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I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read.

can you provide more info ?

Interestingly, similar comments could be made about movies today i.e. movies used to draw on books and plays, whereas today many movies seem to just draw on other movies for their inspiration.

Mark

It’s a half-assed theory and may not be valid at all, but it crossed my mind . . .

Anyway, I just got back into actively following comics again about 3 years ago after a 10-year hiatus. I definitely agree that this is a golden age for reprints. I can’t believe what is now covered in the DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks, and that’s just the (expensive) tip of the iceberg of reprints.

Some comics I have personally enjoyed a lot in the last few years are Mark Waid’s Fantastic Four, Kurt Busiek’s Astro City and just about anything by Dan Slott. Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Spider-man. Common features of all of the above are: 1. I had no problem jumping into any of these stories. Continuity was always at the service of the story rather than the other way around. 2. They were basically optimistic stories (with the notable exception of Slott’s GLA stories) and 3. These writers often mix humor into their stories. I’ve enjoyed these stories as much as any comics I’ve ever read.

Waid’s FF had an optimistic feel of the best of Marvel’s Silver and Bronze Age, with a wonderful modern sophistication. Busiek’s Astro City is a great meditation on super-heroes, but he never forgets to tell stories that work as stories. Slott writes with a sense of fun that I remember so fondly from the bronze age comics of my youth. In fact, I think his Spider-man-Human Torch story involving the spider-mobile is my all-time favorite single issue “bronze age” story, even though is was written in the last couple of years. And Bendis writes Spider-man with the focus that the best Spider-man stories of the silver age had i.e. on Peter Parker first and Spider-man 2nd. I also really like that Bendis has kept Peter a teen-ager for as long as he has, because I think it really opens up story possibilities that were cut off prematurely in Amazing Spider-man by having Peter graduate from high school so fast.

Having a 10 year game in my comic reading background, I find a lot of the mainstream super-hero titles from DC and Marvel hard to follow. Also, most modern superhero comics have virtually no significant non-superhero suppporting casts. Supporting characters are now killed off so regularly that Spider-man, which used to have a supporting cast of a couple dozen non-super-heroes has been pretty much reduced to two: Mary Jane and Aunt May.

Marvel fans have always made a relatively big deal about continuity, but some of the most important continuity in the Marvel Universe involved the supporting charcters. in most cases, the continuity involving the super-heroes in villains usually involved a note or two describing past encounters and how a villain who was seemingly left for dead had managed to evade the grim reaper. With virtually no regular supporting cast, continuity in both Marvel and DC superhero comics has been reduced to a sort of pointless game of tracking who is mad at whom, who is more powerful than whom, who has picked up (or lost) which special powers, which characters have been killed off this month, etc.

I loved Dark Knight, Watchmen and Miller’s Daredevil when they first came out. However, I think it is truly tragic that such a large percentage of today’s comics seem to lean on only the grim and gritty feel of these comics. Simonsen’s Thor, Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Stern’s Avengers were also terrific back in the 80′s. Why not try telling more stories like those as well? For example, Stern’s Avengers had stories involving dozens of heroes and villains. However, they could all be enjoyed whether or not you knew much about past continuity.

Mark

Sorry, but I have to disagree with you that superhero comics are beyond saving. The Marvel and DC universes are beyond saving and those companies don’t want to be saved, this is true. But the genre of superhero fiction is certainly open – IF certain things happen:

1) A legitimate publisher realizes that Marvel and DC do NOT have a lockdown on the supehero genre, and proceeds to look for other superhero content (of which there is plenty to be had) and produces and markets it correctly (format / price points, product placement, etc).

2) Fandom realizes that Marvel and DC’s characters are not the only characters worth reading about and becoming willing to give new superhero properties an equal chance. Why the hell read five to seven Batman / Superman / Spider-Man stories each month and constantly complain about them, if you were able to buy five to several different concepts which might be just as entertaining (possibly moreso) and at least would be a diverse selection of titles to read?

He bases his thesis (and I’m simplifying here) on the fact that fully one-quarter to one-third of all music downloads are songs that are not on the Billboard charts. Approximately the same amount (1/3 to 1/4) of Amazon’s online sales are books that are not in retail outlets — these books don’t have enough sales to warrant it. He has a number of other examples.

Essentially, as content can be produced and distributed more cheaply, the consumer market fragments into niches. My own take on it is that eventually comics will become some of those niches.

I’d be willing to download PDFs of comics if it substantially reduced my expenses. I could print them if I wanted. I could also store them by burning thousands of issues onto DVD. That’s much easier than filing them in my longboxes, which long ago became an albatross around my neck (I’ve been steadily replacing them with trades whenever possible). If I felt strongly about a particular storyline, I’d buy the trade later, just to have it on my bookshelf.

The bottom line is that the comics industry will have to adapt. They can do it voluntarily, or they’ll ultimately be forced into it, but it’s going to happen.

The essence is this: write good stories, avoid Deus ex machina (storytelling style, not the wonderful comic by Vaughn), and allow the characters to tell their own stories. Sadly, too many stores are basically “mine’s bigger than yours” comparisons, and that doesn’t make a compelling story for me.

That said, I, at least, have jumped onto a story and learned the continuity many times. Most of those times, I even enjoyed the process of it.

So, if I, a grizzled comic vet who knows that continuity learning can be fun avoids it, what of people who don’t read comics at all? Why would they buy these books in the first place to find out that they’d enjoy them?

When you were a kid, had you read every Marvel and DC comic ever when you started picking them up? Obviously not. But did it stop you from enjoying them? Were you able to pick up on the backstory and the continuity easy enough? Sure, or we wouldn’t all be here.

Just because the references and winks are there, doesn’t mean a new reader has to get all of them to enjoy the story. These stories can work on two levels: straight-forward super-hero yarns for new readers, and sly homages and loving references for older readers.

I got into comics after picking up a CrossGen paperback at the local library. The production values seemed out of this world and the story was interesting and captivating. I started picking up other CrossGen books. I was hooked. The whole line seemed so new. So vibrant. So innovative. So exciting. And, most importantly, it was, for the lack of a better term, ours. Something that new guys can get into, something the new guys could embrace and call their own.

From there, I made a fairly easy leap of looking at books from the “Big Two” companies. I loved some of the newer titles, as well as titles with “legacy” characters. As a history enthusiast, I got a kick out of the idea that there was all this history behind the new heroes and that in both universes, things actually move foreword and develop. There were plenty of new characters. And even some of the older characters, especially on Marvel side, went through intriguing changes. All and all, it was an exciting time to be in comics.

And then, things started to go wrong. CrossGen went under. Newer concepts were either cancelled or reverted to the old status quo. And the legacy characters were either inexplicably replaced by their prior incarnations or moved closer to their prior incarnations. All the sudden, the new ideas seemed in short supply.

It seemed unfair, somehow.

These days, I usually buy indies or older trades.

Two, while the industry was hyperfocused on superheroes, kids who did want cheap, disposable entertainment about a variety of subjects went out and started buying manga. $5 for 200-250 pages of Shounen Jump or Shojo Beat comics once a month? I don’t even like anything that runs in that magazine all that much and I still enjoy picking one up now and then to read over lunch. $8-10 for 250 pages of a favorite book, already bound and ready to display on a shelf? Also factor in that it’s a story that a) you can read from the very beginning, b) will most likely have a permanent ending so you know you can collect it all, and c) you know that some other dickhead writer won’t come along later to undo? Superhero comics, as they are now, absolutely cannot compete with this.

Video games and manga aren’t going away, either, so I get the feeling that in the past few years, DC and Marvel have just given up on getting kids to read the comics. Now they try to reach them purely through the licensing– particularly movies, cartoons, and video games. The comics are mostly for the long-time, old-school, hardcore fans who can still be relied upon to spend triple-digit figures per month on superheroes. The logical end of this is the comics becoming obsolete and the licensed versions of the characters becoming more vital, but… I dunno. I can’t see it working out well. Even now I’m getting a bit tired of superhero movies, and I have more of an appetite for superheroes than most people do.

Indie comics that play off of superhero comics are, virtually without exception, incredibly boring. There are hundreds of great works that do not do this, thankfully, and these are among the best American comics ever. Los Bros Hernandez, Crumb, Spiegelman, Ware, Clowes et al are far beyond “Baby Boomer autobio comics and gag strips” (and are much better than [bleh] Herge, to my mind). Have you read Crumb’s account of Philip K. Dick’s late-in-life visions, for example? Now that’s comics.

In the 70′s, that perception bar has been crossed by everyone well versed in the medium, but not outside. Before, people reading comics and newspaper strips accepted them as just funnies, something light, but when imaginative comics were credited with tehir creators, people began to notice thematic threads in comics and the artistic quality in them, paving the way for Gerber and Rip Off Press. Unfortunately, comics did not overcome the public’s perceptions, just its audiences, leading to even more incest as the only people who would honestly accept comics as a form of expression, not entertainment, were those picking up comics regularly, so, naturally, very few people read comics besides thsoe who can honestly appreciate their quality, and the only audience for comcis as a whole became the direct market; newsstands still saw comics as disposable entertainment, so people who bought comics didn’t even want to buy them at their recurring place, thus creating the direct market where the core audience bought the books and the potential audience was cut off, because that potential audience didn’t really see comics as of any quality anyways, so who needs ‘em!

And here we are, needing them.

You can go mad trying to find a bookseller or anything besides a DM-style comics shop that stocks anything besides superhero collections, a few of the aforementioned critical darlings, and manga. And in the case of manga, not much in the way of non-Japanese material seems to do all that well. If I may imporperly treat manga as both a style and a format for a moment — and in the American market, that’s what it amounts to — you don’t see loads of Scott Pilgrim digests lining the shelves outside of specialty shops either.

And in fairness, Scott Pilgrim and Strangers in Paradise and dozens of other celebrated indie comics tend to wind up playing off of either superhero, action, or alternate geek-niche genres. (Sorry, lads, something like the once-touted Amazing Joy Buzzards is an amazingly geeky comic; it’s just not superhero-geeky so much as more generally geeky.)

In Europe, comics had the advantage of both a history of acceptance as a medium and even then, in the UK, underwent an almost deliberate reinvention that took place at a time when American superhero comics were doing quite well too. In Japan, comics were adopted as just another medium, rather than being confused with niche genres.

In the USA, comics got knocked on their cans in the 1950s, and the reinvention that might’ve taken place in the 1970s only occurred in limited ways and in connection with a small subsection of a generation-specific counterculture. But that didn’t produce an American Herge, for instance, or an American Moebius, or an American Koike. It produced, for the most part, a load of Baby Boomer autobiographical comics and shock gag strips.

There are remedies, of course, but what those remedies will take is time. And in the meanwhile, the sort of diminishing-returns genre stuff that’s been perversely made synonymous with the medium — to the point that “manga,” as noted above, isn’t treated as a different way of doing comics so much as it is something not comics, some sort of wonderful, exotic foreign import — is in a great many ways the only thing buying the rest of the American comics creator community the necessary time to pull something off.

Good luck to them.

Granted, if Warner Communications decided it was a major priority to get people to read DC Comics, they could take an all-out campaign to advertise them everywhere and make sure they got in people’s faces as impulse buys. As this, or anything like it, is never, ever going to happen, we’ll dismiss this.

The only solution is in smaller, but substantial risks to stretch the boundaries of what American comics can be and how they are marketed.

When paperback books sell for $8.99 on impulse, there’s no reason that the digest or Manga-style books can’t be published and sold in the same price range and at the same places, if someone would take a risk and create something appealing outside the current bounds and sell them in a new way. They can contain 10 times the reading material of a flimsy comic magazine, that’s only half the cost and is ridiculous to store or pass along to anyone but obssessive geeks.

Imagining a goal of reviving and expanding the industry of selling 22 page Superhero comic magazines, regardless of how much any of us may hold affection for them, is entirely futile.

YES. Nail on the head.