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Author Topic: DC to "Reboot Everything"  (Read 150063 times)
Lantyssa
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Reply #245 on: September 26, 2011, 06:58:59 PM

Didn't really have time to comment this morning.  Should be going to be now, but that's the thing that gets me... it's bad porn.  If I want porn, there's an internet full of it.  For free.  If I pay $4 a month for something, it'd be decent writing which is much harder to come by.

It's not that I even find it offensive.  It's just so... juvenile.  And uninteresting.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
UnSub
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Reply #246 on: September 27, 2011, 05:55:39 AM

To add to the pile-on, these are theoretically DC's best attempts at getting readers in. Their best teams on books that are meant to grab the imagination of fans and non-fans alike.

Instead, the fans are unhappy with the weirdly bolted on continuity choices and non-fans are creeped out by all their fears about what comic books are these days being realised. WTG DC.


Sir T
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Reply #247 on: September 27, 2011, 06:15:09 AM

You know, its not like T&A comics cant work. Stuff like Dark Horse Comics "Empowered" is actually a pretty good comic AND its a  T&A comic as well. You just need to have the right level of respect for the characters and use a little imagination and humour. But basically her character is "I COME FROM THE PLANET SLUT WANNA FUCK BOOM BOOM" They could have just had a rocket launcher installed in a blow up sex doll for all the character this thing has. Some have speculated this is setting her up as some kind of damaged character, but if so its a stupid way to go about it and it startes you off as showing the guys as total assholes as well.

So you are starting off a comic by making the reader dislike every character in your comic. Way to go writers.

Hic sunt dracones.
Special J
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Reply #248 on: September 27, 2011, 06:26:49 AM

Yeah that's probably what I dislike most about these two books is they're just so juvenile.  DC goes through all this hoopla and end up lowering the bar, and they'll fail to attract a single new reader.

The content also overshadows the fact the artwork is just dreadful.  There are pages and pages of blogs that slag Rob Liefeld and his imitators and this stuff hits it almost note for note.  There's even a lack of feet.  Catwoman fares a little better until we get to the splash page and Batman's muscles have muscles.



Slightly old news but I didn't see it earlier in the thread.  Amanda Waller apparently got that stomach procedure...

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/09/14/amanda-waller-skinny-thin-reboot/

/facepalm
HaemishM
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Reply #249 on: September 27, 2011, 08:54:11 AM

But the bigger thing, again, is that the whole thing is a managerial fuckup on an epic scale. If I were Didio's boss and I wanted DC Comics to: a) make money from its publications and b) make the intellectual property it has already maintain value and make some new intellectual property with more value, I would be flipping out over this whole thing.

You are assuming Didio's bosses even care, which they likely don't. They see the press attention and in a few months, they'll see the sales numbers. It's going to have to be a lot worse than the (admittedly shitty) stuff linked on here. They don't CARE if it's manbabies with rubbed-raw Johnson's buying them, so long as they are buying them.

Of course, it doesn't sound like they are buying them, but to the suits, they won't give two shits about the content.

Sand
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Reply #250 on: September 27, 2011, 09:03:59 AM

I dont venture in this forum often so sorry for being late to the party. Saw this thread last night and initially got really excited. I read comics when I was younger and I thought, "A complete reboot? Hey here is a chance to get in on the ground floor of some of my old favorites like Batman or such." (ie at this stage Im a potential customer with money to burn.)

Then I kept reading the thread and found out they had created comic porn for 14 year olds.
No thanks. (Now no longer a potential customer.)

DC =  swamp poop what a god awful waste of a great chance to capture new market share.

Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #251 on: September 27, 2011, 09:29:34 AM

DCU:

NO FAT CHICKS

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DLRiley
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Reply #252 on: September 27, 2011, 12:04:42 PM

Today's Shortpacked

Inspired by this.

You don't even need to read the article, which is long and I skipped over parts myself.  The panels themselves are damning enough.  This whole reboot was a terrible idea.

This whole reboot is a terrible idea because wank material is used as...wank material?
Lantyssa
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Reply #253 on: September 27, 2011, 06:55:27 PM

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
DLRiley
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Reply #254 on: September 28, 2011, 01:18:59 AM

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Again the problem? I can understand starfire and since most of the rage concerning her is that someone made a show called Teen Titans, made her awesome, than discovered comic book teen titans pretty much sucks in comparison. Without the show, she will always be wank material with no interesting prospects except being the "off screen" fuck doll of the main lead. Then there is catwomen who.....hmmm....yeah....even in TAS the fans cried out and said "would she fuck batman already".

If you want a decent a female character A. Make a new fucking character, or B. Use a someone who isn't already closely associated with softcore porn (come on its not that hard) and make a non bleating feminist story for her. Wonder Women when written right is fucking awesome on steroids riding a flaming pony serving you apply pie, when written poorly she makes me want to cut my genitals.
Khaldun
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Reply #255 on: September 28, 2011, 04:34:53 AM

The new Wonder Woman is pretty good.

Catwoman was screwing Batman in pre-reboot comics. But it was fine because Ed Brubaker had done some great work making the character into a much more noir-ish crime-fiction sort of character, with a lot of complexity.

The basic thing is: almost no character can't be written well, and therefore interesting. Good writing can make anything interesting, including explicit sex. But bad writing tends to be more than just bad, it also tends to dissolve into a puddle of stereotypes and pandering. That's this case in spades, and the thing that annoys especially about it is that it shows how poorly managed much of this reboot is in relationship to its promise. Taking a character that a lot of teenagers and young adults last saw in a fun, energetic cartoon, a character who had a very clear and sustainable characterization, and deciding that she's better served as a joyless fuckdoll for two scuzzy antiheroes is offensive first for its idiotic miscalculation of potential audiences. You only go for the smaller audience which will never grow when you're telling a story that you feel committed to as a creator, that has to be told that way. That's not this case in any way.
tazelbain
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Reply #256 on: September 28, 2011, 07:30:01 AM

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Again the problem? I can understand starfire and since most of the rage concerning her is that someone made a show called Teen Titans, made her awesome, than discovered comic book teen titans pretty much sucks in comparison. Without the show, she will always be wank material with no interesting prospects except being the "off screen" fuck doll of the main lead. Then there is catwomen who.....hmmm....yeah....even in TAS the fans cried out and said "would she fuck batman already".

If you want a decent a female character A. Make a new fucking character, or B. Use a someone who isn't already closely associated with softcore porn (come on its not that hard) and make a non bleating feminist story for her. Wonder Women when written right is fucking awesome on steroids riding a flaming pony serving you apply pie, when written poorly she makes me want to cut my genitals.
Still it was a reboot, why they wouldn't use the version the char 1000x more popular than the other is just  swamp poop  Wasn't the point of the reboot to take the best of the characters and tash the rest?  Pretty damning that DC thinks this is the best part of Starfire.

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DLRiley
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Reply #257 on: September 28, 2011, 08:09:52 AM

Hey would this reboot be 400x better if they stuck to the animated universe definitions of characters? Mainly the JLU and TT? Yes. Will DC do that? No. I mean for fuck sake look at what they did to Harley Quin.... The reason they won't is because they are reselling old books to the same comic book fans, it doesn't matter if the potential audience is 30 times bigger, they just want comic book fans. The people most likely to applaud real character development for a character like starfire will bulk at the current prices anyway so DC doesn't want to sell to them.
HaemishM
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Reply #258 on: September 28, 2011, 09:33:42 AM

Wasn't the point of the reboot to take the best of the characters and tash the rest?

No, the point of the reboot was to sell 52 different #1's.

Furiously
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Reply #259 on: September 28, 2011, 12:43:09 PM

Wasn't the point of the reboot to take the best of the characters and tash the rest?

No, the point of the reboot was to sell 52 different #1's.

What? No varient covers?

HaemishM
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Reply #260 on: September 28, 2011, 12:45:29 PM

That's so 90's.  why so serious?

Khaldun
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Reply #261 on: September 28, 2011, 05:34:00 PM

Wasn't the point of the reboot to take the best of the characters and tash the rest?

No, the point of the reboot was to sell 52 different #1's.

But seriously, that's the logic of the entirety of American capitalism at this point: get me to next month. What happens after that? Underpants gnomes, who knows.
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Reply #262 on: September 29, 2011, 08:53:08 AM

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Again the problem? I can understand starfire and since most of the rage concerning her is that someone made a show called Teen Titans, made her awesome

Ehhh...what? I thought it was totally garbage. I was having trouble digesting the art, but man, grating dialogues, anime sweat drops, there's just so much I can take but Firestar being the 'star' of the show? Kill me now, it's like DeeDee from Dexter turning superhero. It's no wonder they never made Batman cameo in that series, he just wouldn't fit.


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Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #263 on: September 29, 2011, 09:49:12 AM

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Again the problem? I can understand starfire and since most of the rage concerning her is that someone made a show called Teen Titans, made her awesome

Ehhh...what? I thought it was totally garbage. I was having trouble digesting the art, but man, grating dialogues, anime sweat drops, there's just so much I can take but Firestar being the 'star' of the show? Kill me now, it's like DeeDee from Dexter turning superhero. It's no wonder they never made Batman cameo in that series, he just wouldn't fit.


as said in the comic above, the cartoon had 2million viewers. Also, it was aimed at a younger audience for which, it succeeded. It doesn't matter if starfire was a minor character, hell harley quinn didn't even exist before the cartoon and she's damn near iconic now.

The problem i DC is not adapting, they are trying to keep a death grip on the old and neglecting to realize it's not the 90's anymore and most of their readers have grown up.  This was the oppurtunity to actually 'reboot' characters, make them more appealing. what better time to make starfire more like the incredibl popular version?  Instead they just sort of went with what they felt was safe, changing only minor things but hey....paper comics will be dead in a decade anyways.

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Khaldun
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Reply #264 on: September 29, 2011, 10:50:56 AM

That's really it. Like it or not, the Teen Titans cartoon was an attempt to get kids to watch about and care about those characters by changing up the visual elements and the plotting (though it made use of a significant amount of the Wolfman/Perez Titans, in the end). It worked pretty well.

It's not that the nuDC should all look like that, but the lesson they ought to have learned is that the way out of the trap is by not having all your eggs in one basket. There should be stuff that feels like Go for a variety of moods, visual styles, imagined audiences, characters. Instead almost all of the new 52 books are basically just "Image Comics of the 1990s Redux". If they're not, they're niche-concept books for hardcore comic-book fans, like Demon Knights. (Which I like, mind you.)  About the only thing that had some degree of genuine rethink with an eye to a bigger world was Morrison's Action Comics, and even that isn't particularly daring or inventive in the way it messes around with the concept of Superman. (Nor sustainable: Morrison's rethinking of characters never lasts once he leaves a book.)
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Reply #265 on: September 29, 2011, 11:17:34 AM

TBH they'd have been fucked if they tried to modernize it, too.  Anime is the dominant style among the age range you're talking about targeting and that would just make the hardcore comic nerds rage all the harder.    Not to mention it seems (based on observation of material produced only) that among American comic artists you can't be "serious" if you don't follow the old American paradigms.

Could they have found a middle ground and invented a new art style? Perhaps focused more seriously on some of the slick stuff by the Sci-Fi Manga artists (Of whom I can only think of Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed because I'm only a tangential fan of comics anyway) Of course they could have. They could have also turned away from OMG TITTIEZ too, but hey.. hardcore fans follow their own minds on what people like.  You see it in games you see it in comics and magazines, too and it's always a cluster that ends with "where'd the money go?"

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Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #266 on: September 29, 2011, 01:11:35 PM

DC could have lost every single reader they currently have and still been ok because the potential market out there is so vast. Look at the people that watch dc cartoons or go to comic movies. The problem is not finding and audience interested in super heroes, the problem Is the image and delivery of those heroes to the audience.

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DLRiley
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Reply #267 on: September 29, 2011, 04:02:44 PM

DC could have lost every single reader they currently have and still been ok because the potential market out there is so vast. Look at the people that watch dc cartoons or go to comic movies. The problem is not finding and audience interested in super heroes, the problem Is the image and delivery of those heroes to the audience.

Lolz, its not even the image. Just the delivery. Always been the deliver, we just never had the internet to point that out. DC just wants to sell to people who are willing to pay their price for a comic book. The larger potential audience, which is not a joke there are millions of people who are more than happy to see batman, superman, greenarrow kick mook ass in 2 page glory, ain't interested in buying the books at DC price. That's the problem and always be the problem, because every since 1998 I can go online and download translated versions of scanned comics from japan or anywhere else in the world if I wanted for free, while to read a comic book I had to find a comic book store (good luck) or hope someone ripped the plastic wrapping in the local shoppers. The format isn't dying because Starfire is having sex with RedHood, fuck your 1million+ potential audience would consider :dat fan service the only saving grace of the entire series (here is another kick to the reasons why girls don't read, anime/manga, comics japanese cousin, has probably the most constitently degrading image of women to the point of a 10 page long tv trope page dedicated to the amount of manga where women are just wank material, yet GIRLS LOVE ANIME and not just the "for girly" section of it), its because the medium is expensive in an era when such media is free.

To keep in mind how free this industry is, when manga big wigs got tired of all these free manga rooming the internet they managed to close several sites, this was by the way in a one-two punch of legislation that banned anything deemed "pedophilia", which gave the japanese government working along with the american government, and anyone else wanting to tag along the muscle to demand content removed from sites, but can also come back 2 days later demanding the site be closed for violating intellectual property laws. The manga community was in a fritz and for days manga were super super slow to release (with the normal time being 1 day after the official release in japan). A few months later, almost a year, there are three times as many sites offering two times as many illegially translated manga. The new response by the manga industry? Well zip, while anime is actually agreeing to allow the internet to pick which translators get to work on their stuff for direct to hulu exports. The future sucks.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2011, 04:05:58 PM by DLRiley »
Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #268 on: September 29, 2011, 04:17:40 PM

Quote
anime/manga, comics japanese cousin, has probably the most constitently degrading image of women
'


You're reading the wrong manga/anime then, while most of the stuff popular in America on the porn on your hard drive may be degrading, there's quite a lot of female-centric content coming from japan that is just NOT mirrored in the US.

My little pony, fucking my little pony. 

Do you pay attention to this shit, do you know how popular this is now? I don't have numbers but I would not doubt the viewership for a cartoon about ponies, dwarfs DC's entire reader base across all their comics.  You can't just say it's that people don't want to pay the comic price, it's only one factor. 

Now, I'm not saying they need to specifically focus on "girl power" type characters, what I'm saying is that their characters are stagnant, unappealing for the most part and all designed to hit on the 'classic' comic audiences.

~a horrific, dark simulacrum that glares balefully at us, with evil intent.
DLRiley
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Reply #269 on: September 29, 2011, 04:46:30 PM

Quote
anime/manga, comics japanese cousin, has probably the most constitently degrading image of women
'


You're reading the wrong manga/anime then, while most of the stuff popular in America on the porn on your hard drive may be degrading, there's quite a lot of female-centric content coming from japan that is just NOT mirrored in the US.

My little pony, fucking my little pony.  

Do you pay attention to this shit, do you know how popular this is now? I don't have numbers but I would not doubt the viewership for a cartoon about ponies, dwarfs DC's entire reader base across all their comics.  You can't just say it's that people don't want to pay the comic price, it's only one factor.  

Now, I'm not saying they need to specifically focus on "girl power" type characters, what I'm saying is that their characters are stagnant, unappealing for the most part and all designed to hit on the 'classic' comic audiences.

Err...wow. Just look at the fall lineup for anime. By cover. Read a shounen. Any shounen. Look up gantz, or what "readers who like gantz also like to read". Oh dear god lolz, yes there are lots of manga that have good sometimes great female characters. But errr the other side of the coin is overwhelming sexist.

As far as an entire market of comics being dedicated to girls, well I kinda mentioned that in my post. But there is a large number of girls who just as well read the shounen, and its funny cause technically you can consider the shouji market bigger than the shounen but considering I'm talking about equivalents, shounen has more in common with regular old superhero comics we are used to in the states, than the volumes after volumes of girly pink stuff, which is why I strictly talking about shouji. And no I don't even out of pure curiosity read shouji or its seinen counterpart (well not on purpose anyway there are some series that I picked up that I figured out were the girly side of the coin, but didn't have the effect of shrinking my penis, those tend to be violent, and pretty damn bloody even by shounen standards...), no more than I would sit down and watch my little pony, I don't have a young daughter so... shounen/seinen for me.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2011, 04:56:24 PM by DLRiley »
Sir T
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Reply #270 on: September 29, 2011, 08:11:01 PM

Bloodworthing from the funny pictures thread


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Lakov_Sanite
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Reply #271 on: September 29, 2011, 09:11:20 PM

Kind of missing the point.  They don't need to appeal to women specifically, nor do japanese comics which while they do have a LOT of male-centric content still have  pretty robust female oriented areas.  What DC does need to do is branch out and try to appeal to people other than 40 year old basement dwellers.

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DLRiley
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Reply #272 on: September 29, 2011, 10:00:43 PM

Kind of missing the point.  They don't need to appeal to women specifically, nor do japanese comics which while they do have a LOT of male-centric content still have  pretty robust female oriented areas.  What DC does need to do is branch out and try to appeal to people other than 40 year old basement dwellers.

And I'm saying that only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics. The typical non 40 year old basement dweller male main barrier to comics is both the accessibility AND the cost. Comic books aren't even being judged by the content of their pages, because only 40 year old basement dwellers bitch about it and mostly because only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics. The medium is way too far behind the times not on content (yeah comic books are pretty stupid right now but whatever not the point) but on ways to get kids to read it and monetize on their reading.
NowhereMan
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Reply #273 on: September 30, 2011, 03:49:23 AM

DL's got a valid point that one of the biggest comics have at the moment is the delivery. I haven't read a physical, monthly comic in years because tracking them down is a pain in the ass and they cost almost much as a paperback novel. Now the cost issue isn't one where I think they're gouging me but the focus very much has been in improving the quality of the monthly books (high quality images, good glossy paper, etc.) which comes at the cost of it pretty much competing with novels in my "entertainment spending budget". Fuck if I'm going through Play.com or similar then they're competing with DVDs and individual monthly titles simply don't provide enough bang for the buck entertainment wise. That's without even getting into the quality of what they're selling.

I have purchased trade paperbacks but generally they're only worth getting when they're telling self-contatined stories. One of the problems the industry has is they've focused marketing and storytelling so strongly on selling all titles to everyone (fucking event comics) that they can't just release a trade collection of a single title because half the stuff going on is happening in other books. The on-line distribution is simply becoming something they need to do, especially getting the comics into a format they could release on Kindle or similar as that then gets them not only into a market where they can easily deliver but without printing costs hopefully allow them to price at a level where comics become an impulse purchase for people.

As for the quality, not following up on popular interpretations of characters is stupid. Changing those characters into a format utterly opposed to what people have proved they like is fuckstupid. The Starfire thing is taking centre stage because it's also just offensive and puerile writing, which means it isn't just people that like the character that can get annoyed about it. DC comics are suffering because they're focused on creating a single and harmonious world, which means that they 'can't' (read: won't) put out titles in very different styles since having a fun and Teen Titatns style Robin title would be hard to tie into to them having Robin's parents killed and sodomised in front of him by Killer Croc in the latest Grimdark Batman: Event comic title. Of course it would be possible to have different interpretations of characters in different titles as long as you have a talented enough editorial team to ensure that they remain consistent in terms of knowledge and activities. As far as issues go this is probably secondary to the format/cost/accessibility issue in terms of the company's performance. If they were putting out a better product they'd be doing a bit better but they'd still be fucked in terms of getting the numbers they need.

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Khaldun
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Reply #274 on: September 30, 2011, 06:38:25 AM

The delivery/cost point is a completely valid one. Same point about why a lot of musicians opposed digital delivery so strongly even IF they were getting paid off by it, because they were used to delivering an album of content with one or two songs worth of effort and getting paid an album-rated price. DC and Marvel's comic-publishing arms can't see what the other users of their IP can see: there are a lot of people who like superheroes in other formats. They just don't like schlepping to a comics store, looking at a rack full of confusing titles while a bunch of ill-smelling manboys elbow them aside, and realizing it's going to cost them $10 to read two comics. Digital doesn't solve that when digital is delivering essentially the same comic book at the ridiculously same price.

Right now the only reason DC and Marvel's parent companies are still agreeing to publishing, in all likelihood, is maintenance of trademark + promotion of IP + marginal profits from selling to the "long tail" of their few remaining readers. DC's management have come to the tragicomic conclusion that the answer to that is to publish comics just like they did in 1995 only with more boobs and grimdarkery, as if the reason they've lost audience since 1995 is undersupply of boobs and grimdarkery. I'm surprised none of the #1s had holographic inserts or glow-in-the-dark covers. (Maybe they did and I didn't notice.)

I honestly think there is a bigger market out there if they'd rethink delivery, fire all the Winicks, Kruls, Didios and other arrested adolescents, and publish a much smaller selection of much smarter and more audience-savvy properties. Make everything you publish something like Morrison's All-Star Superman: something special or Ellis' runs on the Authority or Planetary--thoughtful, fun, artistically distinctive, published in trade format for the first time not years later, something you can get critical or press attention for. Yes, that means a comic book shop that just relies on weekly sales is fucked. They should be anyway--any comic store that hasn't already retooled to be something more like Forbidden Planet (games, toys, SF/fantasy books, comics, etc.) should be out of business by now anyway.
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Reply #275 on: September 30, 2011, 01:29:09 PM

Have y'all seen the graphic novel section at a bookstore?  It's huge, and mostly manga.  But the Japanese stuff is a bargain compared to the American stuff.

Delivery is fine.  Value for what you're paying isn't.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
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Reply #276 on: September 30, 2011, 01:54:17 PM

That's true.  When you buy a tankoban for a manga, you're actually getting anywhere from 4-10 chapters of the story.  If it's a weekly series being collected, that averages out to about 18-25ish pages per chapter.  Now it's been a while since I've bought any comics, but I don't remember them being much more than 25-30 pages and those were on a monthly release.  Granted, American comics are a bit more involved since there is coloring involved versus the mostly black-and-white-with-screentones of manga, but still, as Lantyssa said, it seems you're getting more value for the tankoban ($9.99ish) than for an individual comic ($4ish) or a graphic novel ($12+??), even adjusting for the b/w vs. color issue..

I think another "problem" with comics is the dilution of the product.  I used to collect pretty religiously back in the 80s-90s, but the biggest reason I ended up stopping was the constant spreading out of the titles.  It wasn't even the crossovers so much (even though those did annoy me when it involved series I didn't read and didn't care to either) but the number of related titles.  I was mostly a Marvel reader, but the X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, Excalibur, blahblahblah series just got to me, because trying to keep track of which character was in which series this week got old.  I can understand why the companies did it (sell moar comix!) but it got to be a drain after a while and continuity (HA!) was a joke.

Compare this to manga series where backstories are sometimes retconned but for the most part, the character's history remains just that.  I think it's also a difference in the kind of stories being told as well.  Not that manga have deeper storylines (not by a longshot if you've ever read shonen) but there is something about the comic storylines that seem off to me.

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Reply #277 on: September 30, 2011, 02:07:56 PM

And I'm saying that only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics.

Only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers so only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers etc.

The smart thing would be to try to break out of the cycle and get some new customers. They can't do that the way they're doing it now.

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Reply #278 on: September 30, 2011, 02:11:26 PM

And I'm saying that only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics.

Only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers so only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers etc.

The smart thing would be to try to break out of the cycle and get some new customers. They can't do that the way they're doing it now.

To do that means changing there delivery (IE price and accessibility). They don't want to do that. Until they change the way the deliver comics to customers, they will always get the same customers who are happy with the delivery system.
Merusk
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Reply #279 on: September 30, 2011, 03:11:50 PM

That's true.  When you buy a tankoban for a manga, you're actually getting anywhere from 4-10 chapters of the story.  If it's a weekly series being collected, that averages out to about 18-25ish pages per chapter.  Now it's been a while since I've bought any comics, but I don't remember them being much more than 25-30 pages and those were on a monthly release.  Granted, American comics are a bit more involved since there is coloring involved versus the mostly black-and-white-with-screentones of manga, but still, as Lantyssa said, it seems you're getting more value for the tankoban ($9.99ish) than for an individual comic ($4ish) or a graphic novel ($12+??), even adjusting for the b/w vs. color issue..

I bolded the part I wasn't aware of.   Now it feels even more like a problem you see quite often in webcomics, an unwillingness to work for your market share.  I know I've seen some of you comic readers bitching that the big guys can't keep dates, yet Japan can push out weekly manga?  Really?  Marvel/ DC deserve to fail.

Coloring shouldn't take that much additional time.  They aren't using goddamn ink on board anymore  are they? If they are they're idiots and again, deserve to fail. 

The more I hear about comics the harder I laugh at how mismanaged an industry they are.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
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