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Topic: The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ woes (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Chris Wood
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Posted: 24 May 2017 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | 1  

So much in this article in The Atlantic has been stated by our host and others for many years. Very interesting piece.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/th e-real-reasons-for-marvel-comics-woes/527127/
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John Cole
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Posted: 24 May 2017 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | 2  

Re-launch of the month get's old real fast.
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 24 May 2017 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | 3  

Unfortunately, the article offers no real insight on how Marvel can improve their practices aside from a very few, obvious points, made over and over again; Stop relaunching titles; Keep creative teams on books more consistently; Communicate with the buying public, not just a few fansites. A little education to their employees and freelancers in dealing with the public might a long way as well. You can't just envision yourself as a hard-working comedian taking down hecklers and expect that to fly.

Larger issues such as the Diamond stranglehold and the Direct Market system itself are noted in passing, but not identified as part of the problem. The sales system itself for this product is broken. 

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Matthew Wilkie
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 2:09am | IP Logged | 4  

The comparison between constantly providing jumping off points and a title like, say, The Walking Dead is a good one, albeit I know it has been made before. I enjoy TWD and currently it is the only title that I have ordered and sent to me. Similarly I love the recent Hawkeye runs but with the constant breaks in four issue arcs and the reversion to issue 1 when the creative team changed, I cannot be bothered to look out for a simply collect the TPBs as and when.

Getting kids back into comics would be the smart move for me if they wanted to reverse declining sales abut that that, if I think of my own children here, would require Marvel to align the titles to the films (in that Steve Rogers is Captain America, Peter Parker is Spider-Man and so on), drop the more mature themes and get the comics into the newsagents / newsstands. And none of that is going to happen any time ever.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 5:15am | IP Logged | 5  

At this point there is nothing that can be done to "fix" Marvel Comics, or, indeed, the comicbook industry as a whole. There have been too many wrong steps down wrong paths (all the way back to clinging to that 10¢ cover price).

Not even a time machine would help. This is horse and buggy time.

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Marcio Ferreira
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 7:02am | IP Logged | 6  

And yet the industry is not so bad in other countries.
I visited Belgium early this year, and went to a comic book shop in Gent, so many European comics that are not released as a monthly series to choose. And yet, monthly series seems to be the standard in USA even now...
My knowledge of these markets is almost zero, but it seems that something must be done to move the industry to another direction and maybe the answer is in what is working elsewhere.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 7:07am | IP Logged | 7  

And yet the industry is not so bad in other countries.

••

It's also not so tightly focused. Go to France, or Germany, or Denmark, or anywhere that comics are sold, and find not only a wide range of formats, but a wide range of content.

When I have visited shops in Europe I have been impressed by how many different kinds of product are carried, from books for small children, to books for adults. And I haven't heard a lot of adults complaining that the books they read as children are not currently being tailored to their more "mature" needs.

American comic publishers, rather than making the greatest effort to broaden their audience base, to reach the largest number of readers of all ages, had worked at digging deeper into the wallets of the aging audience they already have.

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Marcio Ferreira
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 7:43am | IP Logged | 8  

But John Byrne, that is the European landscape for decades, if I am not mistaken, and it has strong roots in the local culture, way before the "era of gadgets" that we now live.

I wonder if trying to change things now, would probably be nearly impossible to glue together with the current cultural landscape.

Hence, coming back to your original statement: "not even a time machine would help".

This probably means that new artists in the Comic Book Industry will have to try to find a place in the Sun in Europe in the near future...


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Thom Price
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 8:10am | IP Logged | 9  

way before the "era of gadgets"

***

I sometimes wonder where comic books would rank for me if I were 10 years old in 2017 -- with a plethora of video games, apps, cable channels, movies, and books all aimed at the same inherent appeal that comic books fulfilled for me in the 80s.  

My answer is "probably very low".
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John Byrne
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 8:54am | IP Logged | 10  

I sometimes wonder where comic books would rank for me if I were 10 years old in 2017 -- with a plethora of video games, apps, cable channels, movies, and books all aimed at the same inherent appeal that comic books fulfilled for me in the 80s.

••

Back in the Seventies and Eighties, I used to say that those of us working in comics had an advantage over filmmakers like George Lucas. He had to fly his crew to Tunisia to find "alien worlds," but we could "shoot on location."

At every step, we could outpace the movies, because we had absolutely no limits of budget or human ability. Only our imaginations.

That has changed. What used to look pretty spectacular on the printed page is now bigger, louder and MOVING on the screen. And in 3D!!

Can we learn a lesson from painters of the previous centuries? When the camera came along and did what they were doing, they invented whole new ways to do it. Impressionism. Cubism. Abstract art in all its forms. They had to, to survive. Is there some equivalent path for comics? Something we can do that the movies can't?

No any more, methinks.

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Michael Penn
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 9:17am | IP Logged | 11  


 QUOTE:
I sometimes wonder where comic books would rank for me if I were 10 years old in 2017.

My younger son is 9 and for him modern comicbooks don't "rank" at all. 

Yet, he reads. He likes the DIARY OF A WIMPY KID and CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS books, which are essentially comicbooks. He likes old comic strip reprints that I own. And he likes my old comicbooks too. 

But modern comicbooks? For him, they might as well not exist.

I raised a boy born in 1993 and am raising another born in 2008, a not inconsiderable difference in ages. Yet, while both loved superheroes and very much wanted to love comicbooks, when my older boy was 10 years old, there was nothing for him -- not just the content of the contemporary comicbooks but the entire scope of their production and distribution -- the industry was already killed. If that was true in 2003, how much more decayed is the dead (to kids) industry today?




Edited by Michael Penn on 25 May 2017 at 9:18am
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Thom Price
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Posted: 25 May 2017 at 9:39am | IP Logged | 12  

not just the content of the contemporary comicbooks but the entire scope of their production and distribution

***

I'm not even sure that would matter much to my theoretical 10 year old in 2017 self; even if comics were readily available and of the same content I enjoyed as a kid, I'm inclined to think they wouldn't rank very high.  If someone handed me a stack of comics, I'm sure I'd read them -- but would I spend my "hard earned" allowance on comics or beg my mom to drive me to the comics shop like I did in the 80s?  I really doubt it.  There's just too much other "stuff" now.
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