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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes

    Marvel is effectively an underground press pretending it's still the '50s.

... without the advantages of being an underground press, since they're constrained by being custodians of IP for use in movies.





kleinbl00  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's as if Ragnar Benson was responsible for keeping the Smurfs alive.

user-inactivated  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

One of the comic shops here tried for a while to carry locally created and published stuff. They gave up relatively quickly because the people who tried to make and print stuff tried with the best of intentions, but it just wasn't working. Which is a shame, cause some of that "underground" stuff was kind of cool.

kleinbl00  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Speaking as someone who talked to six different presses about doing my graphic novel, roughly 90% of all the small-press stuff is self-financed.

It used to sort of work out - you spend $30k getting a book illustrated and putting out 5,000 copies. 2500 of them get bought at $10. You get 80% of that. Turns out you're only about $12k in the hole on your book and if that means you get a movie option out of it, you made a hell of a brilliant investment. Lookin' at you, 30 days of night. Wanted had sold less than 10,000 copies at the time Timur Bekmambetov optioned it.

That was the universe that existed before Disney made eight fucking summer blockbusters to justify the Avengers.

user-inactivated  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Folks like the Pinis, Dave Sim, Drew Hayes and Jeff Smith used to make a living.

kleinbl00  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I know a guy who used to make $800/page drawing for Marvel.

He left for Hollywood in time to storyboard Alien Vs. predator.

I know the guy who did the character design for the X-men movies.

he has an MFA in sculpture and when we've talked about comics, he's said "I mean, I could draw that but it's so much easier to just farm it out to Korea."

cgod  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My wife is friends with a founder of Dark Horse Comics.

He's now been a producer in the Hollywood super hero complex for for something like a decade. I don't think he has had anything to do with comics for a long time.