There has been no natural progression or actual improvement in the actual structure , art , quality, style etc. since marxists have taken over. It has been stagnant for a long time similar to western art and music in general. What do you think the american comic book industry could improve(outside of the obvious getting rid of woke stuff)?
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I will be honest, I am not hugely into superheroes, but I'm also not into the UWU so random hipster shit with weird Tumblr art.
I guess I just prefer the type of stories manga tends to have.
Give me new things. Not some character that keeps going for a hundred years, dying all the time and every stupid, inconsistent ass bit of characterisation and lore being explained by bullshit like alternate universe.
I would prefer multiple, shorter series that don't constitute one big universe. No "the children of the main characters now", no clone or alternate universe.
This is definitely one non-socjus related thing I think Western comics would benefit from. Barring extreme long-running outliers like Dragon Ball, manga have a clearly defined point where the author goes 'that's it folks, the end, thanks for reading' - you don't see Full Metal Alchemist being rebooted a billion times for a billion iterations of the Elric brothers' adventures with characters who died in one continuity surviving in another or vice-versa for example, once the manga ended, that was that. And of course, most also have an equally clearly defined starting point and continuity - you simply start at issue #1 or episode 1, there's no funny business there either.
Having an obvious start and end would help quite a bit. It wouldn't solve all their problems but I strongly believe it'd help, despite how obvious it sounds: right now, if I wanted to start say Spiderman, I wouldn't be able to start at Spiderman #1 because there's literally dozens of alternate continuities, crossovers (also quite rare with manga), one-shots, etc. - I literally don't know where to begin (which Spiderman #1? The one for Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man...) and most days I can't be assed to figure that tumbleweed out, doubly so if I know that whatever continuity I start with might very well be thrown out and rebooted in a completely different way in another year or two.
Also, pricing and the model for new releases could use an overhaul too. Japan sells their manga in weekly or monthly magazines (such as Shonen Jump) printed on cheap recycled paper, so you can get issues of multiple manga series spread out over hundreds of pages in a single anthology for the equivalent of $4-5 (last I checked) - as much as one 15-25 page issue of one Western comic (which comes on nicer paper and full color, but the SJW antics drove away a lot of the collectors who care enough about that stuff to take the hit to their wallet, so...).
Of course the latter can't reasonably compete with the former once it started hitting Western shores, it's several times the content for the same price and usually much better too. They'd probably have a hard time even if they weren't complete flaming garbage riddled with unwanted and ridiculous politics!
You are spot on when it comes to not knowing where to start. They are so inconsistent in tone, characters, stories, continuity, design, etc. that it's so hard to even understand what to do. And I could never say I like Spider-Man when he has about seven billion variants from UWU teen shit to depressing to not even Peter Parker.
Honestly that barrier to entry you describe is why I've avoided Marvel and DC entirely. I went straight to publishers like Image and the independent labels where they are producing self contained stories where you jump in at Issue #1 and read a few volumes before it all gets wrapped up. It's actually quite nice.
It's a dead industry and the people that own actively and knowingly killing it. There's no way to fix it now, especially since Marvel and DC (and parent companies) do not want to fix it. They have their established IPs and killed the industry to the point no one will ever establish any threat to their IP monopoly. They can exploit them for toys, movies and other more lucrative markets than floppy books.
To rebuild the industry is also impossible. They own the publishing and distribution markets. Artists cost too much and you are left with clip paint studio 3d model tracers and tumblr tier artists willing to work for peanuts. You could draw a comic once a month for less than minimum wage, even as the best artist in the business, or you could do some video game concept art and commission work on side for lucrative paydays and a steady, stable job. Even just doing cover work is easier and more lucrative than actually drawing a monthly now. The artist owns nothing and there is no reason to put effort towards designs and concepts and new creations that will be 100% owned by a corporation.
Writers are only there in hopes of getting a netflix/hollywood option down the line and just shit out sitcom tier rehashes and political leftists shit they are told to do. You need to write 3+ books a month to get above poverty level in comics. No one good is going to write shit when they could just go do literally anything, from basic copy at some magazine or newspaper, and make a living wage instead of doing comics they wont own the rights to or receive any royalties.
Add in the fact there are literal blacklists for conservatives and anyone right of Lenin and you have a very insular and incestuous list of creators that only promote themselves and all fucking hate the people that actually read and buy the comics.
If they wanted to rebuild the industry, they would have to try and mimic the manga industry. Marvel could have a Spider-Man Jump and Avengers Jump and 2 or 3 others putting out black and white newsprint versions and collecting them in various trade formats. They could mix them up to 'force' people to buy multiple 'jump' to get all the Spider-Man content, etc, too. Mix in creator owned model where they split some licensing and royalties and with potential Disney+, etc licensing for animated features and so on to incentivize creators to work with them. there is currently no reason to ever produce a spiderman comic for marvel as an artist or writer since you could just make bugman as an indie and make more money while owning the rights even if you sell a fraction of the total comics you would at marvel and tell your own story that way.
CrossGen did something similar to this back in the day and were on their way to being quite successful until all the distributors and publishers conveniently decided to collude against them. They pioneered the direct to trade formats that Marvel and DC are using now. They had creator mentorships and properties and even brought in Jump-like collections in the Forge books (2 or 3 issues of half the line in the book for like $10 lagging behind the trades and current issues by a few months).
This will never happen because they want to preserve IPs. They dont give two shits about sotries or content anymore. They want their copyrights preserved indefinitely and are now 'diversifying' them - why make new characters when you can have 8 spidermen/women that people can associate with the original. Marvel will likely shutdown in few years and be outsourcing their characters to smaller publishers. They already do this to an extent with IDW doing versions of Spider-Man, etc.
You need to look into IndieGoGo and Kickstarter-based comics that people are doing for direct-to-customer sales. Big Comics may be a lost cause, but self-published Indie books are making a comeback.
Get rid of capeshit and open comics up to multiple genres, like back before the CCA. The quality of storytelling and art will improve when creators who don't want to soil their reputation with capeshit see that they can make good work that will be taken seriously as literature.
Try to get comics back into grocery stores, convenience stores, local places. Comics have become so niche that the only way to really get them is by going direct market. You're never going to get anyone aside from the enthusiast audience that way, and you want more than emotionally stunted, middle-aged men to read your work. Or at least I do.
Social Media Influencers. You may hate the idea, but as a marketing tool, they work.
It would take a lot of work and probably decades of good stories and sound business management to resurrect not only the medium of comic books, but its reputation and cultural cache as well. While I think Hashbrown Comics Gate is kinda silly, I will say that I'm far more interested in what that crowd is putting out than anything Marvel, DC, or Image have put out in at least a decade. At this point, I'm wondering when the indies will figure out that they can make their own labels and get the cultural ball rolling on the resurrection of comics.
What's the CCA? The Comics Code? Hell, even when it was a thing, there were horror and war comics, sci-fi/UFO stuff, Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Scamp; westerns, and even the occasional Weird West tales (not to mention Weird War Tales itself ... speaking of which, I find it kind of gross that they mashed Sgt Rock in with the Monstrous Regiment; those were two VERY different comics, with Rock always leaning heavily towards, you know, historical realism and weight.) Dark Shadows, Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery, Cain and Abel's comics, etc. Basically, "Gold Key" was my childhood.
I read all kinds of comics as a kid, and the superhero ones were my least favourite.
Kind of a shame to hear that the superhero shit is all that's left.
The Comic Code Authority and Hays Code weren't the inherent evil that people make it to be. Movies and comics were almost entirely dedicated to porn at the time they were created.
Not true and also CCA stifled artistic freedom and creativity and banned literally everything adult. That's why everything turned in to "just for kids" (including decimating the horror genre and making one dimensional heroes and villains)
I'm not saying they were inherently good, but there is a tendency to downplay the very real concerns people had. Cuties is a return to form for the film industry.
Cuties cannot be compared , Cuties hurt actual minors and is already illegal (but you know how it is with the corrupt politicians and Netflix). . But when it comes to actual artistic freedom hurting nobody its ridiculous to support CCA, unless you want to go back to the days, where everything has to be for kids.
BUT the point stands, that there were still multiple genres available under the Code. The horror ones often doubled as crime comics, where a ne'er-do-well would get some horrible supernatural come-uppance.
And you are forgetting one major thing - up until my generation, comics WERE considered "for kids". Exclusively. But my generation never fucking grew the fuck up, because we're a bunch of fucking slackers. :P
Also, the Hayes and Comics Codes weren't meant to make everything "for kids" (in the sense of, say, Sesame Street or Saturday Morning Cartoons, it was meant to make everything "one size fits all", that is, appealing to adults as well as safe for kids. Which actually forced writers to be clever and use their brains a bit, rather than just spewing out blatant sex, gore, and fart jokes, because it's easy.
Hell, one of the funniest moments in FAMILY television is one of the dirtiest jokes ever - the "Finger Prints" joke in original Animaniacs ... TOTALLY flew over the heads of my own children as I sat there laughing my butt off ... after a beat or two while I processed what they had just said.
You can have interesting things and multiple genres under the code (though it STILL did decimate many genres and is the reason why the "safe genre" of Superheros ended up monopolizing things ) but the point still stands that it still stifled artistic creativity and i can never agree to that. For example you look at many anime and manga that are timeless masterpieces and cult classics and a lot could not have been made under the CCA . Also i dont know why you think adults liking comics is "not growing up". Comics is an art form like anything else there is literally no reason why it should be "only be for kids"
Hey, you want a "for kids" story, told under the Comics Code? It was a story of the OSS in one of the World War 2 anthologies I mentioned, can't remember which one now, or the title of the story, but it went like this (more or less, it's been at least 40 years, you see):
It wasn't even about an OSS agent, it was about Hitler's own favourite spy, whom funny mustache man himself dispatches to spy on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. During his (the spy's) tenure, he winds up getting close to some family, and "goes native", converting to Judaism as he is sent to Auschwitz. While he's there, he's given a chance to get out - by, yes, Hitler himself, who found out about the spy's treachery. The last time you see the spy is when he gets on his knees and prays in Yiddish.
The final scene shows Hitler reading in his study, a little wry smile on his face, by the light of a lamp, the shade of which is kinda pinkish and has a number tattooed on it ....
That just sounds like old traditional fairy tales plot twist ending for kids when kids were tougher. Similar to The Brothers Grimm stories. Also these things were made despite of the code, not because of. And many genres were destroyed and many things got dumbed down because the code stifled creativity so much. And if you look at many anime and manga that are timeless masterpieces and cult classics a lot could not have been made under the CCA .
I don't think they really censored ANYTHING. Heavy Metal came to North American shores in 1977, and it was sold up with the Playboys and Penthouses, while the "regular" Comics Code comics were available on the bottom row right below, literally everywhere magazines were sold, you could find comics. Adult comics were harder to find, but they existed, even though, as I said, comics weren't really aimed at adults in North America .. until the aforementioned Heavy Metal, anyway. You could find Tintin and Asterix at the book stores. But non-Comics code stuff couldn't be full-colour (which is why the original Turtles comics are black and white).
Now? I don't think I've noticed comics for sale anywhere except for the occasional Archie at the checkout stand. And if I owned one of the last mom and pop corner stores, I probably wouldn't carry comics any more either, if I knew that they might slip in Superman buttfucking Batman or something like that. I would also expect something like Happy! to be sold at the more adult-oriented shops or general bookstores (Coles/Chapters.)
And the censorship the left is about to introduce is going to make the Code look downright tame and lenient.
The code did censor tons of things. If you bothered to look up what happened . Like i said some genres couldn't even survive cause it got censored to oblivion and its why the "safe" superhero genre ended up monopolizing everything . Some designs of some characters of things also had to be censored too. They might not be "aimed " at adults but neither should there be outright censorship and banning of literally anything adult and there was no reason to force all those rules and stifle artistic creativity. But yes now a days its the left that is full of shit. I also hate how much they go around trying to cancel things cause they hate big boobies or whatever else they feel like getting angry about that day, .(though the original discussion was about the code so that was what i was talking about).
Again, I grew up in the 1970s, with the Comics Code very much a thing, and still had access to horror and war comics - but those ended by the 1980s, around the time I stopped being interested in the things (and about the time they started to cost more than a quarter or so.) The Code didn't kill them off, the comics companies did - or rather, something killed off Gold Key and Charleton, which had the bulk of the non-superhero stuff that you would see in corner stores and bagged in three-packs at the department stores (Sears, Zeller's, BiWay). I do not think the Code itself was to blame. Yeah, it got rid of the excesses of the Tales of the Crypt type stuff that my mom remembered (and even she admitted it was pretty gross, and she was permissive af when it came to reading material), but if the Code killed off horror and war comics, it took it 30 years or so to do it from what I can see.
In some cases, the story simply ended - The Unknown Soldier being a case there, I had its final issue. I guess I should have kept it. (iirc, he kills Hitler just before the Russians show up to the Bunker, but himself gets killed, leading to the final scene of the Unknown Soldier memorial or some shit.)
That would help a ton. Even when I was a kid in the 90s comics didn't seem to be a thing and was already a niche. I had a few, but it wasn't something where my friends would all have and read, talk about them, etc. I'm not sure I would have loved anyway since I don't care for superhero stories that much, but still could have tried. Manga was a bit of a thing but by the time it started going I was in that phase or trying to not look like a nerd and they were very niche, especially amongst guys strangely enough.
While I enjoy variety in any art, I don't think capeshit is even a critical problem in and of itself: two of the most popular manga to have come out in recent years are One-Punch Man and My Hero Academia, both of which are explicitly inspired by and feature classic Western-style superheroes doing superhero things (OPM's a parody, MHA plays it more seriously). They've both sold like hotcakes, I think MHA sold like 5 million copies last year while the most popular Western comics are lucky to break 300,000 and it's 'only' the 6th best-selling manga around, and they're equally beloved by Western and Japanese audiences alike.
There's clearly still demand for that stuff, it's just that nobody (quite justifiably) wants androgynous-melted-wax-figure Carol Danvers or Starfire's ridiculous self-insert daughter.
I have nothing against superheroes as a concept. One of my favourite anime is Tiger & Bunny, which deals with how people handle double identities, the commercialization of heroes, turning a noble pursuit into something fake, etc..
But yeah, Tiger & Bunny, MHA and OPM understand that to be a superhero you have to be super and heroic. I don't want superheroes to make me feel good about myself. SJW types don't understand the concept of a superhero. I want them to be amazing. No, not pudgy, neurotic losers.
Of course they can have flaws and such, but why would you call it a superhero when it's virtually identical to some bitchy librarian you can meet anywhere?
Superheroes can have flaws, "kryptonite" is practically a commonplace term for "a significant weakness". They can have weak points, flaws, they can make errors. But I must draw upon Anime to make a point. Specifically, Fate/ZERO. On the speech Iskander makes on the concept of being a King.
This applies to Heroes in general. A Hero isn't someone paid to save people. A Hero isn't even someone who saves people out of the goodness of their heart when presented with the opportunity to do so. A Hero is a Greater Person. Not a great person, greater. They are defined from tabula rasa as "more than".
Superman is Faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive. But morally, too, he is gooder. By definition, a Hero cannot be reached. They embody what the feminists call "unrealistic portrayal" of humans. The most we can do is aspire to approach them. Villains, too, are Greater Persons. More evil, more cunning, even in some cases more petty than any human could aspire to, showcasing the worst, something to shy from.
That is the baseline of a Greater Person, they are beyond us in some unreachable way, but which either draws or repels us in that aspect. Real World Examples: If you say "I want to be like Nikola Tesla", you probably mean "I want to be creative, insightful, and intelligent", not "I want to be a dying-young virgin with only feral pigeons for friends". And on villainy, if you don't want to be like Hitler, you're probably thinking of the systematic murder of millions, not his belief that recycling is important for long-term societal stability. (At least, I hope you aren't viciously throwing a coke can into a compost bin with a knowing smile that you won't support Hitler's recycling ideals, but are fine with the other one.) In writing, likewise, there is infinite room for creativity in those secondary aspects and building the character, but line one of their description should be that Greater aspect that one must wish to approach, or fear.
But this is antithesis to modern western writing, where everyone must be "human". They focus on the flaws and lesser aspects. No one wants to read a story about Batman's struggles with changes to the tax code. He obviously deals with them, it's implicitly known by all of us, but no one cares, it's not his Greater aspect: World's Greatest Detective.
The American Comics Industry is a deeply-penetrated mess of tumblr fiends and executives who don't give a damn about the medium itself, just the established stories that they can repurpose for movies, tv shows, and video games.
In short, it's going to be up to the independents to "save" it, and given current events and the inevitable Sovietization of our briefly great republic, that'll be a temporary measure at best.
Been saying this for years:
I like your ideas, they would probably salvage a chunk of the industry... So it's a shame they'll never happen, because of that last line: These parasites don't leave the body until it stops twitching.
This alone could improve it. What would be the point in improving it in the first place, if you make some new style of comic book popular it will just be taken over by SJWs with pronouns in their bio and fuck it up for the short lived fandom.
But here are my 2 cents if we were to live in an universe where the comic industry was not taken over by communists.
I would get away from the flashy super hero and multiuniverses, inconsistent super power, ever growing powers. I would also return to the original point of comic books, it was intended to give boys role models, which if you think about it was like an early treatment for "toxic" masculinity that guys actually liked. It was when writers forgot this fact that writing started to go down hill.
I like Solomon Kane, but kids may not be drawn to the dark style, but I would like more stuff like that. Maybe start a bunch of new comics and see what sticks, it can be some funny quirky adventures, high fantasy, love interests or something really dark.
As for art, I have no idea what the woke crowd is smoking but they've been putting out some ugly art of late. I just assume that mid thirties is already to old and maybe kids this days like it. I'm not an expert on art or anything but I could at least tell what artists were trying to express by their art style but now I honestly have no clue.
Pretty much all of Adult Swim is a fucking ug-fest when it comes to how cartoons look. The only fucking thing that saves Rick and Morty is the fucking writing, and it took three tries for me to get through the freaking pilot to discover that. (I also had a VERY negative view of Dilbert when it first came out. Until I read it for about a week. But I hated the fucking artwork.)
I had a whole rant written up, but in the interest of brevity:
Creatively, the industry was dying long before anyone took notice. We can discuss any number of valid factors, but ultimately I think plain old laziness and greed was the primary culprit. Writers don’t want to write, artists don’t want to draw, editors don’t want to edit.
Less content at the highest prices ever. Not a winning combination.