1) Ol’ Dirk Deppey gives Brian Bendis quite the ribbing today about the superhero scribe’s description of his upcoming Secret Wars project. Personally I think Dirk’s being unfair. Yes, Bendis’s choice of words–“A gritty real world take on the idea of a secret superhero war”–is, ahem, unfortunate. But Bendis’s work to date has evinced none of the ghastly, unimaginative, dreary cliches that his dopey phraseology calls to mind. We’ve seen any number of mindless atrocities in comic-book form touted as “gritty, real-world takes on superheroes”; I’d like to give Bendis the benefit of the doubt that this won’t be one of them.
2) The ongoing effort to shoot the zombie that is pamphlet-format comics in the goddamn head once and for all, most recently taken up by Franklin Harris, has met a couple of opponents, namely Johnny Bacardi and Tegan Gjovaag. Johnny and Tegan rightly point out that floppy comics are easy enough to travel with (I’ve taken many on airplanes myself; like Johnny, I bag-and-board mine, so they’re both thin and relatively durable). Tegan also deflates Franklin’s argument that collectability makes floppies too precious to actually read. Franklin alleges that today’s small print runs equate to big bucks later on, but he overlooks the fact that those small print runs all end up in the hands of anal-retentive bag-and-boarders (ahem) who are convinced that their copies of the Death of Superman will put their kids through college one day. Beyond the artificial demand created by things like Wizard’s price guides, most floppies won’t be worth much of anything. So hey, read ’em all you want!
But these little niceties, alas, amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the overwhelming evidence that the world at large has less than no use for the stupid things. Tegan claims that “the form has worked for well over 50 years. Tegan, define “working well,” would you? No one buys them except a coterie of, what, 250,000 or so diehards in an increasingly insular market whose idea of growth seems to consist largely of puffing up its cheeks as it thrusts its head in the sand. The comics that sell in big numbers–manga–and the comics that make a big pop-cultural impact–trades and graphic novels–are unsurprisingly in a totally different, much more book-like format. That’s what the kids are reading, and to quote Mrs. Bobby Brown, I believe the children are our future. And then there’s the whole angle of cost-effectivness–don’t make me break out The Manga Stack of Intimidation…
Stuart Moore has detailed all the reasons that the industry is stuck with pamphlets, largely thanks to the backwardness of its current audience and retailership. But just because we have to rely on them now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking to, and planning for, and doing our best to bring about, the future.