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I have been summoned but I feel like these conversations always are a circular argument of "monthly superhero comics tend to be confusing/expensive" (true) "but there are lots of other ways to purchase/read comics" (also true) "but monthly superhero comics are confusing and expensive!" "That is not the whole of the comic book industry" "BUT MONTHLY SUPERHERO COMICS" If someone really wants to figure out the convoluted world of Marvel and DC superhero comics, it's easier and cheaper than ever to do so. The Internet exists and there are copious websites and other fora to use to detangle continuity, reading order, and other things that you'd have to pore over Official Handbooks and checklists clipped out of fanzines to find in decades past. You can reliably purchase collected print editions of 99% of relevant/important/interesting stories, where only two decades ago retailers and fans were super mad at the very idea of accessible trade paperbacks because it would kill the value of back issues and also "what if people just wait for the trade????" Digital comics exists, they frequently go on sale at deep discount, and if you really want to dive deep into Marvel or DC there are Netflix-style services that allow you to read thousands of comics for $10/month. Libraries also have deeper comics collections than in decades past. From a consumer standpoint, it is pretty expensive if you decide to dive in and start buying multiple $4-5 single issues every week, and you can look at sales charts and see that from certain perspectives ("how many issues of Spider-Man sell in this format in a given month?") and decide Comics Are Dying, No One Reads Them. But the actual long-term sales of comics is always exaggerated when people cherrypick ridiculously high numbers from decades past, and tying all of your fortunes to single issues is insane. It's like saying "thirty million people watched Jake and the Fatman, and now only a couple million people watched Mad Men!" Jake and the Fatman never had thirty million viewers, it probably peaked around ten million, which is still significantly more than Mad Men ever got for a first run episode (somewhere around 3.5M) ergo Jake and the Fatman is still three times as popular as Mad Men. Except for the millions of people who watch/watched Mad Men after the first airing on AMC that "don't count" for the purposes of this argument. This is essentially what people are doing when they act like Iron Man and Green Arrow had millions of readers in the 1960s and now under 100,000 people read X-Men and Superman. And even if not as many people are reading brand new Iron Man, Green Arrow, X-Men, and Superman in 2021, even if you want to argue that "no one" is reading any comic books featuring these characters, physically or digitally, new or old, mainline or spin-off, that's still looking at a narrow band of what "comics" are and reducing an entire artform and industry to that is silly. As for the "manga is outselling comics so bad you guys" thing, specifically the Demon Slayer article that had its headline/text copied and pasted thousands of times on social media earlier this year, that was from an article comparing the sales of every volume of Demon Slayer worldwide over its entire publication history to what seemed like a made-up number that tried poorly to estimate Other articles from the same website: "Why is Hentai So Popular?" ("Female characters are depicted as secretly desiring to be sexually assaulted") "Why Shopping Malls are Closing And How to Bring Them Back" (not enough arcades, stand up comedy bars, or LEGO houses) "Super Nintendo World Will Beat Disney World" (because Disney is woke, Nintendo is not) "Why People Don't Like Brie Larson" (it's not because she is a woman or a feminist, it is because of her attitude and politics) "Has The Comic Book Industry Collapse? Here Is the Proof" (politics and a PLANDEMIC) "Why Girls Dont Like It When Boys Play Video Games" ("The Feminine Need Attention" and men are wired for battle, women are not) Here is the original article that has since been edited with a lot of justification for his math, which does not help the case. If people love Demon Slayer that's cool, but it was funny to see people taking this guy at face value.
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Sep 14, 2021 13:11
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:wow, who could say no to an appealing prospect like that Now you can type THANOS into a search engine and get lots and lots of information about who Thanos is and why people were excited to see Thanos and probably read some classic Thanos stories for cheap/free. This isn't even something exclusive to lovely stupid unappealing superhero comics and their movies, there is a significant subset of people who enjoy talking about references and Easter Eggs in other genre-y franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek or Street Fighter or Mario or Disney Animation or Mad Men or Game of Thrones or Stephen King novels or films or song lyrics or you know, anything people are entertained by that is also referential to other things. And the Internet makes it very easy to do this, and lots of people do. This doesn't make certain corners of comic books needlessly complex, and it doesn't mean complexity is good, but if you are constructing a narrative of "comic books used to be popular and now they aren't, because they're just too confusing and complex!" you'd have to be hearkening back a solid 40-60 years to have that be a symptom of why 'nobody reads comics books'.
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Sep 14, 2021 20:23
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A lot of comic books (even superhero comic books) also do not require deep knowledge dives and at best/worst may lead someone to go "when was Wolverine on the Avengers, which he mentioned in this comic?" but people seem to expect that they have to. Some people enjoy that, some people hate it, I'm still not sure why people look at it as a huge inherent barrier to entry as opposed to "a thing some people really enjoy and other people hate". And the whole CCA thing is a weird red herring, in the sense that it neutered crime and horror comics; there are certainly a handful of Twilight Zone level EC comics that someone could point to as "COMICS ARE SERIOUS LITERATURE" but for the most part that entire line of reasoning is speculative. To say that the CCA was designed to privilege superhero comics is even weirder, since superhero comics struggled in near-hibernation (other than Superman) for the better part of a decade after the CCA was implemented (and led by the publisher of Archie), leaving the best-selling comics for years as things like, well, Archie, Uncle Scrooge, Dennis the Menace, Tarzan, various other media tie-ins, plus a wide variety of romance, western, funny animal, war, etc. comics deep into the 1960s and early 1970s. Superhero comics got really popular in the mid-late 1960s specifically by pushing the boundaries of the Comics Code and appealing to teenagers/young adults, were responsible for repeated loosening of the Code's restrictions in each subsequent decade, and abandoned it altogether twenty years ago. Comic books largely survived in the late 1970s rather than getting wiped out from the newsstands because of Star Wars and the Superman movie, and then in the 1980s the direct market absolutely contributed to dominance of superheroes. The direct market is not comics, as much as people enjoy insisting forever that it is.
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Sep 14, 2021 21:08
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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?
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Sep 16, 2021 04:30
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Good news, they generally do not have to read hours of lore, that isn't what I was talking about at all. We seem to be speaking entirely in hypotheticals and trying to read Immortal Hulk or Far Sector is apparently now as complex as Finnegan's Wake? Or is the hypothetical casual reader going to look at those titles and go "dang too complicated for me, do I have to have read Near Sector first? I don't know!" To put this into an entirely different context, when I was a youth I would read reviews of then-new releases from bands that were getting compared to Roxy Music. I had never heard of Roxy Music. I had only the barest context of what Roxy Music sounded like, as they weren't played on the radio and I didn't have any Roxy Music CDs or anything. I could read their entry in like the Trouser Press Record Guide or some book published by Spin I would keep checking out of the library, and read a description of why Roxy Music was important. I would eventually have to purchase a used Roxy Music CD to realize that while they were clearly an influence of Pulp and Suede and the Smiths, they were not really my thing and that maybe I shouldn't jump at every album described as sounding like Roxy Music, but even then years later I would realize that actually, I do like some of their music, just not the album I bought used. But maybe as someone who was reading album reviews and wanted to know who Roxy Music were, I am already a deep lore nerd and the casual listener isn't going to listen to anything but top charting singles? Is that the sort of casual consumer we're discussing? That was twenty-five years ago, now you can type "ROXY MUSIC" into about ten different apps and find out exactly what Roxy Music sounds like. This doesn't mean that in order to like Roxy Music (or see how they influenced other music) that you need to read a 5,000 word Bryan Ferry biography or puzzle together which songs Ferry or Eno wrote about their creative differences, or any sort of "deep lore", I just mean literally if you want to know more about a creator or character it is easy as gently caress to find that information, even if it's as simple as "are there other good stories with Swamp Thing" or "what all has Ann Nocenti written" or "what's the Infinity Gauntlet" or "who is Jason Todd". You definitely can read thousands of words on any or all of these topics, but the idea that you have to in order to enjoy anything seems bizarre to me. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Sep 20, 2021 |
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Sep 20, 2021 21:29
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Why are Rick Perlstein books struggling despite voting for Republicans being huge?
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Sep 20, 2021 21:39
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The thing is, single issues get turned into collected editions and 'streaming services'. If you're a consumer who doesn't want to pay the high price for single issues, you can wait X months and get the story cheaper as a physical trade, discounted digital purchase, or as part of a streaming service. You have to wait a bit longer, but you don't have to pay full price. If you're a publisher who is solvent and can afford to do so, the single issue sales are still a significant revenue stream that doesn't seem to cannibalize the trade/digital/subscription business. As mentioned this "series of OGN" things has been tried repeatedly, including with DC's "Earth One" graphic novels. A really cursory look at orders for these books: Superman Earth One v1 got 16,260 preorders, for net receipts of $325,000. That same month, the floppy issue of Superman got 50,460 orders for net receipts of $150,875. But the OGN represents approximately six months worth of floppies, and six issues of Superman selling around that rate would bring in net receipts of $905,000. The best-selling Earth One OGN in its first month was Batman v1 (32,913, $756,000) compared to that month's issue of Batman (127,210, $507,567.90, or over $3,000,000 in sales for six issues). This is the general trend for every single one of the Earth One OGNs, with lower-selling floppies like Wonder Woman and Teen Titans having comparably lower pre-orders for their OGN versions. Initial sales of Batman Year One v2 were half of v1, and did anyone even notice v3 coming out this summer? All of these numbers aren't even accounting for the fact that all of those floppies were further monetized as trades, in the case of things like the Scott Snyder Batman run that paralleled Year One selling very well in trades as well. By the end of 2012, Batman Earth One had sold 45,700 copies ($1.05M net receipts) in the direct market. The first volume of Scott Snyder's Batman had sold 26,700 ($667,000) on top of its single issue sales. In the 2013 year-end totals, Snyder's Batman v1 had sold an additional 24,000 copies, and the second and third volumes had come out and sold another 17k apiece, totaling $1.4m in additional sales. Other repackagings (trades, deluxe hardcovers, a trade packaged with a mask) pushed total trade sales of Scott Snyder Batman in 2012 well over two million dollars. Additional sales of Batman Earth One came up to an additional $183,000. Also the fact that the core Batman comic has released around 150 issues in the time that it took three volumes of Batman Earth One to come out. Of course, if DC just stopped putting out over 30 Bat Family floppies a month and the only way to get new Batman comics was to buy OGNs, certainly the sales of OGNs would go up. But would it be enough to counter the loss of all those floppy sales? In 2014, Snyder Batman accounted for at least another million dollars in trade sales, I didn't tally it all up. A softcover reprint of Batman Earth One netted $78,000. As discussed ad nauseum in various places, there are markets and audiences that absolutely consume comics completely divorced from the monthly serialized single issue format. Many creators have thrived in those, and more companies are starting with that model rather than trying to 'win' in the direct market. But with a few exceptions, even outside of the Big Two many successful properties -- Walking Dead, Saga, almost every other big Image property, Hellboy/BPRD, Lumberjanes, Locke & Key, etc. -- everything in the direct sales market that breaks through into big sales in book form came out in floppies first, without doing much apparent harm to the trade sales. A lot of this can properly be chalked up to inertia, an outdated business model, speculation, or a dozen other factors that aren't ideal. But it's still profitable for all parties, so they're not going to give it up any sooner than live to air television with commercials are going away even though it represents a tiny fraction of the actual 'television' being consumed in 2021. I'm a sucker for longform serialized storytelling outside of any sort of "big shared universe" thing, and I don't think I would have enjoyed Immortal Hulk, or Die, or Better Call Saul, or Black Monday, or Reservation Dogs if they'd just come out in one giant chunk. That doesn't mean I don't like OGNs or Netflix shows that come out all at once, but it's a different type of experience and there's room creatively and commercially for both.
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Oct 17, 2021 04:45
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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.
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Nov 4, 2021 14:35
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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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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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