I read an article today about a comic creator that suggested some ways to fix the comic book industry (in America).
Basically it calls out that the industry is driven strictly towards an audience of Adult Males that have been buying comics regularly for decades, but that audience is dwindling. And that back in the 70s and before, the audience was Young Boys. So we should be focusing single-issue purchases towards younger readers, with tighter-knit and smaller lines of titles. And then we should aim original graphic novels towards those older readers.
I may be pushing the gender bias here, but I think that’s the way that a lot of people are taking it. Because, commonly and incorrectly, most people think comic readers are almost exclusively male.
There’s a lot of things in the suggestions by this creator that I agree with. I think smaller, tighter lines focusing on either the most well-known characters or the ones with richest potential for stories would be good. I also remember being a big fan of the Showcase and Family books when I was younger, where we’d get some Superman-focused stories, but then ones about Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. Or how there was the Nemesis backup in Wonder Woman. There’s a rich, gigantic amount of characters at your Marvel or DC, and a lot of those characters would do well with being explored, so having a smaller line may limit that.
In theory.
But I also think that when we have a large lot of books, like 52 (as a for instance) for a line, it allows for so many titles to fall by the wayside, completely ignored because there’s only so much the audience will willingly and financially be able to support. And it forces the constant relaunching cycles. This month we end Constantine but next month he’s back in an all-new John Constantine: Hellblazer! Same character, maybe even the same creative team. Marvel did this at a couple points without even really closing off the storyline, they just ended on issue 26 or whatever and went to a new #1 the next month and continued where they left off. Over time, that trick had less and less success. You have 60 books to push each month, even with 5 Spider-mans and 15 X-Men books, when you find this iteration of Daredevil isn’t performing, it’s not like you’re NOT going to have a Daredevil book. He’s got a show, he’s had movies, he’s a known commodity. So you have to have Daredevil relaunch AND, to show your big push in how much you believe the character should be important, you give him a Defenders team book and a mini-series that retells his origin again, but with a new villain at the heart of things we’ve never heard of before, and maybe a Daredevil MAX title that has boobs and swears in it.
CHOKE ON THE DAREDEVIL GLUT!! LOVE IT!!
But you take Marvel and you dwindle it to 15 titles, or even 20 titles… That makes it important when you get to see one of your favorites show up, if they don’t have a book (or three) of their own, and they haven’t been used in a while. It also means you don’t have Kingpin being the villain in 14 different stories a year. There’s breathing room. There’s space to use someone else and not have to use everything just to stretch to fill the cavern of comics void.
You also could take a step back and remember when comics moved faster. When you didn’t have six issues, mostly of characters standing (or sitting) around talking. I’m not saying it should all go back to “HULK SMASH!” in every three panels, there can be nuance. But someone started making the Avengers talk and act like they were in “The Office” and it just kind of stuck. And that became the filler for every major crossover for the last ten-to-twenty years too. In my youth, we had the Red Skies crossovers during Crisis, where they tied into the main event in other DC titles by making the sky red. But the titles at least were telling their own stories. Mega-crossovers today are 40-60 books trying to slowly beat you to death with a single, simple and often forced storyline with as much padding as possible. And then the story doesn’t even conclude a lot of the time. It just leads directly to the next event.
An argument is being made that we can’t get kids into comics though because they don’t have the attention spans. Which… I just talked about, if you have Batman and Martian Manhunter waxing poetic on a rooftop over lattes for 18 of your 20 pages, you might not be playing to a kid’s tastes. But I seem to see a lot of kids who have incredible attention spans. They just focus on what is marketed to them. And yes, a comic isn’t going to get the same level of attention as a video game. But look at how much story and action and time and so on is given to someone in a video game for $60 (not including apps here, which normally get paid with microtransactions or ads) verses a comic book with a dwindling page count and a price up in the $5 range. Again because they’ve been marketed to adults who’ve already been sucked into the fandom.
So I get a lot of what’s being talked about right now.
But I also look at the popularity of comics that isn’t being talked about by this creator and the fandom and industry that’s reacting to his advice. And that’s the webcomics audience as well as the OGN bookstore market. Because those things are seen as so different from “mainstream comics” that they get discluded from the conversation entirely. Even though, frankly, they are currently the bigger success, by far.
By success I mean eyes on them. I don’t know what the payouts are for a webcomic these days. Especially compared to a job as a full-timer at DC or Marvel. I do know that more and more we see creators going to the creator-owned stuff at Image and Boom and so on and making a ton more off of their work than they do making stories about Batman and Iron Man and so on. But this last week I saw the subscription numbers for what is, to be fair, I think a very popular web comic. And the creator who has put in the last several years of her life making it has worked as hard, possibly harder, than any of the people in the mainstream (and she does mainstream stuff too). But in a comic shop, with that audience, she wouldn’t get the name recognition. But out there with the rest of the world, especially with the underserved audience outside of the mainstream, like kids and women and so on, she’s likely far better known than anyone who would have once been glorified on a Wizard’s Top 10 list each month.
And I don’t want to say that one way of creating is any better than the other. I really don’t. I love me some super-hero smack-em-up comics. I love the titular characters from the DC and Marvel pantheons i grew up with. Absolutely. But it seems to me that any time those two companies actually acknowledged this other audience even existing, and made some small attempt at getting their attention, they went about it all wrong. Like horribly so. And mostly it was by trying to market these new art styles and ideas and stories to the same people who had been buying the superhero stuff the whole time. Your average Captain America reader isn’t going to be looking for a Squirrel Girl title by one of the creators of Lumberjanes (I may not be remembering that right). It doesn’t mean that book shouldn’t exist or couldn’t have an audience. I just think it was never pitched correctly to the audience that really would’ve taken to it. Even doing digital through Comixology, I don’t think that’s where the people who want that are looking. And in stores it just gets stuck on the shelves next to Green Lantern and Hulk, so if that audience does wander into a shop and is willing to part with five bucks, they might not even spot it.
So I think the idea that change needs to happen to keep the superhero periodical industry going for another ten or twenty years is completely fair and realistic. And stupidly overdue. But I still don’t see the right people talking about it, taking it seriously, and making any meaningful changes to try to make it happen.
Yet.
But I’ll keep pulling for you, guys.
