Not. Constructive.
The following is a rant. Nothing more, nothing less. There are no great and unrevealed truths being offered, only a passionate restatement of what’s going down, dig?
Direct Market comic books are by and large, not written for children. They are written for adolescents of all ages, who seek a smattering of the titillations of maturity, but none of the weightier responsibilities that come with those. To shy away from that fact is kinda…willfully naïve at best. Younger kids as a primary market got forgotten a long time ago when a bunch of eggheads came up with the captive audience market that comics have been locking themselves into since the 1980s. Instead of husbanding a new generation of readers, nearly every single comic publisher has tried to maintain readership and not create new readers. As that market and that generation grew older, publishers continued to adultify their lines.
Sure, you could argue that process had been going on a long, long time (you ever see how Neal Adams drew Jean Grey in the 1960s?) But it was still a long way from that to WATCHMEN in the middle 80s. Of course, WATCHMEN wasn’t just famous for showing the Blue Beetle and Nightshade getting it on. WATCHMEN actually told a story, a real, genuine all-grown-up story (though relying on some genre tropes that may keep it out of the “Masterpiece” category for some time yet). The titillation was minimal, if nonexistent (but for where the character demanded it, the first Silk Spectre coming to mind there.) No fan-service in WATCHMEN. Not too much unmotivated endarkening going on.
Of course, that didn’t prevent a bunch of really lazy creators from jumping on the grim and gritty bandwagon. Okay, the runaway success of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS helped a bit. But you’d think that after more than twenty years of Captain DarkBlood and SuperAgonyman that both readers and creators would get good and tired of gritifying for the sake of gritifying. I mean, this stuff has got to be a joke, right? Speedball becoming Penance?
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
There’s a point where it loses all gravitas and instead attains an unsustainable level of sillitas. I’m sorry, but how can you not gaze upon this:
(Image shamelessly ripped off from Postmodern Barney)
And not just want to laugh your head off? This is funny, funny stuff. Of course, it’s kinda laugh until you cry in despair funny, but funny nonetheless. Penance will not sell more comic books to people who don’t read comics. CIVIL WAR will not sell more comic books to people who don’t read comics. 52 won’t, either. DC: THE NEW FRONTIER in a hundred dollar hardcover? I love the story to pieces, but no (a single-volume at a reasonable price point paperback would be a whole lot more sensible.)
But I’m getting off track here.
You can darken superheroes only so far before they break. And it’s funny that they even can break, but it’s true. I mean, these guys can fly through suns (pre-CRISIS, at least), shatter dimensions and lift diesel locomotives with jagged lines emanating from their foreheads. But they can’t survive really stupid stuff like, oh, say, punching someone’s head off or putting themselves in black leather and spikes and declaring how much they like the pain.
There’s a word, and I don’t know who coined it, to describe all the folks who get around and daisy chain about how the world is going to hell and it’s all going to end in a nuclear Armageddon or a ecosystem crash Armageddon or a fiscal meltdown Armageddon. It’s called “disasturbation.” And the Big Event output from Marvel (though DC is far from exempt) lately can pretty much be summed up in that one word. Clone Thor ripping Goliath a new one? Disasturbation. Speedball blows up Amherst and goes all Cenobite by way of The Gauntlet? Disasturbation. ZOMG Tiny Footprints In His Brain? I’m not even gonna say it.
But we all know, this is nothing new. I’d go look up and link to that famous Millarworld thread where Darwyn Cooke asks “Where the hell does it end?” (which he also summed up succinctly in a single-page strip he did for a Free Comic Book Day anthology that came out a couple years back – I’m blanking on the name, but I bet Chris Butcher remembers). The really funny thing is, of all the things to make super-serious, comic superheroes have to be about the last on any sane person’s list. There’s an inherent goofiness to the whole idea of spandex gods that a handful of writers are willing to embrace without shame.
Even with that in mind, there’s still room to tell serious and mature stories with four-color leotards and domino masks, believe it or not. I’d note that all the stories by committee that have been offered up as tentpole events lately, however, fall far short, contrary to the protestations of said committees. They involve, by and large, too much plot-hammering, continuity-bending and sturm und drang to really pan out to much other than fan-service. And hey, you gotta play to the fans, amirite?
Comics publishers have always had the choice to cater to their fans and to try and reach past them into new markets. But let’s face it, new markets are hard. You’d need a method of distribution to reach your customers, and when the one you have sends out to only a couple thousand outlets (and really only some several hundred that most potential readers would ever visit), then you’ve got an issue that needs confronting. If only… If only there were a method of delivering content straight to readers on a regular basis… I’m sure there’s one. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.
Oh, right. Digests of reprint comics. That’d do it!
Of course, the publishers would have to decide that they could reach into the great unknown and offer something more than soap operas populated by skintight daydreams traced from the finest figures that images.google.com can provide. They’d have to offer stories beyond the punching and the hitting and the burninating. Effectively, they’d have to spend time and effort trying to sell books to more than just adolescents and making toys. They would have to spend money to advertise these new books and support these new characters, even though these books might only sell 10K copies in the Direct Market.
Of course, they’d have to abandon saddle stitching, too. And everyone knows that you can’t have a comic without staples.
The sad thing is, the ship has sailed. Kids are still reading comics, mind you. But they’re reading (and often not paying for) those funny black and white comics that don’t have superheroes in them and are all big eyes and small mouths. Only we can’t call them comics, can we? They’re filthy manga. FILTHY MANGA (nevermind that one of the most satisfying reading experiences I had last year was some twenty-plus year old filthy manga: ODE TO KIROHITO, and DEATH NOTE was pretty great until it just stopped being great around Volume 6 or so.) The sadder truth is that comics are manga are comics. It’s all graphic narrative, folks.
Direct Market comics are stuck with the small pool, though. They don’t have fat spines and small profiles and easy numbering systems so that people can buy their books in sequence (I mean, what kind of bonehead needs to know that “Slaughter of the Innocents” comes AFTER “Rain of Innocent Blood” in the series of CAPTAIN ANGUISH issue collections?) But they can be sold outside the Direct Market, right? These collections of old material. Sure, go to your local big-box bookstore and you’ll see that the only books that stand out on the shelves in the Graphic Novel section as opposed to the FILTHY MANGA section are the ESSENTIALS and the DC equivalent volumes. Why? Fat spines. Big Letters. Numbers for easy sequencing.
I won’t even go into the fact that it’s cheaper to reprint and translate old stuff than it is to actually create new stuff. I know. That’s not fair. Especially when some of that old stuff is far more compelling reading than the best that the Big Two can come up with.
Funny, but for all the venting over Penance that I’ve been doing, ultimately, none of the readers that I think comics should try to be reaching will give a rat’s ass about whether or not he was Speedball in a former life. Mostly because they won’t give a rat’s ass about CIVIL WAR. They can’t, because the material is impenetrable. It’s written for fans, see.
And we don’t need more fans. We need more readers.
Okay, deep cleansing breath. Whew. Gotta say I feel much better now.