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>WHO put that particular knife in the back of newsstand comics?
I think you have to look to the fans. Once the "mainstream" books shifted to the comic shops they increasingly catered to the comic shop crowd. Books becme intellectually inbred; recycling the accepted memes, pumping trends, less experimentation, an emphasis on "good" storioes rather than "entertaining" ones. Better paper and printing priced books out of impule buy range, and shifted the attention to the nuts and bolts of the books, rather than the content. Designer books, featuring hyped artists. (And occasionally writers.) Stuff like "Marvel Age" and "Wizard" that fed the collector's market over the reader one; hilighting what was gonna be "hot," and what books the top folks were gonna be on.... And the fans went along with it. 'Course, like we was sayin'.... by the late 80's most of them were speculators over fans.
>comic book readership was on a huge decline throughout the seventies,
The seventies were a weird time.... similar to what we've been going through. The decline of the "mainstream" books made openings for the small press, underground stuff; books that eventually coalesced into the early 80's comic boom. (Sorta like the Japanese stuff did here in the 00's.) The "Big Two" retreated into their most profitable lines.... tie ins and superheroes, and saw greater profitability from licensing those characters out. (Or buying the comic license to established material, like Star Wars.) Kinda like now, when the superhero movies make more money than the comics, and so many franchaises have come back in printed form.
>Particularly with the ability to duck the code and recreate an adult readership which had disappeared along with the adult material of the pre-50's.
Yeah. I think Marvel and DC were dancing around the older readership.... but never quite committed to it. You got bits of "mature content" in their magazines, and some of their comics proper. (I was surprised by some of the content in the first "Marvel: Horror" volume.) I've always felt a lot of that was "well, the Warren stuff sells...." (With a touch of "the Exorcist was popular....")
>Comico was one if the companies that was the victim of their own success in the late eighties when they decided to go the newsstand route and got horribly burned by the returns, which ultimately was a major factor in their decline.
Haw! Someone else who remembers Comico! One of the nice things about the early 80's boom was that there were a few distributors, so a compnay could survive with smaller runs. (A lot of independants had runs of 2000-5000 per issue.) Once you start supplying newsstands the numbers change, and it's a helluva lot easier to move 3000 books a month over 20,000 a month. One of the problems of the post 90's distribution system is that there isn't room for smaller run books, so a lot of companies got squeezed out. Unless they could maintain their own mail-order, or hook up with the underground distributors. (Like the old Mailbox Books.) Which perhaps plants the seeds for the cycle to start again....?
>Think of digital comics as a return to the news stands...
I kinda see 'em more like the the old head shops where the smaller guys can get some props.
>It's not our cup of tea, but we should be embracing it at least as a concept so that the medium does survive the death of print readership within two decades.
A comic is a comic is a comic. The medium is NOT the message. The content SHOULD take priority. I prefer paper too, but given the access digital has given me to insane amounts of variety I'll live with it.
Don C.
I think you have to look to the fans. Once the "mainstream" books shifted to the comic shops they increasingly catered to the comic shop crowd. Books becme intellectually inbred; recycling the accepted memes, pumping trends, less experimentation, an emphasis on "good" storioes rather than "entertaining" ones. Better paper and printing priced books out of impule buy range, and shifted the attention to the nuts and bolts of the books, rather than the content. Designer books, featuring hyped artists. (And occasionally writers.) Stuff like "Marvel Age" and "Wizard" that fed the collector's market over the reader one; hilighting what was gonna be "hot," and what books the top folks were gonna be on.... And the fans went along with it. 'Course, like we was sayin'.... by the late 80's most of them were speculators over fans.
>comic book readership was on a huge decline throughout the seventies,
The seventies were a weird time.... similar to what we've been going through. The decline of the "mainstream" books made openings for the small press, underground stuff; books that eventually coalesced into the early 80's comic boom. (Sorta like the Japanese stuff did here in the 00's.) The "Big Two" retreated into their most profitable lines.... tie ins and superheroes, and saw greater profitability from licensing those characters out. (Or buying the comic license to established material, like Star Wars.) Kinda like now, when the superhero movies make more money than the comics, and so many franchaises have come back in printed form.
>Particularly with the ability to duck the code and recreate an adult readership which had disappeared along with the adult material of the pre-50's.
Yeah. I think Marvel and DC were dancing around the older readership.... but never quite committed to it. You got bits of "mature content" in their magazines, and some of their comics proper. (I was surprised by some of the content in the first "Marvel: Horror" volume.) I've always felt a lot of that was "well, the Warren stuff sells...." (With a touch of "the Exorcist was popular....")
>Comico was one if the companies that was the victim of their own success in the late eighties when they decided to go the newsstand route and got horribly burned by the returns, which ultimately was a major factor in their decline.
Haw! Someone else who remembers Comico! One of the nice things about the early 80's boom was that there were a few distributors, so a compnay could survive with smaller runs. (A lot of independants had runs of 2000-5000 per issue.) Once you start supplying newsstands the numbers change, and it's a helluva lot easier to move 3000 books a month over 20,000 a month. One of the problems of the post 90's distribution system is that there isn't room for smaller run books, so a lot of companies got squeezed out. Unless they could maintain their own mail-order, or hook up with the underground distributors. (Like the old Mailbox Books.) Which perhaps plants the seeds for the cycle to start again....?
>Think of digital comics as a return to the news stands...
I kinda see 'em more like the the old head shops where the smaller guys can get some props.
>It's not our cup of tea, but we should be embracing it at least as a concept so that the medium does survive the death of print readership within two decades.
A comic is a comic is a comic. The medium is NOT the message. The content SHOULD take priority. I prefer paper too, but given the access digital has given me to insane amounts of variety I'll live with it.
Don C.
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