I'll move this over here:
Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
The big issue, as a longtime reader, for me is that I don't even recognize many of the characters anymore. Marvel was clearly trying to appeal to a younger and wider audience, but do younger audiences even read print material? DC tried to be edgy with the "New 52", but that was just bad storytelling. The total retconing of the previous material just made it feel like I had put a bunch of meaningless work into the old storylines.
I left the issue thing for a while, and when I tried to get back into it, the comics just didn't appeal to me. I continue to read comics, but choose instead to just read well reviewed and classic collected editions and graphic novels. The character arcs have gotten so derivative and weird that there's not any appeal for me to follow them on a month to month basis.
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I'm a believer that Marvel and DC refusing the abandon the month to month and permanently serialized stories is what is driving sales downwards.
I think all books should be released with the intention of it being a 3-12 issue arc. I will never buy anything other than a collected edition ever again. No story could ever be compelling enough to get me to buy month to month. Marvel and DC don't seem to realize that. They want to keep going back to the well on a small group of hardcore readers who will buy 6 different variants and skew the sales numbers to appear like there is interest in their comics.
It sucks that we'd lose those amazing one off issues that can sometimes be favorites but I don't see any other way to do it that makes sense.
I also think Marvel and DC have both done a piss poor job of helping readers keep track of the books/volumes/characters/timelines in their respective universes. Has anyone actually tried to collect a major character in the last 20 years? Jesus Christ it is impossible. You need an advanced excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs to track which series lead into the new series, when a series resets, which books run concurrently but are set in different timelines or universes, which run concurrently but are in the same universe, which books restart numbering but are actually part of an old numbering series.
Wolverine is an easy example and far from the worst offender at Marvel. They restarted numbering about 5 times in the last 10 years. At one point the "official" Wolverine book, which maintained the continuous issue numbering (which is important for people like me who wanted to own every issue), was actually Daken or Dark Wolverine or some stupid bull#### and at the same time they concurrently published a different Wolverine book, which was the only book actually featuring Wolverine, but didn't officially count in the continuous numbering of Wolverine. So do I buy Wolvereine Not Wolverine so I can complete my collection? Or do I buy the book called Wolverine that actually features Wolverine but isn't officially part of the series numbering. Like WTF Marvel? And that's not even the most confusing one.
Try and find any official Marvel or DC source that shows you what collected editions or graphic novels to buy if you want to collect a series from beginning to end. It's ####ing impossible. The only way to do it is to find fan sites that help list the TPBs you need to buy to get all the issues.
DC is the worst because they used to constantly have lead and backup stories. So sometimes parts 1-6 of a story would be in issues 55-61 but those same six issues would only have parts 4-7 of one backup and then parts 1-2 of a different backup story. But then they'd all be collected in different TPBs.
And don't even get me started on how ####ed up crossovers make everything.