This is simply not true.
Report: Comics had their biggest year ever in 2020 despite the pandemic

It's a long read but here's the gist: Marvel and DC and making more money but offering fewer monthly comics. Their revenues are coming from 1st Graphic Novels, 2nd Comic books, 3rd Digital. In 2020, while Periodical comic sales were down 19.7%, Graphic novels grew $9.1% and digital sales alone grew 33% in 2020. This is why decompression has taken hold in comics: because collected editions, at this point, are Marvel and DC's principle market.

The most important thing in the last year though isn't the sales numbers (which until the pandemic, have been mostly flat for 15 years): the business developments. Everything anyone has ever said about the health of Marvel Comics and DC Comics for the last 20 years, until last year's developments, were really about an entire connected ecosystem: the publisher, the single distributor (Diamond) and the single point of purchase (the direct market, aka the local comic shop). DC and Marvel leaving Diamond (to Lunar and PRH respectively), DC cutting about 40% of its books and hard shifting to digital, and Marvel's increasing integration into Marvel Studios and it's own (different) pivot to digital finally broke that chain.

As I wrote in the other thread, the pandemic really crystalized how ridiculous a situation the entire comic book market was. Here you had DC Comics, owner of Batman and Superman and Subsidiary of AT&T unable to sell comics - thus endangering its future - because Diamond, aka Geppi Family Enterprises - shut down. And perhaps worse you had Marvel Comics, subsidiary of Disney, ideahouse for the biggest movie franchise ever and a merchandising juggernaut in its own right, in the same position - unable to sell its wares because Geppi Family Enterprises and the local comic shop shut down. That's an untenable position for big business to be in, which is why, particularly for Marvel, their relationship with PRH makes so much sense, because it allows periodicals to return to places Diamond didn't serve (or serve as well), like supermarkets, major bookstores and big box stores. And for DC, with their massive publishing cuts, layoffs and shifts to digital, they're just cutting out the middle man entirely. These both are moes the companies should have taken 10 years ago (and everyone knew it) as soon as the iPad came along. But that didn't happen because it was comic book men running comic book companies. How did it change now? DC fired a bunch of comic book men and Marvel had two Disney affiliated non-comic book people come in and take over marvel publishing.

So therein lies the reality: while the direct market is ailing, the big two publishers are doing better than they have in many years because they took the long overdue shift to deleverage themselves from the direct market. And that will likely continue as Marvel puts its books (and especially its main product, collected editions) in more places and has tighter integration with Marvel Studios. And DC, as I wrote, will likely keep cutting periodical comics over the course of this decade, with more comics going digital, and mostly just be publishing Batman + Superman + a few others by the end of the decade. This is a terrible situation for your local comic shop. It's an optimal situation for a comic book publisher that doesn't need them anymore.

Now a lot of people talk shit about Marvel and DC comics "popularity" because of a bunch of nonsense about "woke" content in it. That's meaningless horseshit. They could be publishing blank pieces of the paper for all the content matters. The numbers tell a story that supersedes opinion of content. For my part, yeah the "replacement" heroes both have cooked up are forgettable and the "woke" content is just eye-rolling (looking at you, Tim Drake). But it has absolutely no bearing on the success of these publishers as a business, because even despite this "woke" content, despite the Pandemic, Comics had an excellent 2020 and probably an even better 2021.

 

What I meant was new comics. Probably should have been more specific. They're selling graphic novels of back issues when the writing was good. Marvel's new books just aren't selling because they're terrible. DC has Batman. Batman will probably continue to sell like it always does. There are maybe a couple of others, but DC's new books are total trash as well. The problem is that their writing has been atrocious. They hire activists, not storytellers. People read comics to escape and read a good story, not to be preached at and have current world political crap in them. That's why in the past several years both Marvel and DC's sales have been in a steady decline. As far as the pandemic, THAT'S when they should have been selling a shit ton of comics. Most people had nothing but time to read comics during the pandemic. They simply weren't reading current horrible Marvel and DC comics. Look at the manga sells during the pandemic. Look at how manga sales have been going through the roof; hard copy sales, not digital blah. People have abandoned American comics in droves and went to manga because manga actually gives them what they want. that's all there is to it.

 

IDW did some good stuff but it’s time for change. Hopefully it will be the right change

 

This is what's known as 'false'. The opposite of true. The bulk of the comic TPBs they're selling are of recent works themselves, not old ones. Periodical sales are down probably more due to pandemic than anything else, but on a 10-year trend are still pretty stable on the whole if you don't count covid time.

2009 had 78.4 million floppies sold. 2019 had 83.2 million- lower than the peak number, but certainly not bad numbers by any means. The last time comics dropped below 70m was 2010, and hasn't done so at all in the last decade.

And this year? Looks to be a banner year for comics, as this June-to-June month comparison shows:


DC's up. Everyone else is up. Things are up.

Rule number 1 of comic sale doomsaying: Immediately doubt it because it's pretty much never right.

So many people substitute their own personal dislike for some titles for wide sales trends (while often not being familiar with the whole lines or even the performance of specific books).


X-men has been doing incredibly well ever since House of X, critically and commercially.


Also manga's audience has some overlap with comics but trying to copy manga traditionally hasn't worked well and they are ultimately different audiences who want different things. Though some of the stuff to reach a wide audience that comics does ironically is what gets cried at most for 'comics are dying!' response- aiming at more demographics is a huge part of comics success, you'd need a lot more women-aimed stuff to catch up. Manga's big because it sells to everyone, comics wouldn't replicate that by leaning into old stuff.

 

Depends on the critic.

A good and/or great critic points out BOTH the good and the bad and makes their opinion clear to the point as too why they like or don't like a piece of media. They're also not afraid to go against the grain in terms of what the majority think or what some fans think of their opinions. Great critics are the ones that learn, grow and change and are not afraid to admit that they changed their minds on something and/or admit that they were wrong.

An awful critic just says "this is awesome" or "this sucks" and gives no real reason why they think it awesome or sucks. They're lazy armchair critics that never learn, grow or change they will always bow down to the majority and what fans think. They almost never change their opinions and never admit when they're wrong.

A vile troll will make personal attacks against the creators of media and in some cases this can lead to death threats over really stupid reasons.

 

It's time. Never thought I'd say that, but here we are. Amazing what happens in 16 years? I was member number 13 on their forums, and on their forums before those, back in the 'old days.' but yeah, IDW, it's time to leave.

As to where you go? Well, Marvel will give you bigger initial sales numbers, DC will give you more issues and more of a chance on lower numbers. My pick's DC, but fair enough if you want to see them at Marvel or elsewhere.

 

The above post by ZeroiaSD is entirely correct and yours is simply not. Comchron's tracks all of this.

We can look at the records to start with: Comichron: Comics Sales Records in the Diamond Exclusive Era
All of the recods EXCEPT lowest dollar volume have been set in the last 10 years. The most comic books ordered in a single month since 1997 was in Auugust 2016. The highest dollar volume was in November 2015. Both of those are in the dead smack middle of the "woke" Marvel era in particular. Summer 2021 had the best comic book sales in five years:


If you look through Damond's industry statistics, updated through March 2020 (so the entire Marvel+DC distributed via Diamond era), you'll find that over the last five years the trade sales are dominated by recent releases, not and I quote you here "back issues when writing is good".
Top Graphic Novel Archives

I frankly, don't think you understand the business practices of the industry at all. The reason they didn't sell a shit ton of comics during the pandemic is the same reason they made these big moves in just the past year:

(1) Marvel and DC were closed for business for months, with Marvel really not getting up to speed until November 2020. Because of the lockdown, shut down and lack of infrastructure for work from home, they were not producing (many) new comics and put ongoing stories on 6 month delays. DC restarted first; it had to under the directive from Warner Media that DC stand on its own two feet now after years of being something of a parasite. From March 2020 - November 2020, new comic books releases were almost exclusively DC, and that is because DC made the major decision to speed along work from home for their creators and leave Diamond Distribution for Lunar.

(2) Diamond, the only printer and distributor for Marvel and DC in March 2020, shut down until the end of 2020. This means local comic shops were largely bereft of new product until DC swapped to Lunar. Marvel did not leave Diamond until this year (announced in the Spring, carried out in October) for Penguin Random House, the world's largest printer / book distributor. PRH only briefly shut down in the pandemic, but reopened in June 2020. If Marvel had been working with PRH, new comics could have flowed over the summer.

(3) Because of the above two scenarios, many Local Comic Shops - aka the direct market - shut down in March 2020 and didn't open for months, or closed permanently. They had no new product and couldn't pay their rents. Diamond did what it could to extend lines of credit (which is why many shops are super loyal to diamond) while many stores, like many small businesses in the US, took aid (loans and grants) from the Federal Government under the CARES Act of March 2020 so they could keep paying their employees and keep paying their rents. It worked to a degree, but not universally.

(4) Up until sometime in 2020, the big two were dominated by comic book industry men. People who had affinity for the Direct Market, either personally (they owned one at one point or worked in one) or professionally (they had a tight business relationship with Diamond, Mile High or Midtown). This lead to a general hostility and suspicion to digital sales. Digital sales to marvel, while good for the company, drain revenue from comic book stores. While Marvel has had same day digital since 2011 and Marvel Unlimited is popular, it's digital-only offerings have been extremely lack luster side gigs. That changed as there were leadership replacements at both Marvel and DC, with both beginning, finally, extensive digital-only or digital-first publication (this, 10 years after the iPad, which is a joke). And you saw in my post above the metrics: a 33% increase in sales on digital alone, due to that alone.

You, and others individuals, almost make up these nonsense about the status of Marvel and Comics business because you don't like the content of the comics - the work of "activist writers" as you called them.

I gotta tell you something: it doesn't matter and nobody cares.

Everyone has always lamented the age of the comic books that are in the present. In the 2000s it was Marvel's crossover mania (many of them shit) and doing weird things with its characters (Spider-Man and Wolverine on the X-Men, Civil War). In the 1990s it was the ultra violence, killing characters and replacing them (hello Kyle Rayner, Azrael, 4 different Supermen) the big guns, the highly detailed artwork Jim Lee-style artwork, the "manga influences" in the latter half the decade, the "pouches" Rob Liefeld look. Nevermind that most writers on the big books and most major plots were deeply criticized, from "Batman: No Man's Land" (which formed the basis of Dark Knight Rises) to pretty much all X-Men works after 1995. In the 1980s, it was the bronze age deconstructivism that "ruined people's childhood", when Spider-Man wore black, the X-Men moved to Australia, and Captain America very politically became "The Captain" (introducing US Agent, the replacement Captain America).

At some level to every comic book reader - and I do mean every single one - we all have our idealized vision of characters that are unchanging form the action figures we play with on our bed growing up. To me, "my X-men" are the 1992 Jim Lee X-Men I grew up with. I'm no great fan of the current Dawn of X (despite Hickman being my favorite writer) because I think it gets the X-Men wrong in a lot of ways. In a bunch of other threads I've been saying that I look forward to Nimrod coming down and killing every mutant on Krakoa and resetting the timeline. I still read it, but my heroes aren't the X-Men. It's Mystique and Orchis.

But freezing characters in amber is deleterious to their creative potential in the longer term, and also extremely arbitrary. Look at Hal Jordan (Green Lantern). He's an old character who hasn't changed much in decades besides Parallax. Geoff Johns comes along and reinterprets Parallax and reimagines the entire Green Lantern mythos into something that was, at the time, one of the best comics on shelves and also best selling. But it didn't change Hal Jordan, who is still kind of a shit character. And what happened when Johns ended his run? A bunch of writers followed up and kept the status quo, but didn't move it forward, and it got stale. Even Grant Morrison couldn't save Hal Jordan. So the main Green Lantern focus right now is John Stewart.

Speaking of which, talk Green Lantern John Stewart. The "backup GL" of the 1980s, he was a stunt character who served one purpose for short period of time and spent most of the 1990s abandoned and crippled. He was paper thin character with a simple backstory that no writer was interested in following up. Then Bruce Timm and friends when putting together Justice League for the DC Animated Universe realized that it was probably a bad look to have a league of all white dudes in the 21st century. So they said, somewhat controversially at the time, that Hal Jordan (who the DCAU never prominently showed) and Kyle Rayner (who was in Superman:The Animated Series) would be out and John Stewart would be in. But they reinvited John Stewart. They made him an ex-Marine. They gave him an interesting backstory. They did the development job others wouldn't do. And what happened? This new, better John Stewart went onto be the Green Lantern millions of Americans grew up with (like I grew up with Kyle Rayner) and his relationship with Hawkgirl, a novel creation of the show, turned out to be one of the most compelling parts of the entire JL/JLU saga. And speaking of Hawkgirl, at the same time they decided to have a black Green Lantern on their Justice League, they also said having one woman - Wonder Woman - as the sole representative of 52% of the population of Earth ont he Justice League wouldn't fly in the 2000s. So they added Hawkgirl instead, and rather than use the one that was current at the time (Kendra Saunders) they used the alien Thanagarian Hawkgirl (actually Hawkwoman)from decades before, Shayera Hol. Oh and this Hawkgirl had nothing to do with Hawkman, typically the principle "Hawk" character.

You can imagine how all this went down. But you know what? It was excellent for both characters, DC, the show. There were no losers in it at all. All it required is people to go with the flow and see where the stories take them.

What's become quite clear in multiple forms of fiction is how attached people have become to a permanent, frozen in amber, interpretation of their beloved characters. Maybe that's a psychological feedback from the times in which we live, where change happens quickly and often. But people get genuinely outraged when X-23 starts going by the name of Wolverine, or Captain Picard leaves Starfleet embittered for 14 years, or Tim Drake starts dating a guy. It's okay to think some of these things are dumb. I can deliver quite the soliloquy as to why Tim Drake dating anyone, girl or guy, is fundamentally antithetical to the character (short version: if he's going to be the next Batman like he dreams to be, then typical emotional needs go out the window and love/sex becomes another tool in the utility belt as part of an genda... this is the Grant Morrison "why Batman can't get married" argument applied to Tim Drake). But it's not okay to say some of these things shouldn't happen. Some will succeed. Some will fall flat. Who cares? Let's see where it goes.

Characters cannot develop without things happening to them and reader/viewership needs to let go of this awful habit of not letting stories play out or not simply accepting a bad concept at face value and deleveraging themselves until it improves. I did that with Star Trek Discovery for years, and while it has its groan moments, it's turned into a great show!

Like and tastes are subjective, but numbers are not. For years comic book fans, show fans have tried to attack content they subjectively did not like by pointing out sales or viewer numbers. Sometimes that's true. But with comics? There is plainly zero evidence of that. If you want to take any solace in anything, it's that Comics are doing very well right now largely for reasons that have nothing to do with actual content of the comics, but rather, as I said previously, important and overdue changes to their business model. That "comic book publishers" are doing well, while the direct market is ailing, is the decisive evidence in that regard.


Believe me, I want my "G1 done right" Transformers comic book too, free of shitty obscure characters, weird fanfic-level romances, and artists who can't draw Transformers to save their life. There is an excellent chance I'll get that in the next few years. But the objective reality we live in says that IDW is likely to lose Transformers because of business decisions it has made regarding the property, not (or not wholly) creative ones.

 

Fair enough. I mostly talk out of my ass anyway. Some things I know about, and in some things I'm completely full of shit. Honestly, I'd like to see a Transformers manga more than anything. Really good manga writers are some of the most brilliant people ever. Some of the greatest character development I've ever read is in manga. I'd like to see the Japanese manga spin on Transformers.

 

That'd be pretty cool, but the popularity of Transformers has dramatically shrunk in Japan. Transformers is for the time being predominantly a US+Canada (G1) and China / Asia-Pacific (Bayverse) franchise.

 

Didn't see this topic when i posted the other or i would have just posted it here. (oops.)

Image may have just picked up the rights.



Image Comics, The New Publishers Of Transformers And GI Joe? (bleedingcool.com)

 

Robert Kirkman in Talks for GI Joe, Transformers Comic License – The Hollywood Reporter

 

I also want to add: 1997 was peak speculator boom, people buying 20 copies of absolute trash, mass variant covers and gimmicks for everything, a significant portion of sales going to people who had no intention of reading the books at all. So it's sales are empty fluff- whatever anyone may think of the taste of current comics, this is sales people are actually reading.

There's no real way to tell how many real readers were back then, but I suspect one'd have to go back to the 80s to find a higher peak that's not full of empty mirage.

Interesting.Looking through their lineup, it's not a big one, very few projects that don't involve Kirkman himself, so this is possibly a sign he wants to be involved? Though I also don't think he can juggle two big property books like that and his existing works.

And it does make sense he'd have the clout to pry the licenses away from IDW.

 

Kirkman?
This sounds promising.

 

I'm totally here for the "I've been saying this for 16 years and you guys said mean things but I was right!" posts.

If this is true, I hope the current writers have been tipped off, so that they have time to plan some sort of ending - I'm not following the series at the moment, but it seems like it has its fans.

As for what TF comics do next, it feels like we're rolling a dice - if we get a six, it'll be a surprisingly successful move and a fresh direction, but one to five and they'll just be reduced to dismal movie tie-ins or nothing at all.

 

I genuinely wonder how they’re going to “end” it. I suppose with the Ark launching? I guess it would be a somewhat “poetic” ending to have it end right at the beginning of G1. Although it would be really weird to have the war last like, what, a few months (?) in-universe before they leave Cybertron. I guess that’s the consequence of deciding to show the entire history of the Great War in real time.

I also genuinely wonder what IDW’s plans were had they gotten to continue writing this series as long as they wanted. Were they just planning on writing, like, 5 million years of war?

 

A B I G timeskip would be my guess.

 

Personally I wonder the same for the BW comic. They got the greenlight to go beyond 12 issues but uh... they won't be getting much more than that.

 

Does BW have the same issues as the main comic? Mainly being insanely boring and slow? I haven’t bothered to pick it up since I don’t see the point of getting what seems to be a Beast Wars story but with a few extra characters.

 

It's been sluggish, yeah. It was set to potentially end at 12 issues (which honestly seems like what they should've done at this point, what with the license set to change hands) but its pacing has been... not great.

 

It's like the first season of the cartoon, but with far less character focus and plot progression.