(I know, I know, this blog has been very heavy on comics lately, but Comic-Con is coming, and I got comics on the brain.)
When most people think of comic books they think of the thin, staple-bound, flimsy things you used to see on racks in drug stores. In comics-biz parlance they’re called pamphlets. A Comics Journal messboard thread about the slow demise of this format led me to post the following:
The problem with pamphlet-format comic books as I see it is that they denote throwawayability to the average Joe. Most people aren’t in the habit of saving and rereading magazines or newspapers, two periodical forms that comic books most closely resemble. If people still think that “comics are for kids” (and not in a good, Harry Potter kind of way, but in an annoying, Double Dare and Garbage Pail Kids kind of way), I think we can blame the association in grown-ups minds between comics and the easily beat-up and torn-up and soaked-through and discarded pamphlet format they may remember leaving strewn around their bedrooms as children.
Now, even superhero creators are writing and drawing with an eye toward a lasting legacy: improving paper quality and cover stock and coloring techniques; writing in multi-issue arcs geared toward collection in more durable paperback and even hardcover formats; and in some cases a rise in the overall quality of the art and writing itself (though that, of course, is a more controversial position to hold). In light of these developments, to say nothing of the obvious qualitative and aesthetic reasons the superheroes’ alt-comix counterparts have for appearing in graphic-novel form, clinging to a transitory, far less durable format like pamphlets seems especially anachronistic. The need to get away from pamphlets only increases now that the huge up-and-coming comics-reading audience–teen girls and guys who read manga–have been weaned on book-sized, book-shaped, and book-bound collections.
Yes, there are practical reasons (both in terms of economics and of critical feedback) for the pamphlet, even in alt-comix land, as detailed by many of the posters in this thread. But much of the childlike joy it engenders in comics fans (both of the superhero and alt-comix varieties) is offset by the aversion it apparently produces in the general populace. As Dr. Frank N. Furter might put it, pamphlets have “a certain naive charm–but no muscle.”