Thread 7765590

don't turn this into an east vs west thread
i've read manga my whole life and I recently gave a chance to some 90s capeshit. i specially enjoyed early Spawn and Weapon X.
even if i'm not the target, i find it so sad whole cultural phenomenons follow the cycle of life and can lose their luster so hard (stuff still gets made obviously)
the disappearance of the culture around it is what gets me the most, a lot of it being pre early-globalization era, it felt pretty distinctively american in a way i don't feel anymore out of anything, specially the way they'd interact with fans through mail, i don't know how to explain it.
it's pretty similar to how i feel about early 2000s doujin culture and desu it could happen to any hobby or artform i am enjoying right now, during my lifetime
maybe i'm just whining about the loss of subculture
capeshitbros i get you

>>7765590 (OP)
Capeshit is part of the problem. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a fuck about what people enjoy, but the comics bust of the 90s and Diamond Distributors fucked everything up. Even in the early 90s you could find comics on stands in just about any store, but by the early 00s that was no longer the case. Everything got pushed to specialty stores that wasn't Disney comics or Archie, and with that, decline was inevitable. Once the boom went bust, comics no longer had a foothold in normal stores, so casual readers ceased to exist. Diamond didn't give a fuck because they'd already gotten their industry sanctioned monopoly, so they just let shit languish instead of making meaningful inroads to under-served customers.

>>7765608
Obviously I'm speaking as an outsider but didn't it feel like the cultural death spiral went way too fucking fast? Even with distribution issues how the fuck did they manage to change so much in the span of less than ten years? I obviously know about what happened with the speculation market around the 90s but as soon as it stepped into the 2000s I swear some death switch clicked and both cultural presence and aesthetics got completely blandified

>>7765590 (OP)
I don't know if you've been away from the board for a while, but rest assured it WILL become a dumbed down East vs West thread due to a certain prolific troll.

>>7765620
Diamond basically stopped distributing to anything that wasn't a specialty shop, and that was it. The speculators were buying there, and that's where all the money was, so why bother with anything else? Then when the boom came they never went back to distributing to regular stores.
Nowadays it's too late, since with the boom came higher quality paper, so any given issue of a comic is upwards of $5 for MAYBE 20 pages(12 more that are ads). Even if they started distributing in normal stores, no one is going to buy at those prices.
Kinokuniya sells imported copies of Shounen Jump For SIX. FUCKING. DOLLARS. The closest things for comics in the US is Archie, which...ugh. There is no inroad for casual readership, so the readerbase is continually shrinking. You'd think the movies would bring more people in, but LOL, not the case.

>>7765590 (OP)
>maybe i'm just whining about the loss of subculture
We used to have people who made their entire lives about star wars, or star trek (trekkies), or comics and all that - but do people still really do that? Sure there are fans, but like there used to be.
I think it's because the mainstream got their greedy paws onto them. Comic culture couldn't survive having its conventions co-opted by film studios, and their media all be adapted into big budget tent-pole films. Being a comic nerd was no longer a niche thing, it was "mainstream", and it killed the culture.
Same could be said for nerd culture as a whole, really.
Even weeb culture seems to have been diluted and watered down.

And as the anon above mentioned ( >>7765608 ), the business of comics went through some mindbogglingly stupid stuff.
You'd think comics (well, dc and marvel) would be richer than ever with the movies coming out, and yet their sales were tanking, due to sheer levels of incompetency never before seen.

But overall, I feel like people just aren't as passionate about things as they used to be, regardless of what it is; it's the death of subcultures, due to a societal numbness or indifference for reasons I can't even be bothered thinking about.

>>7765632
That's such a fucking shame, I usually think the health of a medium is comprised on how many people who have greatly opposing tastes can be catered to, I'd really love it if the "american comic fan" who's excited for like 5 different new releases and draws/collects/participates in his free time and can be happy with just that was a more common sight
if the japanese industry ever goes into a death spiral the whole medium will just be a graveyard of tiktok edits

>>7765634
Weeb culture is absolutely 100 per cent been nuked as well for the same reasons you listed
I remember growing up in the 2010s looking around comic stuff and just thinking it was default celebrity stuff due to how overly sanitized it looked
weeb stuff is maybe not at that big bang theory stage yet but its like almost at it at this point, SAO followed by SnK followed by COVID and social media made it into another "default" thing you can be into, "being into anime" might just be like "being into music" in this day an age, and with that comes creators who don't really feel a need to be part of a defined group, therefore "by nerds for nerds" becomes rarer in a subtle way

>>7765627
SHIT

>>7765627
I myself am waiting for that figger naggot with the "Low Cognitive" pseudo-science that he spams everywhere on this mexican sombrero confection server

>>7765590 (OP)
there's many western web comics though.

>>7766046
any recommendations? (that aren't homestuck or kill six billion demonos)

>>7765590 (OP)
Maxx was good because it ended majority of things like Superman and Spider-man are IPs made to be milked to death even when a new form of them comes up (Superboy, Miles Morales) people cry and shit their pants to the old one has to stay FOREVER, Manga end too they can be long as fuck (took 14 years to end Naruto but it ended). The problem is the West doesn't know how to case in on something and let it die and move on to something else like the East, this keeps things fresh, what can you do with a character that is 75 fucking years old that hasn't been done?

>>7766112
That's definitely true, but I'd say it's more of american supercorporations being a black hole that sucks everything into the same point and creatives not having that strong connection web that would keep the scene alive either way. Again I'm talking as an outsider, but it seems like pre-2000s the american community had an actual creative passion that came from fans getting together (I don't know anything about it, but I just found out about Elfquest and it seems to be a sympton of that)
Let's say for whatever reason most japanese magazines decide on reheating Go Nagai and Ishinomori stories ad nauseum, I really struggle to think Japanese manga otaku wouldn't stick around and build close nits communities that allow them to do the stuff they like that the market doesn't cater to. Hell that's what Comiket is supposed to be to begin with.
On the american side, it's probably a compound nuke of corporate interest + clout chasing + it takes a lot of dedication to do a project on your own + said project won't have a pre-decided audience due to current "nerd culture" just being "culture" (desu I think the current movement away from visual novels and into phone gacha is an early sympton of that on the japanese nerd side)
A complete shame overall

>>7765590 (OP)
american society and culture has been completely destroyed by corporations. Its beyond over. Comics are just one thing that died but there's lots of american stuff that no longer really exists because of a certain group of people in power that I can't name.

Like the other anons said, Diamond played a part but so did variant covers and the demonstrable faggots that are the CGC

>>7766076
Why not give the anons making comics in /mmg/ a try? It doesn't hurt to just give them a cursory read (well, some of them at least) and plus its always nice to try to support other anons.

>>7766046
I think a lot of people are gunshy about webcomics.
Homestuck and Prequel went on hiatus for so long that by the time they came back no one cared. Also, Homestuck is Homestuck.
Poppy and Cucumber both just stopped updates with no return in sight(at least GGDG kept doing shit, Morbi is just a fat lazy slob). Lackadaisy too, but at least that seems to be to try and get it animated.
A lot of slop keeps getting put out...who the fuck is reading Megatokyo in 2025? Updated this July. Ctrl+ALT+DEl and Dumbing of Age too.
There's also just kind of a lack of good meaningful linking between comics that aren't on a platform like Webtoons. Back in the day everyone linked to other webcomics and/or a webring. No one does that shit anymore.
>>7766076
I've heard Ava's Demon is good, but I haven't read it.
Oglaf is consistently good, but nsfw more often than not.

>>7765608
This. As a kid/teen in 00s I grew up reading my parents' massive backlog of archie and conan magazines. I desperately wanted comics of my own and I knew there were so many cool options out there, but nothing to be found in my hick town.
I wish I could go back with my current level of reasoning and talk my parents about ordering stuff in the mail. I once loaded an envelope with loose change and sent it out, trying to order an art book from an 80s savage sword of conan lol.

>>7766394
>There's also just kind of a lack of good meaningful linking between comics that aren't on a platform like Webtoons. Back in the day everyone linked to other webcomics and/or a webring. No one does that shit anymore.
It also doesn't help that google is killing private websites by ensuring traffic either remains with them, or one of the other big established sites. Quite a few websites have been destroyed by google's actions.
Google, as a search platform, has become more and more useless.

On top of this, I think the culture of just exploring the internet, and looking at different websites, has kind of disappeared. People only like sticking to what they know these days.

>>7765590 (OP)
Manga:
>Typically over a hundred pages for 5 - 10$
>Wide range of stories
>High quality
Comics
>Typically 30 - 60 pages (if that) for 10$
>One genre dominates, most everything else is strange arthouse work, porn, or the authors thinly veiled political views. Almost impossible to find a starting point.
>No guarantee of quality, even from reputable companies.

>>7766557
>Typically over a hundred pages for 5 - 10$
>Typically 30 - 60 pages (if that) for 10$
True

>Wide range of stories
>One genre dominates
True.

>High quality
>most everything else is strange arthouse work, porn, or the authors thinly veiled political views.
I feel like this just shows you don't read, or look at much western comics.
There's plenty of great stuff outside of that domineering genre, and to suggest a good majority of that stuff is porn, while glazing manga (despite it undeniably having a major larger portion of its releases being porn) shows a bias.

Though I will agree that the manga generally has a higher artistic standard, western indies can be absolute dogshit visually, though when a western comic is good, it hits way harder for me than pretty much any other manga.

>>7766596
>I feel like this just shows you don't read, or look at much western comics.
Outliers dont count. Just look at whats getting put out by big names like Marvel, DC, IDW, etc; recently or in the last few years. If you look at the "good" stuff coming out of comics (even independently published ones) youre usually going pre-2010, while manga since 2010 has had an uncountable number of hits and successes.

>>7766618
>Outliers dont count.
I say it's not outliers.
>Just look at whats getting put out by big names like Marvel, DC, IDW
The publishers known for publishers that overwhelming genre you talked about. look outside of them. Hell, there's even some good stuff not within that genre published by them ocassionally.
>If you look at the "good" stuff coming out of comics (even independently published ones) youre usually going pre-2010
I won't deny that, but recognizing something as truly great usually only comes with time and hindsight, few things set the world on fire on release.
I'd rattle off a bunch of good comics releasing now, but whenever I do get a comic, it tends to be older, haha. But a more recent comic I liked was "I Hate Fairyland", which started release in 2015 (so ten years ago). My favourite comic is probably Steve Purcell's Sam & Max stuff, it's a shame he didn't make more.
But if you looked at the publisher, or another smaller publisher, and read through their releases, I'm sure you'd find plenty of gems.
Same with going through an author's work; I adored Dan Clowes as a teen, and still really appreciate his work now.
Find One good comic, and you'll likely find a dozen more.

>while manga since 2010 has had an uncountable number of hits and successes.
You also need to remember that Japan just also has a much much larger comic market. Comparing the amount of releases isn't reasonable - it'd be the same as comparing the amount of animated releases at the moment.
This also moves the goal posts a bit - we're not arguing if japan releases more good, or just generally more, comics; we're arguing if the west releases good comics at all in general.

>>7766381
I've actually checked some
Funnily enough that one anon that got hired in a hentai magazine caught my attention, his stuff is aesthetically pleasing
Although I don't even know how you get hired without knowing moonrunes

>>7766637
Skottie Young's run on Rocket Raccoon was the very first time I read a non japanese comic and after that I hopped onto I Hate Fairyland, his cartooning is so fun and so "2010 flavored" idk how to explain it

>>7766537
>I think the culture of just exploring the internet, and looking at different websites, has kind of disappeared
That's something I actually wondered, now that the internet is going through a reverse Big Bang and everything is centralized, how tf do people even set up their own webcomic pages like when people said it was like decades ago? Or do they just all imitate the scroll format, unleash it on Webtoon and call it a day?

>>7766394
A friend introduced me to Lackadaisy like years ago, thought it looked cool like an art deco Blacksad.
I remember when I was really young I tried to get into webcomics through Cucumber Quest and some other stuff that was ongoing about the time but something about the one page upload/strip format made it hard for me to stick along.
I did know about Ava's Demon, I have the Homestuck collection downloaded since long ago as well so maybe I should I give it a go
also how the fuck is Megatokyo still going

>>7766656
>after that I hopped onto I Hate Fairyland
IHF is the only "modern day" comic I have actually cared about in years. Any other comics are from 10+ years ago or more.

>>7766662
>unleash it on Webtoon and call it a day?
From my understanding, the pay and the chances of getting paid on webtoon are just too low, so it's not worth putting your work on that.
I think a group of web comic artists need to come together and essentially make their own site that is also open to others. Maybe something like a webring, but I'm imagining something a little more interconnected.

Though I say that, making your own site sounds good, until it's just another site that's ignored and clogging up the internet.

>>7766684
I get you, I had a phase in my early teens of trying to desperately get into american comics through the current publishing issues (2014 more or less?) and nothing caught me except skottie young's run, which was made irrelevant because they eventually took him out of the writer role and like five issues later they also took him out of the artist role, a case of theseus ship so bad it made me quit the whole thing and go back to manga
That's why I recently tried, specifically, edgy 90s stuff and it immediately clicked, I felt transported to a another time the same way first time manga reading made me weeb out about japan
So far I've read Weapon X, Spawn first 10 issues, Batman Long Halloween, Dark Knight, TMNT Bodycount, Jim Lee's X-Men first 10 issues and McFarlane's solo run on Spiderman.
I've recently bought Daredevil Born Again, Ninjak and I somehow randomly found the first four issues of Savage Dragon in a thrift store for 1 euro altogether, so I guess that's my backlog as of now.

>>7766689
>just another site that's ignored and clogging up the internet.
Sadly that's just what the current internet is, if it can't be jammed into some kind of short form content that an algorithm will randomly feel like spamming to phone addicted somethingteens from jakarta then it doesn't exist and it gets drowned out by skibidi labubu jumpstyle remix

>>7766557
>Comics
>One genre dominates
Only sorta kinda true for the North American ecosystem which is basically all capeshit. Britain has it's own thing going on (2000AD). European comics is a bigger industry than US comics. There's comics for every genre you want but if one has to pick which genre dominates Euro comics it's Mickey Mouse and Ducks lol. And quality is actually high unlike manga which is printed in black and white on toilet paper.

>>7766637
>Japan just also has a much much larger comic market
Yeah, they kept their market going well and then took our market when it collapsed (after a brief hiatus). The exact sort of people that would have been reading comics in the 80s are reading manga now.
Also my favorite comic is the Dark Knight Returns.
>>7766708
>And quality is actually high unlike manga which is printed in black and white on toilet paper.
I think the "toilet paper" printing youre talking about is the absolute best way to print in terms of serials. That "high quality" paper comics typically print on now is part of what makes the price so ridiculous. Since the 30s cheap pulpy paper has been the best way to reach people. Doesnt mean you cant have higher quality, for example, the new Fist of the North Star reprints are basically almost plastic, but you shouldnt do it on the first run.

>>7766757
Toilet paper is really underrated not only cost wise, but I find the creative decisions it forces concerning color much more compelling than the usual "overproduced volumetric painting over inking that's already volumetric by itself"
You also get the imperfections and texture of lower quality paper, making flat colors look more integrated.
Joe Quesada's art on Ninjak is my go to example for this kind of thing

>>7766766
oh gosh thats so fvcking kino

>>7766769
I know right
I found it in the same thrift shop I got Savage Dragon from but someone got issue 1 when I was gonna buy it
I've become an ameriboo but only for the 90s

>>7766766
>Toilet paper is really underrated not only cost wise
I seem to recall hearing one printing/comic expert regal why "cheap" pulp papers aren't used in comics or magazines anymore... it's because they're no longer cheap.
They're cheap to make, sure, but the problem is that not enough of it is made, so the cheapest option is defacto a more high quality paper - asking them to make you the cheaper paper specifically for your prints is simply not realistic.

Not sure how true it is, but it'd make sense, since I don't see cheap quality paper much at all these days.

>>7766832
The last time I handled a floppy the paper was high end semi-gloss photo paper. I don't believe for a second they couldn't find cheaper paper, especially given that newsprint is still dirt cheap and in use.

I still think it's a distribution issue, if you could just get that shit delivered by Amazon along with your detergent, espresso capsules or whatever people actually get monthly plans for, or there was an app on your tablet or preferably your child's, where you get, say, every Marvel or DC comic between the 30s and six months ago for 6$ a month and for a few dollars more you get recent issues of some or all series capeshit would be insanely profitable.

You wouldn't even put dedicated shops out of business since they've been Funko/Pokemon/Warhammer shops for a decade now.

>>7766076
do read Gone with the Blastwave if you haven't yet, easily one of my favorites

>>7766394
>Homestuck and Prequel went on hiatus for so long that by the time they came back no one cared.

This is pretty much why I stopped reading webcomics. It wasn't just these two, every narrative webcomic stopped updating. After awhile it's hard to care when you know the author is just going to put it on "indefinite hiatus" before it hits chapter 2. It's actually an unheard of upset that Kill Six Billion Demons is going to end it's run after mostly having kept to it's regular weekly update schedule.

>>7766076
Demon by Jason Shiga was pretty great.

>>7765632
>You'd think the movies would bring more people in, but LOL, not the case.
if anything its extra frustrating because the die hard turbonerd fanbase into the original comic continuities now gets to witness the characters they liked get changed for brand synergy which leads to nothing because you still cant just jump in if you are an outsider because the only way to get a good idea of a comic character is to buy a collected run or an omnibus and i think that if you had to drop 80$+ bucks to get into a manga series no one would give a shit abt manga

>>7765590 (OP)
>big corpos (read: capeshit) displaced everyone else from mainstream stores like bookshops, gas stations, toy shops, etc. Then capeshit cratered in quality killing the interest normies might've had in comics
>Comics had always been targeted mostly at younger audiences, and at people who were more into watching TV than reading books. The "smart" audience is still reading books, but the braindead one would rather doomscroll on phones than flip pages
There simply is no demographic for comics anymore. Most people just want to passively consoom content directly delivered to their eyeballs. "Going outside to a store to buy a comic? And they might not even have the issue I want? Fuck that."
Even weebs, which seem to be the last bastion of comic books have mostly used web readers for a long time or webtoon. Physical comics are dead.
And online-wise, you'd think there'd be a boom of indie comics, just like how streamers and youtube have become a replacement to traditional TV, but the truth is, there's no platform for comics. They don't post well to any social media platforms, so they require personal websites or selling your soul to webtoon, and generally have shit discoverability unless they are single-page leddit political comics. Retards don't have the patience to check your personal website weekly to see if the new chapter is out.

>>7765632
>>7766930
>You'd think the movies would bring more people in, but LOL, not the case.
It still surprises me that they didn't try selling comics related to the movie IN the movie theatres. Give the movie theatres a portion of the profits, fuck, make 'em limited edition prints for the movie, I'm sure they'd have sold well - perhaps it would have even gotten people into the hobby of reading comics. But Marvel and DC aren't exactly known for knowing how to run a business well.

>>7767092
I get the impression they were trying to distance themselves as much as possible from the comics, at least early on. The first Iron Man movie was made in a time when superheroes were still considered nerd shit, and did everything it could to not be a nerd shit movie.

>>7766956
>There simply is no demographic for comics anymore.
You would think so, but the biggest comics publisher in the Us isn't Marvel, and it isn't DC. It's Scholastic, and their comics division is growing. It's never been that people aren't interested or unwilling to read comics, it's corpo bullshit that prevents comics from being accessible to readers.If Scholastic ever starts moving towards older readers they might actually edge out Marvel and DC completely.

>>7765590 (OP)
>I don't read comics
Nobody reads comics and comic artists don't know how to reach an audience that isn't other authors posting on dead ends like tapas. Webcomic creators will get a fighting chance once they stop acting like it's 2003 and learn to adapt to the current climate.

>>7765590 (OP)
I am more of Japanese manga fan, but I try to re-read American comics due to some of my favorite artists still look up to Golden age American comics books. So I had to see for myself.

While this page of (Strange Tales No. 002 (1951-08)) is not really shown on "Best American comic book art" type of books, I see the appeal.

>>7765608
Unpopular opinion but I disagree. It was because the scene for commercial art in the XX century was still not established. Even in the 90s they were still throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. The internet consolidates sales and gave a better idea of what sold and what didn't. The same thing happened with manga where 99% of it is like, a schoolboy gets superpowers and it's the same tropes every time. Tezuka alone was far more creative in his output than the majority of manga artists today combined.
Videogames also had a massive impact on this, especially when they started getting better graphics and the gameplay would allow for "cinematic" stories.That took a big chunk of the comics audience.

Contrary to what people say one of the reasons wasnt the superheroes being there forever without end; it was part of the nerd culture this giant continuous self referenced universe. But then, people who hated superhero comics went there and Booom
>Ultimate universe
>Infinite Crisis
And destroyed this giant universe

>>7768674
>Even in the 90s they were still throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck
Sure, but late 80s/early 90s was the peak of sales, there has never been a bigger amount of big publisher comic book titles being released than in this period. There was a small bubble created, with limited editions going for hundreds of dollars on release. Turns out it was all speculation, and the price of these limited editions came crashing down a few years later. The industry hasn't recovered since.

>>7768675
and it backfired hard because the multiverse shit is even more poison to normies as execs and higher ups keep demanding to bring back legacy shit into the supposed "reboots" which defeats their whole purpose, the new 52 shit by dc is a guide on how to NOT reboot your brand

>>7768674
>Even in the 90s they were still throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck.
In the 90s the big two were churning shit out as fast as they could to feed the speculators markets - they admit as much themselves. The change in distribution was big - casual readers could no longer just pick up a comic at a mini mart or department store - you HAD to go to a specialty shop. And yeah, they got bad reps because of the nerds, but just being restricted to specialty stores was a much bigger problem, because it effectively cut off all casual readership. They then jacked up prices and started using premium paper, making it even harder for casual readers to get in, because now it wasn't just something you had to go out of your way for, it was expensive for what it was.
And that all happened because a capeshit comics sold at auction for some obscene price - I think it was Amazing Spider-Man #1. the whole boom and bust, and the change from normal stores to specialty, came about because of this and it was largely capeshit that was booming.
Unless you mean by
>throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck.
That they were experimenting with a variety of genre, which just wasn't true. The CCA fucking murdered that and by the 90s capeshit was incredibly dominant, to the point a lot of people still equate comics to capeshit. Yeah, we got Dark Horse and Image out of it, but your average normie isn't aware of them and doesn't know comics exist outside of capeshit.

>>7765634
>But overall, I feel like people just aren't as passionate about things as they used to be, regardless of what it is; it's the death of subcultures, due to a societal numbness or indifference for reasons I can't even be bothered thinking about.
Completely and utterly incorrect.
The OLD subcultures have long been dead, sure. But the mainstream is what is in its long slow collapse right now. There are so many fucking subcultures and microcultures now that it's scaring sociopaths and academics. The authoritarian types who want a giant monolithic culture to ladder climb, with subcultures as defined easy to understand boxes for dissidents and outcasts to go to.

With the internet, everyone is becoming increasingly aware that you can travel to the next county, city, town, or (if in a dense enough area) block and the entire culture is completely different. The presence of similar brands and other crap is not a substitute for the fact that the planet is a massive mosaic of people with different value systems.

AND this gets even more confusing when you understand that even these pockets are not a monolith, because subcultures now exist without the limits of physical space. Microcultures as well. You can have a town-size amount of people who really are willing to support YOUR art in particular, they're just distributed across the entire goddamn planet instead of concentrated in one place. You could fill an entire city with people in the "maker" or "FOSS" subcultures as well, I'm sure there's a good 6 or 7 figures of those.

There are people into specific aesthetics that will show up randomly in middling-size towns. People across a region, county, or state will convene to do shit like street racing as a big event, when there's only 1 individual per 50km2. For fuck's sake we live in a time where a man was able to buy the brand and produce Commodore computers once again because there's enough enthusiasts willing to pay to support someone contributing to their hobby.

>>7766537
>On top of this, I think the culture of just exploring the internet, and looking at different websites, has kind of disappeared. People only like sticking to what they know these days.
This never disappeared. It was ALWAYS a minority. What happened is that you are now more likely to meet people from other walks of life online.
It used to be that people would celebrate 2000 hits on your website as a giant milestone. Now 2000 FOLLOWERS is some kind of rookie numbers.

>>7766662
>how tf do people even set up their own webcomic pages like when people said it was like decades ago?
>>7766689
>From my understanding, the pay and the chances of getting paid on webtoon are just too low, so it's not worth putting your work on that.
Most webcomics used to work off of donations. They were passion projects, not moneymaker ventures. They frequently went on hiatus or died because the creator had no time to keep making strips. Some had a donation button and a few had ads (and the ad revinue was never that big). It was only a handful of bigger ones, mostly in the later years, that managed to get some form of monetary "success", typically via releasing a print version. Megatokyo, Van Von Hunter, and Spinerette come to mind. And that's ones with some semblence of story. Remember that PAX is actually a convention that exists because of Penny Arcade. The fucking name stands for Penny Arcade Expo. The only other webcomic I can think of that has had conventions is Homestuck. Two out of a giant sea.

Everyone in the early internet was a goddamn weirdo and often some kind of social outcast. It's why it was so interesting. People would WILLINGLY burn money on hardware, spend time learning how to and coding their websites with shitty tools, draw using crappy primitive digital art software or scan and adjust it with the same, and pay to host their shit to share with others all for free. They made the choice to do this INSTEAD of other things with their time.

>>7766832
>it's because they're no longer cheap.
>>7766845
>I don't believe for a second they couldn't find cheaper paper
Materials used to be a huge factor in production costs. It's not anymore. Good paper is not really expensive overall because the costs of materials have gone down. Labor is now the floor and you can't push costs down lower without reducing labor further, and people are getting paid more individually now than ever. It's why old school "cheap" foods now seem so fucking expensive.

Consider this:
A pack of hot dogs or bologna is multiple times more expensive than ground beef on a per-gram of protein basis.
You get about 100 grams of protein in 1lb of ground beef. You get less than half that (6g*8=48) in an average pack of hot dogs that costs anywhere from the same price to more than double.
This has happened across many many industries. The prices of materials and their resulting consumer goods in real terms have dropped like a rock over the past century.

So on top of the costs being close enough, the shift to cheaper paper would also damage their images as purveyors of "premium" products. They COULD try to spin it as some kind of eco move but that's risky.

Give me black and white on toilet paper. Color comics are awful. Batman before that shitty coloring is actually pleasant to look at. If I were ryan benjamin, I’d be pissed that my work keeps getting ruined.

>>7766708

>>7772847

>>7772517
>the shift to cheaper paper would also damage their images as purveyors of "premium" products.

>>7770673
>Sure, but late 80s/early 90s was the peak of sales
Nope, you need to look at the 30s and 40s. Captain Marvel alone was pushing numbers to make Jump blush.

i get it, i wasnt really there for it, but looking back i just miss old nerd culture and old otaku culture n shit dude. it kinda bums me out seeing anime themed mcdonalds bags or normies wearing naruto merch. like it used to be something special and unique

>>7772495
>Whole post sums up my exact thoughts and feelings
Fucking take me back before the normies swarmed the internet, before social media. When webcomics were these fun and extremely weird, niche, but sincere, soulful story telling rabbit holes, with self-made websites and funky weird rabbit-hole links that tool you over to other weird websites and all! It felt like home!
--
Webcomics now just feel devoid of any soul. As though they're trying to market to an audience rather than just telling some weird ass story in their own personal world in their own little nook and cranny website. The strange designs that didn't really have a strong template to follow, low quality works, but the effort was what shined through so bright, not the polish... I feel like it's either over-polished and/or trying to hump after an audience...

>>7766537
I met a girl whom I later met IRL and became my gf on the biggest blog site in my EU country in the early 2000s. At its peak the site had three thousand users. It died when MySpace came out and everyone flocked there. Dated another girl from a fantasy art forum. You'd meet people IRL back then. Then Facebook hit it big and everything went to shit. Before phones and Facebook the internet was a tiny thing for nerds.

>>7773982
Meant for >>7772495

>>7773965
i feel this. tumblr exodus and covid i think were the two biggest catalysts for the internet dying. it was inevitable, but it at least kinda sped the process up.

the exodus flooded the rest of the internet with the most insufferable people imagineable, covid forced a bunch of normies to be constantly online so now even your most normie person is at least on tiktok all day.

i hate what happened to the internet and subcultures so much dude

>>7770720
>multiverse shit
One of the worst things to ever happen

>>7772517
scale is a big part of it, since newspapers went digital and physical newsprint demand went down, the next cheapest option is actually a higher quality paper. the glossy paper is still used for magazines/brochures/corporate documents around the world. if you mess around on mixam or any of the self printing sites you see how the cheapest option is going to get you something like a corporate document but that really doesn't gel well with a comic/manga look. the japs can get away with it in Jump because they're repulping all their paper and their print runs go into the hundred of thousands (if not millions). we just don't have that scale anymore in the US.

>>7765648
sao was the death of anime ngl.... sloooopppp

>>7765648
feels like almost no one talks about just how much COVID killed subcultures and the internet. i swear, i know was younger and all, but i do not remember nerdy shit and online culture being THIS normie. like ofc it was big, but after covid and everyone was forced to be online, online culture just BECAME culture. alternative cultures like metal and punk got hit especially hard. genuinely depresses me whats been happening to this stuff

>>7778284
I don't think it was actually COVID, it happened well before that. Millennial subcultures got corpo colonized long before that. Corporatization meant that people could easily buy into aesthetics without adhering to an actual culture. The nail in the coffin was the "be yourself" culture of the 2010s when people were encouraged to go out and buy up these aesthetics to create their personality, as in a longterm knockon effect culminated in the current day nihilist clout chasing where everyone is desperate to min-max their perceived social standing at any cost.

A lot of the current-day issues can be traced back directly to tricking early-GenZ into thinking that they were special snowflakes destined to rule the world, and giving them a catalogue of fun personalities to buy to keep up that illusion. It's the American phenomenon of temporarily embarrassed millionaire turned up to 11 and exported to the world.