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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12444
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 7:40am | IP Logged | 1
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QUOTE:
| Is there light at the end of the tunnel? |
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Unless that light shines primarily on a new generation of young readers, it doesn't matter. My younger son is 9 years old. He loves comicbooks. But he has nothing contemporary to read from Marvel and DC. Make something for kids or don't bother.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 8:21am | IP Logged | 2
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How long has this been going on? When I joined Marvel, circa 1975, we (and I include myself) were already leaning strongly away from stories for our original 6 to 12 year old market. Stories were getting "darker". When I pitched an "entry level" Batman book during my time at DC I was told Batman was considered "one of our adult characters." I asked if they were really imagining tired businessmen picking up the latest issue to read on the train to Scarsdale? No answer. Then we got rid of the Comics Code, after decades of prima donnas (not me, this time) whining that we "didn't need it " -- and then going on to prove we did. Is there a parallel in the real world? No, but we can imagine one: 25 year old male who drives only the hottest cars slowly morphs into a 40 year old with a wife and three kids and a dog, all living in suburbia -- but still insisting he wants hot cars to drive, so Detroit give him a ridiculously impractical station wagon version. And then, to complete the analogy, the manufacturers realize they make more from each individual station wagon sale, and so shift their targeting to the older market and phase out the original. Hardly a good business model, yet pretty much exactly what happened in comics.
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Brian Skelley
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 February 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 231
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | 3
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John Byrne wrote:
| No, but we can imagine one: 25 year old male who drives only the hottest cars slowly morphs into a 40 year old with a wife and three kids and a dog, all living in suburbia -- but still insisting he wants hot cars to drive, so Detroit give him a ridiculously impractical station wagon version. And then, to complete the analogy, the manufacturers realize they make more from each individual station wagon sale, and so shift their targeting to the older market and phase out the original. |
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Isn't that what gave us the "SUV" market? Most of those are just Station Wagon's just cloaked in 'coolness'. They're a far far cry away from the off roading beasts they were originally made for.
I always find myself torn with the medium of comics changing. Kids today aren't the same as they were when I was young so what worked for me probably wouldn't work for them. Having said that, I think that would more mean that you'd have new characters that did other things vs having Spider-Man grow up and get more 'adult' with me.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | 4
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Isn't that what gave us the "SUV" market? Most of those are just Station Wagon's just cloaked in 'coolness'. They're a far far cry away from the off roading beasts they were originally made for.••• Nor were the muscle cars adapted for the family market. Please, TRY to get the point.
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Leigh DJ Hunt
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 February 2008
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1570
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | 5
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I'm very happy that Bendis (and to a slightly lesser extent) Alonso have gone from Marvel but I don't think the Luke cage/Jessica Jones liason is quite as described above. For a start it's a comic labelled Mature Content but there's no explicit anal sex. All sorts of things can be read into the panels but nothing that says that is definitely what happens.
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 4789
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | 6
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I'm not pleased mostly because I'm convinced that the end of the tunnel is a 500 foot drop off into the ocean.
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Mike Norris
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4274
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| Posted: 19 November 2017 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | 7
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I'm not pleased mostly because I'm convinced that the end of the tunnel is a 500 foot drop off into the ocean. ************************************************************ ********************** full of hungry sharks.
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Rick Whiting
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 April 2004
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| Posted: 20 November 2017 at 12:12am | IP Logged | 8
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Comics used to read like a book with pictures. Now they read like movie scripts.
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Not only that James, the characters are also being changed to reflect and resemble the live action movie and TV versions of the characters (sometimes even before the movies and TV series even premier). The stories are also being written so that they can resemble the current story lines of the movies and TV series and are timed to come out right around the time those movies and TV series are out. It's "tail wagging the dog" synergy taken to the extreme.
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Yvan Jullien
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: France
Posts: 126
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| Posted: 20 November 2017 at 12:34am | IP Logged | 9
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Bendis writing for DC = Crisis on infinite words ?
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James Woodcock
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Joined: 21 September 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 7622
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| Posted: 20 November 2017 at 5:55am | IP Logged | 10
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Yvan - not crisis of infinite words
Crisis of infinite speech balloons. Infinite words implies that there will be a large number of different words used, instead of the same words repeated many, many times.
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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
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| Posted: 21 November 2017 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | 11
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To echo JB's point -- animated series like Justice League Unlimited proved, again, that you can write intelligent super-hero stories that don't contain anything inappropriate for a ten-year-old. (A smart ten-year-old anyway).
Sure I want super-hero comics to be "sophisticated." But that means smarter, more clever, not more graphic violence and sex.
(Series like Stormwatch and The Authority, during the Warren Ellis years, are a completely different thing with different rules.)
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Rick Whiting
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 April 2004
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| Posted: 22 November 2017 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | 12
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Jim Shooter has weighed in on the current state of Marvel publishing and has echoed many of the things that we have said on these forums over the years.
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/11/22/jim-shooter-blasts-m arvel-business/
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