Inkthinker
05-24-2007, 01:02 AM
Grant asked in this week's (5/23) PD:
What would it take to make a general interest magazine about comics relevant and appealing enough to draw in a broad enough audience to make it economically feasible? Any ideas?
I tell you what I'd like to see...
Don't make it about "comics"... make it about storytelling, and about effective use of prose and illustration in storytelling, and about how to write good stories and draw well, and it seems fairly obvious (at least to me) that the natural convergence of the two subjects is comics.
Perhaps that's too focused on the creative side, but fill it out with articles, reviews and previews of books that cover a wide range of genres and publishers. Treat all comics equally (on their merit as stories) and see if you don't create the impression that comics are more than they've been seen to be by our society at large.
Magazines like Wizard are too focused and partisan... to read them, you'd think the whole medium revolved around four publishers and that distant land beyond the horizon, Japan. They got the slick presentation, but they fall short on discussing the medium at it's potential best. Other magazines cast their nets wider and attempt to stand for a higher level of "quality" in the content they cover, but they often lack the visual polish and the marketing clout to make their presence stand out.
Whatever the book, get that shit into schools and college libraries and bookstores as well as the LCS, for crying out loud. The reason so many magazines about comics crash is because they only market themselves to comics fans.
What would it take to make a general interest magazine about comics relevant and appealing enough to draw in a broad enough audience to make it economically feasible? Any ideas?
I tell you what I'd like to see...
Don't make it about "comics"... make it about storytelling, and about effective use of prose and illustration in storytelling, and about how to write good stories and draw well, and it seems fairly obvious (at least to me) that the natural convergence of the two subjects is comics.
Perhaps that's too focused on the creative side, but fill it out with articles, reviews and previews of books that cover a wide range of genres and publishers. Treat all comics equally (on their merit as stories) and see if you don't create the impression that comics are more than they've been seen to be by our society at large.
Magazines like Wizard are too focused and partisan... to read them, you'd think the whole medium revolved around four publishers and that distant land beyond the horizon, Japan. They got the slick presentation, but they fall short on discussing the medium at it's potential best. Other magazines cast their nets wider and attempt to stand for a higher level of "quality" in the content they cover, but they often lack the visual polish and the marketing clout to make their presence stand out.
Whatever the book, get that shit into schools and college libraries and bookstores as well as the LCS, for crying out loud. The reason so many magazines about comics crash is because they only market themselves to comics fans.