Cap being a Nazi can't help, but...
April 26, 2017 4:34 PM Subscribe

What the hell is wrong with Marvel Comics anyway? Marvel is in trouble. In February 2017, their best selling ongoing superhero title barely passed 60k. By contrast, DC has fifteen superhero comics selling 50k or more that same month. But why is the brand synonymous with superhero comics in the minds of the general public doing poorly?

Marvel's SVP of Sales and Marketing posited that maybe people didn't want diversity in their superheroes after all.

But maybe that isn't really the problem.

It isn’t merely that there are never fewer than six “Avengers”-titled books going on at a single time (February 2017 brought “Avengers”, “Avengers point one”, “Great Lake Avengers”, “Occupy Avengers”, “Uncanny Avengers” and “US Avengers”, sheesh – the best-seller was about 40k copies, yuck!) – but that Marvel prices each of them at $4 (minimum), and tries to publish as many titles as it possibly can at 16-18 times a year.

The harder you make it to collect “Marvel comics”, the fewer people will do so. And that audience fracturing has finally come home to roost.

posted by misskaz (108 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite

For those of use who don’t know, what are “good” sales for a comic book?
posted by Going To Maine at 4:37 PM on April 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm somewhat mystified by the fact that Marvel does great with the films but not with the comics, while DC seems to be doing fine with the comics but struggles with movies.
posted by nubs at 4:46 PM on April 26, 2017 [15 favorites]

Looks like there's a pretty big site for comics sales tracking here (direct link to jan 2017 numbers):
http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2017/2017-01.html
Interestingly, US Avengers tops January with 100k+ sales... So, clickbait? High variability? Overall, you do see a lot more DC in the top of the chart, though.

And here's Feb. Marvel tops the chart with a star wars book (over 100k), and spiderman is the 61k sales book mentioned in the post.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:46 PM on April 26, 2017

I mean, maybe stop celebrating Nazis and your fans will come back I dunno
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 4:49 PM on April 26, 2017 [71 favorites]

I'm somewhat mystified by the fact that Marvel does great with the films but not with the comics, while DC seems to be doing fine with the comics but struggles with movies.

this is actually a conspiracy so neither of them dominates both markets and drive up page counts for think pieces on the internet. I'm like 87% sure a cabal of milleniolds (old millenials) is behind this.
posted by numaner at 4:58 PM on April 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

I'd say it's the endless fucking 'events'.
posted by signal at 5:05 PM on April 26, 2017 [15 favorites]

I wonder if Marvel doesn't care so much how many comics they sell when they can be selling movies and TV and merchandise instead?
posted by latkes at 5:07 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

This sums up my frustration with the big two pretty well:

They’re not looking for a LINE of comics… they’re looking for a comic.

Leaving aside diversity problems - not because I want to, but because I don't consider it an issue unique to comics - my main problem with superhero comics is their endlessly crisscrossing kudzu plots, where I need a chart to figure out what I'm even supposed to be reading. Like, I loved Exiles, and I'm still annoyed that their main run actually ends in X-Men instead of their own book. I don't think it was even one of those big red sky crossovers that wreck everything, the story just bounced over there.

I want media to tell me a story, one I can easily follow. I don't want to break out a chart or need a map. If I watch a movie or TV show or pick up a book, that's what happens. There are tons of indie comics where that happens. It's not what happens if I want to see what happens in Marvel or DC, by and large.
posted by mordax at 5:09 PM on April 26, 2017 [55 favorites]

Previously
posted by mbrubeck at 5:10 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

According to the January sales link, DC sold 2,904,117 units of all titles, at a total cover price of $9,714,363. Marvel sold 2,928,457 units for a total of $11,996,088. It's hard to consider they're hurting when they're #1 in units and total dollars.

The article is right, though, that there are just too many titles. When I was a kid it was a big thing that there were TWO Spider-man titles (three if you count the PBS-inspired Spidey Tales). The last time I was a regular buyer, there were three F4 titles - Knights, Ultimate, and classic - and even though I'm a huge F4 fan that was a bit much. Now there's not even one, so I don't buy anything.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 5:14 PM on April 26, 2017 [7 favorites]

I am your quintessential Sandman and Saga reader, as described in this article. This is 100% why I have not become a weekly pull issue reader of comics, and tend towards buying trades... and even then why I haven't really gotten into any of the traditional superhero ones. I don't fucking know WHICH Spiderman is the good one or worth my time, or WHICH Avengers will be fun and interesting, or which spin-off actually requires catching up on back story to understand, or if I do choose one that it won't splinter or I'll be forced to pick up another line to understand the larger universe or keep up with my favorite character. As a real live 40-year-old adult I don't have time to figure it out, so I don't at all. That's what I liked about this article ("clickbait" aside w/r/t whether Marvel Comics is faltering or not), it's that it really spoke to how confusing the landscape is and how that can deter new customers from becoming regular readers.
posted by misskaz at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2017 [44 favorites]

As a non-comic reader, every once in a while I load up my e-reader with a few comics and every time I try to read something I feel like I need to have an encyclopedia of history to understand what's happening. It's not that comics are unreadable without all the back story, it's just that all of the interesting subtext/narrative stuff is happening at that level, so for the average reader without it it's just PEW PEW BANG BANG. And at the end of the day, I don't give a shit what Superman has been up to for the last 80 years and don't care to learn.

So instead I read a "graphic novel" or two and then I just go back to books and forget about it.
posted by bradbane at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2017 [20 favorites]

I've been collecting comics again. But not from Marvel/DC. I've been grabbing stuff from Image, who offers LGBTQ-centric titles and digital downloads with no DRM. As a bonus, I no longer need to deal with the guilt from not bagging and boxing.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:25 PM on April 26, 2017 [12 favorites]

Right on, Mordax.

Big crossover events do happen occasionally in TV, like how Buffy & Angel used to cross over for an episode or the Flash crossing over with Arrow or Supergirl, but those are generally one episode (or one on each show) and have a plot divorced from the ongoing metaplot, which is fine!

I treat them like Amazon's "if you like X, you should check out Y" recommendations.

But that's a world of difference from the serpentine, "now I don't understand what the fuck is happening in this comic I've been reading for 20 issues and who are these people wandering in off the street like I'm supposed to recognize them," we have going on in Marvel & DC.
posted by Myca at 5:26 PM on April 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

I got out of comics a few years ago but am tempted by Marvel Unlimited. It's weird the article doesn't mention that service at all or even regular digital sales. Maybe those numbers are hard to come by, but it's like complaining a band sucks because their CD sales are so bad.
posted by Gary at 5:31 PM on April 26, 2017

Back in the 80s, I read X-men. I eventually quit when there were so many tie-ins happening that in order to follow the X-men I was interested in, I would have to buy 4-6 comics a month.

A couple of years ago, having enjoyed the first Iron Man and Captain America movies, I decided to try reading comics again. I couldn't find my way in with all the different lines. I ended up reading a few, mostly in graphic novel form—The Young Avengers, the David Aja/Matt Fraction Hawkeye, Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel—but was completly overwhelmed by the marketplace.

This article at least made me feel that I'm not the only one having that problem.
posted by Orlop at 5:40 PM on April 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

Marvel Legacy is such an... idea? Is that generous? To paraphase what the guys on Wait, What? (former house podcast of Comics Experience) were saying, Marvel is just trying to copy DC Rebirth without understanding what it was that made Rebirth work (better stories, an actual awareness they done fucked up) and instead Marvel is just doubling down on NOSTALGIAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Except I think Marvel is worse than that. They are not doubling down on Fan Nostalgia, they're doubling down on Marketing Nostalgia. "Now every Marvel character will be as you remember them! No, not like they were when you read the comics, but like you remember them from the merchandise you see at Target and Old Navy!"
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:43 PM on April 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription. It's been a lot of fun going through the full run of the Amazing Spider-Man (currently in 1976, not even halfway there yet). They seemed to have the right idea in the 70s. There would be crossovers, annuals, and Spidey guest starring in other comics. But it would be for a completely self-contained story, and the continuing plot arcs were entirely in Spiderman's main series.

But trying to break into the modern stuff has been a headache. At least Unlimited does have some handy guides and collections which make it easier to read the major plots like the Civil War or the Planet Hulk / Hulk War stuff. But just picking a 21st century series at random usually just leads to confusion.
posted by honestcoyote at 5:51 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

From my perspective as a regular comic reader that's moved well away from Big Two comics:

- On hinging sales on event comics, my experience with event comics is that they take too much investment to get into, as the Big Two expects you to keep reading till the end for all the major changes to their universe, where nothing ends up remotely interesting and they just end up undoing those same things in later events
- Line-wide initiatives can also end up disrupting whatever good ongoing storylines were in place for individual series by their creators
- Marvel's and DC's sales numbers can be misleading given that they practice double-shipping for their flagship titles
- $4.99 for some titles is indeed a big deal when you can get $2.99 comics elsewhere that tell better stories, which leads me to...
- There's a lot of other publishers doing interesting work already; Image, Dark Horse, BOOM, Valiant, IDW, and I'm not even counting manga in the equation... the Big Two may be fading, but I'd say comics is still fine
- The only stuff I tend to take a shot at from Marvel nowadays is their collected older work, but even their reprint schedules for print copies are wonky, and Marvel Unlimited doesn't really have everything available

Marvel's got a lot of bad press lately, but I'm having trouble trying to reconcile how much they really think of their comics business when it's more just their source for movie ideas now. They'll thrive, the competition is just better now.
posted by FarOutFreak at 5:54 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've wondered how much impact the movies have on comics sales. I suspect not much.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 6:04 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

obviously there are bigger things to talk about, but can I just leave this one bit here

We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, . . . people were turning their nose up against.

one character cannot be diverse

that's not what "diverse" means
posted by a car full of lions at 6:18 PM on April 26, 2017 [51 favorites]

I said this elsewhere, but you really can't judge "do fans want diverse heroes" by "do fans want reboots of all their favorite heroes with random new diverse characters." A "no" to the latter is not a "no" to the former, and Marvel really needs to understand that.
posted by corb at 6:21 PM on April 26, 2017 [23 favorites]

I nth that you just can't jump into comics as a newbie and well, continue to follow along. I have occasionally started with one series or another (not usually Marvel), but most of the time I end up giving up after awhile. There's too much history and too many other things to have to spend money to catch up on and it's freaking impossible. Comics are not meant for new readers most of the time, especially the huge series franchises.

I was trying to follow Mockingbird, which I loved. However, I had to go to four different comic stores to track them all down to start out, and when I finally started ordering them from my local store (which is otherwise usually good), the shipments didn't even show up and after 3 weeks he told me "they're never showing up, get them elsewhere." Except of course by then I couldn't. Hell, one of the four stores I tried was always out of the one copy by .... oh, a few hours into the first sale day.

I think the reason why Marvel and DC do better on film is that newbies CAN jump in with relative ease there. We're interested in the plots, folks, but following 40+ years of history in comics is a pain in the ass, and then they reset the plots all the time on top of that. Grrrr.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:33 PM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

"one character cannot be diverse"

You know what he means... also, I thought the movies/TV shows/associated merchandising were attempts to compensate for a chronic inability (people have been complaining about an industry slump for decades now) to make money off of these properties in comic form. I thought Marvel in particular had a strategy that involved an intent to transcend the superhero genre's traditional medium, widen the demographic subset of adults who consider themselves fans and recapture the interest of children, who by and large don't purchase comics anymore.
posted by Selena777 at 6:47 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

For a demonstration of how bugnuts things are, let’s take the Avengers.

Up to 2004, the team appeared in a series called The Avengers and, for a few years, Avengers West Coast. The odd miniseries or offshoots would pop up, but the Avengers appeared in The Avengers and that was that.

Starting in 2004, things changed and The Avengers was replaced by The New Avengers. Again, fine. Subsequent relaunches and renumberings make it a bit confusing:

New Avengers #1-64 (January 2005 – April 2010)
Avengers vol. 4, #1-34 (May 2010 – November 2012)
Avengers vol. 5, #1-44 (December 2012 – June 2015)
All-New All-Different Avengers #1-15 (October 2015 – September 2016)
Avengers vol. 6, #1-current (November 2016 – present)

Awkward, but fine.

Then…the spinoffs.

Young Avengers #1-12 (April 2005 – January 2007)
Young Avengers vol. 2 #1-15 (January 2013 - January 2014)
Avengers: The Initiative #1-35 (April 2007 – June 2010)
Mighty Avengers #1-36 (May 2007 – April 2010)
Mighty Avengers vol. 2 #1-14 (November 2013 - November 2014)
Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1-9 (January - August 2015)
Dark Avengers #1-16 (January 2009 – April 2010)
Secret Avengers #1-37 (May 2010 – January 2013)
Secret Avengers vol. 2 #1-16 (February 2013 – February 2014)
Secret Avengers vol. 3 #1-15 (March 2014 - June 2015)
Avengers Academy #1-40 (June 2010 – November 2012)
New Avengers vol. 2, #1-34 (June 2010 – November 2012)
New Avengers vol. 3, #1-33 (January 2013 – June 2015)
New Avengers vol. 4, #1-18 (October 2015 – November 2016)
Avengers Assemble #1-25 (March 2012 – March 2014)
Uncanny Avengers #1-25 (October 2012 – December 2014)
Uncanny Avengers vol. 2 #1-5 (March 2015 - August 2015)
Uncanny Avengers vol. 3 #1-current (October 2015 – present)
A+X #1-18 (October 2012 – March 2014)
Avengers Arena #1-18 (December 2012 – November 2013)
Avengers A.I. #1-12 (July 2013 - June 2014)
Avengers World #1-21 (January 2014 - July 2015)
Avengers Undercover #1-10 (March 2014 - November 2014)
A-Force #1-5 (May 2015 - October 2015)
A-Force vol. 2 #1-10 (January 2016 – October 2016)
Ultimates Vol. 2 (January 2016 - December 2016)
Ultimates 2 Vol. 2 (January 2017 - present)
Occupy Avengers #1-current (November 2016 – present)
Great Lakes Avengers Vol. 2 #1-7 (December 2016 - June 2017)
U.S.Avengers #1-current (March 2017 - present)

Holy shit.

Four volumes of New Avengers, three of Uncanny Avengers, three of Secret Avengers, two of Mighty Avengers, and so many goddamned spinoffs. It’s hard to keep straight what each is supposed to be. Then throw in the increasing frequency of relaunches and holy shit, what the fuck is going on?
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 6:49 PM on April 26, 2017 [42 favorites]

There's parts of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl that are going to be funnier or whatever if you have a working knowledge of the Marvel universe, but it's not at all necessary. Read that instead.

(Also DC's Flintstones comic, though that's not the sort of cape comic this thread's about.)
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:50 PM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Also going to post this giant essay again: Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:51 PM on April 26, 2017 [7 favorites]

I just wish they'd print on plain-old newsprint. I mean, they are beautiful and all, but $4+ an issue is hard to swallow.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:01 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

you really can't judge "do fans want diverse heroes" by "do fans want reboots of all their favorite heroes with random new diverse characters."

Given Marvel's habit of refusing to let its flagship characters grow or change (hi, Spidey!), its options are retiring well-used characters (or maybe turning them into Nazis), trying out some reboots or pass-the-torch scenarios with new characters and stories, or just accepting its fate as the new Archie Comics, with a repeating cycle of storylines every four years or so (since readers tend to age out, why not?)

Except that Archie's probably trying harder to be relevant.

My main intro to superhero comics was Generation X, which for all its flaws had a decent stable of new and repurposed old characters without much continuity to worry about. I probably would've kept buying it (and similarly self-contained titles like the 90s Excalibur) if they'd just been able to restrain themselves on the endless bullshit crossover events. Having a pull list at the local comic shop was an easy and pleasant habit to maintain, but the increasing prices and number of titles made it even easier to quit buying and reading.

Sometimes I think Marvel's trying for the alcohol sales model, in which the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. Except that comics aren't anywhere near as addictive as alcohol, and while you're not going to get even the cover price back for the vast majority of comics, it's fairly easy to sell off your whole collection and make at least some money. There's no market at all for used booze.
posted by asperity at 7:04 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

But why is the brand synonymous with superhero comics in the minds of the general public doing poorly?

Not just the general public:

Popular Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot bagged the role of the Marvel superheroine Wonder Woman.

I've wondered how much impact the movies have on comics sales. I suspect not much.

I dig the MCU movies. I have seen all of them first-run in the theatres, sometimes more than once, and own them all on disc except Doctor Strange (which is a question of not owning it yet). The last comic I bought was a Sandman issue.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:05 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I feel like a) we've been over this what's-wrong-with-comics road pretty frequently lately, and 2) per GhostintheMachine above, it's hard to tell that there's even really a problem, at least relative to DC (or it's a problem that affects them both). But I did want to note this from FarOutFreak:

- Line-wide initiatives can also end up disrupting whatever good ongoing storylines were in place for individual series by their creators

This has been a real pain in the ass for me, since I mostly just follow individual creators that I like. They're perking along, doing a great job reviving and refurbishing particular characters, then BAM--they have to do a thing where everyone's a duck (except Howard, who's human) or everyone speaks in pig Latin, or Cap is a stealth Nazi, or whatever. And then, of course, there's the effect on sales. Per John Rogers (showrunner for Leverage and The Librarians, whose Womb Crazy!! blog entry punctured big crossover events in general and DC's Identity Crisis and Marvel's Avengers: Disassembled in particular, and whose Crazification Factor post is likewise a perennial reblogging favorite), when his version of Blue Beetle was cancelled: "Wow. It's almost as if basing your entire business model around a series of must-buy big event crossovers in a market with limited purchasing resources hurts your midlist."
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:23 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure that Marvel is particularly interested in the comic book business as anything other than a test market for 'content' that they can recycle for movies later. The funny book business is basically a pimple on Disney's ass in terms of revenue.
posted by empath at 7:50 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

"They’re not looking for a LINE of comics… they’re looking for a comic."

EXACTLY.

As said upthread: "my main problem with superhero comics is their endlessly crisscrossing kudzu plots, where I need a chart to figure out what I'm even supposed to be reading. Like, I loved Exiles, and I'm still annoyed that their main run actually ends in X-Men instead of their own book. I don't think it was even one of those big red sky crossovers that wreck everything, the story just bounced over there."

I keep hearing stuff that makes me think I might want to get into comics. I really liked Guardians of the Galaxy, so I got the 4 comics recent comics I could find with that name on it. Ok, Iron man is in them? Huh, ok. Issue one was OK. Issue two...doesn't start where issue one left off? It seems I have to magically know what else to read to get what happened in between?

That said, I've discovered sometimes you can get IDW comics for almost nothing on the Humble Bundle. For like, $15 I own digital copies of ALL the Dungeons and Dragons comics. I've not read all of them, but each one? Self contained plot. Start at issue 1, go to end. Vertigo (Owned by DC, it seems) did this just fine with Transmet, the only comic I've collected all of. (I'm slowly working on Modestly Blaise, but there are a LOT of those books).

Also: Dollar per enjoyment time, they have got to be the signal most expensive hobby, after fancy alcohols and illegal drugs. $20 gets me a short trade I can read in an hour or so. Compare to novels ($13 for 3+ hours), movies ($10/2-3 hours).... I mean, you might want to think of turning down how much you are spending on art? And paper? Everything seems to be going for the 'luxury product' feel these days. RPG books do the same thing: All glossy paper, all full colour art, and it gets damn hard to actually afford them. Might lowering the amount of work per page help bring it down to something new readers can actually afford?
posted by Canageek at 7:53 PM on April 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

1) #1 is always going to be the stranglehold that Diamond has on sales, that's industry wide. Break the shitty Diamond monopoly--it makes for a huge disconnect between Comics creators and fans, as actual comic sales have little to no relationship to what fans want. It's also probably messing up any ability to hire and retain talent. Fuck Diamond. It short-circuits the whole system.

2) Another vote for Fuck Events! Events suck! and Marvel's success with the movies has probably only worsened their eagerness for tying different franchises together. Movies ain't comics, please stop!

3) MotherFuck the 'Secret Wars especially! F all that. I Boycotted marvel for Battleworld, and for cancelling / aborting! the She Hulk comic, the one that was so good that they decided to bring it back after cancelling it...

4) A corollary to 'fuck events' is to tell tight stories--serial plot arcs with character development. the Dr Strange story arc was awesome. The recent Black Panther arc was way cool. Xmen has been abysmal and all over the place, and it's not stopping. The Vision series was totally awesome. If you have solid arcs, there's no need to continually #1 the series...there are natural breaks AND continuity to a character. I even can deal with the new She Hulk series because they are building off the pre Secret Wars version of the character.
posted by eustatic at 8:05 PM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

That said, I've discovered sometimes you can get IDW comics for almost nothing on the Humble Bundle.

Like this incredibly cheap enormous fucking pile of Bloom County, or that Bundle I got awhile back with a few dozen Ghostbusters comics.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:08 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Because I have no soul, I made a table with the aggregate gross profits from January 2017 using the Comichron data above:

Marvel $11,996,088.43
DC $9,714,362.83
Image $1,586,458.56
IDW $789,887.29
Dark Horse $687,704.06
Boom $333,990.93
Dynamite $258,009.36
Valiant $223,308.33
Titan $17,8269.09
Archie $114,421.23
Zenescope $95,073.72
Action Lab $78,931.82
Aftershock $75,458.88
Joe Books $61,459.10
Black Mask $53,318.37
Avatar $47,353.76
Albatross $40,977.30
Bongo $37,910.41
Oni $34,377.84
Abstract $33,747.42
United Plankton $18,062.73
Coffin $15,636.81
Broadsword $14,511.05
Devil’s Due $14,328.09
Kenzer $12,608.95
Red 5 $9,444.45
Z2 $8,921.64
Graphic India $6,117.54

There are all sorts of caveats to be had with this, but it looks like this round of complaints about what Marvel has been doing haven’t hurt the gross bottom line. There’s no real way to check about the net…
posted by Going To Maine at 8:10 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh, but here’s the top-ten average gross profit per title:

Marvel $131,825.15
DC $114,286.62
Image $54,705.47
Dynamite $43,001.56
Albatross $40,977.30
Action Lab $39,465.91
Boom $37,110.10
IDW $35,903.97
Oni $34,377.84
Abstract $33,747.42

So, really, it seems like Marvel’s doing okay here, and Oni and Abstract are pulling stupidly above their weight.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:22 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Please, for the love of God, do not spend money on pamphlets. They're not worth it. Subscribe to Marvel Unlimited. Go to the library. Anything else. Just don't spend all your money on this shit.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:29 PM on April 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Marvel passes the buck for "under-performing" just about everywhere except for the slow, grinding collapse of the general-readership print periodical industry in the age of multimedia. At least part of their perpetual complaint about loosing readership is that ink on paper is becoming an old-person or collector affectation.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:30 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Or ink on ephemeral paper. Bound volumes including trade paperbacks seem safe for now.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:33 PM on April 26, 2017

I think this link, 'The Problems with Comics' was posted earlier this month, but it answers this question with comics business history.
posted by eustatic at 8:54 PM on April 26, 2017

I am your quintessential Sandman and Saga reader, as described in this article.

I love Sandman, and I haven't read Saga but I loved his previous series (Y: The Last Man). But that's not because I'm a causal comics reader. It's because I have absolutely no interest in superheroes.

Hey Marvel: make a bunch of comics like Sandman, Books of Magic - or maybe even critically acclaimed stuff like Twentieth Century Boys, and I'll come buy it. (Or maybe not - I hate cliff hangers so I'm more inclined to read a series when it's completed).
posted by jb at 9:28 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't read this stuff. I just don't. I love the movies (well, some of them), but the comics are a steaming pile of stuff I'll never get through. Right now, I read one comic, by one artist -- Terry Moore's Motor Girl (and before that, his Rachel Rising, his Echo and his Strangers In Paradise). There are a lot of other indies out there. They may not provide blockbuster fodder, but at least the stories are manageable, and often much better than what the big studios crank out.
posted by lhauser at 9:32 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Going to Maine, high five for also nerding out on comics sales figures and having a Mountain Goats username and having awesome poetry in your profile. You, you're all right.

Anyway, Marvel. Marvel, Marvel. I don't always 100% agree with Hibbs, but I think he's got a lot of sensible stuff to say here.

One wrinkle to the discussion of Marvel's bottom line: a lot of this talk is (reasonably) around problems with Marvel's superhero properties, and not their licensed Star Wars comics, which I think are still consistently solid sellers across a few different markets and seem immune to a lot of this. (Go see how many spots Marvel's got in Comichron's graphic novels top 20 right now. Here, I'll spoil it: it's three, two Star Wars books and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther.)

Looking at those January single issue numbers, it's not surprising to see a new Avengers #1 taking that top spot, but without having seen later sales figures, I'd bet a 20% attrition rate for that in a few months, easy. I know Marvel beat DC again for sales dollars in March, but it was the first month in I don't know how long that DC moved more units. That's pretty weird, and I'm not surprised Marvel is flailing around a bit.

As far as sales lists: none of this will be new information to comics nerds, but stuff I keep in mind when looking at dollars/issues sold: first, lists like ComicsBeat and Comichron don't generally include digital sales, because DC and Marvel don't release them (not sure about the smaller houses.) Lots of comics survive on digital sales, graphic novels, and Scholastic (Marvel does particularly well in the latter), and smart money is that the actual sales rankings look at least somewhat different from what we can see here, representing (hypothetically) a different segment of the market than Wednesday Warriors. You see yet another tier in the graphic novel sales.

Second, like Hibbs is saying with his sell-in vs sell-through numbers, when you see how many copies a book sold, it's telling you how many copies were sold to comics retailers, not how many end up in people's hands. And because the direct market is the exquisitely weird creature that it is, that number pretty much represents how many copies a shop thinks they can sell two (or so) months before the comic comes out (hello, U.S.Avengers #1.) The margins on this are brutal (because you usually can't return the books to the publisher if you guessed wrong, you just have unsellable product taking up space) and if you guess wrong enough times, you go out of business. So that sure seems not to be working in Marvel's favor right now either. (Market downswings can be bad for publishing companies, but you can sell Superman t-shirts for a million years. Downswings can be apocalyptic for small retailers, and retail as a sector hasn't exactly been having the greatest economic time of it lately anyway. If Marvel really tanks hard in 2017-2018, as some retailers have been worried about for a while, it'll be bad for the whole industry.)

I read all kinds of stuff if I think it looks good and don't sweat continuity too much in the cape books, and have spent twenty mostly happy years in comics in this way.

Okay, I could say more about the comics vs. movies thing but this comment is already way too long and soapboxy.

Also, go read the IDW Transformers comics, they're a comics universe contained in a couple of titles and they're stupidly great, and accessible to grown ass women like me who did not previously know or care about Transformers in any way.
posted by jameaterblues at 9:38 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

What I'd like Marvel and DC to do is the following:

1. Stop publishing nine different Batman or Avengers (etc.) books a month;

2. Stop doing crossovers with other books - one a year at most;

3. Stop it with the title-crossing "events" that run for a year or more at a time. Last one I attempted was Age of Ultron and it was terrible garbage was one of the final straws towards me dropping my pull list completely;

4. If you must have more than one title with the same character, make one of those titles a one-off book with self-contained stories every issue (for casuals), and the other title can be your aficionado book with the year-long storyline;

5. No more year-long storylines;

6. Hiring a talented comic book writer? Good. Giving them eleven titles a month to write? Bad;

7. You have a rich archive of classic and excellent comic book stories. Thousands and thousands of issues. Reprint them, on a monthly or fortnightly or even weekly basis, for whatever length the run is, for half the price of a new release book, for people who a) want to collect comics but can't afford it, or b) love the thrill of picking up a new issue of their favourite book, or c) have already collected them in TPB and want to be nostalgic or whatever. TPBs are fine but some people like longboxes and they like piles of issues - cater to them by giving them the classic stories of their comic-collecting heyday! Bonus: you'll be drawing people in to the comic book store regularly, and they might buy some of your other shit! I would recollect the heck out of e.g. a lot of the stuff from the Comics You Should Own archive;

8. More Punisher Max.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:46 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I think this link, 'The Problems with Comics' was posted earlier this month, but it answers this question with comics business history.

I haven't read that one, but that author has more recently put up a "spiritual sequel" essay, Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel. It's very, very worth the read, to see what's going wrong with Marvel, what's going wrong with comics, what's fucked about the entire business model ... like, whether a book has failed or not is decided months before it hit the shelves? The fuck? Read this.
posted by kafziel at 10:23 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

This really did hit on why I stopped being a weekly pull customer and now just go to the library or buy trades. My branch of the LAPL has floppies, even!
posted by klangklangston at 12:02 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Some really great commentary and analysis in here, but, for me, it pretty much boils down to one thing and one thing only -

Marvel is helmed by greedy morons (who think all their readers are morons too).
posted by Samizdata at 1:23 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

From influential twitterer Colin Spacetwinks. a 30K-word pay-what-you-want Twine essay on the matter: Shut The Fuck Up, Marvel.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:28 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Dang it, didn't notice it'd been posted twice already.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:34 AM on April 27, 2017

Yep. The last time I was regularly buying comics, all the Marvel storylines I was following were interrupted by Some Stupid Event. Spider-Woman specifically addressed it. The Multiverse can suck it.
posted by Gordafarin at 2:22 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

No dogs or diverse.
posted by Segundus at 2:57 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

My main intro to superhero comics was Generation X, which for all its flaws had a decent stable of new and repurposed old characters without much continuity to worry about. I probably would've kept buying it (and similarly self-contained titles like the 90s Excalibur) if they'd just been able to restrain themselves on the endless bullshit crossover events.

To expand on this, when Generation X was first published, it only went 4 issues before getting wrapped up in a crossover event that lasted 4 monthly issues itself. So two thirds into its first year, literally only 50% of its run were normal issues, and 50% was an alternate universe crossover where if you wanted to follow all the characters from the Generation X lineup, you actually had to buy 3-4 books a month. (Depending on whether or not you also wanted to follow a character from the four issue crossover even in the regular X-Men comic books that introduced the Generation X team, but was killed off before the title actually started.)
posted by radwolf76 at 4:25 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I tried to do a quick summary of Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel, which I read over the weekend, but it ended up being pretty long. Basically, Marvel is very bad at marketing (their hit movies don't even move the needle on comic sales, and they do tie-in comics a full year after the movie comes out), and the only way to buy a comic that counts as a vote of confidence in the product is to pre-order it 3 months before it comes out at a comic shop. You can't buy a full run of Marvel's most popular superheroes, and because of all the cross-overs, it's impossible to follow with the kind of budgets people are going to spend on Marvel comics instead of Crunchyroll or Steam sales, or their movies. Also, Marvel's constant events and re-numbering and reboots have a measurable negative effect on long-term sales.
posted by Merus at 4:29 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

I should be the exact audience for comics: I'm young(er), I have nerdy hobbies, I read comics (in the form of manga), I love the movies and even read fanfiction for Marvel comics I haven't read -

But who in my age bracket has the money. All of the issues with comics mentioned above are exacerbated by the money. There's a reason that when I did pay for comics, it was always collected volumes. They were expensive, still, but much less expensive than buying individual issues.

Like, seriously. Let's say I really like Iron Man and I want to read a story about Iron Man. Where do I find it and how much will it cost me? I do't know the answer to the first question, but I know the answer to the second one is "a lot," and that's what stops me from just asking friends who are into comics to help me out and give me a recommendation.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:07 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

You know what was good? Wildstorm. Stormwatch becoming The Authority. I dug that. Mostly read it on TPBs from public libraries.
posted by chmmr at 5:25 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Speaking as a librarian who buys comics for the library, we have some issues of our own. From reading more about the state of the comic retailer, I see a lot of parallels - we have limited space, a tight budget, and have to justify our selections.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:50 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

It seems that Marvel has decided that their customer base is made up of 99% superfans with unlimited resources. Like, they're marketing to what they perceive to be an endless sea of Sheldons.

It looks like Sheldon isn't the only fictional character in that equation.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:56 AM on April 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

As a comic outsider, what the Captain America: Hydra Sleeper Agent debacle communicated to me was that Marvel's ability to read it's audience was basically zero.

I don't read comics, but I use the internet. If someone had asked me what Captain America fans wanted, I would have unhesitatingly said "Officially-sanctioned Cap./Bucky slash-fiction" (I won't pretend to understand the storyline intricacies needed to make it canon-compatible, but I maintain that would have sold like hotcakes in the wake of CA: Winter Soldier).

But no. And now with all the excellent explanations of glut of stories, crossover confusion, poorly-timed marketing..

Jeez what a fumble. Give the people what they want, when they want it, right? But first you have to understand what your audience even wants.
posted by AAALASTAIR at 5:57 AM on April 27, 2017 [9 favorites]

I should be the exact audience for comics: I'm young(er), I have nerdy hobbies, I read comics (in the form of manga), I love the movies and even read fanfiction for Marvel comics I haven't read -

I am the same way; in fact, I probably read more fanfiction than comics, because at the end of the day, what I want is a tight story that gets told in a few chapters. I actually started reading fanfiction on the strength of one or two MCU movies, and branched out from there. Most good writers don't belabor small plot points that came up in this or that comic - they just want to tell a good story with these characters. There's usually very little subtext/inside-baseball stuff going on in a good fanfic. Partially this is because, despite being based on existing properties, these are NEW stories, so people feel free to pare down the background to the minimum necessary to explain the story and then set the characters in new situations. Most [fanfic] authors also know that to get your audience interested in your story, you can't spend the whole time alluding to arcane events or recapping the setup in hugely expository paragraphs.

I SHOULD be the market for comics but I seriously wouldn't know where to begin reading them and to be honest, with new movies/TV shows and fanworks coming out all the time, I don't really need to buy comics to enjoy a good superhero story. This is Marvel's problem, full-stop. If they want to sell more comics, or any comics at all, to new readers, they have to be more accessible and tell more comprehensible stories. The MCU gets it; why not the comics?
posted by chainsofreedom at 6:35 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

I would have unhesitatingly said "Officially-sanctioned Cap./Bucky slash-fiction"

I can hear the objections that of course Steve and Bucky can never have an official relationship, because it would alienate the audience, blah blah bullshit blah blah... all the old excuses for restricting gay relationships to side characters and having them occur mostly off-screen...

But, like, you don't even have to go that far. You pay attention to what attracted fans to the characters in the first place, regardless of what they ended up doing with it (whether they write slash or not). And you give them more t of that, which shouldn't be too hard. Hire some interns to hang out on some message boards.

But instead, you get that terrible storyline where Steve is a secret Nazi, because apparently running a twelve-year-old's idea of a mind-bending and edgy storyline is more important than not setting out to destroy everything that attracted fans in the first place. If you want to sell comics, what kind of business approach is that?
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:37 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Multiverse can suck it.

The "multiverse", in a sense, is the reason why Marvel isn't about to go bankrupt. They've established that there are different universes, with different versions of our favorite characters. So when the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" reboots everything, the hardcore fans don't even think of it as a reboot, they just think of it as "Earth-199999", and if it ends up going into the toilet they can still enjoy Earth-616 just as well; they don't have to worry so much that their own stories are going to get trashed. On the other side, the Hollywood writers end up with the freedom to come up with their own ideas that borrow from but are not shackled by decades of stories that came before.

If Marvel wants to take all my money, they need to have more universes like that, not fewer, and the only part of that which can "suck it" is the crossovers. Give me "Earth-31415" etc, each in a self-contained story, perhaps over several dozen comic issues at most. Sequels and prequels are fine only so long as they still read well even if I haven't read the previously published work. Reward the obsessive completionist readers with in-jokes and dramatic irony if you like, but only so long as you don't thereby punish new readers with "what are they laughing at? what does that mean?" moments or incomprehensible-in-isolation plots.

Everybody talks about the ways in which Watchmen deconstructed comics, but it's odd that I never see discussion of one of the biggest subversions: you can pick up Watchmen, and be completely unfamiliar with the characters it is parodying or the tropes it is subverting, and still thoroughly enjoy it on its own merits, without feeling like you missed important introductions when you started reading or feeling like you were denied closure when you stopped reading. It would have been nice if more comics since then had adopted *that*, not just the grimdark antihero characters.

The Disney Star Wars solution to fictional universe maintainance is to throw out "legends" entirely and vet canon obsessively, but I'm not sure how well that vetting scales. If you have N writers in the same universe then you've got N-squared sources of continuity conflicts to watch out for. Multiverses are a much more flexible answer: as long as e.g. "Red Son" Superman doesn't have to be "The" Superman, you can write a lot of interesting stories without them looking like a junkyard when assembled together.
posted by roystgnr at 7:19 AM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

It seems that Marvel has decided that their customer base is made up of 99% superfans with unlimited resources. Like, they're marketing to what they perceive to be an endless sea of Sheldons.

"Unlimited resources" is stretching it, but I think that there is probably still some belief in the Marvel Zombie (not to be confused with the comic of the same name, written by (of course) Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead fame), the fan who will (or would) buy every book that Marvel puts out. As TFA points out, that fan doesn't exist any more, and even the people who are die-hard Avengers or X-Men (or Justice League or Teen Titans) fans don't want to have to get up to half-a-dozen books, especially since some of them are at best vaguely related to the main title. One of the most direct statements of this belief came from Dan Slott, the writer and co-architect of the "Brand New Day" arc/status-quo shift, who smugly said that all of the people complaining about the storyline would buy the comics anyway, so, so what? Well, the sales figures didn't really bear that out, despite occasional sales bumps from gimmicks such as new costumes or putting Barack Obama on the cover. I don't think that people like Slott realize that someone who doesn't like a comic but wants to read it to be able to criticize it has probably heard of filesharing programs, and the approach of "don't steal content because you're costing your favorite creators money" doesn't work if what's being downloaded is some tie-in book that you wouldn't otherwise be interested in but feel like you have to get because otherwise the story won't make sense.

Interestingly, one of the good side effects of there being so many ancillary/tie-in books is that some of the work usually gets farmed out to creators who wouldn't necessarily have gotten work on the main title, and some of these will turn out to be decent new talents. Slott, for one, first came to my attention when he did GLA: Misassembled, a book that was both a tie-in and a critique of Avengers: Disassembled (as well as DC's Identity Crisis, as well as a few other things, such as Doctor Doom's unfortunate "Buffalo Bill" period. It was funny and very pointed and as responsible as anything else for reviving Squirrel Girl. Likewise, Slott's not-great "Superior Spider-Man" storyline (Peter got mind-swapped with Doctor Octopus) had a sort-of spin-off called Superior Foes of Spider-Man, a funny book about some of Spider-Man's more loser-ish rogue's gallery (just as GLA was about the loser-ish Avengers wannabes). It was a good book that got extended past its initial run, and I looked forward to seeing more from its author... Nick Spencer, who will now probably be known primarily as the Cap-is-a-Nazi-and-always-has-been guy.

Which brings me to what I think is one of the worst things about this messed-up business plan: not only does it alienate readers, it drags good creators into this crazy scheme and compels them to do lousy work, because it pays better than creator-owned stuff. It's hard not to see the fell hand of the editors at work when you see writers taking to social media to defend the sort of crap that, not too long ago, they used to make fun of.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:21 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

I think it's the cost as mentioned above. The annual events source from that. The change to catering to collectors was well underway by the ninties.

I'm not even sure there are newspaper printers of the old kind anymore. Even newspapers aren't on that old news-paper. Digital printing, as is the case with many modern technologies, drove the price up.

The Japanese make it work somehow. Why American comics can't is a hell of a question.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 7:31 AM on April 27, 2017

I love Sandman, and I haven't read Saga but I loved his previous series (Y: The Last Man). But that's not because I'm a causal comics reader. It's because I have absolutely no interest in superheroes.

jb, literally just posting to say OMG READ SAGA because it's awesome. It's awesome.
posted by greenish at 7:39 AM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Marvel's Civil War was my first experience with "all these other comics mucking up the ones I actually want to follow" and I hate it to this day.

I didn't know about the whole Diamond publishing thing, and hearing about it now makes me so angry! This is why shops never have what I want when I read about a new book I might want to check out? And why I can't just subscribe a story I want to follow and have it mailed to my house like any other magazine? Ugh.

I pretty much just buy (or borrow from the library) trade collections now. Cheaper, easier to read and store on my bookshelves, and a better chance of having a completed story arc to read.

Five bucks is just far too expensive for a single issue. And it's not any cheaper digitally! There are books I'd like to read when they're released, but the cost is ridiculous.
posted by lovecrafty at 7:39 AM on April 27, 2017

I cut my comic teeth on indie comics and Sandman so I never got into superheroes, but I am married to a rad dude who did grow up on that stuff. Even he says it's exhausting and drops in and out of whatever Marvel/DC event may be happening. I think the only thing remotely superhero-y I've purchased was The Young Avengers because it was a Gillen/McKelvie jam.

I've read some other Marvel/DC trades but as many have pointed out above, it's like needing a genealogical chart to understand characters and plotlines. I've probably annoyed my partner by asking, "So why this thing happening a big deal? And do you know who that is? Am I supposed to know who that is?"
posted by Kitteh at 7:54 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Is it just me or are these comics significantly shorter than they were in the '80s? I pick them up at work and it seems like even a little kid could read one in 5 minutes, tops; there seems to be a lot less dialogue and fewer actual pages. Doesn't seem like good value for money.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:30 AM on April 27

It's not just you. There's actually a term for it (which of course I can't remember at the moment) that refers to this "new" style of writing. There are fewer words. There are no thought bubbles. The narration has been cut down significantly. Page counts are way, way down (especially if you remember those larger 80 page "supersize" editions of something like Superman Family).

I think originally the "new style" was supposed to make comics less intimidating and lower the barrier to entry for younger readers. To my mind, it makes them less compelling and a much poorer value for money, but then I'm an old person who even in my younger days, always enjoyed being challenged by new vocabulary (there are a ton of words I learned as a young kid because I encountered them in comics--"vernacular" is one that I remember for specific reasons) or ideas or histories.
posted by sardonyx at 8:10 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

More big changes at Marvel.
posted by Etrigan at 8:16 AM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

It's easier to localize when there is so little to translate. The effect is happening in movies as well. Hard to have good dialogue when you got to keep things at such an elementary level.

I've been working with public domain comics recently on a project of my own, and the word count thing is staggering. And no, an illustrator won't be able to write without putting in the same work they did to get good at illustration. I can't tell you how many illustrators I've discussed this with who think writing is a lot like bullshitting at the bar.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 8:25 AM on April 27, 2017

sardonix: There's actually a term for it (which of course I can't remember at the moment) that refers to this "new" style of writing. There are fewer words. There are no thought bubbles. The narration has been cut down significantly. Page counts are way, way down (especially if you remember those larger 80 page "supersize" editions of something like Superman Family).

I think originally the "new style" was supposed to make comics less intimidating and lower the barrier to entry for younger readers.

The term is "decompression," and it's become more and more popular over the years. The reasons why are many, but I think the key one is that comics have evolved in the minds of creators from "comic strips with more room" to "movies on paper." The shorthand tools used by early comic creators to squeeze meaning into a panel are being abandoned for a "movie storyboard" approach, where actions are explicitly shown. Time in an old-style comic page can be very weird; how can Captain Fisticuffs speechify that much while sliding down a banister and also punching out a robot dinosaur that's shooting at him? You can't logically parse the time flow. But then again, who cares. A decompressed style of comic storytelling usually makes time flow much more realistic.

The decompressed style has its virtues. It can create visceral impacts that compressed stories cannot. But it eats up pages and prevents some effects. Mostly, it eats pages. Warren Ellis, who pioneered the technique, often produces comics of remarkable brevity because half of the pages of an issue are given up to blow-by-blow realistic violence. Which is kinda sorta nifty, but dude, where's my story?
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 8:26 AM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Just last week over on the green I asked a question for some guidance on comics and graphic novels. I ended up picking up the first book ...er, trade? I have no idea the terminology here, I'm new to this...the first thing of both Saga and Descender. So far, I really like both of them (they didn't quite scratch my itch of exactly what I was looking for, but what I was looking for was pretty narrow, and these are great nonetheless). They're (so far) good stories, with very attractive art. More importantly, I don't feel like I have to become a superfan just to keep track of it all. I don't want it to become a hobby I want to read stories.

I like stories. And I like stories where the world the story inhabits is cohesive and has rules. I passively read comics in the mid 90's, but never got into it because of many of the reasons others have mentioned. I also feel like both Marvel and DC have this bizarre kind of one-upsmanship to out-weird themselves, and the worlds cease making sense. I've read some of the marvel-wiki stuff on certain characters to try and 'catch up' a little bit, but it gets intense, stupid, weird, lacks cohesiveness and just plain difficult to follow. Crossover events, alternate timelines, multiverse, errmahgrrrd! It's too much, unless you're into that kind of thing, which many people are. I think there are some serious parallels between how DC and Marvel operate and how soap operas operate. They require capital I Investment to enjoy. Some people like this kind of fandom alot, but some of us just want a solid story and some pretty pictures.

I'm personally starting the move towards comics because there's just not alot of TV out there that matches up with what I really like, because what I would like to see on TV would require a bananas-level budget. I'm hoping to eventually find some good books that fall in line with the worlds, themes and characters I'd like to be entertained with.

Tell a good story! Make pretty pictures! Interesting characters! Woo!
posted by furnace.heart at 8:29 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

The phenomenon of convoluted crossovers making it impossible to follow one goddamned story without buying every book, described in this and in Colin Spacetwinks' "Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel" essay, is exactly why I, personally, stopped reading comics several years ago and never got back into them.

As for whether Marvel actually has a problem or not... Well, that's where Colin's Twine essay is very valuable. Yeah, sure the Big Two are still the Big Two. But Marvel used to move a hundred thousand units on random issues of the X-Men where nothing "special" was happening. Now they don't. They used to publish runs where sales remained steady for hundreds of issues. Now they don't. Something's rotten. It smells like a bubble to me.

The gross receipts compared to other companies still look good, but if I were an investor I'd have big questions about the sustainability of the current model.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:41 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Harvey Jerkwater,

Bingo. That's it. Thanks. I was driving myself crazy trying to come up with the term.

I don't have a problem with the style, per se. Sometimes it really works: Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, for example. But lots of times it doesn't. I think the style needs a really talented team of artists, writers and editors to really make it work. When all of the components don't come together, then the result is a really thin gruel. When there was more content--more words, more (or perhaps denser) graphics, I think the odds were better that a weaker story could be carried by stronger visuals or vice versa.
posted by sardonyx at 8:42 AM on April 27, 2017

Marvel's Civil War was my first experience with "all these other comics mucking up the ones I actually want to follow" and I hate it to this day.

Oh man! Marvel Civil War was the thing that got me back into comics, really, because I thought it was so awesome - buuuuut the characters that were really Front And Center on that - Iron Man, Cap, the Fantastic Four, etc - I already loved a lot, so it was less "all those other comics mucking up the ones I actually want to follow" and more "all these other comics I love are pouring into the comics I already love eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee take my money."

But I don't want a crossover all the time. What sold Civil War for me is specficially that I thought it was a one time big deal and it was awesome. When your one time big deal is every year, who cares?
posted by corb at 8:43 AM on April 27, 2017

Man, 2000AD is the bomb. No such thing as crossovers. No capes, either.
posted by trif at 8:56 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Haha, Civil War was my introduction to Iron Man, and I still to this day can't stand 616 Tony Stark. I was following Cap at the time because of Ed Brubaker (I still mostly follow writers I like rather than characters...), so when Tony showed up I was just like, WTF is this?
posted by lovecrafty at 8:57 AM on April 27, 2017

Yes, it is hard to balance the need to deal with the constant aging-out of your core audience, huge distractions for your new audience, and the impossible to balance need to keep things simple and/or reboot for new readers, and keep happy the two divisions of established readers who are polar opposites: those who crave innovation but still scream if they don't like changes, and those detest innovation and scream at any change whatever.

But beyond that Marvel Comics has a mass of problems that no one could fix because they aren't fixable.

(1) by the standards of Disney they make no money, and have no real chance to make money. The manager of parking lot operations at Disney World probably books more profit than the CEO of Marvel Comics. Huge global corporations like Disney HATE business units that are small and doomed to stay that way and will always be sh*tting on the business unit heads and making them alternate between cost cutting and frantic investing / innovating / changing for its own sake. If Marvel Comics wasn't the custodian of the Marvel characters in key symbolic ways (that have meaningful consequence), Marvel Comics would have been sold, or even closed, years ago ... which of course leads to the fact that

(2) Marvel Comics IS the custodian of the Marvel characters, and despite its inability to MAKE any money, it can definitely SCREW UP character and team brands that are worth BILLIONS, meaning that management of Marvel Comics is sort of like those United Airlines gate agents back in Chicago -- they can't make anything meaningfully better for the company but BOY can they make things worse. Imagine how crazy that relationship must be.

(3) Unlike DC, where film and television rights are held by the corporate parent/affiliate, Marvel Comics has to deal with the fact that Disney only owns the Avengers, while its competitor Fox owns movie and television rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four, its competitor Universal shares rights to the Hulk, and its competitor Sony owns (subject to recent sharing) the rights to Spider-Man. A thankless mess and once again something where Marvel Comics can very, very easily cause more pain to Disney than they can ever return in profit.

(4) The sheer scale of the filmed entertainment effort they are required slavishly to support and NEVER to interfere with and into which they have minimal creative input. Comic editors and art directors are longtime veterans with some pretty conservative and slow-to-change habits. They came up when there might be one feature every year or two years in the Marvel universe and maybe one kids-focused animated show at any one time, and those were going to be from the FF / X-Men / Spider-Man universes that didn't share corporate ownership. Now there are half a dozen high-profile live-action television shows all going at the same time with three or four more coming down the pike, several animated shows (with significantly greater visibility / brand importance), and three to four features every year, and the significant majority of them are all Disney productions or co-productions.
posted by MattD at 9:13 AM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

And as people get more in to following creators rather than characters, they gen even more frustrated at the Big Events. It doesn't matter how good a writer Brubaker is, if he has to stop his story and pivot to "Macaroni Month, Brought to you by the Great Taste of Kraft Mac and Cheese II - Everyone is Pasta!" then you are going to walk away from the format that requires those events and focus on other comics (such as Brubaker/Phillips's "Depressing Loner IV - Everyone is Pasta!").
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:15 AM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

(2) Marvel Comics IS the custodian of the Marvel characters, and despite its inability to MAKE any money, it can definitely SCREW UP character and team brands that are worth BILLIONS
...
(3) Unlike DC, where film and television rights are held by the corporate parent/affiliate, Marvel Comics has to deal with the fact that Disney only owns the Avengers

There have been rumblings in the fandom about suspicions that Marvel is deliberately invoking #2 from that list as a solution to #3, saddling non-avengers titles with crap storylines to alienate the fanbase and make it less attractive to the competing studios to want to hold on to the franchises in question due to the one-two punch of both a drop in pop culture capital, as well as the well of good storylines to adapt drying up.
posted by radwolf76 at 9:35 AM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Can I just add as a 45-yo female lifelong comic reader, this whole thread is exactly my experience. I have no idea why they keep fucking up so hard when pretty much every article *and* comment thread I read on comics says the same thing - it's the crossovers, stupid. Is *no one* from Marvel in charge of reading this stuff? When you have your audience consistently telling you what they don't want, and you keep giving it to them anyway, then complain about sales...? That's some kind of head-in-the-sand organisation.
posted by greermahoney at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2017 [9 favorites]

I bet everyone who has written What Is Wrong With Marvel articles also have a few, unpublished What I Would Do If I Were In Charge plot pitches. We're now on the 4th? 5th? generation of comics creators, so those lucky few who actually manage to be In Charge get to live out their fantasies all for the low, low price of conforming to the needs of a corporation's bottom line.

So basically, if you want to have Captain America ride a bear into combat with the Sons of the Serpent, you can, but he will have to have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese powers because of corporate mandate. Surely that's a small price to pay to live out your dream? And if you don't do it... there are ten more creators behind you who will do it. Come to think of it, why limit ourselves to just Kraft powers? Make Captain a Secret Spätzle, that will get USA Today talking. You can do that, right?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2017

I also used to buy dozens of Marvel books a month, but then there was a massive cross over, and the books came to Norway extremely jumbled, so I had to wait and wait to get the first installments. After some weeks I had a large stack of unread comics, and none of the books that opened the cross over had arrived. I just canceled everything and never read any of those last ones.
posted by magnusbe at 10:38 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but here's mine. I used to work in a comic shop, on and off for about seven years. I used to spend at least $20 a week on my pulls and also picked up other stuff. Until my current apartment where I actually have a lot of closet space, I spent about ten years with my bed on risers so I could keep my comic collection. I met one of my (now ex-) girlfriends because she used to work on my favorite title. I love comics. I looooooove comics.

I currently don't even have a local comic shop I patronize.

Why? Because of the lack of diversity. Because never in Marvel's history has a black woman written Storm. Because every time there's a reboot of anything, the women come out of it with fewer clothes. Because there are more known sexual harassers writing and drawing than women, and definitely more than openly LGBT+ folks. Because the big two still treat LGBT+ characters as more controversial than genocide, and we're less likely to get sympathetic treatment than vampires or nazis. Because cis straight white folks are almost always centered and the rest of us are demonized for low sales.

Because I can read awesome comics by women, people of color, LGBT+ folks, and people who fit into all of these categories at once online, and I can support them on my own terms as my budget permits.

Because the whole thing where Cap is a nazi makes me sick. I don't even care how they get out of this, it's disgusting and upsetting and all the more so in the current climate.

As far as the big two go, the only cape title that I'm even meaning to catch up on is Ms. Marvel. I hate all the super complicated crossover crap because it's always a detraction from the stories I actually care about, and if I wanted to be following whatever other books I would already be doing that.
posted by bile and syntax at 10:42 AM on April 27, 2017 [16 favorites]

I'm getting more into comics than I have ever been, and although I'm not a hardcore buyer, I do regularly pick up Squirrel Girl because it is fun, smart, light and feminist. I can read it, I can share it with kids I hang out with. It's like popcorn but healthier.

My daughter follows Harley Quinn and seems to successfully just ignore the multiple titles and sticks to the one she started with.

I do tend to buy collections instead of individual issues for anything else... Still waiting on the next Bitch Planet collection!

Between the huge selection of truly underground, self-produced mini-comics, the boom in web comics, the diversification of mainstream comics, and the massive media empire growing behind the biggest name comic characters (and the expansion of some smaller ones on Netflix), it seems to me comics have never been huger. There is literally something for everyone.
posted by latkes at 11:11 AM on April 27, 2017

as well as the well of good storylines to adapt drying up.

Being as the next X-Men movie is almost certainly going to be Dark Phoenix again, I'm not sure how much that matters.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:02 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

(It is a fact universally acknowledged that an X-Men series in possession of Jean Grey must be in want of retreading the Dark Phoenix storyline.)
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:06 PM on April 27, 2017 [12 favorites]

Just a note about decompression, in defense of Warren Ellis and because goddamnit, it would bring me back to single issues, he did kind of repudiate it afterwards. He wrote the comic Fell, which had 9 panels (almost) every page. Each one was densely packed. And they were $2.99. They were great. And then stuff happened and they never got past issue 9. Self contained, dense story, good writing, inexpensive comic. Last published close to 10 years ago.

I was never a huge one for superheroes and like everyone here is saying, now I don't even bother. I read the wikis and i09 to find out what's happening and then watch the movies. Also, how can there be four different Spiderman stories going at once? Even with two Spidermen (Spidermans?) that's still at least twice what I need for comics.

My favorite run on any superhero series is still Milligan's X-Force/X-Statix run. Because I didn't need to know anything about the past. Because they showed what would actually happen if superpowered people were running around (death, exploitation, etc.), but were not grimdark about it. And because Milligan had the guts to kill off the entire team at the end (this really isn't a spoiler, it isn't part of any story, it's literally in the last few pages of the last book) so that no one would keep them going in any form. And they've never been resurrected. Which is amazing for comics.

I want to read Coates' run on Black Panther, but given what's in this thread about there being multiple books for it after his run, I'll stop after that. Because fuck that noise.
posted by Hactar at 12:11 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Even with two Spidermen (Spidermans?) that's still at least twice what I need for comics.

Spiders-man
posted by the phlegmatic king at 12:30 PM on April 27, 2017 [11 favorites]

"There have been rumblings in the fandom about suspicions that Marvel is deliberately invoking #2 from that list as a solution to #3, saddling non-avengers titles with crap storylines to alienate the fanbase and make it less attractive to the competing studios to want to hold on to the franchises in question due to the one-two punch of both a drop in pop culture capital, as well as the well of good storylines to adapt drying up."

Weirdly, I get more fun out of Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone than I have out of Marvel comics from a store, and have for the last couple years, but the embargo on any new X-characters in that game is real and pretty much an open secret as attributed to Sony control. The creators get asked questions like, "Really, are there any other reasons — even flimsy, improbable ones — that there haven't been any new X-men characters despite digging pretty deep into the Defenders and Avengers also-rans?" and the responses are like, "… we're really excited about the new versions of the Guardians of the Galaxy characters." Pointedly non-denial topic shifting.
posted by klangklangston at 12:51 PM on April 27, 2017

One point I'd make in (further) defense of Marvel is that corporate story is really, really hard.

On the Lucasfilm side of the house Disney has instituted a vaunted centralized story group ... and yet TFS was a frightfully boring THIRD retread of Han Solo and [kid] "blow up the Death Star" and Rogue One had so little idea what its story should be that its trailers and billboards were promoting what was basically an entirely different movie.

By contrast look at how tight and entertaining (albeit crazy) "Legion" was when it was able to use the FX ghetto and Noah Hawley auteur privilege just do its own thing with simply the sketch of the outline of one marginal comics character and only had to fill eight episodes.
posted by MattD at 1:01 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

My local hero Bob Chipman has a good take on this: Marvel may be more interested in using their comics to explore ideas with more lucrative, non-comic potential (movies, tv, streaming). That might mean reaching out to as many new audiences as possible, 'traditional markets' be damned.
posted by es_de_bah at 1:16 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

The new Star Wars movies were the first and second highest-grossing films the year of their respective releases. I would say they were pretty well-received.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:55 PM on April 27, 2017

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese powers

I am pretty sure I have those too. It all happened when I was opening a can of cheese bolus from a package of Kraft Deluxe Mac and Cheese, because the little thing had ripped off, and I needed to use a can opener, which left jagged edges. Even though, realising this, I said out loud "don't cut your finger on one of those jagged edges", I cut my finger immediately on one of those jagged edges. The cheese analogue mixed with my exposed fingermeat and I tasted brass in my mouth.

I am not sure what powers I have been gifted with, exactly. Perhaps they need some time to "awaken", or perhaps I didn't boil the noodles correctly, and thus stymied the transformational cascade. I also added pepper and mustard powder, as is my wont, and that may have had something to do with it. I guess we will wait and see. I just hope my new incredible powers are cheesy, rather than pasta-y, because I need to get back in the low-carb zone (part of the extended universe).
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:59 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Even with two Spidermen (Spidermans?) that's still at least twice what I need for comics.

Spiders-man

Spiderman Too: 2 Many Spidermen
posted by asperity at 5:36 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

There’s good money in a movie about Spider Mennonites.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:42 PM on April 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

The new Star Wars movies were the first and second highest-grossing films the year of their respective releases. I would say they were pretty well-received.

Give it five years. I'll be shocked if anyone still cares, and if they do it will only because of Disney's marketing arm.

It amazes me that the new Star Wars movies make me miss the prequels.
posted by pan at 7:52 PM on April 27, 2017

Give it five years. I'll be shocked if anyone still cares, and if they do it will only because of Disney's marketing arm.

Cats in what sense? In that they feel passionate, or in that they go? Because the first seems debatable but I have little doubt about the second.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:09 PM on April 27, 2017

They want to believe that Marvel is their friend, not just a guy who has gotten used to hitting them up for money again and again.

Fucking exactly. I bought all of Death of X and all of IvX because I'm a hard core X-Men loyalist. And I'm actually happy to buy X-Men Blue twice a month because I cannot get enough of young Jean Grey. I pick up other titles here and there. But you tell me Secret Empire is polluting my comics for the next three months, and I'm out, I'm not buying twenty dollars worth of books every week just so I can keep up on the story.

Black Panther is also always on my pull list. But Lord help me I'm not buying world of wakanda too (probably partially because of my traumatic memories of the X-Men swimsuit edition in the nineties, "take a Wakanda wild side!", Storm in a leopard print bikini, Rogue in a bikini which is just plain dangerous, and I'm bisexual but still totally horrified by my heros in spandex lounging around like Playboy Bunnies.) Ms. Marvel had been, but forgive me Kamala, I am not into this dumb video game storyline and I am NOT buying Champions on top of all this.

And OH MY GOD Monsters Unleashed was unreadable.

It really feels sometimes like they're a drug pusher, who's goal is to get you hooked on one thing, then offer you that thing along with this other thing, just trying to chain you along.

Marvel Unlimited is excellent. I keep trying to convince myself not to buy the books since I'm totally just spending four dollars to not have to wait six months to read it. Sometimes I win that struggle. Sometimes I don't.

I may be actually one of the closest things to a Marvel Zombie still remaining. But I'm still not buying every instance of a line.

I mean except X-Men. Obviously.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:22 AM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

(It is a fact universally acknowledged that an X-Men series in possession of Jean Grey must be in want of retreading the Dark Phoenix storyline.)

I got into X-Men after the original Dark Phoenix storyline via a favored uncle. At the time, I was a gloomy pre-adolescent figuring out my grandfather's death. X-Men appealed to me compared to the Disney and classic Superman stuff I had before, because it had some truths that stuff at my age level danced around. Death happens. Death sucks. Death is one of those things that changes the orbit of the objects around it. So on the one hand, Dark Phoenix was an event that informed the moral positions of everyone associated with the X-Men, and on the other hand, the appearance of a Jean Grey look-alike was a big red flag that something really wrong was happening.

I think a few years after that, death got a lot cheaper in mainstream comics. And that had a couple of results. The first is that I think a larger number of minor characters ended up brutalized in really horrific ways. And the second is that it really doesn't matter because that character will be rebooted at later point anyway. The perpetual undeath of franchise characters seems to involve horror inflation. Send Wolverine and Kitty off to different flavors of hell as a plot device. Maim Angel and Northstar. Eventually the editors will have to undo it, and later take it even further. The high stakes of those storylines are paid in Monopoly money.

I think that completely misses a key idea about how literary horror works, and is one reason why I just don't have much patience anymore for open-ended series involving franchise characters.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:00 PM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

In a press release to ABC News, Marvel begs readers to be patient with Cap/Secret Empire storyline, and essentially admits they're trolling us with a huge spoiler:

At Marvel, we want to assure all of our fans that we hear your concerns about aligning Captain America with Hydra and we politely ask you to allow the story to unfold before coming to any conclusion.

What you will see at the end of this journey is that his heart and soul -- his core values, not his muscle or his shield -- are what save the day against Hydra and will further prove that our heroes will always stand against oppression and show that good will always triumph over evil.

posted by zakur at 6:53 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I don't think I've ever seen that kind of caveat from a D.C. Or marvel before.
posted by bq at 9:05 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Go ahead and read an un-enjoyable story featuring your favorite being evil, for years on end, because we'll erase it all at the end!

...yeah, not seeing that as much of a selling point.
posted by tavella at 2:57 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

How’d it work out for Cerebus?
posted by Going To Maine at 3:03 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Then again, perhaps Cerebus was just shedding layer upon layer until its beating heart was exposed, which is a bit of a different thing.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:06 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

"What you will see at the end of this journey is that his heart and soul -- his core values, not his muscle or his shield -- are what save the day against Hydra and will further prove that our heroes will always stand against oppression and show that good will always triumph over evil."

DONT WORRY GOOD NAZIS WILL SAVE US
posted by klangklangston at 3:19 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Just like in real life!

CUT TO: Captain America in the Americabunker as resistance forces close in. His right hand holds a pistol, cocked and ready to fire. His left hand holds a cyanide pill.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:23 PM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

« Older Flavor Text | The Shipping News: Containers (Podcast) Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

Cap being a Nazi can't help, but...
April 26, 2017 4:34 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Cap being a Nazi can't help, but... April 26, 2017 4:34 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Cap being a Nazi can't help, but...
April 26, 2017 4:34 PM Subscribe