So, now that reading comics isn't the weird socially shunned hobby it used to be in its heyday, where should we go now?

So, now that reading comics isn't the weird socially shunned hobby it used to be in its heyday, where should we go now?
Is any passtime safe from this hobby-gentrification?

No

More meticulous stuff or nerd shit that requires putting more effort than handing over money to a cashier or flipping through pages would me too much for the normie crowd. There's always gonna be a market for those nerds that paint warhammer shit, put together gundams, or play DnD but regular people would rather buy Pop figures and play Cards Against Humanity. God I fucking hate that game,

I thought it was shunned? Back in the 90s I could go to the grocery store or anywhere and pick up a comic book. Now you have to go to some weird nerd store full of creepers

That was 20 years ago. The only comics I see in grocery stores occasionally is the Archie digest stuff.

But really, I never see normies at my LCS. The secret club is still safe. Normies mostly like the movies and tv shows because they are more accessible.
AoS is still bullshit and they brought back the worst Primarch.

Superhero movies may be mainstream, but comics are even more niche than they were 20 years ago. You're still a weirdo with an unpopular hobby.

Thank God.

I regularly see new issues of Batman and shit at Walmart on the magizine rack near checkout.

user, that's not because comics are shunned, it's because actual little kids dont buy comics anymore and that who that shit was for, the little kids brought to the grocery store with mumsy who would bug them to buy it, at some point kids pretty much only cared about video games for escapism

Hell in the 90s, not every kid even had a console, these days every kid has their own cell phone

Yeah this, normalfags only care about live action really.

Collecting piss bottles.

Did jizz bottle guy post his collection this year?

Model Railways. Ain't no one gonna give a fuck about them.

Doujins. The plebs will never understand how sad panda works.

Don't you talk shit about model railways.

It still is weird amd socially shunned, it's just more corporate now that they figured out how to make movies and TV shows about them
People still don't read comics

>he believes that youtube fags wouldn't make videos about bypassing the sad panda.
Bad news, there are already videos of how to do it.

And somehow manga still sells like hotcakes

>play DnD
No, pen & paper RPGs have been taken over as well.

The fact that you care that much is fucking retarded. Why don't you just enjoy shit you enjoy, whether it's popular or not? And the answer is no, comic books are still seen as a stupid weird hobby. Comic book movies, on the other hand, is seen as just going to see the new action blockbuster.

But you don't see it at grocery stores either. I can only go by what I know, I don't know how it is today, but when I was in middle school in the late 90s there were a lot more kids into anime and manga than superheroes, I had a couple friends into comics, but there was a whole subculture of kids who were into the Jap shit, they were also simultaneously the mallgoth kids, they were into anime/manga because of the edginess a lot of it has and also the edginess of rebelling against Western culture, which of course super hero comics are a part of

I have a feeling anime might become more uncool in a couple generations, when it's seen as something many kids parents were into, but that's just a hunch

>pen & paper RPGs have been taken over as well

To play a pen & paper RPG, you not only need to be willing to spend at least a couple of hours (usually more, especially if you're running the game) on meticulous number crunching, but you also have to have at least three friends who are equally committed.

It's not the kind of hobby you can get into without having genuine interest in it. I really don't think it can be "taken over".

Once stuff becomes popular, its fandom becomes shit. So if this is a thing that requires interaction or is affected by fan opinion, it's fucked.

It isn't about edginess or being against Western culture, get off your high horse
The manga audience would have been the comic audience otherwise and everyone knows it, manga just did a better job at appealing to them that comics ever did and honestly when you look past jhonen jump crap there is legit way more variety to manga than to comics and thats involving other publishers than marvel/DC and the indie crap

I love model railways but it'll never be popular or be pushed as the fashionable thing to do.

Manga has stories about fantasy adventures, sci-fi action, secret agents, detectives and criminals, schoolchildren and romance, etc, etc

And these were on the shelf next to 'Superheroes, superheroes, superheroes.'

Now, that's not saying every manga is good (most are crap) or that every Western comic is about superheroes (they're not) but you walked into the shop back in the day and that was what you got. I wasn't really into superheroes but I was into sci-fi and fantasy and crime stories, so I bought the manga.

It's also why I loved 2000AD and Commando comics and bought them too while leaving the American stuff on the shelf.

You give goth kids way too much credit. They're not that cerebral.

So you're saying the comic book industry should just die out because normies?

Profit the comic book industry is literally the emperor sitting on his throne. A mere corpse that's only kept alive through the idiocy of said normies.

New blood is necessary I'm afraid.

Indie comics
I'm serious.
See, unlike 99% of hobbies, wherein the hobby needs a lot of money to create or maintain, generally needing to pa money to rent an area or else it's trademarked and thus can't be made, like say Yiu-gi-oh cards, it's easier to just buy indie comics online and avoid the social interaction with 14 year old weebs

The way to get new blood is to expand genres.

>The manga audience would have been the comic audience otherwise and everyone knows it

No, Manga generally appeals to a completely different set of people than capeshit. The way plots and characters are written, action scenes are paneled etc. are completely different between the two.

I doubt anime or manga will ever become uncool. It evolves all the time at breakneck speed. As long as people like looking at pictures and reading word bubbles, it'll be popular. Which is directly opposite to cape comics which evolve at a glacial pace.

Well let's not get ahead of ourselves, just because anime/manga sell more than comics doesn't mean that it's "cool". Weeaboos are looked at by normies as bigger freaks than anybody into super heroes. There might be more of them than hardcore comic fans, but there are way more casual comic/super hero fans than there are anime fans.

>but there are way more casual comic/super hero fans than there are anime fans.

They straight up don't count though. 'Casual' super hero fans art not in the same ballpark as actual comic readers, it's comparatively more normal to read a manga than it is to read edition #x of whatever line of capes.

I don't think that's true. Numbers don't = public perception. There was a time Insane Clown Posse debuted an album at like number 2 on the pop charts in the 90s, that didn't make being a Juggalo any more "normal" or acceptable to the general public, nor did it make ICP suddenly not the worlds most hated band despite obviously being very popular. Just an obscure example, but the same logic....tons of anime fans exist, so you can say anime is popular, but anime fans are unpopular among cool people, therfor anime is not "cool"

To what exactly? People obvious to comics are not going to start reading just because their favorite genre is presented to them in that medium.

Face it comics can't make a come back unless all other forms of media fail.

But neither are capes, not really. It's at an ironic level with most people — "it's cool because it's nerdy". Everyone loves them a Superman cap, t-shirt, or mug, but tell them you have a whole run by a specific artist at home and they'll look at you like some sort of troglodyte.

That's bullshit. Books are still a thing. And books are doing better than comics precisely because they don't predominantly limit themselves to just a few major genres.

Books are still a thing because reading is basic skill.

That doesn't mean people are avid readers, not this generation anyway. Go ahead and go out and ask some random fellow what the last book they read was that's between the ages of 18-25.

Go ahead.

Watching comic book movies isn't the weird socially shunned hobby.
Reading comics though still is.

I'd say what you're describing is true in many cases, but it's not the whole picture. I should have clarified, it's not the fanbase so much (although I'll touch on that) as it is the publishers and writers for rulebooks.
Game systems have become increasingly simplified (for better or worse) to appeal to a broader audience, and more and more political material is being written into setting information. While some systems are needlessly complex, dumbing them down too much is just as big a detriment. The last thing I want is a hodgepodge where it feels like character skills and abilities are too generalized but combat is still so complex that it takes hours to finish. On top of that, I don't need transexual orc paladins and gay black clerics.
If these changes are being made to appeal to a bigger audience, and I'm sure at least some of them are, I can understand that. But it comes at the cost of alienating the core audience. Like all things that are "nerd" culture, the image of tabletops has been softened enough that new people want to try them, but they typically aren't engaged and become a distraction at the table

the moment you mention "that's actually not how it happens in the comics", normies stop talking to you.

I don't know about you but I'm going to keep reading comics because I actually like reading comics, I wasn't into the medium just to feel like a special snowflake.

I can't tell if you people are 16 or don't actually interact with people and just base your idea of how people are on fiction.

>now that reading comics isn't the weird socially shunned hobby
lol it's more of a closed bubble now than it ever was. Old school nerd didn't mind other people in the hobby as long as they knew their shit. Modern nunerds make it a political badge and require you to submit their views before even buying the books they like.

Just because it's different doesn't mean it appears to different people
It doesn't matter how characters are written and scenes are panneled, comics are at it's core fictional tales that often involves heroism, some sorth of teen literature that's ilustrated with pictures and formated like a play
Kids get way into them when they don't have many friends or activities to fill their free time and often use it as a crutch and as escapism to deal with highschool, that's what manga is now, comics don't want to be like that anymore tho, comics don't want to be fantasy or fiction they want to represent current politics, no wonder they completely lost their tren audience, imagine if Harry Potter went gay and Hermione became black between books for no reason and now the story was about Hermione learning to be black in a wizard school with an old racist principal

Not that user, but as a kid I was into both anime/manga and cartoons and comics. As an adult, I'm only still into the latter....so what does that say? They are not the same even if they are similar, they appeal to different people obviously otherwise every single person into one would be into the other as well

...

You know what? Back when I was in highschool (10 years ago) I bought comics, not cape comics I bought this antology magazine that featured short ongoing comics and short comics and single page funny strips and stuff like that, I was the only kid in the entire school who bought comics at all but I brought it to school and 40-60 kids read it because it was passed from kid to kid in my class and in the next class and during lunch periods so there you go that was 60 kids who at least enjoyed them to the point of reading them for free there must be some potential costumers there and I wasn't a popular kid and that was pretty much everyone I know
When was the last time someone tried to produce an antology magazine oriented to highschool kids and when was the last time they tried something like making a deal with schools to entertain the kids for a while and give them some free comics to try and create costumers? Back in the day lots of brands did this if you had a new sports drink that didn't taste so much like ass you wanted kids to try it so they would want more for example

>so what does that say?
That you have shit taste and you think your opinion matter for some reason obviously
When was the last time you tried to get a kid interested in politics?

>That you have shit taste and you think your opinion matter for some reason obviously
Not him, but taste is a meme. Just by pushing this meme you yourself start thinking your opinion matters for some reason.

Anime/manga is only for edgy teens is what it says, grow up and be a Western man. You like anime because the heroes look like women and emaciated and that comforts you, you like it because it has things like nazi vampires and massive blood showers and this makes you feel special among the jocks who you feel would be scared by your interest in the macabre, you like it because the women look like identical 12 year olds which are the only females you could ever imagine having power over, and you like it because it goes against everything your parents taught you regarding morality.

You need to grow out of your shit taste, and get the fuck off my board.

>gay black clerics

This is a matter of, I don't NEED them, but would despise a system that was so inflexible that playing such a character would be impossible.

>Taste is a meme
This kind of thinking is why comics don't sell anymore

I mean unless it was made by Wick, it's a game and you can do whatever you want with it because none of that shit has anything to do with the rules. It doesn't even need mention, but it's been shoehorned in in such a way that it seems to trump what the table agrees upon as a collective. Like hey, this setting doesn't have birth control so all your bullshit will kill people.

I don't even watch anime, I got into it after highschool when I found out it's not all shit and watched the good ones but I soon run out of good old shows to watch
Regardless if you think it's for edgy teens you are retarded, it's for outcasts and pedos both of Wich are very rapidly growing demographics

>I soon run out of good old shows to watch

Genuine hidden gems thankfully exist, though naturally the vast majority of anime is crap and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You'll have considerable difficulty finding localized versions of these shows though, as many aren't translated.

Why would DnD need to be rewritten to support a gay-trans-whatever black gay cleric? I thought idea of the whole pen n paper shit was that you buy the books, come up with a campgain, and flex the world/rules as agreeded upon with your group. So if your friends want to play 4.8, snowflake edition with DnD as a base then so be it.

And isn't the number one killer of these games still vidya and an idiot fighting over any females that step into the group circle?

>he doesn't want to watch transforming jets fight while they get buffed by jpop or rock

>Game systems have become increasingly simplified (for better or worse) to appeal to a broader audience, and more and more political material is being written into setting information.
and japanese games are starting to take over like japanese animation took over cartoons and manga took over comics
its almost like if when the audience dosent llike something they dont buy it

I nominate ant keeping.

Yeah let's all start an ant farm

>sigmarines
And now I remembered that drivel about making 40k more "progresive", thank you

>and play Cards Against Humanity. God I fucking hate that game
What the hell is that game anyway?

Well I didn't know either but from the website, you ask a question on the black cards and people can answer with one of their "funniest" white cards.

So really it's just a really basic party game.

Jesus, you described anime in the same way my Grandma would

From what I've seen it's anime and manga so far. Whenever you bring it up some cunt always chimes in and asks if it has tentacle rape or whatever. Interesting the pendulum has shifted that way since anime and manga fans are being treated the way American comic book fans were in the early 00s and beyond by the mainstream.