"B-but comics are dead guys!!"

>"B-but comics are dead guys!!"

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They are.

>sales=good.

Source? Citation?

They kind of are.

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Look at that fucking gap between Viz and DC. Fucking hell! And Scholastic still on top.

>DC Comics at the top
Are you even reading?

>Gets utterly bodied by manga
Oof

>in the last 25 years
Comics literally died 25 years ago. Having your best bad year doesn't mean it's not a bad year.

>Scholastic at top
user...

Imagine saying that comics died when they're still growing in 2022 and will continue to sell more.

if they're purposefully hiding 2020 numbers there's something fucked here. maybe they're literally bundling the two years together.

>when they're still growing in 2022
The only comics growing are kid's comics.
Most of the growth in the "comics" industry from the last few years has actually been from manga.

The reality is much worse.
As far as I can tell, what Comichron is doing is taking ComicHub sales data of the index title (the comic with an index score of 100 in Diamond's top 300 lists) from 100 stores and extrapolating them to 3000. Then, comparing the sales of DC comics in those stores against the list, they assign index scores to those DC titles to create a combined top 300 list.
The problem is that we no longer know how many copies the index title (Amazing Spider-Man) is selling. DC used to release this info while they were with Diamond, so that we can work backwards and get pretty good sales estimates on everything on the list. I've seen no indication that Marvel is doing this. All of this is an extrapolation of an extrapolation of an estimate.
It's voodoo

Makes sense why DC has twenty-eight Batman books now.

Most of the comic sales we see are for reprints dude.

>what Comichron is doing is taking ComicHub sales data of the index title (the comic with an index score of 100 in Diamond's top 300 lists) from 100 stores and extrapolating them to 3000
Fucking lol.
So basically they're just making shit up.
This kind of shit is why I don't trust anything that's not bookscan, at least they extrapolate from 16,000 locations and not fucking 100.

These numbers are sales to the stores, not actual sales to customers, for which we have no actual data. We have no idea how much is actually being bought from stores. One inference could be that more store orders = more customer sales, but that's not necessarily the case. Without more direct data it's hard to say how things are really going

>We have no idea how much is actually being bought from stores.
just kindof have to think like a store owner, they're going to use Title+Writer+Artist of their past customer sales to determine how much to order, So if anything if we know how much they ordered we have a good idea how the previous books did.

Even worse, all sales data should be point of sale data when a customer walks out of a retail location with a product or orders said product online.
Anything else literally does not matter.

Okay, but are any of these good?

Old comics or new comics?

The top 3 together under Viz still get bodied, but one of those (the lowest) is also manga
Given Dark Horse outperforms Marvel, and IDW beats Image, I'll say it's more likely licensed, cross-promoted products rather than 'manga' resulting in the tilt

Boom

The big two makes most of their money off of floppy sales. When you include those they make more money than companies like Viz.

>Given Dark Horse outperforms Marvel, and IDW beats Image, I'll say it's more likely licensed, cross-promoted products rather than 'manga' resulting in the tilt
user, Dark Horse also publishes manga.
But looking at the entire picture, the big swing is definitely from manga, Viz for instance saw a 52% increase in unit sales and a 55% increase in revenue, over $30 million from 2019 to 2020.
In fact, every manga publisher in BookScan saw a large increase in both unit sales and revenue, with all of them having their best year on record.
Not that we'll ever know, since they don't release any actual sales figures for their floppies and literally all sales figures are heavily-extrapolated estimates, unlike Bookscan, which is point-of-sale data.

Honestly surprising that DC is doing better than Marvel.

Is it?
Marvel's comics aren't really particularly popular, especially since a lot of them are nothing like the movies.
DC at least has lots of older comics that still sell as well as some YA/kid's stuff that does decently.

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>Teen Titans: R/BB did better than TTGo

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Imagine paying someone to go to Any Forums to try to damage control.

Now compare to manga sales.

I wouldn't doubt most sales were for TWD Deluxe.

Damn, was Rebirth really that popular? I know people talked about it but I don't remember that level of excitement.

>Alan Moore

Has he written anything remarkable since Killing Joke? I only know of From Hell.

Well, user, your own graph shows you why it's too early to say. In 2016, which had even higher sales than this year according to you chart, you might have also triumphantly declared that comics are back... then they slumped again for years.

If that graph is right then comics have stayed within the same 10m sales range for 25 years. Is the high 2021 sales a trend that will continue up? Or some kind of freak blip resulting from the pandemic situation? 2020 data is absent which is a bit suspicious; one might suspect that it's being combined with 2021 sales.

Marvel also doesn't seem to give much of a shit about trades. DC's always been better about that.

>When you include those they make more money than companies like Viz.

You can't know that since neither of the Big Two releases actual sales data. Everything, including these charts, are estimates extrapolated from third party data.

>DC still relying on Moore to carry the company after all these years

Fucking kek, and people cried and screamed when Moore called the industry creatively bankrupt a little while back.

He was still doing great work through the 90s: From Hell, Image stuff, the ABC books, some indie stuff. His comics output through the 2000s and 2010s steadily lessened and isn't anywhere near as good as his older work.

Why do people still post comichron when the sales data is basically just hearsay disguised as data at this point?

Because a consistent run of Comichron over months would give you an idea of how well the titles are doing

The numbers for 2020 is literally 0. Diamond ceased distribution, printers stopped printing, publishers issued pencil down orders, and shops were closed. This is what happens when distribution and production is centralized. One or two companies can shut down an entire industry.
What OP is pushing as "growth" is pent up demand after a year of quarantine. There is no real growth here, only catch-up. Every retailer that says their sales have gone up are failing to mention that 1 out of every 4 of their competitors closed down for good in 2020.
Anyone who spins this as growth is delusional or outright lying to you. No one's out of the woods yet.

How do reissues of classic material (Claremont/Byrne X-Men, Miller Daredevil etc.) fare when compared to modern comics?

Scholastic is even beating manga, what's the problem here?

>doesn't remember what happened in 2020
user...

in part, but ComicHub tracks sales TO CUSTOMERS, so they use that to track their best estimates. It is still estimates but Bookscan is a damn good tracker of sales.

probably won't last long since DC fired most of their collection department.

The only good thing to come from the MCU is those sales figures.

>His comics output through the 2000s and 2010s steadily lessened and isn't anywhere near as good as his older work.
I think Promethea is his best work

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Thank god Spawn is here to save the industry

Comichron is the BEST data available to anyone. it's some estimates but that's always going to happen even when publishers release data (because all sorts of problems can arise).
They reprinted the Uncanny X-Men omni's 1-4 last year and they all sold out immediately. So what Marvel should do is just up the print runs.

>but ComicHub tracks sales TO CUSTOMERS
At 100 stores.
Covering likely less than 10% of the direct market.
Meanwhile BookScan tracks over 16,000 locations, covering more than 85% of the market.

>Comichron is the BEST data available to anyone.
No, that would be BookScan, since it's from NPD.

but bookscan can't track floppies, nor through sale to customers.

BookScan is literally point-of-sale, so yes, it tracks sales to customers.
And floppies are no longer the majority of the market, more than half the market is in the book channel, which is tracked by BookScan.

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Why don't companies release their own sales numbers?
It's only going to cause speculation and lead to other sites estimating sales.

Not really. DC has all the evergreen books like Watchmen and TDKR

>Why don't companies release their own sales numbers?
Then everybody would see how fucked they are

Why would EVS lie to us like this?

No, I you would just argue is pointless since it tracks sales to stores instead of direct sales.

OP anally ragaved, as always.

Nope

But yes.
The latter post literally shows a downward trend for both comic books and the direct market.

It doesn't tho

It quite literally does, unless you're blind.

Bump

Cope

how the fuck is Marvel 7th? All that MCU shit is useless

Why won't Any Forums story time more scholastic comics here?

Because they are garbage, even more so than whatever fotm capeshit.

Meanwhile in the Land of the Rising Sun

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Marvel in the crapper.

I don't see it, user. 2 of the 3 stores near me closed down in recent years and the people I talk to at the one I'm going have decreased in numbers and their pull lists have gotten smaller, just like mine. I'm only pulling 2 comics right now and I'm only really interested in pulling two more come march, 2 of these 4 will be minis.

>no answer

You shouldn't be surprised, stop taking the shitposting of a few dedicated shills on Any Forums as gospel.

Bump

>"B-but comics are dead guys!!"

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People still bought comics in 2020.
I bought comics in 2020. It wouldn't literally be zero.

With old titles, usually self-contained (Watchmen, Year One, Sandman, the Elseworlds, etc). The new garbage they produce every month does NOT sell. Nobody gives a rat's ass about the events or whatever attention-grabbing gimmick they pull out.

American capeshit is dying, which is what fluoride-fed YouTubers mean when they say "comics are dying".
American indies are doing better than ever and they have great titles if you're willing to look. Hell, I'll recommend some publishers to check out: Scout Comics, Aftershock Comics, Alterna Comics, Vault Comics, AWA Studios, Ablaze Comics.
Second, European comics practically ignore the rest of the world and don't give a shit. 2000 AD is still alive and well, the Frenchies are publishing albums left and right, and the Italians I think haven't stopped publishing their Segio Bonelli titles since they started (Zagor, Dylan Dog, etc,).
Fuck the Any Forumsutists who need to tell us "comics are dying" to feel validated.

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>fluoride-fed
Is this some sort of weirdo Any Forums expression or something?

>rent free
Do you also check for Any Forums under your bed before sleeping?
It's not an expression from anywhere that I'm aware of, but I did base it off of the "fluoride stare" meme I've seen somewhere.

How is that possible? I got a good chunk of Immortal Hulk from my LCS in 2020.

user, they're not real. You need to wake up.

>he actually fucks the car
You gave me what I wanted Hill, Bravo

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Hill must be a fan of TLC.

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>People still bought comics in 2020
That graph is specifically for the Summer of 2020.
Direct Market industry stats track new items that are shipped. Diamond shut down during this period, and so did most comic shops along with the rest of retail considered non-essential. So that number is literally 0.
>But what about trades in bookstores?
Outwardly, Marvel and DC were showing solidarity with retailers by stopping publication. But the reality of it is, Marvel and DC cannot afford to print books while their primary retail outlet was shut down. They cannot print most of their books because the primary printer (Transcontinental, I think?) was shut down. They cannot change to overseas printers because that's a process that needs to be planned months ahead; surface/ocean freight takes weeks.
>So how was manga able to continue selling throughout the entire year and beat 2019?
Manga kept publishing. They behaved like real book publishers throughout the pandemic. Books were sold online and delivered through the mail system. Schedules were not changed and stock was always on hand because that's what book publishers are supposed to do.

>all these anons who think there flat out wasn't any publishing or distribution of comics in 2020

As if I need further proof that this board literally does not read comics.

Does it really matter if comics have smaller profits? Even if the industry shrinks, it's not going to disappear.
I think people look at comic movie revenue and assume the books should also be making a $600 million profit.

>Even if the industry shrinks, it's not going to disappear.
No, but it's a huge waste of resources that could go elsewhere.

I'll point you to this. I don't understand why this should be shocking to you, since this only happened just under 2 years ago. These stats track comics *shipped.* Diamond stopped shipping. Publishers stopped publishing. So that number is zero.
Of course some comic shops that managed to remain open, as well as online retailers, had books on hand to sell. But those book were counted the moment they were shipped the prior month. You can't count them twice just to make yourself feel better about comics.

Comics are a huge waste of resources by definition. They're just luxury items.

>So did most
That's not enough to make it literally zero. Unless this is ONLY Diamond, in which case the 2021 numbers are now even more questionable, considering what happened to Diamond last year.

>Manga kept publishing
because Japan handled the pandemic FAR better than the US

Japan is an extremely hierarchical, very conformist, small, homogenous country. Shit's a lot easier to control than a small state like New York, let alone the entire US.

My point is that publishers keep producing shit that nobody (except for the fanatic audience obsessed with sprawling, contradictory continuities) even bothers to read.

How is IDW nearly going bankrupt?

That's just not true. If nothing but capeshit sold then there wouldn't be Image, there wouldn't be the Animosity series, or the Grimm universe from Zenoscope. Just because it's obscure doesn't mean nobody reads it. Obviously someone does or all these indies would've ceased to exist. They're not like Marvel or DC who dig into their pimps' pockets anytime they have a colossal failure.

What's the significance in isolating summer sales?

With "publishers", I mean DC and Marvel. I'm going as to what said.

>They're not like Marvel or DC who dig into their pimps' pockets anytime they have a colossal failure.
Every month they keep going the same path with worthless monthly books without readers is a fucking failure.

>How is IDW nearly going bankrupt?
Profit = Sales - Costs

It doesn't matter how good your sales are if they're eaten up by the costs.

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>Unless this is ONLY Diamond
Of course it's only Diamond. Comichron does direct market estimates. The direct market *was* Diamond until DC moved on.
You can't mix comic sales data with bookstore data because comic sales data tracks comics *shipped*. Any comic you bought from a comic shop in Summer 2020 were shipped and counted before Summer 2020.
I'm not talking about Japanese manga. I'm talking about local US publishers that publish manga. It's not the content that allowed them to keep going, it's the business model.

>huge waste of resources
What exactly? The paper to print physical copies? You know how many flyers and junk-mail is cranked out all day, every day around the country? Literally hundreds of tons. Maybe more. I used to work in news paper publishing so I got a sense of it, but there is probably even more than I think. Could be thousands of tons daily. Paper that goes straight into the trash without even being read.

None. It's lying with statistics. They're just presenting data in a way that makes things look better.

My bad, in that case you're right. Compared what the Big Two used to sell back in the day, their current numbers are pathetic. Superman used to sell millions of issues a month once, if I remember right. Yeah, now he's got competition from video games, movies, streaming and so on. But that only means they haven't adapted. Hard agree on the failure in that case.

>if you only compare summers and only diamond it kind of looks like comics might be doing as expected after a pause in distribution.
Ok? Why are graphs exclusively used to mislead people with arbitrary criteria?

Human resources. Writers, pencillers, inkers and colorists. Manga doesn't even use the latter and kicks US publishers' shit every month.

All of those people could be doing much better things than this month's mandatory Fantastic Four issue or whatever.

>You know how many flyers and junk-mail is cranked out all day, every day
The difference is that junk mail is distributed for free. Comics are produced with the intent to make a profit out of each sale.

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junk mail uses poor quality paper

Here's your indie comics.

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Well, "sir", your mother is of ill repute!

>Does it really matter if comics have smaller profits?
The answer depends on how you define the comic book industry.
If you define the comic industry as the independent comic shops that make up the direct market, then yes. Pro-comic shop people are desperately holding onto floppies because that's the one item they have a defacto monopoly on. If comics shift towards trade paperback releases because margins on singles shrink, these shops will come into direct competition with major book and online retailers. Some will survive, most will not. It will be a replay of what Best Buy did to mom and pop music stores, and what Amazon did to Best Buy.

Because they're usually posted by people trying to push an agenda.
It's why I like stuff like NPD and Famitsu and Oricon, because they actually track everything and have raw numbers for you to analyze (for a few).
Anything that relies on insane extrapolation of estimates based on 2% of the market can be completely ignored.

Bump

>Still growing even with better data
Lol

Bookscan/Comichron is garbage. They extrapolate numbers to fit their narrative.

So which data do you use?

No it doesn't. It literally shows an upward trend lmao.

>it literally shows an upward trend lmao.
Are you literally blind?

Are you reading it backwards? Point to me where it shows a downward trend

>Comic stores in 2016: Almost $600 million
>Comic stores in 2020: A little over $400 million

>Comic books in 2015: Around $400-$450 million
>Comic books in 2020: Under $300 million

I ask again, are you literally blind?

>"B-but comics are dead guys!!" gottem posts.
>gets btfo by Manga sales in every single one.

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board has been reduced to styoritiming new cape shit only

>The big two makes most of their money off of floppy sales.
lmao
at 20k per title?

Most of the comics now are from Book Channel and it still shows them going up...?

The book channel sales breakdown can be seen in .
Most of those sales are from kid's comics and manga.
DC, Marvel, Dark Horse's comics side, and Image combined can't even compete with Viz alone in terms of revenue, and those 4 plus IDW, Boom!, Dynamite, Oni Press, and Hyperion still get bodied by Viz alone in terms of unit sales.

IDW is nearly going under. It should not count.

How does that prove the industry is dying?

Actually, we have a pretty nice breakdown of all the comic publishers in the Book Channel, so we can see their individual growth.
Here's DC.

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IDW
I'm surprised that they seem to be facing such insane financial troubles considering how well they've been doing in terms of sales, but I guess licensing is just that expensive.

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Is a domestic industry really healthy if the only things pulling in money are a specific kind of product and foreign media from the other side of the planet?

Hyperion

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Art doesn't really work when owned by a corporation. You're always going to get the same creatively bankrupt "safe" product.

Meanwhile creator owned manga exude beauty and creativity.

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Image

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Marvel

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Dynamite

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Boom!

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Dark Horse comics

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Sometimes you want a McBurger, sometimes you want a home cooked meal.

Oni Press

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And just for shits and giggles, I'll do the manga publishers too.
Viz

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Kodansha

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>IDW beating Image

Based

It's the Telltale Games situation all over again: they shelled out for the license but didn't do well enough with them, so now they're suffering.
Of course there were other factors at play with Telltale, but that's beside the point.

Yen Press

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Shouldn't be too hard to beat a publisher of unproduced Hollywood scripts.

Dark Horse manga

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Seven Seas

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Vertical

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I'm just glad. I love IDW.

X-men chads, we're still winning

And as a bonus, publishers who mainly publish kid's/family comics alongside their books.
Scholastic

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Penguin Random House

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HarperCollins

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Holtzbrinck

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Andrews McMeel (data incomplete)

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Harry N. Abrams

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Hachette Book Group
Note that they also own Yen Press, which is why they rank 6th overall despite only pulling in $5m on the western side.

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People forget WEBTOON is killing the industry.

Simon & Schuster

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Candlewick

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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And the distributor breakdown for western comics.

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>for western comics
Or rather, in general, excuse me.

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Alright, so based on all that info, the general revenue breakdown is as follows;
>"Direct Market Native" comics
$115,955,372
>Manga
$156,115,243
>"Book Channel Native" comics
$182,665,935

Oh, also I forgot D&Q, pic related.

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And for unit sales:
>"Direct Market Native" comics
4,826,689
>Manga
10,382,419
>"Book Channel Native" comics
12,534,000

holy shit, viz is just god damned miles ahead of the competition. like, not even fucking close. DC looks like they have to be producing some runs where if you bought one of the comics, you have a legit chance at being >1% of the sales for that run. Which is fucking insane.

Yep, Viz and Scholastic are basically untouchable.

Do you have a source on that? Source? A source. I need a source. Sorry, I mean I need a source that explicitly states your argument. This is just tangential to the discussion. No, you can't make inferences and observations from the sources you've gathered. Any additional comments from you MUST be a subset of the information from the sources you've gathered. You can't make normative statements from empirical evidence. Do you have a degree in that field? A college degree? In that field? Then your arguments are invalid. No, it doesn't matter how close those data points are correlated. Correlation does not equal causation. Correlation does not equal causation. CORRELATION. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. CAUSATION. You still haven't provided me a valid source yet. Nope, still haven't.

I'm not saying manga doesn't get that swing, I'm saying it's not because it's manga. 'Manganess' isn't driving the sales
All the mangas published by Dark Horse, and the majority of Viz's output, have anime, vidya, toys and merch out the wazzo. In other words, heavily cross promoted, licensed products
If the comics used the same strategy, they could return to prominence, but it's not about that in the land of Blackrock social(ist) agendas

Honestly, I don't think comics could make that comeback to prominence. You can make the argument that the MCU and disney in general is doing a lot of that cross promotional work for Marvel, but the comics division doesn't even stand up.

>All the mangas published by Dark Horse, and the majority of Viz's output, have anime, vidya, toys and merch out the wazzo.
But the thing is, a lot of them don't.
One of the biggest manga of 2021 was Chainsaw Man, which doesn't have an anime at all, and got big basically entirely on word-of-mouth because it's so weird.
Not to mention Marvel has the MCU, which is the biggest film franchise in the modern era, yet in the book channel they sell worse than second and third-rate manga publishers like Kodansha and Yen Press. Hell, even DC's animated movies rarely help increase comic sales.
Cross-promotion can be important, we all saw how it helped boost Invincible's sales, but they're not the end-all be-all.

Are you seriously posting Witch Hat Atelier as an example that goes against big corporations? It is a Kodansha manga, one of the biggest manga publishers in Japan, with an official US branch to boot too. Manga creativity is in fact instigated by the hardcore corporate culture of Japan who doesn’t allow shit that doesn’t sell or find a lucrative niche to keep running, unlike comics which just keep everything running these days, regardless of quality.

>Japan who doesn’t allow shit that doesn’t sell or find a lucrative niche to keep running
Lol, you're so clueless it's actually funny.
Worst yet, you actually think comics publish anything nowadays except capeshit and pseudo capeshit action stories with a dash of guips.

Everything you said is true though.

It's dying. The debate is whether death will come tomorrow, or 20 years from now, but it's dying in a very literal sense.
Comic sales have been stagnant, with some odd peaks and valleys here and there. This might not seem bad until you consider that comics have not kept pace with the rate of inflation, or with population growth. Fewer people are going into comics than the people leaving it because they've died.
Relatively speaking, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population are reading floppies. So even if sales remain level, eventually it'll reach a point where it's no longer a viable commercial concern.

The difference being that manga are still owned by their mangaka.
If Shirahama didn't want to do Witch Hat Atelier anymore she would just end it and move on, Kodansha can't just dig up the corpse and parade it around after the original creator stops making it and try to keep selling it under a completely different artist and writer.
Also, publishers in Japan have a LOT more niche magazines that they publish stuff in.
Kodansha, Shueisha, Hakusensha, etc. etc. all publish all sorts of magazines aimed at all sorts of niches, everything from big shonen stuff aimed at male tweens and general audiences to small yaoi magazines aimed at women to fucking loli smut magazines aimed at perverts to bara magazines aimed at gay men.

>who doesn’t allow shit that doesn’t sell or find a lucrative niche to keep running
... I mean why write a story for no audience?

If a story sells then it provides more readers with entertainment. It's a win-win situation

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>Also, publishers in Japan have a LOT more niche magazines that they publish stuff in.
This reminds me. I've recently been reading up on the newest research into game theory over the last 15 years since I left college, and one super interesting finding discussed in "Super Cooperators" is that cordoning off subcultures and having a robust gatekeeping mechanism that only allows beneficial migration produces healthier populations in the long run.

We've been a melting pot for 100s of years and nothing to show for it.

Yea, it turns out that having specific places or products that appeal to different demographics for everything actually works when it comes to building a healthy industry.
It's a shame that comics only seem to care about children or Twitter.
Or both.

>... I mean why write a story for no audience?
Stories should be written for the creator first and naturally fine an audience that way.

>Stagnation means death
Kek

It does. Why else do you think cover prices have gone up? Comics become more expensive per copy when print runs are lower. Real readership is down.

>Stories should be written for the creator first and naturally fine an audience that way.
Fucking tumblrite.

Gatekeeping storytelling go advertising and corporate influence is bad.

Only the second part of your sentence makes any sense.

To*

Thanks. The other guy is right. When you're writing you need to keep both your enjoyment and the enjoyment of the readers in mind from start to finish. Very few writers are lucky that have an audience for their personal power fantasy fanfics.
To say the story will "naturally" find an audience if you write just for yourself is impractically idealistic at best and naive at worst.

Everybody loves something. If you put something out there, someone will like it. How is that a refutation?

We're talking within the context of a business. You don't want just a handful of people enjoying your work. You want to reach multiple people, so you'll need to tailor it in a specific way. That necessitates doing some things or making some changes that you don't like that are ultimately done to bring in as big of an audience as possible.
As the saying goes: kill your darlings.

>We're talking within the context of a business.
When artwork becomes a business is when it dies. The creators vision is altered and you'll get the most safe and creatively bankrupt product as possible. I'd rather be a small indie artist than have to dumb down my own stuff for a massive company that could just dump me at any moment.

I mean, sure, but if you're a publisher, then no.

>This is everything. East and West.
This is only America vs. Japan, not East vs. West.
Asterix & Obelix new volume sold 5 million copies.

Plenty of people read it - they just don't pay for it. I know y'all scoff but the Big Two are seriously hurt by piracy and if they weren't backed by enormous corporations and alternate revenue streams they'd have folded years ago.

>Scholastic books
This tells everything about what the comics industry needs to do if they are to survive. Nobody listened to DC and it's a shame they fucked up on an otherwise good idea.

>Asterix & Obelix new volume sold 5 million copies.
*Blocks your path*

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>Scholastic
picture books for toddlers will save comics lmao

In the words of Gabe Newell, piracy is a service issue.
If people aren't willing to pay for your content, then piracy not being an option probably wouldn't get them to pay for it either, they just wouldn't read it at all.

That's great, user. I love comics and I love manga. I hate Americans and their "comic books."

>I love comics and I love manga. I hate Americans and their "comic books."
I think we can all agree that American comics are bordering on genuine cancer.

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>I think we can all agree that American _____ are bordering on genuine cancer.
Yeah

>Comics are for kids again
Based.

We scoff at you because you are making shit up.

The truth of the matter is that nobody cares about the monthly capeshit.

I don't think they ever stopped being for kids really.
It's just that kids read kid's comics, grow up, then just drop comics as a whole, so you end up with very little new blood in the industry, and the YA market is basically completely owned by manga publishers.

I dunno, I follow all the X-Men titles and a few of the Batman books every month but I never buy them. The scan sites are brainless to use.

But it's true if these titles all go away I really don't give a damn. They're not that good.

I always pay for webcomics though. I enjoy them a lot more and feel more of a personal connection with the creators. I'd feel like shit if I stole from them.

that's one man's anecdote

American comics are unoffensive, but I feel like a cock when I don't get the full story when I'm paying money for it. Also the pages are small, printed on shite paper, flimsy and filled with ads.

Marvel and DC recycling the same stories with the same characters for 50+ years and wonder why their shit doesn't sell.

Manga offers entire magical worlds with mythical creatures never seen before.

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Unlike Naruto, which has been going on for 23+ years.

ACKSHUALLY Naruto ended in 2015.
Boruto is about his son.

He's still one of the lead characters though, user! He even got a massive development in the recent chapter!
>Dragon Ball has been going on since 1984

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Sequels like Boruto and Super are literally comic shit.

Recycling stories is what manga does. Otherwise there wouldn’t be 100+ Isekai mangas.

This is like saying that all sci-fi stories are recycled.

23 is less than 50.
And is wrong. It's really closer to 90 years for guys like Superman and Batman. Hell, Spider-man was supposed to be a "young" Superhero when he was created, and his series is turning 60 this year. Yet he still can't hold down a permanent job or get married or do any grownup stuff because Marvel is always trying to send him back to high school.

True, but my point is that it's the same shit at this point. You've got manga that have actual endings, and your standard capeshit like Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piss, that are doing the same shit as cape. Hell, Bleach might even be coming back and people are frothing at the mouth for it

>Recycling stories is what manga does. Otherwise there wouldn’t be 100+ Isekai mangas.
Isekai is a genre, not a story.

But I got good news for you. There are plenty of other genres. They've even got capeshit like One Punch Man and My Hero Academia.

Bleach isn't coming back, it's just the anime adaption that's being finished.

it's not the same shit because all of those (except db lol) are working towards an end even if they get revived. Being long as shit isn't the problem with capeshit to begin with

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Well, we did get that new manga chapter recently.

Get back to me when 100+ sci-fi stories with nearly identical themes come out within five years of each other.

Difference is that Naruto, Dragon Ball, and One Piece have lasted so long because their creators wanted to keep doing them.
Not exactly the same as Superman, Batman, and Spiderman continuing in perpetuity long after their original creators died because they've become brands rather than characters.
We all saw recently what happens when a mangaka dies with Miura, it upsets people but Berserk is pretty much done, because the creator is dead, and it was his property based on his writing, not just some product.

It is not. Every shounen author will be dead one day and with them their series. Sure Boruto and Super are soulless cash grabs but at least their creators are some what involved with them and Kishimoto tried at least to do something new.

Toriyama wanted DBZ to end like fifty times.

>Tori wanted to keep doing DB
KEK

Toriyama doesn't want to keep doing DB, but he does want to keep making money, so he keeps doing DB regardless.

>Boku no Hero has canon side-story ongoing by different creators
Actual capeshit money tactic

Tori hasn't even actually done DB for years, he just gives token nods in occasional staff meetings and every once in a while doodles a character concept here and there...

You must not know much about sci-fi, or books in general.
There are literally hundreds of shitty, generic sci-fi books released every month.
amazon.com/s?bbn=25&rh=n:25,p_n_publication_date:1250226011&dc&qid=1643506260&rnid=1250225011&ref=lp_25_nr_p_n_publication_date_0
That's what happens in an industry that's not on its death bed and thus has more than 10 publishers releasing anything.

>Every shounen author will be dead one day and with them their series
Kek. Being this naive.
None of the really major modern action shounen authors known in the West are dead yet, but Tezuka, Monkey Punch (Lupin III), and the authors of Golgo 13, Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan have all had their series continued after their deaths.
Don't idealize the Japanese system, it's notoriously explotaitive of its creators as well. It's just they rebel less because the standard Japan mentality is to go along with what your authority figures say.

The manga for all of those actually stopped when their creators died, they might get movies and games and stuff but the actual manga are all done and haven't gotten new volumes since the mangaka's death, with the exception of Golgo 13 because the mangaka just recently died (September of last year) and made it clear that he wanted his series to be continued after his death.
You do realize that artists have these great things called estates, right?
They still make new LOTR shit, but Tolkien is long dead and those books will see no new content even though his son dying basically resulted in the estate selling the TV rights to Amazon to produce the garbage they're no doubt making.

Oof
I'm sure Invincible being big for them in 2021 is a huge load off their back.

I still think it's not a good 1:1 comparison for any of those except Dragonball, which I'll freely admit is a garbage series.
For Naruto to be like capeshit, Bort would have to end with a universe reboot where it was all a dream or something and Naruto has to sell his happy ending and marriage for dumb reasons and goes back to being 12 again and god damn it one more day is the worst fucking thing.

>go to book store, most manga buyers were women
>Go to my japanese N4, class, half are women
>Even my 20 yo normie sister asked me to buy her the snk manga instead of clothes for christmas
I think the comic industry should start to appeal to females, and I mean actual female not trannies and dykes, they clearly like to spent lots of money on her hobbies

All these seething replies and not a single one can prove OP wrong.

Wait hang on, what is an item , according to this report ? What is a title ?

Scholastic's main advantage is that they have the schools monopolised.

I don't get the obsession with comic preorders. Why are all stats so focused on them?

It gives a good pre indication of a series popularity. What else would you use before hand to know if a comic is doing well before the its even released ?

I would wait until it's out and look at Bookscan or some other point-of-sale numbers?

What do you mean by direct market native comics? Are those comics based on products originally sold through comicbook shops (like Marvel and DC) but sold through book channels? Or is this sales from comic shops?

What were the asterisks for in 2015 and 2016?

Also is this chart showing a positive trend? They're producing more titles but the sales per title are cut in half. Doesn't that mean that there's half the audience buying their books now than in 2007?

The former.
>"Direct Market Native"
DC
Marvel
Image
IDW
Dark Horse comics
Dynamite
Boom!
Oni Press
Hyperion
D&Q
>Manga
Viz
Kodansha
Yen Press
Dark Horse manga
Seven Seas
Vertical
>"Book Channel Native"
Scholastic
Penguin Random House
HarperCollins
Holtzbrinck
Andrews McMeel
Harry N. Abrams
Hachette
Simon & Schuster
Candlewick
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

These aren't hard and fast categories, just based on what these companies primarily produce and making it easier to categorize them at a glance. The Book Channel publishers mainly publish (obviously) books, while the Direct Market publishers mainly publish comics, and the manga publishers mainly produce manga, since technically they do publish some non-manga material (like Solo Leveling from Yen Press).

>What were the asterisks for in 2015 and 2016?

>Important: in 2015 and 2016 I received lists that appeared to be lightly edited, potentially down to “books that are in print at the publisher level only” (obviously, there’s still stock out there on the shelves of stores and in warehouses that is not “in print” per se).
>Those two years are asterisked to reflect that!
comicsbeat.com/tilting-at-windmills-285-looking-at-npd-bookscan-2020/
All the data is from here.
>Doesn't that mean that there's half the audience buying their books now than in 2007?
I think it's more just that their audience only wants specific books, so they're publishing a lot of stuff that's just not selling, at least in the book channel.

Most of the time, unless author goes full retard.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that Demon Slayer can't inroduce any new worldbuilding because it would interfiere with Naruto or Dragon Ball.
Normal people don't preorder comic books.

Thanks for the link. I wish this were easier to read rather than scrolling forever but it's a really interesting article. 2017 seems to be when the best place to start analysis rather than 2007. This is all raw data; I wish someone from one of the many news sites would take it and do some analysis.

>I wish someone from one of the many news sites would take it and do some analysis.
This IS someone from one of the many news sites doing some analysis, all this data is from NPD Bookscan.
It's just that most sites don't care about comic news and info, hence why comicsbeat is the one doing it.

I meant analysis as in interpretation of the facts. This is someone sorting raw data for information relevant to the industry and then saying whether it's up or down over the previous year. This is all fact and not interpretation. Not saying this isn't incredible work; just saying I'd rather a follow-up article going over the data with some background instead of another list of random shit.

>cheering that manga is outselling comics
yay more normies infesting japanase culture, can't wait for their reaction when they see their favorite mangaka made loli porn!

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Ehh, they'll bitch on Twatter for a bit and then completely forget about it while all the actual fans continue to enjoy their work.
Pretty much every mangaka does porn nowadays unless they're an already-established big name from pre-Y2K.

>Scholastic books btfoing everyone
Book Fair boys, the reign continues

I could believe comics are somewhat growing or at least staying alive just from the numbers and the likelihood that a push to online and trades is finally starting to pay off (like everyone said it would about fifteen years ago) but if you asked me for any anecdotal evidence, I would not be able to bring up anything.

All the stores are closing around me, I live literally right next to Frank and Sons, the biggest comic outlet in the US and the stalls get middling traffic. I hear no one talk about any comics other than when they have coomer stuff or they are webtoons/web comics. I can't think of the last DC, Marvel, or even Image comic that got any major traction other than like Incredible Hulk and The Three Jokers/Dark Universe shit.

Bring CLAMP back, they were good.

>When artwork becomes a business is when it dies.
Wrong, and I can point to the entirety of the comics medium from the US to Europe to Japan as a refutation. Did you know that weekly shounen mangaka are worked like horses and have only free hours in the week? Not free days, free hours. The rest of the time is spent working or sleeping. And did you know they have numerous assistants that help with art duties who have no input on the story? All the fans of Dragon Ball, Jojo, One Piece et. al. definitely don't seem to think the business ruined the art.
And then there's people like Jack Kirby and Jim Shooter who knew you needed to make a product, but make the best possible one for your audience at the same time.
A business is a hierarchy, and a hierarchy is an organization of people who do specific jobs to attain a goal. Do you really think Nate Piekos gets up every day filled with joy that he needs to letter Bumblefuck #11, the longest running indie of 2020? Fuck no, but he does it the best he can and his lettering still looks great.
>I'd rather be a small indie artist than have to dumb down my own stuff for a massive company that could just dump me at any moment.
>implying indie creators have no editors
>implying indie creators don't try to appeal to as many people as possible even within their niches
You seem to think all business is bad for art, and that only when artists are free of responsibility and pressure that they're going to make beautiful works of art. Which just isn't true. Some of the best works of art on the planet were done as commissions for clients who dictated what they wanted put in. I can also say that with some authority because some of my best work as an artist was done because of commissions where the client dictated what they wanted to see.