What made you drop a book?

I recently dropped because it’s a total mess IMO. BMB shouldn’t be on both books.

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*Action

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Definitely just loose interest. That happened to me with sideways…too bad cause I like the first few issues and then just went flat for me. Wonder Woman is starting to get that way too…hope they pick it up the story line soon. :diamonds::black_joker:

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@Kent.53457 I agree with most of what you said. I had the same reactions to Spidey and Nightwing.

Character is my biggest draw. I follow stories for the characters in them more than the plots themselves (although both are important). Generally, if I don’t care about the characters, then I tend not to care what they’re doing or what’s happening to them in the story. Big character shifts - a different voice, amnesia, inconsistently written characters, relationships - can really throw me out of a book. Aside from that, heavy handed messages tend to annoy me, and I think both pacing and art is important for telling a story in periodic comic book form.

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I dropped Batman not too long ago. I just wasn’t enjoying the book , and I thought it was finally time.

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There are several reasons why I might drop a title. If I feel a book is badly written or if the art is terrible then I immediately drop it and wait until someone new comes in. I mainly follow characters but I’ve no desire to read about my favorites in mediocre stories with bad art so I just don’t. There are literally to many other books that sound interesting to me that I’d rather read. I also drop titles if I feel a particular direction change is off the rails or if I get bored with a book because all its doing is retelling old stories but not in a good way or if a writer whose work I don’t care for comes onto a book. I’ve also been known to drop a book if I don’t feel a particular creative team is the right fit for the book.

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I recently dropped Aquaman (one of my all-time favorites) because I don’t want to read about his deconstruction. I also just dropped Wonder Woman because all she does is lop off heads and has forgotten her mission to save man’s world with peace, compassion, and love. And if DC doesn’t remove Bendis from the Superman books I will drop them also. I dropped Superman once before during the New52 when they turned him into a tee-shirt-wearing Super-Nazi, and I’ll do it again if they don’t restore his stones and have him take control of his aberrant family.

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Bendis.

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I have never dropped a book because of the art. As long as the art wasn’t made to look purposefully unappealing or hallucinogenic I’m good. That kind of art is usually a profile thing for the whole concept so I’m not going to pick it up to begin with. No one suddenly starts to draw Green Arrow in Ren and Stimpy style in the middle of the ongoing. :slight_smile:

It’s almost always the writing.

Drawing is one of those incredibly hard to learn crafts, but once a person has mastered it they are able to continually produce more of the same quality.

Writing is not such an art. Almost anyone I believe have a few amazing stories inside them waiting to get out, but there is close to zero people on this earth who are able to reliably produce a neverending stream of high quality stories. The muse goes silent sooner or later and the stories go bland.

That is when I drop out.

(Also I am not very good at coping with someone taking my candy, so I have been known to drop comics en masse in retribution to a publisher dropping one of my favorite ongoings) :stuck_out_tongue:

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@Coville- I disagree with your take on both art and writing. Artists are just as prone to not being able to continually produce the same quality of art as writers are with stories and for a lot of the same reasons. Both are crafts that are incredible hard to learn to do well in my opinion and both have people who are just not as good at it despite being “professionals” and working in the field as others are. Personally for me art is a big part of my enjoyment of a comic and if the art is not up to par, if its not of a style I enjoy looking at, or if the proportions are way off in a panel where things are “normal” I can’t read the book. I find it extremely distracting and it takes me completely out of the story.

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I usually drop a book if I dont like the overall arc of book, if I dont care enough about the characters to continue reading about them; this was the case for Suicide Squad Rebirth.

The main reason, when the funds are low that pull list gets axed, except for like the importation titles.

I cut my pull list in half at the start of the yeatr because life is too short for me to be following comics I’m not madly invested in. Right now I’m reading all the Vertigo stuff (including Sandman Universe), Die from Image, Marvel’s new Conan stuff (not sure how long I’ll keep up with those), Shazam and The Green Lantern. I’m also going to give Fraction’s Jimmy Olsen book a try when that drops.

Naomi #2; what a complete and total waste of time. After a decent debut issue, absolutely nothing happened to move the story along AT ALL. The second issue ends pretty much at the same point that the first issue ended on and nothing is revealed to keep me interested in the story. I won’t be wasting my cash on this series.

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I wonder if DC editors are seeing this. The huge majority of responses mention inconsistent writing; particularly, character inconsistencies. Massive shifts in characterization brought on by writers who want to “really shake up the title.”

Readers want continuity. They want consistency. Now, this doesn’t mean readers want everything reset at the end of every arc. If changes are made as a result of the story, those changes should stay. But the changes themselves need to make sense.

Dark Knight Returns is seen as a massive shake-up. But all of the changes made sense. Because the story made sense, it immediately drew every reader back to the characters. The emotional investment that readers had in the characters wasn’t thrown away. On the other hand, dropping the relationships in the Present family? It doesn’t make sense, and readers are pretty upset about it.

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Kent, not Present. That’s what I get for using the auto-correct.

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harley.333: “I wonder if DC editors are seeing this.”

Doubtful, but if they did, the question would be if the ones in charge even care. DC spent years pushing ahead on something that all signs pointed to being a bad idea (the New52), from dropping sales to reader criticisms to chasing off creative talent. Sometimes it is the writers wanting to “shake things up”, even if they don’t do it very well, but other times it’s people like Dan Didio, who are in charge and want a certain event to happen for business (or personal) reasons, and there’s little option for people lower on the proverbial totem pole. Because, yay, short-term gains.

“Readers want continuity. They want consistency.”

Bingo. To succinctly paraphrase Linkara, continuity isn’t as much a problem for new readers, as writers and editors failing to get people invested in characters and their situations. It’s part of why the New52 failed more than DC is willing to admit: not only did it throw out perfectly good histories, they created new histories and origins for characters that were awful just to say “it’s different”. They wanted to keeps some stuff related to Batman and Green Lantern, but because everything was so poorly planned and executed, the mistakes multiplied. Trying to say “Flashpoint was years ago”, as if that somehow means it no longer has ripple effects for characters today, is plain ignorant.

Another good point you made, was changes needing to make sense. That’s a big reason the new origins for characters ranged from “okay but unnecessary” to “what unholy terror hast thou wrought?!”. These characters didn’t need “new” and “edgy” origins; at worst, they could’ve retold origins with very minor changes, if said changes actually added something. But the new changes failed to innovate; as I said, it was change just for the sake of random, meaningless change. Nothing about changing Cassandra Cain’s history made sense, nor was it as good as the first origin (which I get into in the recent 100th episode of my own review show). Funny how Tynion was okay to throw out Scott Lobdell’s reinvention for Tim Drake, but decided to stay the course on his reinventions for Cassandra and Stephanie that more or less consisted of “Hey, look at Harper Row doing nothing! Isn’t she perfect?” Sure, he teased the better versions before leaving 'Tec, but it’s clear he couldn’t reconcile the disparate elements he chose to engrain with his fan-fiction writing. But fans of the character, such as myself, are expected to accept it and applaud it based on the vague resemblance to what I actually want. Some have, but I wonder how many actually like what was done, and how many are just accepting it because they know DC isn’t going to listen, because DC doesn’t care.

People think it’s about “wanting the same stories over and over”, but that was never the case. It was the fact that people running DC do not know what they’re doing, and hide behind buzz words and slogans and hype to avoid facing their mistakes. So when people drop titles and they lose money, it takes them several years longer than the rest of us to find out why.

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I’ve either dropped some books to trim my pull list a bit or because I can’t really make out what’s going on in a story. The last title I dropped after a few issues was the current Miracle Man maxi series by Tom King. I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve heard good things about the rest of the run, but I didn’t finish it.

@harley: I’d like some consistency and continuity across titles myself. Writers need to be aware of what the continuity of a character they may not be in charge of but want to use is currently and they need to be kept up to date on it as well. All to often I see my favorites characterized one way in their “main” book but completely differently when some other writer writes them sometimes to the point that the two characters don’t feel like the same one at all. I’d simply like for the characters I read about to feel the same across multiple titles even if a writer is also trying to “make their mark” on that particular character .

Bottom line all I want is consistency of characterization and character continuity and I also want those stories to be engaging and well handed by the creatives who handle them.

Weirdly for me it’s retconning familial relationships or childhood friendships. I absolutely hate the introduction of a new character or a twist on a minor character only to be given a hackney backstory about how close they were 20 years ago, then to find out that they are now masked and nefarious. I HATE IT

Hush is a good example of this. When I first read Hush, there was no mystery for me. Instead, it was, “Ah, I see. They introduce a childhood friend and a new villain at the same time. I doubt this is a coincidence…”

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