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boblemoche posted:It should not. However, comparing the size of the US market for comics to most occidental or oriental countries, it is weirdly small (like, half of what it should be). Hence, this topic. Turner D. Century, is that you? How'd you even get online? How do you even know what movies are?
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Nov 5, 2021 11:27
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Yvonmukluk posted:Turner D. Century, is that you? How'd you even get online? Spider-Woman's wi-fi password is password1
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Nov 5, 2021 12:35
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Truth is I'm french and mess up regularly on this, my apologies.
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Nov 5, 2021 12:47
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Extra row of tits posted:Good lord, a genuine “This can’t be true, my specific experience doesn’t match” post! Sorry I was genuinely curious about these questions since this thread seemed to be giving answers. Instead I get snark. Whatever.
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Nov 6, 2021 13:24
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:behind every successful small hobby shop is a spouse who's an investment banker or some poo poo. have you done a headcount on how many mysteriously stable model train stores you have in town too? Why would I do a headcount on something I don’t care about? But anyway According to Google there’s 3 model train stores and…20 comic stores. I live in Las Vegas, it’s not uncommon for a particular niche store (crab shacks, sensory toy kiosks, fish tank foot spas) to just pop up and vanish but this is different. They’re all still here! This is like mattress store level strange to me.
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Nov 6, 2021 21:03
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money laundering fronts, obviously
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Nov 6, 2021 21:11
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Because if you looked at how hobby retail operates outside of the one little niche you'd see that this isn't unusual? There's a shop in my neighborhood that's stuck around for five years selling, like, used pipe cleaners and partially cut-out construction paper. It doesn't stay in business cause there's big money in trash, the lady who runs it is some kind of hoarder uber-hustler who's finagled free rent from the city, a volunteer staff, and most of the inventory through donations so if all she sells in a day is an already filled-out coloring book for fifty cents that's fifty cents straight into her pocket and all the free pipe cleaners she can... eat or whatever. Most of my family lives in Santa Fe, which has an entire neighborhood in the most expensive part of town dedicated to scores of art galleries run by retired millionaires that never sell anything and never have to. Without a look at their account books pointing to the continued existence of those places doesn't say much about whether showcasing the same ten bronzes for twenty years is a lucrative business model. Stick to actual sales figures.
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Nov 6, 2021 22:24
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Because if you looked at how hobby retail operates outside of the one little niche you'd see that this isn't unusual? I'm not familiar with this specific non-profit, but based on the material that again has to be made public by law to maintain their 501(c)3 sratus, their mission/programs look a lot like several non-profits I am more familiar with in my city, who get a ton of poo poo donated to them by local businesses who would otherwise throw it out. The businesses get a tax write-off for the donation, and the non-profit (using a lot of volunteer labor) sift through the donations and use a lot of it for educational programs/give the reclaimed stuff away to local schools and etc. Then the remaining junk goes into a store where they sell it for what amounts to another round of donations. Based on their public annual report and 990 tax filings, the Baltimore chapter of this non-profit brings in about $100,000 a year in sales of donated items, spends around $41,000 on rent/utilities, and the take home salary of the three staff members combined is around $48,000. It's part of a larger organization that does educational programs and has donation sites/stores in five cities, and the president of the main organization has a salary a little under $70,000. Pre-Covid, they apparently ran programs for in the neighborhood of 6,000 students and a smaller number of adults in partnerships with schools. Nothing about this place has any real reflection as to the business model for a comic book shop or really any for-profit business, retail or otherwise. I'm not sure why you thought it did, or how much you even understood what the store was based on your description. How does a market that based on the sales figures supports over $300,000,000 in wholesale orders a year have stores that continue to stay open? I have no clue, probably a series of scams and flams. And yes $300M through one sales channel/$1 billion overall is a drop in the bucket compared to the video game market or the motion picture market and is marginally smaller than the golf club or baseball cap market. But no one is asking how on Earth a store that just sells golf equipment possibly stays in business, who plays golf, it doesn't make any sense.
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Nov 6, 2021 23:08
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King Baby posted:If comic books stores are doing so bad why is there at least 7 legitimate comic only stores in my area? None of these stores have gone out of business even when an owner of 1 died and another that lost their lease just relocated. None of them even sell baseball cards! I’ve asked a few owners about their opinion and not a drat one seems the least bit concerned about the “state of comics.” A comic store that's been open for a good long while probably has a healthy population of regulars who come in every month to buy their books. That, plus occasional pop-ins and random visitors, could keep the lights on for a while. It's also not uncommon in my experience for somebody who runs a retail store that's specifically concerned with collectible items to have a profitable side hustle based around those collectibles, especially these days when the overall market for that kind of thing has gone completely insane. Obviously, that's a generalization and there could be any number of other reasons, from the innocent (the shop's owned by a trust-fund kid or new-money millionaire who doesn't need to make money on the deal and just loves the hobby that much) to the questionable (the shop's kept afloat by the owner essentially preying on a half-dozen regulars who have very poor impulse control) to the criminal (it's a front organization for a weed grow). On the whole, though, comics in general have been in a weird spot for decades. That doesn't mean every store is dying.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:39
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I think the comic shops stay open by selling comic books to customers who want to pay money for comics, as well as whatever other goods they have for sale.
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Nov 7, 2021 03:36
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you got it dude I was absolutely suggesting those comic stores were all operating on a nonprofit model and not that there's shitloads of commonly exercised ways to keep a small retail shop going as a passion project without turning a profit god I might as well be posting on Reddit, absolute cretin poo poo
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Nov 7, 2021 07:21
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 They're calling it non-profit Tone, you don't even need profit to keep your passion project going
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Nov 7, 2021 08:05
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Does Reddit have a lot of people who just weirdly mischaracterize non-profit organizations as weird hoarder/hustler scams that scam free poo poo from rubes when describing other industries and then lash out angrily when it's pointed out that it isn't even vaguely relevant to what's being discussed or something, I don't know all of the subreddits out there. Thank you for following your own advice of not relying on dumb anecdotes and sticking to the sales figures, doing otherwise would be cretinous.
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Nov 7, 2021 08:09
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:you got it dude I was absolutely suggesting those comic stores were all operating on a nonprofit model and not that there's shitloads of commonly exercised ways to keep a small retail shop going as a passion project without turning a profit Calm down, you made a deeply weird comparison and it got critiqued. That's not the end of the world.
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Nov 7, 2021 08:35
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I'd like to use this space to complain that the French get all the good comics and I have to wait ages for translations. I'm pretty close to learning French again because I'm good enough to read a newspaper but not good enough to understand the nuances of French comics… 
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Nov 7, 2021 17:07
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In a kind of monkey's paw situation many french comic gets translated in Scandinavia but almost no american comics is.
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Nov 7, 2021 17:11
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A while ago I saw that Si Spurrier's series Coda got translated into French and even received an OHC release, something it never did in English. They have it to good down there in France.
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Nov 7, 2021 17:35
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I am currently reading Dungeon (Donjon) and the conclusions to several story arcs have been published in French while there's not even a release date for them in English. And i don't want to switch to German because I started reading in English.
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Nov 7, 2021 20:05
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if you wanna read a manga you start at chapter one and the artist and author are usually the same until its dead or done, if you wanna read a big cape comic you "???" and it'll probably be all different a few months from now
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Nov 11, 2021 19:53
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Does Manga have the same breaks that creative owned comics like Saga has adopted? While Saga may be an outlier and it’s longer then initially planned, I’m seeing many other comics I follow that are also owned by the creative team - Moonshine, Redneck, etc - follow the same pattern of publish an arc then pause a few months to regroup and get the TPB out the door publish next arc. Just curious how other markets are doing things. IMO it’s helped the non-cape books I read to not have to follow a monthly schedule like the big two demand.
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Dec 11, 2021 20:46
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Nystral posted:Does Manga have the same breaks that creative owned comics like Saga has adopted? While Saga may be an outlier and it’s longer then initially planned, I’m seeing many other comics I follow that are also owned by the creative team - Moonshine, Redneck, etc - follow the same pattern of publish an arc then pause a few months to regroup and get the TPB out the door publish next arc. Manga typically follows set publishing schedules set by the magazine they publish in. So if they are in a monthly magazine they publish monthly, weekly for weekly, etc. The volumes are similarly regular, typically published when they have about 200 pages worth of content. This amount of work is really really hard and is deeply unhealthy for the creators involved
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Dec 12, 2021 01:24
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I really do think it has a lot to do with perceived value, though. A streaming service is $10/month for more movies and TV shows than you can possibly watch, or you can get two and a half comic books. I know there's comic services now, but they don't seem well known.
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Dec 20, 2021 13:17
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Nystral posted:Does Manga have the same breaks that creative owned comics like Saga has adopted? The amount of work those things require is insanely unhealthy, as the poster above mentioned. Unless you publish online like the person that did Musou Telepathy. Then you're just beholden to yourself.
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Dec 21, 2021 17:55
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Going to the movies is a one-and-done deal. Pay the ticket, go in, watch ZIP ZAP POW for 2.5 hours, you've been entertained. If you're interested in more, the rest of the movies are cheaply available. If you're curious about the lore, there's any number of bloggers/youtubers who will tell you it all in GREAT detail. Meanwhile, if you want a comic story, you pay your money...and wait an entire year for it to finish. Or shell out for trades. And of course, there's the inevitable crossovers and special events linking you to new comics to buy. And the aforementioned complete change due to artist/editors leaving. And that's after you've decided which of the 10 Spiderman or 17 Batman comics to collect. So yeah, much easier to be a movie fan.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:44
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The shop over the hill from me in Livermore, CA: http://fantasybooksandgames.com/ doesn’t seem to be struggling at all. Unfortunately, the owner is getting older and has limited mobility, so it’s not the most well-organized place on earth, but it has a pretty vast selection. And it stays busy, I was far from the only customer browsing on a random Thursday in November. As his homepage indicates, it is something of a well-known destination for East Bay people, but having a national laboratory in town also means there’s a robust local market for geek stuff. A few years ago, I snagged a vintage-1993 Star Trek: DS9 shirt off a discount rack the owner had set up, and at the time he described to me how he had downsized to just the one shop from having a warehouse and two or three other East Bay shops during the 90s. But I got the impression that had more to do with his life circumstances than any market weakness, especially in one of the most tech industry/driven markets in the country. I do have to wonder how much unsold inventory weighs on the business model. The guy who had a shop right across from the high school here in my town about 10 years ago was sitting on a bunch of manga volumes and expensive board games when he finally went out. But that was also when Barnes and Noble was still in town.
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Jan 2, 2022 23:08
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Edge & Christian posted:Libraries also have deeper comics collections than in decades past This this this. Chances are the library has done all the hard work of sorting out the trash for you, or at the very least the librarian is just buying what is popular at other libraries who have done that.
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May 3, 2022 11:07
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Silver2195 posted:Is this even true? The wikis and other fansites I can find with writeups for DC and Marvel characters are not exactly the height of clarity. What's the site I'm supposed to be using? Scansdaily.livejournal.com circa 2006
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May 3, 2022 11:26
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someone recommended the hickman marvel run to me a while back and within like 5 issues the comic had thrown so many turds at the wall that i was left wondering how anyone could relate to any of these gary stu/mary sue freaks in these comics. that poo poo sucked rear end lmao. Hellboy was good but I've yet to find another comic like it.
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Aug 5, 2022 06:03
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#1 mary sue is gender neutral. #2 using mary sue invalidates your opinion
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Aug 6, 2022 20:02
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Soonmot posted:#1 mary sue is gender neutral. #2 using mary sue invalidates your opinion I know we're far past using the term in its original sense but who was Hickman's self-insert, I wonder. Moira? Probably Moira.
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Aug 6, 2022 21:19
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epic rereg guy
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Aug 7, 2022 03:01
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