dvd-4-life

Getting tired of Superman and Batman and besides that ,there's not much too offer from DC.

Any comic book company ready to take the bull by the horns and start producing video animation,Omnibuses,graphic novels,comic books,digital media like the above(DC and/or Marvel) mentioned?

stingermck

Image? They have The Walking Dead, as well as a very diverse group of books.

taffer

Very unlikely.

The barriers of market entry are just too great now. DC and Marvel together control >80% of the market. Penetrating that would be nearly impossible.

There will still be some great selling indie comics, like The Walking Dead for example, but a company as a whole is very unlikely to ever take much market share away from DC/Marvel now.

fumanstan

I really like Image with Walking Dead, Invincible, and Saga, but I doubt they'll ever get to that DC/Marvel level though.

madcougar

The Walking Dead is a great concept, but I think you ultimately need great characters to establish a comic book company the size of a Marvel or DC. Besides Walking Dead, I can't imagine another CONCEPT that could carry more than a couple of books. DC can easily squeeze four monthlys from Batman. This doesn't count team-up books and auxiliary characters.

Image might have been able to do this had they been more cohesive and actually established a universe where all the creator owned properties existed. But of course, that went against the Image model.

fujishig

I don't think there will ever be a third, comparable superhero-based comic book company.

Image has Walking Dead, which just does incredible numbers, and as someone said before they have a lot of great creators and diverse concepts. IDW and Dark Horse have some great licenses. The new Valiant is doing some cool stuff. Archie will always have it's niche. Kodansha and Viz and others do manga. They all dabble in multimedia/omnibus/digital/etc., but won't rival DC or Marvel in terms of Direct Sales.

If you look at DC and Marvel, how many of their top selling titles feature new characters? Very, very few, if any.

Josh-da-man

About twenty years ago (gulp!) Valiant and Image gave Marvel and DC serious runs for their money.

The "new" eventually wore off of Image; readers began abandoning the company when they figured out that all of those Image titles they had speculating on sucked ass, and that the founders were farming their creations out to other artists who were cloning their style.

Valiant suffered a similar fate after they fired Jim Shooter and lost their creative focus, began over-expannding their line of titles, and their print-runs were so high that the newer books being printed would never reach the same after-market value that the earlier, pre-Unity Valiant titles had. I think Valiant probably could have survived without speculators, but they were putting out too many books in an already crowded market, and the books they were making were of mediocre quality at best.

Then, a few years later Marvel attempted self-distribution with disastrous results; every distributor save for Diamond were forced to close up shop and Marvel nearly went bankrupt. The end result of this was Diamond was left as the sole DM distrubutor and Marvel and DC were able to negotiate sweet terms with them that bar entry of new publishers and growth of any publisher that isn't named Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, or Image.

Trevor

I wonder the historical market share percentages are? Did Image or Dark Horse ever get close back before the boom?

(Leaving thread for someone else to do a full wiki level analysis with bar graphs for each year since 1940.)

PhantomStranger

Wizard used to run shiny pie graphs all the time back in the '90s about market share. I think the only serious threat the big two ever faced from a third company in modern times was Image in the 90s. Image was one of the big reasons behind the speculators' boom in the industry. Looking back, a lot of those Image comics are unreadable and have half-finished art.

robin2099

Yeah in the 90's Image was very close to becoming the third biggest publisher and taking over Marvel and DC's sales. Heck, for a little bit Spawn was overtaking DC and Marvel. Then every title they were producing where the hottest things around and all had merchandising. But what killed Image was all the problems they had (books being unfinished, the Valiant crossover, Spawn shipping out of order, etc).

But nowadays no publisher could get anywhere close to DC and Marvel. They are too well established and today I think the number three spot is a shared spot between Dark Horse, Image(much smaller than it used to be) and Dynamite.

Adam Tyner

Don't forget IDW.

starseed1981

Scale-wise, no. Quality-wise, yes.

PhantomStranger

There was the well-known failure of Crossgen Comics at the turn of the millennium, run by that millionaire hoping to create a viable third comic book company to compete with the big two.

fujishig

Even Valiant in it's heyday relied somewhat on some legacy characters, mainly the old Gold Key characters like Solar and Magnus (which new Valiant doesn't have access to). Shooter's cohesive vision (which started falling apart, ironically, right after the Unity event) and the creative talent maintained the fanbase (as did the speculator boom, which someone already brought up) but they didn't start from scratch.

Malibu tried to enter the Superhero realm with their Ultraverse titles (until they were bought by Marvel, integrated into the Marvel universe then left for dead). Dark Horse tried with their 99c lineup. Image basically took most of the young artistic talent from the hot Marvel books of the day, but ultimately found their niche in less super-heroic, creator-owned fare (they tried years ago to revive a superhero universe, but I think Invincible was the only new one that really lasted, and as good as it is I wonder how much of it was due to Kirkman's popularity with WD). Dynamite is relying on old Kirby creations. Crossgen, while not strictly superheroes, had a pretty expansive universe until it imploded under it's own weight.

Even without the market barriers, it's tough to beat the big 2 at their own game. The more successful ones start small and expand slowly, but if they continue to grow, they eventually reach critical mass because the creative talent starts running thin and/or leaves. Meanwhile, Marvel can crap out miniseries of whatever C list character they have to take up the limited shelf space.

taffer

Archie as well.

movieguru

Valiant back in the 90's had a good chance, but once they fired Shooter everything fell apart and sales tanked. CrossGen looked great and were heavily promoted at all the cons. If they had started in the earlier 90's they may have had the opportunity to challenge the big 2. Unfortunetly they came into the game about a decade too late when the entire comicbook market was shrinking.

story

It's not impossible. Image used to bullseye fanboys with their Issue #0s back in the 90s and they weren't much bigger than 20% marketshare!

I think what's more likely to happen within the next fifty years than the rise of a third big competitor is that AOL-Time Warner and Disney buy each other and the two universes are smashed together, somehow. People will go nuts.

kodave

Marvel and DC are only where they are at because they have a rich deep history of characters that are now arguably more valuable as IP for non-comic-book-media because they're so engrained in pop culture.

IDW focuses largely on licensed properties, so they'll never be what you want. Dark Horse also does a lot of the licensed comics and then some creator owned works.

As others have said, Image in the 90s had the best chance of making superheroes that matched up to Marvel/DC, but that didn't fly ultimately. These days Image has a ton of incredible creator owned largely non-superhero works though.

Valiant seems to have the closest thing to Marvel/DC heroes but there's really little chance they'll ever catch on to be as big as Marvel/DC.

Boom has a Mark Waid's creator owned superhero stuff which is kind of its own universe but those are ending/ended.

And I think the growth and trend of creator owned works being published by Image/Dark Horse/Boom/(maybe IDW? I can't think of any off hand other than Locke & Key) means we won't see these sort of everlasting characters that Marvel and DC have endless legions of rise up at a third company. The creator owned stuff will largely remain in their own universes and not have a lot of crossover elsewhere. I don't get the impression a lot of writers are very interested in writing for and creating worlds and secondary characters for companies where they won't ultimately own the creations. It seems like many creators work for the big 2 because that's a huge opportunity to get noticed for their creator owned works and probably pays decently.

And since almost all of the superhero money for non-comic-book media is in the Marvel and DC stables, it makes sense for creators to focus on mostly non-super-hero works to potentially sell movie and TV rights to and whatnot.

PhantomStranger

I agree that it seems most of the big-time comic book creators refuse to create anything new for Marvel or DC. Both of those companies have grown very stagnant in the creation of completely new characters not tied to extensions of older characters since the explosion of creator-owned comics in the '90s.

fujishig

I think it's partly the fanbase that's resistant to change. People will gobble up multiple Batman and Spiderman titles, regardless of quality, because of the character history, and ignore even well-written, well-drawn original characters (I think this is partly because they know the rug can be pulled out from under these secondary characters at any time). If you look at the advent of Image, they were basically carbon copies of a bunch of superhero archetypes/designs from the big companies. While they had a lot of excitement and flash, I don't think there was enough of a core there to give them lasting appeal, even if they had kept up with the art duties and schedules. I mean, if you look at something like Wildcats or Stormwatch, they were basically deconstructed from their original superhero roots and made into totally new creations in order to keep them viable.

I do agree that creators will keep their best stuff for themselves, and why not? Otherwise their beloved creation could get killed off at the whim of the next hot creator who wants to make a name for their new villain/plotline.

Josh-da-man

Agreed that the lack of new and lasting superhero characters from Marvel and DC has more to do with a conservative fanbase that rejects anything that is newer than the Silver Age than creators withholding new characters.

Of Marvel, the only characters I can think of that are newer than the Silver Age that have any kind of lasting impact would be Wolverine, the "New" X-Men, The Punisher, and Ghost Rider.

From DC, there's Lobo, Swamp Thing, and John Constantine.

Though I can also see how creators, working for page rates, would be reluctant to hand their bosses a multi-million dollar franchise.

fujishig

I was thinking more of modern age characters. Certainly there are a number of post silver age characters that have been elevated to some level of importance, but there are so very few in the last 20 or so years. For instance, besides Deadpool and maybe Cable (two Liefeld creations who took a life of their own after he left), who's been established since the 90s?

On a side note, referencing here:
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources...ds-revealed-5/

it seems like Liefeld does collect royalties on the characters, but it probably only kicks in at some high print level that will probably never again be reached in the current comics market.

Gambit barely makes the cut, having debuted in 1990, but I doubt his popularity is all that high anymore. Lobo became popular in the 90s but debuted in the 80s.

Adam Tyner

Re: IDW? In terms of market share, they're neck and neck with Dark Horse. Generally a little above...

kodave

To clarify: Creators will make new characters for the Big 2 - but they're really not making something that will be the next Superman/Batman/Captain America/Wolverine/etc. It seems like there are always new mutant characters popping up at Marvel as well as a ton of low level superheroes and supporting cast members. And there's no telling who will get popular - I doubt Wolverine's debut as sort of a throw away in Hulk was ever foreseen or designed to be the Wolverine of today. But generally speaking I think most brand new characters are probably not going to reach the heights of A-listers. For example, Rucka created the Cole-Alves character for his Punisher run. I doubt she's going to break out and have her own movie 20 years from now and Rucka is going to be like "Shit, I should have saved that idea for her for my creator owned works." Maybe at best she would be a featured character in a future Punisher TV show/film, but she likely isn't going to be a key player.

But if a creator has an idea for what feels like a big centerpiece superhero that isn't tied to something in the Marvel/DC universe, my guess is they would rather have control over it in their own universe and take the risk publishing it as a creator owned work rather than basically hand it over to Marvel or DC for eternity, even if they get paid royalties.

If any third party threat was to come up against Marvel or DC it would definitely be something like a Millarverse rather than a specific publisher. If a popular creator can create a bunch of superhero titles in his own closed universe and then get a successful film made out of one or more of them, that's when I think the threat would be greatest to the big 2 (with the irony that one of the big 2 could actually publish the universe for them and still profit). But so far, not even a Millar-type creator has reached that level yet of having a creator-owned well-constructed closed-universe of superheroes that hits it big on film.

Rex Power Colt-Robot Man

We talking issue sales or dollar amounts? Cause on the whole IDWs books have a higher price point than DH. 3.99 a pop vs 2.99.