Marvel's Falling Sales 6 6

[kav]

And 100% of your readers if the writing is bad.

[AndyFish]

Yup.  It's a shame.  They should require new editors to read the Masterworks as a precursor, then have them build on characters from there.

[Doktor]

1 minute ago, AndyFish said:

Yup.  It's a shame.  They should require new editors to read the Masterworks as a precursor, then have them build on characters from there.

The sad thing is, all of this was foreshadowed if you followed Tom Brevvort on Twitter & Tumblr. He was talking about a "lack of diversity" for years on there. He's been talking about how to "solve the problem of new readers being intimidated by high issue #'s". He was talking about how events were where they made their money. He was talking about the X-Men being a problem because of movie rights & how there was no incentive for Marvel to push X-titles when FOX would reap the rewards for readers seeing the movies. All right around the time he was getting promoted to "VP of Publishing". All of these forced-diversity/event-after-event/relaunch-any-title-with-an-issue-#-above-12/etc initiatives came about after he got promoted. He needs to go back to just being the Marvel in-house continuity cop that he did a mostly OK job with for a number of years.

[Silver Surfer]

2 hours ago, Likefro said:

There's really nothing wrong with that. Marvel and DC have created superheroes for decades that are not white males. I think what pisses people off is when you take an established character and change their ethnicity or gender to something completely different than it has been for decades. Stuff like making Nick Fury black for example. Can you imagine the outcry if they changed the ethnicity of T'Challa or Luke Cage?  

Sure but when you do it at every turn just to be PC it gets to be a little tiresome. 

[Silver Surfer]

Waiting for transgenderman to join the Avengers and then have an argument with Stark over what bathroom to use.

[1Cool]

Use to be (1990s or so) they brought in titles like Punisher 2099 or Ultimate Spiderman if they wanted to try to reach younger audiences.  But they had the wisdom to keep the original series going since that was the series which people collected and they had a guaranteed number of sales each month. 

Edited April 4, 2017 by 1Cool

[StingerMcK]

Good article on the real data behind the slump

http://www.cbr.com/no-diversity-didnt-kill-marvels-comic-sales/

 

Quote

sales on Marvel’s superhero line have slumped across the board since the end of “Secret Wars,” with only a single ongoing series selling more that 50,000 copies a month to specialty shops.

Quote

Between October 2015 and February 2017, Marvel launched or relaunched at least 104 ongoing superhero series, for an average of about six new #1s a month.

 

[Magneto]

1 hour ago, lizards2 said:

It's not about the customers or readers, it's about the retards in management.

[mysterio]

3 hours ago, Silver Surfer said:

Didnt I see an announcement  that they just rolled out a Latino superhero,  give me a break. 

The only thing that struck me about that announcement is that she's a lesbian Latino. Can't just tick one diversity box now, need at least two adjectives to sell a character. 

[Silver Surfer]

Just now, mysterio said:

The only thing that struck me about that announcement is that she's a lesbian Latino. Can't just tick one diversity box now, need at least two adjectives to sell a character. 

I didn't even see that, too funny. 

[ComicConnoisseur]

3 hours ago, Likefro said:

There's really nothing wrong with that. Marvel and DC have created superheroes for decades that are not white males. I think what pisses people off is when you take an established character and change their ethnicity or gender to something completely different than it has been for decades. Stuff like making Nick Fury black for example. Can you imagine the outcry if they changed the ethnicity of T'Challa or Luke Cage?  

The Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics  Axel Alonso is known for this. That is his mo. His first big break in comics is when he took an established character like Rawhide Kid as an editor and outed him as gay.

From Wikipedia.

Alonso edited stories featuring the Western character Rawhide Kid,the first of which was the 2003 biweekly Marvel Max miniseries Rawhide: Slap Leather by Ron Zimmerman and John Severin, which drew controversy[13] for its depiction of the titular character as a homosexual, albeit through the use of innuendo in the book's design and dialogue. The series was labeled with a "Parental Advisory Explicit Content" warning on the cover. Alonso stated of the miniseries, "We thought it would be interesting to play with the genre. Enigmatic cowboy rides into dusty little desert town victimized by desperadoes, saves the day, wins everyone's heart, then rides off into the sunset, looking better than any cowboy has a right to."

 

On January 4, 2011, Alonso was named Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics. Now looking back on it,maybe this is Alonso`s idea to change all these characters?

 

 

[mysterio]

7 minutes ago, Silver Surfer said:

I didn't even see that, too funny. 

This is from my Apple news feed. 

[Senormac]

Sounds like a pretty foolish business model.  Who expects to succeed catering to the smaller population?  I mean, what is the gay pop of this country?  2 - 5%

[delekkerste]

In a similar fashion, any thoughts on the casting diversity in the Marvel movies (both in-house and licensed properties)?  I see that, in the upcoming Spidey film, Flash Thompson is played by a Guatemalan actor.  Ned Leeds is now Filipino.  And Betty Brant is African-American.  Now, on the one hand, I appreciate that, if the Marvel Universe were created today, instead of the '60s, there would be more diversity among the characters created in those early days, and that the film franchises, with a much shorter history and frequent reboots, are an easy place to make those updates.  That said, it does feel like the pendulum is shifting so much the other way that I have to wonder if it's impinging on creative freedom.  More and more, the world I see on TV and in films gets farther away from what I witness in the real world (not talking about super powers and the like, but demographics and such).  Much of the time it's unobtrusive, but, sometimes it's quite noticeable and rings false.  

When it comes to the upcoming Spidey film, at least it is plausible that Peter Parker would have a very multicultural set of friends, especially living in a melting pot like New York.  I do have an issue with casting decisions that are totally incongruous and smack of tokenism, though - like making the Norse god Heimdall of African descent in the Thor films.  Or, I just saw the commercial for the upcoming King Arthur film during the NCAA final broadcast last night, where Djimon Hounsou will be playing one of the Knights of the Round Table.  I mean, seriously?  Has it really gotten to the point where you can't even make a movie set in the 500s A.D. without changing the race of one of King Arthur's knights?  I don't know about you guys, but that just really feels forced and inauthentic to me. 

Being a minority myself, I'm all for more diversity in film, TV and comics.  But, I think it should be done thoughtfully instead of the often ham-handed way that it's being done nowadays.

Edited April 4, 2017 by delekkerste

[ComicConnoisseur]

7 minutes ago, Senormac said:

Sounds like a pretty foolish business model.  Who expects to succeed catering to the smaller population?  I mean, what is the gay pop of this country?  2 - 5%

Looking at  Alonso the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel. He doesn`t have a business background.Looking up his background we find Alonso earned a bachelor's degree in sociology. There you go. The leader of Marvel Comics is a social justice warrior! .Now this explains everything. 

Edited April 4, 2017 by ComicConnoisseur

[zosocane]

1 minute ago, delekkerste said:

Being a minority myself, I'm all for more diversity in film, TV and comics.  But, I think it should be done thoughtfully instead of the often ham-handed way that it's being done nowadays.

I am also a minority.  I don't want Marvel forcing diversity on characters that were originally created as white men or women.  Create NEW characters that are not part of the Silver or Bronze Age canon and get us excited about those characters.  Cloak and Dagger (1982, right?) is a perfect example.  When that issue of PPTSS hit the stands, it was an instant smash hit.  I loved it.  It didn't occur to me that it was a woman and a black man.  These were simply two really cool characters with a different look and vibe to them, unlike anything we had seen before.  That is real creativity, not poaching from the past and changing colors on characters -- which is lazy creativity.

[zosocane]

6 minutes ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

Looking at  Alonso the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel. He doesn`t have a business background.Looking up his background we find Alonso earned a bachelor's degree in sociology. There you go. The leader of Marvel Comics is a social justice warrior! .Now this explains everything. 

The solution is bring Jim Shooter back out of retirement, give him two years to clean up the mess. 

[delekkerste]

51 minutes ago, StingerMcK said:

Good article on the real data behind the slump

http://www.cbr.com/no-diversity-didnt-kill-marvels-comic-sales/

 

 

Hopefully these figures will dispel the notion held by some that the comics industry is doing great these days.  I mean, these figures are shocking - only 2 Marvel titles selling more than 40K copies, with their #3-10 best-selling titles selling a paltry 35-39K issues (and that's just to RETAILERS; actual sales to readers will be less).  The average final issue of a cancelled Marvel book sells only 7K copies.  That is shocking.  

Granted, other publishers have probably taken market share away from Marvel, and there are additional sales from digital and trades.  But, you'd have to conclude that much of the rebound in sales (as measured by $$$) that has been reported in recent years has been due to variant covers, higher cover prices, new issue speculation in the CGC/SS/etc. era, etc.  Again, these stats are just SHOCKING, and not in a good way.  

 

[zosocane]

Looking at February 2017 (most recently published) sales data on Comichron, top 25 sales of comic books, Marvel has only six titles in the top 25, and of those six, two re Star Wars comics, so technically throw those out because those are licensed publishing.  The net result is that Marvel has 4 books in the top 25 with its own proprietary characters.  By contrast, DC has 18 books in the top 25.  

Disastrous.  Wonder what Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter think of all this.

Edited April 4, 2017 by zosocane

[ComicConnoisseur]

14 minutes ago, zosocane said:

Looking at February 2017 (most recently published) sales data on Comichron, top 25 sales of comic books, Marvel has only six titles in the top 25, and of those six, two re Star Wars comics, so technically throw those out because those are licensed publishing.  The net result is that Marvel has 4 books in the top 25 with its own proprietary characters.  By contrast, DC has 18 books in the top 25.  

Disastrous.  Wonder what Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter think of all this.

I find it disastrous as well.

All those Marvel movies that did billions at box office didn't really bring in a great majority of new readers in the long run.

So not only are those sales figures shocking,but a wasted opportunity on Marvel's part to covert new Marvel movie fans into Marvel comic fans.

Marvel the hottest movie company in the world still couldn't convert these new found fans into Marvel Comic readers.

Somehow they dropped the ball.

Edited April 4, 2017 by ComicConnoisseur