A Rant About the Place of Comics in This Our Modern World

As I'm quick to point out, I didn't grow up on comics and until I was involved with the direct market, I never went into a comics store on a Wednesday. So the summer blockbuster "events" of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion came alongside my first exposure to reading new material as it came out.

Well, I've now been out of the direct market for three months and I'm behind on virtually everything I'd been reading except Final Crisis. And my reaction at this point isn't "Good goddess, I need to catch up." It's "damn, Secret Invasion is still dragging out?"

This isn't about cost- I can't even drag my ass to websites to download issues. And you might say quality is to blame, but I used to read them duly and very happily when they were at arm's length.

The real hurdles my interest faces are effort and amount of story. And I think this speaks to something larger underlying the industry and the direct market.

Television serves as an easy analogous comparison to comics, because it's similarly serialized with small chunks of story adding up to a larger narrative. But comics is a niche market, whereas television is big business. What gives?

Now, remember, television and the modern comic book both come out of the 20th century. For decades comic sales were on the magnitude of millions of copies. The explosion of superhero films shows it isn't a matter of interest in the material. People will pay money to see spandex-clad figures punch each other. But Heroes garners 13 million viewers per episode, while Secret Invasion tops charts at 1% of that number.

Well, television is accessible to me at any moment. I don't need to head out to the comics shop and hand anyone money. Hell, with VCRs, TiVo, and streaming video online, I don't even need to plan ahead when I'm going to watch. I'll point out that my alma mater, Midtown Comics, is doing well selling mail order weekly and bi-weekly subscriptions. And Marvel is putting toes in the water towards online distribution. So I think there are fixes to the issues of effort.

But (and this is the "but" I was really building towards), with television, each week I get an entire story or at least a satisfying narrative unit where themes develop and something resolves. Each week. Whole story. With comics, each month I get a scene. For taking time after work to head to a store, shell out $4, I get a snippet of story. 22 pages isn't even 22 minutes.

I think it's no wonder where the direct market stands today: teetering slowly back and forth with the explicit aim of some publishers (and merely the aspiration of others) to serve as an IP farm, selling their characters up the chain to more popular and profitable media. And who is buying comics: the fanchildren who will see their favorite characters through any storm. I don't mean to be dismissive of this group: they're ones with a lot of patience and a lot of interest. And the current strategy of the Big Two is to bleed these loyalists dry: tying together as many of their books as they can and forcing fans to follow a maximum number of titles.

I don't mean to act like a prophet of doom, ranting with a "The End is Nigh" sign on a street corner. I'm just seriously considering what the 21st century has to offer. And, remember, I'm speaking about the place of the direct market. Graphic novels are doing relatively well, selling in book stores, located in libraries and classrooms, and webcomics are a burgeoning field. I don't want to make the ole life blood argument about the direct market, but, simply as an audience member, I'd like to see the medium survive and even thrive.

There's my jumble of thoughts for the day. Maybe tomorrow I'll take the time to unravel them and formulate a list of "What needs to be done."

Until then, may you consume satisfying units of story.

October Sales Figures

Sales figures are up for October, but no one's quite certain what they mean. The top is rattled a little bit. Series always suffer downward slopes and we're hitting the 2/3 marks for the big events, but the effect seems slightly more dramatic. The surprising news, though, is how well things are going in spite of that, especially for tier 2 and tier 3 books.

As Heidi points out:

Obviously, rising comics prices had much to do with it, but as we pointed out earlier, and Miller affirms, the overall sales on the chart were much higher than in the past, with even the #300 book selling over 4000 copies. In January 2005, the #300 comic sold 679 copies.

Maybe I'm just a goddamn optimist, but it's an exciting prospect to me when more niches can thrive within the already niche market of the comic book.

Lord Buttersnatch's Fairy Detective Troop

For those who might not know, for a frighteningly long amount of time A.J. Dibble and I have been working on a webcomic entitled Lord Buttersnatch's Fairy Detective Troop. I'll probably be making a slightly louder announcement once the first scene of act one is complete and we're into a bit more of the meat of the story, but if you'd like to peruse the prologue, it can be viewed at www.buttersnatch.com.

Election Cartoons

In the wake of November 4th, we've been getting a lot of political cartoons that are schmaltzy and, in a way, obvious, while at the same time inevitably eliciting moist eyes at the historicalness of the triumph.

But I've got to say, Tatsuya for the win.

Sandman Live Reading

Saturday night I attended a live stage reading of two issues of Sandman in honor of the series’ 20th anniversary. The two issues were "Three Septembers and a January", the story of Emperor Norton I of the United States of America, a real historical figure, and "The Golden Boy" based on the DC Comics character Prez, the first teenage President of the United States. I’ll get to some thoughts on the event later, but I wanted to discuss something that happened during the Neil Gaiman Q&A after the reading. In the only question related to the performance, Gaiman was asked whether he’d prefer to live in a country run by Norton or by Prez. And his answer was Norton. He felt that Prez, a gifted, charismatic leader, created in citizens the sense that he could solve all their problems for them. While Norton, on the other hand, would oversee a country where people would have to solve their problems themselves. It highlights the fact that the choice of doing these two issues ties in not only to Sandman’s anniversary, but also to this past week’s election.

Gaiman’s point is something to keep in mind as the U.S. moves forward in the weeks and months to come. It seems like a number of supporters of Barack Obama hold the view that once he steps in, he’s going to solve all our problems. Not all of them do. And I’d be surprised if Obama himself did. There has been a significant change, no question. For the past eight years we’ve had to deal with a leader who created problems and who often created obstacles to our attempts to solve them on our own. But Obama’s a leader, not a magical creature capable of granting wishes. His ability to inspire large numbers of people to get involved may be the greatest skill he brings with him into office, because that’s what it’s going to take to really turn things around. One leader making decisions on his own while everyone else watches and admires him isn’t going to do it. As many have said, what’s going to come is going to take a lot of hard work, not just by the new President but also by everyone who voted for him.

Okay, enough politics. On to the show itself. As I said, the two issues “Three Septembers and a January” and “The Golden Boy” were clearly chosen, as I said earlier, partially for their relevance to current events. “The Golden Boy”, the more relevant of the two, would seem to be a less than ideal choice for the format used. Seven actors sat on the darkened edges of the stage and read their roles as the panels from the comic were projected onto the screen. “The Golden Boy” involves large amounts of narration, delivered by a narrator depicted as a wizened Asian mystic. So this resulted in several pages at a time of only one actor reading narration alone. While the moments of dialogue in between were well done, it’s a curious decision to do “The Golden Boy” rather than an issue that would have meant more interaction between the performers.

The performances themselves had a mixed effect, although this isn’t something I can really lay at the feet of the actors. The otherworldly figures at the core of the Sandman stories have such an image built up around them that there’s almost no way to satisfactorily portray them in a live performance. Delirium and Despair especially I’ve always pictured as having voices so inhuman that they’d probably require some form of electronic enhancement to be convincing. Racheline Maltese, the actress who played both Desire and Delirium, was spot on with Desire, but something was missing from Delirium. I think possibly the only way to correctly pull off the character would be to take Summer Glau, ask her to do something similar to her performance as River in Firefly, and then pump her full of incredibly potent narcotics just as she’s about to perform. And even that might only get you halfway there. Dan Green as Dream himself was good, but it’s hard to step into the role of such an iconic figure and deliver everything that a reader has built up in their minds. The performers excelled more with the other roles. Ollie Wyman’s Emperor Norton was what I thought to be the best execution of a character by any of the actors. And exchanges between Wyman’s Norton and Tom Wayland’s King of Pain, Wayland’s Prez and Dan Green’s Richard Nixon, and Prez and Greg Abbey’s Boss Smiley were the best moments of the performance. And it was these exchanges between characters that really made the comic come alive effectively in a way that I wanted to see more, a sentiment Gaiman himself echoed after the performance. It’s a way of presenting comics I’d never encountered before and I’m not aware if it’s been done extensively anywhere else. But it would be something I’d certainly see again, given the opportunity.

Ravi's New Favorite Webcomic

I'm really enjoying No Need For Bushido. It's been a while since I've since such a horribly mismatched team, so much humorous fighting, and a decent plot. The only thing I do not like, and in fact hate, are the weird (and rare) interjections by Matrix like characters:

http://www.noneedforbushido.com/

Anti-Comic and Gamer Discrimination

Christian's still hate gamers... and don't want gamers to feed starving children?

From http://www.giantitp.com/
10/31/2008

As has been reported by a few other gaming blogs and news sites, the Charity Auction at this year's GenCon Indianapolis was held to benefit Gary Gygax's favorite charity, which I will not name here for reasons that will soon become obvious. The fine folks at GenCon raised over $17,000 for this charity, which helps starving children in impovershed areas of the world--only to have that money actually turned down by the charity. The charity refused due to the fact that the money was raised partly by the sales of Dungeons and Dragons materials, which as we all know, puts an irrevocable taint of evil on the filthy lucre that us demon-worshipping gamers might want to use to, say, donate to starving children. Not only is this a slap in the face to every gamer, but it is especially insulting to Mr. Gygax himself, who I understand donated to their cause many times over the years. Plus, I'm sure the children who would have gotten food or clean drinking water with that money would be sort of upset, too.

I bring this story to your attention not simply so that you might let the people at this charity know how you feel (especially if you have donated to it before, as many did in the wake of Mr. Gygax's passing), but so that you would be aware that there is an alternative charity that I would personally recommend (based on our own charitable giving) if you have a desire to donate money to help starving children. Plan USA is a worldwide charity aimed at helping those who live in poverty and/or have suffered from a natural disaster, particularly with monthly sponsorships of individual children. Since the money of D&D players is clearly not welcome at this other charity, I can't recommend Plan USA highly enough to those interested in giving anyway. At least if you choose to donate through them, there's no chance your generous gifts to the starving children of the world will be rejected due to your weekend hobby.

My New Favorite Comic Book Character

So this past week I read Geoff Johns' Final Crisis tie-in "Rage of the Red Lanterns". What follows is possibly the only enjoyment I got out of it, and therefore once you look at it you should have no need to read it yourself:





















In case you were wondering, it's vomiting its own corrosive acid blood. That's the only meaningful (and I use that word with great hesitation) appearance of that character in the entire book (I think it may show up in one other panel). Needless to say, DC clearly needs to give this character (whose name I did not catch, and so I choose to call it "Whiskers the Blood Kitty") its own limited series.