Inspired by discussion at http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3922421.html

It's like DC can't see the reader's perspective, except for a tiny minority of people who despise the same past continuity they do, and in fact the idea of continuity itself.

They don't want to continue the character arcs, but they want to keep the trademarks. So somehow stuff like the new Titans run gets greenlit, where there's no credible thread from the old stuff, but casual readers might not know that. And the old diehard fans say, "Wow, this is a good jumping-off point, let's leave!"

They probably could have done a midstream distillation of each book, clearing off cruft as they went, but instead of letting that flow organically, they decided to completely derail most of their titles at once as a stunt.

And they'd alienated so many of their talented writers that they're hiring Scott Lobdell to write multiple books. (Grant Morrison's still around, yes. I don't know if he stays in order to feed an expensive drug habit, or because DC is more respectful of him at this point. Maybe both.)

DC may catastrophically self-destruct before they figure this out.
Let the books be themselves; Blue Beetle is not "even more Batman," Wonder Woman is not Deadface (though that's perhaps preferable to "even more Batman"), Mr Terrific is not "backstory for Superman or somebody."
Don't try to rewrite everything from the top.
It's OK to publish stuff you aren't the target audience for, in order to reach a broader audience.
And let writers write their own stories.
"I have been doing this for a long time, now. I have lived in the neighborhood of superhero comics for a long time. And frankly, if this is how they think it's ok to treat me when I walk down the street in a place that I thought belonged to me just as much as anyone else who lives here, then I'm not sure I want to live here anymore."

Read More: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/09/22/starfire-catwoman-sex-superheroine/#ixzz1Z9P2yXKn
_

Give it up. There is no reason to support books that offend you. There is some reason to boycott DC, I think. Or just to buy books that aren't this kind of offensive. It's not like your characters are continuing, this is a great time to jump off the ride.

There's a lot of good work being done in sequential art, free to view on the web. Pay-to-view is a weak model, & will lose to free-to-view work supported by advertising & merchandise. Print is a little better, but many comic shops are part of the same toxic culture you describe.

If you want to save DC, write to someone at Time Warner or DC, explain why you're not buying their books, and DON'T BUY THEIR BOOKS. I'm not saying that in a libertarian, "You can change the channel," way. I mean give up on them, encourage others to do the same, and get out of it. Eventually Warner may figure it out.
philippos42: Miss Tyra funny face (funny face)
Here, the argument is advanced that DC's line-wide numbering reboot is the perfect "jumping-off" point. I disagree. The perfect jumping-off point was whenever we were told there'd be another 100-issue crossover.

What this is, more, is an attempt to renumber for a new format, thus bringing new readers in while keeping old ones. And an expansion of titles married to a new distribution system. In a way, an attempt to do Marvel's early-1990's "glut the market" approach right.

And yet I worry they're still screwing it up.
1) Instead of launching 52 titles at once & then coasting, they should be rolling out new stuff every few months in perpetuity, so there's always a new jumping on point.
2) If this is 52 superhero titles in the DC style, they may find there isn't enough market even if they escape the comic-shop ghetto. In general, they need to understand that not all customers want the same things, & the publishing line must be thematically diverse.
3) Are they even managing to advertise to new non-comic-shop customers effectively? I don't know. If I see ads outside the comix press, I'll give them props, but I ain't holding my breath.
4) If they even think about trying to do a 52-title crossover, they deserve to have it blow up in their faces and all get fired.

Oh, well, I'm calling it now. Superman, Wonder Woman, & Batman will still be around whatever comes, due to the corporate culture. Other stuff, like Mr. Terrific, will get lost in the crowd, and be gone in (let's see, 52 titles?) 12-18 months.
philippos42: "Dark Vengeance!" (cold)
Found on teh itnernet:

Beware of Doug:
What Superman was, right from square one, was an American. A vigilante American, not a main-street flagwaver (not yet), and without much patience for any Bill of Rights. More a kind of futuristic frontier lawman. The kind of guy you'd call on to clean up a bad neighborhood in Cleveland.

Exapno Mapcase:
Well, yes and no. The people that Siegel sent Superman after in the first few issues were not breaking any laws. The mine owner, the munitions maker, the head of a foreign government, they were all legally sanctioned, well respected, wealthy, powerful - and morally wrong. Superman was a vigilante, but not a frontier lawman. He was a moral crusader for social causes. This was wildly different even from the pulp superheroes that he was mostly modeled on and bore no resemblance to the western lawmen in the movies that Siegel loved.

Siegel got away with it because nobody was paying him any attention. As soon as the Powers That Were noticed they shut it down. Vigilantes were fine. The rest of the superhero comics were filled with vigilantes. But they didn't go after respectable capitalist businessmen, which was exactly what the people running DC comics saw themselves as. For them, labor was the troublesome, unreliable, crackbrained, lower-class hustlers that made up the writing and art staffs. They didn't want to stand for labor: they wanted to exploit it. Even though many of them came from the same sort of backgrounds, they were now on top of the pile and that changed everything.

So they changed Superman into a Boy Scout and gave Batman a Boy Wonder and made all the plots resonate with kids who had no social consciousness. It worked, spectacularly. And Lois mooned over Superman and blacks were invisible and religion was never mentioned and the law was paramount and Superman and Batman were not wanted by the police but were given medals by them. Real Americans.

And Jerry Siegel became a bitter paranoid recluse who considered jumping off the Empire State Building (a real incident that Chabon adapted for his book).

That's also American, unfortunately.


Well, that was depressing.
(xposted from tumblr)
I am bemused that this: (joverfield doesn't want quotas for sexually deviant characters blah blah) was triggered by this:


'Cos I saw that & I was like, "point."Read more... )
We have discontinued the CMX line with no plans to reprint the titles (except Megatokyo which has moved to the DC Comics imprint). Beyond that I do not know the future of the titles.

Currently there are CMX titles that are still listed as in stock at our distributor, Random House. Please contact them for more information:

Random House

800-733-3000

Thank you,

ERIKA RUSSO | Administrator, Book Trade Sales
DC Comics | A Warner Bros. Entertainment Company
From DC's announcement that they were shutting down CMX:
Over the course of the last six years, CMX has brought a diverse list of titles to America and we value the books and creators that we helped introduce to a new audience. Given the challenges that manga is facing in the American marketplace, we have decided that CMX will cease publishing new titles as of July 1, 2010.

Uh, compared to the challenges selling any of your over-colored over-priced domestic crap?

If sales were the chief determiner, wouldn't you have canceled Teen Titans by now?

Was one of the challenges, "Being distributed by twits who resent how much better the imported stuff is than their own pathetic fanfic scribbles"?

OK, enough snark. Let's google!
...
http://comicsworthreading.com/2010/05/19/cmx-shutdown-reactions/ Johanna Draper Carlson ran this much down at the time.
...

Oh, CMX wasn't selling as well as Tokyopop. It was even being outsold in bookstores by a few of DC's house-produced gorefests (when they had movie tie-ins). It was selling very small-press numbers, the kind Antarctic Press would be happy with, & DC was probably content with considering it was all repackaged content.

But DC wasn't trying too hard to sell it. I was only vaguely aware of CMX for a long time, even after I encountered Land of the Blindfolded. And I started seriously getting into their stuff not long before they shut down.

Check this out: http://precur.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/cmx-cellence/
I've checked out 3 of these titles, & I would be glad to help encourage more sales on them, if they weren't permanently out of stock. This year my local library was buying trades of LotB (which are a few years old), on my recommendation, & then was told, "permanently out of stock"--right about the time of the shutdown.

Maybe DC was just the wrong company for the mix of real bookselling & not-just-doing-more-fanfic-of-the-same-few-characters that CMX needed.
Perhaps I tar DC with too broad a brush. They have done some neat stuff in the last several years, even if a lot of the stuff under the DC Bullet is crap. And CMX (which is of course not really DC) did introduce me to Tsukuba Sakura, who I quite like.

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