There was a guy who has run a comic book store in Massachusetts for 30 years and he ripped into the industry and complained about how dc and marvel comics weren’t selling and said to quit it with the self inserts. Of course the marvel and dc writers attacked him and the lady that bullied Dan Didio into hiring more women at dc attacked him and EVS responded and said feminists have ruined comics and the good female writers are good because they understand that comic books are a male audience
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Yep. I remember seeing America Chavez, Ms. Marvel, and Ironfist collecting dust. I was talking to an MCU shill and explaining the comics didn’t sell and he didn’t believe me.
My local comic store sells a ton of manga. Most comics sold are back issue
It's media in general. The people making the decisions are so entrenched, and the business model is so out of date, that a newbie to the field can't get any attention, and if they do, they'll never get a second shot if their first fails (and it probably will). Anyone who does get a book/comic/album released is probably so deep in the machine that they either have no common ground with reality, or know that if they don't toe the line, the business will spit them out.
Eric July is killing it. Of course he's independent, and not selling through shops, but it can done. Just have to avoid the gatekeepers like DC and Marvel.
Only the independents are making it right now. Best numbers I've seen is that the average new writer gets about a 50K advance, and only 1 in 4 or 5 earn that out and get a second book. Meanwhile, about half of independent authors are making 30K a year from writing.
Yes. He's not wrong. The new authors write the chars as self inserts
That's a direct result of diversity hiring.
Lego did a study to figure out why girls didn't buy Lego, and they found that, when boys play, they try to learn about the toy so their play is accurate; if it's a toy car, they want to know how fast it goes, when kind of engine it has, etc.
With girls, they want to put themselves in the game. If they have a toy car, they want to change the paint colour to their favourite and pretend they're driving to their friend's house.
Obviously this is a generality, but when you apply this to comics, or writing in general, you get a tendency for self inserts from women. Even a mediocre male writer will try to stick to cannon, but an excellent female writer will try to change the existing world to fit her life, which is a very big problem if you're trying to do interconnected stories.
And that's not even considering the fact that most female writers (these days) are hired for their vaginas, not their talent.
There are good comic writers who are women (Shaman King comes to mind) but they're exceptional in that they create characters instead of projecting them.
And also a good female writer in comics understands she is writing for a male audience similar to how Nicholas Sparks is a successful romance author because he understands he is writing for a female audience
It's how I wrote stories when I was like ten years old and I did it just for fun. It's like the newb level of writing skill.
The problem isn’t self-inserts. The problem is self-inserts by people who are degenerate leftist freaks. Because no one wants to watch or read about degenerate leftist freaks.
I mean i wrote myself not spiderman at that age. As in character named my name
Same here. I was always brought into that world to help fix whatever problem was going on. Straight up Gary Stu cringe I rarely shared with anyone (wrote them when I was ten or so), yet now it's apparently good enough for "modern audiences" as long as it's a woman or minority being written like that
Well yeah, they haven't put out a good product since I was a teenager. The now flaccid marvel films were the only thing holding up the IP and they're out of gas. B
The MCU was an unprecedented opportunity, and they didn't just squander that opportunity, they went out of their way to smother it. Hundreds of millions of people were watching those movies, but Disney only saw a host that might die slower when they injected it with the same leftist poison that ruined the comics.
I remember hearing stories at the height of the MCU of kids wanting something like an Iron Man comic and seeing RiRi Williams since this was all new all different. Nerdrotic keeps saying how dumb it was to skip over years of great storytelling to adapt all new all different that bombed
Look at the avengers video game. It came out eight years after the first avengers film, didn’t use the MCU characters, and sucked. Disney had the biggest cinema franchise of all time and completely failed to capitalize on it. They made billions, sure, but they could have made billions more with proper comics and games development.
That was the one where Kamala Kahn featured prominently right? I don’t get the obsession with her. The comics books have been cancelled over and over. It’s like they refuse to accept that teenage girls don’t buy comic books in large numbers
Yea I just buy back issues for marvel and dc. Currently reading some 80s Silver Surfer. Also got in Alphacore from Rippaverse
I've been reading Arkhaven's growing collection. They have a pretty good selection of genres and styles.
Arkhaven is radioactive to some people because that is Vox Day's imprint. There are people who react to the mention of his name like a vampire does to the sight of a cross.
But are they people, really?
I haven’t read his stuff in a while but I remember when I first heard the controversy about him I looked him up and didn’t understand why people hate him so much
He’s j-pilled, for starters.
J-pilled?
If I had to guess: Jews aren't his favorite people.
Aside from comics, their books have been good so far too. The missionaries may well be the funniest and least pc thing I’ve read.
I recently learned about them. Bookmarked the site to get stuff later
There is a lot more going on in the comics industry that is dragging it down than any one specific cancer.
For me personally, its that none of them are worth buying as they release. Nothing is gripping enough to have me coming back for more weekly/monthly, nor are most of them singular enough that I don't have to keep up with plural titles at once to maintain a story when I otherwise wouldn't care about Y or Z characters.
Both of these mean that comics are stuck in a "wait and see" limbo where I have to wait years for big Arcs to finish and then be compiled into their own contained volumes and I know its worth reading as a self contained unit. That last bit is important, because they've turned canon into such a fast and loose joke that comics are only worth reading with a foundational knowledge of a character and then using that for singular chunks instead of overarching mythos over time (which leads back to the lack of "on release gripping").
These issues hit the industry before you even get into the content itself, and have likely also been killing shop sales for quite some time too. Especially as the only thing they've done to staunch it is try and cater to Collectors with special covers and variants constantly to get that FOMO going.
None of that will get talked about much though, because its hard to defend from the industry's standpoint (so its easier to call the detractors virgin racists who hate women) and its not as clickbaity a topic (so the anti-woke grifters won't spend the time on it).
Eric July had a long video breaking that down but like you said it didn’t get as many views. As a kid in the 90s I read a lot of Spider-Man and I hated having to buy multiple books to follow a story. Especially on the budget of a 12/13 year old. Also the endless “collectors editions”. Like when death of Superman came out so many people bought it thinking it was going to be worth a ton of money one day. I think the whole feminist crap and the rejection of the core audience is more of a straw that broke the camels back situation
The only way to get self contained stuff is to break away from the sprawling interconnected universes and hit up creators that have a story to tell rather than a franchise to maintain. The more independent stuff doesn't suffer from this problem. DC and Marvel have dug their own grave by creating such an incestuously interlocking set of series, all set in the same universe.
The unfortunate part is that much of the non-DC/Marvel stuff has broken away so much that it falls under a completely different label, which is "graphic novel." Which are often sold at bookstores much more readily than comic shops.
I still love the little that remains, like The Darkness, but they are too small scale to really make many blips on the radar. I mean, that one had two games (one of which is the best cinematic game in existence, Sony go take notes), with its parent universe Witchblade having a tv series, anime, manga, and novel in Japan. And literally no one has probably heard of it.
Yeah, and Mark Millar has entered the fray in his defense, and now we have a new phrase: "cancel pigs."
I will get some more Millar. Plus he appeared on the real BBC with Gary and Az
Talked a bit to my local store, the lady who runs it keeps telling me similar, there's hardcore fans but the reason manga is taking up more than half the store now is because it sells. In general if I want manga I goto my local store, they don't deserve this shit just cuz marvel and dc fuck up.
Before long they all gonna be like Barnes and noble, 90% shelf space for Manga, the rest for American tbp comics,
I miss Gold Key comics. That's when you had true diversity in comic books. Horror, sci-fi, mystery, war, Disney, etc
Yes! I’ve seen some of those in the vintage section but they were pricey
This is why I like stuff like the Boneyard Garden or Gideon Falls.
Gideon Falls is Image right? I haven’t heard of Boneyard Garden
It just started by Lemire. I might have the name wrong.
Looked it up, it's Bone Orchard.
I missed this, any links?
https://youtu.be/MJfFWPxOsDw?si=TLmY_pwDO_Sw2mMj
Thanks!