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Hmmmm....
My comments follow.
Don C.
My comments follow.
Don C.
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As real Spock (Nimoy) would say Fasinating!!! -
Could be. My wife is the Children's Librarian for our local library. I was actually surprised by the number of graphic novels they have that aren't super heroes or even Manga. Almost every popular young adult book that hits the pipeline gets a graphic novel treatment eventually...and most aren't from DC or Marvel.
ChrisComment
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I hope this is true, not that there's anything wrong with superhero comics - they've given me hours and hours of joy - but it sucks that for 60+ years ONE genre has defined the entire medium - in North America, anyway.Comment
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I love all kinds of comics - but I haven't spent much time reading superhero comics in years - and I've had way too many awkward conversations trying to explain that comics aren't just superhero comics to believe the public perception has really shifted in any widespread way.
The thing that has changed for me is that when I use to tell people I liked comics they use to get a knowing smirk and ask something about comic collecting, in terms of value - and now they'll ask something like "did you like the last Batman movie?" instead.Comment
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I've read comics on and off my entire life. I read more for the artist than anything eles. I dont think I truely "got" what comics really were until I read McClouds Understanding Comics. Now if comics are brought up in a conversation I can actually EXPLAIN them to others, lol.
Regarding superhero comics: I believe circulation has become limited. Children don't have nearly as much access as they use to. How many kids have access to a local comic shop or know where to get a Batman title? It has to be in front of them. Once comics were taken out of the supermarket or chain quick marts, potential readers are lost. Thats losing an entire generation of potential superhero comic readers right there. Not to mention comics just arent affordable now.
Going all digital is a solution but it isnt the only solution. Maybe the magazine format should be looked into. Bring back the old format for book likes Action and Detective and have quality backups with 2nd stringers with a quality lead story envolving our main heroes.Last edited by Figuremod73; Oct 24, '12, 12:37 PM.Comment
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Yes. I know when this is brought up the answer from comic pros is always "newstands were dying". Well, clearly they WEREN'T. Magazines are still around (although I know they are hurting now). But comics could have had another 20 years to grab new comic fans, who actually knew the characters from their source material, not toys, movies, TV shows.Regarding superhero comics: I believe circulation has become limited. Children don't have nearly as much access as they use to. How many kids have access to a local comic shop or know where to get a Batman title? It has to be in front of them. Once comics were taken out of the supermarket or chain quick marts, potential readers are lost. Thats losing an entire generation of potential superhero comic readers right there. Not to mention comics just arent affordable now.
I still don't understand how Archie has managed to keep digests in grocery stores for 30 years, but DC and Marvel pretty much gave up by the mid 80s.
ChrisComment
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I've already read that and "we would get get killed" with returns" nonsense. The nonsense not being the returns but how many they actually sold at non-comic shops.
So if 20 out of say every 100 copies were returned, that means it's better not to sell the 80 copies out of those 100? Backwards logic to be sure.Comment
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My first exposure to superheros (outside of Superfriends and The New Adventures of Batman) were those great Blue Ribbon books. When in line at the grocery stores they were right there in plain site. I begged for them. They were a whopping 100 pages! I didnt know they were usually reprints and didnt care.
Right from there, someone my family knew worked at a drug store who use to sell those "grab bags". I got a ton of X-men, spidey, and Fantastic four that way.Comment
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One of the reason I think they should bring back the magazine sizes is it fits better with other magazines on the rack and doesnt get hidden from the larger books
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>Once comics were taken out of the supermarket or chain quick marts, potential readers are lost.
Yup. A lot of folks see the late 80's as a comic boom; and for Marvel and DC it was, but it was also the beginning of the end 'cos you started seeing a lot of decline in material. If you get the chance, McCloud's "Reinventing Comics" is a fantastic treatsie on this ssort of thing. But yeah, once in the comic shops you had a smaller potential audience; and an audience a lot more focussed on a declining selection of stories.
>Not to mention comics just arent affordable now.
One of the reasons the Japanese stuff won was 'cos you could plunk down $5 and get 250+ pages of comic. (Less if you had a subscription.) You got two or three chapters of five to eight series. Even if you bought it for one of them, that's still 40 or so pages for $5. (A MUCH better investment than the ol' fold floppies.) And odds are you'd at least read some of the other stuff. They were smart and didn't just fill the things with action comics; they did comedies, soap operas, sports books.... which exposed readers to different things. Diversified material = diversified audience.
Thing is; they did it ENTIRELY counter intuitively, as far as our industry goes. Black and white, cheap paper, an anthology.... we'd NEVER do those things. But to a generation of kids who'd been squeezed out of the comic shops there were no preconceptions of what a "comic" was, so they came in clean.
>I still don't understand how Archie has managed to keep digests in grocery stores for 30 years, but DC and Marvel pretty much gave up by the mid 80s
It's a slipery slope, and ties in with my last comment. The superhero stuff ended up in ther comic shops, and at the same time you had a speculator boom. People wanted fresh, pristine books; not pre-fingered ones, so they gravitated to the shops. Once the audience was isolated the intellectual inbreeding began. ALL the companies were playing to the same crowd, and therefore followed a lot of the same tricks to get buyers. Eventually things got so inbred that you couldn't follow a book unless you'd read three others; or you'd get gimmick after gimmick that only worked if you were ALREADY a fan. ("Fall of the Mutants" anyone? Anyone....?) So there was nothing to interest new readers; especially if they don't care for supers. Eventually the bottom fell out and the speculators left, and inertia kept the old crowd coming. So now you've got the Big Two-ish catering to a slowly diminishing pool. Hence the yearly reboot; it gets those folks excited 'cos things are gonna be SO DIFFERENT! (get in on the gorund floor kiddies!) The excitement lasts for a bit, wanes, the other guys do THEIR reboot, everyone hobbles over there for a bit, until the first company does THEIR new reboot....
Archie was always Archie. They do their thing with little hype (and therefore little griping and whining) kids read it for a while, move on, new kids start reading it for a while.
>One of the reason I think they should bring back the magazine sizes is it fits better with other magazines on the rack and doesnt get hidden
Shionen Jump did that, and for a while it worked. The problem you run into is that there's a lot of preconceptions on both sides of the super-aisle that would hamper this. The oldsters would HATE the format as a matter of principle, the youngsters.... who would be perfectly fine with it.... wouldn't care because they don't like superheroes. (REAL comics have speed lines, and stories, and people don't come back from the dead.... unless you're reading Dragonball....) If they could come up with some superhero stuff the kids might like, it'd probably work; but they're still just recycling. And if they did something new, the oldsters would STILL hate it.
Funny thing with the Japanese stuff; this time around it was marketed AS Japanese stuff, so it ended up suffering from the same preconceptions that killed the supers; hence now that their audience is moving on there's a dip in sales there too. And it's funny that they did exactly what the Big Two-ish did; narrow the available stories down to the most profitable genres.... and it's causing the same problems it did 20 years ago for the superheroes.
It's the CCCCIIIIRRRRRCLE of LLLIIIIIFFFEEEEEEE!!!!!!
Again.
But that means the audience is primed for the next big thing.
Don C.Comment
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Whew . . . I thought the title of this thread was referring the the "Liefeld Retires" thread . . .Comment
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