Highway 62

But running a whole business like that seems…counterintuitive to me. If you’re selling someone a book, then you should get to something like a conclusion and not just an end to the page count. Right now, the market is geared towards selling magazines, and yes, there’s a few folks trying to drag it in another direction, all kicking and screaming. But this is the sort of thing that takes years. If it takes at all. There’s plenty of people who’d be happy if the market were frozen in time right now and stuck in the mode of serving up serial bits of a story with the occasional collection. And frankly, I’d have to argue the success of this model. You say “but it’s been this way for YEARS!” And I’ll say: “Wrong.”

See, not too long ago, most, if not all of the comics sold on stands to vastly larger groups of people dealt primarily in standalone issues that all worked together to form a vast patchwork story. And not long before that, it was simply single issues with the same characters suspended in a kind of sit-com like amber. The situation never really changed, so it was familiar to someone who’d been out of the game for years and had occasion to get back into it. “Continuity” was referenced, but never in such a restrictive manner that it got in the way of the storytelling. Even when comics started moving towards multi-episode epic stories (which really happened in the late sixties), where what you ended up getting was a chapter of a larger text on a monthly basis.

Now this was a good thing, because you could get more in-depth stories and a chance to explore character arcs and get the feeling of a heft of work that went beyond the monthly episode. Of course, this also allowed for the worst of storytelling excesses on the parts of writers primarily where pages were filled simply because they could be. Granted, the means and terms of production back then were pretty radically different from what they are now. Creators didn’t have a stake in their creations, and were often working hard to come up with 22 pages a month that were interesting and going to keep the readers on for another cycle.

People coming back for more on a regular basis kept the sellers happy, too. I’d even suggest that the expectation of longer-form stories and keeping readers coming back habitually allowed for the creation of the Direct Market in the first place, but that’s a digression for another time. Buyers in the direct market, by and large, know what they want (usually the adventures of a particular character, sometimes the work of a particular set of creators independent of character). They’ve developed habits, and those habits are more or less predictable (sometimes – read Brian Hibbs’ book for some of those trials and tribulations). Predictable is nice.

Until predictable doesn’t serve you anymore. Or until predictable shrinks to a pool that demands the market as a whole hold steady or shrink (or implode).

See, the biggest problem here isn’t the fact that superhero tropes dominate the form. The problem isn’t that creators are “forced” to work on someone else’s creation to support their own (oftentimes superior) work. The problem isn’t artcomics versus fanboys. The problem is that there aren’t enough comics readers out there. And really, that’s just a subset of there’s not really enough readers out there. Comics as a whole offer up unique experiences in every conceivable genre/aesthetic, if you look. The problem is connecting those books to their readers, whether they already read comics (or more likely, if they don’t already read comics.)

Now, who fixes this? Well, really, the big two are okay with the way things are. Sure, they’d like more readers, but they don’t know how to do it, so they work on consolidating their holds over their respective readership sectors via crossovers or death events or whatever plot-hammered scenarios they can cook up that will whip up the readers into a frenzy. Sometimes they’re even good (such as SEVEN SOLDIERS.) Oftentimes, they just sell a lot of books and are ground up into continuity chow for someone else to revise later. But I’m not expecting a lot of initiative on the publisher’s side. Sure, DC puts out a more diverse line as a whole, but they’re not getting much action in the “draw in new readers” campaign. If they knew how to, I’m sure they would in a heartbeat.

So, the publishers who are most able to do something about this are worried more about keeping their numbers up and not increasing the size of the pool so that everyone can be brought up by a rising tide. The smaller publishers at the front of Previews do what they can, but don’t seem to have a unified plan. I love Image as much as the next guy, and they put out some good books, but they don’t have much of an identity. People pick and choose the titles they like and that’s pretty much it. Granted, they offer a diverse lineup and have a lot of quality, so those are all marks in their favor. But I don’t see them being able to rope in new readers. Same goes for Dark Horse (though they have several gateway drugs in the wings, such as the STAR WARS franchise, et al.) Same goes for Speakeasy, Alias, Viper, etc. They put out books to the established marketplace, but I don’t see them being able to expand it in a significant fashion.

And I would love to be proven wrong on that last point.

How about the retailers? Well, it seems for the most part that a lot of them are worried about keeping their businesses going. This is not an inconsiderable concern, nor is it invalid. If their business isn’t doing well, they don’t eat. Simple as that. I’m sure that if they knew what magic button to push to get more traffic into their stores, they would in a heartbeat. My local guy, Robert Scott at Comickaze, does all kinds of outreach to libraries and local organizations. He hosts events at his store that feature local artists and out of town talent from a broad array of genres.

Okay. Well, what about Diamond? I mean, surely it behooves them most of all to expand the base of comics readership in the US and abroad? I mean, they’re the ones who are working directly off of volume, and bigger volume for them means bigger bucks, right? Of course, some might argue that Diamond is big enough, thanks. But that aside, surely they could do something to get comics in the hands of more people? You’d think they had a direct incentive to.

Obviously the creators and future creators have a huge stake in this as well. A bigger business means that there’s more possibilities for genre expansion, more readers, greater potential returns on their investments (both emotional and financial) in their work. Those are all positives, right? Of course, most creators I know are busy working on creating their works and only have so much time for creating audiences for their works. Even artists with a large degree of success have spent a lot of energy outside of content creation in order to do so. Yes, there’s some who seem to do it effortlessly, but I can’t think of too many people who got into the business five or so years ago who aren’t spending large amounts of time and energy in getting an audience base together.

So, this is something that clearly everyone can benefit from. But it’s also a huge, long-term project. We’re talking life’s work levels of involvement here. We’re talking about rehabilitating (for lack of a better word) an entire medium, of reintroducing it to a public, and one that doesn’t by and large read for pleasure. Not only is it an uphill battle, but it’s one that needs to be fought on two fronts.

Sure, we could build a thousand more comic stores and place them strategically, but would that even be a start? How do you get people inside those stores? How do you get them to browse the racks? How do you make sure that there’s a wide variety of material for them to choose from? And how about hooking up the right reader to the right book? Now, how about making it so that books can be produced cheaply enough that the price point isn’t a barrier? Okay, now do that and be able to pay the creators decently for their time and effort.

One thing’s for sure. The comics market isn’t a zero-sum game. A reader consuming Marvel comics isn’t taking dollars away from Fantagraphics. You could argue that a retailer has to spend more feeding his Marvel fans and that takes away from their ability to buy the latest Fantagraphics offering, I suppose. There might even be merit in it. Of course, the big two act like it is, and maybe from where they stand, that’s the way things are.

And even if it turns out that I’m wrong, and it * is * a zero-sum game, then we even more desperately need that bigger pool to work from, don’t we?