Comic Culture October 24th 2018

Every week Comic Culture hosts Chris Owen and Walter Durajlija talk the comic book talk.

So kick back, relax and enjoy this week’s Comic Culture.

Oh, and please make sure you go out and support your local comic book shop.

Comic Culture is written by Walter Durajlija and engineered by Chris Owen.

Enjoy Comic Culture’s October 24th, 2018 Edition:

Walter Durajlija
Walter Durajlija

Walter Durajlija is an Overstreet Advisor and Shuster Award winner. He owns Big B Comics in Hamilton Ontario.

Articles: 1789
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Charlie
Charlie
5 years ago

Marvel licenses were only one of the things that Disney wanted from Fox. The other was Hulu so they can build out and rebrand as Disney streaming, which is in direct conflict with Netflix. If you consider Netflix’s current market cap… $70+ b doesn’t seem that bad:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/24/netflixs-market-cap-is-now-greater-than-disneys-an.aspx

Apparently, the latest round of talks did not go so well so the cancellation of Iron Fist and Luke Cage was a political play… By cancelling, the shows become tainted as failures. You’ll also note that there wasn’t much hype around DD. Instead of being front and centre… I had to search it up on Netflix. From what I can gather, Netflix will finish up the shows that are already in production… but the whole Netflix Marvel is in jeopardy. It’ll take several years to play out so anything can still happen.

Regarding Venom… we can try and break down why it’s having such financial success, including lack of competition, timing and demographic but it’s a moot point because a win is a win. However, I think equating movie success to book success is a simplistic view. I think it’s more accurate to say that movies help to generate interest. Once the movie is over, interest softens and the book becomes that much more difficult to sell. Evidence of this are the rotating retail shelves… the Last Knight Transformers are out as the stores stock up on the latest BumbleBee Transformers in anticipation of the upcoming movie. How well a book continues to perform after the movie depends on a variety of factors… yes, including how well the movie is received, but also the strength of the character prior to the movie, scarcity or abundance, age or era and the current value or how much the book has climbed. Also consider that by now, speculators will have exited the book, adding to the supply. In the case of Venom and ASM #300… the character is hugely popular, but there are also lots of books around. Are people going to hoard this particular book as they do with books like Hulk#181? Who knows? All we can do is make the best guess and hope that we guessed right.

Next up… Black Panther underwater… aka… Aquaman!