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Post by Hagbard on Apr 11, 2024 18:51:15 GMT
My local store is a horrible shopping experience and they refuse to carry anything other than the big two and image. Still, I heard Ashley Wood did a black and white batman story for the new Batman: Brave and the Bold series so I thought maybe I’d see if the local store has it. I found it, but there was no price displayed on the cover. When I went to the check out they said it was $7.99. That would be 8 bucks for a couple of pages in an issue with a bunch of other artists/writers whose work I can’t stand. Maybe it’s because I don’t read many Wednesday comics, but I can hardly believe that price point. The price to value ratio is so wildly off. You get far more quantity and quality from alternative self-publishing or small presses.
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Post by dominocorp on Apr 13, 2024 2:01:50 GMT
I can hardly believe that price point. The price to value ratio is so wildly off. You get far more quantity and quality from alternative self-publishing or small presses. Not to mention manga... It really is amazing. Mainstream publishing is involved in an insane, basically abusive, relationship with their reading base, forcing them to buy badly made product that their dedicated fans don't even like, but feel that they 'have to' have, at insane prices that pad out the decline in readership from that same loyal base.
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Post by Scott Gerard Ruhl on Apr 14, 2024 22:19:43 GMT
That would be 8 bucks for a couple of pages in an issue with a bunch of other artists/writers whose work I can’t stand. Maybe it’s because I don’t read many Wednesday, but I can hardly believe that price point. The price to value ratio is so wildly off. You get far more quantity and quality from alternative self-publishing or small presses. And there's advertising in it! At least self publishers can justify their price point by not having major advertising offsetting the cost. I have a lot of guilt about pricing my own books so high ($10), but I'd kill to have a King Kong movie or Pepsi ad on the back cover if it paid for printing costs.
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Post by Hagbard on Apr 15, 2024 19:36:29 GMT
Yes, manga is an interesting counter point. Although mainstream manga still has some similar issues. After a while the decompressed storytelling starts feeling like the authors are just trying to string the series along for as long as possible. I’ve been keeping up with the translations of Oshimi Shūzō’s Blood on the Tracks, and, good god, that series could have been tightened up. Eventually, it starts having the familiar “I can’t believe I have to buy another tankōbon just finish the story” element. Sometimes quantity is antithetical to quality.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Apr 18, 2024 0:06:49 GMT
My local store is a horrible shopping experience and they refuse to carry anything other than the big two and image. Still, I heard Ashley Wood did a black and white batman story for the new Batman: Brave and the Bold series so I thought maybe I’d see if the local store has it. You probably already know this, but Ashley Wood has two things going at Image right now. There's a thing called Tales Of Syzpence (sic?) that's like a two-story anthology he does half of, and today I saw a comic called 7174 AD that's all him. As for ads, as mentioned by Scott: Weirdly I don't even think mainstream comics are subsidized by advertising anymore, as when I look at something, it's all house ads. (Or ads for movies based on characters the publishers already own.) It's like they fired the people whose job it was to sell advertising as a cost-cutting measure years ago, or more likely, the circulation numbers are no longer good enough for it to be worth it.
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Post by junkflower on Apr 18, 2024 0:09:36 GMT
Considering that most manga "people like us" might want to read now float in the $25-$35 range I'm not so sure they're quite the bang for ones buck they used to be...
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Post by dominocorp on Apr 18, 2024 18:07:05 GMT
For anyone following this stuff closely over the last few decades and think a rising tide rises all ships, these numbers are staggeringly bad: www.comicsbeat.com/comicspro-releases-results-of-comics-retailer-survey/I still believe people within art comics/literary comics who think the direct market doesn't matter are wrong, and that fact that it barely exists now is really sad, because it COULD be a great thing.
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Post by chocolatemoloko on Apr 21, 2024 16:42:55 GMT
I used to be a Wednesday warrior when I discovered my local LCS. But after following alot of monthly comics I realized that I wasn't getting any satisfaction reading any of them, and I just ended up with boxes of them (I started around the time DC Rebirth started). There are still a few "Monthly" series I follow but I'm really hesitant to add any new ones due to alot of them feel like movie pitches.
I do try to order everything I can through them to give them business because I do like everyone that works there, and they're always open to new stuff.
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Post by dominocorp on Apr 29, 2024 21:40:06 GMT
going through a real copper age phase, read Superman: Man of Steel 1 by Louise Simonson w/ Jon Bogdanove (many more people worked on it as well) from 1991. Very nicely done and entertaining comic, have read of ton of comics from 1983-1993 recently and at some point all of them have a panel or two that feels checked out or rushed, this one seems very inspired throughout. Louise Simonson, very good writer.
this is the start of the 'linked superman stories every single week' era (though not the official start of triangle era, which began 19 weeks prior). I read the superman books every week from 1996-97 and very much enjoyed them, but didn't read what was considered the really good phase, from 1991-1993, which was edited by Mike Carlin, rather than Joey Cavalieri....tho the Cavalieri era has Stuart Immonen (on Adventures of Superman) working on it, who I loved. Anyway, all these comics: maybe the last gasp of Superman stories published when the Wednesday floppy comic was something close to (or at least not drastically removed from) mass medium status. Superman as it is now, read by no one, doesn't exactly make sense.
Bogdanove is really a special artist, as is Jerry Ordway.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on May 1, 2024 19:34:48 GMT
As someone who read the weekly Superman comics in the nineties, from Reign Of The Supermen to the "electric blue" era, and also loved Immonen's work, and is weirdly tempted to check out the earlier nineties stuff now thanks to Austin saying it's solid (although I am figuring I know this is not worth it, as I can basically estimate the upper limit of the enjoyment I would get out of such things) I still think that the nineties model of a basically weekly superhero serial split between four different creative teams is likely an oversaturation of the market for how much interest in a character there would be, and splitting up stories so they cycle through different creative teams is likely the most unsatisfying way to do it, both for the readers and for the creators.
Spider-Man in the nineties did a similar thing, during the Maximum Carnage to clone saga years, and while I read those comics during that time too, I kind of hated it. I distinctly remember thinking the Spider-Man comics got better when they stopped doing this, and each creative team instead had their own story arcs going- but I also got off-board soon after, in part because I was getting older and not satisfied by this sort of stuff but also because not doing it weekly broke the habit and made it easier to try out other things. (Although this of course is probably better for comics as a whole, and maybe even Marvel/DC comics as a whole - it only looks worse from the perspective of a corporate official wondering why the sales of their biggest characters are going down.) Certainly the idea of four separate Superman comics operating in parallel seems like too much! The weekly approach to Superman was balanced out by there being issues that worked as stand-alone stories at least some of the time, but I still feel like there was still a sort of sadomasochistic or adversarial relationship with the readers happening then too.
Throughout the nineties, Batman went back and forth between having stories in each title unfold separately or some crossovers, but it would be rarer for a crossover to be a "ok this story is now unfolding weekly across multiple titles" proposition. I'm sure there's an inverse relationship between what the readership would say they want and what sales bore out. But of course it's all more manageable at a price point of a dollar or two per comic vs what they sell these things for now.
EDIT: I also previously recommended the Man Of Steel annual John Paul Leon drew that Louise Simonson wrote to Austin as an example of a good example of JPL's work and am now passing that recommendation on to anyone else who might be interested. A stand-alone issue!
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Post by disneyweirdness on May 1, 2024 20:59:42 GMT
As someone who read the weekly Superman comics in the nineties, from Reign Of The Supermen to the "electric blue" era, and also loved Immonen's work, and is weirdly tempted to check out the earlier nineties stuff now thanks to Austin saying it's solid (although I am figuring I know this is not worth it, as I can basically estimate the upper limit of the enjoyment I would get out of such things) I still think that the nineties model of a basically weekly superhero serial split between four different creative teams is likely an oversaturation of the market for how much interest in a character there would be, and splitting up stories so they cycle through different creative teams is likely the most unsatisfying way to do it, both for the readers and for the creators. Spider-Man in the nineties did a similar thing, during the Maximum Carnage to clone saga years, and while I read those comics during that time too, I kind of hated it. I started reading superhero comics at the worst possible time, 1996. All those gimmicks and crossovers and stuff- clone saga, electric supes, Onslaught- that's what hooked me. Which is why my collection did NOT pay for my college education, sorry mom
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