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Underground > Comic Books >

Starting to truly hate marvel bosses

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23:55 / 02.09.04

Okay, so x-statics, a book with a small but loyal fan base and favorable critical opinion must be cancelled, but the same month they come out with a glut, and i mean a ######' GLUT of horrendous looking new titles and mini-series. Wednsday was "new comic day" marvel had seventeen books shipping, eleven of them were not around a year ago.
marvel seems to have no clue how to run their company. years ago there were a lot of "marvel zombies" who would buy anything marvel put out, period. their number has greatly reduced, due to similar practices that happened in the early 90's. Marvel Age Jubilee!!!! COME ON!! I can almost gaurantee that most of the titles they have introduced in the last year will not be around a year from now. This is not to say that they don't have a few good titles, most anything that bendis writes is usually entertaining, millar can be okay sometimes, and they even have a few other worthy writers working for them (and milligan on the way!) One of the main problems is, and i work at a store and hear this all the time, is the "marvel keeps putting out so much bullshit, it's too much to buy. i'm about to give up altogether!". This is not good for marvel, and being that marvel is what keeps most comic shops in business, not good for the comics industry at all.

00:04 / 03.09.04

Do you...what I mean is...are you saying that the comics industry might be in trouble?

00:18 / 03.09.04

well, we all know the comics industry is on shaky ground as it is, but it seems like marvel is looking at a list of everything that they have done wrong in the past and are trying their very best to repeat every mistake they ever made.

00:40 / 03.09.04

Are you new to comics? Marvel being mostly shit is the standard for at least 30
years, anything else is an aberrant bonus. As for whats good for the comics industry,
perhaps your store should look at its business strategy, Marvel certainly dosent
keep page45 in business.

01:49 / 03.09.04

The market in the area where we are is such that if marvel were to go out of business, most comic book shops would. DC sells too, but not like marvel. Fantagraphics, D&Q, Top Shelf (my favorite companies) ? Well, Some of the employes push for that stuff, and we do get a small ammount of it in, but a good deal of it will sit on the shelf for ever. We try to keep some good Alt. mainstays in stock (ghost world, blankets, etc.) but most of the copies of those that we sell (and it's not very many) is because I pimp the #### out of them to anyone who seems like they might like intelligent comics. DC has been gaining an edge on Marvel lately because of Jim Lee.
Jim Lee is just another ###### "Image" artist in my opinion, but most people that shop there think that Hush was the second coming of Christ.
I dont want these posts to seem like i don't know that the comics status-quo has sucked for many years. I am fully aware that Marvel and DC can both churn out some serious crap. But I was optimistic for awhile. I mean, Marvel was putting out work by Peter Bagge and James Strum!
Of course, from a business perspective, the decisions to put those books out were even more baffling than the current glut that is coming out. My thoughts were "This is so cool! Pete Bagge is doing a Hulk book! Paul Pope is doing a spider man issue!....HOLD ON, MARVEL DOESN'T CARE ABOUT PUTTING OUT ARTISTICALLY VALID BOOKS, WHAT IS GOING ON!!" and i was right, because those books didn't sell for #### at our store. I got to listen to cretins bitch and moan "awww, what are they doing, this art is garbage, this is stupid. awww, man...why did they have to go and change X-Force!!?? Why can't Liefeld come back?"
basically....

THE COMIC INDUSTRY AS WE KNOW IT MAY BE DOOMED

THE PEOPLE THAT DON'T READ COMICS NOW, AND WOULD ACTUALLY
LIKE A LOT OF THE STUFF THAT IS COMING OUT (the good stuff)WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE EXPOSED TO IT AND THEREFORE NEVER READ IT.

THE PEOPLE MENTIONED ABOVE ARE THE ONES WHO COULD SAVE
THE INDUSTRY.

THAT PROBABLY WILL NOT HAPPEN.

01:58 / 03.09.04

okay, i forgot something in my long-ass post above.
the part about....

." I got to listen to cretins bitch and moan "awww, what are they doing, this art is garbage, this is stupid. awww, man...why did they have to go and change X-Force!!?? Why can't Liefeld come back?""

they are still saying the same ####, but now the books that they are complaining about acutally DO suck. Plus, they got their wish about Rob Liefeld.

check this #### out...

WE HAVE A CUSTOMER WHO BUYS TWO COPIES OF PREVIEWS!!!
ONE TO READ AND THEN BOX.
AND ANOTHER ONE TO GO STRAIGHT INTO THE BOX SO IT'S MINT!!

maybe THAT will give you an idea of what I have to work with.

p.s. I am generalizing, the above example is on the extreme end of our customer base. we have some great people that come in. but it is still very cape-oriented.

02:26 / 03.09.04

ORQWITH...

Have you thought of channeling your angergies into something a bit more constructive? Raising a hellfire and damnation sermon to the Barbelith Clergy is a sad bid for attention. Have you considered teaching these sad chaps you sell to about proper collecting? I'm sure their either young or misinformed. As a professional who works as part of the industry, shouldn't you be doing all you can to encourage tradition and quality in your patrons, as opposed the distant and executive-driven comic creators?

Perhaps a poster or two that outlines "What makes a good comic"? or maybe just an instruction sheet on how to collect apropriately? I don't "collect" anymore, but those two things would've been ridiculously helpful to me when I was younger.

03:04 / 03.09.04

whenever someones conversation leads me to believe that they are "speculators". or that they feel that they HAVE to buy something because of what company is is or what character it is, my advice is
"BUY IT BECAUSE YOU LIKE IT."
i also explain to them that as far as investments go, comics are not the way to go 99% of the time.

each employee has "Derek Reads" or "Jeremy Reads" etc. cards that we can put behind books that we reccomend. These sometimes actually work.

Fairly often, "new readers", "getting back into it" people, or "looking for something different" people will ask me for advice and after talking to them for awhile
and getting a good idea of what they are into i can make a reccomendation "this guy might like The Invisibles, this girl might like Daniel Clowes, this guy wants a superhero book and hasn't read much before, how about Batman:Year One?"

I am proactive in promoting comics that i think are good, or at the very least promoting the best thing i can for the type of book they want to read.

one of the biggest hurdles in promoting good books is that they often dont have the momogenized, full-color, big muscle, clean art that so many people seem to need to be able to enjoy a book.

but i digress....

THIS GUY BUYS TWO COPIES OF PREVIEWS!!!

that deserves a thread all on it's own.
if there are promotional flyers, he will sift through the stack for the best looking one.
he also has his mouth open all the time.
and a sloped forehead.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

04:25 / 03.09.04

Marvel's entire publishing history is that when the market gets good, they flood it. It was like that in the 40's, then they contracted. In the 50's they have over 50 different horror titles published at the height of the horror boom. Then, when they got their own distribution back in the 60's (after a near bankruptsy and distribution by National (DC) for years), they flooded the market AGAIN. In the mid 70's, they have over 400 different titles planned and in print in various formats, and was pretty much reprinting everything from the 60's in one form or another. When the direct market got big, they went apeshit with reprints AGAIN until the late 80's collapse. Then, in the early 90's, look at all the shit they pumped out! Every book had at LEAST 2 spin-offs.

Now, the market is starting to pick up, they are making inroads into the trade paperback boom and....they are flooding the market.

Not so much as shock as it is Business as Usual. I'm just as surprised by the new glut of X-Books as I would be by drinking 5 pints and then urinating more than usual.

04:45 / 03.09.04

solitaire, you are right. no surprise here. but in the earlier years, there was always that large kid customer base that they could market to. even if marvel ###### up, it had a much better chance of rebounding because of the sheer size of the customer base. kids come in our store all the time, for yu-gi-oh cards. the kid comic customers are a small minority. i was just hoping that after the early 90's disaster, and with the small customer base that is left, they may have learned a lesson. actually, they kind of did, you could kind of see it a few years ago. obviously, they have forgotten.
i really like the "these kids seem to like manga, lets make some titles that kind of look manga-ish but aren't! don't forget the hack writer!"

on the good news end of things..the most recent volume of Mcsweeny's (the comic issue) is wonderful and hopefully will expose some "comic virgins" to the true potential of comics. however, i do think that if someone doesn't already "get" comics, even the work of chris ware, daniel clowes, seth, and chester brown may still not be enough to inspire someone to go pick up some of the artists actual books.

05:14 / 03.09.04

To be fair -- and perhaps I'm just cheap -- but I think the biggest obstacle facing the comics industry right now is not an abundance of crap comics (when hasn't there been crap?), but price. I don't really read superhero comics much anymore, but I had heard a bit about HUSH and (sorry) did kinda like the art, so I glanced over the first volume...and soon put it back. It looked like a maybe-entertaining way to kill half an hour, but for $12.95? I think not. And really, that's one of the more reasonably-priced graphic novels. When you can go see a hundred-million-dollar movie on a Saturday afternoon -- four or five bucks for two hours of very expensive entertainment -- and you compare that to what a comic book costs, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. This -- not the insular nature of the field -- is why comics are not gaining in readership: the only people who even would spend that kind of money on comics are people who already love the medium so much that they're willing to pay an insane amount of cash to maintain their habit. Barring that, most people will probably only buy comics as an (unwise) investment when an "event" comes up, a la Death of Superman, or because they're interested in one specific graphic novel so much that they're willing to fork over the cash for IT -- and not much else. (Basically, these are works of exceptional quality...the Lone Wolf and Cub books, Sandman or The Invisibles, Ghost World, Maus...stuff that people will read because it's good, not because it's comics.) But would more people try out stuff that's just, y'know, kinda good, or that might be good but who can say, were it not so ungodly expensive? I think so.

05:41 / 03.09.04

Taking off on that last post (regarding the expense of comics), something I've been thinking about. Does computer coloring have any effect on the price of the book? Is it more or less expensive? If we could save a quarter or two by having more "flat" colors, I know I for one would be up for it. Invisibles, if I recall, used computer coloring but very sparingly. A lot of it was flat tones and I didn't have a whit of problem with it. I see a lot of Spider-Man covers on the shelf today that just seem ludicrously over-colored, to the point where every individual red "square" between the webbing has its own highlight. On mainstream superhero books, especially, computer coloring seems to bury some of the starkness of the primary colors.

Also, is anyone else not entirely thrilled with glossy stock pages? Marvel in particular seems to use it a lot and I find myself missing the feel and "look" of the paper. I know that'd cut down on the price a bit to switch back, eh?

So would we be willing to sacrifice production values for cheaper comics? is the question I'm getting at. I find the production of mainstream superhero comics disproportionate to their size and content.

Regrettable Juvenilia

07:42 / 03.09.04

Do we actually know that X-Statix was cancelled, rather than Milligan deciding that it was time for it to end?

Capital letters make everything more true.

08:34 / 03.09.04

shut up flybs, you're really stoking my angergies there.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:07 / 03.09.04

Maybe the kids buying Yu-Gi-Oh cards might be directed to the cardcaptor/yu-gi-oh/etc manga, thence to copies of Pulp or Tokyopop, thence onto something like Blue Monday... it's a long-term plan, but it does at least involve selling comics, even if none of them is a Marvel comic.

Whether Marvel's choking of the market will destroy the comic stores... well, do you have to buy them? If people aren't interested in buying them off you, why bother? If they are, then it is regrettable that people are reading stuff you think is dross, but it does at least keep you in a job. It's a tricky one... the collector mentality may be despicable to those who want comics to be appreciated as stories made up of words and art, but it does keep sales higher than they would be otherwise. I mean, is anyone buying, say, Nightwing for fun? Why would you?

Possibly the individual comic book is indeed going to go the way of the Viewmaster...

09:10 / 03.09.04

Just my opinion but I do not believe Marvel will ever go away (not in the next 20 years anyway). They may run their publishing business right into the ground but they have proven that their properties are as valuable as any in Hollywood and that gives the company huge value. If Marvel dropped into Chapter 11 again, or even Chapter 7, a larger corporation with deeper pockets would bail them out for the sole use of the icons. They would continue to publish to maintain the property factory that is Marvel Comics.

If you want to worry about something, worry about everyone but Marvel and DC because the smaller companies need the direct market to survive unlike the big two and if the small press crashes.....well, what would be left would drive me away from the medium. And believe it or not, aside from Tokyopop which has deeeeeep pockets back in Japan, there isn't a small press company out there that isn't always having to play the are-we-going-to-exist-in-6-months game from Image to Dark Horse to SLG to Fantagraphics to Top Shelf, etc etc. Been to a con this year? Notice a lack of small press publishers?

I don't mean to paint such a negative picture. Obviously a lot of these companies have been holding on for quite a while but none of them are exactly rolling in cash, even the ones that made some bank off the 80's properties for a while. Don't worry about Marvel. Support the small press when you can and we'll all have a healthier industry.

12:24 / 03.09.04

I like how ORQWITH censors his swearing.

Just like in a real Marvel comic, possibly scripted by Bendis.

I spend ages working out which sweary word fits best.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

12:25 / 03.09.04

Do we actually know that X-Statix was cancelled, rather than Milligan deciding that it was time for it to end?

Sales had dropped below the cancellation mark (which is why they did the Avengers crossover, IMHO) and after a try to boost them, they didn't go up.

If you check the many sales charts available on the web, you'll see that any Marvel comic that drops below 30K is doomed unless there is a contractural reason to keep it going, or it is a huge hit in trade paperback.

12:37 / 03.09.04

Yeah but to what extent are the comic buyers themselves reponsible for the cancellation of "good stuff". Now I'm not defending the actions of Marvel, who imho seem to be undoing a lot of their recent good work, but they are a business. If stuff doesn't sell, of course it's going to get cancelled, but it's not their fault that the Liefield X-force is more popular than the Milligan version. That is purely down to the comics fans themselves.

Matthew Fluxington

13:04 / 03.09.04

X-Statix ended at a pretty natural point. The story ran its course and was wrapped up with style and grace. The best stories have endings, not everything needs to carry on forever and ever.

Haus of Mystery

16:11 / 03.09.04

No, just X-Men threads.

18:02 / 03.09.04

To be fair -- and perhaps I'm just cheap -- but I think the biggest obstacle facing the comics industry right now is not an abundance of crap comics (when hasn't there been crap?), but price.

Absolutely. Probably has much to do with the relative success of manga compared to Western comics these days as well, incidentally; $10 for a 200-300 page (Japanese) comic that may or may not be good is much less painful than $15.95 for a 120 page (Western) comic that may or may not be good. Western comics in general are priced right out of impulse-buy territory, and as such sales are largely restricted to preexisting readers.

19:05 / 03.09.04

The Marvel strategy has always been to find something that works, then copy it a dozen times until no one buys it, then move on. I buy a few comics from them on a sporadic basis, but their prime market is the wacked-out fans who buy absolutely everything with an X, spider, or the word "ultimate" on it.

They fired a friend of mine a few months ago (despite him being on some top ten upcoming artists list) because they decided that they wanted more artists with an "anime-like" look and he didn't fit their new direction.

20:35 / 03.09.04

Orqwith, you might want to try stepping up your marketing in your area to try to attract more customers who have never been in a comic store before. If there's no existing market for alternative comics, then create one.

Pick up a copy of the Guerrilla Marketing handbook or some such. Send out press releases to the A&E section of your local paper about interesting new comics coming out and why they might be interesting to people who have never read comics (done in a news format, of course). You'll probably have to talk your boss into reorganizing and redecorating the store a little to make it more inviting.

There was this thing in Reinventing Comics about putting some sort of technological device outside of a comic store to let passers by read comics. The Danger Room in Olympia, WA does a low-tech version: they blow up a few comics pages and have them posted in the windows outside. I noticed lots of people stopping to look at them. They said they generated some extra walk-in traffic.

The Danger Room also used to do a Comics Appreciation Day every year, and now it's grown into the Olympia Comics Festival.

And see if your boss will let you sell all those indie comics that aren't selling for a lot cheaper to try to hook some new customers.

21:45 / 03.09.04

Fist, to defend my filthieness, i didnt edit my swears, the computer i was using isn't mine, and has a "Net nanny" on it. It even does stuff like print "dick van dyke" as "dick van ####". so now i can say fuck all i want.

as far as mainstream oriented stores go, ours is quite nice. we won the detroit news readers poll for "best comic shop" and most people that come in for the first time tell us that it's probably the best store in the area. i can also safely say we have the best back issue selection in the detroit area and make an effort to carry as much silver and golden age as we can. the store is well lit and the staff is friendly and helpful. so we are going against a couple of the classic "comic shop cliche's" right there.
the owner is very conservative however so as far a promotion goes, he likes to keep things pretty plain.
we also dont' let stuff sit around long, we sell tons of 10 centers, dollar books (right now 5 for 2 bucks!), and reduced price items, and trades, hardcovers, and new comics are always 20% off of cover.
we tend to stay away from the manga thing, we keep a few things in stock (lone wolf & cub, Akira, Battle royalle) but having a good manga section requires a lot of investment and space, and it would be hard to compete with borders and other big stores who are taking care of that market right now.
the alternative comics market in our area is handled pretty well by another store in a slightly hipper area called "green brain". it's a very cool store and i am friendly with the owners and do some shopping there myself. our stores have a good relationship. they send people looking so sell their collections to us, we send people looking for alternative stuff that we don't have in stock to them. personally, i would like to sell a lot more of that stuff at our store, but we have tried and it just doesn't seem to go over as well as we would like it to, so we try to get a decent selection of the popular alternative stuff and pimp the hell out of it.

i really wasnt' trying to "hype" the store i work at, even though reading over it, it sounds like i was.

22:54 / 03.09.04

wouldn't it be #### van ####?

00:50 / 04.09.04

I'm really starting to hate the ####'s. If you find cursing so offensive don't curse. Otherwise, just say FUCK, for fuck's sake!

Sorry, I don't mean to be a pain... back to the discussion.

02:29 / 04.09.04

i discovered the #### instead of dyke thing when i was checking out an article about Van Dyke Parks. i then did a search for dick van dyke to see if it would be "#### van ####". it wouldn't even let me search for it! so i went to the "tv tome" website, found the d page and discvered that dick was okay with net nanny. i wonder if famed organist Dick Hymen would show up as "#### #####, famous ##### player".

02:43 / 04.09.04

so i went to the "tv tome" website, found the d page and discvered that dick was okay with net nanny.

That's gotta be one of the quotes of the year.

Sorry, but i just have to add that this #### stuff is really ####ing funny. Tell net nanny to go #### herself, the filthy #####.

03:34 / 04.09.04

i just want to give a shout-out to olympia's danger room comics... i miss you fuckers.

ok, back to the thread...

04:22 / 04.09.04

To be a little more serious : how well do Image and Top Cow do at your store? Have they started selling more or don't they sell hardly anything?

If those two started getting more popular it would surely be good for the industry, also, how do you think they could get better if they aren't already?

12:25 / 04.09.04

Back on the good things for a comic store to do/have - I have a few more questions for Orqwith... They are not intended maliciously - ideally they weould be questions that all comic shop managers would be asking themselves.

Is there are carpet? If so, when was it last cleaned or hoovered? If not, when was it last swept? Is it cleaned regularly. This should be basic - it is with pretty much every other retail outlet, yet...

Is your store wheelchair accessible? Can you comfortablely get a wheelchair between the shelves and still have room for people the other side? This isn't just important in terms of compliance to the law - more space in the ailses make for a more pleasent shopping experience and more enticing attractive shop to promote a passing trade.

What have you got in the front window of your shop? Do you change the displays regularly?

Those are just a few questions off the top of my head. Again despite addressing them to Orqwith they are intended for all comic shops - having a well lit, tidy, well organized shop with attentive, helpful staff really should be the bare minimum that any shop, comic or otherwise, offers and as in the wider world of retail, the idea should be to continually attempt to improve the shopping experience for the customer and entice more of them in.

12:19 / 05.09.04

the carpet is vacumed a few times a week and we have it professionally cleaned about every couple months. the store has pretty wide isles, much less cramped than most comic stores and we do have at least one or two regulars that are wheelchair-bound
image, darkhorse, top cow, idw, and the other mainstream independents sell pretty good, depending on the title. the big image books sell, whereas some of the more obscure or "alternative" (i fucking that that word! if a comic isn't about a bunch of musclebound guys in homoerotic costumes or giant breasted whores with swords and shit, it must be alternative)books sell much less. For example, jim mahfood books dont' sell very well in our store, we may order two copies and they will take forever to sell.
even though "alt" comics dont' sell well, we try to walk the line by always keeping a really good stock of the better mainstream stuff in and hyping it. we always have a ton of grant morrison, alan moore, warren ellis, frank miller, etc. trades in and reccomend them to people who are looking for something good.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:56 / 05.09.04

You know, it sounds like the only thing wring with Orqwith's store is the customer base... maybe if they merged with the indie comic store they could get some more non-superhero trade going and save on ground rents...

16:51 / 05.09.04

Interesting -

I have a few more questions for you Orqwith, if you are amenable.

How does the age and gender of your customer base pan out - are your customers mainly male? do you have a significant customer base in their 20s 30s 40s and 50s?

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