It might seem to some readers that I’m down on superheroes a bit. Last week I discussed the problems Doom Patrol had finding an audience because it was a niche book trying not to be, and I used Jess Lemon’s review of Outsiders in my column two weeks ago to illustrate the barriers such books create for new readers in the way of heavy continuity. As I said in both of those instances, it’s OK for those books to appeal only to a small niche; to expect them to do more is preposterous.
However, niche books don’t pay the bills, and as comics advocates we should be pushing for fewer comics only accessible to us and more comics that are open to anyone, new and old readers alike. Now from my comments for the last few weeks, some readers might think that I believe the only way to appeal to the mainstream is to give them books like their favorite TV shows and novels, comics that explore every genre but superheroes. But that’s not quite true; I think superhero books CAN be very enticing to new readers, when done the right way. It’s just so few of them are nowadays.
What, then, is the “right” way to do a hero book? Well one method that works is to shove the “big guns” in people’s faces. The iconic heroes, the ones that everyone in America knows already, should be kicking down people’s front doors and dragging those new readers out into the street. And these actions should come not in the form of movies or TV shows, but in the comics themselves.
You’d think the icons would be ready-made to do all that at the drop of the hat, but they need to be prepped a bit first. The characters themselves need to lose a bit of baggage so they are easily recognizable in every aspect. The adventures these characters are involved in also need to be simple to grasp. These objectives can be achieved through the removal of continuity barriers, which amazingly doesn’t take a Crisis or an “Ultimate” version to do. All it takes is writers willing to explain what needs explaining in the simplest terms possible.
Many of the major hero books, like a Spider-man or X-men comic, do it all wrong. Remember when you could read a random issue of Avengers without having read the one before it… and it would still make sense to you? All that without reading a page of text at the front of the story. Today the stories involving these characters are often too long, too in-depth and reliant on you having read all the previous issues. For example, Waid’s first Fantastic Four issue, the nine cent issue, was incredibly accessible, and the book stayed that way for its first few stories, all short and succinct. But now, with the Doom storyline and the aftermath of those events playing out over what seems to be the rest of its run, it’s too much of a burden. The Zod story is just wrapping up now in Action Comics after years of set-up, and Batman is currently in a twelve issue, on-going story. Even the Ultimate universe, which was supposed to appeal to new readers, makes the mistake of every story being six issues long.
That’s one way to go to bring in new readers for hero books, but there is another way, which sends the pendulum swinging in the completely opposite direction. My best example of this type of series is Starman. Here’s a book that features a hero no one has ever heard of but who also has years worth of back story to draw from. Yet it invariably is a great book to give to non-comics readers; in my own experience the people I’ve given this book to loved it.
This book manages to overcome its lack of icon status and burdensome continuity, because it’s real. The main character is not a Hero with a capital H; he’s just human, with the h definitely lowercase. The lead character of Starman Jack Knight is a reluctant hero, a guy who’d rather be hunting through thrift stores for some vintage Hawaiian shirts than fighting crime. He only gets started in the life out of a sense of obligation to his father, who himself used to be Starman. It’s more like passing on the family business than it is the mantle of hero. Jack is similarly unconventional in his approach to being a hero, more likely to reason with the villains he faces than slug it out with them.
It’s a twist, not the type of hero people expect. Those types of heroes, the ones that move hero stories beyond people’s expectations of a clash between good and evil, these heroes go a long way towards advocating comics. They add realism to this genre and make its naysayers see hero books as more than “adolescent power fantasies.” These are also my favorite types of hero books. I’m a huge fan of Starman, if you couldn’t tell. Doom Patrol had this style going for it in a way, since they too had various motivations for being heroes, some for fame, some in search of a place to belong. Other books I love take heroes and place them in a new setting. Noble Causes, for example, is a superhero soap opera; Powers is superhero cop show. Astro City can be all of the above and more.
The former example of iconic heroes might seem immature and one-dimensional, too “Silver Age-ish” in the common parlance. The latter type, the hero with a twist, could be seen as pretentious and convoluted, a bit too “dark” for its own good. But both kinds of books need not stray so far to an extreme. If done by writers who really care about their work, they can be the best kind of tool for comics advocacy: really good material that can sell itself.
