Does anyone actually buy comics from the "big 2" anymore?

Does anyone actually buy comics from the "big 2" anymore?

Last DC books i bought were Swamp Thing and Animal man after Blackest Night. They were fun enough attempts to recapture what Moore did with Saga of the Swamp Thing but ultimately not lasting quality.
Marvel wise i think the last thing i bought was Planet Hulk.

I've heard the comic book stores are dying because the switch to 'signal boosting the right narrative' by both has put off traditional readers who used to buy like 30+ books a month and the new tumblr crowd buy an issue of ms marvel once a month and nothing else and thats killing them off.

Do you still buy comics that often at all? Now things like DMZ, Hellboy and so on have finished for me i think i buy 1 comic every 3 months and nothing but the the cucked 2.

What about you?

*and nothing by the cucked 2.

I'm not buying anything from the big two, but I am pirating some of DC's current lineup. They've moved away from 'signal boosting the right narrative' and back to actually trying to appeal to their audience, though quality is still a bit of an issue.

I'm pretty sure that comic sales tend to number in, like, the 10-20 thousand range. By all modern metrics, that's abysmal. There's no real impact with those sorts of sales and if this was any other business it would have died decades ago.

Fortunately for Marvel and DC, they hold immensely valuable IPs for Hollywood and merch.

The impact is on the stores not the content producers. CBR i think had an anonymous article by 3 separate store owners saying how 'the change to appeal to manga loving social justice teens alienated and pushed away all the 20-50 something decades long regulars who used to buy every book they put out and now buy nothing and the new crowd buys a squirrel girl and the odd manga and thats it'.

I assume they must buy digital on their moms ipads or something because the friendly local mom and pop stores are dying off because of it.

I went to the comic shop for the first time in forever, recently. I picked up some Superdad and Flintsones, and a few other books not from the big two. I grew up on Marvel, I love the universe, the characters, the history… but I didn't pick up a single current Marvel book. I just didn't want a single book they had out. Though I did pick up every old issue of Rom that I could find, old Marvel stuff is still great for me.

I buy DC.

They're putting out a lot of good shit.

'Trying to recreate the magic of old DC' is their code for 'fuck the social justice pandering, it isn't selling comics' as evident with Marvel

Nightwing #3 selling more than Civil War 2 is an absolute mauling from DC. marvel are fucked

I read online on readcomiconline.to for the newer stuff. I'm very cautious about the new stuff they put out so I read and only buy if its good. I mostly end up buying older stuff from the big 2 because they are better written usually.

Same here, I've been going to my LCS and I'll probably start a pull list the next time I go.

This "Drawing the Line at 2.99" thing is pretty good too, I was able to get Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Nightwing, and Aquaman for like $16. I'll probably start picking up that flintstones book too.

Although I can see them trying to go a bit down the social justice road, but unlike Marvel, they're doing it correctly. The only minority character I can think of that's void of personality is Not-Robin from the new Batman book.

Excuse me?

I bought Snotgirl in the last 3 months. Thats it.

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Straya, cunt?

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I have yet to find someone who can adequately justify paying more than the cost of a gallon of gas for 28 pages with ads and giving Dildo money, when you can get such things for free.

It's like you're one those cucks online that get off to financial domination.

If you dont think mike mignola earned his hellboy money there is no hope for you.

Is mignola working for Dildo?

Please tell me why these men deserve any money.

I'd rather read them irl than scroll down panels on a computer screen, I'd also like to support my LCS, the owner of which is even a family friend.

Also like said, royalties.


Are you trying to suggest that Mike Mignola is working on Hellboy for DC?


If we're talking about image they do, if we're talking about other companies it varies pretty heavily, and also varies based on if the person in question is a writer or an artist.

Also why are you listing editors to convince me not to buy comics? I'm fairly sure they get paid by salary, not independent comic sales.

You're demonstrating a very severe lack of knowledge about how the comic book industry works.

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Go back to making threads about Power Girl

Oh fuck off with that "Muh LCS" bullshit. Your family friend is an idiot. Just go into his shop and look at all of the garbage DC and Marvel have conned him into buying, garbage he can't fucking return if it doesn't sell. He'd be better off playing the stock-market or the lottery if he wants to gamble with his money every fucking month.

As for Mignola, I'm suggesting you're a retard for using the fact Mignola occasionally puts out a comic as a justification for people to buy crap from DC and Marvel.

If there's anyone that has a severe lack of knowledge of the horror-scape that is the comics industry, it's you.

user… I have some bad news for you.

Miles Morales is such a Mary Sue

I know it's not feasible, but do you guys think it could be profitable to publish regular reprints of the big 2 older series?

No big fancy omnibus editions, maybe monthly trades?

Are you kidding me? If the Big Two wanted to, they could publish volume upon volume of reprints. They've done it before, with the Showcase Presents or the Marvel Essential series, but they could literally start shoving out their entire publishing history starting tomorrow. It'd be nothing but pure profit for them, as it's all shit that's already bought and paid for.

However, reprints are the last thing the Big Two want to do, especially DC. They want to avoid going into reprints as it would mean certain downsizing and some higher-ups losing their jobs. None of them want to become Archie, so that's why they avoid publishing a lot of reprints like the plague.

DC are already basically in reprints.

The comic companies themselves don't want to have to go into reprints because, as you said, it means a lot of people lose their jobs. Their parent companies on the other hand, have started to wonder loudly and often why the fuck they're bothering to publish new comics when they've got plenty of old comics they can just repackage and re-sell.

the latest issue wasn't spectacular, at least it's not going SJW though.

Personally I'm looking to reduce my Marvel list . And I don't expect DC's "Drawing The Line'' bullshit to hold for long.


>do you guys think it could be profitable to publish regular reprints of the big 2 older series?
Hard to say, because there's very little incentive in reprinting old material that might be a hard sell to anybody besides hardcore fans, especially if they're obscure. There's also the issue of pricing and shelf space.

Marvel has been going through a "every blonde female must be BLACKED" phase. I blame Bendis.

hes the louis ck of comics.

That doesn't count I did buy issue 4, but that was at a smaller game story that happens to have a few comics

My local LCS has been going strong for well over 20 years, and that's including a change of location and a name change.

There are also 3 other comic book stores within 20 minutes of each other in my area, and they're all successful.

But we've already established that editors likely don't get paid for individual comic sales, so why do you keep bringing up these "y-you don't want to support these jews, do you?" points?

There is literally no such thing as a good comic in the history of comics. Everything has never risen above tolerable.

Anyone who buys any kind of comic or visual novel, regardless of who worked on it or published it, is a chump that has no taste or understanding of what is good.

Sorry this wasn't your steven universe only board fagget.

You don't understand: literally everything related to comics and cartoons is shit. There has never been anything good and any idiot that would perpetuate such falsehoods is nothing more than cancer.

I'm not some fan of something you hate. I'm the one person that understands everything is shit, and that probably makes me the most intelligent and sincere person on Holla Forums.

I'm thinking of going to the comic store more often. I recently thought about buying every issue of Rom Spaceknight, but that'll take me a while, and I'd rather get what I can in local stores first. The reboot had a good first issue, so I'll be collected that as well.

I don't know why you retards even come here. This isn't Holla Forums for comics and cartoons.

Yeah, this isn't Holla Forums for comics and cartoons at all, you newfaggot.

you what

The only thing close to that here is EVERYTHING SUCKS THE INDUSTRY IS DEAD, and that's just casuals that are desperate to fit in.

Yes, waifufags need to be gassed.

Comic book shops need to push alternatives.

Currently reading: Island, Tomboy, Paper Girls, Letter 44 and Phantom comics.

Bizarrely enough if some user here hadn't posted a (reaction?) image of the main character face from Tomboy I would have never gotten interested in it's art and wanting to read the comic.

I would love to be able to purchase that KFC DC comic or if more comic had that sort of "less serious/more over the top" style.


Last comic from DC I got was Multiversity (it's nice to actually read a 40 page comic compared to the 20 page ones). And before that probably New 52, All Star Western.

With Marvel it would have been with the last Daredevil series written by Mark Waid. I'll admit that it did feel like it went downhill with the San Fran location change. Also Waid seems to have become a cranky old man who doesn't keep up with the times apparently.

You're really hurting your argument that Holla Forums isn't just Holla Forums for comics and cartoons.

Okay, it shouldn't be Holla Forums for comics and cartoons.

I plan on getting Diesel by Tyson Hesse.

I wonder what brings a Holla Forumsmrade to be such a passionless husk of a human being. Here we are, shitting on comics because we want them to better, because we fucking love them, and this faggot comes in, with absolutely no caring of comics outside of his crack-like addiction and his bizarre idea that comics are in competition with something, trying to extinguish our passion for comics. Trying to get us to be the same shit-guzzling asshats he is and be have us lower our standards to his already rock-bottom level.

Well I'm not going to let him. I fucking love comics and I will keep on shitting on them until they shape up and get better. He can go fuck himself with his willful blindness he wants to infect us all with.

Fuck you, Holla Forums actually gives a shit about vidya.

What, do you think fucking full/co/ should be some circle-jerk "Holla Forums is love" shit where we're spoon-feeding casuals and actively creating a userbase that doesn't give a shit about comics or cartoons?

Fuck that noise. I fucking left cuck/co/ because of that shit.

You're one of those AAA-gobbling goys that fell for the "Holla Forums hates everything" meme, aren't you?

He's just an autistic, like that lolcow who pretended he hacked the board. Enjoying comics is something we should all do. There have been some good storytimes lately, even some not great ones that at least got us talking.

You are in this thread telling people not to buy or read comics.

Oh shit, we really need IDs… I have no idea who is who when I wrote this:

So one guy wants Holla Forums to be the Holla Forums of comics… but why?

Tell people not to buy comics? Fuck yes I told people not to buy comics. Make those fuckers earn your money by not being shit.

Tell people not to read comics? When the fuck did anyone say that?

But if you don't buy the good books they produce, how will they ever improve.

Well, let's be realistic here: they won't.

When you buy a comic at your LCS, none of that money goes to DC or Marvel. DC and Marvel already got their money when the store owner bought the comics. That's how the direct market works, and the store owner gets a discount in exchange for not being able to return them if they don't sell. After that, the only investment DC and Marvel have for the books selling is for the store owner to buy more, which they insure through variant covers, interconnecting stories, etc.

Now on the off chance the book is good and popular enough that multiple stores make big orders of it, DC and Marvel still would not be able to interpret it's success. They won't see that it was well written and only look at surface elements, believing that was the key to the book's success. DC getting apes on every cover, comics being in black and white, comics getting darker in tone, cross-over events, and Wolverine in nearly every single Marvel title are all examples of this line of thinking.

This is why capes, for the most part, are doomed to failure. Even if you bought every good issue of capes and those issues were popular, all that will result is more bad capes. All that success won't change the fact that the people running capes are greedy idiots.

That's a lot of typing, but… who gives a fuck?

There are a few good comics out there, and I prefer reading a comic in my hands to just reading it on a site. Comic shops also are largely game shops, which give space for gaming, meaning they're a part of my community I want to support, and most fans would probably agree. If the big two miss the point of what made me buy a good book, I just stop buying when they don't produce the good books. If they fail at the free market, that's on them. But if anyone here wants to go out and buy a book, with their money, you come off as just an asshole for telling them they're spending their hard earned money wrong.

It's probably the same guy

I actually referred to the wrong post, I meant the guy who says no one should buy comics at all is autistic. Guys like that are pathetic as fuck.

You came here from reddit, didn't you?

If you don't understand why Holla Forums would dissuade you from wasting your money on comics when free alternatives are available, if you don't understand people shitting on comics, if you think we've got to give a shit about your feelings, then you should probably go back to the disgusting casual hell that spawned you.

Faggot.

In most cases the writer gets royalites.

Except when a book sells well or is generally popular, they give the writer more work in an attempt to replicate that same success.

Except they are obviously not.

Pathetic.

Cut Jimmyfag some slack. All the superdickery has scrambled his brains.

Yeah, I think we'd have longer runs on books if books were more successful to begin with. The only flaw of things is that so many books are written by bad writers (especially Bendis getting the option to write any character he wants to fuck with) that it messes up the shared universe, making it hard to get attached to characters because the overall setting is no longer believable.

Comics did just fine in the 80s and 90s because even the bad writers were somewhat consistent with characters (Hell, writer feuds over character depictions were far more noticeable back then).

But Hastings is writing some decent stuff for Marvel (even if the art in Vote Loki is the ugliest shit ever) and the work Priest is doing on Deathstroke as DC has me hyped. We really just need more consistent and good writers. But Marvel is obviously trying a thing with writers and artists who never worked at comics before, and I think they're hoping it'll strike gold more often then it bombs… which I don't think is going to happen.

Hopefully one day we'll get good writers having decade long runs on books again. That shit was great.

Long runs with one or more writers for a few years with actual progression that matters with an end goal down the line that progressively happens depending on the writer's decision. You know, like an actual story that matters and doesn't turn into a product that never ends. That would be my dream for mainstream comics.

It's not like Marvel's current writers are any good. I'd take a rotating series of guys who don't quit their day job and write a few issues for some extra shekels over Spencer and Bendis any day.

Honestly, trying that with a "showcase" compilation series would be better than anything Marvel has done the past decadeish.

No. I didn't buy a single big two book in nearly 8 years, last one being one of early trades of Secret Six relaunch. Nowadays, I just buy occasional trades of creator owned stuff and eurocomics. Cho's new creator owned series that is supposed to come out this fall will probably be my first floppy in a decade.

But we have that, it's called a story arc.

Yeah, the best writers really knew how to work the monthly format. During things like Peter David's Hulk run or Mark Gruenwald's Captain America run, there were obvious long story arcs and series of arcs that people remembered and preferred on their own. But they could also have arcs flowing into eachother, one of the biggest strengths of Claremont's X-Men run. Hell, for a while Uncanny X-Men was coming out twice a month and following several different factions of the team (mostly the time from when they used the siege perilous until X-tinction Agenda brought everyone together again). Runs and characters are what matter in an ongoing comic, writers who only know how to put together a plot (without considering how to keep the characters real and interesting throughout) are the problem with a lot of modern books, especially from Marvel.

Royalties aren't instantaneous. Otherwise most writers wouldn't have to juggle multiple projects to make a living.


I think they're trying to court potential in-house talent. DC has been beating them in terms of exclusive deals lately. The allure of the Image scene doesn't help.


Longer runs would be nice, but remember that there's the issue of commitment. These days writers and artists don't want to be tied to one book when they can be doing others.

Why should there be demonizing of people trying to keep this place from being infested with total cancer like the cuckchan tourists and reddit fags?

Yeah, I can only see Image taking more and more talent from them, especially if Marvel really thinks an event every few months is going to keep readers coming back. They've really squeezed as much outrage and shock as they can, character deaths are pretty much meaningless and they're fucked if they keep relying on Bendis to write all their major books. I'm honestly surprised when they have any good artists at all.

I think the last time was when they did the new 52. The first wave of them. Mostly trash and some good ones that eventually ended prematurely. Now, I don't bother all that much with the big 2. Been checking out other comic companies and seeing what they have to offer and European comics that get translated officially. I'm really liking Paper Girls from Image.

Fucking this, to my knowledge the big 2 both still do page rates.

I realize this thread is full of casuals, so for those that don't know, page rates are probably the most jewish thing in the comic book industry in 2016. They do not pay artists enough.

Elaborate. I would think that page rates would be fine providing the artists get paid a certain amount per page

DC and Marvel could pay page rates that are worth a living wage, but they're cheap, so they don't.

This is why you have an influx of cheap Brazilians and tumblr artists.

I don't see how this is a problem with page rates themselves

It allows them to give new artists the shaft because they don't have any industry experience.

There's not really any way to recognize quality either, just name recognition. Quitely or Romita will be getting paid because they'll draw people to the book, not because they're amazing artists.

Ideally they'd just be paid a living wage via lump sum, or Marvel would just put writers into contact with freelancers like Image does when a writer doesn't have an artist.

Because Console-Wars or because Anime or some shit.

Yeah, that's why I can't even get mad at the artist who does the Iron Man book, I get mad at Marvel. Because there is NO incentive for him to draw the book instead of just pose models, because if posing models if faster, he gets paid the same for less work. Simple as that. And why would he care about pride of "putting in his best stuff" for Marvel if they're fucking him anyway? And he's drawing a shitty, boring script by Bendis where nothing fucking happens, so he's just treading water from payday to payday. It's like any other dead end job, it just happens to be drawing books for Marvel.

They shit on their fans in favor of cuck shit that does not even sell. Even giving them 1p would only make things worse.

Fuck no. Not since nu52 went and took a massive shit on everything DC.

Don't worry, Rebirth retcons so much of that that most of the New 52 may as well not have even happened.

im honestly surprised at how many people keep copying the cover from days of future past. Don't get me wrong its a good cover just annoyed that everyone is using it.

I was honestly surprised by this when I read the first couple of issues. Really good so far.

Hastings is pretty good. I actually am interested enough to reach Vote Loki everytime it comes out cause his writing is at least somewhat interesting. But the art being completely disgusting means I'd never actually buy it.