How did it all go so wrong?

How did it all go so wrong?

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women

/thread

my dumb theory is that cartoons/tv became much more easily accessible, and even though they are different mediums, caused comics/reading to become less desirable. then later on you had popular cartoons to sell toys to kids which caused another split, and currently you have manga/anime being more widespread across the world. kids are lucky to have any access to money, and when newer options from TV-video games are a thing comics seem less, and less worth it.

>why 100 000 000 Americans read comics
>actually it's 70 000 000
>because each of 18 000 000 comics sold is read by 5 people on average, no lie
>of course we assumed that each person buys only 1 comic a month and that every reader is unique
>anyway, 100 000 000 Americans read comics!
This is beyond sad.

an overfixation on gratuitous violence and sex appeal in addition to already being fairly fixated on capeshit.

Competition.
Video games, TV, anime/manga, music, they're all very stiff competition for comics.

Missing tons and tons of historical bits and the idea that popular cartoons were not ALWAYS merchandising fronts with the only ones waxing on about the artistry were low-medium importance journeymen. The last part about accessibility is totally right though

People don't read as much anymore for entertainment, that's the main reason. Back in the day you largely only had books or radio if you wanted that kind of entertainment unless you lived in a city where you had access to live music, theater, etc.

Today there's way more options, and people prefer watching tv, streaming twitch or youtube or playing video games.
Comics are also still considered kiddy shit, not meant for real adults. And there's the neverending bias that "comics are too complex to get into"

It's the same issue as people go less to movie theaters. Ever since TV became widespread it took a way a ton of viewers, but you could watch old movies on TV so movies still had an audience, just the venue from where people watched them changed.

Comics doesn't really have that.

People want straightforward stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Comics cannot provide such stories because they have no beginning or an end, and their narratives are split between dozens of different writers in very episodic formats and no overarching plots. That's why manga succeeded where comics failed - manga has a straightforward approach that lets you get in easily and enjoy more complex stories not fractured by publisher meddling.

The moral panic over comics in the 50s and the creation of the Comics Code Authority destroyed most genres except heavily neutered superhero comics for nearly two decades.

>People want straightforward stories with beginnings, middles, and ends

And this is why people read 20+ decades long and still ongoing manga series?

>People want straightforward stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

You get that with each individual runs that are even conveniently packaged in trades and comics are now even relaunched so often that it's easy to just pick the new volume that starts with #1. Nobody fucking wants Batman to really end forever.

Let's look at some recent popular manga.
>Demon Slayer
Ended in ~4 years
>Chainsaw Man
Ended in ~3 years
>Attack on Titan
Ended in ~11 years
>Jujutsu Kaisen
Ongoing, currently 4 years old
>Spy X Family
Ongoing, currently 3 years old
>Haikyu
Ended after ~10 years
>Tokyo Revengers
Ongoing, currently 5 years old
>MHA
Ongoing, currently 8 years old.

I think the only ongoing manga that are actually relevant that are 20+ years old are One Piece and maybe Naruto if you count Boruto.

superheroshit monoculture destroyed the medium

Beauty and the Beast almost won at Oscars so the Hollywood dynasties set out to make sure that can never happen again.
Cartoons and other adjacent things have been for kids ever since.
They tried it again with videogames once the market was starting to eclipse that of the movies but the old farts had underestimated "the threat" and it was too little, far too late and people did not stop playing videogames.

>that are actually "relevant"
>lists nothing but shounen
>lists things where only the recent anime adaptation made them "relevant"

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME.

No cool fight scenes.

most genres did fine post cca, superheroes only killed them in the late 70s.

Generally these are divided into clear arcs with their own beginning, middles and ends. One Piece is 30 years old, but even the longest arc only lasted four years.

yeah thats true. its basically the bronze age where things really started to go wrong

Marxism.

>DC
>"literature"
stopped reading there

Distribution and catering to brands more than stories

>Generally these are divided into clear arcs with their own beginning, middles and ends.

Like... cape stories are? And they usually don't take several years to complete a story arc.

competition and price
shonen jump is $2 for about 20 different series, a single comic is $5
sure, it's not directly comparable because japan/usa, paper quality, ownership, etc, but who the fuck looks at a single issue of wonder woman and goes "yep, that's good value for money"

I imagine a big part of it was when studios put big money into hiring comicbook writers and editors as consultants for their adaptations. The people writing the comics got too full of themselves despite the medium historically being a dumping ground for neophytes, outcasts and hacks. They lost their connection with their readers and attacked them when the base inevitably turned on them.

Agree with your post but I think it's pretty funny, I'd rather read than watch. Comics, manga and books have way more bang for my buck in half to an hour than TV/anime/cartoons/film, which seem constrained by their medium in comparison.

If the medium is to blame why are manga sales growing?

Movie $10 = 2 hours of entertainment
Comics $5 = 10 minutes of entertainment

Does not add up...

Honestly, it's probably a quality issue more than anything else. While comics were probably comparable to media contemporaries 50+ years ago, I think everything else has gotten better or more appealing towards an audience while comic books have failed to do so, leaving them ever-dwindling in readership.

Like what are comics even doing to try and appeal to an audience anymore? The same old thing they have for decades with occasional pandering to some disparate minority group. Why should I read a comic book? What's the big draw? What am I going to see here that I won't anywhere else?

The printing cost for a comic should be between $0.1 - 0.2 per issue (en masse), I'm not sure how much they pay their artists, or how much shipping costs...but $5 seems excessive imo.

t. printer wage-slave

Writers and artists were given more and more freedom while editors were depowered and seen as problematic if they kept the creatives in line. This combined with many creators never having read comics or worse disdaining them has led to a progressively regressive form of storytelling so that we only ever have retellings meant to do nothing but “fix” some of the greatest stories of all time or destructive misery porn meant to tear down the things built years ago.

Gone are the days of character models, gone are the days of characterization, gone are the days of accessible stories meant to be ditched and picked up every other month. Replaced by artists hackneyed designs and character models, writers 20-40 part stories with no individual issue satisfaction, and characters that vary wildly from title to title.

Creatives who’s entire job is to spin narratives spun a narrative starting in the 80s that they deserved more freedom and that with their freedom they would create excellence. And because many of those creators grew up reading and loving comics and grew up in the industry in a system of rigid management they didn’t go too overboard. They hit the right notes of creative freedom and company control.

Now we have people that want to use comics as a blow horn and artists who all think they’ve got designs that are better than the traditional costumes and character models and so none of it has any form of consistency. to make a sports comparison they’re all ball hogs who play no defense. No sense of team or central identity.

And in an era where people were already naturally dropping out of the hobby renumbering and treating new creative teams as more important than the character they’re writing has steadily over the years structured in more and more jumping off points.

More like
>Movies=free
>Comics=free
At my pace I can read more story and art in 2 hours of comics than a movie could ever depict.

Only someone that doesn’t buy comics would think this, go to a shop any given Wednesday and you’ll see just as many non-cape books as cape books.

80+ years of technological advancements make more entertaining alternatives for kids with increasingly smaller attention spans. Comics were popular for boomers and older gens because they were something cheap you could hold in your hand and carry with you. Video games didn't exist and you couldn't take your TV with you on a road trip.
Now you can: that's the difference.

This.
Pricecoping and distributioncucks are pathetic.
People spam all the latest capecuckery here for free, and everyone still thinks it sucks.

And just to add this is not to say editors these days are any better. Jordan White and Nick Lowe are gleeful to destroy what fans love. Positively gleeful, and Jordan White once edited a Captain America comic that gave credit to Stan Lee for his creation. DC has editors that flat out hate the characters they’re working on and would do anything to kill them off for good and stick with diverse replacements that nobody asked for or wants.

We are in a dark age in which none of the people making comics like let alone love what they’re working on, and many cases regard them as garbage that needs to be reclaimed and changed completely to hold any relevance.

They will never improve at this rate unless the companies that own them wake up and start making comics for the people who PAY for comics.

It's even more simpler than that, user. Superhero movies and shows are popular right now, writers who don't like comic books see them as a way to launch a Netflix career, so they'll hold their nose, write some stupid leftist shit with superheroes, and hope that it will open the door to a Netflix series about lesbian go-go dances in the 1960s so they can get awards.

I mean sure...but how can comics sell if people aren't buying them?

The main purchasers of comics has been 14-30 year old men since the 60s. Shut up. And the fact that manga sales are booming pokes a hole in this logic immediately.

Stop coping. making comics by and for MSNBC obsessives or people that hate any character and story older than 10 years is a massive problem.

People are and were. They’re the ‘wrong” people who don’t care about BLM and racial or gender diversity and just want good, worthwhile comics about their favorite straight white male characters.

ignoring this is why the sales continue to tank.

marvel has 4 of the top 10 highest grossing movies and they still fail to sell their comics

Competition.
Radio shows, home tvs, arcades, home videogames, the internet, phone games, VHSs, DVDs, streaming services, movie theater passes, etc

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Marvel and DC remaining as the undisputed face of the industry and the lack of floppies being sold outside of comic book shops. Enough has said about how the former have turned their publications into a gordian knot, but the latter also means the vast majority of exposure to paperback comics is only in $15+ trades--most of which is still just releases of the Big Two. Very few people are actually going to go to an LCS (even before the coof wiped them all out), and even fewer will know enough to walk past the giant walls of capes to get to anything that has a single-digit number of issues.

Personally speaking, if I could start buying individual Boom or Image comics from the big box stores whenever I go into town to do some shopping, the amount I spend on comics monthly would increase exponentially.

I'm not an employee of any comic company so why should I care?

I’m so sick of seeing newfags like you shit these threads up.

COMIC SHOPS NEVER WOULD HAVE EXISTED IF SELLING TO BIG BOX STORES DIDN’T BECOME UNTENABLE

They can’t sell to big box stores because those stores demand the right to return unsold units for full compensation. This is too much of a risk proposition for comics publishers and why many magazines folded in the last decade and a half despite having pretty solid subscriber bases.

Please stop fucking posting, you and everyone like you, until you can accept this and move on from the idea that comics will ever be on magazine racks in grocers and book stores.

Not at all. Funny animals, Tv and movie adaptations and teen humor comics flourished after the Code. Dell, Harvey and Archie sold better than then than any super-hero or horror comics ever did.

Comics until the late 1970s were sold everywhere. Supermarkets, drug stories, department stores, candy stores, bus stations, just all over the place.

That faded away because they just didn't make enough profit to be worthwhile for these outlets. Local comics stores started springing up. But they drew more dedicated fans who went specifically to buy comics. Before that, most sales were people just picking up a few copies while shopping.

You shouldn't care about anything that doesn't benefit you.

This is indeed the biggest factor. Comics don't offer nearly as much entertainment for the price as other media,

Comics are only the latest medium to die out. We went through Penny Dreadfuls, Dime Novels, the pulps, men's adventure magazines, and they all had their time but passed. Paperbacks are still doing okay but they won't be around forever either. Comics are on their way out.

That's like blaming Babylon for killing the bison.

yep,pretty much. This calls for the copypasta:
You see this fucking piece of shit right here. This thing wants to destroy all of civilization. Women are the cancer of the world. Have something you enjoy? They'll ruin it. Have something you want to build? They'll tear it down. Have something you want to invest in? They'll crash it with no survivors. These pampered, privileged creatures have life so god damn good and easy that they actively seek out ways to introduce difficulties into others lives, so they can pretend to solve problems. They are envious of the male drive to create and build. They are envious of the male intellect and physical capabilities. They sit around all day every day for their entire lives wishing they had a penis.

Even worse, there are fellow men who fail to see the destructive nature of these emotional beasts. They actively fight against their own interests to help women destroy what men who are more successful than they built. These traitors deserve hell. They go by many names, they betray their brothers out of jealously and act like women in response to that emotion.

Add to that street corner newsstands. Like public phone booths, they're nearly extinct.

Hilariously enough, that's milder than what women say about men. Humans holding themselves down.

I just said the same thing but after googling for 20 minutes because I told you to fuck of you think you explained anything differently.

The returnability demands make it untenable, its that simple. it forced comics out and killed magazines more recently. We agree on this.

But then how can you sit there and say they need to put comics back in those venues knowing they simply cannot do this?

We all agree they used to be more available. Where do comics publishers find an injection of capital to take such a financial risk? Otherwise shut up because “if they can’t afford to re-expand they should just die” makes zero sense when most are doing fine even after a bunch (not even most) shops closed because of the pandemic.

Whoa, you're way off base. I didn't google anything for twenty minutes. That's all stuff that is common knowledge. I remember buying comics at bus stations and street corner newsstands,

And i never said anything about needing to put comics back into venues that either don't exist anymore or don't want them,.And you never told me to fuck off. Are you confusing comments from different people? Take your time and read more carefully.

lol nah
>here's why the thing you want isn't possible
doesn't change the fact that that's what would really help things right now, if it were possible to make it happen. You can bemoan that fact as much as possible, but that won't stop it from being brought up.

Like it's kinda retarded to bitch like that when you think about it: of course shit has lead to the way things are now as a logical response to the way shit was. Ergo, wanting things now to be different comes with the tacit requirements of other shit changing as well, so then shit becomes the logical response to that, so if someone wishes it were possible to put cahmix into box stores, then the wish is that it would be tenable to do so. Instead you had to go all crybaby bitch nugget about it like people are outright stating that the publishers are idiots for leaving money on the table, but you jumped to that conclusion on your own. It's fine to assume implication, but following up like this specifically--especially since you're bitching about shit happening in the past--is just screaming that you've been wanting to piss your pants over this argument in your head for a while.

Honestly, things change and life goes on.

You're not going to see a return of the little kiosks where you drop your film to be developed or stores selling 8-tracks either. Some things die out and the American comic book is going that way.