>Poeple for years says comics (big 2 most specifically) are dying and videogames, movies and anime will replace them
>Hollywood is burning and streaming service are a bubble
>Videogame industry doing open exectution of all their personal
>Anime/manga it's doing ok
>Big two still mantain without mass firing and marvel doing pretty decent in sales with x-men, ultimate line and orther stuff
So........what's the lesson here?
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media in general is for the poor obviously
There are massive headwinds stopping comics from being good, but they (mostly Marvel) are actually trying to reform without losing the advantages they have right now. Also it's arrogant to proclaim the death of print media when it merely evolves to fit the times in ways more intensive media like television and movies can't.
Comics (not just the big 2) are the easiest form of expression for narrative artists, as they can be done with little to no collaboration or funding and will be around as long as man survives.
Notice how it's only the western stuff that's currently burning down, meanwhile even the fricking Chinese are opening new gaming studios and going on hiring sprees where they're literally hiring old western vidya devs who can't find work in the west these days.
It's what you get when you get in bed with GM style management. Those guys should have been executed when their bad decisions caused the 1970s, but we let them teach fifty years of teenagers to act like morons.
>be video games
>get better and better over the years
>suddenly at some point they just stop making any half way decent games.
what happened?
AAA gaming got too managerial, and having parasites around is a good way for your business to get completely locked up in committee based design. When you combine that with a deeply corrupt press that is both pay to play and will give praise to anybody that screws them, and the fact that tech companies don't exist in reality and can't be trusted, you have a recipe for destruction.
Thankfully, indie games have now completely displaced AAA stuff, so that is the route forward for all media.
>>get better and better over the years
>get better
No. This culling was long overdue, and I love it.
>Anime/manga it's doing ok
Downplayer of the century over here. Manga is raping comics right now man.
>Big two still mantain without mass firing and marvel doing pretty decent in sales with x-men, ultimate line and orther stuff
OP, most of the industry's top selling comics sell under 100K per month. You can usually make it well into the top 100 on less than 50K. X-Men isn't "doing pretty decent", some of the main books do well by the absolute state of modern comics sales, but for every one that does there's 3 other books with bad sales. Marvel just keeps publishing a gorillion X-books a month because it used to work for them in the 80s and 90s, and they think what worked then will always work even when it's clearly not working. The line had a dead cat bounce when Hickman took over in 2019 and the fandom have been deluding themselves that sales of the whole line stayed up so they can pretend they're "back on top".
It's a dying industry kept alive by Marvel and DC, who both have massive parent companies that just use them as IP farms, and don't want to spend the time, effort or money cleaning house and trying to change things within the company, or addressing the bigger systemic problems in the comic industry because comic sales are so insignificant to Disney and Warner that it just doesn't matter to them.
I think the point of the post is saying that even thought the industry had problems they are doing even worse in other sides (TV, movies and videogames)
MCU is so lucrative that Disney can afford to keep selling the comics at a loss because as far as they're concerned the comics are just a testing ground for future movie plotlines.
Compared to the money involved in videogames and movies, comics are not even a blip on the radar.
Comics are subsisting almost entirely on collectors and "I gotta have the complete run" morons buying every issue because of massive sunk cost. If it wasnt for them, comics would have died right after the 90s.
>Comics are subsisting almost entirely on collectors and "I gotta have the complete run" morons buying every issue because of massive sunk cost. If it wasnt for them, comics would have died right after the 90s.
No they're the morons that killed everything in the 90s. Up until then Indie comics were branching out and becoming healthy again, but the speculator market destroyed the industry. Comics would be better off if we terminator style assassinated these buttholes back in the 90s.
Hard to mass fire a company that only has like 60 employees, each doing the job of at least 3 people.
the shipped/printed numbers are all fake ypu moronic monkey. they pulp 80% of the books because cant sell and cheaper than shipping. only print because have contracts to keep for printers. dog boy or whatever ya shit is not comics. including american sales of manga doesnt mean comics are thriving. its a dead medium. third of billion people and selling 5000 copies of billion dollar movie franchises is a joke.
>the shipped/printed numbers are all fake ypu moronic monkey.
Source?
https://www.comicsbeat.com/what-ever-happened-to-the-sales-charts/
This is the best I can do for the shipped/printed lied comment you replied to. It has been a thing you hear around comic book stores for years. Diamond would send books to stores they never ordered and tell them they would have to pay to send them back. This would show up as high "shipped" numbers for investors or fluff piece articles. It is a common thing in entertainment when you are not sure of sales to publish shipped numbers. It was a big red flag after years of hearing shops complain about stuff like this from diamond, suddenly all comic sales were no long tracked by comichron.
>dog boy or whatever ya shit is not comics
He is not wrong in the context of this thread though. Marvel and DC shills point to "comic sales are up" but those sales are not Marvel and DC they are scholastics books for kids that sell more at book fairs than comic stores. The 24 page floppy comic book is dying.
>The 24 page floppy comic book is dying.
Who cares, it should have died off a long time ago. Honestly I barely consider those things comics anymore, since they're all just content farms seeking to be made into movies these days. You get better shit from small press publishers like PEOW 2.
My point is comics are doing just fine, and will do just fine whether or not DC and Marvel tank. Simply because it is the easiest and purest way to express ones idea to people through visual media.
I agree that no one should really care to much. But just pointing out that when people say comics are dying, like in this thread, they are specifically talking about the big 2 because they are what people look to when you talk comic books.
Pretty much everything that out sells it that is comics book styled story telling wants to be called something else. I have seen graphic novels used way more lately to the point the big two want people to stop using the term trade paper back.
It will probably be better for the industry once they are gone or lost all influence but there are people that just love to keep the conversation about the two.
It will be majorly better once they're gone, but people are afraid that the Japanese or Koreans will utterly dominate. However, we have a great example of how the target audience for these books already moved on in the Scholastic psuedo-comic books like Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Those kids don't get anything from the Big 2, but they still get their comic style stories and that outsells manga.
Americans love comics; you just have to get good ones in front of them, and the floppy capeshit market isn't it.
Which is the best thing to happen. I am so sick of cape shit rebooting or canon changing. We are just at the point where they are to afraid to change what they do, which is crazy because both DC and Marvel have done non-super hero stuff but they are afraid to touch any of it right now.
I think Dynamite will fill a bit of the void with Thundercats if they don't drop the ball because that is what I hear most people at the shop talk about. IDW will hold on with TMNT and Sonic for a bit as long as they can learn to stop fricking around. And scholastics will hopefully really step up and get some more good stories out there. I noticed reprints of Amulet and Bone have been pretty consistent. So with their bigger share of the market now they should get some more new stuff going over the next few years.
Scholastic only sells to kids. I remember I was super into a lot of their stuff until I hit 13, which is where they throw you out into the wild of legitimate literature and trust that you'll find something that doesn't turn you into a libertarian or Tolkien fan.
DC and Marvel, while able to do non-cape stuff well, lack the imagination and guts necessary to get the kind of money to really invest in that middle market. With their demise (or at least Marvel's reform and DC's demise) and the current market going back to sensible (as in not chasing video when comics and books are so much cheaper to make and sell) we will see somebody rise who really gets that.
You can still enjoy Scholastic stories even if you are not in the target demo, but I get what you are saying. Having them step up to be kids entry point into all kinds of comics though it probably the best thing for them right now.
It is also very telling when Disney is also licensing out IPs to Dynamite that they are probably not super confident in Marvel right now. It is the small presses time to shine again and I am interested to see where it goes. I see more shit from Boom and Image popping up on preview site first than Big 2 books. We just need to hope now that all the writers have learned that they will probably not get their big hollywood break and just write good books again.
I always found that mindset stupid, because you don't go into writing for wealth or fame, you go into it for the reaction to your story that you've told. It's not for celebrities, but for graffitists. The audience that there was for comics and writing in general evaporated for the two decades where people thought that, but I have faith that it will return. After all, once YouTube starts pushing its costs on video creators they'll realize that the time they spent making vlogs and video articles would have been better spent writing.
There's going to be an indie writing renaissance soon enough.
Yeah the big 2's influence has kind of refused to let the American comic industry evolve like European and Asian markets have. Even now as it's dying it has this grip on the market causing a schism in people interested in publishing comics like (First Second, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly etc.) and the people interested in publishing content farm slop, (DC, Marvel, with some of Image and Oni being effected too.)
But yeah, I guess since the old way is dying and the new way is struggling to be born, now is the time of monsters and that'll scare some folk.
Dosen't TPB sales also make a hard contribution to sales tho?
Trades get a little complicated but you are technically correct. However, those are not always new books. Watchmen, Civil War, The Dark Knight Returns, etc.. still get prints/sales. So this makes the companies money but royalties don't really help artist and new floppy comics still sit around not selling. So if no new stories in floppies get big then trades will just continue to be reprints of classic stores that do sell.
Which again, I don't mind. New capeshit is usually trash so just making it easier to get the good old stuff is a great idea to me.
>dog boy or whatever ya shit is not comics.
this is cope
The vast majority of people who say X industry is dying have no idea what they're talking about. It's just shitposting.
Except the fact that artist for the big two are getting paid the lowest they have in a long time.
https://www.cbr.com/winter-solder-ed-brubaker-paid-more-cameo-creating-winter-soldier/
https://www.comicsbeat.com/comic-book-page-rates-again-lower-than-they-were-14-years-ago/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/marvel-and-dcs-shut-up-money-comic-creators-go-public-over-pay-1234983043/
https://www.polygon.com/23914388/comics-broke-me-page-rates-creator-union-cartoonist-cooperative-hero-initiative
There is a lot of people talking about it if you look around.