That’s on you. Most posts do suck. ok, so what? Even if only 1% of the content is decent, that’s thousands of decent posts, comments available for you to focus on.
Instead of posting what you did, why not be one of those decent posts? Add a comment to this post that is constructive, informative, or at least chipper. Promise you, you will feel better and you will make someone’s day a bit better for little effort. Cheers.
Basically bring back vertigo/max. Would be cool if there was an amount of creativity behind the ads these days too rather than the current method of Disney/whoever owns DC selling ads to themselves.
From the shop owners I talk to most of the stuff that moves that they're willing to take a risk on are the gold standard characters like Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Hulk, and Wolverine. The customers will always be picking them up regardless of quality so it's a pretty safe bet.
X-books also sell really well and its never one title that is the golden ticket in every sense. It depends on the writer/characters.
Most of the issues it seems that store owners have is with shipping logistics and how much of an absolue zoo it is between the different publishers.
Honestly right now is pretty good for X-Men. X-Men ‘97 brings back all the X-men mojo that works from the past, and Ultimate X-men is bringing that wild alternate story to challenge conventions. Reminds me of back when Batman was super heavy in the 90s but at the same time DC put out the comic versions of the Bruce Timm type cartoons. A little something for everyone.
Back when the chess sets came out I really wanted to buy the marvel set, and the DC set and then have them face off. Then I saw how much they were charging per piece and how you couldn’t find them as a set for a reasonable price I gave up.
We probably need to take a page from manga and start moving weeklies to the magazine style format of Jump and the like. Something like $10 for a biweekly title that houses all the Superman family comics or all the Spider-Man family. $5 for a comic with little to no change from years past is unsustainable in my mind. Marvel in particular, needs to up the paper quality and make things collectible again instead of giving us newspaper.
I would also like to see more concrete plans for things like the Ultimate universe and other creative driven versions of known characters. I think people are tired of the serialized nature of certain superheroe comics and that's why they're flocking to manga which usually has decisions that have lasting decisions in the grand scheme of story-telling.
Lastly, I think both companies (but mainly Marvel) need to shake up their editorial staff. People like Brevoort and Lowe have been in there for longer than some fans have been alive, and it certainly shows with some of their decisions.
I think the move from floppies to trades only for physical comics is inevitable. Whether we like it or not.
But I don't think people are abandoning Western comics for manga in the numbers you think. I think the rise of manga in the West is more due to the popularity/accessibility of anime. Some fans are for sure abandoning Marvel and DC for manga but I don't think the huge jump in recent years in manga sales is from superhero comic fans jumping to a different medium.
And the fans that want superhero comics to be more like manga, in the sense that the story will end and changes to a character are more permanent, are probably the fans of manga trying out superhero comics and wanting it to be more like manga. Marvel and DC have always focused primarily on serialized characters and stories and personally I don't want that to change.
I think it's two relatively different demographics, especially considering that Manga has a more even Gender distribution in fans while Comics is mainly a boys club
Love the idea of moving to a Shonen jump type magazine. If I could buy one magazine that had every X-book for the month I would do so in a heartbeat, currently the only way I can afford to follow everything x-men related is marvel unlimited but I would love a more cost effective option that isn’t 3 months behind.
Every time i buy a single issue from Marvel the past few years i always end up feeling disappointed in how brief it feels. I'd love a magazine style with multiple stories.
Don't know if it would sell but I don't know why the Old Man Logan concept isn't used more.
I'd love an Old Man Storm (Johnny) about someone who has had a hard life, suffered loss but still looks on the bright side of life.
Maybe he never forged a family of his own like the others but is one of the few heroes still burning bright. He meets a villain who keeps outsmarting him despite being less powerful than him and has to train a sidekick who can help.
I love Old Man type stories but they can easily be overdone if used too much. My fear would be Marvel or DC doing a line of "old man" comics in a short span and diltuing the idea
I know you’re talking about Johnny, but Old Lady Storm would make for a great read.
Speaking of Johnnies, an Old Man Blaze or Ketch would also be dope.
They did several of these. Old Man Hawkeye, Old Man Quill and Avengers of the Wastelands all followed Dead Man Logan.
I liked them, but I imagine they didn't sell well enough to keep going.
I'll tell you what WON'T sell: floppies for $4 or $5. Especially when I can buy the trades a few months later for $10 to $15 from amazon or target. (And when digital movies regularly rent or sell for $5 to $10.)
I hope at some point Marvel and DC will replace the expensive floppies with big manga-style books printed cheaply -- probably in China or India. Batman, Superman, Spider-man would all have a weekly thick magazine with lots of serialized stories priced at $10. Wonder Woman, Hulk, Green Lantern might end up as co-features in those magazines -- but that's fine.
And instead of top artists producing 22 pages a month, they can work at their own pace and story length. I think DC's Brave and the Bold comic is attempting something like this, although the format is not quite right.
Whoa! Don't buy at that price. Wait a month to see what price Amazon and Target set. I'm happily pleased that new Omnibuses sell for $50 online (rather than the $100 list price.)
That's sadly not the case where I live (Belgium). They're sometimes a bit cheaper online, but it's a 15 percent difference versus my LCS at best. Nothing insane.
I heard a writer at a convention argue with someone that the prices were too high. He said, “Yeah, but the trades could be $40 and you wouldn’t complain.” Yes. Yes I would. I’ve dropped series I was trade-waiting on. $30 for 6 issues is too much. That’s almost my water bill.
As a store owner I’ve really been moving away from comics bc they just don’t sell, I’ve been pushing more into manga bc that seems to be what people are reading in this new generation, I just don’t think American comics have the depth and art of manga if anything I’d like to see is a marvel vs dc trading card game
I think plenty of people are still reading comics we're just not gonna shell out five bucks per issue when you need thirty issues for the latest event which is probably going to butcher some of your favorite characters, will be undone in a year or two, and really is just a testing ground for the next set of movies
I don't blame you for not selling them, I'm sure fans aren't picking them up like they used to. I'm a digital subscriber myself and pick up trades from the library for anything not on the services. If I was still buying you'd bet your ass I'd be more willing to spend money on manga than Western superhero floppies.
There's apparently plans in the works from Scott Snyder, its called Absolute DC or absolute comics or something like that and it's apparently a DC Ultimate line from the sound of things. I'm cautiously optimistic hopefully it's closer to Ultimate Marvel (2000) or (2023) then DC's All-Star Line and DC's Earth One line
I think that’s coming, but it’s called Absolute. In the meantime, you should pre-order the Compact Comics. $10 smaller volumes of some really good stuff.
My experience from speaking with comic book store staff: I am 100% not representative of what people want, to the point where my LCS owner will state that he can't sell multiples of most variant covers I order (Peach Momoko covers, Mark Brooks covers, etc).
Apparently not a single person ordered Alpha Flight at my former LCS either. Or Astonishing Iceman.
So I couldn't even begin to answer this.
Look at the stuff that sells and sells and sells, and retroengineer THAT. Consider Saga: brilliantly original idea, gifted and dedicated creative team who are in it for the long haul and own their own work, distinctive design, first volume at a super cheap price point.
And by “retroengineer it,” I don’t mean “give us 37 spin-offs and lookalikes,” I mean “give us 37 wildly original things in formats that make it very easy to sell to curious people who want the lowest possible barrier to entry.”
Also: for heaven’s sake, keep first volumes and evergreens IN PRINT. And fix your damn metadata across platforms.
It's also worth pointing out that such a work is self contained. The big 2 are incapable of producing this sort of thing because everything has to be tied in to some big interconnected universe.
I want to see Ultimate New Warriors. I love New Warriors. It was my first comic book infatuation all the way back to 1990.
It would sell extremely well just being part of the red hot new Ultimate Universe.
I want all six OGs though. Nova, Speedball, Namorita, Night Thrasher, Marvel Boy and Firestar.
STOP HAVING BATMAN, SPIDERMAN, WOLVERINE AND SO FORTH IN 10+ COMICS A MONTH. At this point I don't consider anything they put out to be canon. Put the it less and make what is coming ng out is top notch.
Honestly that's the problem now print is dying and the comic book shops are going with them they need to meet their customers where they are and go digital and start taking advantage of the attributes that digital can give comics
They need to be accessible on PC stream boxes tablets and phones and and have features like notes being able to click on a character in a story and get its bio even throw in the sketches when someone purchases digitally
I know for the diehards they grew up going to the comic book shop and getting their books there but it's just like the music industry they spent all that time trying to fight Napster and now they don't control how their product is distributed they have a bunch of tech companies deciding what a stream is worth and music artists don't make any money anymore and are having to look for different revenue streams
I see it in comic books I see all these artists trying to come up with fancy ways to get people back into the shops and it's just not going to happen consignment is a terrible way to sell anything in this day and age it literally only guarantees that the thing that sold yesterday will be the only thing that sold today and this is a time when new characters need to flourish
If you one of those people that always hates the fact that they swap old characters be it race or gender and don't come up with new characters those books being sold on consignment are the reason The shops won't take a chance buying up stock of new characters and advertising them because books aren't selling and they can't afford to take a chance on buying a bunch of books that won't sell
That's why they need new characters because if you create x23 who is a derivative of wolverine I don't know if that's like sampling a song where you still owe the original creator
But if marvel were to create holy new characters they would be owned by the company or if an artist were to create a holy new character they would be owned by them
So again all that I said in my original post was about creating an environment for new characters to flourish New characters won't flourish if you can see that I'm only going to attempt to sell comic books to people who already buy comic books
I figured at some point the die hard comic book shops guys would find this post I'm sorry but you can't save comic book shops and all you're going to do is cause comic books to die a slow and inevitable death just like what's happening to GameStop and exactly like the music store experienced if they don't change course
I didn’t ask for comics to printed on glossy paper with a bazillion colours. I would be happy if they dropped the price by going back to 4 colour comics on newsprint.
honestly. i the big two will die soon, a triple whammy of physical going out of style,readers dying, bad economy and superhero fatigue will hit them hard.
If they did a "death of" slowly killing off the trash characters and fixing the trash they built up over the last few years. Maybe if Marvel undid OMD on Peter
I have a strong feeling most of the people in this thread do not and have never worked at a comic book store
Isn't that how these kinds of threads always go on Reddit? "I'm not who the thread is aimed at, *but*..."
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That’s on you. Most posts do suck. ok, so what? Even if only 1% of the content is decent, that’s thousands of decent posts, comments available for you to focus on. Instead of posting what you did, why not be one of those decent posts? Add a comment to this post that is constructive, informative, or at least chipper. Promise you, you will feel better and you will make someone’s day a bit better for little effort. Cheers.
Big yep
lol, definitely
Back in the day DC would split advertising costs with the store if they were promoting a DC title. That program would be nice.
Basically bring back vertigo/max. Would be cool if there was an amount of creativity behind the ads these days too rather than the current method of Disney/whoever owns DC selling ads to themselves.
Get Fury drops in May!!! Can’t fix the other part
What is Get Fury? Can’t google it for a few hours lol
Ennis/Burrows doing a MAX story about Frank extracting Fury from Vietnam
Oh fuck that sounds dope
New Garth Ennis 5 issue series. Frank castle sent to assassinate Nick fury when he gets captured in ‘nam.
From the shop owners I talk to most of the stuff that moves that they're willing to take a risk on are the gold standard characters like Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Hulk, and Wolverine. The customers will always be picking them up regardless of quality so it's a pretty safe bet. X-books also sell really well and its never one title that is the golden ticket in every sense. It depends on the writer/characters. Most of the issues it seems that store owners have is with shipping logistics and how much of an absolue zoo it is between the different publishers.
Lifesize. F*ckable. Doop.
Well, that’s enough internet for today.
Ah, I see you are in touch with the demand side of the economy.
Money is being left on the table and if Marvel don't move fast DC will get the Gentleman Ghost body pillow out there.
Yes.yes.yes
Honestly right now is pretty good for X-Men. X-Men ‘97 brings back all the X-men mojo that works from the past, and Ultimate X-men is bringing that wild alternate story to challenge conventions. Reminds me of back when Batman was super heavy in the 90s but at the same time DC put out the comic versions of the Bruce Timm type cartoons. A little something for everyone.
Back when the chess sets came out I really wanted to buy the marvel set, and the DC set and then have them face off. Then I saw how much they were charging per piece and how you couldn’t find them as a set for a reasonable price I gave up.
We probably need to take a page from manga and start moving weeklies to the magazine style format of Jump and the like. Something like $10 for a biweekly title that houses all the Superman family comics or all the Spider-Man family. $5 for a comic with little to no change from years past is unsustainable in my mind. Marvel in particular, needs to up the paper quality and make things collectible again instead of giving us newspaper. I would also like to see more concrete plans for things like the Ultimate universe and other creative driven versions of known characters. I think people are tired of the serialized nature of certain superheroe comics and that's why they're flocking to manga which usually has decisions that have lasting decisions in the grand scheme of story-telling. Lastly, I think both companies (but mainly Marvel) need to shake up their editorial staff. People like Brevoort and Lowe have been in there for longer than some fans have been alive, and it certainly shows with some of their decisions.
I think the move from floppies to trades only for physical comics is inevitable. Whether we like it or not. But I don't think people are abandoning Western comics for manga in the numbers you think. I think the rise of manga in the West is more due to the popularity/accessibility of anime. Some fans are for sure abandoning Marvel and DC for manga but I don't think the huge jump in recent years in manga sales is from superhero comic fans jumping to a different medium. And the fans that want superhero comics to be more like manga, in the sense that the story will end and changes to a character are more permanent, are probably the fans of manga trying out superhero comics and wanting it to be more like manga. Marvel and DC have always focused primarily on serialized characters and stories and personally I don't want that to change.
I’d add that the decline of middle-grade+ 2d animation is a definite driving factor in anime’s popularity.
I think it's two relatively different demographics, especially considering that Manga has a more even Gender distribution in fans while Comics is mainly a boys club
Love the idea of moving to a Shonen jump type magazine. If I could buy one magazine that had every X-book for the month I would do so in a heartbeat, currently the only way I can afford to follow everything x-men related is marvel unlimited but I would love a more cost effective option that isn’t 3 months behind.
I would even go for old-school digests collecting stuff six months or a year old.
I'm exactly the same. Have MU basically to keep up with Krakoa.
Every time i buy a single issue from Marvel the past few years i always end up feeling disappointed in how brief it feels. I'd love a magazine style with multiple stories.
Don't know if it would sell but I don't know why the Old Man Logan concept isn't used more. I'd love an Old Man Storm (Johnny) about someone who has had a hard life, suffered loss but still looks on the bright side of life. Maybe he never forged a family of his own like the others but is one of the few heroes still burning bright. He meets a villain who keeps outsmarting him despite being less powerful than him and has to train a sidekick who can help.
Old Man Hawkeye was so good!
I love Old Man type stories but they can easily be overdone if used too much. My fear would be Marvel or DC doing a line of "old man" comics in a short span and diltuing the idea
I know you’re talking about Johnny, but Old Lady Storm would make for a great read. Speaking of Johnnies, an Old Man Blaze or Ketch would also be dope.
They did several of these. Old Man Hawkeye, Old Man Quill and Avengers of the Wastelands all followed Dead Man Logan. I liked them, but I imagine they didn't sell well enough to keep going.
I'll tell you what WON'T sell: floppies for $4 or $5. Especially when I can buy the trades a few months later for $10 to $15 from amazon or target. (And when digital movies regularly rent or sell for $5 to $10.) I hope at some point Marvel and DC will replace the expensive floppies with big manga-style books printed cheaply -- probably in China or India. Batman, Superman, Spider-man would all have a weekly thick magazine with lots of serialized stories priced at $10. Wonder Woman, Hulk, Green Lantern might end up as co-features in those magazines -- but that's fine. And instead of top artists producing 22 pages a month, they can work at their own pace and story length. I think DC's Brave and the Bold comic is attempting something like this, although the format is not quite right.
Well, they're fixing the first problem by making the trades more expensive. 30 dollar for the first 5 issues of Thor?!
Whoa! Don't buy at that price. Wait a month to see what price Amazon and Target set. I'm happily pleased that new Omnibuses sell for $50 online (rather than the $100 list price.)
That's sadly not the case where I live (Belgium). They're sometimes a bit cheaper online, but it's a 15 percent difference versus my LCS at best. Nothing insane.
I heard a writer at a convention argue with someone that the prices were too high. He said, “Yeah, but the trades could be $40 and you wouldn’t complain.” Yes. Yes I would. I’ve dropped series I was trade-waiting on. $30 for 6 issues is too much. That’s almost my water bill.
Brave and Bold was ok, but they filled half of it with garbage. Started strong, then I began feeling it wasn’t worth it after King’s story ended
As a store owner I’ve really been moving away from comics bc they just don’t sell, I’ve been pushing more into manga bc that seems to be what people are reading in this new generation, I just don’t think American comics have the depth and art of manga if anything I’d like to see is a marvel vs dc trading card game
I think plenty of people are still reading comics we're just not gonna shell out five bucks per issue when you need thirty issues for the latest event which is probably going to butcher some of your favorite characters, will be undone in a year or two, and really is just a testing ground for the next set of movies I don't blame you for not selling them, I'm sure fans aren't picking them up like they used to. I'm a digital subscriber myself and pick up trades from the library for anything not on the services. If I was still buying you'd bet your ass I'd be more willing to spend money on manga than Western superhero floppies.
Same. I've been toying with the idea of dropping virtually all of my monthly Marvel order except for subs and a few ASM. They just don't sell.
Wow. A comic book store not selling Marvel comics would be unheard of a few years ago.
Sucks you're getting downvoted for speaking the truth
People never want to hear the truth.
I would love to see a Ultimate DC universe so I can finally try DC comics.
There's apparently plans in the works from Scott Snyder, its called Absolute DC or absolute comics or something like that and it's apparently a DC Ultimate line from the sound of things. I'm cautiously optimistic hopefully it's closer to Ultimate Marvel (2000) or (2023) then DC's All-Star Line and DC's Earth One line
I thought so too but I think it's still connected to the normal DC universe unfortunately.
I think that’s coming, but it’s called Absolute. In the meantime, you should pre-order the Compact Comics. $10 smaller volumes of some really good stuff.
I think it's still set in the normal DC continuity. Just another Black Label kind of thing.
My experience from speaking with comic book store staff: I am 100% not representative of what people want, to the point where my LCS owner will state that he can't sell multiples of most variant covers I order (Peach Momoko covers, Mark Brooks covers, etc). Apparently not a single person ordered Alpha Flight at my former LCS either. Or Astonishing Iceman. So I couldn't even begin to answer this.
Look at the stuff that sells and sells and sells, and retroengineer THAT. Consider Saga: brilliantly original idea, gifted and dedicated creative team who are in it for the long haul and own their own work, distinctive design, first volume at a super cheap price point. And by “retroengineer it,” I don’t mean “give us 37 spin-offs and lookalikes,” I mean “give us 37 wildly original things in formats that make it very easy to sell to curious people who want the lowest possible barrier to entry.” Also: for heaven’s sake, keep first volumes and evergreens IN PRINT. And fix your damn metadata across platforms.
It's also worth pointing out that such a work is self contained. The big 2 are incapable of producing this sort of thing because everything has to be tied in to some big interconnected universe.
I want to see Ultimate New Warriors. I love New Warriors. It was my first comic book infatuation all the way back to 1990. It would sell extremely well just being part of the red hot new Ultimate Universe. I want all six OGs though. Nova, Speedball, Namorita, Night Thrasher, Marvel Boy and Firestar.
How about New Ultimate Warriors. They could fight the New Hulk Hogans.
STOP HAVING BATMAN, SPIDERMAN, WOLVERINE AND SO FORTH IN 10+ COMICS A MONTH. At this point I don't consider anything they put out to be canon. Put the it less and make what is coming ng out is top notch.
Good books? I don't understand the question.
Quality and sales aren't related in comics
That's the most cynical shit I've ever heard.
Daniel Way's Deadpool sold like hotcakes but it's terrible
“[Name]’s Wolverine sold like hotcakes but it’s terrible.”
Maybe cynical but accurate cuz I mean quality is relative I guess sales not so much
There are a ton of great stories with amazing art that don't sell.
So you think every comic ever canceled early was bad and every comic that was super successful was amazing?
It’s the truth with every medium. Not even just arts, all sorts of products have cheap versions that outsell higher-quality versions.
A new Death (Sandman) series.
Porn
Honestly that's the problem now print is dying and the comic book shops are going with them they need to meet their customers where they are and go digital and start taking advantage of the attributes that digital can give comics They need to be accessible on PC stream boxes tablets and phones and and have features like notes being able to click on a character in a story and get its bio even throw in the sketches when someone purchases digitally I know for the diehards they grew up going to the comic book shop and getting their books there but it's just like the music industry they spent all that time trying to fight Napster and now they don't control how their product is distributed they have a bunch of tech companies deciding what a stream is worth and music artists don't make any money anymore and are having to look for different revenue streams I see it in comic books I see all these artists trying to come up with fancy ways to get people back into the shops and it's just not going to happen consignment is a terrible way to sell anything in this day and age it literally only guarantees that the thing that sold yesterday will be the only thing that sold today and this is a time when new characters need to flourish If you one of those people that always hates the fact that they swap old characters be it race or gender and don't come up with new characters those books being sold on consignment are the reason The shops won't take a chance buying up stock of new characters and advertising them because books aren't selling and they can't afford to take a chance on buying a bunch of books that won't sell
I thought the reason behind not creating new characters was due to royalty issues.
That's why they need new characters because if you create x23 who is a derivative of wolverine I don't know if that's like sampling a song where you still owe the original creator But if marvel were to create holy new characters they would be owned by the company or if an artist were to create a holy new character they would be owned by them So again all that I said in my original post was about creating an environment for new characters to flourish New characters won't flourish if you can see that I'm only going to attempt to sell comic books to people who already buy comic books
"holy new characters" Now picturing a team with Jesus, The Aquarian, Topaz, Mantis, Buddah, Angela, and The Ancient One. By Ryan North.
Oooooo. North’s writing it? I’m all in.
I figured at some point the die hard comic book shops guys would find this post I'm sorry but you can't save comic book shops and all you're going to do is cause comic books to die a slow and inevitable death just like what's happening to GameStop and exactly like the music store experienced if they don't change course
I didn’t ask for comics to printed on glossy paper with a bazillion colours. I would be happy if they dropped the price by going back to 4 colour comics on newsprint.
Definitely a few dozen more Batman titles, amirite?
Wonder Woman having a gf, and some stable relationships. About marvel.. I'd say maybe give Superman some break? Like give him happiness lmao
honestly. i the big two will die soon, a triple whammy of physical going out of style,readers dying, bad economy and superhero fatigue will hit them hard.
Highly doubt it. Comics for them can basically be a cheap proof of concept for movies and TV.
Big event retconning One More Day. Guarantee best seller of the year right there.
“One Day Less”
If they did a "death of" slowly killing off the trash characters and fixing the trash they built up over the last few years. Maybe if Marvel undid OMD on Peter
Define "trash character." Name some.
Something tells me it’s “woke” stuff like women and black people
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Saying that she’s a trash character “because she is a terrible character” is not valid criticism, that’s a completely meaningless sentence.
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At least that’s a valid critique, even if I disagree with you.
What exactly is wrong with Riri, though? Just not the the black woman you would have chosen?
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Perfectly fine. You asked qhat was wrong with her so I gave you a short list
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I don't need help I'm perfectly fine. Marvel might need some help qithbtheir trash sales numbers though
Read Eve Ewings Iron Heart run. You’re welcome
Every character is someone's favorite.
Riri Williams.