The new reviewer over at the Pulse, Jess Lemon, has been causing an uproar lately with her recent review of the first issue of Outsiders. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, dash over to the Pulse real quick and see what the hoopla is all about.) Some people who have read this review cheer her for ripping into the book from a new reader’s perspective; others jeer at her for not being informed enough to write a review column, having read very few comics herself. Still others are in doubt that Jess Lemon is anything more than a pseudonym.
As for me, I looked at the content of her review above all else and found something interesting. In her review, she accuses the book of not being friendly to new readers. Whether or not this statement is true has been the subject of much debate, but it is rather tangential to my point. If it is true, it should come as no surprise since the book features two characters from the Golden Age who have been teammates since the Silver Age and who are presently in a book that’s on its third volume. Why anyone would think that such a book would be something a new reader could start a venture into comics with is beyond me.
The larger question is if such a book should be trying to entice new readers at all. In my opinion it is a mistake to assume that every single book on the market must try to draw in new readers. Not every book is a tool for advocating comics; some are for the niche market of comics fans and that’s all they ever need to be.
However, the complaint is not really about Outsiders but about a larger trend in comics: the over-reliance on continuity. This complaint is valid, I think; too many books are laden with continuity, dependent on readers knowing vast amounts of backstory to understand the present situation. Heavy continuity weighs books down and frequently they end up crushed under all that weight. It is NOT a way to bring in new readers, and often it simply ends up alienating even the hardcore fans when it is not strictly adhered to.
In the end, what Jess Lemon is really illuminating is that the industry at present panders too much to fandom’s desires, that comics are too much of a niche market. Publishers rely too heavily on sales of the established to the established and thus cut themselves off from the money the new reader might bring in by making the stories accessible only to the hardcore fans. Scott McCloud uses an analogy in Reinventing Comics involving the image of the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, something I’ve mentioned in past columns. He states that, given a climate in which there is no room for growth, “the system can only recycle what it’s already produced—and fail to grow healthy—or to grow at all” (McCloud 77).
A common example from recent publishing history would be the boom in 80s nostalgia comics, books based on cartoons based on toylines, like Transformers or GI Joe. These were our high sellers less than a year ago, but they were pretty flash-in-the-pan. Even when they were the highest sellers on the market, they were still only selling one hundred thousand copies, not exactly huge numbers. I’ve also recently discussed in this column how publishers seem to be emulating manga’s style in their books to try to appeal to more people. And in a recent column over at Newsarama, it was said that the best way to get new readers is to give them established superhero properties that they already recognize. But with each of these examples, rather than get “new” readers, we are only looking for ways to appeal more widely to readers we already have (or at the very least had at one time). There is no expansion beyond the niche.
If we really want to sell more comics, we need to look at trends in other media instead of emulating other comics. McCloud states that “mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed… while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere” (McCloud 75). Using the term “mainstream” in regards to comics is a bit silly, really, since they do not have the mass appeal of television and film. Doesn’t it make more sense then to find a way to imitate those other forms of entertainment than it does to push for more mainstream comics?
This idea is nothing new; comics have been following larger trends in the mass media since their inception. What is generally accepted to be the first comic book was just a reprint of the strips people already knew and loved from their daily papers. In his book Comic Book Nation, comic historian Bradford Wright details how, early on in comic book publishing history, the lines between media were repeatedly blurred when characters such as Tarzan and Buck Rogers moved from pulp novels to comic strips to comic books seamlessly. Similarly in the ‘50s, when superhero comics saw a downturn in popularity, it was because mainstream tastes had strayed into other genres. William W. Savage says that, in the period right after World War 2, the escapism of hero books had faded because of the changing world climate. In response, “comic-book publishers were willing to change, to adjust their focus, because they supposed that there was plenty of money still to be made. But first, they had to relearn their constituency” (Savage 13).
This trend can be seen in every aspect of the history of comics, comics reflecting the times and the media of those times. The social relevance of comics in the 1970s was a response to the civil rights movement and Vietnam . Denny O’Neil once admitted that his groundbreaking work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow sprung from his love of new journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, and in creating that book he had asked himself, “Could a comic book equivalent of the new journalism be possible? What would happen if we put a superhero in a real-life setting dealing with a real-life problem?” (Jacobs and Jones 159). This book then led to many other publishers reevaluating the material they were publishing and following suit.
I could go on, exploring how the darkness that fell over comics in the 1980s also were a response to Reaganomics and were a reflection of similar trends in other forms of entertainment, but I think you see my point. If we want to keep comics alive today, if we want to appeal to a wider range of people in the here and now, we need to do what publishers of the past did: change what comics are so we give the public things better suited to their tastes.
Some people out there who follow my column each week are probably astonished that I would make such a statement, since I’ve in the past decried the concept of looking to other media for comics’ salvation (see the May 2 edition of Advocating Comics entitled “We Must Save Ourselves” for more details). But there is no contradiction here; I’m not taking a stance contrary to my past statements now. Comics being adapted into movies still doesn’t help comics much, in my opinion. But comics adapting those movies or licensing those properties could.
Even better, comics analyzing what makes a certain show or film popular and then doing their own thing in the same vein could work wonders. As Wright states in his book, even when comics were first beginning, “the field’s future belonged… to those entrepreneurs who suspected that comic books could be more than just repackaged comic strips” (Wright 4). We should not simply openly ape other media, but instead use their popularity to draw in new readers for us and then explore similar ideas or genres in our own unique manner, as only comics can. If comics can follow mainstream preferences yet still retain their distinctiveness and originality, then we will truly have the best of both worlds.
How does that idea of following trends in mass media jive with my discussion recently of how following trends leads to all books being the same? Well, let me first clarify and say that I’ve never been anti-trend. I follow trends and like plenty of stuff in the popular culture myself. (I’d be glad to share with you my thoughts on why Avril Lavigne gets a bad rap some time if you visit my message boards.) Trends are only dangerous when they lead to homogeneity. But trends can have an upside too, in that trendy books lead to higher sales. Higher sales mean more money and attention will be paid to the industry, and those things can eventually translate into more opportunity to diversify and explore more.
So for all my talk of idealism, am I basically just a pimp? Am I saying that comics need to focus solely on giving the mainstream crowd what they want above all else? No, that’s not it either. Sales-driven trends are a problem because they will never lead to that diversity I value so much. It could also end up stifling creativity if publishers cared more about following trends to make the big bucks and not about story quality (like, say, spending more money on holographic covers for the books than in insuring the content is good). As I’ve been saying for the past few weeks, we need to find that middle ground, that symbiosis, this time between popularity and creative expression. Publishers need to let creators feel free to tell the stories they want to tell, but those creators need to try to tell stories that will have mass appeal.
We can reach that middle ground if we try, and we should be trying more and more. Occasional niche books are fine, but we should not mistake the praise of the niche for the goal. Sales are not the enemy; in all honesty, selling more comics is what advocacy is all about. Finding this common ground to build a foundation off of is our true goal, one we can achieve if we just learn to be a little less dependent on the few and figure out how we can please the many.
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References:
- Jacobs, Will and Gerard Jones. The Comic Book Heroes. New York : Crown Publishers, 1985.
- McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York : HarperCollins, 2000.
- Savage, William W., Jr. Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens : Comic Books and America , 1945-1954. Hanover , NH : Wesleyan UP, 1998.
- Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America . Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
