[Comic Book Publishing] – 5 Reasons Comics Must Change or Die

A friend recently told me that comic books are going through a renaissance lately, and that they’re on their way back to becoming mainstream.

“Really?” I asked. This was news to me — from what I have seen over the last decade, sales in the comic book industry are growing marginally at best, and they’re nowhere near the points they reached in the 1990s.

But my friend argued that the success of movies like Iron Man, Hellboy II and The Dark Knight this summer indicate that comics are back at the forefront of popular culture, and that the upcoming Watchmen film is only going to improve comic books’ position. I’ve read similar arguments on websites and in entertainment columns lately. But the idea that comics are making a comeback because comic book characters are showing up in other forms of media is both naive and misguided.

Now, personally, I would love for comics to make a comeback — I’m a big fan of the medium, and I think it has a lot of untapped potential. But the problem is that comics, as they’re currently produced, are not attractive to consumers for a number of reasons, and unless the industry is willing to change, what we know as comics today will likely disappear down the road. It’s a sad thing to say, but it’s true. And there are many reasons behind it.

But before I get into those reasons, let’s step back and take a look at the comic book industry as of 2008. (If you want to know about the history of comics, you might want to read this article first.) Currently, Marvel and DC own around 80% of the total market, with Marvel commanding the lead. These two companies have been neck and neck over the last several years, and they often switch places. Behind them are around a dozen mid-range publishers (Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, Devil’s Due, IDW, Avatar, Archie and so forth) who own around 10% of the total market. The final 10% of the market is the battleground for over one hundred indy publishers, most of whom come and go very quickly.

Marvel and DC primarily do superhero books, and they both do them really well. Both of them have long histories of doing these books, and both have stables of characters who are easily recognized as pop culture icons and who are popular with non-comic book readers. Many companies have attempted to go toe-to-toe with Marvel and DC and release their own superhero lines, and almost all of these have been abysmal failures. In fact, there are only four superheroes not created by Marvel and DC that most non-comic book readers can identify: Spawn, Hellboy, The Tick and Captain Marvel (who was not originally a DC character, but who’s currently a part of the DC universe). Nobody really remembers any of the superheroes from the old Image, Valiant, Wildstorm, and indy publisher days, and what’s more, no one really misses them, as the failed relaunches of Youngblood, WildC.A.T.S. and the Ultraverse have shown.

And therein lies the first problem of the comic book industry: the two biggest companies are focused on an extremely narrow genre. DC gets the credit for starting the superhero craze, since it was the company that launched the genre with Superman, who still remains the most iconic character of the bunch. Marvel gets the credit for reinventing the superhero into a more realistic character, thanks to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and John Romita, among others. But Superman was created over 70 years ago, and Marvel’s been putting out books featuring its current crop of heroes since the 1960s. The genre’s gotten pretty stale, because there are only so many stories you can tell about superheroes every month before you start repeating yourself.

And that brings me to my second point: the comic book industry is built on an outdated serial periodical model. This model was great in the newstand days when comics were distributed like magazines and supported by paid ads. But today’s comic book readers expect more from their books. Most people don’t like reading their comics in 22-page installments, and most people aren’t really that big on collecting magazine-style books. The industry fought this mindset for a long time, and only recently became aware of this when a secondary market, the book market, began demanding more graphic novel style anthologies and collections. And because of the industry’s reliance on the old way of doing things, many readers simply gave up on comics altogether, particularly as costs of individual issues rapidly doubled in price in the late 1990s.

My third point plays off of this as well: the comic book industry insists on producing serialized soap operas instead of mini or maxiseries stories. The mindset here is that as readers get hooked, they’ll continue to buy books every month. But the problem is that many readers approach comics like they would any other book: they want full stories that have a beginning, middle and end. A mini or maxiseries can do this very well, with the potential for a followup series that uses the same characters to tell a new story. A serialized story has to bring one story arc to a close and then immediately introduce a new one in the next issue. If the new arc’s not ready, the book might get a filler issue or two that do nothing to advance the plot. It’s easy to see why readers give up on this mode.

A fourth problem with the industry involves the writing of the books. Now, clearly, comic book writing is no longer just for hacks; some high-quality writers from film and television and stepped in to write comics over the last few years. But the problem is that these comics have become much more adult in their style, with dark plotlines that twist on old classics and self-referential humor that only long-term fans will really get into. Case in point: Marvel’s introduced a female version of Kraven for Spider-Man to go up against in recent issues, and it seems like they’re trying to retell the story of Kraven’s Last Hunt. (My friend Chris Sims talked about this in a bit more detail on his blog, if you’re interested.) That might be interesting for those who want to relive that book, but most readers would rather just pick up the orignal graphic novel. And DC’s Final Crisis is another example of how silly it is to try to keep all this continuity going; the fact that DC has had to have multiple crossovers across multiple universes to resolve its continuity issues is simply maddening to the casual reader. It’s just another signs that the writers, in the process of being fans, have made many of today’s comics inaccessible to the average reader by holding on to the baggage that’s involved with these long-running stories.

A fifth problem involves the misperception that interest in a character equals interest in a comic book. Many, many people went to see Iron Man this summer, but it’s not going to translate into a surge in long-term sales of Iron Man comics. Those who used to read the book might get back into it, and those who’ve never read an Iron Man book might give the story a try. But really, most readers are going to feel that the comic books are inferior to the film, and they’re going to give them up pretty quickly. The same thing will happen with Batman and The Dark Knight — the comics and graphic novels will see a brief surge (particuarly books like The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns), but film fans aren’t going to want to get involved in the ongoing story since it lacks the punch of the current film.

One interesting point about superhero-themed comic book films is that they are popular novel for precisely the same reason superhero comics grew popular in the first place — they provide a fantasy that requires strong visual effects to stimulate the imagination. Comic books were the best choice for rendering superheroes in the past, because they were able to capture the dynamic nature of these heroes without concerns about special effects budgets — if it could be drawn, it could be done. Movies have finally gotten to the point where they can realistically portray superheroes, and that’s precisely why people flock to see them. The idea of the superhero is quite compelling to people, and Americans in particular. But it’s much easier to enjoy a superhero story in two or three hours than to spend years collecting magazine-style books that cost $3-4 a pop and that fail to provide the same payoff.

These are five of the many reasons that the comic book industry has got to change; it’s got to focus on using the medium to tell better stories, and it’s got to focus on creating products that are more in tune with what the mass market wants and less concerned with what a handful of collectors are looking for. I’d recommend ultimately abandoning the magazines altogether and focusing on web content and graphic novels, but the current state of low sales make this a difficult thing for comic book companies to do. And that, ultimately, is why the industry is doomed; the companies with the biggest market share are choking the life out of the industry as they attempt to keep their profits up. And while both of these companies are making the bulk of their money from licensing and other media, they’re hurting the rest of the industry in the process.

In my next article, I’ll address my vision for the future of comics. It won’t be pretty, but it might be accurate.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan