Sibersk Esto
Banned
The workload and profit margins make it unfeasible basically.
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"Why Letting Comics Fail is the "Real" Only Way to Save the Industry"
- Thread starter LordOfLore
- Start date
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The workload and profit margins make it unfeasible basically.
RobbieNick
Junior Member
God! So many ways they can do better that they refuse to do. Here's my two cents.
LOWER THE PRICE!!
This is the #1 problem with the comics industry today. Sales of DC Rebirth have been very strong when DC lowered the price of their comics by $1 from $3.99 to $2.99 and IMO, $2.99 is still too high. But how to lower the price further?
Go back to newsprint
Sure, the picture quality isn't as good, but it's much, much cheaper to produce, thus making comics more affordable.
Get comics back in grocery stores and newstands
Fuck Diamond! The only place I can find a comic book outside of a comic shop is Barns and Noble or Toys R' Us. Wal-Mart carries a few mangas and Archie Digests, but that's it. How can you sell comics if no one has access to them?
Digital subscriptions
Marvel is currently doing this. Low monthly payments for a ton of content. DC, Image and Archie should do the same.
Make it more appealing to EVERYONE, not just 30-somethings.
One of the biggest reasons. The Marvel Cinematic Universe does so well is that it's characters and stories are appealing to everyone. They're not all dark and grim for the sake of being dark and grim. Hell, some of my favorite books are kids books like Sonic and the Disney titles.
LOWER THE PRICE!!
This is the #1 problem with the comics industry today. Sales of DC Rebirth have been very strong when DC lowered the price of their comics by $1 from $3.99 to $2.99 and IMO, $2.99 is still too high. But how to lower the price further?
Go back to newsprint
Sure, the picture quality isn't as good, but it's much, much cheaper to produce, thus making comics more affordable.
Get comics back in grocery stores and newstands
Fuck Diamond! The only place I can find a comic book outside of a comic shop is Barns and Noble or Toys R' Us. Wal-Mart carries a few mangas and Archie Digests, but that's it. How can you sell comics if no one has access to them?
Digital subscriptions
Marvel is currently doing this. Low monthly payments for a ton of content. DC, Image and Archie should do the same.
Make it more appealing to EVERYONE, not just 30-somethings.
One of the biggest reasons. The Marvel Cinematic Universe does so well is that it's characters and stories are appealing to everyone. They're not all dark and grim for the sake of being dark and grim. Hell, some of my favorite books are kids books like Sonic and the Disney titles.
BeatnikGunsoo
Member
When shonen jump first came out here in lil ol america is when I realized comicbook prices were kind of expensive. I can buy this 300 page book with tons of stories for 5 bucks or this spiderman (favorite marvel hero) comic with like 20 pages for 3.99
uh.....
uh.....
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!
Member
I think the answer is actually to print more variant covers. Star Wars #1 sold a million copies with 68 variants so obviously if they reboot it back to issue 1 and have 136 variant covers then it will sell 2 million copies.
afternoon delight
Member
Anecdotally this has always been my feeling as well. I'm a casual comics reader, I think Sandman, Watchmen, Subnormality, PBF, Lock & Key, 30 Days of Night are some of the best and interesting fictions in their respective genres I've ever read. I give them as gifts and people rave about how much they like the stories and art. My friends and I gleefully check the trades around the end of the year for what's been acclaimed and cultivated from the ranks... But not a single one of the ten or so I know who do this (aged twenty to thirty five) care one fucking iota for capes shit.
Again, just a view from here. Wanted to corroborate the idea of casuals eating up the trades but ignoring any day-to-day stuff being discussed.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Nobody wants a cheaply printed comic especially the artists that take their time to make them look good, it's too late at this point to start selling floppies at supermarkets, the price can't go any lower than $2.99 unless you want to cut creator's budgets, and I can tell you right now the current comics being put out are a lot more diverse than what the current movies are doing. There's a lot more minority heroes in comics than in movies. Digital subscriptions are looking to be the future and solution to progress the industry.
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!
Member
Not surprisingly this is what a comic book stand looked like in 1948 when comics were actually mainstream. Notice the variety of titles.
i feel like having a long chain of different processes (writing, penciling, inking, coloring, lettering) in comics is not really necessary anymore with digital production. it really lengthens the production schedules and makes it more expensive to make a comic. artistically, i think it muddles the vision of the comic in most cases with only a few exceptions.
i do think that compartmentalized production in comics has a place, i just don't think that it should be the mainstream. this is also kind of compounded with the problem that superheroes are the main thing in comics. different genres kind of demand different process.
source: i did comics
Not Spaceghost
Spaceghost
It still hurts tho ;_;
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Writing, editing, penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering are the things that make comics. Even with digital you still need those. I'm not sure I follow what your trying to say.
You seem to be stuck on the 'weekly' part. There are monthly models for that sort of thing, too, and in fact that would almost definitely be the way to go. Weekly magazines are barely a thing here, tabloids aside. American audiences wouldn't keep up with it that frequently, so just toss that right off the table.
And who says it needs to be all newly-produced content? Any popular character has hundreds of thousands of pages of comics that the person at the newsstand has never seen. Cherry-pick some of their best recent stories for serialization in the mag, maybe a few older comics for some throwback appeal, and bingo bango, that's half the mag's content in the can already. The people who don't keep up with comics (read: the vast majority of prospective consumers) will get "it's new to me" stories that have already been proven as quality, the small slice that keeps up with all the popular books might squirm about buying something they've already read but, end of the day, they'd still be getting a nice pagecount of newly-produced comics at less than the going rate if they were broken into individual series.
If the format proves popular, scale up production until all of the book is new material, if that's what the market wants. Expand into secondary digests that are themed on other genres or characters if those prove popular in the main book.
A lot of artists are shitty writers (even by comics standards). That's actually one of the issues I have with a lot of manga, where the creator is excellent with visual story telling, but pretty poor with plotting, dialogue, characterization etc. However, having a single person handling all of the art (and sometimes the lettering too) is becoming more common in western comics post digital age.
You're right. writer and artist who does everything is an ideal standard IMO.
sorry, I wasn't being clear. Coloring, inking, lettering and writing do not need to be done by a separate people all the time.
DeathoftheEndless
Crashing this plane... with no survivors!
I don't think changing the physical format would bring in new readers. Physical print as a whole will just never be as popular as it once was. Expanding the digital market is the key to the future.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
I don't know anything about Marvel/DC, but I just assume everyone wants to read everything. lol
No. You're wrong. Each one of these is An Actual Job That Takes Time And Talent To Do Well.
Correct.
Every other major entertainment medium has subscription based apps or programs to use. Why doesn't comics? Granted, Marvel jumped on the train with MU, but every other publisher is refusing to get on board. You have a HUGE potential market to tap into just by offering back issues of your stories. That's a lot of missing revenue you could bring in.
When your target audience spends an average of $20-50 a week on comics..it's understandable to see why it's problematic for the industry. 95% of the population won't drop that much money to keep up with stories priced like that.
Why even 1$? Comics should be free and the artists can live on food coupons while the books are printed on toilet paper.
And if its good, it wont be bought if its not Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Avengers.
if comics switch to a spotify-style subscription model, this is pretty much gonna be the future!
seriously, considering how little spotify pays musicians, it's not a thing you should wish to the MUCH SMALLER comics industry
They can get 15 cent everytime someone reads a book! That will be enough.
I read all of the Inferno crossover stuff like 20 times as a kid and I STILL don't fucking understand it.
What I remember:
A) Mr. Sinister did something.
B) A bunch of people regressed and started referring to Spider-Man as Man-Spider
I'm not sure there's a better alternative when the industry could be near collapse in a handful of years.
try .15 cents, more like
(seriously, royalties per play on spotify are in the third, maybe fourth number after the decimal)
RoninChaos
Member
I really wish they could get back into grocery stores.
Which Ms Marvel? Kamala Khan was created in 2013.
I don't see any realistic solution to the issue currently being discussed.
I'm pretty sure that's sarcasm.
What makes you think you need to read 60 years of stories to understand what's happening now? Or are you joking?
It's a common price for a volume over here, not a single issue.
Too bad I just accepted the Vice President of Creative Shit job at Marvel.
I will make Marvel great again
Manmademan
Member
This is false. The "Marvel Now!" stuff is all self contained arcs, designed to be completely understandable to new readers and no book I can think of runs more than 15-30 issues before the plot is wrapped up.
That being said, It looks like the premise of the OP is flawed to begin with. Purely by coincidence I was having a discussion with a friend in the industry, and this came up:
This is taken from here http://dc1980s.blogspot.com/2013/04/1985-dc-comics-sales-data.html
This is as you can see sales figures for DC's titles for a single month in 1985. The "draw" here is the total print run, the "sale" figures are the ACTUAL sell through.
This is LONG before the advent of the direct seller market, still firmly in the era when comics were sold in grocery stores and 7-11s. edit: looks like Fabian Nicieza (!) chimed in to say this is newstand sales and direct market isn't included- so to be fair you may want to add another 6-10% to the sales total for the direct market at that time. Stand alone comic shops existed but were not common.
The first thing you should notice is that while the total print run for say, that issue of Superman was 256,000, 70% of those issues didn't get sold.. They were returned to the publisher at a loss and simply destroyed.
Yeah, comics were available in a lot more places, but it didn't actually translate into people buying the issues.
In contrast, here is the current estimate of last month's numbers from diamond:
http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2016/2016-07.html
"Justice League" is estimated to have sold 209K single issue copies- and you can bet your sweet ass DC didn't have to destroy 700K copies to get sales that high. Also worth considering is that the single issue market isn't the largest revenue driver anymore- Trades and Digital now combine to eclipse it. Neither existed in the mid 80s.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...ic-novels-market-hit-870-million-in-2013.html
Though by how much no one is sure since DC and Marvel generally don't release digital sales numbers.
By any reasonable metric the comic industry is far healthier than it was in 1985 at least, and sales are at or very close to sales of the industry peak, which hit in 1992/1993- though FAR more stable since the big two aren't completely reliant on the speculator/collector market trading comics like baseball cards to hit those numbers.
I might be Mr. Supreme Intelligence.
Does NFL Superpro have a Marvel Now book?
Manmademan
Member
now THERE is one character you will never, EVER see again
Can we expect a full on Black Panther Cinematic Universe?
hydrophilic attack
Member
so he's saying comic books should be sold in retail stores
what grown man would want to be seen in public picking up a comic book tho
what grown man would want to be seen in public picking up a comic book tho
BoosterDuck
Banned
I do ;_;
and the comics industry doesn't need saving, it had its place in pop culture now it's a niche hobby like heavy metal or extreme sports or yo-yo's
What the issue IS with comics though is Diamond Distributors having a stranglehold on the market and jacking up the prices on everyone.
DeathoftheEndless
Crashing this plane... with no survivors!
Most of the DC books that went back to $2.99 are bi-monthly though.
Anything is possible in a world where Solo is getting a new book!
Say you're buying it for your kids. They you will look like a nerd who also gets pussy.
"Comics are absurd apart from stuff like Comics"
Manmademan
Member
check out the stuff image is publishing. There's a lot there that is equal to or better than those books.
it's not all superhero stuff, though that is what sells well for obvious reasons.
Slamtastic
Member
Does Duckroll or anyone else familiar with the manga industry internal workings have examples of the "compartmentalization" of a weekly or monthly manga via the assistants?
Taking out coloring because it's not applicable, does that industry really have the same "assembly line" of writer, penciler, inker, letterer behind the scenes? Obviously the common idea is of the singular mangaka creating the work, Kishimoto or Araki sitting down and drawing the narrative he came up with, and going over his sketches in ink, and writing (typing) in his dialogue that he came up with.
Is it viable in the US to hire artists who can come up with the plots and draw them, and color, etc.
Also, in the digital era, how much pen inking and coloring still occurs?
Could costs be cut by giving artists the writer position, and setting them up with drawing tablet + Photoshop to put out fully produced issues?
Taking out coloring because it's not applicable, does that industry really have the same "assembly line" of writer, penciler, inker, letterer behind the scenes? Obviously the common idea is of the singular mangaka creating the work, Kishimoto or Araki sitting down and drawing the narrative he came up with, and going over his sketches in ink, and writing (typing) in his dialogue that he came up with.
Is it viable in the US to hire artists who can come up with the plots and draw them, and color, etc.
Also, in the digital era, how much pen inking and coloring still occurs?
Could costs be cut by giving artists the writer position, and setting them up with drawing tablet + Photoshop to put out fully produced issues?
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
If an artists main strengths is drawing they are gonna stick to drawing. The only time Marvel and DC get artist to write a comic is when they need some throwaway filler issue.
Your just gonna ignore all the volumes of Naruto you have to read before getting caught up? No one starts a manga in the middle of it's run.
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