working well for what they were attempting, and direct market sellers pitching a fit.
Not only that but the stores never update the fricking stock. You can't build an audience if the ones who are interested never know when the new issue is going to actually be on store or if it will be at all. Recapturing the grocery store is basically a lost cause at this point, especially with something as inconsistent as Walmart.
Yeah my supermarket had an spinner rack for decades and it was always just random as hell never knew what ya get sometimes books were there sometimes different books, it lasted till 2015 I remember because I looked up the last book I got there.
I started reading comics regularly back in 2005, and didn't have a comic shop within an hour of my hometown. So the only place I could get comics from was my local video store. They pretty much only carried Batman, Superman, and later Superman Confidential. It was fricking awful, there'd be months where they just never got the issues in and sometimes I thought they'd just stopped carrying them entirely. I ended up switching to a subscription the moment I could afford one.
Only time I kept up with comics outside of comic shops was random subscriptions I had as a kid (I had one awhile back recently from DC website and it was fricking awful most my books were late and some didn't come in, never doing that again) I wish they still worked like they did and I remember getting all the issues to Under The Red Hood second half as a kid over the months at local video store, they kept in stock and it only comic they had.
I never really had an issue of grabbing random issues as a kid and just kinda filling in the blanks as a kid, most comics I got before I could read where just cool covers I like random back issues but even when I start reading it never bug me just kinda figuring out stuff in my head and/or looking it up later when I got internet, that was the fun but back then big 2 comics weren't as like hard to figure out.
Retail stores aren't going to save comics no matter how many quaint notions of newstands people have. Yes, manga can get sales at Wal-mart but it's almost certainly not to the level they sell at bookstores and especially not online.
Otherwise...frankly they just don't have that cool factor. The artists they get don't resonate with the kids. They're still pushing the New 52 stuff which itself was an attempt at the glory days of Jim Lee X-men #1 from 91, and Hush from 2002.
Is the Teen Titans anthology reprinting stories form the 2003 relaunch? Think about how dated that's gotta look to a kid born 10 years after 2004. Superboy looking like a 90's jock with a caesar cut.
You can cry all you want about twitter but they'd be better off getting popular internet artists to do comics than the old guard.
They didn't advertise them to the target audience: casual readers
Hardcore comic book fans knew about these but didn't care cause they buy their stuff in the comic book shops. Casual readers don't even know comic books still exist.
Furthermore, they weren't placed at checkout but in some weird section far away from the other magazines. Archie digest was ALWAYS placed at checkout for people to grab on the way out. That's how this things is supposed to be done i.e. an impulse buy.
Lastly, this wasn't a real initiative push. This was done out of JEALOUSY cause Red Rooster got its books in walmart. This wasn't done with a business plan in mind but was reactionary.
On that note, is Allegiance arts still a thing or is it dead?
>On that note, is Allegiance arts still a thing or is it dead?
I gotta imagine they're not doing too hot because they were charging like $5-6 for 22 page floppies. I felt almost bad for them because they seemed to have had good intentions but no way was that a competitive price for the market. Last I saw of them in my local Wal-mart, there was a handful of Bass Reeves #1 or 2 copies left and the display rack was gone. In front of it was a big Viz manga display, discounted to $7.98 per volume. That display sold through pretty quickly
Makes me wonder why Indie comics don't just stick with black & white newsprint for their floppies. Malibu comics and Cerebus shows its possible to succeed like that.
To be honestly I only buy used comics usually, they're dirt cheap, new comics of any kind just isn't worth it and same with manga.
Because you homosexuals have ALWAYS been wrong about "muh spinner racks" and "muh newstand market" and "muh Walmarts".
Listen very carefully: NO ONE WANTS THIS SHIT. IT'S *NEVER* BEEN ABOUT THE "DISTRIBUTION".
They're boomers, anon. They are literally incapable of considering something that conflicts with their worldview.
I think it's an aging thing. Once you grow old enough your brain just turns into stone.
Really most of the people who insist newstands and spinner racks like "the old days" will save comics probably never even experienced it themselves. They're idealistic 18-29 year olds who heard about how manga is available everywhere in Japan and think that model can apply to here.
That model works in Japan because in Japan a shitton of people stop by newsstands every day and want content because a shitton of people take public transit. That wouldn't work in America where everyone drives their own car and everything is frickhuge and spread out.
Welcome to the EXACT reason comic shops popped up. Spinnerracks, newstands, they were random with stock. It was a double edged sword-A book like Batman and the Outsiders and Legion did VERY well in newstands- and losing that crippled both books. Where as titles like Green Lantern in the 80's did so poorly they only circulated like 5,000 copies.
It's easy for people who were born after the newstand era to bemoan comic shops isolating the industry, but it's what kept it alive.
No one CARES about comics. People stopped giving a shit ages ago. They are though factories for rejected idiots who couldn't make it far enough in the entertainment industry. They're there for a quick resume check. The whole "canon" is a marketing gimmick to keep the fatass manchildren collectors to keep buying that trash. Though even that demographic is dying.
>*thought factories
Comics don't matter anymore. Nothing will work because people will never be interested.
Honestly comics are an niche and I'm completely fine with that.
>I think a lot about DC's 100 Page Giant Comics that were exclusive to Walmart.
So are these worth anything? I've got the first two or issues of most the titles, as well as the holiday one-shots.
Make comics available to read for free with ads. Pay a premium and remove ads. You need to get people into the ecosystem with low level entry and eventually you get repeat customers that start buying their favorites.
Except the "Ads" are often paid by Warner Bros and/or Disney. They are the Ad buyers. Of anything, this is more of an argument for why those megacorps should be putting more money into the product.
It's almost as if Marvel and DC have been making the same mistakes for ten years or something.
>It's almost as if Marvel and DC have been making the same mistakes for ten years or something.
>ten years
You know what is funny? Reading older comics letter pages. You start to realise that nothing really changes. People got mad at every little thing. Not saying nothing ever changes or that the problems are always the same thing, but still.
Yeah the medium will always survive. Just not in the current form. The problem is the doom posters here either don't read comics, are nostagic for the comics they read when younger or read the Big 2 shit to get mad.
One guy being mad on the internet is different from a guy like Mark Millar and ACTUAL COMIC BOOK RETAILERS complaining about the quality of the product. Something about the current problems are different from before...And I blame Disney for most of that.
Original X-Men was a bit of a bland book that only picked up near the end of its run with Roy Thomas & Neal Adams. It was cancelled and became a reprint book. Later Marvel noticed that the sales for the end of the run picked up. (Back in the day actual sales took time to collate and get back to them.) Marvel decided to take another punt at X-Men and to purposefully make it a more "Internationalist" team to appeal to wider markets. Len Wein and Dave wienerrum reinvented the X-Men with Giant Size X-Men #1. The OG X-Men team was replaced by a new one with characters like Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus. They purposefully had characters from different countries and religions e.g. Colossus was Russian and Nightcrawler was German Catholic. (Some of the characters were prototypes for DC Legion of Superheroes.) Some people, like Kurt Busiek, hated the new team, see the picture I posted. Now, if I asked you, who are classic X-Men, you'd might say, Wolverine, Storm etc; but they were from a reboot. Then Claremont's run began and became very popular. Dark Phoenix is, again, considered one of the best stories. And the letter I posted complains about it. But the person who wrote the letter is Kurt Busiek, who later became a comic book writer. Kurt Busiek paved the way for the OG team of X-Men to reform in X-Factor. He also paved the way for Jean Grey to be resurrected.
Now what is the point I am trying to make? People have always complained about change in comics. Comics have at multiple times diversified (like the above example of X-Men team being made purposefully "Internationalist"). Comics have always had reboots. Don't misunderstand me, no doubt times are really shit now. But the "rot" in comics is something that is down to the DNA; the format, the industry, how it has always been, something they have always done. And I find that funny.
Fair point but on the other end, you are sighting ONE BOOK whereas we currently have people claiming the direct market will be dead in two years. The industry has always had problems but none of them were terminal.
And that's saying something given Marvel went through a bankruptcy after the speculator bubble burst. The situation is different. It's not just some guy complaining about not liking a book. It's about multiple books not selling and the overall negative impact it is having. This isn't the same complaints made by Will Eisner (who wanted his books in more than just specialty shops) and Dave Sims (who lambasted comics for being a collectors market in one issue of Cerebus).
Like I said, the current problems are different, far worse then the normal "rot"....And I blame Disney for most of it.
I wasn't referencing the Direct Market. I was clearly referring to the creative side of things just to point out something I find funny about how things never truly change.
>The industry has always had problems but none of them were terminal.
The original Direct Market was set up because comics had terminal problems. Distributors kept on to unsold books and resold them and didn't pass the profits on but made the comics companies eat the losses. This almost destroyed the industry. Not saying this to defend the current state of things, just the irony of it all.
>And that's saying something given Marvel went through a bankruptcy after the speculator bubble burst.
Marvel comics actually sold really well in the 90s. The reason they almost went kaput was because of the business issues. The company was used as a piggy bank to back a load of other things, such as buying a load of trading card companies. If the bad business mismanagement hadn't happened then the crash wouldn't have been as bad for Marvel because a lot of its books did alright numbers wise.
>The situation is different. It's not just some guy complaining about not liking a book.
The point I was making was that people, fans and creatives alike, have always been at each other's throats over every little change. Those narratives about books hasn't drastically changed.
>It's about multiple books not selling and the overall negative impact it is having.
And I didn't dispute this? I think we are at cross wires and you're missing what I am saying.
>Dave Sims
Ironic because he boosted the speculation boom and said it was a positive.
>Like I said, the current problems are different, far worse then the normal "rot"....And I blame Disney for most of it.
The current problems are so fricking vast and wide and have been mentioned in thread after thread it seems almost pointless to repeat them. But it goes beyond Disney.
This is a stealth thread for the same old arguments about how to fix the industry. These threads go no where. And 75% of the time they are east vs west bait threads.
Frick the industry comics will always exist no matter what I don't care how many people read them or popular they are.
Capeshit is dead.
So now that comics are dead, what do we do now?
Nothing. It's over.
Comics are a medium and they can't die. There is manga, bande dessinée, British comics, indies and various other nations comics. Will the Big 2 die? No, it is a zombie that'll shamble on. Will shops die? The good ones diversified into manga, games and other stuff a long time ago. Will the distributors die? Most likely. But you can find self published comics online. You can find loads of other comics online. You can go to book stores. Other shops and distributors and companies will rise in the ashes of the old.
What you do is find stuff you might like and enjoy it. And don't support the shit, because supporting it or giving it any kind of attention is like feeding the life support.