@Bloodsquirrel: 1) You need to already be looking for some form of book to begin with. Book stores are still part of the direct market. 2) The relatively high cost and low content makes it more appealing to just read it in the store and forget about it. Comics have no chance of making a come back until either 1) they drop in price, 2) they up in content, or 3) inflation is such that 3 dollars for 20 pages isn't that much.
Honestly what could probably give them a big revenue boost and make continuity a non-issue is if they made an online archive with all comics over 5 years old in them and charged a flat monthly fee for access. The only problem I could see with that is that it would cut into sales of Showcase/Essentials books.
Comixology
Seems to be moving in that direction. I've been enjoying reading the original Marvel Crisis Crossovers, Contest Of Champions, Secret Wars, etc, along with The New Teen Titans. As I was saying, though, most of them have not aged well, and that's more of a barrier, in my opinion, than any Continuity Lock-Out.
It's entirely possible for good writers to tell good stories within a long running Shared Universe continuity, but are those stories really the best ones those writers could have told? Even if every writer working at Marvel and DC was extremely talented, there's such a thing as too many cooks spoiling the broth. With how frequently crossovers are done, you'd need a superhuman editor to keep such a large stable of writers from stepping on each others toes. And even if someone managed to do that, that sort of inter-title consistency is going to require a reduction in variety and creative freedom.
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I'm with King Zeal on this one. I set out to read the complete history of the X-Men, got about two issues into the very first Uncanny X-Men comics, and had to stop.
Stan Lee is a brilliant man with an amazing imagination, without which the Marvel Universe would never have grown into the amazing world that it is. But an immersive writer, he is not.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
Yeah, old comics can be really hard to read. Though, now that I'm on my second read-through of the '60s X-Men comics, I've been finding it much easier than the first time. It may help that I've read a lot of other '60s Marvel comics, too, many of which were even worse.
Marvel would face a challenge in that area because all their titles are set in New York, but DC could reasonably pull it off since each of their titles, with the exception of the Batman spinoffs, takes place in a different city. Therefore, all they have to do is have each hero have their own adventures with minimal reference to the others. And they should probably take Green Lantern off Earth altogether and give him a bunch of big awesome adventures in space.
The problem there is that the epic mega-crossovers are what sell, so keeping the titles separate doesn't make financial sense.
Ukrainian Red CrossManga is a medium. Marvel and DC are both companies. That's like asking if Paramount Studios is having trouble competing with television as a whole.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Manga is not a medium; manga is comics that come from Japan. Thus, the question is more like asking whether anime is dominating Disney.
ETA: Cider and I simulposted; this comment and the preceding are aimed at Tobias.
edited 9th Oct '12 2:47:03 PM by VampireBuddha
Ukrainian Red CrossYou're still comparing one company to a much larger selection.
For example: if all the romantic comedies from this year grossed a combined total higher than Dark Knight Rises did alone, that doesn't prove Rises was a terrible film and a financial disaster. It's not a fair selection comparison.
edited 9th Oct '12 4:06:48 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Manga frequently has it's own annoying idiosyncracies, especially within some of it's most popular genres.
And actually, some of the most popular Japanese comics HAVE been rebooted. Things like Astroboy or Cyborg 009.
Would Tezuka's stuff qualift as it's own "Universe?" He reuses a lot of characters in different series...Leiji Matsumoto (probably butchered the spelling there) who did Captain Harlock had interconnecting series as well.
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No. Tezuka used characters like someone would use recognizable actors (hence why it's called the "Star System" - they're like movie stars). Saying that all of Tezuka's works were a shared universe because they have characters that share similar designs is like saying that The Prestige takes place in the same universe as The Dark Knight because Christian Bale was in both.
All I know is that Japan is a better market for comics, than America per capita. Comics have a much more widespread audience(as I noted under the cross promotion issue). Japanese comics do not exactly do as well in the US as they do in Japan.
I suppose it is like Kenya having the best marathon program in the world but Kenyans living in Japan, or USA are not necessarily the best marathon runners in either country.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack![]()
That probably just indicates that enthusiastic fans of U.S. comics are more likely to get their fix at the comic-book store than at Barnes & Noble, which caters to casual/occasional fans who'll buy an occasional trade paperback. My guess is, Japanese-comic fans are far fewer in number ... but much likelier to buy their stuff at regular bookstores.
Well, comics are far more accessible in Japan. They're considered disposable reading material that people can pick up on their way to work/school/home, read during the trip, and forget about like newspapers and periodicals here in the states.
Here, comics were treated as "collectibles" almost from the start, so that helped create the perception that someone is either "into" them or not. Collectors are guys who happen to have a Mint-Condition issues of Amazing Fantasy #15 in a vault. Fans are creepy guys who have every issue of Spider-man from 20 years ago and can catalog and reference them like a nerdy librarian.
I remember questions often being asked of me during the 90s and early 00s (pretty much during and after the speculation bubble) if I actually read comics or if I was "just collecting", with the latter being more respectable than the former. With the speculation bubble pretty much dead, though, fewer people ask that question. Nowadays, the only people who are really expected to buy comics are the ones who belong to the "into them" crowd.
edited 11th Oct '12 8:13:07 AM by KingZeal

That actually would be really cool. I'd love to see the Galactus Saga from the early Fantastic Four get a visual update. They did that recently with 1991's X-Men #1, and it looked pretty good, even if they didn't do much to it.
X-Men X-Pert, my blog where I talk about X-Men comics.