Dirk Deppey has posted a director’s-cut version of his five-part essay on Marvel Comics’s effort to break into the bookstore market and thereby the mainstream (or vice versa). I’ve already touched on a few aspects of this thoughtful and thought-provoking series, (as well as some general questions and concerns about Marvel’s sundry attempts at innovation) here, here, here, and here. .
To that I’ll add that NeilAlien’s take is excellent for several reasons, not the least of which is that he quotes me (this is the first time this has ever happened outside the confines of a criminal proceeding). The Palindromic One picks up my mantra that the whole “no one reads comics because they’re so disproportionately dominated by superheroes” idea just doesn’t hold water: after all, who’s helping all these superhero movies make all this money? It’s not just the people who are buying X-Treme X-Men, that’s for sure. I know I belabor this point, but it’s important for comics pundits to realize that hating superhero stories is just as unrepresentative a mindset vis a vis the world at large as is loving superhero stories to the exclusion of everything else; both are the twisted products of living in the hermetically-sealed world of comics fandom.
Neil’s also right to point out that even if Marvel’s market share in bookstores is dwarfed by its market share in comics shops, its increase in the last year is cause for celebration. After all, Marvel hasn’t been at this very long (not really); moreover, the businessmen who run the company* surely don’t believe they can replicate Marvel’s dominance of fanboy-run comics shops in the much larger and more cosmopolitan world of bookstores, even within the graphic-novel subset of those bookstores. Their goal is probably to compete on a fairly even keel with the big manga publishers, Viz and Tokyopop, and to do that they’ll need to change readership habits among teenagers who go to bookstores but not comics shops, and that’s going to take a while. So far, though, so good.
However, this is not to minimize the amount of work that’s left to be done for the big American comics publishers. By way of anecdotal evidence, I offer my Father’s Day Weekend trip to the local Borders. As usual I found myself in the graphic novel section, and I noticed it had been reorganized in the last couple of weeks. Of the three bookshelves devoted to graphic novels, fully two of them were stocked with beautifully organized and alphebatized manga collections, offering the complete line of nearly every popular title. Crammed onto the last bookshelf was everything else–Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Fantagraphics, Pantheon–all smushed together in no discernible order or pattern. Brand spankin’ new X-Men hardcovers were next to Dan Clowes collections were next to a random installment of Justice League.
Part of the problem here appears to be trade dress. Lined up one after the other, with uniform spine designs and easy-to-follow numbering and titleing, the manga collections simply look nicer on the shelf. Marvel has been a johnny-come-lately to uniform trade dress, largely because up until recently their policy for what gets collected and reprinted, not to mention when this happens, was catch-as-catch-can. Make the books look like they belong on a bookshore shelf, and not only will the employees take more care with putting them in order, customers will be more likely to give them a look.
*Note: The above used to include a line about “business men who run the country.” It should have read “businessmen who run the company,” as in Marvel. However, this is not to say that the error was really wrong, when you think about it.