justadude

Yeah, I can see how they were trying radically different stuff, but Spawn needed that. It feels fresher today in a lot of ways than it was when Jonboy and Larsen were trying their hand. I honestly can't blame them. While the Krudanski art may have been better, his entire run was a muddled mess behind McFarlane's writing. I get that Spawn has pretty much only been about the art, but at some point in 30 years you'd think writing would become a priority. Sadly, I think Hellspawn is the most well-written Spawn thing to date, and that lasted about 10 issues before McFarlane took it over.

Regarding Larsen. His art isn't for everyone, but the lowest sales were around #220. In reading through the entire series, Larsen was a serious UPGRADE to the writing and storytelling from about #100-#240. Even the incredibly basic story of going to Hell to save his wife was a huge improvement from the meandering and pointless writing of McFarlane. It's honestly one of the most coherent arcs in Spawn over the last 200 issues, which is a bummer to say.

If that was all it was, you wouldn't feel so strongly about "comics today."

Here's what Jean Baudrillard has to say on collecting and collectors: "Because [the collector] feels alienated and abolished by a social discourse whose rules escape him, the collector strives to reconstitute a discourse that is transparent to him, a discourse whose signifiers he controls and whose referent par excellence is himself. In this he is doomed to failure: he cannot see that he is simply transforming an open-ended objective discontinuity into a general validity. This kind of totalization by means of objects always bears the stamp of solitude. It fails to communicate with the outside, and communication is missing within it. . . . The collector is never an utterly hopeless fanatic, precisely because he collects objects that in some way always prevent him from regressing into the ultimate abstraction of a delusional state, but at the same time the discourse he thus creates can never -- for the very same reason -- get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism." Collecting is made to feed your ego, your sense of nostalgia, your unshakable belief that everything made today is simply worse than when you were a kid simply because you were a kid. While the quote above doesn't cover every collector on this board, it easily describes most. You don't understand this world, so you can hide away in the comforting thought that you know what the best of [insert collectible here] is. The world is "going to hell" not because you don't understand, but because you refuse to understand. This is also not universal. Many retired pro athletes say younger players are "soft," but it's an indication of their own insecurity when compared to younger, sometimes even better players. The way they can remove themselves from comparisons. Many players celebrate the wonder of younger players and it's clear that they're much more secure about their position in the pantheon of X sport by doing so. This mentality is one cultivated by decades of thinking your tastes are unilateral, of being convinced that your world is the only correct one, of living years of mental solitute. Thankfully, you have always, and will always, be wrong.

"Hey honey, I'm going to have some people over for dinner." "Oh, yeah? How many can we expect?" "Oh, just 89." Lastly, Hibbs is estimating what's reported in his article is 85% of sales, only sales reported through NPD Bookscan, and admits that "In some cases, those numbers could potentially be many multiples of the retail trade." He's also counting zero digital sales. Looks "all time" to me.

It's not some people. Again, almost everyone on this board equates superhero comics with comics more broadly. Absolutely not true. Kids are reading comics, a whole lot more than adults reading comics as 15 of the top 20 sellers in 2022 were childrens and middle aged titles. They just aren't reading superhero comics which weren't even in the TOP 250 titles sold. And who would blame them for not reading a genre where less than 5% of published stories EVER were any good? The whole discussion just confirms again and again how narrow-sighted collectors on this board, and collectors in general, really are. They collect specific eras or artists or titles because they are so sure they're the "best" era in some way. It's an incredibly limited view and one that furthers their own egotism to think the only thing that matters is what they like. Superhero comics =/= comics. Thank _________ god.

@Brock You nailed it. Thank you. In a lot of ways I'm surprised why anyone is bothered by the collapse of the superhero comic market. After hearing years and years of complaints about how "my captain america would never . . ." isn't this a good thing? Those crypto-Maoist corporations will finally leave your beloved 10-cent nostalgia alone and you can take these characters with you to the grave. Shouldn't most of the board be celebrating?

Gross sales. Manga, children's comics, and trade paperbacks are all "comics" and make up the vast majority of the comics market. While they don't sell more in quantity than pre-code, they sell more in gross sales.

In a market where comic shops regularly "don't receive" the hot issue only to hoard them and put them in back issue bins at 5x the price the next month, good riddance. I'll preorder online with a larger discount. Again, comics aren't failing. Comics are at an all time high in sales. Superhero comics are failing. And again, good riddance.

Worth about $5 a piece. People do buy them though.

Sold 4 pieces, 3 of which were under $100, and bought a great one I thought was below FMV. Definitely seemed like less buyers overall but that follows consumer confidence at the moment. There are always the outrageous prices but I see those as a "price it'll take for me to sell" more than FMV. Didn't quite understand the ComicLink $0 previews... At least there wasn't a $3 million dollar asking price piece?

In 2020, the comics industry made $1.26 billion. In 2015, $900 million. It's been steadily growing for the past 25 years. But I'm probably just in denial. I'd guess these forums are made up of mostly of superhero collectors, which is totally fine, but it's not reflective of the actual comics market. Marvel and DC aren't litmus tests for the comic industry. Manga, Scholastica, independents, web comics, etc. make up the majority of the market by far, and it's not even close. My last point and then I'll see myself out. It is incredibly grating for younger collectors to be a part of a hobby that continually sh_ts on everything. This is not unique to this time period. Fans in the 90s berated the changes to superheroes in the same. exact. way. they berate them today. It's why the comic book fan stereotypes are accurate when it comes to sniveling dorks pointing out continuity errors and how "My (insert character) would never do that." It's the same rhetoric. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and it's BORING. It's uninteresting. It's pointless. And it's just old men whining. The "sky has been falling" since humans invented the word for "sky." And things have gotten worse at times, but on the whole, they've gotten a hell of a lot better. It's not even up for debate. In all the metrics that actually matter: war, disease, preventable causes of death, car accidents, work hours, famine, cancer, abject poverty, birth survival, and I could go on, have decreased per capita across the globe over the last 500 years. It's really in vogue to say the world's going to hell because it fits really well with a nihilistic ideology that "nothing matters, so I'll look out for myself" which translates to "I'll buy whatever I want." You become the perfect consumer because nothing matters, it's all going down the drain, and I might as well "get mine" and not worry about anyone else. Not only is it really cynical and a tough way to wake up every morning, but it's also wrong, as in the world always feels like it's getting worse because human skepticism is what breeds ingenuity. If you want to live like this, then fine, but it's a choice, not a reality, and I only ask that people on these boards, and just people in general, stop stating a belief as "fact." I'm gonna go read a comic . . .

This has been repeated in Western Civilization for the past 2200 years. But I'm sure this time it's going to happen.

This is dead on and gets at the largest problem of DC and Marvel: continuity. The biggest gripe I hear from readers about a new series is "that's not how X's character is." It's this push from the older generation to write stories to fit their (impossible to recreate) nostalgia while coming up with new ideas and fresh takes on characters. Spider-Boy is then both derivative, and the only solution Marvel can offer because it's boxed in by continuity. It's also important to point out that the vast majority of Superhero books are simply bad, as in soap opera bad. Lots of rosy colored glasses are worn in this forum but if you go and read Marvel or DC from any point in time, they're generally overwritten comics. Manga is generally faster, allows for more expressionistic art style, and sparser. Words don't repeat the same thing in the panel, which happens ALL THE TIME in bad comics. An alternative model, which is probably their best option, is to move away from monthly publishing altogether, scale down in size, and only sell standalone graphic novels. I, for one, would welcome a world where there aren't boring tie-ins and unfinished plots just for the sake of continuity. It's inefficient and uninspired storytelling. People point to Claremont X-Men and Miller Daredevil, but has there really been a good run of superhero comics, ever? As in, the story and all of its characters arc properly, there's a thematic through line, and a satisfying resolution? I've only ever found those things in miniseries.

Always fun to see lazy political talking points in comic forum discussions. If the argument is that concessions of knowledge lead to lazy humans, then we've been lazy from the beginning. We've had cities for 10,000 years where people didn't need to grow their own food, hunt, create clothing, etc. If we go to hunter-gatherer stages, it didn't exist then either because labor was divided by sex with women foraging/creating clothes/housing, while men hunted/screwed around. Just because the complexity has increased doesn't mean we are "lazier." It means we've become more and more specialized in a more complex social network. Humans are social animals. They've always been "taken care of" in some form or another. Which is counter to this "human ideal" that is pretty recent and very American. The survivalist attitude that all things need to be done on your own not only has no historical evidence, but is one firmly rooted in a Puritanical mindset of going back to a "better time." (The same Puritans who were banished from England for their backwards conservative ideology and thus set out to North America "for freedom.") The fearmongering of "ballooning populations" is also not true, with birth rates falling in accordance with the level of economic development. This is already being seen in China where the population is about to drop off. Globally, the population is expected to max within the next ~25 years and then decrease there on out. Stephen Pinker offers a basic analysis of this. The reason for even replying is to show this basic "everything is going to hell" mentality (which is SO prevalent of a certain generation) is also false. People have been saying this since they could speak, looking at children playing with sticks and stones saying, "In my day, we only had bones." We're social creatures and should be judged by the societies we create, not by arbitrary metrics of American survivalist standards. AI is an additional complexity. It will surely create unnecessary workers who will then do something else. If anyone thinks artists will simply "become lazy" because AI can do their job for them, then they surely don't understand the neurosis it is being an artist. Last thing, Peter Sloterdijk made the astute point that humanity comes from luxury. It's the luxury of time and materials that allow art to be created, a luxury only possible by a division of labor. We can look back at the greatest artists of human history and enjoy their work, or we can say how "they didn't know how to farm, hunt, fix a pull cart, and get their own water because they lived in cushy cities and were lazy." Uh huh.