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Marvel Movies are a Success why can't Comics do the Same?
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79 posts in this topic

15 hours ago, fastballspecial said:

Great article below. Read and discuss.

https://screenrant.com/marvel-movies-mcu-comic-reboot-fail/

 

The article is irrelevant except for the part about the guys in charge being clueless and directionless.

The movies have decades of material to draw on for their adaptations.

The comics have mediocre creators, terrible leaders, and few (to be polite) good ideas.

3 hours ago, Mercury Man said:

I am sure they made some money in advertising, much like newspapers.  In those old books you had like 40 ads on a page selling everything from a Certificate in Drafting to X-Ray glasses.    Not much of that going on in today's books. 

The publishers got paid for the space. A page with 100 ads brought in the same $ as a page with a single ad.

2 hours ago, 01TheDude said:

nope-- I don't even think you can seeds or Grit either to make some quick spending money

lower the price, sell more volume, get the advertisers back and interested to help pay production costs-- return to the days of old. Maybe even put out some books that are targeted to entertain children. Can you imagine if 7-11s had spinner racks again full of comic books? that would be pretty sweet!

It's a pipe dream-- so sue me.

If you think 7-11 (or any other retailer... or any newsstand distributor, for that matter) wants to deal with comics that have a lower cover price than current issues, you don't understand retail economics. If prices were increased and they had some other incentive to devote space to comics (and Newsstand editions were brought back by the publishers), then maybe.

There are still ads in comic books. If you think ads were ever a great income source for comic book publishers, you are delusional.

4 minutes ago, Kevin76 said:

$4 a comic is way too much, they justify the $4 cover price by using HQ paper and digital coloring. Also way too much cheese cake art in comics now, a lot of readers are women nowadays and they don't want to see that. I blame the editors at Marvel/DC for a lot of today's comics problems. They are the ones who approve what the cover is going to be. If comics were cheaper, they would get into the hands of more people

Wrong, because nobody would sell them.

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- At $4 per book people (namely kids) have to be picky in what they buy

- Original ideas are lacking ("new" characters are recycled copies of the original)

- Too many gimmicks...variants, virgins, "deaths", etc.

- Too many reboots (lazy excuse to fix the mess they made)

- Only a handful of great artist (sometimes I wonder how some artists got a job drawing)

- Numbering (it should not be this complicated)

- Too political

 

With the success of movies and TV the comic book industries have a great opportunity to bring in young fans.  They need to fix these issues immediately.

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11 hours ago, Ken Aldred said:

A major problem is decompressed storytelling, which often spreads a story over maybe 6 issues. So, are many potential new readers, introduced via the super-hero films, going to be willing to drop $25 to read just one dragged-out story, and then be willing to commit to doing that on a frequent, long term, continuous basis with multiple titles?  Very daunting.

 

So true. In this day of instant access it's  kind of hard to pay $4 for a 15 minute read than have to wait another whole month to read another 15 minute read for another $4 chapter.

Too long await,plus poor bang for our bucks.

Amazing how in the 1980s it seemed so normal to wait a whole month to read 17 pages in the next chapter of our favorite heroes.

The monthly sadly seems dated and not a modern way to consume entertainment.

 

 

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4 minutes ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

So true. In this day of instant access it's  kind of hard to pay $4 for a 15 minute read than have to wait another whole month to read another 15 minute read for another $4 chapter.

Too long await,plus poor bang for our bucks.

Amazing how in the 1980s it seemed so normal to wait a whole month to read 17 pages in the next chapter of our favorite heroes.

The monthly sadly seems dated and not a modern way to consume entertainment.

 

 

looks like we were typing at the same time!

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A movie (or trilogy) is a story arc.  Movies end.  Comics don't, it's story arc after story arc.  Continuity is a big problem.  I think the future, if there is any, for print is non-continuity story arcs.  Bascially just limited series.

We've hashed out the legacy heroes ad infinitum, but just disappearing them is as dumb as the way they rolled them out.

Edited by SteppinRazor
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3 hours ago, AnthonyTheAbyss said:

- At $4 per book people (namely kids) have to be picky in what they buy

- Original ideas are lacking ("new" characters are recycled copies of the original)

- Too many gimmicks...variants, virgins, "deaths", etc.

- Too many reboots (lazy excuse to fix the mess they made)

- Only a handful of great artist (sometimes I wonder how some artists got a job drawing)

- Numbering (it should not be this complicated)

- Too political

 

With the success of movies and TV the comic book industries have a great opportunity to bring in young fans.  They need to fix these issues immediately.

A lot of good points in this thread but your post lays out the main issues hindering Marvel.

I love the older Marvel books, from silver to bronze, that's why I mostly buy, but I will always be open to reading newer books. I'll still pickup a handful of Marvel titles every month. Over the last year, I've read the Lemire-Deodato run on Thanos - it was exceptional. And I thought Brisson-Perkins' Iron Fist book was superb. (Now both are cancelled.) When Marvel started hammering out their Marvel Legacy line last fall, I was curious to see where it would go. I actually bought books that I wouldn't normally buy - I picked up America, Ice Man, Marvel Two-In-One (for these, the first two were very tough to get through, the last one was surprisingly very good). But all in all, to me, a return to the legacy numbering was the only real noticible difference after all the hooplah. Nothing really changed - and to top it off they're still pumping out the variants, price point is commonly $3.99 or $4.99, and now after only six months, we get another reboot and Marvel Legacy is dead. It's hard not to get cynical.

If I'm buying new books I pay more consideration to the creative teams over the Marvel brand (but they're losing a lot of their talent to DC these days).

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6 hours ago, Lazyboy said:

The article is irrelevant except for the part about the guys in charge being clueless and directionless.

The movies have decades of material to draw on for their adaptations.

The comics have mediocre creators, terrible leaders, and few (to be polite) good ideas.

The publishers got paid for the space. A page with 100 ads brought in the same $ as a page with a single ad.

If you think 7-11 (or any other retailer... or any newsstand distributor, for that matter) wants to deal with comics that have a lower cover price than current issues, you don't understand retail economics. If prices were increased and they had some other incentive to devote space to comics (and Newsstand editions were brought back by the publishers), then maybe.

There are still ads in comic books. If you think ads were ever a great income source for comic book publishers, you are delusional.

Wrong, because nobody would sell them.

It's a pipe dream-- so sue me

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The business of comic book publishing has become one of printing manufactured collectibles treasured for variant covers and #1 numbering, not to be read, but to be slabbed.

Marvel needs to whittle down the releases, even if they charged $10 per issue, but made comics more meaningful, so only 1 comic book release per character, no more multiple titles for Spider-Man, Avengers, X-Men, etc. and hire great writers, great artists and get rid of the variants as well as stop reprinting (going into a 2nd printing) comics, so the originals retain conductibility and only represent comics as collected editions.

Stop trying to create universal epic event storylines, and bring it back to the Marvel Silver Age formula where writers need not crossover through other titles or run story arcs more than 4 issues, and let it be entertaining, which brings the kids back into reading the books.

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3 hours ago, letsgrumble said:

Over the last year, I've read the Lemire-Deodato run on Thanos - it was exceptional

 

3 hours ago, letsgrumble said:

(Now both are cancelled.)

That's really, really disappointing. I hadn't read about the cancellation. The Lemire / Deodato run was excellent; solid stories with some of Deodato's best ever artwork, expanding on the story of Thane, Thanos' son.  The last Donny Cates storyline was extremely impressive, also with very nice art from a creator I'd never heard of before, Geoff Shaw.  

:frown:

Edited by Ken Aldred
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5 hours ago, Ken Aldred said:

That's really, really disappointing. I hadn't read about the cancellation. The Lemire / Deodato run was excellent; solid stories with some of Deodato's best ever artwork, expanding on the story of Thane, Thanos' son.  The last Donny Cates storyline was extremely impressive, also with very nice art from a creator I'd never heard of before, Geoff Shaw.  

:frown:

I agree with you re Deodato (I couldn't believe my eyes!). 

The Thanos book stopped at 18 issues with the last issue hitting the shelves a few weeks prior to the release of Avengers Infinity War. Now that Thanos is a household name because of the film, the book is cancelled! :facepalm:

Marvel will still however cash in on the later printings and trade releases. Looking at March and April preliminary sales, if you include the later printings and Thanos Annual #1, the title is one of the best selling comics at Marvel. Issues #13 and #14 have already gone to 5th printings with the subsequent ones looking to follow suit.

The Thanos creative team of Cates and Shaw worked together on God Country by Image (never read). Marvel is drawing on newer talent, and don't seem to mind that DC is poaching longtime stalwarts like Bendis and Perkins (now the new Green Lantern artist). This plus n' play approach has a bit of risk to it, but can pay off once in a while. Having said that, it's hard to maintain loyalty to any title at Marvel as creating teams always seem to be jumping around. Even the 18-issue Thanos run had two separate creative teams. The recent Waid-Samnee Captain America (#695-#700) run was also short-lived. They're only looking at short 5-6 issue story arcs to publish later in trades - that's probably what it boils down to. With a publisher like Image, you can settle into a book like Saga, for instance, because you know that Vaughan and Staples will maintain a consistent narrative throughout the run of the title.

On another note, a Marvel Legacy book that I tried and really liked was Bemis-Burrows' Moon Knight. Great story (esp. #188) - absolutely psychotic! I guess Bemis is the new Bendis.

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Also to point out it's not just a modern Marvel movie or low price thing.

Comic book movies for the most part really have never brought up monthly sales.

A great example was Christopher Reeves first two Superman movies in 1978 and 1980. Both blockbuster hits, yet they didn't affect sales going up. Those Superman comics back than were only .40 and .50 cents a piece and that still did not get them in. In fact the opposite happened in that after those two Superman blockbuster movies Superman comic book sales got so bad they had to call John Byrne to reboot the line! :whatthe:

In away looking at it their strategy might be right and why comics are still here. That strategy is don't try to appease the mainstream readers with the comics,but target the die hard comic book collectors which means keep giving them variants and fancy shiny new number ones. It must be working because comic book sales were over 1 billion in 2016.

http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

With that said we will find they are using the movies to target mainstream audiences instead of comics and that seems to be working as well with super heroes dominating the Hollywood scene.

So that leaves us back to the question how to get movie goers to read comic books?

Maybe they don't have to.

Maybe it's just fine the way it is.

'if it ain't broke don't fix it'

 

Edited by ComicConnoisseur
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I think this really all comes down to comic books being a dated and dying form of entertainment due primarily to the instant gratification culture that exists today. At a time when comic books were at their peak popularity, kids didn't have all the competing forms of entertainment that they do now. Video games hadn't been invented yet or were in their infancy. No internet. No devices and social media.

When you add in the fact that a comic book at $4 a pop really isn't very good entertainment value, that certainly doesn't help.

What primarily has driven me away has been price and the fact that the comics produced today bear little resemblance to the ones I grew up reading and loving.

Edited by Jerkfro
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2 hours ago, Jerkfro said:

I think this really all comes down to comic books being a dated and dying form of entertainment due primarily to the instant gratification culture that exists today. At a time when comic books were at their peak popularity, kids also didn't have all the competing forms of entertainment that they do now. Video games hadn't been invented yet or were in their infancy. No internet. No devices and social media.

When you add in the fact that a comic book at $4 a pop really isn't very good entertainment value, that certainly doesn't help.

What primarily has driven me away has been price and the fact that the comics produced today bear little resemblance to the ones I grew up reading and loving.

Basically, I think the $4 price for a 15 minute read has a lot to do with it. If we think about it, most of on here consider ourselves hardcore comic book collectors,yet most of us don't pay the $4 for the latest comic books, so if the majority of us hard core comic book collectors don't find the $4 attractive why would non-comic book collectors?

Myself, I read more comic book stories than ever,but I do it digitally now. At one point during this year I was getting whole Marvel Masterworks/Epic Collections between 200-500 pages long for .99 cents a piece on Amazon Kindle.

Hard to go back to paying $4 for a 15 minute read.

:preach:

 

Edited by ComicConnoisseur
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Echoing what others have said, it really is as simple as "comics are too expensive." Kids LIKE reading comics, but they're not going to spend that much money on them. $4 for a stapled pamphlet is an old man's game. But whenever there is a Comixology 99 cent sale, or one of thoe absurd Amazon Marvel TPB sales, they sell tons of digital comics. Digital is the future of comic readers. Not of collectors, but of readers.

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3 minutes ago, F For Fake said:

Echoing what others have said, it really is as simple as "comics are too expensive." Kids LIKE reading comics, but they're not going to spend that much money on them. $4 for a stapled pamphlet is an old man's game. But whenever there is a Comixology 99 cent sale, or one of thoe absurd Amazon Marvel TPB sales, they sell tons of digital comics. Digital is the future of comic readers. Not of collectors, but of readers.

I can agree with the statement though, that it is a "suggested retail"..... LCS got to make money 

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Print industries are failing. Newspapers, magazines: massive layoffs, loss of readership, advertising revenue. Kaput. 

And here we have an industry, comic book publishing, and satellite industries, distributors and LCSs, that rely on a printed product. Go look at Pew research on where teens spend their media time. It ain't with print materials. I think the future is grim and that small print runs are all we're going to see. A pressing question is, what happens when MCU dries up? It's going to.

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Simple if u had to choose a movie or book 9 outta 10 take the movie. I think people would sit and watch a 8 hour movie instead of reading a book of the same thing that would take them 20mins. No imagination anymore you basically have to tell most people what to like

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