{"id":47271,"date":"2025-04-24T18:24:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/47271\/"},"modified":"2025-04-24T18:24:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:24:10","slug":"did-normies-ruin-comic-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/47271\/","title":{"rendered":"Did ‘Normies’ Ruin Comic Books?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You\u2019ve heard the refrain from comic book nerds a million times: \u201cNormies ruined the comics industry!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But did they? In his classic video, author David Stewart addressed this theory.<\/p>\n

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From the transcript:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t think that normal or mainstream people ruined comics at all. I actually think it was the opposite.<\/p>\n

Comics were taken out of the mainstream, and I\u2019d like to explain my conclusion to that. Before I do, so let me make a distinction between what I\u2019m talking about.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, if you have a small, dedicated subculture, and then you have an influx of normal people to it that, you know, makes it explode in popularity, obviously that\u2019s going to fundamentally alter the subculture in a ways that the creators of the subculture don\u2019t want it to be altered. It\u2019s going to dilute some of the things that made it special.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not what I\u2019m talking about. What I\u2019m talking about in this is the reality that comic books used to be more popular than they are, and the mainstream interest for them was removed because the product was changed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Right away, I recognized that David is offering a rebuttal to Mop Theory<\/a>, which states that geeks create a cool new scene which is inevitably destroyed by an invasion of Mops, aka Normies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, David argues for the diametric opposite position.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019d like to read a little bit of a quote for you that supports my point of view and distills down this idea that comics were taken away from the normies, not ruined by the normies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So this is a this is an interview with Jim shooter, who was in charge of Marvel for about ten years in\u00a0the 1980s. And his basic thesis about the problem with modern comics boils down to storytelling\u2013that they don\u2019t tell good stories that people are interested in. That\u2019s the background of this quote. Let me read it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes forever to tell a story.\u201d He\u2019s talking about what he calls \u201cdecompressed storytelling.\u201d It\u2019s like a soap opera. \u201cIt takes forever to tell a story. What Stan Lee would put in six pages, it takes six months 1745519050.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you look at the sales. Marvel comics are not $4 apiece, and they\u2019re thrilled that the sales are over thirty thousand. When I was at Marvel the whole world was different. We didn\u2019t have a single title. We had 75 titles. We didn\u2019t have a single one that sold below 100,000. We had the X-Men approaching three-quarters of a million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that\u2019s not some special number one or somebody dies or changes costumes or someone gets\u00a0married. It was every time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of it was single copy readers. People weren\u2019t running around buying cases of it because it had a foil embossed cover. It was every issue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

So with that quote, you basically have my thesis, which is that comics at one point in time were\u00a0extremely mainstream. I remember as a kid seeing comic books on the shelf at the drugstore like in the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, I remember buying Ninja Turtle comics off of the shelf and reading them; not going to a comic book store. I didn\u2019t set foot in a comic book store until like the the 1990s, and it was kind of a weird thing when comic book stores became the place where you had to buy comics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So at one point in time, these things are really mainstream, and they\u2019ve gone away from being mainstream and actually been captured and become a subculture, so it\u2019s really like a subculturecaptured the industry and started excluding all of the things which make make the comics appealing to the mainstream.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Watch the whole video:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whatever the cause of the comic book industry\u2019s demise, one conclusion is irrefutable:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Marvel and DC are dead. Move on.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Experience The Burned Book in Audio!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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