Dc comics'generation one-shots

[thunderbolt]

looks like DC is backing off 5G. Guess they woke up

[Nostalgiabuff]

Is that any different than what Marvel did in the 70s/80s with all their disco themed characters, their attempts to cash in on the martial arts fad, then in the 90s all their grim and gritty and urban heroes, etc. etc. Marvel has a long history of desperate attempts of trying to cash in on whatever the youth zeitgeist was and the result is usually terrible characters that are featured for a short time and then disappear. And it is always the previous "generation" of fans who grumble the most that this isn't "My Marvel" and a chunk quit reading. I know older ex-fans who claim the Bronze Age ruined Marvel and stopped reading when all those junk characters of the 70s came out, same with the 80s, 90s, the Quesada years, etc. It's the same as it ever was, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and none of them have ever been the end of Marvel. This is no different. -M

fair point, but these characters and names, to me screams more along the lines of PC and the woke movement. but either way, I don't buy comics anymore and haven't in many years and whether they stick around or not makes no difference to me

[thunderbolt]

didn't know the internet was still a fad. Martial Arts is still a big part of pop culture and one of Marvel's 70s characters from that fad is making his movie debut next year as part of the MCU. Iron Fist has already been a tv show. I doubt the non-binaries(term I never heard of before this mess) are really a fad, more like marvel being tone deaf and more than a bit stereotyping.

[MRP]

looks to me like a desperate grab at having relevance to today's youth. what a train wreck.

Is that any different than what Marvel did in the 70s/80s with all their disco themed characters, their attempts to cash in on the martial arts fad, then in the 90s all their grim and gritty and urban heroes, etc. etc. Marvel has a long history of desperate attempts of trying to cash in on whatever the youth zeitgeist was and the result is usually terrible characters that are featured for a short time and then disappear. And it is always the previous "generation" of fans who grumble the most that this isn't "My Marvel" and a chunk quit reading. I know older ex-fans who claim the Bronze Age ruined Marvel and stopped reading when all those junk characters of the 70s came out, same with the 80s, 90s, the Quesada years, etc. It's the same as it ever was, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and none of them have ever been the end of Marvel. This is no different.

-M

[Nostalgiabuff]

looks to me like a desperate grab at having relevance to today's youth. what a train wreck.

[thunderbolt]

In the grand scheme of things, how much sillier is internet gas than radioactive spider-bite, magic lightning and chemicals, or magic lantern from space alien as an origin. Super-hero origins are inherently silly. It's all a matter of execution an dhow much verisimilitude the creators can give it.

-M

All of it outside the vampire guy(?) are contrived and will be dated in a few years. They will end up used as cannon fodder in a crisis event as soon as it gets cancelled if it even sees the light of day, Snowflake and Safespace indeed. And I doubt that Kibbles n bits guy can give this anything close to verisimilitude .

[MRP]

In the grand scheme of things, how much sillier is internet gas than radioactive spider-bite, magic lightning and chemicals, or magic lantern from space alien as an origin. Super-hero origins are inherently silly. It's all a matter of execution an dhow much verisimilitude the creators can give it.

-M

[thunderbolt]

haha but dont forget its his grandpas" internet gas" or the magic backpack

yea what's with all the grandpa origins?

[libby 1957dog]

well I did watch it and when the "creator" has characters named Safespace and Snowflake and another that got his powers through "internet gas" I'm hitting the down button.

haha but dont forget its his grandpas" internet gas" or the magic backpack

[thunderbolt]

Oops 205K down votes. LOL.

[thunderbolt]

well I did watch it and when the "creator" has characters named Safespace and Snowflake and another that got his powers through "internet gas" I'm hitting the down button.

[MRP]

I haven't seen the trailer and don't really care about the book itself, as I've never been a fan of the New Warriors in any incarnation, but what I do find is that fandom in general has an over-inflated opinion of the importance of internet postings vs. real-world dollars importance. Of the 20K downvotes, how many were actually potential purchasers? How many were actually in the existing customer base of digital or comic shop buyers, and how many were knee-jerk mob mentality comics-gaters trying to sabotage something because it doesn't cater to their narrow view of what comics should be and who the target audience for comics should be? It takes a lot of asses in seats in movie theatres to make a box office success, it takes the average comic shop ordering 5-10* (possibly less, there are approximately 1500-2000 Diamond accounts in the US direct market so if each orders 5 copies that's 10K orders) copies of a books at launch to make it a success, since the big online retailers like Mike High, DCBS, Midtown and mycomicshop order at least 10K of any Marvel book combined for their online sales just to qualify for all the variants they want to be able to have access to sell to their pre-orders. The threshold of a profitable book launch in the context of what the market was pre-pandemic is fairly low.


*For comparison-the top selling books that sell 100K copies sell an average of 50 copies per shop if there are 2000 Diamond accounts. The big 4 accounts mentioned above usually account for close to 50% of the sales figures though, so the remaining accounts only need to average 25-30 or so copies to achieve the other 50K to make 100K. A solid mid-tier seller averages 30-40K a month, so the remaining shops only need to average 10-15 copies (assuming the low end of 1500 accounts, less if there are still 2k accounts)to achieve 40K in sales. At an average of 5 copies per shop, with 2000 shops, you get 10K, figures in the big 4 just about doubling that and you have 20K in sales, in February 2020, 20K would make it a top 100 seller on the Diamond charts. And the people ordering are retailers, not online posters, and they will order based on what their preorders/pulls and projected day of release sales are for the book and not on what internet posters or youtube viewers who never have or never will set foot in theri shop or order from them online.

So in the reality of the actual marketplace, internet comments and downvotes get entirely too much credence for their impact on actual orders or on the potential success of a book. That said, the marketplace on the other side of this is going to be an entirely different animal, and I think publishers are going to consolidate their lines focusing on proven sellers and perennial sellers until the new normal is established and a better sense of the market becomes available, so experimental projects are likely to get shelved in the short term, but it will not be because of internet postings and downvotes, but because of the shambles the market will be in and the limitations of cash flow retailers will have after being closed for several months (and the overall smaller size of the market post-pandemic because there will be far fewer Diamond accounts on the other side as many shops will not survive the hiatus of the industry. But I am sure internet posters will be quick to claim credit for the projects that don't move forward that they didn't like the cut of their jib.

-M

[thunderbolt]

All depends what kind of orders it got. Dollars and wallets speak louder than internet posts. If it sold/sells well in its initial solicitations, then all the negative posts in the world aren't going to make a damn bit of difference because the voices that matter, i.e. people spending money, will have spoken louder than any negative reactions online. If publishers listened to negative internet postings to determine publishing plans, nothing would ever get published.

-M

I don't even think it got that far yet as far as solicits go. Its over 20k down votes, in the Ghostbusters reboot territory. That translated into bomb, so it will be the same with this mess.

[hedrap]

Penguin/Random House made a serious run at buying Diamond before all this went down. Geppi refused. Reportedly, they repeated the offer when Diamond announced it was suspending receiving new books, and Geppi refused.

If true, and Geppi thought this was the end of Diamond, he would have sold in a heartbeat, even if just to get out from the debt that would be incurred if Diamond went out of business. But this tells me that Geppi thinks Diamond is in a position to survive the storm and resume activity on the other side. He's actually a pretty good businessman, and he has been willing to take short term hits to his company in order to enable the industry as a whole to survive in the past...
-M

He's holding out for an offer from Amazon. Penguin/Random is susceptibility to market volatility that Amazon is not. By integrating with Amazon, he not just makes a boatload, but ends up operating their genre/fan division.

[MRP]

wonder if Marvel will learn anything from the beatdown the New Warriors trailer got on Youtube.

All depends what kind of orders it got. Dollars and wallets speak louder than internet posts. If it sold/sells well in its initial solicitations, then all the negative posts in the world aren't going to make a damn bit of difference because the voices that matter, i.e. people spending money, will have spoken louder than any negative reactions online. If publishers listened to negative internet postings to determine publishing plans, nothing would ever get published.

-M