stop colouring the pages for starters

>>8010942
Isn't he like 20 years late asking this question? What is this, the year 2002? They were asking the same questions when TokyoPop was around.

>>8010942
The problem is not what's missing, the opposite.

>>8010950
Webtoons counter that as well.

>>8010942
Fuck I thought Jim died when I saw that thumbnail

>>8010942
they honestly just need to move on from capeshit
come up with some new settings and stop recycling characters. use DC's money to promote this "new era of american comics!!" and learn a little from the japs

Marvel had the right idea in the early 00 with the Ultimate line but then they fucked it up by making it as convoluted as the main universe.

Comics are already going to suck now because every single book comes with nearly a century of accumulated baggage and character debt. Comics resists development so badly They had Spider-Man sell his wife and child to the actual devil just so he could go back to being mid 20s bachelor Spidey. They obviously realize this is crap and that's where shit like Absolute DC and DCKO come from, but they just won't take their fucking medicine and just go a decade without printing a Batman or Superman book.

>>8010950
this + >>8010987 + stop changing writers and arists on a series... if you cant keep 1 pair per character then maybe do 1 pair per arc
and stop doing so much crossover tie in promotion jewery where you need to buy a different series issues to not miss parts of the story
and sell your books in more places than just a comic shop
its not about admitting which is superior, look at how the opponent is thriving and maybe learn some things from him... its about damn time they started this line of thinking but how long will it take for them to actually put words to action...idk...
and definitely be more harsh in what type of stories, writers and artists are permitted

They have to be the biggest retards ever, because they completely failed to capitalize on having a walled-garden environment in an era when consumers were still somewhat open to the idea and their brand was a maximum cultural relevance. How did you not convert a generation of kids into comic readers? My Nephew had every fucking Marvel Spiderman product and never followed the comics. That industry got fucking sucked dry by Hollywood. You don't know a single name behind these stories except for that one businessman, Stan Lee, got to get a Hollywood rimjob for the last decade of his life

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>>8010942
I think a big part of it is the choice to connect everything back to a huge multiverse canon. Same reason the films feel tedious as well. The writers are chained down by the weight of all this lore that new characters feel insignificant and legacy characters feel constrained.
Both Marvel and DC have tried to soft reboot their stuff before but it always seems to end up back in the same multiverse quicksand and anything interesting just sinks into the giant lore.
When new manga comes out it feels genuinely new. It feels like you're getting a new world, new characters (even if it's pretty generic)
When new capeshit comes out it feels like a footnote in a giant story that the average person doesn't give a fuck about

>>8011000
>pic
I remember these illustrations being all over Marvel merchandise in the 00s and early 10s
Who's the artist?

>>8011002
Judging by the insane compression and the hallucinations and rainbow glitch in the back I'm guessing chat GPT is the artist

>>8011003
I meant the front row with Wolverine, F4, SM, Hulk etcetera
Looking further there's obviously stuff taken from the comics themselves as well

>>8011012
Nvm, someone on reddit asked already
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/89757l/discussion_who_was_the_artist_that_worked_on_most/

>>8010978
they make a lot of indie comics no one picks up or reads that has nothing to do with cape shit

>>8011003
The glitch is what happens when you remove transparency from a PNG without proper conversion. The pixels still have color data, which is usually some random garbage that makes sense for compression.

>>8010942
Manga is extremely competed and authors work harder than any westerner can comprehend so they dont get dropped.
I feel like Americans hate the idea of fair competition. They just want everything to exist in a greenhouse type environment where they cannot be challenged because of all the too big to fail memes.
Over time it kills the industry.

>>8011020
Well Western artists are being competed with and what ended up happening was Western comics basically cling to Spiderman and Batman and nobody visits Marvel or DC for anything but those, if ever. The only thing left is for Marvel and DC to just copy the manga industry from 30 years ago and travel from there. Get like 10 artists with 10 stories and just make a Western shonen jump and see what happens.

>>8010942
I don't get why they don't push online subscription and digital purchases strongly.
Asians suck with that. The webtoon platform, kakao, mangaplus, amazon.co.jp, bookwalker, etc. are garbage.

America has the best web people. The solution is literally just make netflix for american comics. The attempts until now are half-assed garbage disney+, paramount+ level of incompetence.

>>8011023
The "competition" they fought to suppress isn't West v East, it's within. Western comics industry is mostly about churning out the same IPs with different artists/writers, with the corpos maintaining a stranglehold on the rights and profits. They will never give anyone a chance to do something new (unless you sign the entire thing away to them) because it takes away from their own IPs.

Why try to greenlight new talent with new IPs when they threaten to take readers away from Spiderman/Batman? You're talking about marketing, merch, movies, all that money could be spent making Spiderman issue #500 and Batman movie #20. This has been their philosophy for the past many decades. And judging from how much money they're still making, it's going to continue this way.

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>>8011017
Yeah, the few that make it are the exception, there is a lack of engagement with western comics that wasn't as present in the 90s/00s. Despite the shit animation invincible got popular, and DWJ's transformers got decent reception, supposedly there is an cartoon in the works for it.

>>8010942
KILL THE MARVEL/DC DUOPOLY RETARDS

>>8011034
I'm pretty sure Bone makes more than Marvel and DC combined. For all intents and purposes, Marvel and DC are dead. They're just quarries for movies at this point.

>>8011017
They don't exactly promote these indie comics either. And they aren't super accessible just the rest of the western comic scene like manga is

>>8011035
Well the bone comics deserve it, bone is awesome

>>8010942
This question or the article reporting on it, is disingenuous. He knows full well why western comics arent doing as well as manga or even just webtoons. He knows full well that the point of western american comics isnt to make good comics. The point of them is to act as an IP holder so nobody else can use them, to make sure nobody else gets an in that can threaten them monetarily, and to promote boring ham fisted platitudes du jour. It is an investment vehicle utilized as a club. Things dont change because the parent investment corporations don't WANT it to change. A place like Europe or Japan where artists can come up with newer stories that arent tied to ak existing IP and/or in which there are many publishers to choose from is a literal nightmare in their eyes.

>>8011043
Funniest day of my life was when my brother in law tried showing his kids his comic collection and the 13 and 15yo didn't recognize anyone but Batman, and only from a half remembered movie, but I showed them a Bone comic and they were both like "oh yeah we've read all of them" lmao. KEKED by a sentient BONE.

cheap, incestuous marketing.
>developing a street level character
>slow burn to find out the villeins plan
>hold on you have to fight space aliens this month because of the Event comic
> Then two months later you need to have a cross over with a new book to promote a hero no one wanted.
>p.s. magic is real in your setting now.

>>8010942
Not an expert, but western comics seem to be always about a superhero in USA, and then there is always this fucking multiverse and stuff.

Now we are also in the era of enshittification, which will consist in bad writing, black washing, self inserts, "strong" women...

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>>8010942
Neither DC nor Marvel have even the slightest chance of competing with manga because they aren't even publishers proper, they're producers.

The ideas of what to produce and therefore publish come from inside the company, not outside.
Even if they hire 1000 people, the creative potential of their company is insignificant next to a traditional publisher. With a traditional publisher you have access to ALL the creative talent in the country. Which may number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

What does Shueisha do when it is lacking in a new mega hit? Does it gather around 4-5 writers around a table and brainstorm ideas? No, they opens for submissions from the whole country, and it sifts through them until it finds a hit.

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>>8011067
Cont
It's a matter of statistics.
Out of a given number of people, a small percentage of those will have the talent needed to make a good comic/manga. And out of those, a smaller percentage will have the talent to make multiple good comics/manga (most creatives only have one good work in them).

Whether you love it or hate it, you cannot deny that Harry Potter is immensely popular and successful.
Where did it come from? It came from the mind of JK Rowling. It was her idea, her passion project. She likely had the idea for many years prior to writing it, most great stories are like this for their creators.
The original publisher of the book, Bloomsbury, did not make Harry Potter. Even if they had personally hired JK Rowling as a writer, unless they told her to just write whatever she wanted to, they would not have gotten Harry Potter. For good reason, the books publishing industry doesn't work like the comics publishing industry, because it's a terrible way to come up with good ideas.

>>8011074
Cont
Well how do you find your JK Rowlings? Or your Akira Toriyamas to use a manga example. Statistically speaking, they're out there, maybe one in a million but they are out there.

Marvel and DC are not adequetly scouting out these talents. They are not hiring, and whenever they are it's a nepotistic affair. Even if they weren't corrupt, they just don't have the logstical means to sift through the required number of people to find even a single genius.

Shueisha on the other hand cleverly utilises competitions to do the sifting for them. These competitions are carefully constructed not to be flashy in and of themselves, but to find those one in a million creative geniuses. Most of these competitions are restricted to young people, or to newcomers. Again, it's not about the competition it's about the talent, letting a veteran win would defeat the point.
Often these youngsters are not ready to make a publishable manga yet, but again that's not important, what's important is their potential.
Editors here act more like guides than just editors. It's entirely expected to find a mangaka who's not ready to make a real work for up to 5 years, and the editor is expected to guide them in the right direction to meet their potential. Torishima, the ex editor in chief of Shueisha and editor of Dragonball refers to this as like planting seeds that won't bear fruit for many years.

Marvel and DC on the other hand are just waiting with closed doors for the next Stan Lee to arrive on a silver platter, they won't get it.

>>8011017
they dont promote them. And that's by design, companies liek marvel and dc don't make comics, they make brands. The comics are just one way to market them. They don't actually give a shit about comics or telling stories.

so an indie comic becoming popular is the WORST case scenario for them. They spent the past 100 years making sure that NEVER happens, and a few still slipped through. If a comic is good, then people read it and want to read more from the artist and writer, that puts powers in the hands of the creators and not the brand holders or publishers.

>>8011077
Cont
Up to this point I've spoken nothing about the art itself, or the writing.
And that's because it doesn't matter. Infact, to even attempt to proscribe and direct how comics should be would itself lead to failure. Because in doing so you would be restricting the ability for creatives to present their best work.

Going with the Harry Potter example, lets say you're Bloomsbury and you want to publish some good books so you say "okay we've gotta make stories with big muscular dudes because that's popular in the movies", and so you reject Harry Potter because it doesn't have that, and now you don't have Harry Potter.

Even if you're the greatest creative genius in the world, you don't have the vision to dictate what comics need to be made. Akira Toriyama could make Dragonball but he couldn't make Harry Potter or Berserk or whatever, and vice versa.
You need to allow your creatives to create what they believe to be the best, publish it, and then see if people like it, see if it sells. And of course if what they make doesn't sell, then you can that guy and try again, and you must do this repeatedly like a self-perpetuating machine, constantly cycling through what is most entertaining for the audience of the day, never stagnating.

There is no "what should comics be" because that answer changes by the day, it's constantly in flux.

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>>8011067
i see your meme i'll raise you this

>he doesn't know that the majority of manga are read and changed by editors to appeal/engage readers
99% of manga is corposlop as well

Im tired of capeshit

>>8011082
I agree with you but your perspective is one of an artist where you think its good for humanity when art is created. for rich people, they don't care. If they reject harry potter based on market analysis and it was never created, that's just fine to them. Its 100% just a game of sim city where they manage risks and watch numbers rise and fall.

>>8010942
The solution is obvious. Adapt the Japanese pipeline to suit America's infrastructure.

>Put the comics on cheaper paper in black and white, and put several comics into a single magazine. If the comics do well, they get their own dedicated releases. If the comics do REALLY well, get them animated or live-action adaptations.
>Sell comics at gas stations, grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and directly to public libraries and school libraries. Dump unsold copies onto thrift stores. Promote the comics.
>After a certain amount of time, publish comics for free online. Accessibility is key.
>Publish a variety of genres and go back to the pre-capeshit days of comics. We're past Seduction of the Innocent and the CCA at this point.
>Have creators sell the rights to the IP but give them a fair chunk of merchandise/book sales. If they sell well, it means the company makes a buttload of money. If they don't, then the creator has an incentive to stick with the company.

>>8011089
I'm not so naive. I recognize that the vast majority of artists who think their art is the best thing since sliced bread are actually total nutters.
Perhaps I should have emphasied the part about firing them when that becomes self evident.

But whether they're a genius or just nuts, their attitude is the same.
You cannot control them. Their creative vision is extremely sensitive, to them. Even demanding they publish to a deadline is a drawback albiet a necessary one.
If you push them too hard, they run away into their shells. If you try to get them to use their talents for anything other than their imagined vision, it's like cutting open the golden goose.

It's their way or the highway when it comes to getting that creative vision out of them and onto the paper for you to publish. And even in manga there are many authors who haven't given their best work because an editor demanded too much control. In the west, they're not even asked for their work at all.

>>8010942
They need more loli

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>>8011092
I agree that comics should be published freely online after a while.
I agree also that there needs to be a greater variety of genres, and I absolutely agree that creators should have stronger financial support.

However, I think the suggestions about printing and distribution, that of cheap people with black and white, anthology, and sold in gas stations, etc, I think these are not good solutions.

Firstly, the demographic of comics is ideally young people, aged 13-30. And that specific demographic does not shop physical. That is, they do not window shop, at all. You could put a stack of cash at the cashier waiting line and they won't see it because they aren't looking at those things. Most don't go to fast food restaurants in person, ever, and absolutely nobody goes to libraries, many schools don't even have libraries anymore.
It is a changing world. They shop online, they discover things through youtube videos and twitter posts. If there's a new trendy brand of pringles out, they won't discover it at the supermarket, they'll discover it online through some e-celeb talking about it.

If you want to get comics in front of peoples faces, the answer is staring you right in the face, and Marvel already owns it, pic related.

>western comic industry is gatekept as fuck
>great majority is capeshit anyway
>same telenovela ass stories that keep repeating in a loop
>same characters getting rebooted every year
>end goal is to sell toys and merch

>manga industry is oversaturated as fuck
>same high school superpower or isekai power fantasy shit
>same generic archetypes
>bland characters
>even blander stories
>end goal is to sell toys and merch


>both industries write the most atrociously bland stories and are scared of doing good shit because they know the type of swines their audiences are

>>8011092
Cont, the black and white, cheap paper, anthology thing is more tricky.
While it would lower the price.. it wouldn't lower it that much. And furthermore, the demographic 13-30 is rich enough to afford comics, they just don't want to. Just look at the money they spend on random cosmetics in videogames. If they can spend $20 on a goofy hat in a videogame, they can spend $20 on a comic.

That being said, I do think comics need to be much cheaper. But I don't think you need to go all the way to black and white and cheap paper to do that. The price difference between colour printing and black-and-white, and cheap paper vs average paper... are not really that much. Most of the cost comes through everything else other than the printing. And solving that is a matter of hiring competent logistics people.

I don't think the anthology system will work because I don't think western audiences will want to buy something they don't want, that is to say, you only want to read some of the titles in an anthology, not all of them. But that is just my opinion. There are great strengths to the anthology system and it would be a shame to lose them.
I think the tankobon system of dedicated volumes would work well though. Specifically becuase they are books and not floppies. People don't like floppies because they're too short. 150 pages minimum imo.

Adaptations are a great idea, anime is crucial to the manga industry.
It would be extremely difficult to set up such a system in the west, but I believe it would benefit greatly if it did.

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>>8011092
The problem with this model is that someone needs to own the distribution zine and that's rife for abuse, especially with today's "creatives." What you'll end up getting is a platform dominated by like 4 or 5 quirk chungus artists and anyone semi serious is going to avoid the platform. Ban the gag of the day comics and focus on serials and then the second someone has enough patreon bucks they'll just stop working for the anthology. Plus you run into the regular issues working with webcomic people like they'll give you a chapter for their debut and then they'll go AWOL and just have fans wondering "whatever happened to Clozzy's comic??" until it becomes a drama farm. Basically you can expect the idea to deteriorate exactly like this:
>voting is fake from the start, editors promote the comics of their friends and anyone they're trying to fuck
>Someone or some people will get low engagement no matter what and disparage the project as a whole and just tell everyone to publish independently
>Someone will become successful and dump the project and tell everyone to publish independently
>Eventually a discord will leak and it will come out that the editors never took the project seriously and everything was quid pro quo anyway
For all the pro socialist and pro union talk amongst working artists they are the greediest most anti worker people in any industry, bar none. And the worst part is even in this hypothetical, every Western artist entertaining the idea basically can find no fault in the scenario where someone signs onto the project, gets a bunch of exposure, and dumps the project (thereby harming anyone who comes after) in favor of their own patreon.

>>8011111
nta, but while I appreciate your pessimisism, I think much of it can be solved with a standard employement contract.
A contract forces people to be serious and professional, with consequences for missing deadlines and other such mistakes. It also offers legal protections such as non-competes, NDA's, and anti-defamation protections.

>>8011114
You're right and a contracted model where the artist owns the IP and the book owns the published appearance is fine. Except in these cases where indie artists will sign on, welch, underperform, or go viral and want out of it so they can go indie again. Unironically I don't think there are enough professional indies to make this a real thing. No matter how healthy the collective might be, everyone is going to be ultimately working for themselves, which yeah, fine, but you can't have a collective effort platform and individual capitalists at the same time. Every artist who gets a 5 or 6 digit hit on their book is going to hate the contract more and more meaning the second something becomes popular and therefore makes the magazine or whatever worth buying, that artist is out. And if they can't get out, they'll boycott the platform. And if they can't/don't boycott, then every comic becomes an advertisement for their patreon. And on and on. Basically I don't think there's enough people who want to incorporate like this, which is ironic again considering working artists are usually very vocal about collective effort.

>>8010942
>>8010942
bro, the answer is simple

make America comic book heroes skinny

Thats it

just look at spiderman

And all the other manga characters

they are ALL skinny

yeah this is a bot thread or op is samefagging

>>8011118
In terms of character, most artists do not want to handle printing, distribution, and advertising themselves, but that is what being independent would entail. The benefit of working with a publisher is that all you have to do is make your comic and get paid. Make the deal lucrative enough and nobody will care to go indie. Give people a reason to work with your publisher.

>>8011121
Most comic book characters are skinny. I guess if you mean sex appeal, manga is more straightforward. The furthest most comics go is with swimsuit issues, most comics don't go as far as having a chick's ass or breasts accidentally fall on a guy's face

>>8011123
You're right but again the publisher or book owner basically needs to compete with crowd funding in order to be attractive. In which case the only people being attracted to the idea are people who are good enough to get some audience but not good enough to become self sufficient from Kickstarter or Patreon. I really just think the cat is out of the bag and people know how easy it is to self host a website, steamdraw for fans, and keep a Patreon up for direct funding, and go down the Kickstarter route if/when they want a book. In the cases of artists with comics that don't have any of that, if they sign on to the hypothetical anthology zine and gain those things, then they won't need the zine and all they have to do is tweet something like "going independent y'all! follow my patreon and twitch for updates!" and that's it, that's the story for every comic in the anthology. It would objectively be better for the industry if there was an institutional discovery queue type book with tent pole comics and up and coming indies, I just don't think we live in that world. It would basically be a miracle to get say, 12 artists or teams together who: would contribute regular, quality work; would stay on for years; and would not undermine the integrity of the platform by directing people to their personal crowd funding platforms. Let alone finding them and making the thing.

Look at invincible

dude is skinny and is mad popular

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>>8011137
You might be on to something

>>8010942
I'd say the big issue is getting people plugged into the comic ecosystem. As much as I think trying to transplant how manga and anime works into the west 1-for-1 probably won't work because of differences in consumer and work culture I do think a big thing that could be brought over is faithful adaptations. Nowadays I'd say I read more manga than I do anime but I started on anime. I'd watch something and, if it interested me enough, I'd go and pick up the manga and because I was now in spaces and on websites that had other manga, I would go on to pick up this or that other manga because I liked the look of it.

For as much as anons like to say that they're sick of capeshit I don't think the general public is because go look at invincible. I never watched it but to my awareness it's pretty faithful to the comic and what do you know? The comic sales started to juice alongside the shows popularity because people knew that if they picked up the comic after the season was done then it would still be the story they loved, Mark would be Mark, Nolan would be Nolan, Thragg would be Thragg, etc. Comparatively, The Boys was also a superhero IP that got an extremely popular adaptation but, like many works, it wasn't faithful in the slightest and unsurprisingly the comic barely saw a bump in sales. When I was still using Instagram I would see invincible comic panels all the time, barely saw the boys outside of that 'excuse me sir?' meme and I'm pretty sure that broke containment from The Boys fandom anyway.

>>8011230
Cont.
I also think the crossovers and multiverses can be an issue but not as much as other anons think. Not to harp on it but Invinicble also had crossovers with other comics and, again, it still saw a bump from the show. I think the issue with crossover shit is that it feels like required reading and muddles the starting point. You see the same issue pop up in fate and gundam. While neither suffer from crossoveritis there is an absolute fuck ton of universes so if you're interested how do you start? Most will go look up a watch order and that's a high enough barrier for a lot of people to not bother. Maybe from a fan perspective that's good because it filters casuals but from a business perspective that's bad because you just had someone who would have consumed your product turn away because getting into it seemed like a hassle.

But all of this is ignoring that Marvel, maybe not DC so much, can leech of their films to keep afloat so as much as it sucks the suits upstairs don't really NEED to care about comics.

>>8010942
Original stories/characters.
IE, Marvel and DC have to DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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9/10 of the best selling comics of 2025 feature Batman, 8/10 feature Batman in the title. The comics industry is not in a good place.

>>8011082
Great write-up anon I've had the same thoughts for a while but you said it more eloquently
I'll also add that most of these new manga publications aren't released into the void they're posted at the end of big magazines for their readers to judge
The magazine sells because it has the latest chapter from the hits you want to read, but the little guy is also there so it gets some readership and maybe moves onto a full-time publication with its own volumes

>>8011265
Thats all they had to offer: capeshit, same character, same guy since 1930 something. Never enter a new territory of audience by starting a new IP because its risky, keep the same character with their friends with the same goal in a different scenario, rinse and repeat. You can argue that shonen is capeshit, powerscaling faggotry, but they come in a different fashion. Not to mention that american comic production system are too compartmentalized for creative works. If manga artist had to handle every single thing in their manga production including character design and story (pre production) and draw the stuff themselves, theres a guy who handle the story, pencil artist, line art, coloring, each from different department in american comic production. At best you have an assistant drawing background in manga production, cant say the same thing with comic

>>8011017
That's how japan's industry works too. Just machine gun new series. Most fail, some succeed. The successes fund the search for more successes. Saying "but they fail!" isn't a counterargument.

>>8011020
>and authors work harder than any westerner can comprehend so they dont get dropped
They might not be working a suicidal amount, but they're still making comics, and comics still take a hell of a lotta work. Don't infantilize working professionals by assuming they don't realize how much work their profession takes.

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>>8010942
>the jews who intentionally killed the entire western comic magazine industry now cry no one wants to buy their dogshit

>>8011084
Not him but he's right. Your counterargument is how we wound up in the scenario we're in now. Dragon Ball is still around, and Dragon Ball fans still buy up Dragon Ball stuff. The point is that there isn't ONLY Dragon Ball stuff, they continued to search for new hits because they understand that there's a huge market outside of just Dragon Ball fans.
And editors existing and providing feedback is not at all the same thing as editors coming up with the ideas and telling the authors to make something with them. Obviously not.

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>>8011097
This

>>8011017
The problem being that they're not "indie" anymore once DC or Marvel publish them. They are owned by the big two, all rights.

Creators these days want ownership. They're not handing DC or Disney the rights to their best ideas and creations in exchange for the paltry paycheck those jews offer, so they keep the good stuff to themselves and wait for an opportunity to self publish or get a square deal from someone else.

So you can't get any new comics to hit it big when you're actively keeping creators from giving you anything except slop they themselves don't care about losing.

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>>8011107
This is true. In both east and west, the good stuff will always be outnumbered 100 to 1 by slop. Good manga is much better promoted than good comics though. At least on the internet
East of West, for example. Absolute kino from the Americans and so underrated that I've only happened to learn about it after it was finished, unfortunately
Meanwhile Tengoku Daimakyou, Sakamoto Days and Oshi no Ko are all series I'm currently reading that I've stumbled upon thanks to random some Youtube essay

>>8011365
Youtube essays are a CIA sponsored op, stop consuming them if you want to actually understand JP media.

>>8011354
>missing the point this hard
i have botgpt fatigue

>>8011382
So what's your point, numbnuts?

>>8011416
what's the point of explaining color to a blind bot?

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>>8011422
Gee I dunno know, maybe communicating whatever the fuck you were trying to say? Your only argument here is that I apparently misunderstood you. So what are you actually trying to say?

>>8011424
how is it my problem that you're illiterate and blind?
scroll up and read the post again, fattie

>>8011431
Starting to think I understood you just fine, you just have nothing to say after your argument was shut down.

>>8011443
>argument agument muh argument
man, you really are utterly unable to make use of words

>>8010942
Jim Lee is a Zainichi Westerner

>>8011035
Scholastic is the World's biggest comicbook publisher

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>>8010942
The stories in American comics are just really bland and uninteresting. That’s really what it comes down to. DC/Marvel is like if every single manga was DBFZ. That’s fine if you’re looking for that, DBFZ can be a real fun time, but at the end of the day it’s just two dudes fighting each other without much in the way of dramatic tension. When every single story is DBFZ, the medium lacks variety.
What is the Death Note of DC/Marvel? Or the Serial Experiments Lain, or the Steins;Gate, or the Madoka Magica? It’s not that they fail at writing engaging and original stories; it’s that they don’t even try. The premise doesn’t even exist in their universe.

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>>8011502
Scholastic basically cheats.
They have partnerships with basically all schools, the schools give out scholastic book fair tokens, and then on a planned day, the school takes the children to the scholastic book fair and tells them to pick 1-3 books with their tokens. This counts towards Scholastic's sales figures, but no child actually cares or reads the books they buy. It's an entirely fake customerbase.

>>8010950
colorist are needed, issue being that most colorist are dogshit or don't match the style for most of the artist for western comics
>>8010995
>>8010987
I would agree, but japs would do the same thing with isekai, moe, and school garbage. It's basically inbreeding at this point.

>>8010978
>learn a little from the japs
are you retarded?

>>8011107
>same high school superpower or isekai power fantasy shit
The lack of variety in anime/manga is nowhere near as bad as it is in American comics.
Granted things have gotten pretty bad with isekai over the last decade, and that’s essentially become anime’s equivalent of the superhero genre. But that’s a relatively recent development in anime’s history. And even today there’s a lot of variety

>>8011604
>japs would do the same thing with isekai, moe, and school
True but the difference is breadth versus depth I guess. Yes the Japanese will have 50 stories in the high school genre, fair. But Western comics have 50 stories about Batman, where the genre is Batman. Pick your poison I guess, the world seems to have picked breadth over depth.

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>>8011599
It's worse than that.
It's not every comic is DBZ, but that there is only one comic and it's DBZ.
In Marvel there is a single shared universe/multiverse/whatever, and all the characters exist in it. DC is the same with theirs.
Think about what this means. When you make an IP, a reality for your characters to live in, you inherently establish an unbreakable canon about how things work.
If the underworld is shown, then that IS the underworld in your reality. You have answered the question of how your reality works and you cannot change it. But even more, you cannot do anything other than that now.
In Bleach, Deathnote, and Dragonball, all three of these series feature underworlds, but all three of them envision totally different underworlds. In Bleach it's a parallel society with magic samurai, in Deathnote it's a dreary wasteland filled with bored gods, and in Dragonball it's a wacky place with demons and stuff.

And this can be applied to literally all other concepts of reality. From underworlds to power systems, to world history, to the metaphysics of the reality, etc etc.
In comics there is one world, the real world except Superheroes exist in it. These superheroes exist as aberrations. Regular people cannot expect to become superheroes. It takes place in the current day, without any meaningful changes, WW2 still happened, Trump exists, smartphones exist, pretty crime still exists. The only thing that is out of the ordinary is the existence of superheroes, but they have no meaningful impact on the world around them. And that's it, that's your world, that's your story.

And it's going nowhere, they've committed to never ending it, which is in itself a sort of end. It means that the world will not change to deviate from regular real life, and none of the characters will die. Ie there is no possibility that Batman will ever defeat the Joker, or even that Batman will so much as reduce crime even a little. He has no impact on the world at all.

Americans comics are gay. They only draw roided out muscle men. Nobody wants to see this apart from gay people.

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>>8011627
Cont
Contrast this with manga, where each and every story is a totally new reality, even when it exists in the real world.
By being a new reality, you don't know what will happen, it's new.
Even if two series are similar, for example both Naruto and Dragonball feature dudes fighting eachother with magic energy blasts, they are (literally) worlds apart from one-another. Naruto will never meet Goku, Goku will never perform a jutsu, and Naruto will never perform a kamehameha.
Goku might destroy the Earth, it could happen, you don't know, he might fix it after that, he might not, the whole story could go in a direction in which the Earth is destroyed, you don't know.
Naruto might re-unite with Sasuke, or he might kill Sasuke, or he might give up on him, you don't know.
This is why these stories are interesting, because it's a new and exciting story you haven't heard before.
And even though many things may be predictable, they are never set in stone, and all the best stories shake it up a little to avoid predictability.
Comics, by their chosen structure have eliminated the possibility for any mystery or anything new.

>>8011627
>”It’s not X, but Y”
Bot post

>>8011629
don't go to the beach, troon.

>>8011634
Please, if it were AI it would be better formatted and less rambly than what I wrote

>>8011633
>Comics, by their chosen structure have eliminated the possibility for any mystery or anything new.
Yeah I think that’s a good way of summing it up. Japanese storytelling really excels at using mystery to get you hooked. Everyone remembers their favorite anime plot twist. Western storytelling has never really leaned into mystery in the same way, and even if they wanted to, Western comics are structurally incapable of doing so because of the problems you described.

>>8011265
It's in a great place for the company who owns batman. Capitalism isn't just about making the best product, but killing your competition. You don't need to make a good product if you strangle the playing field so that people don't have any other options (this has been the MO behind the enshittification of everything int he past few decades).

To them, ideally all comics/manga except their IP are wiped off the face of the earth. They don't give a fuck about art, just milking the audience for every cent they have.

>>8010942
stop ruining quality inking with absolute garbage coloring that still looks like it's from 2004

its kinda funny that the marvel/dc characters are quite literally just action figures meant to play in whatever scenarios those two are approving of for them these days with the only thing tying these variations together being a vague mythos and shared backstory at best. I don't think western comic readers realize how unattractive it is when they start getting into different runs by different writers, and in the end the most digestible versions of each character ends up being the ones from various multimedia projects like videogames and movies and such, but never the actual comics themselves since they get up to some absolutely wild divisive shit.
The X-Men Krakoa thing is the most insane to me still because I watched the 2000s X-Men cartoon and played some fighting games at most, then comes Marvel Rivals and they won't shut the fuck up about it, only to then go into the newest Marvel fighting game and it's been all but scrubbed, back to the Academy roots that I grew up with, and then finding out that even some of the different comic authors were trying to write it out as well. The comics are just completely unreliable nonsense, and I'm guilty of not caring about the mythos besides the bare minimum digestible amount that crosses over with every version, because that's really all I can tolerate with it.

This anon really put it best though >>8011627 >>8011633

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There’s some comic book art that’s actually /beg/ tier, it’s insane. No quality control or standards at all

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>>8012033
I haven't quite figured this part out yet but... I strongly feel that there's something deeply wrong basically all of comic art.
And to make this argument I'm going to post what pretty much everyone will agree is a very cool image.
It is a very cool image... but look instead at what it ISN'T. It isn't alive. It doesn't move, it feels like a drawing, like a static illustration. It's a work of art but it's not a moment in time, it's not what a panel should be in a comic.
Comics are kind of like animation, motion occurs from panel to panel, it is a moving medium. Unlike animation, you don't see all the frames, and to make up for this, information in compressed into each frame that it does have, the panels. And this is important, it makes the world feel alive.
But comes don't feel like this. So many pages and panels in comics feel stiff and lifeless.
They look cool as illustrations... but I think I'd rather have something that feels alive than a cool illustration.

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>>8012070
Cont
Contrast this with manga and you have basically the opposite situation.
It's almost impossible to find a manga page that stands out on its own. Nobody pins a manga page to their wall as a poster. Nobody spends very much time looking at any given panel. As illustrations... they're nothing to look at.

But they feel totally alive. You feel the movement, the intensity, the action, you can even feel the sound of the scene. Some manga capture this effect so well that an anime adaptation can feel pointless, because the manga is already animated in the reader's experience.

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>>8012075
Cont
I've got a few theories as to why they are like this, both comics and manga.

One embarassing reason is that comics artists make alot of money selling individual pencils or inks of pages as standalone illustrations. And that cover work is both more prestigous and better paying than interior pages. Basically artists are incentivised not to make comics but illustrations. Every page becomes a standalone illustration.

But a perhaps less considered reason is the origin of comics. Comics originate as newspaper strips, like Garfield. They had very little space, and so to tell a full story in an animated capacity was impossible. Instead you tell the story through symbolic representations of the events. I.e. you don't choreograph a fight scene, but you just draw the two characters dramatically exchanging blows in a single image. That image isn't animated, it's a poster, it communicates "they fight".

By contrast, manga has its origins in animation. Osamu Tezuka was the pioneer not just of manga but also of anime, and his artistic inspirations came almost entirely through Disney. What inspiration, if any, he took from western comics is not at all documented. Animation has always been at the heart of manga. They never made newspaper story strips, from the very beginning they were drawing their comics more like animation storyboards.

Over time, comics have become more animated, though not much. And manga have become more comic-like, though not much.

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>>8012085

>>8011627
I wonder if religion plays a part in this. American culture gets so obsessed over things being "canon" because we inherited that aspect of Christianity from Catholicism but unlike Europe which is a lot more collectivist/pro-community, American culture is fucking schizophrenic and goes "no, MY individual canon is superior to YOUR canon", hence the constant Christian-on-Christian conflict rooted in individualism and conformity to specific norms rather than a general communal set of norms. There's also the whole thing about prophecy being deeply tied to the cultural mythos of both Judaism and Christianity (Jews will get their holy land back, Jesus is the prophecized messiah, etc).

Things are much different in Asia where there's no "canon" found in their religious texts and there's a lot more room for individual interpretation when it comes to native culture (folklore, myths, legend). Buddha also isn't some prophecy guy like Jesus is, at least not in the same way.

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>>8010942
westen civilization is done, we're at the tail end of the 4th turning, the kaliyuga is upon us

>>8010942
Saved? Just because DC and Marvel (mostly Marvel) are absolutely floundering, doesn't mean the entire industry has gone to shit. The "indies" have been doing fine, and remain so. Image comics is racking in cash.
DC and Marvel made their companies revolve around a single genre, and after 80 or so years they're finding out that doing so wasn't the smartest idea -- especially when they've made that genre, which really should be aimed moreso at children, more geared towards adults, thus ensuring there's no gateway for people to onboard onto the niche product that is floppy comics, and once the movies stop, and superhero genre as a whole.

>>8012212
Pretty much this. Raped to death by america

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>>8010942
>How about saving manga instead?
The Shounen Jump magazine sold less than 1 million copies for the first time in their history recently while the Absolute DC Comics sold over 8 million copies in 2025 alone.

>>8013246
holy absolute cope

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>>8013246
At least 80% of those Shonen Jump sales is because of One Piece, the other manga don't sell much. (You) didn't even include the rest of DC Comics sales in 2025, just the Absolute line, and it still mogs manga.

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>>8013246
Absolute DC Comics are capeshit for weebs, that's why it sells so much.

Absolute Wonder Woman looks like a Berserk rip-off with that huge sword.

>>8013286
can we see the manga influence INSIDE the comic? Yeah thought not.
Covers are worthless.

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>>8013246
Best-selling manga, top 10 2025