What in the hell is even the state of comic books anymore? Superheroes have become so strained and played out that people aren't sure if they're going to be a permanent genre or the most long-winded fad of all time. Fans range from actual children to 40 year old men that act like children to SJW's only interested in destroying all of the perceived wrongthink and larping as political activists. Creators run the gamut from absolutely terrible to true literary writers trying to pen the next Watchmen or Sandman and be picked up for a film or TV show. Physical books are caught up between failing brick-and-mortar sales and an uncertain and unprepared digital landscape that's been met with lukewarm reception. As an artist and lifelong comic fan, it's a strange fucking time to be alive.
Tell me how you feel about all this and what you think of the industry?
>Tell me how you feel about all this and what you think of the industry? S'okay. SJW are more like this generation soccer mom's who always find a reason to complain. I think people should stop looking at comic book writers and artist and more like people with jobs that happened to involve comics. Corona might actually kill physical books though
Noah Campbell
There have always been a mass of awful comic books with a few notable quality titles sprinkled in. Comic books have always pushed this or that social agenda, whether it be anti-social rebelliousness, subversive sex or horror, patriotic conformity, it goes on and on, and will continue because they are written by people and reflect their beliefs. Live and animated adaptations are just the newest, more popular way of absorbing these stories, as the floppy comic has failed to evolve with the times.
Really, outside of physical presentation, not a whole lot has changed in comic books overall, I say that as someone who picked up Giant-Sized X-Men #1 in a pharmacy ages ago as a kid.
>who always find a reason to complain. I find your lack of self-awareness fascinating. YOU always come here to complain. You are just as bad a complainer as any "SJW".
Jordan Gray
The industry is literally unsustainable since any asshole with and level of drawing ability can make their own comics and put them online. The books that sell are big cape comics forcing everyone into a box because money trumps story telling and creativity.
Brayden Moore
I'm curious as to what comics actually did pander to soccer moms. It seems like the Dark Age marched on uninhibited.
Eli Richardson
>40 year old men
No, no you misunderstand.
Around the New 52 launch, DC had a study commissioned to find out who exactly their customers are - since the Direct Market doesn't actually offer point-of-sale data for analysis, it just dumps sales onto store owners who then have no incentive to do the stats work to find out who their customers are (which is why a lot of small businesses, including comic book stores, fail; the owners get fixated on the people they like, the people they want to come in, and don't see where the sales are actually happening).
DC found at that time - in mid-2011 - that the mean age of their readers was around 45, that they were largely suburban professionals with a couple of kids, homeowners, that kind of thing.
That means unless DC's upper-agegroup readers who've died since then were a huge proportion of the audience or they've managed to attract many more younger readers, the average age of a DC reader is about 54-55 years old today. That doesn't mean they all are - there's probably some young black single gay guy who buys 10 DC titles a month at some LCS somewhere - just that they average out to white, middle-aged, closing on retirement, kids heading to college.
As a company, if DC were up for sale, I wouldn't buy it. That is a dead company. Its IPs are increasingly struggling to make money even as movies with huge budgets thrown at them, in an age where CGI means you can pretty much do anything. If I bought it to asset strip for valuables the print division would go overnight, followed by animation and movies. Just sell underoos and branded vitamins ffs. It's the Popeye of comic book publishers - everyone knows it, nobody actually pays for it except stamped on band-aids. Dead IP is dead.
I'm not surprised DiDio retired. Smartest decision he ever made at DC.
Nathaniel White
Its true that no one doing a niche online comic is going to forge another Marvel Comics or DC empire, but good comic talent can make a decent living doing online work. I myself own physical copies of Ashley Cope's Unsounded and Abaddon's K6BD. I also own some obscure books I only found hanging about online.
And the Walking Dead franchise shows what can actually be accomplished without superheroes.
Yeah the virus made things even worse. I don't think digital is ever going to replace physical books, but they might be relegated to like special-order only or print-on-demand as the norm instead of regular production runs.
Jace Davis
DC has had so many recent theatrical failures because they hand these projects off to self-aggrandizing hacks who give no shits whatsoever about the essence of the project.
Whereas a horror movie director can take a minor comic franchise like Aquaman and make a massive hit with it, because he clearly gives half a fuck about making an entertaining movie about Aquaman, and not just being the next Lucas.
People could still order the books directly. But that would kill the comic shops. And the comic shops probably won't make it out anyways. On a side note before the quarantine I made sure to stop by mine and make some purchases.
Christian Brown
The state is "fucked up". Ever since guys like Moore stuffed their dicks into the punch bowl, everyone wants comics to be this big nebulous indie movie that discusses the human mind and society and the under privileged. All that lame gay shit, when at the end of the day, they've only ever been vessels for story telling. The SJW fad is an extension of these artsy fartsy types wanting to push the withered ruins of a stagnant "industry" into the confines of which it was never meant to fit in. If you ask me, comics should have remained entertaining. The way things had been layed out as far back as the 70s was perfect. On the top, you have the spectrum of titles that extend to all ages. The origins of wonderment and jubilation, and then you have the young adult capeshit where things can be a bit grittier and more real, and beyond that you get into shit like Marshall Law and Planetary that examines why we're so infatuated with all this silly shit. And outside of all that, you can have your darkhorse whiny bullshit. But as we stand now people just want it to be inverted. They want the profitable stuff to exist on the fringes, while the whiny baby shit makes up the bulk of the output. In short we're retarded.
Tyler Garcia
Probably the classic superhero stuff and older non-capeshit fare like Archie.
>in mid-2011 - that the mean age of their readers was around 45
Jesus Christ lol, but I guess that's one of the obvious and strongest instigators for this decade of selling nostalgia. Comics had much experience and were ideally suited for it as they've already been repackaging the same heroes for 60 years already.
Austin Rodriguez
Very interesting take.
Connor Hall
The American comic industry has been a shitshow since the implementation of the CCA in 1954 by DC and Archie in order to game the system to cater towards them. Since then, it's only gotten worse with 90's crash and superhero's uniqueness on comics being cracked wide open by the success of the MCU.
The fact that the American industry still struggles with issues that the European and Japanese issues resolved fully by the 70's should tell you a whole lot about how comics are treated as a medium stateside.
Comic shops, like Gaming shops, were always either a way for retired nerds to blow their life savings, or for younger nerds to work their "own business" and barely scrape by. By their very nature they are niche and unprofitable.
>nerds to work their "own business" and barely scrape by That's me sniff sniff
Dylan Collins
You just want to endlessly air your grievances over shit you have zero control over, in an endless loop. Buy what you like. Don't buy what you don't like. That's the vote you get. If you don't actually BUY anything, then you have no vote on what gets made. All this bitching just makes you another bitch. Deal with it better. Please consider pic related.
Current superhero comics survive mainly because of capeshit movies rather than comics themselves. Superheroes will last until a newer fad takes over, or somebody forcibly stops the hollyjew bankroll.
Wyatt Reed
>That's the vote you get. If you don't actually BUY anything, then you have no vote on what gets made. But if the company wants his money they still have an option to market and conform to his demographic. It seems silly to downplay an opinion on a medium he is obviously interested in, just because you have a retarded notion of "vote with your wallet" and erroneously believe he needs to have wasted his money on products he doesn't like just so he can air his grievances on them.
Nathaniel Gonzalez
Movies just don't push comic sales. Comic sales are pretty much where they've always been for the last couple decades. Comics are not kept on life-support by movies and tv, whatever you might think.
James White
>But if the company wants his money they still have an option to market and conform to his demographic. This fucker gets on here and whines, and he's never proven he owns any physical comic books. He's just here to take verbal shits in threads. I knew before I said that that he's a non-voter.
Leo Lee
>Buy product and don't complain about product, NPC! >If you don't buy product, you have no opinion on what kinds of products exist! This is your brain on leftardation. This mental illness is serious and so very sad.
Landon Cox
>Comics are not kept on life-support by movies and tv, whatever you might think. Comics in general, no. Capeshit comics, yes.
Christian Brooks
Voicing your opinion on products (including why you don't want to buy them) is also something that you can do as a consumer.
Lucas Robinson
Then just admit you're mad about his opinions and are just trying to dress up petty emotions with logically unfounded arguments. Call him a shitty tourist and move on.
Dominic Flores
I asked a shop worker if "The Boys" tv show made the comic sell more he replied "same as always. The Boys always sell."
Lincoln King
What this user said "Buy what you like. Don't buy what you don't like." What this user misrepresent "Buy product and don't complain about product, NPC!" The idiocy of this dudes...
Anthony Powell
>Comics sold 1,000,000 copies in the 90's >Now a comic is considered a success if it sells 30k copies. >Comic sales are pretty much where they've always been for the last couple of decades. Just fucking what? No.
But in my opinion, a large part of the problem is that comics became so focused into an exclusively juvenile superhero medium that western audiences can't perceive them as anything else now. Even very talented writers telling quality stories, more literary than pulp or spectacle, can't seem to break the medium out of this.
Jeremiah Parker
Yeah and then he said >You can't have an opinion if you don't buy thing which is the most retarded shit I've ever read.
Ryder Torres
>Buy product and don't complain about product, NPC! You can't seriously be this dense. Buy the sorts of stories you want to read more of, publishers get that message loud and clear. But you don't buy much of anything, you just want to fight social wars on the internets. No, they really aren't. Comic readers are an insignificant percentage of superhero movie goers. The few movies that tried to appeal to comic fans and ignored general audiences failed spectacularly. Billion dollar movies did nothing for the sales of Iron Man comics. He doesn't buy them because he's a wretched poorfag who just likes complaining about "degenerates in media".
>Comics sold 1,000,000 copies in the 90's I got out of buying comics in the 90's.\ Everyone was buying the shit out of them as "investment opportunities". I had an uncle who paid at the top for a bunch of 90's books that lost 3/4 of their "value". The 90's were a wild time.
