>>144623661
The faggot face of that comic shop owner is infuriating me. I can see why no one bothers with their damn stores.

>>144623661
American comic publishers rely on these stores because regular retail stores won't touch them.

Having specialty stores isn't inherently a bad thing. No one complains about game or music stores.
Most indie comics wouldn't survive the bookstore or retail market. And there's Amazon, anyway. If people really wanted comics it's been easy to order them online for 20 years.
The real problem is that the style of art and writing of American comics isn't as popular as manga.

>>144623760
But American comics can sell, just not capeshit.

Damn, less than one of my paychecks is enough to make and break a comic shop? Crazy.

>>144623661
An American on /int/ told me that there was this feminist comic book store where they only sold progressive comic books about women protagonists but they had to close after tannies kept harassing the female patrons
Is it true?

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dc-all-in-absolute-universe-walmart-target/
Desperation.

>>144623760
It's fine for shops to exist, but it's way cheaper to preorder them online and have them mailed right to your house. It's such a superior way to buy comics, but this constant placating of comic shops has to end. I read some article on Bleeding Cool I think where a comic shop owner was bitching about DCBS and how he's losing customers to them because they offer way lower prices than he can. Basically whining and saying that they shouldn't be allowed to offer such a good service to people. I've seen so many shop owners who actively want to hold the industry back and make it more expensive to buy comics across the board, just so their stores do better.

>>144623771
If they could, they'd get better word of mouth online and sell better on Amazon. There's manga that had no push in the US except for scanlations that managed to become big here and get official releases.
European action movies will, generally, never be as popular as ones made in America, because general audiences prefer American action movies, even outside of America. Doesn't matter how many American comics you try to push in other genres like romance, comedy, or fantasy, there will be multiple, more popular manga in those genres.
Doesn't mean their shouldn't be more works in different genres, just that the reality is it won't connect to general audiences

>>144623813
I'm really happy to read this. I'm just happy to see a comic company trying something.

>>144623771
Yeah, if only non-capeshit books existed.

I'd come pick up my pull list if you stopped fucking up and leaving shit i ordered out and "accidentally" losing the variants i ordered.

>>144623661
>not making them pay in advance or some type of fee for holding
that's the problem right there dummy.

>>144623830
I meant Scholastic comics like Dog Man or Raina Telgemeier books. Those sell like crazy.

>>144623842
/co/ must learn to accept that capeshit is a tiny weird niche within the overall American comic market.

>>144623863
My shop was awful about leaving stuff out. Sometimes I'd go in with a post-it note where I've written down issues I want that just got solicited, and then I didn't get them. I've switched to online ordering.

Simpsons called out the fact that comic book stores tend to be run by assholes like 40 years ago and then rather than admit this might be a part of the problem /co/ instead went all in on blaming lesbians.

>>144623869
my poor business skills are your responsibility

>>144623869
If you make them pay in advance they might as well buy direct. If you don't let them hold, they are probably going to miss issues. The whole situation is fucked cause LCS are trying to hang on to a niche that is only enabled by habit and nostalgia.

>>144623760
>No one complains about game or music stores.
>No one complains about game stores
Are you just too young to remember when "FUCKING GAMESTOP" was a meme?

>>144623914
>If you make them pay in advance they might as well buy direct
They wouldn't have to pay full price up front. It's like pre-ordering games at GameStop used to work, you put down a small deposit.

I remember being able to buy X-Men at Walgreens when I was a kid. When did LCS become the only way to keep up with monthly releases? Why is the comic turnstile at my local everything store just Archie?

>Thread already got hijacked by shills.
Sad!

>>144623904
It's true. I will say that woke stuff in mainstream comics is a problem, but it's not even in the top five things wrong with the industry now.

if < $500 a month is going to tank your business your margins are way too thin to survive either way
and if that service is costing more than you're making from it then you should stop offering the service

>>144623944
Won't work, different model. Games are one-off purchases while comics are ongoing. You're going to put down a deposit for every future issue of a comic forever? What would the deposit be based on?

>>144623771
Yeah aren't indie/webtoon comics saleing like gangbusters right now

>>144623944
But what he's saying is that if you're going to put money down in advance, you might as well order from one of these online sites and get all your books for 35-40% off.

>>144623954
Stores stopped wanting to sell them. Low profit margins, people would just read them in the store, get damaged easily.
Magazines in general died a slow death at retail.

>>144623993
>your margins are way too thin to survive either way

Well, yeah. These stores are barely hanging on at best. It's why so many pivot to being general nerd-stuff stores, it's near-impossible to survive on American comics alone.

>>144623954
Publishers had to buy back unsold issues. This isn't the case with LCS because they just hold onto them and stick them in the discount bins.
This guy is an idiot>>144624016

>>144623813
>>144623836
the problem is no one except a select few wants to spend $5 on 22 page issues, even if those issues are densely packed with text.
Manga changed the way we look at comics. even if it's 5 words a page and pages of just action scenes(a good thing), it comes off as a better value at $8. And unless you get a publisher willing to take a loss, you're never going to see a value like that from American comics

>>144623791
>>144623993
Hope he's just thinking the number would be large enough to get sympathy from people who don't manage their own finances, and he's actually doing okay, otherwise he's already fucked if this ammount is his "biggest threat".

>>144623760
>The real problem is that the style of art and writing of American comics isn't as popular as manga.
The real real problem IMO is more that manga has been a better deal unless you really like color printing. Why buy a floppy when a few dollars more gets you a full volume of a manga?

>>144624003
Make the deposits carry forward as long as you pick them up.

>>144624039
No, the lack of sales is also an issue. They never stopped offering monthly comic sales to retailers, there's been times where 7-11/Toys R us/bookstores/supermarkets in the 2000's. they all stopped overtime because they didn't sell.
Having to buy back unsold issues is another part of it too, but it wouldn't be an issue if they were selling decently.

>>144623661
Shops are not a venue intended to promote the sell of comics nor are they intended to make comics accessible.

Shops came about from a now past demand. Comics were sold in many different places, mostly whoever sold magazines which included supermarkets and pharmacies. The demand was such that it allowed for a specialized store catering to a specific market.

Not selling them in other places came about from a lack of demand, isolating access to these specialty stores. It's not a 'model', it's all they can manage.

>>144624042
The price is a massive problem. But they charge those prices because they have fewer and fewer readers. And the high prices drive off readers, so they jack them up more. It's a viscous and destructive cycle.

>>144623661
yeah, I just want to pay $25 a month or whatever and have a modest bundle of comics arrive at my doorstep.

>>144624097
That is such a superior model and it's insane it's not pushed more heavily. I think a lot of people don't even realize it's an option.

>>144624088
This is the second time this week I've seen someone call a cycle sticky. Vicious is the one meaning aggressive.

>>144624039
>This guy is an idiot

He's not, he's right that the low profit-margin to floor/shelf-space ratio is part of the reason why regular retailers stopped selling floppies and most magazines altogether. There were several factors that led to the development of the direct market model.

>>144624042
>even if those issues are densely packed with text.

The "more words = more value" mentality of American comic readers is literally retarded.

Speaking purely as a consumer floppies seem like a scam and I wouldn't buy them, so I can't fault stores for not wanting to sell them.

>>144624058
>The real real problem IMO is more that manga has been a better deal unless you really like color printing.

Nah, that's secondary. You're right that capeshit pricing is insane but it wouldn't matter if manga was a better deal if people didn't first want it. Manga is just more appealing so it sells.

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>>144624058
>Why buy a floppy when a few dollars more gets you a full volume of a manga?
even if you priced American comics that cheap, it still doesn't mean it's going to sell
Toilet-bound Hanako kun makes non-weebs scratch their heads and wonder how the fuck this is a top selling manga in the US, but it has a look and style of writing I won't ever find in American comics. So many indie comics in the US just look unappealing visually.

>>144624129
He's making excuses for the lazy ass comic book industry.
>Oh we can't try that, that didn't work 20 years ago and there's no reason it would work now. Guess we just have to slowly die

>>144624151
>Speaking purely as a consumer floppies seem like a scam

Floppies have been inching up to $5.99 with no sign of stopping. We're approaching a point where an individual floppy issue is going to be a third or even half of what a whole trade is. I know Marvel just announced that they're going to ease up on pricing but we all know that's bullshit that won't last.

>>144624042
What you’re talking about is secondary release manga paperbacks and comparing it to ongoing comics. They’re not the same product.

Amazon could easily cut into physical sales market, all they would need to do implement a pull list system and a pile of loot/private warehouse that auto charges you and ships your pulls last Wednesday of the month.

>>144624185
>Oh we can't try that, that didn't work 20 years ago and there's no reason it would work now.

But that's true unless something has changed in the last 20 years. Regular retailers didn't stop carrying floppies randomly. What's changed that now makes floppies an attractive option for them? Why would they give up valuable floor or shelf space to floppies when they stopped doing that because it wasn't worth it?

This isn't a children's cartoon where you just gotta believe, you need an actual business case for why retailers would ever consider this again.

>>144624208
Outside Japan, you don't really have an option to buy weekly print issues of manga. But when you did, it was still a way better deal. An issue of Jump or a floppy, which has more content?

>>144623806
I've never heard anything about that before.

/lit/ is probably the most full of shit board on 4chan.

>>144624123
no one cares

>>144624219
100%. There's already sites that do this DCBS offers an amazing service, with prices way less than you'd get at a comic shop. It's so much better and it honestly makes comic shops obsolete in my opinion. You can even get the FCBD issues, and the amount you can get is based on how many books you bought in the previous year, which seems fair to me.

>>144624208
That's true, but also a customer doesn't generally care. You may have people who want to support local or understand the difference in production costs, but most will just see
>180 pages, $8
>22 pages, $5

>>144624308
After some Googling I don't see anything like what that anon describes. Closest I could find is a comic store owned by a black woman in Philly closing a few years ago due to Covid pandemic-related problems.

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>>144624144
It's not necessarily the reader, editorial and writers were always self-conscious about not being books. eC comics, which were looked as pushing boundaries back in the 50's, are really just illustrated stories. They even wrote the text out before the art and the artists had to illustrate around that on a page.
Look at Stan Lee's marvel books, when it's a big issue he sells it as being "novel sized".
Readers(at least not the boomer crowd who love Jim Shooter era marvel) welcomed art being more prominent, but it always gets dialed back eventually.

>>144623661
reminder that no other periodicals require the store owner to pay 75% of the cover price and own the title before selling it on

literally everybody else does sale or return, and when DC tried that a few years ago they continued doing variant covers for high orders and so got hosed on costs as retailers over-ordered knowing they'd get the variants for free

it produced massive "sales" that were illusory as most of those books were subsequently pulped at DC's expense

>>144624378
>It's not necessarily the reader, editorial and writers were always self-conscious about not being books.

It's both. It's why Silver Age comics are notoriously wordy. Apparently at that time the children who were the target audience felt that fewer words per panel/page meant they were being ripped off and editorial responded in kind with mandates for minimum amounts of text. You're right that even with adults the idea that comics should be a marriage of word and art is fairly alien.

>>144624403
But isn't that exactly the reason comics publishers switched to this model because they couldn't bear the increasign cost of sale-and-return? The direct model allowed them to foist all of the risk onto the stores.

Americans don't actually like comics in the same way that the Japanese do, at least, not culturally. All of our cultural choices are downstream of books and journalism.

However, I think now is a good time to create a robust comics industry. What can we take from the original appeal of American comics to synthesize with the good parts of the Japanese model?

>>144624357
And the trade paperbacks for western comics are still more expensive than manga volumes. You arguably get better printing for that price, but is it worth it?

DC and Marvel put out "omnibus" editions, but only as hardcover collector's items. Manga omnibus editions are meant to read a long running series for cheaper.

>>144624403
So what you're saying is:
Comic shops brought it upon themselves?

>>144624185
Like I said, they've tried, and a walgreens is the last place I'd try to get sales going again when they can't even make decent sales for far less niche magazines that have been around for 100 years.
I'm younger than you, but the pipeline for how my generation(and others) got into manga is closer to what they should follow. We saw scans online, we had the official websites linking us to chapters, manga was cheap in video and bookstores and available in large quantities(and most importantly we had anime and games to get us into them, but American studios are too stubborn to ever do that)

>>144624480
>I'm younger than you
Maybe.

>>144624205
My logic is, even if I ignore the travel costs? If a trade which contains a minimum of 5-6 issues is $15, then the individual issues CAN'T be more than 3 dollars otherwise it just makes way more sense to wait for the trade. And the odds of floppies going under $3 a pop are virtually nil.

>>144623661
It barely made sense 20 years ago when they could all be mailed directly to readers, and it makes even less sense now when digital comics can be instantly accessible the moment they are done.

Although, the real issue is that brick and mortar stores have been made obsolete by all the taxes, speculative investment, and asset hording bookkeeping scams that have been incentivized by the government. if a store is on the verge of bankruptcy after one or two bad months and their profit margin is measured in hundreds of dollars, they were fucked before they ever started playing the game. Nothing could save them from the reality that the cost of operation is too high to be offset by loyal customers constantly pumping money into something that cannot be sustained by anything short of cult-like consumerism constantly overpaying for luxury entertainment products.

>>144624246
>But that's true unless something has changed in the last 20 years.
NTA but I got a smartphone in that time, so now I can read stuff (mostly manga) on my phone way more easily.

>>144624459
I think the value per dollar has to increase. Either make the books cheaper or bigger. And cut out the middleman of comic shops and mail the books to people's houses. That's how they get every other product in the current year.

>>144624459
>to synthesize with the good parts of the Japanese model?
The big two at least won't use the good parts.

>>144624512
Digital comics suck. They don't work on a laptop or phone, so you need to have a tablet, and you have to turn it sideways for every two page spread. I hate that.

>>144624459
>What can we take from the original appeal of American comics

I think this is the source of the problem that you're identifying, though. The original appeal of American comics was as disposable entertainment for children. It started that way in Japan and Europe too, but for various reasons a more mature comic culture was allowed to develop in those places. The US is still firmly stuck in the "comics = kids" mindset. Most US adults won't even considering listening to anything to do with comics regardless of the actual content.

Used to order all kinds of statues, figmas, mangas, and relugar/variant cover comics from my LCS. Guy who worked there always made sure my stuff was ordered and kept orderly. We became good friends. After a while he left cause they owners were starting to get greedy with Pokemon TCG, Warhammer, Magic TCG pandering. Suddenly my shit is ordered incorrectly, they want to unbox my stuff and then re-box it when I pick up, and sometimes I get comics I'll never have an interest in show up in my box. Owners also want to charge me shipping for when I order anything that's not a comic. Tell em to fuck right off and leave. LCS is now down to 1 struggling store.

Get fucked you greedy jews. I used to spend anywhere from a $100 to 1k at the LCS depending on what I would get in that week.

>>144624170
People often wonder why so many women flock to manga, but you look at American comics and there's just very little cute stuff, and often times what is there is really really gay, and not in a titillating way, but in an embarrassing cringe way.

>>144624524
Well, duh. The most immediate solution is retroactively applied copyright reform and structural relief of the Big 2, but that would still leave the problems of distribution, content, and marketing, which are broader structural problems facing almost all media everywhere today.

>>144623661
Marvel only decides if a comic is successful and should continue based on physical floppy sales. No digital, no trades.

That's a problem.

And no this isn't random speculation we have outright statements from creators working for Marvel that this is the case and why a lot of popular smaller books get axed. The readers are mostly on digital or trade wait and so the book gets canceled by issue 10.

>>144624029
culture changes, industries die, the comic industry for whatever reason thinks it deserves to be "saved" and expects people to adjust their behavior to do so
like the arcade industry died and now it's a much smaller market that always has a restaurant attached to it, people go there to have a dink and a burger and maybe play a couple games while they're there, they don't go there to just play games anymore

I'm sure its jarring and sad to see your business decease but that means people just don't want what you're offering anymore
I think a problem I see when people turn their hobby into a business is they expect customers to care about the hobby as much as they do. But it's a business, it's market driven. You can have pet projects if you want to but don't be mad if you can't make a living off of it

>>144624512
>brick and mortar stores have been made obsolete by all the taxes, speculative investment, and asset hording bookkeeping scams that have been incentivized by the government

What libertarian lunacy is this? Online sales made brick and mortar stores obsolete grandpa.

>>144624523
>Either make the books cheaper or bigger.
I'd say both. Jump has the right model. But that requires cheaper labor putting up with treatment Americans don't accept.

>>144624518
I meant changed for the retail stores so that they'd want to stock floppies for sale again. It made no sense for them 20 years ago and it continues to make no sense. They're out to make money, they're not going to stock something that they don't think will be worth it.

>>144624540
>they want to unbox my stuff and then re-box it when I pick up

They wanted to open stuff you bought? Why?

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>>144624523
You could save so much and make more comic pages for less money if you just made comic pages simpler too.
You don't need a background or a full cast in every panel
You can do scratchier line art
You can do a page of just head shots
Just make more pages and space out the text. Just browsing through a recent JJK chapter from a random website, a page like this is something you'd never see from the big two, but works organically in manga. Comic artists do headshots at cons in just a few minutes, this could be done in a short time and make another page or two a day.

>>144624566
NTA but he's got a point. The comic book store closest to me got bulldozed to make way for "luxury apartments" and that seems to be really common in cities these days.

>>144624571
It doesn't necessarily mean cheaper labor; it can just mean more people for less work (and American comics are already super inefficient) and more firms in the market. We need a lot more investment, and I don't think that companies are seeing that it's worth putting stuff into.

>>144624565
The thing is, we went through a whole decade where Marvel movies were the biggest thing on earth. Normies knew who minor characters like Vision were. They were interested in learning about the history and lore of comic books. The fact that Marvel couldn't turn that into increased comic sales is something that I can only attribute to incompetence.

>>144624543
The sad thing America did once have an enormous romance comics sector that just died and has never come back. I don't even see regular romance stuff from indie publishers, it all has some kind of twist. How do American publishers not get that there is a crazy huge market for it?

>>144624566
The profit margin on most small businesses is usually measured in the very low single digits. Operational costs, taxes, licenses, etc make it so anything short of high volume, overpriced exploitation can't survive long enough to ever recoup the cost of starting a business in the first place.

Online retailers stealing business is a big contributor, but that's because it's so insanely expensive to run any kind of store these days that even if they weren't losing sales to amazon, they'd still barely be scraping by and racking up debt

>>144624618
American publishers run private clubs for their friends and the people who can speak their language, not actual businesses. Of course, you can't make a new slop mill because the establishment stuff gets all the shelf and marketing space, or at least what little of it remains.

>>144624601
The difference is that manga can be sold on its story if its art is lacking. Like how Attack on Titan's art is actually kinda bad but the story sucked people in.

Capeshit as a genre actively mocks the idea of getting invested in anything. Why bother? Characters that die will be back eventually. The next writer will undo the story elements you liked.

>>144624606
>>144624628

Yes, operating a physical store is always going to entail more expenses and risks than a virtual one. That's the point.

>>144624628
>Online retailers stealing business is a big contributor
It sounds cruel to say, but frankly, if an online service can offer a better and cheaper service than an LCS can, I don't see what's the point of their existence.

>>144624425
That's why I had a cheeky comment about Jim Shooter loving boomers. Shooter was basically a 60's DC guy. Look at that "why don't comics do one-shots anymore?" thread for that
Generally complaining about a lack of words still comes down to value, but I think modern audiences would be more accepting if they were cheap.

>>144624571
>But that requires cheaper labor putting up with treatment Americans don't accept.

No it doesn't, and the American companies already pay their creatives. And if we're talking unacceptable practices American companies own their creators' IP something mangaka would never accept.

>>144623661
Imagine your business going under over 500 bucks worth of unsold merchancy every month
Your average grocery store throws that away every week

>>144624649
I do get the sense that DC is trying. I've had that sense for a few years. Maybe it's only out of desperation, but I do think they're at least attempting to get new readers and grow their business. I'm happy about that, and I hope they'll be successful, but it will take a lot more than just some new jumping on points. The industry is so unhealthy.

>>144624681
>Your average grocery store throws that away every week
Your average grocery store is making very thin margins.

>>144624617
well that's true, and also there's no shortage of manga sales happening so people can't even argue the format is undesirable
so it isn't comics that are unpopular, it's western comics that are unpopular. And that's largely to do with the culture surrounding them, and lets be honest the cost is outrageous

>>144624658
In theory the LCS provides an important benefit in the form of a third space where people can gather and form a community and those are important for societal health but the people running the stores tend to be jerks that want you out as soon as possible and generally capitalism doesn't really give a shit about that sort of thing to begin with.

>>144624668
>Generally complaining about a lack of words still comes down to value,

Yeah and it just makes zero sense. What matters is an entertaining story which can be done in 10,000 words or 0 depending on the execution. Screeching about word count is moronic.

>>144624700
Is Alfred back yet?

>>144624649
>art is lacking
But it's not bad art, it's fine and engaging even if it lacks polish.
Really I find it to be the opposite. Manga stories can be stock and cliche but the way they're told is engaging. People joke about romance or shonen having stock tropes but read them anyway because they're enjoyable. I have girl friends who talk about reading a bunch of manga like it's lifetime TV movies because they recognize them as disposable entertainment they're interested in.
The big two keep hyping people up about new comics changing things forever. Only the initiated know it's going to be undone or not permanent and know the score.

>>144624596
They had display glass cases where they put some statues in to "show off" what they could order. I always had an assortment of different stuff I ordered and they thought it "look cool" if they showed off what I ordered.

>>144624734
They're not going to make him black.

>>144624734
He is still dead. Jon is still grown and gay.

>>144624653
It's far more expensive than it should be, which is the problem. External factors, unrelated to online sales, are driving up the cost to ridiculous levels that no small business owner can actually keep up with unless they have an extremely devout customerbase who is willing to overpay as much as possible solely so the business can keep it's head just barely above water. It should not take a cult of consumers just to stay operating are minimum profitability, and there was a long period of time where that was not the case.

>>144624707
>And that's largely to do with the culture surrounding them, and lets be honest the cost is outrageous
I agree. Those are the two biggest problems. That needs to change before anything else. It's not even about the content of the books. Yeah this current Spider-Man run isn't very good, but if those other issues were fixed, more people would be reading it.

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>>144624601
I fucking love manga

>>144624740
That's bullshit. It's not their stock to display those are your property. You should have reported them to the USPS for opening your mail.

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>>144624539
>It started that way in Japan and Europe too, but for various reasons a more mature comic culture was allowed to develop in those places. The US is still firmly stuck in the "comics = kids" mindset. Most US adults won't even considering listening to anything to do with comics regardless of the actual content.
The other side of the pendulum doesn't help really. Indie comics are full of artsy, pretentious bullshit aimed at "elevating the medium" but having no appeal to anyone who isn't in the mood to read an art comic.
I don't care how beautiful the graphic design is in a Chris Ware comic, that shit is boring, meanwhile I can talk about something from JJK or Chainsaw man at a bar with 20 somethings and they'll recognize it, even if those comics are for people younger than us.

>>144623806
Tannies as in old ladies?
Cause I can buy "progressive" and sisterhood type older women thinking they can assault and perv on girls.

Hell it's one of the two major reasons why female only gyms have been a flop and no one wants to talk about it.

>>144624170
>So many indie comics in the US just look unappealing visually.
I really wonder what caused the preference among the powers that be for this sort of stuff. I was looking at the Angoulême awards, and since the early 2000's it's been almost nothing but this kind of stuff that wins awards. Before that, normal comics. But in recent years? Almost nothing but chicken scratchy, hard on the eyes, pretentious shit. You see it, and you think "maybe I'm being judgemental, maybe there's something to these comics I'm just not seeing", so you try to read some of them. But no, they're shit. And sure, the random comic some random Anon recommended last week actually also won this award in the 90's, and that wasn't high art or anything. But at least it had nice art. And it was fun.

>>144624754
The problem is middlemen strangling the economy all at once. Both corporations and the government should recognize them and attack them wherever they are, and advocate for these to be owned by the public and accountable if they fuck up.

You wouldn't tolerate unreasonable taxes and tariffs that only go to a useless man's pockets if it were a king, so the same should not be tolerated here.

>>144624743
It's 2024, you never know.

>>144623760
okay but gamestop is a corporate cess pit

>>144623678
What’s your problem?

>>144623830
but that's bullshit because manga sells but publishing companies refuse to print eurocomics

>>144624087
Walmart should start selling comics again but we could also use synergy to make up for the initial loses like having Walmart heavily featured within the comics like maybe joker keeps a Walmart hostage with his joker ray and batman has to work with wallmarts employees to free the shoppers
Or maybe we could debut a new mascot and said mascot must appear in every comic in at least two pages, the comics should also advertise that weeks deals in some shape and 3 out of the 22 pages could be reserved for third party advertising

>>144624794
I read somewhere that what the US really needs and what the Japas and Euros have is what therm "good crap", which is basically what you're describing. Books in the middle that aren't high art but aren't kid-oriented slop, just well-done stories that don't really break new ground but are entertaining whether they be action or romance or whatever. The US currently just has the two extremes.

>>144624539
this is also bullshit because the same applies to cartoons but plenty of adults liked rick and morty. adults watch cartoons, adults read comics. it is known

>>144624794
>I don't care how beautiful the graphic design is in a Chris Ware comic, that shit is boring
I like Rusty Brown, it's got that nice pathetic sadness going on, works great as a peek into the kind of life you could end up with if you let yourself be absorbed by your hobbies instead of being a more well-rounded person who can both enjoy your hobbies while also being a normal responsible adult.

>>144623935
>>144624820
I meant more indie stores than gamestop. Digital Press here in NJ is one of them.

>>144624087
>>144624849
walmart sells comics but they're shitty generic capeshit

this is an issue with dumbfuck u.s. citizens not being readers. i guess the only people who want to read to kids and get them in to reading at this point are trans people but that makes the conservatives shit bricks. apparently they want the right to kill the children by reading bible stories

>>144624459
Sexy Children

>>144624854
>adults read comics

They really don't. The sales speak for themselves. The only adults that read comics are those who already started as kids long ago. Normie adults wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole. Again, don't take my word for it, try selling a random adult on reading any comic at all.

>>144624459
>original appeal of american comics
>good parts of japenese model

the fuck is the "japanese model"? action, philosophy, and nerdiness. throw in some real science and sexy women. milfs, even.

>>144624902
When I see a kid in the local comic shop, I do a double take because it's so unusual. It's almost exclusively adults who read comics.

>>144624886
I agree with this statement.
>>144624852
Yes, there's nobody who understands quality on the popular side and nobody who understands how to sell something on the indie side. We used to have a better balance of this stuff; the old John Grisham stuff and King were groundbreaking, to say nothing of Silence of the Lambs or even Alex Cross.

>>144624703
Not really tho
At least here the average grocery store has been operating for at least 20 years and I have only seen one go under and it was during covid and I don't even think they struggled financially, I think the owner got fed up and left

>>144624902
>the sales speak for themselves

the sales speak for dumbasses trying to sell comics for kids when adults are the actual audience. people didn't buy mosaic because they were adults, people didn't buy mosaic because it was clearly a contrived character that had no fanbase in existence

>>144624916
Yes, that's what I said:

>The only adults that read comics are those who already started as kids long ago.

The American market has been reduced to this small core of aging autists.

But I'm talking culturally. The general population mocks those people as manchildren. Regular adults consider comics kid garbage, they won't even consider trying no matter what the actual content is. It's different in France or Japan.

>>144624902
If I talk to a 20-something who has interest in something other than sports they're familiar with manga and probably have read some and would be up for reading a comic if it appealed to them. They don't make the distinction that "ackshually it's MANGA not comics", they recognize it as a comic even if it's Japanese.

>>144623661
Yes.
And that they didn't capitalize on the movie comic boom by selling more shit to normies and indie stuff and general nerd stuff to get people into the medium and buying their geekery from them is on them.

>>144624087
This. And comic sellers do not give a fuck because they get paid and some fame and potential to sell new characters to the mainstream normies to do mid work.
And the stores are barely managing to survive because the big 2.5 have taken over the idea of the comic book in NA and the stores don't have the balls or IQ to stock, push and help get the word out on indie and non cape comics.

Most have realized long ago that they can just sell back issues and general geek stuff. Just be a place to meet other geeks and nerds and hang out and talk.

>>144624916
exactly, that other anon is completely fucking wrong. the only time i've ever seen kids in any store at all with gaming shit was a sunday i happened to get some mtg cards and a fuck ton of kids were there for pokemon cards

it also makes no sense why anyone would continue to try to make that argument, because parents shove electronic devices in their kids' faces, not reading material. there is no growth for comics because younger generations don't fucking read as much

>>144624940
>They don't make the distinction

I'd wager they do, actually. They'll know what manga is and where it comes from and don't have the "comics = capes" association they have with American comics.

>>144624954
>there is no growth for comics because younger generations don't fucking read as much

They read manga, though. Capeshit excuse.

>>144624945
>they didn't capitalize on the movie comic boom

demonstrably false. comics changed to match the movies and it fucking sucked because a) it was in poor taste and b) normies don't fucking read comics, they watch movies.

people keep waffling between these arguments about "normies don't read comics" and "the comics didn't capitalize"

pick one, it's not both

It's remarkable how some anons cannot understand that "culturally in the US adults view comics as for kids" has no relation to who is actually buying the comics. Of course kids don't buy comics anymore, a shrinking group of aging autists do, but still the idea persists for normie adults that comics are for kids.

>>144624926
anon have you ever worked as a grocery store? you can have one be around for decades and STILL make thin margins because it's just what it is. Cold cuts basically make no money, for example, which is why delis sell prepared food they can sell for a lot more profit.Loss prevention and costs get hammered into you even as a lowly wagie because any sort of loss is an issue.
They stay afloat because people will always need food. Sure, they lose more money than a comic shop would without risking going out of business, but proportionally they're bigger and sell more anyway.

>>144624971
They don't read comics because they only sell them in nerd shops that smell weird. I promise you that if normies had an issue of Batman or Spider-Man on the rack when they're checking out at a grocery store they'd pick it up. If people were aware that they could subscribe and get some issues in the mail, they'd be interested. Most people don't even know that Marvel and DC have official mail subscription services.

>>144624618
Because romance media is all but dead and what romance there is, is quickly co-opted by a well organized and very agressive cabal of queers and people who hate the idea of anything resembling normal and idealized sexuality.

>>144624956
Pretty much everyone knows Walking dead and Scott Pilgrim is a comic, or read other books in scholastic book fairs, or if they went to college might've encountered your basic course material like Maus or Perseopolis these days.
They know comics are more than capes, they just aren't necessarily interested in American comics for other reasons.
People forget that when I say "people in their 20's", it's people who were teenagers a few years ago.

>>144625009
You do not exist in the real world. Please go outside and get a big hole drilled in your head, preferably in that order.

>>144625009
The funny thing is manga has endless oceans of gay/trans/whatever shit too, it's just that there's also a huge amount of regular romance too. They recognize that there's plenty of room (and big markets) for both. If you want the faggiest shit imaginable you can get it and if you want the purest old-school straight romance imaginable you can also get it.

>>144624984
I think Marvel and DC should publish more artsy shit today. The alternative comics that DC was publishing back in the day are still very highly regarded. Sandman, Hellblazer, Starman, those are all major classics that people can talk about seriously. They should make more of those. Have something that people can point to as something artistic and alternative feeling in modern comics. Even just one or two from each of them would be really good I think.

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>>144625009
anon, please stop getting your media from youtube ragebait. Please.

>>144623678
Good, that's his intent because people costing his business money is infuriating him and he wants to pay it forward.

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>>144624967
>normies love capeshit movies but don't read the comics

you're the only one here with a capeshit excuse. you are directly defying the truth that younger generations are reading less and are scoring much worse in academic shit as a whole

https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/are-books-dead-why-gen-z-doesnt-read

kids in JAPAN read manga

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1328732/japan-manga-reading-frequency-by-age-group/

kids in the UK read
https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-engagement-with-comics-in-2023/

>>144624998
>if it was at the grocery story they'd pick it up
okay but walmart is the only corporate store ive seen do that and the only shitty attempt they've made is to putt in on a shelf, packaged horribly in bulk because it was an afterthought. corporate stores treat them as magazines but what that means is the smaller cash register aisles have less space and the comics industry would have to fight the shitty fucking magazine industry

>>144623661
If your business cannot deal with a $500 a month charge, your business is not profitable. Further, refusing to change your hold policy and continuing to sit on books that could be sold if they were on the floor shows why LCS are the dumbest fucking people alive.

>>144624039
>>144624185
You really don't know shit about how retailing outside of comic shops works and it shows

>>144624876
Are you fucking retarded?
The fuck diseased fantasyland do you live in?

>>144624902
Explain the walking dead? Explain the death of superman? The MCU and DCEU was the NA comics greatest chance LAST CHANCE to capture the imaginations of the NA market.

And they failed.
Archie saw a massive uptick in sales during that time. Many non major cape books saw a boost when the death of superman happened.

The only thing they got out of this movie boom was that they should shit out a new marketable to the normies character to get a movie/tvshow/cartoon/streaming show made.

>>144625067
>okay but walmart is the only corporate store ive seen do that and the only shitty attempt they've made is to putt in on a shelf, packaged horribly in bulk because it was an afterthought. corporate stores treat them as magazines but what that means is the smaller cash register aisles have less space and the comics industry would have to fight the shitty fucking magazine industry
I get that. But I think they need to figure something out and get these books in front of more people, or the industry will die. They need to try something. Do whatever they need to do to make comics attractive for these stores to stock. They don't even need to get every series. Just a few guaranteed sellers.

>>144624606
so the market deemed something unworthy and put a furniture store up. not the government. got it.

>>144624628
okay so rent is high. a way to fix that is for the GOVERNMENT to institutionalize rent caps so rent can't go up. the market doesn't give a shit about small business, the market is specifically designed to help big business cannibalize small business

>>144624995
>have you ever worked as a grocery store?
Why would I? Why would you expect me to?
>Cold cuts basically make no money
They mostly sell dairy, beverages both alcoholic and non alcoholic and every day non perishables, preserves and oils on top of hygiene products and households objects such as trash bags and detergents

>>144625113
>they need to try something

oh they're trying. but they're shitty idpol liberals. so their ideology about what's appealing is going to fail their ideology in capitalism. there are no guaranteed sellers because of the failure of the education system (at least in the u.s.) and the fact that their business model is an explicit rejection of quality

>>144625130
>Why would I? Why would you expect me to?

Because you were proclaiming that comic stores are bad because they make thin margins, but it turned out that's the same case with grocery stores

>>144625109
i live in the world where reading rainbow used to be based and cool, but then later kids stopped reading, and then when a few trans people wanted to read to kids, conservatives shit bricks. these are the same conservatives that defund schools by the way.

no one gets to bitch and complain about people not reading, especially young people not reading, and in the same breath think it's cool to stop law abiding adults from reading to kids

>>144625130
> Why would you expect me to?
It’s a pretty common job you’d do as a teenager or in college. Even if you didn’t work one , you might know some one who did.
The cold cuts thing was just one example. Everyday items generally need to be priced cheap enough so there’s little profit overall. Paying workers also cuts into budget. It’s why self checkouts have become so popular.

>>144623760
>If people really wanted comics it's been easy to order them online for 20 years.

Problem with ordering online is that you have to be sure you want the thing before you even see it. That cuts off all the people on the fence.

>>144625155
I was not
I was claiming that not surviving 500 bucks of unsold merchancy every month is ridiculous when your average grocery stores throws that into the trash every week

>>144624971
Anon, changing nickfury black and making superman into a nebbish nerd when he was just a regular farm nigga that wore a suit and glasses is what you're talking about.

You're not arguing in good faith, and I think you don't know what the fuck you're talking about overall.

They didn't change a single solitary thing else and it was the same poorly written poorly drawn indescribly obtuse business as usual outside of that.

The comics are made by and for a tiny incestuous group of people who don't live in the real world and don't really care if they sell to normies because they'll get paid and get work either way.

They didn't capitalize on a fucking thing. A 5 dollar 200 page mcu based comic book sold at scholastic and in stores?
Fuck that.
Change a character in the comics into something shit and claim their changing it to match the movies.

>>144624984
No one says comics are for kids cause comics are not even in the minds of normal adults or kids. If you see a kid reading a comic it will be webtoons or youtube video comics. Cause google is all but dead as a search engine and you can't accidentally stumble upon a good webcomic just by typing webcomic. Just some bullshit from whoever paid them and stuff to sell.

>>144625174
I'm upper middle class

>>144625192
Which is ridiculous as a comparison because your average grocery expects to sell much more than a comic anyway

>>144625037
K

>>144625040
Yeah, and they openly talk about it. Problem is that het romance is either horribly broken in mainstream stuff or queer.

>>144625057
Oh, one film, from last year, that's more of a star vehicle then an actual romance.
Did you know they cut the kiss at the end of twister because of the say so of steven "rapes children to death" spielberg?

>>144625212
>expects to sell much more
*Sells much more

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>>144625194
>buddy you're talking about *one example when there are many*

>buddy comics haven't changed at all, they were always contrived
yeah almost like it's too much to ask for things to be less contrived, huh?

>comics are made for a shitty in group. that's why i'm here on this board, so stop expecting better things

>hurr durr there were no new comics because of movies from capeshit or even star wars, they don't exist. i am intelligent.
>there was no change to a character in the comics to match the movies, that never happened. i am intelligent.

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-comics-altered-match-mcu/

>>144625165
You mean the dragqueen reading hour?
Many of which were found to be convicted diddlers?
Or the one where the drag queens got naked and started dancing in front fo children while holding books or at a library and the teachers pushed them to go and watch.

That is what you're talking about?

>>144625263
>THEY CHANGED A FEW CHARACTERS BUT THE STORIES ARE STILL THE SAME!!

Yeah...okay that's what you mean.
I was talking about selling comics to people to capitalize on it not doing one of the billions of cheap art changes and expecting it to bring in a huge swath of movie readers

THERE FINE WE CHANGED THIS ONE CHARACTER HAPPY!???
NOW LET US GO BACK TO CIRCLE JERKING/SHLICKING IN A CORNER YOU FILTHIE NORMIE!

>>144623760
You can buy music and games in other stores, not so with comics. I know growing up the only store I could buy comics at was three hours away, it was shit.

>>144625273
>law abiding adults?
>you must be talking about degenerates!

no it's cool anon, you don't have to argue in good faith. keep shitting bricks as younger generations read less and get exposed to comic books less. you're definitely part of the solution.

>>144625306
>selling comics to people

so doing what they were already doing? okay cool you weren't saying anything

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>>144623661
Why would they take orders without people putting down money?

>>144625344
because it's easy to get confused keeping up with it yourself while having a busy life. the cover art for the next issue is often put in the back of the last issue, so you might go to a store and not remember what you already had, or forget which issue you already had because you saw it as a preview two months before

do you feel comfortable with comic book stores just automatically charging your credit card?

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>>144625377
I want to order that book
Okay pay $5
Okay
1 week later
Did you get the book I ordered
Yeah, here it is have a great day

>>144625395
okay cool so you trust the comic store with credit card information being held. thanks for answering my question

Something that I think needs to be addressed is the twitter behavior of a lot of the writers. It's less about woke stuff in the comics themselves. There's a lot of people who refuse to read anything Mark Waid writes, even though he writes exactly the kind of comics they would love otherwise. When DC is trying to promote a new event series that is going to be really important for their new status quo, at a time where they are desperately trying to attract new readers, they really don't need drama about what the writer is saying about the president or conservatives or anything else. That goes for everyone. Even if you think the comicsgate guys are full of shit, seething about them constantly makes them look right. People look at your feed and see ideology and anger. That's not attractive.

>>144625273
surely you have a list

>>144624618
They either want to publish stuff that's bland and gay, or they won't publish anything that's not ugly comix shit that doesn't do happy romance.

>>144625415
>ideology is unattractive
>heroic comic books are about morals and ethics

hm.

>>144625327
What transexuals are you talking about then? Because all I know about trannies helping kids read comes from dragqueen reading hour and the trannies who're indoctrinating children in schools.

Care to link me to an article?

>>144625431
You know what the fuck I mean, and don't pretend you don't, asshole.

>>144624861
I'm also in NJ and Digital Press is great as a museum but I'm always in awe that they're still around. I thought the pandemic was gonna shutter them for sure.

>>144625431
nothing about your ideology is heroic

>>144625442
>all i know is absolutely nothing. now link me an article so i'm not the one baring the burden of proof

>>144625445
oh i do know what you mean. do you think that what conservatives are doing is "attractive"? last i checked the political party that defunds schools stops kids from reading, which means kids stop reading comic books.

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>>144625454
my "ideology" doesn't defund schools, which stops kids from reading, which stops kids from reading comic books

>>144625468
Motherfucker all I'm saying is that if I'm someone who doesn't read comics but is potentially interested, if I go onto the social media of the guy writing Batman and I see him bitching about people who don't like his comics, and bemoaning the terrible eyesight of the person who tried to kill Trump, that's not going to make me interested in becoming part of this subculture.

>>144625459
You're the one who brought it up and bitched about it.
Now post examples of this happening, ill even acept a link to a twitter or youtube video, or shut the fuck up.

>>144625480
yourr ideology turned schools into an expensive waste of time that doesnt even teach children how to read

>>144625502
This is the exact attitude displayed by a lot of supposed professionals who try to promote their comics to potential customers.

>>144625498
"guys this thing called slavery happened and it has generational consequences"

"nope! Cut it!"

just face facts. comic books sales will suck as long as conservatives obstruct education

https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/gop-platform-promises-funding-cuts-for-woke-schools-no-teacher-tenure-school-choice-for-all

>>144625517
yourr ideology turned schools into an expensive waste of time that doesnt even teach children how to read

>>144625516
except it's not. my attitude doesn't hinge on identity politics without class consciousness, and my attitude doesn't hinge on make star wars shitty and incoherent. the dumb attitude right now is "they're just kids give them schlock" when what it should be is "give kids complicated entertainment that speaks to them but doesn't patronize them", like how mr rogers had complex jazz music or something

>>144625528
i'm sure if you repeat yourself enough, you'll eventually feel better enough to cope. comic books will get worse with fewer people following it specifically because of people like you

>>144625551
im not letting you move the goalpost
you brought up schools, own up to it

>>144623842
There is a ton of really cool high concept noncape comics (look to france).

However, American indies suffer from a deluge of black&white suffer porn where mopey sad sacks whine about how bad their life's are and wallow in the fact that they were molested.

If they didn't give indies a bad name we would have more cool pulpshit and fun adventure and comedy books.
Now it's all making out with your best friend and watching your parents die.

Pass

>>144624852
I think they exist, some of what Image puts out fits the bill. But not only is there not much advertising, the format is off-putting. If they're released as floppies they reach a smaller audience and normies won't bother with them, but a graphic novel isn't guaranteed to get in every store. And if you can't tell the while story you want in one book you better hope it sells enough to get a sequel.

>>144625560
you haven't made an assertion, you've just made an attack. you have not backed up anything you've said.
conservatives defund schools, conservatives want one book (the bible) instead of all the other books and comic books in the library. conservatives are also the ones banning comic books

>>144625517
Do you want real accounts of the past and the cost of slavery and class war or do you want divisional trauma porn.

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>>144625569
I'm really excited for The Rocketfellers and Hornsby and Halo and I hope they do well. There aren't enough of these fun, family based comics that can be enjoyed by anyone of any age. I'm glad they're publishing something different from the norm, and it's something I think I'll really like.

>>144624170
>So many indie comics in the US just look unappealing visually.
THIS is a huge deal.
It's all so ugly and the common passer by will never read your skreed if it looks like shit

>>144625569
I read spiderman to get away from the tons of molestation and abuse I had as a kid. Not watch my hero's be beaten down and turned into things I hate.

>>144625577
>>144625560
>>144625551
>>144625536
One or both of these are response bots hoping to drag the conversation entirely entirely synthetic talking points that have nothing to do with actual reality.
Just fagging on about the upcoming farce of an election.

Ignore them and continue on with the subject of the thread.

>>144625581
well for it to be history it has to have been real, genius. the past affects the present.

in any case, this thread only exists because more people aren't reading comics, and for that to happen people, especially children, have to be in to reading. the obstacles to children reading are quite clear

>>144625610
>dragging down the conversation

cope, bitch. the reason comic sales dwindle is because there's no new audience. either ask yourself what's stopping younger people from reading or shut the fuck up

>>144625589
Nice, I'm going to check it out. Never heard of it.
We need more family friendly stuff that is appropriate but doesn't pander to kids.
There is a fine line but if it can handle a serious topic in a respectful way, kids est it up

>>144625516
hold up hold up

i'm not the one that incited violence multiple times then acts surprised if it happens to me. how is pointing out someone else's hypocrisy my attitude problem?

>>144623750
Because the comic distributors make them have to buy whole runs of the damn things without any idea how they'll sell. You can't just buy like ten of a few top titles and put them in the racks anymore.

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>>144625635
Cool. I think it comes out in November, but there was a little preview of it in the Ghost Machine one-shot that came out earlier this year, if you wanted to track that down and give it a look.

>>144625624
>>144625624
>>144625613
>>144625646
Oh, you're actually paid to do this.

>>144625610
>I read spiderman to get away from the tons of molestation and abuse I had as a kid. Not watch my hero's be beaten down and turned into things I hate.

Hard agree.
Trad capes are best when they are aspirational. Modern capes are written by ppl who hate them

>>144625667
oh i do this for FREE

why are kids reading less, you little bitch? answer the question

>>144625680
Or at the very least, a lot of the time it feels like the writer is mocking the idea of a superhero comic while they're writing it.

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>>144625610
oof

>>144625716
When will Skip appear in the Ultimate Universe?

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>>144624042
Its not like manga is inherently spares on words, manga can be just as talky as comics. It just tends to let action speak louder than words in fight scenes and the like, showing the fight instead of having a single part of two dudes not hitting each other with the narrator talking up how impressive the punches that are not being thrown are.

And even thats not a hard rule, the other end of that spectrum is jojo where the narrator has to step in and basically go "To understand the move that is happening at this exact moment in time, lets talk about rayleigh scattering, its effects on the electromagnetic spectrum, and how that interacts with the Elasticisty powers of this character's stand. Only then will you comprehend how this move is being done and what the consequences will be if it lands."

>>144624459
>What can we take from the original appeal of American comics to synthesize with the good parts of the Japanese model?

Alternatively, what if we treated them more like books?

Hear me out. Imagine a world where Spiderman only has like 2 'issues' a year with months between them, but every 'issue' is ~200 pages and represents a complete slice of story with its own internal arcs that start, climax, and resolve within a single volume. No floppies, no splitting stories up into a chapter at a time, just one big slice of story that might still have an overarching story going on in the background between volumes but if you had this one volume all on its own as the only thing on your shelf it be mostly perfectly fine. Like a book: it might be one in the middle of the series, but you can still pick up and enjoy it on its own.
You'd probably pay like 30-40 bucks for that, right? Couple times a year? And with the extra time to devote to each issue, the can afford to make sure that the script and the art is polished up to quality levels instead of shat out to meet a deadline.

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Lets say I want to read a cute romance comic from American publishers. My options are going to be shoddy, whiny looking trash or some shit for hipster boomers written by an old guy who peaked in the 80's.
I can pull our a random romance manga that will be forgotten when it's done and it'll just plain look better than what I see from American comics. show me a comic with hair drawn this nice.
I ask around for American comic recs and it'll be shit that looks like kid's doodles or really old-timey looking art that looks like copy art or instruction manuals.

>>144625929
>Alternatively, what if we treated them more like books?
That won't work because you just know the industry would be full of GRRM types who take a decade to put out a new book.

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>>144625929
here you go.

>>144625683
NTA but
In the general sense, schools that frame reading as a chore backed by organizations like the ALA that put out reading lists full of academia-approved garbage that kills children's interest in reading.
In terms of comics, price and too much continuity. A kid's not going to afford to read comics that are $5 and isn't going to be able to buy enough at any price to keep up with crossover event series.

>>144625577
you made an acusation, i never said conservatives dont defund schools i asked you to justify the budget

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In the middle of this thread I took a walk to a thrift shop by me and found this book for a few dollars.
224 pages, retail is $12, full color. Scholastic knows how to sell comics. Even compared to manga it feels like a good deal. They've made 8 of these books and it's just one of many books they've done.
Now if only we could apply this model to comics for teens and adults.

>>144623678
>>144625063
Retail in general is a dying model. I don't disagree with you that assholes should pay for their collectibles comics (e.g. variants, etc.)/reading material, etc. but retail has only survived and is only surviving by offering consumers something else.

I personally go to LCS to support them when I know they have something I want (no longer books, but a few random other items, or when I am buying gifts), but some owner or employer who is an asshole or is pulling shit is not someone I'm going to spend money on/with.

>>144625431
>thinks ideology, morality, and ethics are the same thing
There you have it. Literally everything wrong with modern politics. The chrysalis of totalitarianism.

>>144625624
>either ask yourself what's stopping younger people from reading or shut the fuck up
They don't know how to read

>>144623661
Should comic book makers take back unsold stock like what happens with magazines?

>>144625589
Fucking hell, this looks identical to all regular American comics to me. Is the American industry really rusted shut so severely that regular, old cape comics with the same, old fugly art are considered groundbreaking just because they're not established characters belonging to megacorporations?

>>144626371
Well it's Peter Tomasi writing it, but it's not really superheroes. It's sci-fi, but it's not your standard Superman story.

>>144626386
Mate, I'm seeing costumes and powers. That's superheroes. I legit don't know why it should qualify as anything else.

>>144625116
The solution to problems caused by the government is less government, not more. Banks and real estate companies squatting on property to try and score some absurd deal from imaginary hyperwealthy investors get dragged into the street and beaten to death as the second step to fix the problem with the anti-business, anti-consumer price gouging happening across the world.

>>144626134
An anon who works at a library once talked about how American comics don't give kids what they want half the time, with more kid and teen aimed graphic novels being bland and safe.

>>144626371
ghost machine is basically the retirement home for people from the Big Two to go to, both creators and readers.
The Rocketfellers premise sounds like it's trying something differently (family from the future goes to the past and has to try to blend in!)- it sounds like a slice of life comedy with a twist, but then it turns out they're escaping An Impending Doom from The Future, so of course it'll end up them becoming effectively superheroes.
It's the same thing when they tried to diversify with New 52 at DC. They said they're doing war comics and horror and so on, but you read a New 52 Sgt. Rock comic and it looks and reads like a superhero book.

>>144623863
I stopped bothering with my pull list the week that they told me they couldn't get the newest issue of Green Lantern Corps (during the War of the Light era) because it was "sold out and they didn't order enough copies".

Like how in the living fuck does that even happen other than they didn't have any copies left, someone asked the clerk behind the counter, and said clerk went into the pull box and grabbed a copy from someones pull list.

>>144625404
Yes, why wouldn't you? If you're that paranoid that the store is going to rob you then you shouldn't be doing business with them in the first place.

>>144626486
>The Rocketfellers premise sounds like it's trying something differently (family from the future goes to the past and has to try to blend in!)- it sounds like a slice of life comedy with a twist

Ironically this sounds exactly like a SOL manga.

>>144626486
>ghost machine is basically the retirement home for people from the Big Two to go to, both creators and readers.
I was wondering about the age of the people involved, given that they treat a VW van as an old banger.

>>144624042
They were on the right track with the anthology books, they just needed better branding with them and maybe a better placement in the stores. That or maybe they should all Archie and try a digest line

>>144626442
You say government like its one single thing, its not. I don't disagree that too many governmental policies are serving the wealthy, but 'less government' is a fallacious answer. They'd just cut the programs that actually help poor people, and keep the ones that bail out the wealthy from their own risky investments. Because the core problem isn't the size of the government, its who that government has been warped to serve as its primary interest.
The answer isn't more government, or less government, but better government. Clip the strings that tie politicians to campaign donors, and suddenly the wealthy no longer pick who gets to run for office.

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>>144626666
That cover is supposed to be a tribute to this I think

>>144626715
what a weird thing to reference

>>144625968
While that might be true, American books end up with a lot more stuff that strikes the happy middle between for kids and for adults. I have my problems with the publishing industry and the infrastructure around book recommendations, but at least they're trying.

Plus >>144625929 is describing what Scott Pilgrim did, and that is still probably the single example of marrying Euro, 90s American, manga, and indie American comics into one awesome package. Other than like Raina of the Bay Area.

>>144624042
>even if those issues are densely packed with text.
>even if
You misspelled "especially when"

>>144626662
That's exactly what I mean. If it was just future family in the past, that's cute, could be fun, but now they gotta team up to fight a bad guy oh no!
>>144626671
>>144626715
lol I was going to say I don't think it's an age thing, if you want to depict a quirky old beater family ride it'd probably be an old VW van, like in Little Miss Sunshine
Then I remembered that movie is 2 years shy of 20 years old. Still I think the visual shorthand is still relevant enough. VW busses just look more pleasant than a modern SUVs.

>>144626701
You're being intentionally obtuse for no fucking reason. We're talking about policies that cripple and kill small businesses, not whether or not we should keep funding foodstamp programs. Kill the policies that make it impossible for any business smaller than Walmart to run a fucking store. Simple as.

>>144625929
The thing is I think that
>what can we take from manga
and
>what can we learn from books
ultimately skirt around to the same point; those things are designed to end. Capeshit isn't. Capeshit is, by design, about to be about a never ending battle of good versus evil that goes on indefinitely. Catharsis and conclusion are an anathema to it.
I don't understand why we can look at something like the Simpsons and say "after thirty years this franchise has grown too stale and should probably end" but then look at something twice as old in Spider-man and say it's fine to keep beating that dead horse.

>>144626779
I don't disagree that should be the end result, but those policy decisions don't exist in a vacuum. The policies that make it impossible for any business smaller than Walmart to survive were the result of a shitton of lobbying and political 'investment', and the people who were behind that lobbying work someone whose name rhymes with ball-mart.
You can't solve the problems caused by corporations owning politicians without unraveling that relationship first, because otherwise even if you did somehow manage to force through a fix for their current exploitative practice their would either find another one or come up with an excuse to quietly change the law back to the way it was a few years later.
We passed a bunch of shit to keep rich people from fucking over the economy for the rest of us after the great depression, and they spent the next few decades giving all of those protections the death of a thousand cuts. Putting us right back under their thumb so slowly we didn't notice it happening because we were distracted by other things.

>>144626769
Damn, now I wanna see the cute future teen daughters trying to blend in at school but failing to understand customs of the present in sexy and hilarious ways.

>Hi Jonathan we're here for the pool party!
>F...F...FUTURA! WHERE'S YOUR BATHING SUIT?!
>Huh? But I've already applied aquatic skin-breathing anti-UV gel...
::her sister walks in wearing the tiniest micro bikini::
>LOL sis don't you remember from the museum? People of this time cover their skin in absorbent fabric when using water entertainment.

>>144625517
I don't know how you've convinced yourself that's a conservative phenomenon. The purpose of education is to allow you to disagree with charming fuckwits, nobody in a position of power is going to back that.

>>144626847
I don't disagree at all, in fact one of the beneficial side effects of the 2 issues a year megaissue is that the stories by necessity have to become more standalone. More focus on the integrity of individual stories, less throwing random bullshit at you issue to issue with crossovers and megaevents.

I totally agree that stories should end, because the end of the story is what makes the rest of it meaningful. By all means keep the brand alive, but we should be on our 3rd or 4th Batman by now. Realistically we already are, goof silver age Batman and edgy Frank Miller Batman ARE different characters, and its dumb to try and pretend they are not by calling them both Bruce Wayne. We would legitimately be better off if MillerBat was a legacy character who donned the cowl after Bruce Wayne retired. And then we'd be on at least another new Batman after that by now.

>>144626461
I think that's a lot of what most American kids experience.
I experienced it too in high school, most of the graphic novels they stocked in the library were boring autobiographies and similar shit, while they also stocked stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist, Death Note, Claymore, and Dance in the Vampire Bund an aisle over, like no shit the kids were more interested in one than the other, what fucking kid wants to read about some depressing WW2 illustrated memoirs.
We got enough of that in actual classes, reading stuff like Night and A Child Called It.

>>144626847
The simple answer is that Spider-man remained relevant through reinvention and Simpsons didn't. If you look at the most popular Spider-man media right now, the PS5 game, the MCU movies, the Spiderverse series, very little of it feels like the first 30 years of Spider-man. Stories that don't end aren't the main problem when books also have long running, unending series that have outlasted their creators. It's a distraction from the issue of comics not being properly marketed, distributed, or appealing. If comics were healthy, there would be room for short, creator owned IPs and long running ones.

>>144624459
Do something similar to what >>144625929 described. Sell them in volumes numbered in chronological order and release two or three every year. This also allows for lower costs in production and shipping, lower prices, and new readers to catch up without having to search for hours online and spend hundreds buying from resellers.

>>144625929
>>144627208
waiting years between new chapters is a good way to kill enthusiasm. You guys go
>muh euro comics
but european teenagers and upward barely read them anymore. It's kids and boomers. You need a way to release chapters online where people will see them, get discussion going, then do the volumes because people liked it enough to support it.
You go on /a/ and have people wishing weekly manga came out FASTER, because it's that popular.

>>144627114
>Stories that don't end aren't the main problem when books also have long running, unending series that have outlasted their creators.

"Long-running but unfinished" isn't the same as "stories that don't end". Long book series do have an ending even if the author dies before getting there. A Song of Ice and Fire is building to an ending even if God knows whether GRRM will ever actually write it all out. Capeshit is different in that there isn't and can't be an end. It's designed to be eternally ongoing.

>>144626546
It's not about that, dumbass. Stores either share information with third parties or pay third parties to handle it for them, making it a privacy concern and more likely to get info stolen. If your mom didn't buy all of your shit for your 30 year-old ass, you would know that.

>>144625624
>because there's no new audience
Man, I wonder how that could possibly be? Clearly, DEI and ESG can't possibly be the culprit. I guess we'll never know.

>>144627267
>Stores either share information with third parties or pay third parties to handle it for them, making it a privacy concern and more likely to get info stolen

Are you posting from 2004? Do you not know what a payment processor is and that they're used everywhere constantly now?

> If your mom didn't buy all of your shit for your 30 year-old ass, you would know that.

You genuinely don't seem to know how commerce works if you're shitting yourself over giving a store your card information.

>>144627244
>waiting years between new chapters is a good way to kill enthusiasm
Only if you have an attention span fried by TikTok. If you were right, manga wouldn't have ever been successful.

>You go on /a/ and have people wishing weekly manga came out FASTER, because it's that popular.
You contradicted your own argument and reaffirmed what I said in the post you replied to.

>>144627114
I use Spider-man as an example specifically because an example that came to mind: Rhino.
They do a story where Aleksei gets married, decides to go straight, gets tempted into going back to crime until Peter talks him out of it. It's great character progression. Then a little bit later just kill off his wife and have him relapse and be a supervillain again because fuck you this is capeshit.
Endings give an audience something to look forward to; even if you never reach them tat sense of build up to something generates interest in a way that the capeshit cycle doesn't. I means hit you cite the MCU but this is why post endgame MCU has been hemmoraging its audience; it's too much wheel spinning and no more real sense of build up to something.

Compare this to manga. I fell off a series like Don't Tease Me Nagatoro because it got stale as fuck, but I heard it's ending so I might as least check that last chapter

>>144625377
>>144625404
Why would you expect the shop to wait until the comic is there to charge you? You'd pay $4 right then and there, they give you a receipt and mark down your name, and when it comes in, it gets put in your pull box just like it does right now. You then come in later to grab your comics that are already paid for. Simple as.

>>144627329
>Do you not know what a payment processor is and that they're used everywhere constantly now?
Yes, that's why I'm said what I did.

>You genuinely don't seem to know how commerce works if you're shitting yourself over giving a store your card information.
I'm cautious because I know how it works. You have the technological literacy of a boomer.

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>>144625517
The generational consequences are self-inflicted. Many countries subjected to slavery and colonialism pull their act together. No American alive today owned slaves or was a slave. Crawl in a ditch with your white devil dog shit.

>>144627256
I'm talking about book series like James Bond, or Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, or other series that have outlived their author or have been handed out to ghost writers. Those are closer to what big two superhero comics are, and intentionally unending by design.

>>144627377
>why I'm said
Fucking dammit.

>>144627377
>I'm cautious because I know how it works. You have the technological literacy of a boomer.

Storing CC info is incredibly common in both online and real-world retail. You sound like some granny terrified of the Internet if you're this scared of a store having your CC on file. You really do seem to be posting from like 20 years ago when everyone was scared of shopping online.

>>144627380
>implying a household with both parents active in the lives of their children is a "white" concept
So this is the power of antiracism.

>>144627348
>If you were right, manga wouldn't have ever been successful.
But manga got big precisely because thee was a constant flow of it keeping people's interests. Delays do kill hype, people are willing to wait if the series has enough backlog or is high quality, but that only goes so far.

>>144627407
Something done frequently doesn't equate to something done right, midwit. Especially with everything IT and service related getting outsourced to Indians who do less than savory things with such information, you should only use your credit or debit when you absolutely have to.

>>144627489
Okay grandma, time for bed.

>>144627244
People will say they want more content sooner, but that's ALWAYS a good sign. It means demand is high, and your market wants more of what you make.

6 months before the next issue is a long time in comics, but its not at all uncommon in any other media. Books can take 2-3 years before you get the next installment or longer, even shows tend to take a year to come back on the air between seasons and thats a short turnaround.

Why should audiences be able to survive content schedules like that in other mediums, but its out of the question for comics?

>>144627463
>But manga got big precisely because thee was a constant flow of it keeping people's interests
You do that by engaging with the audience and encouraging them to express their enthusiasm with things like fan art or whatnot. It's similar to how LGS's stay open; they keep their doors open by renting table space, selling tournament and event tickets, and starting raffles. People want to talk about what they like as much as they want to buy it.

>Delays do kill hype, people are willing to wait if the series has enough backlog or is high quality, but that only goes so far.
That's why you pace the releases properly and give them sufficient length.

>>144623661
They have to adapt and bend the knee. Be a co.ic store that also sells TCG shit. TCG is booming with lots of old fucks like me who prefer paper over digital games.

>>144627521
Thank you for the concession saar.

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>>144625786
>It just tends to let action speak louder than words in fight scenes and the like, showing the fight instead of having a single part of two dudes not hitting each other with the narrator talking up how impressive the punches that are not being thrown are.

Are you insane? 90% of battle manga is dudes standing around explaining how their powers work. That's all tournament arcs are. It's boring as shit.

>>144627545
Because we're not talking about other mediums, we're talking about comics. And people are used to manga and regular releases.

>>144627586
As a /tg/ anon, let me tell you that might not be as safe as you think it is. MTG is setting itself up for a big collapse. Its making money hand over fist right now, sure, but by prioritizing short term profits over long term stability. You can keep escalating the power curve ever faster than before to bait people into buying the latest cards to stay competitive forever, and by completely abandoning previous restraints you kill your eternal formats. The most played form of Magic these days is Commander, an Eternal format.

MTG is going to hit a tipping point in the near future whether the bullshit they want to push will be a step too far for their playbase to want to keep up with, and by then the damage will already be done. Its the same sort of design decisions that made WOTC try to make DnD into a live service online-only platform, despite it being a game a computer has no need to ever been involved with. They are trying to structure their tabletop games according to video game cash farm logic, and people hate it. Nobody wants MTG to be Fortnite the card game, but Hasbro does.

>>144625517
/co/mblr strikes again

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>>144627618
What you posted isn't a fight scene. This is a fight scene.

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>>144624794
People shit on Ware all the time but honestly this two page spread has more 'sovl' and 'vibes' than 90% of the shit I see posted here, american or japanese. This is a great encapsulation of the single mother experience. The vague unmistakable feeling of loss and abscence in the single piece of toast, the empty chairs at the breakfast table, the distance between them both at the pool as the girl learns to swim and is starting to no longer need her mother but brought back during the dress tailoring as they get close and once again the empty chair shows the loss they presumably suffered.

Even without knowing what story that is from you can glean all that just from how he structures his panels and what he does and doesn't choose to show. He's very good at capturing that sad isolation of distance using the high angle 'god view camera'. Americans just don't read enough and think all comics are for children. Same as their animation which fits into two boxes, pure children garbage or juvenile 'adult comedy' which is always invariably super ugly and flatly staged. Japan and Europe have a much better market and audience for comics and cartoons. It's not that US comics are shit and there's no audience, the comics have just adapted to fit the audience that exists in the US. That's why they're mindless slop.

>>144625929
>Hear me out. Imagine a world where Spiderman only has like 2 'issues' a year with months between them, but every 'issue' is ~200 pages and represents a complete slice of story with its own internal arcs that start, climax, and resolve within a single volume. No floppies, no splitting stories up into a chapter at a time, just one big slice of story that might still have an overarching story going on in the background between volumes but if you had this one volume all on its own as the only thing on your shelf it be mostly perfectly fine. Like a book: it might be one in the middle of the series, but you can still pick up and enjoy it on its own.
That exists in the US market and it's incredibly popular. It's called the kids book market, and what Scholastic do. All of Raina Telgemeier's stuff is structured like this and she's the highest paid comics maker in the US. It's just the capeshit delivery system that sucks.

>>144627618
But it works

>>144627660
NTA but people want more of manga because they probably feel like the story in the manga is going somewhere. Regular updates are only a benefit if it's in a direction other than a circle. Weekly updates when it's just the same guys fighting the same fights forever ain't it.

>>144627775
That's nice, but I want to see people fighting. I'm dumb. Let me read dumb things.
> and think all comics are for children.
I wish, then maybe we could get American shonen jump instead of superhero comics trying to be adult and pretentious indie comics.

its cuz they keep stocking up to get ratio comics for people who dont even buy them.

>>144627618
>Are you insane?

Nope, that anon is right. One of manga's strengths is dynamic action. American capeshit tends to be pretty bad at that, with fights mostly being panel after panel of after-action poses.

>>144627859
You should probably follow along with the conversation. Anon suggested a series of books with a finite direction and endings. I have no problem with that. My issue is delaying releases for it 6-12 months a year instead of doing something like weekly chapter releases to show that the story IS going somewhere.

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>>144627735
We can play this game all day, for every good manga fight there are five pages of explanation of what just happened. Shouting out power names, explaining why the fire guy can superheat water to create steam to blind his opponent instead of just showing it and leaving it at that. Manga are fast food, they're quick and easy to read, visually simplistic with the appearance of complexity that isn't really there, no actual depth. They're focus tested to death via shit like shonen jump popularity polls and they exist on a constant wheel of dramatic reveals to keep you reading chapter to chapter. But nothing actually happens. They're pretty much exactly like capeshit, but better refined and marketed far better. Diamond and LCS are choking the life out of the american comics industry that's the problem. Remove that and let the comic makers actually tell stories and retire characters and we'd see a dramatic shift overnight. Let Peter Parker retire. Let Ben Reilly take over as Spider-Man in the 90s. Let Ben retire and let Miles take over in the 2020's Just let something fucking happen instead of Spider-Man #1 (volume 24) constantly rebooting and rewiping the character. At least manga pretend their shonen protags are new characters instead of making every one literally Goku again and resetting him in a slightly different setting for 60 years.

>>144627775
>The vague unmistakable feeling of loss and abscence in the single piece of toast, the empty chairs at the breakfast table, the distance between them both at the pool as the girl learns to swim and is starting to no longer need her mother but brought back during the dress tailoring as they get close and once again the empty chair shows the loss they presumably suffered.

Did you post the wrong picture?

>>144623661
I didn't know Steve Carell owned a comic shop

>>144627904
No I get that. I'm saying that frequency isn't as relevant as direction. People are willing to wait years between installments so long as there's direction. We need only look at franchises like Harry Potter for proof of that.

>>144627877
>American shonen jump

Why would you even want this? Shonen Jump exists. Shit like MHA is trying to be X-men, we don't need X-men trying to be Naruto. Let shit be it's own shit. The main reason the industry is collapsing is because all this shit is incestous. People are writing comics who only ever grew up reading other comics. And that shit has diminishing returns. When your story is just pulling things from other popular stories you don't create anything of value you just revive a Frankenstein's corpse of things done better in other places.

>>144627926
>Did you post the wrong picture?
No I'm talking about the picture in the post I'm replying to where Anon says Chris Ware is boring while posting an interesting page that goes directly against his argument that Ware is boring.

Can you not follow a conversation?

>>144627775
>People shit on Ware all the time but honestly this two page spread has more 'sovl' and 'vibes' than 90% of the shit I see posted here, american or japanese.

Nah. There's plenty of manga just like this and better, it's just not being published in Shounen Jump the same way Ware isn't published by Marvel. Most /co/mrades probably only know a handful of mega-popular shounen series and are unaware that there's a whole world of more mature and artistic manga out there. Can't really blame you, most Japs probably think every American comic is Batman too.

>>144627775
>It's not that US comics are shit and there's no audience, the comics have just adapted to fit the audience that exists in the US. That's why they're mindless slop.

It's not the audience. For generations the only comics allowed to be widely available in the US were childish capeshit. Sure there always existed underground and indie stuff but the average person only ever heard about or saw capeshit, so several generations have been trained to think comics = kids. It's the same with cartoons, the only ones that got on TV or in theaters were kid stuff so several generations were raised with the idea that cartoons = kids. In this case the US audience is kind of the victim here, brought up with an incredibly limited view of what entirely mediums are and can be.

>>144627958
Because I want to see cool people who aren't superheroes fighting.
I'm glad that comic about single mothers exists for you but I don't care to read it. In a better market I can read action and you can read comics about plain looking chubby moms but alas the US market isn't that.

>>144626769
>Still I think the visual shorthand is still relevant enough.
I disagree. It's one of those things I think stands out. Even the youngest of these cars are more than 50 years old. You barely see them anymore, and the ones that remain are usually well looked after. The shorthand of these types of cars as cheap and quirky is very old fashioned by this point. And if the entire thing is based on a liking for Little Miss Sunshine... that's retarded

>>144628083
There was a time not too long ago when the idea of putting something like Chipotle into middle America would be too risky, that people there were not ready for flavor.

>>144628094
That's kind of what I mean. People develop set ideas of what something is (food, comics, etc) and it's very hard to break them out of that. The US public's ideas about comics and cartoons were incredibly constrained for a long time so it's a very uphill battle to change their minds.

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>>144628092
>You barely see them anymore
You barely saw them 20 years ago when the movie was new. Like you mentioned, the model stopped being made in the 70's. It just looks more visually appealing than actual, modern campers, including the newer VW Vans.
Plus being time travelers, the using an anachronistic vehicle seems like a gag. Like how people will mix up decades of fashion in period pieces the further you go from the current era.

>>144623661
I'm surprised as many comic shops stay around as is, even with TCG subsidization. Hell, even manga shops I know pivoted to wargames as physical manga reading has tumbled over the last decade or so.
>>144627691
People have been saying this about MTG for a long while now, but I don't expect it so soon. There has to be an upper number of players at some point at least, they've burned through a lot of their crossover material. Then again who knows, even with all the dogshit decisions they've made they still pull a lot of weight with hasbro as I recall. It's gonna be interesting seeing what they do when they inevitably start sliding in revenue.
You didn't mention them but it's worth noting that of the big 3, YGO is in a dire spot at game stores, at lot more so than the others actually. Apparently a lot of YGO releases were just dogshit and store owners have gotten repeatedly burned by boxes they can't sell even at lower than msrp. Even without considering that, YGO is notorious amongst the TCG community for having the worse fanbase with the most That Guys and cheaters and thieves, if a card game is banned at a store, it's YGO.
PTCG has been doing alright financially. Lorcana and OPTCG pulled in some too, so the TCG side of things is still doing a lot of work keeping comic book stores afloat

>>144624459
You're not going to. Manga thrives in large part due to a highly centralized and dense population that more or less is required to use public transportation for at least an hour or two a week. Manga has a captive audience. It's why all the major kids and teen magazines used the weekly format and put out the phonebooks, you buy one at the shop in the station Monday morning and toss it out Saturday evening. You want to replicate the manga industry's success and reach in America? Cram 1/3rd of the US population into the greater NYC metro area and force them to take the subway.

>>144624540
>>144624596
>>144624740
that is fucked wow

>>144628083
>it's not the audience, it's just the audience.

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>>144623661
My comic shop has been going strong for over 30 years. Let me tell you something, this image is either misleading or they had a customer buying EVERYTHING available for order. That number is too high to match only 3 months. So either the customer let more than 3 months of inventory sit, or the owner allowed the customer to subscribe to an absurd amount without laying down expectations.

Either way, owner is an idiot. Do you know why most comic shops fail? They're ran by hobbyists, not businessmen

>>144628087
>but alas the US market isn't that.
Largely because people like you want everything to be about fighting. You literally want the US to just make more shit aping japanese fighting shit. The US market is catering to you as best it can be making sure every comic is about fighting because other wise it doesn't sell. You're in the majority. You want action comics and that's why they keep making action the focus of most comics. It just happens that the easiest way to make action happen is to make every comic capeshit.

>>144628432
Try working on that reading comprehension, friend. I said the audience is a victim of controlled media. They don't naturally want slop but they've been trained for it.

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>>144628454
>You literally want the US to just make more shit aping japanese fighting shit.

>>144628454
nah, sexy women is also good. With nice art that isn't boring realistic slop or simplistic doodles.
The superhero crap isn't what I want either.

>>144628324
>>144627691
Thing is even as a YGO player, MTG and we are not the real future. It's the younger people playing Pokemon, Lorcana, shounen jump TCGs especially One Piece. One piece TCG is insane how much some of the singles go for. Plus it's the only TCG I see that have events that are first come first serve for regular locals. YGO and MTG can die, and honestly we should probably. But still the TCG community is booming more than ever. I feel it's a direct reaction to everything being digital and not really owning games and shit. Steam can suddenly say you don't own games anymore. however You can't tell me I don't own this ultimate rare TTT I pulled last week from an OTS pack.

>>144623661
Why not take preorder money up front like every other business?

>>144628358
This does work. I started reading short stories again when I had to take the train to work. Short trips, only once or twice a week due to working from home. A monthly issue of Clarkesworld doesn't even cover that little (partly due to approximately half of all stories being unreadable garbage). I imagine this is also instrumental in Webtoons' success.

>>144628454
>Largely because people like you want everything to be about fighting. You literally want the US to just make more shit aping japanese fighting shit.
NTA but I think that's kinda disingenous. Some people want the western model to copy romance manga. Hell, even within shonen it's not all fighting shit; there's sports manga (I can count on one hand the amount of times people tried doing a sports comic) or cooking manga.

>>144627958
Shit being its own shit when shit is stale isn't any better.

>>144624740
That's very illegal. You should have reported them to the authorities.

>>144628324
>PTCG has been doing alright financially.
Pokemon Live has been doing horribly, no surprise. There are rumors that after the issues with power creep they've been having, they'll rework the game entirely, with Pocket being their beta. Two big changes are allegedly energy cards being in a separate deck and prize cards no longer being a win conditions.

>>144628570
>team can suddenly say you don't own games anymore. however You can't tell me I don't own this ultimate rare TTT I pulled last week from an OTS pack.
Until it's deemed unplayable. But at least you have a card with cool art on it.

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>>144624794
>Indie comics are full of artsy, pretentious bullshit aimed at "elevating the medium" but having no appeal to anyone who isn't in the mood to read an art comic.
read more comics

>>144629222
That image kinda looks like artsy, pretentious bullshit though.

>>144623661
He should be bitching out at Diamond for forcing overstock on him instead of blaming the last few customers willing to buy traditional paperbacks in-store and not on amazon.

>>144623661
terrible product don't sell, the consumer is at fault for some reason

>>144624800
It's suppose to be more "real" or "authentic."

>>144629222
>intentionally crudely drawn comic for comic nerds
No I've seen plenty like that.

Comic books are an impulse buy on sight like a newspaper. They die, like newspapers, because being relegated to specialty stores 20 minutes out of the way or subscription orders you have to hunt for doesnt fucking work the same way as a newsstand on every other corner does.

>>144623661
If your business is endangered over <$500/month, what the fuck are you doing?

>>144624854
It's a lot easier to watch a cartoon compared to reading, and everyone grows up watching cartoons. Less and less kids gave grown up reading comics over the years.

>>144629852
>. Less and less kids gave grown up reading comics over the years.
Scholastic says hi

>>144629430
In perspective, that about 3 weeks pay for someone making $12.25. If you can't see how losing the equivalent of 40 labor-hours per month would hurt a business that's a you problem.

>>144624681
your average grocery store probably has more than 100 customers every week tho

$500/month is like 100 unsold books, maybe less if they're events; it likely represents a mix of customers who ordered without looking at the price on a new title, customers who are living paycheck to paycheck and didn't make enough, and customers who fucking died because they weighed 400 pounds for 45 years

>>144625092
that's fair, except LCS don't really get walk-in customers, they get people who go to the store pretty much knowing what they want and what they expect to pay for it all

even if they are in a location that gets enough foot traffic to bring walk-ins regularly, a lot of them will simply look at the cover price of a pre-bagged title and move on, particularly if the art (cover or interior) is stupid or bad

then there's people who'll just assume that it's a collector's game because near everything is bagged, the place looks like a used vinyl place full of boxes of obscure crap you have to know what you want from, etc etc

putting stuff that's on a pull list out on the floor isn't the worst idea but again, real life gets in the way, if tubby had a heart attack and got hospitalized for a week he's gonna miss wednesday, so if you sell to fatty while tubby's on the mend, you don't have anything to sell tubby when he gets in the week after, and you may lose his custom permanently

but that really depends on whether these losses are absolute (nobody else wants the title) or deprecated (someone eventually buys them from the shelf/longbox even though the original guy doesn't) and can't have their value recovered any other way

>>144625109
>Explain the walking dead?

it sold a lot of volume 1, much less vol 2 etc etc

nobody normal is buying vol 17 or the recolors

> Explain the death of superman?

is that still selling? because it was almost 30 years ago and I got bad news about how the market as a whole went right after that

>>144628458
>Try working on that reading comprehension, friend. I said the audience is a victim of controlled media. They don't naturally want slop but they've been trained for it.
So you agree, it IS the audience. Thanks for playing.

>>144630060
I can understand how it would hurt an individual, but for a business that should easily be within the scope of losses/shrink for any small retailer save for flea market booths. And if it's not, that's a problem.

I know you're fat as shit and live with your mom, so you've never had to actually think about something zany like running a business, but a business buckling at the knees over an almost minimum wage salary loss is actually laughable. It's paper-boy level shit.

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>>144628570
I agree, mtg did a lot for itself with arena but even now you just don't see many kids playing magic. It was about a decade ago for me when I was high school but I had never heard of MTG until then, it just doesn't have much kiddy appeal.
YGO's complexity (mtg is complex too at the upper ends, I know, but YGO's lack of official formatting means you it's default game format is basically MTG Legacy which would be fucked if you tried introducing a child or new player too) and back to back awful metas is hurting it too. Also worth noting anecdotally that YGO just doesnt have much of a friendly casual scene like most other games have, nearly every YGO player I've met aside from friends have played like regional hopefuls. So called "Pet Decks" just consisting off last meta's top decks or the like. It's very outputting for new players. YGO community is fucking weird, I don't know why it has this problem so bad compared to other card games, alongside the aforementioned thievery and bad behavior. I'd say it's the worst barring particularly bad personal EDH groups.
>>144629083
Ah, I haven't kept up with pokemon much at all. Is that the followup to PTCGO? I remember that being really beloved when there was no Arena or MD.
I don't think I'd mind the prize card thing, the game really never needed a snowball win mechanic. Playing the digimon card game made me realize the reverse with it's security system was much more fun and balanced where you get cards when you're losing.

>>144627921
>for every good manga fight there are five pages of explanation of what just happened.
And the point is that in the competition there's no good fights at all.
So between starving and getting SOME food, people go with the latter.

>>144630395
>paper-boy level shit.
anon selling comics is basically glorified paperboy shit.

>>144627691
MTG still brings in enough new people that it doesn't matter if the old people leave. Everyone who played in the 90s quit in disgust decades ago but it's still going. As long as they can trick new suckers into sinking cost they will be fine

>>144623661
The industry is being killed by DEI SJW garbage in modern comics. I threw my money at Gushing Over Magical Girls and Kobayashi Dragon Maid because they're cute and funny. The last comic I bought? Locke and Key. The one before? Transmetropolitan.

>>144628656
It's very disingenous. That guys a fag.