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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thormagni" data-source="post: 2046409" data-attributes="member: 13637">I think that is easier said than done though, for a couple reasons. First, assuming comics companies are already spending all of their available capital (i.e., the available money they have to spend for authors, editors and artists is already going out the door for the current crop of books,) they would have to almost entirely throw out their existing customer base (guys in their 20s and 30s) in the hopes of drawing back the kids who have no interest in comics anyway. Otherwise they have to try to keep the existing lines going, while paying the startup costs for a whole other line of books, in essence finding two 12-year-old readers to replace me as a 30-something reader. It might make sense in the long run, grand scheme of things, but in the short run it would be suicide. I mean, I really like the Ultimates. If I picked it up tomorrow, and the adult themes, language and content had been reduced to stories for 12 year olds, would I pick it up again? How long would it take the 12-year-olds to recognize that this book was written for them? Let's say they just cancelled Ultimates, so they could concentrate resources on the new line of kids comics. They lose me as a reader and there is no guarantee they are going to pick up those two 12-year-olds they need to grow their market, plus how much disposable income does the kid have compared to me? It is too much risk to give up that short-term profit.Second, it is really hard to convince teenagers that something is cool enough that they want to invest time and energy into it. Teens generally get their cues from television, magazines and other teens, all with the illusion that it is teens making these suggestions to other teens. They want the illusion that these fashion trends are self-generated. For example, if they see a popular teen actor wearing a fur-lined parka in every episode of a TV series, they are going to want a fur-lined parka. Soon teens everywhere are wearing fur-lined parkas and thinking it is cool. Comics companies would have to make a concentrated effort to somehow get their product in front of the eyes of teens through venues outside the normal distribution channels.  It is really easy to market comics now. You send out advertisements to comic book stores, advertise in comic book magazines and send out advance copies to get good word of mouth. Dropping advertisements in YM magazine, or using Time Warner's pull to get the cool kids to read comics on the WB just hasn't been done.If anything, kids have really stumbled into manga and are buying those left and right. I was talking to a young teen at Waldenbooks a few weeks back and she and her friends were spending $50 every couple of weeks on manga books. That's why Waldens has put in two whole rows of this stuff and relegated trade paperbacks from Marvel and DC into a tiny shelf mixed in with the collectibles stuff. I can't make heads or tails of these books, which is why kids love it. Plus for $10 you can get a nice, solid little book you can put on your shelf, compared to spending $10 on three or four floppy comic books. Plus American comics are stuck in the terminally uncool superhero groove...Which is another sign of how clueless comic book companies have become, or of how little actual comic book sales actually matter to them. With all the new fans brought in temporarily by projects like Smallville, or the Spider-man, X-men, Hulk, Daredevil, Elektra, Catwoman, Punisher, Constantine etc. etc. movies, why haven't comic book companies been able to capitalize on that? I mean, when X2 hit the screen why wasn't there a brand new X-men title tied to the movie continuity ready for the new fans to check out? Same with Spider-man? Or Constantine? Where is the new series titled "Constantine" with the character based in LA instead of London and looking like Keanu Reeves?Nowhere, that's where! Why is that? Either comic companies are pretty sure that they are not going to be able to turn the Constantine/Spider-man/X2 fans into regular comic book readers, so why bother? Or they are so scared of running off their long-term fans, that it isn't worth the risk. So they are willing to suffer a slow death from strangulation than take a chance on breaking free from the chokehold.And as far as the sophisticated stories being relegated to novels and graphic novels, and left out of comics, well, I think the comics have shown that they are very capable of handling those sorts of stories. The problem is that it is a fairly small target audience. But they can sell books like Authority, Planetary, Ultimates, Powers and the entire Vertigo and Marvel Knights line of comics to people like me. As long as there are enough people like me buying them, I think it is a big enough niche market to keep feeding.</blockquote>

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