More than 20 years ago I got my dream job at Lone Star Comics in Texas. Part of my job was to actually keep up with the story lines in various comics! On my first day, the manager was going over how I should greet our customers making sure I was polite and helpful, and he specifically instructed me that I should not assume women were in the store looking to purchase something for their boyfriends. Given that my manager felt the need to emphasize how women should be treated as customers in the store, I can only assume there were some problems with employees over this issue in the past, but I simply don’t remember there being as much hostility directed at women back then that there is now. The majority of our customers were males between the ages of 15-25, but we had a sizeable minority of women who were the primary purchasers of the manga we carried.
I stopped reading comics not too long after I quit my job at Lone Star. I was getting tired of the serialized format, but what really drove the final nail into the coffin was crossover issues. When the Nightwing story line was interrupted by a crossover event with Batman I threw up my hands and quit right then and there.
They can’t do that, because the comics feed into their intellectual property portfolio. They could conceivably do it the other way around—as D.C. and Marvel have both done before—is license the comic characters to external movie producers. Ultimately, though, unless Warner decides it wants nothing to do with the superhero market, it’s going to have to keep D.C. Comics in-house.
Yes, the serialization is a huge problem. It requires constant churning of content, requiring production of a lot of filler, repetitive, and mediocre material. I think comics should fully embrace the “graphic novel” model and publish comics like novels. They’ll have to be much more selective, of course, because they won’t have monthly sales to judge feedback, but really that was a flawed system anyway, because stories can take time to catch on.
I feel this is a key issue. Publishing comic books is a small business. But some of the characters from comic books are massively famous. The result can be some comic book publishers having too high an expectation for their business. They start comparing themselves to movie studios and television networks and wondering where their billions are.
Are you talking about comics from the likes of D.C., Marvel or Dark Horse? I would expect it’s mostly manga.
This is literally in the text book for marketing 101. A successful company discovers a potential customer that wants nothing to do with them. But they see them as a giant walking pile of cash so they ignore their core customer that made them what they are in a desperate attempt to convince these people that they don’t actually hate their brand, they actually love it, and even that they are going to shop somewhere they normally wouldn’t want to be seen dead in to get it.
In actuality there may have been some crossover. That customer they were chasing might have liked the old stuff for what it was. So you end up losing everybody, and deservedly so.
If you want people to buy a Batman book make him the most Batman he’s ever been.
If you want people to buy a high school drama graphic novel, make the most interesting teens you’re likely to know and give them relatable relationship problems to negotiate.
Create an entirely new brand. But the biggest obstacle will always be that America is set on seeing comics as for kids so it’s dicey to write adult story lines needed to be interesting to teens. We did once have an American romance comic industry. It’s had its day and also suffered because of the political climate.
They are doomed to failure by mixing in a bunch of Batman character in name only with bad teen melodrama. Superhero fans, who are the only ones who will notice it, are going to hate it. It’s the last place romance drama fans will be looking to get their fix. Looks like they use the worst writing and artist too.
I think if the readers of school life manga see the likes of Gotham High they would be too nice to say how pathetic it looks.
Batman is a fictional character whose every character trait has been in constant motion over a period of 80 years.
And the entire premise of that post is false. Comic book publishers and video game makers and the like aren’t making “desperate attempts to convince” “potential customer[s] that want nothing to do with them” in “a desperate attempt to convince these people that they don’t actually hate their brand.”
As Jonathan Chance posted, that market segment is already his most lucrative market segment. It only makes sense to figure out what they like and provide that to them.
Ask Jonathan Chance what percentage of his revenue comes from women. Ask him what percentage of his revenue comes from adults. And let him tell you whether the adolescent boys implicit in your post are his core customer base.
Romance comics have not gone away. They still exist, but also their tropes are being absorbed into other genres. There’s no actual reason why genres can’t be combined and recombined.
I mean, for Pete’s sake, the X-Men and Spider-Man have prominently featured romance tropes since before I was born. X-Men has a freaking love triangle as one of it foundational relationships.
[quote=“Acsenray, post:27, topic:917893”]
And the entire premise of that post is false. [/quote]
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Look at the first two sentences. I’m asking Jonathan if we are talking American comics or manga.
Manga is the competition. Manga has the market share they are going after.
What’s all that “convince people to stop hating you” stuff? If Jonathan Chance has customers who want to buy manga, then he’s going to sell them manga.
Yeah, that’s just it, isn’t it?
He should sell them what ever comic they want in as big of quantities as he can get them to carry out.
D.C. isn’t manga. That’s not their brand.
If someone is looking for Bleach or Naruto they might be in a Green Lantern frame of mind.
Someone shopping for Fruits Basket is less likely to be in the Hawkman stacks, even though he is mister romance by superhero standards.
It simply would be better to slow down on production and focus on quality for their superhero line.
The can only go from being good at what they do (which was actually probably some time ago) to making their characters wishy washy parodies of what they were that appeal to no one.
If they are interested in going after a manga market they are far better off starting fresh.
Wow, so much for my easy going Sunday morning. I guess that’s what I get for looking in on the SDMB.
I appreciate the thought but you’re absolutely, completely wrong. My shop doesn’t even sell manga. There’s a Books-a-Million nearby that sells manga cheaper than I can.
Our customers break down in this way:
Comics and collectibles: women teens and twenties
Games: men, twenties and up into 40s or 50s
I’m offering that, from the trade magazines I get, the buyers for comics tend toward female. They’re just not buying the recognizable names. Batman and such do well based on the movies. Ditto Spider-Man. But that doesn’t mean the writing is any good.
We move a lot of indie graphic novels by women. I push them, of course, because I like them. But they move well on their own.
You really can’t make a Batman story that’s “the most Batman you can be”. If you write a Batman story that’s the epitome of what you think of as the essence of the character, you’ll end up with three fourths of the fanbase pointing out how it’s completely contradictory to the core essence of the character, as they see it. And the same will happen if you take any other interpretation of the character. I mean, for context, I’ve seen D&D alignment charts which use Batman as an example for all nine alignments. He’s been written by so many authors over so many years that there’s absolutely nothing consistent about him.
After reading Detective Comics 1000, I can’t help thinking that at his most basic, Batman is just plain depressing. I personally wouldn’t want to read that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was popular.
The best version of Batman is was we saw in Batman the Animated Series back in 1992. There’s always going to be a bit of tragedy when your origin starts with your parents being brutally murdered, but overall the series wasn’t all that depressing and Batman was actually interested in saving lives because it was the right thing to do.
