Highway 62

I’m one of those people who likes to call mothly comics “pamphlets” and “floppies.” Sure, I still buy them, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that they don’t have a host of problems. Let’s take a look at a few of them, shall we?

Cost
Yeah, this is an old, old, old chestnut. Comics cost too much for what you’re getting. “Why in my day,” you hear the old geezer say between breaths on his respirator “comics only cost FORTY CENTS! And you could buy ‘em at corner stores and pay a nickel for an ice cream at Thrifty’s.” Of course, he’d keep talking, but you lost interest a long time ago…

Comics are expensive things, for something that that’s supposed to be a cheap and disposable avenue of entertainment. And yeah I’ve heard the “if you think comics are expensive, then you’re buying the wrong comics” argument before. I agree with some of it, because there are a number of comics that I’m happy to pay three bucks for (and there are some that I wouldn’t buy for half or a third of their cover price…) But when you compare comics to, oh say, the manga stack of intimidation (picture somewhere around here) your money does not go a very long way.*

And paper price/quality/ink/color aren’t the only things that make monthlies expensive. I wish it were as easy as just dropping back to newsprint and lousy printing, but it isn’t. Most of the cost in producing a comic isn’t the object itself, but paying the talent behind the comic. Believe me. I’m looking at this square in the face with my own work now. Paying the artist is going to cost me significantly more than to print a large quantity of books.

And I’m just an indie publisher with a professional, but not big-name artist. Making a comic is expensive. Period.

But cost isn’t the biggest problem, really, though it’s certainly an issue. Get it? Issue? I made a funny.

Okay, I’ll stop now.

Sequential versus Episodic Storytelling
I don’t read particularly fast (moving my lips while I go slows me down something fierce), but there aren’t too many comics that I can’t blow through in five or ten minutes, sometimes longer, depending on the art.

And when that time is spent just moving the story along a little bit because you’re looking at three more chapters to finish the arc to get a collection out of it (stop me if you’ve heard this before) then I tend to get a little steamed. As story-arcs have become a dominant force in mainstream comics, what we’re getting now is a Saturday morning serial, only it takes four to six months to tell the story in fifteen-minute chunks.

Four to six months. Think about that.

This is why we have recap pages now, instead of another page of story. I guess some people don’t mind re-reading the first few chapters once they get it all together, but I don’t count myself as one of them.

There are people who try to equate story arcs with episodic television, and for the most part, I don’t think the comparison holds up at all. Most comics don’t tell a self-contained story (even in two parts.) There are notable exceptions (like Sleeper, which does manage to tell discrete stories, but have situations continue from issue to issue. Most comics really give us about an act of the story, giving us a twist at the end to get us to come back next month.

Which is why most mainstream comics read better when put together in a trade collection, at least they do to me. This is especially true if you’re reading decompressed/widescreen style comics, which are still pretty popular these days (hell, New X-Men, which is one of my favorite titles, is written in this style).

I have no problem with comics being collected into trades, and I think that it’s a good thing, for a lot of reasons (assuming that the format sticks and it can be made economically viable), but if the publisher’s primary product is the monthly magazine, then write the stories for that format. Again, Sleeper is a great example of a story that takes advantage of the monthly comic format. Something like The Goon works pretty well this way, too (though you’d be hard-pressed to find a comic as different from Sleeper as The Goon is.)

Ephemeral versus Substantial
Ooh. That’s not a word you see every day, is it? For those of you who don’t know, and aren’t going to go to dictionary.com to check it out, “ephemeral” basically means ‘temporary’ or ‘impermanent.’

What it really gets down to is shelf-life. Monthly comics, depending on the retailer, have a shelf-life of only a few months at most. Sure, there are some sales of back issues, but for the most part, if the funnybooks haven’t sold in two months, they aren’t going to sell.

However, if you put those same funnybooks into a trade collection, you now have a format which has a number of things going for it. Namely that it gets treated like a book and shelved for a greatly extended period of time, as opposed to the two or so months that your typical monthly book is out for. Trades can be shelved spine out and still be sold.

Ever tried to shop for monthlies without being able to look at the cover? It’s tough. Two staples in a spine pretty much looks like two staples in a spine. Comics, like magazines (which are also ephemeral products, except perhaps for collectors) absolutely must be sold by their cover.

I could also argue about perceived value of a trade versus a bunch of floppies, but I’m not going to go into that. Though I will say that it’s sure easier to read a trade than it is to go into my boxes of comics, pull out the ones that I want to read, open the bags (if they are indeed bagged) and all that. It’s just a hell of a lot easier to pull a book off the shelf and read (assuming it’s made with a decent level of workmanship.) Give me convenience or give me death and all that…

The Downside to Trades.
You’d think that I have nothing but good things to say about trades/graphic novels. As far as storytelling goes, they’re a superior format. Something like Sleeper will read just as well in the trade collection as it will in the monthlies. Though reading monthly comics that have been brought together for a trade is sometimes less than satisfying, for reasons of structural limitations on the monthly form (22-page chapters, every one ends on a twist, etc.)

There’s only one teensy little problem with trades/OGNs (and smarter guys than me, guys like Stuart Moore picked up on this a long time ago). The problem?

OGNs are damned expensive. At a guess, I’d say that if we didn’t have monthly comics coming out in the market before collections come out, your average trade paperback would probably be priced twice what it is now. I can’t think of a surer way to dampen interest in a book than a forty or fifty-dollar price tag, can you?

This isn’t even to mention the fact that the creators of the book need to get paid to pay their bills so they can create and not work at Starbuck’s to make sure that their electricity doesn’t get shut off. Monthlies provide for a more steady trickle of revenue for creators and publishers (one might argue that it’s a revenue stream that everyone involved is addicted to; people will pay eighteen bucks over six months to get a story arc, but will often balk at an eighteen-dollar cover price on a trade.)

Easy solution? Not likely. About all I can suggest is that some people step up their trade collection programs and others slow ‘em down just a tiny little bit (nothing like seeing a trade a month after the last issue of the story arc comes out.) The casual fan and civilian can be satisfied getting their story in one sitting, outside a traditional direct market outlet, and the hardcore fan can show up every Wednesday and get their fix.

And for as much as I gripe about the montly format, I end up buying a damn lot of them.

Right then. Next week, where I won’t end up being so pedantic. Well, here’s hoping, at least.

*- Regarding the Manga Stack of Intimidation. This comparison was put together by John Jakala, and shown on his weblog, Grotesque Anatomy (http://grotesqueanatomy.blogspot.com/). While it’s a somewhat useful comparison as to bang for the buck in manga anthologies versus American monthly comics, there’s a number of problems that I have with the comparison. Most of these have to do with what is effectively reprint versus original material, as well as black and white printing versus color, but this would probably be better served at another time.