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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 5, 2020 12:15:41 GMT -5
Let me ask this for those who dislike writing for the trade-what would you suggest they do when the book trade (where trades sell) is the growth industry and the direct market (where single issues are sold) is shrinking? Remember wallets speak louder and more effectively than internet posts. For me the obvious answer is to abandon the periodical format altogether. But that would cause massive upheaval to the economic life of comic shops and cause hardcore fanboys to go into apoplexy. Again wallets speak louder than internet posts and more people are putting their dollars into other formats than the single issues, so fans are telling publishers to focus their stories for those other formats despite what they post on the internet. -M I just think that not every story needs to be six issues long, you can have trades that are collections of shorter stories. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 12:19:05 GMT -5
I'm of the same mindset.
I can think of some great consecutive 70s Batman issues that would have made a great trade (I'm thinking of Batman #310-315, although I accept that's a personal preference). But it gets back to my "tail wagging the dog" comment. By making a lot of stories 6 issues long, regardless of whether such a tale needed 6 issues to tell, it has led to contrivance and decompression. I don't doubt that a classic like "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" would have been a five or six-issue tale had the decompression mindset/policy been around then.
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Post by rberman on Jan 5, 2020 13:28:32 GMT -5
One more thought-rberman brought up people talking about sports-and the one thing I would add though, if you looked at the percentage of people talking about sports online vs. the number of people who watch sports, the percentage would be a lot smaller than you would think-there's just a lot more people who watch sports than read comics so the numbers seem higher. -M Dunno. All my Sports-watching friends on Facebook talk about sports with great frequency. They make cryptic posts like “That was awesome!” in mid-game, as if they were posting on a live stream. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 15:48:20 GMT -5
True. I've never understood tweeting/posting during sports events. Wrestling fans are the same.
I was on a wrestling forum years ago and when I checked the Raw topic the day after, it seems some people must have been at their laptops/PCs for the entire duration of the show. Me? Wrestling or otherwise, it has my full attention - and after it's over (24 hours or so), then I'll post some thoughts.
Someone once asked me if I wanted to live tweet with her during Doctor Who. I politely declined. I'd rather, you know, watch the episode - and give it my full attention. Discussion can come later.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 16:17:53 GMT -5
Let me ask this for those who dislike writing for the trade-what would you suggest they do when the book trade (where trades sell) is the growth industry and the direct market (where single issues are sold) is shrinking? Remember wallets speak louder and more effectively than internet posts. For me the obvious answer is to abandon the periodical format altogether. But that would cause massive upheaval to the economic life of comic shops and cause hardcore fanboys to go into apoplexy. Again wallets speak louder than internet posts and more people are putting their dollars into other formats than the single issues, so fans are telling publishers to focus their stories for those other formats despite what they post on the internet. -M I just think that not every story needs to be six issues long, you can have trades that are collections of shorter stories. Short story collections cannot even get published in the book trade by major publishers. Most are now published by self-publishers or vanity publishers because they do not move units in the market. They are dog sellers. There is no market for short fiction in the book trade-very few magazines print short fiction any more, book publishers do not do anthologies any more, etc. so why would comic publishers, who operate on an even narrower margin than book publishers want to move into a format where it has been demonstrated over and over again that customers do not want it because the do not buy it when it is published? Lots of people say they want done in one stories and short stories. However, when those are done, sales are poorer on them than on longer stories. Wallets speak louder than internet posts, and the market has spoken on short fiction and done in one stories. Creatively, sure the industry could benefit from it, but economically it's a suicide move, and creativity has never overridden business realities in mainstream comics. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 16:26:19 GMT -5
I'm of the same mindset. I can think of some great consecutive 70s Batman issues that would have made a great trade (I'm thinking of Batman #310-315, although I accept that's a personal preference). But it gets back to my "tail wagging the dog" comment. By making a lot of stories 6 issues long, regardless of whether such a tale needed 6 issues to tell, it has led to contrivance and decompression. I don't doubt that a classic like "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" would have been a five or six-issue tale had the decompression mindset/policy been around then. It's funny that you should mention Batman, because it is largely the Batman comic that is responsible for the move towards story arcs of set length within an ongoing series. Starting with Year One in Batman 404-408, which at the time was marketed as a mini-series within the series, a sales pattern began to emerge. Year One outsold the issues around it with standalone stories by a decent margin, and then sold again in trade, and kept selling becoming an evergreen seller. They tried it again a bit later with Ten Nights o the Beast, and again, the mini-series within a series sold better than surrounding issues and had a second life as a trade in the emerging trade market. Death in the Family soon afterwards did the same, and then the Batline as a whole was doing it on a grander scale and Legends of the Dark Knight was built on that model and other books and other publishers followed suit. Why? Because consumer dollars told them the audience liked this and would buy it in larger numbers when they did it. And since sales drive publishing plans, the more fans bought these things up, the more publishers did it that way until it became the norm and ongoings were now driven to produce trades. It wasn't something foisted on fans by the whim of a publisher, it became the industry standard because fan dollars spoke loudly saying this is what we want and will buy, despite what people posted or wrote in the fanzines (or early internet forums or bulletin boards). Wallets always speak louder than fan letters or posts, and fans spoke pretty clearly with their dollars telling publishers what they wanted. I have said this many times-fans get the comics their buying habits deserve. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 16:31:46 GMT -5
Then why aren't I getting the comics MY buying habits deserve?  |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 16:35:20 GMT -5
Then why aren't I getting the comics MY buying habits deserve? I didn't realize you were plural...  -M |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 5, 2020 18:57:42 GMT -5
Then why aren't I getting the comics MY buying habits deserve? I didn't realize you were plural... -M That was a royal we. @taxidriver1980 let slip that he’s a member of the British royal family before catching himself. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2020 19:36:17 GMT -5
I didn't realize you were plural... -M That was a royal we. @taxidriver1980 let slip that he’s a member of the British royal family before catching himself. Well we better not say anything or King Mob might come for him...  -M |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 6, 2020 11:05:29 GMT -5
I just think that not every story needs to be six issues long, you can have trades that are collections of shorter stories. Short story collections cannot even get published in the book trade by major publishers. Most are now published by self-publishers or vanity publishers because they do not move units in the market. They are dog sellers. There is no market for short fiction in the book trade-very few magazines print short fiction any more, book publishers do not do anthologies any more, etc. so why would comic publishers, who operate on an even narrower margin than book publishers want to move into a format where it has been demonstrated over and over again that customers do not want it because the do not buy it when it is published? Lots of people say they want done in one stories and short stories. However, when those are done, sales are poorer on them than on longer stories. Wallets speak louder than internet posts, and the market has spoken on short fiction and done in one stories. Creatively, sure the industry could benefit from it, but economically it's a suicide move, and creativity has never overridden business realities in mainstream comics. -M While it's true in prose I don't see it a true with comics; collections like Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others, Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others regularly outsell the stand alone Hellboy trades and the same goes for Usagi Yojimbo and those are two just off the top of my head. Stories are better when they're only as long as they need to be, and when collected they're going to sell just as well as other collections. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2020 17:52:45 GMT -5
This is interesting:
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Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2020 22:43:38 GMT -5
In the Claremont documentary, Liefeld complains about late Claremont X-Men stories (before he was kicked off the first time) being too talking and lacking in action. At least he's consistent in thinking that the terrible 90s Marvel and Image comics were the sweet spot. Deluded, but consistent. |
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Post by hondobrode on Jan 6, 2020 23:37:58 GMT -5
I bought Marvel heavily, like all of us did at some point, up until DeFalco. I knew it wasn't going to be good, and creatively IMHO, it was mostly bad. I remember follow PAD's Hulk and Marvels and skipping most until Quesada and Palmiotti thankfully had the Marvel Knights imprint.
Joey Q got promoted and things were mixed but there was still some good stuff.
Pretty much by 2000 I was down to maybe 5 % of my purchases being Marvel; possibly less.
I was hopeful for the recent FF relaunch but was disappointed and dropped it after # 11.
I've always been a huge DC / Vertigo fan, but Vertigo hasn't been good for a decade or so, and DC bloats out the big Superman, Batman, JLA franchises and I don't feel like playing anymore either. I've got a nearly complete run of Super-titles from COIE and am behind and probably not going to pick them up again.
The DC titles I do buy are non-franchises that I can enjoy on their own : Freedom Fighters, Hawkman, LoSH. The DC enthusiasm has been dialed down quite a bit but still above Marvel.
The 5G coming Crisis-style event ?
I don't care anymore.
Part of why I don't care is because I honestly have hoarded way too many thousands of issues that I've never read, and if I read non-stop until I died I still wouldn't be able to read them all.
Part of that was that sick completist mentally most of us had at one time.
I no longer just buy tons. My hope is to finally re-box and catalog and purge along the way and enjoy what I've got. This happens about every 10 years or so.
There's very little I see anymore that I HAVE to have. Part of that was the old days pre-internet; would you see it again ? What's everyone talking about ?
I guess I've mostly peaked in my buying anymore. What money I do spend will be filling in holes in the collection, which I'm not doing now cause I don't remember what I have, had, got ruined somehow, etc.
I'll never go completely cold turkey though. If nothing else, I've come to appreciate the older comic strips more and more as I get older, and they're a very small part of my collection.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 7, 2020 7:57:11 GMT -5
Let me ask this for those who dislike writing for the trade-what would you suggest they do when the book trade (where trades sell) is the growth industry and the direct market (where single issues are sold) is shrinking? Remember wallets speak louder and more effectively than internet posts. For me the obvious answer is to abandon the periodical format altogether. But that would cause massive upheaval to the economic life of comic shops and cause hardcore fanboys to go into apoplexy. Again wallets speak louder than internet posts and more people are putting their dollars into other formats than the single issues, so fans are telling publishers to focus their stories for those other formats despite what they post on the internet. -M I don't think it needed to have every trade be 6 issues... I think they could package trades more logically... have a smaller 4 issue volume when that stories warrants, or combine 2 or 3 to have an 8 issue one. They do this occasionally to accomodate the rare annual/event special/crossover. I get the value of having them all the same price and size, but nothing is more annoying than a cliffhanger after you've spent money on a book (novels or comics, really) |
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