I’m pulling The Flash because of Wally, when Barry eventually takes over again I’m dropping. The only other book that would get my money is a JSA title..........but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
AKA FlashFreak
Favorite Characters:
DC: The Flash (Jay & Wally), Starman- Jack Knight, Stargirl, & Shazam!.
MARVEL: Daredevil, Spider-Man (Peter Parker), & Doctor Strange.
Current Pulls: Not a thing!
I'm starting to think that comics are dead in the water long term.
Their price is to high for young teenagers to be able to buy enough of them to keep their interest.
In my time $10 could get you around ten comics.
Today it gets your around two. What young teen in their right mind is going to blow their allowance on two comic books.
You need to buy at least 5 or 6, to get interested in the DCU long term.
People read comics but they are not reading them in a way that's financially beneficial for the publishers. Like manga, most young people just pirate them with only a few of those actually bothering to buy them later on.
I know there are different kinds of readers out there, but I feel a lot of them fall into this category. Start with one or two books, find something that hooks you in, start to read more books, get to a level where you feel in the know. So not only is that a certain number of books, but it is often a certain percentage of books, whether in the whole line or a particular character. Once you feel like you can't keep up, you tend to just drop out altogether.
I don't have kids (thank goodness), but if $10-15 used to buy 8 to 10 comic books and now it only buys 2, you parents out there are not keeping up with the high cost of inflation. Like, at all.
Seriously, the last time $10-15 bought 8-10 comics was decades ago. Are you telling me that children's allowances haven't grown at all in all that time?
I'm not arguing that kids can afford today's prices, btw. I know they can't. I'm only reacting to what I think is probably a bad metric by which to measure their buying power.
My intro to Batman was primarily through Batman: The Animated Series which lead me to picking up his comics, starting with the tie in comics to the animated show which were appropriate for my age as well as the 90's Grant/Monech/Dixon runs which skewered older but I still enjoyed and when I got older I read TDK Returns and Year One. I feel that's how it should be, have comics for every age group. I got into Marvel through Spider-man. I picked up both Ultimate Spider-man which featured a younger, hipper Spider-man and 616 Spider-man who was a young adult and Spider-Girl which featured a much older Peter Parker with his daughter as the lead. I was never confused about them being set in different universe's and never got the excuse that an older hero was somehow unrelatable or the publisher's insistence on not using the multiverse to explore a universe where the heroes are older and their kids were now the lead.
AKA FlashFreak
Favorite Characters:
DC: The Flash (Jay & Wally), Starman- Jack Knight, Stargirl, & Shazam!.
MARVEL: Daredevil, Spider-Man (Peter Parker), & Doctor Strange.
Current Pulls: Not a thing!
Agreed, the first time I quit comics was the result of one of those major crossover events. It felt like I needed to buy every DC comic to keep up, so I said fudge this and quit.
Piracy is another reason comics are dead in the water. With one google/bing search I can find an offshore website that allows me to read any comic I want. Unless they figure out how to shut then down, the comic industry will become the new music industry.
I had inflation in the back of my head when I was writing this, but....even if you adjusted for the price of inflation I think comic books have become too expensive for a young teen to purchase enough of them to keep their interest.
Pirating is huge where I come from but the only way to stop piracy is to provide a better service than the pirates. That's why I'm a huge proponent of streaming and initiatives like Shonen Jump and DCU Infinite and hope they become more available in other regions. I've seen even the most ardent supporters of pirating decide it's simply easier to pay a Netflix subscription than risk downloading a virus or squint at grainy cam footage of a movie.