r/Popverse

Dan Buckley has seen Marvel Comics change from a comics publisher with dreams of TV and film success into a franchise and a brand where comics is a smaller but integral part inside a massive multimedia empire. Buckley has been Marvel Comics' publisher for the past 23 years, leading it to become the modern comic company it is while also being a key part of its transition into movies, TV, gaming, and being a department of the monolithic Walt Disney Company. 

But now, Buckley is leaving (not retiring) from Marvel after a nearly seamless tenure with the company beginning right after he graduated college in 1991. For context, he joined the company when modern epics such as Infinity Gauntlet and the 'Weapon X' storyline were not even midway through release on comic shelves that month. But things have changed tremendously in the intervening 35 years, and while he's said to be staying a full year to help with the transition, one major thing seems to not be transitioning with him.

For the first time in in 87 years, Marvel Comics has no publisher... and has no signs of getting one.

Here's something I don't have to tell you if you've been to a comic book store lately: DC and Marvel storylines are getting shorter. Arcs that used to fill multiple TPBs are now relegated to one or two (save for a couple of surefire head-liners), and as a result, fans get less time exploring what a certain situation can mean to their favorite characters. Now, we're not experts enough to know exactly why this is happening, but we do know someone who's a lot more embedded in the industry than we are, and he's got an opinion he'd like to share.

According to Scott Snyder, longer runs don't happen at DC and Marvel because readers aren't buying them.

Snyder voiced his thoughts over on his Best Jacket Press substack, where he was explaining what his day-to-day looked like as one of the advisors for DC's Next Level line. One of the things he keeps having to tell authors, Snyder says, is that "the ending needs to be stronger," a necessity brought about by readers investing less in longer stories.

"I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of streaming or if it’s an era of comics that’s gone," Snyder explained, "Like eight or nine years ago, when there was really more of a predilection for these long, long runs where a story in a plot would go for a very, very long time. But the economics of comics right now, although a lot of things are overperforming and there’s a lot of new readership and a lot of excitement, really aren’t supporting very long, slow burn runs in any kind of profitable way."

Still, Snyder's Best Jacket substack is often times addressed directly to aspiring comic creators, and he's quick to clarify - the current market shouldn't entirely dictate how they want to write comics.

"It doesn’t mean that you can’t do a series that’s like, 20 or 30 issues that’s a slow burn," the Batman legend clarifies, "You absolutely should if that’s exactly what you want to do. And I love series like that. I’m just saying it’s a harder marketplace for series like that right now than it was eight or nine years ago."

To Snyder's point, the fact that slower storylines are harder to market does not equate to them being impossible to market. Snyder's own Absolute Batman, for example, has been going for 20 issues as of this writing, and the author has claimed that "there are absolutely no plans of ending it" in October of last year. So perhaps the key to getting readers into longer storylines are spiky shoulder-pads and mutant villains?

Somebody get the My Little Pony comics people on the line.