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"There is a comic about Daredevil ? ! ?"

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My wife, an 8th grade teacher, said that she thinks Marvel Comics is missing the boat. Apparently, some of her male students have shown increasing excitement about the upcoming Daredevil movie. The closer the movie gets to opening day the more they talk about how cool it looks, and the more excited they are getting. In response to their growing anticipation she asked them if they had ever read the comic book. Their reply was a very disappointing "There is a comic book about Daredevil?" This was stated with question, curiosity, and interest. I am not talking about one or two kids here, I am talking about a dozen or so.

 

Is Marvel letting the comics market slide in an effort to get at the Hollywood cash cow? Have they given up on new readers entirely? Do they even care?

 

Lastly, I have donated some of my Daredevil comics to her classroom in an effort to do my part in gaining new readers in the industry. In the mean time, if you need me I will be out by the mail box waiting for my paycheck from the Marvel Comics marketing department. tongue.gif

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marvel comics has gone to , i don't know what the brain trust is doing over there, but selling comics for $2.99 is not a smart idea. why don't they just make some comics like they were from the 80's newsprint, no slick paper and fancy colouring and sell it for $1.50 so kids can get into reading and collecting them. confused.giffrown.gifmad.gif

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Or keep the nice paper if they have to, but put in 30 pages of ads so they can make the price $1.50

 

The new (to America at least) Shonen Jump magazine will hopefully show publishers here a better way to market comics to kids. There's a reason they sell 3.5 million+ per issue PER WEEK in Japan.

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All of my nieces and nephews all believed that Spider-man, X-men, Etc came from Disney or Fox! shocked.gif I quickly educated them on where they came from and now hand them a comic to take home everytime they come over to visit.

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Well, if they cheapen up their books (cheap paper quality usually goes hand in hand with cheap cover quality), then certain forum members will complain that all that they will be lucky to get a 9.2-9.4 if they slab these modern books tongue.gif

 

Since Marvel has no obligation to make sure that their books get a CGC 9.6+ grade, I am with you on this one...anything they can do to keep books at the $2.25-2.50 level would be fantastic. This will not happen though, dealers got angry when they felt Marvel cheapened the Ultimate cover stock (they say it made them more prone to damage, so they had to return more of the books...which is true, but I bet they also got sick of the fanboys whining about how their precious comic book had a few dings on it, therefore it was no longer a "mint" book).

 

Okay, all of the above aside...the real reason why $1.50 books will not work for the majority of dealers and Marvel is that dealers do NOT want to sell dirt cheap books to a dwindling audience. Their day-to-day business costs (lease, etc) will not go down just because the price of the comics they are selling goes down (less profits while business expenses stay the same is, as you know, a recipe for disaster).

 

Of course, you may say..well, cheaper comics=more customers, and in theory this should be true, but I suspect there are bonafide dealers on this board (Lighthouse is one I believe) that would back up my claim that cheaper comics are not doing as much to bring in new customers (and regulars at that) as one would like to think. It is sad but true that cheaper comics does not equal more customers.

 

Regards

Christopher H.

 

 

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It is sad but true that cheaper comics does not equal more customers.

 

Yep. Maybe they should try just going back to where the books were in the SA/BA - same layouts, covers, paper and STORIES!

 

Yeesh! I have been in a few comic books\k stores looking at the current crop and much I almost do not recognize as a comic book!

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Of course, you may say..well, cheaper comics=more customers, and in theory this should be true

 

are the .99 cent menus working for the fast food chains?

 

 

Actually, no. McDonalds is hurting, BK is hurting, Wendy's is holding their own. McD's and BK have both undercut each other so much that they're falling on their own burger-flippers.

 

 

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are the .99 cent menus working for the fast food chains?

 

Looks like not...but the ninety-nine centers are working for a lot of my co-workers. Never saw so many MacDonald Burger King bags. I can't believe they feel nourished afterwards!

 

PS - hey Supa?! Got a bartender question for you. A friend gave me a bottle of Appleton Estates Extra rum for Christmas. I usually drink Bacardi White/Coke but this stuff is several cuts above. Knowing you be a tender of bars, got any recommendations for an even better rum?

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yeah, but it's done not by choice, it's done to compete with each other. i might also add that they make their $$$ off of fries and beverage sales.

 

Yeah, but they've both realized that any victory here is going to be a pyrrhic one, and they're both backing off the $.99 menus! This was McD's first quarterly loss EVER, right? Scary. There's too many fat people out there to have something like that happening. Hell, there's too many fat people on these boards to have that happening. GET OUT THERE AND SUPPORT THE ECONOMY, TUBBOS!

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I don't know about $1.50...as has been posted on this board many times, the operating costs prohibit the comic companies from doing this. My wish is that I could go back into the past 12 years and kill Jim Lee, Rob Liefield, et all the Image founders before they decided to rebel and came up with gimmicks such as trick covers, improved paper qualities, etc that escalated prices in the industry because of their wild success.

 

Given that'll never happen, I do think that stabilizing the price at a lower, more acceptable point has to be a major priority of the industry. $1.99 is a nice sounding number and although still expensive, it's better than the obscene $3 range that most publishers seem to be fixated on. Perhaps the fact that of the two big boys, DC is currently owned by a Conglomerate Media Giant and Marvel may soon be as well, will allow for something like this to happen. As the revenue streams from movie and TV franchises begins to pour in, the corp can afford to take a slight loss in the comics portion of their business in order to try and build the reader base back up.

 

Still, the above is just a veritable desperate bucket-holding crewman against the rising waters of the sinking Titanic. Even if the prices are made more reasonable to entice a new generation to buy, we as the caretakers of the hobby need to bring the kids back in. There's just too much for them to do today for them to find their way into reading anything. Most kids don't read for schooling's purposes, let alone read for the fun of it. To this end, if you have kids, you should have them reading before they're in school and you should encourage them to read on their own. When they do this, then you should start putting comics in their dirty-grimies. Plenty of kid-centric material out there (Powerpuff Girls, Looney-tunes, Dexter's Lab, Scooby-doo, the Simpsons, and the kiddie show based superhero fare Batman Gotham Adventures, Justice League Adventures, and X-men Evolution).

 

Finally, we should all be encouraging other kids around us to read as well. This can be done by raiding your local shops bargain bins and giving comics out to kids by any means you can find. Also, promotions such as Batman and Superman 10 cent adventures, 25 cent Daredevils, and 9 cent Fantastic Fours are a great source of cheap books. Arrange with your dealer to get a bunch of them...100 copies of 10 cent adventure is only 10 bucks; a worthwile investment in the hobby. Then spread the wealth. Also, don't forget Free Comic Book Days...stop being silly and sending those books in for CGC grades. Just plain dumb.

 

Just my $0.02...

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The bargain bin thing is a good idea. Just get them the basics like Spidey, FF, DD, Batman, Hulk, Superman, or any other known icons, and let them go from there.

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It's kind of depressing, but not suprising.

 

DD, like most characters, is not in the public awarness. I can only guess as to how many will go see the movie under the assumption that the character was created by a Hollywood Studio/Screenwriter. Some might even think he was created solely to reap some of Spidey's "juice".

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