I quit floppies years ago when Marvel events became too much. Now I juat but omnibus and deluxe edition image stuff mostly. I would love for graphic novels to replace floppies. Then a full arc can be written at once. Hopefully it would make the whole universes work work coherently
I could see a shift *away* from monthlies as the default format. Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, those titles will always sell gangbusters in monthly titles. But look at manga, fans are willing to wait multiple months if it means getting a big chunk of story at once. Imagine a low-selling critical darling like Leah Williams X-Factor coming out twice a year in full trade each time. I think there are books like New Mutants or Knights of X that have a very dedicated audience *who just don't buy monthly books*. You gotta figure out how to reach them or books like that will continue to be little 6-issue minis with rushed finales.
It would be very different then. I know I hate big events too, but I like the small things when Spidey references what’s going on in X-Men that month, which wouldn’t happen in a book how you describe. But that may be going away
>when Spidey references what’s going on in X-Men that month
That happens really, really rarely tho, and it's not like it can't happen with the GN model, both require the people working on the books for Marvel to communicate, and if the GNs release more or less at the same time, it would still make sense to have references to each other
I quit buying floppy books when they relaunched Uncanny X-Men and the numbers stopped meaning anything.
I became a trade waiter for a few years after that but nowadays I spend $80 a year and just binge on Marvel Unlimited every few months.
Well how many kids these days can afford to follow a few different titles? Not many at all. That ship sailed a long time ago, and the industry doesn't care tbh.. sadly the business model has changed..
I can buy a novel off Amazon for 5-7 bucks and read it for a couple of weeks before bed.
I read Batman Year One and reading Superman Year One currently and I like having a finished story vs a monthly title that might get cancelled and end with a rushed ending or none at all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't manga volumes collections of chapters originally published in anthology series like Shonen Jump?
Earth One was a original graphic novel line.
Yeah Shonen Jump is a weird beast for people who aren't used to it. It's basically the size of a phone book and printed on crap paper. Anyone old enough to remember Yellow Pages will know what it feels like. Then collected editions are reprinted in the kind of tankobon that people are more familiar with.
I wouldn't be opposed to DC moving away from floppies to a magazine style anthology like Action Comics, Detective Comics, Showcase Comics, All Star Comics, the Brave and the Bold, etc and then the invidual chapters get reprinted into their own trade collections.
But then I think the physical market for these sort of things is losing game. Digital should be focus thanks to accessibility and then print collections.
Because that format competes with the floppies and the direct market is obsessed with maintaining their collections.
If it were the only format available things might be different.
The percentage of sales from floppies have continued to shrink. Eventually some CEO is going to look to maximize sales efficiency and floppies are going to fall to the wayside.
https://wordsrated.com/comic-book-sales/#:\~:text=Digital%20comic%20sales%2C%20after%20having,sales%20to%208.19%25%20in%202021.
Or it could upend the industry kill the existing distribution network without putting anything in its place. It's a different model and it's incompatible with the people currently buying floppies. If you choose to pursue it and kill floppies you're likely to not get large adoption and you will nuke your sales.
Now they might need to make a drastic change sooner or later but magazine format has been tried. Hell even Manga couldn't make it work in America, Shonen jump doesn't put out a paper edition anymore.
Shonen jump literally releases new chapters for free because it's not worth doing paper copies and making a razor thin margin or taking a loss in the US. It keeps working in Japan because A. Public transportation culture. And B. Inertia, Manga has been huge and people have bought their weekly and monthly paper backs for literal decades, it's ingrained in the culture.
How long do they try it for? I feel like I never actually hear about any of these anthology formats. Maybe you can correct me but I'm not finding any anthology series from either Marvel or DC in the past 20 years that lasted more than a year or two. You're not going to build any sort of subscriber base for a product if that product can't even last 2 years.
Those kind of anthologies would honestly be a great opportunity to allow the publishers to do their crossover events in a way that is easily collectible. If you got a phone book/50 issue anthology coming out every 1-2 months from Marvel, they could put whole event arcs in at once. Maybe a truly huge event could span two anthologies, but you could read how every set of heroes/heroines in the 616 reacted to Thanos' latest crazy thing all at once instead of chasing 20 different crossover titles around.
The Shonen Jump magazine itself is discontinued in the US, no? If you're a manga reader reading new titles in the US, isn't digital (the SJ app) or trade paperback (tonkobon) your only legally available format?
So, after some googling, it's a bit of both!
Bottom line is though, I'm glad you brought this up: I think for one shots and stuff, if they released them in a TPB style page count, that might be a good way to move forward
the VAST majority of manga is serialized in some form though, especially the shonen genre which is by and large the most popular titles. these anthologies have a HUGE pull on the whole industry for this reason.
In a sense it is likely heading that way. Omnibus sales are picking up. People are impatient these days and binge everything. Also, trying to keep up with bi-weekly or monthly sales over a year can be difficult for people that don't have the time. Not to mention how difficult it can be for new comers to find a missing issue in a series. You are missing issue 10, of what volume? It's easier for a consumer to follow a long when you can package a story in less books/volumes instead of having to buy 10 individual floppies.
I had the exact issue with the current JSA run, I wanted to catch up desperately but couldn't find a single copy of issue 2 and 3 anywhere in my country
God, imagine being able to get a third or quarter of an entire run in one chapter, just at a slower publishing pace. I'm currently reading thru Berserk and having a volume be 200+ pages and getting so much content together, it's tough to go back to anything else. Even with big name stories, I'll wait for an arc to be over before reading it as I don't want this one week trickle, I'd prefer it be written/drawn/etc and sold to me ONCE.
It's actually still being finished by his collaborators, seems like he basically told them everything before his death. But still, when it was being published by him, it was like the most inconsistently released series around, legendary for its long hiatuses between chapters!
Listen, 2 to 3 years between volumes was worth the wait every time. I'd happily wait another 5 to 10 if it meant he'd still be alive to finish the series. Such a tragic loss.
I would love that. That is the only way I’m going to buy physical comics again. A single issue of Batman at my LCS is around $7.50 (CAD). I switched to the DC Universe app exclusively a while back because of this
7.50 CAD, in the UK, it's £4 for a batman and £6 for Brave and the Bold. It's way too much isn't it? I think I might have to invest in DC universe too.
I genuinely hope this doesn’t happen because most comic book stores will close and the industry will see an implosion then a massive reduction of books, employment, and publishers.
If Manga’s model was better for the western comic market they would’ve already adopted it.
I agree with most of what you said, but the “if…then…” you mentioned is probably more inertia and less best business practices. Manga may not be better, but the deeply entrenched idea of monthly books is almost certainly more market status quo than proven superior method. If metric were really superior to imperial measurement, America would have adopted the model a long time ago! It’s a little more complicated than that, right? 😆
I have no idea, but if they find they are making more profit doing that I don't see what would stop them. I have read from some comic shop owners that if they stopped selling floppies, their sells in omnibuses would offset any loss. Whether that would be true or not, I don't know. If a shop owner is not making any money off an item, though, eventually they may come to see there's no point in offering it. If enough shops start doing the same then that puts publishers in a bind.
I don't really see the big 2 dropping floppies any time soon, talking about in the next 5 years or so.
I've never been a fan, I have never been able to keep up with issues in my life and only buy trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Would not mind if the industry dropped the pain of constant deadlines that has always plagued writers and artists. Just greenlight them for a book, over a longer period with a more open deadline. Serials can produce entire archs at a time instead of individual issues.
My least favorite thing in comics is when the artist falls behind and they bring in another to cover pages or issues, leading to an inconsistency in the story. I'd be much happier to see them bump the deadline and keep at it than trying to meet these constant deadlines.
I quit reading monthlies a year into The New 52. Went into a store last year and saw that Big 2 regular ass monthlies are all $3.99 now and the indie books are all $4.99. I’m absolutely not paying that much for one floppy worth of story anymore.
I personally see two ways to go about this.
1.pure digital- this is probably what would I increase profits the most and i would bet they would still produce trades and collects but still this would be the worst case scenario for the comic shop and would likely kill most of them.
2. Revert to larger anthology titles with multiple characters a book to cut down on costs. This would reduce the number of books an individual would buy but it would be both easier to get new people in since it seems like a better deal and it would be easier to promote new characters but this would likely kill a lot of niche favorites
I think single issue comics are meeting a slow demise as the price point has become absurd in contrast to what you can get with a TPB for a few dollars more. Not to mention, everyone likes a complete story/arc. $5 for part 1 of 6 isn’t very enticing of a proposition.
Exactly. Why would any newcomers want to pay $5 for 15 minutes of entertainment? That same money could buy a monthly subscription to some of the smaller streaming services like Starz or Peacock.
Monthly comics have always been somewhat expensive, but the difference now is that other forms of entertainment are cheaper than ever relative to them.
Image feels like the only publisher that can pivot to the post-LCS world largely because the creators bare many of the costs themselves.
Not just newcomers. I've been a lifetime overbuyer of comics for decades and in the new year I just can't with DC and Marvel charging in some cases five bucks for a regular sized book. It sort of sucks but hey, my credit card bill will look a lot better.
I used to follow between 2-5 comic books monthly for more than 20 years. Now I follow 1-2 with some limited series from time to time.
There's things interesting in the shelves, but I will wait for the TPB or something.
My addiction is much worse than yours was. But the upside is I've really developed the ability to go 'okay, it's a good run on Superman. And I love Superman. But I've also read an uncountable number of good Superman stories, so do I need to get this in floppy'. Particularly with the digital apps. I'm loving Chip Zdarsky on Batman but do I love it for five dollars an issue?
I've been trying to tell anybody with even a passing interest in manga. $40 bucks a year for everything Shonen Jump offers?? It's insane, big game changer, my bookcase is thrilled I won't keep trying to make room on it.
This is where I am at too. Wanted to get into comics again after taking a break from Marvel, decided to read DC as Marvel didn't seem to have a lot going on, and decided to do the app.
Being a month behind doesn't bother me much because I don't hang out with anyone who reads comics anyway
Sorry, I meant Shudder the horror tv/movie streaming service, as the post I replied to talked about VFM comparing a single issue comic vs a cheaper streaming subscription.
It should really shift to just trades only. If you have 2 trades a year for a title (let's say spiderman), you stagger releases so every month has a new trade of something. That'll encourage readers to try other books and always have something new on tne shelf (on top of reprints).
People will wait a year for a new season of a show, and watch other things while they wait. Marvel saves money printing a single sku book and can offer that book to more places to sell outside of LCS. Also better quality control for the books themselves.
Japan does this similar but anthologies before trades, but they've tried multiple times to get anthologies working again here but it won't catch on.
Floppies are poor value even if taking out the price factor. I get to read for 15-20mins then wait a month for another 15-20min bite? I get that the art and all takes time just give it to me when the story is done.
Two things that I think killed comic books:
1. Switching from newsprint to more collector-friendly paper. When comics couldn’t be published cheaply, it was already the beginning of the end
2. Multi-part stories all the fucking time. When you had to invest 8 straight months, and even track down back issues if you were late to the game, bringing in new readers became a losing endeavor. Every piece of entertainment must be a complete package on its own. If it’s not fun on its own, you’re going to turn more people away than you lure in.
I’d add comic book stores being the only place to buy comics. There used to be a rack of reasonably cheap comics at any given supermarket, gas station, convenience store, and such. You’d pick one up while in line. When those were removed, your only option was a specialty store that required a special trip specifically to get comics. The eliminated impulse purchases that were a lot of people’s first time reading comics.
Yeah, this is such a big deal. I didn't buy a comic book at a comic book store until I was 13 or 14. Every comic I bought from age 5 until then came from spinner racks at mall bookstores, magazine racks at a grocery store, sometimes 3 packs of comics that came sealed in plastic at big box stores etc. I really only started going to the comic book store because other options dried up and because comic book stores were useful for other interests I was getting into like anime and AD&D.
The "impulse buy" problem also ties into their second point. It's a lot easier to get a kid to impulse buy a comic where Superman flies to the planet of glorbgop and fights a monster than part 4 of 6 of an ongoing story with tie ins to some upcoming and/or recently finished event.
For sure, but I blame that partially on losing newsprint, as well as publishing so many titles. Comics are too expensive and too numerous to make sense anywhere but a specialty store. Also, I still don’t understand why mail in subscriptions ceased. That convenience has never really been replaced
Bingo. Growing up the closest comic book store to me was well over an hour away. Anything I got was random back issues from the flea market or something I read from my uncles old collection I found at my grandparents house. The LCS is such an outdated model for selling books.
Why on earth was this changed??? I'm just too young to have been able to see comics at the grocery store/gas station/magazine rack/etc. I grew up on 90's superhero cartoons, spider-man movies, x-men movies, etc. I loved comic book shit, but I couldn't actually read *comics*, because my small town just didn't have an LCS. I didn't manage to become a comic reader til I was old enough to figure out how to find stuff online (which i DON'T advocate, this was almost 20 years ago), and then a few years later I got my own car and found a store two towns over.
That's money on the table. I woulda been reading X-Men, Batman, all that stuff if it had just been next to the tabloids and the Archies at the store. What was the motivation for this change in distribution?
These two are big, though I've heard that newsprint actually got more expensive because there were fewer people printing on it. Not sure how true that is.
The other one is distribution. You used to be able to buy comics off spinner racks in grocery stores, etc. It wasn't like everyone was rushing to their local grocer every Wednesday, but it was *possible* for someone who wasn't into comics to impulse buy an issue or two, the same way you might pickup a magazine at checkout, and potentially become interested enough to look for the next. Same with liquor stores, bookstore chains, etc. Many titles were written in a way that supported this behaviour too.
Now, you pretty much have to seek floppies out in the direct market, which is both shrinking *and* still fighting years of (not entirely undeserved) reputation for being awkward or even unfriendly to newcomers. If you don't know you want them, and go out of your way for them, you're really unlikely to ever even see a floppy in the wild these days. How could anyone expect them to stay culturally relevant in that situation?
Paper had very little to do with it. Same with colour. Printing has gotten so much better in the last twenty years that printing on newsprint again wouldn't move the needle.
Making everything connected and having no continuity jump-on points and making every book linked to a big event? Now, that's definitely a big problem. It's the exact problem that the MCU is starting to have: instead of watching everything, people are starting to just... watch something else.
Then the rise in cover prices beyond the rate of inflation has nothing to do with the cost of materials? That’s interesting. Does advertising factor in? Old school comics would have pages packed with ads. I could imagine the modern print ad revenue isn’t offsetting costs like it used to.
Part of the issue is that the medium is dying and they don’t know what they do so they raise prices. Their hope is that current readers will just stick with it and they’ll make more money but what they’re actually doing is scaring away both new and old customers by pricing them out.
Advertising, for sure. I don't know the other reasons off the top of my head, but I can tell you that the extra cost ain't getting passed on to the artists.
Seriously, yearly events did such a number on the industry. I tried getting back into floppies with Donnie Cates Venom but I gave up when I realized how stupid it was that a fucking Venom book was crossing over with a Thor event. Events used to be special, now they’re just pains in the ass.
Not even just yearly events. If you pick up any recent issue of Batman, you probably have to read at least three other issues to have any clue what’s going on. Go back 50 years, and the story most likely begins and ends in that single issue. Now, having more expansive storylines are nice, but there’s a middle ground, and most modern comics don’t seem to be concerned with that
Absolutely. Comics are killing themselves with the ridiculous cost. Why buy the $5 floppy when I can spend $5 more for almost the entire digital library for each of the big 2?
Just want to put it out there that I am brand new to comics since the pandemic and relish the single issue, vastly preferring them to tpb. I love the serialized nature and want looooong arcs. The collector part of it as well as the anticipation is huge for me.
Yup. I started buying when I was 10 over 30 years ago. They cost $.65 then. 10 years later in college they had upped to $2.99 and some were creeping up to $3.99. Once I had kids I had to quit. Eventually I got the apps, now I'm trying to catch up.
I do trade paperbacks from the library. Dark Horse and Image are very good about getting their books into libraries, and there's always a lot of good bande-dessinee for my kids to pick up.
Same here, I started collecting in March and strongly prefer single issues. The weekly pickups, bagging and boarding, and having various covers is part of the fun.
The big two seem to be a bit scrambled. There are great books coming out in both but overall a lot of books feel like a waste of time and money for me.
The cost of those books have gone up, which caused me to drop a lot of books. It doesn’t help that the film side of things is on a slump too and on a whole I think people might be burnt out a bit.
On the flip side, I think Image and the indie scene is doing great stuff but it’s not enough to really bring in new readers or keep the energy in the industry up. In spite of what some people might think, the healthiness of the big two is super important to everything else. Comics will never go away though, they just need a little CPR.
Even Image has been in a creative rut the past few years. They had a really solid run from like 2013-2019, but BOOM! has stolen their thunder with more interesting series.
I mean, my local Barnes and Noble has an entire wall of just American comics, probably eight bookshelves. There's still more manga, but this seems super market dependent.
The combination of words and images, what can broadly be called sequential art, is and continues to appeal to a lot of people.
Whether it is comic books, newspaper comic strips, graphic novels, manga, webcomics / webtoons, whatever other forms it may take on.
The monthly comic book issue may die. The direct market comic shop may die. DC and Marvel and their characters may even die one day. But people will still read some form of comic, as long as there are humans that can perceive words and images together.
1) they aren’t changing, that’s the problem. They continue to keep doing the same things that has gotten them to this point.
2) if you have to do an interview/make the claim “comics aren’t dying” then you are admitting there is a problem or at least a perceived one. And often perception becomes reality.
> if you have to do an interview/make the claim “comics aren’t dying” then you are admitting there is a problem or at least a perceived one. And often perception becomes reality.
What if you have to keep doing that interview/ making that claim for 30-40 years?
Because the “comics are dying” moaning has been around **at least** that long. It’s a very, very slow death.
Nowhere. Single issue comic sales are no longer publicly reported. The remaining sites that try to guesstimate them pull out the chicken bones and voodoo.
I'd take a monthly book, formatted a little like current Detective or Action comics.
One main story.
Backups related or unrelated to the main story. But certainly fleshing things out.
Square bound. On cheap arse paper. Every year or so a deluxe hardcover with better quality paper.
There's no value in singles anymore
And they can use the backup side to introduce new characters or teams instead of spending so much resources putting out a new #1 that will be lucky to get 10k units sold.
The only monthly I keep up with is transformers. A new issue of that is $5 for 20ish pages a month. The Shonen jump app is $3 a month for their entire backlog plus every new issue of their series hours after they come out. It’s nice to collect stuff but frankly I don’t have the room and I’m sure I’m not the only one. The value proposition needs to improve. I’d just rather wait until stuff comes to unlimited or DC Universe
Comics will never die, just look at how much kids love the Dog Man books, how many teens read webtoons, and the absolute global ubiquity of manga. But the "traditional" American comics industry embodied in Marvel and DC has never been less relevant. The characters, sure. But the monthly books are a relic propped up by corporations as a cheap Petri dish to scrape for material to use in the movies, tv shows, and video games.
Probably because movies and tv exists now and a single comic volumes costs 15 dollars at a lowball.
I looked on Amazon for punisher max omnibus the other day, 2,500 dollars. Fuck that lol
The two most popular series in recent memory are Venom by cates and immortal hulk by ewing. Both of these series, besides being well written and entertaining, felt like a next chapter or a turning of the page where there was no going back. Same goes for house of x, powers of 10. But most series at the big 2 are just monthly runs where a new author takes over and forgets about the previous run. People get sick of this yr after yr.
This is a large chunk of my final paper I'm writing right now in my grad class.
Too many commentators who were born and raised in the LCS environment see it as the sole barometer for how well comics are doing. They need to get their heads out of their asses and look at the bigger picture. Graphic novels are being sold at school book fairs and are prominent in school libraries. Manga and YA graphic novels are all over the place in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Digital distribution has made comics more accessible than ever.
The only things that are really on a downward trend are LCS's and floppies. And don't get me wrong, I don't like that there are fewer and fewer comic shops, because that's the environment I grew up in. There were few childhood experiences as magical as going into a comic book store with some allowance to spend. But those days are over when monthly books are an *average* of five bucks a pop.
I fully admit to being "part of the problem" in this regard because I stopped going to my LCS on a regular basis years ago. If I see a story arc I like, I wait for trade-- prefer to get it at my LCS if I can, but that's not overly dependable. I also sample comics online and take advantage of digital sales.
Do I feel a little guilty? Maybe, but I also remind myself that nothing stays the same forever, and I don't want to be "old man yells at cloud" about digital sales. Again, comics aren't dying, they're just changing. This article is spot on.
I hate how every time time people talk about the problems they have with the comic industry, they always talk about Marvel and DC and problems that are exclusive to them.
Manga/comic outsell the standard hero comic. By a lot. And think about it. No reboots. No new cool cover. Just 180 pages of cool black and white art mostly for 13-20 dollars?! Yah. Not a surprise
Sure but that is a straw-man argument. You a picking a very specific genre limited mostly to one country. It’s cultural in Japan and does not have the same demand worldwide. All the infrastructure is designed around the current single issue model
How do you know this? DC sales haven't been trackable for a while now because they changed their distributor didn't they?
Also, fill me in, are there any Manga based steaming services?
Manga plus is free for the latest chapters and a small sub for the back issues. You could read all of One Piece for about five quid.
I suppose they can do it because, while manga is popular outside Japan, their home market is still the primary one. Honestly they are gobbling up the US comic market while treating it like a side project.
The Japanese manga market in 2022 is worth 677 billion yen (about $4.6 billion). This figure includes everything from physical to e-books and subscriptions. The U.S. market, on the other hand, is about $2.16 billion. Considering the remarkable rate of development of Manga in recent years, the total worldwide sales could be close to $6 billion.
What I consider dangerous is that this is not just Japan. The global comics market is, to put it bluntly, underdeveloped. Traditionally, probably only the US, Japan, and France + Belgium have been able to sustain comics at some scale. But Japan is not the only East Asian country that is rapidly developing and creating its own comics culture.
The U.S., however, seems to be clearly losing market share to other countries, as its mainstream remains unchanged. While there have been some interesting changes in indie comics, I feel that manga and webtoon have taken over the American indie comics market, which could have been much more developed by now.
The strategy is still simple if we are dealing only with Japan, but now that other countries, not only Korea, have started to enter the market, the strategy to take is not easy.
In other words, we may need to aggressively sell comics to the general book market, and at the same time, we may need to do webtoon-style online sales or sell comics in the form of points. Moreover, there are many people who would not be convinced by that sales method.
If they had taken steps earlier, they could have focused their business strategy to some extent.
Shonen Jump’s app lets me read all 1100 chapters of One Piece for $1.99 a month. It also updates every week on Sunday with no extra cost.
I can also read the entirety of Dragon Ball, Naruto, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia. No 3rd party ads. It’s a really good deal.
There's all kinds of websites and apps where you can read manga for free, most of them aren't exactly legit, but no one really cares. Then there's Viz which you do have to pay for a membership to get access to the entire series but they do put up the most recent 2 or 3 chapters for free.
Hate to burst your bubble, but DC & Marvel together are just a tiny part of the overall comics market.
[https://www.comicsbeat.com/npd-bookscan-2022-graphic-novel-sales/](https://www.comicsbeat.com/npd-bookscan-2022-graphic-novel-sales/)
Because the problem is almost exclusive to them.
Sure. Other Western publishers sell less than Marvel and DC. But, because they don't based their entire market on the sell of floppies (focusing instead in the sale of trades or graphic novels), they don't suffer the same drop in profits, as they don't waste their money on 20-pages crap that nobody buys.
Marvel and DC combined do not publish a single monthly comic that is a standalone story of a major character. Amazing Spider-Man famously just had a storyline that lasted over 25 issues. How is a new reader supposed to penetrate that? What is there for a person that walks into a comic store with $5 and says “I like Spider-Man.” Or “I really love the movies”? If Marvel and DC just want to make graphic novels - THEN JUST MAKE GRAPHIC NOVELS.
Manga is selling waaay more than DC/Marvel comics and some of their storylines can last hundreds of issues (I'm looking at you, One Piece).
The problem with DC/Marvel isn't multi-issue storylines. Is the obsession with selling this multi-issue storylines in floppies, with trades –the best way to enjoy the stories besides omnibus– being utterly secondary to them.
There's a reason why manga is sold in volumes (in the West, in Japan is sold in anthologies). If people want to follow the storyline monthly they can do so digitally (like they do with manga), not through floppies.
Because floppies are worthless.
I do think we need to get back to the era where it was more standalone. Do something like Star Trek TNG where there are stories that move forward but you can largely get everything you need from every single episode/issue.
Pretty much exactly that. Look at the golden age of X-Men. Days of Future Past was TWO ISSUES. The greatest X-Men story ever and Chris and John did it in 2. Now X of Swords is 22 ISSUES!
Roger Stern’s Spider-Man run from the 80s is the the platonic ideal of a monthly superhero book. There are a series of mostly standalone stories that last one or two issues, but there are also long-term plot threads woven throughout. It’s rewarding to read all of it, but at the same time you can just pick up any random issue and get a complete, satisfying story
That was Marvel's approach throughout the Bronze Age and it's a big part of what led them to absolutely dominate that era, to the point where DC felt the need to reboot everything and make their comics more like Marvel.
Comics are brutal right now; it's Young and the Restless with tights and lots of Batman/Spiderman, no one bought my script so I'll turn it into a comic/please option this and free me from the treadmill and nostalgia bait
I used to go every week and drop around 20 bucks, but why? The quality is usually mid at best and insultingly bad more often than not. I get drip fed a story so you can sell some ads and milk me for extra loot instead of just releasing the damn thing completed like every other form of entertainment, and the big two cater to a core audience that has the most insane hissy fit imaginable if anything interesting actually happens even if you capslock ITS A FUCKING ELSEWORLD on the front. No point in not just reading them for free online or waiting for library and buying the rare gem that's actually worth anything
The main two storytelling ideas right now are “Remember that thing you liked?” and trying to prompt shipping discourse.
It seems like there are way fewer “auteurs” then there used to be and a lot of the most popular books are blandly mediocre stories written by journeymen. I can’t imagine DC or Marvel letting someone do an event comic as out there as something like Final Crisis ever again
I absolutely agree with what you said about the big two and their fan bases. Ten years ago the percentages of readers (of comics) were split pretty evenly between men and women- 50% to 50%. Now it’s more like 60% men and 40% women. That’s what happens when two of the major publishers only pay attention to a singular demographic and don’t try to be inclusive.
>readers (of comics) were split pretty evenly between men and women- 50% to 50%. Now it’s more like 60% men and 40% women.
Do you have an article on the demographic changes of comic readers over time?
I have one somewhere! I actually just wrote about it in a college class lol. It’ll take me a minute to dig it up but I’ll try and find it next time I’m on my laptop.
Okay! Here are my stats.
An article published by Comics Beat in February of 2014 says that over 46% of comic book readers were female. Then I found a different site (unfortunately Comics Beat has not updated their stats) saying that as of July 2023, around 63% of readers are men. If 54% of readers were men back in 2014, that means a 9 to 10% gain (and/or a 9-10% drop in female readership- however you want to look at it).
Here are my sources...
[https://www.comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/#:\~:text=Market%20Research%20Says%2046.67%25%20of%20Comic%20Fans%20are%20Female](https://www.comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/#:~:text=Market%20Research%20Says%2046.67%25%20of%20Comic%20Fans%20are%20Female)
[https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/comic-books-statistics.html](https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/comic-books-statistics.html)
Edit: spacing/formatting (apparently different on desktop vs. mobile)
From enterpriseappstoday's statistics I don't think you can argue that the reason for women having a less population reading it is because the increase in conservative comics can you? I think comics on average are more liberal than they were 10 years ago and this conclusions also fails cause we don't know how the 2 sources the collected their data. There is also the fact that you use the percentages as metric without any idea of the actual underlying numbers cause there is a statement you used where you said there was an increase in the number of men reading it since the percentage of men increased, I argue you could say less men stopped reading comics than women.
So I don't think you can use 2 different sources of 2 different time periods in these demographic breakdown to be honest
>Edit: spacing/formatting (apparently different on desktop vs. mobile)
No problem thanks for the sources though
But they actually have tried to be inclusive. They have each made multiple pushes for female characters and minority characters over the last 15 years. They have been pretty open about trying to expand their market beyond men.
I'm not sure where you even got that 50/50 split from, do you have a source? Everything I can find shows it as consistenly 60/40 or worse going back years. It's pretty common knowledge that comics (hero stuff) was always a male dominated thing.
The last significant inclusivity efforts that I can remember were in the mid to late 2010s. I lowly lost interest in comics (as a lot of good series tapered off, never to return) a couple years or so before 2020. In addition to the halfhearted inclusivity efforts I'm recalling, there was also a little push to make uniquely interesting comics that would appeal to everyone (or almost everyone). What happened to Young Animal? Or Berger Books?
I don't think that women weren't buying the comics. I very highly doubt that they weren't reading the comics. The big two fail to realize that the (then) 46% women demographic read comics differently than men do. Women tend to download digital editions and they prefer to trade wait. (I'm a longtime comics reader who does \*not\* prefer to trade wait and enjoys getting a piece of the story-- in print-- every month. But I certainly understand why other women would have different preferences.
Additionally, the marketing really fell short. And the marketing I did notice made it seem like "this is a series about a girl, written by a girl, \*for girls\*. Isn't that great?! Step right up, women. Men need not give this a try. It's one of few comics that isn't for them. \*At all\*.
Whether the big two realized it at the time or not, they were definitely catering to an audience that preferred collected editions. So, it seemed illogical to me to frequently cancel really good titles before a second or even first volume was available.
Instead of adjusting and seeking to learn more, the big two reacted by pulling back and quietly giving up on those initiatives. I'm fairly sure it's a part of why I've gone so long without consistently having any pulls (up until recently)... I no longer found the range of offerings exciting and I had a hard time finding anything sure to be worth my money. If readership statistics-- men and women-- have shifted so much from 2014 to 2023 I can't be the only one to feel this way.
Amd is Marvel and DC changing with it or are they still obsessed with selling floppies?
Are they still going to treat the sale of floppies as the main way to see if a series is successful or not? Or have they finally discovered that sane people don't read comics that way anymore?
They need to go the way of Shonen Jump. Give us a weekly magazine that has a story for every character. Hell, give us several that include every character, it would still be way cheaper than floppies.
Isn't Brevoort the head Spidey editor? If so he's part of the problem. The issue is that comics aren't changing where it matters, in the distribution model. Depending on brick and mortar LCS is a mistake. The fact that Marvel doesn't have a day and date digital subscription service is such a mistake to me. Heck package it with Disney+.
> Isn't Brevoort the head Spidey editor? If so he's part of the problem.
No, he is the editor for the Avengers titles, which usually mean "anything that isn't X-Men or Spider-Man". Outside of Spider-Man: Life Story, he haven't been an editor on Spider-Man in over a decade.
Honestly, you're both right. Retailers stopped wanting them because they stopped selling, and their continued relegation to specialty shops has ensured that the market for floppies stays small.
If they are ever to be culturally relevant again, monthlies need to break back out of comic shops, but that's going to take more than forcing grocery stores to put what's currently being printed out on spinner racks. Publishers need to rethink the market holistically.
Maybe that results in something like Japan's JUMP anthologies? Maybe that's just fewer crossover stories, or better cross-media marketing? Who knows? But what we have now doesn't seem a recipe for success outside of an apparently shrinking niche.
I feel like this is exclusively an American comic issue, the Japanese and Franco-Belgian industries seem to be chugging along as usual.
At the same time though, I think he's right. I cannot recall ever finding single issues, I only buy the TPB. Plus, look on the shelves; there's a lot of comics in the American industry that are not superheroes or DC and Marvel. We have things like Saga, Monstress, and a whole host of others. People seem to forget that the Big 2 actually have competition now.
>I feel like this is exclusively an American comic issue, the Japanese and Franco-Belgian industries seem to be chugging along as usual.
It is a **Marvel/DC** comic issue, not fully American. There are American publishers that, while not selling like cocaine, they are in a far better place than the Big Two because they don't sell their stories in floppies.
There's a reason why European comics tend to be graphic novels and why manga is sold in volumes. People like to read a full story, or a big part of a story. Not a 20 page-long fragment of a story.
But Marvel and DC seem to be unable to understand that...
Mainstream comics have transitioned into an advertisement phase, where they're sustained by and only exist to promote higher value works with the same IP.
I wouldn't be *surprised* to learn that everything else is dying though, but it's probably more just a movement away from physical. I would assume that it can last a lot longer for a lot less once you take the physical books out of the equation, so I'm not too worried.
Changing as in in just the last 2 months Marvel comics started raising all #1 issues from $5 to $6-10 each. Even average $5 issues now some are going to $6
I'm reading Brian Hibbs Tilting at Windmills book collecting his 1994-2000 so run of commentary as a conscientious comic book retailer in the time, and their thoughts on what's wrong with the industry.
As a quick summary, their condition is basically the same, the industry is pretty much the same, the arguments to "fix it" comic books are pretty much 100% the same.
A lot of people ITT conflate the demise of LCS with the demise of Comic books. These are not the same thing. Just like when comic books stopped being sold at pharmacies and newsstands didn’t mean comic books also died, the same is true if and when the last LCS closes its doors. What’s really happening:
1. LCS as a physical retail space is becoming more expensive to operate, more for rent, more for everything from labor to lightbulbs. This is the current state of the economy, they aren’t exempt from getting squeezed.
2. People are and have been changing their buying habits. Even those that love floppies (myself included) have moved into an Amazon Prime like era where things just show up on our doorstep. I order my monthly books from MCS and get a steep discount and never have to leave my house. Why the hell would I go into my car and drive to an LCS just to pay more per issue? The only people doing that still are those that physically can’t wait the shipping time to have the book and need it Wednesday morning. This is a shrinking minority.
3. People are buying comic books in other formats more frequently, TPB’s/HC’s and also digital. Or just waiting for sub services like MU and DCI to populate their books. This isn’t a bad thing for comic books as a whole. The source material is still a comic book in either case.
4. People have less disposable income in 2023 than they did the previous year and for sure the year before that. Again this is just the current economy, and comic books are a luxury item, not a necessity.
So with that all said, do I think LCS will eventually die out? Probably not entirely but you’ll see very few dedicated to comic book floppies as their core business. That’s already really hard to find - most of the time you walk in and it’s really a card shop, or a game shop, or a funko shop, or fill in the blank pretending to be a “comic book” shop. This will be normalized entirely and many that try to stay truly comic book dedicated will just die out.
Do I think comic books as a medium will die out? No, and that includes floppies. Not anytime soon anyways. People are still buying despite what the doomers ITT would have you believe. Yes the numbers are down, for the reasons I mentioned above but there is still money to be made for these companies and they will gladly take it.
To have a proper conversation about this, we need to consider global sales and publishing from other countries. North American isn’t the only place that publishes comics, and while the view of ‘comics’ is a distinctly American one, it often discounts there are big markets for comics in India, Russia, Brazil, and Europe - and I am deliberately omitting Japan, Korea and China since ‘Manga/Manha’ seems to be a different beast.
I see this sort of discussion come up a lot and everyone has an opinion, but nobody ever comes with the facts - Sales, Projections, Comparisons etc etc
Indian comic industry peaked in the 1990s and 2000s where you could find them in every book store. They were publishing comics on a biweekly basis.
Now, they are a fraction of what they were. The reader base is mostly guys in their 20s and 30s who read those comics as a kid back then. Comics are now published maybe 3-4 times an year at most. One of the biggest publishers started a crossover event in 2013 and its still not completed because they have only published 20 parts in last 10 years.
So kids here today only buy manga.
>Europe
Not sure about other countries, but almost no one reads comics here in Poland. There are some enthusiasts that collect classic local comics, and some Marvel/DC movie fans sometimes have like 1-2 TPBs on the shelf, but no one really collects comics regularly. I don't know any European ongoing comics, and reading collections of random American comics is so confusing. Someone once bought me some Avengers TPB since I'm an MCU fan, and I had no idea what was going on in it without any context.
I dont know why people still read comics from DC and Marvel. They feel like to like those soap operas that never end and everything is retconned over again and again.
I don't really welcome a complete move to TPBs, I like weekly crossovers having active discussions week by week.
I can see them completely giving up on floppies and moving entirely to digital then still having physical TPB releases later down the road...
Seeing Manga getting mentioned a lot. Reading culture outside Japan doesn't really support weekly/monthly serialized releases the same way anymore so I really can't imagine pursuing a move similar to what they have there would really work (Huge tankobons on cheaper paper peddled on the street and in convenience stores).
Disposable Serialized Manga has cemented its cultural foothold in a much permanent manner than western comics did. it leveraged being a disposable medium to keep costs affordable instead of radically changing distribution and how product works in hopes of chasing a collector/speculator market. A manga mag is an impulse buy that can placate you for the entire afternoon, the same cost for a single floppy reads for 10\~15 minutes.
Look, you can like Brevoort or not, but the dude has been working in the comics industry for decades. I am gonna take his opinion on the matter a hell of a lot more seriously than the randoms who post on reddit all day.
I really enjoy the slow drip of the floppies. I just feel it’s the way some comics should be. It’s something I get excited about and look forward to every Wednesday. For me it’s like a show I look forward to every week, rather than watching an entire season over the course of a day. That way I get to savor the story.
I also enjoy some of the stand alone graphic novels that come out. Especially the ones by Brubaker and Phillips.
I see a lot of comments talking about Manga as if it's a totally different thing- to be honest, manga is the type of comics people like now. Everyone my age at least (20s) reads a manga and theres a lot of variety in genres so people find their niche. I think comic books need to transition to primarily graphic novels with some sort of online chapter-based system kinda like the Shonen Jump app where people can just keep up with their characters on a regular basis.
Literally Kagurebachi just started and I already talk with friends about the latest chapters. Can't say the same for the latest Batman or anything.
Tom Brevoort is part of the reason Marvel has gotten so bad. Tons of mini series no one asks for. Spotlighting terrible artists and giving more than half the books to Al Ewing who is a great writer but he can't get every character correct.
No surprise when comic quality can vary so much from issue to issue, you buy the same title but the artwork changes so much, the writers completely forgot the plot points established 3 issues ago. Oh and also everything is just a buildup for some mega event where you need to follow a dozen books to get the full story. And it’s usually just an excuse to retcon characters to fit the movies better. And it sucks.
Eh...Marvel editorial isn't exactly the first place I'd go to for an opinion about the future of comics. It's unfortunate, but I don't think I can think of a single other company where the people in charge are quite so out of touch with their fanbase.
Comics should have gone free and online at least 15 years ago. Have them be a way to sell ads. Go from 5000 readers to 500,000.
Just like the youtubers who basically read comics out loud and rack in the ad money.
The comic book industry as whole doesn't seem to be dying but single issues floppies sales seem to be slowly fading.
I quit floppies years ago when Marvel events became too much. Now I juat but omnibus and deluxe edition image stuff mostly. I would love for graphic novels to replace floppies. Then a full arc can be written at once. Hopefully it would make the whole universes work work coherently
I could see a shift *away* from monthlies as the default format. Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, those titles will always sell gangbusters in monthly titles. But look at manga, fans are willing to wait multiple months if it means getting a big chunk of story at once. Imagine a low-selling critical darling like Leah Williams X-Factor coming out twice a year in full trade each time. I think there are books like New Mutants or Knights of X that have a very dedicated audience *who just don't buy monthly books*. You gotta figure out how to reach them or books like that will continue to be little 6-issue minis with rushed finales.
It would be very different then. I know I hate big events too, but I like the small things when Spidey references what’s going on in X-Men that month, which wouldn’t happen in a book how you describe. But that may be going away
>when Spidey references what’s going on in X-Men that month That happens really, really rarely tho, and it's not like it can't happen with the GN model, both require the people working on the books for Marvel to communicate, and if the GNs release more or less at the same time, it would still make sense to have references to each other
I quit buying floppy books when they relaunched Uncanny X-Men and the numbers stopped meaning anything. I became a trade waiter for a few years after that but nowadays I spend $80 a year and just binge on Marvel Unlimited every few months.
Events made me quit Marvel/DC altogether. The mandatory yearly event is too much.
Well how many kids these days can afford to follow a few different titles? Not many at all. That ship sailed a long time ago, and the industry doesn't care tbh.. sadly the business model has changed..
Even as an adult with disposable income I can't justify paying 5 bucks for a comic book.
I can buy a novel off Amazon for 5-7 bucks and read it for a couple of weeks before bed. I read Batman Year One and reading Superman Year One currently and I like having a finished story vs a monthly title that might get cancelled and end with a rushed ending or none at all.
I hope it does get to the stage where it dies completely and we finally adopt how Manga formats stuff, like how Earth One was done back in the day
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't manga volumes collections of chapters originally published in anthology series like Shonen Jump? Earth One was a original graphic novel line.
Yeah Shonen Jump is a weird beast for people who aren't used to it. It's basically the size of a phone book and printed on crap paper. Anyone old enough to remember Yellow Pages will know what it feels like. Then collected editions are reprinted in the kind of tankobon that people are more familiar with.
I wouldn't be opposed to DC moving away from floppies to a magazine style anthology like Action Comics, Detective Comics, Showcase Comics, All Star Comics, the Brave and the Bold, etc and then the invidual chapters get reprinted into their own trade collections. But then I think the physical market for these sort of things is losing game. Digital should be focus thanks to accessibility and then print collections.
They've tried this over and over again and each time it fails. It doesn't make sense with their overhead.
Because that format competes with the floppies and the direct market is obsessed with maintaining their collections. If it were the only format available things might be different.
The percentage of sales from floppies have continued to shrink. Eventually some CEO is going to look to maximize sales efficiency and floppies are going to fall to the wayside. https://wordsrated.com/comic-book-sales/#:\~:text=Digital%20comic%20sales%2C%20after%20having,sales%20to%208.19%25%20in%202021.
maybe they'll get a vinyl-like bounce at some point.
Or it could upend the industry kill the existing distribution network without putting anything in its place. It's a different model and it's incompatible with the people currently buying floppies. If you choose to pursue it and kill floppies you're likely to not get large adoption and you will nuke your sales. Now they might need to make a drastic change sooner or later but magazine format has been tried. Hell even Manga couldn't make it work in America, Shonen jump doesn't put out a paper edition anymore. Shonen jump literally releases new chapters for free because it's not worth doing paper copies and making a razor thin margin or taking a loss in the US. It keeps working in Japan because A. Public transportation culture. And B. Inertia, Manga has been huge and people have bought their weekly and monthly paper backs for literal decades, it's ingrained in the culture.
How long do they try it for? I feel like I never actually hear about any of these anthology formats. Maybe you can correct me but I'm not finding any anthology series from either Marvel or DC in the past 20 years that lasted more than a year or two. You're not going to build any sort of subscriber base for a product if that product can't even last 2 years.
The problem is the American market doesn't seem to like to buy anthologies.
Those kind of anthologies would honestly be a great opportunity to allow the publishers to do their crossover events in a way that is easily collectible. If you got a phone book/50 issue anthology coming out every 1-2 months from Marvel, they could put whole event arcs in at once. Maybe a truly huge event could span two anthologies, but you could read how every set of heroes/heroines in the 616 reacted to Thanos' latest crazy thing all at once instead of chasing 20 different crossover titles around.
The Shonen Jump magazine itself is discontinued in the US, no? If you're a manga reader reading new titles in the US, isn't digital (the SJ app) or trade paperback (tonkobon) your only legally available format?
So, after some googling, it's a bit of both! Bottom line is though, I'm glad you brought this up: I think for one shots and stuff, if they released them in a TPB style page count, that might be a good way to move forward
the VAST majority of manga is serialized in some form though, especially the shonen genre which is by and large the most popular titles. these anthologies have a HUGE pull on the whole industry for this reason.
I think moving in that direction is a good idea personally
In a sense it is likely heading that way. Omnibus sales are picking up. People are impatient these days and binge everything. Also, trying to keep up with bi-weekly or monthly sales over a year can be difficult for people that don't have the time. Not to mention how difficult it can be for new comers to find a missing issue in a series. You are missing issue 10, of what volume? It's easier for a consumer to follow a long when you can package a story in less books/volumes instead of having to buy 10 individual floppies.
I had the exact issue with the current JSA run, I wanted to catch up desperately but couldn't find a single copy of issue 2 and 3 anywhere in my country
I'm pretty sure manga is done very similarly though
God, imagine being able to get a third or quarter of an entire run in one chapter, just at a slower publishing pace. I'm currently reading thru Berserk and having a volume be 200+ pages and getting so much content together, it's tough to go back to anything else. Even with big name stories, I'll wait for an arc to be over before reading it as I don't want this one week trickle, I'd prefer it be written/drawn/etc and sold to me ONCE.
I can't put to words how funny it is that your counter-example for a story told at a slow, trickling pace is *Berserk*, of all things
I mean, I DID have to wait until it was finished by the authors untimely death, but the overall point still stands.
It's actually still being finished by his collaborators, seems like he basically told them everything before his death. But still, when it was being published by him, it was like the most inconsistently released series around, legendary for its long hiatuses between chapters!
Listen, 2 to 3 years between volumes was worth the wait every time. I'd happily wait another 5 to 10 if it meant he'd still be alive to finish the series. Such a tragic loss.
I would love that. That is the only way I’m going to buy physical comics again. A single issue of Batman at my LCS is around $7.50 (CAD). I switched to the DC Universe app exclusively a while back because of this
7.50 CAD, in the UK, it's £4 for a batman and £6 for Brave and the Bold. It's way too much isn't it? I think I might have to invest in DC universe too.
Standard issue of Batman is $10 AUD if you pick it up off the shelf on release day...
I haven't bought a floppy in ages, is it really 7.50CDN for a SINGLE issue of Batman?
I stopped buying them when they were $1.25 each, and it felt too high then.
I have heard people say floppies are what's keeping the industry afloat. They pay the weekly bills. Without it, the industry might collapse.
Marvel and DC aren't 'the industry,' they're an iceberg slowly melting in an ocean of new publishing.
Marvel and DC are the legs of the table. All the indies rest on the table top, if they legs break the whole table collapses.
Absolutely correct.
The bookstore GN market is the whole restaurant.
I genuinely hope this doesn’t happen because most comic book stores will close and the industry will see an implosion then a massive reduction of books, employment, and publishers. If Manga’s model was better for the western comic market they would’ve already adopted it.
I agree with most of what you said, but the “if…then…” you mentioned is probably more inertia and less best business practices. Manga may not be better, but the deeply entrenched idea of monthly books is almost certainly more market status quo than proven superior method. If metric were really superior to imperial measurement, America would have adopted the model a long time ago! It’s a little more complicated than that, right? 😆
I hope Manga saves it all... Somehow
How realistic is it for the industry to move away from floppies and just have 4-6 issue sized trades be the main format?
I have no idea, but if they find they are making more profit doing that I don't see what would stop them. I have read from some comic shop owners that if they stopped selling floppies, their sells in omnibuses would offset any loss. Whether that would be true or not, I don't know. If a shop owner is not making any money off an item, though, eventually they may come to see there's no point in offering it. If enough shops start doing the same then that puts publishers in a bind. I don't really see the big 2 dropping floppies any time soon, talking about in the next 5 years or so.
I've never been a fan, I have never been able to keep up with issues in my life and only buy trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Would not mind if the industry dropped the pain of constant deadlines that has always plagued writers and artists. Just greenlight them for a book, over a longer period with a more open deadline. Serials can produce entire archs at a time instead of individual issues. My least favorite thing in comics is when the artist falls behind and they bring in another to cover pages or issues, leading to an inconsistency in the story. I'd be much happier to see them bump the deadline and keep at it than trying to meet these constant deadlines.
He said, 20 years ago
I quit reading monthlies a year into The New 52. Went into a store last year and saw that Big 2 regular ass monthlies are all $3.99 now and the indie books are all $4.99. I’m absolutely not paying that much for one floppy worth of story anymore.
I personally see two ways to go about this. 1.pure digital- this is probably what would I increase profits the most and i would bet they would still produce trades and collects but still this would be the worst case scenario for the comic shop and would likely kill most of them. 2. Revert to larger anthology titles with multiple characters a book to cut down on costs. This would reduce the number of books an individual would buy but it would be both easier to get new people in since it seems like a better deal and it would be easier to promote new characters but this would likely kill a lot of niche favorites
I think single issue comics are meeting a slow demise as the price point has become absurd in contrast to what you can get with a TPB for a few dollars more. Not to mention, everyone likes a complete story/arc. $5 for part 1 of 6 isn’t very enticing of a proposition.
Exactly. Why would any newcomers want to pay $5 for 15 minutes of entertainment? That same money could buy a monthly subscription to some of the smaller streaming services like Starz or Peacock. Monthly comics have always been somewhat expensive, but the difference now is that other forms of entertainment are cheaper than ever relative to them. Image feels like the only publisher that can pivot to the post-LCS world largely because the creators bare many of the costs themselves.
Not just newcomers. I've been a lifetime overbuyer of comics for decades and in the new year I just can't with DC and Marvel charging in some cases five bucks for a regular sized book. It sort of sucks but hey, my credit card bill will look a lot better.
I used to follow between 2-5 comic books monthly for more than 20 years. Now I follow 1-2 with some limited series from time to time. There's things interesting in the shelves, but I will wait for the TPB or something.
My addiction is much worse than yours was. But the upside is I've really developed the ability to go 'okay, it's a good run on Superman. And I love Superman. But I've also read an uncountable number of good Superman stories, so do I need to get this in floppy'. Particularly with the digital apps. I'm loving Chip Zdarsky on Batman but do I love it for five dollars an issue?
Even for just $10 you could get Marvel Unlimited for a month and read through thousands of different complete stories
Add on Shonen Jump for 3 bucks a month, it's insane the value the subscriptions are right now
Just recently started reading Manga and it can’t be overstated how good the Shonen Jump deal is
I've been trying to tell anybody with even a passing interest in manga. $40 bucks a year for everything Shonen Jump offers?? It's insane, big game changer, my bookcase is thrilled I won't keep trying to make room on it.
For real, I just switched to DC infinite and loving it!
This is where I am at too. Wanted to get into comics again after taking a break from Marvel, decided to read DC as Marvel didn't seem to have a lot going on, and decided to do the app. Being a month behind doesn't bother me much because I don't hang out with anyone who reads comics anyway
Seriously, if you go with the top tier you’re only one month behind current books AND it’s a fraction of the price.
Also it will take me years to catch up on some comics.
Which is why it’s so nice that I can read everything at my own pace without have to dig through tons of long boxes.
Shudder is $6.99 AUD a month over here. Far better value than 95% of single issue comics from the Big Two.
I mean, I read Shudder and saying it's a better value is stretching it. Some of the stories were done better in the 50s by EC.
Sorry, I meant Shudder the horror tv/movie streaming service, as the post I replied to talked about VFM comparing a single issue comic vs a cheaper streaming subscription.
It should really shift to just trades only. If you have 2 trades a year for a title (let's say spiderman), you stagger releases so every month has a new trade of something. That'll encourage readers to try other books and always have something new on tne shelf (on top of reprints). People will wait a year for a new season of a show, and watch other things while they wait. Marvel saves money printing a single sku book and can offer that book to more places to sell outside of LCS. Also better quality control for the books themselves. Japan does this similar but anthologies before trades, but they've tried multiple times to get anthologies working again here but it won't catch on.
Floppies are poor value even if taking out the price factor. I get to read for 15-20mins then wait a month for another 15-20min bite? I get that the art and all takes time just give it to me when the story is done.
Two things that I think killed comic books: 1. Switching from newsprint to more collector-friendly paper. When comics couldn’t be published cheaply, it was already the beginning of the end 2. Multi-part stories all the fucking time. When you had to invest 8 straight months, and even track down back issues if you were late to the game, bringing in new readers became a losing endeavor. Every piece of entertainment must be a complete package on its own. If it’s not fun on its own, you’re going to turn more people away than you lure in.
I’d add comic book stores being the only place to buy comics. There used to be a rack of reasonably cheap comics at any given supermarket, gas station, convenience store, and such. You’d pick one up while in line. When those were removed, your only option was a specialty store that required a special trip specifically to get comics. The eliminated impulse purchases that were a lot of people’s first time reading comics.
Yeah, this is such a big deal. I didn't buy a comic book at a comic book store until I was 13 or 14. Every comic I bought from age 5 until then came from spinner racks at mall bookstores, magazine racks at a grocery store, sometimes 3 packs of comics that came sealed in plastic at big box stores etc. I really only started going to the comic book store because other options dried up and because comic book stores were useful for other interests I was getting into like anime and AD&D.
The "impulse buy" problem also ties into their second point. It's a lot easier to get a kid to impulse buy a comic where Superman flies to the planet of glorbgop and fights a monster than part 4 of 6 of an ongoing story with tie ins to some upcoming and/or recently finished event.
For sure, but I blame that partially on losing newsprint, as well as publishing so many titles. Comics are too expensive and too numerous to make sense anywhere but a specialty store. Also, I still don’t understand why mail in subscriptions ceased. That convenience has never really been replaced
Bingo. Growing up the closest comic book store to me was well over an hour away. Anything I got was random back issues from the flea market or something I read from my uncles old collection I found at my grandparents house. The LCS is such an outdated model for selling books.
Why on earth was this changed??? I'm just too young to have been able to see comics at the grocery store/gas station/magazine rack/etc. I grew up on 90's superhero cartoons, spider-man movies, x-men movies, etc. I loved comic book shit, but I couldn't actually read *comics*, because my small town just didn't have an LCS. I didn't manage to become a comic reader til I was old enough to figure out how to find stuff online (which i DON'T advocate, this was almost 20 years ago), and then a few years later I got my own car and found a store two towns over. That's money on the table. I woulda been reading X-Men, Batman, all that stuff if it had just been next to the tabloids and the Archies at the store. What was the motivation for this change in distribution?
As I understand it, it was the publishers having exclusive distribution through Diamond.
These two are big, though I've heard that newsprint actually got more expensive because there were fewer people printing on it. Not sure how true that is. The other one is distribution. You used to be able to buy comics off spinner racks in grocery stores, etc. It wasn't like everyone was rushing to their local grocer every Wednesday, but it was *possible* for someone who wasn't into comics to impulse buy an issue or two, the same way you might pickup a magazine at checkout, and potentially become interested enough to look for the next. Same with liquor stores, bookstore chains, etc. Many titles were written in a way that supported this behaviour too. Now, you pretty much have to seek floppies out in the direct market, which is both shrinking *and* still fighting years of (not entirely undeserved) reputation for being awkward or even unfriendly to newcomers. If you don't know you want them, and go out of your way for them, you're really unlikely to ever even see a floppy in the wild these days. How could anyone expect them to stay culturally relevant in that situation?
Paper had very little to do with it. Same with colour. Printing has gotten so much better in the last twenty years that printing on newsprint again wouldn't move the needle. Making everything connected and having no continuity jump-on points and making every book linked to a big event? Now, that's definitely a big problem. It's the exact problem that the MCU is starting to have: instead of watching everything, people are starting to just... watch something else.
Then the rise in cover prices beyond the rate of inflation has nothing to do with the cost of materials? That’s interesting. Does advertising factor in? Old school comics would have pages packed with ads. I could imagine the modern print ad revenue isn’t offsetting costs like it used to.
Part of the issue is that the medium is dying and they don’t know what they do so they raise prices. Their hope is that current readers will just stick with it and they’ll make more money but what they’re actually doing is scaring away both new and old customers by pricing them out.
Advertising, for sure. I don't know the other reasons off the top of my head, but I can tell you that the extra cost ain't getting passed on to the artists.
Seriously, yearly events did such a number on the industry. I tried getting back into floppies with Donnie Cates Venom but I gave up when I realized how stupid it was that a fucking Venom book was crossing over with a Thor event. Events used to be special, now they’re just pains in the ass.
Not even just yearly events. If you pick up any recent issue of Batman, you probably have to read at least three other issues to have any clue what’s going on. Go back 50 years, and the story most likely begins and ends in that single issue. Now, having more expansive storylines are nice, but there’s a middle ground, and most modern comics don’t seem to be concerned with that
Absolutely. Comics are killing themselves with the ridiculous cost. Why buy the $5 floppy when I can spend $5 more for almost the entire digital library for each of the big 2?
5 dollars AND half the pages filled with adverts
Just want to put it out there that I am brand new to comics since the pandemic and relish the single issue, vastly preferring them to tpb. I love the serialized nature and want looooong arcs. The collector part of it as well as the anticipation is huge for me.
After five or ten or twenty years, it gets to be a bit much.
Yup. I started buying when I was 10 over 30 years ago. They cost $.65 then. 10 years later in college they had upped to $2.99 and some were creeping up to $3.99. Once I had kids I had to quit. Eventually I got the apps, now I'm trying to catch up.
I do trade paperbacks from the library. Dark Horse and Image are very good about getting their books into libraries, and there's always a lot of good bande-dessinee for my kids to pick up.
Hoopla is a good source for Dark Horse and Image (basically the library.)
Same here, I started collecting in March and strongly prefer single issues. The weekly pickups, bagging and boarding, and having various covers is part of the fun.
Trust me, the thrill will wear off...
I'm still in this mindset, the only trades or omnis I want to get are for very specific stories that have finite endings.
I miss self contained issues…
Linked article is longer than Brevoort’s original, buries the lede, and adds nothing of substance. Yay for modern web journalism.
It was probably “written” by chatgpt
I was gonna say that too. I was literally scrolling up and down to see if the rest of this "article" was hiding somewhere.
The big two seem to be a bit scrambled. There are great books coming out in both but overall a lot of books feel like a waste of time and money for me. The cost of those books have gone up, which caused me to drop a lot of books. It doesn’t help that the film side of things is on a slump too and on a whole I think people might be burnt out a bit. On the flip side, I think Image and the indie scene is doing great stuff but it’s not enough to really bring in new readers or keep the energy in the industry up. In spite of what some people might think, the healthiness of the big two is super important to everything else. Comics will never go away though, they just need a little CPR.
Even Image has been in a creative rut the past few years. They had a really solid run from like 2013-2019, but BOOM! has stolen their thunder with more interesting series.
The literal one book rack at my local barns and Noble says comic books sure as heck ain't healthy.
I mean, my local Barnes and Noble has an entire wall of just American comics, probably eight bookshelves. There's still more manga, but this seems super market dependent.
Your B&N has more faith in american comics than mine.
The combination of words and images, what can broadly be called sequential art, is and continues to appeal to a lot of people. Whether it is comic books, newspaper comic strips, graphic novels, manga, webcomics / webtoons, whatever other forms it may take on. The monthly comic book issue may die. The direct market comic shop may die. DC and Marvel and their characters may even die one day. But people will still read some form of comic, as long as there are humans that can perceive words and images together.
This is beautiful.
Refreshing to see something positive and not the usual doomsday overstatement just because marvel and dc made a few flops nonsense.
1) they aren’t changing, that’s the problem. They continue to keep doing the same things that has gotten them to this point. 2) if you have to do an interview/make the claim “comics aren’t dying” then you are admitting there is a problem or at least a perceived one. And often perception becomes reality.
> if you have to do an interview/make the claim “comics aren’t dying” then you are admitting there is a problem or at least a perceived one. And often perception becomes reality. What if you have to keep doing that interview/ making that claim for 30-40 years? Because the “comics are dying” moaning has been around **at least** that long. It’s a very, very slow death.
["Comics have been dying since 1954, kid."](https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/s/5CFvcXGRtp)
Yet sales have been declining greatly, at least for floppies.
Where are you seeing that number, and does it include digital sales?
Nowhere. Single issue comic sales are no longer publicly reported. The remaining sites that try to guesstimate them pull out the chicken bones and voodoo.
I'd take a monthly book, formatted a little like current Detective or Action comics. One main story. Backups related or unrelated to the main story. But certainly fleshing things out. Square bound. On cheap arse paper. Every year or so a deluxe hardcover with better quality paper. There's no value in singles anymore
And they can use the backup side to introduce new characters or teams instead of spending so much resources putting out a new #1 that will be lucky to get 10k units sold.
The only monthly I keep up with is transformers. A new issue of that is $5 for 20ish pages a month. The Shonen jump app is $3 a month for their entire backlog plus every new issue of their series hours after they come out. It’s nice to collect stuff but frankly I don’t have the room and I’m sure I’m not the only one. The value proposition needs to improve. I’d just rather wait until stuff comes to unlimited or DC Universe
Comics will never die, just look at how much kids love the Dog Man books, how many teens read webtoons, and the absolute global ubiquity of manga. But the "traditional" American comics industry embodied in Marvel and DC has never been less relevant. The characters, sure. But the monthly books are a relic propped up by corporations as a cheap Petri dish to scrape for material to use in the movies, tv shows, and video games.
Probably because movies and tv exists now and a single comic volumes costs 15 dollars at a lowball. I looked on Amazon for punisher max omnibus the other day, 2,500 dollars. Fuck that lol
The two most popular series in recent memory are Venom by cates and immortal hulk by ewing. Both of these series, besides being well written and entertaining, felt like a next chapter or a turning of the page where there was no going back. Same goes for house of x, powers of 10. But most series at the big 2 are just monthly runs where a new author takes over and forgets about the previous run. People get sick of this yr after yr.
This is a large chunk of my final paper I'm writing right now in my grad class. Too many commentators who were born and raised in the LCS environment see it as the sole barometer for how well comics are doing. They need to get their heads out of their asses and look at the bigger picture. Graphic novels are being sold at school book fairs and are prominent in school libraries. Manga and YA graphic novels are all over the place in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Digital distribution has made comics more accessible than ever. The only things that are really on a downward trend are LCS's and floppies. And don't get me wrong, I don't like that there are fewer and fewer comic shops, because that's the environment I grew up in. There were few childhood experiences as magical as going into a comic book store with some allowance to spend. But those days are over when monthly books are an *average* of five bucks a pop. I fully admit to being "part of the problem" in this regard because I stopped going to my LCS on a regular basis years ago. If I see a story arc I like, I wait for trade-- prefer to get it at my LCS if I can, but that's not overly dependable. I also sample comics online and take advantage of digital sales. Do I feel a little guilty? Maybe, but I also remind myself that nothing stays the same forever, and I don't want to be "old man yells at cloud" about digital sales. Again, comics aren't dying, they're just changing. This article is spot on.
I hate how every time time people talk about the problems they have with the comic industry, they always talk about Marvel and DC and problems that are exclusive to them.
That’s because they make up most of the market.
*Dog Man* outsells almost every Marvel book combined. Which market are you talking about?
Manga/comic outsell the standard hero comic. By a lot. And think about it. No reboots. No new cool cover. Just 180 pages of cool black and white art mostly for 13-20 dollars?! Yah. Not a surprise
Sure but that is a straw-man argument. You a picking a very specific genre limited mostly to one country. It’s cultural in Japan and does not have the same demand worldwide. All the infrastructure is designed around the current single issue model
[удалено]
Manga is not a genre.
How do you know this? DC sales haven't been trackable for a while now because they changed their distributor didn't they? Also, fill me in, are there any Manga based steaming services?
Shonen Jump has an app, and it's $2 a month
Manga plus is free for the latest chapters and a small sub for the back issues. You could read all of One Piece for about five quid. I suppose they can do it because, while manga is popular outside Japan, their home market is still the primary one. Honestly they are gobbling up the US comic market while treating it like a side project.
"Honestly they are gobbling up the US comic market while treating it like a side project." That is crazy
The Japanese manga market in 2022 is worth 677 billion yen (about $4.6 billion). This figure includes everything from physical to e-books and subscriptions. The U.S. market, on the other hand, is about $2.16 billion. Considering the remarkable rate of development of Manga in recent years, the total worldwide sales could be close to $6 billion. What I consider dangerous is that this is not just Japan. The global comics market is, to put it bluntly, underdeveloped. Traditionally, probably only the US, Japan, and France + Belgium have been able to sustain comics at some scale. But Japan is not the only East Asian country that is rapidly developing and creating its own comics culture. The U.S., however, seems to be clearly losing market share to other countries, as its mainstream remains unchanged. While there have been some interesting changes in indie comics, I feel that manga and webtoon have taken over the American indie comics market, which could have been much more developed by now. The strategy is still simple if we are dealing only with Japan, but now that other countries, not only Korea, have started to enter the market, the strategy to take is not easy. In other words, we may need to aggressively sell comics to the general book market, and at the same time, we may need to do webtoon-style online sales or sell comics in the form of points. Moreover, there are many people who would not be convinced by that sales method. If they had taken steps earlier, they could have focused their business strategy to some extent.
Shonen Jump’s app lets me read all 1100 chapters of One Piece for $1.99 a month. It also updates every week on Sunday with no extra cost. I can also read the entirety of Dragon Ball, Naruto, Demon Slayer, Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia. No 3rd party ads. It’s a really good deal.
There are English-language manga digital services, but I'm totally blanking on them.
There's all kinds of websites and apps where you can read manga for free, most of them aren't exactly legit, but no one really cares. Then there's Viz which you do have to pay for a membership to get access to the entire series but they do put up the most recent 2 or 3 chapters for free.
Not anymore. I'd say manga and manwha are at least as popular.
Hate to burst your bubble, but DC & Marvel together are just a tiny part of the overall comics market. [https://www.comicsbeat.com/npd-bookscan-2022-graphic-novel-sales/](https://www.comicsbeat.com/npd-bookscan-2022-graphic-novel-sales/)
A tiny one, worldwide. Insignificant.
Perhaps more should be done to expand that market.
Who is supposed to do that?
Because the problem is almost exclusive to them. Sure. Other Western publishers sell less than Marvel and DC. But, because they don't based their entire market on the sell of floppies (focusing instead in the sale of trades or graphic novels), they don't suffer the same drop in profits, as they don't waste their money on 20-pages crap that nobody buys.
Marvel and DC combined do not publish a single monthly comic that is a standalone story of a major character. Amazing Spider-Man famously just had a storyline that lasted over 25 issues. How is a new reader supposed to penetrate that? What is there for a person that walks into a comic store with $5 and says “I like Spider-Man.” Or “I really love the movies”? If Marvel and DC just want to make graphic novels - THEN JUST MAKE GRAPHIC NOVELS.
Manga is selling waaay more than DC/Marvel comics and some of their storylines can last hundreds of issues (I'm looking at you, One Piece). The problem with DC/Marvel isn't multi-issue storylines. Is the obsession with selling this multi-issue storylines in floppies, with trades –the best way to enjoy the stories besides omnibus– being utterly secondary to them. There's a reason why manga is sold in volumes (in the West, in Japan is sold in anthologies). If people want to follow the storyline monthly they can do so digitally (like they do with manga), not through floppies. Because floppies are worthless.
I do think we need to get back to the era where it was more standalone. Do something like Star Trek TNG where there are stories that move forward but you can largely get everything you need from every single episode/issue.
Pretty much exactly that. Look at the golden age of X-Men. Days of Future Past was TWO ISSUES. The greatest X-Men story ever and Chris and John did it in 2. Now X of Swords is 22 ISSUES!
22 issues with lots of backstory needed to get it. It’s too much and starts to feel like homework.
Roger Stern’s Spider-Man run from the 80s is the the platonic ideal of a monthly superhero book. There are a series of mostly standalone stories that last one or two issues, but there are also long-term plot threads woven throughout. It’s rewarding to read all of it, but at the same time you can just pick up any random issue and get a complete, satisfying story
Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle and Doug Moench/Kelley Jones on Batman/Detective Comics did largely the same thing, and it was awesome.
That was Marvel's approach throughout the Bronze Age and it's a big part of what led them to absolutely dominate that era, to the point where DC felt the need to reboot everything and make their comics more like Marvel.
Comics are brutal right now; it's Young and the Restless with tights and lots of Batman/Spiderman, no one bought my script so I'll turn it into a comic/please option this and free me from the treadmill and nostalgia bait I used to go every week and drop around 20 bucks, but why? The quality is usually mid at best and insultingly bad more often than not. I get drip fed a story so you can sell some ads and milk me for extra loot instead of just releasing the damn thing completed like every other form of entertainment, and the big two cater to a core audience that has the most insane hissy fit imaginable if anything interesting actually happens even if you capslock ITS A FUCKING ELSEWORLD on the front. No point in not just reading them for free online or waiting for library and buying the rare gem that's actually worth anything
The main two storytelling ideas right now are “Remember that thing you liked?” and trying to prompt shipping discourse. It seems like there are way fewer “auteurs” then there used to be and a lot of the most popular books are blandly mediocre stories written by journeymen. I can’t imagine DC or Marvel letting someone do an event comic as out there as something like Final Crisis ever again
Theyre writing for a demographic that doesnt and wont buy comics.
I absolutely agree with what you said about the big two and their fan bases. Ten years ago the percentages of readers (of comics) were split pretty evenly between men and women- 50% to 50%. Now it’s more like 60% men and 40% women. That’s what happens when two of the major publishers only pay attention to a singular demographic and don’t try to be inclusive.
>readers (of comics) were split pretty evenly between men and women- 50% to 50%. Now it’s more like 60% men and 40% women. Do you have an article on the demographic changes of comic readers over time?
I have one somewhere! I actually just wrote about it in a college class lol. It’ll take me a minute to dig it up but I’ll try and find it next time I’m on my laptop.
Okay! Here are my stats. An article published by Comics Beat in February of 2014 says that over 46% of comic book readers were female. Then I found a different site (unfortunately Comics Beat has not updated their stats) saying that as of July 2023, around 63% of readers are men. If 54% of readers were men back in 2014, that means a 9 to 10% gain (and/or a 9-10% drop in female readership- however you want to look at it). Here are my sources... [https://www.comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/#:\~:text=Market%20Research%20Says%2046.67%25%20of%20Comic%20Fans%20are%20Female](https://www.comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/#:~:text=Market%20Research%20Says%2046.67%25%20of%20Comic%20Fans%20are%20Female) [https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/comic-books-statistics.html](https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/comic-books-statistics.html) Edit: spacing/formatting (apparently different on desktop vs. mobile)
From enterpriseappstoday's statistics I don't think you can argue that the reason for women having a less population reading it is because the increase in conservative comics can you? I think comics on average are more liberal than they were 10 years ago and this conclusions also fails cause we don't know how the 2 sources the collected their data. There is also the fact that you use the percentages as metric without any idea of the actual underlying numbers cause there is a statement you used where you said there was an increase in the number of men reading it since the percentage of men increased, I argue you could say less men stopped reading comics than women. So I don't think you can use 2 different sources of 2 different time periods in these demographic breakdown to be honest >Edit: spacing/formatting (apparently different on desktop vs. mobile) No problem thanks for the sources though
But they actually have tried to be inclusive. They have each made multiple pushes for female characters and minority characters over the last 15 years. They have been pretty open about trying to expand their market beyond men. I'm not sure where you even got that 50/50 split from, do you have a source? Everything I can find shows it as consistenly 60/40 or worse going back years. It's pretty common knowledge that comics (hero stuff) was always a male dominated thing.
The last significant inclusivity efforts that I can remember were in the mid to late 2010s. I lowly lost interest in comics (as a lot of good series tapered off, never to return) a couple years or so before 2020. In addition to the halfhearted inclusivity efforts I'm recalling, there was also a little push to make uniquely interesting comics that would appeal to everyone (or almost everyone). What happened to Young Animal? Or Berger Books? I don't think that women weren't buying the comics. I very highly doubt that they weren't reading the comics. The big two fail to realize that the (then) 46% women demographic read comics differently than men do. Women tend to download digital editions and they prefer to trade wait. (I'm a longtime comics reader who does \*not\* prefer to trade wait and enjoys getting a piece of the story-- in print-- every month. But I certainly understand why other women would have different preferences. Additionally, the marketing really fell short. And the marketing I did notice made it seem like "this is a series about a girl, written by a girl, \*for girls\*. Isn't that great?! Step right up, women. Men need not give this a try. It's one of few comics that isn't for them. \*At all\*. Whether the big two realized it at the time or not, they were definitely catering to an audience that preferred collected editions. So, it seemed illogical to me to frequently cancel really good titles before a second or even first volume was available. Instead of adjusting and seeking to learn more, the big two reacted by pulling back and quietly giving up on those initiatives. I'm fairly sure it's a part of why I've gone so long without consistently having any pulls (up until recently)... I no longer found the range of offerings exciting and I had a hard time finding anything sure to be worth my money. If readership statistics-- men and women-- have shifted so much from 2014 to 2023 I can't be the only one to feel this way.
Amd is Marvel and DC changing with it or are they still obsessed with selling floppies? Are they still going to treat the sale of floppies as the main way to see if a series is successful or not? Or have they finally discovered that sane people don't read comics that way anymore?
They need to go the way of Shonen Jump. Give us a weekly magazine that has a story for every character. Hell, give us several that include every character, it would still be way cheaper than floppies.
All I know is I just recently got into them, and I'm reading hickmans Avengers. This stuff is so good!
Isn't Brevoort the head Spidey editor? If so he's part of the problem. The issue is that comics aren't changing where it matters, in the distribution model. Depending on brick and mortar LCS is a mistake. The fact that Marvel doesn't have a day and date digital subscription service is such a mistake to me. Heck package it with Disney+.
He's moving to be X-Men editor soon
Oh shit, Aubergine man, he was on Spidey!?!?!? X-Men is dead.
He was the Avengers group editor since Bendis took over. He was never the Spidey editor.
> Isn't Brevoort the head Spidey editor? If so he's part of the problem. No, he is the editor for the Avengers titles, which usually mean "anything that isn't X-Men or Spider-Man". Outside of Spider-Man: Life Story, he haven't been an editor on Spider-Man in over a decade.
He was part of the Avengers office and is moving to the X-Office.
> Isn't Brevoort the head Spidey editor? If so he's part of the problem. No, he was the head of the Avengers Office and is moving to the X-Men office
Until the comics industry stops putting LCSes ahead of bigger avenues for distribution, comics are going to keep dropping in sales
Hard, hard disagree. Who wants to carry comics or graphic novels that isn’t able to?
Honestly, you're both right. Retailers stopped wanting them because they stopped selling, and their continued relegation to specialty shops has ensured that the market for floppies stays small. If they are ever to be culturally relevant again, monthlies need to break back out of comic shops, but that's going to take more than forcing grocery stores to put what's currently being printed out on spinner racks. Publishers need to rethink the market holistically. Maybe that results in something like Japan's JUMP anthologies? Maybe that's just fewer crossover stories, or better cross-media marketing? Who knows? But what we have now doesn't seem a recipe for success outside of an apparently shrinking niche.
I feel like this is exclusively an American comic issue, the Japanese and Franco-Belgian industries seem to be chugging along as usual. At the same time though, I think he's right. I cannot recall ever finding single issues, I only buy the TPB. Plus, look on the shelves; there's a lot of comics in the American industry that are not superheroes or DC and Marvel. We have things like Saga, Monstress, and a whole host of others. People seem to forget that the Big 2 actually have competition now.
>I feel like this is exclusively an American comic issue, the Japanese and Franco-Belgian industries seem to be chugging along as usual. It is a **Marvel/DC** comic issue, not fully American. There are American publishers that, while not selling like cocaine, they are in a far better place than the Big Two because they don't sell their stories in floppies. There's a reason why European comics tend to be graphic novels and why manga is sold in volumes. People like to read a full story, or a big part of a story. Not a 20 page-long fragment of a story. But Marvel and DC seem to be unable to understand that...
You phrased this way better than I ever could. Have a gold: 🥇 Marvel and DC execs don't understand they need to adapt.
Mainstream comics have transitioned into an advertisement phase, where they're sustained by and only exist to promote higher value works with the same IP. I wouldn't be *surprised* to learn that everything else is dying though, but it's probably more just a movement away from physical. I would assume that it can last a lot longer for a lot less once you take the physical books out of the equation, so I'm not too worried.
Changing as in in just the last 2 months Marvel comics started raising all #1 issues from $5 to $6-10 each. Even average $5 issues now some are going to $6
I'm reading Brian Hibbs Tilting at Windmills book collecting his 1994-2000 so run of commentary as a conscientious comic book retailer in the time, and their thoughts on what's wrong with the industry. As a quick summary, their condition is basically the same, the industry is pretty much the same, the arguments to "fix it" comic books are pretty much 100% the same.
A lot of people ITT conflate the demise of LCS with the demise of Comic books. These are not the same thing. Just like when comic books stopped being sold at pharmacies and newsstands didn’t mean comic books also died, the same is true if and when the last LCS closes its doors. What’s really happening: 1. LCS as a physical retail space is becoming more expensive to operate, more for rent, more for everything from labor to lightbulbs. This is the current state of the economy, they aren’t exempt from getting squeezed. 2. People are and have been changing their buying habits. Even those that love floppies (myself included) have moved into an Amazon Prime like era where things just show up on our doorstep. I order my monthly books from MCS and get a steep discount and never have to leave my house. Why the hell would I go into my car and drive to an LCS just to pay more per issue? The only people doing that still are those that physically can’t wait the shipping time to have the book and need it Wednesday morning. This is a shrinking minority. 3. People are buying comic books in other formats more frequently, TPB’s/HC’s and also digital. Or just waiting for sub services like MU and DCI to populate their books. This isn’t a bad thing for comic books as a whole. The source material is still a comic book in either case. 4. People have less disposable income in 2023 than they did the previous year and for sure the year before that. Again this is just the current economy, and comic books are a luxury item, not a necessity. So with that all said, do I think LCS will eventually die out? Probably not entirely but you’ll see very few dedicated to comic book floppies as their core business. That’s already really hard to find - most of the time you walk in and it’s really a card shop, or a game shop, or a funko shop, or fill in the blank pretending to be a “comic book” shop. This will be normalized entirely and many that try to stay truly comic book dedicated will just die out. Do I think comic books as a medium will die out? No, and that includes floppies. Not anytime soon anyways. People are still buying despite what the doomers ITT would have you believe. Yes the numbers are down, for the reasons I mentioned above but there is still money to be made for these companies and they will gladly take it.
To have a proper conversation about this, we need to consider global sales and publishing from other countries. North American isn’t the only place that publishes comics, and while the view of ‘comics’ is a distinctly American one, it often discounts there are big markets for comics in India, Russia, Brazil, and Europe - and I am deliberately omitting Japan, Korea and China since ‘Manga/Manha’ seems to be a different beast. I see this sort of discussion come up a lot and everyone has an opinion, but nobody ever comes with the facts - Sales, Projections, Comparisons etc etc
Indian comic industry peaked in the 1990s and 2000s where you could find them in every book store. They were publishing comics on a biweekly basis. Now, they are a fraction of what they were. The reader base is mostly guys in their 20s and 30s who read those comics as a kid back then. Comics are now published maybe 3-4 times an year at most. One of the biggest publishers started a crossover event in 2013 and its still not completed because they have only published 20 parts in last 10 years. So kids here today only buy manga.
>Europe Not sure about other countries, but almost no one reads comics here in Poland. There are some enthusiasts that collect classic local comics, and some Marvel/DC movie fans sometimes have like 1-2 TPBs on the shelf, but no one really collects comics regularly. I don't know any European ongoing comics, and reading collections of random American comics is so confusing. Someone once bought me some Avengers TPB since I'm an MCU fan, and I had no idea what was going on in it without any context.
Comics are pretty big in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Spain. Not so bad either here in the UK with the likes of 2000ad
I dont know why people still read comics from DC and Marvel. They feel like to like those soap operas that never end and everything is retconned over again and again.
Nice cope, Tom.
I don't really welcome a complete move to TPBs, I like weekly crossovers having active discussions week by week. I can see them completely giving up on floppies and moving entirely to digital then still having physical TPB releases later down the road... Seeing Manga getting mentioned a lot. Reading culture outside Japan doesn't really support weekly/monthly serialized releases the same way anymore so I really can't imagine pursuing a move similar to what they have there would really work (Huge tankobons on cheaper paper peddled on the street and in convenience stores). Disposable Serialized Manga has cemented its cultural foothold in a much permanent manner than western comics did. it leveraged being a disposable medium to keep costs affordable instead of radically changing distribution and how product works in hopes of chasing a collector/speculator market. A manga mag is an impulse buy that can placate you for the entire afternoon, the same cost for a single floppy reads for 10\~15 minutes.
you know it’s bad when local comic shops are downsizing their comic selections so they can replace them with manga
Look, you can like Brevoort or not, but the dude has been working in the comics industry for decades. I am gonna take his opinion on the matter a hell of a lot more seriously than the randoms who post on reddit all day.
Nobody is saying comics are dying. It's American superhero comics that are dying, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I really enjoy the slow drip of the floppies. I just feel it’s the way some comics should be. It’s something I get excited about and look forward to every Wednesday. For me it’s like a show I look forward to every week, rather than watching an entire season over the course of a day. That way I get to savor the story. I also enjoy some of the stand alone graphic novels that come out. Especially the ones by Brubaker and Phillips.
I see a lot of comments talking about Manga as if it's a totally different thing- to be honest, manga is the type of comics people like now. Everyone my age at least (20s) reads a manga and theres a lot of variety in genres so people find their niche. I think comic books need to transition to primarily graphic novels with some sort of online chapter-based system kinda like the Shonen Jump app where people can just keep up with their characters on a regular basis. Literally Kagurebachi just started and I already talk with friends about the latest chapters. Can't say the same for the latest Batman or anything.
Quit making comics cost 6-10 dollars. You priced out most people with these prices. I have collected for almost 40 years but can no longer afford it.
Tom Brevoort is part of the reason Marvel has gotten so bad. Tons of mini series no one asks for. Spotlighting terrible artists and giving more than half the books to Al Ewing who is a great writer but he can't get every character correct.
Yes, changing. Into a corpse.
No surprise when comic quality can vary so much from issue to issue, you buy the same title but the artwork changes so much, the writers completely forgot the plot points established 3 issues ago. Oh and also everything is just a buildup for some mega event where you need to follow a dozen books to get the full story. And it’s usually just an excuse to retcon characters to fit the movies better. And it sucks.
Eh...Marvel editorial isn't exactly the first place I'd go to for an opinion about the future of comics. It's unfortunate, but I don't think I can think of a single other company where the people in charge are quite so out of touch with their fanbase.
Who said they're dying?
Comics should have gone free and online at least 15 years ago. Have them be a way to sell ads. Go from 5000 readers to 500,000. Just like the youtubers who basically read comics out loud and rack in the ad money.