What's the biggest mistake in your opinion that comics inertly have?

What's the biggest mistake in your opinion that comics inertly have?
I mean, for me it's creating a "universe" where all character coexist. If they where separate in their own world or have same level heros in the same world it will improve the quality of comics overall without having power level fights or retard handicap to have them all in the same comics with pants over head explanation why Luke cage can fight along side with Sentry against black bolt
>green arrow in arroworld similar to batworldso I guess they can coexist
>Spider-Man in spidy world where he fights small crime and wacky enemytrying to paying bills and deliver pizza

You can take a handful of heroes and put em in their own worlds. The X-men and other heroes have no business being together. If Mutants are hated then every single hero should be hated. You shouldn't have a world with multiple pantheons existing unless you know how to make them work without stepping on each other's toes. You can't have on prophecy of the end of the world be correct if you have multiple pantheons existing alongside. Then that would mean every faith and belief is correct. Then you'd have to have every end of the world scenario happen the same way.

Then there's stuff like Superman. A character who's so ridiculously powerful that there's no reason for really anything bad to happen with him around. A Justice League universe could work fine with in reason but you'd need to dial back numerous power outputs to have these characters be plausible. There's suspension of disbelief then there's backing yourself into a corner by making a hero too strong. You can't have struggles or problems if a character is practically a god.

The biggest mistake is a toss up between Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
As soon as comics became """art""" and had to have 2deep4you and edgy stories, they went down the shitter.

At least DC is trying to return to fun; Marvel will take a bit longer.

That's exactly my point, Superman shouldn't have any other hero with him….Batman should stay on human level…. the best stories are almost alone style like Lobo or GotG that have no or little character mixing

I see your reasoning but each character have a inertly different stlye. Batman have always work better been gritty and dark rather then jolly good fellow
Spider-Man was always the wacky enemy with shit life management and sometimes a dark moment

But if you make Batman cartoonish like Adam west or Superman like men of steel then it falls apart.

Monopolistic distribution system and a lack of variety.
IIRC one issue of the Japs' One Piece manga sold 2 millions first month, compared to less than the newest Avengers comic which sold less than a hundred thousand or something.

I'd suggest a Brave and the Bold style Batman over purely dark Batman.

You have to understand that comics are more of a niche hobby here in the US than in Japan, but can this please not turn into another my /a/ content is better thread?

Different user here. I find it's hard not to do that when the western stuff is so low quality.

Capes. Fans.
If we remove capeshits and retarded fans such as you, we could actually have an actual decent comics.
Other than that; American comic industry and comic culture needs to die off. Actually any well established american entertainment industry.

Punisher got separated, John Constantine got separated.
The only that mostly need this are the the X Men since has no rational explanation for why humans hate them while love other metas like fantastic four.
The worse of this is that Marvel tase to remove them for years to despite fox and nothing yet.

To be fair, while modern japanimation is irredeemable trash, but modern manga still has plenty of good stuff going on, if you know where to look in /tg/ manga thread, for starters.

And you realize those other don't need their comics being fix?

Universes as used by DC and Marvel have always been a way to cross-promote and populate their respective comics with ready-made concepts and characters with relatively little work. To segregate every franchise and character wouldn't just take more work, it'd tie hands with arbitrary edicts that wouldn't guarantee quality work and would arguably make comics harder to sell than they already are. Every gimmick counts.

Punisher was never separated, he just got a book under the MAX imprint. Constantine was separated, but was folded back into the mainline DCU after Flashpoint. Worth noting his Vertigo ongoing ended at a pretty high number.

When was this? Before Siegel and Shuster?

I have your same problem OP but its with the Xmen and the other marvel heroes.

I know some X-Men comics like to have alternate universes but alot of them are still in the main marvel universe and I just cant see alot of shit flying. Especially the Mutant round ups and sentinels. I seriously never could see how heroes like Captain America would sit idly by as certain X-Men stories were developed.

and the only explanation to why people hate mutants over regular heroes came from Wolverine in Ultimate Spider-Man with "Do you know how you got your powers….there your not a mutant" . I havent read alot of comics in a while but I really remember that one.

My head-canon for supers never stopping them is that they tried one time to catch him, but because they threw a wrench in his meticulous planning, the mission went sideways and a lot of innocents ended up dying. After that they stay away, afraid of what might happen if they try again.

General lack of professionalism in the American comic book industry. Many problems would disappear or be reduced, if people in comics would hold each other and themselves to higher standards. Industry itself would also be taken more seriously.

Other than that, it's generally how comics are made and sold. Every books is an episode consisting of 20 to 30 pages on a low quality glossy paper that collects fingerprints like crazy. Only place to get physical copies are dedicated shops. Books themselves are created by self-important writers obsessed with fads, and by artists who are willing to work for pennies. Individual issues are eventually collected into trades.
Sticking to that one restrictive model is just stupid and it hurts everyone. Imagine if entire film industry was shoehorned into only making 20 - 30 minute long TV episodes, designated to run for years, and with constantly rotating staff. And if most of them were just slight variations within one genre. It would be shit, and so is disproportionate segment of American comic industry.

Stories themselves are not the problem. It's just that the rest of American comic industry went on to poorly imitate them, but only when it comes to superficial elements. Elements like paneling, color choices, and general amount of thought that went into these books were largely ignored.

Where the fuck do you think you are? Talk like a normal person or go back to tumblr, you faggot.

I prefer manga to anime. Manga has good stuff and has a higher entry gate than anime, which is something I appreciate because most weebs are insufferable all lower case witty bitches who's only argument is "k", or something along those lines. Normalfags also aren't trying to hijack manga, as it's nothing more than a one volume novelty to most people.
I also agree that anime became almost universal garbage after the turn of the century
Is manwha any good?

that exists already

fuck off

Where do you think you are, faggot?

Is noticeable how the XMen are always mentioned in these threads about shared universe fuckery, they also are the ones who mostly fuck with the continuum time-space just to bring back some irrelevant dead character that no ones give a shit about

I think the word you're looking for is "inherently". Anyways, I can't think of an answer that isn't tied to cultural baggage or the Big Two's shitty practices. None strike me as problems inherent to the format.

that they're inferior to japanese manga

Issues. They have issues. Even with all the crap they put out, if they organized it right, they'd be making tons more money.
Keep everything in volumes and have different runs very clearly labeled and organized so it's easy for new readers to pick up.
This is why Japan, Europe, and the indie scene are doing so much better than the Big Two.

You don't know how much I hate that magazine-type paper
I have Civil War and Infinity Gauntlet printed on regular paper pages, they still hold up very well, but then the company that re-published said titles suddenly switched to glossy paper, and everything went to hell after that. Born Again, Man without Fear, Hellboy, and a shit-ton of other titles, all printed with that magazine-esque paper, and it's a pain, my 3 issues of Born Again, 3 months after I bought them and the pages are sticky and humid
Fuck magazine paper

Floppies are the bread and butter for most comic publishers though. The straight to trade model is risky because enough books still need to be sold to turn in a profit. And that's not easy for indie publishers going up against the known quantities of the Big Two. Without the floppies and the direct market, those publishers can't gauge/build interest or raise the funds necessary to even entertain the idea of releasing only trades.

Burning money to get money has never been a sound strategy

Magazines. That's how the Japs gauge interest.

You may be correct only in the Waifu area, Japanese "heroes" are weaklings with nonsensical powers.

The single biggest mistake was having multi-part stories become the rule, rather than being the exception.

There was a time when if you bought a comic with Superman, you'd get a complete Superman story in 22 pages, with a resolution to whatever problem was set up. Even if you hated it, it was at least a complete ~thing~ in its own right.

At some point comics lost the idea of, say, producing one Batman story a month. Now it's all one long Batman story; or more accurately, some writer comes onto Batman for 2-5 years and does an "arc," usually consisting of interlocking multipart stories. And the problem is if you're not digging it, too the fuck bad, Batman is going to be running down that groove for the next couple years. At least with big characters or teams you usually have 2-3 comics to choose from; if you like, say, Daredevil, and he has only one comic on the stands, and some writer comes on Daredevil and his idea sucks, you're fucked for the next five years. So you stop buying it and Daredevil just gets fucking canceled.

This is the model the Big Two have been running on since the second half of the 80s at least and I think it's the single biggest reason for comics' decline. I mean the logic is, if you're a hardcore fan, how cool is it that instead of lots of little three-act Batman episodes you get one long EPIC Batman saga? It frees artists and writers to pace out the story more naturalistically so you can dump old comic conventions like narration or awkward exposition, but then it ensures every comic in your serial is uninviting and incomplete and drives away everyone who's not in that little hardcore fanbase that will reliably follow the character year after year.

It took a very very long time for it to come to this and it's certainly not the only factor—fundamentally it's changing media technology more than anything—but I'd say the single biggest mistake comics made was foregoing episodism for dedicated serial arcs.

Many popular European books do just that and they still sell better than American comics. Books like Thorgal or Ekho release in one thick (~50 pages or more) volume released about once a year. Other than that, magazines and anthologies, as already said.

...

Biggest mistake of the comics industry?

Brian Michael Bendis

What confuses me about Bendis is that literally everybody hates him, but Marvel keeps putting him in charge of more and more. I mean, sure, he had fans after Ultimate Spider-Man which wasn't bad, but the more years pass the more people hate him.
It's not just Holla Forums, any site I happen to read the comments on they hate the fuck out of Bendis regardless of the community feel. SJWs and normies want him to get the fuck out too.

Once upon a time Bendis could make good (or at least decent) comics.He certainly had his faults, which made some people hate him. However, he had a fanbase and Marvel kept promoting him for being a recognizable name, which isn't common for comics at this point. But now he's got his hand in so many cookie jars, his decisions and style saturate all of Marvel, so his original fanbase is tired of him, and the people that never liked his shit in the first place are especially infuriated. On top of that, he's not good if there's no one to say no, just like most other creators, so now he's just plain shit on top of everything else.

And that's kind of my point, why did Marvel go out of their way to promote him of all people, and why didn't they stop when everyone turned on him?

Management insulated from the consequences of their actions, payola, and the Old Boys Club, I'll wager.
We'll see if Disney feel they have to trim the fat.

Trimming stories down to 2 issue arcs would be a great improvement.

Because they still like Bendis for some reason. He got hired in the first place because Marvel higher ups, Quesada in particular if I remember correctly, liked his work in independent comics. Then Bendis was successful with Powers and Daredevil, which only let Marvel like him more. Considering how much goodwill he has with Marvel, Bendis is probably pretty competent when it comes to corporate politics too.

Ya gotta realize user, there was a time when Bendis was a fresh-faced young Turk everybody thought was going to shake up and maybe even save Marvel Comics. That time was 2002-2003 when people mostly thought of him as The Ultimate Spiderman and maybe the Daredevil guy. If you were used to longwinded Chris Claremont style dialogue, then Bendis's patter-style dialogue was something that felt very different and funny.

10+ years later the gags are stale, you can see how empty his style is, and his once-forgiveable flaws are huge gaping holes. If the guy had any integrity he'd admit he's out of writing juice and either move to being an editor or just go do something else. Marvel will never get better as long as it remains Bendisburg.

Uh yeah DKR and Watchmen led to some pretentious comics, especially in the '90s.

But I don't think the blight of the industry right now is pretentious comics but rather comics that seem self-important in the same way that a ranting meme-speak social media post seems self-important.

Basically the problem is narcissistic "heroes" written and drawn by narcissistic creators and megalomaniacal editors.

What about Bendis word-diarrhea or Tom Breevort sell-out crossover screams "too much self-importance grim'n'gritty"? Nothing

His early 2000s stuff was great. He was a borderline revolutionary comics writer and there was even a legitimate discussion as to whether he was the best newcomer since Miller and Moore.

He had solid indie crime comics, which wasn't even really a thing at the time, then he started a Daredevil run unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Different type of storytelling. Different type of dialogue. A different type of realism. The basic touchstones were classic Marvel, but it was filtered through crime noir and had dialogue like a hip movie or television show, pacing like a cop drama.

And then he did Ultimate Spider-Man, which while not totally original, proved that he had massive range. It seemed like he was basically reinventing the character for the new millennium and that Bendis's take on Spider-Man would become the equivalent of what Miller did for Batman Year One in the '80s in terms of "Okay now everyone thinks of this as the emotive start."

What he was doing was the equivalent of "What if '80s Chris Claremont was actually being ghostwritten by Alan Moore? How much more impressive would Alan Moore have been at that time." Bendis was innovative and successful and had that kind of range.

Then he did New Avengers, which basically became the signature Marvel Comic of the '00s, their biggest series of the decade and stable market-leader for years. It was the title that affirmed Avengers over X-Men as Marvel's biggest franchise.

Unfortunately New Avengers (and Avengers Disassembled) was shallow crap, with everything being lazily plotted and open-ended. Bendis's writing took a nosedive. Unfortunately sales didn't and he became Marvel's golden boy forever status.

His lazy writing and lackadaisical characterization became Marvel House Style writing. It's a cancer that's been eating Marvel away creatively for over a decade now, and sales are finally showing this. It's hollowed out the actual product into flimsy "nothing burger" (ugh) productions.

Yeah. New Avengers was fun at the time but looking back on those early issues (admittedly I haven't looked at them in close to a decade) you can already see the cracks starting to form. No attention to continuity, quips before characterization, constant 4th-wall poking "lol member how gay and lame comics used to be" meta jokes. As long as Bendis isn't trashing something YOU love it's a fun ride; then he killed off Alpha Flight in a filler issue, off-panel, to build up some new character nobody even remembers anymore (I sure don't), and while I still enjoyed Avengers after that it was like "oh, this guy really doesn't give a fuck huh."

Also he's probably the A no. 1 culprit responsible for "decompressed" storytelling (e.g 24 pages = 3 scenes) becoming the thing for almost a decade so fuck him for that too.

huh, new info
guess this is why some writers hold him in regard

I hate that so much. Nothing happens in comics anymore because it's all stretched out.

I'd say is the continual run ignoring continuity and all that stuff. Batman should be decrepit fuck in many iterations, same with a ton of other heroes, and there's usually no long lasting consequences. Which severally limits what can and can't be written about, Wally dealing with being the successor to the Flash made for a great story. Why can't there be more long lasting effects to actions. And ultimetly just fucking finishing a story, end the batman's story or at least Bruce's.