The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer for NY's Vulture section says there's too many comics coming out, or, too much of the same series from DC within a month:

...what caught my eye was a terrifying little tidbit buried in the announcement: 17 DC series will be shipping twice every month.

Eventually I realized DC was also canceling some of its current series, so the overall number of monthly issues wouldn't be quite as massive as I was fearing. But I was shaken and made to see the bigger picture: There are too many goddamn comics to read these days. Not to get all Andy Rooney about the funny-book industry, but it’s absolutely overwhelming how much one has to consume in order to stay on top of the various comics narratives in the marketplace.

[...] Sure, comics has long been a volume industry. It costs very little to make a comic book, compared to a movie or a TV show, so publishers can crank out a ton of content without blowing their overhead. But it’s hard not to feel like the industry has descended into a unique kind of madness.

Where's he been all these years? They plummeted into madness long ago, most specifically, poor writing, and an effective waste of good artwork for nothing. And they never tried to abandon the monthly/weekly pamphlet format for paperbacks and hardcovers, the former which costs a lot less in total to buy for a whole story, and certainly doesn't cost as much to produce. Yet the writer makes no attempt to argue that this is the best way to go next for comicdom. As a result, his article fumbles.

At least he makes one good point at the end:

[...] Consumers are getting fleeced right now. Twice-monthly comics are the last thing we need, no matter how good they are.

But most of the superhero titles today aren't. Certainly not the twice monthly or near-weekly issues Marvel was putting out for Spider-Man in the past several years, and those were obviously little more than an attempt to fleece more dollars from readers over the same series. The writer says he may not understand the business model, but worse, he doesn't have what it takes to be critical and objective, or make a point of how they could improve it.

Labels: dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales