#Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

[Absurdity]

The early 90s where the best part for comic books in my casual biased opinion. After the great Marvel collapse and Image failing to follow through on their potential, the mid to late 90s looked terrible. Only in comparison to what's happened recently could those days seem hopeful. Then the movie industry took over the superhero hype machine for the most part and now video games like the Arkham series and Spiderman are outdoing both film and print in terms of action sequences, character development and storytelling.

So while yeah, the print medium is dying here just like it is everywhere else, the bubble has yet to burst in the digital entertainment front despite Coof. The comic book industry has been captured by big corporate media and function more as demographic research tools than anything else. Going the crowdfunding route really warps the power dynamic between consumer and producer. Those industry standards developed in order to remain competitive in a world of newsstands will not be maintained without exceptional skill and effort. It's not that all artists are lazy per se, it's that a lot of decisions that used to get made for the artist are suddenly presenting themselves due to lack of cooperative compromise and intense release schedules.

But one thing for all these pros to remember no matter who they are: if you're not capable of cranking out a comic book within the space of a few months or a graphic novel within a year, you're not worth the commitment beyond a one-and-done. You want people to wait a decade to get to issue 5? You better be Jack Kirby & Frank Miller post fusion dance. All ComicsLate is doing is giving old comic pros something to retire on.

I mean have you seen the fan-made videogame shit, holy fuck!

That is brilliant but it's just a simulation, not a real game at all. Absolutely stunning though and I'd grab it just for the sake of seeing the environments flow together the way it was seen on camera and all those hidden areas.

 

[YesNoMaybe]

I'll take a single 90s gimmick cover (and some of them could be very eye catching, while some could be an eye sore) over the predatory practice of 1:25 and so on variant covers going on today.

 

[Brother Maynard]

STARBLADES is being shipped to my warehouse today. Should begin fulfillment next week.

Awesome. So this will be the 2nd original comic out of ALL CAPS in over 3 years?

Allegiance Arts has a better publishing record.

 

[Newman's Own]

Interesting to compare against Frog's characterisation of Zack on here, as a scatterbrained ADHD-afflicted dilettante.

This is how friends talk about each other. Let's pretend it's tough love or something.

Hah. I just watched that. To be fair, Chuck has terrible instincts as a publisher and even thinks what killed comics was them leaving news stands.

He's right.

When Marvel and DC jacked prices and went with the direct market only model they got huge profits but they closed the gateway most kids used to get into comics.

Once the speculator bubble popped there were hardly any new 12 year olds spending their money on Spidey or Bat-Man which led to a massive collapse in the customer base and forced the big two to chase an ever dwindling market of adult cape shit fans with adult appeal comics that were overpriced and less appealing to young people.

Before the switch to direct market and the cash in on the collector bubble millions read comics. Now 10s of thousands do. There have been other mistakes but walking away from selling comics to kids for cheap at the 7-11 was a time bomb the industry never recovered from.

All the supposedly great 90s movies are cringey and full of cheese too, much more so than the timeless immortal classics of the 80s. Am I wrong here? I think almost everything in the 90s sucked, I feel zero nostalgia for the entire decade.

The 90's represented a renaissance in indy movie making with films like Pulp Fiction changing the way mainstream and indy cinema was done. That change was a net good.

Everything else about the 90's sucked though, unless you played video games.

The 80s or the 60s hold the best decade, sadly.

Agreed.

 

[Rupin]

This is how friends talk about each other. Let's pretend it's tough love or something.


He's right.

When Marvel and DC jacked prices and went with the direct market only model they got huge profits but they closed the gateway most kids used to get into comics.

Once the speculator bubble popped there were hardly any new 12 year olds spending their money on Spidey or Bat-Man which led to a massive collapse in the customer base and forced the big two to chase an ever dwindling market of adult cape shit fans with adult appeal comics that were overpriced and less appealing to young people.

Before the switch to direct market and the cash in on the collector bubble millions read comics. Now 10s of thousands do. There have been other mistakes but walking away from selling comics to kids for cheap at the 7-11 was a time bomb the industry never recovered from.

The 90's represented a renaissance in indy movie making with films like Pulp Fiction changing the way mainstream and indy cinema was done. That change was a net good.

Everything else about the 90's sucked though, unless you played video games.
View attachment 2146533


Agreed.

what exactly about the 90’s sucked compared to today? The music was better, the video games were great, there was still arcades, roller rinks and places you could go to as a teen to hang out compared to today or the 2010’s. Comedy was still actually funny. The mall was the place to be and you actually had to hang out with your friends in real life in order to play multiplayer games.

i don’t know about you But, I had a blast during that time.

 

[Miniluv]

When Marvel and DC jacked prices and went with the direct market only model they got huge profits but they closed the gateway most kids used to get into comics.

Once the speculator bubble popped there were hardly any new 12 year olds spending their money on Spidey or Bat-Man which led to a massive collapse in the customer base and forced the big two to chase an ever dwindling market of adult cape shit fans with adult appeal comics that were overpriced and less appealing to young people.

Before the switch to direct market and the cash in on the collector bubble millions read comics. Now 10s of thousands do. There have been other mistakes but walking away from selling comics to kids for cheap at the 7-11 was a time bomb the industry never recovered from.

Absolutely correct.

The advantage comics always enjoyed over other forms of entertainment was they were ubiquitous and cheap. The average price of a comic was less than a dollar for almost 50 years. They didn't rise above a dime until 1961. And you could get comics almost anywhere: drug stores, gas stations, grocers, pretty much any place with a shelf sold comics. They were easy to find and kids could get them with pocket money. At one point, Captain Marvel (the Shazam one) had a circulation in the millions and in some markets outsold major magazines.

Now you have to live in a town with a comic shop and if you manage to find the secret clubhouse, it's likely populated with adult men exhibiting varying degrees of personal hygiene and autism. The books are expensive and the stories and characters seem designed to confuse the coveted "new readers" that the Big Two always chase to no avail.

Imagine you're a parent and your kid loves the MCU and has expressed a desire to read the comics. So you manage to track down a shop. You go inside and find the place drowning in expensive statues and Funko Pops. Adult nerds with an allergy to deodorant are sitting at a table playing a CCG while forgetting their inside voice. Your kid finds an Avengers comic, but the team is made up of characters they don't know and this particular issue is a tie in to some larger storyline connected to another Avengers series with more characters that they don't recognize. The books cost $5 a pop to read about not-Tony Stark and not-Thor doing god knows what. Not exactly a recipe for success or an inviting environment for younger people with no clue about comics.

Sex pest Warren Ellis once said that "good" comics died when they realized it was easier to sell five Batman books to one person than it was to sell one Batman book to five people. He wasn't wrong.

 

[Captain Manning]

Before the switch to direct market and the cash in on the collector bubble millions read comics. Now 10s of thousands do. There have been other mistakes but walking away from selling comics to kids for cheap at the 7-11 was a time bomb the industry never recovered from.

I have to agree with Newman here (and, by extension, Chuck).

There was a bubble that burst in the mid-90s. Prices started going up, and distribution vectors shrank. I was around to see it with my own eyes. That was also when I stopped giving a shit about Marvel and D.C.

The astute will note this was LONG before the SJWs started showing up. The comics industry pretty clearly had issues before their taint.

The only thing I don't know if I agree with is the notion of the industry going from "millions to tens of thousands" of readers. The below graph plots sales in dollars, rather than units. The readership undoubtedly shrank (price inflation is a thing, and the end of the graph should be a lot higher if they kept anywhere near the same readership), but I don't know by how much. Nevertheless, I agree Marvel and D.C. screwed the pooch. Marvel even ended up in bankruptcy.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

Everything else about the 90's sucked though, unless you played video games.
View attachment 2146533

 

[Mister Dongs]

What would qualify as completely dead?

To me? The large-scale abandonment of the "community"/movement/whatever you want to call it by creator and customer alike with the general acceptance of the yoke of the likes of Heather Antos, Mark Waids and Camilla Zhongs of the world over the alternative of resisting in any meaningful way. Youtube commentators will either sink into complete irrelevance like Cummings or chase the pop culture algorithm elsewhere like YellowFlash and any future creators will simply skip the intermediate step of ever associating with Comicsgate, effectively continuing the blacklist in-place. While I don't doubt Frog and those capable of delivering professional output will continue to eke out personal success under any scenario, it would become more the modern day answer to Byrne Robotics, a safely ignored and outcast relic of previous times as opposed to any alternative to anything.

Right now I wouldn't say that's the case given there's more creators joining on now than ever before, a decline of gatekeeping and infighting as mentioned earlier, and a general acceptance of personal responsibility among smaller creators that it's on them to make it happen instead of hoping Frog will swoop in and carry them by the dozens, all of which I'd say are positive developments.

But there's also a number of other things like the erosion of consumer trust (the highest profile projects are the latest), drifting of purpose (the Waid lawsuit), along with a growing sense of insularity and irrelevance (the flood of 'chillstreams'), all of which are very bad.

Overdue projects highlighted in orange, gray due dates are projects where fulfillment has been verified, light yellow signifies a project that encountered delays but was completed.

Going off this list of projects launched since Jan 2020 (scraped from CreatorGoGo) whose due dates have passed , the theoretical new Comicsgate customer that jumped on Jan 2nd and then backed the top ten most visible, most heavily marketed crowdfund campaigns (that the majority of Comicsgate backed) would have 3 out of 10 comics they invested in to show for it by their promised delivery dates. Why it's so topheavy is something of a mystery, but infighting doesn't seem to be a factor and simply concluding that the more successful artists are lazier seems a bit reductionist.

In any case, it's small wonder that posters in this thread like @Unverified , @Miniluv, @TiredAndInked and countless others I've heard in various chats state flatly that they refuse to support any more projects until they start seeing some returns. Given that that the funding locked into late projects ($2,223,905) is greater than all of 2021's revenue combined ($1.81M), that is potentially a lot of money lost due to decline in backer confidence. All this is not going into Frog's flagship product which, while the wait time is a whopping 426 days, is technically not overdue (yet).

In short, I'm ambivalent about how things will go from here. There are serious but not insurmountable problems, but progress has been made in some areas and most importantly, there does appear to be continuing changes going on even now. If the outlook is bad and there seems to be no capacity for reinvention or change, then I'll concede it is definitely dead.

 

[GranDuke]

Whole "comics back then were in newsstands!" argument misses the point that they were returnable back then. They printed lots of copies, but lots of them were returned as well. By comparison comics sold to comic book shops are not returnable (in some cases publisher makes the book returnable if they are really pushing it) and as a result profit margins are much higher.

 

[TESTEFY-HD]

LIAM GRAY of CON-quest Comics - TREE HOUSE UPDATE #4
@FROG hope you enjoy

 

[A nameless trool]

Absolutely correct.

The advantage comics always enjoyed over other forms of entertainment was they were ubiquitous and cheap. The average price of a comic was less than a dollar for almost 50 years. They didn't rise above a dime until 1961. And you could get comics almost anywhere: drug stores, gas stations, grocers, pretty much any place with a shelf sold comics. They were easy to find and kids could get them with pocket money. At one point, Captain Marvel (the Shazam one) had a circulation in the millions and in some markets outsold major magazines.

Now you have to live in a town with a comic shop and if you manage to find the secret clubhouse, it's likely populated with adult men exhibiting varying degrees of personal hygiene and autism. The books are expensive and the stories and characters seem designed to confuse the coveted "new readers" that the Big Two always chase to no avail.

Imagine you're a parent and your kid loves the MCU and has expressed a desire to read the comics. So you manage to track down a shop. You go inside and find the place drowning in expensive statues and Funko Pops. Adult nerds with an allergy to deodorant are sitting at a table playing a CCG while forgetting their inside voice. Your kid finds an Avengers comic, but the team is made up of characters they don't know and this particular issue is a tie in to some larger storyline connected to another Avengers series with more characters that they don't recognize. The books cost $5 a pop to read about not-Tony Stark and not-Thor doing god knows what. Not exactly a recipe for success or an inviting environment for younger people with no clue about comics.

Sex pest Warren Ellis once said that "good" comics died when they realized it was easier to sell five Batman books to one person than it was to sell one Batman book to five people. He wasn't wrong.

I believe that CGI and video games are so good nowadays that, a concept that used to be only suitable for comics is now feasible as a movie/TV Show/video game.
I felt more Batman playing Arkham games than by reading any Batman stories. There was a new marvel movie every six months and so did a DC one and way too many CW series to keep me occupied. Reading comics was not the only way to get my cape fix.
Then, no matter how cowish YBZ is, he pointing out all the "superheros sit and talk in cafes" is totally correct. Comics can strip down a lot of the "paced for the trade" crap and get back to some 80's writing, with 1-3 issue stories and subplots where you can pick up a title and not get lost, or just change to an album/GN format to survive.

 

[Pilule Noire]

what exactly about the 90’s sucked compared to today? The music was better, the video games were great, there was still arcades, roller rinks and places you could go to as a teen to hang out compared to today or the 2010’s. Comedy was still actually funny. The mall was the place to be and you actually had to hang out with your friends in real life in order to play multiplayer games.

i don’t know about you But, I had a blast during that time.

One thing I can say about the 90s, with absolute 100% certainty, is that Kevin Smith was definitely much cooler in them, than in now.

That whole NJ comic scene was way cooler in the 90s, and he was like the alpha dog of it!

I mean for one thing he was banging this chick:

But look at him now:

It's like someone sucked the cool out of him!

 

[TiredAndInked]

@Mister Dongs put it perfectly. Several indie producers are able to get their product out and with the exception of Icarus and the Sun(a year late but the book quality is another huge post) They've all been either on time, or the creator has sent within a month. All CG titles I've backed have been well, a shitshow. More concerned with YouTube, running out of money, or simply vanishing.

 

[Analog Devolved]

To me? The large-scale abandonment of the "community"/movement/whatever you want to call it by creator and customer alike with the general acceptance of the yoke of the likes of Heather Antos, Mark Waids and Camilla Zhongs of the world over the alternative of resisting in any meaningful way. Youtube commentators will either sink into complete irrelevance like Cummings or chase the pop culture algorithm elsewhere like YellowFlash and any future creators will simply skip the intermediate step of ever associating with Comicsgate, effectively continuing the blacklist in-place. While I don't doubt Frog and those capable of delivering professional output will continue to eke out personal success under any scenario, it would become more the modern day answer to Byrne Robotics, a safely ignored and outcast relic of previous times as opposed to any alternative to anything.

Right now I wouldn't say that's the case given there's more creators joining on now than ever before, a decline of gatekeeping and infighting as mentioned earlier, and a general acceptance of personal responsibility among smaller creators that it's on them to make it happen instead of hoping Frog will swoop in and carry them by the dozens, all of which I'd say are positive developments.

But there's also a number of other things like the erosion of consumer trust (the highest profile projects are the latest), drifting of purpose (the Waid lawsuit), along with a growing sense of insularity and irrelevance (the flood of 'chillstreams'), all of which are very bad.

View attachment 2146217
Overdue projects highlighted in orange, gray due dates are projects where fulfillment has been verified, light yellow signifies a project that encountered delays but was completed.

Going off this list of projects launched since Jan 2020 (scraped from CreatorGoGo) whose due dates have passed , the theoretical new Comicsgate customer that jumped on Jan 2nd and then backed the top ten most visible, most heavily marketed crowdfund campaigns (that the majority of Comicsgate backed) would have 3 out of 10 comics they invested in to show for it by their promised delivery dates. Why it's so topheavy is something of a mystery, but infighting doesn't seem to be a factor and simply concluding that the more successful artists are lazier seems a bit reductionist.

In any case, it's small wonder that posters in this thread like @Unverified , @Miniluv, @TiredAndInked and countless others I've heard in various chats state flatly that they refuse to support any more projects until they start seeing some returns. Given that that the funding locked into late projects ($2,223,905) is greater than all of 2021's revenue combined ($1.81M), that is potentially a lot of money lost due to decline in backer confidence. All this is not going into Frog's flagship product which, while the wait time is a whopping 426 days, is technically not overdue (yet).

In short, I'm ambivalent about how things will go from here. There are serious but not insurmountable problems, but progress has been made in some areas and most importantly, there does appear to be continuing changes going on even now. If the outlook is bad and there seems to be no capacity for reinvention or change, then I'll concede it is definitely dead.

Ethan Van Sciver can best be described as the "Robert Mugabe" of comics. He fought against a corrupt system (Rhodesia, aka SJW comics) only to create an even worse system that only benefits himself. From liberator to dictator in 3 years. Just like Mugabe.

Ya Boi Zach is so God damned retarded and such a colossal fuck up. The best thing that could happen at this point is Zach goes over to Mr Biggons house to pick up comics and falls in the pool and drowns. At least then his comics might be worth more than the paper they are printed on. If he or EVS died it would be the best thing to happen to the "movement" itself.

Frog's untimely demise would make him more of a folk hero instead of the impetus for one of the biggest fubars in publishing history.

Anyway it's time for the 2021 dead-pool. My money is still on EVS dying first but YBZ is my hedge bet.

There is no "comicsgate" anymore. It's the EVS dick sucking club and I'm interested to see someone like Liam go nuts and smoke that retard and whether or not the resulting global block party, fireworks and celebrations involving ewoks would be a positive move for independent comics.
Typically "dictators" hijack a movement -check-, declare themselves the only answer -check-, destroy the people who helped them into power -check-, make tons of money -check-, then they die leaving their movement and industry in ruins.

Hope he dies.

In minecraft.

 

[Newman's Own]

They were easy to find and kids could get them with pocket money. At one point, Captain Marvel (the Shazam one) had a circulation in the millions and in some markets outsold major magazines.

They need to be accessible again or they'll continue to decline.

The below graph plots sales in dollars, rather than units.

A graph that shows dollars instead of units won't illustrate what happened to the reader base well.

Because the price of comics sky rocketed and speculators were buying multiples dollars were going up while readership was in decline. Less people were buying comics. Many weren't even reading the comics they did buy.

Whole "comics back then were in newsstands!" argument misses the point that they were returnable back then. They printed lots of copies, but lots of them were returned as well. By comparison comics sold to comic book shops are not returnable (in some cases publisher makes the book returnable if they are really pushing it) and as a result profit margins are much higher.

It's better for most companies to make massive profits off of low margins and high volume than it is to make massive profits off high margins and low sales.

High margins are lucrative but always unstable. Accessibility promotes stability.

Comics are less stable than ever as an industry.

EDIT: A very good write up about comics sales over the last 80 years. I didn't agree with every conclusion but there's some good insight into the history of the comics industry and some interesting thoughts about what could make it work again.

Marvel and DC sales figures

 

[jspit2.0]

I have to agree with Newman here (and, by extension, Chuck).

There was a bubble that burst in the mid-90s. Prices started going up, and distribution vectors shrank. I was around to see it with my own eyes. That was also when I stopped giving a shit about Marvel and D.C.

The astute will note this was LONG before the SJWs started showing up. The comics industry pretty clearly had issues before their taint.

The only thing I don't know if I agree with is the notion of the industry going from "millions to tens of thousands" of readers. The below graph plots sales in dollars, rather than units. The readership undoubtedly shrank (price inflation is a thing, and the end of the graph should be a lot higher if they kept anywhere near the same readership), but I don't know by how much. Nevertheless, I agree Marvel and D.C. screwed the pooch. Marvel even ended up in bankruptcy.

View attachment 2146613

Your graph doesn't establish your point at all either in terms of spinner racks or success.

I would argue SJWs showed up in the late 98 to 99.

regarding your chart, around the time at issue of rising profit per issue (this is dollars made not units sold in your chart) you had; the Manga boom, the Digital market instituted, the price of individual comics quadrupling, the Trade collection Boom, Scholastic, Crowdfunding, and the collapse of a dozen indie publishers, giving Marvel and DC greater market share. Just for example. DC enjoys a brief boomlet thanks to the NU52. But it also increased its issue price by a dollar, expanded trades, and was benefiting for inflation. Despite this, DC's Dollar from the second year of the NU52 on declined.

They need to be accessible again or they'll continue to decline.

Kids don't read.

If they do read, they don't read the crap we have today.

A graph that shows dollars instead of units won't illustrate what happened to the reader base well.

Yeah.

Because the price of comics sky rocketed and speculators were buying multiples dollars were going up while readership was in decline.

And what even counts as a comic as well as distribution. That's what people used for years to say comics were healthy when they weren't.

it's like Ethan crowing about a million dollars. It's less impressive to say you sold as many copies of Cyberfrog as Larsen sales of Savage Dragon on the direct market.

Less people were buying comics. Many weren't even reading the comics they did buy.

In the speculator era, sure.

 

[Miniluv]

Whole "comics back then were in newsstands!" argument misses the point that they were returnable back then. They printed lots of copies, but lots of them were returned as well. By comparison comics sold to comic book shops are not returnable (in some cases publisher makes the book returnable if they are really pushing it) and as a result profit margins are much higher.

They were returnable just like nearly every other magazine distributed at the time but I'd bet they sold more copies too. People selling comics didn't have to take a bath on every low selling series that hit the shelves. Non-returnable comics didn't do many shops any favors.

I believe that CGI and video games are so good nowadays that, a concept that used to be only suitable for comics is now feasible as a movie/TV Show/video game.
I felt more Batman playing Arkham games than by reading any Batman stories. There was a new marvel movie every six months and so did a DC one and way too many CW series to keep me occupied. Reading comics was not the only way to get my cape fix.
Then, no matter how cowish YBZ is, he pointing out all the "superheros sit and talk in cafes" is totally correct. Comics can strip down a lot of the "paced for the trade" crap and get back to some 80's writing, with 1-3 issue stories and subplots where you can pick up a title and not get lost, or just change to an album/GN format to survive.

At this point comic readers are a focus group that pays for the privilege.


Just for shits, here are Capital City Distribution's top 100 selling books for February 1984. Sales figures are for average number of copies sold per store. I was surprised to see how well indie books did but Capital distributed lots of indies, so maybe it skews things. In any case, it's hard for me to see many stores these days selling through an average of 50 or 100 copies of a regular Marvel or DC book.

Spoiler: February 1984 sales

 

[Newman's Own]

Kids don't read.

If they do read, they don't read the crap we have today.

They read. They just don't read comics the way they used to.

And why would they? Comics are for Gen-X, Boomers and the woke worst elements of the Millenials and Z's.

In past decades if you bought Captain America you got something by Kirby, Stern, or Gruenwald. Even Brubaker (or Waid ) would be less depressing and uninteresting than the horrors put out by Coates or Remender who seem more interested in praise from people who don't read comics (Twitter) at all than people who might.

Kids might read comics if they didn't cost a fortune or read like sermons from the Church of Perpetual Victimhood.

They seem to like manga.


On another subject it appears the MCU train is going full bore down the woke tracks lately.

- Falcon and Winter Soldier was substandard to the movies and preached critical race theory and antifa apologism throughout.
- The Eternals who were supposed to be based on Greek gods look to be "re-imagined" as an ultra woke Benetton ad from the 90's.
- Ms Marvel. Does anyone think this won't be an 8 episode sermon streamed on Disney.
- Ironheart
- Untitled Wakanda series (I'll lay odds this is the lesbian story no one read)
- The Marvels (AKA Captain Marvel 2) Brie Larson
- Chick Thor
- Chick Hulk (made for TV)
- Chick Hawkeye
- Chick Black Panther? Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
- And the Black Widow movie looks like a girl power flick complete with the stock incompetent dad (Red Guardian) character straight out of a sitcom.

The writing is on the wall. I'm never going to pay money to see another Disney/Marvel product.

At least the first 3 phases were good.

 

[GranDuke]

It's better for most companies to make massive profits off of low margins and high volume than it is to make massive profits off high margins and low sales.

Thats neither here nor there when we don't know what these margins exactly are.

Non-returnable comics didn't do many shops any favors.

That was never the goal.

As for selling 50-100 issues. Looking at Batman numbers that looks like a given? Quick google search says that there are around 2000 comic book shops in USA and Batman usually sells around 100k mark if its not King doing fuck knows what. Obviously not every shop is even selling DC comics, so yeah, I'd think there should be a good number of comic shops selling more than 50 Batman comics every month it is released. And its not like Batman is #1 book every month.

Here is the latest on Batman: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/this-weeks-batman-108-had-over-200000-orders/