"It sells less and less every month"

[Andrew NDB]

Skip to 49:50 to hear artist Shane Davis recount his experience with IDW on TMNT:



Just found it odd, that's all.

[Leo656]

"He's just one guy who barely worked there he don't know" You know that's coming.

I don't have time to listen to that whole thing but I skipped around a little. YIKES, things ain't good for the industry as a whole right now. They're absolutely right that trying to force synergy between the print arm and the Hollywood arm of these properties is killing the business. There's a ton of other problems obviously but that's a big one.

[Andrew NDB]

The DC Comics part is interesting. I guess they were just notified they have to get all their personal things and move out of their Burbank offices and move into some smaller studio where no one has a desk, there is just "hot desks" that they all have to share.

[Leo656]

"Get Woke, Go Broke" but nobody wants to hear it.

I mean for a couple of years now, the internet is swamped with people saying "I'm not buying another DC book until they quit with all the identity politics crap", but they keep doubling- and tripling-down because they're booking for f*cking Twitter and Tumblr - and those are the people who want everything for free, and if they read comics at all they do so online for free, they don't pay any money. Just because a group of people has the loudest or most persistent voice doesn't mean that's where your audience is. MOST people do not want politics injected into their super-hero fiction, the entire reason they read comics is to escape from the drudgery of the real world, and pink-hairs have other avenues that cater more to their sensibilities. They don't need to hijack super-hero comics to make their annoying points about race, gender, sexuality, or any of that. Nobody wants it. Nobody who's paying money for the products, anyway.

These are proven facts, but "Blah blah Bigots blah blah Racists blah blah blah." And they'll argue that "print is dying anyway, it's not about the content" despite the fact that, supposedly, manga sales were up something like 160% in 2021. Which means people WILL pay to read books as long as they enjoy the content. DC and Marvel have simply not been doing a good job of servicing their readership, with IDW in a similar situation, noted in how Hasbro pulled their licenses because of the poor sales and public reaction to their "woke" content.

You can't do this kinda sh*t, man. The Tumblristas will cry, but about 90% of the population doesn't care about race politics or Gay Sh*t. And they don't want it force-fed to them in their entertainment. When you book your company towards trying to please a mere <10% of Planet Earth, sales hit the sh*tter, which has very real consequences for all involved.

They never should have moved to California in the first place. They were entrenched in NYC and doing well there for ages. Moving to Cali to try and build better synergy with the movie branch was a HUGE mistake. Since as noted in the podcast, people never have and never WILL go right from the theater to buy a comic about the movie they just saw. The audiences are different, there's no cross-over, never was and never will be, they should have left well enough alone. All that happened is that the poisonous "California Thinking" creeped into their operations and sped up the death process by making them put out a bunch of stuff nobody wanted to read.

[Allio]

I hate to be that guy but isn’t the whole monthly comicbook thing losing sales in general? I haven’t bought a floppy since like the early 2000’s as a kid but American comics have basically been a dying breed and losing relevance.

[Coola Yagami]

Not terribly surprising. Nobody likes woke ****. Gay Superman (son) only sold a lot during that issue due to people getting it out of morbid curiosity, or wanting to read it and see 'how gay it gets' to be part of the conversation. But after that, any steam it got, literally died in the following issue.

They also made Vixen gay and no one cared, and the writer complained on Twitter as to why Vixen didn't make the same headlines Superman Jr did. That's pretty much proving she did it more to make headlines than to actually write a good story.

That's why nowadays I either buy manga, older Batman comics from my childhood, or indiegogo projects like Arachna and Orgasm Girl. Or I buy indies from guys I meet at cons. But I long dropped the 'big two'.

Part of it is because I just can't commit to going to the comic store every month. But then I remember a few years back, I used to go to the comic shop in the middle of the night and with 3 feet of snow and I didn't care cause I wanted to see how the 'Forever Evil' story played out. Say what you will about the New 52, but I was digging the Forever Evil and Court of Owls stuff. I was way more dedicated back then.

[neatoman]

When did he talk to that guy exactly? Because if it's accurate then it's either old information, information about the period where we got no data at all or it's some secret information only known to people on the backend.

Regardless, I don't think anyone needs to say "go woke, go broke" here because Sophie's run is just badly written in general, it's so easily to criticise without ever bringing up politics.

[AquaParade]

I agree that DC has gone overboard with the virtue signaling...and I'm not the most sensitive to that. I enjoy politics in my entertainment sometimes. I don't want to be preached to or talked down to, of course, but I don't shriek whenever social injustices are brought to light in entertainment.

DC is just so loud and in your face about what they are pushing though. I'm not reading any of their current books, because none can keep my attention, but this stuff is in my face, just from being in my periphery.

The whole comics industry is a mess, if you ask me. I'm not following any current series and after like a decade of occasionally trying to hop onto a new monthly series, I've just gone back to collecting hardcovers of my old favorites or a few collectible floppies here and there. There's just nothing exciting going on in comics.
The Last Ronin is the only that that's got my juices flowing in the last couple years, and it probably has to do with the simple fact that they brought in passionate creators and gave them some freedom to just tell a story they wanted to tell. It's not god's gift to comics, but it's a great book, which is rare right now.

There are always going to be solid books, and there are certainly talented creators still in the field, but by-and-large, it's bad. I probably wouldn't shed a tear if new comics stopped being produced tomorrow. Being able to say that makes me more sad than that actually happening would, in all likelihood.

[Bahamut810]

Originally Posted by AquaParade

I agree that DC has gone overboard with the virtue signaling...and I'm not the most sensitive to that. I enjoy politics in my entertainment sometimes. I don't want to be preached to or talked down to, of course, but I don't shriek whenever social injustices are brought to light in entertainment.

This. When you try to beat people over the head with it its a problem.

[IMJ]

Originally Posted by AquaParade

whenever social injustices are brought to light in entertainment.

I don't think many people are actually complaining about that content in entertainment as much as being able to see right through the cover of social justice into that what is going on nowadays is strange, misguided assaults.

Gaslighting people under a "cause" as a justification for strange vengeance and attacks only works for so long.

[Andrew NDB]

And then they get mad. "Why are you noticing this? Don't you have better things to do? Why are you noticing this, now?"

[AquaParade]

Originally Posted by IMJ

I don't think many people are actually complaining about that content in entertainment as much as being able to see right through the cover of social justice into that what is going on nowadays is strange, misguided assaults.

Gaslighting people under a "cause" as a justification for strange vengeance and attacks only works for so long.

I believe it is both.

People confuse anything for being an attack on their politics nowadays. You can't cast a couple black people in traditionally white roles without accusations. You simply can't do it. And that's weird.

But there is gaslighting too, and a lot of gross use of beloved cultural heroes & icons being used for pushing of selfish and disgusting politics, which is really sad.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by AquaParade

You can't cast a couple black people in traditionally white roles without accusations. You simply can't do it. And that's weird.

But imagine the opposite, casting a couple of white people in traditionally black roles without accusations. Why is one weird but not the other?

[IMJ]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

And then they get mad. "Why are you noticing this? Don't you have better things to do? Why are you noticing this, now?"

Yeah. Everything is just a winding of words to create a defense or assault in real-time with a lot of these people. They don't have anything they actually stand on or for.

Just inventing language for the moment to create a virtue-signal or a grasped opportunity to make a "hard point" for victory through language whether it's cogent or not.

Don't even have a real thesis or point to their bull$#!(, and when you present them with one they slither and squirm in addressing it and instead rely on childish, unfalsifiable nonsense - "that perception is in your head and not real".

Immediate sign of weakness and evidence of who you are dealing with.

[AquaParade]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

But imagine the opposite, casting a couple of white people in traditionally black roles without accusations. Why is one weird but not the other?

Off the top of my head, Spawn did this in 1997 and no one gave a crap on any measurable scale. I'm sure there are other examples but I'm not keeping tabs on it, thank god.

But more importantly, do you know what I'd say to someone complaining about a white person cast in a "black role"?

Spoiler:

The same thing: Shut up.

Apparently it happens all the time, with more than just black roles:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...o-wasnt-white/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/26-ti...b0bf0dab313ffc

Who cares? These are actors.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by AquaParade

Off the top of my head, Spawn did this in 1997 and no one gave a crap on any measurable scale.

But nobody saw the movie.

[AquaParade]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

But nobody saw the movie.

It opened #2 at the box office, so it had some attention pre-release, but no, I can't really defend the movie. Like I said, it was off the top of my head, but a quick Google search seems to provide more than enough examples of the opposite happening.

[IMJ]

It really is as simple as "the free market is going to have to iron this $#!( out" and do it through action and interest.

This is my go-to because it is the great equalizer. The end. If people support it financially then it's wanted and warranted and once it dries up, give it up. And so far? Replete examples of go woke, go broke. Almost every example.

Even Black Panther which was successful would have been more successful if it just presented the movie and the culture without the messaging and the race-war. So this theory works across all of the spectrum of "financial success".

[CyberCubed]

I've been hearing "floppies are dying or will end soon" since the early 2000's, and we're now 20 years later and they're still around. Obviously comics don't sell anywhere as much as they used to, but single issues would have died off by now outside the very top titles. Yet every comic still has single issues each month.

[IMJ]

The only real reason that printed comic sales are so diminished is because people are rejecting the extremism content in droves. Almost nobody wants to read teen-boy-Superman making out with his teen-boy-boyfriend.