Grabbed a random Wizard magazine issue today out of a quarter box for some lite reading and woe and behold look what I found in the back pages. It's a nice little find but at first I had a bit of trouble trying to understand this graph but then it sunk in. Interestingly enough here's another one of those examples where a publisher with out the property rights printed ROM's likeness with out any legal fuss. Anyways, getting back to the graph. Notice how the amount of titles published by Marvel were on the rise all the way up to the early 90s only to make a nearly 50% drop over the course of the next decade and quite literally leading into the new century? I wonder if something similar was the case for DC? If so, the 90s must have been something of a down turn in the comic book industry.
What a random thing to toss on that chart.
ReplyDeletenot too random, there's a mention of ROM below in the text in regards to titles published in 1981.
DeleteYou'll need to do a little editing on this one right quick buddy; the beginning paragraph is hard to read the way it was formatted.I know it's hard to catch little stuff like that when you're typing it out, then blogger messes it up the alignment sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI have this Wizard myself, and yeah, the 90's was an odd time period for the industry. You can easily divide the decade up, because the first half was booming, right before the bubble burst. But the second half, it was a
very rough patch for the industry, with companies like Marvel heading going into bankruptcy due to the sheer devastation caused by the speculator market going bust.
I'd say though those levels of distribution or product are way back up, but the number of sales don't match the sales from old. Just check out the circulation numbers, like Googum will sometimes post on his blog for reference. The stuff that sold in the past had higher numbers, and had better sales across the board. Shit the lowest numbers you could do, would still be considered profitable in today's market.
Oh speaking of my buddy Googum, he posted today about your boy ROM. Check it out if you're interested:
ReplyDeletehttp://random-happenstance.blogspot.com/2017/08/how-there-arent-toys-for-everyone.html
yeah there was some weird shit going on with the alignment and the first sentence if you look at the posting on your iphone but i believe it's fixed now. i had a feeling you might have had something to say about the state of the comic book industry over the decades.
DeleteThere was a huge downfall in quality of the comics starting from the 90' s,the art was eye candy but the scripts were horrible.
ReplyDeleteFor reasons I don't recall I started to loose interest in comics some where in the early 90s. That was pretty much the case until shortly after I started this blog. For anyone who's followed it from almost the beginning can see how I again became disinterested in comics again with how Marvel and now idw has been fucking up all things Rom related in recent years. Same goes for DC's reboot and handling of the Suicide Squad. I just don't relate to what these writers are trying to do any more but unlike the 90s I can at least still follow things a bit thanks to the internet. Then there's also the library I don't know if you remembered my posting about the Revolutions trade paper back and how un 80s it felt.
Delete"and make it toast", that reminded me of how the Cylons were called in the new Galactica. The chrome robots were called "toasters" :)
ReplyDeleteI worked with a guy in the early 90's that would come into work with a brief case and that day's comics. He would carefully put a dozen into their protective sleeves without even reading them. They were his version of "Investing".
ReplyDeleteI too got tired of comics then. Too many titles, NO ROM, and the books seemed to get shorter and shorter. Now all the "reboots", "Alternate Universes", etc just make it not even fun anymore. I'd almost rather go find an old "G.I. Combat" and read than any of the new titles. I know that it is a business and they are in it to make money. But they need to quit trying to squeeze the life out of fans and start writing QUALITY again.
same here. I find comics from the 70s and 80s to be a pure treasure
Deletei can't remember Brian it's been a while since i heard from you did you drop the IDW series or are you still picking it up? or did you never get it in the first place?
ReplyDeleteStill getting it but that will stop after the next issue unless they do something miraculous.
ReplyDeleteoh just think Brian, you could have used all that money for the 12 or so issues you've bought already (which boils down to rewarding idw for bad behavior) and got yourself a ROM figure of your own. i remember when the DC Universe had it's relaunch i was holding out hope for the new Suicide Squad series up until issue 11. kinda kept following the title online after that for a while but eventually ended up also just giving all the issues i had bought already back to my LCS as a donation. the only regret i had is that i waited as long as i did to drop it. moral of the story, if idw's "vision" of ROM's return hasn't won you over by now you're almost certainly just wasting more of your money and patients.
DeleteNew ROM is ending at #14 anyway, so maybe stick with it for two more instead of one, Brian! ...
DeleteThe industry is in a transitional state even now, for sure. Marvel & DC are driving themselves out of the business of comics, I think. No one cares about them enough anymore due to their destructive marketing schemes. But comics will survive beyond them. I'm primarily a fan of Image comics more than anything else these days - that company has really grown up since the early 90's. Comics always had the potential to be about more than just universes full of superheroes in tights. Any genre of storytelling can be done in the visual medium of comics, with only imagination and creative talent being the limit.
So idw's Rom in name only series is about to come to an end huh? Very interesting, I'll have to look into that more they may deserve a posting of its own. As for your comment about the figure like I said there's some minor stuff we could nit pick about it but over all I'm still very happy with it. Thanks for the info and feed back have we met before?
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