Has Image fallen off the map? They used to be huge from like 2012-2015...

Walking Dead sales collapsed last year (both bookstore and floppies, it's actually stunning).
The big books that were being promoted 2012-2015 (Saga, East of West, Sex Criminals, etc) are either ending, on hiatus or delayed to all hell.
Image doesn't do Image Expos anymore because the books were just never coming out and it was starting to be a negative.

Spawn and Walking Dead is mostly what they are known for and is a majority of what effects their sales. We are probably going to be looking at a surge of Spawn popularity between the new movie and the reception Venom got, being the most similar super heroes.
Skottie Young has some fun things going for him with I Hate Fairyland and Bully Wars.
Post Gert.

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>Image Comics was founded exclusively by artists to be a place where artists could create comics without any writers to get in the way
>Within 1 year, every Image founder with the exception of Eric Larsen had hired a professional writer to script their comics for them because they realized they didn't know how to write

>25 years later

>Image Comics is now known as the exclusive domain for Superstar Writers like Mark Millar and nobody gives a flying fuck about the artists that come out of Image

I love it. I fucking love it.

Except Image isn't fucked, because their company structure is different from other companies' structure. Image as a company is just a small staff that handles certain things. They charge a flat fee to print a comic, and it's the creators who take the most risk financially, because they don't get paid until their creator-owned stuff is sold. Image doesn't pay advances for pages like Marvel and DC do.

The TPBs may be underperforming, but I'm also pretty sure that while Image gets a fee from the TPBs, anything not selling would be a hit to the creators who own the comics being published.

If Marvel and DC were doing those kind of declines, that would be a problem because Marvel and DC pay people in advance to write, draw, etc and have a larger staff.

Retard, they're doing half as well as they used to but you still want to cover your ears and shout "everything is fine!"?
And it's reflected in their line since rarely do you see anything go past 6 issues, even when marketed as an ongoing.

>I don't know how Image works but I'll keep doomsaying

This is why the "Comics Are Dying" posters are a joke.

As a creator, publishing a comic through Image doesn't make you jack shit in terms of revenue. It's the "proof of concept" you've created that has the potential to make you rich. Mark Millar didn't become a millionaire just by publishing comics through Image. He became a millionaire by taking those proof-of-concepts he had published to Hollywood and selling them to studios for millions.

That's why Image Comics is just a proof-of-concept factory for movies and Netflix series and all their "comics" look like fucking storyboards. Getting published through Image won't make you rich, but it's the first step on your way to Hollywood or Netflix bucks.

Good for them if that is the case. Just the creators are fucked I guess. I wonder what that flat fee is they charge then if the dollar value per title has fallen so far. You have to hope that Image as a company didn't over expand when they were ridding high off the back of TWD's sales craze.

Also while Marvel's trade bookscan sales are doing okay, they have never cared about trade sales that much, DC's trade bookscan numbers are even worse than Marvel's. Hibbs' part about the DC numbers is the most interesting given how consistent sellers for decades like The Killing Joke and Watchmen unexpectedly completely tanked. Maybe with the Watchmen HBO show and the Joker movie those books will rebound again, but they are doing worse than they did before the New 52 started from a dollar per title value apparently now. Like Image they are trying to keep afloat by releasing more books than they ever have before even if the vast majority of those books sell very poorly.

>And it's reflected in their line since rarely do you see anything go past 6 issues, even when marketed as an ongoing.
That's not Image's fault, that's the writers/artists either a) giving up or b) not making enough off the book themselves

I would imagine, though, that Image's decline revenue does mean that they're able to publish fewer books

>DC's trade bookscan numbers are even worse than Marvel's
I meant worse than Image.

It was a bubble from the success of Saga and the TWD show. It was always going to burst. They are still in a better place now than they were in the 00s, as others have said they still have a lot of big names working with them. Sales have just normalized.

>a) giving up or b) not making enough off the book themselves
this is not a problem

>Has Image fallen off the map?
jesus no board is safe from flat earthers

This guy gets it. The founders would literally have to die for Image to disappear. They have been through far worse situations than this. They went from a 10% market share in 2000 to like a 2% market share just a few years later.

>I would imagine, though, that Image's decline revenue does mean that they're able to publish fewer books
Image is releasing more books than they ever have before despite their revenue falling to what it was a 8 years ago when they were releasing 2/3 fewer titles. Next year's bookscan numbers will be interesting to see if the decline in revenue over 2 years will make Image have to drop the number of titles they are putting out.

I don't know if that's quite true. They have definitely cut back on new series, a couple years ago they had like 3 or 4 #1s a month.

Image gets the same amount of money from an issue of Saga or TWD as they did from one of Rock Candy Mountain or Flavor.

The current sales are the norm for Image tbqh. The boost in sales were always temporary for them.
I don't think they are going under like DH since they actually have IPs that are still somewhat popular and they can milk them.

I just posted the number of titles they release per year here I don't see how you can say it isn't true. We have all of their numbers in Hibbs' column and they released 1706 different books in 2018 and released 749 in 2011 eight years ago.

Erik recently said how Image worked here:

twitter.com/erikjlarsen/status/952405011648020480

>Here's how @ImageComics works: We publish comic books. Creators pitch comic books--if accepted, they work out the creative split on their end and we publish their books. When we get a check from the distributer we take a small flat fee and the creators split the rest. Simple.

>Image doesn't pay page rates--the books belong to their creators--how they split money on their end is up to them. We're essentially facilitating curated self-publishing.

>What that means on their end is that they're often putting in a lot of work and investing in themselves. And the payoff can be fantastic. Creators own their books entirely. Image itself owns nothing.

>When @mrmarkmillar sells a movie--@ImageComics doesn't see 5¢. And he pays into the company the same flat fee for his books as anybody.

>Different creators make different deals with each other. Some are essentially doing work-for-hire while others have joint ownership. It's all up to them.

And this has been the case since day 1, Erik Larsen can't make any money off of whatever McFarlane does with Spawn, except in a crossover comic. McFarlane can't make any money off of whatever Kirkman does with Walking Dead, except for when McFarlane Toys does Walking Dead toys (which would be a deal between Kirkman and McFarlane, and not Kirkman and Image).

Image's TPBs may be underperforming, but he difference between them and Marvel/DC is that they don't pay for page work as a singular entity. If you do work-for-hire for Spawn comics, it's McFarlane who pays you, not Image. If you do work-for-hire for Skybound, it's Kirkman who pays you, not Image.

If those TPB numbers were for other companies, like IDW or Valiant, or whatever, maybe there'd be concern about the decline (but then again, they have less to work with compared to Marvel/DC so their sales thresholds may be different).

>>Image doesn't pay page rates--the books belong to their creators--how they split money on their end is up to them. We're essentially facilitating curated self-publishing.
>
>>What that means on their end is that they're often putting in a lot of work and investing in themselves. And the payoff can be fantastic. Creators own their books entirely. Image itself owns nothing.
What does that mean for stuff like Skybound? Did Kirkman make nothing from Thief of Thieves for the last five years?

>What does that mean for stuff like Skybound? Did Kirkman make nothing from Thief of Thieves for the last five years?

Kirkman would still have gotten money from optioning Thief of Thieves and The Outcast, to say nothing of what he probably would've gotten from Walking Dead being on the air. If he played it smart like the other Image founders he could still keep things running with that money.

Yes, Image is a vanity publisher. They hit 'creators' for costs (including editing) instead of taking a risk like any reputable publisher, but are happy to take a cut from sales and even reprint and - presumably - any movie or tv or other rights that are sold as a result of exposure of these IPs.

But what do you expect from a company founded by grifters?

Those aren't books released in 2018. That's "listed items," which is any book that people bought in 2018, including books released in previous years. If you look at the other publishers they all have higher numbers of listed items in 2018 too.

>and - presumably - any movie or tv or other rights that are sold as a result of exposure of these IPs.

They don't. Didn't you even read None of the Image founders get any money from movie/TV rights of other creators. McFarlane and Larsen don't get any of that Walking Dead TV money, that's all Kirkman's.

what was the last hot new image book?

Saga probably?

Actually, he became a millionaire by selling his company, Millarworld Ltd, to Netflix a couple of years ago.

He'd consistently valued the company's assets as being worth around what would have been $3m (it was a UK company, so he actually valued it in £) for several years, without ever elaborating on what these assets were particularly (it's not that important for a small company's published accounts so there's no legal duty to provide details unless the taxman requests them) or why they didn't seem to be depreciating in value (most assets do depreciate - cars, computers, furniture etc). But none of them were getting made either and no million-dollar payments were coming in to increase the cash value of the company, which suggests he wasn't necessarily even using Millarworld as a PSC to avoid tax on his payments for the movies that did get made, or at least just taking the cash and spending it before the accounts were due.

The assets were probably just film rights to things nobody had produced (with a promise to pay him actual money if they ever got produced, which would now go to Netflix) or else things that nobody had the rights to but he was prepared to part with for, in a combined total, about $3m. Which he eventually did, of course, but he was far from a millionaire before that.

Contrast him with Morrison, who made a lot more money as a landlord than he ever seems to have made making comics.

that long ago?
>made more as a landlord
please elaborate

No, I didn't.

But it's wrong anyway, as court filings show that when you do work for hire for McFarlane, he doesn't pay you if he thinks he can get away with it, and then he claims to own anything you've created that appeared in his title.

Doesn't change the fact that Image is a vanity publisher. 1700 books a year? Do you honestly think anybody but Image is making money from these things.

he owns a couple of buildings in I think Glasgow, has done for years

because of the way property prices have risen, these are far more valuable than his comics work and provide a solid income

How hot is hot?
Gideon Falls came out last year and it got a lot of hype. Everything Brubaker does still gets hype. And Millar sadly.

doesnt millar put all his stuff out under millarworld?
also hate the guy or not but he pays his artists top$$

>But it's wrong anyway, as court filings show that when you do work for hire for McFarlane, he doesn't pay you if he thinks he can get away with it, and then he claims to own anything you've created that appeared in his title.

I don't think you get it. The situation with Neil Gaiman deals with McFarlane and his studio. Not Image as a whole. This is why when Gaiman sued McFarlane, he initially sued Image along with it... but then Image was removed entirely from the lawsuit and it was just Gaiman vs McFarlane.

McFarlane would represent both Image (He's its President currently) and Todd McFarlane Productions, but the Gaiman lawsuit was a Todd McFarlane Productions situation, not an Image one.

Probably the biggest ongoing things they have right now is Wicked + Divine and Monstress. The former is wrapping up. The latter doesn't get as much buzz or attention as Saga, Walking Dead, Spawn etc even if it sells alright. Likely because it's art does all the heavy lifting.

Retard

The only time they were ever "huge" was the early 90s. They don't sell as much as you seem to think they do.

But the different books Image sold in 2018 was double what they sold just 2 years before. 876 in 2016 and 1706 in 2018. I can't imagine that Image's back catalogue suddenly started selling a ton of different titles and it is more likely that Image is just releasing more books even if those books aren't selling that well. Since creators still want to release books though Image.

>Image is a charity
>they were created by poor oppressed comics "creators" because they cared so much about other poor oppressed comics "creators" that they intentionally lost their own money just to provide "opportunities" for other poor oppressed comics "creators"
>they have a completely unqiue corporate structure that no other corporation has ever had in history in any industry

You are the biggest fucking rube. Image's whole marketing campaign of trying to convince comic readers that they're a fucking charity that does this shit without compensation because they just care so much about "the art, man" is the single most disingenuous and most manipulative marketing strategy in the entire history of the comics industry. They're a billion dollar corporation and their executives are snakes that make DC's look honest by comparison.

>consistent sellers for decades like The Killing Joke and Watchmen unexpectedly completely tanked

How the fuck did that happen? Does anyone even have any theories on this? Is the industry just THAT fucked in general or is it just TPBs specifically?

>tfw Grant Morrison isn't your landlord

>muh conspiracy theories

This is also why the "Comics Are Dying" posters on this board became a complete joke now.

Part of that has to do with the specific data Hibbs was getting from Bookscan. It's not like Image released 655 titles in 2017. Hibbs got more (deeper) data in 2017/18 than in previous years.

based

>Starting in 2009, Image began to greatly expand both the types of comics it publishes and the types of creators drawn to the publisher,[33] beginning a period of critical acclaim. Image's sales grew significantly during this period[29] to a market share of around 10% in 2015,[35] and an influx of Marvel- and DC-associated creators began publishing creator-owned work with them.[36]

Image is still hovering around 10% each month

What people don't acknowledge is that things have long-term damage. Hibbs was the one who pointed out that DC books didn't do well last year, but I also remember that years back I think he or someone else commented that Morrison's Multiversity would've done better had the New 52 relaunch/reboot not happened.

Based on what little we know, I think that part of it was people uncertain about whether they should read anything from the New 52 or Pre-New 52. There's also the slim possibility that last year's monthly comics (with Tom King's Batman and Bendis' Superman and all that) turned readers off from getting TPBs. But I think the real reason is the long string of poorly received DC films also had long-term damage. Wonder Woman did okay reception but DC didn't really have much to promote in the way of the backlog. And there was waaaay too long a lull between Justice League's release and Aquaman's release.

>Multiversity
I just looked up sales for it, wow. I thought it did way better than it actually did.

What happens to the industry when Image collapses, will Marvel and DC start buying up properties like they did with Spawn's Angela or will it have a domino effect and Marvel and DC go along with it?

I think only in 2015/2016 were the numbers Hibbs got edited in some way. But the numbers don't really indicate that Image is releasing fewer new titles given they are still selling more books than they have been. I mean this is easy to go find out. Just have to go look at the new releases from their solicits to see how many new titles they have. Although it would be annoying to count them up every month per year.

Yeah, DC's branding has been really bad. The New 52 reboot killed the sales of their pre New 52 books, and then Rebirth killed the sales of their New 52 books. But now DC restructuring their company and doing things like wanting to move Tom King off the main Batman title sooner than planned, and come up with a more consistent DCU timeline (said that at a recent panel) makes sense given the sales of their books.

But why would titles like Watchmen and The Killing Joke that would always be DC's #1 and #2 trade sellers every year for like decades suddenly have the bottom fall out from under them? I'm not that worried about those two specifically given the Joker movie and Watchmen show will bump up their sales again, but it is weird.

Image doesn't own any properties. There is nothing that Image could sell to Marvel or DC.

Excuse me I meant buying from the creators and incorporating characters into their universes like Marvel did with Angela.

>being this obviously an unpaid WB intern
Meanwhile, back in reality:

>No, I don’t mean “hey, you get to do your own thing and make some money.” I mean “you are doing financially better than you would by doing a WFH book for the big two.”

>Anything selling stably over 10k in single issues is a cause for celebration and joy. The creators are almost certainly extremely happy.

>If you’re selling over (ooh) 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names.

>If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends.

>Iif Phonogram settled around 6k back in 2006, I suspect Jamie and I would have settled into doing it for another 40 or 50 issues.

>There’s all manner of exceptions to the above, but if you look at the charts and bear that in mind, you’ll be closer to how the industry looks at those numbers.

>None of the above includes digital sales.

>None of the above include TRADES. You throw trades in, and you change everything entirely. A cursory look at hit indie comic numbers reveals that their trades sell much more than Marvel/DC main universe trades, with a few exceptions (There’s a reason why Matt and David’s Hawkeye was such a big thing, and it wasn’t its monthly sales).

>On a personal level, we’ve sold over 50,000 copies of the first WicDiv Trade. Last I looked at Amazon’s stats we were selling about 1000 a month via book shops alone (i.e. not including comic shops, which is usually more.) The orders for 12 were 22k. The initial orders of the second trade are up 33% on the first trade. Realistically, we were hoping to stabilise at around 13k, and we’d have been enormously happy with that, even if we weren’t selling trades. Which we are. WicDiv is a ludicrous success, by far the biggest thing in our entire career.

kierongillen.tumblr.com/post/121756273497/market-maven-is-the-wicked-the-divine-in

Why the fuck do you think people make comics? Why the fuck do you think every minor comic book publisher exists? Do you seriously believe every last one of these people only wants a movie deal?

>image comics
>billion dollar corporation
W
E
W

When is Death or Glory coming back?

October 2019

DEATH OR GLORY #6
WRITER: Rick Remender
ARTIST / COVER A: Bengal
COVER B: Eric Canete
OCTOBER 30 / 32 pages / FC/ M / $3.99

Glory is back and barreling toward the Mexican border in the hopes of delivering the liver transplant to save her father’s life. Hot on her heels is her ex-husband, his criminal empire, crooked cops, psycho killers, and a Mexican murder cartel. Time, fuel, and hope are running out, but no one outruns Glory!

Hope it's true this time, they've been pushing the date everytime it's suppose to come out.

I don't understand how Saga became so popular. The art is it's saving grace, the story is very lackluster.

Too many of its titles keep going on hiatus. It's fucking annoying.

They make edgy shit, extremely gay shit and extremely gay edgy shit.
They published Spawn and I doubt most people even know who that character is anymore.
They published The Walking Dead and now that is over.
I always think Marvel is gay and dumb, but I feel image exists just so people know that Marvel could always be dumber and gayer than they are right now.

Lol.

>And the payoff can be fantastic.
>When @mrmarkmillar sells a movie--@ImageComics doesn't see 5¢. And he pays into the company the same flat fee for his books as anybody.
I it just my negativity or does Erik sounds like aninvestment banker. Try to lure you in?
Its fair from him that he names the hard work, but all this "it can pay-off" and talking about movie deals feels wrong. Not everyone is Millar and not everyone has luck as walking dead.

Maybe Doomsday clock and the last stuff batman appeared in spoiled the TPB?
And everyone has now an issue of killing joke and Watchmen.
I can think of reasons, but i am guessing out of the blue.

yes besides Drawn/Quarterly, Fantagraphics, Koyami, 2dcloud and other true indie publishers

They're not fucked because their business model means they were only taking a small percentage of this money to begin with. Kirkman, BKV in Gillen are making less money, that's about it.

>I literally know nothing except how to run my mouth

It's your negativity. He's also said that success isn't always guaranteed.

He was a fucking millionaire long before that genius, he just happened to get even richer off the retards at netflix

You brainlets are embarassing.

They've had a minor spot as the third largest publisher but it's by quite a bit compared to other publishers not named DC and Marvel. But with Invincible and Walking Dead done it'll be interesting to see if they drop by a lot with nothing to replace them.

Exactly, I'll pay to see some alien tiddie anytime

You can tell who the idiot newfags are via their replies to this post. A few years ago we had FAQ threads on how to get a book published by Image.

>Skottie Young has some fun things going for him with I Hate Fairyland and Bully Wars.
Don't forget Middlewest

I live in Glasgow and I've never met him but I wanted to invite him to my masters degree show at art school as I'd made a book that I felt he'd get, I wasn't even going to be at the show because I was going to Las Vegas instead. I didn't have any way of contacting him though but I did a sigil to meet him, remembering he said he mainly used sigils to meet people and basically gave up on it as impossible.

Like two weeks later I was sitting down to lunch in the Mirage buffet and there's this guy sitting at the next table who looks familiar and I say to my wife whose been a fan longer than I have 'Have you noticed the actual Grant Morrison behind me', jokingly of course. She said the guy looked up when I said the name and now he was staring at us.

This continues and we're freaking out and don't know what to do because we've both apparently got autism. I say it can't be him because he was too tall and I thought Morrison was short for some reason. He was actually pretty built. I also reasoned his eyebrows were too light compared to like 15-20 year old photos. The guy gets a drink and it was like he wanted us to talk to him, I got up for a drink and tried to sneak a look and he stares right at me, my spaghetti is in overdrive. When I was away my wife says he spoke to a server and he was Scottish, as are we which would have been enough of an in to cold approach someone. Eventually he leaves and for some reason only then do I look up a 2018 pic of him and there's no mistaking it, just his eyebrows are a bit greyer than in the photos I was familiar with. Vegas is pretty boring during the day and he probably just wanted someone to talk to and obviously he couldn't approach us.

That was ten months ago and I'm still kicking myself. I've self published a few 150-200 page books that have sold well and people like them but I don't know how to get someone that isn't a pleb to read them and that was my big shot. Hopefully it's not my last.

I've seen quite a few articles about Monstress from mainstream websites, which, for Image is pretty good

Well Walking Dead is finished and Saga is in a never ending cycle of hiatus. I don't read buy Image floppies because I never know if a series will actually finish or not

Millarworld actually sold for 30-50 mil but nice try.
And the assets were IPs, which in the boom of comic book adaptation filmmaking most certainly do not depreciate.
hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/behind-netflixs-bold-bet-comics-king-mark-millar-1031336?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

All the books fron the talent that left Marvel have finished or went on indefinite hiatus now that everyone got their tv/movie deals.

oh yeah, thanks for reminding me!

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You're retarded lad

How did Morningglories turn out?. I was reading it early on and people were talking about it and then I just gave up

>then I just gave up
so did Nick Spencer

>fewer titles: more revenue

Maybe something could be learned from this?

Walking Dead and Invincible died

Kirkman needs to make another hit for them.

>tfw

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I tried looking for the post on Multiversity and other stuff but couldn't find it, but I did find this column Hibbs wrote in 2015:

cbr.com/trouble-on-the-horizon/

>Let's start with DC Entertainment, which took two months off publication of "regular" titles in order to smooth a cross-country move from New York to Burbank. This, in and of itself, was worrisome because periodical comic buyers are nothing if not creatures of habit, and any time you suspend a habit, it makes it much easier for customers to reassess the actual pleasure they get from it. The timing here was even worse, because it was clear that many customers were getting tired of the "New 52" (DC's line-wide reboot from 2011) -- despite massive initial success with the New 52, large swathes of the audience were already starting to walk away, and "Convergence," the publishing stunt designed to fill that two-month hole, proved to be a great "jumping off" point.

>DC came back in June with "DC You," an initiative that launched 21 new series, meant to spotlight character and creator diversity and refresh the line, and to embrace a new, younger audience that many retailers can tell you is actually out there.

>But "DC You" isn't connecting with this new readership. Kind of at all: On the October sales charts, which represents the fifth issues of the initiative, only two of the 21 titles have sales over 30,000 copies (very roughly the sales level where companies with big overhead start cancelling books for lack of sales), and a staggering ten titles are selling under twenty thousand copies, which marks nearly half the initiative as an abject failure. At the same time, the changes to the core titles ("Batman," "Superman," etc.) appear to show the stalwart characters bleeding readers, and even the hail-mary for DC periodicals, the weekly series "Batman and Robin Eternal," is only selling at the end of its first month about where the previous series ended up. DC might be able to steal a bunch of marketshare with "Dark Knight III," but their core product and core market is clearly in big trouble right now.

>The worst part is that it is really difficult to find a logical path out of it for the company -- creatively the company appears to be mired in house style and a small stable of creators. As an example, earlier this month DC announced new creative teams on three titles, and, as a retailer, it's very hard to get excited about creative musical chairs like that, and it's hard to imagine that kind of lateral thinking generating even one additional new sale.

>I personally have a very hard time watching this happen because for 25 years DC was my #1 publisher -- and in a fashion in which it really wasn't even close. DC dominated my sales. And they've slipped down to #3 in 2015, which is just heart-rending. And getting out of it is so much harder because of the negative loop of backlist sales: poor-selling frontlist periodical comics irrevocably yields poor-selling backlist.

>And backlist is where much of the real money in comics is.

>But things don't look much more promising over at Marvel either. We're too early in the process to see the actual impact of the "All-New All-Different" initiative at Marvel reflected in the published sales charts (we need to be at month four or five to see that), but I can tell you the anecdotal reports I hear from retailer after retailer is that ANAD sell-through is generally pretty bad, with many of the books essentially just picking up at or below where they left off before the break, without the stream of new faces that we were all hoping for. This is despite orders being up, leaving a great number of unsold new number ones sitting out on the shelves.

>Marvel did something similar to DC: they took several months of production "off" on the regular titles for "Secret Wars" and a series of "SW" related miniseries. The real shocker for me was that this plan was actually working for Marvel: customers seemed deeply engaged in the entire "SW" experience... at least until "Secret Wars" started hitting unconscionable delays. "SW" sell-through then fell off the cliff, leaving many retailers with lots of unsold (and unsalable!) books -- worse in this case because while there's some hope you might shift first issues of new series, pretty much no one is going to buy issue four of a miniseries after the mini has concluded.

>Anecdotally, I can state that at my stores from mid-September essentially every "Secret Wars"-related comic, including the main book, took a sharp drop of about 20%, which turned those comics from profitable to "not." We're trying to steer the orders back toward profitability as fast as we can, but clearly there are always going to be casualties. And the truly painful thing is that, much like "DC You," "All-New All-Different" is stumbling out of the gate, and what should have been a grand repositioning that would draw flocks of new and excited readers to a revitalized Marvel line, like "New 52" did for DC, ANAD has arrived with just a quiet sigh of indifference from the majority of the readership.

>In fact, my sales were down 4% in the month of November, the first drop we've seen after seven straight quarters of growth -- and these are 4% sales down on orders that were approximately 20% higher than the year before. That's bad and dangerous to ongoing operations.

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>How about the new and young readership? Marvel actually was starting to attract some of them at our stores -- books like "Squirrel Girl," "Ms. Marvel" and the Jane Foster "Thor" title were racking solid sales for us outside of the "traditional" Marvel customer. But that new/younger readership? They literally don't understand why you would start a book over again at #1. It makes no sense to them! And that confusion appears to have shooed a number of them off. In an equivalent sales period, our sales of the first issues of all of those series are actually below (dramatically so in the case of "Thor!") the final issues of the "old series" -- which was only on issue #8 for two of the three! But readers appear to be treating the relaunches as simply "issue #9." That's not typical consumer behavior.

>And I hear similar things from many other retailers -- the "word on the street" from a wide swath of stores is that a vast indifference has begun to creep in among the readers of superhero comics, and that this miasma is softening the 4th quarter enough to potentially threaten these stores. This is scary because an enormous amount of stores in the market don't really have a fall-back position from "we sell superhero comics." As the old saying goes "They carry both kinds of comics: Marvel and DC!" Which puts you in a bad position if both companies are underperforming at the same time.

This was back in 2015. We did see DC try to revitalize things with Rebirth. Problem was more prevalent last year when they tried to move away from Rebirth, and made complete blunders like Heroes in Crisis.

Marvel took a long time to pull out of the problems that started that far back. They were lucky that Star Wars was their top sellers during the final Alonso years, but now they need other sellers to make up for Star Wars' declining sales.

Holy shit you are such a moron!