Will Comic Books Survive Coronavirus? (theguardian.com) 107
As Marvel cuts staff and publishers stop selling new titles, artists, shop owners and writers worry for the future of an industry worth billions. From a report: There are no new comic books. Steve Geppi, head of Diamond Comic Distributors, which distributes nearly every comic sold in the anglophone world (or used to), announced this on 23 March, though senior industry figures already knew what was coming. The coronavirus pandemic had sunk retailers deep into the red. They couldn't pay their bills to Diamond or rent to their landlords, because they hadn't made any sales. "Product distributed by Diamond and slated for an on-sale date of 1 April or later will not be shipped to retailers until further notice," Geppi wrote. If shops can't pay Diamond, Diamond can't pay the industry's constellation of comics publishers, who then can't pay artists, writers, editors and printers, who now can't pay their rent or credit card bills -- or buy comics.
Sales of comics, graphic novels and collectibles distributed by Diamond were $529.7m in 2019 -- a huge number which suggests that a months-long gap between issues of Batman, Captain America and Spawn will stretch into tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. (Though Diamond plans to start shipping comics to shops again on 17 May, many around the world will still be in lockdown then.) The unprecedented situation has encouraged many acts of kindness, by individuals and companies. In solidarity with the shops relying on physical sales, most publishers are not currently selling new comics digitally. And dozens of artists and writers are auctioning off books and art to benefit others; DC artist Jim Lee is sketching a superhero pinup every day for two months, selling them for thousands on eBay to benefit comics shops.
Sales of comics, graphic novels and collectibles distributed by Diamond were $529.7m in 2019 -- a huge number which suggests that a months-long gap between issues of Batman, Captain America and Spawn will stretch into tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. (Though Diamond plans to start shipping comics to shops again on 17 May, many around the world will still be in lockdown then.) The unprecedented situation has encouraged many acts of kindness, by individuals and companies. In solidarity with the shops relying on physical sales, most publishers are not currently selling new comics digitally. And dozens of artists and writers are auctioning off books and art to benefit others; DC artist Jim Lee is sketching a superhero pinup every day for two months, selling them for thousands on eBay to benefit comics shops.
How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:5, Insightful)
This subject is a much better title to this summary. I assume the comic book industry will take heavy hits because of this pandemic, just like nearly every other industry. Shops will go out of business, many people will leave the industry and never come back, and plenty of other dire results.
But unless people know longer want to read comic books as a medium of entertainment, the industry will survive.
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Digital comics have been around for ages. They just haven't taken off and not due to any lack of pushing them from the publishers. The Comics industry isn't quite the same as the music or movie industries. There's an inherent collectible aspect to it. People want their physical books.
But the comics industry was in trouble before the Coronavirus thing came into the picture. The pandemic merely accelerated things. Sales have been steadily declining for years, creators have taken an adversarial posture to thei
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone wants the physical books, though. But for those who don't, there are no proper devices. For a decent reading experience I would want something like a 12~13" color e-ink e-book reader that shouldn't be too heavy, either...
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not everyone wants the physical books, though. But for those who don't, there are no proper devices. For a decent reading experience I would want something like a 12~13" color e-ink e-book reader that shouldn't be too heavy, either...
Sadly there are no full color e-ink displays. Somehow they have failed to crack that problem. A 10.1" traditional LCD tablet is almost ok, though the aspect ratio is just slightly wrong so either you have to pan across a page or letterbox it. It starts feeling pretty heavy after a while too.
If you read manga, you're golden. There are 12" 16-shades-of-grey e-ink display readers out there, and more coming all the time.
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I read them on a 12.9" iPad Pro, the screen being pretty close to the correct size and shape. The battery life does leave something to be desired when compared to e-ink, of course, and it does get heavy.
However, they look great on it.
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Sadly there are no full color e-ink displays. Somehow they have failed to crack that problem.
I see nobody has corrected me, possibly because I'm still technically correct. (The best kind etc.) Color e-ink displays have existed for about 4 years, though they can only display about 40,000 colors and originally took upwards of several minutes to refresh the whole page. In January of 2020, they demoed a color e-ink display that can refresh in about 2 seconds, still with about 40k colors. So perhaps an actual comic book reader will be available before long. The limited color palette could be accepta
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If you read manga, you're golden. There are 12" 16-shades-of-grey e-ink display readers out there, and more coming all the time.
I haven't been paying attention apparently. The state of the art in greyscale e-ink has progressed considerably. Modern e-ink displays can display 4096 shades of grey. The new reMarkable 2 coming out later this year being a prime example.
The reMarkable 2 is primarily designed for notetaking, and might be very good at it, with a quoted 21ms response time to the stylus. It supports only PDF and ePub, but the original allowed ssh root access and the developers provided an SDK, so if they do the same for th
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:4, Funny)
The advantage of the physical books is that you can read your entire back collection from the '70s onwards while sheltering in place.
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:4, Informative)
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I pretty much exclusively read them on an 8 inch tablet, but generally only when I'm flying.
If they were cheaper I'd probably consume a lot more.
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Comixology has sales all the time.
Humble bundle and Groupees regularly sell comics bundles. These don't cover Marvel and DC, though.
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How much will Coronavirus damage physicality? (Score:2)
Comic book shopping though was as much about the experience as it was the product. Our local shop even hosted physical games in it's back room. Mailing, and digital much like streaming and downloads just doesn't have that. There's a reason physical bookstores still exist, and even Amazon trying to get into a physical presence with their stores. Consumers have a tactile sense neglected by digital, as well as other attributes online can't solve. e.g. clothes fitting.
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Phones are a bad choice to read most comics, I agree.
But tablets the size of comic books exist, and computer monitors can be pretty much any size you want.
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Don't they sell digital copies of comics, or are there still some that are physical only?
A lot of indie comics don't have a digital distribution platform. Meanwhile bigger companies are reluctant to go all digital as physical books make up the bulk of their sales.
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This parent comment is offering a sincere and ENTIRELY correct opinion of the state of things.
It is a huge problem for comics fandom, as Boomer and Xer white men can't possibly understand that publishers might want or need to create anything in the name of younger or more diverse readership. There is some truth that collecting single issues is out of reach for most people who don't have good jobs (single issues are $3 - $5 these days), but a $12 trade paperback that collects six issues isn't THAT unreasona
Re: How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:2)
Now if people were only buying that garbage you might have a point.
Comic shops were closing before covid and now they are certainly doomed. No one was buying the non-sense and while movies drove sales that has ended.
The free ride is gone and their merits will not justify their existence.
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The publishers were assaulting retail before the shutdowns. This is a cover piece.
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comic books are doing fine. What's dying off is the confusingly-named "direct market": comic book stores, which buy from distributors, which buy from the likes of Marvel and DC. I say "distributors", but Diamond Comics has an effectively monopoly, and they "paused" operations a couple weeks ago. DC is trying to create 2 new distributors out of 2 large resalers, and maybe that will work. This industry has been in collapse for years, and barely sells any books. The best-selling periodicals sell at numbers that would have been cancelled in the 80s, and many titles sell about 1000 a month, which is basically vanity publishing. There wasn't much to keep people coming back to stores before the Kung Flu, and now the picture is very dark for most. Even once they're allowed to re-open, there will be very few new titles for several months, and it's unclear where Marvel books will come from (Marvel dominates this market).
Meanwhile, crowdfunded comics are growing explosively. It's normal now for crowdfunded books to be in the top 10, often the top 5 in sales each month. It looks like it won't be long before Spiderman and Batman are displaced by titles I've never heard of. If you take the comic book industry as a whole, including crowd funding and graphic novel reprints, the industry has been growing for years.
Crowdfunded books have stories and artwork that people actually like, or they don't get funded. Old-school comics, beyond Spiderman, Batman, and Superman, really look like vanity projects now with very odd stories and unattractive art. It's not exactly a mystery why the crowdfunded titles are taking over. Japanese manga is also growing nicely in the US, though those books are usually ignored in "comic book" sales figures, oddly.
Also of note: people mostly still like print for comics, even though nothing is really collectable any more. Online comics certainly exist, mostly via ComiXology (owned of course by Amazon), but that's not where the market has gone.
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Went into a comic book store for the first time in a decade six months ago. The latest titles were already bagged with backing boards. I asked what do I do if I just want to buy one to read? Just get one now doubly-overpriced.
Thank you, but that's too much money for me.
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Getting a bag and board is considered a service nowadays and better shops aren't charging you extra for it.
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Getting the books already bagged and boarded was considered a free service from a comic shop at least 20 years ago. If a shop is charging extra for a pre-bagged and boarded book - you need a new shop. I've never walked into a comic shop in nearly 30 years and not found every book bagged and boarded. With the exception being the ones in hard plastic cases and professionally graded, and priced as such. And graphic novels as well, as their thickness makes it difficult to fit in the bags. Unless there are b
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I never read comics, but my understanding is that the average reader actually buys trade paperbacks (a collection of several issues of a comic book). Digital distribution of comics seems to be gaining ground as well.
The likely answer is that single issues are wanted by readers who simply want high quality cover art to display. There's always someone out there with too much money looking to spend it, whether it be cars, boats, or computers.
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I just want to hear the new hit song, COVFEFE killed the comic book star.
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It's really hard to say that the medium itself will vanish entirely. The internet has lead to all kinds of creators who publish stories online, and some of them are just as good or even b
Re:How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's an interesting take. There's a little more to it, the business model is frail.
Comic Books (floppies, not digital editions or graphic novels) have been sold exclusively through comic book stores since the 1990s. Diamond is the single distributor who services all comic book shops.
Most comic book shops have been seeing declining revenues for a while now. Go into one, chances are new comics are going to account for the smallest amount of shelf space. Magnets, figurines, t-shirts, posters, back issues and other stuff make up the majority of sales at comic book shops. To give you a sense of how the industry has contracted, there were about 4,000 comic book shops in the North America and Europe in 2014, in 2012 there are about 1,800. And people are not moving to digital, digital accounts for about 10% of total comic sales.
The risk is to the distribution model, there may not be shops when this is all over. For the Publisher -> Distributor -> Retail model to work, shops need to make big enough margins to weather a bad month or two. The problem is they have been having bad years, many owners are not in a financial position to deal with the lost sales over this period.
Without the shops, there's no one to distribute to. Without the distributor, the publishers have to find new ways to get their comics into the hands of consumers. This creates problems. On the one hand, consumer behavior does not change overnight, sales channels take time to develop.
On the other hand, independent publishers - not Marvel and not DC - will need to work out deals with other distributors to get into places that will sell their comics. The beauty of Diamond was they would deal with anyone. That's not true of other publishers, some of who won't deal with small-volume publishers.
To answer the question, how much will coronavirus damage comic books - small publishers will suffer greatly, anyone without a large existing audience is probably out of business. The Big 2 will cut their lines down to 40 titles a month, there just won't be enough shelf space to support a larger set of comics. A lot of comic book shops are already out of business, so they will need to find new places to sell their books. It remains to be seen if consumers will transition to buying comics at Walmart / Target / supermarkets.
A secondary effect of all the comic book shop closures is backissues. Many shops make their margins on backissue sales on the Internet. Going out of business means there's going to be an excess of supply, as retailers take over each other's catalogs. This is going to drive down prices on eBay, which will be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of comic book shops. So expect to see another round of closures starting around November.
A tertiary effect of comic book shop closures is an excess of talent. There are a lot of creatives working in comics, artists mostly get paid by the page. There's going to be price competition for very talented artists accustomed to making a (relatively) high page rate, the people who stay in the industry will need to adjust to lower rates. Compensation has always been incentivized, where artists make more for creating books that sell more. Expect to see a lot more of that going forward, maybe the average page rate for a penciller will be around $200 with a nickel for each copy sold over 40,000.
The problem is no one has any money. Comics may be a billion dollar industry, but that's because they've been increasing prices, not circulation. Marvel and DC are going to run into some challenges moving into a boutique retailer model simply because the Walmarts of the world want to sell mass-market publications. They're not going to make the same margins they made with Diamond, not sure anyone wants to be paying $10+ for their comics. So there's a limit to how well the industry can scale back up to pre-covid-19 levels.
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Just wait for the movies. They seem to come out faster than the average comic book fan can read one.
Re: How much will Coronavirus damage comic books? (Score:2)
Comics were already in deaths door thanks to epic levels of wokeness.
With characters like snowflake and cuck I wouldnâ(TM)t be surprised if this just ended it all.
I am not even exaggerating on these names.
Retroactive (Score:2)
I predict people will be flocking to their hobby haunts, including comic book stores, to buy whatever is on the shelves once the stay-at-home orders are lifted. All the retailers have to do is hold on until that day and the hunger for new content will provide record sales.
Mail order? (Score:2)
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When I was a much younger individual, I had several of my comic books delivered by US mail. Usually they arrived OK. Sometimes they didn't. Pull file approach is superior if one can actually go in the shop and get the books (I couldn't yet drive when I was doing this). Boxing up and sending better protected would work too. At current comic book prices it would seem to be a reasonable model to get the books out, but rather it would really suck for the local shops if people did their orders from a central pla
Probably not... (Score:1)
I had not bought comic books for a long time either, just recently I've been buying some and even put in a special request for a local comic book store to order - in all cases I had to go to the shop to pick it up.
I'm thinking all the stores really wanted you in to buy additional comics beyond what you ordered once you were in to browse... but now that plan is proving to be a problem.
One thing I wonder about comic stores though, is how many of them are sort of like a private museum of collectables for the s
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I don't buy much, but I only buy online - I'm too far away from the shops.
But both of the shops I "frequent" have watch lists - I can set a watch for upcoming releases of a particular comic or storyline.
Both of them send comics bagged, with backing boards, in sturdy cardboard mailers. No complaints here, although I miss the physical pleasure of browsing in an actual store.
No. Of course not. (Score:3)
Why do people not understand this. Everything is over. Comic books? Over! Cinemas? Gone. Those restaurants? Shutdown! School? No you're going to be stuck with your kids forever, that's assuming you yourself survive the massive commercial dieoff.
Have you not watched the infamous documentary from the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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No he's voted down for being a racist fuckwit in the first sentence and a troll in every other. That you think he spoke some "truth" ... well you choose the company you keep, we'll be the ones to judge you for it.
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The comic industry was in big trouble even before Wuhan virus
If you had a point I didn't get it because I stopped reading when you pointed out you were being an intentionally racist twat. Congrats.
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Re: No. Of course not. (Score:1)
I was under the impression (Score:4, Insightful)
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Or am I wrong and Snowflake and Safespace #1 is flying off the shelf?
I thought you were just being sarcastic, but nope, that's actually the names for the characters. I'm not sure if it's particularly telling in and of itself though because there's always plenty of crap [wikipedia.org] at any point in time, but we tend not to remember most of it from the past.
If there's stuff that's not for you or to your tastes for whatever reason, then don't buy it. There's all kind of art or media I would never care to consume, but its existence doesn't take away the things that I do want to consume. I
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It's a pretty great troll, just their names are enough to trigger you. It was all done deliberately to create some controversy and get the comic noticed, which it has managed to do. I've have never heard of it if you two hadn't been complaining about it.
Reminds me of much older trolls like in some of the Luke Cage (Power Man) comics.
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It's kind of hilarious, you sound like the opposite side of the coin of "owning the libtards". Kind of an expensive troll; it's been shown that comics with regressive left propaganda don't do very well. So it's unlikely that traditional comic fans will buy this, and it seems unlikely regressive leftists will buy this either.
It's comes off as just...stupid. Something that a 15-year old would make. But that does seem to be about the maturity level of the creators.
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Regressive leftists (the target demo for this comic) just don't seem to buy that many comics. A lot of those have bombed really hard lately (Birds of Prey comes to mind).
The issue is, Marvel decided to give up one an audience for another. You make it sound like the only option is "go buy something else". You do know that not all the characters that Marvel makes comics about are wholly owned by them, right? Sometimes you don't have a choice. But people are free to voice their opinion that it's bullshit.
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It's not dead, just much smaller than it used to be.
In part this is because it has moved away from 'comic book stores' (except in cities). Now you get stuff from the internet. Also it goes a lot further than just superheros.
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I only got Blade Runner by ordering as soon as it was announced, otherwise, "sold out"
https://www.incognitocomics.co... [incognitocomics.com.au]
So, yes, some titles are flying off the shelves. Bonus - some cover variants are by Syd Mead.
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OMG, I need to thank you for the laugh! I even compared the superpowers of the New Warriors from the 90ies to those of today. So, in the 90ies we had: telekinesis, generation and control of microwave radiation, mutant superpowers enhanced by water contact, control over kinetic energy for impact shielding and bouncing, flying + strength + injury resistance.
What does the new generation get? Augmented reality and instant googling (! really? So google glass and a phone that you can buy off the shelf?!), icy shu
Seems the same logic as with video games... (Score:2)
Games have also mostly gone online - and are not having a quasi-renaissance in terms of usage and some buying during this pandemic time.
Stores selling some specialized non-crucial good are all going to have a huge hurt from a pandemic scenario like this.
I think this time will hurt lots of industries - but it won't kill the desire for any of them over time, so the logical market will still be there.
Really, I think the comic store model itself is kind of holding back the comics industry. There's a ton more
Are you kidding me? (Score:2)
Seriously .. dead after a few months pause button? How is that possible? If it doesn't come back it wasn't needed in the first place. I mean, if people want comic books, it's not like someone has to invent it from zero. If there is a market for it and there is a way to make money from it, it will get produced.
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Try two weeks. That's how long it took for the comics industry to fold like a cheap tent. It took two weeks before Diamond, the monopoly on comics distribution in the US, announced they wouldn't be shipping any books and wouldn't be paying their vendors. That's all it took for DC, Marvel, and Image to instruct their creators to put their pencils down. So even if comics shops were allowed to be open, they wouldn't have any new product to sell.
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Seriously .. dead after a few months pause button? How is that possible?
Because it was already ailing.
Yes, one month with no income, meaning you can't pay your mortgage, will hurt a business, and two months will kill many businesses.
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Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, comic books will survive coronavirus. There will be a crisis, there will be an economic depression, but eventually, in a few years, we will be back to business as usual, companies will publish books and people will buy them.
A different question is whether current companies will survive the crisis, or they will become bankrupt and be bought by pennies. Which is very likely...
Literal question... (Score:5, Funny)
Question: Will Comic Books Survive Coronavirus?
Answer: Definitely, yes. SARS-CoV-2 attacks the respiratory system from humans and other animals, including bats and pangolins. However, it does not attack comic books. It may infest them, but show that On cardboard, no viable SARS-CoV-2 was measured after 24 hours, so we may expect a similar result on comic book paper pages. So yes, comic book 1, coronavirus 0, round lasts less than one day. [nejm.org]
Or maybe you were wondering if the comic book industry will survive the economic crisis caused by this coronavirus?
"Will comic book survive woke idiocy" (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY. The comic book industry is dying because it is catering to people who are not their fans, and the fans just don't enjoy it any more so they don't want to throw more money at it.
Re:"Will comic book survive woke idiocy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Comics, like science fiction, always did this kind of stuff. The difference is now not, "Here's a future world, wouldn't it be nice, dear reader?" It's "here's a future world and you are part of the problem."
The tone has shifted.
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They sell a product that has no essential value, that is only ever bought for entertainment purposes. I would think it doesn't take a genius-level IQ to figure out that telling your audience that "there is a problem and you are part of it" is a bad strategy for making money...
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I'm not so sure about that. Yes, science fiction has dealt with progressive issues (racism, sexism, bigotry, moving to no currency). But, at least from what I saw, it was done as exploratory and story-building concepts.
The stuff we have now is meant to cast blame and guilt, and appeal to a very specific audience. It's meant to exclude on the basis of including people are groups that traditionally may not have been advertised to. I never really felt like any of those things were in science fiction 20+ years
Supermarket vs Direct Sales (Score:2)
Your own fault (Score:1)
They stopped catering because the fans (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was a kid my mom would buy me comics for long car rides. I'd read and re-read the stack of 10 or so for the 2-4 hours it took to get wherever we were going.
Kids have tablets and game consoles now. It's a non issue. Even without internet a parent can load Netflix shows in offline mode. And 5G is on the way.
As for the woke stuff, do you actually read comics or just look at the art? Because that's been there since the 70s, often in a garish and ridiculous manner. Christ, the X-Men were one big allegory on racism and bigotry. Batman was chock full of social commentary with a woke bent. Christ, he hates guns for Pete's sake. I guess if you only ever read 90s Punisher...
Me? I stopped reading comics because I had a kid and got real broke real fast. When kids stopped reading in the 90s they moved onto nerds flush with cash from the
The industry is trying to reach outside it's regular hard core customer base. It's not working, but if they don't succeed the industry dies, pandemic or no pandemic.
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"Woke" is not just "left wing policies", its a badly thought out, collectivist spiral of insanity that is not far off from far-right extremists.
It's the kind of people that gets offended because one of the heroes in captain planet is a white dude.
It's none of those things (Score:2)
Unfortunately there are real civil rights issues tied up in wokeness, making it a highly effective attack vector...
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The first hint that social justice and virtue signalling plots did not sell?
Return to plots that sold.
What was done?
More social justice and virtue signalling plots.
Few wanted to buy.
More political social justice and virtue signalling plots.
Not selling? Try again with social justice and virtue signalling.
Still not selling? The people expected to buy the comics are told to accept the new politics and buy.
Return to fun and smart plots that s
On the Woke thing.... (Score:3)
As for the woke stuff, do you actually read comics or just look at the art? Because that's been there since the 70s, often in a garish and ridiculous manner. Christ, the X-Men were one big allegory on racism and bigotry. Batman was chock full of social commentary with a woke bent. Christ, he hates guns for Pete's sake. I guess if you only ever read 90s Punisher...
Comics sales suffer when they go woke. The X-Men may have been Lee and Kirby's attempt at mirroring racial politics in the US, but the sales sucked until the new version of the X-Men brought along this character called Wolverine whose chief attraction was that he went around killing everyone with animal-inspired claws. Pretty un-PC. Very un-woke. Batman sales in the 70's and 80's suffered when DC allowed its writers to push a Batman that was traumatized by guns and psychological problems, unable to even pic
I don't find Wolverine unwoke (Score:2)
Yeah, it's annoying as fuck when it's taken too far by dumb ass college girls (doesn't help that they're usually butt ugly). But anything's annoying taken to an extreme. For all the right wing's railing against wokeness I never hear one bloody peep about the mega pa
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If you really think that what was produced in the 70s and what is produced now is the same, I'm sorry, then you're just not paying attention.
Science fiction has dealt with progressive issues (racism, sexism, bigotry, moving to no currency). But, at least from what I saw, it was done as exploratory and story-building concepts.
The stuff we have now is meant to cast blame and guilt, and appeal to a very specific audience. It's meant to exclude on the basis of including people are groups that traditionally ma
It's nothing of the sort (Score:2)
They're not trying to exclude, they're just not very good writers. None of them are. It's like classic games. You remember the amazing runs where a story came out great. Nobody remembers the drek. Every
Yes they will (Score:2)
Some corporations might not. but who gives a shit? People drawing comics will survive, so will comic books.
Next question.
Please stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Please stop asking if every thing "will survive" corona virus?
Aside from the very old, the medically fragile, and a few businesses whose existence was teetering in the first place, for pretty much EVERYTHING ELSE the world post-covid19 will be the same as the world pre-covid19.
We will still shake hands.
We will still socialize with friends.
We will still worship together.
We will still go into an office to work.
and yes, we'll still read comics.
No (Score:2)
Indies will (Score:2)
What comics I buy are those that show up on Kickstarter. I think they'd continue.
Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
As a medium, yes comics will survive. The US comics industry has gone through several periods of expansions and contractions over the decades, but it has endured. It will endure the coronavirus crisis and Diamond's demise (not a bad thing in the long term), but it will change the industry and hopefully for the better. Marvel and DC have had declining sales for the past ten years or so. This is mainly due to factors such as alternate entertainment venues (video games, social media, etc.), higher prices (a ba
No! (Score:2)
They won't survive and it's your fault, with that damn Betteridge headline!
We can only hope (Score:2)
An end to the formulaic comic book movies we've endured for two decades would be nice.
Uh... (Score:2)
What is the point of Comic Book stores? (Score:1)
I order just about anything off the Internet, or visit a Barnes & Noble. I feel no loyalty to comic book stores. We live in the future now.
DC was talking about going to all digital anyway (Score:2)
There were reports months ago that DC was going to do a huge reboot. And that most of their books were going to be digital only.
This'll just give them the excuse they needed to do it without worrying about a huge backlash.
Yes (Score:2)
Go digitsl (Score:1)
Two weeks (Score:4, Informative)
I follow the comic industry news mostly by watching videos on the "Comics MATTER w/Ya Boi Zack" YouTube channel. "Zack" covers the state of the comics industry, reviews comic books, and touts his own comic book projects.
He has repeatedly pointed out that everyone is being hit hard by COVID-19 but the comics industry shattered after only two weeks. There is a big distribution company called Diamond, which has a monopoly on comics distribution to comics shops (seemingly a money-making position!). They apparently had no reserves at all, and after two weeks of COVID-19 lockdowns they were unable to pay their creditors and dramatically scaled down how much shipping they were doing. They are making promises that they will start paying some of their creditors soon now.
As for DC and Marvel: in recent years they stopped caring what the fans want and started doing whatever they want to do. They have seemingly made a calculation that their hard-core fans buy whatever they make, so they have stopped trying to please the fans. They have had year after year of declining sales, which they have masked by increasing the selling prices of the comics (and in at least Marvel's case, by cutting the quality to cut expenses).
It would be bad if the big comics publishers hired people with no proven track record, but it's actually worse than that: they repeatedly have hired people who have a track record of poor sales. There are many talented professionals with long track records of success who would love to get work, and they are passed over in favor of some failures. "Zack" makes the case that it's entirely because of "wokeness": there are trans-women, lesbians, people of color, etc. among these underperformers who keep getting work. (Don't try to claim that "Zack" just hates women or something. He's a huge fan of Ann Nocenti and has made several videos praising her, and while he was critical of the decision-making process that led to hiring Eve Ewing to write Ironheart he feels that she learned how to write comics and started doing a good job. I could name others but this is already long.)
"Zack" made a couple of videos talking about "pre-COVID thinking" where the publishers felt they could just do whatever they wanted, and COVID-19 slapped them in the face with a dose of reality.
He says that two weeks is plenty of time to create a new habit or lose an old habit, and comics fans are actually unable to go to comics shops for their weekly comics buys. He predicts that the big publishers won't see the hard-core fans return at the same level as before COVID-19 and the industry will have to change to survive.
"Zack" has one simple prescription to save the industry: make comics returnable. Right now, comics stores buy comics and eat the cost of the ones that don't sell. It's common practice in the world of magazines to allow stores to rip the covers off and send the covers back for a refund. (Just the covers to save on shipping expenses; the cover is to serve as proof that the magazine was destroyed and not sold.) If Marvel and DC had to start eating the cost of their failed comics, it would provide valuable negative feedback on what fans actually will buy, and within a year at most they would start rewarding merit.
A few small, independent publishers have made their comics returnable and loudly called on the big two publishers to do the same. So far: crickets.
Link to Comics MATTER w/Ya Boi Zack [youtube.com] on YouTube
P.S. "Zack" is a target of actual hatred by many in the comics industry. I believe the main reasons are that he has criticized them repeatedly (and they didn't like being criticized), and that in his earlier videos he was more willing to be actually insulting (he called a famous trans-woman a "man in a wig" because he said he hadn't seen any evidence she had medically transitioned). He's still critical but he made a decision to dial back the insults; he's now much more professional,
Re: (Score:2)
Why would the comic companies care about comic books at all, now?
Aren't the big name comic books just storyboards for movies, these days?
What is the profit that comes from making huge big feature movies, vs. profit that comes from publishing comic books?
I'd think that movie profits vastly, vastly, vastly outweigh the profits that come from the comic book industry.
If I were a skilled artist or comic book writer, -- I'd think they should go straight to the public, (self-publishing,) rather than stick with the
How to comic (Score:1)
2. Study how to draw, paint and do the needed art.
3. Work on your plot and story.
4. Consider what is in demand, what reviews well and did not sell.
5. Read the reviews of social justice and virtue signalling plots.
6. Find the reviews of comic that sold well and did well in the USA, globally.
7. Get your plot and art ready. Understand what computer software, files, color work is needed to publish.
8. Find art work that works for you and create your comic.
Jeez this is news (Score:2)
It can infect comic books? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Comic books already doomed (Score:1)
Marvel's hatred of their own audience have already doomed its comic selling business and irreversibly damaged the entire industry. They've been pushing social justice preaching over quality and calling their own consumers homophobes and shitlords straight to their faces for well over a decade by now. And their consumers are the same people who have enjoyed comics like *X-men* since childhood. Comics that have been allegories about racism and teenage "coming out of the closet" for the entirety of their exist