ttfitz

So sad to read, I will miss the Frank Zappa man posting. Now who's going to tell someone to "go fist yourself" when they need it? So it goes.

That's pretty much all the time.

While I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of Mile High, one thing people around here don't seem to recognize is that he's got a pretty large selection of (relatively) inexpensive comics available. As mentioned earlier, the website is awful to navigate, but he appears to have a minimum of around 20,000 individual issue numbers available at under $5, so under $2 with the frequent "codeword" sales.

According to his website, his NICE subscription service is still up and running. https://www.milehighcomics.com/nice/index.html

That's what it sounded like to me - going only off of what was said here and was not disputed.

You apparently missed the bolded part below when I first responded:

Not disputing that it happens, just that whether your example really shows anything in regards to the particular item being discussed. Do you really think my spending $4 for a loaf of bread that I could get for $3 elsewhere because I didn't want to make another stop says anything at all about whether I'd be willing to spend $600 on a cell phone that regularly sells for $100? I did not, because I haven't the least bit of interest in the subject of John Carter or whatever the director/studio/actors/AMC theaters might have done with it.

Hey, he only goes after the message, not the messenger. He said so himself.

I don't really have an opinion on the overall topic, but I'm not sure presenting an instance of "wasting" a million dollars to keep the rights really does much to address the idea of whether someone would blow things up on a $626 million dollar project with no return.

You've already used that card once. Now it's your turn to admit you were wrong in one of our discussions. I've been waiting for over 2 years and you know where to find me. I'm sure what "used that card once" means; I just figured that with as many times as you have claimed to admit it when you are wrong this would have been the perfect opportunity to have done so, and I must have missed it. As for me in discussions with you, I'll be happy to do so if it ever happens.

Where's that famous Roy "looks like I was wrong" statement we've heard so much about?

I didn't miss anything, I just thought I'd post the video for those either too young to know about it, or those (like me) too old to remember it. Frankly, I didn't know it "ruined his career" or that you and @Prince Namor were talking about the same incident. So maybe I did miss something.

People are against that? I must have missed it, I don't know why anyone would oppose that. Most of what I've seen people (including me) object to is the idea of having what some called "complete ignore" by which they meant that if they ignored someone, that person was also blocked from seeing their posts. Basically making someone else ignore them.

His career was ruined by a really unfortunate dance he did in the 'Rock Me Tonight' video. (The comments are brutal)

No one who ever says that is 'done' with the discussion. Never has a truer thing been said on the internet. It's also something that lots of people don't seem to understand. Make a public statement, expect for there to be a response.

Sold out again? ( seating capacity 107,601)

I suggest asking Hibbs if he thinks comic sales are at an "all time high." Having talked to him on a number of occasions, I doubt it, he's a pretty smart man. (EDIT - I should also point out for completeness sake that the estimated billion comics sold was only the traditional comics, and wouldn't include any sort of things that Hibbs' report included. No clue whether that would change things much, but it doesn't really matter.)

My hope is you are being disingenuous, and not that you are completely unaware that "some" is a relative term. Yes, for a dinner party at home, 89 is "a lot." But to use your reasoning, :"Wow, there were a lot of people at the Michigan football game this week." "Oh, yeah? How many?" "EIGHTY-NINE!"

You're on a roll!

It's not some people. Again, almost everyone on this board equates superhero comics with comics more broadly. Thanks for that link - not only does it not contradict what I've been responding to (as in, I haven't claimed anything about what your second sentence says, at all), but it supports it. I know Brian Hibbs (the author of the link), and I trust what he says. So... "Some people" - From the article: "These 89 people [selling 100K copies] represent 62% of all sales of NPD BookScan-reported sales in 2022. What you can take from this is that only a tiny number [emphasis mine] of creators drive the vast majority of the business in comics (and books in general, as far as I can tell); and conversely, this probably means that the numerical majority of comics published aren’t actually significantly profitable any given year." Comic sales at an "all time high"? "But, as amazing as those topline numbers look, please remember that it really is largely “hits” that are driving the business – the “average” book still only sold approximately 1,051 copies, nationwide, in the entire year. Almost no one can earn a living from that (including book sellers!)" Finally, as to your earlier statement that you were talking about "gross sales", Hibbs places the "calculated retail value" as $863,574,176 for 2022. From this article on the same website as your link - "Certainly they help make sense of the trajectory that led Publishers Weekly in a 1954 article to place annual comics sales above 1 billion." So, at 10¢ per comic, that would be $100,000,000 in 1954 dollars, or $1,089,962,756 (according to the inflation calculator on the Minn fed page) in 2022. So, not an "all time high" by that measure, either.

Ah, I see where the problem is - you responded to my disputing that "comic sales are at an all time high" to say that "comics are selling well for some people" which I've never argued with.

Dav Pilkey's top 9 comics sold more than 3.3 million copies in 2022, and the "long tail" of his lesser selling books added another 400,000 copies. His top comic in 2021 sold 1.3 million copies. That's not far off the circulations of peak issues in the 1940s. Is that 1.3 million copies a month, or 1.3 million copies total? Because those examples I gave were for each month - so over the course of the year, we're talking 8-12 million copies. And that was just those few titles - I wouldn't be surprised to find that every comic published today would have been canceled for poor sales back then. And also note that I am not trying to say there aren't any comics that don't do well or make a profit for their publisher, just that any sort of definition of "all time high" for comic sales now is just ridiculous.

So you are talking dollar volume? Yeah, I guess if you continually raise your prices, you can claim an "all time record" in sales. Not really sure that proves anything about the health of the industry, but maybe that's just me. Although I will note that 10¢ in 1940 had the same buying power as $2.15 now, so if you adjusted for inflation it probably still wouldn't be a true statement.

I don't know what current comic sales are, but I'm guessing this is true only if "all time" only goes back a decade or two. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and others regularly sold over a million copies a month in the 40s.

Curious if you are still able to access the purchase information and images from the purchases back as far as 2013?