Back on track…so as I kept Googling for a place to download this comic and I thought, do people even read comics anymore? Over the last few months, I have ventured to the closest comic book shop to my house and upon arriving each time I started to notice a common trend, mostly, if not all of the customers were around my age (23) or older. Which made me think the enjoyment of going to the comic store every Wednesday isn’t really there anymore, especially among the younger generation. Sure I had never really experienced this when I was a kid, cause I’ll be honest I was too poor, but all my friends would. I remember growing up, they would eagerly await the newest issue of Spider-Man, the McFarlane edition and each Wednesday they would crowd the shops like buzzing bees.
With that in mind, I had posted this question on my forum, and one of the members replied “Where do they get the money to even start a new saga if no one bought their comics? Why is DC and Marvel still in business if no one like their stuff?”. I think the only reason comics are making a “comeback” is because of the entertainment industry. In the last few years Hollywood has taken a big leap into the comic industry to pull out new stories for the big screen, because lets be honest, they’ve run everything else dry. But because of Hollywood the comic industry doesn’t seem to be spiraling down anymore, or at least to me. Personally, I welcome the movie & TV studios to bring some of the lesser known comics to the screens. And on that note…
/end
Related posts:
3 Comments
Who knows, perhaps it could end up like the Japanese Manga vs TV Drama/Anime industries. Win/win, it would continue to popularize comics by injecting a new set of readers on every piece of content, and the TV/Movie industry would gain an easily translatable medium to draw from with a great testing ground.
I’d love if it were like manga vs anime, but things like that just doesn’t happen in the western world, and it baffles me as to why it doesn’t.
It doesn’t happen because most adults and teens in the western world consider cartoons and comic books to be for children. Now, they’re partially right as there are certain ones that are targeted at that audience, but there’s a very large number that are targeted at an older audience.
I think if we had some better voice actors do the roles (when I say better, I mean better than the ones that currently do the English dubbing for most anime series that get licensed), maybe we could possibly hire a Japanese studio to do the animation for said comics and then air it on North American TV stations. There’s really only one good example to use for this and it’s Afro Samurai. Samuel L. Jackson and some other good voice actors plus Japanese studio animation. Now, take that formula and use it to adapt some of the better more adult comics out there and we may start to see some growth and room for it in the Western TV world.