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I'm sure Edge & Christian will be along for an effort-post on the matter at some point. It's been my understanding that for years, the American comic book industry has been shackled to a particular business model, and is locked into continuing that model despite its obvious obsolescence. While there's potential for some forward motion, it's seemed for years to be a situation where it would have to collapse entirely before it could create something better. Comics themselves are in decent shape, at least as an art form, with creators like Reina Telgemeier hitting the NYT charts. Comic books, on the other hand, are stuck in a worsening spiral.
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Aug 13, 2021 23:37
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ronya posted:1) A while ago there was some viral articles on the rise of manga relative to comics in the sales rankings. How true is it? What are some generally-accepted/plausible reasons, if so? Any particular explanations favoured by publishers or retailers etc.? 1) Manga is much cheaper by general page count and readily available by the metric ton in bookstores. They're also very accessible by the time they arrive over here, at least these days. They're frequently serialized in Japan, but if they're translated for release elsewhere, they're usually released in numbered paperbacks by volume. I suppose there's also the virtue of consistency. A single manga is typically a finite story, told all the way through by the same team. If you want to read it, you pick up volume 1 and go. 2) Basically, Fredric Wertham hosed it up for everyone. His 1954 work Seduction of the Innocent, which blamed comics for turning teenagers into delinquents, also told lawmakers and parents at the time all about how their kids were reading some surprisingly gruesome stories. When the dust settled, almost everything in the American comics market had been preemptively canceled aside from a relative handful of weak-tea superhero books. Marvel came along a few years later, scored a few smash hits, and subsequently the superhero genre became almost indistinguishable from comics as a medium. A few other kinds of comics showed up here and there, then and since, but were never as successful as the established superhero franchises. Aside from statistical anomalies like The Walking Dead or early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they still aren't. Depending on what you mean by "non-genre fiction," that exists (Strangers in Paradise, maybe?), but it's a niche within a niche.
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Aug 16, 2021 04:31
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JordanKai posted:Using sites like Wikia/Fandom to look up information about comics is a bit of a pain these days. More and more I see them following the lead of Wookiepedia by presenting information from an in-universe perspective and hiding the actual publication info and other out-of-universe information out of plain sight. The Marvel Fandom wiki's pretty decent about that right now, although you're right in that it's not the easiest thing to spot at first glance.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:25
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Noob Saibot posted:I know this is controversial but I feel like Comics will have to move into a physician OGN format or streaming service only format (or both) eventually to survive similar to the DC earth one titles. Single issues are getting too expensive. It's not particularly controversial. Individual issues of comics have been too expensive by half for 20 years, as any analyst will tell you. The issue is that American comics in general are shackled to a particular sales model, and so far, it's been more comfortable/convenient for the publishers to ride that model into the ground than upset it. Physical comics' sales are also heavily nostalgia-driven and fueled by collectible speculation, even now, which makes it difficult for any major publisher to switch away from that. Basically, Marvel and DC are going to have to ride this into the ground before they switch, and since those two companies make up a full 50% of the modern industry, it makes it that much harder for any smaller company to try and branch out.
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Oct 15, 2021 04:04
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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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