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Topic: Who did more damage? (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Flavio Sapha
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | 1  

a) The British Invasion;
b) The Image Wave;
c) The Decompressionists;
d) Joe Quesada;
e) The Direct Market;
f) Other:______;
g) Nobody. Comics never had it so good!

Let me explain:

I am a comic book junkie. I cannot live without comics.

Yet, over the past twenty years, I've been struggling to find stuff I like
among tons of crap. Steadily, the number of "readable" comics have been
diminishing as the craft of storytelling becomes a lost art.

Personally, I enjoyed the British Invasion comics, because the quirky
stories they produced depicted the fringes of the DCU, in stern contrast
to mainstream characters like Superman.

Then, when saying that "comics had grown up" was all the rage, they
were lobotomized. The Image wave arrived. Out with Moore and McKean,
in with McFarlane and Liefeld! Suddenly, it was all pin-ups, stories,
characters and plot a thing of the past.

This lasted several years.

Inexplicably, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Story
decompression, page after page of talking heads. The thing people
forget is: BENDIS CAME UP WITH THIS PACING BECAUSE HE COULDN'T
DRAW AND MADE COMICS OUT OF STATS!!!!!!!!

The market has shrunk dramatically. So much so, that so-called
alternative artists now ALL have to ply the mainstream super-hero trade.
Mostly, the results are...doubtful (last week I read BATMAN: ORDER OF
THE BEASTS, by Eddie Campbell, an enjoyable book - that was a rare
instance in which this worked). I am very saddened to see former heroes
like Grant Morrison (yes, you read that right) who made such awesome
comics in the past turn out something like Final Crisis and Bruce Wayne
Returns.

Another consequence of the shrunken audience is the constant effort to
raise the shock level, always reaching for the lowest common
denominator. This is Joe Quesada's game, which is now played at both
sides of the board. Sometimes, I think Quesada and Didio are the same
person! Idiotic, revolting story developments result, such as "Superboy-
Prime" punching "walls of reality" and the "new Red Hood", two examples
I find particularly abhorrent (nuMarvel, I can't even cite examples).

Finally, the "it's the singer not the song" syndrome. What sense does it
make to spot an ad saying "Bill Willingham is coming" to a casual reader
or a civilian? Ah, how I detest the "pull list" mentality...which reminds
me, could it be all this is to blame on the direct market system? Hrm.

For all these reasons, it is a very, very, very rare occurrence that I pick up
a comic produced this decade that I enjoy. I find it very unlikely that
anything produced today will last.

So, these days, I live in the Land of the Back Issues, slowly making my
way through the roster of DC and Marvel titles from the late seventies
and eighties. Michael Kaluta or Gil Kane are usually on cover duty, the
coloring is pleasant and the newsprint smell and feel is...addictive!   

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Brett Wilson
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | 2  

The speculators who were buying up comics by the boat load not because they actually liked comics but because they thought they were going to end up making big money selling them on the secondary market.
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Martin Redmond
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | 3  

Everyone who's trying to reinvent the wheel in "writing".


 QUOTE:
Idiotic, revolting story developments

There are no stories, storytelling is dead in comics, It's not even allowed on a cover. It's fanservice city.


 QUOTE:
BENDIS CAME UP WITH THIS PACING BECAUSE HE COULDN'T
DRAW AND MADE COMICS OUT OF STATS!!!!!!!!

Didn't MacFarlane start Bendis? I suggest you reread TORMENT, it's oddly avant garde now.

Dave McKean's Cages was alright, but it had alot of problems in it. The biggest one was that the stories were not that engrossing. There was no hook or aim to encourage me to keep reading. The chapter about the musician was kinda nauseating. I would still like for him to make more comics anyway.



Edited by Martin Redmond on 17 June 2010 at 9:04pm
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Knut Robert Knutsen
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | 4  

Cages was okay for what it was, which was McKean experimenting with storytelling in the context of painting/illustration sensibilities. Miller's Ronin and Sienkiewicz' Stray Toasters fall into a similar category in that they are experiments in style ocurring in a published comic.

Glamourpuss, again, is Dave Sim doing the same thing. He's willing himself to devlop an illustrative / photo realist style through imitation, examination and recreation as well as historical study of context, all in a published work.

To some extent the early British Invasion comics, the tolerably good ones, were similar to that in that they were writers with new sensibilities experimenting with the boundaries of the established US superhero comic. Trying to properly grasp the form.

But without the utter demolition of the demographically broad marketplace that followed the Image delays (which put retailers on a forced starvation diet) / the speculator bust (that finished off a lot of retailers) / the Marvel/Diamond distribution war (which seriously hurt the small press and destroyed even more retailers) we wouldn't be experiencing the current Cannibal Zombie Holocaust.

(Not to be confused with the upcoming DC for Kids! crossover of the same name)

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Troy Nunis
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | 5  

 I think it has to be top down, Editorial (and those that hire them) losing grasp of what the product should be, being aware they need to know how to protect what's long term (their characters) and realize what's transitory (the talent) -- if you have a responsible editorial staff who knows how to say NO you don't have the damage from the Decompressionists, Brit invasion, Image style, Quesada - and the Speculators aren't catered to.

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Robert Bradley
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Posted: 17 June 2010 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | 6  

Unintentionally, Frank Miller and Alan Moore.

But only in that all the other writers felt like they should be writing stories like 'Batman: The Dark Knight Returns' and "Watchmen" instead of breaking their own new ground.

 

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Petter Myhr Ness
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 12:20am | IP Logged | 7  

The Direct Market. By removing comics from everyday view and placing them in specialist stores. A lot of the s**t that goes on in comics right now - variant covers and over-priced, pointless mini-series being two examples, would not have been possible without that move.
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Paul Kimball
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 1:07am | IP Logged | 8  

I think Petter got it. Everyone can still blame their least favorite artist/writer
though.
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Mike O'Brien
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 1:57am | IP Logged | 9  

Yeah, Peter is saying what JB usually says - it was the direct market on one hand, and the readers on the other hand.

I mean, all the things you list might have merrit or not - as noted, you yourself liked the Brit stuff, heck, so did I, when, as you noted, it was it's own niche thing. But had the dwindling psychotic fanbase not bought any of the fads you mention, we wouldn't even remember them now.

Surely one could argue that an editorial hand could have curbed such excesses, but on the other hand, the editors aren't there to facilitate art, but to make profit, so... eh! Penny wise/pound foolish. Profit was made in the short term and it killed the industry in the long term.

I know that Flavio himself has an oppertunity to great greatness in comics... we'll see where that goes.

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Carmen Bernardo
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 3:45am | IP Logged | 10  

   I'm seconding what Mike and JB have said about the Direct Market.  The saying "It seemed like a good idea at the time..." comes to mind here.  I was one of those fanboys who couldn't wait to get their comics fix back in the day, when I didn't know better, and look where it's gotten us now.

   The direct market clearly took the concerns of newsstands and grocery store managers out of the equation, thus speeding up the decline of the medium by taking away any disincentives for the current crop of creators and editors to pursue their pet projects in the name of making their comicbook characters "grow up".  The whole singer and song argument would've been neutralized, had management said things along the lines of "Hold your horses there, son.  Just who are you producing that story for, anyway?  Yourself, of the kid whose parents are gonna be complaining to me about why you had (insert Hero's name here) do that?"

   Was a time when some of the stuff that we see in comics today belonged in some fan-art or fan-fiction you'd be finding in a bin in the out-of-the-way corner of a convention hall...

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Pedro Bouça
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 4:31am | IP Logged | 11  

Well, since I read comics from pretty much all over the world, I would say that comics never had it so good. Even if you don't like the new stuff, pretty much all of the old is available on reprint collections!

Restricting then the subject to "Marvel/DC super-hero comics", which I think is the scope most people here are interested, I would say that the big problem was the Direct Market.

It restricted the reading public to a very narrow slice of hardcore super-hero fanboys - and that is ALWAYS bad!



Edited by Pedro Bouça on 18 June 2010 at 4:31am
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John Byrne
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Posted: 18 June 2010 at 4:41am | IP Logged | 12  

To reiterate: The greatest amount of damage to the industry was done by the Direct Sales Market, and how it shifted from being a place to pick up back issues, to being virtually the ONLY place to get comics.

The DSM is a classic example of a solution that becomes, over time, itself a problem. Conceived largely by Phil Seuling, a dealer, as a way for dealers to keep up a constant stock of back issues they could sell at conventions and thru other such venues, it ushered in the birth of comic shops, which became a place where titles which would otherwise have been canceled due to low sales could find a profit margin acceptable to the publishers. Once the "Direct Only" titles had come into being, it did not take long for the bean counters in the business to ask themselves why ANY titles would go thru the arcane and economically marginal system that served the rest of the magazine industry, when if ALL comics were sold thru the DSM shops, ALL sales would produce the highest possible profits for the companies. In the DSM, after all, the most important element was NO RETURNS. As originally conceived, the DSM didn't WANT returns, as the whole point was to build up a backlog of back issues.

But, once the decision was made to shift the majority share of the product into the DSM, the Companies were deliberately choosing to turn a mass market product into a niche market product. The arrival of the speculators, a few years into this, created the illusion that this was a good idea, but once that bubble burst, the Companies were faced with the harsh reality -- obvious from the start to anyone who really thought it thru -- that without speculation fueling inflated sales of "hot" issues and titles, it is simply impossible to sell as much product thru X number of venues as it is thru XXXX. The profit margin is much, much higher in the DSM than it was on the newsstand, but a higher profit margin is not much use when the number of units being sold is cut to a small fraction of what it once was.

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