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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2022 11:00:42 GMT -5
I like the Joker fine, but he's suffered from Wolverine syndrome. Just everywhere. Also as an artifact of serialized stories lasting over decades and the push to make comics edgier while somehow preserving the status quo to a point, his continued existence just seems more absurd as time passes. For the last 10 years, DC has only had 3 characters... Batman, Joker, and Harley Quinn... they have overexposed them to the point of boredom. Again who's at fault here-the company publishing to make money putting out what sells, or the consumers who are only buying things featuring those characters and not buying other things in sufficient quantities to make publishing more of them viable. When consumers speak with their wallets (and not on message boards, forums and social media) companies listen. If books featuring other characters were more profitable, DC would publish more of them. Consumers don't buy them, DC's not going to publish them. It's the ole saw, if one finger is pointing at someone, three more are pointing back at you. Consumers have no one to blame but their own previous buying habits as to what books are out there now. Publishers are not charities catering the tastes of vocal non-consumers, they produce what sells to actual paying customers. Saying something is overexposed simply means, lots of people are buying it and not buying the other stuff I like and want to see more of. Because comics is essentially a zero sum game. There's only so much consumer dollars to go around and no new money is entering the monthly comic game, so if consumers are buying one thing, its less money for something else, and right now the money is coming in form Batman and company and NOT other things, even when DC does put them out there. -M
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Post by impulse on Feb 10, 2022 11:46:45 GMT -5
I don't think anyone is saying it's anyone's fault or even that there is a fault. Just some people who have been around in the market for a while are bored by the seemingly endless repetition. No one is picking on the poor comics publishers struggling to make a buck. Of course they are in it to profit.
I disagree that saying something is overexposed only means other people are buying it. When I was still collecting, Wolverine was one of my favorite characters, and even I got bored with him and stopped subbing/dropped some books. I know others who shared similar sentiments. Obviously he remained popular and sold a lot of books, but I don't think that much saturation has a zero sum impact on buying habits.
A similar thing happened in music in the 2000s where there was a bit of a loop of shrinking sales and increasingly generic music boring people etc. It's probably impossible to quantify since there is no way to compare who kept buying versus who stopped, but it did happen.
I also don't think there is anything to be done about it as the comics market is just the same shrinking market it will be until it's too small to sustain.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2022 12:07:27 GMT -5
I don't think anyone is saying it's anyone's fault or even that there is a fault. Just some people who have been around in the market for a while are bored by the seemingly endless repetition. No one is picking on the poor comics publishers struggling to make a buck. Of course they are in it to profit. I disagree that saying something is overexposed only means other people are buying it. When I was still collecting, Wolverine was one of my favorite characters, and even I got bored with him and stopped subbing/dropped some books. I know others who shared similar sentiments. Obviously he remained popular and sold a lot of books, but I don't think that much saturation has a zero sum impact on buying habits. A similar thing happened in music in the 2000s where there was a bit of a loop of shrinking sales and increasingly generic music boring people etc. It's probably impossible to quantify since there is no way to compare who kept buying versus who stopped, but it did happen. I also don't think there is anything to be done about it as the comics market is just the same shrinking market it will be until it's too small to sustain. It's the direct market. It doesn't matter what customers are buying. It matters what retailers are buying. That is the publisher's customer. If one customer stops buying a title but the retailer can sell it elsewhere (at a con, online, etc.) then they are still going to buy it, and it is what they buy that defines the market. So if the retailer is still buying Batman books, it's because they have customers somewhere that are still buying them. Batman continues to sell well despite the shrinking market, so retailers continue to buy Batman books, so DC continues to make more and more Batman books. Batman video games outsell other DC video games, so DC continues to focus on Batman video games even if some of the consumers are bored with it, those games continue to sell. Movies featuring Batman continue to outperform other DC movies, so DC/WB keep making movies featuring Batman, even if some folks are Batmanned out, those featuring Batman still outperform those featuring other characters. So yes, overexposed for one consumer whose tired of it doesn't mean it has stopped selling better to other consumers. Nothing that is selling is overexposed as long as it is selling. If it stops selling and is still being churned out, then the market is saturated. But as long as the market can bear more products featuring a property, it is not over-exposed. Since Batman keeps selling despite many people complaining online about it being overexposed, the market says it's not overexposed. The market says a saturation point has not been reached and people are still buying it. And since Wolverine is still driving sales for Marvel in comics and other media (especially in the toy market where sales of Wolverine action figures are continuously higher than other figures in lines featuring him) that character hasn't reached a saturation point yet either even though some comic fans have grown tired of it. A small segment of the customer base tiring of a property is not over-exposure. Over-exposure is when a property exceeds saturation point and stops selling. Neither Batman nor Wolverine have stopped selling in the overall marketplace, so yes even though some fans feel they are overexposed, other people are still buying it in sufficient numbers that the market is sustainable and still has growth potential (if you look at overall market for all mediums and merchandise and not just direct market monthly comics). The mistake many comic fans make is thinking the market for a property is limited to the direct market comic field and that the sales results in that market matter to the overall viability of the character. Merch and licensing have long been more important than comics sales (going back at least tot he 970s if not earlier) in determining the viability of a character and defining what the saturation point for a property is. It doesn't matter if direct market comic buyers are tired of a character and think it is overexposed if it is still selling in other sectors of the overall market and still is sustainable and has growth potential in those markets. They may be sick of it, but the property is still selling elsewhere and still selling well and the market has determined that no, it is not overexposed despite what that small segment of the market that is traditional monthly comic buyers think. -M
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Post by impulse on Feb 10, 2022 12:29:40 GMT -5
Well, now, unless I am mistaken we were specifically discussing the comic books. The intellectual property altogether is an entirely different discussion with different goalposts.
With regards to the total IP market, no arguments with your above points.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2022 13:07:42 GMT -5
I like the Joker fine, but he's suffered from Wolverine syndrome. Just everywhere. Also as an artifact of serialized stories lasting over decades and the push to make comics edgier while somehow preserving the status quo to a point, his continued existence just seems more absurd as time passes.
Joker and Harley might be everywhere but I'm quite liking the books, esp on the DC Black Label line, so no complaints from me.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2022 13:21:44 GMT -5
Well, now, unless I am mistaken we were specifically discussing the comic books. The intellectual property altogether is an entirely different discussion with different goalposts. With regards to the total IP market, no arguments with your above points. If we are discussing just the comic book direct market as its currently constituted, pretty much any character that is featured in more than 1 title is overexposed based on the size of the actual customer base and sales potential. -M
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,058
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Post by Confessor on Feb 10, 2022 14:32:49 GMT -5
I liked the Joker when he was a stone cold yet sane killer with a clown gimmick. The Killing Joke ruined the character. Conversely, The Killing Joke is still my favourite Joker story, closely followed by "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" in Batman #251. But then I think Alan Moore and Denny O'Neil are both great comic book writers.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Feb 10, 2022 15:05:37 GMT -5
Wolverine to me is the worst 'overexposed' character. It was absurd how he could be on multiple X-Men teams, the Avengers, and have his solo adventures all at the same time. And unlike Batman or Spider-Man, he's supposed to be part of the X-Men franchise, not an entire franchise in his own right. It made his appearances impossible to keep up with or make sense of in a way I don't think Batman or Spider-Man have ever suffered from. Right now the X-Men have 2 'big events' going on that were advertised as being entirely focused on Wolverine. Now, it seems that was false advertising about one of them, but the other one is entirely about Wolverine traveling through time to save Xavier over and over. The X-Men are a nation now. There are millions of mutants, including omegas, reality warpers, people with time travel and magic powers, and still they feel the need to make an entire event about Wolverine saving the mutant race by himself.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2022 15:30:30 GMT -5
Wolverine to me is the worst 'overexposed' character. It was absurd how he could be on multiple X-Men teams, the Avengers, and have his solo adventures all at the same time. And unlike Batman or Spider-Man, he's supposed to be part of the X-Men franchise, not an entire franchise in his own right. Disagree. Many characters are part of ensemble groups (JLA, Avengers etc) and have their own books, Wolverine should be no different?
I especially liked the MAX series which was made for his foul-mouth...
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Post by profh0011 on Feb 10, 2022 15:30:52 GMT -5
I like the Joker fine, but he's suffered from Wolverine syndrome. Just everywhere. This reminds me of what happened to Hal Jordan after Kevin Dooley replaced Andy Helfer as GREEN LANETERN editor. Helfer, with writer Gerard Jones, had planned out and been slowly working on rehabilitating the character after decades of editorial abuse, and, leading up to a big story. But when Helfer departed, his assistant got a promotion that went to his head... and it seems to me Dooley wanted nothing less than to turn Hal Jordan into a "FRANCHISE".
At one point he actually appeared in 6 books in the same month (between spin-off series and guest-appearances). It was absurd, especially for a character whose career, only 3 years earlier, had been hanging by a thread.
When sales TANKED on all the spin-off books, Dooley blamed his writers. He then decided, RIGHT at the point where the "big story" Helfer & Gerard had spent 4 years building up to was about to begin... to DERAIL their long-held plans and do SOMETHING ELSE. When Jones objected, he was FIRED off the book, Ron Marz was happy to just do what he was told and take the money, and GL fandom was violently polarized for the next 15 YEARS. Thanks a lot, Dooley.
When Dooley said in an intro to a Silver Age Green Lantern Archive book that he considered himself "Green Lantern's Number One Fan", all I could think of was... "THE NERVE of that clown!"
Hal Jordan didn't get "fixed" until Dooley was OUT of DC... and OUT of comics. Gee, I wonder what happened there?
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Post by tarkintino on Feb 10, 2022 15:31:58 GMT -5
Wolverine to me is the worst 'overexposed' character. It was absurd how he could be on multiple X-Men teams, the Avengers, and have his solo adventures all at the same time. And unlike Batman or Spider-Man, he's supposed to be part of the X-Men franchise, not an entire franchise in his own right. It made his appearances impossible to keep up with or make sense of in a way I don't think Batman or Spider-Man have ever suffered from. Right now the X-Men have 2 'big events' going on that were advertised as being entirely focused on Wolverine. Now, it seems that was false advertising about one of them, but the other one is entirely about Wolverine traveling through time to save Xavier over and over. The X-Men are a nation now. There are millions of mutants, including omegas, reality warpers, people with time travel and magic powers, and still they feel the need to make an entire event about Wolverine saving the mutant race by himself. While I agree where the overuse of Wolverine is concerned, in the 1970s, it was almost as bad with Spider-Man; in the early 70s, his main title had such a tight story structure very aware of time, that the creation of Marvel Team-Up came close to destroying the believability of Spider-Man's life. There's no way he could be in all of the places and events seen in The Amazing Spider-Man (including annuals), Marvel-Team-Up and even one-offs such as Giant-Size Super-Heroes Featuring Spider-Man and still have the reader believe his movements in relation to the time stated was possible. I started with MTU from its launch, but after a time, it was just too much, too improbable. On a related note, in the 80s' Marvel's index to MTU and TASM attempted to make sense of the joined stories, but in the end, it was more about...indexing, just to say "Person A was in issue 160, then appears in Person B's title on pages 3 - 6, then reappears in Person A 161".
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Feb 10, 2022 15:58:08 GMT -5
Wolverine to me is the worst 'overexposed' character. It was absurd how he could be on multiple X-Men teams, the Avengers, and have his solo adventures all at the same time. And unlike Batman or Spider-Man, he's supposed to be part of the X-Men franchise, not an entire franchise in his own right. Disagree. Many characters are part of ensemble groups (JLA, Avengers etc) and have their own books, Wolverine should be no different?
I especially liked the MAX series which was made for his foul-mouth...
Having his own book isn't the problem. I don't have a problem with his 80s series even though it was going on at the same time as Uncanny. It's the sheer volume of appearances and his taking over the franchise. Unlike Avengers and the JLA, the X-Men were not a group of successful solo characters who decided to form a team. They're a team first and foremost. If Batman has a big event, it's marketed as a big Batman event, not a big JLA event. If Spider-Man has a big event, it's marketed as a big Spider-Man event, not a big Avengers event. Wolverine has 2 events right now that were marketed as being the next big X-Men event which will determine the entire future of mutantkind while being almost exclusively about him. That's bullcrap. If he was someone with powers on the level of Superman it would make sense. He's not. He's one guy out of an entire nation in which hundreds of other people are better suited for almost anything than he is. Him being on at least 3 teams from 2 different franchises and having at least 1 solo going on all at the same time isn't normal even by Batman and Spider-Man standards. Even Batman left the JLA when he went to the Outsiders.
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 10, 2022 16:13:19 GMT -5
I like the Joker fine, but he's suffered from Wolverine syndrome. Just everywhere. This reminds me of what happened to Hal Jordan after Kevin Dooley replaced Andy Helfer as GREEN LANETERN editor. Helfer, with writer Gerard Jones, had planned out and been slowly working on rehabilitating the character after decades of editorial abuse, and, leading up to a big story. But when Helfer departed, his assistant got a promotion that went to his head... and it seems to me Dooley wanted nothing less than to turn Hal Jordan into a "FRANCHISE".
At one point he actually appeared in 6 books in the same month (between spin-off series and guest-appearances). It was absurd, especially for a character whose career, only 3 years earlier, had been hanging by a thread.
When sales TANKED on all the spin-off books, Dooley blamed his writers. He then decided, RIGHT at the point where the "big story" Helfer & Gerard had spent 4 years building up to was about to begin... to DERAIL their long-held plans and do SOMETHING ELSE. When Jones objected, he was FIRED off the book, Ron Marz was happy to just do what he was told and take the money, and GL fandom was violently polarized for the next 15 YEARS. Thanks a lot, Dooley.
When Dooley said in an intro to a Silver Age Green Lantern Archive book that he considered himself "Green Lantern's Number One Fan", all I could think of was... "THE NERVE of that clown!"
Hal Jordan didn't get "fixed" until Dooley was OUT of DC... and OUT of comics. Gee, I wonder what happened there?
I had wondered why thre were so many GL books. I was thinking " are they really selling that much ?"
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Post by tonebone on Feb 11, 2022 9:32:41 GMT -5
I had wondered why thre were so many GL books. I was thinking " are they really selling that much ?" I think the root cause of this, and the Joker/Harley books flooding the shelves is ..... Marketing. Having worked with IP Marketing people a lot in the past, they really like to latch onto a "hit" and run it into the ground. It can take YEARS for them to wise up and see that the audience that was there, or they thought was there, has dried up. I worked with more than one particular groups of marketeers who had ZERO ability or interest in predicting a trend, or in betting on an unknown property. They had no ability to judge quality or foresee how the public would receive something that was not proven or already popular. All they could do was see existing sales and interest and jump on the bandwagon. If one product had a substantial uptick in sales, they would immediately put into production as many spin-offs and copycats of that product as they could. It would take months or maybe years for the products to hit the public, and by then the public had moved on. I have seen it in toys, games, and videogames, first-hand. Now, traditionally, the production lead-time for comics has been about 4 months, and it takes about 4-6 months after publication to get a good gauge of how well something is selling (which is why Marvel is famous for taking an ongoing series, cancelling it after 6 issues, and saying it was a "limited series", after the fact). So you can see how, once the sales figures are able to be evaluated, other coattail-riding products are conceived, developed, produced, marketed, you are now possibly years from the initial "good sales" of a series or issue that started it all. Add into that movies, tv shows, etc. that merit being capitalized on, and you have a multi-year cycle that might or might not pay off. I'm not saying Marketing folks are bad, but the ones I have dealt with were.
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Post by profh0011 on Feb 11, 2022 23:55:23 GMT -5
15 years (I think) after Dooley destroyed Hal Jordan, Geoff Johns managed to fix things. I was stunned. After, before long, there were 2 GL books-- Hal's, and GREEN LANTERN CORPS, a sort of better revival of the GL QUARTERLY. It had INTENSELY-fabulous art... but the visual storytelling wasn't there. It struck me as doing what GL always should have been doing-- "space cops"-- but almost never was. But if memory serves, Dave Gibbons (who wanted to do this stuff back in the early 80s!!) was writing it. And... his writing is never all that coherent... UNLESS, he's also supplying the art. I recall this one fill-in where he did the art, and thought, " Oh, man, this is SO MUCH better than the regular issues!" On the other hand, they started this "epic" storyline about "The Sinestro Corps" just about the time I ran out of money and had to stop buying comics regularly... and from what I saw, and what I later heard... I'm kinda glad I missed most of that. Apparently it went on as long as the "Spider Clone" story.
In the tradition of Len Wein's 3-year run on ASM... "I only have ONE story idea, so I'm gonna STRETCH it out over 3 years and hope nobody minds!"
He turned out to be so much better as an editor than as a writer!
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