Comic Book Industry in Trouble...

The current COVID-19 pandemic is hammering the industry hard as the only distributor (Diamond) shut down, leaving retailers and the industry as a whole in a lurch. It does not help that many of the so-called "professionals" in the industry possess a sense of massive sense entitlement and spit on the fans without recognizing that the fans are also costumers who can their money elsewhere. Adding to this is that the aforementioned retailers take the brunt of damage as they are the ones stuck with books they cannot sell nor return to the publishers as they could in decades past. Now that COVID-19 has essentially put the industry on indefinite hiatus, we may be seeing even more retailers fold in the couple of months.

This could also be attributed to an obsolete business model as the similar format of manga imported from Japan has been doing much better in sales. From what I hear the manga One Piece has sold more manga in twenty years than Superman or Batman in their entire 80+ publication history. It is disheartening to hear regardless as the vast majority of of retailers are small businesses. In my case, it is Redd Skull Comics in Calgary and I consider the proprietor and the staff friends so I've been trying to buy trade paperbacks via their curbside pick-up to support the store any way I can.

I'd like to hear some other takes from other fans on the forum as I prefer talking about comics to talking politics.

All the comic companies have their own subscription services, where if you join up you can read pretty much every issue of anything they've put in their online archive, which will probably kill off the stores in due time anyway. Just like with most magazines, printed monthly comics will decline and become a thing of the past.

I read my things on some free sites online that are somehow getting away with it, like an old-school Napster for comic books. Maybe that's nasty on my part but I figure with the money I spent in the stores over the course of my life that I should be allowed to do this. And single-issue sales have declined a lot over the last decade (or more) as the main income for the stores. That's why the stores are much more diverse now in the merchandise they carry, especially with the tradeback and hardback story compilations. Lots of people specifically wait for a compilation because they just don't have the time, interest, or money to be chasing down every single issue in a long & complicated story. And, as mentioned already, manga is a huge seller for them now. Any store that carries enough other merch to balance out the lack of new issues for the next several months should make it through once they're allowed to re-open.

Gotta consider that every comic book store is a potential hotbed for Covid given that every single one I've ever shopped at in my life time has been crammed to the gills with too many customers next to each other in narrow aisles. No one should be in a rush to go into one of those stores for a while because of that.

Died when the stories weren't worth 15c

As a long-time comic book fan and collector, I have noticed the following issues with the comic book industry in the 30 years I have been reading/collecting/buying/obsessing with/over comic books and such:

- Too many reboots (DC and Marvel have both rebooted their universes repeatedly)
- Fewer original ideas
- Retooling classic characters over and over when they don't need it
- Comic book companies telling us what we want to read instead of listening to their fans
- Price hikes for a single comic book
- Politics and real life entering into the comic book realm, whether we like it or not
(this pertains to political correctness, changing characters and introducing new ones
to reflect special interest and minority groups)

I've been a fan of DC and Marvel since I was eight years old, and let me just say that the story lines and characters have devolved a hell of a lot. DC reboots their universe so often, it's become pointless to follow along anymore, while Marvel has introduced so many goddamn characters to their own universe, that most of us can't keep up.

I'm also sick and tired of reality infringing on comic books. (Note: I have nothing personal against the groups I am about to mention)How many LGBTQ2S12345EIEIO characters do we need? How many disabled characters do we need? The whole point of comic books is to take us away from reality, and help us to imagine we are those awesome heroes that are already established, saving the world, and giving us a lesson in humanity in the process.

I pretty much don't collect any comics made after the year 2000, with the exception of an ANT-MAN I picked up that coincided with the movie coming out a while back. I prefer Silver, Bronze, and Copper age comics, and my collection reflects that.

The only way the comic book industry will survive is if the major comic book companies go back to the basics, stop all the nonsense I mentioned, and give us back our heroes in their pure form that we love so much. They need to listen to their fans, now more than ever.

I apologize for the length of this post, but comic books are a passion.

-J.

Scares me to think about how many of those 20-cent issues I used as colouring books way back when in the early 1970's considering that their value now would be about 20/30/40 dollars each. And I had a lot of them too.

Most valuable regret was Mom tossing out my National Lampoon mag with the "If Ted Kennedy drove a VW he'd be President!(VW bug floating in water)" ad in it. I gather they were forced by the Court to round them all up and they're valuable these days.
The original SpiderMan and Fantasic Four - well who'd ever have thought they'd be worth shit back then!
When I was like 10 I asked my aunt to bring me back a comic book from every country she visited in Europe. I still have Nembo Kid (Superman in Italy), Le Phantome and a couple others somewhere.

I like to say that I was able to sell my collection of Walking Dead #1 thru to 130-ish for $1200. It sounds like a decent price until I mention that I had to add in several thousand other comics that were worth absolutely nothing just to get rid of them. :lol:

Good riddance though. I feel a lot of regret for buying any of them at all after high school, especially since the vast, vast majority of them got read once then filed away in a plastic bag to be essentially forgotten altogether. Too much money spent, too much space taken up, and too much time given to them that should have been used on much more important things. Like drinking, for example. Or porn.