We are in really bad recession and inflation hike that the ~~*economists*~~ want to pretend isn’t happening
So this has little to do with comics and more the general economy, how it’s harder to run a business and how non-essential spending is decreasing
People aren't buying comics and Diamond and other distributors are flooding the market with variant covers and trash that won't sell, meaning most of these stores are operating on a razor thin profit margin, usually by having the owner and their family run on unpaid labor. Comic stores have been fricked for decades now. The economy taking a huge shit, covid lockdowns, and all the typical prohibitive taxes and fees and real estate hyper-inflation just means no one can skirt by and hope business picks up later anymore.
No, they are not. The units shipped is not up, the revenue is.
Primer was not by any metric a “hit”.
Not to mention the attention they've gotten with anime, capeshit had their chance with the push of movies and it didn't even budge the needle. >Even now it feels like comics are just not really a talked about commodity compared to other mediums.
I mean they killed themselves with ANAD 2.0 in 2015 and earlier with the new 52 at DC. Both have yet to ever truly recover. Rebirth’s minor resurgence and it’s subsequent dissolution via complete and utterly offensive shit by portlandian writers killed any trust they rebuilt.
They need to stop hiring homosexuals and people who watch MSNBC.
>Primer was not by any metric a “hit”.
compared to everything else DC has been putting out, Primer is their best seller. The Gabriel Picolo books due well too.
>So this has little to do with comics and more the general economy
Only partially right.
Video game revenue is still up YoY, so clearly it's not just the economy, it's that comics are a lower-order form of entertainment, and when times are tough they're among the first to get cut.
Many video game centric shops are closing and I don’t think anyone is saying video games are a dying medium
It doesn't have to do with the medium sold but the economic realities of now
>Many video game centric shops are closing and I don’t think anyone is saying video games are a dying medium
Difference being that video games have had strong digital sales for like a decade now, which is the main reason why physical sales have dwindled and shops have started closing.
Comics have almost 0 digital presence despite being available digitally for nearly 20 years now.
Because comics stopped being monthly entertainment and became collectors only shit. And collectors have no use for digital anything. They want their precious first issues and anniversary issues with guest artist covers safely in a box so they can pretend that shit is going to be valuable some day.
>"Its not happening" >"OK it happened but its no big deal" >"OK maybe it is a big deal but its actually a good thing" - YOU ARE HERE
Why don't you go live in Venezuela for a month and then tell me inflation is a good thing?
Late stage capitalism.
When we told you mom and pop shops were dying, did you think your little spandex fantasy magazine selling sex dungeon would be exempt?
Meh, call it the American Empire, the American Economy, call it Capitalism. Whatever you call it, it is clearly ailing
It's doing better than ever you fricking morons. Excuse me, but this shit about capitalism makes me brain throb.
Just because a business you don't like is doing the best, doesn't mean capitalism is failing. It means it's fricking working to it's zenith. The population decides what to support, and if it supports cheapest and easiest, that's what it gets.
I love how people magically think capitalism causes problems and not the consumers. Capitalism is a system that consumers utilize.
>The French Monarchy is stronger than ever, we beat the British depriving them of their colonies, our food issues are temporary, and with our new navy we will be able to--ACK *French Revolution happens*
This entire thread is proof that Cinemaphile, and Cinemaphile in particular, knows literally NOTHING about business or economics. ESPECIALLY this homosexual:
Funny thing is that Larry is wants to rename it, because it's become a borderline curse word. But renaming isn't going to do shit, unless he retools it to not grossly favor wokeshittery as a means to up the score. But then it wouldn't be a proper propaganda tool.
no one buys it. everyone knows manga>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Comic books are a dead outdated medium. $5 for 20 pages of decompressed storytelling and ads-only boomers are dumb enough to buy that. For just $10 you can get 200+ pages of story if you buy a manga tankobon or Dogman instead. Back when I was a kid, I'd always go with the value deal. Western comic floppies seem like a massive ripoff.
The last time I spent 10 dollars on a recreational item it was to buy the HD remaster of Chrono Cross, which comes with Radical Dreamers.
So two video games and at least 40 hours of entertainment between them versus what, thirty pages of story that goes nowhere and will get undone by the next team change?
To add on, I was in middle school and highschool in the 2000s and early 2010s. I wanted to keep up with capeshit books and storylines I'd see online, but it cost $25 for each of their trade paperbacks and oftentimes the TPB doesn't even tell the whole story and you need 3+ of them to get an entire arc.
Meanwhile with manga, I could easily find it on pirate sites online, and when I wanted to buy the books, they were long and cheap. Western capeship priced themselves out of the kid market and are only going for boomers and gen X collectors with arrested development and whales.
Marvel and DC's attempts to appeal to the kidsters by spamming their books with woke LGBTQ+ shit has failed.
>Western capeship priced themselves out of the kid market and are only going for boomers and gen X collectors with arrested development and whales.
This has also sabotaged capeshit comics, because kids no associate Western capeshit comics with creepy fat old boomers with arrested development, or weird millenial wine aunts who are obsessed with the MCU. How can they expect kids to get in to a hobby that is dominated primarily by weird old men, whales, and wine aunties?
MCU isn’t millennials (or women), but adult normies. Also, who fricking cares if the brats today don’t want to read comics. The comic industry doesn’t even attempt to relate to them.
>Western capeship priced themselves out of the kid market and are only going for boomers and gen X collectors with arrested development and whales.
This has also sabotaged capeshit comics, because kids no associate Western capeshit comics with creepy fat old boomers with arrested development, or weird millenial wine aunts who are obsessed with the MCU. How can they expect kids to get in to a hobby that is dominated primarily by weird old men, whales, and wine aunties?
Samegayging to spew the same autism doesn’t make it true. Most of the people in comics shops are in their 20s and young 30s. And that’s mostly an economic reality that’s been true since the 90s boom. Comics haven’t been “for kids” since the direct market took over and it only did because sales dwindled in other venues.
I agree with some of what you, singular, said in the first post but I really do grow tired of people who haven’t been to a comic shop in their life touting meme opinions that have zero basis in reality. I see one or two women every Wednesday at my LCS and I’m only there for fifteen minutes the idea that it’s fat neck beard 40 and 50 year olds is just not true at all.
Stop coping so hard. There clearly aren't enough 20 and 30 year olds and alleged women buying comics to keep these stores open. There was an Eisner winning comic store near me in Burbank that catered exclusively women and also had a cafe. Despite all the comics media promotion, attention and Eisner awards, that place closed down months ago too.
Kids aren't in to western capeshit and you need the kid market to keep the industry going.
>coping
I’m not, I’ve very clearly said ITT what the problem is. Your homosexual ass is just going to spew autism about manga and, like I said, meme opinions not based on reality let alone on your own experiences.
You are triggered hard that kids love manga and your beloved capeshit comics are associated with femcels, troons and fat boomers now. Your hobby is dead, gramps.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I likely own more manga than you. I definitely own more floppies. And you’ll be proud of this somehow and imagine not leaving your house is superior.
have a nice day homosexual
Funny thing is you’re not even getting many ads anymore. You used to see shit for tv shows, cartoon blocks, movies, candies and cereals. Now it’s just in house ads for other comics MAYBE a cross promotion using their own characters and the back cover is normally the poster of that months cape shit release from their own company. They can’t get other companies to invest in advertising through the books because no child is reading them so there isn’t anyone to sell to
This. That’s exactly why so many get canceled.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>I likely own more manga than you. I definitely own more floppies. And you’ll be proud of this somehow and imagine not leaving your house is superior.
You are one of those creepy anti-social boomers I was talking about who kids associate with capeshit comics these days.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I’m 30 homosexual and I’m not antisocial, I’m literally the one telling you to leave your fricking house and expose yourself to reality. Give you live near Burbank that’s a horrible reality but it’s better than your fricking fantasy land.
Fricking Christ you’re such a homosexual you’ll fit in with the rest of them.
I agree with most of what you said but it bears repeating that the L in LCS matters. These aren't franchises, this isn't like McDonalds or Barnes and Noble or 7-Eleven where you can have go to one on each side of the country and they're generally going to be the same.
What's true for your LCS might not be true for others. You may have lucked out and gotten a good one but the reality for someone else might be completely different where it's a cramped poorly lit dive run by an antisocial neckbeard that reeks of stale pizza and forces his elderly mother to work the cash register.
I go to shops in every city I visit, most are not holes in the wall. Holes in the all are holes in the wall and should only be used in a pinch and never trusted to complete pull lists.
That’s like comparing a greasy spoon to a McDonald’s to a legit restaurant.
People’s bad experiences are more often than not reflective of thmselves than anything or worse, and far too common, based on relayed heresay and imagination.
Pure lcs's or game hobby stores there's a significant difference a lot of times.
8 months ago
Anonymous
None of them are “pure” if they’re still alive so there are obviously funkos and manga and mercy and shit but my shop doesn’t even get modern baseball cards, only collectibles. Comics are their main source and they do big money on back issues.
>and never trusted to complete pull lists.
Again, your mileage clearly varies. Of the three comic book stores in my area none have ever even offered to set up a pull list or order something for me. I went in a couple years back asking for specific titles and at best I got "if it's on the shelves it's on the shelves". Ended up having to get the books off of amazon instead.
You probably live in bumblefrick nowhere then, where they don’t have the margins to over-order. If they don’t trust you to show up for your pull weekly why would they order it?
8 months ago
Anonymous
I can only think of 2 or 3 in my area(Dallas) that does primary work for pure issues/back issues. The majority that aren't "pure" usually see higher margin on events for card/tabletop stuff.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Like I said bumblefrick nowhere, flyover, usa
8 months ago
Anonymous
? Dallas is a pretty fricking busy metropolitan area, idk if i'd classify it as nowhere.
8 months ago
Anonymous
He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Dude’s never left his bubble.
8 months ago
Anonymous
A city with zero culture outside of stolen recipes and Jerry Jone’s abomination of an organization. “America’s team”? More like “flyover country losers” SADDDDD
>and never trusted to complete pull lists.
Again, your mileage clearly varies. Of the three comic book stores in my area none have ever even offered to set up a pull list or order something for me. I went in a couple years back asking for specific titles and at best I got "if it's on the shelves it's on the shelves". Ended up having to get the books off of amazon instead.
Funny thing is you’re not even getting many ads anymore. You used to see shit for tv shows, cartoon blocks, movies, candies and cereals. Now it’s just in house ads for other comics MAYBE a cross promotion using their own characters and the back cover is normally the poster of that months cape shit release from their own company. They can’t get other companies to invest in advertising through the books because no child is reading them so there isn’t anyone to sell to
Because online retailers like Amazon are choking the life out of stores and taking everything to robot warehouses and convenience beats conscience every time. So frick all the workers and the stockers and the people who work in stores and places downtown. Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
But on he plus side Funko pop sales are tanking so nature is healing.
And don't act like you actually buy any comics anon, you read everything online for free anyway.
>Because online retailers like Amazon are choking the life out of stores and taking everything to robot warehouses and convenience beats conscience every time. So frick all the workers and the stockers and the people who work in stores and places downtown. Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Exactly, comics are competing vs Tik Tok, Youtube and videogames now, not to mention manga. You can't charge $5+ for a shitty 20 page digital floppy that provides 5 minutes of entertainment when your competition is cheaper, cooler, and provides hours of entertainment compared to a few minutes.
>How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Barnes and Noble is basically the Wal Mart of books. It's not a small hole on the wall with a limited inventory. it's a hybrid of brick and mortal and online retail. They've got exponentially greater stocking and inventory options as a result. Not to mention every B&N I've been in sells other stuff and has a cafe so it's more about creating experience and atmosphere than a lot of LCS which can be kinda dank.
>the Wal Mart of books
It's funny that you mention Walmart-there isn't a capeshit book in sight there these days. Their books shelves are 80% manga and the popular titles are always nearly sold out or sold out every time I walk by.
>It's funny that you mention Walmart-there isn't a capeshit book in sight there these days.
i actually saw the blue beetle graduation day trade at walmart a few weeks ago and was shocked.
Maybe? I haven't been to mine in almost a year but last time I was there they'd combined it with Manga and art books and that it took up like a full corner of the store.
I can't even find the comics or graphic novels at my Barnes & Noble. They used to be right next to the manga, but then they had to move to a new location cause their landlord didn't renew their lease cause he wanted to change the location into a family restaurant. When they reopened across the street, no sign of the graphic novels or western comic books, but manga section expanded to take up almost an entire wall of the building.
I just think it's telling when barnes has a dedicated manga space with full decked out display and merch. Comics meanwhile gets shoved in the back with records.
8 months ago
Anonymous
If you want to strike at the heart of the issue regarding flagging sales, then you'll have to chance me getting a little/misc/ on Cinemaphile.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>If you want to strike at the heart of the issue regarding flagging sales,
Terminally online gays that insist everything is a culture war are never going to strike at the heart of this issue.
Shit's expensive.
Comics are a luxury that have a far higher price than their value. No matter what or who they're about.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It's true. I only have seven beans metered out for this month's budget and I daren't spend a single bean on whimsy.
8 months ago
Anonymous
By all means spend a bean on whimsy.
Just, you know, get more for your money.
The price of 2 to 3 comics can get you month of a streaming service of your choice, or a video game (multiple video games if you do steam sales), or a trip to a matinee.
Or you can spend it on 22 pages of a story that doesn't matter, goes nowhere, and is mostly repetitive Bendisian dialogue and splash pages that you can finish in under five minutes if you've got greater than a toddler's literacy.
Comic books, as a form of entertainment, are not competitive at their price point. They need to be 99 cents to justify themselves.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>They need to be 99 cents to justify themselves.
Problem is they can't afford to be 99 cents.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Someone said it online but G.O.D.S issue 1 is legit 1/6th the price of bg3 which will provide you with 8x more content.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>G.O.D.S issue 1 is legit 1/6th the price of bg3 which will provide you with 8x more content.
G.O.D.S. will take at most 45 minutes to an hour to read, isn't BG3 200 hours or something?
8 months ago
Anonymous
>isn't BG3 200 hours or something?
If you're doing as much of the content as possible, yeah. If you do core story only, I imagine BG3 is completable in 20 hours, maybe less, but speed running BG3 is actually pretty hard unless you're meta-gaming the hell out of it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
That's a pretty formidable argument.
>They need to be 99 cents to justify themselves.
Problem is they can't afford to be 99 cents.
Why?
Too expensive.
What? How? It's essentially a reprint!
8 months ago
Anonymous
>What? How? It's essentially a reprint!
More pages. It’s best to keep things as-is to keep costs down.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Why
Because labor and print costs.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You fricks wanted your Sorros puppet in the White House, this is what you get for the effort. Crippling inflation from a man that punishes Americans.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I'm convinced it's not wokeness. I mean, granted, they're really, really clumsy about incorporating woke messaging into the comics and that is definitely turning away some people, but it's not why sales are flagging. Sales were flagging way before they started wokifying comics as a desperation measure.
The problem is comics just grew stale. Superheroes are played out and the talent pool for drawing and writing comics is extremely small with a high barrier to entry, meaning there is hardly ever new blood to freshen up the scene, and those new people aren't even allowed to create new stories, they're forced to work on existing IPs.
I think we'll eventually see a situation where superhero comics are gone, and western comics that remain are the ones that ape manga style and storytelling conventions.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Sales were flagging way before they started wokifying comics as a desperation measure.
Good luck convincing anyone here of that, no matter how true it is. Pointing out the 90s crash just gets you called a troony these days.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Saying anything does that
8 months ago
Anonymous
The American comic industry has always been really strange to me because capeshit is at its best when it's not trying to be anything else but a guy's power fantasy. That's what it is and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is it's the only fricking comic America really produces.
It's fricking strange. Imagine Sailor Moon is the only anime and instead of trying to diversify, I insist on making new characters to try to appeal to every single person on Earth that Sailor Moon wasn't intended for. >Here is The Punisher scout's transformation scene
8 months ago
Anonymous
I’m sorry but you’re just wrong. To distill it down to “woke” is flawed but without a doubt that is the biggest sales hinderence.
Without the, again awful word, “woke” problem jon kent is aged up and made gay, Zdarsky and Howard or Leah Williams or Kelly Sue or Tom Taylor or Jason Aaron or John Hickman or James tynion or Brian Bendis or on and on and on yada yada yada don’t have a job within the last ten years.
Simple fact is big 2 comics are made by spiteful women gays and diversity hires and that spite leads to awful comics nobody wants.
You people who have never bought a floppy keep saying this shit and ignoring those of us who stopped buying them as if we’re the ones ignorant to reality.
8 months ago
Anonymous
What the hell are you talking about, Bendis and Aaron and Hickman had careers long before comics went full-on "woke"
Bendis became big because of USM and his New Avengers, while shit, was popular. These were 00s comics.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Okay so let's go back to how things were 30 years ago before things were "woke".
Oh look it's the 90s again and the industry has crashed due to mismanagement.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It’s because comic geeks already got o LCS. Buying trades elsewhere is redundant
>Barnes and Noble better than ever
Barnes and Noble closed at least three locations in my general vicinity in the last few years. It’s the shittiest bookstore so I don’t care that much. I do mourn the loss of Borders, Bibelot, and a great Books a Million that closed recently.
Best bookstore ever was Bookmarket, which used to open up temporarily in unused retail spaces like those Halloween stores do. It shit all over Barnes and Noble, and fit more books into smaller spaces because they didn’t sell overpriced toys and gift items.
Amazon is mostly online.
When I said B&N was like Wal Mart I meant in the sense that they're hybrid online/storefront model.
Whereas most LCS are all storefront.
>How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Because Barnes and Noble stuck to its guns, stopped selling shit like jigsaw puzzles and kids toys. Went back to books only and sells things other than juvenile power fantasy capeshit and sleazy manga.
>Went back to books only and sells things other than juvenile power fantasy capeshit and sleazy manga.
The majority of shelf space and store space in every Barnes and Noble I've been in in the past 3 years has been dedicated to manga. Capeshit and indie comics generally have half a shelf max.
It's amazing how the indie stuff that gets promoted and put in stores is honestly pretty shit.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Get a chance to read some new indie titles in B&N >So many of them are nepobaby navel-gazing
Indie section in shops? >Samey Image sci fi comic. >Tumblr art style fantasy/slice of life/whatever. >Shit aping off of other pretentious shit.
Fricking dire.
They still sell jigsaw puzzles and kids toys. Have you even been in a Barnes and Noble lately? The big difference is their Funko section is usually more reduced
They actually carry nice figurines. Some part of me is ashamed of what my shopping habits have done to B&N, but I'm only feeling this shame as I molest the display with my eyes. Oh God, I am the kidult. It was meant to be on the DL! No one was meant to know!
What? B&N still has a sizable section for puzzles and games. It also sells stationary, writing / office supplies, and various other accessories like book bags, lapdesks, etc.
They even put cafes in B&N now, not just a starbucks that shares the same floor space, but an actual B&N branded cafe. The stores also have a lot more seating, not just in the cafe, but nice comfy chairs scattered around the store so people can read a bit.
They also started doing something I first saw at Powell's, a book store in my hometown, which is these little hand-written placards where store employees recommend a particular author or book and write their own little blurb for it.
They luckily got a CEO who previously ran independent bookstores and revived a UK bookstore chain. They basically went private (instead of publicly traded) in 2019, then they changed up how they do things by emulating indie bookstores, as the NPR article says:
>The biggest change borrowed from the playbook of independent bookshops: Daunt gave local Barnes & Noble stores much more authority to order what THEIR readers, in THEIR area want to see.
Smart man. My state has a local book store chain that, here at least, is as big as B&N, if not bigger, and it started out as a single used book store location downtown before it expanded several times and now has multiple locations. It did all this while other book stores were dying, because it dealt mainly in books that people sold to them, and in books that people wanted to see, and had a range of prices. You could potentially find very cheap old editions of obscure books there. It was a great option for me to shop there as an English major in college, I could often buy all the novels I needed for the term under $15 total.
B&N definitely doesn't feel like a proper used book store these days, it has too much of a corporate polish to everything, but it does have a pretty decent selection of books now. Whoever is ordering books in the fantasy and sci-fi section, at least, seems to have their finger on the pulse of that genre and what people want.
>I wish they sold Cardcaptor Sakura at my local comicstore.
Maybe you'll get lucky and they'll do a new CC Isekai show since they're the only things getting greenlit these days.
Holy shit, actual animation in an anime.
I tried to watch the new Bleach season Cinemaphile is salivating about and it's just a slideshow, except when the old man with the fire sword fights and even then his special moves are cg.
It's bizarre to me that Anime as an industry is bigger than ever, but the individual shows are so poor quality on a technical level.
Name a single non-isekai show from the last 3 years that has proper animation throughout. Chainsaw Man? Jjk? Frick off.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>why don’t television animatons have the same quality as OVAs or anime movies?!?
You understand what a “budget” is right?
You might as well be pissing and moaning about “why doesn’t Disney’s television division match their theatrical releases?!?”
If you really want a look at what truely technically lacking animes are, just take a gander at shit like Speed Racer.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>His examples are two (technically 3) of the most casual anime out >Implying fricking isekai have well respected and received animation
Fricker, I didn't even need to go beyond the last couple months
Most anime these days are slideshows. If I could actually speak moon I'd just put them on as background podcasts/radio dramas because so little actually happens they might as well just be audio only.
>Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
I love how manga has thousands of stories for everyone on almost every topic while american comics are stuck with the same capeshit heroes and comics from the last 90 years that have barely evolved since the 21st century, but somehow manga is the one reduced to pedo-bait.
>but somehow manga is the one reduced to pedo-bait.
If you read indie comics, the majority are actual pedobait like Blankets or Hebibi by Craig Thompson or anything by Mariko Tamaki, that depicts actual pedo rape, and the comic critics dicksuck and slather over Craig Thompson. Even Kate Beaton made an autobiography about being repeatedly raped.
So in western comics you can either buy capeshit, smile, dogman, or sad indie comics about kids being raped.
>in the west
just say America anon franco-Belgium, British, Italian, and Spanish comics would all constitute a Western market but the LCS is a pretty American shop(with some in the UK like Forbidden Planet, Eurocomics are either sold in Newsagents or bookstores
8 months ago
Anonymous
How much do these eurocomics sell in Europe? There must be a decent audience. It was several years ago but I remember going in to the massive Borders in Champs-Élysées in Paris and an entire massive floor was nothing but Eurocomics and manga, so people must be buying it. The quality of art and writing in eurocomics tends to be much better than what you'd find in your average marvel or DC capeshit.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Releases aren't as frequent, but I guess that keeps the quality high and can tacitly encourage patrons to try out other books while they wait.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>How much do these eurocomics sell in Europe?
at least in regards to French comics, decently but it has been slowing down in recent years some of that might be down to more manga but the French were early adopters of Manga
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yep, One Piece is a national religion in France.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>but the French were early adopters of Manga
I hear manga was also super popular in Italy decades before it caught on in America.
8 months ago
Anonymous
my grandpa used to watch Lupin the 3d all the times
it was already airing in the 70s in italy, with many other animes
but in the 70s they were reading Tex, Diabolik, dylan Dog, topolino, paperino
8 months ago
Anonymous
yeah I know Lupin III was big in Italy, which is why the 5th series did a special Italian broadcast.
In Japan, they have comics for young adults, they fall under the seinen and josei demographics that target 19-22 year olds specifically. In Pedomerica, the young adult comics are for 5-8 year olds because America wants to push these ideas that children are mature enough to talk about their sexuality and decide if they want to have sex changing surgeries.
Japan didn’t outlaw CP until 2009, dude. The Rurouni Kenshin guy got caught with CP and just got a slap on the wrist. The Welcome to NHK dude was jacking off in front of an Elementary school.
It doesn't hold the same stigma in Japanese culture, and they only made it illegal because of constant b***hing from the UN to do so. In typical Japanese fashion, though, they did the bare minimum to comply with foreign pressure they found distasteful, and the punishments for possession of CP are extremely light by comparison to the west. In the west, having CP gets you put on a permanent sex offender registry with years in prison as a possible sentence. It can totally frick up your entire life. In Japan the minimum sentence is a fine equivalent to a few hundred dollars, and the maximum penalty is a few months in jail + fine of a few thousand dollars equivalent, and to my knowledge nobody's ever been hit with the maximum penalty in Japan. I believe they charged the Ruroni Kenshin guy a fee of about $1200, which isn't nothing, but jail was never even on the table for him.
Why the frick are japs like this? Two nukes werent enough
8 months ago
Anonymous
Unlike the west they understand going after IRL Pedos, many of whom publically denounce e-girl, is more important then wasting time on hysterical failed moral crusades while turning a blind eye to their actual leadership's IRL pedophilia.
>Remember lego boy from the George Floyd riots?
You mean the guy who stole a $299.99 Lego set instead of spending an hour smashing open the till to get $50?
Sometimes """people""" steal things to keep them instead of fencing them. And those stores typically sell other shit as well.
Remember lego boy from the George Floyd riots?
LEGO is actually fricking expensive though, especially the big sets with a frickton of pieces. I bet he thought it was a box of actual legos, and didn't have the mental capacity to notice it wasn't nearly as heavy as it should be if that was the case, and subsequently failed to add two and two together.
No it was a skinny white dude, you could totally tell he knew what he wanted and grabbed it in the madness. I want to say he was one of the few who got arrested but I’m not to sure. I just remember that dude who owns my LCS b***hing about him when the picture dropped saying “no man I wouldn’t have done that I would’ve been at the hydration station handing out water and rendering first aid to these freedom fighters” it wasn’t THE reason I stopped my pull from him, but it didn’t help
Huh, could'we sworn it was a jogger. Not that I can be assed to doublecheck. He probably wanted to keep it for the gimmick factor then. Kind of like people stealing road signs with funny names.
I think he was just some nerd wagie who saw the set last time he was shopping and made the wise decision to not buy it because it’s a waste of money. Look up the photo though, it’s almost like a modern day renaissance painting with the joggers in the foreground tearing up a bunch of self service scanners for the money and the lil white dude in the background with both hands clinging a Lego set to his chest
There's a rumor on Twitter that this user on CBR is actually one of Dan Slott's alt accounts, which if true provides insight to why Marvel would keep doing it, even though they're getting diminishing returns
>hyped death >came out of nowhere as a side character to bolster the sales of the already top selling book
God damn this is sad, is EVERY industry just being headed by sightless old people clinging to what worked three decades ago?
[...]
[...]
It helps solidify the impression that America's comic publishers are a rat-king of self-seeking sadistic scumbags and wouldn't you rather step back and watch it die then help the thing stay alive?
I want the LCS to live, but they are mostly an extension of these people. Diversity if you want to live, damn it. I'm not interested in solely indulging your highly specific power fantasies. I want no part of it of this fruitless, endless hoping, and these humiliation rituals. I'm not patroning that shit.
The only LCSs that are going to weather this are the ones that are already game shops as well. It’s impressive the industry has lasted as long as it has, with such a diminishing number of people actually invested in those types of books and the publishers themselves being as incompetent as they are actively CHASING readers away both old and new alike. The LCS I was talking about (the one I stopped going to) is headed by some pretty smart people, they hooked up with the local library and I believe they are the ones heading the scholastic book ordering for the town, which is a damn smart move to keep relevant in these times
>clinging a Lego set to his chest
I suspect we're talking about two different cases. I'm like 90% sure what I'm referring to was an oversized LEGO display, and the dude held it over his head for a while at least.
8 months ago
Anonymous
This is what I was talking about, I honestly don’t have any recollection of what you’re talking about
8 months ago
Anonymous
Come to think of it, wasn't there some dude who stole an oversized duracell battery prop? I might be confusing that with a big yellow lego displaybox.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Honestly this was the ONLY screen grab I personally took during the riots. I just remember thinking “I’m going to watch all of these live streams to make sure I catch the media in lies against these poor people” and it just ended in me watching 24 hours of empty (and sometimes fun) wonton destruction over the course of 3 days all the while watching the news say “naw this shits all going fine” I watched everything from Minneapolis then watched the live stream from Kenosha when the rittenhouse stuff happened. But I stayed out of it after that, I posted my findings on Facebook with the raw live streams and ended a decent amount of fair weather friendships. Now I’m hear b***hing about Spider-Man because it’s not important to b***h about with my name attached
One in west Seattle was just robbed and a lot of their stuff stolen. Plus more and more people are reading manga than big 2 cape shit and I NEVER hear anyone talking about indy comics fricking ever.
There isn't a LCS within a tri-state area around me that is worth a damn. Every one of them are ran less like a business and more like a clubhouse for the owner and his friends to hang out, presumably funded by the tubbo's boomer parents just to get him out of their house most of the day. Its so stereotypical and hilarious how often it holds true.
The funniest thing is when losers try to argue manga isn't good anymore and not selling or how getting into manga is as frustrating as getting into capeshit lmao.
that anon in the other thread was a lone contrarian fighting a fight only he believes in
he had the worst contrarian and or wrong takes i have ever read in here
i usually only find those on comic twitter or /r/comicbooks
like he had a series of opinions one worst than the other
>Manga’s cheaper to print in the states as it’s just reprints of finished material from Japan. They’re just English editions of the exact same books they get in Japan. Publishers like Viz and Kodansha are the western branches of the original Japanese publishers, meaning they don’t need to pay for the license for the shit they already own. Easy money.
I think Marvel commissioned a Spider-man and deadpool manga. It was not anything special.
Their Spider-Manga wasn’t even about Spider-Man. Just some Jap kid with no powers. As if people want to actually see that shit. No shit it got canceled.
>obsessed f/a/gs
The thing that you don't understand is that on Cinemaphile they probably make similar troll threads. Because guess what they are not the inhabitants of any board. They are just here for the (you)s and they do that using the oldest trick in the Catalog, praise japan on non-japanese boards and shit on japan on japanese boards.
Sorry if it seemed that way but most of Cinemaphile's population is made of teenagers and young adults nowadays >cause the boards have a ton of overlap these days.
This implies that these new generation read both comics and manga compared to the older ones. I remember a lot of old Cinemaphile wasn't really into western comics, especially a lot of the popular tripgays and Cinemaphile had plenty of "atla is better than every anime ever" threads back in the day(check the archive) so I concluded that the newer generations are more ready to accept the differences.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It was more a statement that the userbase these days doesn't seem to have a home board and doesn't learn board culture like we had in the early 2000's. Now Cinemaphileermin post like Cinemaphileermin on every board, ESLs shitpost without a second thought, the crossover between boards is at an all time high, and election tourism in 2015+ fricked up the boards worse than the iphone did in 2007.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Also nobody actually knows anything about the board’s subject matter anymore. It’s always “oh I haven’t watched/read that but here’s my baseless claim about it”
They do have these threads on Cinemaphile. The difference is that somehow there are even more people completely clueless about comics over there. You wouldn't think it could less knowledgeable than Cinemaphile.
Like comics the best manga and anime came out in the 80s and 90s and the Xoomers don’t actually enjoy their effeminate modern shonen they just like being contrarians.
I don't need to cope. You, however, better start stockpiling.
Having spoken to people at comicet I remember someone saying.
>If we are banned from the market by the white leftists, we will just go back, to pure digital to, printing and selling by hand if we have to. The rave will just go underground again, and you can't stop the music. You can't stop the party.
Increasing the minimum wage doesn't cause everything to spike in price tho
It's more complicated than Cinemaphile should handle. Increasing minimum wage absolutely drives inflation. It's not the ONLY thing driving inflation of course.
Not really. The doujinshi culture will most likely never die at least not while I am still alive.
Emperor Meiji couldn't stop it. Generalisimo Tojo couldn't stop it. Douglass McArthur coudn't stop it. Chairman Xi can't stop it. What makes these people think they can?
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Having spoken to people at comicet
That's interesting. The leftists will likely attack via legal angles, though.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>The leftists will likely attack via legal angles, though.
That is completely expected. And they're prepared to sell their shit out of the back of the Pachinko parlor if it comes down to it.
Japan had some bad experiences with the left going nuts with the cultural revolution next door. Being openly political is actually kind of taboo. Besides. They've already had gays and crossdressers for hundereds of years, in very specific roles in society, that the west really doesn't get.
Manga’s cheaper to print in the states as it’s just reprints of finished material from Japan. They’re just English editions of the exact same books they get in Japan. Publishers like Viz and Kodansha are the western branches of the original Japanese publishers, meaning they don’t need to pay for the license for the shit they already own. Easy money.
Not to mention the attention they've gotten with anime, capeshit had their chance with the push of movies and it didn't even budge the needle. >Even now it feels like comics are just not really a talked about commodity compared to other mediums.
Marvel and DC could publish black and white comics and sell it for 99 cents, people still wouldn't buy it because the terrible writing and out of touch characters and stories that appeal to no one.
>Not to mention the attention they've gotten with anime, capeshit had their chance with the push of movies and it didn't even budge the needle.
One thing to note here is that anime adaptions tend to be near perfect adaptions of the manga. Sometimes they add filler but they generally stick to the manga for both script and storyboard angles.
Capeshit comics however are completely different from their MCU depictions. People would see the Thor movie, go in to a comic store wanting more Thor, and when the shop owner shows them Thor comics, Thor is a girl who spends her time arguing against mens rights advocates and people with opinions Israel. It resembles nothing like Thor depicted in the movie! If Marvel made comics closer to how the MCU is, maybe they would have sold and had a chance to gain a new audience. Marvel stabbed themselves in the put by pumping out wokeshit books instead of mainstream normie entertainment comics during the height of MCU popularity.
Back then, they used to flip the books to match up with US comics. After a while, they decided to keep them as-is. Not because they wanted to keep it faithful to the original format, but because it was cheaper to keep it that way.
>>lcs closes en masse >It's manga's fault
Really? It's not the political pandering, constant events and renumbering, rent hikes, shop lifting, etc. It's Japanese comics...that have been doing the same thing for 20 years.
readers have a finite amount of time and money
they have to chose between manga (various genres, from fujo to historical) and american comics (capeshit)
actually they'll probably choose some webcomic on naver
Because when people think of comics, they think of capeshit, which are lame as frick outside the adaptations. It’s the same boomers trying to seem hip. When My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Men their creators where in their twenties. Zeb Wells is fricking 46, why is he writing Spider-Man? The top mangas always change every few years, it was once Shield Hero and Black Clover, then Spy x Family and now Sakamoto Days and Kaiju no8 are on the rise. While comics is always the same shit written by the same people.
>While comics is always the same shit written by the same people.
Because comics aren’t lucrative or cool. Why would a top artist work in comics when he could just work in animation or games? Dude gets more money that way.
>You can pay bills working a part time job too
Not in this economy.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yes you can. Comics suck because it's full of hacks that want to be millionaires.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Yes you can
No you can’t. Do you even have a job? Live on your own?
8 months ago
Anonymous
I live with my girlfriend but I'd say you could still live a modest life alone even working part time if you don't have to pay rent.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Nah but current comics market is hella scalpy at least for the big 2. >High overpriced issues & event tie ins that are just glorified minis detract me from expaning my pull list.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't know, man. Say you're a writer and you're working on two titles. Even if your rate is 200 dollars per page, you're still getting about 4.5 grand a month.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I'm talking about consumers not the workers.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Most people pay rent if they want to live on their own. Buying a whole house is expensive. You’d need a pretty good job if you wanna pay off the mortgage.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I live off welfare just fine.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Leech.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Just proving a point. If I can live good on welfare then you can live better working part time.
8 months ago
Anonymous
you didn't prove a point. welfare isn't designed to live on. you absolutely cannot pay modern rent on welfare unless you live in a Hud building.
The upper middle class don’t get this. Those jackasses tend to live in their own bubble where they’re totally ignorant of what it’s like below their social class.
Big shock, the industry which targeted just pubescent straight white males has seen their market vanish. Maybe they should have tried to get a more diverse audience at some point over the last 70 years.
difference is, manga for women is a power fantasy that appeals to them, no shame in it. women want himbos, gay love, smut, 50 shades of gray stuff? the give it to them no problem
but superhero comics that used to be for men? they don't give you that anymore
They also do cute romantic comedies, which rarely exist in American comics outside of gay tumblr shit and indie comics depicting REAL HUMAN DRAMA that aren't cute.
>which rarely exist in American comics outside of gay tumblr shit
Yea, it's rare to find cute romance in American comics that isn't just gay shit or tumblr shit.
Speaking of France. I remember that article about french authors being surprised when visiting japan that the kind of manga that they would have to go indie to be allowed to publish is serialized in a mainstream seine/josei magazine. I might post the wiki.
>Like Sam Raimi Spiderman and most X-Men cartoons >Get told that I'm a filthy secondary if I don't read the comics >Read the comics >Shit is not only bleak and depressing but expensive and rare to fully read each floppy
I can just roll up to B&N or Borders to read and get into anything from Jump and feel engaged and less stressed.
Half of what i used to read has been cancelled over the last three or so years. And the other half that still exists is trying to fricking hard to not be a superhero book it's fricking frustrating.
I dropped Fantastic four when it turned into all drama, and maybe there might be 1-2 pages dedicated to a supervillain appearing, and they are always defeated off panel.
I tried Darkhawk, and it was wall to wall teen angst drama about someone having cancer, and Darkhawk does not even appear in the second issue. He is only there for 3 pages in issue 3. No villains appear in the first 4 issues.
Green Lantern, also angst ridden drama with no actual superhero shit at al 5 issues in. Another noname villain appears for about 3 pages, is defeated off panel.
Thor....same shit, except that one stretches back to about 2018 or so with the villains only appearing for about 1 page and being defeated off panel. The rest is dedicated to wordy melodrama and angsting.
I just dropped each book one by one since none of it contained anything I can give a shit about until I stopped giving a shit about comics in general. What the frick is with all comics being nothing but CW-tier drama shit with no capes, no villains, no heroic plots?
Just wanted to throw out another idea I had for publishers:
Comics could be a great way to learn a second language and publishers could make it a lot easier than it is. Simply print one page of a foreign comic in its original language (French, Japanese, Spanish) and the next page is the same exact page in English. Maybe add some translator's notes at the end of the chapter if necessary.
Because comics are a visual medium, the reader can see the different contexts in which casual/formal language is employed.
I remember that in 2011 or so, in the "pre-SJW/woke era", every Amerimutt media and journo mocking every Japanese media calling them "gay" and "backward" and bragging about how advanced America or the west is, and many Amerimutt geek audiences were swallowing the narrative and wallowing in the sense of superiority. Most of them were millennials but their mindset hasnt basically changed since then, they are incapable of soul-searching, and now theyve totally lost their way with their woke/tradcon cult.
Amerimutts totally deserve this consequence. I dont feel bad for you at all. You were/are so fricking stupid and self-absorbed.
The last thirty years of cape shit has been a never ending cycle of >try to push out old readers for new readers >replace old characters with new characters that don’t have as much baggage to write for but are literal shadows of popular hero >never ending events that change everything but revert back to the stays quo within 6 months
I don’t understand it, these books were fine with dealing with ongoing stories for DECADES without feeling like you can’t just hop into the current issue and still get a satisfying story on its own. These books aren’t worth the cover price and the “owners” get mad at us for pointing that out to them.
Publishers never really got over the idea of comics as collectibles. Even after the 90s crash nearly killed the industry they still think they can go back to that bubble where all the stories are big crossovers where people have to collect them all to make sense of the narrative.
Which is funny considering how little side books in events ever actually matter and how giddy they always seem to be to interrupt their stories in order to see if THIS TIME they’ll get a sales bump by being a part of an event no one wanted. That thinking literally killed any momentum Kamala had how can they STILL be making these mistakes?
It's uneven.
Big crossover events do matter, but in the sense that they completely derail the smaller book's ongoing.
You want an object lesson on the damage events stuff can do just look at the first few years of Miles Morales' existence. He almost immediately got pulled into Ultimate Civil War, then Secret Wars, then Civil War 2, basically any time his story was about to go somewhere and lead to some sort of establishing he'd get sucked into a crossover event and oops back to square one again.
Kamala got the same things just with X-men vs Inhumans, and now she's getting killed off in Spider-man and resurrected in X-men.
Nobody's allowed to just have their own book anymore.
There's a rumor on Twitter that this user on CBR is actually one of Dan Slott's alt accounts, which if true provides insight to why Marvel would keep doing it, even though they're getting diminishing returns
Only collectors care for death/return, Wolverine's was a joke.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't think collectors really cared about Wolverine's death and return. I simply forgot about it months in and there didn't seem to be any buzz for it
In retrospect the 00s were a perfect example of this as well. Emerald Twilight pissed a lot of fans off in the 90s and the takeaway DC had was "that got a lot of engagement let's do a big event like that literally every five weeks"
Which is funny considering how little side books in events ever actually matter and how giddy they always seem to be to interrupt their stories in order to see if THIS TIME they’ll get a sales bump by being a part of an event no one wanted. That thinking literally killed any momentum Kamala had how can they STILL be making these mistakes?
It helps solidify the impression that America's comic publishers are a rat-king of self-seeking sadistic scumbags and wouldn't you rather step back and watch it die then help the thing stay alive?
I want the LCS to live, but they are mostly an extension of these people. Diversity if you want to live, damn it. I'm not interested in solely indulging your highly specific power fantasies. I want no part of it of this fruitless, endless hoping, and these humiliation rituals. I'm not patroning that shit.
The more I think of it the more it's because people had the wrong reaction to the 90s crash
>Marvel decided to stick to rollbacks during the Harras era which worked for something like Avengers but didn't work for Spider-Man >This got worse in the 00s when the mentality under Quesada/Jemas/etc was that the characters were brands yet being handled by people who have a very inconsistent way of handling brands, so it amounted to "run in place while pissing the audience off" >There was the mentality that "these old comics from the 60s/70s/80s/90s have outdated storytelling except for Moore and Miller, we need to change how we do stories" and we got decompressed comics that wasted the audience's time
In retrospect the 00s were a perfect example of this as well. Emerald Twilight pissed a lot of fans off in the 90s and the takeaway DC had was "that got a lot of engagement let's do a big event like that literally every five weeks"
Oh I know but 00s was basically going off on what Marvel and DC learned from the 90s crash, which was a lot of the wrong lessons
Another one I forgot to add to the list was the push for writer-driven comics
This works when it's someone like Alan Moore but is less effective when you have someone doing too many talking heads
Does anyone here have an LCS that sells video games? I've been going to them for like 30 years now and it occurs to me I've never seen one that sold an X-men or Spider-man game despite there being so many on the market.
One of the spots I used to go to as a kid was in the same building as a used game store, but no for some reason comics and games remain separate. Hell the Newbury I go to doesn’t even sell MOVIES anymore, a small comic corner with giant music sections and a wall of funko pops
So here's the interesting second half of my post: There's a vintage video game store that I go to on occasion and they actually sell video game comics by the cash register. It's basically the only place I ever saw that sold the Assassins Creed books.
We're back already? Holy frick that last thread was fricking moronic. A lot of great points were made about why comics are failing. Lack of easy distribution, refusal to publish any other genre, poor visibility in stores, etc. But the sad truth is that comics are absolutely fricked with no way out. The problem with the industry is that the writing was on the wall for the past decade but the people making the comics are so hostile and antagonistic, they refuse to adapt to a changing market. In order to fix comics you would need to clean house, both the characters and everyone making them. It really is over for this industry and another crash is soon to come.
>We're back already?
Same thread, same points. Can't escape it. Comics aren't cool, history bad, business bad, creative decisions bad, fans bad. I truly believe there is no other medium where its so-called fans despise the very medium itself and don't actually like or understand it. The average comic book fan is so devoid of any actual knowledge about the medium that it is painful.
These past threads have just been a sad angry "man" being told to leave his burning home but the "man" responds "NO YOU LEAVE". Pathetic but this average anon is also your average executive in the comic book industry. They refuse to change and blame everyone else. Everyone involved in this industry are bootlickers who only got to where they are through "connections" and not hard work and talent. The rot is to the core. The only hope of survival for the medium is a complete clean house.
>Everyone involved in this industry are bootlickers who only got to where they are through "connections" and not hard work and talent.
I can't agree with the everyone part. Recently I went to a small convention. >Cheap entry. >Artist driven. >Commissioned a load of art. >No cosplayers. >Boxes full of cheap comics. >Had a chat with a bunch of artists and creators. >Had a drink with some artists.
Deep down there are some decent quality people. Half the trouble is the artists aren't driving the books.
[...] >I made a romantic comic that reads like a brick wall and no one bought it.
[...]
[...]
So factor it into the overall cost then. You're gonna learn French with this special edition, many people would pay a little extra to invest in themselves.
It just boggles my mind that an industry charging $5 for 20 pages of story wants to b***h about the cost of production.
Bullshit.
[...]
Can Western comics properly relay action in order to render sport anyway?
[...]
Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
>Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
They really did take a big huge shit in the well.
Oh I’m well aware that a LARGE part of the problem with comics today is that the writers are typically just failed tv and movie writers with a swarthy agent to keep them getting paid. But outside of that the bulk of people who LIKE comics writing comics are just bitter nerds replicating what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of. Though did you read what you posted? Because Brevoort responded to him and it was GLORIOUS. Though in all honesty it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
>what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of
None of them have really lived to have any experiences. >Though did you read what you posted?
I did. >it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
On Cinemaphile it is typically one of these >he was mean to Chris Claremont and pushed away good creators while demolishing them >his tenure made a bunch of the best stuff and he kept the hack frauds in line
>Everyone involved in this industry are bootlickers who only got to where they are through "connections" and not hard work and talent.
I can't agree with the everyone part. Recently I went to a small convention. >Cheap entry. >Artist driven. >Commissioned a load of art. >No cosplayers. >Boxes full of cheap comics. >Had a chat with a bunch of artists and creators. >Had a drink with some artists.
Deep down there are some decent quality people. Half the trouble is the artists aren't driving the books.
[...] >Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
They really did take a big huge shit in the well.
[...] >what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of
None of them have really lived to have any experiences. >Though did you read what you posted?
I did. >it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
On Cinemaphile it is typically one of these >he was mean to Chris Claremont and pushed away good creators while demolishing them >his tenure made a bunch of the best stuff and he kept the hack frauds in line
>Commissioned a load of art.
You want to know how twisted comics and the industry is? You can find an actual page of a comic or commission some art work relatively cheaply. From even the top artists in the industry!
I was walking past a gallery in this shopping mall and it had a Stan Lee exhibit. Stan Lee wasn't a fricking artist. Part of the Stan Lee collection was a huge Thor print. The art was by Esad Ribić but I couldn't see his name anywhere. You could actually commission Esad to do that drawing for a better price than that print was. It was astronomically expense.
it's not that they refuse to change it's that this is what comics exist for in their eyes.
Profit is only a means to an end for these homosexuals, promoting anti-whiteness and sexual deviance is what the israelites who own western comics want comics to do, so that's what they do. All of Marvel and DC could go bankrupt and the israelites who own them won't give a shit if along the way they managed to normalize race mixing, homosexuality, and hatred of Whites.
...and I will never stop rubbing that truth in peoples faces no matter how many times the troony jannies ban me for "racism"
>These past threads have just been a sad angry "man" being told to leave his burning home but the "man" responds "NO YOU LEAVE".
Most people accept the house is on fire. Most people name all the issues and problems. But none of us can solve it without just blanket statements about "destroy the whole industry". I can't name how many times they have tried to do stuff and it just hasn't sold. Good comics, good formats, will not sell and it is impossible to market them properly.
>I can't name how many times they have tried to do stuff and it just hasn't sold.
The problem is it is always half ass measure they frick up. >Post Brightest day/Flashpoint they were planning on a revamp but eventually that evolved into New 52. >DiDio decided to do the New 52 because it would be a new starting point and get over the hump of "Where should I start?" >Fresh start that would allow new readers on. >Only a huge number of titles were legacy titles and continuations, like Geoff Johns Green Lantern, and continued on not a true reboot. >Some big mainstream media outlets did actually mention it, which is unusual, I have only seen comics mentioned like 3-4 times over the past god knows how many years in mainstream media. >But they never actually had any real marketing to get new readers into it. >Some quirkier titles like Dial H for Heroes were thrown under the bus pretty sharpish despite actually being different. >Geoff Johns Justice League was bland as frick but had enough blockbuster feeling despite all the characters acting nothing like they should. >Scott Snyder's Court of Owls actually did rather well despite being a Dickbats script he changed for the reboot. >Grant Morrisons Action Comics isn't actually a good place for new readers to start. >Quality was all over the place, they did far too many initial titles. >Crossover bullshit began to majorly infect stuff and the whole Trinity of Sin/Forever Evil and Pandora stuff was too convoluted.
Everyone b***hed it was a reboot and ruining their favourite stuff but it was a half assed/half measure with no real strategy behind it. They had too many titles and flung feces at the wall. There is a small minority of comic fans who actually did start with New 52, which is surprising, but this is tiny. It was a huge wasted opportunity with no real foundation or planning.
decided to do the New 52 because it would be a new starting point and get over the hump of "Where should I start?"
To this day I think that was an inherently bullshit claim. Comics do that whole renumbering thing all the fricking time. It's why "Just start at #1" doesn't work for capeshit; there's multiple #1s. Hell, half the big names don't even debut in #1. Spider-man first showed up in #15. Batman in #27.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Comics do that whole renumbering thing all the fricking time.
This is the New 52 paradox. Because yes, they do renumbering all the damn time. But New 52 was like, doing a whole line refresh at the same time and saying, "This is more than a renumbering," while it being half a renumbering and half reboot with no planning or marketing behind it. Brightest Day brought back a bunch of old characters from the dead like Swamp Thing, Aquaman etc. Then Flashpoint happened. All the stories that were planned post-Brightest Day got rebranded into New 52 reboot™. DiDio and others really tricked themselves into believing it was more than renumbering. It was really a last ditch shit fling at the window. Because the New 52 did give DC a boost for a while. But yeah, ultimately it was the same gimmick. And this is the point I am making, when companies try smaller books (tankoban size) or different genres etc, they don't sell because they are half assed gimmicks. New 52 lets the editors say, "Well we tried a fresh start and it didn't work!" It absolves them of responsibility because they can then turn their noses up at you and go, "We tried it your way!!"
8 months ago
Anonymous
>"We tried it your way!!"
This is a common tactic. Pretend to do what someone says but purposefully frick it up. Then act like the person was wrong.
Going back to the burning house metaphor, what happens when your house burns down? The best option would be to build a better one that won't burn down. You don't build over the crumbling building, you get a new land and start from scratch.
The problem with the metaphor is this shit has never fully burned down enough to rebuild. It is a shame COVID didn't do it. It came close. DC ended up wrecking its collected edition department
The problem with the metaphor is this shit has never fully burned down enough to rebuild. It is a shame COVID didn't do it. It came close. DC ended up wrecking its collected edition department
Comics aren't a burning house, more like a crumbling one. And there is so many issues that you should just pull it down and start again but some homie is talking about some period features in the dining room that dat back to the late 1700s and someone from the council is telling you it is a grade 1 listed building and can't be demolished.
Manga has a diversity of genres anon, and look at their section in ANY book store compared to American comics.
>We're back already?
Same thread, same points. Can't escape it. Comics aren't cool, history bad, business bad, creative decisions bad, fans bad. I truly believe there is no other medium where its so-called fans despise the very medium itself and don't actually like or understand it. The average comic book fan is so devoid of any actual knowledge about the medium that it is painful.
It’s honestly fine that comics aren’t cool, cool is a temporary state of mind. The problem with them is that they’re boring and written by people who don’t understand the value of the five fricking dollars the books costs.
So here's the interesting second half of my post: There's a vintage video game store that I go to on occasion and they actually sell video game comics by the cash register. It's basically the only place I ever saw that sold the Assassins Creed books.
That’s pretty cool, one of the old game stores I used to go to (which got bagged for fricking tax evasion of all things) at most sold old anime VHSs.
Something Cinemaphile overlooks is that many mangaka took their pacing from old American movies, not comics.
Capeshit's pacing, spacing, and action often hits me like a brick wall. Tons of monologuing rather than letting a scene naturally unfold. A lot of telling instead of showing.
>It’s honestly fine that comics aren’t cool, cool is a temporary state of mind. >temporary
Something that rarely gets mentioned in these threads. The average person thinks comic books are for losers that only losers care about. And even MULTI BILLION DOLLAR movie franchises hasn't changed that perception at all. >The problem with them is that they’re boring and written by people who don’t understand the value of the five fricking dollars the books costs.
Because they cater for losers and are made by losers who are bullying other losers. >https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/why-are-some-comics-pros-so-damn?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Being cool isn't just some temporary state of mind, it is the driver behind it all. It is what has driven it into the dirt. Comics are regressive because of a state of mind that creates regression and becomes a cycle. We are always talking about decline, why? They have been talking about that for decades now. The social stigma will always damage the business and creativity of it.
The problem is that comics aren’t written by writers anymore, but primarily by the sad ducks who liked comics. So they don’t come from a lived experience being expanded onto the page to fit the fantastical nature of the genre, but rather they come from the fanatical place of people who have nothing other to think than what the character they like should be like from memory
Something Cinemaphile overlooks is that many mangaka took their pacing from old American movies, not comics.
Capeshit's pacing, spacing, and action often hits me like a brick wall. Tons of monologuing rather than letting a scene naturally unfold. A lot of telling instead of showing.
Another thing is Japan is a small country with a large population that uses public transportation often. So people there have time to read disposable comics they pick up for five bucks to waste the hour or so of transportation they have to deal with.
So what if comics aren't cool? Books aren't cool and people still read. There are a lot of things people do that don't make them pussy magnets and they do it anyway.
Everything has a counter balance in status. Books aren't cool? But there is still booktok, huge celebrity drive book clubs, stuff being driven by social media. When a book is adapted into a movie it has a huge boost in sales.
It isn't just that "comics aren't cool" but that the stigma attached to them is a certain cultural poison. I mean this goes all the way back to the CCA and Fredric Wertham. Modern stereotypes of comics fans exist for a reason.
The problem is that comics aren’t written by writers anymore, but primarily by the sad ducks who liked comics. So they don’t come from a lived experience being expanded onto the page to fit the fantastical nature of the genre, but rather they come from the fanatical place of people who have nothing other to think than what the character they like should be like from memory
[...]
Another thing is Japan is a small country with a large population that uses public transportation often. So people there have time to read disposable comics they pick up for five bucks to waste the hour or so of transportation they have to deal with.
>by the sad ducks who liked comics
Half the people in comics would rather be liking screenplays and don't actually like the medium or understand it. The other half of people are the sad ducks who liked comics but don't understand the medium and just push what they like and massively bad mouth what they hated. But they do that in huge frick you changes to a character.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Oh I’m well aware that a LARGE part of the problem with comics today is that the writers are typically just failed tv and movie writers with a swarthy agent to keep them getting paid. But outside of that the bulk of people who LIKE comics writing comics are just bitter nerds replicating what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of. Though did you read what you posted? Because Brevoort responded to him and it was GLORIOUS. Though in all honesty it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
8 months ago
Anonymous
>positively about shooter
He basically says the guy was bullied by editors and then went on to bully? Fecal gravity? Not really positive.
People put out western comic, nobody buys it. People put out fantasy comic, nobody buys it. People put out war comic, nobody buys it. People put out sport comic, nobody buys it. People put out horror comic, nobody buys it. People puts out romance comic, nobody buys it. Facts!!!
>People put out sport comic, nobody buys it.
When the hell is the last time someone put out a sport comic that wasn't just some non-fiction biography shit?
The closest I can think of is Do a Power Bomb, but that depends on whether or not you consider professional wrestling a real sport.
Once again proving nobody reads anything anymore and just makes up shit to complain about not caring one bit if it’s true or not because all that matters is you thinking and more importantly feeling like your imaginary grievances are real
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Gay shit
Yea, I wonder why no one reads it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yet you read manga which is full of gay shit
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't read gay manga.
I can tell just from one glance at that cover that that comic is gay as frick.
This kind of shit is why they don't sell, you can't just make a sports comic, you have to make a gay sports comic and then wonder why people aren't interested.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I haven't seen in my store also would it hurt to make the black guy less homosexual looking?
8 months ago
Anonymous
the would defeat the purpose of pushing gay Black folk on people, which is what that comic is for
https://i.imgur.com/YAOcNSP.png
comics are largely digital these days and the overhead of running a physical store is getting worse while sales and interest are dropping like crazy; this is the most logical outcome. Just look at the big two, they exist solely as IP farms now, the industry hasn't produced something worth buying in over a decade; what little go is let is all South American artists that haven't gone full gay... yet
8 months ago
Anonymous
Given the artist and writers love for low quality yaoi? The homosexual looking is the point.
I don't read gay manga.
I can tell just from one glance at that cover that that comic is gay as frick.
This kind of shit is why they don't sell, you can't just make a sports comic, you have to make a gay sports comic and then wonder why people aren't interested.
It isn't even good quality yaoi. It was given a tryout for the storytime of pain series. I don't think it made the cut.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>those hair clips
That “girl” is a troony isn’t he?
People have no problem buying those genres when they are manga. Clearly the problem is not genres. The problem is comics and their distribution system as well as some kind of stigma people have toward them as a result of over-saturation of superheroes. When you say "comic book" the first thing people think of is superheroes from Marvel and DC, they don't think of niche indie comics or Euro comics. That is a problem that needs to change.
Yes, the problem is the market ie the readers who WILL NOT BUY ANYTHING THEY CLAIM TO WANT
8 months ago
Anonymous
How are these people supposed to know these comics exist when there's virtually no advertising? No word of mouth? These non-readers aren't frequenting LCS locations which is just about the only place such comics are seen. Comic sections at book stores are increasingly smaller and moved to more remote locations of the store, which they have no reason to visit because again, no advertising.
Again, the main problem is distribution and stigma. There's no attempt by the industry's dominant players to reform the image of comic books in the mind of the American public. They're fine with the American public thinking Comic books are Marvel/DC superheroes because Marvel and DC spent decades building their dominant position off of superheroes and are loathe to give it up.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Manga has no advertising. 90% of translated manga does not have an anime so STFU about that.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>WILL NOT BUY ANYTHING THEY CLAIM TO WANT
>"I want a sports comic!" >"Here you go anon, here's that gay sports comic you wanted!" >"What the frick? I said I want a sports comic, not a gay sports comic." >"OH MY GOD YOU PEOPLE WON'T BUY THE STUFF YOU CLAIM TO WANT!"
8 months ago
Anonymous
What's wrong with it being gay
8 months ago
Anonymous
I don't want to read gay stories.
It's that simple.
If you can't provide non-gay media, then you're not providing me what I want, ergo I'm not buying it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It's overrated
8 months ago
Anonymous
>baaaaaaawwwwww the gays >baaaaaaaawwwwwwww sports is meant to be straight!
There’s nothing straight about being obsessed about bunch of muscular sweaty men in a field showcasing their bodies
8 months ago
Anonymous
See this?
This is why your industry is dying.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Just come out of the closet, Jared
8 months ago
Anonymous
I'm sorry about your relationship with your father, anon.
One day you'll earn his love, though I'm not holding my breath.
Something Cinemaphile overlooks is that many mangaka took their pacing from old American movies, not comics.
Capeshit's pacing, spacing, and action often hits me like a brick wall. Tons of monologuing rather than letting a scene naturally unfold. A lot of telling instead of showing.
>I made a romantic comic that reads like a brick wall and no one bought it.
>What? How? It's essentially a reprint!
More pages. It’s best to keep things as-is to keep costs down.
>Why
Because labor and print costs.
So factor it into the overall cost then. You're gonna learn French with this special edition, many people would pay a little extra to invest in themselves.
It just boggles my mind that an industry charging $5 for 20 pages of story wants to b***h about the cost of production.
Bullshit.
>People put out sport comic, nobody buys it.
When the hell is the last time someone put out a sport comic that wasn't just some non-fiction biography shit?
The closest I can think of is Do a Power Bomb, but that depends on whether or not you consider professional wrestling a real sport.
Can Western comics properly relay action in order to render sport anyway?
Everything has a counter balance in status. Books aren't cool? But there is still booktok, huge celebrity drive book clubs, stuff being driven by social media. When a book is adapted into a movie it has a huge boost in sales.
It isn't just that "comics aren't cool" but that the stigma attached to them is a certain cultural poison. I mean this goes all the way back to the CCA and Fredric Wertham. Modern stereotypes of comics fans exist for a reason.
[...] >by the sad ducks who liked comics
Half the people in comics would rather be liking screenplays and don't actually like the medium or understand it. The other half of people are the sad ducks who liked comics but don't understand the medium and just push what they like and massively bad mouth what they hated. But they do that in huge frick you changes to a character.
Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
I hope non-American anons understand that we live with millions of people who think fooling the market with fake regulation to kill the competition is a legitimate market strategy. That's who we live with. That's American life.
>It just boggles my mind that an industry charging $5 for 20 pages of story wants to b***h about the cost of production.
Inflation happened. By raising the minimum wage, everything got more expensive to compensate.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Increasing the minimum wage doesn't cause everything to spike in price tho
8 months ago
Anonymous
Restricting gas will do that, however.
Gas is our economic blood, you liberal dipshits. Windmills are not.
All the green new deal did was ensure DC's synagogues got a cut from taxpayer-subsidied bird-killing windmills and self-exploding electric cars.
Turns out vilifying gas tycoons was a bad idea. Actually, they can take the hate, but not subsidizing costly investments for our economic blood has increased the price of everything.
Capitalism is poorly understood.
>reddit spacing to help you understand
8 months ago
Anonymous
DC wanted to keep comics at $2.99 but everyone would rather pay $3.99 or $5.99 for Marvel comics so they raised their prices not similar level. Once again the market did the exact opposite of what people here now b***h about
Friends have asked me for recommendations but then ignore them. Every Google search is the same thing. >Someone reads Watchmen or Sandman or something, then stops.
Or >Finds a Batman list, reads Batman Year One and TDKR and then stops.
It is a dead end.
The format isn't build to be like that, is half the issue. There are some lovely collected editions out there but they aren't build to be carried about and read.
Marvel are currently doing a line of books for kids reprinting the old original marvel series and those books are a smaller format. Wonder how they are selling.
when it comes to format you also have to consider how the story is structured, none of the Marvel 60s books would be considered Decompressed so it might be hard to read in a Tankōbon format
lol...all the autismo freaks in the thread blaming everything except the actual cause, which is hiring gross fricking mentally deranged loser morons that suck ass at what they do, and then cry about it on twitter and blame all the fans they've already pushed away.
You hire people like Sana Amanat, Vita Aoili, Tamara Bondvillan, Mags Visagio, heather Antos, Zoe Quinn, Chuck Wendig, Tee Franklin, Tom Taylor, Whale Simone, and literally any other fricking moron whose main goal it was push as MANY normal people away from comics as possible. And they did the job well. Now they are crying because they aren't making any money.
"If you dont like my politics, dont buy my book" Guess what Knock off Janeane Garofalo, we didn't.
Frick them, and anyone who supported their homosexualry that destroyed an ENTIRE industry. You destroyed something people actually loved, all because you had daddy issues and hated straight dudes so much, you wanted to take that happiness away from them. FRICK YOU IM GLAD YOUR INDUSTRY IS DEAD. I have manga.
They didnt help it at all. They made everything worse. Everything those less thatn human filth touch turns to toxic shit.
>Comics crash in the 90s long before the current woke trend >thinks wokists are the reason it's shit
Wokists are just opportunistic parasites. They infested the comic industry because it was desperate to turn things around and attract new audiences after decades of moribund sales. Yeah, the woke shit has been a stunning failure, as it usually is, but it's not the ultimate reason the comic book industry is dying. It's just the equivalent of trying to cure cancer by infecting yourself with HIV.
They are absolutely the reason comics are dying. You defending them means youre part of the problem as well. Notice how they arent allowed into manga, and its doing amazing? Its so good in fact, that the parasites try to claim it as their own sales, because they know they cant compete without sticking gay dudes or fat chicks sitting around eating and talking for half of a comic.
People like you should have held the gate better, but instead, you just let them in. You are just as much of a problem as they are and I hope you die soon. Frick you.
it didn't moron. Marvel went bankrupt in the 90's because of overstepping too fast and buying to much shit up. It wasn't the comics, and their quality remained consistent throughout. Buying a bunch of companies that didn't make money and gross mismanagement doesn't mean the industry died out.
Keep supporting the cancer though bro. Mags needs you to front her another $1000 because her family can't get groceries this week. fricking clown.
Okay so you've explained what happened to Marvel.
What about WIldstorm? How come Jim Lee had to sell it to DC?
How about Awesome Comics? Why did that fold?
Eclipse? What happened to Eclipse? For a while they were third behind Marvel and DC.
Or Comico? Remember Grendel? Why did Comico die?
8 months ago
Anonymous
>remember all those companies and comics people never read to being with except when wizard was dick riding Grendel??? DO YOU CHUD???
And wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee wanted to focus on making art, not running a business... but you already knew that.
And Marvel bought out Malibu because it was the only company making any kind of push into their market successfully.
8 months ago
Anonymous
all those companies and comics people never read to being with except when wizard was dick riding Grendel??? DO YOU CHUD???
You should remember Eclipse because that was the company that put out Miracleman.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>that put out Miracleman.
No one here reads comics
8 months ago
Anonymous
>No one here wants to read superhero comics in fricking 2023 are you fricking kidding me how is this not sinking in holy frick
8 months ago
Anonymous
>that put out Miracleman.
No one here reads comics
I disagree with both these statements. I'm in the store every week. I buy small press stuff and capeshit. But I reckon I am in the minority.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>What about WIldstorm? How come Jim Lee had to sell it to DC?
>remember all those companies and comics people never read to being with except when wizard was dick riding Grendel??? DO YOU CHUD???
And wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee wanted to focus on making art, not running a business... but you already knew that.
And Marvel bought out Malibu because it was the only company making any kind of push into their market successfully.
>And wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee wanted to focus on making art, not running a business... but you already knew that.
Wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee lost money on the Gen 13 animated movie and needed to recoup money fast.
>Notice how they arent allowed into manga,
Some of the most famous and wealthy manga authors are women. There have been explicitly female-focused manga basically since the industry started, and that includes lots of homosexual stuff. You are hopelessly clueless. Manga is doing fine because their industry isn't being strangled by an ass-backwards distribution system, isn't being stifled by a creatively bankrupt genre (superheroes) which is heavily pushed by the dominant publishers, and it has a significantly lower barrier to entry for new talent, and authors are allowed to keep the rights to their own stories which encourages publishers to continually publish new stories rather than reuse the same IPs forever.
Not all women are woke, butthole. Many female mangaka understand how critical it is that boys have noble heroes to look up to. Let's say they even have fujo inclinations: they keep that shit away from media intended to shape boys into men.
I'm talking about the woke far left ass moronic degenerates that make it their sole job to stomp on anything fun. not women you fricking sexist piece of dog shit.
This is another reason the industry is dead. Someone mentions a list of people and your moronic ass goes "REEEEE YOU DONT LIKE WOMEN REEEEEE" like thats still a thing that works in 2023.
You refuse to accept the fact this industry was circling the drain 30+ years ago, long before woke shit started infecting it. You just want your boogieman cause you want to go back to the "heckin based" era of the 1990s when the industry was barely surviving thanks to all the idiotic practices I already mentioned. Dumbfricks like you deserve your dead industry. Even if every wokist was expelled from the industry tomorrow it wouldn't save anything. Even if you went back in time to prevent a single wokist from ever being hired to work at either of the big 2, and prevented every single woke agenda topic from ever worming its way into comics, we'd still be pretty much right here where we are today, with manga eating western comics alive.
8 months ago
Anonymous
lol. it absolutely wouldnt. if you got rid of every homosexual in comics today, i'd go back to buying them tomorrow. As would a lot of people. but go off I guess. Maybe you can find a job coding.
Not all women are woke, butthole. Many female mangaka understand how critical it is that boys have noble heroes to look up to. Let's say they even have fujo inclinations: they keep that shit away from media intended to shape boys into men.
>Notice how they arent allowed into manga, and its doing amazing?
No. They ARE allowed into manga. And their shit is only allowed to go as far as it sells. Which is one story in a third tier monthly or so.
>chicks sitting around eating and talking for half of a comic
What the hell is going on in all the slice-of-lofe garbageCinemaphile has been posting about for years?
The Japanese Tea ceremony is a fierce battlefield, and has killed and saved many soldiers in it's time. Do not underestimate it. See Hyogemono or the Tea Ceremony part of Usagi Yojimbo for more explanation.
>Comics crash in the 90s long before the current woke trend >thinks wokists are the reason it's shit
Wokists are just opportunistic parasites. They infested the comic industry because it was desperate to turn things around and attract new audiences after decades of moribund sales. Yeah, the woke shit has been a stunning failure, as it usually is, but it's not the ultimate reason the comic book industry is dying. It's just the equivalent of trying to cure cancer by infecting yourself with HIV.
What was the last monthly comic that really brought new people to comics stores? The Walking Dead? My money is on TWD, which ended in 2019. Listen frickers, you wanna save this sinking ship, u need like a new walking dead, something different yet easy to digest to normies.
So what you're saying is, the only way a comic can possibly sell anymore is if they have a multi-million dollar adaptation? And that's somehow a sustainable business model?
Comic shops did this to themselves by being dark dank dungeons for the type of manchildren who shun outsiders because its the only thing they have and they can't stand the idea of normies coming in and gawking at them. Kevin Smith said almost exactly that but in a way that he apparently thought sounded positive. "We don,t want outsiders coming in here going oh this is weird, this is silly".
Whites, Hispanics, and Asians already liked manga and anime, and black nerds too, but it was a loser pastime. When blacks became the new vogue, their music, their fashion, and even their nerdy pursuits became "cool".
Take a good guess who is behind this, and ultimately who is behind the rise in popularity of manga and anime in the US. I'll give you a clue: it's not the Japanese.
>The israelites made manga popular in the west
That could be construed as technically accurate simply because the publishing and distribution landscape (for all print) is largely israeli-owned. But in reality manga is simply taking aware market share from western comics because it contains appealing narratives that have been effectively purged from the latter, at least in its commercial segments.
Take pic related, none of the big western publishers would EVER greenlight a story such as this today - it would be considered problematic as it depicts traditional gender roles, patriarchal structures, prostitution as immoral and so on.
You're right. Manga does offer something the US does not, and cannot, offer.
However, both of these were effectively orchestrated by people from the same group. Maybe because one is clearly more profitable in today's world.
They know it's a sinking ship because they've made all the holes, so it's onto the next venture.
Honestly
Who knows?
Comic stores have a weird economy of their own, because yes, many have gone under but I’m always amazed to see ones that are not only around but have stood the test of time. Like there’s this comic store in my town on the corner of the Main Street and it’s beloved by everyone and it’s still doing well, it survived the 2008 recession, the COVID 19 Pandemic, and also the current inflation, so who knows how it’s still kicking, maybe it helps that they have a good manga selection
>recently
This has been going on for decades. Turns out a niche market with a main product at a bad price point has trouble sustaining thousands of independent physical retail stores.
Marvel comics should have had a major boom when Marvel movies were the biggest thing in the world a decade ago and interest in superheroes was at an all time high. Marvel failed to capitalize on this though and their comics are still failing.
Comics are just a dead genre as a whole. Why read comics when manga are cheaper, have better writing and art, and have much more creative freedom compared to the average Western comic?
On top of that, physical distribution of media is dead in general. Just look at Gamestop's issues in recent years as an example. Comics need to switch to switch to a digital only distribution model (with maybe a monthly mail subscription as an alternative) to compete in the modern media marketplace.
Because comics are fricking dying as a medium and the publishers are militantly refusing to address what's causing it.
It's shocking that Mark Millar and to a lesser extent Dan DiDio are literally the only relevant creators who seem to be addressing the destruction of their medium/industry in front of their very eyes.
>It's shocking that Mark Millar and to a lesser extent Dan DiDio are literally the only relevant creators who seem to be addressing the destruction of their medium/industry in front of their very eyes.
u wot
He's got a podcast where he talks with a different guest each episode and he pretty much always talks about how the comic book industry is in a very bad place.
Millar has a podcast where he regularly mourns how manga is beating the shit out of comics.
DiDio says the same and writers/artists are shitting on him because he's a boomer and one of the people he told those things to was some comicsgate grifter.
Does didio talk about his personal contributions to comics being in the state they’re in?
So Millar, who is the epitome of "wants to write screenplays not comics" and has shit out a bunch of early 00s trash. And DiDio, who is fricking DiDio. Are complaining about the shit heap they helped create and for some reason that anon wants to give them brownie points for "addressing the destruction" which they are part of?
More or less. Millar says comics suck now because DC and Marvel sucks and he said things are getting stagnant and the same people have been there for decades so they should just switch creators. When DC and Marvel are going strong, the other companies rally around them (he's right about this one).
Comics are also partially dying because all of the crossover event bullshit making them feel pointless and opaque and Millar has pointed that out.
And that's admittedly been a problem for a long fricking time (thanks Jim Shooter), but other factors (death of retail, etc) have made it so that the autists who support that system are on their way out and there has been nothing to get a new generation of kids interested in comics. I don't see the dying of comics as some kind of modern shift, but just as a systematic stagnation that happened for a longass time that everyone in the industry had ignored because they all just naively pointed to the MCU and said "look how popular the characters have become!!"
Millar has a podcast where he regularly mourns how manga is beating the shit out of comics.
DiDio says the same and writers/artists are shitting on him because he's a boomer and one of the people he told those things to was some comicsgate grifter.
>Don't care or want to save rat-king capeshit. >Do want to save small, local business.
Important distinction. I'm not helping capeshit. I will watch it drown though.
>>Do want to save small, local business.
Only if they are good though. My LCS owner is a genuinely decent person and runs a good business. I will buy from him. While traveling I have been to other stores that are trash. I hate how some people have that blind "support local businesses" mentality when 3/4 of local businesses are shit and don't deserve the customers.
It didn't have to have poison, anon. Diabetes, heat disease, all those things were running riot already. The last piece of cheesecake was a big mistake but they insisted, how could they refuse? It is a cause of death and a epitaph for a life not-so-well lived.
It didn't have to have poison, anon. Diabetes, heat disease, all those things were running riot already. The last piece of cheesecake was a big mistake but they insisted, how could they refuse? It is a cause of death and a epitaph for a life not-so-well lived.
Undeselling the problem. Wokeness isn't the single last thing, and it also affects the limitations on available artists, writers and books.
If wokeness is the industry's cheesecake addiction, diamond is the dude's untreated high blood pressure.
No one here reads comics. They just screech about lesbians.
The storytime of pain series is a long and storied tradition.
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
I don't visit /tg/ enough to know if that's true but I seem to come across a lot of people unhappy with how woke mtg is getting. Too many planeswalkers are black now or something.
Since the hasbro buyout, ther'es been a push and pull from within the company on which way it goes. Shit like demanding wheelchair accessible dungeons in ADD, raceswaped lord of the rings. Real life gatcha lottery bullshit.
I'm not sure how far some of this shit, like trying to remove "facisim" from warhammer 40k's empire is going to go, but we'll have to see.
>Undeselling the problem
Not at all. You seem to misunderstand. All the problems we talk about, like diamond, are the conditions that created the obesity, maintained it, caused diseases and ultimately death. I undersold nothing.
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
While people have talked endlessly about comics industry etc and I have nothing to add there. I just feel like the problem with the LCS as a business is it needs active participants to run a shop and the problem is so many shops are either passively run or run by walking stereotypes. A lot of other businesses don't need as active a push. No one wants to be upsold at a normal bookstore or coffee shop.
Having worked in an LCS we did do a lot of sales techniques you might find in other businesses but it didn't come from a place of actively pushing, it came from enthusiasm and knowledge. Like at a Starbucks they might push you to go up a size or buy something on offer. It feels corporate. You want what you want. We sold a lot of stuff by sparking up conversations and talking about what people liked. Where you place items matters. How your shop is arranged, matters.
If you don't actively engage with your customers then you're doomed. I've been in shops where people insult you for purchases, give garbage recommendations, talk too much politics, are walking stereotypes.
I definetly feel that at a lot of the comic shops I go to in my area, there's only 1 that has employees that actively engage with you on the product in a non cancer way.
It just feels like many LCS' think all comics should be capeshit. They've reluctantly accepted manga, but are oblivious to more artsy, adult comics like the stuff Fantagraphics puts out. I'd say Fantagraphics are the only real alternative Western comic publishers I'm aware of. As in their catalog doesn't look like an almost perfect clone of capeshit.
Local comic book guy can't properly curate an alternative library, stocks up on nepobaby horseshit, and screams at my hipster ass for leading him astray.
Like in 2000s when piracy didn't exist, this doesn't follow in today's buisness model. At best your just generating noise that turns to apathy which is the result of the last 20 years of current market exodus.
This is a very short term outrage gimmick. I’ve personally never bought these issues. Whoever is buying them might be comic reviewers. Imagine basing your entire industry around something so negative. Nobody associates Western comics with anything good now because of it. Long term brand industry damage.
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
They went bankrupt because DC and Marvel were full woke, alienating readers forever and Disney and Feige were the big villains of the industry, even the rarest comic books lost value
>that pic
I am not defending the Disney shows I am simply pointing out that after a show is announced the prices tend to increase and after the hype is over they go down. This happens with movies too. I bought and then sold copies of Uncanny X-Men 141/142 for a premium when the movie hype was building for Days of Future Past. I then bought some when the price lowered. And resold them again.
How is the speculator market I heard it was crashing.
The real speculator madness is variant covers. Because shops buy several times the issues they need just to get and sell a variant. I have seen someone drop £400 on variants for garbage comics.
It just feels like many LCS' think all comics should be capeshit. They've reluctantly accepted manga, but are oblivious to more artsy, adult comics like the stuff Fantagraphics puts out. I'd say Fantagraphics are the only real alternative Western comic publishers I'm aware of. As in their catalog doesn't look like an almost perfect clone of capeshit.
Local comic book guy can't properly curate an alternative library, stocks up on nepobaby horseshit, and screams at my hipster ass for leading him astray.
They need to be good business people but also actual socialiable human beings with knowledge. And that is rare. Even if they do stock manga or alternatives they won't know anything about it. If your shop owner can't name more than a few creators then they are trash.
If you go into a book shop you don't expect the employees to know every single piece of literature. They will have their tastes but don't need to actively push customers as much. A LCS shop owner has to guide his customers to prevent dead ends or burn outs from the medium and that is too much of a skill for most.
if they pivoted it to LGS they'd be fine tbh, magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff they'll still show up to buy product
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
I don't visit /tg/ enough to know if that's true but I seem to come across a lot of people unhappy with how woke mtg is getting. Too many planeswalkers are black now or something.
They blackwashed Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, in MtG.
[...]
Undeselling the problem. Wokeness isn't the single last thing, and it also affects the limitations on available artists, writers and books.
If wokeness is the industry's cheesecake addiction, diamond is the dude's untreated high blood pressure.
[...]
The storytime of pain series is a long and storied tradition.
[...]
[...]
Since the hasbro buyout, ther'es been a push and pull from within the company on which way it goes. Shit like demanding wheelchair accessible dungeons in ADD, raceswaped lord of the rings. Real life gatcha lottery bullshit.
I'm not sure how far some of this shit, like trying to remove "facisim" from warhammer 40k's empire is going to go, but we'll have to see.
hasbro is making hand over fist, more people are playing magic now than ever before
It's true LOTR sold well, but that's attributed more to unsustainable scumbag gimmics, like having a chase card in elvish that ended up being sold for 2 million dollars and upping the "you must have this card or you're not competitive" cards.
Player numbers are down significantly.
I predict they'll treat it like comics treated special edition covers, and end up hollowing themeselves out. But we'll see.
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
I don't visit /tg/ enough to know if that's true but I seem to come across a lot of people unhappy with how woke mtg is getting. Too many planeswalkers are black now or something.
Who the frick cares about the story even, if your playing mtg its for the game not the story. >Most people will get hyped about mechanics than the story.
Seiki K has a dad character who was an editor of a manga magazine.
There were scenes of him coaching young mangaka. He gave terrible advice in the show, but I think that job does actually exist in Japan: someone who has an eye for young talent and helps them create a better end product.
You'd have to have an eye for potential, an understanding of your reader, and a thorough understanding of what makes a good story. I don't think those skills exist in the American comic book industry at all.
It really does feel like this sometimes. >You want a down to Earth Batman fighting real life injustices while also wanting the 100th Joker story and huge multiversal threat?
Funny because the early Marxist comics are the best comics have ever been. If all comics were as good as those, not necessarily remaining marxist, they would decimate manga in terms of quality.
Corporations are ALWAYS the ones pushing multiverse bullshit because it is literally the perfection of >low-effort nostalgiabait >if something sticks you can make more of it, if it doesn't you can toss it with no consequences
Much like a lot of things these days, it's something no one objectively actually wants but corporations think they can save time by just mashing shit together and hoping people will get on-board. I wonder what other technology these same corporations are trying to implement that's just mashing up pre-existing shit and using it as a lowest common denominator?
They're not wrong though. Look at how many anons are pining for a return to the oversaturated event era of the 90s and early 2000s simply because of identity politics?
There *is* a market for regurgitated trash based on pre-existing shit that only has nostalgia going for it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
And there's a market for original easier-to-follow stories. It's buying manga at a higher volume than the autistic crossover market is buying big 2.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah but if you try to tell that the autistic capeshit guys that people want original self contained stories that go somewhere and eventually end in a satisfying way, they'll insist that's not why people are reading manga, it's ackshully something something woke trannies.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Sounds like we're pretty much on the same page and more just discussing about if it's the fans' fault for holding shit hostage by demanding and unsustainable status quo vs how much of it is the corporations giving it to them. Sounds like a chicken and egg question.
8 months ago
Anonymous
The funny thing is I hear people b***hing about the longevity of a bunch of manga series and the endings being awful too. A lot of them don't have satisfying endings.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah I can agree to that. Doctor Stone for example was rushed to the point of turning to shit.
But I'd still rather take it over Batman. Because any ending is better than no ending.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Dr Stone is over?
8 months ago
Anonymous
Manga ended like a year and a half ago.
8 months ago
Anonymous
How bad was it?
8 months ago
Anonymous
the craziest thing to me about the manga argument is that the most popular one is 1200 chapters long and you have to read them in order. At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
homie do you think that's supposed to be a selling point?
I can read a full volume in like 30 minutes.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
So long as you're very lenient on the definition of "complete".
Like whoopdedoo the villain got put in jail again. He's just gonna break out next issue.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You have hundreds of issues of Spider-Man dating back to 1963. Of course it is written by a bunch of different people and hasn't ended. It is like getting into a soap opera. Coronation Street in the UK has 11,000 episodes. No one is going back to watch them all. People who b***h about the format being wrong don't seem to realise that a lot of people dip in and out of stuff. Like a creative team? Try out an arc. Finality doesn't exist here. It is like getting angry that water is wet.
Now before you have a go, absolutely the quality of comics is an issue and all the other problems people have mentioned. But this format issue is weird. Kids in the 1980s would just go and pick up an issue and not care. And while stories are more decompressed now you could just do that. The quality is more the issue than the format.
People would be fine dipping in and out for arcs if they were something good. People ITT and others like it will talk about creative teams and other things and single creators in manga etc, but the thing about comics is that it has been interpreted a bunch of times and reinvents itself. Without that reinvention we wouldn't have gotten some of the best stories.
Ultimately
8 months ago
Anonymous
They fricking hid it from my store, shits stuffed in the back with records.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>It is like getting into a soap opera.
That is the problem, yes. Soap operas aren't good, they're just long running.
I mean for fricks sake look at what happened this year. Kamala's resurrection got announced essentially in the same day as her death. Who in their right mind is going to give a shit about either when they pull that shit so often that anyone with basic pattern recognition knows not to get invested in anything? When Alfred died a few years ago I didn't even blink I just occasionally ask someone that's still dumb enough to read Batman if he's back yet.
The neverending serial works when you cycle out old fans for new ones, who haven't gotten wise to the fact that these stories operate in a loop. But now we're in a weird place where the old guard never leaves and actively throw a fit when anyone new is approached so it just gets even MORE stale. (It's kind of like X-men actually, and how anyone that was introduced after wolverine is really just there to be cannon fodder.) Or like, you can only do "Peter Parker is having relationship problems because this is a soap opera" before the cucking starts.
The fact that stuff has to keep going on indefinitely is the reason the quality lacks. They're intrinsically linked.
I don't get why people are willing to accept that the Simpsons has gone on for 30 years and run out of ideas but capeshit IPs that have been around for 80+ can keep doing the same 3-4 stories and fighting the same rogues gallery until the heat death of the universe and it's never a problem.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It’s because nobody gives a shit about comics. The only superhero anything that people care about are the movies, games and merch. The average person will gladly watch the the next Spidey flick but wouldn’t be caught dead reading his comic.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Even then we see a lot of people and outlets starting to entertain the idea of superhero fatigue because a lot of the franchises are getting long in the tooth.
Like how many fricking Batman reboots do we need, really? It's gotten to the point that those pearls falling in slow motion is more funny than anything else.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Soap operas aren't good, they're just long running.
This is just a matter of media taste. For some, people regularly watch them like a religion. >I mean for fricks sake look at what happened this year.
Anon, to be clear, I outright said the quality is attrocious. >The neverending serial works when you cycle out old fans for new ones, who haven't gotten wise to the fact that these stories operate in a loop. But now we're in a weird place where the old guard never leaves and actively throw a fit when anyone new is approached so it just gets even MORE stale.
You're arguing the inherent continuation is the issue. I am saying that all the other stuff are more of an issue. We probably agree on practically every other point about quality, crossovers, gimmicks, distribution or whatever. The truth is though, you could still just have a Batman comic or whatever that works. >I don't get why people are willing to accept that the Simpsons has gone on for 30 years and run out of ideas but capeshit IPs that have been around for 80+ can keep doing the same 3-4 stories and fighting the same rogues gallery until the heat death of the universe and it's never a problem.
I think things are fixable.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>For some, people regularly watch them like a religion.
It's good if you've got a cultish level of addiction is not the endorsement you think it is. >I think things are fixable.
There's really no way to fix stuff like the Joker at this point. He's got a body count bigger than some countries.
How bad was it?
IMO it was pretty mediocre but the manga in general had kind of tanked in quality once they went to America. A lot of the whimsical "we're doing this scientific process step by step" gets speed blitzed over to the point that they start making stuff in the space of two panels. At one point they skipped ahead like 2+ years just to get to the next invention and none of the characters really changed or anything in that time. It really felt like they just wanted to end the thing.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>It's good if you've got a cultish level of addiction is not the endorsement you think it is.
It wasn't an endorsement. Different strokes for different folks. It is like complaining that reality TV is shit. For some it is. Comics could still be fixed if people gave a frick.
8 months ago
Anonymous
That seems to mostly just be a problem with shonen judging by all the examples people use. I've read plenty of manga that ended on a fine note.
8 months ago
Anonymous
It's a problem with long-running manga.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Mangakas are still humans. Sticking to your guns isn't an easy decision when your publisher asks you to milk your series instead of ending it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Japanese Job culture, aside from encouraging working yourself to death, also disencourages unprofessional behavior.
recession
specialty shops people would have to go out of the way for instead of buying online or a major big box retailor
the smart stores will pivot to offering board games/card games/war games
my FLCS makes more from MTG and 40k than comics and they're not slouching on comics either
I dunno. Was only really invested in this thread to avoid my own problems. Guess I'll go back to focusing on those. Was fun to spitball ideas and see what stuck. I think there is potential. I also realized I have no real love for capeshit beyond a love for the medium.
>go to local B&N >manga section is huge, multiple shelved and a table close to the front advertising popular series >find the comics section >one stand alone shelf near the wall next to the magazines >one side is recent superhero stuff, other side is a bunch of shitty graphic novels
Honestly the none of the stuff in the comic section seemed to be really exciting. Like they eschew simple dynamic genre stories that people want to buy.
The only way to solve the problem of comics is to solve the problem of capeshit and the only way to solve the problem of capeshit is to introduce permanence.
Why is any reasonable person going to be interested in a story that goes on forever? Especially when the stakes have gotten so overblown and absurd. How many times has the entire multiverse in Marvel or DC been threatened? How many times have the big names died and come back? There's no dramatic potential there anymore. It's tired and boring.
But the diehards don't want stories to matter. They throw a tantrum when Hal Jordan gets character progression. They want the same hit of dopamine they got when they were six years old, consequences to the narrative be damned. They WANT the same slop fed to them on a loop. So instead of reflecting on themselves, they insist the real issue is the blacks and the gays and pronouns.
Honestly, mainstream comics are just too gay and lame for me.
Most of the "fanservice" is lame as frick, everything has to have gays, all camaraderie between people of the same sex is either extremely shallow or shipper-bait for morons, siblings are always presented hating each other/having shitty relationships, action in most series sucks ass,
Like frick, people who make comics insist that they're trying to appeal to me (young black male) but I can't think of a SINGLE decent delinquent comic, meanwhile I find stuff like Holyland, Rainbow, Crows, Clover, and Worst constantly on the other side, even fricking manhwa has a few decent delinquent stories.
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
literally the only fricking capeshit anyone currently under the age 35 has read is spawn
the only western comics that people ive known irl have read is alt shit that isnt on the collectors market besides like original prints of the crow and love and rockets
>one shop closes >we're back to east vs west thread >all the same points about the industry and comics that have been debated over a thousand times and that most people accept >all said in a generalised manner with no actual detail >all the same skewed perceptions on matters with no actual detail >no one on Cinemaphile reads comics
>no one on a board dedicated to comics reads them anymore
Yes, it’s part of the reason the industry is in the dire state it’s in. The big 2 are now both simultaneously vestigial parts of struggling media empires AND the most important IP farms for their more profitable counterparts in the entertainment industry
I just hate that a whole fricking medium is reduced down to superheroes or east vs west threads. I wish we had more vibrant discussions about stuff we were actually reading
>~~*Western comics*~~
act like youre not selling mindless boring stories with mild sex and violence to kids and teens to avoid government regulation then turn around in the 70s and 80s and do exactly that while still making suck ass boring stories and going out of your way to being apolitical >manga
doesnt have to give a shit about anything besides showing vulvas and foreskins
>transition industry to cater to almost exclusively women >turns out women don't "collect" things beyond fashion as they only care about how they look >??? >No Profit
The only profitable aspect of the industry is the omnibus reprints as dudes still want to read the old good shit and collect for their shelves
I wonder if popular superheroes in the public domain would have changed things?
If the Sonny Bonno act had never gone through, would we be seeing more comics as the 30s Superheroes like Batman and Superman came into the public domain around 2018?
I think it wouldn't. The industry being farther left than Bernie Sanders, and Diamond's issues still don't change. I think you see a stronger indie pulp scene with dynamite, but that's about it.
I thought all the woke shit mostly stopped until I blind bought the Batman ‘89 hardcover cause I loved those movies as a kid and I was welcomed with full on BLM horseshit.
We are in really bad recession and inflation hike that the ~~*economists*~~ want to pretend isn’t happening
So this has little to do with comics and more the general economy, how it’s harder to run a business and how non-essential spending is decreasing
People aren't buying comics and Diamond and other distributors are flooding the market with variant covers and trash that won't sell, meaning most of these stores are operating on a razor thin profit margin, usually by having the owner and their family run on unpaid labor. Comic stores have been fricked for decades now. The economy taking a huge shit, covid lockdowns, and all the typical prohibitive taxes and fees and real estate hyper-inflation just means no one can skirt by and hope business picks up later anymore.
If that was the issue, sales of manga would be down too. They're up instead.
The entire industry is down units shipped, it’s “up” via inflation. Manga (and dog man) is just a bigger portion of a smaller, more overpriced pie.
Manga sales and book sales are rising. Capeslop western comics that aren't aimed at kids are flopping hard.
Primer was actually a big hit for DC comics, capeshit aimed at kids. They should make more comics like Primer.
No, they are not. The units shipped is not up, the revenue is.
Primer was not by any metric a “hit”.
I mean they killed themselves with ANAD 2.0 in 2015 and earlier with the new 52 at DC. Both have yet to ever truly recover. Rebirth’s minor resurgence and it’s subsequent dissolution via complete and utterly offensive shit by portlandian writers killed any trust they rebuilt.
They need to stop hiring homosexuals and people who watch MSNBC.
>Primer was not by any metric a “hit”.
compared to everything else DC has been putting out, Primer is their best seller. The Gabriel Picolo books due well too.
Not all shit stink equally, but all shit is shit.
>So this has little to do with comics and more the general economy
Only partially right.
Video game revenue is still up YoY, so clearly it's not just the economy, it's that comics are a lower-order form of entertainment, and when times are tough they're among the first to get cut.
Many video game centric shops are closing and I don’t think anyone is saying video games are a dying medium
It doesn't have to do with the medium sold but the economic realities of now
>Many video game centric shops are closing and I don’t think anyone is saying video games are a dying medium
Difference being that video games have had strong digital sales for like a decade now, which is the main reason why physical sales have dwindled and shops have started closing.
Comics have almost 0 digital presence despite being available digitally for nearly 20 years now.
And you can just buy the physical releases online.
>Webcomics have almost 0 digital presence
Based moron
Anon, no one actually pays for most webcomics, and half the ones on places like webtoon and tapas aren't even American.
Because comics stopped being monthly entertainment and became collectors only shit. And collectors have no use for digital anything. They want their precious first issues and anniversary issues with guest artist covers safely in a box so they can pretend that shit is going to be valuable some day.
Ignore this chud. The economy is doing great if you disregard luxury items like food and fuel.
>"Its not happening"
>"OK it happened but its no big deal"
>"OK maybe it is a big deal but its actually a good thing" - YOU ARE HERE
Why don't you go live in Venezuela for a month and then tell me inflation is a good thing?
Woke broke blah blah blah
Late stage capitalism.
When we told you mom and pop shops were dying, did you think your little spandex fantasy magazine selling sex dungeon would be exempt?
Rent Is Too Goddamed High!
>Late stage capitalism.
t. zoomer that doesn't understand Capitalism
The core of capitalism is greed. It's just called mandatory infinite growth, because it's sounds nicer.
Meh, call it the American Empire, the American Economy, call it Capitalism. Whatever you call it, it is clearly ailing
It's doing better than ever you fricking morons. Excuse me, but this shit about capitalism makes me brain throb.
Just because a business you don't like is doing the best, doesn't mean capitalism is failing. It means it's fricking working to it's zenith. The population decides what to support, and if it supports cheapest and easiest, that's what it gets.
I love how people magically think capitalism causes problems and not the consumers. Capitalism is a system that consumers utilize.
>The French Monarchy is stronger than ever, we beat the British depriving them of their colonies, our food issues are temporary, and with our new navy we will be able to--ACK *French Revolution happens*
Reddit post
This entire thread is proof that Cinemaphile, and Cinemaphile in particular, knows literally NOTHING about business or economics. ESPECIALLY this homosexual:
>typical past the bump limit meta response of "oh I'm better than all you dummies"
You know the least
I could save this industry.
You've already saved this industry, Ms. Antos
Bad economy, higher rents, shipping costs up, big 2 ongoings are made for people who don’t go to comic shops.
Anyone telling you any of those isn’t a factor is being disingenuous.
It’s because of ESG scores in comics and inflation. It can be both.
Does ESG also make you touch yourself at night?
No, I do that on my own. ESG scores are the reason everything is failing. Denali is also why it’s failing.
Funny thing is that Larry is wants to rename it, because it's become a borderline curse word. But renaming isn't going to do shit, unless he retools it to not grossly favor wokeshittery as a means to up the score. But then it wouldn't be a proper propaganda tool.
Too late, Larry is seen.
no one buys it. everyone knows manga>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
gomiqz
Sure, but comics >>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
gomiqz (whatever the frick that is)
Comics are for nerds.
Bro a dozen eggs costs 10 dollars I'm not wasting money on capeshit.
No he blamed him for stopping the show from airing on HBO Max, which he technically did.
Comic books are a dead outdated medium. $5 for 20 pages of decompressed storytelling and ads-only boomers are dumb enough to buy that. For just $10 you can get 200+ pages of story if you buy a manga tankobon or Dogman instead. Back when I was a kid, I'd always go with the value deal. Western comic floppies seem like a massive ripoff.
The last time I spent 10 dollars on a recreational item it was to buy the HD remaster of Chrono Cross, which comes with Radical Dreamers.
So two video games and at least 40 hours of entertainment between them versus what, thirty pages of story that goes nowhere and will get undone by the next team change?
To add on, I was in middle school and highschool in the 2000s and early 2010s. I wanted to keep up with capeshit books and storylines I'd see online, but it cost $25 for each of their trade paperbacks and oftentimes the TPB doesn't even tell the whole story and you need 3+ of them to get an entire arc.
Meanwhile with manga, I could easily find it on pirate sites online, and when I wanted to buy the books, they were long and cheap. Western capeship priced themselves out of the kid market and are only going for boomers and gen X collectors with arrested development and whales.
Marvel and DC's attempts to appeal to the kidsters by spamming their books with woke LGBTQ+ shit has failed.
>Western capeship priced themselves out of the kid market and are only going for boomers and gen X collectors with arrested development and whales.
This has also sabotaged capeshit comics, because kids no associate Western capeshit comics with creepy fat old boomers with arrested development, or weird millenial wine aunts who are obsessed with the MCU. How can they expect kids to get in to a hobby that is dominated primarily by weird old men, whales, and wine aunties?
MCU isn’t millennials (or women), but adult normies. Also, who fricking cares if the brats today don’t want to read comics. The comic industry doesn’t even attempt to relate to them.
Samegayging to spew the same autism doesn’t make it true. Most of the people in comics shops are in their 20s and young 30s. And that’s mostly an economic reality that’s been true since the 90s boom. Comics haven’t been “for kids” since the direct market took over and it only did because sales dwindled in other venues.
I agree with some of what you, singular, said in the first post but I really do grow tired of people who haven’t been to a comic shop in their life touting meme opinions that have zero basis in reality. I see one or two women every Wednesday at my LCS and I’m only there for fifteen minutes the idea that it’s fat neck beard 40 and 50 year olds is just not true at all.
Stop coping so hard. There clearly aren't enough 20 and 30 year olds and alleged women buying comics to keep these stores open. There was an Eisner winning comic store near me in Burbank that catered exclusively women and also had a cafe. Despite all the comics media promotion, attention and Eisner awards, that place closed down months ago too.
Kids aren't in to western capeshit and you need the kid market to keep the industry going.
>coping
I’m not, I’ve very clearly said ITT what the problem is. Your homosexual ass is just going to spew autism about manga and, like I said, meme opinions not based on reality let alone on your own experiences.
Leave your fricking house homosexual.
You are triggered hard that kids love manga and your beloved capeshit comics are associated with femcels, troons and fat boomers now. Your hobby is dead, gramps.
I likely own more manga than you. I definitely own more floppies. And you’ll be proud of this somehow and imagine not leaving your house is superior.
have a nice day homosexual
This. That’s exactly why so many get canceled.
>I likely own more manga than you. I definitely own more floppies. And you’ll be proud of this somehow and imagine not leaving your house is superior.
You are one of those creepy anti-social boomers I was talking about who kids associate with capeshit comics these days.
I’m 30 homosexual and I’m not antisocial, I’m literally the one telling you to leave your fricking house and expose yourself to reality. Give you live near Burbank that’s a horrible reality but it’s better than your fricking fantasy land.
Fricking Christ you’re such a homosexual you’ll fit in with the rest of them.
I agree with most of what you said but it bears repeating that the L in LCS matters. These aren't franchises, this isn't like McDonalds or Barnes and Noble or 7-Eleven where you can have go to one on each side of the country and they're generally going to be the same.
What's true for your LCS might not be true for others. You may have lucked out and gotten a good one but the reality for someone else might be completely different where it's a cramped poorly lit dive run by an antisocial neckbeard that reeks of stale pizza and forces his elderly mother to work the cash register.
I go to shops in every city I visit, most are not holes in the wall. Holes in the all are holes in the wall and should only be used in a pinch and never trusted to complete pull lists.
That’s like comparing a greasy spoon to a McDonald’s to a legit restaurant.
People’s bad experiences are more often than not reflective of thmselves than anything or worse, and far too common, based on relayed heresay and imagination.
Pure lcs's or game hobby stores there's a significant difference a lot of times.
None of them are “pure” if they’re still alive so there are obviously funkos and manga and mercy and shit but my shop doesn’t even get modern baseball cards, only collectibles. Comics are their main source and they do big money on back issues.
You probably live in bumblefrick nowhere then, where they don’t have the margins to over-order. If they don’t trust you to show up for your pull weekly why would they order it?
I can only think of 2 or 3 in my area(Dallas) that does primary work for pure issues/back issues. The majority that aren't "pure" usually see higher margin on events for card/tabletop stuff.
Like I said bumblefrick nowhere, flyover, usa
? Dallas is a pretty fricking busy metropolitan area, idk if i'd classify it as nowhere.
He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Dude’s never left his bubble.
A city with zero culture outside of stolen recipes and Jerry Jone’s abomination of an organization. “America’s team”? More like “flyover country losers” SADDDDD
>and never trusted to complete pull lists.
Again, your mileage clearly varies. Of the three comic book stores in my area none have ever even offered to set up a pull list or order something for me. I went in a couple years back asking for specific titles and at best I got "if it's on the shelves it's on the shelves". Ended up having to get the books off of amazon instead.
Funny thing is you’re not even getting many ads anymore. You used to see shit for tv shows, cartoon blocks, movies, candies and cereals. Now it’s just in house ads for other comics MAYBE a cross promotion using their own characters and the back cover is normally the poster of that months cape shit release from their own company. They can’t get other companies to invest in advertising through the books because no child is reading them so there isn’t anyone to sell to
Because online retailers like Amazon are choking the life out of stores and taking everything to robot warehouses and convenience beats conscience every time. So frick all the workers and the stockers and the people who work in stores and places downtown. Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
But on he plus side Funko pop sales are tanking so nature is healing.
And don't act like you actually buy any comics anon, you read everything online for free anyway.
>Because online retailers like Amazon are choking the life out of stores and taking everything to robot warehouses and convenience beats conscience every time. So frick all the workers and the stockers and the people who work in stores and places downtown. Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Exactly, comics are competing vs Tik Tok, Youtube and videogames now, not to mention manga. You can't charge $5+ for a shitty 20 page digital floppy that provides 5 minutes of entertainment when your competition is cheaper, cooler, and provides hours of entertainment compared to a few minutes.
Barnes and Noble is online too. They even have their own e-reader.
>How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Barnes and Noble is basically the Wal Mart of books. It's not a small hole on the wall with a limited inventory. it's a hybrid of brick and mortal and online retail. They've got exponentially greater stocking and inventory options as a result. Not to mention every B&N I've been in sells other stuff and has a cafe so it's more about creating experience and atmosphere than a lot of LCS which can be kinda dank.
>the Wal Mart of books
It's funny that you mention Walmart-there isn't a capeshit book in sight there these days. Their books shelves are 80% manga and the popular titles are always nearly sold out or sold out every time I walk by.
>It's funny that you mention Walmart-there isn't a capeshit book in sight there these days.
i actually saw the blue beetle graduation day trade at walmart a few weeks ago and was shocked.
Is it just my barnes and noble that has moved the graphic novel section the little pit where they keep records?
Maybe? I haven't been to mine in almost a year but last time I was there they'd combined it with Manga and art books and that it took up like a full corner of the store.
I can't even find the comics or graphic novels at my Barnes & Noble. They used to be right next to the manga, but then they had to move to a new location cause their landlord didn't renew their lease cause he wanted to change the location into a family restaurant. When they reopened across the street, no sign of the graphic novels or western comic books, but manga section expanded to take up almost an entire wall of the building.
I just think it's telling when barnes has a dedicated manga space with full decked out display and merch. Comics meanwhile gets shoved in the back with records.
If you want to strike at the heart of the issue regarding flagging sales, then you'll have to chance me getting a little/misc/ on Cinemaphile.
>If you want to strike at the heart of the issue regarding flagging sales,
Terminally online gays that insist everything is a culture war are never going to strike at the heart of this issue.
Shit's expensive.
Comics are a luxury that have a far higher price than their value. No matter what or who they're about.
It's true. I only have seven beans metered out for this month's budget and I daren't spend a single bean on whimsy.
By all means spend a bean on whimsy.
Just, you know, get more for your money.
The price of 2 to 3 comics can get you month of a streaming service of your choice, or a video game (multiple video games if you do steam sales), or a trip to a matinee.
Or you can spend it on 22 pages of a story that doesn't matter, goes nowhere, and is mostly repetitive Bendisian dialogue and splash pages that you can finish in under five minutes if you've got greater than a toddler's literacy.
Comic books, as a form of entertainment, are not competitive at their price point. They need to be 99 cents to justify themselves.
>They need to be 99 cents to justify themselves.
Problem is they can't afford to be 99 cents.
Someone said it online but G.O.D.S issue 1 is legit 1/6th the price of bg3 which will provide you with 8x more content.
>G.O.D.S issue 1 is legit 1/6th the price of bg3 which will provide you with 8x more content.
G.O.D.S. will take at most 45 minutes to an hour to read, isn't BG3 200 hours or something?
>isn't BG3 200 hours or something?
If you're doing as much of the content as possible, yeah. If you do core story only, I imagine BG3 is completable in 20 hours, maybe less, but speed running BG3 is actually pretty hard unless you're meta-gaming the hell out of it.
That's a pretty formidable argument.
Why?
What? How? It's essentially a reprint!
>What? How? It's essentially a reprint!
More pages. It’s best to keep things as-is to keep costs down.
>Why
Because labor and print costs.
You fricks wanted your Sorros puppet in the White House, this is what you get for the effort. Crippling inflation from a man that punishes Americans.
I'm convinced it's not wokeness. I mean, granted, they're really, really clumsy about incorporating woke messaging into the comics and that is definitely turning away some people, but it's not why sales are flagging. Sales were flagging way before they started wokifying comics as a desperation measure.
The problem is comics just grew stale. Superheroes are played out and the talent pool for drawing and writing comics is extremely small with a high barrier to entry, meaning there is hardly ever new blood to freshen up the scene, and those new people aren't even allowed to create new stories, they're forced to work on existing IPs.
I think we'll eventually see a situation where superhero comics are gone, and western comics that remain are the ones that ape manga style and storytelling conventions.
>Sales were flagging way before they started wokifying comics as a desperation measure.
Good luck convincing anyone here of that, no matter how true it is. Pointing out the 90s crash just gets you called a troony these days.
Saying anything does that
The American comic industry has always been really strange to me because capeshit is at its best when it's not trying to be anything else but a guy's power fantasy. That's what it is and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is it's the only fricking comic America really produces.
It's fricking strange. Imagine Sailor Moon is the only anime and instead of trying to diversify, I insist on making new characters to try to appeal to every single person on Earth that Sailor Moon wasn't intended for.
>Here is The Punisher scout's transformation scene
I’m sorry but you’re just wrong. To distill it down to “woke” is flawed but without a doubt that is the biggest sales hinderence.
Without the, again awful word, “woke” problem jon kent is aged up and made gay, Zdarsky and Howard or Leah Williams or Kelly Sue or Tom Taylor or Jason Aaron or John Hickman or James tynion or Brian Bendis or on and on and on yada yada yada don’t have a job within the last ten years.
Simple fact is big 2 comics are made by spiteful women gays and diversity hires and that spite leads to awful comics nobody wants.
You people who have never bought a floppy keep saying this shit and ignoring those of us who stopped buying them as if we’re the ones ignorant to reality.
What the hell are you talking about, Bendis and Aaron and Hickman had careers long before comics went full-on "woke"
Bendis became big because of USM and his New Avengers, while shit, was popular. These were 00s comics.
Okay so let's go back to how things were 30 years ago before things were "woke".
Oh look it's the 90s again and the industry has crashed due to mismanagement.
It’s because comic geeks already got o LCS. Buying trades elsewhere is redundant
Some in my area moved comics and manga to the section with records, presumably because they cut out a lot of DVDs and CDs
>Barnes and Noble better than ever
Barnes and Noble closed at least three locations in my general vicinity in the last few years. It’s the shittiest bookstore so I don’t care that much. I do mourn the loss of Borders, Bibelot, and a great Books a Million that closed recently.
Best bookstore ever was Bookmarket, which used to open up temporarily in unused retail spaces like those Halloween stores do. It shit all over Barnes and Noble, and fit more books into smaller spaces because they didn’t sell overpriced toys and gift items.
>Barnes and Noble closed at least three locations in my general vicinity in the last few years.
Yeah and they're opening up more locations elsewhere
I do miss Borders though
>Barnes and Noble closed at least three locations in my general vicinity in the last few years
Living in Gary Indiana must be hard.
>Barnes and Noble is basically the Wal Mart of books.
I thought Amazon was the Wal Mart of books?
Amazon is mostly online.
When I said B&N was like Wal Mart I meant in the sense that they're hybrid online/storefront model.
Whereas most LCS are all storefront.
>How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
Because Barnes and Noble stuck to its guns, stopped selling shit like jigsaw puzzles and kids toys. Went back to books only and sells things other than juvenile power fantasy capeshit and sleazy manga.
>Went back to books only and sells things other than juvenile power fantasy capeshit and sleazy manga.
The majority of shelf space and store space in every Barnes and Noble I've been in in the past 3 years has been dedicated to manga. Capeshit and indie comics generally have half a shelf max.
>Get a chance to read some new indie titles in B&N
>So many of them are nepobaby navel-gazing
It's amazing how the indie stuff that gets promoted and put in stores is honestly pretty shit.
Indie section in shops?
>Samey Image sci fi comic.
>Tumblr art style fantasy/slice of life/whatever.
>Shit aping off of other pretentious shit.
Fricking dire.
Mine still sold jigsaw puzzles and legos the last time I thought to look in.
To put it on simple terms:They respected their core audience
they sell all those things still you fricking moron
They still sell jigsaw puzzles and kids toys. Have you even been in a Barnes and Noble lately? The big difference is their Funko section is usually more reduced
They actually carry nice figurines. Some part of me is ashamed of what my shopping habits have done to B&N, but I'm only feeling this shame as I molest the display with my eyes. Oh God, I am the kidult. It was meant to be on the DL! No one was meant to know!
What? B&N still has a sizable section for puzzles and games. It also sells stationary, writing / office supplies, and various other accessories like book bags, lapdesks, etc.
They even put cafes in B&N now, not just a starbucks that shares the same floor space, but an actual B&N branded cafe. The stores also have a lot more seating, not just in the cafe, but nice comfy chairs scattered around the store so people can read a bit.
They also started doing something I first saw at Powell's, a book store in my hometown, which is these little hand-written placards where store employees recommend a particular author or book and write their own little blurb for it.
>How come Barnes and Noble is doing better than ever, while comic shops continue to close?
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/07/1161295820/how-barnes-noble-turned-a-page-expanding-for-the-first-time-in-years
https://www.rd.com/article/is-barnes-and-noble-going-out-of-business/
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/01/barnes-and-noble-james-duant-ceo
https://www.businessinsider.com/barnes-and-noble-ceo-owns-small-bookstores-daunt-books-2023-3
They luckily got a CEO who previously ran independent bookstores and revived a UK bookstore chain. They basically went private (instead of publicly traded) in 2019, then they changed up how they do things by emulating indie bookstores, as the NPR article says:
>The biggest change borrowed from the playbook of independent bookshops: Daunt gave local Barnes & Noble stores much more authority to order what THEIR readers, in THEIR area want to see.
Smart man. My state has a local book store chain that, here at least, is as big as B&N, if not bigger, and it started out as a single used book store location downtown before it expanded several times and now has multiple locations. It did all this while other book stores were dying, because it dealt mainly in books that people sold to them, and in books that people wanted to see, and had a range of prices. You could potentially find very cheap old editions of obscure books there. It was a great option for me to shop there as an English major in college, I could often buy all the novels I needed for the term under $15 total.
B&N definitely doesn't feel like a proper used book store these days, it has too much of a corporate polish to everything, but it does have a pretty decent selection of books now. Whoever is ordering books in the fantasy and sci-fi section, at least, seems to have their finger on the pulse of that genre and what people want.
Those are book stores, not comic shops. The comic section in all Barnes and Nobles is one shelf.
>"sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
I wish they sold Cardcaptor Sakura at my local comicstore.
>I wish they sold Cardcaptor Sakura at my local comicstore.
Maybe you'll get lucky and they'll do a new CC Isekai show since they're the only things getting greenlit these days.
Holy shit, actual animation in an anime.
I tried to watch the new Bleach season Cinemaphile is salivating about and it's just a slideshow, except when the old man with the fire sword fights and even then his special moves are cg.
It's bizarre to me that Anime as an industry is bigger than ever, but the individual shows are so poor quality on a technical level.
>How to say "I don't watch anime" without saying "I don't watch anime"
Every time
Name a single non-isekai show from the last 3 years that has proper animation throughout. Chainsaw Man? Jjk? Frick off.
>why don’t television animatons have the same quality as OVAs or anime movies?!?
You understand what a “budget” is right?
You might as well be pissing and moaning about “why doesn’t Disney’s television division match their theatrical releases?!?”
If you really want a look at what truely technically lacking animes are, just take a gander at shit like Speed Racer.
>His examples are two (technically 3) of the most casual anime out
>Implying fricking isekai have well respected and received animation
Fricker, I didn't even need to go beyond the last couple months
its because they don't have japanese working on it anymore, its all koreans and malaysians willing to work for peanuts
Most anime these days are slideshows. If I could actually speak moon I'd just put them on as background podcasts/radio dramas because so little actually happens they might as well just be audio only.
>Most anime these days are slideshows
Shut the frick up
>Antisocial fricks want to buy their titty mags from robots so they don't feel shame about going into an LCS to buy their "sakurachan the 12 year old's adventures in pedo-bait" 'comic books'.
I love how manga has thousands of stories for everyone on almost every topic while american comics are stuck with the same capeshit heroes and comics from the last 90 years that have barely evolved since the 21st century, but somehow manga is the one reduced to pedo-bait.
>but somehow manga is the one reduced to pedo-bait.
If you read indie comics, the majority are actual pedobait like Blankets or Hebibi by Craig Thompson or anything by Mariko Tamaki, that depicts actual pedo rape, and the comic critics dicksuck and slather over Craig Thompson. Even Kate Beaton made an autobiography about being repeatedly raped.
So in western comics you can either buy capeshit, smile, dogman, or sad indie comics about kids being raped.
what about Eurocomics?
They tend to be good, but are not sold much in the west and I'm not even sure how well they sell in France and Europe.
>in the west
just say America anon franco-Belgium, British, Italian, and Spanish comics would all constitute a Western market but the LCS is a pretty American shop(with some in the UK like Forbidden Planet, Eurocomics are either sold in Newsagents or bookstores
How much do these eurocomics sell in Europe? There must be a decent audience. It was several years ago but I remember going in to the massive Borders in Champs-Élysées in Paris and an entire massive floor was nothing but Eurocomics and manga, so people must be buying it. The quality of art and writing in eurocomics tends to be much better than what you'd find in your average marvel or DC capeshit.
Releases aren't as frequent, but I guess that keeps the quality high and can tacitly encourage patrons to try out other books while they wait.
>How much do these eurocomics sell in Europe?
at least in regards to French comics, decently but it has been slowing down in recent years some of that might be down to more manga but the French were early adopters of Manga
Yep, One Piece is a national religion in France.
>but the French were early adopters of Manga
I hear manga was also super popular in Italy decades before it caught on in America.
my grandpa used to watch Lupin the 3d all the times
it was already airing in the 70s in italy, with many other animes
but in the 70s they were reading Tex, Diabolik, dylan Dog, topolino, paperino
yeah I know Lupin III was big in Italy, which is why the 5th series did a special Italian broadcast.
In Japan, they have comics for young adults, they fall under the seinen and josei demographics that target 19-22 year olds specifically. In Pedomerica, the young adult comics are for 5-8 year olds because America wants to push these ideas that children are mature enough to talk about their sexuality and decide if they want to have sex changing surgeries.
>The country that makes e-girl hentai graphic novels and had the first troony in any printed media isn’t “pedo”
Lol
Lmao
Japan didn’t outlaw CP until 2009, dude. The Rurouni Kenshin guy got caught with CP and just got a slap on the wrist. The Welcome to NHK dude was jacking off in front of an Elementary school.
It doesn't hold the same stigma in Japanese culture, and they only made it illegal because of constant b***hing from the UN to do so. In typical Japanese fashion, though, they did the bare minimum to comply with foreign pressure they found distasteful, and the punishments for possession of CP are extremely light by comparison to the west. In the west, having CP gets you put on a permanent sex offender registry with years in prison as a possible sentence. It can totally frick up your entire life. In Japan the minimum sentence is a fine equivalent to a few hundred dollars, and the maximum penalty is a few months in jail + fine of a few thousand dollars equivalent, and to my knowledge nobody's ever been hit with the maximum penalty in Japan. I believe they charged the Ruroni Kenshin guy a fee of about $1200, which isn't nothing, but jail was never even on the table for him.
Why the frick are japs like this? Two nukes werent enough
Unlike the west they understand going after IRL Pedos, many of whom publically denounce e-girl, is more important then wasting time on hysterical failed moral crusades while turning a blind eye to their actual leadership's IRL pedophilia.
... what person steals comics, it's the literal lowest value item?
Remember lego boy from the George Floyd riots?
>Remember lego boy from the George Floyd riots?
You mean the guy who stole a $299.99 Lego set instead of spending an hour smashing open the till to get $50?
Sometimes """people""" steal things to keep them instead of fencing them. And those stores typically sell other shit as well.
LEGO is actually fricking expensive though, especially the big sets with a frickton of pieces. I bet he thought it was a box of actual legos, and didn't have the mental capacity to notice it wasn't nearly as heavy as it should be if that was the case, and subsequently failed to add two and two together.
No it was a skinny white dude, you could totally tell he knew what he wanted and grabbed it in the madness. I want to say he was one of the few who got arrested but I’m not to sure. I just remember that dude who owns my LCS b***hing about him when the picture dropped saying “no man I wouldn’t have done that I would’ve been at the hydration station handing out water and rendering first aid to these freedom fighters” it wasn’t THE reason I stopped my pull from him, but it didn’t help
Huh, could'we sworn it was a jogger. Not that I can be assed to doublecheck. He probably wanted to keep it for the gimmick factor then. Kind of like people stealing road signs with funny names.
I think he was just some nerd wagie who saw the set last time he was shopping and made the wise decision to not buy it because it’s a waste of money. Look up the photo though, it’s almost like a modern day renaissance painting with the joggers in the foreground tearing up a bunch of self service scanners for the money and the lil white dude in the background with both hands clinging a Lego set to his chest
>hyped death
>came out of nowhere as a side character to bolster the sales of the already top selling book
God damn this is sad, is EVERY industry just being headed by sightless old people clinging to what worked three decades ago?
The only LCSs that are going to weather this are the ones that are already game shops as well. It’s impressive the industry has lasted as long as it has, with such a diminishing number of people actually invested in those types of books and the publishers themselves being as incompetent as they are actively CHASING readers away both old and new alike. The LCS I was talking about (the one I stopped going to) is headed by some pretty smart people, they hooked up with the local library and I believe they are the ones heading the scholastic book ordering for the town, which is a damn smart move to keep relevant in these times
>clinging a Lego set to his chest
I suspect we're talking about two different cases. I'm like 90% sure what I'm referring to was an oversized LEGO display, and the dude held it over his head for a while at least.
This is what I was talking about, I honestly don’t have any recollection of what you’re talking about
Come to think of it, wasn't there some dude who stole an oversized duracell battery prop? I might be confusing that with a big yellow lego displaybox.
Honestly this was the ONLY screen grab I personally took during the riots. I just remember thinking “I’m going to watch all of these live streams to make sure I catch the media in lies against these poor people” and it just ended in me watching 24 hours of empty (and sometimes fun) wonton destruction over the course of 3 days all the while watching the news say “naw this shits all going fine” I watched everything from Minneapolis then watched the live stream from Kenosha when the rittenhouse stuff happened. But I stayed out of it after that, I posted my findings on Facebook with the raw live streams and ended a decent amount of fair weather friendships. Now I’m hear b***hing about Spider-Man because it’s not important to b***h about with my name attached
they should have sold manga to stay afloat
One in west Seattle was just robbed and a lot of their stuff stolen. Plus more and more people are reading manga than big 2 cape shit and I NEVER hear anyone talking about indy comics fricking ever.
what counts as indie comics these days?
Too many walls of pop vinyls that never sell.
Because Cinemaphile didn't support them or whatever
Pandemic driving everyone to buy online and rising rent costs making it untenable to hold a physical position. Almost like it's INTENTIONAL.
There is no LCS in my city.
There isn't a LCS within a tri-state area around me that is worth a damn. Every one of them are ran less like a business and more like a clubhouse for the owner and his friends to hang out, presumably funded by the tubbo's boomer parents just to get him out of their house most of the day. Its so stereotypical and hilarious how often it holds true.
Name them.
Seeing manga dominate while american comics continue to fall is hilarious.
The funniest thing is when you see people point to sales increases in comics and they include manga as part of the sales.
The funniest thing is when losers try to argue manga isn't good anymore and not selling or how getting into manga is as frustrating as getting into capeshit lmao.
Yeah saw a dude who tried saying naruto was confusing to get into b/c of the volume count and boruto.
Kinda ridiculous that you have to read 70+ volumes just to be able read another series.
it's not another series that is somehow parallel to Naruto, spawned 10 volumes in
its a sequel, it's still linear
Who claimed anything of the sort?
vicious snake homosexual
that anon in the other thread was a lone contrarian fighting a fight only he believes in
he had the worst contrarian and or wrong takes i have ever read in here
i usually only find those on comic twitter or /r/comicbooks
like he had a series of opinions one worst than the other
It’s so weird how obsessed f/a/gs are with coming here. If manga was so good you’d think they would go storytime, read and discuss it.
There's a big overlap of people who read both manga and capeshit. You are out of touch.
I still want my Battle Shonen Spider-Manga. None of this weird shit that only appeals to weirdo-freaks. Just Peter Parker doing cool shit.
>Manga’s cheaper to print in the states as it’s just reprints of finished material from Japan. They’re just English editions of the exact same books they get in Japan. Publishers like Viz and Kodansha are the western branches of the original Japanese publishers, meaning they don’t need to pay for the license for the shit they already own. Easy money.
I think Marvel commissioned a Spider-man and deadpool manga. It was not anything special.
Their Spider-Manga wasn’t even about Spider-Man. Just some Jap kid with no powers. As if people want to actually see that shit. No shit it got canceled.
>obsessed f/a/gs
The thing that you don't understand is that on Cinemaphile they probably make similar troll threads. Because guess what they are not the inhabitants of any board. They are just here for the (you)s and they do that using the oldest trick in the Catalog, praise japan on non-japanese boards and shit on japan on japanese boards.
We actually do have comics vs manga threads on Cinemaphile and they're exactly the same as here because the boards have a ton of overlap these days.
>boards have a ton of overlap these days.
Cause everyone is a zoomer? So zoomers do indeed read more comics?
That's some serious reaching to come to a conclusion that had nothing to do with my post.
Sorry if it seemed that way but most of Cinemaphile's population is made of teenagers and young adults nowadays
>cause the boards have a ton of overlap these days.
This implies that these new generation read both comics and manga compared to the older ones. I remember a lot of old Cinemaphile wasn't really into western comics, especially a lot of the popular tripgays and Cinemaphile had plenty of "atla is better than every anime ever" threads back in the day(check the archive) so I concluded that the newer generations are more ready to accept the differences.
It was more a statement that the userbase these days doesn't seem to have a home board and doesn't learn board culture like we had in the early 2000's. Now Cinemaphileermin post like Cinemaphileermin on every board, ESLs shitpost without a second thought, the crossover between boards is at an all time high, and election tourism in 2015+ fricked up the boards worse than the iphone did in 2007.
Also nobody actually knows anything about the board’s subject matter anymore. It’s always “oh I haven’t watched/read that but here’s my baseless claim about it”
They do have these threads on Cinemaphile. The difference is that somehow there are even more people completely clueless about comics over there. You wouldn't think it could less knowledgeable than Cinemaphile.
>even more people completely clueless about comics over there
No fricking shit. It's an anime and manga board.
Thats on them, but its more or less on the industry why they are clueless.
>Comics have some of the worst marketing of any industry.
well why would Cinemaphile anons know about how the direct market works it's really something that doesn't impact then at all
Like comics the best manga and anime came out in the 80s and 90s and the Xoomers don’t actually enjoy their effeminate modern shonen they just like being contrarians.
I have plenty of favs from the 70s and 2000s. Speak for yourself man.
An interest in comics doesn't stop at Japan's borders. Anyway, it's funny to watch you people seethe over the flailing inferiority of American comics.
That's a huuge hat.
if only comics had more Huge Hat's
It's gonna be even funnier seeing manga become woke because the wound was left to fester.
Too much e-girl/shota/sexualized teens for that to happen.
They act as a natural filter towards annoying people.
Get ready to kiss those types of manga goodbye. Their days are numbered.
Whatever helps you cope.
I don't need to cope. You, however, better start stockpiling.
see
see
Not really. The doujinshi culture will most likely never die at least not while I am still alive.
Having spoken to people at comicet I remember someone saying.
>If we are banned from the market by the white leftists, we will just go back, to pure digital to, printing and selling by hand if we have to. The rave will just go underground again, and you can't stop the music. You can't stop the party.
It's more complicated than Cinemaphile should handle. Increasing minimum wage absolutely drives inflation. It's not the ONLY thing driving inflation of course.
Emperor Meiji couldn't stop it. Generalisimo Tojo couldn't stop it. Douglass McArthur coudn't stop it. Chairman Xi can't stop it. What makes these people think they can?
>Having spoken to people at comicet
That's interesting. The leftists will likely attack via legal angles, though.
>The leftists will likely attack via legal angles, though.
That is completely expected. And they're prepared to sell their shit out of the back of the Pachinko parlor if it comes down to it.
The elevens actually do vote with their wallet. If a manga goes full wokeshit and dumblr jargon it'll get axed after 5 chapters due to zero sales.
Japan had some bad experiences with the left going nuts with the cultural revolution next door. Being openly political is actually kind of taboo. Besides. They've already had gays and crossdressers for hundereds of years, in very specific roles in society, that the west really doesn't get.
American comics are just goyslop manga.
Manga is just goyslop novels
Is this image supposed to imply that an opinion is correct when enough people believe it?
Yes.
But that's wrong. 25 million people in South Korea believe Kim Jong Un is a demigod who never shits. But he's not, and he does
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
Literally any reason except the obviously true one.
Manga’s cheaper to print in the states as it’s just reprints of finished material from Japan. They’re just English editions of the exact same books they get in Japan. Publishers like Viz and Kodansha are the western branches of the original Japanese publishers, meaning they don’t need to pay for the license for the shit they already own. Easy money.
This. Let alone the fact that they only localize the guaranteed successes which already have pirated bases.
Not to mention the attention they've gotten with anime, capeshit had their chance with the push of movies and it didn't even budge the needle.
>Even now it feels like comics are just not really a talked about commodity compared to other mediums.
No one’s going to pay $5 for 22 pages. Most people don’t have the disposable income to do so. They got bills to pay.
Marvel and DC could publish black and white comics and sell it for 99 cents, people still wouldn't buy it because the terrible writing and out of touch characters and stories that appeal to no one.
>Not to mention the attention they've gotten with anime, capeshit had their chance with the push of movies and it didn't even budge the needle.
One thing to note here is that anime adaptions tend to be near perfect adaptions of the manga. Sometimes they add filler but they generally stick to the manga for both script and storyboard angles.
Capeshit comics however are completely different from their MCU depictions. People would see the Thor movie, go in to a comic store wanting more Thor, and when the shop owner shows them Thor comics, Thor is a girl who spends her time arguing against mens rights advocates and people with opinions Israel. It resembles nothing like Thor depicted in the movie! If Marvel made comics closer to how the MCU is, maybe they would have sold and had a chance to gain a new audience. Marvel stabbed themselves in the put by pumping out wokeshit books instead of mainstream normie entertainment comics during the height of MCU popularity.
>perfect adaptions of the manga.
Oh get the frick out of here. Not even Cinemaphile sucks off to anime this much.
Plus they do a lot of digital only releases, further lowering costs
Back then, they used to flip the books to match up with US comics. After a while, they decided to keep them as-is. Not because they wanted to keep it faithful to the original format, but because it was cheaper to keep it that way.
blackrock doing everything they can to put people out of business so they can buy up properties.
>>lcs closes en masse
>It's manga's fault
Really? It's not the political pandering, constant events and renumbering, rent hikes, shop lifting, etc. It's Japanese comics...that have been doing the same thing for 20 years.
readers have a finite amount of time and money
they have to chose between manga (various genres, from fujo to historical) and american comics (capeshit)
actually they'll probably choose some webcomic on naver
The truth is it’s their denial of everything you said. That’s why it’s dying.
That shop sold manga too.
ITT: South Americans tries to ignore why the economy is bad in another continent and instead discuss how it’s le heckin manga owning the dykes
Because when people think of comics, they think of capeshit, which are lame as frick outside the adaptations. It’s the same boomers trying to seem hip. When My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Men their creators where in their twenties. Zeb Wells is fricking 46, why is he writing Spider-Man? The top mangas always change every few years, it was once Shield Hero and Black Clover, then Spy x Family and now Sakamoto Days and Kaiju no8 are on the rise. While comics is always the same shit written by the same people.
>While comics is always the same shit written by the same people.
Because comics aren’t lucrative or cool. Why would a top artist work in comics when he could just work in animation or games? Dude gets more money that way.
It shouldn't all be about the money. Maybe that's why comics suck, zero creativity just greed.
>It shouldn't all be about the money
It is if you got bills to pay, which most people do.
You can pay bills working a part time job too. Maybe you should leave your ego at the door and understand you work in comics.
>You can pay bills working a part time job too
Not in this economy.
Yes you can. Comics suck because it's full of hacks that want to be millionaires.
>Yes you can
No you can’t. Do you even have a job? Live on your own?
I live with my girlfriend but I'd say you could still live a modest life alone even working part time if you don't have to pay rent.
Nah but current comics market is hella scalpy at least for the big 2.
>High overpriced issues & event tie ins that are just glorified minis detract me from expaning my pull list.
I don't know, man. Say you're a writer and you're working on two titles. Even if your rate is 200 dollars per page, you're still getting about 4.5 grand a month.
I'm talking about consumers not the workers.
Most people pay rent if they want to live on their own. Buying a whole house is expensive. You’d need a pretty good job if you wanna pay off the mortgage.
I live off welfare just fine.
Leech.
Just proving a point. If I can live good on welfare then you can live better working part time.
you didn't prove a point. welfare isn't designed to live on. you absolutely cannot pay modern rent on welfare unless you live in a Hud building.
The upper middle class don’t get this. Those jackasses tend to live in their own bubble where they’re totally ignorant of what it’s like below their social class.
Win-O threads on Cinemaphile
Frick Cinemaphile. These guys suck massive dick.
Big shock, the industry which targeted just pubescent straight white males has seen their market vanish. Maybe they should have tried to get a more diverse audience at some point over the last 70 years.
Demographics of buyers for comics/GN/Manga.
Mangasisters…
>30+ oldgays huffing nostalgia farts
Checks out.
>Buying comics/manga
>In 2023
Which manga though?
difference is, manga for women is a power fantasy that appeals to them, no shame in it. women want himbos, gay love, smut, 50 shades of gray stuff? the give it to them no problem
but superhero comics that used to be for men? they don't give you that anymore
They also do cute romantic comedies, which rarely exist in American comics outside of gay tumblr shit and indie comics depicting REAL HUMAN DRAMA that aren't cute.
>which rarely exist in American comics outside of gay tumblr shit
Yea, it's rare to find cute romance in American comics that isn't just gay shit or tumblr shit.
>try to le strong and independent female superheroes in an attempt to pander to women
>they buy boizu rabu mangoes instead
LMAO
>itt: boomer capeshit readers fuming and coping
Why manga is winning
Went woke gone broke. Many such cases.
Speaking of France. I remember that article about french authors being surprised when visiting japan that the kind of manga that they would have to go indie to be allowed to publish is serialized in a mainstream seine/josei magazine. I might post the wiki.
Comic books were already a niche hobby.
Now even less people are buying.
>Like Sam Raimi Spiderman and most X-Men cartoons
>Get told that I'm a filthy secondary if I don't read the comics
>Read the comics
>Shit is not only bleak and depressing but expensive and rare to fully read each floppy
I can just roll up to B&N or Borders to read and get into anything from Jump and feel engaged and less stressed.
Comics have turned to shit recently.
Half of what i used to read has been cancelled over the last three or so years. And the other half that still exists is trying to fricking hard to not be a superhero book it's fricking frustrating.
I dropped Fantastic four when it turned into all drama, and maybe there might be 1-2 pages dedicated to a supervillain appearing, and they are always defeated off panel.
I tried Darkhawk, and it was wall to wall teen angst drama about someone having cancer, and Darkhawk does not even appear in the second issue. He is only there for 3 pages in issue 3. No villains appear in the first 4 issues.
Green Lantern, also angst ridden drama with no actual superhero shit at al 5 issues in. Another noname villain appears for about 3 pages, is defeated off panel.
Thor....same shit, except that one stretches back to about 2018 or so with the villains only appearing for about 1 page and being defeated off panel. The rest is dedicated to wordy melodrama and angsting.
I just dropped each book one by one since none of it contained anything I can give a shit about until I stopped giving a shit about comics in general. What the frick is with all comics being nothing but CW-tier drama shit with no capes, no villains, no heroic plots?
Okay all I'm seeing in this thread is
>If you prefer manga then you're a pedo!
>Oh yea, but if you prefer western cape comics you're a pedo!
Where did all the insults in our society go? We only have one accusation to sling around for everything now.
Tbh we can all be pedos.
>why is a store closing when their suppliers have been replacing all their product with pallets of shit for 20 years?
Beats me
Just wanted to throw out another idea I had for publishers:
Comics could be a great way to learn a second language and publishers could make it a lot easier than it is. Simply print one page of a foreign comic in its original language (French, Japanese, Spanish) and the next page is the same exact page in English. Maybe add some translator's notes at the end of the chapter if necessary.
Because comics are a visual medium, the reader can see the different contexts in which casual/formal language is employed.
Too expensive.
Nothing in Fresno is beloved
that's the answer to why
>Nothing in Fresno is beloved
Finally, a local's opinion.
I remember that in 2011 or so, in the "pre-SJW/woke era", every Amerimutt media and journo mocking every Japanese media calling them "gay" and "backward" and bragging about how advanced America or the west is, and many Amerimutt geek audiences were swallowing the narrative and wallowing in the sense of superiority. Most of them were millennials but their mindset hasnt basically changed since then, they are incapable of soul-searching, and now theyve totally lost their way with their woke/tradcon cult.
Amerimutts totally deserve this consequence. I dont feel bad for you at all. You were/are so fricking stupid and self-absorbed.
>Boomer/Gen X media outlets mock Japanese media
>Frick you, Millennials
Also try living with 30 million crypto-israelites and see how well-balanced you turn out.
Have you seen how stupid capeshit(the #1 comics sellers) has been in the past decade?
hell, past decades really.
The last thirty years of cape shit has been a never ending cycle of
>try to push out old readers for new readers
>replace old characters with new characters that don’t have as much baggage to write for but are literal shadows of popular hero
>never ending events that change everything but revert back to the stays quo within 6 months
I don’t understand it, these books were fine with dealing with ongoing stories for DECADES without feeling like you can’t just hop into the current issue and still get a satisfying story on its own. These books aren’t worth the cover price and the “owners” get mad at us for pointing that out to them.
Publishers never really got over the idea of comics as collectibles. Even after the 90s crash nearly killed the industry they still think they can go back to that bubble where all the stories are big crossovers where people have to collect them all to make sense of the narrative.
Which is funny considering how little side books in events ever actually matter and how giddy they always seem to be to interrupt their stories in order to see if THIS TIME they’ll get a sales bump by being a part of an event no one wanted. That thinking literally killed any momentum Kamala had how can they STILL be making these mistakes?
It's uneven.
Big crossover events do matter, but in the sense that they completely derail the smaller book's ongoing.
You want an object lesson on the damage events stuff can do just look at the first few years of Miles Morales' existence. He almost immediately got pulled into Ultimate Civil War, then Secret Wars, then Civil War 2, basically any time his story was about to go somewhere and lead to some sort of establishing he'd get sucked into a crossover event and oops back to square one again.
Kamala got the same things just with X-men vs Inhumans, and now she's getting killed off in Spider-man and resurrected in X-men.
Nobody's allowed to just have their own book anymore.
There's a rumor on Twitter that this user on CBR is actually one of Dan Slott's alt accounts, which if true provides insight to why Marvel would keep doing it, even though they're getting diminishing returns
Only collectors care for death/return, Wolverine's was a joke.
I don't think collectors really cared about Wolverine's death and return. I simply forgot about it months in and there didn't seem to be any buzz for it
It helps solidify the impression that America's comic publishers are a rat-king of self-seeking sadistic scumbags and wouldn't you rather step back and watch it die then help the thing stay alive?
I want the LCS to live, but they are mostly an extension of these people. Diversity if you want to live, damn it. I'm not interested in solely indulging your highly specific power fantasies. I want no part of it of this fruitless, endless hoping, and these humiliation rituals. I'm not patroning that shit.
The more I think of it the more it's because people had the wrong reaction to the 90s crash
>Marvel decided to stick to rollbacks during the Harras era which worked for something like Avengers but didn't work for Spider-Man
>This got worse in the 00s when the mentality under Quesada/Jemas/etc was that the characters were brands yet being handled by people who have a very inconsistent way of handling brands, so it amounted to "run in place while pissing the audience off"
>There was the mentality that "these old comics from the 60s/70s/80s/90s have outdated storytelling except for Moore and Miller, we need to change how we do stories" and we got decompressed comics that wasted the audience's time
In retrospect the 00s were a perfect example of this as well. Emerald Twilight pissed a lot of fans off in the 90s and the takeaway DC had was "that got a lot of engagement let's do a big event like that literally every five weeks"
Oh I know but 00s was basically going off on what Marvel and DC learned from the 90s crash, which was a lot of the wrong lessons
Another one I forgot to add to the list was the push for writer-driven comics
This works when it's someone like Alan Moore but is less effective when you have someone doing too many talking heads
are bookshops and Libraries going to be the next comic stores specialising in Manga and Kids graphic Novels?
>All the big chain book stores in my town are gone, and only my LCS is left to fill my needs
What an odd feeling this is.
Does anyone here have an LCS that sells video games? I've been going to them for like 30 years now and it occurs to me I've never seen one that sold an X-men or Spider-man game despite there being so many on the market.
One of the spots I used to go to as a kid was in the same building as a used game store, but no for some reason comics and games remain separate. Hell the Newbury I go to doesn’t even sell MOVIES anymore, a small comic corner with giant music sections and a wall of funko pops
So here's the interesting second half of my post: There's a vintage video game store that I go to on occasion and they actually sell video game comics by the cash register. It's basically the only place I ever saw that sold the Assassins Creed books.
We're back already? Holy frick that last thread was fricking moronic. A lot of great points were made about why comics are failing. Lack of easy distribution, refusal to publish any other genre, poor visibility in stores, etc. But the sad truth is that comics are absolutely fricked with no way out. The problem with the industry is that the writing was on the wall for the past decade but the people making the comics are so hostile and antagonistic, they refuse to adapt to a changing market. In order to fix comics you would need to clean house, both the characters and everyone making them. It really is over for this industry and another crash is soon to come.
>We're back already?
Same thread, same points. Can't escape it. Comics aren't cool, history bad, business bad, creative decisions bad, fans bad. I truly believe there is no other medium where its so-called fans despise the very medium itself and don't actually like or understand it. The average comic book fan is so devoid of any actual knowledge about the medium that it is painful.
These past threads have just been a sad angry "man" being told to leave his burning home but the "man" responds "NO YOU LEAVE". Pathetic but this average anon is also your average executive in the comic book industry. They refuse to change and blame everyone else. Everyone involved in this industry are bootlickers who only got to where they are through "connections" and not hard work and talent. The rot is to the core. The only hope of survival for the medium is a complete clean house.
>Everyone involved in this industry are bootlickers who only got to where they are through "connections" and not hard work and talent.
I can't agree with the everyone part. Recently I went to a small convention.
>Cheap entry.
>Artist driven.
>Commissioned a load of art.
>No cosplayers.
>Boxes full of cheap comics.
>Had a chat with a bunch of artists and creators.
>Had a drink with some artists.
Deep down there are some decent quality people. Half the trouble is the artists aren't driving the books.
>Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
They really did take a big huge shit in the well.
>what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of
None of them have really lived to have any experiences.
>Though did you read what you posted?
I did.
>it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
On Cinemaphile it is typically one of these
>he was mean to Chris Claremont and pushed away good creators while demolishing them
>his tenure made a bunch of the best stuff and he kept the hack frauds in line
>The rot is to the core
>Commissioned a load of art.
You want to know how twisted comics and the industry is? You can find an actual page of a comic or commission some art work relatively cheaply. From even the top artists in the industry!
I was walking past a gallery in this shopping mall and it had a Stan Lee exhibit. Stan Lee wasn't a fricking artist. Part of the Stan Lee collection was a huge Thor print. The art was by Esad Ribić but I couldn't see his name anywhere. You could actually commission Esad to do that drawing for a better price than that print was. It was astronomically expense.
it's not that they refuse to change it's that this is what comics exist for in their eyes.
Profit is only a means to an end for these homosexuals, promoting anti-whiteness and sexual deviance is what the israelites who own western comics want comics to do, so that's what they do. All of Marvel and DC could go bankrupt and the israelites who own them won't give a shit if along the way they managed to normalize race mixing, homosexuality, and hatred of Whites.
...and I will never stop rubbing that truth in peoples faces no matter how many times the troony jannies ban me for "racism"
>These past threads have just been a sad angry "man" being told to leave his burning home but the "man" responds "NO YOU LEAVE".
Most people accept the house is on fire. Most people name all the issues and problems. But none of us can solve it without just blanket statements about "destroy the whole industry". I can't name how many times they have tried to do stuff and it just hasn't sold. Good comics, good formats, will not sell and it is impossible to market them properly.
>Good comics, good formats, will not sell
We're listening.
>I can't name how many times they have tried to do stuff and it just hasn't sold.
The problem is it is always half ass measure they frick up.
>Post Brightest day/Flashpoint they were planning on a revamp but eventually that evolved into New 52.
>DiDio decided to do the New 52 because it would be a new starting point and get over the hump of "Where should I start?"
>Fresh start that would allow new readers on.
>Only a huge number of titles were legacy titles and continuations, like Geoff Johns Green Lantern, and continued on not a true reboot.
>Some big mainstream media outlets did actually mention it, which is unusual, I have only seen comics mentioned like 3-4 times over the past god knows how many years in mainstream media.
>But they never actually had any real marketing to get new readers into it.
>Some quirkier titles like Dial H for Heroes were thrown under the bus pretty sharpish despite actually being different.
>Geoff Johns Justice League was bland as frick but had enough blockbuster feeling despite all the characters acting nothing like they should.
>Scott Snyder's Court of Owls actually did rather well despite being a Dickbats script he changed for the reboot.
>Grant Morrisons Action Comics isn't actually a good place for new readers to start.
>Quality was all over the place, they did far too many initial titles.
>Crossover bullshit began to majorly infect stuff and the whole Trinity of Sin/Forever Evil and Pandora stuff was too convoluted.
Everyone b***hed it was a reboot and ruining their favourite stuff but it was a half assed/half measure with no real strategy behind it. They had too many titles and flung feces at the wall. There is a small minority of comic fans who actually did start with New 52, which is surprising, but this is tiny. It was a huge wasted opportunity with no real foundation or planning.
decided to do the New 52 because it would be a new starting point and get over the hump of "Where should I start?"
To this day I think that was an inherently bullshit claim. Comics do that whole renumbering thing all the fricking time. It's why "Just start at #1" doesn't work for capeshit; there's multiple #1s. Hell, half the big names don't even debut in #1. Spider-man first showed up in #15. Batman in #27.
>Comics do that whole renumbering thing all the fricking time.
This is the New 52 paradox. Because yes, they do renumbering all the damn time. But New 52 was like, doing a whole line refresh at the same time and saying, "This is more than a renumbering," while it being half a renumbering and half reboot with no planning or marketing behind it. Brightest Day brought back a bunch of old characters from the dead like Swamp Thing, Aquaman etc. Then Flashpoint happened. All the stories that were planned post-Brightest Day got rebranded into New 52 reboot™. DiDio and others really tricked themselves into believing it was more than renumbering. It was really a last ditch shit fling at the window. Because the New 52 did give DC a boost for a while. But yeah, ultimately it was the same gimmick. And this is the point I am making, when companies try smaller books (tankoban size) or different genres etc, they don't sell because they are half assed gimmicks. New 52 lets the editors say, "Well we tried a fresh start and it didn't work!" It absolves them of responsibility because they can then turn their noses up at you and go, "We tried it your way!!"
>"We tried it your way!!"
This is a common tactic. Pretend to do what someone says but purposefully frick it up. Then act like the person was wrong.
Going back to the burning house metaphor, what happens when your house burns down? The best option would be to build a better one that won't burn down. You don't build over the crumbling building, you get a new land and start from scratch.
The problem with the metaphor is this shit has never fully burned down enough to rebuild. It is a shame COVID didn't do it. It came close. DC ended up wrecking its collected edition department
Comics aren't a burning house, more like a crumbling one. And there is so many issues that you should just pull it down and start again but some homie is talking about some period features in the dining room that dat back to the late 1700s and someone from the council is telling you it is a grade 1 listed building and can't be demolished.
>refusal to publish any other genre
PEOPLE DO NOT BUY MOST OTHER GENRES.
Manga has a diversity of genres anon, and look at their section in ANY book store compared to American comics.
It’s honestly fine that comics aren’t cool, cool is a temporary state of mind. The problem with them is that they’re boring and written by people who don’t understand the value of the five fricking dollars the books costs.
That’s pretty cool, one of the old game stores I used to go to (which got bagged for fricking tax evasion of all things) at most sold old anime VHSs.
It doesn’t change anything about the fact that there would be more genres in western comics if people would buy them but they won’t.
Something Cinemaphile overlooks is that many mangaka took their pacing from old American movies, not comics.
Capeshit's pacing, spacing, and action often hits me like a brick wall. Tons of monologuing rather than letting a scene naturally unfold. A lot of telling instead of showing.
>It’s honestly fine that comics aren’t cool, cool is a temporary state of mind.
>temporary
Something that rarely gets mentioned in these threads. The average person thinks comic books are for losers that only losers care about. And even MULTI BILLION DOLLAR movie franchises hasn't changed that perception at all.
>The problem with them is that they’re boring and written by people who don’t understand the value of the five fricking dollars the books costs.
Because they cater for losers and are made by losers who are bullying other losers.
>https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/why-are-some-comics-pros-so-damn?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Being cool isn't just some temporary state of mind, it is the driver behind it all. It is what has driven it into the dirt. Comics are regressive because of a state of mind that creates regression and becomes a cycle. We are always talking about decline, why? They have been talking about that for decades now. The social stigma will always damage the business and creativity of it.
The problem is that comics aren’t written by writers anymore, but primarily by the sad ducks who liked comics. So they don’t come from a lived experience being expanded onto the page to fit the fantastical nature of the genre, but rather they come from the fanatical place of people who have nothing other to think than what the character they like should be like from memory
Another thing is Japan is a small country with a large population that uses public transportation often. So people there have time to read disposable comics they pick up for five bucks to waste the hour or so of transportation they have to deal with.
So what if comics aren't cool? Books aren't cool and people still read. There are a lot of things people do that don't make them pussy magnets and they do it anyway.
Everything has a counter balance in status. Books aren't cool? But there is still booktok, huge celebrity drive book clubs, stuff being driven by social media. When a book is adapted into a movie it has a huge boost in sales.
It isn't just that "comics aren't cool" but that the stigma attached to them is a certain cultural poison. I mean this goes all the way back to the CCA and Fredric Wertham. Modern stereotypes of comics fans exist for a reason.
>by the sad ducks who liked comics
Half the people in comics would rather be liking screenplays and don't actually like the medium or understand it. The other half of people are the sad ducks who liked comics but don't understand the medium and just push what they like and massively bad mouth what they hated. But they do that in huge frick you changes to a character.
Oh I’m well aware that a LARGE part of the problem with comics today is that the writers are typically just failed tv and movie writers with a swarthy agent to keep them getting paid. But outside of that the bulk of people who LIKE comics writing comics are just bitter nerds replicating what they liked from comics as kids rather than just writing stories informed by experiences had and lived lived to inform the soap opera they’re not a part of. Though did you read what you posted? Because Brevoort responded to him and it was GLORIOUS. Though in all honesty it’s weird to see a modern writer write positively about shooter, it seems like he’s an odd target of ire more often than not
>positively about shooter
He basically says the guy was bullied by editors and then went on to bully? Fecal gravity? Not really positive.
Books are unironically cooler than comics.
You are so wrong it's mind boggling.
People put out western comic, nobody buys it. People put out fantasy comic, nobody buys it. People put out war comic, nobody buys it. People put out sport comic, nobody buys it. People put out horror comic, nobody buys it. People puts out romance comic, nobody buys it. Facts!!!
>People put out sport comic, nobody buys it.
When the hell is the last time someone put out a sport comic that wasn't just some non-fiction biography shit?
The closest I can think of is Do a Power Bomb, but that depends on whether or not you consider professional wrestling a real sport.
Once again proving nobody reads anything anymore and just makes up shit to complain about not caring one bit if it’s true or not because all that matters is you thinking and more importantly feeling like your imaginary grievances are real
>Gay shit
Yea, I wonder why no one reads it.
Yet you read manga which is full of gay shit
I don't read gay manga.
I can tell just from one glance at that cover that that comic is gay as frick.
This kind of shit is why they don't sell, you can't just make a sports comic, you have to make a gay sports comic and then wonder why people aren't interested.
I haven't seen in my store also would it hurt to make the black guy less homosexual looking?
the would defeat the purpose of pushing gay Black folk on people, which is what that comic is for
comics are largely digital these days and the overhead of running a physical store is getting worse while sales and interest are dropping like crazy; this is the most logical outcome. Just look at the big two, they exist solely as IP farms now, the industry hasn't produced something worth buying in over a decade; what little go is let is all South American artists that haven't gone full gay... yet
Given the artist and writers love for low quality yaoi? The homosexual looking is the point.
It isn't even good quality yaoi. It was given a tryout for the storytime of pain series. I don't think it made the cut.
>those hair clips
That “girl” is a troony isn’t he?
People have no problem buying those genres when they are manga. Clearly the problem is not genres. The problem is comics and their distribution system as well as some kind of stigma people have toward them as a result of over-saturation of superheroes. When you say "comic book" the first thing people think of is superheroes from Marvel and DC, they don't think of niche indie comics or Euro comics. That is a problem that needs to change.
>Clearly the problem is not genres.
Yes, the problem is the market ie the readers who WILL NOT BUY ANYTHING THEY CLAIM TO WANT
How are these people supposed to know these comics exist when there's virtually no advertising? No word of mouth? These non-readers aren't frequenting LCS locations which is just about the only place such comics are seen. Comic sections at book stores are increasingly smaller and moved to more remote locations of the store, which they have no reason to visit because again, no advertising.
Again, the main problem is distribution and stigma. There's no attempt by the industry's dominant players to reform the image of comic books in the mind of the American public. They're fine with the American public thinking Comic books are Marvel/DC superheroes because Marvel and DC spent decades building their dominant position off of superheroes and are loathe to give it up.
Manga has no advertising. 90% of translated manga does not have an anime so STFU about that.
>WILL NOT BUY ANYTHING THEY CLAIM TO WANT
>"I want a sports comic!"
>"Here you go anon, here's that gay sports comic you wanted!"
>"What the frick? I said I want a sports comic, not a gay sports comic."
>"OH MY GOD YOU PEOPLE WON'T BUY THE STUFF YOU CLAIM TO WANT!"
What's wrong with it being gay
I don't want to read gay stories.
It's that simple.
If you can't provide non-gay media, then you're not providing me what I want, ergo I'm not buying it.
It's overrated
>baaaaaaawwwwww the gays
>baaaaaaaawwwwwwww sports is meant to be straight!
There’s nothing straight about being obsessed about bunch of muscular sweaty men in a field showcasing their bodies
See this?
This is why your industry is dying.
Just come out of the closet, Jared
I'm sorry about your relationship with your father, anon.
One day you'll earn his love, though I'm not holding my breath.
>I made a romantic comic that reads like a brick wall and no one bought it.
So factor it into the overall cost then. You're gonna learn French with this special edition, many people would pay a little extra to invest in themselves.
It just boggles my mind that an industry charging $5 for 20 pages of story wants to b***h about the cost of production.
Bullshit.
Can Western comics properly relay action in order to render sport anyway?
Everyone thinks the CCA is legitimate regulation of the comic book industry, but it's not. It was created by capeshit publishers to drive out their competitors by scaring mothers away from buying the competition. Pretty slimy move that's moronic the talent pool and the industry as a whole.
I hope non-American anons understand that we live with millions of people who think fooling the market with fake regulation to kill the competition is a legitimate market strategy. That's who we live with. That's American life.
>It just boggles my mind that an industry charging $5 for 20 pages of story wants to b***h about the cost of production.
Inflation happened. By raising the minimum wage, everything got more expensive to compensate.
Increasing the minimum wage doesn't cause everything to spike in price tho
Restricting gas will do that, however.
Gas is our economic blood, you liberal dipshits. Windmills are not.
All the green new deal did was ensure DC's synagogues got a cut from taxpayer-subsidied bird-killing windmills and self-exploding electric cars.
Turns out vilifying gas tycoons was a bad idea. Actually, they can take the hate, but not subsidizing costly investments for our economic blood has increased the price of everything.
Capitalism is poorly understood.
>reddit spacing to help you understand
DC wanted to keep comics at $2.99 but everyone would rather pay $3.99 or $5.99 for Marvel comics so they raised their prices not similar level. Once again the market did the exact opposite of what people here now b***h about
Good. I hate comics.
It’s weird how this board is full of people who hate everything and then bemoan that the industry is dying like it’s a bad thing.
Almost as if some of these posts are automated
The average person doesn't want to buy fricking floppies.
there are a lot of reasons to stop buying comics and but not to start so eventually they were going to have a customer problem
Friends have asked me for recommendations but then ignore them. Every Google search is the same thing.
>Someone reads Watchmen or Sandman or something, then stops.
Or
>Finds a Batman list, reads Batman Year One and TDKR and then stops.
It is a dead end.
Maybe Marvel and DC should go all-in on reprints.
Most collected edition sales are the same few evergreen books.
Then present it in a manga-style format. Not the right-to-left thing but the everything else. Make the thing actually nice to hold in your hands.
The format isn't build to be like that, is half the issue. There are some lovely collected editions out there but they aren't build to be carried about and read.
Marvel are currently doing a line of books for kids reprinting the old original marvel series and those books are a smaller format. Wonder how they are selling.
when it comes to format you also have to consider how the story is structured, none of the Marvel 60s books would be considered Decompressed so it might be hard to read in a Tankōbon format
Marvel has tried with the digest format for almost two decades and they never seem to catch on.
Manga is popular because it’s simpler and people of every race watched DBZ 30 years ago when it was dubbed here anon
Manga is more popular because it has more of everything that people want.
lol...all the autismo freaks in the thread blaming everything except the actual cause, which is hiring gross fricking mentally deranged loser morons that suck ass at what they do, and then cry about it on twitter and blame all the fans they've already pushed away.
You hire people like Sana Amanat, Vita Aoili, Tamara Bondvillan, Mags Visagio, heather Antos, Zoe Quinn, Chuck Wendig, Tee Franklin, Tom Taylor, Whale Simone, and literally any other fricking moron whose main goal it was push as MANY normal people away from comics as possible. And they did the job well. Now they are crying because they aren't making any money.
"If you dont like my politics, dont buy my book" Guess what Knock off Janeane Garofalo, we didn't.
Frick them, and anyone who supported their homosexualry that destroyed an ENTIRE industry. You destroyed something people actually loved, all because you had daddy issues and hated straight dudes so much, you wanted to take that happiness away from them. FRICK YOU IM GLAD YOUR INDUSTRY IS DEAD. I have manga.
Comics were in the shitter before those freaks came along. Normal people ain’t gonna buy shit they think is for creepy nerds.
We don't need normies! An increasingly small demographic can keep the lights on in a world of rising costs! That's basic economics!
And they have to raise the prices if only relying on that increasingly small demographic.
They didnt help it at all. They made everything worse. Everything those less thatn human filth touch turns to toxic shit.
They are absolutely the reason comics are dying. You defending them means youre part of the problem as well. Notice how they arent allowed into manga, and its doing amazing? Its so good in fact, that the parasites try to claim it as their own sales, because they know they cant compete without sticking gay dudes or fat chicks sitting around eating and talking for half of a comic.
People like you should have held the gate better, but instead, you just let them in. You are just as much of a problem as they are and I hope you die soon. Frick you.
>They are absolutely the reason comics are dying
So why did the comic industry nearly die in the 1990s?
it didn't moron. Marvel went bankrupt in the 90's because of overstepping too fast and buying to much shit up. It wasn't the comics, and their quality remained consistent throughout. Buying a bunch of companies that didn't make money and gross mismanagement doesn't mean the industry died out.
Keep supporting the cancer though bro. Mags needs you to front her another $1000 because her family can't get groceries this week. fricking clown.
Okay so you've explained what happened to Marvel.
What about WIldstorm? How come Jim Lee had to sell it to DC?
How about Awesome Comics? Why did that fold?
Eclipse? What happened to Eclipse? For a while they were third behind Marvel and DC.
Or Comico? Remember Grendel? Why did Comico die?
>remember all those companies and comics people never read to being with except when wizard was dick riding Grendel??? DO YOU CHUD???
And wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee wanted to focus on making art, not running a business... but you already knew that.
And Marvel bought out Malibu because it was the only company making any kind of push into their market successfully.
all those companies and comics people never read to being with except when wizard was dick riding Grendel??? DO YOU CHUD???
You should remember Eclipse because that was the company that put out Miracleman.
>that put out Miracleman.
No one here reads comics
>No one here wants to read superhero comics in fricking 2023 are you fricking kidding me how is this not sinking in holy frick
I disagree with both these statements. I'm in the store every week. I buy small press stuff and capeshit. But I reckon I am in the minority.
>What about WIldstorm? How come Jim Lee had to sell it to DC?
>And wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee wanted to focus on making art, not running a business... but you already knew that.
Wildstorm was sold to DC because Jim Lee lost money on the Gen 13 animated movie and needed to recoup money fast.
>Notice how they arent allowed into manga,
Some of the most famous and wealthy manga authors are women. There have been explicitly female-focused manga basically since the industry started, and that includes lots of homosexual stuff. You are hopelessly clueless. Manga is doing fine because their industry isn't being strangled by an ass-backwards distribution system, isn't being stifled by a creatively bankrupt genre (superheroes) which is heavily pushed by the dominant publishers, and it has a significantly lower barrier to entry for new talent, and authors are allowed to keep the rights to their own stories which encourages publishers to continually publish new stories rather than reuse the same IPs forever.
Not all women are woke, butthole. Many female mangaka understand how critical it is that boys have noble heroes to look up to. Let's say they even have fujo inclinations: they keep that shit away from media intended to shape boys into men.
I'm talking about the woke far left ass moronic degenerates that make it their sole job to stomp on anything fun. not women you fricking sexist piece of dog shit.
This is another reason the industry is dead. Someone mentions a list of people and your moronic ass goes "REEEEE YOU DONT LIKE WOMEN REEEEEE" like thats still a thing that works in 2023.
Clearly it does work considering how much you’re seething about it
You refuse to accept the fact this industry was circling the drain 30+ years ago, long before woke shit started infecting it. You just want your boogieman cause you want to go back to the "heckin based" era of the 1990s when the industry was barely surviving thanks to all the idiotic practices I already mentioned. Dumbfricks like you deserve your dead industry. Even if every wokist was expelled from the industry tomorrow it wouldn't save anything. Even if you went back in time to prevent a single wokist from ever being hired to work at either of the big 2, and prevented every single woke agenda topic from ever worming its way into comics, we'd still be pretty much right here where we are today, with manga eating western comics alive.
lol. it absolutely wouldnt. if you got rid of every homosexual in comics today, i'd go back to buying them tomorrow. As would a lot of people. but go off I guess. Maybe you can find a job coding.
Oh frick, sorry, meant to respond to someone else
Hold up. There's a HUGE fricking difference between Female Focused by Women, and fricking Kibblesmith.
>Notice how they arent allowed into manga, and its doing amazing?
No. They ARE allowed into manga. And their shit is only allowed to go as far as it sells. Which is one story in a third tier monthly or so.
>chicks sitting around eating and talking for half of a comic
What the hell is going on in all the slice-of-lofe garbageCinemaphile has been posting about for years?
Anons on Cinemaphile seem to think all manga is weekly shonen jump titles. And even then they don't acknowledge the sports and comedy titles.
The Japanese Tea ceremony is a fierce battlefield, and has killed and saved many soldiers in it's time. Do not underestimate it. See Hyogemono or the Tea Ceremony part of Usagi Yojimbo for more explanation.
>Comics crash in the 90s long before the current woke trend
>thinks wokists are the reason it's shit
Wokists are just opportunistic parasites. They infested the comic industry because it was desperate to turn things around and attract new audiences after decades of moribund sales. Yeah, the woke shit has been a stunning failure, as it usually is, but it's not the ultimate reason the comic book industry is dying. It's just the equivalent of trying to cure cancer by infecting yourself with HIV.
>tfw comfy manga and newspaper comic reader
What was the last monthly comic that really brought new people to comics stores? The Walking Dead? My money is on TWD, which ended in 2019. Listen frickers, you wanna save this sinking ship, u need like a new walking dead, something different yet easy to digest to normies.
So what you're saying is, the only way a comic can possibly sell anymore is if they have a multi-million dollar adaptation? And that's somehow a sustainable business model?
Comic shops did this to themselves by being dark dank dungeons for the type of manchildren who shun outsiders because its the only thing they have and they can't stand the idea of normies coming in and gawking at them. Kevin Smith said almost exactly that but in a way that he apparently thought sounded positive. "We don,t want outsiders coming in here going oh this is weird, this is silly".
Reminder that manga is only cool and popular in the US because black people like it.
They'll hate you because you spoke the truth, senpai.
Manga is popular because it also has the anime pipeline funneling straight into it. While cartoons are languishing.
And cartoons aren't popular because they're similarly lame.
Pretty much, in a lot of ways they're worse than western comics and everything it has it made worse in western animation.
Well that and Hispanics, and of course Asians.
Manga just appeals to more people, from all ages.
Whites, Hispanics, and Asians already liked manga and anime, and black nerds too, but it was a loser pastime. When blacks became the new vogue, their music, their fashion, and even their nerdy pursuits became "cool".
Take a good guess who is behind this, and ultimately who is behind the rise in popularity of manga and anime in the US. I'll give you a clue: it's not the Japanese.
>The israelites made manga popular in the west
That could be construed as technically accurate simply because the publishing and distribution landscape (for all print) is largely israeli-owned. But in reality manga is simply taking aware market share from western comics because it contains appealing narratives that have been effectively purged from the latter, at least in its commercial segments.
Take pic related, none of the big western publishers would EVER greenlight a story such as this today - it would be considered problematic as it depicts traditional gender roles, patriarchal structures, prostitution as immoral and so on.
You're right. Manga does offer something the US does not, and cannot, offer.
However, both of these were effectively orchestrated by people from the same group. Maybe because one is clearly more profitable in today's world.
They know it's a sinking ship because they've made all the holes, so it's onto the next venture.
Not enough manga on shelf to prop of revenue.
This is unironically it. All 'purist' shops outside of big metropolitan areas are getting purged.
Honestly
Who knows?
Comic stores have a weird economy of their own, because yes, many have gone under but I’m always amazed to see ones that are not only around but have stood the test of time. Like there’s this comic store in my town on the corner of the Main Street and it’s beloved by everyone and it’s still doing well, it survived the 2008 recession, the COVID 19 Pandemic, and also the current inflation, so who knows how it’s still kicking, maybe it helps that they have a good manga selection
How many of you pitched a comic to a publisher?
None, my Ideas are glorified fanfics, and good luck trying to enter the Comic industry in Colombia
>recently
This has been going on for decades. Turns out a niche market with a main product at a bad price point has trouble sustaining thousands of independent physical retail stores.
Marvel comics should have had a major boom when Marvel movies were the biggest thing in the world a decade ago and interest in superheroes was at an all time high. Marvel failed to capitalize on this though and their comics are still failing.
Comics are just a dead genre as a whole. Why read comics when manga are cheaper, have better writing and art, and have much more creative freedom compared to the average Western comic?
On top of that, physical distribution of media is dead in general. Just look at Gamestop's issues in recent years as an example. Comics need to switch to switch to a digital only distribution model (with maybe a monthly mail subscription as an alternative) to compete in the modern media marketplace.
>Comics
>genre
moron.
Because comics are fricking dying as a medium and the publishers are militantly refusing to address what's causing it.
It's shocking that Mark Millar and to a lesser extent Dan DiDio are literally the only relevant creators who seem to be addressing the destruction of their medium/industry in front of their very eyes.
>It's shocking that Mark Millar and to a lesser extent Dan DiDio are literally the only relevant creators who seem to be addressing the destruction of their medium/industry in front of their very eyes.
u wot
He's got a podcast where he talks with a different guest each episode and he pretty much always talks about how the comic book industry is in a very bad place.
So Millar, who is the epitome of "wants to write screenplays not comics" and has shit out a bunch of early 00s trash. And DiDio, who is fricking DiDio. Are complaining about the shit heap they helped create and for some reason that anon wants to give them brownie points for "addressing the destruction" which they are part of?
More or less. Millar says comics suck now because DC and Marvel sucks and he said things are getting stagnant and the same people have been there for decades so they should just switch creators. When DC and Marvel are going strong, the other companies rally around them (he's right about this one).
Comics are also partially dying because all of the crossover event bullshit making them feel pointless and opaque and Millar has pointed that out.
And that's admittedly been a problem for a long fricking time (thanks Jim Shooter), but other factors (death of retail, etc) have made it so that the autists who support that system are on their way out and there has been nothing to get a new generation of kids interested in comics. I don't see the dying of comics as some kind of modern shift, but just as a systematic stagnation that happened for a longass time that everyone in the industry had ignored because they all just naively pointed to the MCU and said "look how popular the characters have become!!"
Yup, precisely the "muh superhero comics are NOT for kids!" crowd. Fricking geniuses.
Millar has a podcast where he regularly mourns how manga is beating the shit out of comics.
DiDio says the same and writers/artists are shitting on him because he's a boomer and one of the people he told those things to was some comicsgate grifter.
Does didio talk about his personal contributions to comics being in the state they’re in?
>Don't care or want to save rat-king capeshit.
>Do want to save small, local business.
Important distinction. I'm not helping capeshit. I will watch it drown though.
Disney, Marvel, and especially DC. You know why.
>>Do want to save small, local business.
Only if they are good though. My LCS owner is a genuinely decent person and runs a good business. I will buy from him. While traveling I have been to other stores that are trash. I hate how some people have that blind "support local businesses" mentality when 3/4 of local businesses are shit and don't deserve the customers.
Saying wokeness killed comics is like saying that last piece of cheesecake killed a 600lb obese man.
That's a good fricking analogy anon wtf
This anon, in this one post, has written better than the last 30 years of capeshit.
You don't read comics.
No one here reads comics. They just screech about lesbians.
I read comics.
No, you don't.
Yes, I do.
That piece of cheesecake had a poisoned sweetner
It didn't have to have poison, anon. Diabetes, heat disease, all those things were running riot already. The last piece of cheesecake was a big mistake but they insisted, how could they refuse? It is a cause of death and a epitaph for a life not-so-well lived.
Fair enough, the death of the Comic Book Industry is trully a death by a thousand cuts.
And hormones, to add insult to injury.
Which also tasted like shit, in case the fatass survived, so that'd he'd stop buying this brand of cheesecake.
Undeselling the problem. Wokeness isn't the single last thing, and it also affects the limitations on available artists, writers and books.
If wokeness is the industry's cheesecake addiction, diamond is the dude's untreated high blood pressure.
The storytime of pain series is a long and storied tradition.
Since the hasbro buyout, ther'es been a push and pull from within the company on which way it goes. Shit like demanding wheelchair accessible dungeons in ADD, raceswaped lord of the rings. Real life gatcha lottery bullshit.
I'm not sure how far some of this shit, like trying to remove "facisim" from warhammer 40k's empire is going to go, but we'll have to see.
The storytime of pain is now a regular thing. Just pick up the latest big two comic.
>Undeselling the problem
Not at all. You seem to misunderstand. All the problems we talk about, like diamond, are the conditions that created the obesity, maintained it, caused diseases and ultimately death. I undersold nothing.
if you want to stay open as a LCS, you need to be a LGS too
magic is where the money's at
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
While people have talked endlessly about comics industry etc and I have nothing to add there. I just feel like the problem with the LCS as a business is it needs active participants to run a shop and the problem is so many shops are either passively run or run by walking stereotypes. A lot of other businesses don't need as active a push. No one wants to be upsold at a normal bookstore or coffee shop.
Having worked in an LCS we did do a lot of sales techniques you might find in other businesses but it didn't come from a place of actively pushing, it came from enthusiasm and knowledge. Like at a Starbucks they might push you to go up a size or buy something on offer. It feels corporate. You want what you want. We sold a lot of stuff by sparking up conversations and talking about what people liked. Where you place items matters. How your shop is arranged, matters.
If you don't actively engage with your customers then you're doomed. I've been in shops where people insult you for purchases, give garbage recommendations, talk too much politics, are walking stereotypes.
I definetly feel that at a lot of the comic shops I go to in my area, there's only 1 that has employees that actively engage with you on the product in a non cancer way.
It just feels like many LCS' think all comics should be capeshit. They've reluctantly accepted manga, but are oblivious to more artsy, adult comics like the stuff Fantagraphics puts out. I'd say Fantagraphics are the only real alternative Western comic publishers I'm aware of. As in their catalog doesn't look like an almost perfect clone of capeshit.
Local comic book guy can't properly curate an alternative library, stocks up on nepobaby horseshit, and screams at my hipster ass for leading him astray.
LCS can't compete with amazon on fantagraphics.
They burnt people out.
He’s got a point. I don’t read Spider-Man but I’m tempted to read through that hated run with Paul just to see how bad it really is
No offense, but you're a capeshitter, that kind of stupidity is expected from you guys.
When it comes to new audiences, anger doesn't really sell.
Like in 2000s when piracy didn't exist, this doesn't follow in today's buisness model. At best your just generating noise that turns to apathy which is the result of the last 20 years of current market exodus.
No wonder Skottie only does covers now.
This is a very short term outrage gimmick. I’ve personally never bought these issues. Whoever is buying them might be comic reviewers. Imagine basing your entire industry around something so negative. Nobody associates Western comics with anything good now because of it. Long term brand industry damage.
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
They went bankrupt because DC and Marvel were full woke, alienating readers forever and Disney and Feige were the big villains of the industry, even the rarest comic books lost value
How is the speculator market I heard it was crashing.
>that pic
I am not defending the Disney shows I am simply pointing out that after a show is announced the prices tend to increase and after the hype is over they go down. This happens with movies too. I bought and then sold copies of Uncanny X-Men 141/142 for a premium when the movie hype was building for Days of Future Past. I then bought some when the price lowered. And resold them again.
The real speculator madness is variant covers. Because shops buy several times the issues they need just to get and sell a variant. I have seen someone drop £400 on variants for garbage comics.
They need to be good business people but also actual socialiable human beings with knowledge. And that is rare. Even if they do stock manga or alternatives they won't know anything about it. If your shop owner can't name more than a few creators then they are trash.
If you go into a book shop you don't expect the employees to know every single piece of literature. They will have their tastes but don't need to actively push customers as much. A LCS shop owner has to guide his customers to prevent dead ends or burn outs from the medium and that is too much of a skill for most.
Idw is now going down the hole after sales quarters, which comic book publisher is next?
It's a mystery
if they pivoted it to LGS they'd be fine tbh, magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff they'll still show up to buy product
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
hasbro is making hand over fist, more people are playing magic now than ever before
Uh no sweetie going woke means they've gone broke.
*making money hand over fist
It's true LOTR sold well, but that's attributed more to unsustainable scumbag gimmics, like having a chase card in elvish that ended up being sold for 2 million dollars and upping the "you must have this card or you're not competitive" cards.
Player numbers are down significantly.
I predict they'll treat it like comics treated special edition covers, and end up hollowing themeselves out. But we'll see.
>magic crowds for example don't care about anti-trans/pro-trans stuff
I don't visit /tg/ enough to know if that's true but I seem to come across a lot of people unhappy with how woke mtg is getting. Too many planeswalkers are black now or something.
They blackwashed Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, in MtG.
Who the frick cares about the story even, if your playing mtg its for the game not the story.
>Most people will get hyped about mechanics than the story.
They should also stock good quality Berserk figurines because I currently want one.
Sad.
Seiki K has a dad character who was an editor of a manga magazine.
There were scenes of him coaching young mangaka. He gave terrible advice in the show, but I think that job does actually exist in Japan: someone who has an eye for young talent and helps them create a better end product.
You'd have to have an eye for potential, an understanding of your reader, and a thorough understanding of what makes a good story. I don't think those skills exist in the American comic book industry at all.
New stuff is frowned upon in the comics market. Even the progressives just wants the old thing wearing a new hat.
It really does feel like this sometimes.
>You want a down to Earth Batman fighting real life injustices while also wanting the 100th Joker story and huge multiversal threat?
Who the frick is asking for multiversal anything
Unfortunately some are. It is the multiplication effect. All that Dark Multiverse shit.
Everyone pining for the halcyon days of COIE and Secret Wars before comics went and got all "marxist"?
Funny because the early Marxist comics are the best comics have ever been. If all comics were as good as those, not necessarily remaining marxist, they would decimate manga in terms of quality.
Corporations are ALWAYS the ones pushing multiverse bullshit because it is literally the perfection of
>low-effort nostalgiabait
>if something sticks you can make more of it, if it doesn't you can toss it with no consequences
Much like a lot of things these days, it's something no one objectively actually wants but corporations think they can save time by just mashing shit together and hoping people will get on-board. I wonder what other technology these same corporations are trying to implement that's just mashing up pre-existing shit and using it as a lowest common denominator?
They're not wrong though. Look at how many anons are pining for a return to the oversaturated event era of the 90s and early 2000s simply because of identity politics?
There *is* a market for regurgitated trash based on pre-existing shit that only has nostalgia going for it.
And there's a market for original easier-to-follow stories. It's buying manga at a higher volume than the autistic crossover market is buying big 2.
Yeah but if you try to tell that the autistic capeshit guys that people want original self contained stories that go somewhere and eventually end in a satisfying way, they'll insist that's not why people are reading manga, it's ackshully something something woke trannies.
Sounds like we're pretty much on the same page and more just discussing about if it's the fans' fault for holding shit hostage by demanding and unsustainable status quo vs how much of it is the corporations giving it to them. Sounds like a chicken and egg question.
The funny thing is I hear people b***hing about the longevity of a bunch of manga series and the endings being awful too. A lot of them don't have satisfying endings.
Yeah I can agree to that. Doctor Stone for example was rushed to the point of turning to shit.
But I'd still rather take it over Batman. Because any ending is better than no ending.
Dr Stone is over?
Manga ended like a year and a half ago.
How bad was it?
the craziest thing to me about the manga argument is that the most popular one is 1200 chapters long and you have to read them in order. At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
>At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
homie do you think that's supposed to be a selling point?
I can read a full volume in like 30 minutes.
>At least generally you can get complete comic story in one volume.
So long as you're very lenient on the definition of "complete".
Like whoopdedoo the villain got put in jail again. He's just gonna break out next issue.
You have hundreds of issues of Spider-Man dating back to 1963. Of course it is written by a bunch of different people and hasn't ended. It is like getting into a soap opera. Coronation Street in the UK has 11,000 episodes. No one is going back to watch them all. People who b***h about the format being wrong don't seem to realise that a lot of people dip in and out of stuff. Like a creative team? Try out an arc. Finality doesn't exist here. It is like getting angry that water is wet.
Now before you have a go, absolutely the quality of comics is an issue and all the other problems people have mentioned. But this format issue is weird. Kids in the 1980s would just go and pick up an issue and not care. And while stories are more decompressed now you could just do that. The quality is more the issue than the format.
People would be fine dipping in and out for arcs if they were something good. People ITT and others like it will talk about creative teams and other things and single creators in manga etc, but the thing about comics is that it has been interpreted a bunch of times and reinvents itself. Without that reinvention we wouldn't have gotten some of the best stories.
Ultimately
They fricking hid it from my store, shits stuffed in the back with records.
>It is like getting into a soap opera.
That is the problem, yes. Soap operas aren't good, they're just long running.
I mean for fricks sake look at what happened this year. Kamala's resurrection got announced essentially in the same day as her death. Who in their right mind is going to give a shit about either when they pull that shit so often that anyone with basic pattern recognition knows not to get invested in anything? When Alfred died a few years ago I didn't even blink I just occasionally ask someone that's still dumb enough to read Batman if he's back yet.
The neverending serial works when you cycle out old fans for new ones, who haven't gotten wise to the fact that these stories operate in a loop. But now we're in a weird place where the old guard never leaves and actively throw a fit when anyone new is approached so it just gets even MORE stale. (It's kind of like X-men actually, and how anyone that was introduced after wolverine is really just there to be cannon fodder.) Or like, you can only do "Peter Parker is having relationship problems because this is a soap opera" before the cucking starts.
The fact that stuff has to keep going on indefinitely is the reason the quality lacks. They're intrinsically linked.
I don't get why people are willing to accept that the Simpsons has gone on for 30 years and run out of ideas but capeshit IPs that have been around for 80+ can keep doing the same 3-4 stories and fighting the same rogues gallery until the heat death of the universe and it's never a problem.
It’s because nobody gives a shit about comics. The only superhero anything that people care about are the movies, games and merch. The average person will gladly watch the the next Spidey flick but wouldn’t be caught dead reading his comic.
Even then we see a lot of people and outlets starting to entertain the idea of superhero fatigue because a lot of the franchises are getting long in the tooth.
Like how many fricking Batman reboots do we need, really? It's gotten to the point that those pearls falling in slow motion is more funny than anything else.
>Soap operas aren't good, they're just long running.
This is just a matter of media taste. For some, people regularly watch them like a religion.
>I mean for fricks sake look at what happened this year.
Anon, to be clear, I outright said the quality is attrocious.
>The neverending serial works when you cycle out old fans for new ones, who haven't gotten wise to the fact that these stories operate in a loop. But now we're in a weird place where the old guard never leaves and actively throw a fit when anyone new is approached so it just gets even MORE stale.
You're arguing the inherent continuation is the issue. I am saying that all the other stuff are more of an issue. We probably agree on practically every other point about quality, crossovers, gimmicks, distribution or whatever. The truth is though, you could still just have a Batman comic or whatever that works.
>I don't get why people are willing to accept that the Simpsons has gone on for 30 years and run out of ideas but capeshit IPs that have been around for 80+ can keep doing the same 3-4 stories and fighting the same rogues gallery until the heat death of the universe and it's never a problem.
I think things are fixable.
>For some, people regularly watch them like a religion.
It's good if you've got a cultish level of addiction is not the endorsement you think it is.
>I think things are fixable.
There's really no way to fix stuff like the Joker at this point. He's got a body count bigger than some countries.
IMO it was pretty mediocre but the manga in general had kind of tanked in quality once they went to America. A lot of the whimsical "we're doing this scientific process step by step" gets speed blitzed over to the point that they start making stuff in the space of two panels. At one point they skipped ahead like 2+ years just to get to the next invention and none of the characters really changed or anything in that time. It really felt like they just wanted to end the thing.
>It's good if you've got a cultish level of addiction is not the endorsement you think it is.
It wasn't an endorsement. Different strokes for different folks. It is like complaining that reality TV is shit. For some it is. Comics could still be fixed if people gave a frick.
That seems to mostly just be a problem with shonen judging by all the examples people use. I've read plenty of manga that ended on a fine note.
It's a problem with long-running manga.
Mangakas are still humans. Sticking to your guns isn't an easy decision when your publisher asks you to milk your series instead of ending it.
Japanese Job culture, aside from encouraging working yourself to death, also disencourages unprofessional behavior.
recession
specialty shops people would have to go out of the way for instead of buying online or a major big box retailor
the smart stores will pivot to offering board games/card games/war games
my FLCS makes more from MTG and 40k than comics and they're not slouching on comics either
Now that we're all on the same page, what now? Are you going to continue making these threads, so that they continue to fall on deaf ears?
I dunno. Was only really invested in this thread to avoid my own problems. Guess I'll go back to focusing on those. Was fun to spitball ideas and see what stuck. I think there is potential. I also realized I have no real love for capeshit beyond a love for the medium.
>go to local B&N
>manga section is huge, multiple shelved and a table close to the front advertising popular series
>find the comics section
>one stand alone shelf near the wall next to the magazines
>one side is recent superhero stuff, other side is a bunch of shitty graphic novels
Honestly the none of the stuff in the comic section seemed to be really exciting. Like they eschew simple dynamic genre stories that people want to buy.
The only way to solve the problem of comics is to solve the problem of capeshit and the only way to solve the problem of capeshit is to introduce permanence.
Why is any reasonable person going to be interested in a story that goes on forever? Especially when the stakes have gotten so overblown and absurd. How many times has the entire multiverse in Marvel or DC been threatened? How many times have the big names died and come back? There's no dramatic potential there anymore. It's tired and boring.
But the diehards don't want stories to matter. They throw a tantrum when Hal Jordan gets character progression. They want the same hit of dopamine they got when they were six years old, consequences to the narrative be damned. They WANT the same slop fed to them on a loop. So instead of reflecting on themselves, they insist the real issue is the blacks and the gays and pronouns.
Honestly, mainstream comics are just too gay and lame for me.
Most of the "fanservice" is lame as frick, everything has to have gays, all camaraderie between people of the same sex is either extremely shallow or shipper-bait for morons, siblings are always presented hating each other/having shitty relationships, action in most series sucks ass,
Like frick, people who make comics insist that they're trying to appeal to me (young black male) but I can't think of a SINGLE decent delinquent comic, meanwhile I find stuff like Holyland, Rainbow, Crows, Clover, and Worst constantly on the other side, even fricking manhwa has a few decent delinquent stories.
Patroning something out of hate is sick. You neglect it until it dies. Then you check for any viable seeds.
>Why are so many LCS closing recently?
literally the only fricking capeshit anyone currently under the age 35 has read is spawn
the only western comics that people ive known irl have read is alt shit that isnt on the collectors market besides like original prints of the crow and love and rockets
>one shop closes
>we're back to east vs west thread
>all the same points about the industry and comics that have been debated over a thousand times and that most people accept
>all said in a generalised manner with no actual detail
>all the same skewed perceptions on matters with no actual detail
>no one on Cinemaphile reads comics
>no one on Cinemaphile reads comics
Comics are gay.
There have been numerous closures. Every time one thread ends, yet another closes. It’s been bad lately.
>no one on a board dedicated to comics reads them anymore
Yes, it’s part of the reason the industry is in the dire state it’s in. The big 2 are now both simultaneously vestigial parts of struggling media empires AND the most important IP farms for their more profitable counterparts in the entertainment industry
I just hate that a whole fricking medium is reduced down to superheroes or east vs west threads. I wish we had more vibrant discussions about stuff we were actually reading
>~~*Western comics*~~
act like youre not selling mindless boring stories with mild sex and violence to kids and teens to avoid government regulation then turn around in the 70s and 80s and do exactly that while still making suck ass boring stories and going out of your way to being apolitical
>manga
doesnt have to give a shit about anything besides showing vulvas and foreskins
>transition industry to cater to almost exclusively women
>turns out women don't "collect" things beyond fashion as they only care about how they look
>???
>No Profit
The only profitable aspect of the industry is the omnibus reprints as dudes still want to read the old good shit and collect for their shelves
I wonder if popular superheroes in the public domain would have changed things?
If the Sonny Bonno act had never gone through, would we be seeing more comics as the 30s Superheroes like Batman and Superman came into the public domain around 2018?
I think it wouldn't. The industry being farther left than Bernie Sanders, and Diamond's issues still don't change. I think you see a stronger indie pulp scene with dynamite, but that's about it.
If the Bono act never happened, then Superman would've gone public domain in 2014 and Batman in 2015
So right in between the shift in entertainment during the 2010s
Bump limit.
We need a new thread
Why? Everything that has been said on the topic has been said.
I thought all the woke shit mostly stopped until I blind bought the Batman ‘89 hardcover cause I loved those movies as a kid and I was welcomed with full on BLM horseshit.
Superman '78 was so much better.