On Black Friday, I took my nieces and nephew to my local comic book store to get some Christmas shopping out of the way. I just go straight to the back issue section now. My nieces and nephew got manga and tabletop games. I can remember years back when pretty much all that was sold was comic books, and the new issues took up a lot of space because people were buying them/had subscriptions. Now the new issue section is tiny and most comics that are sold there are from the back issue section (to the point that sometimes they have to put a time limit on that section due to the demand). The increase in women coming to the store happened when they started selling manga which was a wise choice.
I guess every time I go now, it just irritates me because I think of how the comic book industry has been decimated due to rabid feminists, obsession with DEI, and totally ignoring who actually buys comics. I guess you could add that they could've capitalized on the success of the MCU. After the Marvels bombed Forbes had an article taking issue with someone who said it was for teen girls and not comic book fans and they said something like "as if those two groups aren't the same".
Imagine if someone had told the execs that women don't buy this product in large numbers so exclusively catering to this audience is a losing proposition. I also remember an interview with Kathleen Kennedy saying she gets a lot of calls from male directors wanting to work with Star Wars but few women. A good interviewer would've told her "who do you think is mostly interested in Star Wars".
Finally, one of the most annoying things in "nerdy hobbies" is a feminist saying she never felt welcomed in a comic book store, or in a video game store. I don't know how many times my friends and I would roll out the red carpet when a girl came into the comic book store or how awesome I thought it was as a teen when I met a girl who was into games.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. On the bright side, I got some back issue comics and my niece got me a manga for an early Christmas gift. Alice in Borderland.
Comics were dying a lot earlier than that.
The overreliance on retreads to create more issue ones, expensive cover gimmicks, and basically nothing genuinely new. It was known even in the 90's that sales decline as issue count goes up; you could practically describe it in radioactive half-life terminology.
I put the root of the problem at the forever churn that is DC and Marvel. They have no finite stories to tell. No standalone collection of books that compose the totality of a series. Oh you like Xmen? Great. Where do you fucking start? At the beginning of course. Good luck finding that or tracing your way through a storyline or a history that gets reset constantly. The product lines are impenetrable.
Compare that to the multitude of things I've picked up from Image or more independent publishers. You get standalone stories where it's reasonable to collect a series from start to finish with a fresh new world that has to be presented to the reader. You get a complete experience and it's great.
Comic books as a medium have a market, but I assert that the larger publishers don't know how to create a product for that market. The model pioneered by Marvel and DC are not what the market is clamoring for, but they're what's kept the western comics industry alive on life support.
Also with Manga if I want to start Attack on Titan, it’s all in the volumes. Like you said someone new to comics would have a hard time to start. I have been getting into 80s indie comics. But there were problems before feminists invaded. I guess the annoyance is that dc and marvel took them seriously and hired them
I speak from experience on that front. I knew how DC and Marvel were set up so when I took the plunge into comic books I just skipped over those two publishers entirely and went straight for stuff where I could pick up Volume 1 and finish on Volume 8. It was exactly what I was after and Marvel and DC simply do not provide that experience at all. They don't even try.
That makes no sense. I know where to look for certain characters but that’s only after years of reading but it would be nice to have a massive omnibus. Any indies you can recommend? I you haven’t read them already check out Alien Worlds. It was like a 12 comic series of sci-fi anthologies from Pacific/Eclipse comics
No arguments there. I remember that. Along with the overproduction.
Honestly I think they were doomed to death the moment Crisis on Infinite Earths happened. Because now you had to acknowledge not just all the various versions as "multiverses" and regularly intersect them but also regularly do massive crossover events that require a fucking walkthrough guide to keep up with all the various issues (most of which you wouldn't care about but are now forced to buy). Which also led to constant "relaunching" whenever a character started to fall off that wasn't actually a relaunch as it stilled basically required you to know their entire history anyway, meaning the stated goal of a jump in point failed.
All of which to try and relive that one single huge event's success. Every factor else since then has just been natural causes (raising prices, kids having more alternatives) or vultures feasting on the corpse (all the woke shit).