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Post by benday-dot on Aug 23, 2016 18:48:14 GMT -5
I always hated renumbering and I just can't stand it. It's drives me crazy! After thinking about it (funny quoting from my own post) that benday-dot convinced me to not to worry about it and I decided that renumbering doesn't bothers me one bit. As long there is a reason for it - I say go for it. Glad I could help ease your anxiety! |
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Post by Nowhere Man on Aug 23, 2016 19:37:02 GMT -5
It's not that I can't keep track, it's that they're hard to locate properly on sites like E-bay. It's fine for 2nd tier characters, but major series (like Avengers, JLA, Iron Man, etc) it's kinda difficult. @ MRP: I disagree with you completely on the importance of back issues. I know many people (family and friends) that LOVE Superheroes, the TV shows, the movies, the action figures, and what to know WHAT happens in the comics, but they won't actually read them. Why? 'I don't know where to start'... 'I don't know which series to read', or 'I don't know which ones are important' are what I hear. I think that's 1/2 the reason stuff like the Vertigo Titles and Walking Dead can be 'evergreen' titles.. there's a clear, accessible beginning, middle, and end. That's not the case with Marvel and DC superheroes.. where either the history is muddled, or not all the material is easily available. All the more reason to eliminate the need for back issues and make their product accessible to the wider audience. Marvel and DC are not in the back issue business. They never have been. Maybe instead of trying to make it easier for someone else in the secondary market to sell back issues they don't profit on, Marvel and DC should focus on producing stories with clear beginnings, middles and ends which is what modern audiences want. Their movies and tv shows do it and are vastly popular and profitable. Their comics do not and barely break even and are relegated to a niche market. There's a lesson in there, but it's not make it easier for people to buy back issues. -M The more I think about it, the more I think Marvel and DC comics would be served better with clear beginnings, middles and ends. Creative runs often seem to play out in that a creator or creative team will have a story they really want to tell, they tell it in 12 to 24 issues at most, and stick around after the fact until a clear decline become apparent and the whole thing loses steam. It's tough to let go of the past. The never-ending flow of Silver and Bronze Age comic, with barely visible or nonexistent arcs, worked great in a world where there was so many casual readers, but alas those days are gone. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 23, 2016 20:07:00 GMT -5
All the more reason to eliminate the need for back issues and make their product accessible to the wider audience. Marvel and DC are not in the back issue business. They never have been. Maybe instead of trying to make it easier for someone else in the secondary market to sell back issues they don't profit on, Marvel and DC should focus on producing stories with clear beginnings, middles and ends which is what modern audiences want. Their movies and tv shows do it and are vastly popular and profitable. Their comics do not and barely break even and are relegated to a niche market. There's a lesson in there, but it's not make it easier for people to buy back issues. -M My point is they should be. Image is making piles of money on Walking Dead 'back issues' in the form of trades and omnibuses.. reaching tons of people that don't usually buy comics. No reason that wouldn't work for other properties if the price and format were correct. It's all about availability. No one is going to by things if they're not sure they going to finish. You seem to be saying you think the lesson is to not have any history... I think they should embrace it. What they do it is this weird half measure that doesn't work for anyone. Image is not in the back issue business. They are in the story business. The don't sell back issues, and they don't make any money from purchases of back issues. They make no money if someone drops $5K on a first issue of Walking Dead and they didn't suffer any when back issues hunters weren't able to tell the difference between the regular Walking Dead series and the weekly reprint series that had similar numbering and covers. But they continue to sell that one self-contained story in different formats to new and old readers alike without any obstacles to new reader entry because of things that happened in some other comic book from 30 years ago that doesn't really matter to the current story but gets dragged out and trotted around when creators run out of new ideas or the suits don't let them do something new with the characters that allows them to change and grow. You don't ever have to think about a back issue if you want to read Walking Dead, you don't have to worry about what is happening in Saga to read Walking Dead. You don't have to worry that Rob Liefeld is going to get hired to write and draw Walking Dead and find out everything you knew about Rick Grimes is wrong. You don't have to own a complete run of Spawn to read Walking Dead because of a cross-over that happened 20 years ago. You buy a collection of the Walking Dead and read it. If you read all of the volumes in whatever format you purchased, you can get current issues to keep reading, eiher in print or digitally, or you can wait 6 months for the next collection to come out and read it. There is no selling of back issues by Image and back issue sales do not inform their market strategy. What Image does have in Walking Dead that Marvel and DC do not, is one self-contained ongoing story with a consistent creative team and one voice/vision in its execution that has a clear beginning, is in its middle and works towards an end. When Kirkman (and Image) had other stories to tell, they didn't try to shoehorn them in to the Walking Dead, he created different stories with things like Invincible, Outcast and Thief of Thieves and let reader recognition of a storyteller they enjoy market the material not trying to make it part of the Walking Dead's success by crossing over with it, having guest stars from its story appear, etc. Marvel and DC have nothing in their 50-75 year catalog to compare to that. Maybe if FF had ended when Kirby left or Lee did, or Spidey when Ditko left, and they had never crossed over or shared a universe, but they cannot bang the square peg of shared-universe editorial driven rotating creative team assembly line comics into the round hole of the Image model. Not without scrapping all that came before and starting fresh (which Marvel half-heartedly tried with the Ultimate universe which caused hardcore fans to go into apoplexy over what would happen to their beloved 616) and it worked well for a time selling well and drawing new readers until they made the same mistake they had before and kept it a neverending story shared universe and it began to collapse in on its own weight and shed readers and fail to continue to draw new readers. I'd be all for Marvel and DC embracing storytelling as a driving force for marketing and abandoning the backstory driven model they sell to hardcore fans. But they won't forsake those habitual sales so they are forced to play a middle game trying to serve 2 masters pleasing neither. But they're making more revenue now than they did 25 years ago when they still used legacy numbering and didn't have steady flow of new #1s and were shedding readership and sales regularly. Then 20 years ago the first wave of renumbering hit (for Marvel with Heroes Reborn, earlier with DC with Crisis)and the sales spikes started and that has been the norm since. But in all that time, they were never in the back issue business, even when they started their trade paperback programs, they weren't selling back issues. They were selling reprints and reprints have always been a staple of their business, but it was never to make back issue sales for secondary sellers or back issue purchases easier for collectors, it was to sell more product they were putting out whether original material or reprint. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 24, 2016 13:11:31 GMT -5
That's exactly my point, all their shenanigans with re-booting and reseting and such have made it so they can't capitalize on selling the entire story like Image does.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 14:31:14 GMT -5
That's exactly my point, all their shenanigans with re-booting and reseting and such have made it so they can't capitalize on selling the entire story like Image does. They never had an entire to sell to begin with. The one continuous story since the beginning is really a snipe hunt put over on hardcore fans that doesn't stand up if you look at the actual publishing history and content of the books involved. There never was one continuous story it was something passionate (if misguided) fans tried to kitbash together and prop up as the one true momomyth, but really was a muddle of lots of contradictory pieces MacGyvered together and not built to last. The very fact there needs to be rolling time lines, retcons, refreshes, etc. points tot he fallacy of it being one continues story with one vision and one voice in its execution. Marvel and DC never had that so they cannot sell what Image is selling currently. -M |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2016 14:34:30 GMT -5
That's exactly my point, all their shenanigans with re-booting and reseting and such have made it so they can't capitalize on selling the entire story like Image does. They couldn't have done that anyway. The difference between the Walking Dead and pretty much any DC or Marvel book that wasn't a mini-series or a short-lived title is that the former has one artistic vision telling one story and the latter a hodge-podge of stories by a variety of writers, artists and editorial regimes that don't make and have never made an entire story. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 24, 2016 20:30:35 GMT -5
It's a mess NOW, but it didn't have to be.. they could have had it be a continuous story if they chose not to do so back when the started moving orgins instead of letting characters age. At this point, it would be really hard to salvage it, but I be some smart, creative guys could do it.
Different writers and artists are not a big deal as long as things change logically and gradually.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 21:54:09 GMT -5
It's a mess NOW, but it didn't have to be.. they could have had it be a continuous story if they chose not to do so back when the started moving orgins instead of letting characters age. At this point, it would be really hard to salvage it, but I be some smart, creative guys could do it. Different writers and artists are not a big deal as long as things change logically and gradually. It was a mess in the 60s and then in the late 60's and early 70s people like Roy Thomas started trying to kitbash it together, but it never was one story, not from the start-hell Sub-Mariner as a hobo in early FF and Cap lot in the ice were the among the first retcons that showed hole sin the monomyhth idea and Earth -2 was another glaring sign this was never meant to be one single story as much as it was a clever solution, it's galringly obvious that something had to be kitbashed into a singular story rather than actually being one. And multiple artists/writers destroys the sense of one complete work with a single vision behind it that powers so much of the Image stuff with the mass audience. You, as a hardcore fan. are used to it, but it is a dealbreaker for a lot of folks no matter how slow or gradual it is. -M |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2016 22:45:57 GMT -5
It's a mess NOW, but it didn't have to be.. they could have had it be a continuous story if they chose not to do so back when the started moving orgins instead of letting characters age. At this point, it would be really hard to salvage it, but I be some smart, creative guys could do it. Different writers and artists are not a big deal as long as things change logically and gradually. It was a mess in the 60s and then in the late 60's and early 70s people like Roy Thomas started trying to kitbash it together, but it never was one story, not from the start-hell Sub-Mariner as a hobo in early FF and Cap lot in the ice were the among the first retcons that showed hole sin the monomyhth idea and Earth -2 was another glaring sign this was never meant to be one single story as much as it was a clever solution, it's galringly obvious that something had to be kitbashed into a singular story rather than actually being one. And multiple artists/writers destroys the sense of one complete work with a single vision behind it that powers so much of the Image stuff with the mass audience. You, as a hardcore fan. are used to it, but it is a dealbreaker for a lot of folks no matter how slow or gradual it is. -M It really has never not been a mess. At least not as far as DC and Marvel are concerned. I honestly am beginning to think that Wildfire and I live in two alternate universes. |
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Aug 24, 2016 23:00:51 GMT -5
The trend in constant re-numbering reflects upon the current hard core fans as junkies for #1s. When the high of the #1s wear off, the pusher publisher offers a new batch. And knowing the junkie collector is salivating for a new fix, the pusher ups the price by an extra dollar or two. Disney and Time Warner, acting as rival cartels, laugh behind closed doors on how easy these folks can be manipulated. Or do they need a breather from a new #1 for a spell? No problem. Here's a "big event" drug for them. And what the hey, let's have a slew of #1 minis tied to the "big event" . Bwah-ha-ha-ha.
mrp is right that the comic buying public get what they deserve. They enable those pushers
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 25, 2016 16:07:38 GMT -5
You might be right that we're used to it as comic book readers, but I think it could happen if there was a will for it to do so... the very fact that people like #1s (apart from speculators) is that they like to be in on things from the beginning.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Aug 25, 2016 19:24:47 GMT -5
The trend in constant re-numbering reflects upon the current hard core fans as junkies for #1s. When the high of the #1s wear off, the pusher publisher offers a new batch. And knowing the junkie collector is salivating for a new fix, the pusher ups the price by an extra dollar or two. Disney and Time Warner, acting as rival cartels, laugh behind closed doors on how easy these folks can be manipulated. Or do they need a breather from a new #1 for a spell? No problem. Here's a "big event" drug for them. And what the hey, let's have a slew of #1 minis tied to the "big event" . Bwah-ha-ha-ha. mrp is right that the comic buying public get what they deserve. They enable those pushers Once again, this is why my ire is now directed at the type of fans you describe. It's hilarious how irritated I can get --if I let myself-- simply reading spot on descriptions like this. This mentality in general (not just as it applies to comics) irritates me. I need a stiff drink! *grumble* |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2016 20:44:07 GMT -5
Get off my lawn all of you new #1's!!!
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