Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Comic Book Industry death spiral

found this nice article about the reasons the comic book industry is in decline..though to me its simple, once you lose the young reader your done…and who can afford to spend the kind of money these books cost now

Price and hassle? You used to be able to get comics for one or two bucks, even less, and they were at grocery stores and things.

Now they're at bookstores and specialty stores and _expensive_. Meaning you can pay five bucks and up for a _single_ normal-sized 17 page comic. So people wait for the trades. We didn't _have to_ have a Free Comic Day back when there were full quarter bins and lots of independent publishers. Edit: Then again we didn't have bookstores _closing_ and going out of business left, right and center either.

Too much shock and awe? It used to be, at least with Marvel Comics, that the things were about _good artwork_ and relatable characters. But with the past ten years of event after event after event....a lot of the characters people grew up with are just killed or discarded. Not to mention, the artwork has suffered a LOT over the years, and I blame the Wizard Promo (tm) for this as much as anything.

Everybody draws the over-rendered splash page now. Or they draw and paint these "perfect" shots that are near-photorealistic....and posed and stiff as a board. Or they go too far the other way and do things _sketchy_ or in too much of a manga-wannabe style. This ends up producing some _odd_ results when your penciller goes one way (like oh, Humberto Ramos on his X-Men runs) and the inkers and colorists are in "splash-page" mode, painting a manga image like they're Alex Ross.

So basically, nerd-rage aside, people are tired. Tired of the grind of events that never end, and tired of paying through the nose when the comics don't have narratives or art styles they _Like_.

Imagine that, not paying $5-6 U.S. for a single comic book that irritates you. Will wonders never cease?

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