CBR: When Words Collide - Jul 19, 2010

[CBR News]

This week, Tim returns from a comic book workshop with stories to tell about what comics mean to the average person and why and what might be wrong with the inevitable shift to digital distribution.


Full article here (http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=27287).

[Ben Kenobi]

really interesting article. Makes me want to read up on how comics are made now. I'd never heard about "22 panels that always work" either, so that was cool.

On a side note, I wept inside a little bit when he described Spidey as someone who does what's right "even at great personal cost", but hey OMD is Marvel Editorial's fault, not Spidey's.

[Caanan]

That was one of the best columns I've read for quite some time. I usually skim, but I read the whole thing this time. :)

Very interesting.

Maybe it all comes down to focusing on the big guns. Sure, everyone gets sick of another Spidey comic, or another Batman comic, etc. but done in the right way, a bunch of mini or maxi series from characters telling complete whole stories about their subject of interest, could work.

For example - there could be six batman books, but heavily researched and all completely different. Batman tackles a psychotic villain. Okay, standard. But then, maybe the other books are about Batman investigating illegal black market organ sales, on a wild goose chase finding a missing person, a comedy about Batman accepting face time with inventors who say they have some great crime-fighting tools (using real science) for him, whatever. A fictional character weaving through some well done, heavily researched, finite, cohesive stories. Could be good? Ah, what do I know...

Rambling now.

Great column! :)

[bluebeetle73]

Really interesting article.
I agree with the idea that for a comic books featuring superheroes to pass over to the mainstream and appeal to non-comic book fans they need to stand for something. There needs to be a concrete idea supporting and defining the character. while you can tweak certain aspects of the character you need to stay true to the core concept. The examples given (Superman, Batman, Spider-man) are loved by non-comic fans for the exact reasons mentioned in the article.
They stand for concrete concepts that people can relate to and believe in. The only other characters I might add at the moment would be The Fantastic Four, Wolverine and Captain America. Wolverine has that whole tortured bad boy with a good heart thing going for him that the masses seem to like a lot. Unfortunately the character has been treated as kind of a wuss on the big screen, but people still like him. Wolverine also fills in a lot of roles. He is part of a persecuted race and a tortured past so he represents the oppressed and the under dogs. He has the great power/great responsibility thing going, but unlike Spidey he expresses the anger that so many people feel. I suppose he is more about vengeance. Captain America's concept is pretty simple, patriotism. No matter your political views or religious beliefs (or lack there of), nearly all of us love our country. Like Cap, the FF also has simple concepts, family and adventure. Everyone can relate to these concepts in some fashion.

But that lack of concrete concept that people can easily relate to is why I think other characters like Wonder Woman, Thor, or Flash are more popular or well known both in and out of comics. Few of us can relate to being or hanging out with Greek or Norse gods. Few of us can relate to being raised on a hidden island by warrior women (though I'm sure many would like to try it). WW and Thor are just too foreign to most people. Everyone wants to like them, but they don't have that concrete concept that everyone can relate to.
The Feminist Warrior version WW may appeal to a large portion of female readers, but not all and probably not many male readers. Yet a more docile WW would alienate most females and would not be appreciated or taken seriously by most men. DC needs (in the books and film) to come up with a concrete concept that works for WW and stick with it. One of the ways they could do this is find out what people (comic fans and non-fans) think WW stands for. Then rebuild the character around that concept.
Thor has the exact same problem. As a Thor fan I think he is a great character, but even I have to admit he can get boring. The current series is doing a fairly good job and hopefully the movie will as well.
After reading this I asked a some of my non-comic book reading friends to name as many superheroes as they could. Then I asked them to think about what the characters stood for or what they meant to them. This is the list I got:

Superman- Truth, Justice, Peace
Batman- Justice, Vengeance
Wonder Woman- girl power/feminism, patriotism
Hulk- dangers of science, inner monsters/demons
Wolverine- vengeance, rebellion
Aquaman- "he was on that superfriends cartoon when we were kids"
Ghost Rider- "he looked cool in the movie", vengeance, love
Spider-man- human/working class struggles, hope, "even one person can make a difference"
Iron Man- everyone is basically good and will try to do good/protect people, ingenuity of man, the future
Fantastic Four- Family, science, adventure
Silver Surfer- (no one really had a response for this, but because of the movie they knew who he was)
Plastic Man- (2 people remembered him from the cartoon when we were kids and had no idea what he stood for)
Storm- (everyone just remembered her from the movie)
Punisher- vengeance, vigilante justice

Batman, Superman, & Spider-man were the only ones on the list that my friends all listed and could quickly decide what they thought the characters stood for. The rest of the list were mostly characters they saw as kids or in movies and thought were kind of cool, but they had to struggle to decide what these characters stood for.
Out of all the characters they(as non-comic book readers) mentioned Aquaman was the one they thought was just plain silly and had no real purpose. Aquaman was the one character none of them liked, which is why they remembered him. Their concept of Wonder Woman was closer to the concepts of Captain America or Superman and most of them didn't know she had any relation to the greek gods. One of them thought she had an origin similar to Superman and grew up in the U.S. and decided to fight for the "American Way".
When I asked them which of the characters on their lists best represented what it meant to be a superhero and which were the most iconic they gave me this list:

Superman
Batman
Spider-man
Wonder Woman
Iron Man

I got several different answers when I asked why they added Iron Man, but they did all indicate that the only reason they know about Iron Man is because of the movies. They all felt he was a good representation of a hero and deserving to be on the list because he is an ordinary man putting his life on the line to save people using only the weapons he can create.

[oletheros]

One of the theories that I have seen about why the big two aren't embracing digital distribution as tightly as they (perhaps) should comes down to the fact that they know (subconsciously or otherwise) that everyone who wants to read superhero comics is already reading superhero comics.

After all, one of the arguments for digital distribution is the idea that it offers a new and different channel for new readers to find new material. Unfortunately, if that new material is tailored to pre-existing fans, then the new channel doesn't actually do what it's meant to do; at the expense of pre-existing sales partners, no less.

Unsurprisingly, I'm a fan of what Scott McCloud calls "genre diversification." My feeling is that there are a lot of potential comic book fans out there in the wide world. Unfortunately, most of them don't know that there is any other genre besides superheroes. Even a little bit of education about what else is available would increase the potential audience for the medium, which is really what's in the best interests of the majority; even if it doesn't specifically increase readership in the big two's biggest properties.

[Brannon]

One of the theories that I have seen about why
Unsurprisingly, I'm a fan of what Scott McCloud calls "genre diversification." My feeling is that there are a lot of potential comic book fans out there in the wide world. Unfortunately, most of them don't know that there is any other genre besides superheroes. Even a little bit of education about what else is available would increase the potential audience for the medium, which is really what's in the best interests of the majority; even if it doesn't specifically increase readership in the big two's biggest properties.

I agree with this. When people talk about comics--knowledgeable fans and industry insiders--I find that "comics" and "superheroes" have become all but synonymous. That's a dangerous mindset for the art form...and I say this as a huge superhero fan.

The superhero as a concept is widely appealing, as the movie, games, and toy success' indicate, but the act of reading the somewhat static adventures of these characters year in and year out is quite frankly the soul province of a select few that got hooked at an early age--to "care" about Batman or Spider-Man beyond the core concept, you have to have had some emotional history with the character's long-running adventures and the minutia that comes along with it.

I don't think it anachronistic naiveté to point out that comics, as a whole, were vastly more popular when war comics, crime comics, fantasy comics, etc, were as readily available as superhero comics. Casual fans once made up the bulk of audience, after all.

Just look at movies, the province of "casual" entertainment seekers. Not to say that modern Hollywood is a fountain of unbridled creativity by any stretch, but the variety of genre's is still more or less there. That can't be said for mainstream comics.

[TimothyCallahan]

CBR is certainly a superhero-centric site, and it has been since it's very beginning, but I would argue that there's more great comics from non-superhero genres now than there ever has been.

Scalped is brilliant.
So is Daytripper.
Scott Pilgrim is great and immensely popular. (Soon to be more so.)
Darwyn Cooke's doing his crime thing, and so is Ed Brubaker.
Casanova, even in colorized reprints, is stunning.

And yet, yes, if you look at Direct Market sales for May 2010, it's ALL superheroes. Out of the Top 50 best-selling books, 49 are superhero comics. The other one is Buffy, which is about as close to a superhero comic as you can get without putting on a costume made of primary colors.

So, yes, mainstream (direct market) comics are incredibly, ridiculously superhero centric. And everyone knows that it can't sustain itself that way.

[DarkBeast]

Really interesting article.
I agree with the idea that for a comic books featuring superheroes to pass over to the mainstream and appeal to non-comic book fans they need to stand for something. There needs to be a concrete idea supporting and defining the character. while you can tweak certain aspects of the character you need to stay true to the core concept.

Overall you make some good points, but I don't see why comic heroes need to fit into tidy little ideological boxes in order to appeal to a wider audience. Many, many big movies and entertainment properties are a lot more diffuse and conflicted in their appeal (beyond the broad "good guys vs bad guys" dynamic that pervades almost all fiction).

And just to take comic heroes as an example, when X-Men and Spawn (Spawn to a lesser extent) broke through to the mainstream in the early '90s, they didn't really "stand" for anything, they were just "cool" properties that were packaged in a high-quality way (leaving writing quality aside), and that's why they became popular amongst an audience that hadn't been reading comics before. Sure, historically speaking the X-Men have had a great "underdog minority/outsider" angle, but it wasn't that keynote theme that made them really popular twenty years ago. Jim Lee's art deserves the credit for that, along with the huge supporting cast of reasonably deep characters that Claremont had cultivated over the years, which made for a great cartoon show, with attractive character design, and some good video games where you could pick your own character. Spawn was a complete mishmash of vague religious themes, but it found notable mainstream success in the early- to mid-'90s simply because of the artwork and because its look and tenor fit in with what seemed edgy and contemporary at the time.

On this level, the problem today is that most comic properties don't seem "contemporary" at all. Rather, they go out of their way to seem nostalgic (but, err, in a way that's kinda "new" if you're already steeped in the genre), because this feel-good nostalgia pleases the pre-existent, aging audience who are history junkies. Asking a non-comics reader to start picking up a new title from the "Heroic Age" or the "Brightest Day" is almost like trying to get someone to start being a fan of bluegrass music by playing a new cover band of old Bill Monroe songs. Twenty years ago, drawing like an Image artist was enough to get your comic book at least NOTICED by many (most?) young male teenagers ("Aw, that's a cool detailed violent image! I wish I could draw like that!"). But that's obviously not the case anymore, and no one within the American comic book scene can really figure out what type of art ("art" in the broadest sense, especially visual) would even look contemporary and appealing to your average denizen of ANY broad demographic in 2010 who wasn't ALREADY preconditioned to be interested in comics. The best ideas are things like: "Oh look, the President-to-be has a high approval rating because he hasn't taken office yet--let's put him on the cover! It's 'historic'!" And Marvel sold like 350,000 copies of that Spidey comic, when there were like 53 MILLION people who voted for Obama...and that's a success? Minor gimmicks like that are our best success stories now.

[NinjaZilla]

Very Interesting article. I guess alot of the great recent non superhero stuff might not be kid freindly enuff for this kind of group.