With the capeshit movie genre in its twilight thanks to superhero fatigue and cape comics at an all-time nadir, the economy in one of its worst depressions in decades and the staff at Mongrel and Decrepit Comics chock full of senile boomers and utterly incompetent if not maliciously spiteful nepo babies, it is quite possible we're about to see the end of the Big Two (and more generally capeshit) stranglehold on the American comics market. With that in mind, what do you think is in the works for the comics medium in the coming years once it's shaken off the capeshit yoke?
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It’s not a zero sum game, there is not going to be anything to replace capes.
Comics are dying.
>but manga and Europe
Also on the decline. My hugely weeb country is stopping publishing manga because it no longer sells.
>>but manga
You know for as much as people like to point at manga like it's some triumph it's always only the same handful of series that are doing well rather than the entire manga industry which often sell as badly or worse than mainstream comics. Yeah Demon Slayer sold a billion units but how many manga have come out versus how that hit that.
Bruh, niche shoujo series and Isekai that aren't even doing well enough to get an anime are still doing better than a big portion of Marvel and DCs weekly drops.
But other countries, including mine, have just started on the manga craze and are bringing a lot of new material every year. Of course they might decline at some point but probably not this decade.
>have just started on the manga craze
No they haven't. A handful of series getting popular is not a MANGA CRAZE it's a fad.
>It’s not a zero sum game, there is not going to be anything to replace capes.
This, culture is too compartmentalized and fractured between individuals now. Constantly being plugged in turns everyone's exposure to pop culture into a personalized experience. Broadcast TV is dying. Big theatrical releases are an exception now. The radio is exclusively pandering to old people because it's impossible to keep track of what sound cloud musicians are trending with each demographic, and it would hardly matter with the speed it changes at.
Cape movies were a leftover from before the time when everyone was logged into front pages that just reflect their own interests back at them. The idea of a shared cultural phenomenon that everyone wants to be a part of is becoming a dated idea based on obsolete marketing data. Doubling down the way Star Wars and Marvel have recently just alienates general audiences.
By the way this isn't doom posting. It's a good thing. Marketers have to try harder or focus on niche audiences. They can't just get a Game of Thrones style hit that everyone at the office is obligated to watch for social relevance.
>niche audiences
Anon, comics before the big crunch from DC and Marvel were just a shit ton of niche comics and smaller publishers.
The age of big behemoth media producers is dead and buried. Comics will go back to being small niche stuff with some taking off and getting a ton of praise and lots at best being modes successes.
This is the natural state of the industry and one that the big two desperately sought to stomp out with every means at their disposal.
>It’s not a zero sum game, there is not going to be anything to replace capes.
>Comics are dying.
The market is going to open up dubsman. The Big Two are dying, and their corpses will fertilize a joyous new era for smaller creatives.
>My hugely weeb country is stopping publishing manga because it no longer sells
Classic cope tactic: gotta allude that manga is also doing bad with no proof
I know in France the younger generations prefer manga to the traditional native comic industry. People have liked manga in France for decades of course but it's reached the point where creators are making their work as much like manga as possible. I read a series called Beyond the Clouds the feels like a mediocre webcomic made by a Final Fantasy fangirl. Turned out it was by a Japanese artist who couldn't get published in Japan but the French were eager to eat it up.
>Turned out it was by a Japanese artist who couldn't get published in Japan but the French were eager to eat it up.
Wait, what? How did that even happen? I thought it was the other way around.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624824/beyond-the-clouds-1-by-nicke/
It's not included in databases like MAL because it wasn't originally published I'm Japan.
TCD
Billionaire who loves comics buys Marvel and DC and pays out the nose for talents to write and draw the books. We're in the "need oil prince" phase now, the devastation of the industry is so total and far reaching.
The American comics industry, and comics stores are both being kept on life support by Marvel and DC, by superhero comics. If the big 2 die, the industry dies. Nothing else is going to suddenly become popular, replace superheroes and keep the industry alive. When the giants fall everything else will be crushed beneath them.
The Big 2 being owned by Warner and Disney means nobody can buy Marvel or DC unless their owners are willing to sell, and we're living in an age where mega-corporations like that are steadily buying up everything to consolidate all of the entertainment industry, it's not likely to be reversed. The best you could hope for is for Warner and Disney to just outsource production of comics to other companies, rescuing the characters from the morons currently controlling them.
Death.
The comic books stores that were too fricking stupid and afraid to put their full weight behind indies and back orders and being hobby shops.
Them not getting together and helping get indipendent comic books off the ground and into the hands of comic book readers is their fault.
Did you know that there are funny books by dogboy that sell more then every spiderman and batman book sold this year combined.
>The American comics industry, and comics stores are both being kept on life support by Marvel and DC, by superhero comics. If the big 2 die, the industry dies. Nothing else is going to suddenly become popular, replace superheroes and keep the industry alive. When the giants fall everything else will be crushed beneath them.
They are the ones who strangled the indie market back when it was taking off so they could maintain their fricking dominance and control of the indie market. And what they did to the webcomic arthors was obscene.
The big 2 deserve to die and all those in it that helped turn the NA comic market into this disaster deserve to never work in comics again.
>They are the ones who strangled the indie market back when it was taking off so they could maintain their fricking dominance and control of the indie market. And what they did to the webcomic arthors was obscene.
elaborate
>Them not getting together and helping get indipendent comic books off the ground
I have worked in a comic shop. I must say that sure, many comic book shops are stupid but comic book shop customers are also the most moronic of all high street retail customers:
>People don't read previews, they expect you to read their mind or have extra rack copies despite the issues involved with over ordering.
>Some people will buy comics they don't want because they are too beta to cancel.
>Others will leave their orders for a whole month before telling you they don't want their comics.
>You're almost expected to manage their pull lists for them as if you have psychic powers.
>People say they want variety but getting them to try new things is incredibly difficult.
>You have to deal with some of the most autistic and annoying people in society.
>It is like doing business via a bunch of gestures and secret handshakes without concrete numbers.
Working at a comic shop you actually need to be a good businessman, good at dealing with customers as well as having knowledge otherwise you are just another "that shop" that is either for the autists or for the funko pop junk. You think the shoe store hiring teenagers requires them to really know anything or give a frick? Or the coffee shop? You actually have to think about your shop window, your racks, what you have on the counter. Fricking old school placement matters. Get in a bunch of cool zines, different comics to try? Half the people coming in think its either woke superheroes or autobiographical fart sniffing indies and nothing else. Everyone talks doom and gloom. People complain about prices then buy online. People want to get your extra copies to throw on the speculator market because Ultimate Spider-Man #1 actually sold and they can't have a second print run because they want to flip it. I can get 20% of loyal customers interested in something new at most even with sustained effort but the drop offs over time are high.
>Billionaire who loves comics
>With that in mind, what do you think is in the works for the comics medium in the coming years once it's shaken off the capeshit yoke?
Get ready for the era of Turtle Power Domination.
TURTLE POWER!
Go Green Machine! The new TMNT #1 has 300,000 preorders.
I only ever watched the 2003 cartoon. Are any of the others worth watching too?
They all have their charms. 87 is clearly the goofiest and saturday morning-est. The middle is a bit shit and the later seasons try to course correct. 03 is good, closer to the original comics. 2013 takes a little bit to hit it's stride, the cg is a little stiff the first year but it becomes amazing and really gets cinematic later on, and it's last season is a victory lap where we get a full on Usagi Yojimbo movie out of it. Rise has some great animation, the fight scenes can be amazing but it suffers a little from not getting enough time to really embed itself. People b***h about black april/raph being leader and everyone acting like mikey but it is good. And the rise movie is probably the best piece of TMNT media in history beside the original comics and 1990 movie. Don't let anyone convince you not to give rise a shot and even if you don't like it, watch the movie the animation is gorgeous and the shots are fricking fantastic. Watch it on a big screen if you can.
And if you want to read the IDW comics start at #1 and keep going till about 100.
lol
you people never experienced the 90s
Nobody is looking to selloff or shitcan DC or Marvel
>Nobody is looking to selloff or shitcan DC or Marvel
Delusional. Just look at their finances.
Marvel Comics is literally a side-hustle of the MCU now, which itself is a side-hustle of the Greater Disney Empire. Marvel Comics can break even and just send IP ideas forever now.
No one is going to buy DC comics; they are waiting (and it won't be long) for WBD's shares to drop below $5 and buy the whole enchilada on fire-sale.
Imagine the pink Wojacks of the poor bastards that bought WBD stock as it climbed over $60 a share
Who's gonna pick up the slack after the Big Two are finally in the ground? Image? Dark Horse? Devil's Due? Cinemaphile?
Literacy was a mistake.
Print comics may be going out but webcomics are more common. Although not as popular as phone videos and memes.
If webcomics becomes the next hot thing, what are the implications for comics as a medium, and for the industry itself?
Print comics will still be around. Although more of a niche
Especially graphic novels. And on demand printing is a thing
I presume it'll be like vinyl which made a comeback.
If anything needs to make a comeback is cheap pulp zines.
I have actually been seeing more zines lately, at least my LCS sells them
infinite scroll will be the new normal artists think within as panels fall by the wayside
Hi, I'm totally inexperienced in comic culture, very fascinating world that sounds it would have been so fricking great to have experienced by the way.
I only know movies an animated series based on comics starting with the Tobey Maguire spiderman.
My question is, now that you talking about what's next for comic industry, couldn't it happen that big private companies or individuals like google, apple, Elon musk, Chinese millionaires or others start acquiring comic publishing houses, small or big ones, and you know give them a chance and try to make business out of them, for money and also because of idealistic purposes? You know how rich people sometimes try to rescue stuff that has a sentimental value for them, but hey also maybe Elon likes comics and seeing the state of things wants to actually to improve it all.
I mean that's what is the future for industries in general right? Big companies buying everything, and making their own space agencies, armies, satellites
Do you guys see something like that happening in the future?
It is hard to explain but comics have too much creative, industrial and cultural baggage to suceed. For anything anyone could suggest, there comes up a problem.
>Back in the 1950s a moral panic made a comic book code that destroyed other genres/companies, comics were just for kids.
>In the 1990s there was a huge speculator boom followed by industrial crash and comics were reduced from a great American pastime to nothing.
>Comics are culturally seen as a forgettable medium for children with bad stereotypes.
>The selling model uses specialist stores and archaic modes of distribution and issues aren't built for digital reading.
>Print media is dying.
>Other forms of media exist, everything from Youtube to videogames to online streaming.
>Poor creatives and bad industry output.
I could go on and on and explain the whole history and all the individual issues in detail but the medium of comics is looked down upon so even if you created a new industry from scratch, it would be hard and too expensive to do. And that isn't even looking at competition from other mediums.
Disney bought Marvel and nothing changed.
That was just a stay of execution. Marvel is going to fall and so is DC. The bottom can't stay forever, it's going to fall out sooner rather than later.
I mean you're just reiterating the point I was making. If anons suggestion about things changing via big companies literally happened it would be the same result as what happened when Disney did it. Nothing would get better.
Have faith, even the Rat is taking some serious hits to the hip pocket these days.
But didn't they buy it to make movies? I'm talking bout buying publishers to help the comic industry
Disney want to make money. Yes, they bought Marvel for movies and merchandise. But if they thought comics could, in any way shape or form, make money, then they would be doing something with them.
The point I am making is, that the thing you are talking about is very unfeasible.
>Disney want to make money.
Hey look, someone wrote "Gullible" on the ceiling.
Yeah they tanked their brand, still doesn't mean comics are fixable.
On the contrary, once the big monopolies fall down the indies will thrive.
I feel like you're naive in that thought. What does thrive mean? Will indies do better? Sure but thrive? Relative to what? Comics as a form of entertainment don't possess much that audiences want anymore and there are an array of entrenched issues. You aren't getting masses of new readers in. Not when there are a bunch of different forms of entertainment that are full of lustre.
The Darth Vader comics are the best Star Wars media Disney has put out
Damning by faint praise much? I mean those are slop too.
True, but it amazes me the Disney era Star Wars comics are more coherent than their film trilogy
Any time you think “wow, the comic industry is dogshit” you should be thinking “wow, I can make a webcomic that’s better than this”.
It's just a matter of breaking the monopoly, after that all bets are off.
I hope the industry dies and everyone in it becomes homeless.
Cinemaphile gay never read a comicbook, neither mcugays they never weren't in our side
It shook off the capeshit yoke decades ago. You just don't bother with reading or looking at other comics.
Usago Yojimbo may be the longest running comic under a solo creator ownership. Brubaker and Phillips have put out enough Crime/Thriller comics together to fill a whole bookshelf. IDW contiues to be the only company of both comics AND manga who was willing to pay for nearly all the Godzilla monster rights when creating their stories and not resorting to OCs as often as the rest. Hell, even read some new Western comics that even still print on newsprint for an oldschool colorstyle and feel, which oddly felt very refreshing and stood out to me now days.
Not to mention amounts of noncape the Big2 put out.
Sort of. The market is still sarturated to hell and Diamond still chokes anyone that isn't the Big Two.
IDW and Manga?
>With the capeshit movie genre in its twilight thanks to superhero fatigue
TWO MORE WEEKS
MUH SPIELBERG (who hasn’t made a good movie in like thirty years) TOLD ME ABOUT LE WESTERNS AND LE COWBOYS
TRUST THE PLAN
WE WILL GET THE SNYDERVERSE RESTORED SIRS DO NOT REDEEM MARVEL BLOODY BASTARD
>Snyderverse
No. Capeshit must die. It all must burn.