The Four Color Media Monitor

The Free Press of London, Ontario reports that the Comic Book Collector, one of the oldest specialty stores which opened back in 1979, is now closing down because of poor sales, and Marvel has to be faulted for at least some of the decline:

It wasn’t the fierce competition in the Forest City that has forced owner Tim Morris to close down.

It wasn’t the fact Marvel Comics has neglected its print products in favour of blockbuster movie adaptations featuring Wolverine, the Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man.

It wasn’t the summer construction east of Adelaide.

It was all of those things.

“It’s not making any money,” Morris said.

The store’s third owner, Morris, 60, says he simply can’t afford to sink any more cash into the venture.

As I figured, Marvel's abandonment of their comics proper for the sake of movies, by leaving the writing to a bunch of amateurs, has been costing readers who've come to see their output from nearly 2 decades past as some of the worst scriptwriting possible. More of that is discussed below:

One of the biggest factors in the sales decline, Morris says, is the proliferation of needless, low-quality books the last few years from Marvel Comics especially. “Marvel Comics has been doing a bunch of crap for the last five years,” he said. So where there was once a single monthly title starring self-reflective mutant antihero Deadpool, there are now four. “Give me one good Deadpool book,” Morris said.

On this, I'd like to make clear, however, that their downfall came much farther back, in the early to mid-90s, with the X-Men one of the biggest victims of dismal scripting. As I've noted a few times, I can't help feel at this point that badly written characters like Gambit were only created to give extended merchandise manufacturers something to go by for developing cartoons and toy action figures. Yep, IMHO, licensed merchandise had a part of its own in bringing down superhero comics, which by then had been taken over by apathetic publishers with no confidence in the creations they were taking charge of.

And 4 Deadpool books is certainly too many. Especially if, as the guy hints, they're written as badly as they come. But hey, given creator Rob Liefeld (who conceived Wade Wilson with Fabian Nicieza) was almost as bad a writer as he was an artist, it isn't much of a surprise.

As I read this, I also thought it best to make a point that Marvel's not the only one guilty of this poor quality. Even DC has to be held accountable in plenty of ways for bringing down the quality of storytelling. Let's remember a lot of the worst stuff they put out in the mid-2000s, with surely the worst being Identity Crisis and Countdown to Infinite Crisis, to name but some, and they came up with some SJW-pandering diversity tactics (a Latino Blue Beetle, Asian Atom, female Manhunter, black Firestorm) several years before Marvel began pushing the idea so forcefully. Even the changing of Green Lantern Alan Scott to gay in the "New 52", their own big mistake from the past 6 years, was another example coming just a few years before Marvel's own blatant steps, more on which is spoken of below.

There’s also a disconnect between the company’s comic universe and the cinematic one.

“(Fixing) continuity would bring a lot of people back,” Morris added.

Now that's an excellent point! Continuity as we once knew it has been reduced to a terrible jumble at the Big Two, and this was already back in the early 2000s. Grant Morrison made a mockery of the X-Men's characterization, to name but one example, and the Marvel Knights volume of Captain America was definitely another. I'd argue there's valid grounds for quietly canning a lot of the storylines that were in use since the mid-2000s, and even earlier, going back to the 1990s. There may have been some gems at the time, but there were still quite a few disasters in storytelling at the time, like the Spider-Man Clone Saga and a lot of X-Men stories written by Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza. Green Lantern was also in a state of badness during this time, what with all the contrived, forced writing that went on when Ron Marz was helming that title, and that's something that could be discarded from continuity too. Why, who knows, even the Gerard Jones run may have to be discarded after the scandal he caused.

He’ll have customers come in the store fresh from the multiplex who are confused because they don’t understand why the Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, is dead.

And Spider-Man is Hispanic.

And Thor is a woman.

And Iron Man's had his background forcibly retconned, and been mostly replaced by a teen girl. And the Hulk's been replaced by a young Asian guy who makes quips like "totally awesome Hulk", in an absurd, stereotypical attempt to sound cool. And Ms. Marvel's been intentionally replaced by a Muslim girl in one of the most politically motivated books ever. Maybe the worst part of all this diversity-pandering is that they do it under the impression nobody, not even movie fans, will care. Which says quite a bit about what they really think of the products they're in charge of.

Indeed, one could argue superheroes have never been more popular, thanks to the movies and video games, while the dwindling comics audience has been cannibalized by too many “event” storylines aimed at collectors, not fans.

Yes, that's another problem: the "events", much like the pamphlets proper, are all prepared for the sake of the speculator market. But one could also argue the popularity of superheroes is superficial only, and even if there is a small sum of moviegoers who do head for the store, a much larger sum not only don't, they have virtually no interest in the source material either. Not even the Golden/Silver/Bronze Age stories, which are far superior to the newer, SJW-geared farces.

Even a city like London now sports two annual comic conventions, Forest City Comicon and London Comic Con, more proof comics are mainstream.

“They’re bringing in their kids now, trying to get them hooked on comics,” Morris said of the original generation of Comic Book Collector shoppers.

But many of those children and teens don’t want to read about Batman, they want to be Batman, which immersive video games allow them to do.

They don’t need the books.

See, this is what happens when a technology-based medium surpasses both recognition and marketing of a storytelling medium. But also when parents themselves make the mistake of raising their children on too many video games to boot. And, when they fail to get them to read literature often enough. Yet at the same time, depending on what the Batbooks contain today, they may not be old enough to read them, because as time went by, the Batbooks became bloodier, and require parental guidance. This is the same for many other superhero books today, when any and every series could be affected by this approach. When Geoff Johns was writing the Flash, it was certainly that kind of mess.

On which note, while this was an interesting article, I still find it bothersome whenever these folks make it sound like Marvel's to be held first and foremost responsible for the modern downfall of superhero comics, when DC's proven just as awful, and it'd be foolhardy to think they've improved overnight. Of course Marvel's done considerable harm, especially ever since Bill Jemas worked as their publisher. But DC also has to be held unambiguously accountable for the harm Paul Levitz and especially Dan DiDio inflicted as DC company heads. Citing DC's own serious mistakes in the news could help draw vital attention to why they're in as sore need of repairs as Marvel is.

There's also a lesson to be learned from this news, that store managers shouldn't put all their eggs into Marvel and DC's baskets, and rely on more than 3 quarters of their output for stock to sell. A lot of smaller publishers like IDW, Image and Dynamite have products worth selling too, probably more than meets the eye. And whatever they're producing, that's precisely what store owners should take the challenge of investing in. More importantly though, is getting companies to abandon the pamphlet format and make the move to paperbacks, which I'm sure a lot of consumers would be more encouraged to buy.

Labels: Avengers, Batman, Captain America, conventions, dc comics, Hulk, indie publishers, islam and jihad, marvel comics, politics, sales, Spider-Man, technology, Thor, X-Men