Since comics is something only a few people care about, I sorta feel like I should warn people when I’m going to start talking about it. So face front, true believers–it’s time for Seanieblog to talk about comics again. (The rest of you philistines can go watch CSI or something.)
Nick Barrucci, head of Dynamic Forces, a company that makes comics-related collectibles (busts, statues, autographed comic books, foil-enhanced “special edition” comic books with fancy covers), recently issued a “call to arms” to the industry in which he outlines steps he feels will advance the medium, and the business, of comics. There are three installments, which can be found here, here, and here, at comics news site Newsarama. It’s the buzz of the biz right now.
Parts of it are pretty smart. The world of comics fandom is famously insular, and despite the high awareness levels in the general population of Hollywoodized characters like the Hulk, the X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, etc., very few fans of these movie characters actually buy their comics, either in their monthly pamphlet form or in collected edition paperbacks (though that last bit is changing a little). Comics DOES need to advertise, then, to get people aware and interested in the medium. Barrucci proposes a fund for paying for the ads, and a slogan along the lines of “Got Milk?” Good ideas both.
But the slogan cannot, must not be “Comics Are Cool.” The very fact that you need to say they’re cool will be perceived, correctly, as a sign that they aren’t. It reminds me of when Long Island modern/altrock radio station 92.7 WDRE, in an effort to survive during the mid-90s corporate-alternative-radio explosion (during which NYC area stations Z-100, KROCK, WNEW and Q104.3 were all playing some brand of alt-heavy radio), began calling itself “The Underground Network,” and referring to itself as such about 20 times per hour. “How underground could they be?” I thought, and changed the channel. That’s what people will do if “Comics Are Cool” is plastered all over the place, and I don’t care how many pictures of Samuel L. Jackson or Ben Affleck or even J.Lo reading the latest issue of The Ultimates you put up on bus stops.
Aside from running ads before comics-derived or inspired films, which seems like a) a no-brainer and b) something that’s within the realm of possibility for the comics companies to finagle, the right-in-front-of-you-all-along obvious place for comics ads is college newspapers. The clothing-company lifestyle publication for which I am a freelance editor has used ads in college papers to great success, at a fraction of the cost and with an exponentially more appropriate demographic as the hugely expensive and probably ineffectual ads we occasionally run in big fashion magazines. If a company like Marvel put a few thousand dollars aside every month to advertise the latest Daredevil, X-Men, X-Statix collection in The Yale Daily News, allowing for a place in the ad where local comics stores could put their address, they’d increase sales dramatically, I guarantee you. And that’s for superhero stuff, which in its comics form might be seen as geeky. When Fantagraphics pulls itself out of its financial doldrums, perhaps they might consider plugging their brilliant, sophisticated books in college papers (if they don’t already do so). Kim, Gary, Eric, Dirk et al, believe me: people will go and buy them.
Another problem with Barrucci’s recipe for greater success is his, let’s be honest, embarrassingly narrow definition of comics.
Quote: “Comic books are the best, most original, most beautiful art form ever – the perfect merging of art and story, hitting readers with a full experience.Where else can you go and get a monthly dose of Superman, Spider-Man, Justice League, X-Men, Transformers, each and every month, whether or not you’ve got the same writers or artists or different.”
Arrrgh. Yeah, look at all that wonderful variety! An alien who hits people! A radioactive spider guy who hits people! A group of various strong flying people who hit people! Mutants who hit people! Robots who hit, well, robots! I love superhero comics in particular and genre-based comics in general, and I don’t subscribe to the idiotic notion that it’s the prevalence of superheroes in comics that keeps comics from gaining more of a foothold in the popular eye (they seem to enjoy them to the tune of several hundred million dollars per movie over in the film world, thank you very much, and TV shows like Buffy and Smallville and the animated DC character cartoons do just fine), but if this is the best you can do in enumerating the books that make comics great, you probably don’t deserve to be telling anyone how to get their collective act together. Hell, of the books he names, only Spider-Man and the X-Men currently have monthly editions that pass even the relatively lax critical muster in the superhero-fan world, for Pete’s sake! And this is to say nothing of the fact that Barrucci makes a living off the kind of non-comics ephemera–essentially, toys and ridiculously expensive and unspecial “special editions”–that crowd out regular comics for shelf space and hard-earned dollars in the first place.
Moreover, the “whether or not you’ve got the same writers or artists or different” angle is disturbing. The indie/underground/altcomix scene has long argued that the rotating creative teams on the superhero books, if not the very fact that (for the most part) separate people are writing, drawing, inking, lettering and coloring even the best books from the big companies, strip the comics of much of the artistic cohesiveness they might otherwise have. To a certain extent this might not matter–only a relatively small percentage of moviegoers go see movies for their directors, for example–but in other media, audiences certainly follow individual actors, musicians and authors. Encouraging newcomers to comics to blindly follow characters around regardless of who’s writing or drawing them will inevitably lead to those new readers coming across a really, really terrible version of that particular character. Though I see how it’s important at least initially to engender interest in characters (I got into comics because I loved Batman, not Frank Miller or Grant Morrison or whoever was writing him), it’s much better in the long term to cultivate readers with the capacity to recognize and reward talented creators with repeat business.
This is why it’s disturbing to hear Barrucci talk about Free Comic Book Day, an annual giveaway in comics stores, in terms of making sure that only stuff involving the biggest characters is distributed. Everybody already knows that they can find a Batman or Spider-Man comic if they want–the question is, what else is out there? An issue of Acme Novelty Library, or even of Alias (the comic, not the TV show) might go a long way to getting the word out that there’s more to comics than what you’re already aware of.
Now we’re getting to the biggest problem with Barrucci’s plan–increasing, through pseudounionization, the power of comics retailers. Folks, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a comic book shop, but the odds are you haven’t. There’s a reason for that: THEY SUCK. You know the Simpsons Comic Shop Guy? That is not satire. That is real life. There are exceptions–glorious, ecumenical, clean, bright, well-staffed, orderly exceptions like New York City’s Jim Hanley’s Universe, with its alphabetized rows of every comic known to man, or Midtown Comics, with its user-friendly website that allows you to preorder every comic from the most popular to the most obscure–but for the most part these stores are staffed by and cater to the worst type of fanboy, who hate any shake-ups in the “lives” of their favorite characters, hate artsy comics with a passion, resent any efforts to shake things up, and demand the kind of convoluted, backstory-mired stories (we call them “continuity-based”) that the “Direct Market” (as the comic shops are called) thrives on. They need people to keep coming back month after month to support the increasingly cost-ineffective pamphlet format, and the indecipherable storylines make that happen, as opposed to self-contained, generally more interesting storylines that lend themselves to collection and therefore to sale in big chains like Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The industry is starting to realize that the bookstore market is where the future of the medium is, something comic-shop retailers, understandably, will fight tooth and nail. If we allow them to exert more influence over the kinds of comics writers and artists produce, we won’t be shooting ourselves in the foot–we’ll be shooting ourselves in the face.
My own recipe for increasing sales and audience size for comics is a pretty simple one, and given what’s becoming conventional wisdom amongst comics pundits, fairly uncontroversial.
1) Advertising is a good idea. Let’s not go nuts–that money could be better spent increasing the salaries of the artists and writers, which will increase the quality of the books simply by virtue of allowing them to quit their day jobs–but it’s important to get the word out. Advertise in college newspapers as a first step, and take real advantage of the free press provided by comics-related movies by muscling in on the trailers.
2) The bookstore market is the future. Alternative publishers like Fanta have known this for years, ever since they saw creators like Art Spiegleman and Chris Ware do very well in the bookstore market and began publishing their collections themselves. Manga (Japanese comics) publishers freaking clean up in B&N and Borders–their comics are now the most popular in the country, largely without any help from comics-only stores. Marvel has begun increasing the amount and quality of their collected editions–whether this precipitated or was precipitated by the increase of quality in their writing and art over the last three years or so is a refreshingly positive chicken/egg question to answer. When comics are no longer primarily sold by fat bachelors in their 40s to teenage Slipknot fans with Vampirella on their pull list and nary a girl, let alone a woman, in sight, we’ll have made progress.
3) Sometimes I feel like this is the most important: Quit talking about how much comics needs help! Even though it’s a dumb slogan, comics are cool. There are big famous superhero comics that are really entertaining right now; some of them, like New X-Men and Daredevil, are beyond entertaining and into great. There are amazing indie comics by people like Phoebe Gloeckner and Joe Sacco and Dan Clowes and Chris Ware coming out month after month, in collections people can easily buy and read. And there are gems in the middle ground, like Hellboy and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that are ready to burst into the spotlight thanks to upcoming movies. Comics are cheap, visceral, enjoyable entertainment that rival literature for descriptive power and film for depictive power. They’re increasingly available in big stores in little towns. And they’ve maintained just enough of an air of “danger” from their days as juvenile-delinquent bugaboos, underground rabblerousers and hypey Hollywood next-big-things to make them edgy. Why bother accentuating the negative when there’s so much positive to talk about? Simply act like comics are popular, important, and (yes) cool already. Enough comics fans start doing that, and soon enough, they will be.