Because I Was Losing Track of Which Earth This Was

OK, so I just learned about this. More details here (warning: link to AICN).

My first thought: this could be big. Very, very big.

Don't misunderstand me. In terms of the actual stories they apparently plan to tell, this sounds, um, inessential. Well, OK: unbelievably boring. But I'm saying that from the perspective of a longtime superhero comic reader. From the perspective of a teenager who hasn't read a Superman or Batman comic before--which, let's face it, is by no means improbable these days--this could only be somewhatboring.

Um. I'm getting a little off track here. Let's circle round and come back.

The crucial thing here is not the story, it's the publishing strategy. These are trade paperback OGNs aimed specifically at the book market, with a major publisher providing the marketing muscle. That's the potential paradigm shift here. In terms of sales, what the Big Two have been doing wrong has has less to do with their subject matter than their ability to break out of their fanatically loyal but tiny audience pool. Recent attempts to do so have largely been well-meaning but somewhat doomed, because they were creating material for new readers with no way for those new readers to get to them. Not only were they sold in the terrible pamphlet format, which in and of itself is forbidding to anyone who isn't a hardcore nerd, they were plunked on the direct market store* shelf alongside Rape Avenger and BoobGirl or whatever. And since "new readers" generally translate to "kids", you can imagine how well these have raked in the newbies.

This all seems pretty obvious to me, and I doubt many people would disagree, though given that a lot of people have a vested interest in the direct market they may balk at what needs to be done. But there's been pretty much no excuse for DC and Marvel to keep doing this; their job, or the jobs of the comic divisions at least, is to get their product out there, and they've suffered from an appalling lack of leadership in this regard. You get the definite sense that it's a combination of nerdy short-sightedness and fogeyism; bizarrely, a lot of comics publishers seem to be genuinely convinced--still--that the gold rush of the early 90s is going to return, and that that was ever a logical model for selling comics in the first place. I think that's part of the emphasis on the pamphlet format, and the reason they charge so much per issue; they're still stuck, if only subliminally, in the collector's mindset. Or rather, a lot of their readers are, and attempts to force them to move on have failed, so they figure they may as well keep catering to that attitude.

This, of course, goes against the whole reason pamphlets were created in the first place: they were cheap. You could buy a stack of them and not be out much money, which meant that your buying habits could be dictated by nothing more than "that looks cool". Which is how people would prefer to buy things, generally. When the prices get jacked up to the level they're at it becomes a matter of YOU MUST BUY THIS ISSUE BECAUSE IMPORTANT CONTINUITY STUFF HAPPENS, which is a pitch that only appeals to the hardcore. I really do think it's as simple as that.

So. Now we have DC launching this series which will be more accessible (it's an odd fact that Graphic Novels, even if they're more expensive than the individual issues that make them up, still feel more satisfactorily priced, because you get the sense that you sat down and read a full story), and are going to be plunked down where the non-hardcore can see them. I don't think a lot of Jane Austin fans are going to be compelled to pick this up, but the vast potential audience of "kids and teens who saw the movie" are actually being reached. Combine that with some actual marketing which, again, will presumably go beyond "Previews", and you've got the potential for superhero comics to actually become a popular genre again.

Now, I still think there are a lot of potential missteps here, starting with the subject matter. No one, and I mean no one, needs a new retelling of Superman or Batman's origin at this point. DC is clearly playing it safe, the way they've done with their animated movie series, but I think they're misjudging the market a little. The kid's and young adult's book audience is not as pathologically addicted to comfort food as the adult superhero audience; they're probably, on the whole, more likely to be looking for something new and different, especially if they're picking up a graphic novel for the first time. A new story featuring either of these two characters would probably go over better with new readers, not to mention the many lesser characters DC can't peddle to geeks but who could be big with kids. (If their next offering is a well-done Wonder Woman story, I think it could be huge--the ratio of girls looking for stuff to read is immensely higher in "real" bookstores.)

And it doesn't look much like these stories are aimed at younger kids, which is already a fairly successful audience for graphic novels that make it to bookstores. Likewise, even aside from the tiresome grim 'n' grittiness of many current titles (and both Straczynski and Johns are guilty of this) there's a sense of self-importance around superheroes that has led to lousy storytelling--decompression, talkiness, cloying pop culture references, you know the drill. These comics are so busy trying to be REAL ADULT DRAMA that they've forgotten the fun and imagination that appealled to kids, which is how they saturated the culture in the first place. If these new books are too heavy on the "standing around angsting" school of comics, they may not find traction.

But this might not matter. I think that a lot of comics fans--and I'm guilty of this--focus too much on the nitty gritty of the stories, thinking that there's some magic element we're missing that will achieve popularity. It's good in a sense, because it keeps us honest, and anything that can draw superhero comics back from the morass of self-referential wankery that they're constantly threatening to fall into is a good thing. But the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of cruddy movies, TV shows, and books that achieve massive popularity, and they're not, on average, any better than the average lousy comic. So I'm led to believe that yes, it is a failure of delivery rather than a failure of content that's been holding comics back. The new approach is a huge step, and it might be all it takes to break the logjam. I'll be watching this with interest...

*I happen to be lucky in that I have always had access to appealing, well-run comics stores; Toronto probably has more of these per square mile than any other city in North America, except maybe San Francisco. But even here, I've encountered enough of the traditional fleapits run by people with terrible social skills to relate to the horror stories, and let's face it, the very material offered by the comics industry lends a certain off-colour character to all but the most specialist of stores.