[Snowflakian]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fedup23

You seem to know exactly how Marvel can run a better business..I dare say that it is very different than your "simple" solutions. I am not bagging on your ideas..you have said thing that I think are valid..but if running a publishing company was as easy as people in comic chat rooms seem to believe then I think a company that has been in business for 70+ years would have figured it out too. There are a ton of problems in the industry..from printers inflated costs to the evil monopoly that is Diamond distributing (they make more per issue sold than the publisher) to the fact that kids just don't read comics anymore. DC has been around for decades too and they went all in with an act of desperation. It has worked for them in the short run...but do you think that in 2 years 60% of "The New 52" will still be getting published..I don't. A LOT of that stuff is bad. But its selling because people are going to give it a few tries before dropping.

My point is that it is simple to point at marvel as the main problem..just like many people on this message board know exactly how Hasbro should run their company. In actuality none of us has a single clue about what it takes to run one of these huge corporations and be profitable. Not finishing a story about Nova being in a coma or Hasbro releasing another 3 spiderman figures next year are great places for us to chime in..but they are less significant to the big picture than we like to think.

Oh I think hasbro is doing perfect. No question there. Marvel isn't a simple solution either. There are too many factors that are creating this. It's also why they've had a ton of layoffs lately.

But the blame does fall on Perlmutter for all this, that's all I'm saying. Some comics can be excused like X-23 where it makes sense that she's being pushed somewhere where she can learn social interactions, other comics it varies. Like they gave female ghost rider a death sentence by only making her a tie-in into events and the second it's free of that, it's canceled.

There is no easy fix, but Marvel comics themselves are hemoraging money and not pulling in as much as they used to. A lot of that has to do with yes the lower readership, but the other problem has to do with it's harder to not alienate a new readership. They need to find a way to attract new readers, and keep them. Which is exactly what the toons are doing... but the comics aren't keeping them. (Sounds simple, but it's not.)

Again though, this is only refering to the comics. The toys/toons/movies/statues etc are all safe. They make money.

The main problem to Marvel is the fact it's run by fans of the properties though. So unlike hasbro and other companies that have that seperation to not be too close to what they are doing, Marvel is self-absorbed. It's one of the things that's made some of the best comics. Just look at how Hickman has completely turned around the sales of the Fantastic 4, and he was never quite a full on fan of them like say Slott is of spider-man. Though then again, slott is also someone I wouldn't change as his love shows in how great the work is, ditto to Bendis on ultimate spider-man. It really varies title to title, but some writers are blinded by their own fan worship and happiness to do a title they read as kids to the point it's crap, and some to the point they are doing stuff other writers could have never dreamed of.

I think the changes that need to happen are more at the top and less on the writing level. Some of the editors need to go, like Wacker, Brevoort, and a few others. Mostly just the fan trolling ones that are causing Marvel to look like asses. With new editors would come hopefully quality improvements to avoid typos, and other issues they've had a lot of lately, and a new public persona would start forming that'd generate buzz. Axel Alonso, the new EIC has this chance himself while his EIC reign has yet to be defined. Right now because of perlmutter, his reign might get a lot of flack, but it can still turn around.
The event band-aids though aren't the way, and it's driving as many fans away as it is bringing some old ones back in.

This also becomes a problem of a cohesive world though. A cohesive soap opera super hero world would have a few events and crossovers. It is one unified world, but even soap opera writers will tell you, there's a point you have to focus on only the characters for awhile or you'll burn your audience out. This is what marvel hasn't learned yet, and is in the process of learning now.

Another issue to this is how they spread out sub stories. Like cyclops devolving into the new Magneto. This spanned so many writers until the start of the downfall that it's hard to follow how it started and keep accurate to that idea. This is a common problem to things written by commitee though. When you keep switching writers up and bringing new ones in, they all want to do something different and the original character outline goes out the window that made it all make sense.

And another issue, when was the last time you saw an issue by Craig Kyle? He's not as vocal as say Yost, but his work is honestly more talented on the comic front. (I love yost on animation, but his cliche-ridden writing works best there, in comics craig kyle was the half of the pair that kept that in check. So Yost without the other in comics doesn't enthuse me. X-force sex and violence proved this as well as their other seperate work.) The same could be said to other staff members they've kept, but you rarely see comics by them except for event titles.

That's probably my only beef with marvel as a business entity. They learn solely from personal trial and error while bagging on others, and not from the mistakes and actions of other companies that have become more successful than them now(for example, DC was causing event fatigue to the point the only solution was a reboot. Marvel needs to avoid this path, but their constant events are seemingly building to it not being an option to skip). If they'd stop making excuses for lazy writing, and give books that are both amazing and in character to the core of what fans love about the characters, they'll pull readers back in. They do have a few comics that prove this on a monthly basis. I just tire of the excuses as opposed to giving actual story-centric reasonings. Like cyclops has story-centric reasons for his character to have evolved, whereas many times, other characters don't. They're just different because the writer wants them to be different without a reason for them to be different. That's just lazy.

Yeah, it may sound like an easy fix on paper, but it really isn't all that simple. There's a lot of give and take, and a lot of repair work that'd need to be done. They also need to stop making arbitrary excuses for things to try to rationalize bad choices.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fedup23

On the other hand there are some new books coming out that I am hopefully about.

Scarlett Spider - tagged "All of the power, none of the responsibility "
Defenders -hope this version lasts a while
Carnage
Winter Soldier
The Twelve

All those are safe. Except for maybe the twelve.
Defenders is a good plan. Each issue focusing on a different character gives them a book for many characters, a team, and also avoids giving each of them their own title that could get canceled.

Winter Soldier is sticking around as Bucky has proven to make money.
Carnage makes money as his last limited series saw.
Scarlet Spider... Well I'm not too enthused about this with solely Yost on board, but uncanny X-Force proved magnificent, so I'll give it a shot. It's basically the same formula though. X-men who kill, a spider-man who kills.

What we're seeing right now though in many ways is a rebirth of the 90s era superhero like Image used, but with real story, or at least that's the hope.
The 90s who tried out a batman who kills, the first X-Force, and many others. Though Remender on Uncanny X-Force, as well as yost/kyle on x-force showed you can do it and do it well if you dive into the moral dilemmas of it. This is what scarlet spider has me worried about though, the character lacks that care for depth. He's less dexter, and more azbats. That was my problem to FI X-Force too. It was too much "we're justified in killing those we want to" and too little "we do this because we have no other choice against this enemy." That mini in particular was one of the only times they had a target that could have been prosecuted by the law, but they took it upon themselves just to off him, just to off him, saying sociopath stuff like "The world is better off without you." Whereas the main UXF book makes it clear the targets are stuff that can't be handled through legit means. So that mini completely dilutes the point of the main comic.