Til All Are One Cancelled

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Patapsco
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Til All Are One Cancelled

Post by Patapsco »

But why when it's not the worst selling TF book on the market? Oh yeah, got to get those sweet retweets and tumblr reblogs....

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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Are these the figures for the floppies, or with digital sales too?

And what does the rest of the comics market look like in terms of sales?

...these are really low numbers, whatever.

TAAO doesn't look to be selling that much less than Lost Light. Maybe its the continuing downward trajectory that's put the brakes on. And my God, who are the people who buy the first issue and then bugger off?
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Post by Warcry »

Have sales really gotten that bad on all the TF books? Wow. I guess I'm not the only one who's given up in the past half-year. Shit, you've gotta think they're all hanging by a thread at this point.

Hopefully Scott lands another TF gig before long if she's still interested. She was a solid writer, at least going by the scant number of her books that I read.
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Post by Unicron »

Word I've seen going around is, I believe coming from a blog post or something by Scott, is that IDW gave her the choice between a relaunch/status-quo shake up or be cancelled and she opted for the latter. Reason I keep seeing is that a relaunch would muck up a variety of stories she'd planned as the series progressed.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Having not paid attention to the sales figures for a while, I was as surprised as anyone when I saw the drop off. But there's a few things to remember. Most of this comes from chats with my Podcast Maximus pals, so hopefully I've got it right:

TAAO was the worst selling book month on month, remember it started a little before the other two, so the above graph is slightly out of sync there.

Also, as Unicron says, IDW's original idea was a revamp, not cancellation (though considering what Combiner Wars did to the second Windblade, I can see why Scott would rather walk away with her plan intact), so this seems to be a "OK we're going to do something!" level rather than a "We're going to can it!" level. They keep giving Scott work, so they're clearly not that unhappy with 6K ish figures.

The first issues sold much, much better than Ex-0RID and MTMTE had been previously (bar the big push for their 50th issues), so the fall-off isn't as drastic as it might seem, even if it's still not great.

LL's bigger drop-off compared to where it was before is worrying (and some of his tweets recently suggest Roberts is a bit dumbstruck by this, he actually said on twitter the other day that it wasn't the right story to launch with and that's before it's even finished. Annoyingly this kills my "It worked OK as a first issue" arguments if even the writer doesn't think so!), but that book's always the one that's done better digitally and in trades (probably because a lot of the key audience aren't "Traditional" comic buyers), so it's probably on more of a level playing field with OP than it looks.

As to why, I think one factor may be that IDW used to be pretty convinced that 3 was the sustainable number of Transformers books. With all the Hasbro Shared Universe stuff there's now, what, four or five a month with Transformers in? Revolutionaries has been cancelled as well (in the same way as Windblade 2 where they didn't mention it wasn't supposed to be just a miniseries), I think the mean audience is just a little bit more spread out than it was before.

Delays and people who had issues with either finding the reboot a good jumping off point after giving it a brief try haven't helped either of course.

I expect First Strike will be used as an excuse for a rejig for both books as was intended for TAAO. Hopefully a sensible one rather than blind panic.
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Post by Brendocon 2.0 »

Hello hello hello what's all this then me in an IDW comic thread oh my word?

Right, outsider's perspective. This isn't a TF book problem, it's a comic marketplace problem.

Sales drop-offs like this are happening all over the place lately (a Marvel exec hilariously tried to blame it on "too much diversity") and the common consensus seems to be it's the issue 1 factor.

"Oh hey let's relaunch our title, it'll make it more accessible to new readers and also create a huge sales spike because #1s are historically more collectible."

On the face of it, yeah, fine. But over the past couple of years this has actually been an Incredibly Bad Thing.

1) A book having multiple number 1s actually just confuses newer readers, discouraging them from picking it up. (not so much an issue here because retitling, but still).

2) New readers pick up an #1 thinking it's a new series and "a great jumping on point" swiftly realise it's actually chapter 53 of a series that's years-in and quickly jump back off again.

3) (and this is my favourite) - Resetting a book back to #1 actually shaves off a huge chunk of your existing readership. Because it forces people to resubscribe with their comic shop/whoever.

Okay, hardcore fans who pay attention to the internet or read Previews and know that it's going to happen months in advance are fine... but all those word of mouth casual fans that MTMTE picked up because you love it and launched a crusade to make everyone read it? They're gone.

They heard about MTMTE and picked up the trades to catch up and phoned their comic shop and said "hey add this to my pull list" and they go in when they can and they pick up the hard copies that have been put aside for them. Now they're going in and those copies aren't there because they didn't know/forgot that they needed to tell their comic shop "hey can you add this new series that's going to be replacing it."

Or they knew and couldn't be arsed with the hassle because comics are an expensive hobby and sometimes you just need to give someone the excuse to drop singles and switch to trades/digital/drop it entirely.

But because #1s draw in new readers jumping on to see what this new book is, you don't notice the people you've lost. That gets lost in the huge "new series" sales jump. You don't get to see what you've actually caused until 3-4 issues down the line.

So yeah, in the increasingly crowded and more expensive marketplace, relaunching a book with an #1 is tending more and more toward the opposite effect than is intended - it's actively causing people to stop reading your comic.

And that's without even touching on hilarious crossovers like Revolution and saturating their own mini marketplace past the point that TFs can sustain.

Marvel recently announced that Black Panther & The Crew is ending with #6 - they announced this a week after #2 was released. The marketplace is BRUTAL right now. Black Panther already has two books with his name on it, so probably just can't sustain a third. But the most recent Nova relaunch is being binned after #7 and that run has included the return of a character the online fanbase have been clamouring for for nearly 7 years.

And ultimately Marvel are backed by Disney so if they wanted to run a loss on a book or two they could. IDW don't have that luxury.

So yeah, from where I'm stood, that's why your sales are down on everything. With the caveat that I don't know what they were like pre relaunch but hey ho. That's why they'll have had such a huge post-#1 drop-off, anyway.

[EDIT] And we also need to consider that the figures published by Diamond are retailer purchases, not actual physical sales. That's what the comic shops have bought from the distributor, based on previous sales. With #1s those figures are frequently complete guesswork, with it settling down on later issues based on what they're actually moving through of the book.

So to be fair, it may well be that sales of #1 were dogshit too, and retailers didn't bother buying many of subsequent issues because all those number 1s are still clogging up their shelves.
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Have to agree with much of that. Part of the reason I've lost interest in a lot of mainstream comics is the endless relaunches. Marvel thinking success on the big screen = increased comic sales +a license to chuck out half a dozen books based on one character isn't much of a help. Especially when the stories aren't actually any good - Nova was terrible (I had an issue put aside because Death's Head was in it by my local comic shop, but refused it it was so bad), Ghost Rider thought it'd be a good idea to build on the good will generated by the portrayal on Agents Of S.H.E.I.L.D to launch with a sort of latter day New Fantastic Four storyline where most of the scant 5 issues were given over to various shades of Hulk and Wolverine that I'm not buying the book for! Black Panther is a try hard character, in that he's interesting to a point, but has always felt like a supporting character to me (mainly because he's spent much of the last 40 or so years being exactly that).

I'm having a hard time enjoying Spider-Man 2099, which has suffered to some degree of relaunch interference. Perversely, its only interesting when there's a cross-over going on, and Peter David gets the wave to return the character to his own time - which I get the feeling he'd rather be writing about, as that's when the book feels most interesting.

All of this silliness is why I've found myself drawn to the indies, where you kind of know what you're getting - a good, solid series that's probably got an end point in mind and that's okay.

DC seem to have done well with their relaunches, but that seems to me because they give their new stuff enough time to bed in and run before shaking it all up again. Plus, they seem much more like soft reboots and aren't doing anything to discourage long term readers from sticking around (at least it seems that way to me). Or maybe because they're not so frequent as Marvel's.

Whilst I think about it, the big 2 changing up their comics to match what you see in other media always annoys me and instantly turns me off a title. That is just boo.

Maybe we'll get to a point when a new launch series is just endless #1s...
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Post by Brendocon 2.0 »

Skyquake87 wrote:Maybe we'll get to a point when a new launch series is just endless #1s...
Marvel have the GENERATIONS mini-event coming later this summer, which is literally just a collection of one-shots.

But then they're following that with something called Legacy which, amongst other things, is going to see a load of books resume their old numbering. So maybe they've learned their lesson and are moving toward addressing the situation moving forward.

Probably not though.
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Post by Denyer »

I'm in the "bought the #1s" camp with LL and OP.

If the books hadn't relaunched I'm pretty sure my MTMTE subscription would still be running, even with misgivings about the opening story/art, removal of a strong and recognisable TF-related MTMTE branding and the cross-franchise bollocks. It sounds like others feel similarly. RID/OP I'm a bit more conflicted about because it's pairing art I like with a writer I find frustrating -- so I'm actually more likely to pick some more up if/when it hits trade than LL. That's at least two great creators being very badly served by the comics company they're doing work for.

Marvel and DC will probably get through the Death of Ideas / Shrinking of the Customer Base despite their recent offerings being reset and rehash (although arguably deserve to less) but it feels like IDW have shot themselves in the feet all the way up to the brain-stem and that unless digital or collected sales are great the TF comics lines are close to over.
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Post by Brendocon 2.0 »

Denyer wrote:I'm in the "bought the #1s" camp with LL and OP.

If the books hadn't relaunched I'm pretty sure my MTMTE subscription would still be running, even with misgivings about the opening story/art, removal of a strong and recognisable TF-related MTMTE branding and the cross-franchise bollocks.
Ch-ching. This is the thing. Number ones force people to actively opt-in to continue reading the books they're already getting. Dropping a book used to involve taking action, now it's the other way round.
Marvel and DC will probably get through the Death of Ideas / Shrinking of the Customer Base despite their recent offerings being reset and rehash (although arguably deserve to less) but it feels like IDW have shot themselves in the feet all the way up to the brain-stem and that unless digital or collected sales are great the TF comics lines are close to over.
I can't speak for DC's current output, but on the creative side Marvel are full of NEW ideas (and some old ones), but balance is the key thing. There's a lot of fresh ideas and approaches, but also a lot of deep-continuity sequels and pay-offs and straight storyline repetition. The key to doing deep-continuity is always in doing it in a way that newer readers don't realise that's what it is.

Approach-wise a lot of the output feels really reminiscent of the mid 90s right now, with far too many titles and ridiculous high-concept idea after ridiculous high concept idea, which is just massively off-putting for people. Understandably. So the actual fresh stuff (King/Walta's Vision, Samnee's Black Widow) gets lost in the shuffle.

One thing I think they've done well is in having a subset of kid-friendly comics that are more in tune with the cartoons they release, separate from the mainstream continuity and focussing on a cast of characters that reflect the movies. That way a five year old can be given an Avengers comic without needing it explaining why Captain America is a black man, Thor's a girl, why Hulk and Hawkeye aren't in it, who Hercules is, etc etc.

IDW could really benefit from something similar, as at the moment (I think?) they've got no way of cashing in on the popularity of stuff like The Last Knight, having shot themselves in the foot early-doors on the movie comics by trying to pitch them at people who didn't like the movies.

They need to realise that, while you can attract fans from the 80s with stuff like All Hail Megatron, there's actually a whole generation of comic readers who've grown up with Bayhem as their first exposure to the franchise. There's money in them there explosions.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

IDW just seem incapable of leaving anything be... I'm years behind (what with most of it being shit) but I've got stuff sitting on my tablet ready to read but after Dark Cybertron yanked both books out and shook them around I really can't be arsed to read them; there's a lot to be said in the market for inertia and habit. You give people much of an excuse and they will drop the books; the sort of mindset of the comic buyer is that the things are still relatively cheap so you might as well complete the set, especially considering the average age of buyers is going up all the time. IDW don't need to appeal to Roberts' cultists, they would buy a comic that was just a typed polemnic on Brexit if it had his name on it. They need to appeal to lazy ****ers like me.

IIRC the rough rule of thumb for Diamond's charts is that an issue most likely sold what the issue published three or four months later charts with as that's about the run-up needed for stores to order, so the first 2-3 are just guess work (possibly even factoring in alternate covers). Handy graph, though; I had no idea the Barber book was outselling the Dreamweaver's opus.

As for digital I've said it before and I'll say it again - if we were talking much more than a thousand or so we'd be hearing numbers. Naturally MTMTE/LL's high position in digital charts due to double dippers not wanting to miss out on the Twitter bantz is a financial boon for IDW but honestly if digital sales for any title we'd be starting to see more series from more publishers switching to that format - not dippy little sidereal minis that have little to do with the ongoing material but titles actually switching to the format - things like Nova and Black Panthers Matter. It would be a genuine stage of the process like going bi-monthly or running reprints used to be as it cuts out the whole distribution and manufacturing aspect, not to mention the retailer-end ordering.
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Post by Brendocon 2.0 »

Aye Marvel have experimented with "digital first" issues where the print version turns up a few weeks later, but I don't think any of them have lasted more than half a dozen issues.

Beyond that they've recently gone back to giving away free digital copies with the $3.99 books (usually now including a first chapter from a recent trade too). That's how desperate the market is for "oh my god will you please just switch to legally downloading so we can ditch the print model on some of these titles".

Profit margins on single issues are (from what I gather) an absolute pittance and Diamond's monopoly helps nobody but Diamond. The future lies in digital singles with retailers making their money on trades, but it just isn't happening yet.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

When MTMTE changed its title to Lost Light, Forbidden Planet cancelled my MTMTE order. There was no instruction to Forbidden Planet from IDW that LL is the new continuing title? No suggestion that maybe those MTMTE subscribers would like Lost Light?

Similarly the only Revolution title I was interested in was the Scavengers one. I had to order that in, as again the comic shop were none the wiser. Seems a bit bizarre.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Brendocon 2.0 wrote:Aye Marvel have experimented with "digital first" issues where the print version turns up a few weeks later, but I don't think any of them have lasted more than half a dozen issues.

Beyond that they've recently gone back to giving away free digital copies with the $3.99 books (usually now including a first chapter from a recent trade too). That's how desperate the market is for "oh my god will you please just switch to legally downloading so we can ditch the print model on some of these titles".

Profit margins on single issues are (from what I gather) an absolute pittance and Diamond's monopoly helps nobody but Diamond. The future lies in digital singles with retailers making their money on trades, but it just isn't happening yet.
Yeah, if you're a publisher digital would be a dream - you're paying creators and maybe a licence (though presumably that amortises across a series or range) and that's basically it - little fee to Comixology or whoever aside the rest is surely profit, especially if you still have willing advertisers.

Problem is a gigantic proportion of the comic market is collectors - much more than that of other media that's seen digital make such huge gains like TV, film and music. The format is much more entrenched.
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Post by Warcry »

inflatable dalek wrote:TAAO was the worst selling book month on month, remember it started a little before the other two, so the above graph is slightly out of sync there.
It's out of synch in terms of month published, but considering how so many comics seem to bleed readers every month these days, it may still be worthwhile comparing them based on issue number.

What surprises me, though, is that TAAO didn't have the same massive drop after issue #1 that the other books did. If anything, that tells me that it performed about as well as retailers expected it to, while the huge crash after #1 for Op and Lost Light tell me that those are doing worse than initially expected. It's been ages since I looked at sales, but weren't RiD and MTMTE both shifting around 9k monthly before they got the axe?
inflatable dalek wrote:LL's bigger drop-off compared to where it was before is worrying (and some of his tweets recently suggest Roberts is a bit dumbstruck by this, he actually said on twitter the other day that it wasn't the right story to launch with and that's before it's even finished. Annoyingly this kills my "It worked OK as a first issue" arguments if even the writer doesn't think so!), but that book's always the one that's done better digitally and in trades (probably because a lot of the key audience aren't "Traditional" comic buyers), so it's probably on more of a level playing field with OP than it looks.
Honestly, as much as I was annoyed by where Lost Light was headed I suspect the whole "Hasbro Shared Universe" nonsense has more to do with it than anything. The main stories stopped for three months so that a big Hasbro-mandated crossover could permanently weld the Transformers titles to a bunch of stuff that practically no one cares about. G.I. Joe is popular but Joe fans don't want giant robots running around in their hoo-rah army fantasy any more than TF fans want camp gay army men running around in our giant robot fights. But if Skywarp is your favourite character, now you've got to read the Joe book to see what he's doing. And if you wanted to follow the further adventures of Prime on Earth...well shit, you'd better hope you like Joes, because they've been in all but one issue so far.

(Curious to see of the Joe books' sales are in the shitter too...)

It was a terrible idea and it would have had to have been executed brilliantly for the crossover sales to make up for the number of hardcore TF fans that they alienated. Obviously it wasn't, they haven't and I think that's a big part of the decline. And if Hasbro manages to sink their two actually successful comic properties by tying them to the anchor that is Rom, Micronauts, M.A.S.K. and whatever the hell other forgotten 80s properties they're trying to revive, then...well, good. I hope it teaches them a lesson.
Denyer wrote:Marvel and DC will probably get through the Death of Ideas / Shrinking of the Customer Base despite their recent offerings being reset and rehash (although arguably deserve to less) but it feels like IDW have shot themselves in the feet all the way up to the brain-stem and that unless digital or collected sales are great the TF comics lines are close to over.
I actually wouldn't be surprised to see Hasbro take comic production in-house like they did with the TV shows, if and when IDW loses the license. They definitely seem to see the value in the comics as a promotional tool, even if they're not especially profitable on their own.
Brendocon 2.0 wrote:Sales drop-offs like this are happening all over the place lately (a Marvel exec hilariously tried to blame it on "too much diversity") and the common consensus seems to be it's the issue 1 factor.
He was right, though. Not because people were looking at the books and going "Grrr! Minorities!", but because:
Brendocon 2.0 wrote:...why Captain America is a black man, Thor's a girl, why Hulk and Hawkeye aren't in it, who Hercules is, etc etc.
The movies are bringing in a lot of potential new readers and giving a lot of potential old readers motivation to get back into things, but the comic universe they find is almost unrecognizable. Captain America is a Nazi. Falcon is cosplaying as the new Cap. Thor's a chick. War Machine is dead. Iron Man is dead and there's an oversexualized 14 year old black girl flying around in the armour. Wolverine is a chick and/or a fogey. Hulk is a Chinese dude. Hawkeye was a chick too last I heard. Cyclops and Professor X are dead. Bendis is allegedly hellbent on making Myles the go-to Spider-Man in the main universe. Etc, etc., etc... Deadpool is probably the only one who's going to look "right" to someone jumping in from the movies. So they make like Grandpa Simpson and turn right back around and head out the door again.

(Curious how many of these have been retconned in the last few months since I pay so little attention to modern comics.)

Marvel had a great chance to create a whole new wave of readers by capitalizing on movie hype and publishing comics that would grab the attention of people who fell in love with Steve Rodgers, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, James Rhodes, etc. at the movies. But instead they decided that now was the time to pander to small groups of vocal whiners on the internet who like to play identity politics. They had a chance to spur the greatest comic boom since the 90s but instead they blew their own foot off.

I'm not saying diversity is bad, or even that replacing existing characters is bad ("diversifying" the X-Men in the 70s was the best thing to ever happen to the book, and there are a ton of legacy characters I prefer over the originals, albeit mostly on the DC side), but this was a godawful time to do it. If anything, they should have been using the movies to bring attention to the diverse characters that Marvel already had. And in fairness, they have made War Machine and Falcon quite popular, even if it's mainly because Don Cheadle and Anthony Mackie are awesome.

Likewise, the Transformers books should at least make a token effort to catch the eye of people who love the Bay movies and their giant robots smashing shit. But anyone who picks up a TF comic after watching The Last Knight will be confused when they open it up and find either a boring book about politics (now with extra G.I. Joe!) or one that's mainly an excuse for quips and shipping when they came looking for fast-paced popcorn action.
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Post by Denyer »

If the Panini Essential X-Men title had been reprinting A-Force rather than the lacklustre selection of titles it chose, I'd have stuck with that as well. It's time-travel, alt-universe crap and event books that bother me rather than whether a title's perceived as a sop to SJWers. Next generation situations such as X-23 is as Wolverine can be fun, even if the Angel character bits seem to be pulled from that awful Black Vortex arc... refusing to let Logan sit things out for a while and just grabbing another one from somewhere else -- and from a fairly dire what-if-style story no less -- not so much.

Are there still two Hawkeyes? The series that had both Barton and Bishop in it was rather good from what I caught.

If it's possible to follow new stuff in team books and anthologies I'm more likely to check it out. If it's a Previews job and trying to work out which book fits where, very little chance.

Transformers... Hasbro has even less idea of quality control, judging by green-lighting various club comics, so that'd be the end of that...
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Post by Blackjack »

Cliffjumper wrote:IDW don't need to appeal to Roberts' cultists, they would buy a comic that was just a typed polemnic on Brexit if it had his name on it. They need to appeal to lazy ****ers like me.
Yeah, I think this is kind of the crux of the problem. I haven't touched a Transformers book for a year now -- I have a pile of MTMTE TPB's that has been gathering dust on my table, but after the whole Dark Cybertron mess I stuck around for like a story arc or two before dropping it. Not because of quality or anything, but because of real-life business.

Now, I tried to get back to reading comic books about giant robots but just found it... so... inaccessible, I guess. Even with things like TFWiki giving me a list of the IDW titles and whatnot, things like enforced crossovers that forces me to read MTMTE and RID alternatingly -- or whatever their successors are called -- is just a huge pain in the ass that makes me go 'well, screw that, I just won't bother and I'll go do something else with my time'. Plus random cast shake-ups that are made in order to tie in with the newest toylines that's just annoying. Add that to the fact that apparently everything is in a shared universe with G.I. Joe and... a bunch of... other stuff I have never heard about in my life and it's just the final nail in the coffin for me.

Like, I have nothing against G.I. Joe crossovers. The ones made by Devil's Due were dumb fun with pretty art, and the ones that IDW published right around the time I stopped reading Transformers worked in their own way, but pushing this shared universe to the exclusion of any 'only Transformers' stories is definitely alienating me.

Add that to the strangely prominent focus on robots banging -- it was fine in earlier MTMTE when it's alluded to and part of the focus of some arcs, but yesterday I browsed through issue ten of TAAO in the comic book shop, and it's basically a full issue of Blast Off and Onslaught's weird romance drama, with Blastoff waiting for Onslaught to wake up from a coma and, and I'm like... yeah nope.
Warcry wrote:But if Skywarp is your favourite character, now you've got to read the Joe book to see what he's doing. And if you wanted to follow the further adventures of Prime on Earth...well shit, you'd better hope you like Joes, because they've been in all but one issue so far.
This, and, shit, like, reading any of the other titles will end up just having random tie-ins to the Skywarp or the Prime story and it's irritating.

Warcry wrote:The movies are bringing in a lot of potential new readers and giving a lot of potential old readers motivation to get back into things, but the comic universe they find is almost unrecognizable. Captain America is a Nazi. Falcon is cosplaying as the new Cap. Thor's a chick. War Machine is dead. Iron Man is dead and there's an oversexualized 14 year old black girl flying around in the armour. Wolverine is a chick and/or a fogey. Hulk is a Chinese dude. Hawkeye was a chick too last I heard. Cyclops and Professor X are dead. Bendis is allegedly hellbent on making Myles the go-to Spider-Man in the main universe. Etc, etc., etc... Deadpool is probably the only one who's going to look "right" to someone jumping in from the movies. So they make like Grandpa Simpson and turn right back around and head out the door again.
This is exactly me. I know jack shit about Marvel comics other than the very basics and what the movies and the odd tie-in game taught me, but I really liked the movies. So I tried getting into the comics, and the new ones are all but unrecognizable. The only real way to appreciate the characters I'm introduced to via the movies is to track down older material -- and it's a huge pain in the ass to do that, what with there being like fifteen different variations of the X-Men and Spider-Man titles and all that nonsense. Get the wrong book, or the wrong universe, and suddenly Emma Frost is the leader of the X-Mansion, Colossus becomes the Juggernaut, Spider-Man is possessed by Dr. octopus, Cyclops goes around shooting Magneto in the head, the X-Men fight the Inhumans for some weird reason, there are two Steve Rogers-es running around, and Giant-Man cannibalizes the Blob.

Like, I don't really mind having more diversity in the comics, but, jeez, there's a limit on replacing every single one of your A-lister characters with random people.
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Post by Denyer »

Most of that's random status quo flipping, but Emma being in charge of "good guy" teams has been a tradition for about twenty three years since Gen X.

Would recommend the Kieron Gillen stuff with Cyclops leading up a team of heavy hitters (a so-called Extinction Team to handle major threats) circa 2012, it's somewhat reminiscent of The Authority.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

On something more casual fan orientated, they did try with stuff based on the current cartoons that seems to have been well received and at least some of which was written by someone from the series.
Auntie Slag wrote:When MTMTE changed its title to Lost Light, Forbidden Planet cancelled my MTMTE order. There was no instruction to Forbidden Planet from IDW that LL is the new continuing title? No suggestion that maybe those MTMTE subscribers would like Lost Light?
In fairness, I'd say it's a good thing that publishers can't sneakily subscribe you to their books without your permission!
Warcry wrote: Honestly, as much as I was annoyed by where Lost Light was headed I suspect the whole "Hasbro Shared Universe" nonsense has more to do with it than anything. The main stories stopped for three months so that a big Hasbro-mandated crossover could permanently weld the Transformers titles to a bunch of stuff that practically no one cares about. G.I. Joe is popular but Joe fans don't want giant robots running around in their hoo-rah army fantasy any more than TF fans want camp gay army men running around in our giant robot fights. But if Skywarp is your favourite character, now you've got to read the Joe book to see what he's doing. And if you wanted to follow the further adventures of Prime on Earth...well shit, you'd better hope you like Joes, because they've been in all but one issue so far.
See, I'd agree with all that, but it is odd that the book that has had the least to do with the Shared Universe stuff has taken the biggest hit.

I suspect the departure of Milne has been a big factor, I don't think Hasbro quite realised the extent to which it was seen (rightly!) as a joint creative endeavour and that it wouldn't be seen as the same thing with only Roberts aboard. At least not with how the transition was handled anyway...

But I'll be musing more on that when I actually sort out my thoughts on issue 6...
REVIISITATION: THE HOLE TRUTH
STARSCREAM GOES TO PIECES IN MY LOOK AT INFILTRATION #6!
PLUS: BUY THE BOOKS!
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Post by Cyberstrike nTo »

Warcry wrote:Likewise, the Transformers books should at least make a token effort to catch the eye of people who love the Bay movies and their giant robots smashing shit. But anyone who picks up a TF comic after watching The Last Knight will be confused when they open it up and find either a boring book about politics (now with extra G.I. Joe!) or one that's mainly an excuse for quips and shipping when they came looking for fast-paced popcorn action.

IMHO I would say that the number of people buying comics because of the movies is very small going back to early 00s when the superhero movies began to take off. I don't remember the then current X-Men and Spider-Man comics getting a huge a sales spike because those movies were huge hits. Most people don't want to read a 40+ year old story some of which spans across multiple books and some are downright confusing and some and/or most the titles that are no longer published and one would have to buy expensive and confusing TPBs and HCs (seriously Marvel and DC's collected editions are just as confusing as their comic book universe's continuity) with some of the characters that at best just barely even look and act like they do in the movies and TV shows.

The people who are buying comics are 30-40+ year old hardcore life long time fans and any new fans that are coming into comics are those fans' kids.
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