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.

Aldo Leopold, the first conservationist in the United States, described hobbies as acts that try to deny the natural passage of time. I think the definition works pretty well with collectors because the very act of buying old stuff and storing it away is to make sure it exists for the future. Nostalgia is clearly a big part of that for many and I'd argue the very act of refusing to live in the present and holding the idea that the past had better X, Y, Z is what makes you all great collectors. That said, it doesn't mean you're right. What I find most ironic is this clear frustration with the next generation's lack of interest in your, often nostalgia-driven, interest, and yet a total lack of desire to engage in newer forms of media, the very media the younger generations are engaging in. While superhero readership declines, Manga, indies, and trade paperbacks are clearly on the rise. It seems pretty obvious why your children wouldn't want anything to do with your collection if you basically devalue their entire reality. "X was better in my day." "Everything today is garbage." "Nothing could live up to X." Why would they want to engage under such dismissive pretenses? This kind of rhetoric is especially off-putting for younger collectors, the collectors many older collectors need in order to keep the hobby going. Reading this gives me second thoughts about collecting because there seems to be very little joy in it for many people with an obvious disdain for contemporary comics readers and just younger people in general. There are lots of good comics being printed today, some better and some worse than in the past. It's just a shame to see how short sighted so many people are because if they would be willing to meet the younger collectors/generation halfway, there would be a much higher chance of instilling the very love many of you clearly have for the medium. It seems the cure is in the disease.

Yes, as stated, that was hyperbolic flair and in no way was intended as "argument" which could be then considered fallacious. But it is telling that after a barrage of points made about the collecting community that's the single line you'd like to point out. The "snowflake generation" really does get worked up over the smallest of things . . . EDIT: On further thought, I'm puzzled by what you mean in that post. That my post is something about whataboutism? That's it's confessional writing? I'm unsure in which ways I'm acting like a "tastemaker" or "running my mouth" with a total of 39 posts over 3 years. A tough question given it has the same kind of disjointed reasoning it would take to argue that "Most new art looks the same." Points for consistency. Points for unrelated Latin, too? I guess?

I guess what's strange is that people think comic art has become "commoditized and commercialized" only recently. That's categorically false. It has always been commercialized because it is a commercial medium. I'm fine with people critiquing modern comic art, but not as exception to the rule of commercial art, but as it's defining aspect. Most commercial art isn't very good. It can't afford to be. Artists need to pump out as much as possible as quickly as possible. That's been the model since work-for-hire existed, but remains just as true for independent creators as the only way they can generate business is by putting out stuff fast. Again, this is generalizing (Alex Ross is an obvious contemporary exception), but it includes Golden Age (especially), Silver Age, Bronze Age, etc. If we're just thinking superhero art, which is commercial art as compared to underground comix which are not, there is no linear progression of improvement. There are simply different styles and changes like in all art. To say a third tier artist of the 70s is better than a third tier artist of the 2010s is just not a very interesting argument to make (not saying you're making it), and discounts that most commercial art is bad by nature. If someone puts realistic figure drawing as important to what they think is of high quality, then McFarlane, Lee, Liefeld etc. are all kicked out, but also Kirby and many artists from the beginning of the superhero genre. There is no more "realism" or "accuracy" in Kirby's grimaced and stretched characters than McFarlane's Spider-Man with opposable hip joints. If we had forums in the 40s and 50s, there'd be the same kind of lambasting of 60s comic art. And that would also be categorically not true.

I absolutely drifted off into hyperbole. Generalizations, by nature, are false, so in making sweeping summaries, I will of course be wrong on many accounts and should qualify those statements with "many," "often," etc. The financial value of art is something I avoided because not only do many see price = quality, but they forget the relationship this kind of art has to the market. It's a commercial art, which means the product is very much the finished page, not the art used in making it. And I totally agree with you in that artistic merit has little to no impact on pricing of OA. Pricing is mostly about which character is represented and how big that character is on the page. I also find that odd in that the most valuable pages are often covers or splashes in a medium defined by its interrelated nature of panels, gutters, and the movement of the eye across the page. Instead, collectors often want the biggest depiction they can find of their favorite character. Which is totally fine, but it doesn't make it good art as it's not even an honest representation of the very medium it comes from. I also don't mind that most discussion is about older art, but to continually bash new art just because it's new and doesn't resonate with you is totally self-defeating. If people want this niche community to grow (which is incredibly small even among comic collectors), the way to do that isn't by disparaging things you aren't interested in. Art can be good that we don't like. It seems so fundamental in saying that, but fandom often has this point of view to where if they don't like it, it can't be good. I just think art, especially, should be given careful consideration and nuanced argument when talking about it. We should hold ourselves to a more nuanced standard than simply arguing over the first panel appearance of so-and-so. But, this is coming from someone who genuinely loves art and its many forms. Comic OA just seems to treat it differently than many other mediums. And on the flip side, I'd rather put a bullet in my head before hearing someone wax poetic as if they were at MOMA about a Jack Kirby page. I think there's a happy medium. @Carlo M I absolutely agree that the shift to digital has made new OA collecting more difficult. It's a bummer to find that many artists only offer commissions when they have otherwise amazing pages in books. I also think it's worth noting that covers and variants have simply become separate art objects. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but collecting Artgerm, for example, is to collect singular representations, or fancy pinups of famous characters. To me it stands a little oblique to the comics medium as a whole as these covers have artistic merit, but they're qualitatively different than a comics page in that they don't have to communicate movement across a page. If that makes sense.

It's true! But in seriousness, these kinds of posts are so tiring and these sentiments are so pervasive among the collecting community. People are so blinded by their nostalgia, and lack even the most basic terms to describe art, that not only are most members of the community unable to discuss art on its own merit, they're incredibly dismissive of anything they don't like. Personal opinions =/= criticism. As a younger collector, it's quite off-putting to join a community that's essentially made up of 50+-year-old fan boys bashing new comics, new comic art, new anything, because they didn't pick it up off the general store rack for 25 cents. It's almost like *gasp* not everything is made for that demographic, and yet members of that demographic are consistently surprised by this. Not only that, but they run their mouths as if they were the official tastemakers of anything when in reality they probably should have put that first comic on the rack, bought a lollipop instead, and saved us all the hassle of having to listen to their incredibly naive and poorly formed thoughts on why art and comics from their childhood are naturally superior to art and comics made at any other period in time. They're often the same people lamenting about how the comic collecting and comic art communities are dwindling and there won't be collectors in the future. Duh. Instead of shoving your opinions down our throats and acting from a scarcity mentality, we can instead create a community that allows for appreciation and intelligent discussion not on what superhero is depicted on a page, but how lines, dynamism, contrast, panel composition, etc. are working. It's frustrating because this forum isn't the right place for this discussion, and yet, there is on place for this discussion. There's this "soundbyte" mentality where everything is a hot take or quick opinion with no real thought or analysis to it. I think we should demand more from our communities. This isn't really for anyone but myself. I know nothing will change. Maybe someone will appreciate this. Most likely they will not.

Ah, gotta love a think tank still tackling the burning question of if evolution is real or not.

Most old art looks the same.

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Or you're a cancer and can't help but metastasize before killing your host.

I haven't seen many either. I knew the Spawn ones were valuable. These are probably worth hanging onto then. Thanks for the info!