Diseased #Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

[Manwithn0n0men]

There is a reason why I have repeatedly declared Joss Whedon the worst thing to ever happen to speculative fiction.

His entire canon is just cheap "LOL HERO SO #SNARKY! LOL VILLAIN SO #SILLY! LOL EVERYONE SO #REFERENCE!"

And the thing is....it became toxic because everyone started doing it

 

[Judge Holden]

And the thing is....it became toxic because everyone started doing it

Honestly even if the quality of writing and art was consistently great across the board and the creators had the best possible relationship with fans, and hell even if all the shit in the 80s and 90s that seriously fucked the industry up never happened, the industry as it stands with dozens if not hundreds of different series running indefinitely at the same time like eternal soap operas is utterly doomed to die.

The reason comics sales boomed bigtime from the 40s to the 70s is because at the time, they were literally the *only* easily accessible, storable, and regularly replaced form of entertainment media available to children and teens, and hell even adults in a lot of cases because of the following factors.

1. Radio and TV were on set schedules and thus 99% of the time people couldnt watch or listen to what they wanted
2. Movies had just as set schedules and once a film was out of theaters it may as well have vanished off the fucking planet given how little recourse there was to see it again
3. Video games effectively didnt exist until the 70s rolled in and took a while to find their footing.

If you wanted some form of non sport entertainment that you could enjoy at any time and any place, and that was not a literal fucking book, it was comics. Thus comic books made enough money to justify having all these different titles running in perpetuity.

Come the 80s however, and you have a whole bunch of these rules change.

1. TV companies realised targeting kids with cartoons made to advertize toys was a moneymaker and flooded networks with homoerotic cheese filled cartoons, which would by the end of the decade be joined by this strange new jap animation style being imported from abroad.
2. This nifty new invention called a "video tape" happened, and suddenly people could watch their favourite films/tv shows whenever they liked
3. Video games exploded in popularity and accessibility

All of which meant that comic books were looking decidedly less appealing to newer generations who were now surrounded by far more colourful and viscerally enjoyable distractions, which wound up driving comic books into a niche position at a time when shit was going really bad in the Industry given the whole 80s collapse thing.

After the 80s struck the mortal blow, the 90s well and truly sealed the fate of the industry with the exponential growth in home media and the introduction of the internet to normie homes which meant that there was literally no way the industry could ever compete the way it once did. The 2000s and following 2010s have demonstrated well and truly that the industry should have died twenty years ago while it still had a sliver of dignity left.

If Marvel and DC had been smart they would have changed the structure of their businesses to focus on limited runs by sole creators aimed squarely at those who still stuck around and those who were drawn in by curiosity, and thus ensuring a consistent level of quality, a minimum of audience fatigue, and far lower costs than eternally pushing dozens of different unpopular superhero soap operas onto the market. Hell just ape the manga business model entirely if you have to.

Instead they piss away the residuals they get from selling their IPs to TV and Movie companies on trying to fuck life back into the rotting corpse of their industry by latching on to whatever trend they think is kewl with the kids at the klub and plastering said trend on every square inch of their work.

The industry was always going to die. This whole SJW shit just ensured it will die without dignity and with nobody mourning its passing.

 

[CheezzyMach]

Honestly even if the quality of writing and art was consistently great across the board and the creators had the best possible relationship with fans, and hell even if all the shit in the 80s and 90s that seriously fucked the industry up never happened, the industry as it stands with dozens if not hundreds of different series running indefinitely at the same time like eternal soap operas is utterly doomed to die.

The reason comics sales boomed bigtime from the 40s to the 70s is because at the time, they were literally the *only* easily accessible, storable, and regularly replaced form of entertainment media available to children and teens, and hell even adults in a lot of cases because of the following factors.

1. Radio and TV were on set schedules and thus 99% of the time people couldnt watch or listen to what they wanted
2. Movies had just as set schedules and once a film was out of theaters it may as well have vanished off the fucking planet given how little recourse there was to see it again
3. Video games effectively didnt exist until the 70s rolled in and took a while to find their footing.

If you wanted some form of non sport entertainment that you could enjoy at any time and any place, and that was not a literal fucking book, it was comics. Thus comic books made enough money to justify having all these different titles running in perpetuity.

Come the 80s however, and you have a whole bunch of these rules change.

1. TV companies realised targeting kids with cartoons made to advertize toys was a moneymaker and flooded networks with homoerotic cheese filled cartoons, which would by the end of the decade be joined by this strange new jap animation style being imported from abroad.
2. This nifty new invention called a "video tape" happened, and suddenly people could watch their favourite films/tv shows whenever they liked
3. Video games exploded in popularity and accessibility

All of which meant that comic books were looking decidedly less appealing to newer generations who were now surrounded by far more colourful and viscerally enjoyable distractions, which wound up driving comic books into a niche position at a time when shit was going really bad in the Industry given the whole 80s collapse thing.

That doesn't explain Manga or novels' continued popularity in America.

In fact books are the only industry that bucking the digital trend and actually expanding physical sales.

 

[Judge Holden]

That doesn't explain Manga or novels' continued popularity in America.

In fact books are the only industry that bucking the digital trend and actually expanding physical sales.

Novels are their own thing, and pound for pound are cheaper to produce in bulk than comics due to lack of artwork which is why I distinguish them entirely from comics.

Manga has the same sort of industry model I mentioned at the end of my post along with a bunch of different cost saving/time saving things thrown in like a lack of colouring. I admittedly know little of the industry but from what I am aware there is a lot more focus on creator driven works...or beating the creator to do the works depending on how much pressure they are under, which generally results in a more consistent quality and "feel" of a work as opposed to throwing in any two bit nigger who sucked the right tranny dick to be given a writing job at marvel with a character they didnt even know existed until they were told to write for them.

 

[CheezzyMach]

Novels are their own thing, and pound for pound are cheaper to produce in bulk than comics due to lack of artwork which is why I distinguish them entirely from comics.

Manga has the same sort of industry model I mentioned at the end of my post along with a bunch of different cost saving/time saving things thrown in like a lack of colouring. I admittedly know little of the industry but from what I am aware there is a lot more focus on creator driven works...or beating the creator to do the works depending on how much pressure they are under, which generally results in a more consistent quality and "feel" of a work as opposed to throwing in any two bit nigger who sucked the right tranny dick to be given a writing job at marvel with a character they didnt even know existed until they were told to write for them.

I don't, when your argument is that comics are dying thanks to other visual mediums replacing them as cheap escapism.

If that's the case it would be affecting all printed media not just American comics and instead the opposite is happening books and manga sales are only growing. the only area that's stagnating/declining is American comics.


Except it really doesn't. The most popular manga have been running for decades they aren't "limited" in any sense of the word.

The main difference between Manga and American comics is that generally in Japan everything exists to sell the manga if a manga gets an anime it's typically to advertise the manga. American comics exist to advertise everything else which is why they are treated as an afterthought by the people that own them.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Shonen Jump comes out weekly. It costs $3.00, is five hundred pages long and has a circulation of 2 million. Its very existence makes comic book professionals salty because its proof that comics are still a viable medium if you're able to 1) produce a quality product, 2) at a reasonable price point, and 3) have the distribution system in place to get it into the hand of your target market.

https://twitter.com/ErikJLarsen/status/1162450687319429125

"guys if you pulled any one comic from SJ, charged a hundred times as much, and put it into stores that kids generally have no or limited access to, it'll do just as bad as my comic" - Big Brain Erik Larsen

 

[verissimus]

Spider Gwen or Gwenpoole... which is worse?
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So is the only time Ms. Marvel has rendered the world a great service?

 

[MirrorNoir]

I wonder how bad things are going to have to get before Joe and the hacks at Marvel will start listening to fans again.

Even Dan Didio acknowledges the Industry has a problem.

They are tacitly, half-assedly doing it now.

Hickman's writing X-Men and he just launched a plot device that threw out a good chunk of the last 7-8 years of franchise derailment and created an excuse plot to bring back pretty much every dead mutant in existence

MJ and Spider-Man are back together

Eddie Brock is Venom again

Fantastic Four's back

The Avengers are still irrevocably pozzed but at the very least, Marvel's tacitly ceding the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises to actual comic fans in order to use them make actual money and subsidize the SJW anti-life shit that has perverted the Avengers family of titles.

Also, DiDio acknowledged the problem them tripled down first chance he could to refuck things up, to the point that Doomsday Clock; the thing that EVERYTHING was building towards, was wholesale declared as "not canon" and not mattering whatsoever in the big picture, due to Snyder and King and Bendis staging a coup with DiDio and Lee's explicit conset against Geoff Johns first chance DiDio got.

 

[CheezzyMach]

They are tacitly, half-assedly doing it now.

Hickman's writing X-Men and he just launched a plot device that threw out a good chunk of the last 7-8 years of franchise derailment and created an excuse plot to bring back pretty much every dead mutant in existence

MJ and Spider-Man are back together

Eddie Brock is Venom again

Fantastic Four's back

The Avengers are still irrevocably pozzed but at the very least, Marvel's tacitly ceding the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises to actual comic fans in order to use them make actual money and subsidize the SJW anti-life shit that has perverted the Avengers family of titles.

Also, DiDio acknowledged the problem them tripled down first chance he could to refuck things up, to the point that Doomsday Clock; the thing that EVERYTHING was building towards, was wholesale declared as "not canon" and not mattering whatsoever in the big picture, due to Snyder and King and Bendis staging a coup with DiDio and Lee's explicit conset against Geoff Johns first chance DiDio got.

Thor's getting relaunched in 2 months too so they might slowly be working on Avengers too.

If Marvel unfucked She Hulk and Iron Man I would forgive them completly in all honesty.

Hulk,Iron Man,X-Men and Spider-Man shit are the only Marvel stuff I care about.

 

[MirrorNoir]

He wants to Undo rebirth and he brought in Bendis to do that to stalling or declining sales

Besides his hate boner for Post-Crisis married Superman and Rebirth Superman selling huge, DiDio is DESPERATE for an evergreen series of Superman trades to sell to casuals. He gave Superman to Bendis thinking he'd get another run of TPBs ala Snyder's New 52 Batman that he can keep in print indefinitely.

As for Gail Simone; she turned radioactive SJW after two things happened:

1. New 52 happen and she was CONSTANTLY clashing with a complete and irrevocably re-tard-ed editor in charge of the Batbooks who wanted super fucking grim dark shit and demanded Gail change her entire writing style to ape Snyder and who banned EVERYONE from using existing Batvillains because of behind the scenes butt-hurt from Tony Daniels and Scot Snyder over Snyder stealing the main Bat-book from him and Snyder cockblocking plans to do to the Batman books what the Superman books were doing where Snyder got the present day Batman title but Daniel's Detective Comics would be a "Year One" title and that Daniels would basically get to create the new Batman mythos, which Snyder would have to shill in his Batbook with no say over how Daniels recreated EVERYTHING for the New 52. Gail turned in her scripts late to mess with her editor but when she scoffed over the planned post Death of the Family arc for Batgirl, that the editor wanted, she got fired and rehired and ultimately quit the book after a brief return.

2. She was given a new Secret Six book but rather than bring it back as closes as she could to the pre-Flashpoint version, she replaced 90% of the cast (including Deadshot) and requested a new artist who's artwork was super fucking garbage chickenscratch. Fans of the pre-New 52 hated New 52 Secret Six and it flopped, even when Gail tried to salvage it by throwing out a huge freaking retcon where she declared Riddler faked Sue Dibney's death in Identity Crisis and brainwashed her into being his murderous gun moll and one of the new S6 guys turned out to be Elongated Man in disguised.

Both basically killed Gail's reputation with die-hard comic fans and turned her bitter and resentful and prime recruitment fodder for the SJW death kult

 

[Manwithn0n0men]

Besides his hate boner for Post-Crisis married Superman and Rebirth Superman selling huge, DiDio is DESPERATE for an evergreen series of Superman trades to sell to casuals. He gave Superman to Bendis thinking he'd get another run of TPBs ala Snyder's New 52 Batman that he can keep in print indefinitely.

Has Dan not read Bendis?

 

[MirrorNoir]

Has Dan not read Bendis?

Bendis has clung mightily to the lie that he "sells gangbusters in TPB" off of the back of the big trade sales that Ultimate Spider-Man had even as his main monthly book sales floundered and flopped huge.

The whole reason he's there is that DiDio is desperate Bendis's cult of anti-life abominations will buy his run in TPB/HC/omnibus and justify keeping him on the book even with his dogshit sales.

 

[ZMOT]

There is a reason why I have repeatedly declared Joss Whedon the worst thing to ever happen to speculative fiction.

His entire canon is just cheap "LOL HERO SO #SNARKY! LOL VILLAIN SO #SILLY! LOL EVERYONE SO #REFERENCE!" with heavy smatterings of personal internet/proto internet slapfights he has had with people over the years, which unfortunately is both easily marketed to disinterested normies the same way lazy laughtrack sitcoms were in the 80s, and is even more easily imitated by other worthless and derivative hacks who now see this as the basic template of how to do modern speculative fiction, which is why all of these fucking people have the exact same styles of writing and the exact same characterisations of all characters. They are just copying from the most profitable hack they know of, even if said hack has long been quietly unpersoned and exiled from media.

it's easy to hate on tard whedon, but you can't blame him for hacks copying what's popular. if everybody would be mangling seinfeld or frasier we would be equally annoyed for drowning in low effort shit of a different flavor. to make a bad food analogy, it's not vanilla's fault risk-averse icecream companies go with what works to the point of "make everything vanilla". vanilla is fine on it's own but no one can constantly eat vanilla only.

it's also mostly an isssue with capeshit, and capeshit is fucking profitable and companies have always copied what makes money long before we had whedon, so it gets reinforced this way.

personally I rather direct my disgust or indifference at suits that shit out zero-effort lowest denominator trash, quippy faux-nerd shit or not. the end of the 2010 have been fucking abysmal in general when it comes to creativity, talent and effort - and I hope my gut is wrong telling me that the ride isn't over yet with everybody getting more cynical burning out from the whole culture war bullshit and the only option is rick & morty level "humor" opposite equally infantile games of thrones "serious plots" (no harm intended if someone likes it, I don't judge and have my own stupid shit I enjoy - but not constantly and only that).

Novels are their own thing, and pound for pound are cheaper to produce in bulk than comics due to lack of artwork which is why I distinguish them entirely from comics.

it's really only a american thing, just look at the european comic scene (which had the same problems two decades ago and pulled themselves out of it. otoh it was never such a capeshit mono-culture to begin with).
as others have said manga does fine (to the point it apparently sells more than capeshit now), and while the format probably has some part in the shit-spiral I see more as a shrinking industry (due to various factors) with execs panicking and trying to hold onto the moneytrain.

it might sound weeb af, but maybe people prefer stuff creators put an ounce of effort and pride in (on top having the talent).

 

[Uranus Pink]

Manga even when they were sold as flipped floppies during the late 80ies to late 90ies have been a better deal than Marvel and DC comics on page count alone. Given almost every manga publisher at the time were selling their floppies at an actual 28 pages to 64 pages of manga with little to no ads at all at roughly the same price as capeshit. During the mid to late 90ies the publishers except for Dark Horse (due to Toren Smith) been on the ball in dropping the "flipped floppy" format for "unflipped floppy" and ultimately dumping the "floppy" altogether for the graphic novel formats we have now.

 

[Gee Willows Wilson!]

Yeah Spider Gwen is an awful character

My first look at her was the Spider-Verse storyline where all the Spiders merged to fight the vamps. Of course they had the Scott Pilgrim "Name: quip" set up and under Gwen's it said simply "Your new favorite spider" - yeah no. Do a little better than 'what if Peter died and Gwen got powers, isn't she cool? She's prolly lesbean and has lesbean roommates and they are totes in a band lol right?'

I'm a Spider-Woman fan. Jessica Drew. Hands down favorite... I hate what they've done with her recently, though at least they gave her an interesting team and her old costume back.

Whale Simone, The Scourge of Seaworld isn't the worst offender when it comes to bad comedy in comics, but I've grown to hate any abortive attempt at humor after years of Bendis and Co. sacrificing good characterization for a bad quip. Characters should have unique and varied personalities. Its okay for some of the characters to be jokey, but they shouldn't all be jokey, sardonic quip machines.

I will never forgive her for Domino, I don't care if she writes the next masterpiece series, she fucked Domino up twice... Never again.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

My Salamandroid variant of Cyberfrog finally came in the mail. So shiny.

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

I think most of DC fandom hates Bendis for what he's doing with the Supes family, and effectively steamrolling any chance of a future for Super Sons.

Bingo. Bendis really, really fucked up Jon Kent by aging him to his late teens. Something that was completely pointless because he brought back Connor Kent in Young Justice (the only good thing I can say about Bendis is that his Impulse is on point.) I serious dread what he is going to do to Legion of Super-Heroes, which will be its fourth fucking reboot. I've heard some pinheads justifying it by saying that its necessary to purge decades of tangled continuity to draw in new readers, often citing the failure of Levitz's last run on the retroboot Legion. Here is the thing: as @Judge Holden illustrated, the industry is a decayed husk of what it used to be in years past. Newer generations aren't as enticed to buy comic books when there are more attractive entertainment options and that "new" audience is a pipe dream. All they have is a shrinking pool of disgruntled fans who are increasingly fed up with this bullshit.

The only books from DC that I even think are worth reading are Flash, Hawkman, and Shazam (when Geoff Johns actually hands in his scripts on time.) I'm only picking up Legion of Super-Heroes out of sheer morbid curiosity to see how Bendis will fuck them up.

God, I wish they had just stuck with the post-Zero Hour Legion instead of letting Waid reboot it again in 2004. It would've saved me a headache.

 

[Detrogen]

Gee guys. Why are sales so low?

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

Not really Comicsgate, but relevant to what has been discussed...

DC Comics Rumored To Replace All Their Main Superheroes With New Versions

DC will reportedly launch a publishing initiative in the coming year that will see many of its [...]

comicbook.com

DC will reportedly launch a publishing initiative in the coming year that will see many of its classic heroes replaced by next-gen successors, according to a report at Bleeding Cool. The initiative, called 5g, is something that several geek news outlets have been hearing rumbles about for months. Bleeding Cool has written about it more than once, and The Beat suggests that they had been tracking rumors as well. Here at ComicBook.com, we had heard about elements of this during the summer. The idea, seemingly, relates to the DC Universe timeline unveiled at New York Comic Con last week.

The "5g" is almost certainly a reference to a fifth generation of DC heroes; the first generation begins with Wonder Woman and carries through the Golden Age. The second generation will start with Superman and encompass many of the Silver Age heroes. Third generation would be from Crisis on Infinite Earths until Flashpoint. Fourth is the current crop of books, post-New 52. And the fifth? Well, it seems that most of DC's heroes will cede their roles to younger heroes.

Bleeding Cool also suggests that Luke Fox will take over as Batman, rather than a more seemingly obvious candidate like one of the Robins or Nightwing. Other characters like Jonathan Kent (Superman's son, and the Superboy of Brian Michael Bendis's Legion of Super-Heroes title) and Cassie Sandsmark (Wonder Girl in Young Justice) seem like obvious choices, but...well, as we said about obvious ones above, taht doesn't mean much.

The Beat follows up on BC reports that the 5g idea will be precipitated by a Crisis-style event and that there will be some kind of explanation put in place as to why some of the longer-running DC characters have been able to seemingly stay young for decades.

This all feels a bit like the '90s, when DC replaced Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Green Lantern (among others) with young, new versions. Of course -- especially with the first rumored change being a person of color -- fans will likely compare it to the Marvel Now initiative from a few years back, which introduced a group of younger and more diverse heroes into the Marvel canon. Once the "classic" heroes were back in place, many of those new characters have established themselves as key players in the Marvel Universe.

Such a move helps sidestep a key problem with the comics market -- that many readers will not try a new, unproven property but will buy books they have years of investment in even if they don't like the books. This has meant that it's hard for Marvel and DC to introduce entirely new characters, and some fans who are critical of introducing a more diverse cast of characters into superhero comics will claim that their real complaint isn't with the diversity itself as much as attaching the new characters to existing brands. It's a real case of "do what I say, not what I do," and if building a temporary story around replacement heroes and promising a return of the originals is the way to do it, then it's hard to criticize that logic.

Word on the street is that 5G will launch next summer and presumably roll through DC's line.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[Manwithn0n0men]

Not really Comicsgate, but relevant to what has been discussed...

DC Comics Rumored To Replace All Their Main Superheroes With New Versions

DC will reportedly launch a publishing initiative in the coming year that will see many of its [...]

comicbook.com

What could possibly go wrong?

Please tell me this is an imprint