Denyer wrote: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.
I get what you're saying, but I think both in combination have been a drag on IDW's sales. When it comes down to it, if you want your book to be overtly political it also needs to be genuinely good (
actually good, mind you, not "okay for a Transformers book" good), with strong characters and storylines that keep people coming back even if they don't always agree with or care about the message you're pushing. If your book is going to be a pile of bland comic book tropes (all the stuff you mentioned, plus characters that never really die and villains that pose no actual threat), and you offend people or bore them with your politics, they're out the door when otherwise they probably would have stuck around and read your mediocre story out of habit for years and years to come.
Denyer wrote: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.
I still can't fathom why anyone thought Emma would be a good fit as a good guy, let alone how it's stuck for so many years. She's never been a likeable or sympathetic character in anything I've read, whether the old stuff where she was a villain or the newer books where she's an X-Man.
inflatable dalek wrote: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...
That probably plays a big role too, you're right. The new artist isn't awful, but the PR around the switch certainly was.
Cyberstrike nTo wrote: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.
You're not wrong, and that's a big problem that the comic industry seems to be totally incapable of addressing. All they ever seem to do is double down again and again on the practices that started the problem in the first place (like constant crossovers, replacing popular classic characters with "modern" stand-ins that no one cares about and derailing their entire industry to commit heart and soul to passing trends).
But all that said, there are still hundreds of thousands of people actively buying comics, and under ten thousand of those paying for your average Transformers book. There's a veritable army of people who are now reading Batman, X-Men, Spider-Man or the Flash right now who grew up watching Transformers on TV, playing with the toys and even reading the Marvel comics who don't pick up the IDW books, and that's something they
can do something about. When people like Brend or Cliffy (and I guess me too, since I haven't even read scans of the TF books in months, let alone bought one) who read
other comics, are lifelong Transformers fans and have spent the last decade and a half posting about them on a message board aren't reading your TF comic, there is absolutely room to grow.
Cliffjumper wrote:Marvel tried to chase the movie buck in the very late nineties but it didn't go down well as normal people don't read comics and it was exactly what the existing readership didn't want.
Normal people don't buy hundreds of dollars worth of toys for themselves as adults either, but the movies have still led to giant growth on that side of the fandom. Partly by making a generation of Chinese 20-somethings fall in love with the franchise, but also by bringing a lot of people who grew up with the brand in the 80s back into the fold. The exposure from the movies has led to all sorts of growth: far more lines and sublines from Hasbro and Takara, an exploding third-party scene, multiple TV series airing at the same time, several successful video games...IDW seem to be the only ones who
can't figure out how to make an extra few bucks off of it.
Of course, their total inability to capitalize on opportunities like this is a big part of why the comic book industry is sinking to begin with. But it says a lot that with the franchise rolling in cash and the fandom larger than it's ever been, the only growth strategy that IDW can come up with is to pander to the shippers and Tumblr trendsters that Roberts accidentally attracted attention from. What's their backup plan for once the new readers move on to the next hot thing? Are we going to be getting overtly fascist comics three years from now in a vain attempt to try and wring a few sales out of the 4chan demographic?