Highway 62

And what a perfect song to encapsulate what’s going on in comics circa now. As long as “now” means July, 2006. Let’s face it. We’ve been holding our breaths out here in mainstream comics land. The twin titans of DC ONE YEAR LATER are squaring off against MARVEL’S CIVIL WAR. It’s not just Marvel versus DC, line against line. It’s event against event as they tie up the vast resources of both lines and try to outdo one another in siphoning away comic buyer dollars. Eighty percent of the direct market lies in the hands of Marvel and DC and easily eighty percent of their incomes* are from these mega-events.

* - This number strictly for effect; the real amount is likely higher; not that they’re ever going to tell me.

But what’s their next trick? Surely they’ve got something to keep the numbers up and the readers reading? It’s not like they’re taking any great efforts in getting comics to alternate markets, so surely they’ve got something on tap that’s huge, huger than huge, bigger than anything you can imagine. And we know that it’s not Mark Millar reshaping the DC Universe, remember, Grant Morrison’s got his fingers in that one (along with Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid, though reports have his input tailing off.) If you’ve got a plan to Keep Marketshare In Your Hands, surely you’d announce it at the San Diego Comic Con, the largest comic and pop culture event in the lower forty-eight.

Maybe you would. But that’s not what happened. In fact, the story on the floor was that there was no big story. Which, as I recall, was the story last year. If I were a real journalist or a real essayist, I probably would research that, but I’m not going to be bothered right now. And sure, if you announce anything at San Diego, it’s just gonna be swallowed up in the black-hole dense media cloud that surrounds the convention center for five days a year. How the hell do you expect comics companies to compete with the hype machines set up by the big studios anyways?

I expect it because the comics companies are providing the content for these big media companies. Well, maybe not all the content, but sure seems like a fair bit of it. I’d expect a little more trumpeting of one’s own horn. And no, I don’t expect that to translate to more comics readers necessarily, mostly because it’s been proven time and time again that there’s usually only a temporary bump in the popularity of monthly comics with the advent of a comics-related movie. Trades, I hear, do better. The whole story in one shot doing better than a habitual weekly purchase. I know, go figure, right?

You can try the best you can
If you try the best you can
The best you can is good enough
The best you can is good enough
This one's optimistic
This one went to market
This one just came out of the swamp
This one dropped a payload
Fodder for the animals
Living on an animal farm

But the big companies (and to be fair, even the little ones) will turn around and say that they’re periodical publishers and not book publishers. They’re not set up to do that at all and really don’t know how. Of course, I’d say that periodical publishers publish the same magazine every thirty freaking days come hell or high water. Well, that and periodicals are available in more than some 2000 outlets across the United States as a whole. How many places can you buy magazines in just the city of Los Angeles? At least that many and perhaps twice as many more.

The truth is, the big two largely publish serial novels (I’m using “novel” as a generic term for a unit of story consumption and am not interested in debating the usefulness of the term as it applies to comics; strictly convenience, mind you.) These serial novels come out when the individual chapters are finished (largely not monthly, but sometimes) to be bound and then sold in market secondary (and much larger) than the direct market that they’re initially sold into. These collected editions, while they create their own problems with glutted backlists and SKUs, as folks like Brian Hibbs have pointed out, are a far more long-lasting, profitable and desireable product than the original printings which are only salable for a few months or occasionally as a collector item in the rare case that demand outstrips supply.

New product? We’ve got a ton of that. New characters? Not so much. What Robert Kirkman (bless his bearded head) got into with Todd McFarlane could easily be supersized up to the big companies. We don’t see new characters from the big companies except in places like the Vertigo line (though they’re as dependent on their backlist as anyone and have yet to create a real breakout hit in the last couple of years outside Y: THE LAST MAN and FABLES.) We see the line continually reformulated and are asured that everything we know is wrong all over again, but the fact of the matter is that the market is being carried on the backs of characters as old as seventy years and maybe as young as ten. Granted, it takes time to build a character up into a franchise (HELLBOY probably the most recent addition there, though you could argue SPAWN and WITCHBLADE and the like.) Yes, this is a myopic view. I’m ignoring a whole bunch of books that sell outside the top 150 or so. Deal.

So, there’s that snapshot of the now. We’re breathlessly awaiting something, anything, a sign that things are gonna be okay, that we’ll have something to hang our hats on.

If you try the best you can
If you try the best you can
The best you can is good enough
The best you can is good enough

I'd really like to help you man
I'd really like to help you man.....
Nervous messed up marionette
Floating around on a prison ship

What did we get? Announcements of an old Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR issue finally seeing print. Continuations of old events being dovetailed into the fundamental pinnings of entire offerings. Rotating artist/author teams. A handful of new books from the smaller publishers. Dark Horse staking out horror as one of its primary markets (which is a consolidation as much as anything else, though the addition of Steve Niles to their line and his seeming disassociation with IDW is something of a coup, as is the promise of greater HELLBOY output even without Mike Mignola’s signature art style). We get the details of a reinvention of the Wildstorm universe, which is sounding as continuity-clogged as the lines that it rebelled against (by way of WILDCATS and a million other universes being established during the Image Revolution). DC gets into animation. Marvel continues the HALO books. Some of the indies announce some potentially intriguing licenses in terms of crossover appeal (SCARFACE, COLBERT REPORT by way of metafiction).

What I wasn’t seeing was any way of addressing audience stagnation or expansion of comics outside the direct market, or the aggressive creation of new characters that are likely to appeal to new readers or anything resembling genre diversification. What I saw from the big two, certainly, was a lot of treading water.

If you try the best you can
If you try the best you can
The best you can is good enough
If you try the best you can
If you try the best you can
Dinosaurs roaming the earth
Dinosaurs roaming the earth
Dinosaurs roaming the earth

And maybe we’re just going to have to wait another year or more before we get that big message from on high. Whether it comes in the form of some kind of electronic distribution or another fundamental change to the shipping monopoly/content duopoly we currently enjoy, whether it’s in the establishment of a new crop of characters that could have the staying power required to grow new franchises or a sudden assault on the non-comics-reading public via a new format or a wholesale embrace of the bookstore mass market (that would require a new publishing model as well as genre diversity commensurate with that in the mass market today, which isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but makes comics look positively monochromatic in their offerings.) One day we’ll get that big announcement, that herald of a tectonic shift in the market.

But this year wasn’t it. Not from the big boys. But then perhaps expecting it from the dinosaurs, instead of paying attention to the mammals being all warm-blooded and stealing both food and eggs from the lumbering titans, is the wrong approach...

The actual convention report minus the pragmatic evaluation of the zeitgeist follows on a bit later.