Give one good reason why Marvel and DC don't have comic books in the magazine racks at grocery stores.
Protip: You can't
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Give one good reason why Marvel and DC don't have comic books in the magazine racks at grocery stores.
stores don't want that garbage
Have you ever looked at a magazine rack?
Not profitable. As: and:
pointed out, stores don't want that shit.
Something that Cinemaphile continually refuses to accept is that PEOPLE WOULD NOT TAKE AMERICAN COMICS EVEN IF YOU GAVE THEM AWAY FOR FREE.
True, what are they good for? Can't line a pet cage with them.
WOULD NOT TAKE AMERICAN COMICS EVEN IF YOU GAVE THEM AWAY FOR FREE.
This
They do in my country.
1. No one would buy them
2. Marvel and DC put out like 80 books a month each, have fun selecting like 5 or so to sell in grocery stores, have fun when they get delayed or relaunched etc. the grocery stores dont want that unstable shit.
3. no returnability which is the only reason grocery stores/newsstands sold them in the first place
I'd think it would be fairly easy to select a handful of the most popular books and get them in grocery stores. DC would probably also want to sell Scooby-Doo and Looney Tunes for younger kids. The big two should work out some kind of deal to make it palatable for stores to stock these books and give people a way to start reading comics without being forced to visit a specialty shop.
you're too much of an optimist. i wish the companies thought the way you did but they dont and it wont ever happen. they'd rather just keep increasing the number of variant covers.
It's getting to the point where the problem is impossible to ignore. Websites whose whole purpose is to pretend that everything is fine, are now admitting that things aren't fine. Something has to change.
Would be nice, but no one working at DC or Marvel give two shits about kids or new readers at all. They only want serious adult collectors like them that have memorized knowledge of 70s era deep lore.
Maybe time to cut from 80 a montha to like 10.
No one reads most of the titles anyway.
im on your side here. guys but you under estimate how little Marvel DC and to an extent Image care. they cater to the wednesday warriors who prop up the direct market and buy variant covers and dont mind books constantly getting relaunched. There are tons of these people who admit that they buy comics not even to read them but just so they dont "break their run".
Yeah but it's becoming clear that it's not working anymore. Marvel and DC are both slowly raising the price of a standard comic to $5, when $4 was already too much for what you're getting. I don't think they can raise it any more than this. They've reached the absolute limit of what they can charge people. It's amazing that when superhero movies exploded in popularity, comics got 0 new readers. It's disgusting, and if something doesn't change soon, then comics just won't exist anymore.
They made it so that the average person can’t even regularly buy them. Only those of the upper middle class. Basically, the same type of people who write the books.
>but it’s not working anymore
So why would going back to an outdated, antiquated system work better, dumbass? You literally have no real argument other than “waaaahh but they did it when I was a kid”. You can’t show any data that would prove it helps sales when in actuality magazine stands have been declining for years
Why don't they make a specific comic run that's easy to pick up and can be in grocery stores? I see Manga in Walmart. There used to be comics there. That got me into reading Ultimate Spider-man. Why can't they do something like that again?
Didn't they try to do this with Walmart, and then Walmart wanted to stock particular things and they wanted to stock something else so Walmart told them to frick off?
B&N's big new strategy is to decentralize and give individual stores more control over how they look and what they offer to try to maximize local interest in visiting the physical store. That isn't really transferable to the current comics situation short of completely reinventing themselves as multigenre publishers like manga.
it is very transferable
It was impossible to follow a run through grocery mags since their racks changed all the time or they never carried the weird off book part 3 of some ongoing story took place in.
maybe the comic industry shouldnt be so confusing/hard to follow
The people buying would be casuals, and the books should all do what Marvel does and put a little blurb on the first page summarizing the story so far.
They should constatntly have some issues and trades in bigger grocery stores in their own stands .
They would frickin sell and you don't need to go to a store that smell like semen and vomit..
>Straight up cardboard stands in a general store in the middle of Chucklefricklesovakia filled with a handful of iconic characters collections and runs on prominent display
Unironically and with complete seriousness "Too many books" and "Nobody would buy" gays BTFO. If what looks to be fricking Poland or some shit can manage this much fricking Walmart could. And don't give me that homosexual shit about "buT THeY Don'T WAnT tHEm" general stores and super markets have always had zero fricking standards as to what they'll sell.
who drew this
rivera
thanks
diamond distribution and their monopoly combined with the direct marketing model
grocery store mags also have wafer thin margins, so it only makes sense with the cheapest possible paper and the broadest possible appeal
>Cheapest possible paper
So yet again we come back to "Switching to gloss and shitty bindings was a fricking mistake"
Like fricking clockwork.
Daily reminder that Barnes and Noble has been OPENING new stores because their business has been doing well. They realized they were losing and started looking for ways to attract people to the stores and get them to spend money, and their plans have been successful. So if comic publishers want to shrug their shoulders and say "This is just how it is," that is completely unacceptable. You're losing readers, your product isn't relevant? Well guess what? Fix it. Figure it out. That's your fricking job.
They already sell comics at Barnes and Noble. Have for decades. The problem remains
>too expensive
>confusing to get into
These are problems that they need to fricking fix. Make it cheaper and make it simple.
How?
Superman the Golden Age
SUperman the SIlver age
Superman the Bronze age
Modern Superman
There. Done.
You're talking about literal decades worth of comics with no real direction that contradict each other. And hundreds of dollars you'd need to spend.
-So what if they contradict each other? They were ust funny paper strips that had a beginning, middle, and end in one issue. Just let people know that.
-So what if its hundreds? There's literally 100 volumes of one piece ranging from 7-10 bucks each. Just put enough issues in a vol anf go from there
ANd thats your opinion. Moving on.
golden age is boring
silver age is desperate
modern is moronic
But Bronze Age is good?
Ok Midwit
to get into
Get over yourself. Comics are braindead moronic. The problem is they just suck.
The issue is trades are generally labeled so that people can find specific story arcs that they are interested in, but most people looking to get into a series will be looking for a starting point which is poorly communicated through story arc names. Marvel is a bit better about this with the epic collections, but they had the stupid idea of putting the volume number on the back cover which is terrible for looking for volume one on a store shelf. Compare that to manga which generally has a volume number prominently on the spine. it's never been that people are incapable of figuring out how to get into comics, but the more barriers in their way, the fewer people will be motivated enough to research enough to get into them.
More importantly, manga almost never reset counting, and if they do there's a name change to indicate the part order.
No, "the issue" is that NO ONE WANT THIS SHIT.
WHY THE ACTUAL FRICK are you in denial about this?
Because as someone that buys and reads both manga and comics, manga makes it much more affordable and easier to try out most series.
To compare, I recently got a couple volumes of the eminence in shadow manga. It took me a couple minutes at barnes and noble to find the series immediately I could find volumes one and two for about $15 a piece and contained the origin story and the first main story arc as well as a bit of the second, about 300 pages total.
On the other hand, I also recently wanted to start reading spider man. It took me a minute or two to find the spider man section, but then it was unclear where a good starting point was. After looking at the back of issues, meaning I had to take each one off the shelf to look at what was contained since the spines were relatively unhelpful, I was able to find two that contained amazing fantasy 15 which luckily, I had already known was spiderman's first appearance. On closer inspection one was a greatest hits sort of collection that was not a collection of sequential issues like I was looking for, and the other was labeled as epic collection containing spider man 1-17 and annual 1 in addition to the amazing fantasy issue. I then had to look up to see if the epic collections were a good way to experience a series from the beginning, which was relatively unclear online as there didn't seem to be consensus on which series of collections was best, but I decided to go with it since it seemed good enough despite only focusing on Amazing Spider Man. I'm still not entirely sure if there were other Amazing Fantasy Stories I should have read before moving onto Amazing Spider Man. This volume cost about $50 for a little under 500 pages, roughly the same cost per page but a much greater initial buy-in that might discourage some people.
I successfully got into both series, but the difference in effort and thus motivation needed is the problem.
>but then it was unclear where a good starting point was
Comics don't have "starting points". What the hell is the matter with you? Do you have literal autism? Serious question.
Then where are you supposed to start?
Anything you think looks interesting.
You pick up an issue and read it.
That's what everyone did back when comics were actually selling.
Are you supposed to start reading in the middle of an arc? lol
you mean "mainstream capeshit comics don't have "starting point". Most comics that aren't mainstream capeshit from Marvel/DC have very easily starting points. even Love and Rockets that have been running since 1983.
The difference is that mainstream capshit sell characters and the artist are interchangeable. while other comics are about the individual artist.
this can only happen when you're so spoiled by linearity you start making shit up just to spice things up. Same as people who insist the way to watch Star Wars is 4, 5, then the entire PT, then 6. It's moronic
>Using Mother's Basement as a source
>MOTHER'S BASEMENT
>All to read JoJo in some autistic order to have all the flashbacks appear in chronological order
Are you legitimately moronic? Just start at part 1. Then read part 2 because it takes place after that, then part 3 because it takes place after that, and so on until you get to the reboot.
most manga aren't like this. getting into the big 2 requires reading multiple books. you pretty much need a guide to get into Xmen.
Jojo isn't even like this, release order is also chronological order and nothing else makes sense
Only Mother's Basement does this shit and everybody laughed at him
Want to read/Watch JoJo? Start at Part 1
lol didn't this guy try to claim Avatar and Steven Universe were anime?
"You can start whereever you want and understand what's happening" vs. "You HAVE to read ALL of it to understand what's happening"
>it's been garbage for 30 years and resets every 5 years so eh just start wherever I guess
>You can start whereever you want and understand what's happening
Good joke, Anon
Yes? No one who reads comics ever started at the very beginning.
>baaaawwwww it’s too confusing
You pick up a comic and read it. It is not confusing. Actual adults are able to read novels in non-chronological order without hyperventilating about how confusing it is that there is no number system.
We're not just talking about adults. Kids too
>kids will read anything!
I'm sure a kid will pick up a random Spider-man TPB if it looks cool. but you want returning readers.
>Actual adults are able to read novels in non-chronological order without hyperventilating about how confusing it is that there is no number system.
No they don't, Black person
It used to be the case- you'd go on a flight or need something to pass the time and pick up a book in a series that's largely standalone from a known author.
But that isn't the case anymore.
Fact is, manga won the format wars. Just like how decades of young adult novel series made serialization of stories in books much more popular than book series with loose continuity.
The funny thing is, manga in Japan is largely sold so you can jump in whenever- but the way the US market consumes manga is ALSO different from how they consume it.
All these media consumption developments in the last 20 years has changed how we jump into media- with manga reading sites, streaming services, anything- you can just start from "1".
It’s literally how people read detective, spy and crime novels. Almost nobody goes out of their way to find the first chronological Quarry or Maigret or Sherlock Holmes or Poirot or George Smiley or Jack Reacher book or whine about it how it’s too confusing to start when they don’t have numbers on the cover. Instead people read up the plot summary and go with whatever sounds the most interesting.
Anon those are all boomer novels at this point, very few people under the age of 40 read those anymore. I’m not saying that ahes 40 and up isn’t a lucrative market too- but it’s a limited market you can’t grow
>Next to nobody under 40 reads books that have very recently had very successful mainstream TV and film series, bro!
GTFO
And when people do read those books, or they get adapted, guess what’s usually done?
They’re followed in chronological order.
Yeah, no. I have been reading all said series and I have never ever read ANY of them in chronological or publishing order because it doesn’t fricking matter. What people actually do is usually go with the book the show/movie they watched and then go with whatever is available or has the most interesting sounding plot. Like 99% of people who start reading John le Carré because of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy do not know it’s not the first book in the Smiley series. It’s the first part of the Karla trilogy. And they don’t care, they’re interested in Smiley as a character and reading more about him, period. They do not think that oh noes I apparently have to go read the Spy Who Came In From The Cold before I start the other parts of the Karla Trilogy, otherwise I’ll be too confused!
>I
And there’s your problem. You’re being defensive because of how you consume it, not thinking of how people other, very likely the majority of people do.
I’ll even let you in on a secret, I get into media just jumping into parts. But I don’t believe I reflect how most people would prefer to get into media now
You're a moron, what does it matter to follow ANY of the long-running big names in chronological order if you're a casual reader?
I suppose that's what normalgays don't get about capes like Spider-man or Batman. At this point these are stories meant to go on indefinitely, it's not like there's an endgoal or conclusion in mind for these characters
>Well I believe this thing
Cool story bro but that doesn’t reflect reality of how most people traditionally get their start from whatever random series, which is more often than not a random volume rather than the first one, because usually they are either gifted something or what they find something from a library or store and or they just buy shit based on what they happened to have watched in another medium and use that as their starting point as they aren’t this obsessive that they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO read everything, even though they’re entirely self-contained stories that usually do not require any prior continuity knowledge, in a specific chronological publication order, otherwise they’re too confused and will simply not read anything. Most people are not going to spent fifteen minutes googling it in a store or library just to make sure they have the first book. They go with whatever is at hand and looks cool.
Embarrassingly disingenuous.
That's because those tell self-contained stories that rarely reference past events and only re-use a few characters who are all clearly defined in the text. Some comic stories work like this, but many are built on some kind of prior knowledge of characters or events to justify whatever's going on because comics repeat themselves constantly.
Most superhero comics are self contained because most people globally consume them through collections and not monthly titles, same way as people do with manga.
>But Muh crossovers
Are also collected and most of the time do not impact the main plot so they can be ignored.
Heh, I guess that has some truth
Continuity doesn't really matter with most long running cape comics now does it? It's not like there's a final goal or definitive conclusion in mind for Batman or Spider-man
I suppose the real issue with comics nowadays would be the shitty writing and price point
would it help if there were a comic book chain store? to my knowledge there aren't many, there's not mcdonalds or whatever of comic book stores that average people can easily know sells comics
>Barnes and Noble
This disparity is worse at Books a million. They’re a de facto manga store now.
Are indie comics dying too?
Who do you know besides yourself who reads comic books?
its to late for that to "save" comic books
As a kid I'd buy marvel adventures books in my local target while my parents grocery shopped.
Man I loved those comics at book fairs.
Giant Girl was Best Girl.
Yes
Marvel and DC primarily produce really bad comics that no one wants to read. It wouldn't be worth the investment to get them in prime locations.
>Marvel and DC primarily produce really bad comics that no one wants to read.
Not even true. Most of what they publish is readable and some of it is even really good. Now I don't think most people want to pay $4 to read it, but if they bring the price down, if someone's in a store and sees Spider-Man or Batman and they see a cool looking cover, yeah they might pick it up.
>but if they bring the price down
they dont want to. they keep increasing it if anything
>they dont want to
That's the fricking problem. That's what needs to change. They need to grow their readership, and the only way that's going to happen is lower prices.
Lowering prices won't help unless they also offer things non-neckbeards want to read. Nobody is forced to buy capeshit if they want characters having cool fights or even just sequential art telling interesting stories. On balance, it's a poor offering since it never goes anywhere and the product you get is highly inconsistent.
>Most of what they publish is readable and some of it is even really good.
That’s a good one, anon. You should be a comedian.
>Now I don't think most people want to pay $4 to read it,
They don’t.
>but if they bring the price down,
Won’t matter because the comics are still trash and people don’t want to buy them.
>if someone's in a store and sees Spider-Man or Batman and they see a cool looking cover, yeah they might pick it up.
Most general audiences don’t read or care about comics. The Shang-Chi movie didn’t make his comic sell. Gunn Suicide Squad didn’t increase comic sales.
And most comics have graphic nature that parents and Normies would be turned off by. Like the recent ASM had Hammerhead’s head bashed in with blood.
Plus when they pick up the comic, they will be confused at the story and put it back.
>Most general audiences don’t read or care about comics.
Of course they don't, but how could they when they don't sell them anywhere? That's why they should put popular characters where people can see them. And do what Marvel does with a paragraph or two on the first page explaining what's happened so far.
AND have a least a couple of titles that are doing single issue or two issue stories. That's what they're doing in Fantastic Four now. That would probably be a good one for store shelves.
>but how could they when they don't sell them anywhere?
Anon, making comics available everywhere isn’t going to make people want to buy them. You could sell comics at Costco or Baskin Robbins and it wouldn’t change a thing because comics are a NICHE genre.
From the the 30s through the 90s they weren't niche. Comics were a part of just about everyone's childhood. Most kids grow out of them before their teens, a few stick around.
>comics are a NICHE genre.
That's the fricking problem. They didn't used to be, and they don't have to be today.
>comics are a NICHE genre
Manga is foreign on top of that and yet
>And most comics have graphic nature that parents and Normies would be turned off by. Like the recent ASM had Hammerhead’s head bashed in with blood.
dude that's nothing we had anons in other threads talk about their school libraries having e-girl vampire manga. And that was over 10 years ago.
Chainsaw man is available at walmart and like 5 pages in the protagonist is talking about selling his testicle.
they dont sell enough
They don't sell magazines at grocery stores anymore where I live.
So there is that, OP.
Why the frick do you guys always seem so far behind on things? Magazine racks? In an era where a lot of people choose to just shop online, even groceries?
You really want to do something big?
>Scholastic. Fricking. Bookfairs. You'll get new readers here
>Cheap, Black and White reprints. I don't care if you have to pay 10 cent royalties every 20 copies, you guys can sweat it.
>The reprints can be chunks of stories and arcs, so that you can collect them in order and get a narrative. You have a bunch of material
from the 60's-2000's that can form a sequential narrative. Put out a series of Batman black and white reprints that cover Post crisis Batman from Year One through Batman Inc- get the most essential stories and important continuity arcs.
I don't get how these companies have 6+ decades long backlogs(and look, I get that most things before the 90's aren't going to resonate as much with kids) of comics you can just reprint cheap, but don't. Shit that wouldn't sell at a comic shop as a color reprint might just sell as a black and white reprint series. All those animated tie-ins like Teen Titans Go(the comic for the 20003 cartoon), those would KILL at book fairs.
>In an era where a lot of people choose to just shop online, even groceries?
The pendulum has swung back and will continue to. People, even zoomers, are getting fed up at online search results being full of bullshit half-assed Chinese crap instead of the thing they actually want that actually works. Even zoomers are valuing actually going in to physical stores because you can see for yourself what the product is. If anything it's the boomers that are going all-in on online shopping because of a combination of laziness, entitlement, and gullibility. So yes, physical magazine racks in actual stores are still a good way to improve sales.
I work at a Barnes and Noble. The magazine rack sales demographics are basically an inverted curve: you have older people who get magazines because that's what they're used to, and younger people who are tired of the Internet getting progressively shittier and want something that at least has a real name behind it.
I think physical will help, I just don't think supermarkets are as viable as people think. Especially with the crapshoot they are for coverage. Lastly magazines are getting expensive as it, and a lot I see shift into a special format for supermarkets(anniversary of ___ commemorative issues with a collection of images and articles from the magazine's history, basically a magazine version of a coffeetable book)-
The model I mentioned would work just as well in a B&N or other bookstores
What kind of magazines are the younger people buying?
>I get that most things before the 90's aren't going to resonate as much with kids
Try giving comics to actual kids. The younger they are, the more they enjoy pre-90s comics and the more they think 90s-2020s comics are LAME.
>they don't sell in grocery stores because they would have to actually put in effort to make comics people want
>THEY DONT SELL IN GROCERY STORES BECAUSE THEY WOULD HAVE TO ALLOW THEM TO RETURN DEAD STOCK FOR FULL CREDIT
i said that in
because kids much prefer sonic comix.
There's no reason that Sonic or Ninja Turtles wouldn't work either. It's so fricking simple and it's really baffling that they haven't fricking done it already.
IDK, in the 2000s and 2010s I saw way more stores having, and people buying sonic comics.
No they don’t.
Anon I'm one of the people saying supermarkets are a bad idea.
Anons read about manga selling in newstands in Japan and think that's the way to go.
Manga tries to find what sells. Capeshit tries to sell their brands.
THIS IS THE FIRST INTELLIGENT OBSERVATION IN THE THREAD.
The rest of this thread is moronic cliches.
>Manga tries to find what sell
Manga publishers just look at what series are already popular and then license and translate reprints of those. And what is popular in Japan isn’t necessarily popular in America. Fricking idiot.
The nerds in charge love the super exclusivity by having their stuff only show up in specialty collector stores for super serious collectors.
It's their special way of gatekeeping...the very business they hope to make money with
What is this post even saying?
Really? It's not that hard to get. The current comics industry is stuck pursuing 'exclusivity' by making it difficult to purchase comics, via only selling them in specialist stores. At the same time, they hope to turn a profit doing this, and are obviously struggling to do so because their product is frequently shit and a good chunk of their audience has shifted their interests to manga.
there's no way anyone actually thinks that tabloid rags would sell more than comics would.
Tabloids have ALWAYS sold more than comics.
anon newspapers sold only $60 million in 2021 according to pew research and comics revenue was 1.9 billion with a B in 2021 according to statista.com
>comics revenue was 1.9 billion
You know goddamn well that includes manga.
that doesn't change my assertion that comics (and manga) would sell more at cash registers than shitty tabloids
Okay now compare digital subscriptions.
I'll help you out: https://wordsrated.com/newspaper-revenue-statistics/#:~:text=As%20of%202021%2C%20the%20total,revenues%20have%20dropped%20by%2015.26%25.
It totals $20 BILLION (with a B) for newspapers.
People still pay for the news, they just get it on their phones. Try harder.
They could just let comic books be sold in gas stations, supermarkets and grocery stores.
THEY DON'T STOP ANYONE FROM ORDERING THEM. THERE IS NO LAW OR POLICY AGAINST SELLING THEM ANYWHERE. THE STORES DON'T FRICKING WANT THEM. WHY IS THIS SO HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND?
Cinemaphile (and reddit [same difference]) seem to think that Marvel and DC and Image are so fricking amazing that if the general public only knew that these comics existed (pro-tip: THEY DO) then they'd all rush out and buy them by the millions. Cinemaphile seems unwilling to accept that NO ONE WANTS THIS SHIT.
no one cares what you think, screeching homosexual
Because they don’t sell enough when you have to PAY the stores for placement so that they do not just junk them in some remote corner, you have to PAY for your own people to stock them so that they don’t get damaged, you have to accept back any unsold copies and pay for recycling that shit, etc. It isn’t worth the time and money and you can’t tell how many any title is selling until you handle the returns. This is exactly why they left the newsstands and went direct market which was cheaper, more efficient and when everything was sold without massive returns and because LCS’ would just revive their next orders up or down based on what sold, you got way more accurate data on what sold immediately rather than waiting couple of months.
I’ll wait for your “BUT MUH GROCERY STORE CHECKOUT LANE RACK NOSTALGIA” rebuttal that ignores all the actual business and money arguments.
>This is exactly why they left the newsstands and went direct market
Everything in your post is true, but this part needs further elaboration because it's still sort of misleading.
The direct market exists more because of what we'd now call "indies" than it does because of Marvel or DC. The phrase "direct market" is a holdover from when you'd order the comics directly from the publisher through the mail via catalogs/pamphlets you got from "hobby shops" (which also sold "underground comics" from behind the counter). That term came to be used to describe the shops themselves when they began transitioning into comics ONLY shops. The indies (what used to just be called "small publishers") exclusively were sold in the LCSes because no grocery store would carry their products and never did even back in the 60s in the days of R. Crumb and that sort of thing.
As for why Marvel and DC moved into the LCSes, it's because literal newsstands and magazine racks weren't making money from comics anymore and haven't since about 1968. The "newsstand market" was killing the industry and those retailers didn't want to carry that shit when LITERALLY ANYTHING would have generated more revenue per shelf space.
>As for why Marvel and DC moved into the LCSes, it's because literal newsstands and magazine racks weren't making money from comics anymore and haven't since about 1968. The "newsstand market" was killing the industry and those retailers didn't want to carry that shit when LITERALLY ANYTHING would have generated more revenue per shelf space.
The point shouldn't have been to make money, it should have been to get new generations addicted to comics, which had been still working for deades. Comics haven't been easily accessible to kids for nearly 3 decades now and now retailers are in a panic because the whales are dying and not getting replaced like they were before.
It most certainly had not been "working for decades". The newsstand market wasn't selling in the 70s. Comics sales were in freefall decline. "New readers" were not coming in. The LCSes brought new people in for the first time since like the 60s.
Straight from Jim Shooter
>So you look at the sales–Marvel comics are now $4 apiece, and they’re thrilled if the sales are over 30,000. When I was at Marvel, the whole world was different. We didn’t have a single title–we had 75 titles–we didn’t have a single one that sold below 100,000. We had the X-Men approaching three quarters of a million. And that’s not some special No. 1, or somebody dies, or changes costumes, or someone gets married–it was every time. A lot of it was single-copy readers. People weren’t running around buying cases of it because it had a foil-embossed cover. It was every issue.
300,000 adults were not buying X-Men comics from comic book shops. The majority of those were kids. But the problem was that kids were minnows, they weren't whales, and they were too short-sighted to accept newsstand sales as a loss leader.
>300,000 adults were not buying X-Men comics from comic book shops.
Oh, they most certainly were. Shooter himself has talked about newsstand being unprofitable. There's no money there.
Stop being an apologist for the industry and their moronic excuses like "muh newsstands" that they use to deflect blame from themselves and their shitty comics.
>Oh, they most certainly were.
Nonsense. The popular perception of comics in the 80s and 90s is that they were strictly for kids. If there were hundreds of thousands of adults buying them, that perception would have changed. Even in the early 00s there was still an attitude of comics being for kids (Fox News freaking out about Marvel's gay cowboy comic), though that changed by the middle of the decade (Quesada promoting Civil War and Secret Invasion on Colbert).
>Shooter himself has talked about newsstand being unprofitable. There's no money there.
Look up what a loss leader is.
>Peter David: The aspect that Dan perpetually leaves out of his two-part evisceration of “Young Justice” is that YJ was specifically designed to appeal to a younger readership. That was the mandate from editorial. That’s what I was asked to write. YJ was intended to skew young–in its stories, in its subject matter, in its readership–with the notion that it would draw in younger readers who would eventually “graduate” to the older-skewing titles. I was told at the outset that DC neither expected nor needed the book to sell huge numbers; it was aiming at the long-term goal of bringing in new, younger readers.
>>Paul Pope: "Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do 'Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]', this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said 'You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do 'Scooby-Doo.' And I thought, 'I guess we just broke up.'"
The 45 year olds of 2006 are now in their 60s. We're now seeing the consequences of Didio and the industry's "frick them kids" attitude. Quality has nothing to do with it. The top selling comics were never necessarily the best. And Marvel's superhero movies have been the top-grossing for the past decade so it's not like kids were over superheroes either.
You are not the business genius that you think you are. You sound like a Cinemaphile poster.
I'm not claiming to be a genius, but you sound like an industry person yourself if you're siding with Dan Didio and claiming there's nothing they could have done to avoid their current circumstances.
DC was publishing kid titles during Didio’s tenure and regularly did initiatives to diversify the line and offer more variety to readers who were graduating from the kid Tiny Titans, etc. titles to the main line. Hell, they are still doing YA graphic novels to lure in young readers. To claim Didio told kids to frick off isn’t true at all. All he did was acknowledge where the mainline was and what drove the interest of the main demographics. Paul Pope doing Kamandi wouldn’t bring children to DC. Kids don’t even know wtf Kamandi is nor would they care.
Don’t forget the Walmart collections. DC tried everything to get kids and Normies to like them.
>Kids don’t even know wtf Kamandi is nor would they care.
This is a stupid argument because nobody knows anything about anything new, or anything rebooted after multiple generations. It sells anyway if it has a good hook, good marketing, and good accessibility.
The only reason anybody cares about Kamandi is Jack Kirby’s art. It was a Planet of the Apes ripoff with occasional DC reference. Animals running the world and one human boy having adventures wouldn’t offer anything special to attract kids to it. It wouldn’t have done anything that would appeal the kids of today. There’s a reason the title has always been something people go to read because of Kirby, and not other people aping Kirby
It doesn't matter if you didn't like it, it sold well back at the time and was only cancelled because DC was imploding.
>Animals running the world and one human boy having adventures wouldn’t offer anything special to attract kids to it.
Why? Is that a concept that's saturated in kids media right now?
I like Paul Pope, but I'll say I don't think any comics he or Darwyn Cooke would've done for kids in the 2000's would've gotten me excited to read comics on the same level the growing manga boom did. and I say this as someone who actually did look up old Golden Age comics as a preteen like Will eisner. Guys like Cooke and Pope are too wrapped up in making "art" comics, and then the kid's/Young Adult titles are solid but also safe as milk.
Kids like some risk and excitement. Cute one and done comics can get kids interested, but if you want repeat customers you really need to keep the story rolling. And the art needs to be far more exciting as well. The basic animated looking styles in these comics are pleasing, but they don't sell the action in the same way a typical action manga does.
>Kids like some risk and excitement. Cute one and done comics can get kids interested, but if you want repeat customers you really need to keep the story rolling.
Nothing except their parents are stopping them from reading the mainline.
>but they don't sell the action in the same way a typical action manga does
I think this is a big thing. Ongoing action/adventure series are a great way to bring in readers buy for some reason depicting dynamic action is mostly unheard of in American comics. Even outside of DC and Marvel is all really stiff.
The big problem is that big two comics make pages that can be resold on the secondary market(so lots of big character posing shots that buyers like on the pages), for the most part.
And then indie comics are really concerned about trying to make "art comics" so they hyper focus on the graphic look of the art; wanting really streamlined and simple styles or going for specific illustrative looks and so they're more concerned about the overall look than the action.
and then of course there's just plain artists that aren't good.
What sells Manga action scenes is the fact that they're willing to warp and distort figures. Speedlines help, but it's not just putting them on a punch, it's really warping and contorting the fist and the figure it's impacting.
>To claim Didio told kids to frick off isn’t true at all.
Anon Didio has always openly hated the idea of any of the kid appeal lines like YJ and TT, they were on his literal hitlist for Nu52 and like almost half of the reason why Cyborg got moved to the League as part of internal politics that hinged on that. I would not put it past Dan to actively hate children for making him feel old.
But like anon said, didio's DC was still putting out kid's books. still are. Hell he signed off on that Carrie Kelley kid's book Frank Miller/Ben Caldwell is doing that's in development hell.
Getting a guy like Paul Pope (who is way more expensive than the guys doing the DCAU books were) to do a kids book(when the guy's ability to reach kids is questionable.) seems like a waste of money. Pope's audience is the indie crowd. Battling Boy has been out for like 5 years now, how many kids actually read it? And how many readers are Pope's usual audience of aging art comics lovers?
got a link to these interviews? Sound interesting
People order shit online to be delivered directly to them at home, who the frick buys from magazine stands anymore?
If it doesn't sell then they won't try to sell it.
.so the answer is money
How to save comics:
>Step 1: Get rid of all the hack writers
Sounds good? Great
Also no more homosexualry like there being multiple "Daredevil #1"s or multiple titles like "Amazing/Spectacular/Astonishing" to refer to the same fricking continuity
>But normalgays will get scared if they see it's issue #1893
Isn't exactly stopping normalgays from infecting long running manga like One Piece or JoJo
It's way easier to get into Spidey if I know the one I should care about is just called "Amazing Spider-Man" and has the highest issue count, then look up the range for whatever story I'm interested in or a compilation named after that story/run
if a high issue number scares the normies away, then so be it. they saw movies and still aren't buying comics anyway, so frick em. all they do is exist to consume in such a way that it destroys our comics. the rest of us got in to comics without movies and could handle the issue numbers just fine
It just doesn't work. Even Shonen Jump with manga being massively popular stopped publishing their magazine physically in the US
Most people don't want propaganda pictures of brown men kissing each other against a pink and purple background right next to the grapples.
No one wants to spend $12 for 6 pages of content (not counting ads) from a story line they're not familiar with.
I think that comics need to drop the prices to get more people reading again. They need to be willing to possibly lose money for a period of time in order to build readership so their companies don't die.
My understanding is that right now Marvel and DC are both profitable. They're not super profitable, and normally a business that makes such a small amount of money wouldn't be valuable to Disney or Warner Brothers, but they both see the comic publishing business as a nice supplement to their overall Marvel and DC portfolios. So they're fine as long as they're operating in the black. And if you try something new to try and get new readers, that would make it harder to stay in the black, and that's when Disney and Warner Brothers might stick their heads in and not be happy. So Marvel and DC just kind of exist, and instead of trying to make the business healthier, just raise the price and milk more money from the rapidly aging addicts who have to buy everything.
Convenience stores like 7-11 don’t sell magazines anymore and places that do have been drastically shrinking their magazine sections in the last few years. A grocery store in my area used to have an entire aisle of magazines, that was reduced to a single shelf unit. My
local BN remodeled and reduced the magazines by about half. Comics aren’t the only periodicals that have gone down the shitter.
2000AD is still going strong in Bongland and you can get those at any supermarket
They're mostly in newsagents afaik but even then I guess it's just a difference in distribution.
Although you also see those panini reprints of marvel and DC comics where its 2-3 random issues bound together
Isn't it because Karens lost their shit about inappropriate material being easily accessed by children?
Then why haven’t they lost their shit about manga? That has way more “inappropriate material”.
Because nobody would buy them anyway.
Comics sucks.
Selling floppies via newsstands would be more trouble than it's worth for reasons already established in the thread, but there's no reason thr big two can't go the Archie route and put out Digest collections for the big brands. They have 70 years of backlogged comic stories and all the BIG stuff is archived digitally in HD already. No reason why we can't get monthly or bi-monthly Batman or Spider-Man digests that are grab-bags of one-off stories.
Or just reprint the Post-Crisis material in a sort of chronological order. Titles for Batman and Superman starting from Year One and Byrne’s Man of Steel. To the reader, it’ll seem like the story is progressing.
They do this with Superman and Batman already. The problem for Superman is they stopped with Byrne's end, they should've kept it going.
Because individual issues of american comics cost like $7 now are 90% ads have terrible art, and even worse stories.
Nobody wants to pay for that shit in 2023
A 5 dollar booklet that will entertain for 3 minutes tops if you're in 5th grade or higher and is probably dependent on knowledge of some currently running storyline isn't worth it, be it sold from a LCS or a grocery store isle.
Because the Big Two don't have the guts to give Diamond the middle finger
They gave Diamond the finger back during covid, the monopoly is finished.
Because nobody wants to buy modern Marvel/DC trash.
I love Carrie Kelley like you wouldn't believe.
Because when the comics were sold in racks and grocery stores the industry almost become bankrupt.
Read more about Phil Seuling, Seagate distribution and the comic book sales crisis from 1970.
Also the problem is not the direct market per se, but the monopoly conditions that Marvel and DC accepted with Diamond. One of the biggest one: keeping digital at the same price of physical.
Who doesn't grab a comic book off the rack at 7-11 when you're grabbing a Slurpee?
DC did have comics in Walmart a few years ago. Even had a bit of hype with a Superman comic that had a rush of sales with people speculating it was going to get pulled.
Not sure what happened after that to make Walmart stop giving a shit about selling the comics.
Alright. Reading alot of your opinions on here my first thought is really shows how little you homosexuals actually read modern era comics because if any of you did then first thing most of you would notice how big two mainstream titles are specifically now written for young adults. Almost all of them, with few exceptions have a self imposed age limit printed on top right hand corner (For ages 13 Plus). That they simply no longer cater to children and simply don't care is symptomatic of the larger issues plaguing the comic book industry right now. That if they are to turn it around then frick distribution model, frick chain stores, frick convenience shops, frick local online come book shop, they need to start looking at themselves first. That instead of writing stories for themselves, they need to start writing for kids, stop all stupid bullshit, and start having some serious fun. That's how you get everyone buying them again.
Do kids even like super heroes?
uh, yeah? Super powered character in outfits are always popular with kids.