For the record, I only personally know of a few guys who have used steroids. (Sorry. I needed to defend the business.) I know more than a few others who are wholly clean, and will not even smoke or drink.Then it becomes "why work harder now when you can just take steroids later?" until finally it's just "take steroids all the time". Nobody wants to watch sports full of juiced-out maniacs for long (except wrestling, oh, wait, I said "sport", sorry Dom ).
Pick up "War Within" if you can find it. DW's "Armada" series was also pretty good.(their TF backs are way wider selection than anyone else in the area, but also have a lot of DW mixed in).
The original Crisis was not viewed this negatively. (And, how did Crisis ruin comic events for you?)How can they ever forger something they've NEVER known? They've created the line-wide reboot event and suffered these exact same fuckups, WORSE EVERY TIME I MIGHT ADD, 3 times at least, and have learned nothing for those troubles - instead actively doing it again and again as if it wasn't a huge fuckup that turned the DC brand into a joke even outside the comics industry and faithful.
Until the 90s, the comics industry as a whole understood that first issues sold higher and that new titles eventually settled into a "natural sales level". In fact, up until the 90s books with low numbers were assumed to sell worse than high-numbered books. (The higher-numbered books had longevity and thus more credibility.)
That was forgotten in the 90s, and books were expected to be running "first issue" sales numbers every issue. By the end of the decade, the publishers seemed to have remembered how thing really worked. The guy at the local comic shop pointed out that most of DC's New 52 are actually selling at healthy levels and consistently after making allowances for the books "settling" after the initial curiosity value wears off.
You are giving comics and sci-fi fans too much credit for being thoughtful and discriminating. Buying something because it is "____________" is as bad as not buying something for not being "________________". Comic fans will buy out of habit or absurd devotion to a given character more than anything else. (Marvel fans are actually known for being a bit worse about this than DC fans.) They are likely to go along for the ride for the cheap trick, even when they know it is a cheap trick.They are going to be smart and wise to cheap tricks, they are going to be discriminating and thoughtful about the way they take in advertising and the way they shop - in other words, they are impossible for lazy, corporate assholes to tempt out of their own boxes. So as the audience ages out and thins out from disinterest, readership goes down and the books are too isolated to draw in much new audience.
But, when they leave, they are not likely to come back.
I currently have 6 books on my obligatory list. That works out to ~$20 a month plus compilations and random books I pick up. I am willing to spend $3 or $4 per book. But, I want my money's worth in terms of writing. I would rather spend $4 for a quicker, but better, read than even 50c for a bad read. BEvery time the price goes up, a certain amount of readers are lost. Then the price needs to be raised to keep up the profit margin so the book continues to make money, and to cover employment and production costs. The price goes up and more people drop the book. It's a vicious cycle.
I've been reading comics since 1989. I remember paying 75 cents each for many of DC's mainline books. While I understand that inflation is always a factor, it's not hard to look back at those prices and look at today's $3.00 and $4.00 books and question whether I'm still getting the same value for a book that costs three to five times as much money. In most cases, the answer is no, and I suspect I'm not the only one looking at things that way.
20 years ago, comics that were worth picking up ranged between $1.50 and $2. Some of the more expensive books were $2.50. About ten years back, comics were creeping up tothe $3 mark, with $4 or $5 not being unheard of, if still rare. By that logic, comics ranging between $3 and $4 is about right. But, because we are adults, we "feel" it more.
Comics are not the only thing that is going up faster than inflation though.Obviously some price issues are at play there, but we're at $4 a book, that's nearly 300% higher than inflation says it should be, it is hard to see where that money is going from our point of view
Printing techniques and paper type do matter. I am not familiar enough with the technical details. But, there is a certain "weirdness" to some reprints where the publishers did not correct for that sort of thing (printing old content on newer paper for example).When I came up, the books were on pulp instead of glossy pages, and there were sponsored ads spread throughout the book instead of mostly in-house ads at the end, and there were less colors available. Comics publishers still adhered to the CCA. There were less titles, and less competing publishers. There were more distributors and more non-specialty locations carried the books.
Publications are supposed to make money through ads. Circulation should never pay more than distribution and/or printing. DC comics runs car ads. That had damned well better be bringing in the bucks.Would I accept ads throughout the books again to save money? Not likely, they disrupt the reading flow and they're generally not valuable to the advertiser at this point by how few eyes will stop on them.
Dom
-admits to be planning a purge at the moment.
