Die by the Big Two. My sympathies for the self-reported decline of the Comicstorian are rather limited:
In a bombshell video this weekend, Ben Potter revealed that his channel has been losing money for some time now, which might come as a shock to viewers who have been watching his content, which highlights the best of Marvel and DC’s major events over the years and distills the books in easy ways for viewers to catch up on storylines…
Comicstorian caught lightning in a bottle as these superhero movies propelled interest to new cultural heights. His high production value offerings gave casual fans the background they needed on the characters to have a deeper understanding of Marvel and DC.
That all changed in 2020, according to Potter’s new video. COVID hitting slowed the production of films and ground the comic industry to a halt. It made the content harder to produce, and the offerings of Marvel and DC garnered fewer clicks than the previous content. He said the channel hoped to ride out the slowness of content and was kept alive by an angel investor who believed in his work.
But those funds eventually dried up, and as Marvel and DC began to push more woke content with their films and comics, interest in the Comicstorian content began to drop along with the companies’ properties.
Now, why would anyone involved with independent comics give a damn about this channel? When has he ever paid any attention to the considerable amount of content being produced by anyone outside the Big Two?
It’s really rather remarkable how the comics media would observably prefer to go down with the Marvel-DC ship than actually devote any attention to the space where all the action is. And I’m not just talking about the industry’s staunch refusal to pay any attention to Arkhaven Comics or Arktoons, because they also refuse to devote any to the successful products developed by independent creators like Razorfist, Eric July, Ethan van Sciver, and most of all, the massive Webtoons platform.
In fact, the comics media barely pays any attention to the long-established Japanese manga industry, even though it is bigger than Marvel and DC combined. It is essentially a collection of parasites that refuse to adapt, therefore they will die alongside their hosts.
UPDATE: In related news, the Dark Herald reports that Comixology is dead.
Amazon has finally and officially pulled the plug on the Comixology app.
ComiXology used to be something halfway decent back when the Big Two were halfway decent. It started life as an online community that would spot interesting upcoming releases and build pull lists for the brick-and-mortar comic book shops back when they existed.
It also had some tools for the aforementioned brick-and-mortar comic book shops to help raise their online presence. Then around 2009 ComiXology went one step better and launched a digital comic book reader and a digital comic book store. For a while it was looking like this was the future of comic books.
Project Asteroid strikes again. Arktoons is inevitable.
