I watch his videos every now and then and Richard Meyer's take on the decline of comics is that it's now full of writers who don't actually like or care about comics. They're diversity hires. Writers who just started last April get high profile assignments because they're black trans lesbians who post a lot on Twitter. Then there's Chelsea Van Valkenberg's new comics career.
By contrast, comics creators back in the day busted their asses to get there because they really wanted it. And they worked their way up, slowly, to working on big titles.
It's a different industry these days, though. Sales aren't just down, they're pathetic. The industry is now floundering and desperate.
I'm genuinely suprised that Renfamous isn't writing Superman or X-Men. Maybe she turned it down. Probably pays less than her straight job.
>Renfamous
>Her
>Job
Renfamous is literally a trust fund baby who lives at home with his rich daddy. It has no job at all and just tweets all fucking day like Spoony.
When poor people do a shit job raising their kids the government takes them away. It's about time that applied to the rich, and if anyone thinks that is extreme look at the amount of damage Antifa does when they riot and the careers trust fund Twitter people ruin.
But back to the comics industry being shit.
When you take out inflation the industry fell down to 2012 levels despite the massive growth in comic book movies since then. The industry starts falling against economic trends that are going upward under Trump, and keep in mind Comichron's numbers are SHIPPED, not based on actual sales at the stores. The numbers are probably way lower since they only get data from Diamond Publishing and overshipping is absolutely a thing to make it look like their sales aren't that bad.
No wonder comic book shops are shutting down left and right. And shills blame this on "digital sales" but Comichron tracks that too and digital's percentage of sales has stagnated and is small like 10%.
Comics have been extreme garbage for the better part of a decade. Hell, two decades. If anything it's a miracle they are even around anymore.
Like pro wrestling the people who grew up with it won't let go and the industry milks those last few fans for as much as they can. It's why comics are so expensive, since until recently the sales would have been the same anyway so you may as well charge as much as you can.
I'm 28 and even when I was a kid most kids didn't read comics. We just knew about superheroes from the tv shows that came on every day and the big movies. Comics could probably stop being printed today and the characters wouldn't be any less relevant because of how ingrained they are in pop culture at this point.
The way I see it, and I don't think it's something even mah boi Zack has acknowledged in full, the "industry" never really recovered from the near crash from 1996, and the problems go beyond just socjus neocommie infiltration & pandering. Marvel and DC are never gonna be matching manga's ability to actually market to the audiences; everything they do always revolves around tokenist of tokenism capeshit, and that's not even taking into account the fact it ran itself into a ghetto of of eternal reboots and revisions decades ago.
I think the industry is out of touch. There's a reason mango and animu got so popular in the west and it wasn't just oriental novelty. As shitty as mango and anime are/were, they use a different set of cliches than western comics do (especially capeshit) and western comics were so fucking stagnant that people were gasping for anything different or remotely fresh. It's the same reason that shitty Scott Pilgrim and shitty Walking Dead were big hits. They cribbed from soap operas and film rather than stale capeshit cliches.
I read comics sometimes as a teen/kid, but I never paid for them. My grandparents had some and I would read those, or I would read them at the library for free. Even the best of the capeshit, so-called "golden age" or "silver age" was still paper-thin and cliche as fuck. Too much dialogue (entire panels of text boxes) but very little character depth to be found. Modern capeshit is the same thing but with MUH CURRENT YEAR social polidicks and LGBTQIA+++++ characters.
I think the industry is out of touch. There's a reason mango and animu got so popular in the west and it wasn't just oriental novelty. As shitty as mango and anime are/were, they use a different set of cliches than western comics do (especially capeshit) and western comics were so fucking stagnant that people were gasping for anything different or remotely fresh. It's the same reason that shitty Scott Pilgrim and shitty Walking Dead were big hits. They cribbed from soap operas and film rather than stale capeshit cliches.
It's also why the last time comics had a boom period was in the 80s and early 90s when stuff like Frank Miller's Batman got big and changed him from the 60s Adam West goofball to the grimdark one we know today. That and old Vertigo were the last time comics truly changed (for the better) and were with the times, they haven't changed at all since other than adding woke garbage.
Again, like the WWE, the format for Monday Night Raw has been the same since 1998 and the ratings slowly keep dropping. The only difference is WWE hasn't gone woke so the drop isn't sudden, but it's lead to the rise of alternatives like New Japan, AEW and the rust of indie wrestling. Manga, new Image comics and Comicsgate comics are the comic equivalent.
WWE isn't a good analogy. The ratings held pretty high through the early 2000s because you still gas some personalities and it wasn't overly corporatized. It went down since John Cena happened and Vince tried to make progressively dumber and more senile decisions (like let his daughter become creatively involved). You could say the women's stuff is popular as a novelty, but that's because they're just treating it seriously and playing it straight (instead of overcomplicating shit). Novel concept.
Comics sren't selling because their ideas are terrible. DC got buzz because of the crisis stuff but then flubbed hard with Batman shooting a gun at Darkseid (Final Crisis), Blackest Night leading up to nowhere (Brightest Day), Joker basically now turning into a supernatural being, the Multiversity fiasco, Muslim Batman International, and so on.
Marvel also had big ideas that flopped hard. Civil War turned very messy very quickly. Spider Man died and became possessed by Doc Oc way too long (also mo more marriage). It burned the X-Men (best franchise) and Fantastic Four to push Captain Man-vil. Drawn ugly with no personality other than to be a menopausal woman with blasters. No correlation between the stuff on screen and what's on shelves (which us what pissed Feiggy off the most).
No new adventures, no new villiams. Just empty marketing gimmicks.
For six bucks a comic you don't get much of a story anymore either.
