I totally dropped my regular comic buying habit 20 years ago, because this is not a new problem.

Last year I totally devoured the Manga Shakespeare series, I want DC/Marvel to do that with their characters as a set of mini-series. For example, I loved Marvel's Mystery Men five parter, interesting story with a distinct beginning and end. Same thing with the Thor mini series.
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TAZ

Comics are fine. The 'big business' of comics is in terrible shape and has been for a long time - DC and Marvel are little more than intellectual property houses for the Hollywood studio system. While the Big Two are the 800lb. gorillas in the room, there are other publishing houses such as Dark Horse, Arachia, IDW and Image who all do fine, fine work. Other than Vertigo titles (the DC creator-owned imprint) I don't purchase any Big Two comics but I still manage $30 a week of new comics purchases.

When readership realizes that the medium can tell stories other than adolescent power fantasies and the second-tier publishers figure out how to appropriate price and market to their audience... that's when things will change with new readers.

If you want to stay with superhero books, Image's re-vamped superhero line is really awesome. As is DH's Hellboy-verse.

Side note: publishing in general kind of sucks right now. Too many plates spinning and falling but great work is out there.

Let's not forget that there is a market for the Marvel and DC Superhero books. I am part of that market because while I pine for older stories, there are some great books coming out right now.

Aquaman is pure gold every month. It somehow is the best of the New 52.

Daredevil is fantastic and he is a character I have never cared for. I give all the credit to Mark Waid since he has never let me down. I am currently picking up 3 books a month that he is writing(Irredeemable, Incorruptable, and Daredevil).

Avenger's Academy has been a spectacular book. It is suffering from event tie-in syndrome, but until Avengers vs X-Men has even done that incredibly well.

Green Lantern has really been doing some new things with thier stories.

I only wish I could praise the Superman books because he still is and will likely always be my favorite hero. He is also the hardest hero to get right though. The New 52 seems to have taken the awe and wonder away from the character. While they are doing a decent job with Clark Superman just doesn't seem to have any personality either. Supergirl is a better title than Action or Superman at the moment.

Just because the small guys are putting out some good stuff doesn't mean that everything from the big two has to be bad. Just because the major franchises from the big two are not very good right now also doesn't mean that they don't have other titles that aren't great.

As a longtime lover of comic books, let me try to address the OP's points...

I'm 34 years old and I know this has been a common practice for the most popular heroes going back to the 80's. DC had Batman AND Detective Comics, Superman AND Action Comics. Marvel had Amazing Spider-Man AND Spectacular Spider-Man. This is ignoring the crossover appearances, appearances on other super-teams, and alternate reality (Elseworlds, Ultimates, All-Star) storyline comics. The core reason it happens is because the demand is there. Hell, friggin' Archie Comics had separate titles for Archie, Jughead, and Betty and Veronica, even though each of those characters would be in each other's comics... but that's getting away from the supers genre (unless you count Jughead's adventures in the Time Police, which I loved). Bringing it back to supers, IDW recently rebooted TMNT, and gave each turtle their own miniseries where they had a solo adventure which got referenced to briefly in the main title. If you've got a hot property and the public is buying it up, it makes sense to increase the content featuring said property, damn the possible snarls in continuity. Two DC titles I'm enjoying right now are Hellblazer and Justice League Dark. Both have John Constantine, with no clear way of reconciling how the two storylines interact. It's the nature of popular characters to show up across titles even when they wouldn't seem to have enough time to.



Yes, both of the big two have been doing cash-grabbing mega-crossovers where an event impacts the majority of their universe, and God have mercy upon the people like me that just read a few of the related titles. It SUCKS to start reading a story and find out that I have to try to catch, say, and issue of Daredevil (which my FLCS does not sell enough of to regularly keep in stock) to get the next part. Going back to Justice League Dark, they recently had a crossover story with I, Vampire which I wasn't reading and I just said "Fuck it, I'm not interested in this story enough to buy the other half." But again, the reason they do these things is because they will sell comics. One of the biggest hits for both was DC vs. Marvel, which was just what it sounds like... the biggest names of each universe pitted head to head in battles, forced by an external entity called "The Brothers" (author avatars for each publishing house) into combat until one side was "down, because some of the heroes are functionally immortal. Civil War was pretty good, but could have been better. Marvel Zombies was just a fun alternate reality romp, and they even crossed over with Army of Darkness for extra silliness. I know that AvX is selling out for Marvel, but I read issue zero and decided I had no stake in this conflict and no interest in reading it, so I'm not buying any more of it. The nice thing about a comic is that if you decide you don't care for it, you can stop picking it up. With new 52 I gave many of the titles a chance, and dropped some for not being to my taste.



Spidey still fights crime. Batman is still fighitng crime, as is Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. Catwoman is not fighting crime, because she's a villain protagonist who commits crimes. Yes, in the crossovers, and in *most* comics where more than one hero is featured (Justice League post-new 52 is a prime example), you have an obligatory sparring between heroes. But that is because today's comic writers are yesterday's comic fanboys, and you can NOT have two of them in a room talking about a pair of heroes without them inevitably discussing which has the advantage in a fight. Look at the Avengers movie... at one point you a had a three way fight between Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. Why? Because once again, it's something people wanted to see. It was a good fight, too.


Which titles are you reading?! In Batman, the villains may be nucking futs, but they're still to blame for their actions. In Spider-Man, the bad guys know they're the bad guys and for the most part don't give a single fuck about it, only getting upset when they fail and are caught. Sometimes one villain will have a sympathetic motivation for their robbery, like trying to pay a sick relative's hospital bills, but that's art imitating life. Some people try to rob a bank or store because they are in a desperate situation. It doesn't make what they do right, but it's how they justify the act to themselves.


Yes, some heroes want to emulate Spidey, because when you're in business, you look to the successful models and try to emulate them. One of the appeals with Spider-Man has always been that it's not just about a young man with the powers of an arachnid fighting crime, but trying to get a good work/life balance. Actually, a work/life/heroics balance because he's not paid to fight crime. Animal Man right now is dealing with familial drama on top of the major threat of the villain, and doing it well. Swamp Thing has had a romance subplot that tied directly into the plot, and it went well too. One of Batman's challenges has always been the conflict between his life as a socialite and his life as a vigilante, to the point where most of the upper echelons of Gotham's social scene see him as this flaky disappointment to his father's legacy. Before New 52, JLA was getting dragged down with the angsty relationship subplots to the point where it desperately needed a hard reset. Hell, I'm still waiting post-reset if Nightwing is going to pursue Huntress or Batgirl as a romantic partner. If all the hero ever did was fight crime, it'd be really one dimensional. Life in modern society is way too complicated for anyone to just be doing one thing and not have any other sources of conflict.


You couldn't be more wrong. It's still a multiple million dollar industry. I'd go so far as to say it's due to outlive daily newspapers and journalistic magazines like Time and Newsweek.


Slave Labor Press, home of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Lenore. Dark Horse Inc, home of Hellboy. IDW, publishing all Star Trek, Ghostbusters, TMNT, Doctor Who, and Army of Darkness titles. Image, started with Spawn and grown out to lots of other works. Aspen comics, home of Fathom and Lady Mechanica. Crossgen Comics RIP, Tekno Comix RIP. Those are just the independents I have stuff from on my shelf. There's tons more out there that I haven't heard of because I live in a town so damn small that the FLCS is also the sports memorabilia shop. Manga is just comics drawn backwards, far as I'm concerned.


As stated above, today's comic book writers ARE yesterday's fanboys. If they didn't love the property, they wouldn't have worked so damn hard to work in it, and somebody else who was more of a fanboy (ok ok, or fangirl, props to Gail Simone), would be writing the title. Now if you're trying to indicate it's relationship-based fan fiction... that's a bit hard to argue against, given that issue 1 of the new 52 Catwoman had her straddling Batman in an impromptu costumes-mostly-on coitus. But I think what you're trying to imply is that it's all BAD fan fiction, and Sturgeon's Revelation would agree that yes, 90% of it is currently of poor quality... but that was true when you were a child too, you just weren't a discerning enough reader to know it then, and now when you look back via TPB's what you get available to you is just that best 10%.


Er... no. Different heroes were created with different kinds of stories in mind, but one thing they all had in common was they were created to make some money for their creator. I might agree that for most these works, that was not the SOLE purpose, but in each of the true origins starts with a writer/artists sitting down, looking at a blank sheet of paper, and saying "What can I get published so I can make rent next month?"

As for ideals and morals, you can only represent that so many times before you're recycling the same story again, which is something you were complaining about up higher. There's only so many ways to say "stealing/murdering/raping/terrorizing the citizens makes you bad." That's why heroes end up with internal struggles, like Iron Man and alcoholism, Batman and his grief at losing Jason Todd, Spidey and his inability to maintain a healthy romance life, or Spawn coming to terms with the fact that his best friend is boning his wife now. Then when the internal struggles are played out, you get inter-hero conflicts, like Spidey trying to stop Punisher because he doesn't think killing is the right way to stop villains, Captain America fighting Iron Man because they're on opposing views as to whether or not heroes should be registered with a governing body to operate, and half the Justice League fighting the other half over the morality of mind wiping.

Serialized fiction (which all modern hero comics count as) is tricky, because of continuity issues, long histories, and conflicts between keeping it recognizable while allowing characters to grow and change as they gain experience. It's made more a snarl by the retcons, reboots, crossovers, and other shenanigans that editors pull because they either want to change something they didn't like or need to make a clean break after destroying the whole damn universe. It's made worse in the age of the internet, when so much more info is able to be referenced by finding it somewhere online. Google Superdickery and look through the site sometime... it's a catalog of Superman comic covers where Superman is using his powers to be a douche. You'll notice quite a few repeated or nearly-repeated covers there, because for a long time DC had a standing rule that if a plot was more than 15 years old, it was available for rewriting again because the people who read it have grown up and are probably no longer reading. This is now known to not be the case, so that means they have to be far more careful about finding new plots for characters that have been around for longer than most the population has been alive.

I've said all I have to say about the proper subject, but I must jump in to say this: Kudos, good sir, on actually knowing the difference between Sturgeon's Law and Sturgeon's Revelation.

Hey, if I'm going to be a pedant, I better make sure I'm an accurate one, right?

I think that at 23, you still have a lot of living and learning ahead of you.

I hit the same problem you did back in the 90's, which is now referred to as the dreaded "Polybag age". There were 5 different versions of the COVER of each comic, or there were two foil wrapped covers and also exact copies without the foil on the cover... It was awful.

But at the same time, there was an influx of Anime and Manga into the video stores and comic shops, and the material was foreign and new, with a different set of expectations and world views. Publishers were bringing out all the best Japan had to offer, and it took off.

Then they ran out of the best, and had to go to the mid-tier stuff, and with that came some sub-teir stuff as well. Some stuff that really should NOT have been dredged up. As has been said before, 90% of everything is crap, and I started to notice that the manga waters were turning brown.

As it turns out, Japan has it's own set of cliches just as annoying as american superhero comics cliches. The Samurai is to Japan what the Superhero is to DC. Super powered martial artists aren't much different from mutants, except in their origin story and how their journey progresses. Vigilantes aren't much different if it's Ninja-swords or Bat-a-rangs.

Like American comics, Japan's Manga market has 60 years worth of cliches, they just seem new and exciting because you aren't familiar with them yet . You'll learn them soon.

Don't worry, 10% of the stuff that's published is still worth reading, you just need to learn to find a filter to avoid the large turds like All-Star Batman & Robin or (god help us, but this is a real thing) Rapeman. Quickly learn how to filter out what you don't like, and find what you do, whether it's Samurai's or Mutants, Baseball comics or Fantasy in graphic novel form. This will make comics reading, east or west in origin, much easier for you.

Next, I'd like to deal with the "death of comics" myth be exploring a bit of history, and then extrapolating into the future.

Let's go back to the Victorian age. As the economy of Europe and America both began to expand, people began to earn a small excess of money and could afford to buy small luxuries. It was in this time that the penny-novel came into popularity. A penny novel was a single chapter of a story, published and sold as cheaply to the public as possible. When these stories were complete, they were compiled and sold as complete novels. Over time, whole groups of these penny novels were compiled and sold as anthologies, which were popular into the late 20th century.

Interestingly, at the same time that penny novels were falling out of popularity, a new type of entertainment was becoming popular, the newspaper comic. Newspapers told small bits of stories in their paper with drawing included. At the end of the month, the stories would be compiled into a monthly "comic" book. (hence the origin of the term "funny book" for comics, derived from "sunday funnies".)

After a short while, publishers started writing original stories for these comics, which were coincidentally the same size as the old penny novels and published in a similar way. In 1939, two kids from new york wrote a story about a man with super strength, and the genre of superhero comics was born.

All seemed to be going well, until the technology progressed, allowing better drawn comics to be produced, and at the same time, the cost of paper began to increase. Publishers started to charge more, and what began as colorful "dime novels" were entering the $4 range in price. With the increased cost, came decreased demand. As fewer people purchase monthly comics, onlookers decry the death of the comics industry.

But perhaps "death" is the wrong word. Perhaps what we are seeing is actually a transition. Just as people got tired of reading novels one chapter at a time, and just waited for a whole book to be written, so too readers tire of getting one chapter of a graphic story, and now just wait for the trade paperback to be released. Incidentally, these complete stories also fit on a bookshelf much more smoothly than a thin 24 page comic.

That's what I think we are actually seeing in the industry right now, and it's going to take a while for the big publishers to see what's happening. The comics industry isn't really dying, just changing into something new.

Just a few thoughts.

The "Wait for the TPB" angle is one I hadn't thought of, but I can see your point and suspect you are on to something.

Weirdly (ironically?) Rapeman was created by Japanese women. Because, y'know... Japan.



Marvel has been catering to the wait-for-the-trade crowd for years. No matter how awful, a series will get collected and a soft cover will be released. Popular books get the hardcover treatment first. A negative side-effect of this is that when stories are written for the trade you end up with three-panel pages as writers stretch their stories out to meet the format.

There's a definite transition but it isn't with Marvel and DC; they're behind the curve. I'm convinced the free-to-read web comics model is the mainstream future. Profits are made through smart web advertising, merchandising and printed collections a la Dicebox and Finder. Penny Arcade has managed to cultivate a dedicated and influential fan-base with a tiny staff. And now they're phenomenally successful and wealthy.

I also see lots of indie books with lovely art being produced and distributed by second-and-third-tier publishers. You get the best of cottage industry art with commercial production values.

Hm... Gonna need a citation on that, given the wiki article credits the artist, Shintaro Miyawaki (a dude) as the sole creator ("Keiko Aisaki", the credited writer, was just a pen-name for Miyawaki, according to the same article). The claim is that he was using a feminine 'author' as a way to not be criticized for the book's contents.