I mean, everytime I hear comic book news about these two, its always something awful. Whether it be retcons, political BS, bad art, or some idiot on twitter spouting their mouth out. Meanwhile, no sales data. It's like all the drama exist to hide the actual state of things.
I know its a meme that "American comics are trash" but I think the concentration is just the Big 2. Even then, I do think the market will self-correct if either of them goes out of business. That said, is there any actual hope for these two? Can they pull out of their death spiral? Or will Warner and Disney just job the comics out to Skybound or Japan?
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No it’s over. Most comics were always ass anyways.
>Most
The sales say otherwise. Even then, DC's Vertigo imprint was some of the best shit of its time.
doesn't seem like the superhero genre can be saved, most people are done with that after endgame.
but they could move on to all of the other comics they have, like horror, magic mystery, etc.
Superhero movies are pretty much over except for properties like Spider-Man and Batman. Instead of letting certain IPs go to waste, they can instead focus on the less superhero-esque characters in both Marvel and DC. They'd be the easiest to turn into movies for the coming years. Characters like Blade and Ghost Rider can function just fine as action horror films. No superhero shit in sight. Same deal with Hellblazer and Swamp Thing. Constantine 2 could be a hit, especially with Keanu as the star. You don't even need a high budget for these.
>Superhero movies are pretty much over except for properties like Spider-Man and Batman. In
What will be your narrative when R-rated Deadpool surpasses The Joker?
The current Filler Phase is just that, WB fails at movies because they don't actually like any of the characters.
They said Barbie was gonna flop
Mario was going to underperform like Detective Pikachu
Avatar 2 will flop
GOTG 3 will flop
Don’t listen to chronically online bots who don’t touch grass.
>Is it possible to save Marvel and DC?
Why would you want to save them?
It is "possible" but it's possible in the same way a 42-year-old unemployed alcoholic turning his life around is possible. It requires an immediate, comprehensive and most importantly honest re-evaluation and rework of all decisions and processes that led to this point. And barring a miracle that's unlikely to happen.
The people working in those companies have no reason to care, as they know they'd lose their jobs immediately if either of the Medium Two (soon to be Tiny Two) began to demand quality work. So it has to come from the shareholders. People who hold shares in those companies would need to suddenly start to give a shit about th health of the comic divisions. And that's unlikely too since the comic divisions are such a small piece of the pie. It's a really fricky situation.
They hold hostage a bunch of characters that I'm irrationally attached to. Otherwise I wouldn't care at all.
They would also need to have a company plan. Like figure out who is their actual major demographic, also figure out how in the hell to write and draw books they would want to purchase, shift all processes over to producing content fans would want to buy. Then make it available for the mass market.
This means dropping the 30-40 something "Collectors" who are most interested in #1's, 25's, and 50's (as if any run ever got that far any more) who buy variant covers and limited editions...that give no fricks what actually happens inside the book. Dropping the comic shops and placing their stuff in more available shipping locations.
TPBP. Thread can and should have ended here.
At this point the best thing you can hope for your favourite characters is for them to fade into anonymity. The average talent of writer still willing to work for the funny pictures companies has gone all the way downhill, and the passion simply doesn't exist anymore.
There have been detailed threads here breaking down why management at both Marvel and DC have screwed over their biggest names, and people are seriously sitting here asking B-BUT CAN IT BE SAVED?? when the only people with the authority to do the saving are the same ones that screwed everything up in the first place, and the harsh reality is that there simply isn't enough competition in the marketplace to light a fire under their asses because at this point they're just IP farms for the movies.
>At this point the best thing you can hope for your favourite characters is for them to fade into anonymity.
You can chart the course of superhero comic history from
>I wish they'd bring back my obscure fave, someone could really do great things with them
to
>I'm afraid someone will bring back my obscure fave just to kill them in an event story
to
>I'm afraid someone will bring back my obscure fave and turn them gay or black
>people are seriously sitting here asking B-BUT CAN IT BE SAVED?? when the only people with the authority to do the saving are the same ones that screwed everything up in the first place
This can't be said enough. Even a full reboot of Marvel or DC would be handled by the exact people that made you want a reboot in the first place.
They don’t deserve to be saved. Especially not DC Comics.
No. They have run their course and its time for them to die and new competitors to rise up.
what fricking competitors?
Capeshit makes no fricking sense whatsoever. If you’re not going to take the time to establish rules and follow them for a coherent story then why the frick should the audience take the time to read them?
have you ever read a fricking book you moron?
>Stuck a nerve insulting capeshit
HAHAHAHA
The thing about that is when DC or Marvel publish something other than "Capeshit", people pretend it doesn't exist (Hill House comics imprint) or just hate it (Fire and Ice).
Of anything, the issue isn't "Capeshit" insomuch as the current capeshit is just bad.
no you just haven't read a single book in your life if you think any good book lays out strict rules for how their universe works. Go read some Brandon Sanderson trash and get out of here
No fiction is PERFECT. None. But there’s something called trying. Capeshit is just moronic. And there are alot of dumbass books written as well. Sorry for standards are so shit you have to resort to assumptions.
I think DC needs a new reset. The 4th in less than 15 years.
A new reset won’t fix them. Especially with the current people in charge of them. If anything, they would just make things worse.
They need better writers and editors. That's the number one issue they have, people making the comics are just shit at their jobs.
Yeah. DC comics can reset the universe to make more characters gay or black. That will fix everything.
They haven't reset and a reset is what got them into this mess. Debooting back to pre-Flashpoint is the only card they have left.
Do you seriously want them to soil the REAL DC universe? At least New 52 gave us a jumping off point where we can all acknowledge that everything after that doesn't count.
New 52 sucked shit. How the frick could they get any worse?
If a new reset could actually fix DC, it would have been fixed long ago. The problem has never been bad continuity. The problem has always been bad writers.
>THE DAWN OF THE NEW FLASHPOINT NEW 52 MEGA ULTRA SECRET HYPERCRISIS WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA, IT SHOULD HAVE STOPPED AT THE FLASHPOINT BLACK LABEL INFINITY COSMOS OR AT LEAST RESET THE UNIVERSE BACK WHERE IT WAS DURING THE CRIMSON 52 ELSEWORLDS MULTIVERSE ANTHOLOGIES TIMELINE
this right here is the reason no one gives a frick about comics gents
Add Shonen Jump to this pic.
I could but last I checked, Shonen Jump was solvent. Other than the general abuse of artists done in all of manga, what's wrong with Shonen Jump? Is it not profitable, if so, why?
I'll repeat this again:
The better question is: Should comics be saved?
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TLDW:
No, we deserve the industry we have.
Just let the good artists draw what they want. It's the writers and editors largely fricking shit up. Let artists draw cool fight scenes and heroes teaming up and the writers can offer some guidance as long as it's not veering off to "characters talking about gender at a coffee shop" shit.
Yeah, worked great in the early 90s. That was sarcasm in case you're so moronic that you need this explained to you.
I wiish they kept the writers/artist for the same series for more than an arc or 6 months. I hate getting into something and then their is a sudden paradigm shift in how the heroes look/act with a sudden change in the stories tempo.
Artists think trying to draw 20 pages a month is overwork even though all they're generally doing is the pencil lineart. Everything being so split up and spread out is a big problem too and increases ineficiency.
Styles and page density has gotten too complex for their own good. People can point to shit like those 8 year old hellcat pages (drawn by an animation storyboard artist on a weekend) but the majority of comics stuff from the big two is still heavily lineart based "house styles"(a vague term but bare with me) and dense paneling. Manga knows when to pull hard for spreads and openings and reveals, and when to just do a page full of face closeups.
Not easily without clearing house, firing everyone and starting completely over again with new crews and new books.
Do you think it would be a bad move if DC just said, "Frick it!", scrapped all plans for DCEU and just said they were making small one-off films from now on? On-the-cheaper-side stories like Joker, or a Plasticman comedy with no ties to other DC stuff, or an origin movie about Mr. Freeze?
None of these movies will lead up to a big event. They will all remain low budget. They don't want BIG BLOATED 'SPLOSION SPECTACULAR finales and might even have more dialogue than action, depending on the character. Would the public accept this? Would they be okay to just have an entire cinematic universe scrapped and pretend it never happened? I really cannot think of a franchise that put all their eggs in a basket nobody wants and then twiddles their thumbs wondering what to do with all these fricking rotten eggs.
It would be better. Joker and The Batman have been their more successful movies. Trying to do a cinematic universe is dumb.
Also they need to fricking stop it with the multiverse bullshit already. I don't want a solo movie that is actually an ensemble team movie with three Flashes, four Batmen, five Spider-Men, and an uncountable number of Lokis.
The over-inflated budgets the MCU and DCEU have had are what's been killing them. Had they capped it at 100 mil, then the fatigue wouldn't have hit them as hard. They could've have had a few more years of coasting. But they decided to put big money into that and tv shows and ended up fricking themselves completely.
>But they decided to put big money into that and tv shows and ended up fricking themselves completely.
Nothing Streaming has any path to making money. All the Streaming Wars is about is gaining subscribers til the rivalsans fold in frustration.
Stuff like The Eternals and The Marvels failed because they are about boring or inconsequential conflicts with foes noone has heard of and are poorly presented.
Eternals is a bunch of guys (3 times the cast of GotG) fighting CGI aliums and each other over a single movie where no one has time to establish character, for stakes that have no impact on the MCU.
2/3rds of The Marvel's cast is teevee actors, fighting the kid sister of MCU's most dull villain in a Spaceballs plot.
None of these problems have anything to do with budget per se; neither should have been a movie project to begin with.
Superheroes movies have not been profitable since 2019. They need to just stop making them.
Endgame was the last best superhero movie. We just didn't know it at that time...
There are good books out there. Cinemaphile fixates on the shit that gets them mad
Look! It’s the shill who likes Zdarsky and PKJ! Laugh at him!
What are you talking about? Zdarsky Daredevil started out fine but ultimately directionless. I don't know what PKJ wrote.
Point still stands
Shitdarsky please jump off a bridge. You’re a shit writer and a homosexual.
I think that depends on your definition of "good."
You might just have lower standards than others.
Personally I don't care, because I was never all that interested in cape stories so most of the industry has always just been something I ignored.
This is part of the problem
What is?
Me not paying attention to stuff I'm not interested in?
You came in to say I had lower standards like your taste was the benchmark of quality, when you outright admitted to your own personal cynical bias. You don't care about books, you care about your weird meta
>You came in to say I had lower standards like your taste was the benchmark of quality
No, I came in to say that your idea of "a good book" is not the same as everyone else's, and you might just have lower standards (which, given that this is Cinemaphile, is probably true).
I brought up my lack of interest in cape books because I know that otherwise the conversation would have just shifted into you spouting off a bunch of cape stories that I have no interest in, as it always does whenever someone who reads cape comics feels like their taste is being criticized, even when they're being compared to other people who also read cape comics.
>No, I came in to say that your idea of "a good book" is not the same as everyone else's, and you might just have lower standards (which, given that this is Cinemaphile, is probably true).
See, again, you're being a cynical c**t stating any positive reception is "lower standards' by default. You're only proving my point that Cinemaphile wants to be perpetually triggered, and focuses on the shit that does admittedly exist in both publishers
Or, you know, other people genuinely have higher standards than you and don't find comics you like entertaining.
So is this bait or are you really this far up your own ass?
Are you? You're throwing a shitfit at the notion that other people don't enjoy the same things you do. That doesn't mean they're "looking to get triggered" or whatever ridiculous fantasy you've invented to avoid facing reality. They're looking for entertainment but don't find the shit you enjoy entertaining.
For every comic, no matter how awful, there's always somebody who thinks it's great and everyone else is just haters. You are that guy.
No that's what you've invented in your head. Being "oh it's all shit" is not a personality nor is it true. There IS shitty comics out there, you just willfully ignore the good too
>Being "oh it's all shit"
Except no one said that.
Again, this just seems like you being upset that not everyone has the same low standards that you have.
You just said that when you directly say someone has low standards. How else is that to be interpreted?
If I say that your taste in movies is suspect and you have low standards does that mean I'm saying that all movies are shit?
honestly everything I cared about has ended, cancelled, or turned to shit in recent years. I used to read a lot of books in 2019 but I slowly read less and less after that until 2022 when there was just nothing left that I cared about.
JLDark ended, Guardians of the Galaxy ended, Hawkman ended, JLA ended, Green Lantern ended, Nova ended. Then Thor got incredibly boring and there was only ever a fight for a single panel with it resolved off panel. Fantastic four got incredibly boring with again villains only appear for a panel or two and are stopped off panel then back to the family drama stuff for the rest of the issue. Green Lantern turned into nonpowered guy doing nonpowered guy things and no space cops, no supervillains, no anything but mopey drama about some loser who's life sucks. I'm tired of book after book of nothing but some writer desperately wanting to be a drama film writer but hijacking cape stuff to do it.
>Green Lantern turned into nonpowered guy doing nonpowered guy things and no space cops, no supervillains, no anything but mopey drama about some loser who's life sucks.
What the frick is up with that? We are 6 issues and a year into this run and it's like we are still on page 4 with Hal just stumbling around in the park with his hands in his pockets. Why does it take 7 issues to get some actual superhero doing superheroing action in a book?
>There are good books out there
Maybe there are some left, but you have to dig so, so deep to find them. At a certain point it stops being worth the effort.
>honestly everything I cared about has ended, cancelled, or turned to shit in recent years
I'm in the same boat. I had my little selection of favorite characters, and one by one those were all killed, canceled, turned gay or otherwise ruined, and that killed the whole superhero universe for me. It was like that moment in GoT season 4 when I realized every character I liked was dead. I didn't stick around after that.
I can imagine these companies undoing the damage but they don't seem at all interested in doing so. And until they do, I don't like them.
>Good Books
I don't think so. If there were "good" i.e. books that were selling well, we'd see DC/Marvel actually pumping money to advertise said books. We'd get toys in stores right NOW about say, the New Earth villains in Action Comics. We don't cause they aren't successes.
To use manga as an example, Shonen Jump commissioned an anime commercial for "Debby the Corsifa wa Makezugirai", a webcomic on Shonen Jump Plus. They also got a voice actress to dub the first chapter of the manga ala motion comic style. It made money so they spent money to make more money. Clear, visible success.
Closest thing I can think of is DC doing those animated movies awhile back. Even then, I didn't know they existed until long after release. And it was only movies of old stuff.
>If there were "good" i.e. books that were selling well
The books I'm talking about do, and are still ongoing. No I'm not talking about Batman or Amazing Spider-Man
Yes, by hiring me!
No, I actually have a feeling that we will probably see their end in our lifetime.
The companies won’t die because of licensing money and trademark rules that necessitate publishing titles at certain intervals to maintain active ownership.
I think they’d do well to go the Archie route, accept that comics are seen by just about everyone as a nostalgic token of a bygone era, and just repackage their old material in affordable, accessible ways. But that won’t happen.
I think a random old Kurt Schaffenberger Lois Lane would sell at least as well as any new comic, as a kitsch artifact.
And if these companies end up being bankrupted, then what? Or do you truly believe that they are "too big to fall"?
Disney is not going bankrupt anytime soon.
This, and it certainly won't be over movies or comics in any case.
WBD on the other hand is ripe for another fire-sale.
That would be the absolute worst case scenario possible. Then the companies would literally just exist to keep characters as hostages inside them, not making any new stories for them but also not allowing anyone else to write new stories either. That would be the closest thing to death that's possible for a fictional character.
Well, both are owned by massive production companies that view them as major IP farms. So I doubt DC or Marvel are going anywhere no matter how much they tank their books or churn out shit.
You do realize that WBD is on the verge of bankruptcy, right?
We have these threads all the time.
>Why not try anthologies or different genres.
They don't sell to the current audience and marketing to new audiences would require a Herculean effort.
>Better digital?
Digital services are actually alright but older comics aren't built for it and people don't know about these services.
>Get out the LCS!
It is practically impossible to just remove yourself from an entrenched system.
>Why isn't there consistency?
Schedules in pumping out a monthly, monthlies are still necessary. Fear of successful artists leaving ala Image lot.
>Quality bad.
There are good comics out there but it requires a sustained effort to find them, that means there is a larger buy in. And the mainstream trash could definitely improve massively but even if it did..
>The specific perceptions about comics and the fact comics aren't cool.
To avoid comics being regulated they created the Comics Code Authority, in part because some psychologist said comics were causing juvenile delinquency. Comics were a big pastime like the pulps or magazines. But the CCA entrenched comics as being for kids, destroyed companies and whole genres leaving the superheroes the big game in town. And by the time we began to get an indie/self-publishing boom, the waning CCA and movement towards variety, the 90s comics crash destroyed comics as a pastime and decimated things, never to recover to pre-crash levels.
The truth is people just think comics are uncool, for kids or have specific perceptions about them (e.g. people think you can't get *into* a hero without reading all their stories, when these characters are like ongoing soap opera and really you should follow creative teams). I have given friends stacks of good comics that they will even acknowledge are good but in the grand battle for attention they would rather read manga, play video games or browse the Internet. People don't want to have to read an essay of how to get into comics when they could just get into something else.
>The truth is people just think comics are uncool
Man, I wonder why that belief continues to be so common...
Entrenched cultural baggage going all the way back to the 1950s; CCA, Fredric Wertham etc, comics are for kids. Made worse by speciality shops run by fanatics rather than decent normal people. Final death knells in the crash. And now the modern cringey culture warriors. It is amazing that weebs are universally looked down upon as being pathetic but Japan has a certain foreign cool factor that doesn't have the same cultural baggage. Comics are not just "your lame dad" interest but fricking coloured hair pansexual weirdo who would rather be writing a screenplay or "changing the world" deciding that Batman needs to be more queer.
Little floppy mini-magazines are an obsolete medium that Americans no longer largely care for.
Japan is obsessed with obsolete media/techniques done in obsolete ways. They still think folding grade z garbage steel a gorillion times (so it doesn't just fall apart) is the height of greatness.
Americans have moved on past comic books.
>It is amazing that weebs are universally looked down upon as being pathetic but Japan has a certain foreign cool factor that doesn't have the same cultural baggage.
That's because weebs as they were originally described don't really exist anymore, and the way anons here use "weeb" applies to literally everyone who is not white, so the vast majority of the planet.
There's a reason you see fricking black pro football players dressing up like fricking Akatsuki members and not Court of Owls members or some shit.
>That's because weebs as they were originally described don't really exist anymore
Those weebs definitely do still exist. I would say that anime is a big factor here in how it acts as a pipeline and gateway to things and that Western animation has massively languished here. You need pipelines to get people into things. Anime has simply been a much better pipeline and translates better to other weeb shit. Comic book movies don't act like a pipeline to other media at all.
>Those weebs definitely do still exist.
Not really, people forget what weeb (or wapanese in general) used to mean.
Nowadays white people fling out "weeb" at someone who just likes an anime, which, again, would encompass a significant proportion of the planet.
And the comic book movies don't act like a pipeline because the comics they're usually based on are either old stuff that younger people generally aren't going to care to look for or incorporate elements of the new, lamer, gayer stuff that no one actually likes.
>which, again, would encompass a significant proportion of the planet.
The highest grossing Anime of all time barely made more than Ant-Man 3. It's not as significant as you delude yourself into thinking; you practically live here at Weeb Central.
Anime movies don't make money because they take forever to release outside of Japan.
Meanwhile when you look at the best-selling pieces of media in general, tons of manga make the list.
But again, you are white, so your idea of a weeb is "likes an anime/manga more than a western thing."
Well that and Japan has a population equaling a single large state.
They also don't receive a wide release, not like the MCU. That 3D Pokemon movie could've been successful had they given it a wide release rather than a limited one outside Japan.
If there was money on the table, it'd be out there making money. Disney even tried to promote and release Ghibli Studios.
And "units" is a pretty cherry-picked metric for anything. I don't argue that Japan (or China) can sell a craptillion "units" to themselves. It just doesn't amount to real money in the grand scheme.
Again, all the anime ever to see worldwide release, evar, and $500 million was the absolute peak, and 90ish percent of that was to Japs.
It's just not broadly popular across the world like you believe.
>If there was money on the table, it'd be out there making money
And it does, but no one is going to wait 4 months to watch a movie.
>It's just not broadly popular across the world like you believe.
I mean, it most definitely is, not all of it, but there's a reason why the "highest grossing media franchises" list is full of manga and anime.
You live in a very Anglo-tinted bubble.
>And it does, but no one is going to wait 4 months to watch a movie.
People wait YEARS to watch a movie. Cameron fricked around with blue aliums for AGES.
Now you are just making excuses.
Piracy for Anime is no greater an issue than it is for everything else.
>People wait YEARS to watch a movie.
Not one that's already out you moron, especially foreign films, which Americans don't really give a frick about to begin with.
No one is going to care to watch a movie that's been out for 6, 7, 8 months in theaters when they could have watched it at home months ago.
That goes for ANY movie.
>specially foreign films, which Americans don't really give a frick about to begin with.
THANK YOU.
That's what I am saying; people do not give a frick about Anime movies and shows (outside of Japan). It's a niche.
>That's what I am saying; people do not give a frick about Anime movies and shows (outside of Japan). It's a niche.
Anon, you're moronic, people in countries outside of America DO give a frick about anime movies and shows (and manga).
Hell, 2 of the top 5 highest-grossing foreign films in China this year are anime movies.
This is why I said you live in an Anglo bubble.
You assume that everyone is like you.
And people wonder why modern Pokémon Games are unfinished.
The fact that 99.9% of Hello Kitty is kitsch merchandise pretty well says it all; unless you want to lecture me about the cultural impact of Hello Kitty.
Are you going to pretend that Hello Kitty has had no cultural impact?
It's a character that's had pretty much 0 movies made about it, and yet if you ask anyone in the street they're going to know what Hello Kitty is.
>and yet if you ask anyone in the street they're going to know what Hello Kitty is.
Yes, they know its a stupid brand girls bought into. Absolutely none of them could tell you anything at all about the characters or anything else. Just that there's a Kitty face.
>Absolutely none of them could tell you anything at all about the characters or anything else
I...are you moronic?
The character IS the brand you moron, Hello Kitty didn't start as some media with a story or a character to follow, Hello Kitty is literally just a brand mascot, like Ronald McDonald.
>The fact that 99.9% of Hello Kitty is kitsch merchandise pretty well says it all
I mean most of the top things on that list are merchandise driven.
homie, Mickey Mouse is also 99.99% merchandise, the frick is your point?
I also want to point out that this chart is made from information from Wikipedia from YEARS AND YEARS ago, and is no longer correct (and wasn't accurate when they got it).
It's:
Pokemon 88bil
Mickey and Friends 52bil
Winnie the Pooh 48bil
Star Wars 46 billion
Disney Princesses 45 billion
Anpnman 38 billion
Harry Potter 34 billon
Barbie 33 billion
MCU 32 billion
Call of Duty 31 billion
Batman 29 billion
Hello Kitty 28 billion
Spider-Man 25 billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises
That's the very source your chart lists at the bottom. I smelled BULLSHIT when they gave Hello Kitty 80 billion dollars, lol.
Your Chart is bullshit.
>Cinemaphile - Comics & Cartoons
this board is called Cinemaphile - Comics & Cartoons
At this point it should be called "pretending like the last 25 years of comics publishing hasn't happened, cartoons and web animations"
>Dragonball at 24 billion
So this is just made up weebery.
I pulled out just the Disney / DC ones cause those are the only ones I'm interested in for this discussion. I didn't like having to scroll through a bunch of anime properties to see comparisons of what these two competing studios were making. Especially curious with Disney since they've had an entire year of break-evens or flops, with the exception of Guardians 3. I'd like to see what some of these properties numbers look like with updated numbers; whether the merch didn't budge and is still making them a ton of money, or if interest actually went down for stuff like MCU, Star Wars, and Disney Princess. I mean, the Wish merch certainly can't be flying off the shelves, so that impacts profit, right?
what is scary as frick is that the single ips like dragon ball are just one facet of anime/manga and just by themselves eclipse most of comics.
like that’s just 1 fricking ip.
you gotta realize comic companies are multiple fricking ips of the thousands and they are getting collectively mogged by one single anime/manga ip.
that is ridiculous.
like in one year a new jjk or one piece or naruto expy could be released and it could literally eclipse most of comics in a single year.
that is kinda ridiculous.
>That's what I am saying; people do not give a frick about Anime movies and shows (outside of Japan). It's a niche.
Anon...Cinemaphile is an anime board.
>Comic book movies don't act like a pipeline to other media at all.
Because they're just seen as their own thing. Anime is usually just an advertisement for the manga or light novel. But US movies are treated as the main product, regardless if they're adaptations or not.
>Because they're just seen as their own thing.
And they could be more. But ultimately they aren't even their own thing. Merchandise is the thing. A pair of Batman underwear out sell all the Batman comic titles put together.
>Not really
Cringey weebs do still exist. Unless you're ignoring all the weirdos on this site and beyond. I have no idea what you're trying to say anymore because it is going beyond the point I was making and it feels more like you're insulted? All I was saying is that comics are uncool and have cultural baggage. And manga/anime, even with weirdo internet weebs, doesn't have the same baggage. Although it might have a seperate type of baggage.
>Comics are not just "your lame dad" interest but fricking coloured hair pansexual weirdo who would rather be writing a screenplay or "changing the world" deciding that Batman needs to be more queer.
And that is why they're not cool.
They're not written by anyone who your average person would consider "cool" or "edgy," most of them seem to be written by old farts who USED to be cool and edgy and middle-aged karens (or 20-something women who act like Karens) who are literally the exact opposite of cool or edgy.
It doesn't help that comic companies continued to hire failed script writers who wished to god they were writing for tv or film, but this was the best they could do. They either washed out of film and landed on comics instead or never made it in the first place and bitterly write comics. Hoping some day they will graduate up to movies.
God I hate these kinds of people, they also infest video game writing.
And so many of them are always super fricking bitter about being "stuck" writing video games or comics or cartoons or what have you, and it shows through constantly in their work.
If you want people to write with their whole ass you need them to be invested and that will never truly happen when you're forcing them to play in someone else's sandbox.
Especially when the few times a writer does get to leave their mark all the audience does is piss and moan about it like with Bendis changing the status quo by inventing Miles Morales.
If you want to play in the big boy sandbox you need to bring something to the table.
If you can't make it there, it's on you.
>If you want to play in the big boy sandbox you need to bring something to the table.
Depsite Cinemaphile's hate boner for the current state of capeshit writing I haven't heard of a single hire that was just some rando off the street. They'll hire journalists and YA authors and indie creators sure, but it's always someone that DID get published before, and often has some notoriety. They're bringing that to the table.
But why give a shit? Why bother researching a eighty years of capeshit lore when nothing you write is going to matter and the next guy can just undo everything to tell HIS fanfic?
Anon, I'm not talking about capeshit, I'm talking about TV and film, did you actually think the "big boy sandbox" was referring to fricking capeshit?
Anon, you are in a thread about Marvel and DC.
Have you accidentally into another thread or are you just a schizo?
Try reading the reply chain, stupid.
Bruh the reply chain is all about the attitude of comics writers. You're the one that shifted gears to say "ackshully i just meant tv" in an attempt to move the goalposts.
>Bruh the reply chain is all about the attitude of comics writers.
Are you moronic?
>It doesn't help that comic companies continued to hire failed script writers who wished to god they were writing for tv or film
>God I hate these kinds of people, they also infest video game writing.
The posts were about how people who failed to make it in TV and film come to comics and are bitter about having to "downgrade."
How are you this stupid?
>>It doesn't help that comic companies
>comics companies
>comics
Good lord you're moronic.
I accept your seething concession.
Name a successful movie or television writer who fell into a gig writing comics.
There's quite a number of the opposite, Millar and Miller spring to mind immediately.
NTA but JMS?
Straczynski?
He was doing scripts for heavy-duty shit like He-Man and The Real Ghostbusters.
Also, the "height" of his career was Babylon 5 (that thing sorta remembered as "other Galactica), and he was rubbing shoulders with comics and cartoon people for AGES before that, I don't think he considers comics some awful downgrade?
cantwell
More like Cantwritewell lmao
Gottem
aiieeee save me sexo hacker lady
No one wants to discuss non-Cinemaphile television and film with you, moron.
>>Cinemaphile
Sorry, I keep forgetting you homosexuals treat this board as a Cinemaphile offshoot.
this is why anime and manga will win.
they can let their writers create new ips and experiment.
for every 10 failures they get 1 jjk 1 chainsaw man 1 Spy X Family per year.
comics side will get 100000000 failures and 0 successes over a span of 10 years and 1 halfway success during all this time.
these sick fricks suck so just let them create their own ips and watch them burn that way we can definitely separate the good from the bad.
comics system of the companies holding both the ip and forcing new creators to work on a pre existing narrativs prevents them from being successful.
nobody wants to read the thousandth superman x batman x spiderman story.
people want new shit.
people want to move on and be entertained.
ip fatigue is real.
> comics side will get 100000000 failures and 0 successes over a span of 10 years and 1 halfway success during all this time.
Which is, weirdly, by design. DC doesn't actually WANT a new hero to get popular, they want their EXISTING heroes that they have already decided are important to sell more.
Given a choice between launching a new hero and putting that same money into Batman, DC will pick Batman every time.
They don't even need to make a masterpiece. Just something solid. No more subversion. Play the concept straight. Just a solid story, nothing more and nothing less.
This is the modern degradation of writing. Writers used to be king on TV shows. Nowadays everything is showrunner/producer based. 2007-8 Writer's Strike really was a death knell. Nowadays you have to go on someone's Twitter to really understand what they meant because writers now can't express rather basic arcs or human emotions.
>failed script writers
At least the British invasion writers actually had cut their teeth in comics, were journeymen creators and had written and experienced comics. Some of them had literary or screenwriting aspirations but at least knew something about the medium. The spiral of fans becoming creators then people who only had vague ideas of comic characters or cartoons becoming creators. And now we have people who are actively embarassed by comic characters writing those characters.
The third issue is that a lot of writers can never get anyone to make their movie at all and then take their failed script over to comics. A lot of shit story arcs started life as some stupid scifi movie script that no studio wanted to buy.
>And now we have people who are actively embarassed by comic characters writing those characters.
This is why you have villains that only show up for a page or two if any appear at all. The writer really really doesn't want to write a comic character. They want to write hard hitting drama that lands them a screen writing gig.
You guys say this but the worst writers are usually the people who HAVE made it in tv and movies and get to do comics unfiltered. Look at John Ridley or Ta-nehisi Coates.
Those people are in the same wheel house of what we are discussing to be honest. They don't really give a frick about writing for comics.
>cliches
>cliches
>cliches
This is why comics discussion is impossible on Cinemaphile. You guys just parrot revisionism you saw on reddit or wikipedia.
>why do you keep saying earth is round and orbits the sun, that's such a cliche
>you just keep parroting things you heard that are objectively true
>but older comics aren't built for it
Put the pages up, keep spreads as the are. I can read Mangadex on my phone and never have a problem with how the pages or anything look. Literally just have a non-shit reader that automatically fits the page to the screen size.
It's telling that the Invincible and The Boys show proves you can sell the IDEAS in comics...as long as they're not attached to the MEDIUM which as you say, has been browbeaten as cringe in the court of public opinion.
Don't forget
>PAUL KEK PAUL KEK PAUL KEK PAUL
Marvel and DC have valuable IP's...Warner and Disney will likely pimp them to gamer some cash
Stop with supershit and do another thing
>Meanwhile, no sales data
You can find distributor data which you can extrapolate as sales data..
>https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales.html
The problem with the whole "Marvel and DC don't sell" thing, is that the numbers over the last decade haven't actually been terrible. They have occasionally grown (small numbers though). They are terrible when comparing them to the pre-crash era and 90s boom. They are terrible when comparing them to manga. People on Cinemaphile live in a bubble where they will just say everything is awful (partly in terms of sales, especially because of thinly veiled east vs west threads and partly because of culture war reasons). The big characters might shift hundreds of thousands or high tens of thousands, in terms of units. Smaller characters in the tens of thousands. Trade market is a different beast to monthlies. For anything to truly change you'd need another crash. Right now it is very "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kinda place. It isn't growing by large enough numbers and getting new demographics is still the problem because the system is hard for people to navigate in terms of ordering. COVID was a kind of shift in DC abandoning the old distributors and messing all that up. For the kind of seismic shift you want you'd need a full on industry crash to actually make people think about doing something different. Stumbling onwards is how it will be until that happens.
Comichron hasn't been reliable since the Diamond monopoly ended. Furthermore, is should be DC and Marvel shouting from the rooftops about how "successful" they are.
Even the recent success with Skybound claiming Duke #1 sold well* shows it can be done.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/duke-1-makes-g-i-joe-history-with-nearly-70000-orders/
*The comic had EIGHT variant covers so maybe divide that by eight.
>Comichron hasn't been reliable since the Diamond monopoly ended
This is true, even then it has always been a guide at best. Part of the problem is that some shops would over order for some comics due to variants and some of those variants going for extortionate prices.
>Furthermore, is should be DC and Marvel shouting from the rooftops about how "successful" they are.
Actually fixing things would require a big sustained effort that neither one would truly ever commit to. See the mess of the New 52.
>variants and some of those variants going for extortionate prices.
Second half of that post literally went into that kek
>I want to read Spider-Man, where should I start?
>Overwhelming amount of content to sort through [Some people end their journey here, who can be bothered?]
>Find a list with a selection of collected editions e.g. hey check out Spider-Man Life Story (which is self-contained) or Kraven's Last Hunt (considered a very good run/story) [Other people end their journey here, read a collection of the best or self-contained stories]
>Want to do a deeper dive? Got to consider runs, volume numbers, how they are collected, personal taste of whether to read older runs, art & writing taste [Again, who can be bothered?]
>Someone reads a few of the "must read" runs e.g. Ditko or Roger Stern [Ends their journey here]
>Say you want to read a monthly: you have to read previews magazine and order it in advance. Say you want to read a trade: you take a number TPB off the shelf. Creative teams change all the time. Events gum up the works. Maybe you follow it for a time but eventually you might burn out or drop it [Ends their journey here]
Everyone has gone on a comics reading journey which is kind of like a choose your own adventure game. The problem is it is very easy to turn the page and find a dead end and a lot of people cannot be asked to turn the page back to find a path to continue. That is the problem with the ongoing story, it never ends and constantly needs a level of buy-in effort and context to navigate it.
And yet Marvel and DC's forever-characte model of doing things is far more successful than most western creator-owned works.
And most Wapanese creator-owned works too, sure Japan has some that are super-successful, it's a Darwinian thing out of a million piles of shit.
>forever-characte model
I think part of the problem with the forever character model now is the FOMO and burn out it brings.
>TV shows used to be one-and-done stories.
>Unless a show was syndicated with reruns you couldn't catch up.
>Advertisers and creatives couldn't really create long running shows because of the issues involved.
>Physical media meant you could catch up.
>Shows all moved away from writer-lead one-and-done stories to showrunner/producers and long-form stories.
>Fear of missing out used to stop long running stories but now it is an active component of marketing, "DON'T MISS OUT ON GAME OF THRONES BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS WATCHING IT!" (And look at how that turned out.)
>Comics used to be one and done, or as Shooter would say, "Every issue is someone's first comic".
>Kids would just jump in with an issue.
>Story decompression happened as arcs were written for trades.
>Buy-in became greater because a story was stretched out.
>Similar thing has happened with the MCU as it has lumbered on.
While the forever character model has been successful I think the culture has shifted with the FOMO aspect of these things causing people anxiety. It has steadily lead to the buy in being too great for not much reward. If you recommend people some comics they don't want to start at some random part and get context as they go along. A lot of people are all or nothing. They'd much rather watch a movie that deal with the perceived effort of getting into comic stories.
If this were the case, we'd be seeing an increase in sales of western comics with a definite endings, but that isn't the case, those things are selling as low as they always have, with the usual few exceptions here and there.
>increase in sales of western comics with a definite endings
Lad, the trade market shows this massively. A bunch of the evergreen trades are self contained stories or have endings. There is a reason why something like Spider-Man Life Story sold so well.
>>Find a list with a selection of collected editions e.g. hey check out Spider-Man Life Story (which is self-contained) or Kraven's Last Hunt (considered a very good run/story) [Other people end their journey here, read a collection of the best or self-contained stories]
Comics are like a descending spiral. You come on Cinemaphile and ask for Batman stories and they will tell you Year One, TDKR and maybe some other stuff like Morrison or someone. It is the same small pool. And then the next lot of Batman fans have all dipped their wick in the same small pool. And those books get constantly reprinted.
>You come on Cinemaphile and ask for Batman stories
That's because Batman is a corporate super-IP, not a compelling serialized story. Very occasionally a Batman arc or limited series is worth reading. 90% of it is derivative sloppa, just like Manga. Asking for good Batman is like asking for good Naruto or Dragonball, it exists, but most all of it is worth a pass.
Yeah of course, but the point I was making is there are more good stories outside the few cited examples but people have narrow knowledge and never branch out and they perpetuate that. Honestly the average comic book fan knows frick all about the medium in general. Frick all about creators or artists or good books outside a few. The comics pipeline is so fricking narrow. Like some people will read Watchmen and a few other things and that is is. Or some will only ever read a few Marvel comics. Ultimately I just want to enjoy the medium but the medium is hard to enjoy sometimes when it is driven by a consumer base who never ever venture out to try different things. I don't care what country the comics are from I just want to find good stories but instead it is like people fighting over a shrinking rock pool with the same few crabs rather than looking out at an ocean.
>Honestly the average comic book fan knows frick all
You aren't the gatekeeper of Comics Fandom, nor do you associate with enough comic readers to express a valid consensus on them.
Sorry, but you don't.
Climb out of your own ass.
Now you're just baiting and not connecting with anything I said. Weird projection tbh. I am not gatekeeping and you don't know anything about me to make assumptions about what I know. I have worked in the industry and run comic events. I have talked with a lot of shop owners. A lot of comic fans don't truly have a connection with the medium. And that is an issue holding the medium back. Why are you making weird assumptions and reading into things in a strange way?
You sound like a massive whiny homosexual who released a DOA comic and thinks it’s the consumers’ fault for not understanding your genius.
That's just more bait. You miss the point. I am just lamenting that it is hard to find people truly into the medium and that it is hard to get people into comics without them hitting a roadblock based on specific cultural perceptions of comics or lack of knowledge. I am not attacking consumers anyway like you think. The industry is as much to blame for the inability to get people into things as much as consumers are. For some reason you seem to be reading into shit that isn't there.
How is wanting to read good comics and enjoy the medium a bad thing?
>The comics pipeline is so fricking narrow. Like some people will read Watchmen and a few other things and that is is.
Doesn't help that all clickbait articles list the same few things as the acceptable face of comics. I wouldn't have gotten into comics as much as I have if it wasn't for my LCS owner who actually gives decent recommendations
Also, given good quality materials, Japan still can't make better than Germans, because they are broadly "not good at things" that don't revolve around thankless slave-work.
Is the manga industry still doing well in Japan? I remember reading somewhere that the anime industry is doing pretty bad this year.
It is. Which is why copying it is such a horrible idea.
Capeshit is a creatively bankrupt genre that cannot be improved.
One can only go so far with characters and titles that started in the early 1960s. DC and Marvel both refuse to allow a new character or franchise that started after 1962 to go on for more than a couple years before canceling it in favor of the same old silver age superhero shit over and over and over again.
If DC and Marvel eventually do come to an end, it means they have finally done absolutely everything that can be done with the 25 or so main characters that endlessly repeated for decades until there was no one left that care anymore.
Dude, that's just the comics. They don't matter. Film, television and video games are what matters.
I try to say this to them; they cannot understand "Obsolete Media". They might as well be bragging that a Japanese Radio Serial is styling on American Radio Serials.
Who cares?
And they all are failing currently with only very few exceptions here and there.
When you people will realize that we are heading towards a big change?
Batman and Spider-Man will continue do fine in those industries as they've always had. It's the other IPs that are in trouble.
>And they all are failing currently with only very few exceptions here and there.
Out of the 7 post-covid MCU movies, 5 have broken $750 million, or 1.5 times Demon Slayer.
One of those made as much as 4 Demon Slayers.
And they all managed to bring in less profit for Disney than DS brought in for Aniplex, since Disney is run by morons.
>And they all managed to bring in less profit for Disney
Ah yes, the confused moron that conflates budget to proceeds with actual monies in the bank. I'm sure Demon Slayer made more profits than Endgame in your noggin.
You're forgetting that because of the over-inflated budgets of those movies, they didn't make much in profits.
I don't believe in Hollywood Math numbers any more than Trump Property Valuations, I also don't believe they'd start churning out 3 movies a year if they made pennies on them.
You believe what you wanna. As much as production and marketing is costs, there are tax breaks, product placements, product synergy branding, merch and home sales and a host of other incomes.
Film Television and Video Games just follow the same trajectory of a never ending battle of generic good against stale vaguely political topic du jour evil that loses all meaning and impact as it invariably grows stale.
It isn't stale for the average person. They still very much like that shit. They can't get enough of it.
people become sick of characters on screen a LOOOT faster than in print
Nobody reads comics anymore.
>Film
Every DC movie bombed and now people are getting tired of the MCU. With even Marvels bombing.
>television
Literally no one cares about the TV shows. Especially not the DC ones (Peacemaker had worse ratings than Hawkeye).
>video games
Sony Avengers was panned and killed. Midnight Suns bombed. Gotham Knights bombed. Suicide Squad was panned so badly that WB delayed it. The only successful game was Spider-Man 2.
Ideally I'd like to see Jim Shooter return and shake things up but he's probably too old and going to die soon. Robert Kirkman would be my second choice but I doubt he'd go and work for them again considering their rocky relationship plus he seems too busy with running Skybound/Image
Otherwise there's legit no one I see competant enough and everyone else is too old or going to die soon. Comics are fricked.
Not really no.
No. They died 30 years ago when they allowed women into the industry. Now the comic & movie industry is getting the woke & diversity treatment it deserves for letting women call the shots. That's what you get when you let israelites & women run the industry. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Not my problem. I will gladly support the next issue of Big Tit Anime Girl while capeshit is forgotten.
one problem. Even manga aren't immune from the chopping block
its not women alone.
anime and manga have a shitload of women mangaka and authors who also write big tit anime girl stories too.
many of them create stuff raunchier then their male peers.
the do you love your mom and her two hit multitarget attacks anime creator was a former female doujin maker.
i agree judaism and western corporatism and every other disgusting -ism is a key reason the wests comic industry will never be repaired.
it’d take another world war and actual holocaust and massive ethnic genocides and culling before the world can be repaired.
it’s uncomfortable but thats just the direction the world is heading.
either that or we will live in pods and eat bugz dystopia and own nothing.
No. Because the problem isn't any one thing or person. The whole system is fricked for both companies. On every level. Creators, editorial, management.
You'd have to fire and replace everyone. And have some magical way to ensuring the replacements aren't just as fricked.
There's no feasible, realistic way to do it.
>Is it possible to save Marvel and DC?
No.
Now stop making these threads.
This board is for discussion of OLD comics. New shit has ZERO readers and therefore has no place on a comics board.
What, you don't want to talk about how currently in DC the Amazons are fighting the US government who have special Amazon-piercing bullets as a statement about immigration AND patriarchy, or how in Marvel we're still somehow pretending like the collapse of Krakoa isn't a good thing they had coming?
>New shit has ZERO readers
Hickman carrying new comics on his back.
It is abject moronation all the way down.
They aren't just doing things bad, they're doing thing objectively wrong.
If their business is designed to make money first and foremost, they have gone out of their way to not so much screw the pooch as rape it into a mangled corpse to appease their pagan deity called woke.
Not exactly their fault when they're literally beholden to ESG scores lest the banking institution of our thinly veiled capitalistic oligarchy threaten them.
They shouldn't have creatives as dedicated "employees".
They should have talent that is vetted and approved of especially by the public.
People like liefeld shouldn't have a career to say nothing of all the creatively inept lefty cultists who do nothing but wiener-suck the establishment.
They should at best just swing around the rubber stamp for one-offs made from their tired half a century old IPs.
Some frick-head of some renown says "I have an idea for a [whoever] story" and they read it over and reject it or not.
Toss out a chapter and have people vote on if they like it or not.
That meritocracy type shit that apparently only flies in ethnostates.
They're not going to do anything like that.
They're going to keep employing women, homosexuals and shitskins who don't give any kind of a frick about comics until the companies are actually dead.
You have an audience.
They exist and like your product.
YOU DO NOT THEN ENGAGE IN CLEAR FRICKING CONTEMPT FOR THE SINGLE LARGEST DEMOGRAPHIC THAT LIKES YOUR STUPID homosexual BULLSHIT.
Try to broaden your demographic, absolutely, but you don't replace every god damn fricking first-stringer with a woman, poc or she-poc unless you are truly out to shoot your company in the foot as hard as you can.
Why do you guys always type so much?
Autism
Not in the English speaking world, unfortunately. Even if you cut out all the cancerous people, you'd only have other types of cancer available to replace them. If you wanna fix them, you'll have to look in Europe or Asia. Maybe South America or something idk.
>Maybe South America or something idk.
Honestly, we already outsource so much of the art to South America, I don't see why we couldn't do the same with the writing.
>South America
I don't know how to tell you this, but Dragon Ball (and formerly Saint Seiya too) is basically already a religion in South America.
>just recolors the god and UI hair
lazy spics
Is something like this possible for the big 2? I know DC tried this with Superman.
It is VERY MUCH possible. Spiderman is what, ten books right now? Batman is ten books. Superman is ten books. That's 210 pages already being printed per month. All could be put in a magazine format.
>DC tried
Cause that shit was exclusive to walmart and had ZERO advertising. This should have been in comic book shops but someone at DC was too busy being jealous of that Red Rooster crowdfunder guy.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/comics/dc-comics/dc-comics-announces-walmart-exclusive-100-page-mon
This can be done but now DC has an excuse not to do it...despite setting it up to fail.
Like a lot of good ideas, a thing being possible is also pretty much a guarantee the higher-ups at DC/Marvel are too stupid and/or up their own asses and/or skinflinty about money and skeptical about novel ideas to attempt it.
Smh at homosexuals here missing Didio like his moronation and autism isn't why DC has been a burning trashfire for decades
It will be like the 70s movies but in comics where artists/ writers will get a shot at new stories and heros and maybe like one or a small handful will build buzz and rise up. But it will be short lived once DC or Marvel take the reigns again and plie drives enthusiasm.
Both companies are infested with woke writers who will insert their politics into everything and use existing characters as meat puppets to gush about their politics.
Until these people are removed, buying comics from the big two is like waiting to see if your cancer gets better on it’s own.
Barbie was woke as frick and it still made gorillions of dollars. "Go woke go broke" is a myth.
What does that have to do with DC and Marvel comics? Two brands which have nothing in common with girls toy movie?
We are talking comic book sales.
Barbie targets women. Women don’t buy superhero comics.
For some reason nobody on Cinemaphile gets this or wants to listen when it is explained to them. But Twitter and the gig economy is the actual source of this shit.
Landing a comic, cartoon or film artist job or writing job is a temporary at best gig that only people who network endlessly can land. Around 2014 Twitter became the primary means of networking with professionals, getting noticed, and getting work. So it spiraled from there.
>Only way to get work in a studio is to network
>Best means of networking is through Social Media
>Only way to get noticed on social media is to play their game, act like them and get as many likes and followers as possible
>Since all jobs are temp gigs, you have to keep up the act and keep selling yourself on twitter at all times, it never stops
>So any artist or writer that wants constant work needs to keep playing the game, keep joining in on any big trend like pronouns, rights, justice for whomever is popular today, retweet the right things, etc.
>This must also appear in their work so they can post about it on twitter looking for their next job, so they ad in a purple transgirl into a comic, just to tweet about how they added a purple transgirl when that gig ends
>repeat
There you go, that's the evil woke israelite wokey woke israelites and woke israelites being woke let's say the word israelites about three more times because woke woke woke bullshit you cannot ever stop b***hing and whining about. They HAVE to do this shit even if they don't want to.
jew
Also adhering to twitter for new recruits, and tumblr before it, meant that they actually were hiring up a lot of the brainwashed "intellectuals" in pretty wide numbers. So you did have a lot of overly political buttholes who would rather preach than entertain being hired up into positions on shows and in comics.
But I do agree switching over to recruiting almost entirely from social media platforms was the beginning of the end.
It became a beat that constant feeds itself because of the level of popularity some writer or storyboarder can personally achieve from adding in pozzed stuff too. A writer can add in a cast of side characters that are nothing but ambiguously brown LGBT labels and then go on to win awards and fame for doing it. Writers became massively popular from failed comics just for being bold and including minorities any damn way. Nobody cared the comic failed. And an award winning, popular writer can much more easily land their next job than someone who remained a nobody. Or they will try to cheat by adding in characters and then screaming on twitter how that person is actually a minority or gay later on in hopes this will help them win awards, fame, and land their next job.
Except Japan doesn't have this. Korea doesn't have this. Why is it only in America comics that we have this social media intellectual dishonest degeneracy? Social media exists in other countries yet only here did this happen.
You aren't wrong but at the same time, that isn't everything. Something something Israel, something something derp.
The difference is japan has way more manga studios and have more distribution options among many other differences like their willingness to release a bunch of one shots to see if something sticks. America has very few studios and for a long time a functional monopoly on distribution making prices this lead to very little options for getting into the industry leading to basically networking and trying to be as safe and marketable as possible. Sorry if this is explained poorly running on little to no sleep tonight.
>The diamond monopoly fricked things
True. There's also a mistake in thinking "more manga studios" insomuch as the Publishers are Magazine publishers who do more than just manga. Marvel and DC, despite being publishers, only do comics and nothing else. Sure, movies and tv do diversify things somewhat, but that's not the same as a reading audience.
Significantly wider variety of studios and outputs that can cater to a massively larger pool or artists and writers.
The US has basically 2 comic companies that matter, which only employ about 20-30 of the same people forever and ever and ever. While it only has about 5 big studios employing around 100 or so storyboarders, who all know each other due to how fricking tiny the talent pool is. Either situation is built to be hijacked by a small handfull of people who get to enforce their viewpoints.
also Japan does not witchhunt the "evil ones" who say a bad word or do a bad in a McDonalds culture that has been hugely cultivated in the west. There is no need to be a revolutionary at all times, always revolt, always tear down always be against the ones in charge mindset. Everyone on twitter is fricking terrified that the twitter justice mob will target them and attack them, ruining their career and life forever. Japanese people for the most part can mind their own goddamn business. Americans by and large all want to be the hero that stops all evil people, and will make shit up or blow a mundane thing way out of proportion just to brag that they did good that day and feel like they saved something.
It takes a whole lot less words to just admit the israelites at the top are fricking everything up on purpose anon. Just wake the frick up and say it.
Hows about shutting your israelite dick sucking mouth the frick up and frick off already. We know what is happening and it's none of this stupid shit.
>Japan does not witchhunt
Yes...Yes they do. If you get caught with Drugs, its over. That's not just the anime/manga industry mind you. Vtubers and idols "graduating" cause they got caught having sex and ruined their pure image also comes to mind.
It's not political witchhunting but it is indeed a witchhunt.
>If you get caught with Drugs, its over
That's not a witchhunt, you moton, that's the law.
>Moton
You lose already
>that's the law
You can get caught with CP, commit sexual assault, run a prostitution ring, and you will still be able to work in any industry. Drugs in Japan in particular is a big no-no. That's the one illegal thing that gets you cancelled everywhere. Don't ask me why, it just is.
Are you moronic or pretending? It's simply the law, you moron. Same way other parts of the world like the UK and Australia can jail you for posting racial slurs online.
>Bot doesn't understand
I guess mentioning the promised land summoned you?
That is not the same thing as not having pronouns in your twitter bio or not dropping a few BLMs in your posts, or an ex girlfriend from when you were 15 in high school inciting a hate mob against you ruining your career.
I hate you fricking culture war homosexuals.
Then you shouldn't have supported starting a culture war in comics by changing the race/gender and sexuality of the characters.
>enforcing the law is a "witch hunt"
you are a special kind of moronic
How is an idol having consensual sex "enforcing the law"?
You don't get it. It's not the law. You can commit all sorts of crimes in Japan without it impacting your career negatively. Drugs are a special case where if you get caught with a gram of weed you get treated like you're worse than an actual serial killer, not just by the cops but by everybody else in the country too. It goes FAR beyond just a law.
Idols are a more understandable case (even though they have nothing to do with laws whatsoever) because everyone in that business knows the product you're selling is an illusion of a chance of having that idol as your girlfriend, and that illusion shatters the instant some other guy is involved. Idols get punished for having sex because they destroyed the product that was being sold. It's fricked up, but it's how that business works and everybody in it knows it.
>also Japan does not witchhunt the "evil ones"
Tokyo Shinobi Squad arguably got cancelled because it couldn't stop REEEing about immigrants
Kinda funny given that the artist for it was an assistant on Act-Age and we all know what happened to end up with that getting axed.
Manga has "get your series greenlit" contests, apprenticeships, the doujin scene, a lot of stuff that lets no names get their foot in the door on skill alone.
America...doesn't.
But also, and perhaps more importantly, it's because Japan and Korean comics are largely creator driven original IPs. You NEED a constant influx of new people and new ideas to keep the publishing machine chugging along.
Big Two Capeshit, by way of using the same character and story stable from the 1930s, values the IP more than the quality of the books, so you end up with publisher that think they can just shove any warm body into the space to keep things going. And since capeshit is such a big part of the industry in America, it pretty much dictates how things operate.
The first american comics company that does this will succeed. Sure, there will be a TON of poorly-drawn stuff by purple-haired fat lesbians to wade through, but the male manga fans and artists here will whip out some good stuff.
>The first american comics company that does this will succeed
It won't, because the damage is done and it's so severe that there's no coming out of it. What you'll see is what's happening now; a bunch of kickstarters and crowdfunding guys that will run their own individual grifts and then pull up the ladder after them because that's what the rugged individualistic american spirit is all about. Getting yours, and getting out.
Also no, nobody here is ever going to amount to anything creative. Not when the overwhelming majority of people look back rather than forward. The solution to fixing comics is NEVER going to be the return to the over-saturated capeshit days of the 90s that so many anons pine for.
I've been reading Bakuman, and while it's obviously a sensationalized story, there's still truth to how the industry works. It's funny seeing how creators want to put everything on the line to make a manga series and figure out how to get people to like it. Like kids in America who want to grow up to "work in comics" usually mean they want to write all the same superhero characters. Or they have to publish a single graphic novel that's not guaranteed to get much of an audience since the American indie scene is still stuck on hating genre fiction.
An unfortunate side effect of the Big 2 is that the industry is run on "Hero Worship". People aspire to write their favorite characters cause said characters have had multiple writers and/or artists. This can also be attributed to Marvel and DC being "shared universes" and not singular original universes (in DC's case, blame Crisis on Infinite Earths).
In Manga, other than a few exceptions, the story dies when the Mangaka dies. And that is as it should be. If Yoshiro Tagahashi dies before completing HunterXHunter, it stays incomplete. Nobody, not even his kids, are gonna pick up the pen.
>It's funny seeing how creators want to put everything on the line to make a manga series and figure out how to get people to like it.
The thing that stuck in my head the most about Bakuman is how deathly seriously the publishers took those little opinion polls that come with the books. Apparently failing to appear in peoples' top three favorite series is a death sentence, so the creators are desperate to come up with ways to make their series more popular. Meanwhile in M/DC the only people interested at all in what the audience likes seem to be the types who deliberately want to go against it out of spite.
I can't remember DC or Marvel ever having a poll, a simple poll asking my opinion on very basic things like which are my favorite comics or my favorite characters. They don't give a shit.
American media companies seem to operate almost the exact opposite. They never ever want people to easily get their foot in the door at all and do everything they can to make breaking into comics, cartoons, film, tv anything entertainment incredibly hard unless you are born into it.
It's because they want to keep their little clubhouse free of invaders. Admirable for a messageboard, but suicide for a publishing house. They NEED to set up a real merit based talent search if they want to live. Something like an open contest, repeated a few times a year, where the most popular talent gets the job would be ideal.
The problem with that is...it was done...And that's how a bunch of unqualified b***hes, trannies, and weak men poisoned the industry.
https://www.gamesradar.com/scott-snyder-aiming-to-revive-dcs-writers-workshop-initiative/
It's like a monkey's paw. Your idea is sound but the people in question are so shit that it will fail despite working in other places. They call it "cancer" for a reason.
It won't fricking matter. The best writer in the world is still going to have to play in the Big Two Canon sandbox and anything he does will get undone by the next guy. Capeshit is a fundamentally flawed premise until permanence is entertained.
DC has a fix for that that they don't properly utilize with Elseworlds and Black Label; Marvel doesn't even have that because they want everything to be a single top-down continuity to make it easier for Kevin Feige to adapt into the latest underperforming MCU flick.
Elseworlds are not fixes. Batman White Knight didn't fix the main books. They can also go completely breasts up like Hellblazer: Rise and Fall.
It's a monkey's paw. Whatever you ask will bite you in the ass. And nobody is doing anything to remove the monkey's paw.
Unless you're a sexual deviant or a racist black loudmouth. Then you're in, seemingly without an interview.
It's because they want to sell the IP not the writer. You don't need a lot of new people when the point is Spider-man not the guy dictating Spider-man's actions.
It doesn't matter why they're doing it, it matters that they're doing it. The conversation is about the survival of American comics, and the behavior is a major impediment to that. The behavior existing and being widespread is what matters. Everybody already knows it is performative, that doesn't matter.
No Its not possible has not been for a long time. the mid 2000's we must reboot or restore old status quo's bring back characters that no one really wanted anymore killing of the xmen and trying to replace them with the inhumans. the list goes on It made comics hard to read for everyone involved.
The best way to save comics is going back to episodic adventures, complete self contained stories and end all crossovers. Make each costumed hero or heroine its own protagonist, develop his or hers supporting cast, develop his or hers place in the world and a rogues gallery.
Once a year, a single special king-size deluxe super duper hiper well drawn well written issue will handle ONE crossover, gathering them all agaist some global/cosmic/epic threat.
Then they all go back to their places, dealing with consequences of what happened (new powers, lost powers, new resources, lost resources, new friends, new enemies, lost loved ones, etc). Time marches in-universe as "3 months" per real year.
There.
>The best way to save comics is going back to episodic adventures, complete self contained stories
That may be too far, but they should definitely re-adopt the Jim Shooter paradigm where in every issue there needs to be a conflict introduced and resolved. Even if you're doing a long running arc you still need to have a new B plot in every issue that begins and ends in that same issue.
Unironically no, the American industry is terminally ill. They're at the stage of irrelevance where even if they turned things around and started releasing high quality content, nobody would know because nobody is reading. There are food trucks in your home town that are doing more business than American comics, it's an impossibly small business that is always shrinking, and now entirely owned by media conglomerates that don't care a damn about the "legacy" of it all and will shutter it when the films are cooled off enough. It's over, this is just death rattle
Floppies must die, thats all I know.
LOL capeshit is dead. Most numbers are faked and all capeshit corners are filled with intelligent bots. It’s over. You were fooled.
DC really needs better artists.
It is one thing to have bad writing, but the artwork of all their comics is just beyond awful. Even IDW has better artists.
I can’t believe how many DC books copy and paste the same poses again and again and again. The Batman and Robin comic is especially terrible at this.
I couldn’t get pass the first issue. Gave me a headache. That art was awful.
They have plenty of great artists though, better than Marvel at least.
>They have plenty of great artists though,
They don’t. Most of DC’s good and even mediocre artists have gone indie. Most of the current “artists” at DC Comics are glorified tracers that copy-paste
Disagree.
I don't know why Inhyuk Lee still fools around doing urban Spider-man crap with his level of skill. He needs to be hitting up Hasbro, Paizo, and Onyx Path.
They can be saved, just put them in the hands of people who are fans of the comics rather than the hands of cultists that want to use the comics to push their views down people's throats.
>Can they pull out of their death spiral?
no. its gonna die. the industry has already lost one whole generation. zoomers. this practically means they cant get any new customers from the newer gens. the modern teenagers who are younger than zoomers are already gobbling manga and anime up and they dont even know any western cartoons shows or even 2d disney stuff, much less capeshit garbage comics
It's weird: one's run by an asian, the other by a white guy, and both keep hiring sjw headcases that probably hate them just because of their races and their perceived place on the hierarchal ladder of western society.
Yeah, Jim Lee was never the same after Wildstorm failed and he sold his child to DC, he was never the same....Man, was Cerebus right.
There's no recovering this, the only thing that can happen is other companies emerge and succeed. Marvel and DC are busy turning their comics into apology tours to people...who don't read comics.
You can save Marvel
>1)Get rid of most of the shit from Avengers Disassembled til now
>2)Keep the good shit and rework those with good potential
3)Hire someone like Mark Gruenwald to keep track of continuity
5)Hire Jim Shooter or someone like him to keep the writers in check
>namegay
>moronic opinion
many such cases
How's that possible?
It just is
Why not
The big two have three main problems.
1. Gender/Race/Sexuality flipping kills appeal with the older audience. They'll quit, or go to manga.
2. Cheesecake fanservice is taboo, kills appeal with adolescent boys, they will go to manga.
3. They got rid of all the good (expensive) writers, therefore can't provide compelling stories.
>have local comic shop I go to for years in my bachelor days
>get married, move 100 miles away, can no longer regularly go to that shop
>see all the doom and gloom on here and Bleeding Cool about how comic sales are in the shitter and the big two will be closing in two weeks
>worry about my old LCS
>run into LCS owner at con today
>tells me his comics are selling like gangbusters, clearing out statues and collectibles at cons to make more room for comics at his store
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I've found LCS thrive by area. The one in my hometown became a warhammer/TCG store. Comics/Manga are relegated to one wall in the corner now. The LCS in my college town was thriving, expanded to selling Games/DvDs/2 Rooms of Comics/Manga room/Statues/Toys etc. It's all about foot traffic and word of mouth, if you're not near enough to customers they'd rather buy online and meetup in person elsewhere.
>I mean, everytime I hear comic book news about these two, it's always something awful. Whether it be retcons, political BS, bad art, or some idiot on twitter spouting their mouth out.
This is true, but most of Marvel and DC isn't like that. Most of what they publish is fine at least, and some of it is even great. The problem is people don't read them. And the only way they get attention is through woke stuff in headlines.
Can it be saved? Yes, it would just take the right leadership figuring out how to get new eyes on comics, instead of releasing endless variant covers to try and stay afloat. Getting comics sold in more places besides comic shops would be huge. Yes it's possible, but it's probably going to take a while.
If people actually liked reading comics as much as they like posting in this shitty thread all the time comics would be fine. I buy corporate comics and I read them because I like it. I don't need people who don't even like my hobby trying to save it.
Very good post. Most people who talk about comics, on both sides, never read them. They just look at individual panels and get mad or glad about them.
There is literally no-one on this board with no interest in comics. What you have is people who used to love comics and have checked out of reading them, because they have been driven away by the industry turning to shit.
>anon says he cares
>you blatantly deny it
Crossovers, variant covers, events, retcons, reboots, didactic writing, asinine contradictory writing have been part and parcel with cape comics as long as I've been reading them. Those arguments are meaningless to me.
Perception of quality is subjective. I'm sure Anon would say the books I read are shit. Some of them in fact, are not great. But the sheer volume of product the corpos push through the stores means that some of it is gonna be enjoyable. Just stick with the people whose work you know you like.
Serialized action adventure storytelling in cape comics is generally not as strong as in past eras. Not enough action for my tastes. And I haven't regularly pulled a DC book since 2017. But I'm just not ready to write off the genre completely like most of the posts early in the thread.
Yes but now all that shit is happening in blackface so get angry.
>I buy corporate comics
Okay
>I read them
No you don't. If the people who (allegedly) bought comics actually read them, the situation wouldn't be as dire. Instead, you have a small group of "Collectors" who buy, bag, and board the comics with little care of what's inside them. The same whales who waste twenty dollars on a single variant cover of a book about tumblrized superheroes. The corporate douchetards KNOW they don't have to try because shitstains like you will buy whatever they put out thus quality suffers.
The IDW Sonic comics have a higher quality than your average Marvel book nowadays cause at least Sega keeps them from doing dumb shit like turning Sonic into a homo.
You say that like the next thread over in the catalog isn't a bunch of reeeing about lesbians in idw sonic.
It's Sonic the Hedgehog. Let's not pretend that in and of itself isn't a den of degeneracy. The point of that is Sega keeps that shit to a minimum....Which is why anything gay has to be snuck in unofficially via random shit on tumblr/twitter.
It's been too late for a long time. To describe it:
Marvel and DC comics lost a lot in the early 2000s due to the internet replacing a lot of what they do, giving more ways for people to find newer and niche comics. And then manga got popular with normalgays. This creates people who want more expressive and interesting things western comics hasn't done.
Marvel and DC actively do not want to change outside the smaller non-canon stuff, which is why those sell well.
To put it bluntly: Modern comics is like a toilet full of a chemicals that has a bunch of explosive reactions to it. The Janitor sees this, but instead of trying to clean it out, or flushing it, or making note they flush it and then they pour in a new chemical to flush down. This causes a chemical reaction when the new chemical goes down, causing the pipes to break and the toilet cannot be fixed without massive amounts of effort and money, maybe even it releases a chemical stink so bad it knocks everybody else around it out. In short: It's fricked until western comics tries to be creative again, doing the same things as before only leads to more damage when the market doesn't support it as much.
To save comics is to stop and not have shared universes anymore and do more than superhero comics. Variety is always gonna kept industries alive. Why do you think japanese comics (aka manga) is selling well.also doesn't help these two is fine dying yo keep thinking their right and not earn money (which is ironic when one is owned by Disney)
OP, no. Indie comics and manga are the future where the writers and artists are in control and can do what they want without having SJW's shove their woke identity politics trash into everything.
Marvel and DC are just big corporations with too many people and these types manage to worm their way into positions of authority, particularly HR departments which hold the real power, to which they then hire people with no talent but who identify with their political beliefs.
You also have to take into account that they have no interest in telling stories to entertain and make money, just use it as a platform for propaganda and like the parasites they are once Marvel and DC are dead they'll find a new host to suck dry!!!FACT!!!
One thing I keep wondering is how indie comics are going to get more exposure.
These companies drove out anyone who isn't an insane leftist ages ago so there's no hope for recovery.
I will never understand how a board that insists shows like the Simpsons that have been on for 30 years are zombie series past their prime that need to be put out of their misery but then in the next breath insist there's nothing wrong with holding onto capes that have been around for nearly three times that, it's actually DA JOOS ruining everything.
Yes,
I think is possible to save Marvel and Dc, we need MORE LGTBI1--32%/)+ representation.
We need more iconic characters coming out as gays and lesbian.
It always works. It is what people want.
And how's that work out for them?
I don't think there's any hope for Marvel.