The Four Color Media Monitor

The New Yorker wrote about Amazon's purchase of ComiXology. There's two interesting parts here. First:

American comic books, like the superheroes that fill their pages, must occasionally reinvent themselves.

Yes, but that all has to be consistent with what came before, like characterization. And that's something lacking in today's mainstream, much of which got thrown away in the past decade, more than ever before.

Then, there's this part:

Sales of comic books began to fall in the nineties, with a lot of casual readers losing interest after the deaths of Batman and Superman.

I'm glad they noted that. It was all because crossovers began taking over at the expense of good writing, and no doubt that also led to price hikes. Even padding out stories for the sake of trade collections must've had a bad impact. Even now that a lot of publishers are experimenting with digital platforms, I doubt there'll be much improvement, because these programs and their subscriptions cost money, and chances are the crossovers and stunts will continue even on the internet, so I'm afraid the shift to online content won't change much.

Labels: dc comics, golden calf of death, indie publishers, marvel comics, sales, technology