I get that fans might look at commentary like this as negative, but honestly, we need channels like this and it's guests that challenge all the bullshit, critically. We don't have to agree on everything, but the conversations need to be happen, especially if you're that reader who's been around for a while and want something more.
All true but they don't give one flying #$@#$ about their fans. THAT is the problem. Wes has been respectful in his critiques against the industry and the creators, and his thanks as Vita A dumping on him that he's a "racist". The ONLY times the industry "listens" to fans is when the sycophants are applauding whatever #$@#$ is coming out. There are a LOT of conversations that should be happening but they aren't and they won't since long term sales don't matter. Everything is a gimmick and they have no problems with that.
@@jamesneese7663 Anyone in a creative endeavor who doesn't care about profits is mainly doing it as a 'vanity project', or 'labor or love'. If that was the case, there would be no need for 'gimmicks' of any kind, in terms of marketing.
@@wylier maybe in other industries people CAN do BOTH (gaming for example has ppl who are passonate about gaming and making money), but this is comics we're talking about. Most ppl in mainstream comics today are shamelessly using comics as a stepping stone to Hollywood, so they don't care about comics, sales, or fans because they have no intention to stay for long. We've seen this from Kate Leth (of Hellcat) going to High Guardian Spice then Mags V with the show Vagrant Queen. its depressing....
Continuity is one of the main draws for me in comics. Ignoring it or pushing it to the side is a huge mistake. The lack of solid continuity diminishes interest in the new books significantly. What's worst, it also diminishes the interest in older books as well. Why bother with them if they no longer matter or will not matter in a second? Why should the reader bother if the creators don't? Strong continuity is the key. When Batman gets injured in the Justice League title I want that injury to be acknowledged or referenced in his own book as well. And so on and so forth.
@@EvandroACruz I think messy continuity is better than none. Still, they did manage to tidy it up a little with DC Rebirth and Doomsday Clock... hm, only to royally f it up later.
@@egonnn244 Agreed. A messy continuity is better than none. Just look at real world history, its a messy hodgepodge of bullshit that barely worked but we're stuck living it every day.
Funny how every comic channel starts by reviewing books with love and passion for the art and ends up turning into a channel dedicated to pointing out what a shit show it has all become. EVS/Comics Matter/Perch/Thinking Critical. ITS ALMOST LIKE THE FANBASE HAS BEEN TRYING TO TELL THE BIG TWO FOR YEARS THAT THEY ARE FUCKED UP!!!!!!!! ………ya know what I mean? My message to the industry is a play on words with one of my favorite dragon ball z dialogues by Cell. “Yet another fan YOU could have saved.”
That is not fair to Thinking Critical. Yeah he craps on most new Marvel and DC because he is not a shill but there is plenty of love for comics on the channel (such as the retrospectives.) I would not group this channel with Comics Matter which has devolved into bitching about marginal comic creators twitter posts.
JB that is not how I meant that at all I love Wes and his content. I am not comparing him at all to other channels or their line of thinking. But his channel has changed for the same reasons.
The problem is that the companies DO NOT CARE about their customers or fan base. Sales abysmal? No problem! Fans outraged? No problem! Posting (or publishing IN THE COMICS) comments that are racist, hateful, political, immoral or personal issues? No problem. Negative press/publicity? No problem. hell...look how benign Wes has been all this time but then Vita A got upset and called out Thinking Critical as "racist" ANYWAY. It was only after THAT that Wes has been very openly boisterous in his disgust of the industry and it's tolerance of the incompetence, selfishness, and disdain by the comic pros towards ANYONE who disagrees with them. Zack might be a little salty but he's NOT wrong that these comic pros are not only unprofessional but openly DESPISE the fandom, don't care about their jobs, and have no problem screwing over THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS for the sake of their personal grievances. EVERY channel that has been critical of the industry has been attacked, smeared, and defamed. Look how Clownfish RIGHTLY called out Kevin Smith and Masters of the Universe for offing He-Man in the opening episode. Kevin Smith and his sycophants went on a tear that Clownfish were lying and wrong. And guess what happened in that first episode?! Rather than get better, the industry prefers to attack their critics, namecalling them into oblivion until something "sticks".
The real meaning of Marvel Zombies, fans who will buy every varient cover, buy every x-men comic without being critical, if you buy anything written by Vita Ayala you don't care about those characters/books. (At DC it is Tom King).
Christine P. Just stick to old back issues via Omnibuses. Premimum format and good stories. For example, I'm collecting the X-men Omnibuses/ spin-offs and am loving it. It's been years since I've reread Claremont's stuff and boy he was amazing back then. Especially New Mutants. My favorite X-men spinoff book.
I have been a longtime reader of Marvel since the late 80's, I didn't get into DC comics till the late 90's. From my perspective DC and Marvel for the past 5-6 years is creatively stumped at this point. The stories have been lack luster, both companies do nothing now but hire SJW and activist to write their books along with the editors, they are all into pushing a social/political narrative with the books now. They want to virtue signal and gender and race swap alot of main characters and can't make any good new ones. Re hashing the same storylines over and over and now the new gimmick is a putting cool new covers and turning existing characters gay out of know where instead of developing original gay characters. It is getting sickening at this point. Its like they hate their longtime true comicbook readers/customers at this point and would rather try to trick new readers into buying their books. Go on alot of those writers and editors twitter pages tells you all need to know about the writers and editors of this new Marvel/DC.........
I stopped with Doomsday Clock and The Three Jokers. Picked up a few of the new Batman comics with the new writer, but I see he is leaving, so am I. Stick with the old back issues. The stories are better and the price is usually cheaper! No regrets.
I'm with Jesse. I stopped buying new comics 20 years ago and started spending my hobby money on back issues. New comics are $4-10 each. That buys a lot of great classic titles.
for someone like myself who wants to get into reading comics again how can i do it in a cost effective way? i will probably do the collecting as well but i want to read for now. so with titles like we live that are so impactful is it possible to pick up the 1st run for reasonable prices? i would assume those would be books that are gonna be hard to get for a regular price. and i want to read the superman with the aliens that detected him traveling to the earth's orbit. i thought that was a cool idea and i fuck wit aliens all day lol. thanks!
@@fleamarketmixtape3793 I've been buying long series lots on eBay. I recently bought huge runs of Mike Baron's Nexus and Chuck Dixon's Airboy for about $1 and issue after shipping.
Great video. Batman and Superman books were my thing growing up. I stopped reading around 2005 because there was an event every other week that kept ruining the flow of the titles I read. Sounds like not much has changed.
It's everything you all said. At the end of the day, the biggest factor is the fan base being there to buy the books. I watch and follow comic channels where guests, hosts, people send in comments admiting to buying books they don't really like in multiple formats, double, triple dipping just to collect and ironically maintaining a continuity on there shelves and boxes that no longer exists.
Many of my online comic buddies who i met on reddit, fandom forums and on twitter.. are going back and reading comics from older era.. hack writers/activists ruin everything they touch.. be it gaming, comics , movies and other form of entertainment. I am not even a white man but i feel a huge disconnect with current marvel and dc comics. Its all boring, lame and insanely agenda driven. IMPORTANT FACT : Most EDITORS and management level executives at marvel and dc comics are encouraging this and must be BLAMED.
I’m not reading many of the books as they release because “writing for the trade” has conditioned me to believe that I have to wait if I want a complete story, so I typically wait 6 months to a year before reading/catching up on a title. I don’t buy a lot of variants… maybe two a month, and only when they are near cover price.
The "this person was behind everything all along" trope is like "subverting expectations" or "morally gray". People trying to make game of thrones without even making the map first. Edit: disney literally did a bigger deathstar lmao it was the starkiller.
Honestly I think both dc and marvel really need to make there continuity actually make sense because frankly it feels to me everything is in flux and not making sense continuity anymore.
Last comic book series I was completely nuts about was the Grant Morrison 2 year run of Green Lantern. I know I've gone on and on about this, but this 2 year run was made with love of the character and love of the richness of the GL Corps and had zero to do with whatever else DC was doing. The writing required multiple reads. The art was challenging, rich, out there, sometimes beyond comic book art. I was crazy about Morrison's THE FILTH and Multiversity series and I don't mean to gush on Grant, but the big companies have pushed OUT the creative, cool, out there, different thinking comic book creators. And now, there's little chance that they'll want to pay for a meaningful return of a Claremont or Byrne or...
So glad to hear it’s worth getting into. Loved what I picked up, but my shop closed and moved locations halfway into his series. Issue #3 was really fun.
I agree with this review, I stopped buying comics about 10 years ago. I'm not interested in the reboots, changing male characters to female, gay or minorities just for political correctness or wokeness-nothing original anymore really.
I actually picked up a lot of star Wars legends omnibus and Punisher by Garth ennis collections and X-Men by Claremont masterworks. Having a great time reading back issues tbh. So much better than the new ones.
Marvel is part of an umbrella corporation with access to federal reserve cash and bailouts. They are fine continually throwing away revenue. IDW is acting like Marvel without the situation they have and probably will go bankrupt.
I want the entire dc continuum to come to and end, and they LITERALLY restart everything from origins, and slowly come out with each character’s story, leading up to the Justice League being created, in a more Earth One style. But you can not do that with woke writing because it’s literally the antithesis of good writing. Is HAS to be a return to focus on GOOD storytelling and nothing else.
10 years ago was Age of Heroes at Marvel and n52. N52 had a few titles worth buying. Aquaman, Swampthing, Animal Man, and JLD. Within the last 10 years at Marvel, Agent Venom and Scarlet Spider featuring Kane are the two solid comics-start to finish- that I can think of.
Terrific ACCURATE analysis of what's going on at DC and Marvel from guys that actually still WANT to enjoy current Marvel and DC comics but just can't!
You're right, nothing matters anymore. Even as a relatively new reader, having started in 2016, I'm already limiting the scope of my collection unless things change. Batman is just gonna be just about everything but I'm stripping Tom King's stuff down to bare essentials and I'm not even sure if I'm getting Tynion's run. Bendis ruined Superman for me so I'm stopping at the end of Tomasi's run. I might stop Wonder Woman at Azzarello's run. Spider-Man is stopping before the 90's Clone Saga, might get JMS. Unless someone sells me on something else, Daredevil is stopping at Frank Miller. I'm getting Thor here and there, probably not getting any further than Jason Aaron but even then I won't fill everything in. Etc, etc.
I just saw the Vol 6 synopsis that made me face palm. You have to see it for yourself and come up to your own conclusion. Spider-Man's finally done with the crud concerning Mephisto and Kindred, only for things to fall down before the Beyond storyline concludes. I won't know until I read it but it's like they love putting Spider-Man in places where it's tough to come back from.
This was such a great video guys, I agree with everything you guys said. At this point the only thing I am buying are Omnibus editions of old series which I must say I have been loving. Just finished vol 1 of the Geoff Johns Green Lantern now I am getting stuck into the Mutant Massacre Omnibus and nothing in the last 10 years comes remotely close to the quality of these stories. DC and Marvel need to bring these older writers back to train the younger writers in how to craft a fun compelling comic book story.
To me the decline of Marvel started when they brought Jean Grey back in the mid-80s for X-Factor. Before then deaths mattered in comics. Gwen Stacey stayed dead. Mar-Vel stayed dead. At that point Green Goblin would still be dead for another 10 years. Jean's return was the beginning of the cyclical nature of comics resetting to the status quo and death not mattering. It even destroyed continuity by ruining one of the seminal X-Men works at the time, the Dark Phoenix saga, and did incalculable damage to the character of Cyclops. If Jean could return after destroying a world of 5 billion people and have both her crimes and sacrificed handwaved away, then anyone could and nothing was sacred. They went about making Magneto a villain again after Claremont had a 50-issue arc about redeeming him, telling readers that there was no point in getting invested in a character arc because it could and would be undone. Bob Harris and Jim Lee moved to ensure X-Men would only move backwards and stay stuck in the old Magneto-sentinels plots and so kicked Claremont out. The X-Men have never recovered from those mistakes. Harris spread that same philosophy to the rest of Marvel when he became chief editor in the 90s and the result was crap like the Spider-Man clone saga and Marvel having to declare bankruptcy, and Marvel as a whole has never recovered. So many characters who were great back in the 80s are stagnant and boring now, from Wolverine and Storm to Iron Man and Spider-Man. I wasn't even born yet the last time Marvel was really good. DC was doing better in the 90s because they had really good editors who ran as tight a ship as possible when it came to continuity. Superman in the 90s had a comic literally every week with a gigantic cast and it worked because the continuity was as perfect as possible. In the 2000s this began to change as the old editors left and talentless hacks like Dan Didio took over. Continuity went out the window, good storytelling went out the window in favor of marketing to the lowest common denominator. Then they hired Bob Harris of all people. Hiring the man who led their competitor into bankruptcy is the height of madness. The problem with the Nu52 was that it was a reboot of the universe while the people who ruined the previous universe weren't rebooted. A DC led by Didio and Harris would always be doomed. They got rid of Harris but kept Didio on until very recently, and now that he's finally gone it might be too late to fix things. I don't care about Batman anymore. Batman - my biggest obsession growing up, isn't a draw for me now because DC has run the character into the dirt. Now DC is in an even worse place than Marvel because the good stories from Marvels past are still in continuity outside of anything related to Spider-Man's marriage. Those great Iron Man stories from the 80s like Armor Wars still matter, while DC has no continuity at all, with a general 'everything happened' from 50 different universes no matter how much they contradict each other, and seminal works like Peter David's Supergirl run - the only good Supergirl, remain lost to time and are never referenced as having happened. I can take stories with political messages I don't agree with. I love Godzilla even if I strongly disagree with the messages of the Godzilla movies that have messages, and I love Star Trek despite finding much of its political outlook stupid or abhorrent. Being woke isn't a deal breaker for me, and I find that the stories became bad long before they became woke. Tim Drake being bi isn't something that bothers me. What bothers me is how DC has been destroying the character of Tim Drake since 2004 - first by killing his father and much of his supporting cast, making him into a mini-Bruce and destroying everything that made him unique, then by erasing his history in the 2011 reboot and leaving a bland shell that has no purpose or reason to exist in his place. The biggest problem with making him bi is that at this point he's been so destroyed that the only value he has as a character anymore is as Stephanie Brown's love interest. Without that nothing remains of the great character he was in the 90s, and he should be erased the way Wally West was erased after Barry was brought back and the Nu52 happened. He was destroyed not by wokeness, but by the DC Didio Dan created where characters are reduced to single-sentence descriptions with 0 depth and good stories are replaced by the cheapest marketing gimmicks possible. The woke part only happened at the very end of this sad tale. Superman, as well, has been on a downward spiral ever since they stopped caring about continuity in the mid-2000s and started trying to make things as silver age as possible even if it made no sense in the post-crisis universe. They introduced so many Kryptonians, but the cast shrunk to a fraction of what it was when Superman was the only Kryptonian and the stories were awful. Then they kept rebooting Superman ever couple of years to the point where there's no continuity or character at all, and certainly no room for a decently-sized cast. Clark going public with his secret identity would have been a big deal in the 90s because the world had been built up that its effects would have been seen and felt. But in the 2020s the world was so small that there's no reason to care. So too with Marvel, the destruction of characters like Spider-Man has to do with the way they've tried to destroy his continuity and ensure he never ages or grows, hence how the Clone Saga and One More Day came to be. The wokeness came later and is the symptom of the larger problem rather than the problem itself. Why get invested in a story about Peter's growth if he's not allowed to grow and will revert the moment the next story begins? Didn't mean to go on such a rant, but I just hate Didio and Harris so much.
@@RamManNo1 indeed and honestly at this point I think the industry as a whole really needs a reality check and stupid putting out so many variant covers that mean jack and shit within the story itself.
There are two major problems with comics . 1. They never changed the social perception of either being for kids or something speculators invest money in. And 2. The main two companies have been rehashing the same stories for decades now. None of them has the bravery to actually do something new, Hickman's X-Men is the last example, the moment he wanted to do something new, the editorial pulled him back .
If people are just buying books without reading them, then why have a stable of writers or book artists at all? Fire them all, print only issues from decades past (but give them all new titles & promo hype), and just hire artists to give the reprints cool new covers for the collectors. Bam! DC & Marvel just saved themselves tons of money! Bonus: don't need editors, either, if you're just reprinting back issues! I suppose if you have to give customers something new, do what X-Men Classic did way back when. Tack on a 3-5 page new story to the back issue. That'll incentivize customers to buy it even if it's just a reprint with a new cover.
Variants, specifically hard to find ratios. This reminds me of collecting Star Trek tng figures back in the day. My mate bought everything they released, actually he bought 2 of most 1 to collect and 1 to open. Then the 1701 limited box set came out and he couldn't get one. Stopped collecting on the spot and got a girl friend. Probably worked out better in the long run.
Your best bet is to go, like myself, retro. And older trade paperbacks are a great option. I love my old trades of Fantastic Four- The Trial Of Galactus, West Coast Avengers- Vision Quest (both John Byrne), The Thing- Liberty Legion (I'm a big Marvel and DC Golden Age fan), The Avengers- The Korvac Saga, and Avengers- The Serpent Crown (Love The Squadron Supreme). Old stories? Sure. But there's a lot of quality, great art and consistent story telling.
I grew up with comics in the late 60's and read religiously through the 70's and 80's. What kept me coming back was the care the editors took (not always, granted) with cohesive storylines, characterization and making sure that when something relevant happened, it had impact through the universe it was taking place in. This made the whole experience of reading a DC or Marvel comic seem legitimate and real. But this started to go away when both companies focused more on universe changing storylines that reset everything. like Crisis on Infinite Earths. If this had stayed as a one-time event then great but it didn't. Soon every writer wanted to reset everything or have the biggest villain with the highest death count. The problem with this formula is that when everything can just be reset, nothing really matters and very quickly my interest went away and I stopped reading comics. Now I read about comics and the out of control egos of the editors and writers and the SJW messages and politics and, honestly, just want nothing to do with them.
Before I get into my points, Wes, I have to thank you for recommending Hellions. You mentioned Zeb Wells wrote the comic but I didn't put two and two together. He wrote an excellent 2009 run on New Mutants which I loved as much as the Claremont years of the comic. But I digress. Outside two ongoing titles, Moon Knight and Robin, I rarely keep up with comics anymore. Civil War 2 was my breaking point with Marvel and I am just sick of the poor storytelling, hamfisted agenda/partisian politics alongside weak writing. Because I know ideologues love to strawman/ point to us we just hate all social/ political issues but no. We don't hate politics/ social commentary.. It can be done well. Static Shock had this, Teen Titans original animated series, Denny O'Neil Green Lantern/ Green Arrow comic was great that this. No we dislike partisan views that actively shame those on an opposing side without taking a nuanced/ big overview approach. In addition, the over use of crossover events has become boring for me and tedious. There's a reason why younger readers are gravitating towards graphic novels and manga. It's cheaper and easier to get into. Overall, Marvel/DC are royally screwed. This CB media bubble won't last forever. And once it pops, the direct market is going to crash with it. Because really all Marvel/DC need to do is reprint back issues of older work forever and they will be fine. Those are what sell better because they were made by folks who wanted to prove themselves and talented writers.
I'm reading the last great era of Marvel Comics. These back issues are all metal. 1.Darkhawk # 1, March 1991 2. Sleepwalker # 1, June 1991 3. Avengers # 326, November 1990 4. New Mutants # 100, April 1991 5. Fantastic Four # 347, December 1990 These comic books are all from the early 1990s, back in the good old days, when they had the first appearances of Darkhawk (Chris Powell), Sleepwalker (Rick Sheridan/the Sleepwalker), Rage (Elvin Holliday), X-Force (Domino (Nina Thurman), Cannonball (Sam Guthrie), Boom-Boom (Tabitha Smith), Cable (Nathan Charles Christopher Summers/Nathan Dayspring A'skani'son), Feral (Maria Callasantos), Warpath (James Proudstar), and Shatterstar (Shatterstar/Gaveedra-7), and the "New" Fantastic Four (The Gray Hulk (Dr. Bruce Banner/Joe Fixit), Ghost Rider (Dan Ketch/Noble Kale, the Spirit of Vengeance), Wolverine (James Howlett/Logan), and Spider-Man (Peter Parker)). The early '90s (1990 to 1994) was the last time that the "mainstream" Marvel Comics Universe (Earth-616) was still fuckin' awesome with major badass super hero characters. 🤘😎
@@tomcruisenukedmyaccount5388 The only way to bring it back is to make your own independent comics. You can't bring it back like it used to be with the "mainstream" comic book industry in the United States of America. Not anymore.
Manga is fine for folks who live foreign culture, but it's very far removed from Anglo-American culture. That's why there's still a market for usa comics and heroes.
Yeah, it's like the comics are being bought for the cover and treated like a card collection. The content of the inside is irrelevant. The other day I tried to buy ASM # 88 which has a new goblin character on the cover. It was sold out everywhere because speculators bought up all the copies to flip them on eBay. as a "first appearance". BFD!
I was a big collector in the 80's and 90's and have been collecting again these last few years. I find my favorite books are the non-superhero books like Nice House on the Lake or the newer creations like Geiger or Barbaric. The old DC /Marvel superheroes (I barely get into DC) are boring and nothing really matters since everything is so watered down with multiverses where anything can happen. Not like the good old days. But even then they will just resurrect the dead erasing anything significant that previously happened. Plus most of the gimmicks to sell books these days just make things worse with constant race/gender swapping of existing characters we love. It just shows a lack of creativity. The JLA will probably be replaced by minority women with one token gay. The goal is to remove white males and replace them with whatever. If they are a white male they at least need to be gay.
@@stonecoldstevejobs It's not racist for noticing a trend in the comics industry. I'm all for new minority heroes, but in order to get sales they just take popular selling characters and swap them out. Or with Batman / Spiderman they create another non white version because it might sell better. They aren't making gay characters straight or minority characters white are they? I like Furthest Place, but it's not moving very fast and jumps around a little too much. I did order the special issues with the vinyl on the first 3.
Marvel and DC is literally laying the path for image comics. The most highest rated tv show are based on image comics,image comics is more author oriented compared to marvel and DC which is more ip oriented. Idk what's gonna happen tho.
The variant covers are probably very lucrative, I think you can compare it to the "whales" in gaming who buy loot boxes, micro transactions, skins etc; you only need a few percent of the player base to buy these things to be insanely profitable. I stopped with Marvel/DC when Hellions stopped, though I bought one cover variant as an art piece but that it. Im still reading comics, but Ive moved on to comics made by Pulido, JP Roth, Art Thibert etc etc etc. And for a while I also have been collecting various comics form the 90ties.
One of the reasons I quit reading comics was the constant realigning the lore and the killing off of heroes only to bring them back 6 months later.I remember when Marvel killed off the human torch I was at the comics shop and the owner was hyping it and I told him that he'd be back in less than a year he's a licensed character he was on tshirts and action figures and what happened he was back in a few months.
DC continuity always was a endless mess,but Marvel used to be great with continuity until the early of the 2000's,but dumb retcons was screwing everything in the last 15 or more years.
The only thing that is moderm I am following is actually Hellboy and stuff from Mignola's universe, such as Baltimore, etc. Aside of that, I am picking up the omnis "Savage Swrod of Conan", "Aliens", and preparing for "Predator".
Favorite online comic suggestions! "Slightly Damned" by CHU. "Life Of The Party" by Travis Hanson, and "Mystery Babylon" by Val Hochberg. Great writers I met at comic conventions. More recommendations on the way. DC and Marvel are not the only comics.
i agree with jesse regarding the need for an overarching storyline that moves the whole universe along. he refers to dark reign which was part of the bendis run on avengers and new avengers which incorporated storylines such as civil war, siege, secret invasion etc, each of which reshaped the marvel universe and led into the next big story arc. This continued into hickmans avengers with infinity and onto secret war and that's when this story building stopped. Even slotts spiderman (which is much maligned on channels like this) had ongoing stories that led into and built upon each other and it was actually really good, especially compared to the pants that came after slott. marvel and dc need this deep thinking, planning, creativity and quality all of which they are missing.
You mentioned Batman storylines where Gotham gets taken over 1. City of Bane, Joker War and Fear State....I feel like War of Jokes and Riddles kind of fits this bill as well, although I kind of enjoyed that one admittedly
One thing I'll say, as a die-hard Magik fan, Marvel has mostly done a fantastic job with her continuity in recent years. There's an actual character arc and progression since her return in 2007 until now, with her regaining her soul under Wells, deciding to take responsibility for her situation under Bendis, growing as a person and leader, and finally now getting over the self-hate she's had since 1984. I don't think there are many characters from either company that have such a fully-realized arc in this millennium. The attention to continuity with her has been really good most of the time recently as well. There's been a running gag throughout New Mutants about her newfound coffee addiction, while at the same time she's been shown doing a ton on Krakoa and elsewhere, keeping as busy as anyone. This idea that she's overworked and not getting enough rest and that's why she's suddenly addicted to coffee is never stated outright, but it's heavily implied in dialogue such as her complaining that it's too early when she has to discipline a group of teens who terrorized the younger kids or her remark in Savage Avengers than the dragon Sadurang was very relatable to her because he just wanted to take a nap. The solicitation for the next New Mutants arc is the most direct reference to how busy she's been. It's not the most important thing, but it's the kind of attention to detail and consistency across multiple books that I don't see very often in comics anymore. Her lack of a proper formal education has also been a running gag in the Krakoa era, specifically her spelling, but that proved to be more than just a gag with her letter to the Quiet Council vowing to be a different and better kind of educator than Xavier or Magneto were. I know some people really hate Vita Ayala, but I feel the current New Mutants book really does respect continuity and the relationships these characters have with each other more than most other Marvel or DC books right now.
I used to be a Darkhawk completionist, covers included but I stopped. Happy that it was a carbon copy of Darkhawk Connor Young that they phaked up and not Chris.
Everything you gentlemen said rings true. They fill their books with terrible artist and writers and then put out the same book with 6,7, or 8 different covers. They care more for comic book collectors than comic book readers. I live more than an hour away from the nearest comic book shop so I read mostly everything online. Once I finish a recent issue, I shake my head and dive into the archives for some good reading.
I wish I could turn back time to 2005 dc when events and storylines clearly matters , one event leading to the next thanks to geoff johns. Similary early 2000s brian michael bendis events were incredible in how densely connected they were. So much fun
I’ve been sticking with DC far more than Marvel. I got totally lost there. But with DC I am going back over their Vertigo imprint and I am enjoying Black Label and Hill House comics. Also digging the sort of classic noir movies Tom King’s current Human Target is evoking. Other than that I am really enjoying a lot of Boom! Studios stuff which also proves James Tynion can write original stuff and looking forward to more Saga and some of the shorts like Stray Dogs from Image.
This is why I mainly stick to indies. The quality of the story, art, and even paper quality dwarves what the Weak 2 are putting out. Never mind their woke agendas, give us cohesive storytelling with flawed characters we can relate to, and there wouldn't be such a big problem.
Ilove comic's but who's too say what's better DC Or Marvel comics I Think they both have unreal hero's.But too many Cross overs an Time line's which Can make IT confusion for read's.
I left comic collecting on a monthly basis back in 2014. I STILL love comics, but mainly back issues, foreign, independent and omnibus's. What has happened since I left is worse than what I ever could've imagined. I'm pondering here, but will DC or Marvel ever regain their once mass appeal or just further fragment into irrelevance or.............oblivion? I'm not talking about the films, they're a world of their own.
The entire video can be summed up by looking at the cat behind Jessie at around the 1:46 mark. It's actions tell you all you need to know about the current state of Marvel and DC.
To be honest the issue of permanence has been a problem since the inception of comics, you never had to worry about any lasting impact of character deaths or the main character being in peril. For example, Superman can find Lois almost anywhere in the known universe, except for when the plot needs him not to. Batman never randomly lands wrong, slips off a wet surface, trips,etc. Let's not forget Wolverine,Deadpool, and the Hulk, virtually immoral. So the solution is... I created my own universe where consequences are permanent and even the main characters aren't immune to death.
I believe that you guys have done a great job of pointing out the symptoms of this disease without actually calling out the illness. Everything you said is true. However, DC and Marvel are no longer DC and Marvel. They are now part of the larger umbrella of AT&T and Disney. Show me that you are making a profit companies. There is no incentive to keep continuity alive if you can PT Barnum the customer into buying your bill of goods. There is no incentive as long as the larger company controls the characters for cinematic release. The good old days of the publishing companies are dead unless you are an Independent company.
I've given up on modern comics. The past decade killed my interest in current comics. They just don't do anything for me anymore. Now I'm focusing on back issues of comics I actually want in my collection.
I've been collecting back issues of stories I've missed; and now I just wait on TPBs and reviews before I read anything new. I'm not going to be a "whale" and eat up everything that gets released. There are 20 new Batman story arcs on the shelf every time I go into the comic store and I'm sure most of them are great but my goodness that is just too much at once.
As a DC ‘reader’ I don’t even bother with DC and haven’t since New 52. I’d never dream of entering DC now as a reader. Currently buying 3 titles. BM One Dark Night for the hype. Green Lantern, I’m not reading it but I intend to. I think though that if I did read GL then I wouldn’t be buying it lol. And DC vs Vampires... two of three are limited series. So grateful for my crisis to new 52 collection. It was a real kick in the guts when all that continuity was deleted but now I’ve disattached from DC and any goings ons in the universe. Thinking of filling holes in Starman collection.
The start of this happened many many years ago with Image Comics. With all the recent corporate takeover is over the last 30 years Comic books are not where the big money is.. They are just researching development for film and television and television. Collecting has turned into Speculation for wealthy people. Personally I gave up reading comic books 20 years ago
Parallel earths,multiverse and time travel stories have been alot of what I've collected for years. With DC getting rid of continuity haveing a omniverse it just dilutes and lessens everything that makes multiverse stories fun.☹
Every Dc event feels like there's a bigger bad guy waiting behind the current event bad guy going I orchestrated the last events to lead up to this big moment as the next bad guys waiting behind him like sorry buddy I'm using you to use someone else to use someone else. Just make the current event have a bad guy whos plan wasn't using the last event to lead to something bigger. But also Marvel feels like there nostalgia bating with comics that come out now that take place during the 80s or 90s like symbiote Spider-Man series or the new Ben Riley series there's even X-Men Legends which is ok but doesn't work for me cause I wasn't even born when they came out to read them so the nostalgia bating doesn't work for me.
I bailed a bit over 10 years ago now. Back then I wasnt actually intending to leave comics behind, I just figured with the new 52/Rebirth going on in DC and the new marvel characters being introduced that it was a bad time to try to "get back into comics like when I was a kid/young teen". at the time I just thought I was waiting to see where they were going with the stories. Instead I've watched both companies go thru at least one hard reboot and one soft reboot each. like whats the point of getting into the comics if the slate is wiped clean every 5-ish years? like some comic stories take a whole fricken year to tell, but we're gonna erase the record at the 5 year mark.
The production quality is garbage now also. Spider-Man Beyond as an example, literally each issue felt and looked like someone put together something that looks sort of like a comic in photoshop and then cheaply printed it in China.
I picked up Super Girl Woman of Tomorrow a few weeks ago because I was blown away by the art. I've enjoyed it greatly. The writing, the penciling, and top notch coloring are all excellent. I literally know nothing about Supergirl really or what her story is in the main continuity yet I was very invested in the story in part because it could almost be stand alone from the DC universe. Anyway, on the whole I think DC and Marvel comics are dead but there are still amazing creators in the industry
@@Wes_From_TC Interesting, I'll definitely have to check out True Grit then the next time I'm buying novels. It being a rip off isn't super concerning for me since we've pretty much have already discovered every story that will emotionally resonate with an audience and it's just a matter of repurposing it into new context, mediums, and settings. Also I still really enjoyed the art. That was what caught my eye in the first place. The only other DC/Marvel comic I liked was Wonder Woman Dead Earth. What did you think of that one?
There can't be any stakes without permanent death. When you know that any Hero's loved ones or any Heroes themselves will be resurrected or an alternate universe version will replace them, why care what happens? This is a problem comics have been rushing to collide with for decades, we're just now finally seeing the crash as it happens.
I was born in 1954. For years I read everything I could that looked like a comic book, funny animal, teen humor, TV adaptation, romance, supernatural, war....Eventually got hooked by Marvel, and occasionally returned to DC when Marvel forced them to up their game. I kept on past the old age limit for readers: twelve. Marvel expanded, I tried everything, sometimes losing enthusiasm as titles stopped working for me. Kirby left, returned and we discovered why he wasn't a scripter originally. (He's been canonized since his passing, rightly. So no one remembers his return to Marvel books were dismissed by many fans as "Kirby Krap.") To close I eventually tired of "events " or "stunts " as one of you called them. Being obliged to read characters I'd dropped or NEVER had interest in. I stopped regular purchases in 1990 at age 36. You fellows all seem to be A LITTLE past that. Congratulations for having more endurance and tolerance than I did. And I came in when a lot of these tropes were just being formulated.
Kinda, but different. This comic environment is a bit more stable but far smaller. It'll be interesting seeing the 3rd and 4th order effects these changes have. I'm not optimistic.
Depressants on the upper left camera, stimulants on the upper right, but the guy on the bottom in the middle doesn't look to be on anything except a chair. Just kidding! Thank you so much for making this video and bringing up these serious issues, they are totally destroying (and have been) one of my favorite forms of entertainment since childhood. I've noticed that everything has been going downhill bit by bit for about 20 years (especially 15 or 10 years or so), Comics, Films, even Music has been pretty terrible and only getting worse since the 2000s. Games too! They aren't fun, they aren't focused on fun, they are all so over-serious seeming or they go in the other direction and make themselves too ridiculous and obnoxious, besides shoving down all kinds of annoying political non-sense and lecturing about things, like what the heck! I used to enjoy games and comics and all that when they were just fun, whether dark or light, they never seemed to be so heavy handed usually, or frankly boring, they were even more simple in many ways and it was so much more satisfying. In some ways, even merchandise and the way customers are being treated (like toys and collectibles) have also gone in some kind of disturbing directions too. I don't like any of these corporate models being applied to these businesses, why does everything seem to suck so much more than it ever did? In the 80s and 90s, however bad something may have been, it was still so much more fun in comparison to the stuff being pumped out now all across media. It isn't just the "woke" thing seemingly, music was getting louder, the lyrics were getting way stupider and more repetitive, the companies were getting more rich than ever before and disrespecting customers more than ever before, because they weren't desperate anymore and stopped caring entirely. They have disappointed so many people, they get constant backlash, but they hide away in "ivory towers" and treat everyone making legitimate complaints like they are all just crazy idiots! It is so simple to compare great things from the past, even the less great or things that were considered "bad" or poorly produced in the past, with the modern materials in almost any area of the entertainment, media, and publishing industries, and one will find the older stuff is always better, always more entertaining, even at its worst, in comparison to so much being produced constantly, and it has driven away so many people, it is also failing to impress many more new people. If someone is impressed by today's stuff, they must be ignorant of the superior stuff before it, because it is almost incomprehensible to me that someone would actually prefer a lot of these newer stories, a lot of the newer artwork, compared to generations of classic top notch material that it seems to totally just disrespect the legacy of and tries to actively attack and compromise and insult the older materials, it is like hubris, and people don't like it! Besides that, can't they come up with anything new? They are so uncreative and unintelligent, and are keeping out all kinds of great talents from their seeming rule through nepotism and favoritism and other "gatekeeping" that is keeping so many great minds from helping to make things good again like they used to be. The people being praised and rewarded today inside "the industry" seem like so many freaks and fools compared to the talents who were given a shot in the past.
I think hunted was just a way to finally kill off kraven for good this time hopefully, still you have to admit that nick spencers run of spiderman was better than dan slott's run
I get that fans might look at commentary like this as negative, but honestly, we need channels like this and it's guests that challenge all the bullshit, critically. We don't have to agree on everything, but the conversations need to be happen, especially if you're that reader who's been around for a while and want something more.
Sometimes these companies need an outside voice to tell them what they need to hear.
All true but they don't give one flying #$@#$ about their fans. THAT is the problem. Wes has been respectful in his critiques against the industry and the creators, and his thanks as Vita A dumping on him that he's a "racist". The ONLY times the industry "listens" to fans is when the sycophants are applauding whatever #$@#$ is coming out. There are a LOT of conversations that should be happening but they aren't and they won't since long term sales don't matter. Everything is a gimmick and they have no problems with that.
AMEN.
@@jamesneese7663 Anyone in a creative endeavor who doesn't care about profits is mainly doing it as a 'vanity project', or 'labor or love'. If that was the case, there would be no need for 'gimmicks' of any kind, in terms of marketing.
@@wylier maybe in other industries people CAN do BOTH (gaming for example has ppl who are passonate about gaming and making money), but this is comics we're talking about. Most ppl in mainstream comics today are shamelessly using comics as a stepping stone to Hollywood, so they don't care about comics, sales, or fans because they have no intention to stay for long. We've seen this from Kate Leth (of Hellcat) going to High Guardian Spice then Mags V with the show Vagrant Queen.
its depressing....
Continuity is one of the main draws for me in comics. Ignoring it or pushing it to the side is a huge mistake. The lack of solid continuity diminishes interest in the new books significantly. What's worst, it also diminishes the interest in older books as well. Why bother with them if they no longer matter or will not matter in a second? Why should the reader bother if the creators don't? Strong continuity is the key. When Batman gets injured in the Justice League title I want that injury to be acknowledged or referenced in his own book as well. And so on and so forth.
But the problem is that the DCU continuity always was a huge mess.
@@EvandroACruz I think messy continuity is better than none. Still, they did manage to tidy it up a little with DC Rebirth and Doomsday Clock... hm, only to royally f it up later.
@@egonnn244 Agreed. A messy continuity is better than none. Just look at real world history, its a messy hodgepodge of bullshit that barely worked but we're stuck living it every day.
Funny how every comic channel starts by reviewing books with love and passion for the art and ends up turning into a channel dedicated to pointing out what a shit show it has all become. EVS/Comics Matter/Perch/Thinking Critical. ITS ALMOST LIKE THE FANBASE HAS BEEN TRYING TO TELL THE BIG TWO FOR YEARS THAT THEY ARE FUCKED UP!!!!!!!! ………ya know what I mean?
My message to the industry is a play on words with one of my favorite dragon ball z dialogues by Cell. “Yet another fan YOU could have saved.”
Thank you sir. Well said.
Perfect.
That is not fair to Thinking Critical. Yeah he craps on most new Marvel and DC because he is not a shill but there is plenty of love for comics on the channel (such as the retrospectives.)
I would not group this channel with Comics Matter which has devolved into bitching about marginal comic creators twitter posts.
JB that is not how I meant that at all I love Wes and his content. I am not comparing him at all to other channels or their line of thinking. But his channel has changed for the same reasons.
The problem is that the companies DO NOT CARE about their customers or fan base. Sales abysmal? No problem! Fans outraged? No problem! Posting (or publishing IN THE COMICS) comments that are racist, hateful, political, immoral or personal issues? No problem. Negative press/publicity? No problem.
hell...look how benign Wes has been all this time but then Vita A got upset and called out Thinking Critical as "racist" ANYWAY. It was only after THAT that Wes has been very openly boisterous in his disgust of the industry and it's tolerance of the incompetence, selfishness, and disdain by the comic pros towards ANYONE who disagrees with them.
Zack might be a little salty but he's NOT wrong that these comic pros are not only unprofessional but openly DESPISE the fandom, don't care about their jobs, and have no problem screwing over THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS for the sake of their personal grievances. EVERY channel that has been critical of the industry has been attacked, smeared, and defamed. Look how Clownfish RIGHTLY called out Kevin Smith and Masters of the Universe for offing He-Man in the opening episode. Kevin Smith and his sycophants went on a tear that Clownfish were lying and wrong. And guess what happened in that first episode?!
Rather than get better, the industry prefers to attack their critics, namecalling them into oblivion until something "sticks".
People are buying covers and gimmicks, and are not reading the comics. I 100% agree! Great video Wes
The real meaning of Marvel Zombies, fans who will buy every varient cover, buy every x-men comic without being critical, if you buy anything written by Vita Ayala you don't care about those characters/books. (At DC it is Tom King).
If anything modern comics has encouraged me to look up obscure older comics to find what they haven’t screwed over yet. I’ve found some gems.
Christine P. Just stick to old back issues via Omnibuses. Premimum format and good stories. For example, I'm collecting the X-men Omnibuses/ spin-offs and am loving it. It's been years since I've reread Claremont's stuff and boy he was amazing back then. Especially New Mutants. My favorite X-men spinoff book.
I have been a longtime reader of Marvel since the late 80's, I didn't get into DC comics till the late 90's. From my perspective DC and Marvel for the past 5-6 years is creatively stumped at this point. The stories have been lack luster, both companies do nothing now but hire SJW and activist to write their books along with the editors, they are all into pushing a social/political narrative with the books now. They want to virtue signal and gender and race swap alot of main characters and can't make any good new ones. Re hashing the same storylines over and over and now the new gimmick is a putting cool new covers and turning existing characters gay out of know where instead of developing original gay characters. It is getting sickening at this point. Its like they hate their longtime true comicbook readers/customers at this point and would rather try to trick new readers into buying their books. Go on alot of those writers and editors twitter pages tells you all need to know about the writers and editors of this new Marvel/DC.........
I stopped with Doomsday Clock and The Three Jokers. Picked up a few of the new Batman comics with the new writer, but I see he is leaving, so am I. Stick with the old back issues. The stories are better and the price is usually cheaper! No regrets.
@Ryan Wilson you aren't wrong.
Steven Caldwell Wise choice. I've been picking up a lot of good stuff in Omnibus/ epic collection format and enjoying it.
I stopped with that bs of Heros in Crisis. Not regret at all!
Doomsday Clock was pure garbage
@@adamquenano8563 although I don't believe it was pure garbage, I feel like it definitely fell short of what it could have been.
I'm with Jesse. I stopped buying new comics 20 years ago and started spending my hobby money on back issues. New comics are $4-10 each. That buys a lot of great classic titles.
for someone like myself who wants to get into reading comics again how can i do it in a cost effective way? i will probably do the collecting as well but i want to read for now. so with titles like we live that are so impactful is it possible to pick up the 1st run for reasonable prices? i would assume those would be books that are gonna be hard to get for a regular price. and i want to read the superman with the aliens that detected him traveling to the earth's orbit. i thought that was a cool idea and i fuck wit aliens all day lol. thanks!
@@fleamarketmixtape3793 I've been buying long series lots on eBay. I recently bought huge runs of Mike Baron's Nexus and Chuck Dixon's Airboy for about $1 and issue after shipping.
In hindsight, the perfect jumping off point for longtime DC fans was 2011 when Flashpoint ended the post Crisis DCU.
Great video. Batman and Superman books were my thing growing up. I stopped reading around 2005 because there was an event every other week that kept ruining the flow of the titles I read. Sounds like not much has changed.
It's everything you all said. At the end of the day, the biggest factor is the fan base being there to buy the books. I watch and follow comic channels where guests, hosts, people send in comments admiting to buying books they don't really like in multiple formats, double, triple dipping just to collect and ironically maintaining a continuity on there shelves and boxes that no longer exists.
Many of my online comic buddies who i met on reddit, fandom forums and on twitter.. are going back and reading comics from older era.. hack writers/activists ruin everything they touch.. be it gaming, comics , movies and other form of entertainment. I am not even a white man but i feel a huge disconnect with current marvel and dc comics. Its all boring, lame and insanely agenda driven.
IMPORTANT FACT : Most EDITORS and management level executives at marvel and dc comics are encouraging this and must be BLAMED.
Back issues are the best thing going in comics today.
I’m not reading many of the books as they release because “writing for the trade” has conditioned me to believe that I have to wait if I want a complete story, so I typically wait 6 months to a year before reading/catching up on a title. I don’t buy a lot of variants… maybe two a month, and only when they are near cover price.
I always liked how a “Hulk Incident” could be felt in every book.
Yes
The "this person was behind everything all along" trope is like "subverting expectations" or "morally gray".
People trying to make game of thrones without even making the map first.
Edit: disney literally did a bigger deathstar lmao it was the starkiller.
@alexander I deliberately avoid any book that is described as "subverting expectations" - you know it is going to be dire.
My last purchase was Three Jokers.
I think a story where the main core is about moving past trauma and forgiveness a good stepping off point.
What got me out of comics is price, politics, crossovers, events and bad story telling.
Honestly I think both dc and marvel really need to make there continuity actually make sense because frankly it feels to me everything is in flux and not making sense continuity anymore.
Last comic book series I was completely nuts about was the Grant Morrison 2 year run of Green Lantern. I know I've gone on and on about this, but this 2 year run was made with love of the character and love of the richness of the GL Corps and had zero to do with whatever else DC was doing. The writing required multiple reads. The art was challenging, rich, out there, sometimes beyond comic book art. I was crazy about Morrison's THE FILTH and Multiversity series and I don't mean to gush on Grant, but the big companies have pushed OUT the creative, cool, out there, different thinking comic book creators. And now, there's little chance that they'll want to pay for a meaningful return of a Claremont or Byrne or...
So glad to hear it’s worth getting into. Loved what I picked up, but my shop closed and moved locations halfway into his series. Issue #3 was really fun.
I agree with this review, I stopped buying comics about 10 years ago. I'm not interested in the reboots, changing male characters to female, gay or minorities just for political correctness or wokeness-nothing original anymore really.
I actually picked up a lot of star Wars legends omnibus and Punisher by Garth ennis collections and X-Men by Claremont masterworks. Having a great time reading back issues tbh. So much better than the new ones.
Marvel DC and IDW are in a race to see who can bankrupt themselves first.
Marvel is part of an umbrella corporation with access to federal reserve cash and bailouts. They are fine continually throwing away revenue.
IDW is acting like Marvel without the situation they have and probably will go bankrupt.
I want the entire dc continuum to come to and end, and they LITERALLY restart everything from origins, and slowly come out with each character’s story, leading up to the Justice League being created, in a more Earth One style.
But you can not do that with woke writing because it’s literally the antithesis of good writing. Is HAS to be a return to focus on GOOD storytelling and nothing else.
10 years ago was Age of Heroes at Marvel and n52.
N52 had a few titles worth buying. Aquaman, Swampthing, Animal Man, and JLD.
Within the last 10 years at Marvel, Agent Venom and Scarlet Spider featuring Kane are the two solid comics-start to finish- that I can think of.
Terrific ACCURATE analysis of what's going on at DC and Marvel from guys that actually still WANT to enjoy current Marvel and DC comics but just can't!
You're right, nothing matters anymore. Even as a relatively new reader, having started in 2016, I'm already limiting the scope of my collection unless things change.
Batman is just gonna be just about everything but I'm stripping Tom King's stuff down to bare essentials and I'm not even sure if I'm getting Tynion's run. Bendis ruined Superman for me so I'm stopping at the end of Tomasi's run. I might stop Wonder Woman at Azzarello's run. Spider-Man is stopping before the 90's Clone Saga, might get JMS. Unless someone sells me on something else, Daredevil is stopping at Frank Miller. I'm getting Thor here and there, probably not getting any further than Jason Aaron but even then I won't fill everything in. Etc, etc.
I just saw the Vol 6 synopsis that made me face palm. You have to see it for yourself and come up to your own conclusion. Spider-Man's finally done with the crud concerning Mephisto and Kindred, only for things to fall down before the Beyond storyline concludes. I won't know until I read it but it's like they love putting Spider-Man in places where it's tough to come back from.
This was such a great video guys, I agree with everything you guys said. At this point the only thing I am buying are Omnibus editions of old series which I must say I have been loving. Just finished vol 1 of the Geoff Johns Green Lantern now I am getting stuck into the Mutant Massacre Omnibus and nothing in the last 10 years comes remotely close to the quality of these stories. DC and Marvel need to bring these older writers back to train the younger writers in how to craft a fun compelling comic book story.
Thanks 👊
Always a pleasure to listen to you gentlemen even if I’ve stop reading or caring about the big two.
Thanks 👊
To me the decline of Marvel started when they brought Jean Grey back in the mid-80s for X-Factor. Before then deaths mattered in comics. Gwen Stacey stayed dead. Mar-Vel stayed dead. At that point Green Goblin would still be dead for another 10 years. Jean's return was the beginning of the cyclical nature of comics resetting to the status quo and death not mattering. It even destroyed continuity by ruining one of the seminal X-Men works at the time, the Dark Phoenix saga, and did incalculable damage to the character of Cyclops. If Jean could return after destroying a world of 5 billion people and have both her crimes and sacrificed handwaved away, then anyone could and nothing was sacred. They went about making Magneto a villain again after Claremont had a 50-issue arc about redeeming him, telling readers that there was no point in getting invested in a character arc because it could and would be undone. Bob Harris and Jim Lee moved to ensure X-Men would only move backwards and stay stuck in the old Magneto-sentinels plots and so kicked Claremont out. The X-Men have never recovered from those mistakes. Harris spread that same philosophy to the rest of Marvel when he became chief editor in the 90s and the result was crap like the Spider-Man clone saga and Marvel having to declare bankruptcy, and Marvel as a whole has never recovered. So many characters who were great back in the 80s are stagnant and boring now, from Wolverine and Storm to Iron Man and Spider-Man. I wasn't even born yet the last time Marvel was really good.
DC was doing better in the 90s because they had really good editors who ran as tight a ship as possible when it came to continuity. Superman in the 90s had a comic literally every week with a gigantic cast and it worked because the continuity was as perfect as possible. In the 2000s this began to change as the old editors left and talentless hacks like Dan Didio took over. Continuity went out the window, good storytelling went out the window in favor of marketing to the lowest common denominator. Then they hired Bob Harris of all people. Hiring the man who led their competitor into bankruptcy is the height of madness. The problem with the Nu52 was that it was a reboot of the universe while the people who ruined the previous universe weren't rebooted. A DC led by Didio and Harris would always be doomed. They got rid of Harris but kept Didio on until very recently, and now that he's finally gone it might be too late to fix things. I don't care about Batman anymore. Batman - my biggest obsession growing up, isn't a draw for me now because DC has run the character into the dirt. Now DC is in an even worse place than Marvel because the good stories from Marvels past are still in continuity outside of anything related to Spider-Man's marriage. Those great Iron Man stories from the 80s like Armor Wars still matter, while DC has no continuity at all, with a general 'everything happened' from 50 different universes no matter how much they contradict each other, and seminal works like Peter David's Supergirl run - the only good Supergirl, remain lost to time and are never referenced as having happened.
I can take stories with political messages I don't agree with. I love Godzilla even if I strongly disagree with the messages of the Godzilla movies that have messages, and I love Star Trek despite finding much of its political outlook stupid or abhorrent. Being woke isn't a deal breaker for me, and I find that the stories became bad long before they became woke. Tim Drake being bi isn't something that bothers me. What bothers me is how DC has been destroying the character of Tim Drake since 2004 - first by killing his father and much of his supporting cast, making him into a mini-Bruce and destroying everything that made him unique, then by erasing his history in the 2011 reboot and leaving a bland shell that has no purpose or reason to exist in his place. The biggest problem with making him bi is that at this point he's been so destroyed that the only value he has as a character anymore is as Stephanie Brown's love interest. Without that nothing remains of the great character he was in the 90s, and he should be erased the way Wally West was erased after Barry was brought back and the Nu52 happened. He was destroyed not by wokeness, but by the DC Didio Dan created where characters are reduced to single-sentence descriptions with 0 depth and good stories are replaced by the cheapest marketing gimmicks possible. The woke part only happened at the very end of this sad tale. Superman, as well, has been on a downward spiral ever since they stopped caring about continuity in the mid-2000s and started trying to make things as silver age as possible even if it made no sense in the post-crisis universe. They introduced so many Kryptonians, but the cast shrunk to a fraction of what it was when Superman was the only Kryptonian and the stories were awful. Then they kept rebooting Superman ever couple of years to the point where there's no continuity or character at all, and certainly no room for a decently-sized cast. Clark going public with his secret identity would have been a big deal in the 90s because the world had been built up that its effects would have been seen and felt. But in the 2020s the world was so small that there's no reason to care. So too with Marvel, the destruction of characters like Spider-Man has to do with the way they've tried to destroy his continuity and ensure he never ages or grows, hence how the Clone Saga and One More Day came to be. The wokeness came later and is the symptom of the larger problem rather than the problem itself. Why get invested in a story about Peter's growth if he's not allowed to grow and will revert the moment the next story begins?
Didn't mean to go on such a rant, but I just hate Didio and Harris so much.
All in on the Spawnverse boys!
Great conversation, could listen to you three talk about stuff all day.
Thanks 👊
Shock value as a way to generate attention has diminishing returns. You can only go to the same well so often before it runs dry.
Variant covers really need to go away because they feel like a complete waste of time and resources.
They are dumb. Especially when the cover has nothing to do with the book.
@@RamManNo1 indeed and honestly at this point I think the industry as a whole really needs a reality check and stupid putting out so many variant covers that mean jack and shit within the story itself.
@@TevyaSmolka the only 'reality check' that the industry would get would be a drop off in sales for anything featuring a 'variant' cover.
@@wylier that's true
There are two major problems with comics . 1. They never changed the social perception of either being for kids or something speculators invest money in. And 2. The main two companies have been rehashing the same stories for decades now. None of them has the bravery to actually do something new, Hickman's X-Men is the last example, the moment he wanted to do something new, the editorial pulled him back .
If people are just buying books without reading them, then why have a stable of writers or book artists at all?
Fire them all, print only issues from decades past (but give them all new titles & promo hype), and just hire artists to give the reprints cool new covers for the collectors.
Bam! DC & Marvel just saved themselves tons of money! Bonus: don't need editors, either, if you're just reprinting back issues!
I suppose if you have to give customers something new, do what X-Men Classic did way back when. Tack on a 3-5 page new story to the back issue. That'll incentivize customers to buy it even if it's just a reprint with a new cover.
Variants, specifically hard to find ratios. This reminds me of collecting Star Trek tng figures back in the day. My mate bought everything they released, actually he bought 2 of most 1 to collect and 1 to open. Then the 1701 limited box set came out and he couldn't get one. Stopped collecting on the spot and got a girl friend. Probably worked out better in the long run.
Your best bet is to go, like myself, retro. And older trade paperbacks are a great option. I love my old trades of Fantastic Four- The Trial Of Galactus, West Coast Avengers- Vision Quest (both John Byrne), The Thing- Liberty Legion (I'm a big Marvel and DC Golden Age fan), The Avengers- The Korvac Saga, and Avengers- The Serpent Crown (Love The Squadron Supreme). Old stories? Sure. But there's a lot of quality, great art and consistent story telling.
Back Issues are where it's at!
I grew up with comics in the late 60's and read religiously through the 70's and 80's. What kept me coming back was the care the editors took (not always, granted) with cohesive storylines, characterization and making sure that when something relevant happened, it had impact through the universe it was taking place in. This made the whole experience of reading a DC or Marvel comic seem legitimate and real.
But this started to go away when both companies focused more on universe changing storylines that reset everything. like Crisis on Infinite Earths. If this had stayed as a one-time event then great but it didn't. Soon every writer wanted to reset everything or have the biggest villain with the highest death count. The problem with this formula is that when everything can just be reset, nothing really matters and very quickly my interest went away and I stopped reading comics.
Now I read about comics and the out of control egos of the editors and writers and the SJW messages and politics and, honestly, just want nothing to do with them.
Before I get into my points, Wes, I have to thank you for recommending Hellions. You mentioned Zeb Wells wrote the comic but I didn't put two and two together. He wrote an excellent 2009 run on New Mutants which I loved as much as the Claremont years of the comic. But I digress. Outside two ongoing titles, Moon Knight and Robin, I rarely keep up with comics anymore. Civil War 2 was my breaking point with Marvel and I am just sick of the poor storytelling, hamfisted agenda/partisian politics alongside weak writing. Because I know ideologues love to strawman/ point to us we just hate all social/ political issues but no. We don't hate politics/ social commentary.. It can be done well. Static Shock had this, Teen Titans original animated series, Denny O'Neil Green Lantern/ Green Arrow comic was great that this. No we dislike partisan views that actively shame those on an opposing side without taking a nuanced/ big overview approach.
In addition, the over use of crossover events has become boring for me and tedious. There's a reason why younger readers are gravitating towards graphic novels and manga. It's cheaper and easier to get into. Overall, Marvel/DC are royally screwed. This CB media bubble won't last forever. And once it pops, the direct market is going to crash with it. Because really all Marvel/DC need to do is reprint back issues of older work forever and they will be fine. Those are what sell better because they were made by folks who wanted to prove themselves and talented writers.
Glad you liked Hellions!
Lack of talent and consistency
You guys are right as a 47 year collector its rare i buy any new comics & thats usually just cover buys.
Thank you for another great video/commentary
Thanks Brian 👊
great video, and 100% spot on.
I'm reading the last great era of Marvel Comics. These back issues are all metal.
1.Darkhawk # 1, March 1991
2. Sleepwalker # 1, June 1991
3. Avengers # 326, November 1990
4. New Mutants # 100, April 1991
5. Fantastic Four # 347, December 1990
These comic books are all from the early 1990s, back in the good old days, when they had the first appearances of Darkhawk (Chris Powell), Sleepwalker (Rick Sheridan/the Sleepwalker), Rage (Elvin Holliday), X-Force (Domino (Nina Thurman), Cannonball (Sam Guthrie), Boom-Boom (Tabitha Smith), Cable (Nathan Charles Christopher Summers/Nathan Dayspring A'skani'son), Feral (Maria Callasantos), Warpath (James Proudstar), and Shatterstar (Shatterstar/Gaveedra-7), and the "New" Fantastic Four (The Gray Hulk (Dr. Bruce Banner/Joe Fixit), Ghost Rider (Dan Ketch/Noble Kale, the Spirit of Vengeance), Wolverine (James Howlett/Logan), and Spider-Man (Peter Parker)).
The early '90s (1990 to 1994) was the last time that the "mainstream" Marvel Comics Universe (Earth-616) was still fuckin' awesome with major badass super hero characters. 🤘😎
I agree with you.
This is because these comics were metal.
@@tomcruisenukedmyaccount5388 Hell yeah. Way better than any of the garbage-tier bullshit that gets published today.
@@incubustimelord5947 They need to bring metal back.
@@tomcruisenukedmyaccount5388 The only way to bring it back is to make your own independent comics. You can't bring it back like it used to be with the "mainstream" comic book industry in the United States of America. Not anymore.
I’m tired of the industry as a whole going backwards…fresh ideas weather they fail or finish ,explore…
I’m impressed people are still reading Big Two. Manga is so much less frustrating.
Manga is fine for folks who live foreign culture, but it's very far removed from Anglo-American culture. That's why there's still a market for usa comics and heroes.
Yeah, it's like the comics are being bought for the cover and treated like a card collection. The content of the inside is irrelevant. The other day I tried to buy ASM # 88 which has a new goblin character on the cover. It was sold out everywhere because speculators bought up all the copies to flip them on eBay. as a "first appearance". BFD!
Catering to speculators is a delicate balance. Sorry you didn't get your comic.
I was a big collector in the 80's and 90's and have been collecting again these last few years. I find my favorite books are the non-superhero books like Nice House on the Lake or the newer creations like Geiger or Barbaric. The old DC /Marvel superheroes (I barely get into DC) are boring and nothing really matters since everything is so watered down with multiverses where anything can happen. Not like the good old days. But even then they will just resurrect the dead erasing anything significant that previously happened. Plus most of the gimmicks to sell books these days just make things worse with constant race/gender swapping of existing characters we love. It just shows a lack of creativity. The JLA will probably be replaced by minority women with one token gay. The goal is to remove white males and replace them with whatever. If they are a white male they at least need to be gay.
Overreaching and a tad racist. I do agree with you on enjoying non super hero books such as NHOTL.Where is the furthest place from here is my fav rn.
@@stonecoldstevejobs It's not racist for noticing a trend in the comics industry. I'm all for new minority heroes, but in order to get sales they just take popular selling characters and swap them out. Or with Batman / Spiderman they create another non white version because it might sell better. They aren't making gay characters straight or minority characters white are they? I like Furthest Place, but it's not moving very fast and jumps around a little too much. I did order the special issues with the vinyl on the first 3.
Marvel and DC is literally laying the path for image comics. The most highest rated tv show are based on image comics,image comics is more author oriented compared to marvel and DC which is more ip oriented. Idk what's gonna happen tho.
The variant covers are probably very lucrative, I think you can compare it to the "whales" in gaming who buy loot boxes, micro transactions, skins etc; you only need a few percent of the player base to buy these things to be insanely profitable. I stopped with Marvel/DC when Hellions stopped, though I bought one cover variant as an art piece but that it. Im still reading comics, but Ive moved on to comics made by Pulido, JP Roth, Art Thibert etc etc etc. And for a while I also have been collecting various comics form the 90ties.
One of the reasons I quit reading comics was the constant realigning the lore and the killing off of heroes only to bring them back 6 months later.I remember when Marvel killed off the human torch I was at the comics shop and the owner was hyping it and I told him that he'd be back in less than a year he's a licensed character he was on tshirts and action figures and what happened he was back in a few months.
DC continuity always was a endless mess,but Marvel used to be great with continuity until the early of the 2000's,but dumb retcons was screwing everything in the last 15 or more years.
Thank You 👍.
The only thing that is moderm I am following is actually Hellboy and stuff from Mignola's universe, such as Baltimore, etc.
Aside of that, I am picking up the omnis "Savage Swrod of Conan", "Aliens", and preparing for "Predator".
Favorite online comic suggestions! "Slightly Damned" by CHU. "Life Of The Party" by Travis Hanson, and "Mystery Babylon" by Val Hochberg. Great writers I met at comic conventions. More recommendations on the way. DC and Marvel are not the only comics.
i agree with jesse regarding the need for an overarching storyline that moves the whole universe along. he refers to dark reign which was part of the bendis run on avengers and new avengers which incorporated storylines such as civil war, siege, secret invasion etc, each of which reshaped the marvel universe and led into the next big story arc. This continued into hickmans avengers with infinity and onto secret war and that's when this story building stopped. Even slotts spiderman (which is much maligned on channels like this) had ongoing stories that led into and built upon each other and it was actually really good, especially compared to the pants that came after slott. marvel and dc need this deep thinking, planning, creativity and quality all of which they are missing.
You mentioned Batman storylines where Gotham gets taken over 1. City of Bane, Joker War and Fear State....I feel like War of Jokes and Riddles kind of fits this bill as well, although I kind of enjoyed that one admittedly
One thing I'll say, as a die-hard Magik fan, Marvel has mostly done a fantastic job with her continuity in recent years. There's an actual character arc and progression since her return in 2007 until now, with her regaining her soul under Wells, deciding to take responsibility for her situation under Bendis, growing as a person and leader, and finally now getting over the self-hate she's had since 1984. I don't think there are many characters from either company that have such a fully-realized arc in this millennium. The attention to continuity with her has been really good most of the time recently as well. There's been a running gag throughout New Mutants about her newfound coffee addiction, while at the same time she's been shown doing a ton on Krakoa and elsewhere, keeping as busy as anyone. This idea that she's overworked and not getting enough rest and that's why she's suddenly addicted to coffee is never stated outright, but it's heavily implied in dialogue such as her complaining that it's too early when she has to discipline a group of teens who terrorized the younger kids or her remark in Savage Avengers than the dragon Sadurang was very relatable to her because he just wanted to take a nap. The solicitation for the next New Mutants arc is the most direct reference to how busy she's been. It's not the most important thing, but it's the kind of attention to detail and consistency across multiple books that I don't see very often in comics anymore. Her lack of a proper formal education has also been a running gag in the Krakoa era, specifically her spelling, but that proved to be more than just a gag with her letter to the Quiet Council vowing to be a different and better kind of educator than Xavier or Magneto were. I know some people really hate Vita Ayala, but I feel the current New Mutants book really does respect continuity and the relationships these characters have with each other more than most other Marvel or DC books right now.
I used to be a Darkhawk completionist, covers included but I stopped. Happy that it was a carbon copy of Darkhawk Connor Young that they phaked up and not Chris.
There are only so few current Dc and Marvel stories I want to read. It’s sad.
Remember DC Rebirth? The last time DC was good. Thanks DC editor s.
Everything you gentlemen said rings true. They fill their books with terrible artist and writers and then put out the same book with 6,7, or 8 different covers. They care more for comic book collectors than comic book readers. I live more than an hour away from the nearest comic book shop so I read mostly everything online. Once I finish a recent issue, I shake my head and dive into the archives for some good reading.
Comic readers are the lowest priority for DC and Marvel.
Again. Manga person since continuity and stories are good.
I wish I could turn back time to 2005 dc when events and storylines clearly matters , one event leading to the next thanks to geoff johns.
Similary early 2000s brian michael bendis events were incredible in how densely connected they were. So much fun
I’ve been sticking with DC far more than Marvel. I got totally lost there. But with DC I am going back over their Vertigo imprint and I am enjoying Black Label and Hill House comics. Also digging the sort of classic noir movies Tom King’s current Human Target is evoking.
Other than that I am really enjoying a lot of Boom! Studios stuff which also proves James Tynion can write original stuff and looking forward to more Saga and some of the shorts like Stray Dogs from Image.
This is why I mainly stick to indies. The quality of the story, art, and even paper quality dwarves what the Weak 2 are putting out. Never mind their woke agendas, give us cohesive storytelling with flawed characters we can relate to, and there wouldn't be such a big problem.
There are still comics. Marvel and DC are just hurting themselves.
Ilove comic's but who's too say what's better DC Or Marvel comics I Think they both have unreal hero's.But too many Cross overs an Time line's which Can make IT confusion for read's.
I left comic collecting on a monthly basis back in 2014. I STILL love comics, but mainly back issues, foreign, independent and omnibus's. What has happened since I left is worse than what I ever could've imagined. I'm pondering here, but will DC or Marvel ever regain their once mass appeal or just further fragment into irrelevance or.............oblivion? I'm not talking about the films, they're a world of their own.
The entire video can be summed up by looking at the cat behind Jessie at around the 1:46 mark. It's actions tell you all you need to know about the current state of Marvel and DC.
Lol
Aaron hits the nail on the head: "Fan fics".
To be honest the issue of permanence has been a problem since the inception of comics, you never had to worry about any lasting impact of character deaths or the main character being in peril.
For example, Superman can find Lois almost anywhere in the known universe, except for when the plot needs him not to.
Batman never randomly lands wrong, slips off a wet surface, trips,etc.
Let's not forget Wolverine,Deadpool, and the Hulk, virtually immoral.
So the solution is... I created my own universe where consequences are permanent and even the main characters aren't immune to death.
I believe that you guys have done a great job of pointing out the symptoms of this disease without actually calling out the illness. Everything you said is true. However, DC and Marvel are no longer DC and Marvel. They are now part of the larger umbrella of AT&T and Disney. Show me that you are making a profit companies. There is no incentive to keep continuity alive if you can PT Barnum the customer into buying your bill of goods. There is no incentive as long as the larger company controls the characters for cinematic release. The good old days of the publishing companies are dead unless you are an Independent company.
I've given up on modern comics. The past decade killed my interest in current comics. They just don't do anything for me anymore. Now I'm focusing on back issues of comics I actually want in my collection.
Was Batman: White Knight the last time we had a truly new Batman story?
Batman the Imposter is pretty unique
@@Wes_From_TC But is it good? Because I haven't heard anyone reading it.
@@MichaelStormGaming The quality is very good but it's not everyone's Batman story. It's different.
@@Wes_From_TC Good quality you say? In that case I will give it a chance. Thanks for the recommendation.
I've been collecting back issues of stories I've missed; and now I just wait on TPBs and reviews before I read anything new. I'm not going to be a "whale" and eat up everything that gets released. There are 20 new Batman story arcs on the shelf every time I go into the comic store and I'm sure most of them are great but my goodness that is just too much at once.
As a DC ‘reader’ I don’t even bother with DC and haven’t since New 52. I’d never dream of entering DC now as a reader. Currently buying 3 titles. BM One Dark Night for the hype. Green Lantern, I’m not reading it but I intend to. I think though that if I did read GL then I wouldn’t be buying it lol. And DC vs Vampires... two of three are limited series.
So grateful for my crisis to new 52 collection. It was a real kick in the guts when all that continuity was deleted but now I’ve disattached from DC and any goings ons in the universe.
Thinking of filling holes in Starman collection.
what are people doing about it
The start of this happened many many years ago with Image Comics. With all the recent corporate takeover is over the last 30 years Comic books are not where the big money is.. They are just researching development for film and television and television. Collecting has turned into Speculation for wealthy people. Personally I gave up reading comic books 20 years ago
You know what happen when there's no continuity?
Everything becomes filler.
Why don’t they just take a risk and do one character gets one book and then 1 shared universe book? Simplify it. (Batman gets Detective Comics too)
Parallel earths,multiverse and time travel stories have been alot of what I've collected for years. With DC getting rid of continuity haveing a omniverse it just dilutes and lessens everything that makes multiverse stories fun.☹
Every Dc event feels like there's a bigger bad guy waiting behind the current event bad guy going I orchestrated the last events to lead up to this big moment as the next bad guys waiting behind him like sorry buddy I'm using you to use someone else to use someone else. Just make the current event have a bad guy whos plan wasn't using the last event to lead to something bigger. But also Marvel feels like there nostalgia bating with comics that come out now that take place during the 80s or 90s like symbiote Spider-Man series or the new Ben Riley series there's even
X-Men Legends which is ok but doesn't work for me cause I wasn't even born when they came out to read them so the nostalgia bating doesn't work for me.
I bailed a bit over 10 years ago now. Back then I wasnt actually intending to leave comics behind, I just figured with the new 52/Rebirth going on in DC and the new marvel characters being introduced that it was a bad time to try to "get back into comics like when I was a kid/young teen". at the time I just thought I was waiting to see where they were going with the stories. Instead I've watched both companies go thru at least one hard reboot and one soft reboot each.
like whats the point of getting into the comics if the slate is wiped clean every 5-ish years? like some comic stories take a whole fricken year to tell, but we're gonna erase the record at the 5 year mark.
The production quality is garbage now also. Spider-Man Beyond as an example, literally each issue felt and looked like someone put together something that looks sort of like a comic in photoshop and then cheaply printed it in China.
Upvote just for Aaron finally being on camera.
I picked up Super Girl Woman of Tomorrow a few weeks ago because I was blown away by the art. I've enjoyed it greatly. The writing, the penciling, and top notch coloring are all excellent. I literally know nothing about Supergirl really or what her story is in the main continuity yet I was very invested in the story in part because it could almost be stand alone from the DC universe. Anyway, on the whole I think DC and Marvel comics are dead but there are still amazing creators in the industry
That story is a complete ripoff of True Grit, a wonderful novel. Not surprised you enjoyed it.
@@Wes_From_TC Interesting, I'll definitely have to check out True Grit then the next time I'm buying novels. It being a rip off isn't super concerning for me since we've pretty much have already discovered every story that will emotionally resonate with an audience and it's just a matter of repurposing it into new context, mediums, and settings. Also I still really enjoyed the art. That was what caught my eye in the first place.
The only other DC/Marvel comic I liked was Wonder Woman Dead Earth. What did you think of that one?
@@galenpemberton4382 Dead Earth is great. I like most everything Daniel Warren Johnson does. If you didn't read his Beta Ray Bill, it's amazing.
There can't be any stakes without permanent death.
When you know that any Hero's loved ones or any Heroes themselves will be resurrected or an alternate universe version will replace them, why care what happens?
This is a problem comics have been rushing to collide with for decades, we're just now finally seeing the crash as it happens.
There is plenty of other options to read than the current crop from the big two.
Let me correct your title: "How DC and Marvel DESTROYED Comic Books!!"
True
I was born in 1954. For years I read everything I could that looked like a comic book, funny animal, teen humor, TV adaptation, romance, supernatural, war....Eventually got hooked by Marvel, and occasionally returned to DC when Marvel forced them to up their game. I kept on past the old age limit for readers: twelve. Marvel expanded, I tried everything, sometimes losing enthusiasm as titles stopped working for me. Kirby left, returned and we discovered why he wasn't a scripter originally. (He's been canonized since his passing, rightly. So no one remembers his return to Marvel books were dismissed by many fans as "Kirby Krap.") To close I eventually tired of "events " or "stunts " as one of you called them. Being obliged to read characters I'd dropped or NEVER had interest in. I stopped regular purchases in 1990 at age 36. You fellows all seem to be A LITTLE past that. Congratulations for having more endurance and tolerance than I did. And I came in when a lot of these tropes were just being formulated.
my guess is monthly comics died a while ago so there is nothing to destroy.
I think since 2019 that i only buy reprints of old DC and Marvel stuff!
I really hope wilford brimley’s nephew let’s tough guy talk this episode.
I was just wondering, do you feel like we're repeating the 90s?
Kinda, but different. This comic environment is a bit more stable but far smaller. It'll be interesting seeing the 3rd and 4th order effects these changes have. I'm not optimistic.
I’ve never bought a comic I didn’t want to read. Today, I buy mostly independents and a few Marvel. Hard pass on DC.
Depressants on the upper left camera, stimulants on the upper right, but the guy on the bottom in the middle doesn't look to be on anything except a chair. Just kidding!
Thank you so much for making this video and bringing up these serious issues, they are totally destroying (and have been) one of my favorite forms of entertainment since childhood. I've noticed that everything has been going downhill bit by bit for about 20 years (especially 15 or 10 years or so), Comics, Films, even Music has been pretty terrible and only getting worse since the 2000s. Games too! They aren't fun, they aren't focused on fun, they are all so over-serious seeming or they go in the other direction and make themselves too ridiculous and obnoxious, besides shoving down all kinds of annoying political non-sense and lecturing about things, like what the heck!
I used to enjoy games and comics and all that when they were just fun, whether dark or light, they never seemed to be so heavy handed usually, or frankly boring, they were even more simple in many ways and it was so much more satisfying. In some ways, even merchandise and the way customers are being treated (like toys and collectibles) have also gone in some kind of disturbing directions too. I don't like any of these corporate models being applied to these businesses, why does everything seem to suck so much more than it ever did? In the 80s and 90s, however bad something may have been, it was still so much more fun in comparison to the stuff being pumped out now all across media.
It isn't just the "woke" thing seemingly, music was getting louder, the lyrics were getting way stupider and more repetitive, the companies were getting more rich than ever before and disrespecting customers more than ever before, because they weren't desperate anymore and stopped caring entirely.
They have disappointed so many people, they get constant backlash, but they hide away in "ivory towers" and treat everyone making legitimate complaints like they are all just crazy idiots!
It is so simple to compare great things from the past, even the less great or things that were considered "bad" or poorly produced in the past, with the modern materials in almost any area of the entertainment, media, and publishing industries, and one will find the older stuff is always better, always more entertaining, even at its worst, in comparison to so much being produced constantly, and it has driven away so many people, it is also failing to impress many more new people. If someone is impressed by today's stuff, they must be ignorant of the superior stuff before it, because it is almost incomprehensible to me that someone would actually prefer a lot of these newer stories, a lot of the newer artwork, compared to generations of classic top notch material that it seems to totally just disrespect the legacy of and tries to actively attack and compromise and insult the older materials, it is like hubris, and people don't like it!
Besides that, can't they come up with anything new? They are so uncreative and unintelligent, and are keeping out all kinds of great talents from their seeming rule through nepotism and favoritism and other "gatekeeping" that is keeping so many great minds from helping to make things good again like they used to be. The people being praised and rewarded today inside "the industry" seem like so many freaks and fools compared to the talents who were given a shot in the past.
Perhaps comics should come out monthly. 😎
14:17 - 14:28
My sentiments exactly 💯
I'm working on a collaborate Cooperative universe. Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to interview you for your perspective.
I think hunted was just a way to finally kill off kraven for good this time hopefully, still you have to admit that nick spencers run of spiderman was better than dan slott's run