Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

October 05, 2017

RFS Peter the Great Has Some Fun

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October 04, 2017

It Appears That the Nonspeciffic "You" Referenced in the Last Post Was NOT Kidding

Those, in or around Tallahassee and Apalachicola; this weekend might be a good time to take a roadtrip to Kansas.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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October 03, 2017

Are You KIDDING Me?

The yellow thing is just thunderstorms with a 10% chance of developing into something obnoxious. The item marked in red that is currently lining up on New Orleans is described as having a 70% chance of developing into a tropical cyclone.

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75% Non-Excrable

I missed an episode of The Orville when they switched nights. Fortunately, (well... not for him) J. Greely took the hit and was able to provide a warning to us all.

Having missed that, I actually watched episode 4 and I can say that three quarters of the episodes thus far have not reeked of vomit and shame. In fact the three I've seen have all been quite solidly mediocre.

This is a by the numbers Star Trek show that appears to have been written by the perfectly straightforward method of recording week night sessions of Star Trek the Role-Playing Game, where the house rules include "no transporters" and two of the players really just want to play Starfleet Battles, so the GM sets up a separate Hex map for them in the table next to the wet bar.

At least that's what it feels like.

It's REALLY not high art, but I'm going to keep rolling the dice on this show for now.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 ...did somebody say "Starfleet Battles"?

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tue Oct 3 21:16:19 2017 (Mxu+F)

2 I've been enjoying it.

Posted by: Mauser at Tue Oct 3 22:42:17 2017 (TYvUn)

3 So far I like the show. They may have front-loaded the fart jokes to an extent.
Episode 3 was a better version of TNG's

Posted by: Rick C at Wed Oct 4 13:55:07 2017 (ECH2/)

4 Aww, man, I was sure I put those spoiler tags in right.

Posted by: Rick C at Wed Oct 4 13:55:49 2017 (ECH2/)

5 Rick: "Episode 3 was a better version of TNG's (spoiler)"

I disagree, even though I disliked that TNG episode, and the reason is: the 5th-season TNG episode took a well-developed character and put him into a situation that challenged his attitudes and the audience's expectations. Its failures were arguably due to not being able to get away with more in 1992.

The corresponding Orville episode fails largely because no one put any real thought into it (and, yes, I've read detailed spoilers of how it's resolved).

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Wed Oct 4 15:22:41 2017 (tgyIO)

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October 02, 2017

Wishful Thinking & Unwarranted Schadenfreude

There is a fair amount of concern trolling expressed at Marvel's recent sales woes and a belief amongst certain people that they represent the death knell for the Comic industry.

This is not the case.

Marvel and DC don't even NEED to turn a profit anymore. They are now idea factories and copyright farms for Time Warner and Disney to whom the budget of Marvel is a rounding error.The notion that driving away their former audience is going to have any effect upon their editorial decision making is delusional. Furthermore, these reports of declining sales are based largely on Diamond's sales figures, which are not going to show, say, Amazon sales. Comic stores are just another type of brick and mortar store that is being bypassed by direct, online sales so the sales figures for the actual companies may not be as low as is assumed.

Furthermore, the comics themselves are loss leaders. I was reminded of this by a post by a comic professional on a private board. Trade paperbacks are where comics make money nowadays. That is, the comics themselves don't really make money anymore. (I used to know this, but haven't worked in the industry for years).

Pretty much the only people who buy those are those who frequent comic shops, the hardcore fans who are the object of the SJWs hate. Newer fans, and casual readers buy the trade paperbacks, which remain in print (thanks to modern printing technologies) pretty much in perpetuity. A comic doesn't make money. A trade paperback ordered on Amazon does.

I've talked to people in the industry who would know and paperbacks are actually selling pretty well. Indeed, the declining comic sales have no bearing on this because trades are the new way of buying comics...one picks up the trade paperback on Amazon. One industry professional described the new business model as very similar to the Japanese Manga industry, with the individual comics taking the place of the big manga "phone books" as loss leaders. The trade paperbacks here are the American equivalent of the manga complilations...that's what people buy, and the profit on each book actually increases with time as the number of trade paperback editions grows. Trade paperbacks thus work sort of like like compound interest, and in fact they are generally the way that web comics make money.

So while it may be very satisfying to believe that the editors who hate us with every fiber of their being might be forced by economic reality to not make Captain America a Nazi, the fact is that this has not hurt them at all.

Marvel and D.C. are doing exceedingly well. They have cultivated an entirely new fan base which is making them money. This is good business. That these SJWs did so by treating their long time fans with the kindness and respect that a spoiled child demonstrates in pulling the wings off a junebug, is sad.

What is sadder still is a bunch of adults gloating over comic book stores suffering. They had no control over the editorial decisions that many of us find vexing nor the technological innovations that have bypassed them. Their demise will not hurt the big comic companies in any way and will almost certainly (given the demographics of comic store owners) give SJWs a wry smile and cruel chuckle. It will not affect the bottom line of Marvel and DC in any way.

So don't expect multimillion dollar corporations to come crawling back to atone for not catering to us. That is the impotent fantasy of grade school looser. Instead, take some satisfaction that they did a good job with the Wonder Woman movie, and they haven't screwed up Squirrel Girl yet.

Then go poke about and look for other comics that you just possibly might like. There are quite a few online.

There's even a likeable genderbent Thor!

Failing that go out and create your own. Or send some of that comic money this guy's way.

Or sit on your duff and wait for Marvel and DC to collapse...but if you do that, you may want to get a book or something. 'Cause it's gonna be a long wait.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:12 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 Ok, question: if nobody's buying (say) Thorette comics in the shops, then who's buying the compilations? Are SJWs rushing out to buy comics they'd previously disdained now that there's a trans Spiderwoman (or whatever?)

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Oct 2 14:58:58 2017 (ECH2/)

Ok, question:

NOPE! Guess again! (While my secret identity is something I keep close to the vest, I assure you that it is not Victor Sage...whose alias should always be capitalized.) HINT: I'm actually a comic book super-villain (no really).
As to the rest of your inquiry, it's probably people who don't show up in comic book stores.
Also, given the price of comic book single issues, the fact that they are awkward and expensive to store, and trade paperbacks are just books one puts on a shelf, a LOT of people are just buying the trades. Those can be gotten from Amazon easier than a comic store and the people who are into the SJW world view are often not going to be hanging out in a comic store, so it's a completely different demographic than we run into. Ordinarily, this would be a good thing, expanding the market with new titles and demographics is objectively good.
The grief arose where this was quite explicitly not about just bringing new people in, but pushing us out.
Finally it should be noted that while not all of the reimagined superheroes have been badly done (The new Blue Beetle worked quite well) ALL of them have elicited howls of protest from people who were emotionally invested in characters that they could see themselves in. The new audiences are interested for that same reason. These are characters who they can see themselves as and so they're picking up these books for the same reason we, as awkward alienated teens did. It would be better if more of these books were written as something other than check boxes on a Benneton ad. It would have been better still if this shift had not had such contempt for the long time fans behind it.

The point is that there is every reason to believe that the up and coming comic book reader is not just as different in their consumption habits from the dwindling number of aging gen Xers as every other Millennial customer segment is. Unlike the editors involved, most of the new fans probably harbor us no ill will any more than we begrudge them their enjoyment of books directed at them. But we only rarely will encounter them because we all hang in different circles....which is contributing to this notion that these companies must be failing, when they most assuredly are not.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 2 17:52:23 2017 (KicmI)

3 Largely, those aren't on sale yet - they tend to lag the individual-issue comics by a good bit to avoid cannibalizing the comic sales. Even beyond that, the number of comics actually affected by this stuff is a pretty small fraction of total comics titles, especially small compared to "total TPBs available from the past few decades".

Sure, it'd affect their ability to draw in new fans - which was already pretty limited by the superhero focus to begin with, mind you. The industry had been busy pigeonholing itself since the 90s. Of course, it's not unlike anime - in the same way that Japan panders to the creepy otaku, the US comic industry has pandered to our own equivalent. I'm going to guess that the intersection between "people who like reading comics about young women with gravity-defying bodies in spandex" and "people who like being judged as horrible human beings for reading comics about young women with gravity-defying bodies in spandex" to be just about zero.

But like you say, the comic book companies make more money through movies than they ever did through actual comics, and they've got a lot of untapped material to work through yet; they'll be selling movies based on comic stories from ten or twenty years ago long enough for everyone now making decisions to retire comfortably. If they aren't managing their companies to keep things rolling fifty years down the road, well, who else is, these days?

The comic shops have long since had to diversify; just about all of the ones I've been to make a lot more off of related goods, gaming stuff, and Magic cards than they do off actual comics. Hell, most of them are really Magic card shops that happen to have a side line in comics...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Mon Oct 2 21:19:17 2017 (/lg1c)

4 I don't think I've bought single-issue comics since Adam Warren and Toren Smith were doing Dirty Pair.

That was.... A while ago now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Oct 3 01:11:05 2017 (PiXy!)

5 Are there any actual numbers to support the claim that Marvel is making up for losses in the direct market with trade paperback sales? Their Amazon rankings aren't spectacular, and BookScan has them at 10% of the C/GN market behind Dc at 14% and Viz at 23%.

Posted by: muon at Mon Oct 16 05:16:07 2017 (vMYTH)

6 The numbers do exist. I know for a fact that the comic companies are doing very well. However, I have a non-disclosure agreement with my former employer.
Regarding the publicly available numbers, they are not good data. Bookscan is bunk. (Read the whole thing)
Another thing to remember is that TPs are essentially cash in the bank. Printing costs are way lower than they used to be, so once the books are compiled they just sort of make money from then on. Thus even very moderate sales generate more profit than a regular 32 page book.
It would be interesting to know WHAT trade paperbacks are selling. After all, a huge amount of Marvel and DC comics going back decades are for sale in trade paperback form...
I...I...Great Galaxies! If you go to the link, The Watcher is now hocking back issues. So perhaps the end really is nigh !

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 16 16:40:02 2017 (3bBAK)

7 Collen Doran wrote that in 2013, and as she said, Author Central had only linked with BookScan in 2010. It also wouldn't include sales to comic shops, which might also account for the discrepancy. Comichron has the sales figures for TPBs in comic shops, and Amazon has a category for comic books and graphic novels. What most people are interested in is how the diversity titles launched after 2014 are doing as opposed to the classic trades. The first Ms. Marvel TPB seems to be a perennial seller, but the subsequent ones aren't. Patsy Walker aka Hellcat came in at 71 on the Graphic Novel list, but the series was still cancelled.

Posted by: muon at Tue Oct 17 07:16:21 2017 (vMYTH)

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Terror in Vas Vegas

20+dead as I type this.

50+ dead as I type this.

Someone opened fire with an automatic weapon from the 32nd floor of a hotel in Vegas cutting down at least a score of 50 people at a country music festival.

The gunman has tentatively been identified as being named Paddock, so the authorities are saying that this is probably not terrorism....

That's not how this works.

He just shot up and killed at least 50 people. This was certainly a terroristic act. If he was trying to affect policy in any way, he was a terrorist.

If he was a jihadi he was a terrorist.

If he hated country music and wanted to make an artistic statement regarding that, this was terrorism.

If he was antifa trying to kill rednecks because "TRUMP!" then this was terrorism.

If he was a Protestant nutbar trying to cleanse sin city, then this was terrorism.

If it was a Trump supporter trying to avenge the fact that Las Vegas voted for Hillary, then it was terrorism.

If it was a pro life advocate trying to make a statement about the slaughter of the unborn then he's quite unclear on the whole "pro-life" thing....and its still terrorism.

However, if, he was trying to shoot up the crowd in the hopes that he'd hit a reptillian and cause them to shapeshift on national television thereby exposing their dire influence on the country music world, then it's just a lone nut.

If he's mad because he broke up with his girlfriend, then she was prescient and it isn't terrorism.

Terrorism does not equal islamism. Bill Ayers, Tim McVeigh, Brett Kimberlin and James Hodgkinson were not islamists, but they sure as hell were terrorists.

I've typed this, the death toll has gone up from 20 to more than 50. This is now the worst mass shooting in U.S. History.

Good lord, there was just a report of over 200 people shot! Was he using a belt fed weapon? There's a fellow being interviewed now who says that it was definitely a fully automatic weapon.

***A lot of this info is likely to get revised, the 200 shot could well be injured for instance (they might have been trampled) so it's probably best to just leave it at this for now.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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