Not that poster, but if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers, maybe things wouldn't be as dire as they are now. I'm not trying to shit on retailers, I'm not saying this is what they deserve. But if someone has no sense of self preservation, if someone does not fight hard for their own interests, then there's really nothing anyone else can do to save them. Sympathy is wasted on them.
You know, it really wasn't their battle to fight and they didn't deserve to be thrown onto the frontlines of a culture war. The same goes for the readers. Comic book stores are really just small time businesses and you are downplaying how severe cancel culture was back then. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. If you stand against the changes, they call you a racist and a bigot. If you're for the changes and go quietly, you pass on the problem to the customer and take the cancer into your store.
At the end of the day, the comic book shop is a causality of the culture war. It makes me sad the shills and industry ghouls are laughing at their demise. They're not going to get them back. They'll realize what they destroyed once they're all truly gone.
>they didn't deserve to be thrown onto the frontlines of a culture war.
Deserve's got nothing to do with it. If something is going to affect you directly, then you have to take action. It's not because you have an obligation to a cause or an industry. You have an obligation to yourself.
No civilian wants to be in a culture war, but it landed on every shore. You can't wait to be conscripted.
Yeah, but even so. Nobody really saw it as a war until years later. They just were as confused as everyone else. I didn't fully see it as what you'd think of as an attack until about 5 years in. I had to see everyone on Twitter attacking whites, comic books fans, males, just about everyone to understand it was massive subversion.
Also, what were they supposed to do? They don't have the money to push back and "fight" like you want them to. Comic book stores are just glorified news stands.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Also, what were they supposed to do?
Think about what they were able to do collectively to digital comics. It was to their own detriment, of course, but that's beside the point. Stores have power as the actual customers of these publishers. They control the purse strings.
If stores had simply sided with customers a few years sooner and called out the false narrative in the media, that alone would have done a lot. They didn't need to go alt right, or bash diversity. They simply needed to tell the truth.
"This stuff isn't selling."
"We are not healthy."
"Manga sales don't lift comic sales."
"We are losing legacy readers but not gaining new ones the big two are chasing."
Just tell the truth.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I know what you're saying with them holding the purse strings, but they would've got caught in the culture war then. If there some type of #ComicBookStoreGate, it would've destroyed them. They absolutely would've attacked those comic book store owners for standing up to them.
They really are just an unfortunate victim in the whole mess. If I were a comic book store owner, I'd just expand into general nerd media, though most already do that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I know what you're saying with them holding the purse strings, but they would've got caught in the culture war then
I have no idea what you think this involves, but all they had to do was not buy anything that doesn't sell. This is how they treated every indie publisher since the start. They only bought what people ordered. This is the entire underlying theory of the direct market.
7 months ago
Anonymous
If I could redo everything, knowing what I would know, I think the mistake of all comic consumers was we should drop series immediately when they do not appease us. Then, they should've put all that money into making a new industry. Don't make Youtube videos and complain about the subverted product hoping it can be saved, and invest all that time and energy into indie or an alternative new company immediately. That would've killed the subverted comic book companies immediately. The LCS wouldn't have been hurt if we all would've done that, too
7 months ago
Anonymous
If they could work with a distributor to get the fricking French to send their comics over, I'd be very interested.
I'd really like to own tangible copies of European comics.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Seconding this. How do we get so many Japanese comics but nothing from Europe?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Some creators do not want their work translated. I know the Moebius estate hasn't allowed a bunch of his work to be translated. (Major stuff has been but there is so much that hasn't been.) Americans don't tend to understand the European way of thinking. A lot of it is about risk/reward. Anyone seeking out these works will want a much larger slice of the pie because they are assuming a large risk, translating//printing. And if you're selling a classic to your audience already in Europe then these deals seem unfair or pointless. Really this is fertile ground. I have seen people use crowdfunding to do things like this. I think the problem is: you need someone clever enough to talk people round a table to try it and then you need it to actually pull through. Right now most of these people think there isn't enough of a market and besides a big name they don't think it'll sell much.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Thanks for the input. That's all interesting. It's frustrating because most of the good European comics I just happen to catch being posted here.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Americans are really starving for good Western comics. I think to make that deal, you'd have to speak French fluently and be able to curate the best selection of French comics for American audiences. Although frankly I have never once seen an Asterix book over here.
I think there is a sizeable hipster market that can tolerate a story not having the punch of capeshit or shonen, but it should still be poignant, meaningful.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Americans are really starving for good Western comics.
Are they? Kids are just buying manga, even in France.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I was thinking about 20-somethings and older, not kids. Winning kids back from shonen would be hard.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Honestly I think Western comics could win back girls before boys given how utterly superior shonen is at showing the ins and outs of a fight.
7 months ago
Anonymous
You wrap a complicated, interesting relationship around the fights, and now you got the girls. The fights add gravitas to the relationships for the girls.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Honestly I think Western comics could win back girls
No chance, shoujo and gay BL shit has an absolute lock on girl readers while Western publishers haven't done romance in like 50 years.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Demon Slayer has a lot of young female fans. Pretty sure it's shonen. Shonen often appeals to both sexes. Naruto has very dedicated female fans.
I actually feel more comraderie with Naruto fans than with AT fans even though Kishi is almost as bad as Ward. /schizo
BL...please let BL remain an underground thing. For the health of humanity, for the love of God, do not court fujos. Or do so through a subsidery of a subsidery of a subsidery, if you must.
Dear God, I do not want to imagine BL with American pacing.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Demon Slayer has a lot of young female fans. Pretty sure it's shonen. Shonen often appeals to both sexes. Naruto has very dedicated female fans.
True, but American capeshit can never do this. The tiny remaining contingent of capeshit readers lose their damn minds at even the slightest nods towards attracting female readers as you can see in this thread alone.
7 months ago
Anonymous
There were no lingering shots of Sasuke's ass in Naruto. Guys were fine. Girls were fine.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Nobody really saw it as a war until years later.
they did call everyone a chicken little for trying to point it out. Or they oversimplified the problem to the point where they were dismissing it as right-wing religious activism and shit. When it was all about dunking on those fricks, everyone was all about it.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>they
You mean the ones using Twitter on a regular basis?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>twitter
oh sweety, this shit has roots before twitter was a twinkle in Dorsey's eye.
No, they in this context means the LCS. Some of us tried to warn them that cozying up to this elements was going to have consequences, but most of them were such antiestablishment types they were easy fodder to use their antipathy.
>if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers
The readers who wanted to buy the stuff? The readers who b***h and whine but then run and buy the stuff they whine about not wanting? The readers who never support the shit they claim to want instead?
You c**ts do nothing but cry and blame others and never have the self awareness to admit that you don’t actually do what you preach and you do not represent the majority of readers. You’re just another entitled whiny fanboy.
I don't want to hear shit about fighting for quality when Spider-Man man fans would rather hate-read about Peter getting cucked by a man named Paul than even entertain the idea of reading something else, just because the book has "Spider-Man" on the cover
Yes they are, the one they don't give a shit about is Spider-Boy
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Yes they are >source: your ass
Hate-reading was debunked already, people just stop buying. That's why manga overtook comics.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm not talking about in comparison to manga, I'm talking about in comparison to other western comics, Spider-Man fans would rather see Peter get cucked than just read a different comic, much in the same way capeshit fans would rather b***h about the state of capeshit than read non-capeshit comics
>I don't want to hear shit about fighting for quality when Spider-Man man fans would rather hate-read about Peter getting cucked
It's *not* about the fight for quality. I never said it was about quality. It's about the market behaving rationally. The stores that got into trouble were buying speculatively. If people actually bought these comics, they wouldn't be having a problem.
When the market does not behave rationally, when stores are allowing manipulation by buying 20 copies of a comic just to get one special cover they could mark up 2000%, it is sick. They are propping up failure. They needed to say no to that shit. They needed to stand with readers. Everything in pop culture is crashing because nothing is organic. All of this stuff is by fiat.
Comics have died as a medium due to distribution
Comic book shops pretty much made it so the market would only gravitate there
at first it was great because it was an answer to censorship, but also it was a downfall
Comic book shops made it so comics would only focus on the market of fanboys
The Simpsons character is more reflective of reality than a lot of people realize.
My closest "little storefront" is an hour round trip and run by a guy that treats his customers like an inconvenience. I ask if they carry a book and instead of offering to order it for me or anything I get told "what's on the shelves is what we got" like I pissed in his cereal. I went specifically to support the local business and left thinking Amazon would've been faster and cheaper. Good job, LCS.
I know people say that, but this was all completely unnecessary. Indie comics were around before they destroyed the entire industry. They'll be around after it's destroyed, too.
So long homosexuals, now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores with ease of access for the average consumer, S, you won't be missed.
Now let's kill Marvel and DC too.
I wonder what it's like to infiltrate an industry, thinking you'll make bank, then completely destroy it over the course of about two decades. From what I see here, they never acknowledge the real problem is they chased out the whites, got political, subverted everything for subversions sake, and can't fathom why nobody wants that trash.
What were once healthy parts of the industry, like second hand sales and comic shops are gone. It's kind of depressing.
The last comic I bought was that racist Miles Morales one because it was so offensive it was funny, I had to have it in print form. >white people collect comics
Like maybe the old comics, but not the new. Comic collectors have always been a meme. The new blood in comics ruined the collectors market too, because there's nothing of worth out anymore.
>The real problem is they chased out the READERS. Only people still buying are COLLECTORS who don't even read the comic.
Collector market isn't actually that big though so your point doesn't hold any mustard.
>Collector market isn't actually that big though so your point doesn't hold any mustard.
NTA but that actually helps his point.
If comic book stores chase collectors and collectors are an even smaller market, of course they're not going to be able to stay open in a world of rising costs.
>second hand sales and comic shops >healthy parts of the industry
The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry, rendering Comics from something available to most people off a shelf to tiny shops you wouldn't know of unless you were already into comics; this enabled the 2000s era of fanboys infiltrating and pandering to themselves which furthered the incestuous spiral, which in turn enabled the political takeover in a desperate attempt to make money off what (from the out of touch executive perspective) was a large and socially influential demographic in twatter types.
And when presented with the idea of digital comics to try and let things heal, these LCS homosexuals boycotted because they didn't care for the long term health of the industry so much as keeping their parasitic relationship. They're no better and I'll be happy to see them die with the Big 2.
>tiny shops you wouldn't know of unless you were already into comics
That's bullshit. They're called specialty stores. I'll give you an example as a manga reader. I sometimes go to "tiny anime shops" to get anime and manga related good specifically. I can still buy manga just about anywhere where books are sold, though. Those specialty stores are very important to me as a consumer of anime and manga so I can talk to a store owner who actually knows a thing or two about manga. It's their whole job. They're also super important for rallying any type of fandom or fan meet in the area. You can't rely on Comic cons for everything.
Likewise, if I want to ask a super obscure question about comics or find a really rare comic, that's the store I'd go to. I'm not going to ask some idiot at Barnes and Noble these things. You just don't understand the importance of the brick and mortar comic store at all.
You idiots are also full of hubris and think your comics would sell without the pushing of the comic book stores. Good luck getting moronic normies buying transgender Batman or gay Miles Morales, or whatever you're pushing these days.
>The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry,
The Direct Market kept it going. If they stayed only in the newsstand market, they would've died back in the 80s because they wouldn't have had the avenues for innovation. Where they went wrong was pandering only to collectors and marginalizing themselves, making them too weak to try things more effectively
The 00s crowd happened because they tried to present themselves as the savior of comics and fricked things up way more than the 90s ever did
Comics in it's current form doesn't deserve to be on the news stand. I'd hate to the store owner given that shit and have it just sit there while other magazines sell. They have to earn that right back.
>The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry,
I'm tired of people saying shit like this that is objectively false. Back in the day distributors would routinely keep a load of comics and put them in with the unsold returns from newstands and essentially re-sell them while keeping the profits and not passing them on to the publishers. The creation of the Direct Market actually massively improved things by cutting out these issues and giving more control. And comics were avaliable at small shops and newstands for a long time even after the Direct Market was created (some even still sell them now). Talk to most people who read comics in the 80s and most of the 90s and they were not buying them from comic shops.
The problem is the 90s crash really destroyed comics as an American pastime and all the subsequent gimmicks never actually fixed the problems. People really don't understand what the speculator boom and bust did. So many creators left comics, so many distributors were closed down, so many people had invested so much into the industry and I've seen estimates putting the closure of like 50% of all shops. Diamond ended up with a monopoly that was challenged by monopoly rules but found to be one of the only things actually keeping comics afloat.
The problem is that comics were decimated at the worst time. Decent manga/anime had been flooding into the states, loads of other interests like videogames were taking off more so than before, card games like MTG. What tricks did comics have left? More events? More gimmick covers? The movement towards the secondary trade market led to decompressed stories and those sales ticked things on. And then with the Internet we have seen digital media take off and comics have never been able to really get into that, even with more modern attempts at subscription stuff. So all we have left is a bunch of after thoughts and shitty creators more interested in getting into screenplays and a dead medium.
>the 90s crash really destroyed comics as an American pastime
what happened?
Also, the 90s were a very long time ago. Saying that something that happened in the 90s is the reason for people's purchasing choices 30 years later is like saying WWII explains the 70s disco craze. Or that the disco craze is why Yu Gi Oh got so popular in the 2000s. The 90s are ancient history so far as popular culture is concerned.
You mean what was the 90s crash? In the late 80s publishers saw they could sell huge numbers to speculators via the newly emerging direct market comic shops so they flooded the market with variants, special editions, #1s, etc. This artificially inflated their sales because stores (and to a lesser extent real people) would purchase large numbers of the same issues. High on the temporary sales explosion, the Big Two massively over-expanded, especially Marvel which went on a corporate acquisition spree and even tried to become its own distributor. But by the mid-90s the junk inventory had piled up and the wave was unsustainable so the bubble popped, causing a massive market crash that wiped out like 50% of all comic stores and drove Marvel to bankruptcy. The industry would never again see anywhere near the highs it did in that period.
Thanks, didn't know any of that.
But that sounds like it only affected specialty comic stores. Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
You're getting it wrong: by the 90s most people weren't buying at those places anymore. As others have said above, the comic shops arose in the late 70s/80s because newsstands and stores started to dump comics because they weren't profitable enough. The industry shifted to the "direct market" of comic stores during that time, which is what led to the bubble and crash.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
In some ways, yes.
Loss of money from comics overall during the mid-90s meant less money to spend on having comics sold in the newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc
Meanwhile the key factor that people ignore: A lot of newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc DID NOT WANT THEM like
>Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
You're getting it wrong: by the 90s most people weren't buying at those places anymore. As others have said above, the comic shops arose in the late 70s/80s because newsstands and stores started to dump comics because they weren't profitable enough. The industry shifted to the "direct market" of comic stores during that time, which is what led to the bubble and crash.
said. They were selling them at a loss and demanded the comic companies put higher prices on them, and the comic companies didn't really want to fight them anymore. That's part of why they started to decline in those markets during the late 90s and onwards till Marvel and DC finally pulled out of them in the 2010s
The problem right now is that magazines themselves have been in decline since the late 00s and if comics tried to jump back into that newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc there's no guarantee it would even sell and the companies would have to eat the costs from returns.
I mean for frickssake, everyone demanding that comics be sold in grocery stores again--have you looked at a magazine rack in the grocery store lately? A lot of the magazines are these $15-$20 specials; you'd have to get someone to take a risk at making a magazine collecting comics and eat the costs for like a few years, and that could be expensive
>a very long time ago
Comics are dominated by its past. Why is superheroes the dominated genre? Because some psychologist said comics were perverting kids so the industry made a code banning a bunch of shit. You literally couldn't have monsters or show certain things in comic books, here are some rules: >No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title. >All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.
If you didn't accept the code, most distributors or stores would not carry your books. Companies like DC used the code to purposefully go after competitors selling things like horror. Superheroes were already popular but they easily got round these rules. So while the code was made in 1954, waned by the 70s and abandoned by 2001 it still influences things. Comics are for kids and superheroes and the dominant genre.
>what happened?
To summarise and generalise, speculator boom and bust: >The successful auction of some older comics (Action Comics #1) made people think, "Comics are super valuable investment!" >Superstar artists at Marvel massively boosted sales, they moved away from the old house style art they then later left and formed Image. (X-Men #1 in the 90s is still the best selling comic of all time.) >Death of Superman event, feeling of finality and potential investment in getting the issues. >GIMMICKS, foil covers, #1 issues and renumbering, events. >Market was flooded with comics. >Small operations followed the Image example, their number #1 issues sold better than best selling comics today. >Loads of new shops opened up to capitalise on it. >Marvel overleveraged its positon, buying up collectible card companies and a distributor. Corporate raiding.
>Marvel almost went bankrupt and sold off the movie rights to a lot of its characters (hence why Sony and Fox had what they had). >All distributors collapsed leading to the Diamond monopoly, a monopoly that existed until COVID and DC changing to a different one. >Up to 50% of the shops closed. >Many creatives left the industry and didn't return. >Industry never returned to those levels of sales, the average book now doesn't hit anywhere like those numbers. >This happened as other media was rising and published media has waned. >Comics had a mainstream appeal before hand and it massively lost that. >The hobby had been taken over by obsessive collectors who wanted investment or value on essentially worthless items. >The gimmicks and ridiculous stuff clashed with what some wanted. > People aping off of Alan Moore or Frank Miller leading to edgy comics and the battle between those insecure people wanting comics to be taken seriously vs those who wanted entertainment.
(2/2)
7 months ago
Anonymous
Edge and seriousness also have entertainment value.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Indeed. The edge part and the battle part of the sentence were seperate really. I was saying that there is deep seated insecurity between people arguing over depth in comics vs pure entertainment. Deep comics with serious themes can be entertaining. But there certainly is a battle over what people perceive as the soul of comics.
There are already several replies to this post that disprove it, so I won't bother.
But you don't understand the history of comics. Not even in the slightest. You know literally nothing about the business.
I'm glad other posts are rightfuly calling out this bullshit. Yes, comics only being available in shops for the most part isn't the best thing, but the newstand was dying by the 80's, and if you ask any old gays they'll tell you getting a decent selection at one was spotty at best.
The Direct Market should have just been a stopgap to maintain the industry through the collapse of newsstand sales. Instead it became an albatross around the industry's neck. The publishers should have found better avenues for sales and distribution ages ago. That anon is right in that the result is today comics are relegated to the weird ghetto of specialty shops with no ability to appeal to the masses and pull in new readers. The publishers should have seen this death spiral ages ago but they either didn't or ignored it.
>digital pushback
There was that shitfit about the Wal-Mart digest comics a couple years back too. Some of them are still fricking mad about it. Comics are a weird ass industry where they spite innovation and bringing in readers and then wonder why the frick business is down.
My friend just got back from his comic shop still open.
How about that?
A fourth one just opened where I live, haven't checked it out yet. The other three have one that's barely alive, one that seems to do really well somehow, and one I forget exists.
>Comics are a weird ass industry where they spite innovation
So many big 2 comics have a free digital edition with a print issue and there are subscription services for access to shit loads of comics.
Half the trouble is people say "I want x!" and then it doesn't sell. People say they want more genres, they try it, doesn't sell. People say they want anthologies, they try it, doesn't sell. People say it is ultimately about quality, but then will go out and buy a dogshit comic over something good.
About the only innovation that comics could do is just to actually make tankobans, cheap paperbacks with far more content that people might actually buy.
Not that poster, but if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers, maybe things wouldn't be as dire as they are now. I'm not trying to shit on retailers, I'm not saying this is what they deserve. But if someone has no sense of self preservation, if someone does not fight hard for their own interests, then there's really nothing anyone else can do to save them. Sympathy is wasted on them.
I remember a few years ago at an event a bunch of shop owners really did Marvel a kicking over the shit quality of stuff.
This is more a general point about small businesses, but what you realise is that most human beings are incompetent and can't run a business. My LCS has weathered many stores because it has diversified, been clever at what it does and the owner genuinely knows what he is doing. So many other stores are run by enthusiasts or people overextending what they are doing.
It is weird but comics are still a massive word of mouth thing for many and a good salesman can absolutely say "You like x, try y!" But when you have people that are either the Comicbookguy stereotype or some c**ty hipster type giving up garbage recommendations, it goes no where.
Don't they have a month-long delay for new comics on those services?
I gave Marvel's a shot and the delay wasn't even what bothered me. Half the pages just refused to load on both my phone and tablet versions. Tachiyomi has no such problems and I don't know why pirate media is so much better than legal media these days.
>most human beings are incompetent and can't run a business
That's absolutely true, but just in the context of this thread, we're talking about Jim Hanley's closing down. That doesn't bode well for anybody.
>About the only innovation that comics could do is just to actually make tankobans, cheap paperbacks with far more content that people might actually buy.
They did this in the 2000s with some books and they sold well enough to basically save series like Spider-Girl, Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Then they just stopped for no real reason.
>They did this in the 2000s with some books and they sold well enough to basically save series like Spider-Girl, Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Then they just stopped for no real reason.
There was a rumor that Ike got mad that Scholastic or something demanded more money and so those digest sized books stopped
That could be true but I think it's also because Marvel wanted to wind down Spider-Girl and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane because they were pushing Brand New Day and wanted to shove Mary Jane to the side.
Weirdly enough they are doing small size books right now but they are original Marvel series. Hulk, Spider-Man, Avengers. Not sure how they are selling because I don't know if kids want to read those old comics.
>Penguin Classics
First time I've heard about that. Does DC have an equivalent? Seems like a cool idea.
Marvel has Penguin classics but also Taschen put out some Marvel books as did Folio. So like there are a bunch of premium classic formats for Marvel stuff.
I know this might not sound like a big deal but I work in a library and what immediately catches my eye about this that would catch a patron's eye is how LEGIBLE THE SPINE IS.
Tankobons are nice and fat with thick spines, when arranged on the shelf it is immediately obvious what the title is and what the number is and many times they even fit artwork onto them. Look at this shelf of Western comics. That it is a smallish image is irrelevant, because imagine seeing a shelf like this from down the bookshelf aisle before you walk to it. How legible is it? Even when you get up close to it in many cases you will need to pull the comic out or lean in and squint to see how it is labeled to know the order number.
I think this makes the shelves look cluttered and intimidated. I've seen patrons linger at the Western comics section and get flustered and confused and walk off on MULTIPLE occasions. They really like the thicker books though.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Now compare that to this shelf of manga. And this isn't even arranged on the shelf 'nicely' the way I like. This is a messy display shelf and yet it looks more legible and intimidating thanks to those chunky spines. On a visual level its more approachable. The last time I saw this play out it was a father with his kids, the kids got confused by the numbering of the comics and just walked over to the adjacent manga section. You gotta nab kid's interest while they're young because they'll carry that preference going forward and the comics failed to do that while the manga did not. Consider those kid's preferences set.
They later approached me looking for DOGMAN and Raina Telgemeir comics, all of which have nice fat chunky spines too.
7 months ago
Anonymous
this is obvious to everyone that read American comics for more than 3 months
but the people in here that tell you that 300 writers and a shit format aren't a problem for new readers are never going to agree with you
7 months ago
Anonymous
pricing is also a major factor even when a book does have a big fat spine like a compendium priced too high for an entry-level reader,
7 months ago
Anonymous
Comic book trade paperbacks price themselves out by being in color and printing on glossy paper. WHY? Manga prints on black and white and on cheap paper and the readers don't care. The artwork is still nice. Even the kid's comics have figured it out . . . they print in color but they print on cheaper matte paper, the kids don't care. Personally I think the matte paper looks nicer too.
7 months ago
Anonymous
People always prefer colour. Fact.
7 months ago
Anonymous
insane how every take you wrote in this thread is just factually wrong yet you always say it with such certainty >people always prefer color >multiple writers isn't a problem >price and format aren't a problem >manga is as hard to get into as capeshit >miles is more famous than peter
how do you do it?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>people always prefer color
They do. That’s why even manga has color pages. >multiple writers isn't a problem
It isn’t. Even manga series have multiple writers. >price and format aren't a problem
It’s not, because stupid shits like you always ignore the fact publishing manga abroad is always cutting the chapter by chapter publishing step and just jumping to collections. The price is a factor but tons of manga moves so slowly you are
not getting much actual content per page. >manga is as hard to get into as capeshit
It is if we want to play games and pretend people are lobotomised like you people always want to do. >miles is more famous than peter
I never said that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Boob anon, half the people ITT are complaining about coloreds in their comics.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Now here's a better arranged shelf of manga. It looks orderly, clean, and legible. Even from an aisle's distance you can make out titles and order numbers. It just looks more approachable than the comics.
The fat graphic novels circulate well. They should make more of those. Or maybe reconsider the printing dimensions they go with, those tall skinny books aren't cutting it.
this is obvious to everyone that read American comics for more than 3 months
but the people in here that tell you that 300 writers and a shit format aren't a problem for new readers are never going to agree with you
You are right, but I felt it was worth adding because 'shelf appeal' is rarely ever brought up when the topic is discussed despite that being one of the most important factors. The tankobons are just the perfect size and incidentally are very similar in dimension to the romance novels on our spinning racks which just fly off the shelves. I think there's an ideal size for reading materials and comic book trade paperbacks are just too big.
7 months ago
Anonymous
how well do things like Judge Dredd Case Files or Tintin Albums do?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Tintin does alright so long as it is in the kid's comic book section. The most popular Eurocomics are Geronimo and Thea Stilton.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>The most popular Eurocomics are Geronimo and Thea Stilton.
GRIM
how low the italians, french and belgian have fallen
7 months ago
Anonymous
I don't think our librarian is familiar enough with Eurocomics to order more. I could think of stuff to order where I in charge of that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I think Eurocomics are simply not well known in the US and UK comics even less well known
7 months ago
Anonymous
I haven't worked anywhere that carries Judge Dredd, sorry. The most popular British comics are well, Alan Moore, his stuff is evergreen.
7 months ago
Anonymous
but the stuff he made at DC with maybe LOEG only?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>redundant copies of every Negima volume
highly based library
>People say they want more genres, they try it, doesn't sell.
Because they half ass it. When people say they want different genres they don't mean
"capeshit but with a twist of horror"
"capeshit but with slightly more romance"
I'm glad other posts are rightfuly calling out this bullshit. Yes, comics only being available in shops for the most part isn't the best thing, but the newstand was dying by the 80's, and if you ask any old gays they'll tell you getting a decent selection at one was spotty at best.
When I went to tokyo I bought manga in a 7-11
if comics were in 7-11 in America I would buy them there
As of right now I buy a trade every few months from a comic shop because it is inconvenient and I have things to do
My first comic was pic related. My Dad bought it for me in some random gas station in Alabama on a cross-country family drive. I remember seeing the colorful cover of a robot wizard standing over a bunch of weird people and just being entranced. That used to happen all the time, it's how new readers came into comics.
You can buy random manga at a 7/11 because people travel by mass transit and that’s how you pass the time. That is how it’s profitable to sell them there in whatever minuscule quantities they offer.
>if comics were in 7-11 in America I would buy them there
Used to be, you could buy comics in any 7-11 or grocery store or news stand or drugstore. They were in spinning racks, magazine shelves, and checkout lines. Comics were easy to find, and convenient to buy.
Somewhere along the way all that dried up. Comics only got sold in comic book stores. Not every town has one. If there is one, you have to go out of your way to find it. And when you get there it only has boxes of old comics and mostly sells card games and funko pops. Where I live, there are zero stores selling comics, and I bet there are lots of places like that. I don't remember the last time I saw an actual new physical comic book for sale.
How are people supposed to buy comics if they're not for sale at the places where they shop?
>How are people supposed to buy comics if they're not for sale at the places where they shop?
If shit like newsstands were still around in areas with lots of foot traffic. Issue is that zoning laws all but force comic shops into strip malls 15 minutes driving away from the nearest residential area so kids can't spend on it (not that kids get their own pocket cash to begin with but that's another problem). There aren't small stands, there aren't hybrid shops, there's no small corner of a publix just leased out to one guy keeping some stock there. You're either wholly dedicated to the hobby or you don't buy anything.
>somewhere along the line
Yeah, it was called the 90's collectibles speculation boom. You can't have cheap comics when people want the next Superman #1. This is why Archie is still in supermarkets and Superman isn't.
It’s incredible how in the year of our Lord 2023 people are still clinging to an outdated model from forty years ago as the way to save comics simply because they’re nostalgic for it and understand nothing about the business model.
The problem is that everything related to how you buy comics is moronic and the industry has not adapted to anything. You have to go to stores to buy one issue a month at $4 or $5 for about 20 pages worth of content (realistically less than that because of how slow the writing is). Most stores are out of the way. Digital should have been cheaper but stores threw a fit so they're the same as floppies. There's tons and tons of audience alienating and insulting bad stories from the 2000s alone that helped drive off readers or laid the groundwork for bad precedents that did: One More Day, House of M, Identity Crisis and such. Geoff Johns' pointlessly and cruelly violent shit. Decompressed comics in general which shallowly took storytelling styles from manga and TV. The entire attempt at trying to copy TV in general and comics turning into blatantly obvious pitches for TV showd and movies.
And through all of this you had people like DiDio, Brevoort, and others who told fans that they were glad they were mad because angry fans will hate buy and talk about the comics. Did Fear Itself or Cry For Justice or Original Sin need wokeness to be awful comics? No. The "woke virus" mostly came in the second half of the 2010s and if it had any effect it was a straw that broke the camel's back one. Hiring writers that hate the fans and characters to make everyone black crippled transdykes is bad but it's not the root cause. It's 20 years of terrible decisions, bad comics, poorly thought out ideas like the DC reboot, trying to make the comics like the movies, openly advertising that none of your stories matter, and telling fans who hate all this to suck your dick all while failing to adapt to a changing consumer climate. Wokeness is like a drop in the ocean in terms of the industry's problems. The horse is beaten, crippled and dying and wokeness is just strolling by to take a piss on it.
Fricking this. What people focusing only on the woke problem miss is that, most of the people in charge in the 00s were still in charge in the 2010s. Dan Buckley became publisher for Marvel in 2003 and got promoted to President of Marvel in 2017 and is still there. Axel Alonso became EIC of Marvel in 2011 and stayed there till getting forced out in 2017. Brevoort's been at Marvel since 1989. CB Cebulski was at Marvel in the early 00s and quit in 2006 to go freelance but came back a year later and signed an exclusive contract as editor/talent scout and became EIC in 2017.
Over at DC Dan Didio joined the company in 2002 and stayed there in power until he was forced out in early 2020. Jim Lee's still been with the company since like 1999 or something.
Tom Brevoort is such a huge fricking idiot. On his blog he admitted they just ignore online sentiment about comics. Wtf? In the modern age, where everyone and their mom has a phone/tablet/computer and express their opinion on multiple social media platforms 24/7, this moron casually admits they don’t absorb any of that data. Editorial self reports every time they open their mouth.
>LISTEN TO THE FANS!!! >Okay here is what y- >I DON’T FRICKING WANT THIS SHIT EVEN THOUGH I REPEATEDLY MOAN ABOUT WANTING IT ONLINE!
There you go, two decades of what it has looked like when companies try to address things fans claim to want. It’s like trying to get a petulant child to eat something only the little frick keeps changing its mind every two seconds and throwing tantrums when you can’t read its mind and then throw up and complain it’s sick when you feed it just chocolate like it wants
7 months ago
Anonymous
See
Curating, analyzing and interpreting online data is key to growing. Labelling it as “whining” is exactly how you get into positions where your business begins to stagnate which is where we’re at now
Curating, analyzing and interpreting online data is key to growing. Labelling it as “whining” is exactly how you get into positions where your business begins to stagnate which is where we’re at now
Most people online do not make intelligent and informed comments. They complain and show their ignorance because the things they whine about is often things that have been done countless times and don’t work or sell enough to support it.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Stop your whining
7 months ago
Anonymous
Online data doesn't have to be random comments. Are people buying because of our stories or variant covers? out of the people who buy how many are actually reading? How many people have dropped the book entirely? Did they drop because of a particular story/issue/writer/artist? etc. All extremely valuable data points if they had a digital platform worth a damn. but naaaah let's ignore all of that and fight with people on twitter and cbr, surely that will fix the problem.
7 months ago
Anonymous
the new PAIGE book has 17 variants or something, and they are all bait of the highest order
7 months ago
Anonymous
And how much of online talk can actually be relied on to be accurate? How many can be verified to be actual buying costumers instead of pirating and then feeling entitled to whine about everything?
So long homosexuals, now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores with ease of access for the average consumer, S, you won't be missed.
Now let's kill Marvel and DC too.
Also >Th--the characters are more popular than ever how does this happen?
Multiple reasons.
For one, no one gives a shit what the characters do outside the MCU, especially when it's some weird geopolitical story about grey morality between Stark Corp trying to build roads on Krakoa that will never be adapted into film for another 2 centuries.
No amount of adaptations will save a non streamlined story, anime works well as a commercial for manga because people want to be the first to know what happens next, that's why people were begging for GRR to release Winds already
YOU FAT FRICK
But if it's some unrelated shit then yeah the fanbase is and always will be niche.
Petit bourgeoisie dick sucker. You deserve your Hitler dubs.
You morons are so stupid. You know you can have both, right? You ever think about that? Now you have one less option but you morons are destructive. >your average normie is going to pick up a comic about gay superman and khamala khan the muslim
Yeah, no. Now they really don't stand a chance out in the wild. Only comic book fans really care about comics, at the end of the day.
>your average normie is going to pick up a comic about gay superman and khamala khan the muslim
I explicitly said kill DC and Marvel and all capeshit.
I'd rather not have DC and Marvel die, but for there to be a purge. It's all it takes. I'm not a huge fan of capeshit either, but I just want the real perpetrators out of the comic industry first.
You morons are so stupid. You know you can have both, right? You ever think about that? Now you have one less option but you morons are destructive. >your average normie is going to pick up a comic about gay superman and khamala khan the muslim
Yeah, no. Now they really don't stand a chance out in the wild. Only comic book fans really care about comics, at the end of the day.
>now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores
Fricking lol no they won't. You aren't turning back the clock on physical distribution. What's going to happen is comics are going to be available digitally and maybe through a tiny handful of specialty mail-order services or a few remaining stores. Stores and stands don't carry the books already because they don't want to because they don't sell, it has nothing to do with the existence of the stores. The stores were a reaction to that fact.
>now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores
GUESS IT IS TIME TO GO TO THE OL' NEWSTAND TO GET A COPY OF THE FUNNY BOOKS!
Who is Mr Beast and why are you so interested in that there rectangle in your hand?
Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores.
You can buy random manga at a 7/11 because people travel by mass transit and that’s how you pass the time. That is how it’s profitable to sell them there in whatever minuscule quantities they offer.
So then it's an issue of knowing your consumer, which we know the industry has an issue with.
>Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores.
Grocery stores don't want them because they don't sell, that's why they stopped carrying them in the first place. Comic stores are the result of this, not the cause.
Actually it was the publishers not wanting to do them because everything from paying for the display location to stocking them yourself etc. costs a shit ton of money.
>Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores. >"Sweetie would you like to pick out a comic at the checkout?" >"Get fricked you fricking b***h. She just asked me if I wanted to read? YEAH AS IF." >"Sweetie if you're not careful you'll use up all your phone time for today." >"MOM I WILL BE WATCHING YOUTUBE LATER."
Do those little Archie digests still sell? My sister used to love those and my Mom bought them at the checkout every time. Seems like the perfect material for kids.
Comic saled have been falling since the 1970s; the direct market started out as a counter to falling news stand sales. News stand comics are returnable so companies would eat lossed on any unsold comics whereas the direct market's selling point for publishers was that they would forego returns. The problems with news stands now, 50 years later, would be even worse. Especially given the shrinking footprint of print media.
And nothing of value was lost. If you're still invested in comics after Death Metal or you're still deluded that anyone except collectors and the people stupid enough to buy from them are interested, you only have yourself to blame.
LCS were nothing but parasites. Disney and WB need to set up their own comic shops that deal exclusively in their products. Customers will flock to them, while avoiding the smelly armpit of the industry.
>Disney and WB need to set up their own comic shops >everything should be more corporate and I hate small business owners
That sounds fricking terrible. What kind of shill are you? I want to go into a comic book store and buy indie shit, not Disneyslop and DC/Marvelslop. No, I don't care about your black Disney princess or Miles Morales. The fun of a comic shop is they're not owned by you homosexuals.
Stop rewriting history. >Black Panther was a huge hit
It was marginally successful and it managed to hit it's target audience. Tricking the black American audience into believing Black Panther was a black power movie was clever marketing at the time. They really rode that BLM wave. >Miles is bigger than Peter ever was
lol. lmao. Miles will always be in Peter's shadow. It's by design. He just can't escape it and none of his comics are good and even his movies need Parker to make them work. Sorry.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Black Panther was the most successful marvel movie until Endgame. Seethe.
Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time. Seethe.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Spiderverse is nice and comfy next to Ice Age lol. Black Panther had clever "black power" marketing tricks, like I said. It's higher up, but it's still in the shadow of white heroes. Also, the graph on the right is JUST capeshit. It doesn't fare well next to any realm film.
Sorry, shill. Lying doesn't make things real, even on Cinemaphile.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time. Seethe.
The Incredibles is still an animated superhero movie even if it doesn't have a Marvel logo on it
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time.
That's not what you argued. You said Miles is bigger than Peter ever was which is just false. Neither of Miles' movies have outgrossed any of Peters' at the box office, not even the shitty ones. And he couldn't overtake them even with decades of inflation raising ticket prices. He couldn't outgross Spider-Man 1 twenty years later. He couldn't outgross Amazing Spider-Man ten years later. You're living in a fantasy world if you think Miles is more popular than Peter.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Miles is more popular than Peter among the younger generation. Nobody knows who Peter is except old farts who whine about not having a girlfriend on twitter.
7 months ago
Anonymous
is this bait or are you mentally moronic? there's more to the world than american ghetto teens
you really think that if you asked people on the street, they'd answer "spiderman name is Miles Morales"??
7 months ago
Anonymous
Urban areas contain the vast majority of the population, moron.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Miles is more popular than Peter among the younger generation. Nobody knows who Peter is except old farts who whine about not having a girlfriend on twitter.
yes and they all imma do my own THANG all over america
7 months ago
Anonymous
>t was marginally successful
It was 9th highest grossing film of all time when it released.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yes but it wasn’t #1 ERGO nobody wants to see black people. RACIST FACT!!!
Impossible to operate because big companies like CR control the licencing. You're basically going to buy from them to sell to people, so why don't customers just buy directly?
CR (and by extension Sony) doesn't control anything for manga, all the manga publishing in America these days is controlled by the Japanese parent companies since they own most of the publishers (or cut out the middleman and just started western branches for their western publishing, ala Square Enix and Kodansha).
There's an anime store in my town but I'd say its mainly for figures, merch, and gundams. At least, I only go there for Gundams and there's always one or two people sitting at the tables clipping sprues.
I had to stop going there because I'd pop in for a bottle of airbrush paint and come out with $200 of new kits to add to my backlog.
>Alright, let's see about your monthly orders >we're gonna send you 20,000 issues of this month's Commander Queef punches the Nazis and gets Gay Married >Another 5,000 issues of that big indie comic Girldick Rape Diaries >There's a pricebreak if you order all 50 of the variant covers of the new #1 Issue of Ethnostate Soldiers... No, this is the other #1. Yeah they rebooted it again. >And then we've got about... half a dozen funny crossovers. I'm sure the Family Matters meets MASK crossover is gonna be a huge seller for you!
>Boss! We have over 30k tons of useless paper and plastic laying around! No one buys this shit anymore they just came here for Warhammer/Magic board games and manga! What do we do? >It's ok Jimmy-- I'm taking these all home in my basement then reselling them on ebay for thirty times the price in 20 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were. These things change and a more niche interest like actally reading physical comic books is an obvious casualty in the move/push away from physical stores of that kind.
I don't care for comics, but in OP's post, the person is pleading for Marvel and DC to do something. If people keep relying on large companies to change then they will be frustrated and let down. Either new life is breathed into these things, or they may very well die.
Wish I had the retailer who responded to this making fun of Millar for not really understanding the problems. Making fun of lien variants and shit iirc
The craziest thing to me is that in the Direct Market era there has never been a way to track how many actual customer buy issues. Yes, I know the WELL AKSHUALLY that since comics inventory is non-returnable the number of copies ordered and shipped to comic stores are counted as sales by the publishers, even if they do not sell through to customers at retail. But it seems insane that the publishers don't want to know those sell-though numbers. How do you gauge what your readers actually buy and want without that? No other industry works like this.
But that's just a second-order guess. It's crazy there isn't accurate direct information on consumer behavior. This is how you get the 90s bubble, looking at what the shops are buying rather than what real people are actually purchasing. e.g., ss there really a reader demand for all these variant covers or is this just shops gambling on them?
Whatever they don’t sell immediately goes to the bargain bin or back issue stock. And tons of LCS sales of new stuff are based on people’s pull lists and they don’t necessarily come and pick those up every week and there are policies where if you don’t come and pick your shit in x amount of time they won’t hold it anymore. It’s impossible to get accurate numbers because of this because they aren’t actually final sales until whenever the regular people have come and picked up and paid their shit and that can be anything from days to weeks if they come once a month.
All LCS's either become Nerd General Stores for board game /tg/ gays, or just die out.
When I went to tokyo I bought manga in a 7-11
if comics were in 7-11 in America I would buy them there
As of right now I buy a trade every few months from a comic shop because it is inconvenient and I have things to do
Watch out there buster, you're on thin ice, point out that accessibility matters more than isolated economy and watch as you're call a corporatist by a libertarian moron who lacks self awareness itt.
>Watch out there buster, you're on thin ice, point out that accessibility matters more than isolated economy and watch as you're call a corporatist by a libertarian moron who lacks self awareness itt.
"Comics will sell more if they're sold in more places"
How is this a hot take
...you're missing that anon's sarcasm. They're agreeing with you and mocking the other morons in this thread screeching about how comics being in the LCS ghetto is actually a good thing.
I didn't misunderstand Anon I just thought that it was a unanimous opinion that like
there should be more places selling comics
My surprise is that there are other mockable morons
It suprisingly is. There is a number of people out there that think comics must be sold by dedicated retailers, instead of all over with a couple specialty locations.
OK this is weird that people think this. I think it's largely because the movies have made the characters really accessible to normies. So the exclusive space of comic shops changes who can become a "real fan" I guess.
The failing of American comic books is that they no longer engage children. If any of the anons have 10 year olds in their family, how many of them buy comics on a regular basis? 0?
But they all probably play video games and shit.
It suprisingly is. There is a number of people out there that think comics must be sold by dedicated retailers, instead of all over with a couple specialty locations.
>"Comics will sell more if they're sold in more places" >How is this a hot take
Even if comics were sold in more places they wouldn't sell. >The art is bad. Big 2 still are scared of giving artists any power because of the Image lot in the 90s. So that means there is no consistency. >The writing is bad. Every single writer comes in with the same tired overegged plot to completely change a character without really caring about what came before or caring too much with no real continuity. >None of these people even really like the medium or understand its strenghts and weaknesses. >The story is decompressed, the events are bad, they don't even act like the characters. >And it isn't fricking cheap.
No one is really defending the specialty shops ITT, simply explaining that history of how we got to this point with them and how at one point it was something.
>Even if comics were sold in more places they wouldn't sell.
We don't necessarily know that. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I think by sheer numbers they'd have to sell more than they currently do (e.g., even if the percentage is lower if the availability is vastly expanded the total number will be higher). The real question is, if they did sell more, would they sell enough to justify the expanded production, distribution, and marketing costs. Getting books onto more shelves isn't free.
>We don't necessarily know
I mean bookstores show you this principle a lot. So we do know. >Watchmen and a few other comics actually sell. >But comics usually have half to one whole bookshelf compared to multiple bookshelves for manga.
I honestly don't disagree with your take either.
Comics started dying when building up to the next crossover event became the norm in stead of the exception.
I certainly don't keep up with modern comics, and I'm the mixed race commie homosexual being pandered to.
The stories being bad wouldn't be as huge of a problem if they were aimed at young teens. Demon Slayer is a small pile of cliche's and it's the most popular shit since DBZ.
I definitely agree that there is a problem in all of western lit of being sarcastic, meta or deconstructing. We're at this point so far removed from the original stories in people's minds that "evil Superman" is a genre of capeshit all its own.
You can buy random manga at a 7/11 because people travel by mass transit and that’s how you pass the time. That is how it’s profitable to sell them there in whatever minuscule quantities they offer.
I didn't take a picture of it but the rack of manga was pretty large considering the size of the store. Like it took up the amount of space that energy drinks take up in an American 7-11.
>Demon Slayer is a small pile of cliche's >not understanding that not everything needs to try to be groundbreaking, just telling a good story with time-worn tropes works
The failure of mainstream US comics in a nutshell.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Well yeah honestly.
The problem is also that in part- the 90s good stuff was meta and de-constructive.
So getting back to the good old days for any new comic authors is still the genre commenting on itself.
At this point dusting off Superman so he can just like solve a crime or fight a robot is just the thing the old stories referenced, not what the writer's nostalgia is rooted in.
7 months ago
Anonymous
same guy: The real problem with the American superhero is that no new characters can stick without being derived from existing characters.
Kamala Khan's defining character trait is "being a fan of the other superheroes"
Miles is just Spider-man #2.
7 months ago
Anonymous
That’s because nobody wants to support original characters. Time and time again they try and fans won’t buy them
7 months ago
Anonymous
No crusty old frick in a super-incestuous industry understands the anxieties and realities of young people. The themes they focus on are so hilariously out of touch it's insulting.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Oh so now every new character has to a teen in order to sell, despite most readers being adults who don’t care about teen characters?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Publishers fricking over Alan Moore made sure every famous Western writer will never let themselves get involved with comic publishers unless someone covers the cost of hiring a team of lawyers to craft a business contract that does not frick over the writer.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Today if you own your work you can strike it super rich through licensing for movies or TV. You'd have to be moronic to take a good idea and sell it to the Big Two for whatever pittance they'll give you. Only morons or absolute super fanboys work for them.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
His influence shifted the whole medium to turn capeshit into "adult" entertainment and slowly sucked the life out of it by convincing every writer that they have to outsmart the genre.
>When you can just get volume 1
This argument always ignores the fact that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell. But the logic that you just want easy volume 2 access Indy comics should be doing way better than big two, yet that isn’t the case.
Normies and casuals know what anime is and might just buy a manga volume.
They don't know that America produces something other than cape comics.
The American Indie scene could be more popular if people could frickin see it.
That’s because nobody wants to support original characters. Time and time again they try and fans won’t buy them
No crusty old frick in a super-incestuous industry understands the anxieties and realities of young people. The themes they focus on are so hilariously out of touch it's insulting.
Well on one hand- I'd love a new popular superhero character to save capeshit.
On the other, My Adventure with Superman is resonating because it relates to young people better than anything I've seen the cape genre do lately. >Can I actually start a career? >How can I navigate relationships under the pressure of being in a trouble industry?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
Yes, actually, to some extent. He's said he doesn't like the direction mainstream US cape comics took post-Watchmen and has some regrets, but also that they took the wrong lessons from his work. It's not really his (or Frank Miller's) fault the industry is full of derivative morons who just badly aped their work.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Can I actually have a career? Or is the American dream dead? >How do I navigate this decrepit industry full of nepotism and remain true to myself? Is it possible? Will I be able to eat without kissing the ring?
Do you actually have the balls to answer such questions or are you just going to pat yourself on the back for asking them?
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm saying that's what the Superman cartoon has as a minor feature. Making both Lois and Clark new employees at the Planet was a fricking inspired move.
The fact that Clark has to prove his competency at work makes him immediately relatable and likeable. Somethings that Superman constantly is accused of not being.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm saying a competent, talented young person is more likely to be undermined than celebrated in many newsrooms. I'm saying the tenor of the American newsroom has changed dramatically within the last 20 years. There is no way some coddled old fart is going to recognize that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yes, the new Superman cartoon is written by younger millennials and Gen Zs
>Can I actually have a career? Or is the American dream dead? >How do I navigate this decrepit industry full of nepotism and remain true to myself? Is it possible? Will I be able to eat without kissing the ring?
Do you actually have the balls to answer such questions or are you just going to pat yourself on the back for asking them?
I mean it's also a Superman cartoon. It has to be positive about the world and proclaim that people can be successful on nothing but tenacity and skills.
7 months ago
Anonymous
You mean Superman was written by nepobabies who made brown girl protagonist #65722.
It would be a lot more impactful, more resonant, if you allowed Clark to feel some of the incredible tension in the modern newsroom. Maybe you don't have The Answer, but you could look at the problem, really fricking look at it.
To write a good Superman would require understanding the news and the people who make the news. Keep Superman as a nice, upstanding guy in a world of cancel culture.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I need a cartoon to tell me what to read!
So they aren’t really comic readers, they just go to whatever shut is popular and treat it as an extension of cartoons. These people would never read comics in the first place
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
I'm guessing he doesn't. Because he didn't.
7 months ago
Anonymous
he did an interview recently where he talked about his time in comics but I don't think he gives a stuff about the American direct market at all probably considers it a blight on the entire industry >https://www.gamesradar.com/interviewing-watchmen-co-creator-alan-moore-its-one-thing-to-quit-comics-a-different-thing-to-stop-thinking-about-them/
>Comics started dying when building up to the next crossover event became the norm in stead of the exception.
People want crossovers and there is no build up to vast majority of them anyway. And most crossovers are part of an ongoing storyline building up to a big event where it usually requires a crossover due to the shared universe and you not having to spend considerable time explaining why nobody else is dealing with x or what they’re doing during the story
Becuase the truth is that people here don't WANT comics to sell more because selling more comes with the threat of selling to people that aren't like them. They champion a limit of accessibility because accessibility is inherently progressive.
>Becuase the truth is that people here don't WANT comics to sell more because selling more comes with the threat of selling to people that aren't like them
what? but comics are already being written for those kind of people that don't buy comics
believe it or not the average comic reader would love over the top action and sexy babes
i mean, women are getting books and comics all catered to them with hot studs and romance
Your coomer idelogies hinge on there being a silent majority of "average comic readers" that are a huge untapped market that will drive out to a tiny hole in the wall rather than have stuff delivered to the comfort of their own home via the internet.
7 months ago
Anonymous
[...]
So, people that visit this site to post wojaks and scream 'Black person' without consequence? Like I said? I thought that was a strawman?
>people always prefer color
They do. That’s why even manga has color pages. >multiple writers isn't a problem
It isn’t. Even manga series have multiple writers. >price and format aren't a problem
It’s not, because stupid shits like you always ignore the fact publishing manga abroad is always cutting the chapter by chapter publishing step and just jumping to collections. The price is a factor but tons of manga moves so slowly you are
not getting much actual content per page. >manga is as hard to get into as capeshit
It is if we want to play games and pretend people are lobotomised like you people always want to do. >miles is more famous than peter
I never said that.
this is the anon with the head in the sand
keep going dude
7 months ago
Anonymous
>untapped market
Oh that market is well covered by Anime and Manga.
Western market don't have a chance anymore, also feminism won't and conservatives prudishness won't allow them ever get into that market
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Oh that market is well covered by Anime and Manga.
Which, again, has better distribution
You still haven't explained why, if comic books put all that shit in, I would choose them over the bird in the hand.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>You still haven't explained why, if comic books put all that shit in, I would choose them over the bird in the hand.
lots of people dislike manga art-style, and it would be in colors
7 months ago
Anonymous
>lots of people dislike manga art-style, and it would be in colors
Then why is manga selling better? You can't have it both ways.
7 months ago
Anonymous
because manga is better written
they have superior writers
7 months ago
Anonymous
I can agree to that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
because manga is better written
they have superior writers
O think is also because of the huge cultural differences.
Japan authors acknowledge the difference between fiction and reality, so they tend to be less moralistic and have more creative freedom for writing.
While westerners have been sharing the idea that fiction affects how people perceive reality or something like that, and so fiction must be subjected to real world standards and morals, so westerners tend to be have more prudishness when writing.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'd agree it's cultural differences but not in the way you're thinking.
A big part of it is that Japan is a very old country. They LOVE old physical media over there, you can still find cassette tapes regularly in Japan.
Another big part is that they have a train culture which artificially keeps things like newsstands alive, which in turn keeps manga viable as a distribution model. Here in the states everyone drives so there's less news stands.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Japan >tend to be less moralistic
Fricking what.
7 months ago
Anonymous
more like caution since you never know what's going to set the Twitterbomb off.
Coomers are not a big market. If it was shut like Tarot would outsell everything
7 months ago
Anonymous
>people always prefer color
They do. That’s why even manga has color pages. >multiple writers isn't a problem
It isn’t. Even manga series have multiple writers. >price and format aren't a problem
It’s not, because stupid shits like you always ignore the fact publishing manga abroad is always cutting the chapter by chapter publishing step and just jumping to collections. The price is a factor but tons of manga moves so slowly you are
not getting much actual content per page. >manga is as hard to get into as capeshit
It is if we want to play games and pretend people are lobotomised like you people always want to do. >miles is more famous than peter
I never said that.
[...]
So, people that visit this site to post wojaks and scream 'Black person' without consequence? Like I said? I thought that was a strawman?
Your coomer idelogies hinge on there being a silent majority of "average comic readers" that are a huge untapped market that will drive out to a tiny hole in the wall rather than have stuff delivered to the comfort of their own home via the internet.
Lupin III manga has been written and drawn by numerous people and keeps being produced even today when Monkey Punch has been dead for years. First of the North Star is a franchise that has several spin-off titles not done by the original team, which itself is a writer and a different person as an artists collaborating. Attack on Titan similarly is a franchise with several different manga series made by different authors. You are wrong.
Who? Who is calling the board Cinemaphilemblr?
holy fricking samegayot
i've never seen such a contrarian comic reader lmao its like you're living in your own universe
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Coomers are not a big market
Videogames market disagree >
My LCS is actually doing pretty good. There's a small /tg/ & trading cards section but it's like, 80% comics and comic accessories, and 20% not comics. Frick, my school library had a larger selection of manga than my LCS does.
I mean, why should I go to a lcs? What can they provide that I can't get from ordering online? Only thing I can think of is hosting game nights and tournaments, but the places I've been to don't charge cover fees and I wouldn't think that alone can cover rent in most places.
>It is 1986. >I pick up a copy of Uncanny X-Men #205 from the newstand. >The Barry Windsor Smith cover is pleasing to the eye. >I watch an injured Logan trying to escape. >It is an exciting issue.
>It is 2019. >Hick-man, I am told, has made an eXciting story. >Wolverine has his arm around Jean and Cyclops with a beer in hand. >A floorplan of a base shows that both Logan and Cyclops room leads into Jeans implying a polyamorous situation. >Why is there so many pages of random goobledeasiatic.
>it is 2001. >I go to my local LCS. >I pick up a copy of X-Treme X-Men. >Why did Chris Claremont come back?
>It is 2023. >I am arguing the same arguments about why comics have failed. >I have become shitpost.
>It is 2000. >Hugh Jackman has just been annouced as Wolverine. >My friend Alan complains about him being too tall. >Nonetheless he is excited to see the movie.
Why even bother selling them at all? They're the tiniest drop in the ocean of their respective corporate empires. Marvel and DC should just start handing them out for free everywhere they can as part of their movie marketing budget, it probably wouldn't even add a single extra digit.
Yes, but as others have said it's almost impossible to survive as a pure comics store, it'd have to be more of a general nerd hobbies store that features comics. Those can do quite well.
It can't be all comics. You have to make it more like a nerd store with trading cards, tabletop games, maybe even movie memorabilia and collectable items.
Does anybody even buy Funkopops anymore? I only bought like 3 and thats cause they were being sold for like 2 bucks each.
i just assume their hatred is an online thing and normalgays love them. My brother bought my dad a William Wallace from Braveheart one and they both like it
[...]
i just assume their hatred is an online thing and normalgays love them. My brother bought my dad a William Wallace from Braveheart one and they both like it
Funko is dying. The bubble burst. The company is overextended via licensing and isn't selling as much hence having to destroy stock. The concerning thing is they own companies like Mondo who produce good comic art prints (as well as other stuff). They laid off a bunch of Mondo staff.
>Some trades are only giving you 4 issues
Vast majority of trades are 6 issues which is standard.
>and the arcs tend to be bad.
Entirely subjective.
>Vast majority of trades are 6 issues which is standard.
I mistyped. >Entirely subjective.
Yeah it is. But honestly when was it when a cape arc really grabbed you? When did a modern cape arc actually become a classic? Maybe I'm just burnt out from ultra multiversal level threats and continuity being such a chew toy, everyone dying and all getting reset.
Comics got a reputation as being only for children especially via the Fredric Wertham "Seduction of the Innocent" shit and Comics Code Authority and that shit even persists today. Comics back then were varied. Comics Code decimated so many genres like horror. It wasn't until the 70s when the code waned that we had an improvement but the damage was done. Even now most people believe that the whole genre = for kids, pic related. (Before anyone says anything, yes, we should have more comics for kids and no, I don't think ultra edgy stuff for adults helps comics now. I am more talking about an outside perspective. Comics being for kids is more about a maturity level for an interest. Even though comics are a whole medium with variety people don't want to be associated with immature things.)
Comics crashed in the 90s and the industry was trashed just as manga was being imported. Anime was also a great import and importantly it could bridge a gap and be a gateway into manga. While cartoons were far too disconnected from their comics. Manga didn't have the same cultural baggage as comics had developed. It had more genres. Teenagers like to rebel against parents and parental culture. Japanese has a foreign cool factor.
While we have steadily had the creation of a weeb stereotype and denigration of people who like that shit, it still has much broader appeal. Also, if I asked an older person about comic book stereotypes they'd name something like Comic Book Guy from Simpsons and that all has a certain perception to it. Or that Poochie episode of the Simpsons where Homer tells the obsessive fan with obsessive question to essentially frick off. You can go into a book shop, or for free online, and read some manga, start at volume 1 and people are talking about it. No one really talks about comics IRL unless in an LCS. I mean who the frick wants to deal with reading preview catalogues? Pull lists? When you can just get volume 1?
This argument always ignores the fact that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell. But the logic that you just want easy volume 2 access Indy comics should be doing way better than big two, yet that isn’t the case.
>This argument always ignores the fact that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell.
For the Big Two, that's misunderstanding the problem because that actually IS the problem. A new reader saw a Spidey movie and wants to start at Volume 1. Which volume 1?
>But the logic that you just want easy volume 2 access Indy comics should be doing way better than big two, yet that isn’t the case.
Non-Big Two books have kind of the opposite problem: no real way to get the word out. They're easier to just pick up but don't have the universal brand recognition of Batman or Spider-Man, and publishers won't or can't really market them well. How would a non-comics reader even know about an indie book?
Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google.
Even if you want to go to the original comics from sixty years ago it’s easy. They have Penguin Classics collection of that stuff now for fricks sake. Why do these conversations always assert people are so stupid they couldn’t put their own pants on let alone ask on the counter “where can I get the very first Spider-man comic?” There’s numerous collections about this stuff at this point. You can even just look it up on Wikipedia. Or post a question on Reddit or Twitter.
Nobody gives a flying frick about this when they want to consume Batman. It’s a disingenuous argument.
7 months ago
Anonymous
most people who read anything follow authors not genres
7 months ago
Anonymous
And how do they find authors and figure out what books they have to start with since books usually are not titles VOLUME 1
7 months ago
Anonymous
The uneven quality of ever-changing creative teams is a common complaint, and ties into the bigger #1 complaint of not knowing where to start in the first place.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>but the quality varies!
Yeah, no shit. You don’t like it, skip it. Be a goddamn adult.
7 months ago
Anonymous
It's astonishing how bad people like you are at selling things:
>Hey, you're product is uneven and a lot of it is shit. >UM BE A GODDAMN ADULT
And then you wonder why no one is buying it.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>You don’t like it, skip it
K.
You don't seem to understand just how much of this stuff is considered shit, or even below average.
I don't read below average shit, I take your advice and skip it, which means I skip 99% of cape comics.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Some people really can't grasp that you have to already like something to put up with that kind of bullshit. If you already love Batman you can power through or skip the bad runs/issues, but if you don't already have that motivation you're just going to be turned off by the shit. Similarly, if you don't already have a reason to try you're not going to do the relatively small amount of Googling to figure out where to start, you're just going to see that you need to dig a little and move on to something else.
7 months ago
Anonymous
How is this any different from manga. Lots of garbage out there. Lots of wacky premise but writing is shit. Why should I read manga when I actually have to watch a cartoon first to know if it’s good and then the art is bad when I try the manga and there’s tons of boring filler that was never in the show.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Why should I read manga when I actually have to watch a cartoon first to know if it’s good
homie do you even read the shit you type?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Then do it and stop whining, b***h. This is a (you) problem.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Then do it and stop whining, b***h. This is a (you) problem.
a you situation? who the frick talks like that? lets ignore the fact that you speak like the average redditor, with his head in the sand about comicbooks situation
anyway, the you problem has become an industry problem lol
7 months ago
Anonymous
>You don’t like it, skip it. Be a goddamn adult.
yes, that's what people have been doing
how are things tell me?
7 months ago
Anonymous
That’s not what people have been doing. You’re claiming causation without any actual evidence because you have a pet peeve.
>Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google...You can even just look it up on Wikipedia. Or post a question on Reddit or Twitter.
How do you not understand that you're exactly describing the problem? No one wants to do homework just to pick up a comic. Just saying someone needs to read up on where to start is the turn-off for normies, they're not going to put in the effort because why would they? Meanwhile, they see an anime they like, they just get the first volume of the manga.
>let alone ask on the counter “where can I get the very first Spider-man comic?”
Are you moronic? Again, this is the problem: a kid who saw Across the Spider-Verse and is interested in Spidey doesn't want ASM #1 (or Amazing Fantasy #15 if you're being a b***h).
>No one wants to do homework just to pick up a comic
Motherfricker they do this shit all the time when watching TV, movies and actual novels, even music. Hell fricking manga and anime requires research when you deal with decades long franchises!
The premise that people can’t do same thing for comics is just stupid cope. And again, you have extensive collections that you can just be point towards and read that if you are that much of an idiot.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>they do this shit all the time
when the results are worth it.
clearly, they don't think the comic book results are worth it.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Motherfricker they do this shit all the time when watching TV, movies and actual novels, even music.
No they don't, what the frick are you talking about? Start with the first episode, start with the first movie, start with the first book.
>Hell fricking manga and anime requires research when you deal with decades long franchises!
"Where do I start with One Piece?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with Berserk?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with..."
>The premise that people can’t do same thing for comics is just stupid cope.
And yet American capeshit being confusing is literally the #1 complaint from normies about why they don't read them. Perhaps it's worth actually listening to the people you want to read your shit instead of calling them idiots? You're exactly the reason why capeshit is dying, you refuse to even accept the problem people tell you over and over.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>"Where do I start with One Piece?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with Berserk?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with
I mean, you do still need to pick a not-shit translation; telling someone to just read jojo through and they end up picking Duwang is still a possible mistake. Obviously it's better than the constant reboots of characters and series of capeshit though
7 months ago
Anonymous
I thought we were talking about buying them since, y'know, the thread is about sales.
7 months ago
Anonymous
these people wouldn't be watching pirate streams. they would be reading the official versions and paying for crunchyroll
7 months ago
Anonymous
Where do I start with Dragon Ball, Gundam, Attack on Titan, Lupin III, Fate series, Fist of the North Star, Devilman, Cyborg 009, Great Teacher Onizuka extensive universe, do I need to read all 72 volumes of Naruto before I start Boruto…???!?!
7 months ago
Anonymous
At volume 1. And yes.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Lol volume 1 for all of those, and yes.
Those are all titles with multiple spin offs, different authors, different runs, and some even are alternative timelines or other side shit where you can’t tell by just looking at the tile. So you’re full of shit if you think LOL VOLUME 1 is answer. Fist of the North Star has character origin manga, prequel shit, etc. so how are you supposed to know what you’re supposed to start with. Clearly manga is too hard.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Clearly manga is too hard.
It's strange you think you're arguing against us and not the simple fact that capeshit being too confusing is what most normies say holds them back from getting into it.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Fist of The North Star is Fist of The North Star. Dragonball is Dragonball. Those spin offs aren't even properly promoted for you to know about them or they're not even available to purchase in english.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Don't bother. That dumbass is clearly combing Wikipedia articles on those series to find lists of spin-offs to try and prove their moronic point.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Why are we suddenly pretending people don’t just pirate manga first and foremost? There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Why are we suddenly pretending people don’t just pirate manga first and foremost?
And yet it still outsells capeshit.
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
Okay sweetie, you tried. Here's your (you).
7 months ago
Anonymous
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z
holy frickin have a nice day
7 months ago
Anonymous
Because we were talking about sales and how even though they're easy to pirate, they sell. You might just be moronic if you don't get this AND you're sitting there trying to argue that people have ever said "where do I start with Dragonball? It's all so confusing!"
[...]
Yeah, it's pretty clear. He's so pathethic.
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
I'm autistic and even I can tell that's sarcasm.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I don't think so, he just combed over wikipedia like that other guy said. Otherwise he wouldn't have named Lupin.
7 months ago
Anonymous
He does seem like the type of person who thinks Dragonball and Dragonball Z are separate manga
7 months ago
Anonymous
Because we were talking about sales and how even though they're easy to pirate, they sell. You might just be moronic if you don't get this AND you're sitting there trying to argue that people have ever said "where do I start with Dragonball? It's all so confusing!"
Don't bother. That dumbass is clearly combing Wikipedia articles on those series to find lists of spin-offs to try and prove their moronic point.
Yeah, it's pretty clear. He's so pathethic.
7 months ago
Anonymous
[...] >There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
I'm autistic and even I can tell that's sarcasm.
to be fair it's not the first time both in here and other platforms, where i see people say that comics aren't confusing for novices
it's so strange, i always thought that it was one of the major problems, and everyone knows it but apparently i'm wrong about that..
7 months ago
Anonymous
Just more hiding your head in the sand and pretending there are no problems as the industry continues to crumble.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Everything is confusing as a novice. The difference here is that the same group of smug weaboo c**ts and anti-sjw crowd with stick up their ass over minor things want to pretend somehow comics are impenetrable to new people and impossible to get into. Which is horseshit. Kids have been able to do it for decades.
That’s why you always see the same strawman arguments get recycled every single time while refusing to admit any similar issues with manga and how the argument always boil down to muh single
author and just crying how you don’t like certain things. And always insist simplistic solutions that anyone with any understanding of the business model would say don’t work.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I want to get into Dragon Ball where do i start? >Dragon Ball! Maybe Dragon Ball Z
>I want to get into Batman, where do I start? >Defiantly not Detective Comics #1 or Batman #1 (the older one). Most people will consider starting with Batman Year One as the true place to start but then you could move onto Long Halloween, then Dark Vict.... You could also start with the New 52. Not Dectivce Comics #1, or Batman The Dark Knight, or Batman Eternal, or Batman Incorprated (that's another whole mess to explain) but just Batman's Snyder's run. You could also instead read into Batman Rebirth. But if you don't want that stuff you could also read some of the older self containted stories like Batman the Dark Knight Returns, or Batman of Gotham by Gas...
7 months ago
Anonymous
>So you’re full of shit if you think LOL VOLUME 1 is answer.
Nah, volume 1 is the answer. Cry more, capeshitter.
7 months ago
Anonymous
with manga a significant amount of manga are long-running series, there's also a healthy amount of fresh new series and decades worth of shorter series that finished
with american comics, 90% of the market is capeshit.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>there's also a healthy amount of fresh new series and decades worth of shorter series that finished
Same applies to western stuff. So why do people ignore everything else that’s published and just care about superheroes if they’re so bad and awful to get into? How are they able to be more popular?
7 months ago
Anonymous
So why do not image and dark horse and other small publishers sell more than confusing DC and Marvel if people just want chapter 1 stories?
you're gonna be finished quickly of things that are actually good even if you make a backlog of the "alternative comics" from the alast 40 years
7 months ago
Anonymous
Except you’re not.
7 months ago
Anonymous
That's bullshit, none of those japs can write for shit stop trying to pretend like it's a quality thing, there have been no new mangaka in the past 20 tears that have reached the geniuses of Jonathan Hickman or Al Ewing. Manga has great marketing I'll give them that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
this is some tremendous cope and most of what those guys write is still capeshit
and there's only a few handfuls of capeshit. writers who've been at it for the last 2 decades. so its been the same shit
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Same applies to western stuff
it really doesn't. there aren't many good writers in published comics right now because the market hasn't been a place of true competition.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Spoken like someone who doesn’t read anything
7 months ago
Anonymous
You tell em, sister! The american comic book industry is overflowing with talented writers.
7 months ago
Anonymous
lol tell me what's good right now then
tell me about all the fresh talent, the compelling stories, and fresh takes on different genres that's being published right now
oh you're gonna recommend me Saga? lmao
7 months ago
Anonymous
Saga is better than 90% of all mangas ever made
7 months ago
Anonymous
you're not arguing from a honest place
7 months ago
Anonymous
Truth hurts, weeb?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>i love indie comics! i got Saga, Evil Superman, israelite Mice, Evil Superman, Gritty Gun guy, Evil Superman, Saga, Gay coming of age story, Cartoony people BUT ADULT, Evil Superman, also did i mention Saga? its the best thing we have!
7 months ago
Anonymous
You ok, weeby?
7 months ago
Anonymous
hey did you read that last subversion of superheroes comics? this one says FRICK
7 months ago
Anonymous
Truth hurts, weeb?
go back
7 months ago
Anonymous
that guy is trolling i think
although i don't think i've ever seen anyone in so much denial about the state of their hobby industry as much as comic book fans
7 months ago
Anonymous
he's going to say Tinyon 4 and thats it lmao
7 months ago
Anonymous
Saga is better than 90% of all mangas ever made
I don't like indies either, it's just the same woke shit that plagues marvel and DC but with somehow even worse art.
I used to read a lot of comics as a kid, Xmen with Fatal attractions the Onslaught saga, Hellblazer, Spawn, etc.
But nowadays i feel like comics just don't appeal to me anymore and they don't want to.
But i still want to read stories and engage in fantasy, and nowadays manga is the only medium with stories that still appeals to me personally.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I think the problem with the term Indies is that people just think it applies to a bunch of samey Image sci-fi comics and nothing else.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>it's just the same woke shit
Opinion discarded
7 months ago
Anonymous
90% of the time if you want to read a manga, you start at volume 1 and most of the time if it's complicated it's either due to the series not being a manga primarily (Gundam, Fate) or decisions by US Publishers(Dragonball, JoJo) with even those being relatively easy to understand with a small amount of recommended starting points.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>different authors
?? what? no i'm pretty sure the authors of Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, Lupin III, Fist of the North Star, Devilman, Cyborg 009, Great Teacher Onizuka have been the same from start to finish
Fate and Gundam aren't even manga primaries
and hear this! more often than not, writers even drawn their own manga!!! instead in capebooks you have to worlds that more often than not, don't even communicate
7 months ago
Anonymous
You’d be wrong.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>dragonball is Toriyama >Attack on Titan is Isayama >Lupin is Monkey Punch >HnK is Okamura >C009 is Ishi but published on half a dozen publishers >GTO is Fuiwara from the beginning till he dies
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I don’t know what I am talking about
7 months ago
Anonymous
you're going to make a point? or just admit you're wrong?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Lupin III manga has been written and drawn by numerous people and keeps being produced even today when Monkey Punch has been dead for years. First of the North Star is a franchise that has several spin-off titles not done by the original team, which itself is a writer and a different person as an artists collaborating. Attack on Titan similarly is a franchise with several different manga series made by different authors. You are wrong.
7 months ago
Anonymous
but you're calling them spin offs yourself dude
the main manga is 99% of times written by a single author
you want to read SnK? you start from chapter 1 and you finish with 139, one author
7 months ago
Anonymous
So fricking what. You people claim just having multiple titles created too much confusion. Now you’re pretending it doesn’t when manga does the same thing. Not every manga reader will automatically know what title is the original one, or even be interested in it. A person interested in Fate franchise can’t immediately know wtf he is meant to read first. There is no rhyme or reason what Lupin series you should read unless you do research. Do you read Shin Devil Man or Devil Man, what’s the difference? I can’t tell, I am a walking moron. I can’t do homework. I can’t use google.
That is the se time what people like YOU always project to any person who wants to read anything western. And then act like a hypocrite when the same strawman logic is applied to you.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Expecting people to research shit by googling is idiotic, it's abandoning all impulse buy potential. And even by googling it's impossible to get the answer to the question "which Batman comic I should read" because that doesn't have a definitive answer. Manga does have an answer, you always buy the one that has the number "1" printed on it. There are no exceptions to this rule. And no, it is NOT even close to as confusing in manga, it is simply not and you are mad if you think that. Forget new readers, people actively following comics can't keep track of what's the chronlogy in them because the writers don't know that answer a lot of the time either.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>All reading is just impulsive buying
You have to be a troll
7 months ago
Anonymous
You mean because of the law forbidding them to draw genitals?
It's ok they always find the way to bypass that stupid law anyway, like when they invented the tentacle porn genre.
7 months ago
Anonymous
he's just trying to gaslight you with his factually wrong opinions
7 months ago
Anonymous
You know what I hate about comics continuity?
When they literally force you to read another completely different comic from characters I don't give a frick to understand or to read the conclusion of some story you were reading.
And is not even the number 1 of said comic, is like in the middle of that run.
>you liked supah dark league? >now buy Stupid justice #5675 to understand and read the conclusion.
I really hate that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
you know he's full of shit because if you want to read a batman arc, for example No Man's land, ou have to read 4 different publications usually (batman, detective comics, Nigtwing, Batgirl, Harley quinn more recently, Catwoman)
then a year later another author is going to ruin all that was built because batman HAS to punch his son in the face
7 months ago
Anonymous
If you want to read a storyline that’s almost thirty years old you just buy the trade. Stop being disingenuous. This is like claiming if you want to read Naruto arc you have to go find the specific Shounen Jump issue rather than the tankoubon
7 months ago
Anonymous
>If you want to read a storyline that’s almost thirty years old you just buy the trade.
NTA but DC has a mixed history with trades. I remember that for an extremely long time they just would not print the second half of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl run and it got to be such a long wait that I stopped checking so I don't even know if it ever came out
7 months ago
Anonymous
So what. Most old manga is impossible to get in English after their initial print run. Where do you buy Black Jack? Nowhere. Where can I get Moyashimon? Sorry, they only did two volumes. What about Drops of God? Oh they only did couple of volumes, then years later with little fanfare released the entire finally in digital format only. Dance Till Tomorrow? Oh that’s been out of print for twenty years lol
7 months ago
Anonymous
it's like you're arguing against reality
it's not something we made up dude, most people find it hard to get into super hero comics, and find it easy to get into manga
whether it is because the are too stupid to research a bit, doesn't change reality
7 months ago
Anonymous
>baaaawwww it’s hard!
It’s not. How do you even buy food with this level of b***h like mentality
7 months ago
Anonymous
it is for most people apparently, that's what i'm saying
7 months ago
Anonymous
How about YOU stop being disingenuous because what he said is true for CURRENT comics, not just old ones. Right now if you want to understand the current Batman story about Selina's takeover, you have to read like eight different titles. That is unreasonable and you pretend it makes sense.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Buying new trades collects everything unless it sold so badly it didn’t even justify collecting it. And even then you can get it digitally. And there would be no crossovers. Make up more bs issues why don’t you.
7 months ago
Anonymous
nah, im pirating fan made collections instead
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Manga does have an answer, you always buy the one that has the number "1" printed on it. There are no exceptions to this rule. And no, it is NOT even close to as confusing in manga, it is simply not and you are mad if you think that.
Tell that to Dragon Ball fans
7 months ago
Anonymous
dragon-ball is called dragon-ball from its start to its end, 42 volumes from '84 to '95
7 months ago
Anonymous
You’d have to Google that. Liar liar pants on fire.
7 months ago
Anonymous
and?
7 months ago
Anonymous
I meant that most dragon ball fans did not start from the beginning and never intend to, they hop on with whatever is popular enough to get their attention and only ever go back one or two arcs. A vast majority of Dragon Ball fans have no clue about anything before Raditz, and an increasing number don't know about anything before Beerus
7 months ago
Anonymous
are you talking about American fans? because the rest of the world got into Dragonball from the start thanks to the anime
like it was in my country, i bet in other too, the main TV channel kept airing Dragonball for years so multiple generations got into it
7 months ago
Anonymous
Lol volume 1 for all of those, and yes.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>b-but manga also has long running series
you know what this is different? you have a choice in the market for the shorter series
also most of these are pretty much start at chapter 1
7 months ago
Anonymous
But which chapter one when there’s dozen titles? What is the important one?! I want the origin story first! Why do I have to read Kenshiro’s brother’s origin stories in completely different manga?! Why is there an entire Fist of the Blue Sky prequel series nobody told me about? I should have been trading that apparently to get the real important backstory!
7 months ago
Anonymous
So why do not image and dark horse and other small publishers sell more than confusing DC and Marvel if people just want chapter 1 stories?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Hiatuses or getting canceled/abandoning the series after 6-12 issues. Nobody likes reading unfinished series, if they do they'll just stick to capeshit.
Also, the average quality of a DH or Image comic is just as bad as DC/Marvel.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Man, I wonder.
With amazing comics like this, you'd think DH would be selling gangbusters.
7 months ago
Anonymous
It funny you mention that train wreck because I was busting about another comic that almost hits that many red flags.
Hellaween is a 1 volume YA graphic novel.
It’s about a racial ambiguous brown witch with purple hair, a twink vampire and werewolf male duo and the werewolf has a nose ring.
It also stars a black kid and a white girl with an alternative hairstyle and takes place in suburban California.
And yet I enjoyed it. I don’t know if it appealed to my teenage years reading bad internet OCs or enjoyment in watching two would be Van Helsings contend with the Halloween trio or the stupid YA humour of everyone realising they were blundering around in mortal peril. If the art was shitter, I wouldn’t have looked at it. If the writing even breathed SJW I wouldn’t have liked it. But it was all aesthetic for an OK YA story.
So there are stories that can sell, but they are obscured by the same problem as the cape comics where no one seems to have figured out how to sell comics that don’t rely on what has already failed.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Didn't Dark House admit that Beserk outsold all their other titles combined?
7 months ago
Anonymous
i wouldn't be surprised if Wayne Family Adventure on WebToon were to be the highest grossing comic for DC right now
7 months ago
Anonymous
Man, I wonder.
With amazing comics like this, you'd think DH would be selling gangbusters.
>a kid who saw Across the Spider-Verse and is interested in Spidey doesn't want ASM #1 (or Amazing Fantasy #15 if you're being a b***h).
Yeah, they would just go and ask a store to show them a Miles Morales comic. It’s not hard. You want to make it be harder than it is.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>ask a store to show them a Miles Morales comic.
...which is completely unrelated to, and completely unlike, the movie they just watched, so they're confused and don't buy it. You don't get that people don't want a generic comic, they want what they just saw.
>You want to make it be harder than it is.
I am describing the actual reality as it really is right now. People aren't going into stores and asking and the #1 complaint from non-readers is that capeshit seems confusing to get into. Screech all you want, you're fighting against the actual facts. You're describing some fantasy world you want and not the real world.
>Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google.
Normal every day people are plebs. There is so much stuff that people need to be motivated to do. The problem is 100% a perception issues. I am not saying comics are "hard to get into" the issue is "people perceive them as hard to get into".
Back in the day Jim Shooter said, "Every comic is someone's first," so you'd get superfluous dialogue describing every X-Man's power. My friend would tell me, "This comic is worth getting into," so I would go and buy an issue and contextually I would understand some things and not others. Maybe he would explain the gaps or lend me some back issues. With collected editions you could actually experience the older issues.
The problem is this sense of completionism or FOMO. Kids today can't start at issue #560 and just read it and pick up the context. The huge continuity breaking arcs from every new writer and no one and done stories doesn't help either. In the past, TV shows were one and done and driven by advertising. You had the occasional two parter and that was it. Nowadays TV shows have complex multi series arcs. On the one hand this encourages must see TV and the feeling of experiencing it. On the other hand people also feel like this is an investment.
Did you watch Game of Thrones? Everyone was telling you to watch it. But season 2 had already started. Do you start now? You can catch up and binge. Everyone is telling you to watch it. But now everyone says the last season was awful. Is it worth the time or not? People who watched it early feel like part of something and talk theories and experience it. Other people don't want to invest the time in it.
I regularly hear people act like to enjoy Spider-Man they'd need to read everything back from the start. The problem is, the psychological profile of "geeks who'd be comics-curious" also overlaps with "obsessive compulsive FOMO types".
>Normal people don’t know how to use google
I never said that.
I'm saying that there is a certain perception of "buy in/investment" that exists in people's heads that has only gotten worse because of modern culture and FOMO.
Their perception is not the same as actual reality. Like when people make a simple task harder.
>Okay we’re done here.
Geez lad, you completely missed the point.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Please just be pretending to be this stupid. What you're refusing to understand is that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of motivation as that anon is trying to explain. Try to understand this: people won't Google if they don't feel any reason to do so. The problem is that capeshit seems daunting and people just aren't going to bother to try, even though in actuality it really isn't that hard. You need to put yourself into the mindset of someone who doesn't already want to read comics.
>that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell
You know whats funny, Volume 1s do sell. But the drop off is always so fricking huge. The reason why some DC omnibus editions have been so huge is partly because even with big collected editions, which appeal more to specific readers, they don't want 3+ volumes if they can get away with 2 because of sales drop offs. Volume 1 drop off is massive when it comes to collected editions. So many books end up getting cancelled and not even completing a run (some of Peter Davids DC books have done this). Casuals tend to do something similar. Buy a volume 1 and then nothing else. Some trades are only giving you 4 issues and the arcs tend to be bad.
had no idea you yourself are the whole universe
the point is, at the same time there's a woman into another genre
or a kid into another one
or an old timer into something else entirely
and as it is said, there's a manga for that
Ive given up on buying single issues and just go for the hardcover volumes of comics I like after reading them online. So I just order them online from whatever's cheapest; no reason to waste my time going to a store.
The wait time+ the price and short length of each issue really just soured my joy of buying them to read.
This is demonstrably false delusion. There was a recent temporary boost during the pandemic, but even that didn't change the ever-shrinkign % of capeshit vs the whole industry because manga had an even bigger boost during that period.
>The comic book industry is fine.
Yes, but that's the trick: the "industry" is now manga and kid comics with a tiny sliver of capeshit. You're trying to conflate the two. Capeshit is in a death spiral.
The most recent volume of Spy x Family was the bestselling book in the U.S. in early April. Not best-selling comic, the best-selling book of any kind in the US.
>Comic stores closing because nobody wants to buy their propaganda filled shit.
Keep pandering to these imaginary people. Seriously why do they keep trying when they all go broke?
I just wish the majority of material and discussion around western comics wasn't around Big 2 and Superhero characters that are like 75 years old by now. People here always bring up that comics is more than the big 2—and I do mostly read eurocomics—but you have to admit even here a majority of discussion is around these long established cape franchises, and it just feels like asking for stagnation. Every plot idea under the sun has been tried for these characters, do we really need more Batman, or more Spiderman(s)?
Because the industry shot themselves in the foot and even non cape comics of today still feel and read like capeshit (most are written by the same cape experts that write a million cape comics).
Some dude that was translating comics to spanish and helping creators with accommodations and communication for cons said Vertigo used to sell better than Marvel and regular DC and they killed it all the same and then they wonder why american comics don't have global appeal like manga does.
The problem will always be quality, if I'm sick and tired of action shonen I have plenty of options, outside of DC and Marvel comics are still slop.
you only want American comics to do better due to some weird sense of patrotism
Western comic books will never be popular again, 2 generations have gone by where they weren't common
To get western comics to get the chance of ever getting popular is to
1. change distribution to make them put in places of easy access. You will also have to change transport in the US so people will pass by comics on their way to work on the bus or train because that's where comics are usually read
2. get people accustomed to buying and reading comics. its just not in our culture to even see them as a form of entertainment
3. get rid of smartphones, home consoles, movies, etc.... because they are where people find entertainment more often
all this and you'll need to have them actually be good in the first place. Even though there are hundreds of manga being published every day in japan, its still a market ripe with competition. Its been a healthy market for decades
American comics haven't really been a healthy market since the 50s, and a little of the 80s
the 90s onward the market was only being held up by obsessive fanboys, and people looking for the next Action Comics #1. That's not a healthy market created by competition
Here, maybe my latest LCS interaction will provide a hint:
>Stop in at LCS after the fourth ownership change in ten years >Walk in the door; fully 40% of the store is funkos/statues/merch/D&D books/MTG/etc. >Ask they have any European comics, especially Franco-Belgian titles and even more especially Tintin or Asterix as I was looking to get some for my nephew >Blank look >I have to explain what Franco-Belgian comics are to the OWNER of a comic shop >Ask if he has any titles from 2000 AD instead >"Never heard of that; who wrote it?" >He had also never heard of EC comics or the Goon and only had a vague idea of what Heavy Metal is
I wasn't exactly expecting to walk out of there with a complete hardcover set of Metabarons but jesus christ; as someone with zero interest in capeshit soap operas there was absolutely NOTHING in the entire store that I was interested in. I would have settled for some Dark Horse Star Wars floppies or something just to support a local business but even that fairly low bar wasn't reached.
>but even that fairly low bar wasn't reached.
So glad my LCS is a complete opposite. The owner actually knows stuff and gives recommendations based off of that. He also knows a bunch of writers/artists IRL too and has sold art. Honestly this is a knowledge business.
I walked in a different store while in another town and had this weird creepy shop keep bigging up some shitty new 52 Harley Quinn on some 14 year old girls while pointing at some actual good comics and saying they were crap and I walked straight out of there.
this is a big one. one of the biggest failures in retail history is the u.s. not selling eurocomics. it's an easy slam dunk and the moron publishers are just fingering themselves
It is a paradox. The average western comic book reader reads superhero comics exclusively and doesn't want to try anything else. They think that anything not superhero is essentially pretentious autobiographical garbage. But these same people also constantly "appeal to Watchmen" to overcome their insecurity about comics being immature. People just want Batman. But also want Batman to actually be deep and dark and adult and to actually discuss real world issues. But also want Batman fighting the Joker for the 100th time and epic consequences. But they want continuity for those consequences. But also don't want continuity. But people also get autistic and feel FOMO about not being able to read all Batman issues. But then people only ever read a few Batman stories they get recommended to in some list and that drives 90% of Batman collected edition sales. Comics are always constantly rebooting for a dwindling audience who complain. They are huge pop culture icons that are ingrained into society. But Batman underweart far outsells any comic book. None of these people even really like the comic book medium because people call it childish and only feel validated when a movie is made to justify it. But the movies don't even improve the comics or really get new readers.
Watchmen outsells your average yearly capeshit. You want it to be the enemy so desperately but a tin of capeshitters hate Watchmen and say it's the sole reason comics suck now.
>You want it to be the enemy so desperately
I don't. And never said that. I was simply making a ramble on how some people think and why comics is so full of contradictions because of its fans.
Watchmen. People appeal to it as if it is a life raft in the ocean that proves comics are mature. Other people hate it for starting a chain of fads that ruined these characters and comics. So many people read it and dislike it and think the art is old. So many people claim to enjoy it but really get nothing out of it. It still sells amazingly well and has all different versions. For some Watchmen is like a cul-de-sac the only acceptable comic to read and enjoy (because it is in the Times Literature list).
You are. You want to blame it because "everyone's copying it" but the only copying you see is that "they're just too damn violent just like that blasted Watchmen! This isn't mature!". Truth is, cape comics were plenty violent in the 80s before Watchmen came out and violence in an action series is not bad, those shonen series that are marketed to 13 year olds are more violent and bloody and they sell. When adults took over capes they wanted them to appeal to kids so they neutered them (think of the children!) but then they also want them to be deep except the people writing them are not deep, they're those fanboys of the 80s and 90s all grown up.
Point is, blaming g Watchmen for capeshit being awful is redundant, boring and false. Nobody's stopping you from making an actual well written comic like Watchmen.
>You are.
Oh frick off. I said: >I was simply making a ramble on how some people think and why comics is so full of contradictions because of its fans. >on how SOME people think
As in, NOT ME.
My original post said this, actually: >But these same people also constantly "appeal to Watchmen" to overcome their insecurity about comics being immature.
The point I was making there was that some people appeal to Watchmen to make themselves feel mature about comics. Because a certain type of comic fan wants to feel mature about their comics but also feels immature about them because they mostly like the same stuff.
In my post you are now replying to, I also continued with the conflicting opinions people have on Watchmen. Not my opinions. The fact you can't tell the difference is bizarre.
>Point is, blaming g Watchmen for capeshit being awful is redundant, boring and false.
I never blamed Watchmen at all? I like Watchmen. I am simply stating that comic fans are contradictory and paradoxical about what they say they want vs what they want and all the things they blame along the way.
For a while I wanted to write the most boring Superman comic imaginable. Just Clark living his daily office existence, trying to flirt with Louis, hovering 4" above the ground when he's certain no one is looking.
And then I want this absolute mundanity to be interrupted by a corner of the building melting away into open air. And for a second Clark doesn't understand what's happening. Just an incredibly surreal moment. But then he realizes it's an attack, races to change, fumbles in the stall, hides the suit, creeps down the fire exit, around a block, scanning, locates the malevolent dot in the sky, and launches into a pale blue void just to cleave right through it.
Just really emphasize the surreality of it all. Mundanity. Then absolute violence.
>The average western comic book reader reads superhero comics exclusively and doesn't want to try anything else
Growing up the only thing I’d want from the LCS was Toyfare because I liked their comics and looking at the toyline sculpts, as well as their generally decent articles. And an Archie digest every so often. Oh yeah, and vintage mad magazines since they’d have ‘em for cheap.
99% of capeshit just isn’t worth reading, period. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of the genre or not, most of it isn’t worth the paper its printed on.
It doesn’t help that floppy pricing is just dogshit. Why the frick would anybody pay $4 for less than 30 pages of content? Its little wonder most people interested in comics just go to Barnes and Noble and grab a 300 page manga for $13.
Doesn’t help that most of the art in mainstream comics is just plain boring.
>Comic Books >Dont add Manga to your selection.
Why? I know comic shops who added Manga and still are open.
Besides is it really a Comic-Manga problem or just an “online/Amazon“ condumer thing?
Comics are too expensive and reading them on a phone for free is absolute dogshit compared to manga. Is it any wonder why one thrives while the other dies in le modern times? other than comics also just being shit most of the time
recently i read the rebirth run of Batman and up to date with Zdarsky
i understand i'm not exactly reading the fan favorites here, but just the fact that in barely 5 years of publication from end of rebirth to the newest stuff you had Batman act like 5 different people, ruining his relationships with friends and lovers again and again, character growth and destruction...
all of this is absolutely keeping potential readers away... and i know this has been happening for decades but now there's nothing else in comics that warrants keeping up with that problem
even a simple "yeah characterization is ass but at least it appeals to my hormone filled male head"
Comic book shit is like a soap opera. Like Coronation Street in the UK has over 11,000 episodes. No one is going to watch it all. You can dip into it or out of it.
The problem is modern mentality isn't "I like this arc and artist and might pick it up again" it is instead people wanting many decades, over half a century, to all make sense and be digestible. Everyone knows who Batman is. So dip in, read a story and have fun.
>So dip in, read a story
a story that has no beginning and no end, because the next writer will just do as he pleases >and have fun.
apparently people aren't having fun
People still watch and read James Bond despite numerous different people playing him and writing his books.
so why are they selling like shit now?
Entirely different reasons that are complex, as it is a mix of economics, culture, slow moving death of print, interests in entertainment changing, independent leisure reading levels going down, etc.
>why dont they even sell manga?
out of spite and a sense of superiority
LCS owners are the pretentious sommeliers of capeshit and blue haired comics
they're never going to lower themselves and sell fujobait or isekai
I get that you guys that visit this site to post wojaks and scream 'Black person' without consequence and will glady eat shit so long as its not woke but you have to know deep down that you're not a big enough demographic to keep comic book stores alive in the face of all the other problems with the medium and the economic realities of running a business?
nice strawman
first of all, this board is called Cinemaphileumblr for a reason, and your takes are the majority in here
having said that, all i have ever seen is people asking for a bit more eye-candy and maybe toning downs the white people bad rethoric
i mean take a look at the most recent restarts of Wonder Woman, HawkGirl, PowerGirl and Catwoman... they all start the same way, with the most trite talking points
and they all sold to white dudes in the past
rest of the site and even other sites
it's not hidden secret this board shares most users with r/comicbooks and now dead tumblr forums
this gif is more than 9 years old
a thread about that Avengers game.
Is the problem that the visual style is drab and colorless and looks like hong kong knockoffs of the MCU?
NO!
Is the problem that the gameplay loop gets stale and boring an hour in?
NO!
Is the problem that it's a live service game that dripped out support in a terrible and synergistic way with the movies?
NO!
Is the problem that the game's story was boring as frick and that the subtitles included stage direction for incomprehensible reasons?
NO!
It's Kamala's fault! The problem was muslims!
And I'd like to remind you, people were saying this Avengers game looked like shit from the very first preview, beore Kamala was even revealed to be in it. But look at what Anons decided is the nail in the coffin.
It's not a strawman. People here regularly ignore tons of shitty practices to laser focus on idpol and will swallow anything so long as it aligns with their politics. Then they accuse everyone else of doing it.
We see it in the AI threads and all those threads shilling for youtuber vanity projects as if they're the first and only indies as well.
>Coomers are not a big market
Videogames market disagree >[...]
>Oh that market is well covered by Anime and Manga.
Which, again, has better distribution
You still haven't explained why, if comic books put all that shit in, I would choose them over the bird in the hand.
So fricking what. You people claim just having multiple titles created too much confusion. Now you’re pretending it doesn’t when manga does the same thing. Not every manga reader will automatically know what title is the original one, or even be interested in it. A person interested in Fate franchise can’t immediately know wtf he is meant to read first. There is no rhyme or reason what Lupin series you should read unless you do research. Do you read Shin Devil Man or Devil Man, what’s the difference? I can’t tell, I am a walking moron. I can’t do homework. I can’t use google.
That is the se time what people like YOU always project to any person who wants to read anything western. And then act like a hypocrite when the same strawman logic is applied to you.
>My local comic shop has literally consumed the strip mall its in. Every store that was once something else is now another annex for it to sell more stuff
Skill issue tbdesu
>boobs don't sell
come one, i understand arguing for the sake of it, but there are hundreds of absolutely shit manga and manwha selling like hotcakes just because the women in it are sexy
NTA but that's what I do.
The thing is, that means only buying comics on the first Saturday of May every year when they have FCBD sales.
I can't imagine that customers that only buy once a year at a discount are particularly good for a business.
are no sales outside of one day in the year
At my LCS? Yes.They only do sales one day a year.
You do get there's no standardization in this business model right? Some stores have bigger more diverse stocks or are run by more personalable people. Some stores are pits run by jerks.
Then buy online. Why do you just rely on LCS if you don’t buy anything from it 364 days of the year? You could buy second hand comics. This isn’t rocket science.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Then buy online. Why do you just rely on LCS if you don’t buy anything from it 364 days of the year?
Anon you get that we're in a thread talking about how LCS are going out of business, right? This is why. Because that IS what I do. I read comics online because the in store experience is shitty.
How is THAT rocket science?
I do. The thing is that I liked collecting comics and I liked discussing the weekly issues with people. sadly post 2014 the prices have gone up and the conversations have devolved into mindless culture war and shitflinging. Now I just buy trades and pirate in peace.
5e isn’t garbage 4th was stupid and 3.5 was over complicated and just as easy to break, if not easier to break than 4th and 5th. If any homosexual says pathfinder go frick yourself that was just 3.5.5. 5th is the lesser of evils in my book not as overly complicated as 3.5 but not stupid easy like 4th.
5e isn’t garbage 4th was stupid and 3.5 was over complicated and just as easy to break, if not easier to break than 4th and 5th. If any homosexual says pathfinder go frick yourself that was just 3.5.5. 5th is the lesser of evils in my book not as overly complicated as 3.5 but not stupid easy like 4th.
Literally where the frick do you live you homosexual
Name the fricking country and state where you supposedly don't see manga on every god damn store that has anything to do with books or magazines at all
There is no place in America or Europe or Asia where that's true so you're living in Africa or Antarctica or most likely lying your ass off
>nuh uh it doesn't count unless it's in my mom's basement room that i never leave
Go frick yourself. You're not interested in the real facts of the matter, you just want to defend an industry that's killing itself. Ostrich ass motherfricker, hiding head in sand.
Says the person who can’t even admit the same issues they whine about also exist in manga which destroys their entire strawman argument they use in every thread
7 months ago
Anonymous
>same issues
which issues?
7 months ago
Anonymous
The very issues that are always complained about.
7 months ago
Anonymous
They literally do not and that's why manga is crushing it. 92% of comics sold in America are manga. It's not even a fight, it's an execution and it's that because of ostriches like you who think refusing to admit reality means it won't affect you. Too bad reality doesn't need your consent for anything. >b-b-but fate!
Fate franchise is literally unique in Japan. It is literally unique in how many different series and spinoffs it's got. In Marvel/DC every single important character has a double digit amount of titles, ongoings, minis, oneshots, team books, what-ifs, black labels et cetera. It's not remotely the same thing.
7 months ago
Anonymous
They do though. You just can’t accept your biased argument is bullshit.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Whatever. Here's the thing buddy: I don't need to convince you. Your opinion doesn't matter at all, it is patently wrong and whether you accept it or not doesn't change a damn thing. Manga dominates because of the reasons discussed, comics languish because of the reasons discussed, and your little head can stay in the sand forever for all I care.
7 months ago
Anonymous
No inch off my back. Meanwhile you will keep being wrong.
Accessibility and ease of breaking in as a new reader. You can go to any Barnes and Noble, Hot Topic, Box Lunch or other chain book store and grab a volume of Manga. You arent forced to seek an LCS that still carry a stereotype of unfriendly gatekeepers(whether true or not). Also, if for example, you liked the Naruto anime and wanted to read the manga, you can go grab Naruto vol 1. You dont have 14 different titles that all have Naruto in them. Western comics make it very difficult for new readers.
Affordability. Volumes are $9.99-$14.99 while a single issue of Batman costs $4.99-$7.99 for 22 pages
Manga also listens to their audience. When it comes to Shonen Jump they have reader polls on their favorite series, characters, best new series, artists, etc. The Manga industry is driven by reader trends, not what movie is out or what TV series they are trying to push or by what editorial believes are the best books to promote and push.
my mentally ill pastime is going on r/comicbooks, asking why manga is doing better than western comics, and getting flooded with insults and people telling me that it is, in fact, not true that the comic book industry is struggling... or going on about how it isn't a zero sum game between comics and manga, as if people have infinite money and time
Manga is more book for less money and has none of the western censorship.
I don’t think western comics can truly complete on price as they simply take more time and are more costly to make due to both book quality and higher pay.
European comics take even longer and look even better in my opinion.
Selling on scale doesn’t make a product good, just cheap and easily accessible
Comics just aren't cool. We can moan about distribution, quality, comics crash, comics code, all the other shitty business decisions, price, digital and everything else until we are blue in the face.
But comics are just not cool to people. People think those that read comics are losers. Manga isn't necessarily cooler just people have better mental gymnastics to justify their interest. People just can't justify their interest in comics without feeling immature or looked down upon.
This is culturally entrenched and billion dollar movies couldn't change it.
American comics are literally only one genre, and people think super hero comics are for kids
manga is seen as more adult somehow, and it has many different genres for different audience
there's a fujo manga set in Victorian Britain somewhere out selling all the capeshit industry
Mr. Marvel intern, vehemently arguing online that there's nothing wrong with your industry does not actually translate into there being nothing wrong with your industry.
>hit it big with mcu >tank comics with THE MESSAGE >it's ok because the movies are still exploding >tank movies with THE MESSAGE >it's ok because >oh shit
Manga has been selling gangbusters so they can't even say it's the industry. People still have a huge appetite for it.
American comics have a (untrue) perception of being "difficult to get into". This perceived barrier to entry turns off a lot of potential readers. The fact that there's no real agreed-upon "jumping-on point" or established order to the books that's easy to figure out doesn't help. You can even compare cape comics to books like The Walking Dead, or Saga, or Hellboy. Those do a lot better, because people know that you can start at the beginning and just go forwards. The constant relaunches with new Issue #1s do not help.
Additionally, the fact that they're done by a myriad of creators means that the quality of a book can vary wildly. If you read One Piece or The Goon, you know what you're getting, there's going to be a consistent tone or quality throughout. But if you read Batman, that's a different story entirely.
As well, cape comics are just hard to find. You've got to go to out-of-the-way specialty stores, whereas you can buy a copy of Jump at any convenience store.
Cape comics are expensive too, nearly four dollars for just twenty pages of decompressed story, so barely anything happens. Cape comics are still chasing the dragon oft he speculator boom of the 90s, so they print on this high quality glossy magazine paper that inflates the cost of the product. Compare to manga, which is printed on cheap newsprint in black and white, keeping the costs low.
>CTRL+F manga >126 results
Cinemaphile needs to ban the word manga so we can go back to actually discussion.
Can someone give me QRD? I refuse to read threads that mention manga excessively.
I refuse to read these because they are always the same shitty contradictory arguments. In the end it's all just >comics bad >no manga bad
>QRD
manga sells better
some anons wrote some issues comics have as cause
another anon insists that those issues exist in manga too, so that can't be the problem
Same as always
blame minorities and wokeness
praise manga for accessibility and breasts
>QRD
manga sells better
some anons wrote some issues comics have as cause
another anon insists that those issues exist in manga too, so that can't be the problem
Also another interesting thing. Fans of manga are usually either fans of the whole medium or fans of specific genres while for comics there are a lot of fans of just 1 hero. For example a guy likes green lantern he will read all the green lantern stuff and most likely stop there since he isn't really a fan of the medium as a whole.
In all seriousness there is a kerne of truth to this. Comic book fans seem to pride gatekeeping while lamenting diminishing sales and rather than self refect and consider that maybe those two ideas are mutually exclusive, a lot of them shift the blame to the same demographics they just told to frick off.
It's not true. You pick up a current comic and it's full of references to older stories. X-men on particular are very guilty of this, you basically need to read from the 80s on.
>relaunches are good
Slapping a new #1 on a comic every 12 months doesn't really help anyone. Also how could someone have trouble figuring out how to read Naruto and Boruto but figure out American comics?
I have never said manga isn’t doing well. I am saying the “analysis” manga fricks always put out is based on nothing but bullshit they made up because the only argument they have is either baaaawww comics hard or muh one author. Which only goes to show how stupid these people are because they’re using their own limited and biased opinions as facts without any ability to back it up. Nor can they counter when people point out the many ways their argument doesn’t actually work even when something is exactly like what they claim people want.
Then what is your moronic idea of why manga is effortlessly crushing DC/Marvel in their home territory? What in your demented, mad, subhuman, inferior mind explains it, if everything said in the thread is so wrong?
anon, the insane comic shill you're replying to also said that it's not true that comics are only found in LCS and manga is widespread
he lives in a different reality
There is no single simple minded answer like your durrrrr people are too stupid to read western comics and also all comics reading is just impulse buying you can’t ever do cursory google research with a smart phone that would take you two seconds!
Format, format, format.
Set everything else aside for a moment, and think of *what* you are buying, and how it is served up to you. Marvel/DC/indie comics come as individual issues at a given cadence (weekly/fortnightly/monthly/whatever) where you pay a fair amount for a small number of full colour glossy pages. You've got to go somewhere which specialises in their sale, because other retailers no longer carry them.
Most manga is published in weekly compilation magazines, where you get multiple stories from different writers and artists. It'll generally be in black & white on non-gloss paper to keep the price down, and the physical format makes it much simpler/easier to be sold by non-specialised retailers as well as be carried & read on the go. If a given story isn't popular, it isn't likely to affect overall sales of the magazine and retailers won't be stuck carrying deadweight stock. We then in the west get the 'good' stories published in standalone volumes, where the bad stuff has already been filtered out.
Then why isn’t 2000AD and Judge Dredd Magazine the biggest selling western titles? Why isn’t Batman Brave and the Bold outselling everything? Why isn’t the current Superman anthology raved about here?
Are they sold at local convenience stores & public transport hubs and marketed to the widest possible demographics?
The answer is of course no they aren't. The truth is that the manga ecosystem is radically different (and radically Japanese). They never had the Comics Code / Superhero-only lockdown of the format and they built upon a customer base which wanted convenient entertainment in a pocket-size book they could read on the bus or train to/from the workplace. It also helped that you had different magazines for different tastes / market segments, so it never generated the stigma which comics did in the US/West of "Oh, comics are just for nerdy boys!".
>Are they sold at local convenience stores & public transport hubs and marketed to the widest possible demographics?
in the UK they are the UK comics like 2000AD and the Beano never lost the newsagent market anon
It has still declined, however. When I was growing up, there was both the Dandy & the Beano, but the Dandy disappeared a while ago. I miss Desperate Dan and his Big Cow Pies
you can partly blame DC Thompsons' constant format and marketing changes for the Dandy every declining Market share like Xtreme Dandy in the late 2000s
Sales success in manga doesn't really care about Jump sales but the sales of collected editions which 2000AD/Rebellion are terrible at with strips not getting collected for years at times since due to 2000AD compressed format simply won't have enough material for those collected editions
the Megazine is an odd case since at least half of every issue is reprints of all material such as currently their reprinting a Garth Ennis Johnny Red comic from 2015 and the IDW Rogue Trooper comic along with random interviews of people so the Megazine itself is a really odd publication overall
The art in manga doesn’t look like shit. The women are beautiful. The story is good. And they don’t talk down on their customers.
I'm reading "old" (90s,2000s) comic stuff now from TopCow, Dynamite, Avatar comics,awa, behemoth, ablaze
>The story is good
Every time I hear about a manga ending it's people talking about how it retroactively ruined the entire story, most explosive case being Attack on Titan
Lol nah slotts writing I'd one thing, his ego is a whole other. >stalks people he blocks >creates alts to praise himself >edits his own Wikipedia page >modern day American comic writer
Slott's just an example of abused becoming abuser https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/why-are-some-comics-pros-so-damn?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 >Let’s have an example. In one of those odd Marvel behind-the-scenes specials on the Disney Channel, we saw long time comics scribe Dan Slott absolutely humiliated on camera by his editor, whose name I believe is Anonymous Nobody (I’m not willing to rewatch the thing in order to get the fellow’s name). >And of course Dan Slott is notorious for how badly he treats his readers, because those who are trained to be bullies don’t abuse the ones who bullied (or bully, since it seems to still be ongoing) them. They bully the next ones down the line.
manga is already publicized enough thanks to anime
but comics aren't being publicized by movies adaptation nor games
so why don't the big 2 simply pay content creators to publicize comics?
I can't go into my LCS after 2016 without the workers in trying to get me to talk about how they hate Trump. On top of that the New52 attracted a ton more people to it in 2011, which was fine because most were normal, but the most socially incompetent neck beards out of them became regulars that I want to avoid. I've seen grown men starting fights with young children in there and guys trying to hit on the cashier. Weirdly enough the only nice one was this troony who always wore a Wonder Woman shirt. He seemed normal apart from the crossdressing.
as an absolute DC noob, every time i dared say that i loved the DCAU of the new52, i get angry people coming at me, even irl
i just think those anime style cartoons were fine and DC should have kept doing them
adult Kori and Nightwing flirting? apparently makes people mald
>as an absolute DC noob, every time i dared say that i loved the DCAU of the new52, i get angry people coming at me, even irl
You'd have to be an aging Gen Xer or a contrarian Millennial to hate the DCAU. I get the New 52 hate though, they replaced a decent universe with a worse one.
As a man with a large dick, I will interject and say that, aside from the overall low quality of most american comics, they are very expensive, that's why nobody buys them. The model is bad and quite frankly, so is the marketing since for example Japan makes manga for 13 year old boys in shonen but also makes manga for young adults of 19-22 years. If you want to pick up a comic for young adults you get shit made for 8 year olds because Pedomerica wants to insist 8 year olds are capable of making their own decisions just like an adult.
daily reminder that there was a Young Justice story released during Dark Crisis some months ago that consisted in the writer and editorial calling you, and old YJ readers, chuds and sex pests
The saddest thing is comics feel like they have such little presence outside of the movies/tv industry. >USM is coming back and you'd think that would garner hype amongst a generation that grew up on it. However, it feels more like crickets than a mainstream surge.
>USM is coming back and you'd think that would garner hype amongst a generation that grew up on it. However, it feels more like crickets than a mainstream surge.
Why would it, Bendis ran it into the ground and this is an entirely new take on the concept.
Honestly, not really related to the conversation, but where did this idea that you have to watch from the beginning come from?
Like, did you watch every TMNT/Transformers/Simpsons/BTAS/Whatever episode in order? Did everyone watch the 'first' episode? What about shows that don't even have 'first' episodes? Hell, a lot of people infamously watched only half of Dragon Ball.
And from my experience I had no problem with Raimi Spidey and Cartoon Spidey being what they are.
I guess to tie back in, I didn't have any problem reading the few Spidey comics I picked up on a whim back then.
No offense but marvel continuity has become way more problematic in this sense. >I never really read X-men till someone told me modern day hickman was a good entry point. >Proceeded to get lost in all of these characters and organizations i had no idea about.
Most of those still have continuity through. And some of those are seriealised enough.
Maybe I'm just weird. I watched the Dark Knight without any context from Begins (not even sure I realised it came out). Also, this was more of a thing when I watched TV more, but I had no problems with watching something I tuned into the middle of.
No offense but marvel continuity has become way more problematic in this sense. >I never really read X-men till someone told me modern day hickman was a good entry point. >Proceeded to get lost in all of these characters and organizations i had no idea about.
X-Men has been this way for decades, it was never a problem in the past.
Most of those are episodic. Did you really need someone to point this out to you?
They all have continuity. The difference between a show and a long-running comic series is that an individual episode is self-contained whereas these days an individual run is self-contained.
LCS were part of the problem. Frick 'em.
This is the falsest thing ever posted.
But keep being a corporate apologist, you subhuman homosexual.
>Local comic shops were part of the "problem"
Huh? What did little storefronts for your comics ever do to you?
Not that poster, but if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers, maybe things wouldn't be as dire as they are now. I'm not trying to shit on retailers, I'm not saying this is what they deserve. But if someone has no sense of self preservation, if someone does not fight hard for their own interests, then there's really nothing anyone else can do to save them. Sympathy is wasted on them.
You know, it really wasn't their battle to fight and they didn't deserve to be thrown onto the frontlines of a culture war. The same goes for the readers. Comic book stores are really just small time businesses and you are downplaying how severe cancel culture was back then. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. If you stand against the changes, they call you a racist and a bigot. If you're for the changes and go quietly, you pass on the problem to the customer and take the cancer into your store.
At the end of the day, the comic book shop is a causality of the culture war. It makes me sad the shills and industry ghouls are laughing at their demise. They're not going to get them back. They'll realize what they destroyed once they're all truly gone.
>they didn't deserve to be thrown onto the frontlines of a culture war.
Deserve's got nothing to do with it. If something is going to affect you directly, then you have to take action. It's not because you have an obligation to a cause or an industry. You have an obligation to yourself.
No civilian wants to be in a culture war, but it landed on every shore. You can't wait to be conscripted.
Yeah, but even so. Nobody really saw it as a war until years later. They just were as confused as everyone else. I didn't fully see it as what you'd think of as an attack until about 5 years in. I had to see everyone on Twitter attacking whites, comic books fans, males, just about everyone to understand it was massive subversion.
Also, what were they supposed to do? They don't have the money to push back and "fight" like you want them to. Comic book stores are just glorified news stands.
>Also, what were they supposed to do?
Think about what they were able to do collectively to digital comics. It was to their own detriment, of course, but that's beside the point. Stores have power as the actual customers of these publishers. They control the purse strings.
If stores had simply sided with customers a few years sooner and called out the false narrative in the media, that alone would have done a lot. They didn't need to go alt right, or bash diversity. They simply needed to tell the truth.
"This stuff isn't selling."
"We are not healthy."
"Manga sales don't lift comic sales."
"We are losing legacy readers but not gaining new ones the big two are chasing."
Just tell the truth.
I know what you're saying with them holding the purse strings, but they would've got caught in the culture war then. If there some type of #ComicBookStoreGate, it would've destroyed them. They absolutely would've attacked those comic book store owners for standing up to them.
They really are just an unfortunate victim in the whole mess. If I were a comic book store owner, I'd just expand into general nerd media, though most already do that.
>I know what you're saying with them holding the purse strings, but they would've got caught in the culture war then
I have no idea what you think this involves, but all they had to do was not buy anything that doesn't sell. This is how they treated every indie publisher since the start. They only bought what people ordered. This is the entire underlying theory of the direct market.
If I could redo everything, knowing what I would know, I think the mistake of all comic consumers was we should drop series immediately when they do not appease us. Then, they should've put all that money into making a new industry. Don't make Youtube videos and complain about the subverted product hoping it can be saved, and invest all that time and energy into indie or an alternative new company immediately. That would've killed the subverted comic book companies immediately. The LCS wouldn't have been hurt if we all would've done that, too
If they could work with a distributor to get the fricking French to send their comics over, I'd be very interested.
I'd really like to own tangible copies of European comics.
Seconding this. How do we get so many Japanese comics but nothing from Europe?
Some creators do not want their work translated. I know the Moebius estate hasn't allowed a bunch of his work to be translated. (Major stuff has been but there is so much that hasn't been.) Americans don't tend to understand the European way of thinking. A lot of it is about risk/reward. Anyone seeking out these works will want a much larger slice of the pie because they are assuming a large risk, translating//printing. And if you're selling a classic to your audience already in Europe then these deals seem unfair or pointless. Really this is fertile ground. I have seen people use crowdfunding to do things like this. I think the problem is: you need someone clever enough to talk people round a table to try it and then you need it to actually pull through. Right now most of these people think there isn't enough of a market and besides a big name they don't think it'll sell much.
Thanks for the input. That's all interesting. It's frustrating because most of the good European comics I just happen to catch being posted here.
Americans are really starving for good Western comics. I think to make that deal, you'd have to speak French fluently and be able to curate the best selection of French comics for American audiences. Although frankly I have never once seen an Asterix book over here.
I think there is a sizeable hipster market that can tolerate a story not having the punch of capeshit or shonen, but it should still be poignant, meaningful.
>Americans are really starving for good Western comics.
Are they? Kids are just buying manga, even in France.
I was thinking about 20-somethings and older, not kids. Winning kids back from shonen would be hard.
Honestly I think Western comics could win back girls before boys given how utterly superior shonen is at showing the ins and outs of a fight.
You wrap a complicated, interesting relationship around the fights, and now you got the girls. The fights add gravitas to the relationships for the girls.
>Honestly I think Western comics could win back girls
No chance, shoujo and gay BL shit has an absolute lock on girl readers while Western publishers haven't done romance in like 50 years.
Demon Slayer has a lot of young female fans. Pretty sure it's shonen. Shonen often appeals to both sexes. Naruto has very dedicated female fans.
I actually feel more comraderie with Naruto fans than with AT fans even though Kishi is almost as bad as Ward. /schizo
BL...please let BL remain an underground thing. For the health of humanity, for the love of God, do not court fujos. Or do so through a subsidery of a subsidery of a subsidery, if you must.
Dear God, I do not want to imagine BL with American pacing.
>Demon Slayer has a lot of young female fans. Pretty sure it's shonen. Shonen often appeals to both sexes. Naruto has very dedicated female fans.
True, but American capeshit can never do this. The tiny remaining contingent of capeshit readers lose their damn minds at even the slightest nods towards attracting female readers as you can see in this thread alone.
There were no lingering shots of Sasuke's ass in Naruto. Guys were fine. Girls were fine.
>Nobody really saw it as a war until years later.
they did call everyone a chicken little for trying to point it out. Or they oversimplified the problem to the point where they were dismissing it as right-wing religious activism and shit. When it was all about dunking on those fricks, everyone was all about it.
>they
You mean the ones using Twitter on a regular basis?
>twitter
oh sweety, this shit has roots before twitter was a twinkle in Dorsey's eye.
No, they in this context means the LCS. Some of us tried to warn them that cozying up to this elements was going to have consequences, but most of them were such antiestablishment types they were easy fodder to use their antipathy.
>you are downplaying how severe cancel culture was back then.
Oh cancel culture was destroying LCS left and right? LMAO GTFO
No, LCS downfall came later.
>Oh cancel culture was destroying LCS left and right?
It is NOW, though.
>It is NOW
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers
DING DING DING
WE HAVE A WINNER
This is the ONLY person in the thread that gets it.
You really overestimate what message trying to protest does, and what would really happen id they were to just stop ordering books.
The big stores (and Diamond) push against the wrong fricking things, which is how they get into this mess.
>if stores actually fought back harder at the dumb stuff Marvel and DC were pushing at the start, and stood fast with readers
The readers who wanted to buy the stuff? The readers who b***h and whine but then run and buy the stuff they whine about not wanting? The readers who never support the shit they claim to want instead?
You c**ts do nothing but cry and blame others and never have the self awareness to admit that you don’t actually do what you preach and you do not represent the majority of readers. You’re just another entitled whiny fanboy.
I don't want to hear shit about fighting for quality when Spider-Man man fans would rather hate-read about Peter getting cucked by a man named Paul than even entertain the idea of reading something else, just because the book has "Spider-Man" on the cover
Nobody is actually reading that.
Yes they are, the one they don't give a shit about is Spider-Boy
>Yes they are
>source: your ass
Hate-reading was debunked already, people just stop buying. That's why manga overtook comics.
I'm not talking about in comparison to manga, I'm talking about in comparison to other western comics, Spider-Man fans would rather see Peter get cucked than just read a different comic, much in the same way capeshit fans would rather b***h about the state of capeshit than read non-capeshit comics
>I don't want to hear shit about fighting for quality when Spider-Man man fans would rather hate-read about Peter getting cucked
It's *not* about the fight for quality. I never said it was about quality. It's about the market behaving rationally. The stores that got into trouble were buying speculatively. If people actually bought these comics, they wouldn't be having a problem.
When the market does not behave rationally, when stores are allowing manipulation by buying 20 copies of a comic just to get one special cover they could mark up 2000%, it is sick. They are propping up failure. They needed to say no to that shit. They needed to stand with readers. Everything in pop culture is crashing because nothing is organic. All of this stuff is by fiat.
An industry propped by speculator and collectors is a bubble waiting to burst.
>ever do to you?
Replaced their concrete walls with Funkos
Comics have died as a medium due to distribution
Comic book shops pretty much made it so the market would only gravitate there
at first it was great because it was an answer to censorship, but also it was a downfall
Comic book shops made it so comics would only focus on the market of fanboys
The Simpsons character is more reflective of reality than a lot of people realize.
My closest "little storefront" is an hour round trip and run by a guy that treats his customers like an inconvenience. I ask if they carry a book and instead of offering to order it for me or anything I get told "what's on the shelves is what we got" like I pissed in his cereal. I went specifically to support the local business and left thinking Amazon would've been faster and cheaper. Good job, LCS.
>t. banned from the game place
If only they stopped buying Marvel and DC shitty variant covers sooner.
Now is too late, frick them and their stupid variants.
good.
let it all die and let a new indie scene rise from the ashes.
I know people say that, but this was all completely unnecessary. Indie comics were around before they destroyed the entire industry. They'll be around after it's destroyed, too.
Indiegays are so fricking dumb and ignorant.
Where will these indie comics be sold? If normies can't find them they will always be niche.
I wonder what it's like to infiltrate an industry, thinking you'll make bank, then completely destroy it over the course of about two decades. From what I see here, they never acknowledge the real problem is they chased out the whites, got political, subverted everything for subversions sake, and can't fathom why nobody wants that trash.
What were once healthy parts of the industry, like second hand sales and comic shops are gone. It's kind of depressing.
>they chased out the whites
The buyers are whiter than ever.
The real problem is they chased out the READERS. Only people still buying are COLLECTORS who don't even read the comic.
The last comic I bought was that racist Miles Morales one because it was so offensive it was funny, I had to have it in print form.
>white people collect comics
Like maybe the old comics, but not the new. Comic collectors have always been a meme. The new blood in comics ruined the collectors market too, because there's nothing of worth out anymore.
The one where he's in ghettofied Asgard?
>The real problem is they chased out the READERS. Only people still buying are COLLECTORS who don't even read the comic.
Collector market isn't actually that big though so your point doesn't hold any mustard.
>Collector market isn't actually that big though so your point doesn't hold any mustard.
NTA but that actually helps his point.
If comic book stores chase collectors and collectors are an even smaller market, of course they're not going to be able to stay open in a world of rising costs.
>second hand sales and comic shops
>healthy parts of the industry
The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry, rendering Comics from something available to most people off a shelf to tiny shops you wouldn't know of unless you were already into comics; this enabled the 2000s era of fanboys infiltrating and pandering to themselves which furthered the incestuous spiral, which in turn enabled the political takeover in a desperate attempt to make money off what (from the out of touch executive perspective) was a large and socially influential demographic in twatter types.
And when presented with the idea of digital comics to try and let things heal, these LCS homosexuals boycotted because they didn't care for the long term health of the industry so much as keeping their parasitic relationship. They're no better and I'll be happy to see them die with the Big 2.
>tiny shops you wouldn't know of unless you were already into comics
That's bullshit. They're called specialty stores. I'll give you an example as a manga reader. I sometimes go to "tiny anime shops" to get anime and manga related good specifically. I can still buy manga just about anywhere where books are sold, though. Those specialty stores are very important to me as a consumer of anime and manga so I can talk to a store owner who actually knows a thing or two about manga. It's their whole job. They're also super important for rallying any type of fandom or fan meet in the area. You can't rely on Comic cons for everything.
Likewise, if I want to ask a super obscure question about comics or find a really rare comic, that's the store I'd go to. I'm not going to ask some idiot at Barnes and Noble these things. You just don't understand the importance of the brick and mortar comic store at all.
You idiots are also full of hubris and think your comics would sell without the pushing of the comic book stores. Good luck getting moronic normies buying transgender Batman or gay Miles Morales, or whatever you're pushing these days.
>The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry,
The Direct Market kept it going. If they stayed only in the newsstand market, they would've died back in the 80s because they wouldn't have had the avenues for innovation. Where they went wrong was pandering only to collectors and marginalizing themselves, making them too weak to try things more effectively
The 00s crowd happened because they tried to present themselves as the savior of comics and fricked things up way more than the 90s ever did
Comics in it's current form doesn't deserve to be on the news stand. I'd hate to the store owner given that shit and have it just sit there while other magazines sell. They have to earn that right back.
>The Direct Market was one of the death knells of the industry,
I'm tired of people saying shit like this that is objectively false. Back in the day distributors would routinely keep a load of comics and put them in with the unsold returns from newstands and essentially re-sell them while keeping the profits and not passing them on to the publishers. The creation of the Direct Market actually massively improved things by cutting out these issues and giving more control. And comics were avaliable at small shops and newstands for a long time even after the Direct Market was created (some even still sell them now). Talk to most people who read comics in the 80s and most of the 90s and they were not buying them from comic shops.
The problem is the 90s crash really destroyed comics as an American pastime and all the subsequent gimmicks never actually fixed the problems. People really don't understand what the speculator boom and bust did. So many creators left comics, so many distributors were closed down, so many people had invested so much into the industry and I've seen estimates putting the closure of like 50% of all shops. Diamond ended up with a monopoly that was challenged by monopoly rules but found to be one of the only things actually keeping comics afloat.
The problem is that comics were decimated at the worst time. Decent manga/anime had been flooding into the states, loads of other interests like videogames were taking off more so than before, card games like MTG. What tricks did comics have left? More events? More gimmick covers? The movement towards the secondary trade market led to decompressed stories and those sales ticked things on. And then with the Internet we have seen digital media take off and comics have never been able to really get into that, even with more modern attempts at subscription stuff. So all we have left is a bunch of after thoughts and shitty creators more interested in getting into screenplays and a dead medium.
Not comics but webtoons tbh. They've captured a much more robust audience with the rise of the internet .
Even the copy Japs are kicking capeshit's ass
>the 90s crash really destroyed comics as an American pastime
what happened?
Also, the 90s were a very long time ago. Saying that something that happened in the 90s is the reason for people's purchasing choices 30 years later is like saying WWII explains the 70s disco craze. Or that the disco craze is why Yu Gi Oh got so popular in the 2000s. The 90s are ancient history so far as popular culture is concerned.
>what happened?
You mean what was the 90s crash? In the late 80s publishers saw they could sell huge numbers to speculators via the newly emerging direct market comic shops so they flooded the market with variants, special editions, #1s, etc. This artificially inflated their sales because stores (and to a lesser extent real people) would purchase large numbers of the same issues. High on the temporary sales explosion, the Big Two massively over-expanded, especially Marvel which went on a corporate acquisition spree and even tried to become its own distributor. But by the mid-90s the junk inventory had piled up and the wave was unsustainable so the bubble popped, causing a massive market crash that wiped out like 50% of all comic stores and drove Marvel to bankruptcy. The industry would never again see anywhere near the highs it did in that period.
Thanks, didn't know any of that.
But that sounds like it only affected specialty comic stores. Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
>Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
You're getting it wrong: by the 90s most people weren't buying at those places anymore. As others have said above, the comic shops arose in the late 70s/80s because newsstands and stores started to dump comics because they weren't profitable enough. The industry shifted to the "direct market" of comic stores during that time, which is what led to the bubble and crash.
>Did that affect comic sales at drugstores, convenience stores, and supermarkets where people bought most comic books and other magazines?
In some ways, yes.
Loss of money from comics overall during the mid-90s meant less money to spend on having comics sold in the newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc
Meanwhile the key factor that people ignore: A lot of newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc DID NOT WANT THEM like
said. They were selling them at a loss and demanded the comic companies put higher prices on them, and the comic companies didn't really want to fight them anymore. That's part of why they started to decline in those markets during the late 90s and onwards till Marvel and DC finally pulled out of them in the 2010s
The problem right now is that magazines themselves have been in decline since the late 00s and if comics tried to jump back into that newsstand/drugstore/supermarket/etc there's no guarantee it would even sell and the companies would have to eat the costs from returns.
I mean for frickssake, everyone demanding that comics be sold in grocery stores again--have you looked at a magazine rack in the grocery store lately? A lot of the magazines are these $15-$20 specials; you'd have to get someone to take a risk at making a magazine collecting comics and eat the costs for like a few years, and that could be expensive
>a very long time ago
Comics are dominated by its past. Why is superheroes the dominated genre? Because some psychologist said comics were perverting kids so the industry made a code banning a bunch of shit. You literally couldn't have monsters or show certain things in comic books, here are some rules:
>No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title.
>All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.
If you didn't accept the code, most distributors or stores would not carry your books. Companies like DC used the code to purposefully go after competitors selling things like horror. Superheroes were already popular but they easily got round these rules. So while the code was made in 1954, waned by the 70s and abandoned by 2001 it still influences things. Comics are for kids and superheroes and the dominant genre.
>what happened?
To summarise and generalise, speculator boom and bust:
>The successful auction of some older comics (Action Comics #1) made people think, "Comics are super valuable investment!"
>Superstar artists at Marvel massively boosted sales, they moved away from the old house style art they then later left and formed Image. (X-Men #1 in the 90s is still the best selling comic of all time.)
>Death of Superman event, feeling of finality and potential investment in getting the issues.
>GIMMICKS, foil covers, #1 issues and renumbering, events.
>Market was flooded with comics.
>Small operations followed the Image example, their number #1 issues sold better than best selling comics today.
>Loads of new shops opened up to capitalise on it.
>Marvel overleveraged its positon, buying up collectible card companies and a distributor. Corporate raiding.
(1/2)
>Marvel almost went bankrupt and sold off the movie rights to a lot of its characters (hence why Sony and Fox had what they had).
>All distributors collapsed leading to the Diamond monopoly, a monopoly that existed until COVID and DC changing to a different one.
>Up to 50% of the shops closed.
>Many creatives left the industry and didn't return.
>Industry never returned to those levels of sales, the average book now doesn't hit anywhere like those numbers.
>This happened as other media was rising and published media has waned.
>Comics had a mainstream appeal before hand and it massively lost that.
>The hobby had been taken over by obsessive collectors who wanted investment or value on essentially worthless items.
>The gimmicks and ridiculous stuff clashed with what some wanted.
> People aping off of Alan Moore or Frank Miller leading to edgy comics and the battle between those insecure people wanting comics to be taken seriously vs those who wanted entertainment.
(2/2)
Edge and seriousness also have entertainment value.
Indeed. The edge part and the battle part of the sentence were seperate really. I was saying that there is deep seated insecurity between people arguing over depth in comics vs pure entertainment. Deep comics with serious themes can be entertaining. But there certainly is a battle over what people perceive as the soul of comics.
Fair.
The ~~*Comics Code Authority*~~ completely stunted the industry
This is the exact opposite of reality.
The Direct Market should have just been a stopgap to maintain the industry through the collapse of newsstand sales. Instead it became an albatross around the industry's neck. The publishers should have found better avenues for sales and distribution ages ago. That anon is right in that the result is today comics are relegated to the weird ghetto of specialty shops with no ability to appeal to the masses and pull in new readers. The publishers should have seen this death spiral ages ago but they either didn't or ignored it.
>digital pushback
There was that shitfit about the Wal-Mart digest comics a couple years back too. Some of them are still fricking mad about it. Comics are a weird ass industry where they spite innovation and bringing in readers and then wonder why the frick business is down.
A fourth one just opened where I live, haven't checked it out yet. The other three have one that's barely alive, one that seems to do really well somehow, and one I forget exists.
>Comics are a weird ass industry where they spite innovation
So many big 2 comics have a free digital edition with a print issue and there are subscription services for access to shit loads of comics.
Half the trouble is people say "I want x!" and then it doesn't sell. People say they want more genres, they try it, doesn't sell. People say they want anthologies, they try it, doesn't sell. People say it is ultimately about quality, but then will go out and buy a dogshit comic over something good.
About the only innovation that comics could do is just to actually make tankobans, cheap paperbacks with far more content that people might actually buy.
I remember a few years ago at an event a bunch of shop owners really did Marvel a kicking over the shit quality of stuff.
This is more a general point about small businesses, but what you realise is that most human beings are incompetent and can't run a business. My LCS has weathered many stores because it has diversified, been clever at what it does and the owner genuinely knows what he is doing. So many other stores are run by enthusiasts or people overextending what they are doing.
It is weird but comics are still a massive word of mouth thing for many and a good salesman can absolutely say "You like x, try y!" But when you have people that are either the Comicbookguy stereotype or some c**ty hipster type giving up garbage recommendations, it goes no where.
Marvel and DC’s digital services are like under 10$ a piece, insane value no one takes advantage of or talks about
Don't they have a month-long delay for new comics on those services?
I gave Marvel's a shot and the delay wasn't even what bothered me. Half the pages just refused to load on both my phone and tablet versions. Tachiyomi has no such problems and I don't know why pirate media is so much better than legal media these days.
>most human beings are incompetent and can't run a business
That's absolutely true, but just in the context of this thread, we're talking about Jim Hanley's closing down. That doesn't bode well for anybody.
>About the only innovation that comics could do is just to actually make tankobans, cheap paperbacks with far more content that people might actually buy.
They did this in the 2000s with some books and they sold well enough to basically save series like Spider-Girl, Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Then they just stopped for no real reason.
>They did this in the 2000s with some books and they sold well enough to basically save series like Spider-Girl, Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Then they just stopped for no real reason.
There was a rumor that Ike got mad that Scholastic or something demanded more money and so those digest sized books stopped
That could be true but I think it's also because Marvel wanted to wind down Spider-Girl and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane because they were pushing Brand New Day and wanted to shove Mary Jane to the side.
Weirdly enough they are doing small size books right now but they are original Marvel series. Hulk, Spider-Man, Avengers. Not sure how they are selling because I don't know if kids want to read those old comics.
Marvel has Penguin classics but also Taschen put out some Marvel books as did Folio. So like there are a bunch of premium classic formats for Marvel stuff.
So are there things like that for DC comics?
Unless you count absolute editions, not really.
https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/dc-comics-the-golden-age-1938-1956.html
I know this might not sound like a big deal but I work in a library and what immediately catches my eye about this that would catch a patron's eye is how LEGIBLE THE SPINE IS.
Tankobons are nice and fat with thick spines, when arranged on the shelf it is immediately obvious what the title is and what the number is and many times they even fit artwork onto them. Look at this shelf of Western comics. That it is a smallish image is irrelevant, because imagine seeing a shelf like this from down the bookshelf aisle before you walk to it. How legible is it? Even when you get up close to it in many cases you will need to pull the comic out or lean in and squint to see how it is labeled to know the order number.
I think this makes the shelves look cluttered and intimidated. I've seen patrons linger at the Western comics section and get flustered and confused and walk off on MULTIPLE occasions. They really like the thicker books though.
Now compare that to this shelf of manga. And this isn't even arranged on the shelf 'nicely' the way I like. This is a messy display shelf and yet it looks more legible and intimidating thanks to those chunky spines. On a visual level its more approachable. The last time I saw this play out it was a father with his kids, the kids got confused by the numbering of the comics and just walked over to the adjacent manga section. You gotta nab kid's interest while they're young because they'll carry that preference going forward and the comics failed to do that while the manga did not. Consider those kid's preferences set.
They later approached me looking for DOGMAN and Raina Telgemeir comics, all of which have nice fat chunky spines too.
this is obvious to everyone that read American comics for more than 3 months
but the people in here that tell you that 300 writers and a shit format aren't a problem for new readers are never going to agree with you
pricing is also a major factor even when a book does have a big fat spine like a compendium priced too high for an entry-level reader,
Comic book trade paperbacks price themselves out by being in color and printing on glossy paper. WHY? Manga prints on black and white and on cheap paper and the readers don't care. The artwork is still nice. Even the kid's comics have figured it out . . . they print in color but they print on cheaper matte paper, the kids don't care. Personally I think the matte paper looks nicer too.
People always prefer colour. Fact.
insane how every take you wrote in this thread is just factually wrong yet you always say it with such certainty
>people always prefer color
>multiple writers isn't a problem
>price and format aren't a problem
>manga is as hard to get into as capeshit
>miles is more famous than peter
how do you do it?
>people always prefer color
They do. That’s why even manga has color pages.
>multiple writers isn't a problem
It isn’t. Even manga series have multiple writers.
>price and format aren't a problem
It’s not, because stupid shits like you always ignore the fact publishing manga abroad is always cutting the chapter by chapter publishing step and just jumping to collections. The price is a factor but tons of manga moves so slowly you are
not getting much actual content per page.
>manga is as hard to get into as capeshit
It is if we want to play games and pretend people are lobotomised like you people always want to do.
>miles is more famous than peter
I never said that.
Boob anon, half the people ITT are complaining about coloreds in their comics.
Now here's a better arranged shelf of manga. It looks orderly, clean, and legible. Even from an aisle's distance you can make out titles and order numbers. It just looks more approachable than the comics.
The fat graphic novels circulate well. They should make more of those. Or maybe reconsider the printing dimensions they go with, those tall skinny books aren't cutting it.
You are right, but I felt it was worth adding because 'shelf appeal' is rarely ever brought up when the topic is discussed despite that being one of the most important factors. The tankobons are just the perfect size and incidentally are very similar in dimension to the romance novels on our spinning racks which just fly off the shelves. I think there's an ideal size for reading materials and comic book trade paperbacks are just too big.
how well do things like Judge Dredd Case Files or Tintin Albums do?
Tintin does alright so long as it is in the kid's comic book section. The most popular Eurocomics are Geronimo and Thea Stilton.
>The most popular Eurocomics are Geronimo and Thea Stilton.
GRIM
how low the italians, french and belgian have fallen
I don't think our librarian is familiar enough with Eurocomics to order more. I could think of stuff to order where I in charge of that.
I think Eurocomics are simply not well known in the US and UK comics even less well known
I haven't worked anywhere that carries Judge Dredd, sorry. The most popular British comics are well, Alan Moore, his stuff is evergreen.
but the stuff he made at DC with maybe LOEG only?
>redundant copies of every Negima volume
highly based library
>People say they want more genres, they try it, doesn't sell.
Because they half ass it. When people say they want different genres they don't mean
"capeshit but with a twist of horror"
"capeshit but with slightly more romance"
There are already several replies to this post that disprove it, so I won't bother.
But you don't understand the history of comics. Not even in the slightest. You know literally nothing about the business.
I'm glad other posts are rightfuly calling out this bullshit. Yes, comics only being available in shops for the most part isn't the best thing, but the newstand was dying by the 80's, and if you ask any old gays they'll tell you getting a decent selection at one was spotty at best.
When I went to tokyo I bought manga in a 7-11
if comics were in 7-11 in America I would buy them there
As of right now I buy a trade every few months from a comic shop because it is inconvenient and I have things to do
My first comic was pic related. My Dad bought it for me in some random gas station in Alabama on a cross-country family drive. I remember seeing the colorful cover of a robot wizard standing over a bunch of weird people and just being entranced. That used to happen all the time, it's how new readers came into comics.
You can buy random manga at a 7/11 because people travel by mass transit and that’s how you pass the time. That is how it’s profitable to sell them there in whatever minuscule quantities they offer.
>in whatever minuscule quantities they offer.
Even in this era of declining physical sales the major manga magazines sell in quantities the Big Two would kill for.
>if comics were in 7-11 in America I would buy them there
Used to be, you could buy comics in any 7-11 or grocery store or news stand or drugstore. They were in spinning racks, magazine shelves, and checkout lines. Comics were easy to find, and convenient to buy.
Somewhere along the way all that dried up. Comics only got sold in comic book stores. Not every town has one. If there is one, you have to go out of your way to find it. And when you get there it only has boxes of old comics and mostly sells card games and funko pops. Where I live, there are zero stores selling comics, and I bet there are lots of places like that. I don't remember the last time I saw an actual new physical comic book for sale.
How are people supposed to buy comics if they're not for sale at the places where they shop?
So stupid.
>How are people supposed to buy comics if they're not for sale at the places where they shop?
If shit like newsstands were still around in areas with lots of foot traffic. Issue is that zoning laws all but force comic shops into strip malls 15 minutes driving away from the nearest residential area so kids can't spend on it (not that kids get their own pocket cash to begin with but that's another problem). There aren't small stands, there aren't hybrid shops, there's no small corner of a publix just leased out to one guy keeping some stock there. You're either wholly dedicated to the hobby or you don't buy anything.
>somewhere along the line
Yeah, it was called the 90's collectibles speculation boom. You can't have cheap comics when people want the next Superman #1. This is why Archie is still in supermarkets and Superman isn't.
It’s incredible how in the year of our Lord 2023 people are still clinging to an outdated model from forty years ago as the way to save comics simply because they’re nostalgic for it and understand nothing about the business model.
The problem is that everything related to how you buy comics is moronic and the industry has not adapted to anything. You have to go to stores to buy one issue a month at $4 or $5 for about 20 pages worth of content (realistically less than that because of how slow the writing is). Most stores are out of the way. Digital should have been cheaper but stores threw a fit so they're the same as floppies. There's tons and tons of audience alienating and insulting bad stories from the 2000s alone that helped drive off readers or laid the groundwork for bad precedents that did: One More Day, House of M, Identity Crisis and such. Geoff Johns' pointlessly and cruelly violent shit. Decompressed comics in general which shallowly took storytelling styles from manga and TV. The entire attempt at trying to copy TV in general and comics turning into blatantly obvious pitches for TV showd and movies.
And through all of this you had people like DiDio, Brevoort, and others who told fans that they were glad they were mad because angry fans will hate buy and talk about the comics. Did Fear Itself or Cry For Justice or Original Sin need wokeness to be awful comics? No. The "woke virus" mostly came in the second half of the 2010s and if it had any effect it was a straw that broke the camel's back one. Hiring writers that hate the fans and characters to make everyone black crippled transdykes is bad but it's not the root cause. It's 20 years of terrible decisions, bad comics, poorly thought out ideas like the DC reboot, trying to make the comics like the movies, openly advertising that none of your stories matter, and telling fans who hate all this to suck your dick all while failing to adapt to a changing consumer climate. Wokeness is like a drop in the ocean in terms of the industry's problems. The horse is beaten, crippled and dying and wokeness is just strolling by to take a piss on it.
Fricking this. What people focusing only on the woke problem miss is that, most of the people in charge in the 00s were still in charge in the 2010s. Dan Buckley became publisher for Marvel in 2003 and got promoted to President of Marvel in 2017 and is still there. Axel Alonso became EIC of Marvel in 2011 and stayed there till getting forced out in 2017. Brevoort's been at Marvel since 1989. CB Cebulski was at Marvel in the early 00s and quit in 2006 to go freelance but came back a year later and signed an exclusive contract as editor/talent scout and became EIC in 2017.
Over at DC Dan Didio joined the company in 2002 and stayed there in power until he was forced out in early 2020. Jim Lee's still been with the company since like 1999 or something.
Tom Brevoort is such a huge fricking idiot. On his blog he admitted they just ignore online sentiment about comics. Wtf? In the modern age, where everyone and their mom has a phone/tablet/computer and express their opinion on multiple social media platforms 24/7, this moron casually admits they don’t absorb any of that data. Editorial self reports every time they open their mouth.
Over 90% of online comic discourse is endless, stupid, inane whining
Yeah they kept saying that as far back as the 00s
Now they're in more trouble than before
>LISTEN TO THE FANS!!!
>Okay here is what y-
>I DON’T FRICKING WANT THIS SHIT EVEN THOUGH I REPEATEDLY MOAN ABOUT WANTING IT ONLINE!
There you go, two decades of what it has looked like when companies try to address things fans claim to want. It’s like trying to get a petulant child to eat something only the little frick keeps changing its mind every two seconds and throwing tantrums when you can’t read its mind and then throw up and complain it’s sick when you feed it just chocolate like it wants
See
Curating, analyzing and interpreting online data is key to growing. Labelling it as “whining” is exactly how you get into positions where your business begins to stagnate which is where we’re at now
Most people online do not make intelligent and informed comments. They complain and show their ignorance because the things they whine about is often things that have been done countless times and don’t work or sell enough to support it.
Stop your whining
Online data doesn't have to be random comments. Are people buying because of our stories or variant covers? out of the people who buy how many are actually reading? How many people have dropped the book entirely? Did they drop because of a particular story/issue/writer/artist? etc. All extremely valuable data points if they had a digital platform worth a damn. but naaaah let's ignore all of that and fight with people on twitter and cbr, surely that will fix the problem.
the new PAIGE book has 17 variants or something, and they are all bait of the highest order
And how much of online talk can actually be relied on to be accurate? How many can be verified to be actual buying costumers instead of pirating and then feeling entitled to whine about everything?
OK schizo
So long homosexuals, now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores with ease of access for the average consumer, S, you won't be missed.
Now let's kill Marvel and DC too.
YOU are the problem. You corporate bootlickers who blame the small businesses instead of admitting the real problem.
Also
>Th--the characters are more popular than ever how does this happen?
Multiple reasons.
For one, no one gives a shit what the characters do outside the MCU, especially when it's some weird geopolitical story about grey morality between Stark Corp trying to build roads on Krakoa that will never be adapted into film for another 2 centuries.
No amount of adaptations will save a non streamlined story, anime works well as a commercial for manga because people want to be the first to know what happens next, that's why people were begging for GRR to release Winds already
YOU FAT FRICK
But if it's some unrelated shit then yeah the fanbase is and always will be niche.
Petit bourgeoisie dick sucker. You deserve your Hitler dubs.
>your average normie is going to pick up a comic about gay superman and khamala khan the muslim
I explicitly said kill DC and Marvel and all capeshit.
I'd rather not have DC and Marvel die, but for there to be a purge. It's all it takes. I'm not a huge fan of capeshit either, but I just want the real perpetrators out of the comic industry first.
>openly admitting to being a corporatist
Yeah, you don't even deny being part of the problem.
You morons are so stupid. You know you can have both, right? You ever think about that? Now you have one less option but you morons are destructive.
>your average normie is going to pick up a comic about gay superman and khamala khan the muslim
Yeah, no. Now they really don't stand a chance out in the wild. Only comic book fans really care about comics, at the end of the day.
Marvel would probably just focus on video games and movies if the comic industry finally crashes and dies and comic stories will be online only 100%
>now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores
Fricking lol no they won't. You aren't turning back the clock on physical distribution. What's going to happen is comics are going to be available digitally and maybe through a tiny handful of specialty mail-order services or a few remaining stores. Stores and stands don't carry the books already because they don't want to because they don't sell, it has nothing to do with the existence of the stores. The stores were a reaction to that fact.
>now comics can return to their homes at news stands, screens, and convenience stores
GUESS IT IS TIME TO GO TO THE OL' NEWSTAND TO GET A COPY OF THE FUNNY BOOKS!
Who is Mr Beast and why are you so interested in that there rectangle in your hand?
Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores.
So then it's an issue of knowing your consumer, which we know the industry has an issue with.
>Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores.
Grocery stores don't want them because they don't sell, that's why they stopped carrying them in the first place. Comic stores are the result of this, not the cause.
Actually it was the publishers not wanting to do them because everything from paying for the display location to stocking them yourself etc. costs a shit ton of money.
It's both. Physical retail space is limited, every inch counts. Comics just weren't selling so they weren't going to devote precious space to them.
>Put'em with the magazines in the checkout lanes at the grocery stores.
>"Sweetie would you like to pick out a comic at the checkout?"
>"Get fricked you fricking b***h. She just asked me if I wanted to read? YEAH AS IF."
>"Sweetie if you're not careful you'll use up all your phone time for today."
>"MOM I WILL BE WATCHING YOUTUBE LATER."
Do those little Archie digests still sell? My sister used to love those and my Mom bought them at the checkout every time. Seems like the perfect material for kids.
>Archie
You mean Riverdale? That sex filled series on CW?
Frick off Jingle Jangle junkie degenerate
I'd like to "jingle jangle" them, if you know what I'm saying.
Get them hooked on addictive narcotics? That's fricked up.
I'd like to "frick them up".
They’re reprints on cheap paper. They would have very low production costs to help make them profitable.
I see them in the checkout line at the walmart all the time. Somebody must be buying them.
Comic saled have been falling since the 1970s; the direct market started out as a counter to falling news stand sales. News stand comics are returnable so companies would eat lossed on any unsold comics whereas the direct market's selling point for publishers was that they would forego returns. The problems with news stands now, 50 years later, would be even worse. Especially given the shrinking footprint of print media.
>newsstands and convenience stores
Go back to bed, Grandpa.
>news stands
Do these still exist?
And nothing of value was lost. If you're still invested in comics after Death Metal or you're still deluded that anyone except collectors and the people stupid enough to buy from them are interested, you only have yourself to blame.
>if you don't like my politics don't read my books
>Okay
>No wait!
My friend just got back from his comic shop still open.
How about that?
Some barely float others swim, a lot are gona drown in the nearby future though with the Cost of Living crisis.
I have one near me that's open but it's depressing. They got a big troony flag on the wall. They survived, but by "adapting" in a really bad way.
Comics are fricking garbage
FRICK jim lee
LCS were nothing but parasites. Disney and WB need to set up their own comic shops that deal exclusively in their products. Customers will flock to them, while avoiding the smelly armpit of the industry.
>Disney and WB need to set up their own comic shops that deal exclusively in their products.
Are you dense, they closed down the Disney and WB stores
What makes you think they can help Marvel and DC comics?
You're like two decades late to offer this advice
>Disney and WB need to set up their own comic shops
>everything should be more corporate and I hate small business owners
That sounds fricking terrible. What kind of shill are you? I want to go into a comic book store and buy indie shit, not Disneyslop and DC/Marvelslop. No, I don't care about your black Disney princess or Miles Morales. The fun of a comic shop is they're not owned by you homosexuals.
>OH NO, BLACK PEOPLE
You will not be missed.
Well enjoy your black audience that doesn't buy your comics.
Go back to Cinemaphile or /misc/ with your TORtanic nonsense. Black Panther is a huge hit, and Miles is bigger than Peter ever was.
Stop rewriting history.
>Black Panther was a huge hit
It was marginally successful and it managed to hit it's target audience. Tricking the black American audience into believing Black Panther was a black power movie was clever marketing at the time. They really rode that BLM wave.
>Miles is bigger than Peter ever was
lol. lmao. Miles will always be in Peter's shadow. It's by design. He just can't escape it and none of his comics are good and even his movies need Parker to make them work. Sorry.
Black Panther was the most successful marvel movie until Endgame. Seethe.
Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time. Seethe.
Spiderverse is nice and comfy next to Ice Age lol. Black Panther had clever "black power" marketing tricks, like I said. It's higher up, but it's still in the shadow of white heroes. Also, the graph on the right is JUST capeshit. It doesn't fare well next to any realm film.
Sorry, shill. Lying doesn't make things real, even on Cinemaphile.
>Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time. Seethe.
The Incredibles is still an animated superhero movie even if it doesn't have a Marvel logo on it
>Spiderverse is the highest grossing animated superhero movie of all time.
That's not what you argued. You said Miles is bigger than Peter ever was which is just false. Neither of Miles' movies have outgrossed any of Peters' at the box office, not even the shitty ones. And he couldn't overtake them even with decades of inflation raising ticket prices. He couldn't outgross Spider-Man 1 twenty years later. He couldn't outgross Amazing Spider-Man ten years later. You're living in a fantasy world if you think Miles is more popular than Peter.
Miles is more popular than Peter among the younger generation. Nobody knows who Peter is except old farts who whine about not having a girlfriend on twitter.
is this bait or are you mentally moronic? there's more to the world than american ghetto teens
you really think that if you asked people on the street, they'd answer "spiderman name is Miles Morales"??
Urban areas contain the vast majority of the population, moron.
>Miles is more popular than Peter among the younger generation. Nobody knows who Peter is except old farts who whine about not having a girlfriend on twitter.
yes and they all imma do my own THANG all over america
>t was marginally successful
It was 9th highest grossing film of all time when it released.
Yes but it wasn’t #1 ERGO nobody wants to see black people. RACIST FACT!!!
Okay, Johnny Reb, go back to your swamps.
Ironically LGS are thriving more than ever due to Warhammers increasing popularity and cardgames becoming more mainstream
Everybody needed a hobby during covid.
Comics had a 10% boost for those first 6 months that went away.
To quote South Park, if a big business offers better service or products, what the problem with the small ones losing out on the free market?
>To quote South Park
have a nice day.
Why has no one been smart enough to open a manga shop?
Impossible to operate because big companies like CR control the licencing. You're basically going to buy from them to sell to people, so why don't customers just buy directly?
CR (and by extension Sony) doesn't control anything for manga, all the manga publishing in America these days is controlled by the Japanese parent companies since they own most of the publishers (or cut out the middleman and just started western branches for their western publishing, ala Square Enix and Kodansha).
So basically what I just said.
I've seen those, but they are traveling vendors that frequent conventions instead of a brick-and-mortar store.
They're called Barnes & Noble.
There's "anime" affiliated ones that primarily sell manga and merch. A lot more exist in my area than lcs's actually.
There's Kinokuniya
There's an anime store in my town but I'd say its mainly for figures, merch, and gundams. At least, I only go there for Gundams and there's always one or two people sitting at the tables clipping sprues.
I had to stop going there because I'd pop in for a bottle of airbrush paint and come out with $200 of new kits to add to my backlog.
>Alright, let's see about your monthly orders
>we're gonna send you 20,000 issues of this month's Commander Queef punches the Nazis and gets Gay Married
>Another 5,000 issues of that big indie comic Girldick Rape Diaries
>There's a pricebreak if you order all 50 of the variant covers of the new #1 Issue of Ethnostate Soldiers... No, this is the other #1. Yeah they rebooted it again.
>And then we've got about... half a dozen funny crossovers. I'm sure the Family Matters meets MASK crossover is gonna be a huge seller for you!
>Boss! We have over 30k tons of useless paper and plastic laying around! No one buys this shit anymore they just came here for Warhammer/Magic board games and manga! What do we do?
>It's ok Jimmy-- I'm taking these all home in my basement then reselling them on ebay for thirty times the price in 20 years.
>magic
nah, frick wizards of the coast too
>nah, frick wizards of the coast too
Yes. But at least their shit is selling.
MtG revenue is down 15% and i hope it fricking crashes
>BAAAAAWWWWWW NAZI AREN’T BAD GUYS, IT’S THE GAYS BEING FORCED DOWN MY HETEROSEXUAL MALE THROAT!!!
>reddit homosexual misses anon's point
hope you don't miss your brain when you swallow that pistol
I can't even imagine being as moronic as you are now. Do you forget to blink unless someone tells you to?
>claiming nazis exist
I wouldn't be surprised if they were. These things change and a more niche interest like actally reading physical comic books is an obvious casualty in the move/push away from physical stores of that kind.
I don't care for comics, but in OP's post, the person is pleading for Marvel and DC to do something. If people keep relying on large companies to change then they will be frustrated and let down. Either new life is breathed into these things, or they may very well die.
>go into a comic store for Friday night MTG
>locals there make me feel unwelcome
>never go back
Three times and three stores, this has happened to me
Those same locals are kind of the guys itt what did you think was going to happen? That they'd be welcoming or socially well adjusted?
MTG is cancer glad they kicked you out
Wish I had the retailer who responded to this making fun of Millar for not really understanding the problems. Making fun of lien variants and shit iirc
comics from certain country don't have this problem
The craziest thing to me is that in the Direct Market era there has never been a way to track how many actual customer buy issues. Yes, I know the WELL AKSHUALLY that since comics inventory is non-returnable the number of copies ordered and shipped to comic stores are counted as sales by the publishers, even if they do not sell through to customers at retail. But it seems insane that the publishers don't want to know those sell-though numbers. How do you gauge what your readers actually buy and want without that? No other industry works like this.
You can get a rough estimate just by seeing how the subsequent issues are ordered since retailers trim down what they can’t sell.
But that's just a second-order guess. It's crazy there isn't accurate direct information on consumer behavior. This is how you get the 90s bubble, looking at what the shops are buying rather than what real people are actually purchasing. e.g., ss there really a reader demand for all these variant covers or is this just shops gambling on them?
Whatever they don’t sell immediately goes to the bargain bin or back issue stock. And tons of LCS sales of new stuff are based on people’s pull lists and they don’t necessarily come and pick those up every week and there are policies where if you don’t come and pick your shit in x amount of time they won’t hold it anymore. It’s impossible to get accurate numbers because of this because they aren’t actually final sales until whenever the regular people have come and picked up and paid their shit and that can be anything from days to weeks if they come once a month.
My LGS has comics on a single rack in the store. Board Games get an entire wall along with TCG and the other wall has Miniatures and Figures.
All LCS's either become Nerd General Stores for board game /tg/ gays, or just die out.
Watch out there buster, you're on thin ice, point out that accessibility matters more than isolated economy and watch as you're call a corporatist by a libertarian moron who lacks self awareness itt.
>Watch out there buster, you're on thin ice, point out that accessibility matters more than isolated economy and watch as you're call a corporatist by a libertarian moron who lacks self awareness itt.
"Comics will sell more if they're sold in more places"
How is this a hot take
They also MUST be cheaper, 5-6 dollar single issues is beyond moronic
...you're missing that anon's sarcasm. They're agreeing with you and mocking the other morons in this thread screeching about how comics being in the LCS ghetto is actually a good thing.
I didn't misunderstand Anon I just thought that it was a unanimous opinion that like
there should be more places selling comics
My surprise is that there are other mockable morons
OK this is weird that people think this. I think it's largely because the movies have made the characters really accessible to normies. So the exclusive space of comic shops changes who can become a "real fan" I guess.
The failing of American comic books is that they no longer engage children. If any of the anons have 10 year olds in their family, how many of them buy comics on a regular basis? 0?
But they all probably play video games and shit.
I did both as a kid. It's not a thing anymore.
It suprisingly is. There is a number of people out there that think comics must be sold by dedicated retailers, instead of all over with a couple specialty locations.
>"Comics will sell more if they're sold in more places"
>How is this a hot take
Even if comics were sold in more places they wouldn't sell.
>The art is bad. Big 2 still are scared of giving artists any power because of the Image lot in the 90s. So that means there is no consistency.
>The writing is bad. Every single writer comes in with the same tired overegged plot to completely change a character without really caring about what came before or caring too much with no real continuity.
>None of these people even really like the medium or understand its strenghts and weaknesses.
>The story is decompressed, the events are bad, they don't even act like the characters.
>And it isn't fricking cheap.
No one is really defending the specialty shops ITT, simply explaining that history of how we got to this point with them and how at one point it was something.
>Even if comics were sold in more places they wouldn't sell.
We don't necessarily know that. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I think by sheer numbers they'd have to sell more than they currently do (e.g., even if the percentage is lower if the availability is vastly expanded the total number will be higher). The real question is, if they did sell more, would they sell enough to justify the expanded production, distribution, and marketing costs. Getting books onto more shelves isn't free.
>We don't necessarily know
I mean bookstores show you this principle a lot. So we do know.
>Watchmen and a few other comics actually sell.
>But comics usually have half to one whole bookshelf compared to multiple bookshelves for manga.
I honestly don't disagree with your take either.
Comics started dying when building up to the next crossover event became the norm in stead of the exception.
I certainly don't keep up with modern comics, and I'm the mixed race commie homosexual being pandered to.
The stories being bad wouldn't be as huge of a problem if they were aimed at young teens. Demon Slayer is a small pile of cliche's and it's the most popular shit since DBZ.
I definitely agree that there is a problem in all of western lit of being sarcastic, meta or deconstructing. We're at this point so far removed from the original stories in people's minds that "evil Superman" is a genre of capeshit all its own.
I didn't take a picture of it but the rack of manga was pretty large considering the size of the store. Like it took up the amount of space that energy drinks take up in an American 7-11.
>Demon Slayer is a small pile of cliche's
>not understanding that not everything needs to try to be groundbreaking, just telling a good story with time-worn tropes works
The failure of mainstream US comics in a nutshell.
Well yeah honestly.
The problem is also that in part- the 90s good stuff was meta and de-constructive.
So getting back to the good old days for any new comic authors is still the genre commenting on itself.
At this point dusting off Superman so he can just like solve a crime or fight a robot is just the thing the old stories referenced, not what the writer's nostalgia is rooted in.
same guy: The real problem with the American superhero is that no new characters can stick without being derived from existing characters.
Kamala Khan's defining character trait is "being a fan of the other superheroes"
Miles is just Spider-man #2.
That’s because nobody wants to support original characters. Time and time again they try and fans won’t buy them
No crusty old frick in a super-incestuous industry understands the anxieties and realities of young people. The themes they focus on are so hilariously out of touch it's insulting.
Oh so now every new character has to a teen in order to sell, despite most readers being adults who don’t care about teen characters?
Publishers fricking over Alan Moore made sure every famous Western writer will never let themselves get involved with comic publishers unless someone covers the cost of hiring a team of lawyers to craft a business contract that does not frick over the writer.
Today if you own your work you can strike it super rich through licensing for movies or TV. You'd have to be moronic to take a good idea and sell it to the Big Two for whatever pittance they'll give you. Only morons or absolute super fanboys work for them.
I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
His influence shifted the whole medium to turn capeshit into "adult" entertainment and slowly sucked the life out of it by convincing every writer that they have to outsmart the genre.
Normies and casuals know what anime is and might just buy a manga volume.
They don't know that America produces something other than cape comics.
The American Indie scene could be more popular if people could frickin see it.
Well on one hand- I'd love a new popular superhero character to save capeshit.
On the other, My Adventure with Superman is resonating because it relates to young people better than anything I've seen the cape genre do lately.
>Can I actually start a career?
>How can I navigate relationships under the pressure of being in a trouble industry?
>I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
Yes, actually, to some extent. He's said he doesn't like the direction mainstream US cape comics took post-Watchmen and has some regrets, but also that they took the wrong lessons from his work. It's not really his (or Frank Miller's) fault the industry is full of derivative morons who just badly aped their work.
>Can I actually have a career? Or is the American dream dead?
>How do I navigate this decrepit industry full of nepotism and remain true to myself? Is it possible? Will I be able to eat without kissing the ring?
Do you actually have the balls to answer such questions or are you just going to pat yourself on the back for asking them?
I'm saying that's what the Superman cartoon has as a minor feature. Making both Lois and Clark new employees at the Planet was a fricking inspired move.
The fact that Clark has to prove his competency at work makes him immediately relatable and likeable. Somethings that Superman constantly is accused of not being.
I'm saying a competent, talented young person is more likely to be undermined than celebrated in many newsrooms. I'm saying the tenor of the American newsroom has changed dramatically within the last 20 years. There is no way some coddled old fart is going to recognize that.
Yes, the new Superman cartoon is written by younger millennials and Gen Zs
I mean it's also a Superman cartoon. It has to be positive about the world and proclaim that people can be successful on nothing but tenacity and skills.
You mean Superman was written by nepobabies who made brown girl protagonist #65722.
It would be a lot more impactful, more resonant, if you allowed Clark to feel some of the incredible tension in the modern newsroom. Maybe you don't have The Answer, but you could look at the problem, really fricking look at it.
To write a good Superman would require understanding the news and the people who make the news. Keep Superman as a nice, upstanding guy in a world of cancel culture.
>I need a cartoon to tell me what to read!
So they aren’t really comic readers, they just go to whatever shut is popular and treat it as an extension of cartoons. These people would never read comics in the first place
>I wonder if Alan Moore Feels responsible for killing the American comic industry.
I'm guessing he doesn't. Because he didn't.
he did an interview recently where he talked about his time in comics but I don't think he gives a stuff about the American direct market at all probably considers it a blight on the entire industry
>https://www.gamesradar.com/interviewing-watchmen-co-creator-alan-moore-its-one-thing-to-quit-comics-a-different-thing-to-stop-thinking-about-them/
>Comics started dying when building up to the next crossover event became the norm in stead of the exception.
THIS. THANK YOU.
>Comics started dying when building up to the next crossover event became the norm in stead of the exception.
People want crossovers and there is no build up to vast majority of them anyway. And most crossovers are part of an ongoing storyline building up to a big event where it usually requires a crossover due to the shared universe and you not having to spend considerable time explaining why nobody else is dealing with x or what they’re doing during the story
Becuase the truth is that people here don't WANT comics to sell more because selling more comes with the threat of selling to people that aren't like them. They champion a limit of accessibility because accessibility is inherently progressive.
>Becuase the truth is that people here don't WANT comics to sell more because selling more comes with the threat of selling to people that aren't like them
what? but comics are already being written for those kind of people that don't buy comics
believe it or not the average comic reader would love over the top action and sexy babes
i mean, women are getting books and comics all catered to them with hot studs and romance
Your coomer idelogies hinge on there being a silent majority of "average comic readers" that are a huge untapped market that will drive out to a tiny hole in the wall rather than have stuff delivered to the comfort of their own home via the internet.
this is the anon with the head in the sand
keep going dude
>untapped market
Oh that market is well covered by Anime and Manga.
Western market don't have a chance anymore, also feminism won't and conservatives prudishness won't allow them ever get into that market
>Oh that market is well covered by Anime and Manga.
Which, again, has better distribution
You still haven't explained why, if comic books put all that shit in, I would choose them over the bird in the hand.
>You still haven't explained why, if comic books put all that shit in, I would choose them over the bird in the hand.
lots of people dislike manga art-style, and it would be in colors
>lots of people dislike manga art-style, and it would be in colors
Then why is manga selling better? You can't have it both ways.
because manga is better written
they have superior writers
I can agree to that.
O think is also because of the huge cultural differences.
Japan authors acknowledge the difference between fiction and reality, so they tend to be less moralistic and have more creative freedom for writing.
While westerners have been sharing the idea that fiction affects how people perceive reality or something like that, and so fiction must be subjected to real world standards and morals, so westerners tend to be have more prudishness when writing.
I'd agree it's cultural differences but not in the way you're thinking.
A big part of it is that Japan is a very old country. They LOVE old physical media over there, you can still find cassette tapes regularly in Japan.
Another big part is that they have a train culture which artificially keeps things like newsstands alive, which in turn keeps manga viable as a distribution model. Here in the states everyone drives so there's less news stands.
>Japan
>tend to be less moralistic
Fricking what.
more like caution since you never know what's going to set the Twitterbomb off.
>if we just had more breasts!
Coomers are not a big market. If it was shut like Tarot would outsell everything
holy fricking samegayot
i've never seen such a contrarian comic reader lmao its like you're living in your own universe
>Coomers are not a big market
Videogames market disagree
>
My LCS is actually doing pretty good. There's a small /tg/ & trading cards section but it's like, 80% comics and comic accessories, and 20% not comics. Frick, my school library had a larger selection of manga than my LCS does.
I mean, why should I go to a lcs? What can they provide that I can't get from ordering online? Only thing I can think of is hosting game nights and tournaments, but the places I've been to don't charge cover fees and I wouldn't think that alone can cover rent in most places.
>It is 1986.
>I pick up a copy of Uncanny X-Men #205 from the newstand.
>The Barry Windsor Smith cover is pleasing to the eye.
>I watch an injured Logan trying to escape.
>It is an exciting issue.
>It is 2019.
>Hick-man, I am told, has made an eXciting story.
>Wolverine has his arm around Jean and Cyclops with a beer in hand.
>A floorplan of a base shows that both Logan and Cyclops room leads into Jeans implying a polyamorous situation.
>Why is there so many pages of random goobledeasiatic.
>it is 2001.
>I go to my local LCS.
>I pick up a copy of X-Treme X-Men.
>Why did Chris Claremont come back?
>It is 2023.
>I am arguing the same arguments about why comics have failed.
>I have become shitpost.
>It is 2000.
>Hugh Jackman has just been annouced as Wolverine.
>My friend Alan complains about him being too tall.
>Nonetheless he is excited to see the movie.
>I'm tired of comics.
So between 1986 and 2000, for 14 years you didn't buy comics? No wonder they can't stay open.
Underrated post.
Comic shops are always for of over valued stock and funkopops
>duuurrrrr the only way to buy comics is through LCS and that’s why they don’t sell!!
You can literally buy and read comics through your phone today.
Why even bother selling them at all? They're the tiniest drop in the ocean of their respective corporate empires. Marvel and DC should just start handing them out for free everywhere they can as part of their movie marketing budget, it probably wouldn't even add a single extra digit.
Is it still viable opening up a comic store in today's environment, seems like a hellish buisness pitch.
Yes, but as others have said it's almost impossible to survive as a pure comics store, it'd have to be more of a general nerd hobbies store that features comics. Those can do quite well.
The only dedicated comic stores I've seen work do most of their business online and the store is mostly a warehouse for their physical inventory.
It can't be all comics. You have to make it more like a nerd store with trading cards, tabletop games, maybe even movie memorabilia and collectable items.
you need funko pops too
Who the frick buys those? I only ever see people making fun of them yet they're everywhere.
i just assume their hatred is an online thing and normalgays love them. My brother bought my dad a William Wallace from Braveheart one and they both like it
Does anybody even buy Funkopops anymore? I only bought like 3 and thats cause they were being sold for like 2 bucks each.
Funko is dying. The bubble burst. The company is overextended via licensing and isn't selling as much hence having to destroy stock. The concerning thing is they own companies like Mondo who produce good comic art prints (as well as other stuff). They laid off a bunch of Mondo staff.
>Vast majority of trades are 6 issues which is standard.
I mistyped.
>Entirely subjective.
Yeah it is. But honestly when was it when a cape arc really grabbed you? When did a modern cape arc actually become a classic? Maybe I'm just burnt out from ultra multiversal level threats and continuity being such a chew toy, everyone dying and all getting reset.
Comics don't sell because they aren't cool.
Comics got a reputation as being only for children especially via the Fredric Wertham "Seduction of the Innocent" shit and Comics Code Authority and that shit even persists today. Comics back then were varied. Comics Code decimated so many genres like horror. It wasn't until the 70s when the code waned that we had an improvement but the damage was done. Even now most people believe that the whole genre = for kids, pic related. (Before anyone says anything, yes, we should have more comics for kids and no, I don't think ultra edgy stuff for adults helps comics now. I am more talking about an outside perspective. Comics being for kids is more about a maturity level for an interest. Even though comics are a whole medium with variety people don't want to be associated with immature things.)
Comics crashed in the 90s and the industry was trashed just as manga was being imported. Anime was also a great import and importantly it could bridge a gap and be a gateway into manga. While cartoons were far too disconnected from their comics. Manga didn't have the same cultural baggage as comics had developed. It had more genres. Teenagers like to rebel against parents and parental culture. Japanese has a foreign cool factor.
While we have steadily had the creation of a weeb stereotype and denigration of people who like that shit, it still has much broader appeal. Also, if I asked an older person about comic book stereotypes they'd name something like Comic Book Guy from Simpsons and that all has a certain perception to it. Or that Poochie episode of the Simpsons where Homer tells the obsessive fan with obsessive question to essentially frick off. You can go into a book shop, or for free online, and read some manga, start at volume 1 and people are talking about it. No one really talks about comics IRL unless in an LCS. I mean who the frick wants to deal with reading preview catalogues? Pull lists? When you can just get volume 1?
>When you can just get volume 1
This argument always ignores the fact that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell. But the logic that you just want easy volume 2 access Indy comics should be doing way better than big two, yet that isn’t the case.
>This argument always ignores the fact that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell.
For the Big Two, that's misunderstanding the problem because that actually IS the problem. A new reader saw a Spidey movie and wants to start at Volume 1. Which volume 1?
>But the logic that you just want easy volume 2 access Indy comics should be doing way better than big two, yet that isn’t the case.
Non-Big Two books have kind of the opposite problem: no real way to get the word out. They're easier to just pick up but don't have the universal brand recognition of Batman or Spider-Man, and publishers won't or can't really market them well. How would a non-comics reader even know about an indie book?
>Which volume 1?
Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google.
Even if you want to go to the original comics from sixty years ago it’s easy. They have Penguin Classics collection of that stuff now for fricks sake. Why do these conversations always assert people are so stupid they couldn’t put their own pants on let alone ask on the counter “where can I get the very first Spider-man comic?” There’s numerous collections about this stuff at this point. You can even just look it up on Wikipedia. Or post a question on Reddit or Twitter.
Manga is one story by one author adapted into an anime, and then sometimes adapted into a second anime that follows the completed manga more closely.
Which Batman comics by which authors do I read to better understand The Dark Knight?
>ONE AUTHOR
Nobody gives a flying frick about this when they want to consume Batman. It’s a disingenuous argument.
most people who read anything follow authors not genres
And how do they find authors and figure out what books they have to start with since books usually are not titles VOLUME 1
The uneven quality of ever-changing creative teams is a common complaint, and ties into the bigger #1 complaint of not knowing where to start in the first place.
>but the quality varies!
Yeah, no shit. You don’t like it, skip it. Be a goddamn adult.
It's astonishing how bad people like you are at selling things:
>Hey, you're product is uneven and a lot of it is shit.
>UM BE A GODDAMN ADULT
And then you wonder why no one is buying it.
>You don’t like it, skip it
K.
You don't seem to understand just how much of this stuff is considered shit, or even below average.
I don't read below average shit, I take your advice and skip it, which means I skip 99% of cape comics.
Some people really can't grasp that you have to already like something to put up with that kind of bullshit. If you already love Batman you can power through or skip the bad runs/issues, but if you don't already have that motivation you're just going to be turned off by the shit. Similarly, if you don't already have a reason to try you're not going to do the relatively small amount of Googling to figure out where to start, you're just going to see that you need to dig a little and move on to something else.
How is this any different from manga. Lots of garbage out there. Lots of wacky premise but writing is shit. Why should I read manga when I actually have to watch a cartoon first to know if it’s good and then the art is bad when I try the manga and there’s tons of boring filler that was never in the show.
>Why should I read manga when I actually have to watch a cartoon first to know if it’s good
homie do you even read the shit you type?
Then do it and stop whining, b***h. This is a (you) problem.
>Then do it and stop whining, b***h. This is a (you) problem.
a you situation? who the frick talks like that? lets ignore the fact that you speak like the average redditor, with his head in the sand about comicbooks situation
anyway, the you problem has become an industry problem lol
>You don’t like it, skip it. Be a goddamn adult.
yes, that's what people have been doing
how are things tell me?
That’s not what people have been doing. You’re claiming causation without any actual evidence because you have a pet peeve.
>Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google...You can even just look it up on Wikipedia. Or post a question on Reddit or Twitter.
How do you not understand that you're exactly describing the problem? No one wants to do homework just to pick up a comic. Just saying someone needs to read up on where to start is the turn-off for normies, they're not going to put in the effort because why would they? Meanwhile, they see an anime they like, they just get the first volume of the manga.
>let alone ask on the counter “where can I get the very first Spider-man comic?”
Are you moronic? Again, this is the problem: a kid who saw Across the Spider-Verse and is interested in Spidey doesn't want ASM #1 (or Amazing Fantasy #15 if you're being a b***h).
>No one wants to do homework just to pick up a comic
Motherfricker they do this shit all the time when watching TV, movies and actual novels, even music. Hell fricking manga and anime requires research when you deal with decades long franchises!
The premise that people can’t do same thing for comics is just stupid cope. And again, you have extensive collections that you can just be point towards and read that if you are that much of an idiot.
>they do this shit all the time
when the results are worth it.
clearly, they don't think the comic book results are worth it.
>Motherfricker they do this shit all the time when watching TV, movies and actual novels, even music.
No they don't, what the frick are you talking about? Start with the first episode, start with the first movie, start with the first book.
>Hell fricking manga and anime requires research when you deal with decades long franchises!
"Where do I start with One Piece?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with Berserk?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with..."
>The premise that people can’t do same thing for comics is just stupid cope.
And yet American capeshit being confusing is literally the #1 complaint from normies about why they don't read them. Perhaps it's worth actually listening to the people you want to read your shit instead of calling them idiots? You're exactly the reason why capeshit is dying, you refuse to even accept the problem people tell you over and over.
>"Where do I start with One Piece?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with Berserk?" "Volume 1". "Where do I start with
I mean, you do still need to pick a not-shit translation; telling someone to just read jojo through and they end up picking Duwang is still a possible mistake. Obviously it's better than the constant reboots of characters and series of capeshit though
I thought we were talking about buying them since, y'know, the thread is about sales.
these people wouldn't be watching pirate streams. they would be reading the official versions and paying for crunchyroll
Where do I start with Dragon Ball, Gundam, Attack on Titan, Lupin III, Fate series, Fist of the North Star, Devilman, Cyborg 009, Great Teacher Onizuka extensive universe, do I need to read all 72 volumes of Naruto before I start Boruto…???!?!
At volume 1. And yes.
Those are all titles with multiple spin offs, different authors, different runs, and some even are alternative timelines or other side shit where you can’t tell by just looking at the tile. So you’re full of shit if you think LOL VOLUME 1 is answer. Fist of the North Star has character origin manga, prequel shit, etc. so how are you supposed to know what you’re supposed to start with. Clearly manga is too hard.
>Clearly manga is too hard.
It's strange you think you're arguing against us and not the simple fact that capeshit being too confusing is what most normies say holds them back from getting into it.
Fist of The North Star is Fist of The North Star. Dragonball is Dragonball. Those spin offs aren't even properly promoted for you to know about them or they're not even available to purchase in english.
Don't bother. That dumbass is clearly combing Wikipedia articles on those series to find lists of spin-offs to try and prove their moronic point.
Why are we suddenly pretending people don’t just pirate manga first and foremost? There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
>Why are we suddenly pretending people don’t just pirate manga first and foremost?
And yet it still outsells capeshit.
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
Okay sweetie, you tried. Here's your (you).
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z
holy frickin have a nice day
>There’s Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball SD, Dragon Ball Super… this is too confusing!!!
I'm autistic and even I can tell that's sarcasm.
I don't think so, he just combed over wikipedia like that other guy said. Otherwise he wouldn't have named Lupin.
He does seem like the type of person who thinks Dragonball and Dragonball Z are separate manga
Because we were talking about sales and how even though they're easy to pirate, they sell. You might just be moronic if you don't get this AND you're sitting there trying to argue that people have ever said "where do I start with Dragonball? It's all so confusing!"
Yeah, it's pretty clear. He's so pathethic.
to be fair it's not the first time both in here and other platforms, where i see people say that comics aren't confusing for novices
it's so strange, i always thought that it was one of the major problems, and everyone knows it but apparently i'm wrong about that..
Just more hiding your head in the sand and pretending there are no problems as the industry continues to crumble.
Everything is confusing as a novice. The difference here is that the same group of smug weaboo c**ts and anti-sjw crowd with stick up their ass over minor things want to pretend somehow comics are impenetrable to new people and impossible to get into. Which is horseshit. Kids have been able to do it for decades.
That’s why you always see the same strawman arguments get recycled every single time while refusing to admit any similar issues with manga and how the argument always boil down to muh single
author and just crying how you don’t like certain things. And always insist simplistic solutions that anyone with any understanding of the business model would say don’t work.
>I want to get into Dragon Ball where do i start?
>Dragon Ball! Maybe Dragon Ball Z
>I want to get into Batman, where do I start?
>Defiantly not Detective Comics #1 or Batman #1 (the older one). Most people will consider starting with Batman Year One as the true place to start but then you could move onto Long Halloween, then Dark Vict.... You could also start with the New 52. Not Dectivce Comics #1, or Batman The Dark Knight, or Batman Eternal, or Batman Incorprated (that's another whole mess to explain) but just Batman's Snyder's run. You could also instead read into Batman Rebirth. But if you don't want that stuff you could also read some of the older self containted stories like Batman the Dark Knight Returns, or Batman of Gotham by Gas...
>So you’re full of shit if you think LOL VOLUME 1 is answer.
Nah, volume 1 is the answer. Cry more, capeshitter.
with manga a significant amount of manga are long-running series, there's also a healthy amount of fresh new series and decades worth of shorter series that finished
with american comics, 90% of the market is capeshit.
>there's also a healthy amount of fresh new series and decades worth of shorter series that finished
Same applies to western stuff. So why do people ignore everything else that’s published and just care about superheroes if they’re so bad and awful to get into? How are they able to be more popular?
you're gonna be finished quickly of things that are actually good even if you make a backlog of the "alternative comics" from the alast 40 years
Except you’re not.
That's bullshit, none of those japs can write for shit stop trying to pretend like it's a quality thing, there have been no new mangaka in the past 20 tears that have reached the geniuses of Jonathan Hickman or Al Ewing. Manga has great marketing I'll give them that.
this is some tremendous cope and most of what those guys write is still capeshit
and there's only a few handfuls of capeshit. writers who've been at it for the last 2 decades. so its been the same shit
>Same applies to western stuff
it really doesn't. there aren't many good writers in published comics right now because the market hasn't been a place of true competition.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t read anything
You tell em, sister! The american comic book industry is overflowing with talented writers.
lol tell me what's good right now then
tell me about all the fresh talent, the compelling stories, and fresh takes on different genres that's being published right now
oh you're gonna recommend me Saga? lmao
Saga is better than 90% of all mangas ever made
you're not arguing from a honest place
Truth hurts, weeb?
>i love indie comics! i got Saga, Evil Superman, israelite Mice, Evil Superman, Gritty Gun guy, Evil Superman, Saga, Gay coming of age story, Cartoony people BUT ADULT, Evil Superman, also did i mention Saga? its the best thing we have!
You ok, weeby?
hey did you read that last subversion of superheroes comics? this one says FRICK
go back
that guy is trolling i think
although i don't think i've ever seen anyone in so much denial about the state of their hobby industry as much as comic book fans
he's going to say Tinyon 4 and thats it lmao
I don't like indies either, it's just the same woke shit that plagues marvel and DC but with somehow even worse art.
I used to read a lot of comics as a kid, Xmen with Fatal attractions the Onslaught saga, Hellblazer, Spawn, etc.
But nowadays i feel like comics just don't appeal to me anymore and they don't want to.
But i still want to read stories and engage in fantasy, and nowadays manga is the only medium with stories that still appeals to me personally.
I think the problem with the term Indies is that people just think it applies to a bunch of samey Image sci-fi comics and nothing else.
>it's just the same woke shit
Opinion discarded
90% of the time if you want to read a manga, you start at volume 1 and most of the time if it's complicated it's either due to the series not being a manga primarily (Gundam, Fate) or decisions by US Publishers(Dragonball, JoJo) with even those being relatively easy to understand with a small amount of recommended starting points.
>different authors
?? what? no i'm pretty sure the authors of Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, Lupin III, Fist of the North Star, Devilman, Cyborg 009, Great Teacher Onizuka have been the same from start to finish
Fate and Gundam aren't even manga primaries
and hear this! more often than not, writers even drawn their own manga!!! instead in capebooks you have to worlds that more often than not, don't even communicate
You’d be wrong.
>dragonball is Toriyama
>Attack on Titan is Isayama
>Lupin is Monkey Punch
>HnK is Okamura
>C009 is Ishi but published on half a dozen publishers
>GTO is Fuiwara from the beginning till he dies
>I don’t know what I am talking about
you're going to make a point? or just admit you're wrong?
Lupin III manga has been written and drawn by numerous people and keeps being produced even today when Monkey Punch has been dead for years. First of the North Star is a franchise that has several spin-off titles not done by the original team, which itself is a writer and a different person as an artists collaborating. Attack on Titan similarly is a franchise with several different manga series made by different authors. You are wrong.
but you're calling them spin offs yourself dude
the main manga is 99% of times written by a single author
you want to read SnK? you start from chapter 1 and you finish with 139, one author
So fricking what. You people claim just having multiple titles created too much confusion. Now you’re pretending it doesn’t when manga does the same thing. Not every manga reader will automatically know what title is the original one, or even be interested in it. A person interested in Fate franchise can’t immediately know wtf he is meant to read first. There is no rhyme or reason what Lupin series you should read unless you do research. Do you read Shin Devil Man or Devil Man, what’s the difference? I can’t tell, I am a walking moron. I can’t do homework. I can’t use google.
That is the se time what people like YOU always project to any person who wants to read anything western. And then act like a hypocrite when the same strawman logic is applied to you.
Expecting people to research shit by googling is idiotic, it's abandoning all impulse buy potential. And even by googling it's impossible to get the answer to the question "which Batman comic I should read" because that doesn't have a definitive answer. Manga does have an answer, you always buy the one that has the number "1" printed on it. There are no exceptions to this rule. And no, it is NOT even close to as confusing in manga, it is simply not and you are mad if you think that. Forget new readers, people actively following comics can't keep track of what's the chronlogy in them because the writers don't know that answer a lot of the time either.
>All reading is just impulsive buying
You have to be a troll
You mean because of the law forbidding them to draw genitals?
It's ok they always find the way to bypass that stupid law anyway, like when they invented the tentacle porn genre.
he's just trying to gaslight you with his factually wrong opinions
You know what I hate about comics continuity?
When they literally force you to read another completely different comic from characters I don't give a frick to understand or to read the conclusion of some story you were reading.
And is not even the number 1 of said comic, is like in the middle of that run.
>you liked supah dark league?
>now buy Stupid justice #5675 to understand and read the conclusion.
I really hate that.
you know he's full of shit because if you want to read a batman arc, for example No Man's land, ou have to read 4 different publications usually (batman, detective comics, Nigtwing, Batgirl, Harley quinn more recently, Catwoman)
then a year later another author is going to ruin all that was built because batman HAS to punch his son in the face
If you want to read a storyline that’s almost thirty years old you just buy the trade. Stop being disingenuous. This is like claiming if you want to read Naruto arc you have to go find the specific Shounen Jump issue rather than the tankoubon
>If you want to read a storyline that’s almost thirty years old you just buy the trade.
NTA but DC has a mixed history with trades. I remember that for an extremely long time they just would not print the second half of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl run and it got to be such a long wait that I stopped checking so I don't even know if it ever came out
So what. Most old manga is impossible to get in English after their initial print run. Where do you buy Black Jack? Nowhere. Where can I get Moyashimon? Sorry, they only did two volumes. What about Drops of God? Oh they only did couple of volumes, then years later with little fanfare released the entire finally in digital format only. Dance Till Tomorrow? Oh that’s been out of print for twenty years lol
it's like you're arguing against reality
it's not something we made up dude, most people find it hard to get into super hero comics, and find it easy to get into manga
whether it is because the are too stupid to research a bit, doesn't change reality
>baaaawwww it’s hard!
It’s not. How do you even buy food with this level of b***h like mentality
it is for most people apparently, that's what i'm saying
How about YOU stop being disingenuous because what he said is true for CURRENT comics, not just old ones. Right now if you want to understand the current Batman story about Selina's takeover, you have to read like eight different titles. That is unreasonable and you pretend it makes sense.
Buying new trades collects everything unless it sold so badly it didn’t even justify collecting it. And even then you can get it digitally. And there would be no crossovers. Make up more bs issues why don’t you.
nah, im pirating fan made collections instead
>Manga does have an answer, you always buy the one that has the number "1" printed on it. There are no exceptions to this rule. And no, it is NOT even close to as confusing in manga, it is simply not and you are mad if you think that.
Tell that to Dragon Ball fans
dragon-ball is called dragon-ball from its start to its end, 42 volumes from '84 to '95
You’d have to Google that. Liar liar pants on fire.
and?
I meant that most dragon ball fans did not start from the beginning and never intend to, they hop on with whatever is popular enough to get their attention and only ever go back one or two arcs. A vast majority of Dragon Ball fans have no clue about anything before Raditz, and an increasing number don't know about anything before Beerus
are you talking about American fans? because the rest of the world got into Dragonball from the start thanks to the anime
like it was in my country, i bet in other too, the main TV channel kept airing Dragonball for years so multiple generations got into it
Lol volume 1 for all of those, and yes.
>b-but manga also has long running series
you know what this is different? you have a choice in the market for the shorter series
also most of these are pretty much start at chapter 1
But which chapter one when there’s dozen titles? What is the important one?! I want the origin story first! Why do I have to read Kenshiro’s brother’s origin stories in completely different manga?! Why is there an entire Fist of the Blue Sky prequel series nobody told me about? I should have been trading that apparently to get the real important backstory!
So why do not image and dark horse and other small publishers sell more than confusing DC and Marvel if people just want chapter 1 stories?
Hiatuses or getting canceled/abandoning the series after 6-12 issues. Nobody likes reading unfinished series, if they do they'll just stick to capeshit.
Also, the average quality of a DH or Image comic is just as bad as DC/Marvel.
Man, I wonder.
With amazing comics like this, you'd think DH would be selling gangbusters.
It funny you mention that train wreck because I was busting about another comic that almost hits that many red flags.
Hellaween is a 1 volume YA graphic novel.
It’s about a racial ambiguous brown witch with purple hair, a twink vampire and werewolf male duo and the werewolf has a nose ring.
It also stars a black kid and a white girl with an alternative hairstyle and takes place in suburban California.
And yet I enjoyed it. I don’t know if it appealed to my teenage years reading bad internet OCs or enjoyment in watching two would be Van Helsings contend with the Halloween trio or the stupid YA humour of everyone realising they were blundering around in mortal peril. If the art was shitter, I wouldn’t have looked at it. If the writing even breathed SJW I wouldn’t have liked it. But it was all aesthetic for an OK YA story.
So there are stories that can sell, but they are obscured by the same problem as the cape comics where no one seems to have figured out how to sell comics that don’t rely on what has already failed.
Didn't Dark House admit that Beserk outsold all their other titles combined?
i wouldn't be surprised if Wayne Family Adventure on WebToon were to be the highest grossing comic for DC right now
>a kid who saw Across the Spider-Verse and is interested in Spidey doesn't want ASM #1 (or Amazing Fantasy #15 if you're being a b***h).
Yeah, they would just go and ask a store to show them a Miles Morales comic. It’s not hard. You want to make it be harder than it is.
>ask a store to show them a Miles Morales comic.
...which is completely unrelated to, and completely unlike, the movie they just watched, so they're confused and don't buy it. You don't get that people don't want a generic comic, they want what they just saw.
>You want to make it be harder than it is.
I am describing the actual reality as it really is right now. People aren't going into stores and asking and the #1 complaint from non-readers is that capeshit seems confusing to get into. Screech all you want, you're fighting against the actual facts. You're describing some fantasy world you want and not the real world.
>Fricking any of them. It takes like two seconds to find it on Google.
Normal every day people are plebs. There is so much stuff that people need to be motivated to do. The problem is 100% a perception issues. I am not saying comics are "hard to get into" the issue is "people perceive them as hard to get into".
Back in the day Jim Shooter said, "Every comic is someone's first," so you'd get superfluous dialogue describing every X-Man's power. My friend would tell me, "This comic is worth getting into," so I would go and buy an issue and contextually I would understand some things and not others. Maybe he would explain the gaps or lend me some back issues. With collected editions you could actually experience the older issues.
The problem is this sense of completionism or FOMO. Kids today can't start at issue #560 and just read it and pick up the context. The huge continuity breaking arcs from every new writer and no one and done stories doesn't help either. In the past, TV shows were one and done and driven by advertising. You had the occasional two parter and that was it. Nowadays TV shows have complex multi series arcs. On the one hand this encourages must see TV and the feeling of experiencing it. On the other hand people also feel like this is an investment.
Did you watch Game of Thrones? Everyone was telling you to watch it. But season 2 had already started. Do you start now? You can catch up and binge. Everyone is telling you to watch it. But now everyone says the last season was awful. Is it worth the time or not? People who watched it early feel like part of something and talk theories and experience it. Other people don't want to invest the time in it.
I regularly hear people act like to enjoy Spider-Man they'd need to read everything back from the start. The problem is, the psychological profile of "geeks who'd be comics-curious" also overlaps with "obsessive compulsive FOMO types".
>Normal people don’t know how to use google
Okay we’re done here.
>Normal people don’t know how to use google
I never said that.
I'm saying that there is a certain perception of "buy in/investment" that exists in people's heads that has only gotten worse because of modern culture and FOMO.
Their perception is not the same as actual reality. Like when people make a simple task harder.
>Okay we’re done here.
Geez lad, you completely missed the point.
Please just be pretending to be this stupid. What you're refusing to understand is that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of motivation as that anon is trying to explain. Try to understand this: people won't Google if they don't feel any reason to do so. The problem is that capeshit seems daunting and people just aren't going to bother to try, even though in actuality it really isn't that hard. You need to put yourself into the mindset of someone who doesn't already want to read comics.
>Penguin Classics
First time I've heard about that. Does DC have an equivalent? Seems like a cool idea.
>that you can find tons of volume 1 western comics and yet they don’t sell
You know whats funny, Volume 1s do sell. But the drop off is always so fricking huge. The reason why some DC omnibus editions have been so huge is partly because even with big collected editions, which appeal more to specific readers, they don't want 3+ volumes if they can get away with 2 because of sales drop offs. Volume 1 drop off is massive when it comes to collected editions. So many books end up getting cancelled and not even completing a run (some of Peter Davids DC books have done this). Casuals tend to do something similar. Buy a volume 1 and then nothing else. Some trades are only giving you 4 issues and the arcs tend to be bad.
>Some trades are only giving you 4 issues
Vast majority of trades are 6 issues which is standard.
>and the arcs tend to be bad.
Entirely subjective.
>It had more genres.
I don't think that really matters considering all the big manga/anime I keep falling into one of three genres anyway.
had no idea you yourself are the whole universe
the point is, at the same time there's a woman into another genre
or a kid into another one
or an old timer into something else entirely
and as it is said, there's a manga for that
If you're gonna say that comics are 100% only the most talked about part (aka Big Two), then Manga/Anime is nothing but Battle Shonen and Waifu anime.
so so wrong but its ok, it stems from ignorance
>trying to sell comics
it's like trying to sell poison laced dog shit
Ive given up on buying single issues and just go for the hardcover volumes of comics I like after reading them online. So I just order them online from whatever's cheapest; no reason to waste my time going to a store.
The wait time+ the price and short length of each issue really just soured my joy of buying them to read.
Actually single issues are selling amazing and are putting manga to shame. Remember that, weebs. The comic book industry is fine.
This is demonstrably false delusion. There was a recent temporary boost during the pandemic, but even that didn't change the ever-shrinkign % of capeshit vs the whole industry because manga had an even bigger boost during that period.
>The comic book industry is fine.
Yes, but that's the trick: the "industry" is now manga and kid comics with a tiny sliver of capeshit. You're trying to conflate the two. Capeshit is in a death spiral.
>putting manga to shame.
The most recent volume of Spy x Family was the bestselling book in the U.S. in early April. Not best-selling comic, the best-selling book of any kind in the US.
>Comic stores closing because nobody wants to buy their propaganda filled shit.
Keep pandering to these imaginary people. Seriously why do they keep trying when they all go broke?
Kek and I remember all the big youtube shills were screaming that the industry is doing better than ever.
Guess they were full of shit
I just wish the majority of material and discussion around western comics wasn't around Big 2 and Superhero characters that are like 75 years old by now. People here always bring up that comics is more than the big 2—and I do mostly read eurocomics—but you have to admit even here a majority of discussion is around these long established cape franchises, and it just feels like asking for stagnation. Every plot idea under the sun has been tried for these characters, do we really need more Batman, or more Spiderman(s)?
Because the industry shot themselves in the foot and even non cape comics of today still feel and read like capeshit (most are written by the same cape experts that write a million cape comics).
Some dude that was translating comics to spanish and helping creators with accommodations and communication for cons said Vertigo used to sell better than Marvel and regular DC and they killed it all the same and then they wonder why american comics don't have global appeal like manga does.
The problem will always be quality, if I'm sick and tired of action shonen I have plenty of options, outside of DC and Marvel comics are still slop.
I think my local shops have rainbow flags in their store fronts or inside.
Why don't they stock up on more manga? It is what sells.
cause why would you go to a specialty store for manga when you can get it everywhere
Pride.
you only want American comics to do better due to some weird sense of patrotism
Western comic books will never be popular again, 2 generations have gone by where they weren't common
To get western comics to get the chance of ever getting popular is to
1. change distribution to make them put in places of easy access. You will also have to change transport in the US so people will pass by comics on their way to work on the bus or train because that's where comics are usually read
2. get people accustomed to buying and reading comics. its just not in our culture to even see them as a form of entertainment
3. get rid of smartphones, home consoles, movies, etc.... because they are where people find entertainment more often
all this and you'll need to have them actually be good in the first place. Even though there are hundreds of manga being published every day in japan, its still a market ripe with competition. Its been a healthy market for decades
American comics haven't really been a healthy market since the 50s, and a little of the 80s
the 90s onward the market was only being held up by obsessive fanboys, and people looking for the next Action Comics #1. That's not a healthy market created by competition
Let's not pretend that it is possible to actually appreciate translated manga.
Well obviously we need more gay superheroes.
only if they show the penis
>only if they show the penis
lol, you already forgot about the batwiener incident? "readers" lost their minds and had DC reprint the volume
Here, maybe my latest LCS interaction will provide a hint:
>Stop in at LCS after the fourth ownership change in ten years
>Walk in the door; fully 40% of the store is funkos/statues/merch/D&D books/MTG/etc.
>Ask they have any European comics, especially Franco-Belgian titles and even more especially Tintin or Asterix as I was looking to get some for my nephew
>Blank look
>I have to explain what Franco-Belgian comics are to the OWNER of a comic shop
>Ask if he has any titles from 2000 AD instead
>"Never heard of that; who wrote it?"
>He had also never heard of EC comics or the Goon and only had a vague idea of what Heavy Metal is
I wasn't exactly expecting to walk out of there with a complete hardcover set of Metabarons but jesus christ; as someone with zero interest in capeshit soap operas there was absolutely NOTHING in the entire store that I was interested in. I would have settled for some Dark Horse Star Wars floppies or something just to support a local business but even that fairly low bar wasn't reached.
>but even that fairly low bar wasn't reached.
So glad my LCS is a complete opposite. The owner actually knows stuff and gives recommendations based off of that. He also knows a bunch of writers/artists IRL too and has sold art. Honestly this is a knowledge business.
I walked in a different store while in another town and had this weird creepy shop keep bigging up some shitty new 52 Harley Quinn on some 14 year old girls while pointing at some actual good comics and saying they were crap and I walked straight out of there.
>not having any european comics
this is a big one. one of the biggest failures in retail history is the u.s. not selling eurocomics. it's an easy slam dunk and the moron publishers are just fingering themselves
>business owners are clueless
what else is new?
Especially since many comics have been translated into English so they can be sold in England (Tintin, Asterix).
Surely having to compete with Marvel Unlimited and even DC Universe Infinite hasn't helped, especially with digital only content.
But LCS are gateways. Without them the industry will die out.
I mean how many people use the paid subscription services anyway?
It is a paradox. The average western comic book reader reads superhero comics exclusively and doesn't want to try anything else. They think that anything not superhero is essentially pretentious autobiographical garbage. But these same people also constantly "appeal to Watchmen" to overcome their insecurity about comics being immature. People just want Batman. But also want Batman to actually be deep and dark and adult and to actually discuss real world issues. But also want Batman fighting the Joker for the 100th time and epic consequences. But they want continuity for those consequences. But also don't want continuity. But people also get autistic and feel FOMO about not being able to read all Batman issues. But then people only ever read a few Batman stories they get recommended to in some list and that drives 90% of Batman collected edition sales. Comics are always constantly rebooting for a dwindling audience who complain. They are huge pop culture icons that are ingrained into society. But Batman underweart far outsells any comic book. None of these people even really like the comic book medium because people call it childish and only feel validated when a movie is made to justify it. But the movies don't even improve the comics or really get new readers.
Watchmen outsells your average yearly capeshit. You want it to be the enemy so desperately but a tin of capeshitters hate Watchmen and say it's the sole reason comics suck now.
>You want it to be the enemy so desperately
I don't. And never said that. I was simply making a ramble on how some people think and why comics is so full of contradictions because of its fans.
Watchmen. People appeal to it as if it is a life raft in the ocean that proves comics are mature. Other people hate it for starting a chain of fads that ruined these characters and comics. So many people read it and dislike it and think the art is old. So many people claim to enjoy it but really get nothing out of it. It still sells amazingly well and has all different versions. For some Watchmen is like a cul-de-sac the only acceptable comic to read and enjoy (because it is in the Times Literature list).
You are. You want to blame it because "everyone's copying it" but the only copying you see is that "they're just too damn violent just like that blasted Watchmen! This isn't mature!". Truth is, cape comics were plenty violent in the 80s before Watchmen came out and violence in an action series is not bad, those shonen series that are marketed to 13 year olds are more violent and bloody and they sell. When adults took over capes they wanted them to appeal to kids so they neutered them (think of the children!) but then they also want them to be deep except the people writing them are not deep, they're those fanboys of the 80s and 90s all grown up.
Point is, blaming g Watchmen for capeshit being awful is redundant, boring and false. Nobody's stopping you from making an actual well written comic like Watchmen.
>You are.
Oh frick off. I said:
>I was simply making a ramble on how some people think and why comics is so full of contradictions because of its fans.
>on how SOME people think
As in, NOT ME.
My original post said this, actually:
>But these same people also constantly "appeal to Watchmen" to overcome their insecurity about comics being immature.
The point I was making there was that some people appeal to Watchmen to make themselves feel mature about comics. Because a certain type of comic fan wants to feel mature about their comics but also feels immature about them because they mostly like the same stuff.
In my post you are now replying to, I also continued with the conflicting opinions people have on Watchmen. Not my opinions. The fact you can't tell the difference is bizarre.
>Point is, blaming g Watchmen for capeshit being awful is redundant, boring and false.
I never blamed Watchmen at all? I like Watchmen. I am simply stating that comic fans are contradictory and paradoxical about what they say they want vs what they want and all the things they blame along the way.
For a while I wanted to write the most boring Superman comic imaginable. Just Clark living his daily office existence, trying to flirt with Louis, hovering 4" above the ground when he's certain no one is looking.
And then I want this absolute mundanity to be interrupted by a corner of the building melting away into open air. And for a second Clark doesn't understand what's happening. Just an incredibly surreal moment. But then he realizes it's an attack, races to change, fumbles in the stall, hides the suit, creeps down the fire exit, around a block, scanning, locates the malevolent dot in the sky, and launches into a pale blue void just to cleave right through it.
Just really emphasize the surreality of it all. Mundanity. Then absolute violence.
>The average western comic book reader reads superhero comics exclusively and doesn't want to try anything else
Growing up the only thing I’d want from the LCS was Toyfare because I liked their comics and looking at the toyline sculpts, as well as their generally decent articles. And an Archie digest every so often. Oh yeah, and vintage mad magazines since they’d have ‘em for cheap.
99% of capeshit just isn’t worth reading, period. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of the genre or not, most of it isn’t worth the paper its printed on.
It doesn’t help that floppy pricing is just dogshit. Why the frick would anybody pay $4 for less than 30 pages of content? Its little wonder most people interested in comics just go to Barnes and Noble and grab a 300 page manga for $13.
Doesn’t help that most of the art in mainstream comics is just plain boring.
Comics are dead. People flock to manga because things actually matter in those stories. Simple as. It's the reason I dropped comics.
>Comic Books
>Dont add Manga to your selection.
Why? I know comic shops who added Manga and still are open.
Besides is it really a Comic-Manga problem or just an “online/Amazon“ condumer thing?
That shop sold manga too.
Obviously not enough selling.
Comics are too expensive and reading them on a phone for free is absolute dogshit compared to manga. Is it any wonder why one thrives while the other dies in le modern times? other than comics also just being shit most of the time
recently i read the rebirth run of Batman and up to date with Zdarsky
i understand i'm not exactly reading the fan favorites here, but just the fact that in barely 5 years of publication from end of rebirth to the newest stuff you had Batman act like 5 different people, ruining his relationships with friends and lovers again and again, character growth and destruction...
all of this is absolutely keeping potential readers away... and i know this has been happening for decades but now there's nothing else in comics that warrants keeping up with that problem
even a simple "yeah characterization is ass but at least it appeals to my hormone filled male head"
i'm back to reading TopCow tomb raider
Comic book shit is like a soap opera. Like Coronation Street in the UK has over 11,000 episodes. No one is going to watch it all. You can dip into it or out of it.
The problem is modern mentality isn't "I like this arc and artist and might pick it up again" it is instead people wanting many decades, over half a century, to all make sense and be digestible. Everyone knows who Batman is. So dip in, read a story and have fun.
>So dip in, read a story
a story that has no beginning and no end, because the next writer will just do as he pleases
>and have fun.
apparently people aren't having fun
>a story that has no beginning and no end, because the next writer will just do as he pleases
That's how comics have always been
so why are they selling like shit now?
Because the authors are more shit now.
People still watch and read James Bond despite numerous different people playing him and writing his books.
Entirely different reasons that are complex, as it is a mix of economics, culture, slow moving death of print, interests in entertainment changing, independent leisure reading levels going down, etc.
>israelite York
>crime ridden shithole with catch and release laws
Gee I wonder why they're closing up forever
why dont they even sell manga? its really fricking stupid that they unironically keep selling woke trash comics.
they honestly deserve that. they are too old to change their taste or they are too nationalistic or bigoted to read foreign comics aka manga
>why dont they even sell manga?
out of spite and a sense of superiority
LCS owners are the pretentious sommeliers of capeshit and blue haired comics
they're never going to lower themselves and sell fujobait or isekai
Vast majority of isekai stuff isn't even manga, it's web/light novels.
I get that you guys that visit this site to post wojaks and scream 'Black person' without consequence and will glady eat shit so long as its not woke but you have to know deep down that you're not a big enough demographic to keep comic book stores alive in the face of all the other problems with the medium and the economic realities of running a business?
nice strawman
first of all, this board is called Cinemaphileumblr for a reason, and your takes are the majority in here
having said that, all i have ever seen is people asking for a bit more eye-candy and maybe toning downs the white people bad rethoric
i mean take a look at the most recent restarts of Wonder Woman, HawkGirl, PowerGirl and Catwoman... they all start the same way, with the most trite talking points
and they all sold to white dudes in the past
Who? Who is calling the board Cinemaphilemblr?
rest of the site and even other sites
it's not hidden secret this board shares most users with r/comicbooks and now dead tumblr forums
this gif is more than 9 years old
So, people that visit this site to post wojaks and scream 'Black person' without consequence? Like I said? I thought that was a strawman?
Everyone in this website.
Cinemaphile Cinemaphile Cinemaphile, even /toy/ have started calling this board Cinemaphilemblr
>nice strawman
Look at
a thread about that Avengers game.
Is the problem that the visual style is drab and colorless and looks like hong kong knockoffs of the MCU?
NO!
Is the problem that the gameplay loop gets stale and boring an hour in?
NO!
Is the problem that it's a live service game that dripped out support in a terrible and synergistic way with the movies?
NO!
Is the problem that the game's story was boring as frick and that the subtitles included stage direction for incomprehensible reasons?
NO!
It's Kamala's fault! The problem was muslims!
And I'd like to remind you, people were saying this Avengers game looked like shit from the very first preview, beore Kamala was even revealed to be in it. But look at what Anons decided is the nail in the coffin.
It's not a strawman. People here regularly ignore tons of shitty practices to laser focus on idpol and will swallow anything so long as it aligns with their politics. Then they accuse everyone else of doing it.
We see it in the AI threads and all those threads shilling for youtuber vanity projects as if they're the first and only indies as well.
mental illness
Black person
>My local comic shop has literally consumed the strip mall its in. Every store that was once something else is now another annex for it to sell more stuff
Skill issue tbdesu
>How does this even happen when the characters are more famous than ever?
because superhero comics suck
>boobs don't sell
come one, i understand arguing for the sake of it, but there are hundreds of absolutely shit manga and manwha selling like hotcakes just because the women in it are sexy
floppies are too expensive. I didn't mind spending $20 for my books but now that price point has doubled-tripled.
also my lcs got rid of all there tabletop stuff and replaced it all with 5e shit which sucks because 5e is garbage
Nobody is forcing you to buy single issues. Just buy trades. Just buy trades when they’re in sale.
NTA but that's what I do.
The thing is, that means only buying comics on the first Saturday of May every year when they have FCBD sales.
I can't imagine that customers that only buy once a year at a discount are particularly good for a business.
>there are no sales outside of one day in the year
Come on, brother.
are no sales outside of one day in the year
At my LCS? Yes.They only do sales one day a year.
You do get there's no standardization in this business model right? Some stores have bigger more diverse stocks or are run by more personalable people. Some stores are pits run by jerks.
Then buy online. Why do you just rely on LCS if you don’t buy anything from it 364 days of the year? You could buy second hand comics. This isn’t rocket science.
>Then buy online. Why do you just rely on LCS if you don’t buy anything from it 364 days of the year?
Anon you get that we're in a thread talking about how LCS are going out of business, right? This is why. Because that IS what I do. I read comics online because the in store experience is shitty.
How is THAT rocket science?
I do. The thing is that I liked collecting comics and I liked discussing the weekly issues with people. sadly post 2014 the prices have gone up and the conversations have devolved into mindless culture war and shitflinging. Now I just buy trades and pirate in peace.
Pathfinder 2e is better
5e isn’t garbage 4th was stupid and 3.5 was over complicated and just as easy to break, if not easier to break than 4th and 5th. If any homosexual says pathfinder go frick yourself that was just 3.5.5. 5th is the lesser of evils in my book not as overly complicated as 3.5 but not stupid easy like 4th.
what about visibility? you can find manga everywhere
you can only find comicbooks in LCS
>you can find manga everywhere
Where? I don’t see manga anywhere except weebs and incels using them as avatars
at this point you should be a namegay
but you're trolling so go on
Answer the question. Where are all these manga shit you supposedly see.
in stores... why are you even trying to gotcha! here dude? or are you going to deny even this?
Oh so everywhere is just walking into a specific store you already know sells manga.
yes pretty much
Literally where the frick do you live you homosexual
Name the fricking country and state where you supposedly don't see manga on every god damn store that has anything to do with books or magazines at all
There is no place in America or Europe or Asia where that's true so you're living in Africa or Antarctica or most likely lying your ass off
Liar. If you have to go out of your way to go to a book store to see manga shit then it’s not everywhere.
>nuh uh it doesn't count unless it's in my mom's basement room that i never leave
Go frick yourself. You're not interested in the real facts of the matter, you just want to defend an industry that's killing itself. Ostrich ass motherfricker, hiding head in sand.
Says the person who can’t even admit the same issues they whine about also exist in manga which destroys their entire strawman argument they use in every thread
>same issues
which issues?
The very issues that are always complained about.
They literally do not and that's why manga is crushing it. 92% of comics sold in America are manga. It's not even a fight, it's an execution and it's that because of ostriches like you who think refusing to admit reality means it won't affect you. Too bad reality doesn't need your consent for anything.
>b-b-but fate!
Fate franchise is literally unique in Japan. It is literally unique in how many different series and spinoffs it's got. In Marvel/DC every single important character has a double digit amount of titles, ongoings, minis, oneshots, team books, what-ifs, black labels et cetera. It's not remotely the same thing.
They do though. You just can’t accept your biased argument is bullshit.
Whatever. Here's the thing buddy: I don't need to convince you. Your opinion doesn't matter at all, it is patently wrong and whether you accept it or not doesn't change a damn thing. Manga dominates because of the reasons discussed, comics languish because of the reasons discussed, and your little head can stay in the sand forever for all I care.
No inch off my back. Meanwhile you will keep being wrong.
you're replying to this
anon, dude
he's either a troll, or r/comicbooks strongest warrior
Accessibility and ease of breaking in as a new reader. You can go to any Barnes and Noble, Hot Topic, Box Lunch or other chain book store and grab a volume of Manga. You arent forced to seek an LCS that still carry a stereotype of unfriendly gatekeepers(whether true or not). Also, if for example, you liked the Naruto anime and wanted to read the manga, you can go grab Naruto vol 1. You dont have 14 different titles that all have Naruto in them. Western comics make it very difficult for new readers.
Affordability. Volumes are $9.99-$14.99 while a single issue of Batman costs $4.99-$7.99 for 22 pages
Manga also listens to their audience. When it comes to Shonen Jump they have reader polls on their favorite series, characters, best new series, artists, etc. The Manga industry is driven by reader trends, not what movie is out or what TV series they are trying to push or by what editorial believes are the best books to promote and push.
Comicshomies be like
>Our reputation is a joke and our industry is failing. Here's why that's a GOOD thing
my mentally ill pastime is going on r/comicbooks, asking why manga is doing better than western comics, and getting flooded with insults and people telling me that it is, in fact, not true that the comic book industry is struggling... or going on about how it isn't a zero sum game between comics and manga, as if people have infinite money and time
Based. There is literally no excuse for a foreign media to be beating out a country's own media and they need to accept that asap
It actually isn't a zero sum game between comics and manga, but western comics are losing anyway.
Manga is more book for less money and has none of the western censorship.
I don’t think western comics can truly complete on price as they simply take more time and are more costly to make due to both book quality and higher pay.
European comics take even longer and look even better in my opinion.
Selling on scale doesn’t make a product good, just cheap and easily accessible
Japan has ten times more censorship than America.
They don’t censor boobs, they censor bush and genitals. So magically that’s okay to people who “hate censorship.”
please dude i beg you, use a name so i can filter you
i have never seen so many wrong and contrarian takes in here it's insane
Comics just aren't cool. We can moan about distribution, quality, comics crash, comics code, all the other shitty business decisions, price, digital and everything else until we are blue in the face.
But comics are just not cool to people. People think those that read comics are losers. Manga isn't necessarily cooler just people have better mental gymnastics to justify their interest. People just can't justify their interest in comics without feeling immature or looked down upon.
This is culturally entrenched and billion dollar movies couldn't change it.
>Comicshomies walking into a barnes and noble and going instantly blind: "Where is the hecking manga chudigga!? I can't see it!"
it's literally ONE anon being so in denial (i hope)
American comics are literally only one genre, and people think super hero comics are for kids
manga is seen as more adult somehow, and it has many different genres for different audience
there's a fujo manga set in Victorian Britain somewhere out selling all the capeshit industry
Mr. Marvel intern, vehemently arguing online that there's nothing wrong with your industry does not actually translate into there being nothing wrong with your industry.
>hit it big with mcu
>tank comics with THE MESSAGE
>it's ok because the movies are still exploding
>tank movies with THE MESSAGE
>it's ok because
>oh shit
Manga has been selling gangbusters so they can't even say it's the industry. People still have a huge appetite for it.
American comics have a (untrue) perception of being "difficult to get into". This perceived barrier to entry turns off a lot of potential readers. The fact that there's no real agreed-upon "jumping-on point" or established order to the books that's easy to figure out doesn't help. You can even compare cape comics to books like The Walking Dead, or Saga, or Hellboy. Those do a lot better, because people know that you can start at the beginning and just go forwards. The constant relaunches with new Issue #1s do not help.
Additionally, the fact that they're done by a myriad of creators means that the quality of a book can vary wildly. If you read One Piece or The Goon, you know what you're getting, there's going to be a consistent tone or quality throughout. But if you read Batman, that's a different story entirely.
As well, cape comics are just hard to find. You've got to go to out-of-the-way specialty stores, whereas you can buy a copy of Jump at any convenience store.
Cape comics are expensive too, nearly four dollars for just twenty pages of decompressed story, so barely anything happens. Cape comics are still chasing the dragon oft he speculator boom of the 90s, so they print on this high quality glossy magazine paper that inflates the cost of the product. Compare to manga, which is printed on cheap newsprint in black and white, keeping the costs low.
>CTRL+F manga
>126 results
Cinemaphile needs to ban the word manga so we can go back to actually discussion.
Can someone give me QRD? I refuse to read threads that mention manga excessively.
HOLY SEETHE, BATMAN
I refuse to read these because they are always the same shitty contradictory arguments. In the end it's all just
>comics bad
>no manga bad
So the usual deal huh. Not really missing much .
>QRD
manga sells better
some anons wrote some issues comics have as cause
another anon insists that those issues exist in manga too, so that can't be the problem
Same as always
blame minorities and wokeness
praise manga for accessibility and breasts
>same as always
How many different answers do you expect to get to "what is 2 + 2"?
Manga
>t. industrycuck
How exactly is discussing competing mediums in a thread about responding to competing mediums a problem?
Also another interesting thing. Fans of manga are usually either fans of the whole medium or fans of specific genres while for comics there are a lot of fans of just 1 hero. For example a guy likes green lantern he will read all the green lantern stuff and most likely stop there since he isn't really a fan of the medium as a whole.
hi marvel intern
In all seriousness there is a kerne of truth to this. Comic book fans seem to pride gatekeeping while lamenting diminishing sales and rather than self refect and consider that maybe those two ideas are mutually exclusive, a lot of them shift the blame to the same demographics they just told to frick off.
The second paragraph is correct and but all of the rest is bullshit.
>buy the current issue
Frick off.
It's not true. You pick up a current comic and it's full of references to older stories. X-men on particular are very guilty of this, you basically need to read from the 80s on.
>relaunches are good
Slapping a new #1 on a comic every 12 months doesn't really help anyone. Also how could someone have trouble figuring out how to read Naruto and Boruto but figure out American comics?
Is he also complaining there are too many volumes?
>kek
Manga weebs really can’t handle being called out on their bs
explain please
Manga is the competition and it's winning, that's the facts.
I have never said manga isn’t doing well. I am saying the “analysis” manga fricks always put out is based on nothing but bullshit they made up because the only argument they have is either baaaawww comics hard or muh one author. Which only goes to show how stupid these people are because they’re using their own limited and biased opinions as facts without any ability to back it up. Nor can they counter when people point out the many ways their argument doesn’t actually work even when something is exactly like what they claim people want.
If you're denying that manga sells more than comics, then you should post comic sales numbers.
If they even exist, that is.
Then what is your moronic idea of why manga is effortlessly crushing DC/Marvel in their home territory? What in your demented, mad, subhuman, inferior mind explains it, if everything said in the thread is so wrong?
anon, the insane comic shill you're replying to also said that it's not true that comics are only found in LCS and manga is widespread
he lives in a different reality
I mean for floppies he's not wrong.
>he
dude, you're pathetic
There is no single simple minded answer like your durrrrr people are too stupid to read western comics and also all comics reading is just impulse buying you can’t ever do cursory google research with a smart phone that would take you two seconds!
Look I wrote a post not addressed to everyone I am soo cool guys!! ZOMG!!
Format, format, format.
Set everything else aside for a moment, and think of *what* you are buying, and how it is served up to you. Marvel/DC/indie comics come as individual issues at a given cadence (weekly/fortnightly/monthly/whatever) where you pay a fair amount for a small number of full colour glossy pages. You've got to go somewhere which specialises in their sale, because other retailers no longer carry them.
Most manga is published in weekly compilation magazines, where you get multiple stories from different writers and artists. It'll generally be in black & white on non-gloss paper to keep the price down, and the physical format makes it much simpler/easier to be sold by non-specialised retailers as well as be carried & read on the go. If a given story isn't popular, it isn't likely to affect overall sales of the magazine and retailers won't be stuck carrying deadweight stock. We then in the west get the 'good' stories published in standalone volumes, where the bad stuff has already been filtered out.
Then why isn’t 2000AD and Judge Dredd Magazine the biggest selling western titles? Why isn’t Batman Brave and the Bold outselling everything? Why isn’t the current Superman anthology raved about here?
Are they sold at local convenience stores & public transport hubs and marketed to the widest possible demographics?
The answer is of course no they aren't. The truth is that the manga ecosystem is radically different (and radically Japanese). They never had the Comics Code / Superhero-only lockdown of the format and they built upon a customer base which wanted convenient entertainment in a pocket-size book they could read on the bus or train to/from the workplace. It also helped that you had different magazines for different tastes / market segments, so it never generated the stigma which comics did in the US/West of "Oh, comics are just for nerdy boys!".
>Are they sold at local convenience stores & public transport hubs and marketed to the widest possible demographics?
in the UK they are the UK comics like 2000AD and the Beano never lost the newsagent market anon
It has still declined, however. When I was growing up, there was both the Dandy & the Beano, but the Dandy disappeared a while ago.
I miss Desperate Dan and his Big Cow Pies
you can partly blame DC Thompsons' constant format and marketing changes for the Dandy every declining Market share like Xtreme Dandy in the late 2000s
Sales success in manga doesn't really care about Jump sales but the sales of collected editions which 2000AD/Rebellion are terrible at with strips not getting collected for years at times since due to 2000AD compressed format simply won't have enough material for those collected editions
the Megazine is an odd case since at least half of every issue is reprints of all material such as currently their reprinting a Garth Ennis Johnny Red comic from 2015 and the IDW Rogue Trooper comic along with random interviews of people so the Megazine itself is a really odd publication overall
The war is lost
The treaty signed
The art in manga doesn’t look like shit. The women are beautiful. The story is good. And they don’t talk down on their customers.
I'm reading "old" (90s,2000s) comic stuff now from TopCow, Dynamite, Avatar comics,awa, behemoth, ablaze
>The story is good
Every time I hear about a manga ending it's people talking about how it retroactively ruined the entire story, most explosive case being Attack on Titan
mangakas are hard working people and they love their fans and readers
comic book authors only have contempt for you
and it shows
Slott basically.
this
Lol nah slotts writing I'd one thing, his ego is a whole other.
>stalks people he blocks
>creates alts to praise himself
>edits his own Wikipedia page
>modern day American comic writer
Japanese writers would get killed if the tried something like that
add to the list Tini Howard and Hailey btw
what has tini howard done besides being a shit writer?
Slott's just an example of abused becoming abuser https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/why-are-some-comics-pros-so-damn?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
>Let’s have an example. In one of those odd Marvel behind-the-scenes specials on the Disney Channel, we saw long time comics scribe Dan Slott absolutely humiliated on camera by his editor, whose name I believe is Anonymous Nobody (I’m not willing to rewatch the thing in order to get the fellow’s name).
>And of course Dan Slott is notorious for how badly he treats his readers, because those who are trained to be bullies don’t abuse the ones who bullied (or bully, since it seems to still be ongoing) them. They bully the next ones down the line.
>It’s all about the law of fecal gravity.
manga is already publicized enough thanks to anime
but comics aren't being publicized by movies adaptation nor games
so why don't the big 2 simply pay content creators to publicize comics?
>make the games and movies just as shitty as the comics
They're already doing it.
Perch anecdote: Quesada thought that specific anime like one peice would die on the vine and not attract the mainstream audience.
I can't go into my LCS after 2016 without the workers in trying to get me to talk about how they hate Trump. On top of that the New52 attracted a ton more people to it in 2011, which was fine because most were normal, but the most socially incompetent neck beards out of them became regulars that I want to avoid. I've seen grown men starting fights with young children in there and guys trying to hit on the cashier. Weirdly enough the only nice one was this troony who always wore a Wonder Woman shirt. He seemed normal apart from the crossdressing.
as an absolute DC noob, every time i dared say that i loved the DCAU of the new52, i get angry people coming at me, even irl
i just think those anime style cartoons were fine and DC should have kept doing them
adult Kori and Nightwing flirting? apparently makes people mald
New52 was a mixed bag. The moronic shit they did back then seems a lot less awful compared to what we have now though
>as an absolute DC noob, every time i dared say that i loved the DCAU of the new52, i get angry people coming at me, even irl
You'd have to be an aging Gen Xer or a contrarian Millennial to hate the DCAU. I get the New 52 hate though, they replaced a decent universe with a worse one.
I just don't think anything after BTAS was good. They liked Batman and not so much everything else, and it showed.
They made the best Superman cartoon. They definitely had a more casual interest in those Justice League characters, but it was a good cartoon overall.
As a man with a large dick, I will interject and say that, aside from the overall low quality of most american comics, they are very expensive, that's why nobody buys them. The model is bad and quite frankly, so is the marketing since for example Japan makes manga for 13 year old boys in shonen but also makes manga for young adults of 19-22 years. If you want to pick up a comic for young adults you get shit made for 8 year olds because Pedomerica wants to insist 8 year olds are capable of making their own decisions just like an adult.
daily reminder that there was a Young Justice story released during Dark Crisis some months ago that consisted in the writer and editorial calling you, and old YJ readers, chuds and sex pests
Meghan Fitzmartin hates you
The saddest thing is comics feel like they have such little presence outside of the movies/tv industry.
>USM is coming back and you'd think that would garner hype amongst a generation that grew up on it. However, it feels more like crickets than a mainstream surge.
>USM is coming back and you'd think that would garner hype amongst a generation that grew up on it. However, it feels more like crickets than a mainstream surge.
Why would it, Bendis ran it into the ground and this is an entirely new take on the concept.
Honestly, not really related to the conversation, but where did this idea that you have to watch from the beginning come from?
Like, did you watch every TMNT/Transformers/Simpsons/BTAS/Whatever episode in order? Did everyone watch the 'first' episode? What about shows that don't even have 'first' episodes? Hell, a lot of people infamously watched only half of Dragon Ball.
And from my experience I had no problem with Raimi Spidey and Cartoon Spidey being what they are.
I guess to tie back in, I didn't have any problem reading the few Spidey comics I picked up on a whim back then.
No offense but marvel continuity has become way more problematic in this sense.
>I never really read X-men till someone told me modern day hickman was a good entry point.
>Proceeded to get lost in all of these characters and organizations i had no idea about.
Most of those are episodic. Did you really need someone to point this out to you?
Most of those still have continuity through. And some of those are seriealised enough.
Maybe I'm just weird. I watched the Dark Knight without any context from Begins (not even sure I realised it came out). Also, this was more of a thing when I watched TV more, but I had no problems with watching something I tuned into the middle of.
People just come up with flimsy excuses.
X-Men has been this way for decades, it was never a problem in the past.
They all have continuity. The difference between a show and a long-running comic series is that an individual episode is self-contained whereas these days an individual run is self-contained.
The problem still exists just cuz it didn't in the past.