Since the influx of new readers is so low and I've heard from many people that they might drop the books it's possible DC might, at the bottom line, lose readers.
They easily could at that. I know a fair amount of people, like me, have bought books mostly because we felt committed to them because we had the last 300 issues or whatever. I mean, my Detective Comics set starts pretty consistently around issue 200 and I have practically every issue from 300-up (missing some issues from my post-Zero Hour sabbatical), but once they cancel it and the rest of the core four titles (Action, Detective, Batman and Superman), I can just cut the new series anytime if I don't like them. I realize not many readers are like that, but many collectors are. I mean, I bought all those Superman books in the late 80's and 90's just because it was Superman and in the case of Adventures of Superman and Action Comics, because I had the last 200 or so issues of the title.
This doesn't sound too different from what I encounter with people in other mediums. I can't for the life of me get my friends to appreciate any films or music released pre 1980 (and even the 80s stuff they like is just for the cheesy charm) and the few friends I have that read books, forget about getting them to pick up any classics. People just have a natural resistance towards appreciating older things in any medium while theres the select few in younger generations that are willing to give old stuff a shot. Its an unfortunate reality.
Yeah, it is. Why people choose ignorance is really not something I can understand. As an example, when I was a kid I used to read Werewolf By Night and Tomb of Dracula. So I got interested in famous monsters. I started watching Hammer and Universal monster movies, and reading Forrest J. Ackerman's
Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I ended up reading the original horror novels by Stoker and Shelley, and watching films like
Nosferatu and
Vampyr, etc. My current musical kick has been Brian Wilson/Beach Boys, and from that I've been learning and listening to the Four Freshmen and George Gershwin, etc. I am a person who loves to learn and study and see new things, even if they are only new to me. So if I was a 20 year old kid right now and I was listening to stuff like Arcade Fire or MGMT then I would check out other baroque rock and psychedelic bands and the history of the genre and I would arrive at...Beatles, Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, It's a Beautiful Day, Renaissance, etc. But that's just the way I am.
That's because any comic from the golden ages is full of 9 panel pages that have more words in them than an entire arc from Bendis. On every page.
Any Golden Age comic?? Really?
What's wrong with comics with a lot of words? Is reading hard? And remember, the main reason old superhero comics had so much exposition in them (e.g. Superman thinking, "Perry White, editor of the
Daily Planet." was because they were getting these things called NEW READERS. I wouldn't recommend that now because I think a simple introduction page works better, but I understand why superhero comics were that way then.
By the way, what many people feel is the greatest comics story of all time is a story called "Master Race" from EC's
Impact #1. Have you ever read any EC? Their comics were incredible-they may have been the best comics company of all time to be honest, but their books were wordy:
You people need to accept the fact that, not everybody is gonna like that old s**t. I love me some Fat Domino and Chuck Berry. But I understand that some, hell, most people aren't gonna be into that old s**t. I'm not gonna sit up here and call them philistines or whatever because they aren't into what I'm into. Especially when I can understand why they wouldn't like what I like. What I think of as folksy and a nice peak into life of the times, others might see as hokey and racist. I play at being an elitist, but in reality, I'm just not that big of a *****e bag.
I understand that not everyone is going to like it, but saying things like "All Golden Age art sucked" is just not true. There were crappy Golden Age comics and there were great Golden Age comics, just like there are today.
Read that link.
