Comic Sales Have Been Declining for Years, Says Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson

bleedingcool.com/2018/03/09/comic-sales-declining-mike-richardson/

Why aren't more normies reading comics now with everything being made into a Movie/TV show nowadays? How much longer do you think we have lads?

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he needs to be fired

No fucking shit.

Didn't he sexually abuse men?

most people under their mid 20s don't like to pay money for stuff. not even movies. they'll just watch youtube videos they don't have to pay for. people past their mid 20s paying for physical printed works are most of the ones that would keep comics financially alive. the only way to get large numbers of people younger than their mid 20s interested in comics is to put narrated/voice acted videos of comic book panels on youtube, facebook, or a tv on demand service for free or as part of their general cable, streaming, and/or internet package available at the same place as conventional tv shows and movies.

You're new aren't you?
You don't talk about comics often right?
Anyways, it's a distribution issue with Diamond.
There's also the issues with decompression and the stigma that the only western comics are big 2 cape.
Comics that come out as graphic novels in actual bookstores do fine.
The traditional LCS, floppy model is stagnant

Because it's the wrong demographic. Older readers are the ones that buy the most comics but you need to get people at a young age and plant the seeds. The lack of actually good cartoon shows is a problem. You got Justice League Action and that's it. Otherwise you get the shit that Marvel has been churning out for several years.

I think DC doing YA books is a good idea.

And that's a good thing!

No, they need to lower the price and put more pages/story material in it. I absolutely hate how little dialogue and plot are actually in a single issue now compared to 20 years ago.

profits from book publishing is declining

Isn't that factually incorrect though? I mean yeah the 2010s sell less than the 2000s which sell less than the 90s, but the recent trend has been upwards rather than downwards.

That's another guy, but I can't remember his name. He still works there as a freelancer

Why are you using a 2 year old graph with false data?

He is likely wrong. Comics likely drifted towards focusing a lot on people with super powers and magic powers due to other things not being deemed interesting enough for people to read when they could easily watch tv shows and movies. Something similar seems to be happening with the modern movie industry. The proportion of movies that large numbers of people are seeing in the USA that are non-action oriented blockbuster movies has been declining.

COMIC BOOKS ARE DYING AND IT'S BECAUSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

>Why are you using a 2 year old graph
2017 was 2 years ago? And we're talking specifically "for years" here, the graph being made in 2018 wouldn't change 2011 sales.
>false data
Care to show me contradicting data from a credible source? Pretty sure comichron has always been considered credible around here.

Are you just shitposting?

Lack of variety, fucked niche distribution, most comics are generally very unappealing concepts because of stupid writers, oversaturation of superheroes and convoluted intertwining plotlines and constant retcons, and writers desperately trying to appeal to audiences they don't know how to appeal to and trying to form old concepts around new audiences instead of trying something new. Monthly issues being a pain in the ass to keep up with and the price of them eventually piling up. Webcomics are free and a lot of the time more entertaining because of more variety and the ones you like don't get tied up in some shit from another comic.

the industry needs to fucking crash and burn before it can get better and mainstream comics are fucking stupid

>I think DC doing YA books is a good idea.

I actually thought about reading those if they were any good. Anyone on Sup Forums read any of these yet?

I think he means the DC Ink imprint rather than cape novels, which have been a thing since forever,

One solution I've heard thrown around is to get comics out of shops and back on newsstands in grocery stores/toy stores/etc. This would help relive the stigma and intimidation most people feel when thinking about going into a comic shop. I think you'd be surprised how many people out there want to read comics but have no fucking idea where to start. My current girlfriend was always interested in comics but was too nervous/weirded out to go to her LCS until we met and now she reads comic pretty regularly with. I know that's anecdotal evidence but it's something to think about.

There's also the biggest issue of print just plain old being dead, comics not being worth the price of entertainment they're handing out, ontop of the lack of any quality making them worth picking up.
You can get it in front of all the eyeballs you want but you can't make them give a fuck and you definitely can't make them shill out 5 bucks to do it.

Because everything is being made into tv/movies. They scratch the superhero itch for most people. 1 in 100,000 might want more, and they can turn to the comics for that. But for the vast majority, the movies and tv shows are more than enough.

The Comic industry should have copied Japan a long time ago.

>Better art
>black & white print for faster delivery/more focus on the art
>released in an anthology of different comics by different authors
>when volumes are completed, they are released with improved art
>stories are more self contained and rarely soft reboot
>continuity actually matters
>cheap to produce, cheap to buy
>content is varied and not just super hero a in new york, super hero b in new york, and super hero c in new jersey.
>heavily tied into the animation industry. create cartoons specifically tied to the comic to increase awareness and interest among target demographics
>online distribution that actually works

Of course, it's far too late for any of this. the reality of the matter is, comics are a species that isn't extinct yet but is on an unstoppable path to extinction. The main market for most comics is getting older and older, they aren't retaining any of the younger demographics at all. I think it's a realistic possibility that in 10-20 years the revenue generated from imported/officially licensed manga will actually be higher than the revenue generated from American comic books. It's just too niche of a genre to survive.

>Where's our Harry Potter
You best be joking if you think Harry Potter is fine literature. YA is the Marvel and DC of American Literature: Everyone knows it's 90% rehashed shit and it sells anyways.

Maybe it's the fact that normal people don't want to go to some shithole filled with smelly fat fucks with horrendous breathe?

This.

Of course the guy who lost Star Wars would say that.

Diamond

>Better art
No, read more comics
>black & white print for more focus on the art
Only because BW is cheaper, in everything else color is superior. Also read more manga.
>stories are more self contained and rarely soft reboot
>continuity actually matters
>content is varied and not just super hero a in new york, super hero b in new york, and super hero c in new jersey.
Read something besides capeshit

>released in an anthology of different comics by different authors
>when volumes are completed, they are released with improved art
>cheap to produce, cheap to buy
>heavily tied into the animation industry. create cartoons specifically tied to the comic to increase awareness and interest among target demographics
>online distribution that actually works
These are actually valid points.
Basically all they need to do is to make comics more accessible, kinda what DC is trying to pull off right now.

He didn't say Harry Potter was fine literature, though. He said it was a massively popular piece of commercial media that came out of nowhere. He's not saying anything about the quality of comics, he's saying that comics cannot reach the same levels of popularity as Harry Potter, even if they were on the same quality/entertainment levels.

>better art
>posts Katsuya Terada
>proving his point

while i agree with you, post something a little more in line with western comics.

Newsstands are how I got into comics. It just wouldn't have happened if I had to go into an actual comic shop. I was traveling cross country by bus, and impulse bought a bunch. It turned into a thing where every stop I'd hit the newsstand. By the time I reached my destination any extra space in my suitcase was stuffed full of comic books.

Because comics are not marketed to anyone other than people already buying comics. I have never seen a poster, billboard, or any kind of ad outside the context of comic shops, comics, comic websites, so I'm not that surprised. I've seen ads for books in the cinema, but never a comic even though all those characters actually show up in films

that graph isn't adjusted for inflation. if it was you'd see there was a slight decline ever since 09 (essentially ever since blackest night)

Some of this already exists and most of it is geared for very young kids. I buy some of these by Capstone because they are well made (hard covers) so great for people who are past the slim readers but not for someone older than 5th grade or possibly even younger.

The YA books I've read are very YA; there are three Lois Lane books where Clark has powers but they are mostly Lois based books. Otherwise, things like what you are talking about (and then there are also YA versions that aren't the movie, but for example BvS had a tie-in young adult book). They are all OK, nothing is horrible, nothing is fantastic.

Yes, but graphic novel sales have been increasing for years so it evens out.

>Why aren't more normies reading comics now with everything being made into a Movie/TV show nowadays?
Terrible marketing. Terrible management at the very least in Marvel's case.

Not that user but you must have failed basic math, not to mention economics. Inflation has not increased in the way you think, the graph clearly shows a 25% increase from 2011 to 2016. Inflation isn't 5% per year and isn't cumulative that way such that the increase would be represented solely by inflation. In addition, these charts don't even take into account bookstores (e.g. non-Diamond, much less digital downloads).

I do agree with this user ; sales of floppies are not what is increasing, which is going to diminish the business in general.

>market is oversaturated with stuff that's very uniform in tone and themes with everyone apeing each other, all of that on a god-awful format full of ads
>and now the stories are somewhat more accessible thanks to far more digestible movies and TV shows with ridiculously better production value
GEE I WONDER WHY

>Webcomics

Webcomics are free, and are also fucking total garbage-trash-can-shit.

>and a lot of the time more entertaining

Holy shit you have bad taste, kys

Or you could just stop exclusively buying cross-over events from Marvel and DC you dumb new-fag cancer.

>because of more variety

MUH SLICE OF LIFE, MUH HOKEY JOKE PANELS, MUH REFERENCES TO POP CULTURE INSTEAD OF ACTUAL CONTENT

Fuck off, no one's interested in your webcomic.

>be a normie who wants to get into comic books after watching the last marvel movie, or watching Gotham or whatever
>turns out you have to catch up with several years of continuity with stuff that may not be available in reprint yet
>turns out said continuity keeps branching out or getting rebooted/retconned every other year to the point that it's not clear what did and didn't happen
>turns out the characters from the movies or shows you like have been phased out of comics to set up ratings traps and novelty issues & events
As for how long you have, it really depends on how some of the bigger actors manage themselves in the next few years. Marvel Comics at least seems to be trying to put its years of horrible managment and editorial policies behind them.
But then you also have stuff like IDW seeing a 91% decrease of their yearly income, so...
I'd say they could get a clue from frog&waffle comics and try to actually offer products of better quality, even in terms of format. Ditch the floppy format. Seriously. The readers already buy a lot of graphic novels, they are fine paying more for a product of better quality and not stuff printed on toilet paper with ads for other shit you sell that they may already know about, may see in the stores and most definitly hear about on the internet.

This. Eurocomic weeklies and sometimes even books are sold in grocery stores in my country, and in bookstores, and gift shops too.

They have a special section for kids everywhere. Works like a charm.

He has also been running his company into the ground for years. If he didn't have Mignola keeping him afloat.

Honestly it's strange to see how it's only the americans who seem to be in that much trouble.
The world Eurocomics is doing considerably better than it was in say the 90s or the early 2000s, dealt with webcomic artists and the like by offering them gigs for oneshots to measure their potential sales, stuff like that. The model of expensive quality product for a reliable and dedicated readership, flagpole titles arround christmas for profit and dumping old material on cheapo softcover into newstands and gas stations is working alright, to the point they don't seem to be that worried about concurrence from other media, at least not on the level of TV in the 90s. publishing manga themselves or buying small publishers when they appeared to bank in on the novelty, get the new readership and sell really cheap products was a genius move too
Japan is still maintaining its industry pretty well. TV tie-in and merchandise is working better than ever though you could argue that when it comes to manga, underpaying everyone might have something to do with how sustainable the business model is.

"No!"

It doesn't matter if it's good. What matters is that it sells well and can carry a publisher.
One big crap title for plebs allows you to publish loads of smaller titles without losing money if you manage things correctly.

>monthly
>less than 20 pages of content
>rarely a book with consistent art
>too many rectons and crossovers that makes you lost
>only characters like Batman get any promos who people already know and can simply watch his movies/shows/games
Gee, I wonder why younger generation don't care about comics.

>with everything being made into a Movie/TV show nowadays?
Precisely because the TV shows, movies, video games and stuff are things you can get into without worrying about inconsistent continuity, reboots, crossovers and all that shit.

I'd rather see the industry shift to just trades. I think it would allow for better storytelling in the medium, with writers and artists able to take the time they need to tell coherent and well-thought out stories and make sure that each page is beautifully detailed.

It also would allow...For artists to not suddenly disappear after the 1st issue or randomly get replaced. For writing and art teams to change, after each trade is finished, if you wanted, etc.

Yeah, it was hard getting into comics because most of the popular shit was like that and I couldn't find any of the good niche shit.

On a new comics day you can spend 30 dollars on what ends up being less than an hour of entertainment. I love comics, but also completely see why they're not that inviting to others.

Because the recent increase is by trying to force a speculator market again by relaunching and variant covers. Which is why after the #1s are done, they're back to shit all sales.

This

>Weekly issues will be digital only
>Only physical version will be trades sold at books a million
>Subscription services will be the norm for reading weeklys

The comic market isn't just the big 2.

>Subscription services
FUCKING THIS
The only reason you don't get your comics in the mailbox is that the big two have their own contracts with distributors.

>Why aren't more normies reading comics now
They are. They just aren't paying money for them. Nor should they since almost any comic you might want to read is freely available on the internet now.

>normies follow comic books by downloading pdfs
o i am laffin

>being this booty bothered
Triggered much?

Floppies as they are in the US are also a problem. In no other country, floppies cost that much with so much ads in it.

>Pretty sure comichron has always been considered credible around here.
You mean the Marvel shills that goose their numbers so they can "beat" DC? Yeah, no, they're about as "credible" as The Mary Sue.

I've said this before, and I'll say it for eternity:

Put comics in places where nerds are likely to buy them. At this point, even "nerds" don't read comics -- the comic market is laughably small, and it's absurd to pretend that little growth year-to-year means that the comic industries are successfully capitalizing on so many eyes being on their IPs. Newsflash: they are wasting the opportunity of a lifetime -- an opportunity that almost any medium would destroy a third world country for.

Easiest solution by far: sell comics (i.e. OGNs or trades) with movie tickets. At this point, they could even simplify things and just work through Fandango, since online ticket sales are growing rapidly.

Best solution: sell. floppies. through. Amazon. Every day that I can't buy a physical copy of the latest issue of Batman on Amazon at its sticker price (or the sticker price as an add-on for a $25+ purchase), I KNOW that DC/et al. are missing out on a fuckload of free money. And yes, of course I know this will hurt comic shops, but at a certain point, you have to approach this like the big soda companies did with "soda shops"/"malt shops": is it *really* worth maintaining strong relationships with these old relics, when you could reach a larger audience more effectively through other means?

agree. i only buy comics when trades are released anyway

thats why you read old comics instead

Part of the reason this is happening is because most people in their mid 20's struggle to just pay basic bills.

That was Scott Allie.

>Part of the reason this is happening is because most people in their mid 20's struggle to just pay basic bills.

If they stopped spending all their money on avocado toast -- !

In all seriousness, you're right. People in their early to mid 20's struggle hard to make ends meet -- they opt for things like Netflix because they get value for their dollar every month (quality for their dollar is a whole different issue).

Paying $3.99 for a sliver of a four or five part story just doesn't fucking work anymore. Especially if you are trying to reach an audience that binges consumes media. Marvel or DC bundling their
titles in a low-cost anthology might work but ultimately I think the era of the floppy is more or less over.

Additionally, Marvel fucked up HARD by allowing their movies to become more engaging than most of their comics.

The truth is that sometimes I see websites, although as you say are in things like amazon prime or similar where it is legal purchase, also in ign official site, but is that even the print media are difficult to promote as well, books that they are promoted are only 2%

>How much longer do you think we have lads?

Comics are like porn, they could stop producing any new material and you would still have enough old material to watch/read for more than a lifetime.

People prefer easily accessible, bountiful and cheap content, it's why news papers are dying and blockbuster was taken over by things like Netflix and Amazon prime video.
Buying comics week to week is expensive, that's why DC for example is making more money n trades than single issues, because people prefer trades as you get more "bang for your buck of you will".
The Industry is slowly growing, but I could easily see the big two in 10-20 years to either be putting out super expensive floppies for tradition with digital comics becoming more popular, trades will continue to dominate

>Generalizing all Webcomics
Want me to tell (you) how I know you're just full of shit?

>The traditional LCS, floppy model is stagnant

This.
Comics (or at least the big two) need to be sold in more accesible places. Even in fucking Mexico you can go to any random street corner and find a newspaper stand carrying not only floppies, but hardcovers and TPBs. Grocery stores ranging from 7/11 up to Wal-Mart carry have racks stocked with Spider-Man, Superman, The Walking Dead and even manga like Bleach, InuYasha or the 100th reprint of Evangelion.

>tfw cheap smut comics outsell Spider-Man, Superman and Batman 5 to 1; effectively surviving the early 90s crash that killed Mexican comic books for a while
>they're pocket-sized and offer over 50 pages per issue at 50 american cents.
>And they're weekly.

I want all of those

>tfw getting cheapo Disney comic dumps from the gas station during holiday trips as a kid
Most of them were quite crap on average but fuck me even now it's kinda tempting to get them for just 4 bucks for nostalgia's sake. Pretty good value as far as kids stuff goes since you have 200 pages of stuff.

>pdfs
Why wouldn't you just use cbr?

>Dark Horse hasn't been selling Star Wars or Buffy comics - their bread and butter - for years
>"HURR HURR COMIC SALES ARE BAD"

Yeah, for them maybe. How about they put something worth reading out?

Have fun, user.
e-hentai.org/uploader/Mexican+Comic

Comics really need to a Netflix-ish model. Move everything to digital, charge a flat fee for everything published in the last five or ten years. They can keep printing floppies, but cut the numbers down so LCS doesn't whine about having so many left over that they're used as toilet paper.

>Diamond chokes out the American comic market with their bullshit exclusive distribution
>This prevents a lot of independent comics from getting any attention and from smaller locations that don't specialize in comics to even sell Diamond-distributed books, meaning that people who don't visit comic shops in the first place would never see them to begin with
>The capeshit movies that are flooding the theaters give the general audiences a gist of what they could've gotten in comics if they read them instead, or at least, what they THINK that the movies are supposed to be a close approximation to the source material
>Between that and certain companies being very aggressively stupid with their writers and artists / not getting proper editors and basically allowing any trash to get made these days, everyone is taking a massive loss in the market save for Diamond and movie studios

Legally they're well within their rights to make people sign for their exclusive distribution deal, but if the big two decided to jump ship that'd cut them down well enough to give stores more of a chance to push whatever they want out - rather than whatever obligation is forced on them.

Hell, my LCS isn't even supposed to be "supporting local artists", but they'll do it anyway by giving out prints of their comics because it's horseshit.

Im 29, in my case I stopped reading comic books a few years ago for a few reasons:
>most of the mainstream stuff is capeshit with little variety
>capeshit is never ending and most of the twists become undone or non-important in the long run
>if I instead decide to read indie or non-mainstream stuff, unless its a pretty short series(8 issues or less), the release schedule for the most time is awful as there can be long waits between issues
>even if I decide to go with capeshit, these can also have the same issue with scheduled releases
>if I wait for trades, these are quite expensive if I compare them to manga volumes and contain less pages
>I keep reading manga because, while not colorized, most of these end, unless rare occasions(hxh, berserk) volumes are released regularly and have variety to them

Because you're a fucking normie who may not even use VLC because your computer already has Windows's media player so why would you use something else?
We're not talking about enthusiast comic readers, we're talking about people who aren't that and saw the Avenger movies, in short : turbonormies.
They are not going to download their comics as pdf as previous user was saying, let alone use a dedicated software for that.

>Take comics out of newsstands, grocery stores, convenient stores
>place then only in niche comic shops
>Get to work fucking hating on any normies who don't have the same powerlevel as the comic book shop fags
>wonder why sales are down

it's a fucking mystery

comic nerds wanted it to be a comic nerd only market, and then sales dropped like a rock.

They also wanted to age up the audience from 10-16 to 18-30 and then increase the price well out of the range for most kids.

It's fucking retarded that not only has Disney not stepped in a fucked Diamond's day, but that they don't see the profit of putting comic books in grocery stores and convenience stores where so many potential new readers would see them and go "hey, the movies were cool, let's check this out".

They should be ruling the comic market, but they let Marvel act like complete fucking idiots.

Because they actually don't care.
They just wanted the movie and tv rights.

Marvel does that already.
It's kinda shit and there's tons of holes. It's easier to just use comic reader sites. They also don't diversify enough. It's like if Netflix was nothing but Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Transformers; the crowd gets bored of the same shit all the time fast.

I've never seen a PDF file be even close to the first results when googling a download link for a comic. It's all cbz, and shit. If you're downloading comics you're going to realize pretty quickly you need a comic reader program. I use Astonishing on mobile, and that's how I've caught up mostly on post crisis DC. I wasn't gonna pay out the ass for copies of stories I may not even enjoy, but now that I have I'm thinking of picking up some reprints of stuff like COIE, and "52". This is also how I decide which current trades I wanna buy cause I read them online and then decide if they're worth it.

Pirating shit off the internet like comics is normie as fuck.
Even anime is less normalfag than that. Sup Forums is one of the normiest boards on Sup Forums.

American comic coloring has been mostly ass since the advent of digital. I would honestly prefer them in B&W.

Wide digital distribution kills the LCS
Getting rid of floppies kills the LCS
Movies neither help nor hurt the comic industry

None of these things happening or not happening is particularly the fault of Disney.

Also, to anyone posting shit like "I've stopped reading/buying comics", the fact is that you are now spending that time lurking on Sup Forums bitching about comics. So it's less about the hobby and more about the idea that you enjoy expressing your autism on the internet more than reading.

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>Why aren't more normies reading comics now with everything being made into a Movie/TV show nowadays?
because it's a dying medium
theater ticket sales won't have a boom if famous plays and musicals start (better said continue) being turned into movies/tv shows

Well it's not helping.

Comics, books and movies (and theater) are all recreational means of spending time to take in stories.
One growing in popularity is necessarily going to contribute to a decline in in the others, as people have a finite amount of time and money to spend on leisure storytelling.

That's just how it is.
Comics peddle a lot of samey old stories from poorly advertised singular locales in a relatively expensive format. They are also the least social way to take in stories aside from books.

Their decline really isn't amazing.

>he needs to be fired

He owns the company, dipshit.

Oh and I left off videogames.

>Also reports that water is pretty wet.

DURRRRRRR CAWMIKS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER IF THEY WERE LIKE MANGA

WESTERN SHIT IS SO FULL OF SJW GARBAGE ITS NO WONDER WHY GLORIOUS NIPPON SUCEEDS ALL THE TIME

DOYYYYYY ORIGINAL OPINIONS HURRRR

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There are plenty of great full-color manga out there, but you're just trying to stir the pot and not really make a point so it doesn't matter.

Please observe Global Rule #2.

>You will immediately cease and not continue to access the site if you are under the age of 18.

The biggest thing Manga has over comics, since it's been brought up, is it's usually one writer in charge, and it's not a shared universe with a bunch of other people who will just do whatever the fuck they want.