I've been talking about comics online since 1999. There are mailing list archives going back to 1991 on Google Groups. Certain fans will always moan that comics have become vapid, commercialised crap unlike the good old days, when they were just hitting puberty and becoming self-aware. It's harder to connect with a comic, character or writer once you're past that stage. Some people have always mistaken that 'I don't connect with things the way I used to' for 'things aren't as good as they used to be'.
The issue now is that the 'things just aren't as good as they used to be' folk have got mashed in with the nationalist, far-right politics of rage and victimhood that has been brewing ever since Nixon's Southern Strategy. Cutting up an issue of Squirrel Girl to demonstrate your hate of it is, to me, aggressive. Getting into a rage about Squirrel Girl is also, to me, insane. It's meant to be silly. Marvel's always had a side-line of 'wtf talking duck defeats thanos' comics.
A certain subset of fans are treating that title, those creators and those books as an attack on them as fans. They're reacting as if Marvel is mailing them dog poop every month. It reminds me of the early 00s when certain people online would go into a rage when two men held hands in public.
Some of these reactionary commentators have tried to make their rage about the state of the market and saving the medium. It doesn't need to be saved. Marvel and DC are very cheap IP generating operations for Disney and WB. They've never made huge profits- ever. Publishing, especially monthly/weekly/dailies does NOT make money the same way other industries do.
Direct market North American sales of the top 100 have been stable for about 20 years now. Not falling, not growing. There has been a dip from 2016-17. If that continues into 2020 then that will be a new pattern of declining sales, but the past twenty years has seen similar peaks and troughs in five year groupings.
Digital sales are an unknown unknown. You could make an assumption that continuing titles that don't sell much in the direct market are maybe doing better digitally, and that's why they don't get cancelled.
Comic stores shutting down cannot be separated from the decline in retail business against online, and cannot be separated from the limitations of Diamond's direct market model.
Comics aren't dying. Marvel and DC aren't going anywhere. What's happened is that outrage, 4chan victimhood has spread into the world of Comics.
Aka, people not knowing how to leave each other the #@$% alone. I'm just tired of seeing this stuff pop up on my Twitter feed. I don't follow D&C or Mark Waid. I found both of their Twitter ranting annoying. There's reason on both sides, but extremist at each end drown out the saner voices.
Current Comic Pros are not trying to kill comics and take away your characters. That's from a bunch of frustrated nonsense flingers that cant properly verbalize their complaints.
"Comicgaters" are not anti-diversity. This is a straw-man accusation used to de-legitimize valid arguments from customers. Utilized mostly by folk who can't take criticism.
I guess you can lump me into the "books used to be better"-group, but I think that's obvious to me. When I say "used to be" I'm not talking about the 90s - I'm talking about as recent as 2012 when I was buying 4 to 5 titles per month. Can't really blame falling sales on the decline in quality of books (there's no effing way you can look at Marvel during the last few years and say they look the way they are supposed to as the leader of the comic industry.). The reason sales are dropping is simply because people are less willing to invest their money into literature of
any kind. People are reading less. Period. Current readers are, for lack of a better phrase, dying out and they aren't rapidly being replaced as they were during the 80s-90s. We'll never see another X-Men #1 (1992) sales again or even something like the Harry Potter craze. Those times are over. Marvel is finally trying to evolve by cutting costs and utilizing their already existing online infrastructure (I'm sure Disney had a lot to do with it, as they are doing the same thing).
But if your think Disney, the corporation, is going to keep Marvel COMICS around to pump-out IPs, your mistaken. They have 50+ years of IPs to mine and can recycle every 10 to 15 years. The moment Marvel Comics cannot sustain itself, it'll be gone. Marvel is ALREADY contracting out Spiderman and Black Panther to IDW. Marvel's YouTube channel is doing cooking shows and their Marketing Director is trying to rebrand the whole thing company as a "life-style brand". Those are her words. But this is not because of social issues and politics being injected into the books (which do annoy me, even as a 1st gen black-American, democrat). It's because there are less of us reading, thus less money coming in. That's it. It's not personal, it's business. In my opinion, instead of chasing trends, Marvel, DC, whoever should
try to at least keep the customers they have left.
