/gamergatehq/ - #GamerGate Headquarters

>>314787

> Both companies are losing established readers …

>… established readers who have sufficient disposable income that they can afford to buy what they like to read. A significant portion of these readers are trimming their title lists by 50% or more because they don’t enjoy the current output.

Pandering to sjws = kill off your dedicated user-base. Watch the profits plummet!

When will companies realize that sjws don't buy the product -at least not in the numbers of their existing consumers? By all means, open up a new line/product to cater for the sj niche, but not at the expense of your flagship products that keep you in business.

You really don't need a business qualification to work this out.

Stunned silence for full minute, G Willow Wilson, Ms Marvel writer. Check her twitter funny

>>315059

It's strange, and pushing paki kebab as the ultimate Inhuman is very stressful to me. She's basically Plastic Man. She's pushed hard in the new tablet game Marvel Avengers Academy too.

I wasn't aware of Carol Danvers going SJW, she's about as un-PC a character as can be. Drunk, whore, problems with authority.

>>315069

If you're interested, it's like the Simpsons Tapped Out or Family Guy's, but set in a school where the old adult Avengers are teens and Nick Fury is the Dean/Principle, and it has a lot of dating sim elements. Some characters like Vision end up very endearing.

>>315074

>>315067

It is a hilarious trainwreck in slow-motion.

>Marvel is aiming to make a whole movie based around it

>>315052

>G Willow Wilson

In @gwillowwilson's house; Koolaid flows from the tap like water.

She like a Poe's Law parody of hyper-SJW religious nonsense, but horrifyingly real.

…and to think, Marvel hired her over some person who actually wanted to write comicbook stories; I.E. someone who's actually qualified to do the job she's being paid to do; because she filled so many diversity tokenism checkboxes.

>>315042

Yeh you're right - 'appease' them is a better way of saying it. Marvel + DC are big enough to create new titles and keep the existing ones without altering them -which would keep the existing fan base happy. No doubt any new socjus inspired titles would be trumpeted so loudly as a 'win' by the sjws that they'd lose sight of the fact that the stuff they complained about carried on as normal for the fans.

I've no idea what Marvel or DC's social media presence is like in terms of sending feedback -any comicfags here? Or anyone know any comicfags who stopped reading cos of sj dogma?

>>315042

>>315074

>completely ignoring her previously established personality and problems

….which takes time (and effort) to establish and is why fans like the characters they do. These character traits also act as ongoing storylines in their own right -sjws turn up and basically erase the character's history and personality. If sjws want specific types of characters -they could just create their own.

>>315153

All right, boys and girls, let me tell you a story about Marvel's (and, to a smaller degree maybe, also DC's, but I'm not an expert on them) businness model that makes absolutely nobody happy.

As with everything that's wrong with comics, it all started in the nineties. At the start of the decade, people started hearing about how rare comics featuring first appearances of popular heroes – Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27, the debut issues of Superman and Batman respectively, among others – sold for some serious money (some pages say a AC#1 sold for a million, while according to others it only sold for around $10k – and the latter is probably the truth, seeing as how some other sites are telling me that the first time a comicbook actually sold for a million was a few years ago, and it was another copy of Action Comics #1).

And then, new #1s started coming out: first, the adjectiveless Spider-Man (there were other, older Spidey comics, but they all had an adjective in the title: Amazing, Spectacular, the like) series, created by Todd McFarlane (no relation to Family Guy's Seth McFarlene, as far as I know) in 1990 was hyped up by Marvel as a collectors item, published with three different covers (we call them "Variants"), and sold about 2.5 million copies. A year later, an adjectiveless X-Men series by series veteran writer Chris Claremont and hot-stuff artist Jim Lee (no relation to Stan Lee) was published with five different, interlocking variant covers, and sold a whopping 8.1 million copies – still a record to this day. At the same time another X-series, New Mutants, was rebranded as X-Force, starting with a new #1, written and illustrated by Rob Liefeld, he of giant and physically impossible guns and strategical foot covering fame, and I'm sure it did pretty good as well.

Now, let's put two and two together. In hindsight it's pretty obvious that those sales numbers were because of people who heard the stories of #1s fetching crazy money, assumed that the value of those new #1s would spike as well in a few years and decided to buy a bunch of them as an "investement".

Which, of course is completely retarded if you know the basics of economy. The old comics were valuable because between wear and tear, comic book collecting in those years not being all that popular, and most of the REALLY old ones being scrapped for the war effort, the ones in good condition were actually rare. Meanwhile, there were 3 million copies of Spider-Man #1 printed, and most of them winded up in the possesion of collectors taking good care of them. Supply was way more biggererer than demand, but no-one seemed to notice.

For some time, the speculator bubble grew, and Marvel (and DC as well) fed the speculator market even more, with special editions, super-special-awesome holo covers and shit like that. To make matters worse, comic book companies relied more and more on the collectors market, ignoring "actual readers market", because they believed that's where the real money was.

Part of that reasoning was, I'm guessing, the fact that when your comics are distributed by grocery stores, newsstands and other shops like that, you have to buy back the unsold copies. Meanwhile, comic shops – which started popping up everywhere in the nineties because major comicbook distributors like Diamond introduced new, very lax rules about who can create a new shop – worked on a principle called Direct Market: meaning that the stores are BUYING the comics from the publishers, and then sell them to their customers. This is important, and we'll get back to that later.

So anyway, we're in 1992 right now, and shit's getting cray. A bunch of artists working for Marvel, McFarlane, Lee and Liefeld among them, were pissed on their work for hire policy and, thinking that their series popularity had anything at all to dowith them being any good, decided to create their own publishing company, with blackjack and hookers and with them keeping all the rights – Image Comics. That meant, of course, a new slew of #1s for retarded "investors" to buy. There are stories of people – allegedly – buying up whole boxesfull of Youngblood #1, and while I don't think it's possible to actually confirm those stories to be true, they're pretty indicative of what the atmosphere was at the time.

>>315230

And then Superman died.

Needless to say, sales of that comic also reached crazy levels – partially because it was a major story, but partially – and maybe mostly, because if the first appearance of Supes is so valuable, the last one will sell for a lot of dosh in a few years as well, right? And it IS his last appearance, right?

Right?

So yeah, Superman came back after eight months. But by then, we were in 1993 and people stopped caring as much about buying shitloads of comics. The sales dropped rapidly, and because comicbook shops had to buy their stock a couple months in advance, they got hit pretty bad. And since the lax rules I mentioned, many of them went bankrupt before they could reduce their orders. Apparently, about 90% of all comicbook shops folded in that time – and those 10% that didn't, reduced their orders significantly. And that cought the publishers by surprize – they were used to selling a metric shitton more comics, and believing that they would do so for quite a while afterwards, they overinvested. The smaller ones weren't hit THAT hard, since they were, well smaller – since mo' money = mo' problems, one could assume that less money = less problems. DC was already a part of Time Warner for decades by that time and could hope for a bailout, but Marvel took it BAD. I mean, "filing Chapter 11 in 1997" bad.

To save the company, they had to sell the movie right for some of the most popular characters to other studios – namely, Spider-Man to Sony and X-Men to Fox (and a bunch of smaller ones as well). After that, someone at Marvel actually had a good idea and got a bunch of good writers to write good, serious stories. Under the Marvel Knights imprint, Daredevil was put through the wringer repeatedly by Kevin Smith and, later, Brian Michael Bendis, who still cared at the time (You've heard that right. Bendis cared at one point. Yes, that Bendis. The comicbook writer, he used to care). Christopher Priest's Black Panther and Paul Jenkin's Inhumans faced some political turmoil… Punisher came back from the dead because angels or some shit, but at least Garth Ennis took over a few years later, and if there's one thing Ennis is good at writing, is Punisher-type comics. A little bit later Grant Morrison went crazy on the X-Men, as well, and J. Michael Straczynski took Spider-Man in a completely new direction.

But apparently, "pandering" to people that want to read good, engaging stories wasn't enough. In the early 2000s, Marvel decided to pander to Manga fans, and did it in the most ass-backwards way possible. Instead of doing what mangas were doing – a multitude of genres with good art and, for the most part, good storytelling, and in an affordable format, they created a small imprint called Marvel Mangaverse and filled it with every cliche possible – kaijus, ninja clans, sentai, giant robots, I think there were some magical girls as well. They also reached out to a few asian artists to get the art to appeal to mangatards, and sold a few of their teen-oriented series in a smaller, fit-in-a-pocket book format. Therewas even a miniseries set in the mian universe where the Avengers piloted giant robots, because fuck you, that's why.

>>315231

Well, that obviously failed. In the end, Marvel brought in some more actually good writers, like Ed Brubaker or Joss Whedon back when he still had both his hair AND his balls, as well as actually talented artists. At the same time, however, Marvel started publishing major crossover events – company-wide storylines that would shake up the status quo, and therefore, were pretty much required reading for everyone interested. Those existed, of course, ever since the eighties, when DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel's Secret Wars were published, but in the middle of the noughties they really went all out, with a major crossover (and a new "foundation-building" status-quo-presenting kinda-event following it) pretty much every year, with other, smaller ones sprinkled in there as well. Just check this shit out:

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_history_of_Marvel_Comics_crossover_events#2000s

At the same time, Marvel has gone crazy with variant covers – which, as I already mentioned, are alternative covers for the comics they're selling. Nothing other than the front cover (and maybe the back cover, in the rare wraparound cover cases) is different from the regular edition, and therefore are only sought after by collectors. There were even some rare variants, that a retailer could get only after ordering enough copies of the regular version, in ratios of 1:10, 1:20, 1:50, and sometimes 1:100 and 1:200.

And this is when we're reaching our decade. Let me create a picture here: the publishers are stuck with Diamond, who is pretty much the only comics distributor in America, and the only place ou can buy their comics, other than the Internet, is specialty stores doing the whole Direct Market thing. The ususal number of copies a comicbook will sell (again – not to the readers, but to the retailers) is around 40k-50k. Some series sell more, and usualy for the Big Two books, under 20k is where one can assume the series will be cancelled shortly.

There were some things that would sell more: One thing were #1s, partially as a way for the shops to try and get some new readers interested, and partially, probably, because of the collectors and "investors" that never got the memo. Another were high-numbered "anniversary" issues, since the longest-running series all reached issues like #500 or #600 around that time – and sold more because of the exact same reasons as #1s. And of course there's the events.

At the start of 2011, Joe Quesada, Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, got promoted to Chief Creative Officer and his old job was given to a long-time editor, Axel Alonso. In September, DC rebooted their whole universe with New 52 – and released a whole lot of #1s (52 to be exact). That contributed to a noticeable raise in sells, at least for a few months, so Axel decided to do the same thing. In late 2012, Marvel did a soft-reboot with Marvel NOW, shitcanning most of the series they were releasing at the time (which, to tell the truth, was a good thing, because a fair bit of those SUCKED royally) and starting with new series and new #1s.

>>315232

I think Alonso figured out how to play the system. Since he took over we can see Marvel doubling down on #1s, variant covers and events. Lets start with events: since the start of 2013, we've had Age of Ultron and Infinity in 2013, and Original Sin and AXIS in 2014, as well as smaller ones: Death of Wolverine and Spider-Verse. AXIS began exactly five WEEKS after Original Sin ended and a week before Wolverine actually died (which, was just the beginning of the DoW storyline, which ended sometime in January), and Spider-Verse started in the middle of AXIS. There were also a few minor crossovers during that time, like X-Men's Battle of the Atom or Revolutionary War about forgotten Marvel UK IP's. To make matters worse, since at least the turn of the decade I've noticed that regular series are being overshdowed by events, to the point that, unless they're about third-stringers that nobody cares about, the happenings in regular series barely even create an illusion of change. The only time there are actual shake-ups in the universe is during crossovers, to the point that ongoings sometimes seem to exist solely for the purpose of doing something with the IPs and making some money in between events.

Anyway, remember what I wrote about retailers having to preorder their comics in advance? That's still the case, and Marvel milked that for all it's worth with AXIS – a nine-issue story spread across a three-month period. As a result, the retailers had to place orders for the last issue before they learned how well the first issue sold with readers. While Marvel laughed all the way to the bank.

2015 was a bit more conservative on the event front – other than the ending of Spider-Verse and a rather short Black Vortex, the only event that year was the new Secret Wars – but it was the biggest one they've ever had. But more on that later. Anyway, while we had very few events in 2015, 2016 is picking up the slack already.

Now, regarding variant covers. While once upon a time they were fairly rare, nowadays however almost every other issue gets at least one. Add to that all the "gimmick" covers that follow a theme ("zombie variants" were the first ones, while one of the recent themes was "covers based on rap albums". There's at least two dozen more, including TWO "Dadpool Photobomb" themes). And to make matters worse, they're artificially inflating their sales even more by that bullshit 1:Whatever "rare" covers – in 2012 every #1 of DC's Before Watchmen miniseries had a 1:200 cover by Jim Lee (which were pretty shit, to be honest) that people are still selling for way over 100 bucks on ebay.

Also in 2012, one of the new series by Marvel, Uncanny Avengers, had 12 different variant covers (not counting the 2nd printing variant, sketch variants and the "blank cover" variant), some of them "rare". Not surprisingly, it was the "best-selling" book that month, with over 300 thousand copies (the next one, the finale of Avengers vs. X-Men crossover event, had about 170k, and the third was Batman with almost 150k), but since all those numbers really tell us is how many copies the retailers preordered and had no relation to the actual sales. Needless to say, the retailers would soon fill up their quarter bins with unsold copies of UA#1.

That series, by the way, was written by the same guy who wrote AXIS, Rick Remender (and AXIS is actually an epilogue to the story started in UA#1). Poor guy had his work used as a scam all the time, no wonder he quit Marvel and now publishes his shit through Image.

But that's not all, because when Marvel started publishing Star Wars comics in 2015, it had a whopping total of 68 (SIXTY EIGHT) variant covers, a shitload of them specially created to be sold in selected stores, and some with an outrageous ratio of 1:500. Of course it topped the charts when it came out, with just 15k shy of a million copies. But since it's Star Wars, I can't be certain it's only because of the underhanded tactics.

>>315233

And, last but not least, the slew of #1s. First came Marvel NOW in late 2012/early 2013. Then, after Infinity, there was All-New Marvel NOW in early 2014, followed by two phases of Avengers NOW in late 2014, after Original Sin, and early 2015, following AXIS, Spider-Verse and Death of Wolverine.

I'll talk a little bit more about 2015 in a moment, but for now, let's take a look at a few "new" series – mainly, Avengers Undercover, Captain Marvel, Daredevil and Wolverine. Most of the new series introduced in ANMN were actually new, with characters that didn't have their own series in a while, and few others (Like Fantastic Four or Wolverine and the X-Men) were "restarts" of the series with different creators, the four series I've mentioned stayed the same – DD moved from New York to San Fran, Cap Marvel moved to space, and Wolverine got lost his healing factor and started wearing armor, but that's about it. The writers stayed the same and in the good old days™ the series would continue without a hickup. Hell it would still continue even after the writer would leave and a new one would hop on, but that's besides the point. All in all, those four restarts were considered completely unnecessary and done just to squeeze a few more bucks out of retailers.

Now, 2015. As I've already mentioned, 2015 is the year when the new Secret Wars came out, the biggest event Marvel has ever done. To not spoiler very much, since 2012, writer Jonathan Hickman was panning a story about a multiversal collapse – Earths from alternate realities colliding with each other and taking their whole universes with them, until only two Universes were left – the main one, and the Ultimate Universe, which was basically the second most important one. And then they collided as well, but a retardedly overpowered character (not spoilering the character's identity, even though it was revealed in #2) created a world out of fragments of alternate Earths he managed to safe.

Since the Marvel Universe as we knew it ceased to exist, all but few really minor books were cancelled and a slew of miniseries was created – which means a lot of new #1s. And after the story had its finale in October (well, the actual story ended in January because of delays, but Marvel couldn't just hold off on publishing comics for three months), another initiative, All-New All-Different Marvel started, with another fresh batch of #1s. But since a good chunk of those were continuing the storyline from before Secret Wars, with the same characters and the same writers, and sometimes even with the same exact title (All-New Hawkeye, Amazing Spider-Man, Angela: Asgard's Assassin/Queen of Hell, (Astonishing) Ant-Man, Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy, Howard the Duck, (Mighty) Thor, Ms. Marvel, Silk, Silver Surfer, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Woman… Damn, basically the whole Spideyverse… and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), the name of the initiative is kind of ironic.

And seeing as how some of those Secret Wars miniseries were basically "you know that character I'm writing about? Well, that's how they would look in another reality!", a few characters/series had basically three #1s in a span of about a year (Like Angela. Angela: Asgard's Assassin started in December 2014, with 1602: Witch Hunter Angela miniseries during Secret Wars, and coming back with Angela: Queen of Hel in October 2015. Or how about Thor? Starting in October 2014, with Thor*s* Secret Wars miniseries, and coming back with Mighty Thor In November 2015).

So yeah, Marvel's business model under Alonso's rule is basically disregarding anything the readers might think and coming up with new gimmicks to flash before retailers, so they might want to buy their shit thinking that the readers (or, more likely, collectors) will be interested. And with most comicbook shops at the verge of collapse ALL THE TIME, they don't really have the luxury of not doing business with them.

>>315234

And now, for my theory about Marvel/DC and the SJWs. Obviously, artists are more liberal than average person by nature (if they weren't, they'd get a real job), and that might be why people at Marvel are so in-sync the PC crowd. But I have another theory. I hope that I managed to show that in recent years, Marvel went away from caring for the stories they publish – what with constant events, shake-ups and reboots. I thinks that's partially why so many talented writers have left in recent years – Ed Brubaker, who's killing it in Image, as does Rick Remender. Brian K. Vaughan used to write for them a few years ago, but not anymore. Neither does J. Michael Straczynski. Meanwhile, Bendis doesn't seem to care for anything other than his scalp wax money and is more than happy to write his characters running around in circles until he gets a chance to write another event, Dan Slott got to write his softcore fetish porn in Superior Spider-Man and actually gets paid for his Doctor Who fanfic he calls "Silver Surfer", so he's happy as well, and it seems to me like Mark Waid is just happy that he can be a part of something and can bitch about DC about something that happened ten years ago. And Warren Ellis doesn't care as long as he gets to write a few issues about some third-stringer. And I suspect that Marvel wants it that way. After getting rid of all but few established names that might want to do things their way, and might stand up to the editors in the name of "artistic integrity", "caring for the actual fans" and bullshit like that, they can hire no-names, has-beens and never-weres that'll do what they're told for half the money or less (and this is why Marvel is plagued with shitty webcomic artists nowadays). But to make sure they'll want to work for them, Marvel must put up a friendly exterior. It's basically cult-like breeding tactics, but seeing as how all those dumbasses are SJWs anyway, it's pretty apparent that they wouldn't catch on to it.

>>315230

>>315231

>>315232

>>315233

>>315234

>>315236

Thanks for all of this -I didn't know many of the specifics -just had a general overview. I do remember the #1s that started appearing in the 90s -a friend was into Marvel/DC (mainly Spidey/X-men/Batman) -I was into 2000AD at the time (Britbong reporting in) -he collected some of those #1s -but as a fan, not really as an investment.

I think another thing happening at the time was the rise of self-published comics -of which the successful ones could earn the creators a decent amount of money. The writers/artists that left to form Image were no doubt well aware of this and knew they could set up on their own -keeping the rights (and profits) to their own IPs and not be under-the-thumb at Marvel. If I remember right, it didn't take long for Image to become the 3rd biggest player in the market.

I guess the data to look at is from the retailers themselves -how many copies they sold to customers compared to how many they bought from the publishers.

Do people still 'buy-to-invest' in comics? With all these #1s around are any of them really worth anything to the investment buyers? (For example: are the e-bay prices just the asking price or the actual price a copy sold for?)

I know about using variant covers (money-making scam IMO) -didn't know about the overuse of events + crossovers -spin out the happenings somewhere else = more that the fans have to buy. (Sounds like another milking machine to me!)

I was thinking along similar lines to your theory -for talented artists/writers there's much better deals out there so why work for Marvel?

Not least, decent artists/writers will always attract a fanbase who'll support them where ever they go -it's the quality of content they produce.

>>315028

>DCYou

>SJW

They had one shitty Batgirl book and Midnighter, who was gay long before the SJW fad was even a thing.

Anyone who says DC is SJW is a fucking moron because all they know about it is taken from the same shitty panel caps that keep getting posted.

>>315336

The irony being that the shit Ennis and Morrison wrote would be "extremely problematic" by current SJW standards. Rape jokes, incest jokes, retard jokes, almost parodic levels of cheesecake, sometimes inverted with surprise trap cheesecake, the whole nine yards. Just about the only thing it was remotely pious about was racial shit, but even then, they had fucking Bueno Excellente.

Talking to some of the Sad Puppies followers, there's a parallel here with what's been happening with SciFi/Fantasy books. As the genre became more socjus heavy, readers have stopped reading the books, just as comic fans have turned away from the big 2 as the sjws crept in. Soon as these readers find something entertaining again, they pick up the books again, even if they've stopped reading for a while.

I'm guessing it's the same with comics. If comicfags don't find anything they like from other publishers they can always wait a while until something comes along they do like.

In effect, in both cases, the customer is always there, just sometimes the content isn't.

With Marvel + DC being big publishers, when they stop producing the content they will leave a void -and it always takes time for that to be filled by other content creators.

For anyone thinking of getting into creating comics (or SFF books) -no fear of sjws -learn your craft -if it's entertaining, the customers are there.

>>315231

>Marvel took it BAD. I mean, "filing Chapter 11 in 1997" bad.

This is when I got out of the hobby, and never really got back into it. (I kinda got into the Tansformer books in the late-2000/early-2010's, but the shameless "Michael Bay's bullshit is now cannon" and SJW fucksticks like that "It's Walky" hypocrite killed that for me before GG was even a thing.) Also, "event fatigue" I liked the Phalanx Covenant, and liked the concept for "Age of Apcolypse" event (a re-boot done right) but the pay-off was shit (X-Man: yet another Nathan Summers depressional-alternate is Mutant Jesus, but the whole concept was forgotten by the time of the next event…), then came the clusterfuck of Onslaught which killed capes comics for me and then I… Made Mine Manga (Area 88, Mason Ikkouku, Urusei Yatsura, Ghost in the Shell, Dominion Tank Police, AKIRA, Lone Wolf and Cub, ect…). FUCK YOU MAHVEL.

>>315231

>Marvel decided to pander to Manga fans

THE FUCK THEY DID; as a recent manga fan convert at that time, who was hyped as fuck about the concept… the execution was cringe as shit:

I remember hearing about a novel written by an paleo-weeb American in the 19th century who had never been to Japan or had any first-hand knowledge of Japanese Culture, History, or Fictional Tropes, but wrote an adventure novel based on 2nd-hand articles and books he read with Samurais and Geishas and karate and shushi and shit… (essentially, the great-great-grandaddy of every embarrassing headband-wearing, fanfic-writing, Narutard weeb-faggot in the West)

…that was what "Marvel Manga" was like.

I had a deep suspicion that "marvel Manga" was a marketing exercise with the intent, not to make money, but to show western capes comic fans that: "Look! We told you Manga is a Shit; buy our shit instead!" and "Manga is shit; don't look at all the things we're cribbing from Masamune Shiro, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Hayato Miyazaki, but visually interesting enough for us to rip off for decades."