The price is wrong?
AND THEY’RE SAVING THEIR LABOURS FOR INSANE READING
Comics cost too much. There. I’ve said it. We all know it to be true, but I’ll go ahead and say it.
Well, it’s not 100 percent true. It is, however, quite true when you’re talking about single issues. Six issues of a comic cost something in the neighborhood of twenty dollars, and that’s if you’re not buying IDW or Avatar books (or any off-price books from Marvel or DC, while we’re at it.) Throw those in and six books will edge you up to twenty-five dollars.
Now, in any of those six comics will you get a complete story? No, not in any but the rarest of cases. What will you get? About half of an act more or less. If we’re considering movies as a metric (which is problematic at best, I’ll admit), then we’re talking about getting fifteen or twenty minutes of a movie. This is not satisfying, even if you only pay a buck fifty for it. It just isn’t.
And when you’re expecting your reader to juggle complex storylines with nuanced character development fifteen minutes at a time, six times over six months, you’re just headed for heartbreak. I don’t know how else to say it. People aren’t conditioned to read like that, unless you’re a comics fan, that is. And we know how many comics fans there are in the US. I’d wager on the order of about half a million, maybe less. That's just readers, not *hardcore* readers, which is a tenth or less of that. Who all reads PREVIEWS, actually?
Most people don’t want to read their novels as serials. Readers want stories, not chunks (satisfying or otherwise.) So, of course when publishers abandon standalone stories in favor of tidy arcs, you’re practically begging for readers to wait for the trade.
Now, I don’t think trades cost too much. Most trades offer a decent bang for the buck, well, the good ones anyways. We can argue about which are good and which aren’t on some other day. Not today. Why can trades do this? Easy, the trade is the standard unit of story these days.
And really, none of this is new. I noticed this five years or so ago when I started getting back into comics. People were arguing about this online then, too. Nothing has changed, only now some publishers have admitted that they’re publishing monthly books and keeping them afloat because the trades do well. That’s encouraging, but after a certain point, unless the trades do amazingly well, the singles go.
I could argue some other points, like the current primacy of art over writing (after all, comics is a predominantly visual medium), and that driving all kinds of lopsided content decisions, being part of the “problem” of comics prices. And anytime that surface gloss and rendering trumps storytelling, you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that your singles are going to be worth my three dollars.
And before we get into another tiresome “this is only because you hate superheroes” thing, let’s just remember that I probably have more superhero comics in my collection than you do. I’d read 60s an d 70s (and even 80s) Marvel comics until my eyeballs bled, if I had time. In singles. You know why? Because like serial sitcoms today, the writers of these books understood that even when you’re running an epic of interminable length, each episode’s gotta have a beginning, some middle and an end (even if it’s not THE END). What I get when I read a single now (by and large, there’s exceptions) is usually a chunk of middle and if I’m lucky a twist.
That can’t satisfy. If it works, I’m just going to be pissed that I can’t keep running with the story. If the twist doesn’t work, well, then that’s an indication of another kind of deficiency, whether it’s me just not caring or bad writing (usually the former, not the latter.) Some people live for that anticipation. I, however, am not one of them. That eleven months between WATCHMEN 11 and 12? Yeah, not fun. But it was necessary (or at least allowed) because of the way things were done.
I waited because that’s how you got the story those days.
I don’t have to now. Well, I do have to wait, but I don’t have to buy the singles in order to get the story. I used to do that. Buy the singles and then the trade because I'd want to read the story again. Nuh uh. No more. Not happening unless your name is Grant Morrison or you're delivering an outstanding single issue experience. I'll buy one or the other, but not both.
This is the part where someone pipes in that television works fine as a serial form. Which may be true, but television comes to you and you’ve already sunk the cost. This is not true for comics. Television is also largely a social phenomena, and comics largely isn’t (other than talking about it on the internet.) And oh yes, most hour long television shows (and even sitcoms, as pointed out above) know about the whole beginning, middle, end thing, even as the pieces assemble a greater whole. I’ll note that I’m happy to pick up your average MARVEL ADVENTURES book (though I once said that the whole thing was a bad, bad idea back when they first announced it, and yes I really said that) because they’ll do it in one. And be entertaining while they do it.
Now, by most measurements, the writing of those single standalone issues from The Old Days isn’t real good. It’s cramped, lots of things telegraphed and dialogue on the nose because it had to be. You gotta work to jam a whole story into 22 pages (or 16). Sometimes things have to get left behind. This is one thing that comics have largely improved on now, given that decompression has allowed characters room to breathe and we can get things like atmosphere pages that were unheard of before now (at least in the mainstream west).
But those developments are hell on the 22 page format. Makes for very light reading. Granted, this is tarring with a wide brush, but sometimes it takes a wide brush to catch everyone. And for those who strive to fill every issue with value (and there are those who do try and often succeed), they’re still better served by having the entirety of the book in one place at one time. Remember, I’m old and when books are often more than four weeks apart, I’ll misremember things and start to forget who’s who.
And this leaves us where? We’re still in the midst of an industry that depends on the serial to trade model (though there’s been traction in a direction away from that, but still that’s the exception and not the rule.) Mini series are being written as if they’re a whole book cut into chunks of equal length (which leads to some real structural inadequacies) to be reassembled later to make a uniform reading experience that you’d want to buy in a bookstore.
There’s the rub. My perception is that there’s still a market for stories and storytelling, significantly wider than what we’ve currently got. People will want to read comics (though probably not the stuff that you like, or me, let’s be fair), but I know they’re not going to be bothered to make six trips to get a whole book. They. Won’t. You might be able to sell them on single issues if single issues were the standard unit of story (and had genres for all tastes, but maybe we’ll consider that later.) As it stands, however, the single is a subsidy unit for the larger story in the trade. Change that and you up the perceived value of the single issue, taking a considerable amount of sting out of that thing that costs as much as a (plain) cup of coffee.