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BY DAVE KOPPERMAN
A Patton Oswalt routine describes his feeling that things have become so perverse and strange of late that we’ve surely been shunted into an alternate universe. At first, he jokes, it seemed sinister and wrong, but now it’s just kind of “wacky. On our planet, Arnold Schwarzenegger runs California, torture is legal, and spinach is poison!”
To this list of bizarre, quantum-duplicate oddities, let’s add, “…and graphic novels on any subject matter are regarded as acceptable literature, and are proudly displayed for sale in national book store chains!’ It lacks Oswalt’s rhythm and verbal economy, but the sensation for the long-term comics reader is eerily similar.
In the last twenty-five years, hardcore comic junkies – those who will read anything with ‘words and pictures juxtaposed in deliberate sequence’ – have seen their pusher go from the poorly maintained spinner rack in the local deli to direct market stores to an ‘endcap’ in Barnes and Noble. Along with this move from Mediterranean Avenue to Park Place (in retail terms) came subsequent rises in production values, price, artistic intent, critical attention, public profile, and all of the other things that are emergent signs of a medium finally having come of age.
Simultaneously, we’ve seen the shrinking of the audience for traditional American comic monthlies, and the contracting of the direct sales market. It’s hard not to wonder if the increase and decrease aren’t related in ways other than the obvious moving of consumer dollars from one product and market to another.
A publisher that’s indicative of comics having finally arrived an accepted part of the cultural mainstream is New York and London based First Second Books. Here’s a bite of their mission statement: “High quality, literate graphic novels for a wide age-range, from Middlegrade to Young Adult to Adult readers … assembling an inspiring line-up of exceptional talents from all over the world… Fiction of all kinds, as well as non-fiction such as personal memoirs, biographies, history, comics journalism and visual essays.”
In other words: “We want to make money selling comics to people who don’t want to go where comics are usually sold and aren’t into what comics are usually about.”
Sounds good if you’re a fan of the medium and don’t want to see it die out or be limited in content and theme, but it’s sad-making if you also like the unique iconic language of American superhero comics and feel that their dwindling market share is something like the death of a small part of our collective soul (note: not a reference to the band – things haven’t yet gotten quite that bad). The overall tone of the above mission statement seems positive – and it really is – but there also seems to be a deliberate attempt to position First Second as an alternative to superhero comics, like the news headlines that turn up anytime something like Maus breaks through to national prominence. You know the ones, that read, “Bam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!’
This constant scapegoating of mainstream artists and product is pretty tired. While the need to do so is a sadly necessary part of the marketing of ‘alternative’ works – if you’re going to market an alternative, it has to be an alternative to something – scapegoating is ultimately as self-defeating a path for comics as for politicians who stir up shit to gain office and then wonder why the Congress that they’re now part of has such low public approval numbers.
How is it self-defeating? For starters, superhero comics – although no longer really catering to a youth market – will always be an excellent way for kids to fall in love with the medium. And kids reading comics are pretty much the only people who grow up to become adults reading comics. There’s nothing sadder than someone who doesn’t have the ability to read a comic or – even worse – thinks that somehow there’s nothing there worth their time if they did. That calls to mind images of a particularly sad childhood, made exclusively of vegetables and homework.
Even if the young superhero reader only falls in love with the content, that’s more than enough. Think that loving comics for their content if the content is someone who puts on a leotard and flies through space automatically makes you a geek or social misfit? Try this experiment: attend a comic convention and then drive past Giants Stadium on Sunday, and then ask yourself: which fans are the bigger geeks? And this isn’t even a trudging out of that tired old trope, ‘anyone who’s into anything is a geek’ – no, we’re talking a baseline agreement of a geek as a geek, and, pound-for-pound (often quite literally), those Giants fans are – if you’ll pardon the term – massive fucking social retards, geekier than a carny shredding a live chicken with his teeth, nerdier than Bill Gates getting a handjob from a Honda Asimo while watching a Powerpoint presentation on 3D Hentai porn at SIGGRAPH.
Of course, those who still maintain at this late date that literature – ooh, words without pictures! – is in some way superior to comics are also getting fairly tiresome, being either genuinely ignorant or simply willfully obtuse. An adult who is engaged by the continuing adventures of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine is no more socially maladjusted than one who thinks that carrying around a book by Rabelais somehow = wit, charm and class. One’s got French giants and the other has a Jewish girl who walks through walls, so get over yourself, artsy.
Feel free to take that little tirade as a sample of why it may not be the best marketing angle to sell your comics by making people who already like comics feel bad for liking the ones they like. Imagine if the producers of The Hurt Locker were to market their movie thusly: “Hey, faggot – Red Dawn was fucking lame! Why don’t you come see a film about what war is really like?” While I’ll admit that there is a small percentage of filmgoers with egos so pliable that that shame-baiting would work, on the whole, it would be – to say the least – a waste of advertising dollars.
The simple truth is that (as noted) the bulk of adult comics readers – that is to say, those that don’t merely dabble but are pretty steady consumers – will come up through the ranks of childhood comics readers, teenage comics readers, college age comics readers, etc. And the best way to maintain that stream is for publishers to realize that the comics liferaft is still small enough that trying to go after someone else’s rations could end up capsizing the whole thing. Keep a wide variety of age-appropriate material in print and well-marketed. Generate interest in public and school libraries by donating copies and spending a little money on outreach. And don’t close off the direct market – those stores may seem like unwinnable territory but hardcore comics fans can be persuaded to try something new.
For publishers of ‘alternative’ comics (who seem afeared of even uttering the word ‘comics’), a balance needs to be struck between drawing new readers among the curious endcap browsers at Barnes & Noble, and finding a way to not alienate those long-time fans of the form who are their likeliest targets for finding loyal, long-term readers. While First Second, Top Shelf, Fantagraphics and other high-end publishers have made inroads into the big retail outlets, their work is still lumped in to a big comics section, meaning that the people in closest proximity will be those hanging out and leafing through a copy of the Secret Wars trade paperback.
Put it this way: the idea of a comics publishing house having a brand identity isn’t limited to the neurotic Marvel universe of the eternally unrewarded or the crack-fueled throwdowns of early Image. All of the major alternative publishers have a brand identity as well – although it’s more likely to be thought of as an ‘editorial style.’ The tastes of Kim Thompson and Chris Oliveros entirely define the work they publish, and for those who trust their judgment, the names Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quartely are synonymous with good comics. If you can make a product that the long-term comics reader likes, chances are good that they’ll be more likely to purchase more of your publications just from seeing your icon on the spine, having long been trained in the ways of brand loyalty by Stan Lee and his Excelsioring! progeny.
It remains to be seen how this current wave of bookstore-friendly comics publishers will fare in the long run. It’s perhaps telling that the biggest comics publication of 2009 – seemingly even bigger than Crumb’s Genesis – was the long-gestating Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli. Mazzuchelli started his career at Marvel and DC, drawing tightly crafted but naturalistic superhero adventures, but eventually fell in with the Raw crowd and the idea that comics are only worthwhile for adults if they strive for art and serious meaning.
It’s possible that’s true. But it would be sad to see comics travel the same path as that other 20th Century American art form, jazz. Jazz started life as music to fuck and dance to. Then it became music to be cool and sophisticated to. Then it became something to study and think about. Then Wynton Marsalis came along and sucked whatever life remaining out of the form by firmly entrenching it as a museum piece. Comics should always be free to be what they are – and although much has been made of American comics finally breaking out of their prolonged adolescence, it should be remembered that the perils of growing up are that you eventually grow old, break a hip, and die.
*Apologies to Scott McCloud, who addresses this same issue of public perception with that very headline in his excellent (and underappreciated) second book, Reinventing Comics.
