Do comic book buyers actually care about any of the indie companies? Why do Marvel and DC dominate so heavily?
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Do comic book buyers actually care about any of the indie companies? Why do Marvel and DC dominate so heavily?
infantilism, capeshit often has no quality control and saidly so do the people themselves
The indies are worse. They're basically a playground for toy/cartoon IPs, TV/movie pitches, boring people making boring autobiographical comics about their boring lives, and cape stuff so bad (usually because it's edgy) not even current Big Two would take it.
>The indies are worse.
No.
Yeah
>missing avatar studios and dynamite
not going to make it.
got it from another thread
im talking all the non marvel and dc publishers. image is just some of them, all of them are included for this question
Well that's not what you asked in the first place.
>avatar studios
I thought that edgy shit died a few years ago tho
>indie
These aren’t indie. Most of these aren’t even small-press.
I’m so sick of you losers misusing terms.
how are they not indie and tell me what does consist of indie then ?
Indie means independent as in not a publisher. Stretching it, as with music, to mean smaller companies is already departing from the definition but there is no way to spin IDW, Image, Dynamite, Boom!, Valiant, Dark Horse, Vault, ect as indie. They’re publishers, they just aren’t marvel and DC, colloquially the big 2
ok so what companies are indie to you ?
not withing the us comics context.
marvel and dc traditionally outnumber everything else by orders of magnitude, and save for a short period of time, those not big 2 are always at risk of folding.
things haven't changed much except now schoolastic and viz media replaced dc & marvel while the former big 2 are unfoldable IP farms
Fricking have a nice day the term means “independent of a publisher”. I legit wish I could watch you bang yourself.
sorry but the term has been industry standard for 50 years, what you want matters not.
That’s not true at all, indie always meant self published until the 90s. What you imagine matters not.
>independent of a publisher
That makes no sense. Any book that gets published has a publisher. You're confusing "indie" with "self-published." Self-publishers are all indie, but most indies are not self-published.
They fit exactly in the same definition as indie music you fricking moron, you said it yourself. "smaller companies". All of them have single digit marketshare. Image is the only one you could say maybe doesn't fit since it has above 5%, but most of these others are in the 1% rounding range.
Indie music is indie because they're not under a record label, they self-publish their own shit.
> Indie music is indie because they're not under a record label, they self-publish their own shit.
Old-ass musician here. That’s not fricking true. The self-publishing model only became a viable option fairly recently, but indie music goes way back. There are indie record labels. Indie musicians were any musicians not on a *major* label. That includes self-publishing musicians, but the term is not exclusive to them.
Maybe in the 90s. In the 70s and 80s it specifically meant "self-published". And was restricted to amateur arthouse stuff recorded in somebody's basement.
brother practically the entire thread disagrees with you, why insist
>pack of moron zoomer ESLs don't know what words mean so neither should you
I shall plant my tree along this shore and declare no, it is everyone else who is wrong.
I literally turned 30 last week, keep coping I guess.
I’m only the second anon and that was my first post ITT schizo
>old ass
You honestly sound like you’re 20-22 at most.
>The self-publishing model only became a viable option fairly recently
pleeeenty of people in the brit punk and the american alt scene would debate being viable didn't matter.
No. They care about individual creators and titles. Usagi yojimbo moved, and really didn't matter to the fanbase.
Image I thought was creator owned. I would think that makes a difference.
>Usagi yojimbo moved, and really didn't matter to the fanbase.
He and Vampirella tend to be teflon legacy like that.
This is a semantic argument because words change in English. When people say indie in the context of American comics they tend to mean "non big 2".
Speak for yourself, also anon literally said it’s a common misnomer. You’re acting like they’re ignorant to that fact.
Indie is either self-published or published by a company equivalent of 3 guys in a garage.
Brand recognition, I guess. Marvel and DC also defined the American comic book culture and mostly closely adhere to it, which is a detriment to quality works, but people don't care much about that.
Did you see how excited people got over the recent Hickman Spider-Man? It wasn't even half good.
This little b***h behavior isn't helping things either.
Dark Horse's run down offices are only a few blocks away from my own run down office. If that isn't indie, then I don't know what is.
You work at image?
Darkhorse, Boom, and IDW live off of licensed books. They aren't really competitors to DC and/or Marvel as they could just as easily job the comics out to them. A thing that Marvel did do to IDW but pulled it from them when the quality sucked.
Image fills a niche and makes money doing it. They don't need capeshit and exist when capeshit writers want to write non-capeshit stuff.
Vault...I honestly don't know. I can't think of a single hit they've ever had. I can only assume someone is footing the bill for that imprint.
>Darkhorse, Boom, and IDW live off of licensed books.
IDW and Boom maybe, but Dark Horse?
Huh?
Well, licensed manga to be specific. Point is, they aren't real competition to DC and Marvel.
I guess they have the Millar verse and Hellboy but that's it. Same way Dynamite only has Vamperella.
Dark Horse almost backed into the manga market thanks to their association with Studio Proteus throughout the 90's. Before manga they were definitely the company held aloft with middling movie licensed comics like Star Wars, Terminator, Aliens, Predator, etc.
Perhaps we need to view comic publishers more as major and minor leagues at this point?
To be fair, the point of contention seems to be with what boomers referred to as "comix" which eventually spun into "indies", with other small press and niche publishers.
Didn't Dark Horse do a lot of the pre-Mouse Star Wars comics?
Marvel did the first lot of SW comics back in the day from 1978 to 1987.
>Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief of Marvel from 1978 to 1987, would later say in an interview regarding the importance of Star Wars to the plight of the company, "Star Wars single-handedly saved Marvel... And that kept us alive."[2]
There was also Marvel UK who reprinted those stories but also made a bunch of original ones. Darkhorse got the license in 1991 and continued until 2015 when they came back to Marvel.
>Do comic book buyers actually care about any of the indie companies?
Yes, but like half of the indie sales are not in any company in your pic. You are missing Fantagraphics.
Wasn't fantagraphics in such shit condition awhile back that they had to beg for money via kickstarter?
not at all. specially since they got into the reprinting classics business. doesn't stop them from using crowfunding as an additional income.
Actually...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fantagraphicsbooks/fantagraphics-2014-spring-season-39-graphic-novels
Nobody is/was buying their stuff. It's even more embarrassing when not too long ago, Fantagraphics criticized people who were using crowdfunding. Oh how the turn tables.
homie are you citing data from 10 years ago?
>Nobody is/was buying their stuff.
All I see is met crowfunding goals. I see you got a grudge against the company.
Ah yes, back in 2012 when "The Comics Journal" owner of Fantagraphics, shat on crowdfunding in the blog post.
https://www.tcj.com/no-good-reason/
And then, only two years later had to "beg for money" in order to get their books filled. Point is, Fantagraphics are no different than Vault or IDW i.e. not competition to DC and Marvel.
>Point is, Fantagraphics are no different than Vault or IDW i.e. not competition to DC and Marvel.
Virtually nobody said this. Actually nothing you said relates to the conversation, crowdfunding doesn't mean it was selling badly at any point in time.
Did you read "Fantagraphics" and got triggered or something?
Groth really is such a piece of shit hahaha.
The indies fill the gaps Marvel and DC don't cover, either in genre or artstyle
If you like cheesecake good girl or bad girl books or books about characters in the Public Domain Dynamite and Zeniscope got you covered.
Boom, IDW, and Dark Horse do mostly licensed material.
Archie is Archie, but they dabble in horror and golden age superheroes
Image does mostly movie pitches by big time creators and Hollywood types
Aspen does 90's image house style books
Valiant does violent superheroes
AWA does hard sci fi and sex thriller pulp books
Titan reformats Euro comics
And there's probably 100 more I'm forgetting
>And there's probably 100 more I'm forgetting
Mad Cave
Massive/WhatNot
Oni Press
>Aspen
do they evens still exist?
Frank Miller Presents (Frankie and Dan Didio)
Still ILL comics (Dan Mendoza aka Zombie Tramp)
And who knows how many Crowdfunding imprints.
>The indies fill the gaps Marvel and DC don't cover
Not really.
Just because you don't support indie comics doesn't mean they don't exists
I buy indie comics and don't buy from the big two anymore. They don't really fill any gaps.
He went on to explain exactly what gaps they fill you fricking mongoloid. Either counter the shit he wrote or shut the frick up.
He just listed more niche shit, dicksucker.
This.
There have been 12 good comics. All indie yet all other indie comics are equally shit.
>Aspen
a name I haven't listen in too many years. Are they still alive?
What about Scholastic?
>Boom, IDW, and Dark Horse do mostly licensed material.
Boom and Dark Horse is about half
IDW does a lot less licenseshit these days
I've always wanted to get into Zenescope Entertainment stuff but never had the time.
>bad edgy writing
>bad to mediocre interior art
>all they have going for them are the sexy covers by artists that draw nothing else for them
I wouldn't bother.
Image has been taking 10% of comic sales for a long ass time and that's a good spot for something that isn't DC or Marvel. It seems all of the others are doing well enough with the exception of the really small and obscure publishers. And the other exception is IDW. They're fricking dying and every financial report is of them losing money. Seems they're betting it all on TMNT since they renewed that license.
>Seems they're betting it all on TMNT since they renewed that license.
Does IDW have anything other than TMNT and Sonic? Nobody gives a shit about the new gen of miniature horse show comic.
IDW still does the Dungeons and Dragons books and Star Trek as well.
People care about Image a little bit but otherwise no. Sales outside of the big 2 are almost non-existent.
Yes we care a lot
dark horse used to have quality stuff better than mundane capeshit at DC and marvel
ive recently been into stuff from scout, AWA, Mad Cave, and Massive
>scout, AWA, Mad Cave, and Massive
these are the new publisher I found it really odd that they came out nowhere.
Is Hellicious from Massive good?
don't know but massive and scout publish a lot of comicbooks each month
I only read Zorro #1 and Basic Instinct #1. Liked Zorro and knew about it because of Sean Murphy, thought Basic Instinct sucked
That manga Popeye looks nice.
Scout has actually been around for awhile. They had a recent blow up which I can only assume is due to some kind of investor capitol
>Mad Cave
Newish, can't think of any hits they've had
i always wondered what kind of subhuman buys Image series, they are nothing but shameless HBO+ pilot bait that disappear after two volumes
Some people still have hope we'd get back to the glory days of 2010
Marketing isn't great. Even people who want to read comics have a hard time finding out about series they might like. You really have to dig for the good stuff.
>indie means not marvel or dc
>implying image, darkhorse and the like are not publishers
literal twitter logic here. apply binary narratives to everything else because you can't do it with gender anymore.
and you're an even bigger idiot if you believe the meme that manga sells because of more genres when the best selling shit is always the "punch really hard" slop. it all goes back to superheroes.
>Why do Marvel and DC dominate so heavily?
They get to more normies.
More eyes.
More culture conditioning.
It's more complicated than that.
The obvious answer Marvel and DC simply release more product than the indies, 200 of the 350 books released every month are published by them
Marvel and DC have a more aggressive variant cover program which allows stores to buy more books to flip the rare variants to pay for that months shipment.
Marvel and DC have more of speculative value. While indies are vastly rarer due to their low print run most people would rather buy the trades. In Marvel and DC the floppies are king. Ultimate Spider-Man #1 that came out last week now commands $60 on the secondary market
General continuity and the need to see what happens next. Most Indie books end after one story arc, Marvel and DC have been chugging along for over 80 years, people tent to get attached.
Finally consistency in release dates, the indies are are a crap shoot when it comes to releasing on time, nothing pisses a reader off more if the book he's looking for isn't there when he comes in the LCS because the writer has taken a 6 month to 20 year hiatus. Marvel and DC (less DC) will always have Spider-Man and Batman out on the first week of the month.
People only care about Dark Horse because they imported manga.
Is there a reason indie publishers avoid artstyles that have even a slight Eastern resemblance? I know they pass on great titles all the time just because they don't have that samey indie western comic look.
Yeah it's called Deity.
And about 20,000 other comics that failed in the late 90's that I proudly own.
I like a lot of Boom's stuff honestly, they get to have fun with a lot of genres
what boom books do you like
I buy IDW comics all the time.
Way back in the day when Wizard magazine did break-ups of marketshare there were several shake-ups
1. Marvel went bankrupt and was bought-out by Toybiz which in turn went bankrupt. Several buyouts later they're owned by whoever.
2. DC bought Wildstorm, sellouts who went from creator-owned to indifferent thousandaires. This purchase gave DC the biggest marketshare.
3. Dark Horse was in a strong third position thanks to all the tv/movie IPs it had curated.
4. Image I don't remember ever having a substantial share but, given they got TWD, they can't be hurting.
The real dirt is that marvel and dc conspired to invent the Comics Code Authority to put Entertainment Comics, which dominated the market, out of business.
>The real dirt is that marvel and dc conspired to invent the Comics Code Authority to put Entertainment Comics, which dominated the market, out of business.
Sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy.
>oy vey
>there is no such thing as planning goyim
Its a well known fact the CCA was made by pussy senators and other government types.
Besides, it fricked over Marvel and DC, too.
What? There is nothing factual about that statement. The CCA was an industry-led initiative. It is true Congressional inquiries ramped up public pressure and lawmakers were threatening to pass legislation. But no laws were passed and the Code was designed by publishers and implemented by publishers and distributors.
While I'm fact-checking,
also has his story wrong. EC comics did not dominate the industry, it was only a small slice of the market. The head of EC, Bill Gaines, did take center stage during the Congressional hearings, and as a result of bad publicity EC was scapegoated and the CCA did have sections of it that seemed to specifically target some of EC's main titles. And while a variety of publishers and distributors likely were conspiring against EC even beyond the CCA, it's unlikely that Marvel was culpable since then-Atlas comics was not much of a force in the industry either.
Also you're still wrong.
No.
Just because a company is unsuccessful, does not make it indie.
Indie is not a synonym for small press, which is the way you're trying to use it. I could get where you're coming from if the meaning of "indie comics" once meant one thing and now means something else as language drifts, but the current use of "indie comics" has been going for decades and your definition is only used by you.
Scholastic isn't an indie publisher. They're a big company that relatively recently got into comics as a side gig.
>If not for the government, the CCA would never have existed.
That statement is correct, since there was significant pressure and threats from lawmakers. Without the looming threat of government censorship the publishers would not have devised their own rules for self-censorship. But claiming that
the CCA was made by congressmen and/or bureaucrats has no basis in reality.
Indie referring to whatever shitty publishers can't make a profit is not a widely used definition at all.
Ask me how I know you've never set foot inside a comic book store. Besides, by your definition even outfits like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly aren't indie, which is peak silliness.
Don't bother.
already tried to explain why they're wrong about the terms, it's a lost cause.
D&Q aren't indie.
Shit, at this point most of their money comes from licensing 60 year old Japanese manga.
They're not an indie publisher.
Black person what you call indies the industry calls zines. you got your terms all wrong.
>The CCA was an industry-led initiative.
This is 100% false. If not for the government, the CCA would never have existed.
>The real dirt is that marvel and dc conspired to invent the Comics Code Authority to put Entertainment Comics, which dominated the market, out of business.
qrd?
>Comics originally came from pulps and pornos.
>Became a big American pastime.
>Early comics were all over the place e.g. Wonder Woman creator is an interesting person when it comes to his lifestlye and beliefs for instance (lived with two women in a polyamorous relationship, various fetish stuff).
>This stuff bleed into comics and then came the accusation they were harmful e.g. Batman and Robin are gay!
>Moral panic caused in part by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent and appeared before a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.
>"Comics cause sexual deviancy and damage kids etc!"
>Fearing a kind of backlash and regulation the industry responded by creating CCA which had specific rules (pic related).
>News stands and shops would only carry your products if you had the CCA, effectively forcing non CCA books underground or to cease publication.
>The problem is how these rules were formed and how they were applied.
>For instance, a bunch of the rules attacked their competitors e.g. horror comics got decimated (underground horror comics existed but it wasn't until the 1970s when you got more horror theme Marvel books like Tomb of Dracula and Morbius that this waned).
>Incredible Science Fiction by EC comics featured a sci-fi story ending with the reveal that the astronaut was a black man. The CCA demanded they change his race even though this did not properly conflict with any of the rules.
(1/2)
>"The company's head, Bill Gaines, firmly believed that the Code was at least partially designed by the other members of the authority (including DC Comics) to put his company out of business, as the Code had rules against titles with the words "horror" and "terror" in them, and rules about how large the word "crime" could be in a comic book title. All of those things were trademarks of EC Comics."
>"Within a year of the Code's implementation, sales of EC Comics had slumped dramatically."
>I personally don't believe the code was engineered to be against EC. It was an industry response to a moral panic. I do think however that the other publishers did use it as a opportunistic move to exert some influence at the CCA to go after their competitors. But I would also say that EC and others did sometimes really push the line when it came to their covers and stories in a way that was flirting with disaster.
(2/2)
Ignores how both marvel and DC lost like 90% of their output.
>Ignores how both marvel and DC lost like 90% of their output.
Got a link for that figure?
I didn't "ignore Marvel and DC". I was commenting on the conspiracy over EC. And personally I don't believe the conspiracy happened as a maliciously organised thing against them. But I do believe that there was some opportunistic attacks against EC. There is a difference.
>Atlas
Goodman was a famous trend chaser and was literally copying what EC was doing, ended up reduced to Funnies and Young Romance comics because of the CCA.
>DC
limited to something like 8 ongoings, basically created the silver age just to survive.
Again, the EC director could cope how he wanted, but anyone pretending the CCA didn't royally frick every single company that wasn't a funnies publisher or Archie Comics. is high off his ass.
Actually, Archie comics does have some bill fitting your accusation. The big 2 definitely weren't.
You left out Malibu Comics who were close to beating DC as the #2 comics publisher before Marvel bought them and mucked everything up.
>Image
Never had the volume of books to take much marketshare if I recall. They are only in their current place due to surviving the 90's market crash.
You're confusing things. Malibu WAS Image in the beginning. That is, initially Image produce comics but had a deal to publish them through Malibu since it didn't have the ability to publish themselves yet. Thanks to that, in 1992 Malibu/Image did briefly exceed DC as the #2 direct-market publisher.
>4. Image I don't remember ever having a substantial share but, given they got TWD, they can't be hurting.
What are you talking about, Image is currently the third-largest direct-market comicbook publisher behind Marvel and DC.
Image started out of the game red hot with all the big creators that left Marvel doing their own books in the 90s. They fell off, but then rebounded with The Walking Dead for a long time. Now that TWD has kind of died down they are falling back down a lot.
>but then rebounded with The Walking Dead for a long time
TWD was not the cause of Image's rebirth. A lot of comics contributed and were more popular than TWD ie Chow.
Then the TV adaptation happened and it pretty much marked a new period for Image, and looming a spiral into irrelevance as their self-publishing system crashed under 10 billion tv pitches.
>The real dirt is that
that you are completely deranged and Marvel straight up crashed and burned when the CCA happened.
Most of my purchases are independent. I have box for my Superman and Batman but other than that i really love looking for horror and sci-fi. DC and Marvel suck at that.
No one reads comics anymore. The only buyers still around are collectors and they only buy pop-culture related stuff.
an actually interesting thread for once
Indies nearly beat the big two but the marvel crash plus Image dropping the ball with endless delay fricked everyone in the ass and put the industry straight back to the 80s status quo
After, from 2004ish to 2012ish Dark Horse and Image (and Viz Media and Schoolastic) had a decade straight of gradual but consistent growth, to the point it seemed inevitable that the big two were going to get dethroned.
Only for the culture war - and the movie adaptation boom - to straight up rape every major indie to irrelevance. And then that turned Marvel/DC into an IP farm that gets less overall sales each month.
Now the big two DID get dethroned. By a manga publisher called Viz media and a federal scam called Schoolastic. Indies dropped the ball -yet again- We more or less have Fantagraphics, a bunch of GN indies, and everyone else does shitty licenses. Sometimes, an Image comic or a Dark Horse comic makes some noise. But today being a porn artist on patreon literally pays 3 times more dividends than making a comic. The market is fricking dead.
Not indie (sorted by size):
Scholastic
Viz Media
DC
Marvel
Indie, but not technically:
Image
Dark Horse
Boom
IDW
Fantagraphics
Drawn & Quarterly
Actually Indie:
Zines
Webcomics
Actual Self-Published Print Runs
Remember when Penny Arcade and Homestuck made webcomics actually compete with the big two? Fun times.
Doesn't Viz only distribute manga and not comics?
Comics are a medium, not a genre. Pretending Manga and Comics don't compete is moronic.
They're basically the same thing, but a company that focuses on importing stuff from Japan and one that publishes Western talent are different things and should be evaluated differently.
Image is Indie, outside of Kirkman and the founders they don't commission books who have carte blanche to make what they want, creators come to them to publish their books.
before we as a society decided manga was okay, Viz would reformat manga into the superior 6.6125inX10.25in comic format with actual good quality paper and ink
Image is not technically indie, their core as you said is the founders + kirkman.
yeah it's true the self-publishing system is like 90% of Image's current output but that doesn't make it "indie". Marvel and DC had a creator-owned imprint and they weren't indie either.
Image are indie because they are not market leaders which is where the industry sets the bar for being called "indie".
Frick em, only DC matters.
>Indie
>Company
you fricking moron
>he's still mad
back to shitposting on Cinemaphile you go.
Most of the comics I’ve liked were published by Image. I don’t look for them specifically; it just turns out that way.
I’m not super into Marvel or DC tbh
Why did nobody ever fill in the gap Archie filled untill manga somehow did
that would require making lighthearted comics about straight romance
No one managed to figure out that boys also like romances.
>indie
>doesn’t post a single indie
>Marvel and DC dominate so heavily
>dominating the western comics market
but isn't that just like being 1st place in the Special Olympics?
Those are not indie.
How do you expect a conversation when a chunk of people can't get past the use of the word "indie"?
No wonder comics are dead.
>No wonder comics are dead.
seriously
Comics are booming. Industry's bigger than ever. Just not capeshit. Manga and kid shit like Dog Man have been eating their lunch for a long time now.
Sorry man, but manga and Scholastic books are not comics.
>eating their lunch for a long time now
Exactly. Comics are dead.
Not to mention the webtoon industry, which for some reason always gets left out in these conversations.
Your comment is a pretty funny example of why it's important to carefully define terms to have a meaningful conversation: "No wonder comics are dead". The truth of this statement varies wildly depending on what you mean by "comics".
Are the best comics each put out last year?
What?
Just read european comicbooks
Anyone checked out DSTLRY yet?
I got the first issue of Somna and enjoyed it
>I got the first issue of Somna and enjoyed it
ive read somna #1 and gone #1, didnt finish the devils cut. so far i dont notice anything different than if these comics were from any other publisher unless you get the physical and get those big sized floppied. i liked the beginning of Gone but not the second half so much, Somna looks nice but isnt that intereseting imo. since I bought bought somna and gone im gonna read the second issues online for now see how i feeel about them