However, it gets worse for DC Comics, as he writes, “DC had a pretty bad year, with their lowest sales since 2004 – down 25% from 2022 in the bookstore market – even with their highest ever number of titles in the total list. In 2023 they had only 14 titles in the Top 750; in 2013, ten years ago, they had 130. That is a huge and troubling drop – but maybe laying off nearly your entire sales and marketing team is not a great strategy for growth? If someone had been been making a concerted effort to dismantle DC Comics, they couldn’t have been more surgical – luckily, DC still has talented execs like Marie Javins, Jim Lee, Annie de Pies and the rest of the staff who have thwarted those plans. And from what we’re hearing, 2024 will see some more moves to reverse this concerning trend.”
I wouldn't hold my breath.
PUT A DIVERSE WOMAN IN IT AND MAKE HER GHEY
AND LAME!
I get the comic industry has had declining sales going back a long time but giving the middle finger to actual fans, hiring women who hate comics to write, and believing there were waves of female fans just waiting to read comics.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When I go to the comic store the manga section has all the women since Manga markets to a variety of audiences. Super hero comics have always and will always appeal to men generally speaking and the back issue section is the most popular for super hero comics. Eric July once said that marvel and dc execs need to go to a comic book store and see who actually buys them.
I used to have almost 20 comic subs through Midtown that were mailed to me monthly. Now I have zero subs and just buy older comics
Japan learnt the way to keep women from fucking up their manga:
You have a Yaoi section available along with muscular men doing sports, distracts them from going to our action plus gets their money lol.
You’re presupposing that western feminists have any sincere interest in expanding brands or audiences. In reality, these people are primarily motivated - by hatred and resentment - to commandeer, subvert, and destroy the beloved icons of their political and cultural enemies. Making comics for girls and women would be mind numbingly easy, but that’s not the goal. Wrecking comics for boys and men is the goal.
Exactly why they chose to infiltrate and subvert Boy Scouts while leaving Girl Scouts alone, even though the gaslighting reason they gave us was that Girl Scouts didn't do as much of the "fun" activities that Boy Scouts did.
Its not about giving girls their own equivalent thing, it's always about taking something away from boys and making that "for everyone" (ie mostly catered to girls) while preserving girls spaces and hobbies and clubs.
For the stone headed feminists, you're completely right.
For their followers on and other women, it ain't hard to distract them with some Yaoi or revenge porn like Re do of healer.
And with them distracted, the shill shouts of the feminists get quieter and quieter..
And I remember a woman who actually was into comics saying that people don’t want slice of life stories with their super heroes. I can remember before giving up on modern comics super heroes sitting at the table discussing feelings.
Comics has always had a problem with, I believe the term was, speecifying? Where the characters talk about what they are doing rather than showing them do it. Them sitting around discussing feelings has always been a thing, and as long as its not the only thing they are doing it can lead to some nice setup to some plot later.
True, with good writing you can do that. I loved the dialogue between Punisher and Spider-Man when they would team up and debate their opposing philosophy. In the example I mentioned that was the only thing or current year commentary. Like the all new all different avengers a citizen mentions he misses the old avengers and is condemned as a racist. I liked the avengers due to the sci fi aspect and going into space. They took that away
Big shocker that some of the most popular superheroes are based heavily on slice of life on top of their heroic stories huh?
Spider-man is cool and all, but Peter Parker’s struggles and relatability make him the icon he is today.
Absolutely but notice they blend the two. Some female super heroes discussing the patriarchy for the entire comic isn’t my cup of tea
This is the way, need to make hobbies extra autistic so normies can't ruin them and then distract the women with female oriented fanfic they can fap to. Like it or not 50 shades of grey and Twilight was something the women went crazy over, the people selling that knew what they were doing.
They also know they shouldn't alienate their audience by making their male characters gay in shonenshit just because women write doujins about them
And I remember a woman who actually was into comics saying that people don’t want slice of life stories with their super heroes. I can remember before giving up on modern comics super heroes sitting at the table discussing feelings.
There's only like 200-ish 'comic shops' in the US. (maybe less now)
If the big 2 were serious about making money, they would have sales reps call the shops and glean demographic info. They aren't serious businesses though. They have been in the movie/Netflix pitch model for too long, or the even lazier 'we sell ads in our comic book shaped pamphlets' model.
Forgetting that they need to get pamphlets into houses for the ads to hold their value.
Bad management. Weak editors. Activist writers. No coming back from this.
I wish you were wrong but I can’t argue with what you are saying. The comic books stores in my area seem to sell more tabletop and manga and with the comics they do sell, the majority is back issue
Ironically that actual market existed all along just never in the ways it was hyped.
When I first got into comics it was because an ex was buying them weekly and I'd read what she had picked up that week. The titles she was buying? The 2001 New X-Men run by Grant Morriston which basically kicked off with the Genosha genocide. The same plot the current X-Men 97 has gone scraping after because none of the modern writers are competent.
The current Krakoa comics are ending with a reboot happening very soon and JFC the writing is so fucking bad everyone involved needs fired and blacklisted from working on comics ever again. Gerry Duggan is continuing to prove he has no fucking idea what or who he is writing about, contradicting decades of character history, ignoring both his own and the larger comics continuity, and pissing off everyone reading the story. While sometimes there would be shills or simps for certain characters in some issues the collective opinion of Duggan's work on the X-Men right now is one of disdain and rejection.
The worst part is a lot of the problems are Marvel fucking over actual writers and throwing away long term story plans in favour of stale, shitty bit pieces that do nothing except virtue signal and tank interest in the series.
The untapped female comic audience isn't being offered anything at all by Marvel and DC. They're not entirely wrong about that audience existing, as evidenced by the legion of Yaoi fangirls, but the slop those two publishers are releasing isn't being written for a female audience. Honestly I think that's a large part of why manga does so well with women in addition to men. They don't have this ideological poison that prevents them from honestly acknowledging how men and women actually are and as a result they're able to write stuff that appeals to both.
Exactly. Nothing wrong with marketing to men or women. Romance novels always sell
Oh I mean even within a single work. If you portray men and women as they are then there's more for both to engage with. It's how you can get some dumb battle shonen that's targeted at boys, but because you have actual healthy and realistic gender dynamics being portrayed there's plenty of girls who will latch onto the franchise as well.
Oh. That is very true. Also I think you have writers who really don’t like romance between men and women due to trying to avoid “heteronormativity”
I was talking to some dude on the comic book subreddit the other day who had mentioned that Marvel had a policy of straight up never allowing anyone to remain in a successful romantic relationship or something to that effect. It's incredibly destructive in my opinion. There are forces out there actively discouraging the portrayal of healthy relationships for people to model themselves after or aspire to. No wonder everything is so fucked up.
Every other comic industry (like Manga or French BD) have been growing. Manga is growing something like 20% per year!
So it's not "the industry". People want to buy and read comics.
But they don't want to buy and read a bunch of runny diarrhea shat out by a bunch of conceited fart-sniffing activist morons who couldn't write a story if it hit them in their stupid smug self-satisfied face.
I love how they see Manga outselling them and don’t think to examine why. Also I really need to dive into French comics. I got the TPB for the one that was adapted into a movie that flopped but that is it
the comic book subreddit is full of people twisting themselves into absolute pretzels to avoid acknowledging that manga is absolutely skull-fucking the western comics industry into irrelevance. They're all too wrapped up in analyzing the next inscrutable cross-over or wanking themselves off over which author is going to get to scribble all over their favorite character's continuity next, completely missing any of the glaringly obvious reasons why manga might be casually destroying the entire western landscape entirely by accident.
Got my first Manga (Oh My Goddess, and now I have 7 volumes) in 22 and when I go to comic store I try to buy at least one. Just wish there was a manga dollar bin as well
Have you tried your local public library?
I've got the first 8 volumes of Naruto and started rereading them recently. When I finished volume 8 I just put a bunch of volumes on hold at my library and now I'm plowing through volume 20. They're not gonna have everything, but they have a lot.
I have but I’m weird and like to own the mangas or books but it would be a good way to sort through what I want to keep
You must have way more storage space than me man. I tried that at the outset but Berserk and Nausicaa remain the only mangas for which I've got a full collection. The only other things on my shelf of any note are a handful of Naruto and Bleach.
Berserk is really the only one I think was worth acquiring without any reservation. If you're going to buy a manga, buy that one.
Lmao, sales and marketing is why the comics aren't doing well, not because they're shit? Trying to sell and market shit doesn't fix the problem.
Leftists cannot accept that they are wrong. It's just not something they're capable of.
Same shit happens in politics here in Europe. People vote for leftists less and less? That's not because leftist policies are wrong. That's merely because the people don't understand why leftists are right. It's a "communication issue".
That's why their only response ever is censorship, oppression and reeducation.
To be fair, the way the comic industry operates is a complete shitshow.
When was the last time you laid eyes on a comic book available for purchase somewhere that a kid could easily bug their parents enough to get their hands on it and gain entry into the hobby? There's no more $3 comics to snag at the checkout line at the grocery store now.
Selling modern DC comics is like selling ice to Eskimos. Throw in that the ice is rainbow/pastel colored and very consistently states that it hates Eskimos, and you have something that barely appeals to self hating, pillow biting Eskimos, let alone Eskimos at large.
Is it the product that sucks ass?
No, it must be the advertising.
Why would climate change do this?
I mean DC COULD come back depending on what WB's intentions are with funding Japanese studios.
If it's literally 'allow the franchise to be used by anime studios' it'll probably do better simply because they are not within the Hollywood bubble.
Then the problem is the comics division but being honest, I think that well dried up YEARS ago for both Marvel and DC.
Will Marvel and DC shrink into irrelevancy, forcing the companies and/or IPs to be sold off or shelved indefinitely, allowing the western comic book market to finally die or open a vacuum for competitors to step up where they failed? Or will they continue to chug along, producing slop that no one wants or buys, as more people are laid off while the DEI agents remain and CEOs reap record profits from ESG funds?
I really wish things would just FUCKING DIE already.
Independents are doing just fine. Rippaverse, Ethan van Sciver, and Arkhaven are not going anywhere. Raz0rfist just published a comic western through Arkhaven yesterday, in fact.
all modern comics read like they absolutely despise the audience
#1 issues and variant covers are propping up their sales. If this continues for another 5 years, they are going to hit a competency crisis where no one working there will know how to make a good comic anymore.
Stop hiring women who write shitty YA novels. In fact, stop hiring women for at least 10 years. 99% of western women are deeply out of touch with being able to make a marketable product.
I thought they hit that point at least five years ago.
They did put Catwoman back to the GOAT tier 90s purple costume for her latest arc. It's not the worse Catwoman comic I read, just her pulling capers for good while dying from time to time and losing one of her 9 lives given to her by some cat god.
I didn't read all the text but it didn't smack me with woke so there's that. If other comics are on the right track that's great, glad to hear it, but I'm done buying comics, Marvel and DC got me off the habit and my wallet thanks them.
The sooner Marvel and DC die the better. All the interesting stuff is coming from other publishers and has been for a very long time at this point. Marvel and DC have been holding western comics back. Publishers like Image or even Dark Horse and Archie have a lot more to offer the medium than any of the dross coming out of the big 2.
Marvel has always been a j owned psyop, see Stan (((lee)))
Guys, the comics don't need to make money. Only the comics shops will die. Marvel and DC are owned by corporations too big to fail. Money printer go brr. Capitalism died a long time ago, if it was ever truly alive to begin with.