Yeah! X-Men Gold is in the top three. X-Men Gold 30 is the top seller. That's excellent.
X-Men Blue sales went down after the return of the fake O5, not surprising though.
Yeah! X-Men Gold is in the top three. X-Men Gold 30 is the top seller. That's excellent.
X-Men Blue sales went down after the return of the fake O5, not surprising though.
I agree with you.
There are just too many X-books around and it's confusing in terms of continuity.
One X-writer doesn't know what the other is writing.
I would think there are only 4 X-teams.
X-Men Gold
X-Men Blue
X-Men Red
Astonishing X-Men (I hope they can rename this to X-Men 'color' to be more consistent with the rest).
New Mutants dead souls is really just a very short mini and will be forgotten quickly after its finale.
sure. according to this site i was off by 6 million copies.
https://www.zapkapowcomics.com/top-1...ng-comic-books
This is a valid point. The New 52 did simplify continuity a lot, and restore some characters to more classic states. I was sad about the Batgirls and Oracle.
Even so, I sometimes wonder if X-Men would benefit from a very soft reset. I'm not proposing washing away continuity or eliminating characters, but rather writing stories that maybe rely less on knowing a character's history, and focus more on the core of who the X-Men are (what Westworld would call their keystones). I'll give you an example. X-Men Gold #31 relies heavily on the reader's knowledge of history. Unless you know about Rachel as a hound and, to a lesser degree, the rest of Days of Future Past, the story is opaque. It also does a cheap trick, where it pretends at first to be from Kitty's perspective, but is really Rachel's delusion. Compare that to Iceman, where it touches lightly on aspects of Bobby's history but doesn't rely on them and tells you everything you need to know about him to follow the story.
I know the obvious counterargument is that Gold is outselling the rest of the books, but I don't think it would do worse with a more new reader friendly approach that still respected history.
Yeah, but I don't think those 7 million copies were a sign of much more than the rampant speculation in the 90s. I'm sure some collectors picked up hoarder-level numbers of all five covers in the hopes that they would get rich off them in the future. There is probably some dude with a thousand copies in his attic, mournfully regretting his choices.
Last edited by DearMachine; 07-10-2018 at 04:41 AM.
That's a whole lot of ifs, and I'm still left highly doubtful. Comics =/= novels, as they're even more stigmatized, to say the least. I'm not at liberty to counter your claims in detail, at this time. But suffice it to say, anything you suggest would merely be a stopgap measure and only be staving off the inevitable, IMO. The irrefutable existence of the larger trend(s), belie your cherry-picking & highlighting of the GoT books:
NewRepublic.com, The fate of literary publishing in the twenty-first century, in three numbers.
For good or ill, as the old saying goes, ya can't fight progress. Change is the only constant, and nothing stays the same, forever. The way I see it, books, periodicals, and yes, comics, are fighting a losing battle. They have been for a long time, but in the modern, digital age, they've lost ground ever faster.... these numbers also reflect a troubling decline in literary fiction more broadly. The Association of American Publishers reported last year that adult fiction sales fell 7.8 percent in 2016, compared to the year before—and have fallen a staggering 23 percent since 2012. Franzen’s sales are dropping, but not because of his essays about birding. They’re dropping because the days of the novel that sells a million copies are behind us.
Last edited by Heroine Addict; 07-10-2018 at 05:16 AM.
They do. They have freaking Nnedi Okorafor writing for them. She is a huge deal in science fiction. Binti alone has won the Hugo and Nebula in the last 2-3 years. Ta-Nehisi Coates is also an impressive coup for them.
More traditionally, they have Gail Simone, Jason Aaron, Tom Taylor, PAD, Charles Soule, and Chip Zdarsky, all of whom are considered among the better writers at the moment. They also have Mariko Tamaki (whose indie work is amazing; I love This One Summer), and Kelly Thompson.
I'm better at assessing writers than artists, since that's my own area of training. I'm sure someone else can chime in with artists. But I think they have a better writing team than DC.
That article is specifically about literary fiction, though. It would not surprise me to discover that literary fiction was on a decline, but that genre fiction was on a rise. Literary fiction often requires a degree of focus and commitment that's pretty hard to achieve when you're busy and overworked and stressed about the world. By way of contrast, genre fiction usually provides an escape. Anecdotally, I probably read like two literary novels a year, but three to four genre novels a month. And I'm in one of the categories of people - Ph.D in English - who are probably most likely to read literary fiction.
In fact, numbers from 2017 suggest that may be the case: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...w-in-2017.html Fantasy, Mystery/Detective, and Horror show growth. Suspense holds steady. SF has a tiny decline, but that may be because of the releases that year. Romance has an interesting drop, and I wonder if there's a shift to self-published books going on there, which can provide for very niche audiences.
Fair point, but the statistics I highlighted from AAP, were about adult fiction in general. So it doesn't change the fact that it's dropped almost a full fourth, in the last five years or so. And more to my point, from your link, the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Magic category fell 10% in juvenile fiction. While there's the faintest of hope here & there, I'm still not all that encouraged, and not sure any of it suggests a brighter future for comics. For instance, from the above:
... Graphic novels, which had an 11% increase between 2015 and 2016—the second biggest gain in adult fiction in that year—saw sales fall 5% last year.
Last edited by Heroine Addict; 07-10-2018 at 05:51 AM.
As Heroine pointed out, the problem is fragmentation. There are no more 1,000,000 selling novels.
The audience has so much choice, not just comics, but in all entertainment. Remember when there were only 3 networks? And only the best shows got picked up to air?
Can you Imagine any book selling 100,000 consistently?
Maybe Morrison and Jim Lee on Xmen. (A dream come never)
Even then, you will have a ton of fans, not liking Morrison. And then a ton of fans not liking Lee.
Fans are going to like and buy what they like. As long as books can be in the top 100, they’ll be fine. And as pointed out, around 20% of all comics in June were Xmen related.
Now let’s go CB, you need to make Xmen an imprint and find someone to lead it.
I said that it might be different, not that it would be There are two points that I'd make:
1. Your original statement that there is a decline in attention span. That is not something that is possible to judge by book, comics and periodical sales in any event, because people are consuming entertainment in all kinds of different forms. So I'd question whether evidence for such a statement could be anything other than anecdotal to begin with. So I'll introduce another anecdote Television drama, in particular, has featured an unprecedented quantity of demanding drama series over the last 20 years - certainly a greater number than in my childhood, where the more demanding dramas in the UK (such as Edge of Darkness, or literary adaptations, such as A Jewel in the Crown) were spoken of in hushed tones.
I don't, in short, believe that people are rejecting comic books because they lack the attention span to appreciate them.
2. There are particular reasons why comic books are suffering significantly, even in comparison to other written material. What, after all, were AvX, or Civil War 2, or Battle of the Atom, or the "marriage" of Kitty and Colossus, or any other of the events or mini-events or crossovers, other than to attempt to maximise sales among the currently existing readership? Comic books are facing a greater challenge than many other forms of entertainment because while the skill of the talent may be considerable, the superhero genre itself is stale, the outlets of distribution are consciously limited, the sales techniques are geared towards current readers buying multiple periodicals, and the fictional universes set a higher entry for the new reader than you'd find in the works of George Eliot. I honestly don't think this is that controversial.
But whether it's possible to expand the interest in the genre to new readers while not losing existing ones... why, there's the question.
Do they count overseas sales as in Europe and Asia?
I think that there are many talented writers and artists working for both Marvel and DC. Not only that, but the genre is fairly mature and many of the techniques used sophisticated.
That said - and it may be partly because I am myself getting on in years - but the superhero comics genre does feel very tired. That in itself is hardly surprising. It's over 70 years since the start of the Golden Age, over 50 since the start of the Silver, over 30 since the height of the superhero writing career of Alan Moore. That's many many years of continuous publication and artistic endeavour, and it needs a hell of a lot more than a fresh coat of paint.