Why the Superhero Comics Market Matters if You're a Fan of Non-Superhero Comics

[Omar Karindu]

A hypothesis: American non-superhero comics are still largely held hostage to the fortunes of the superhero-centric direct market. Why? Because North American comics formats, things like page size and so forth, are still largely based on a model that has (somewhat unfairly) come to be associated with superhero comics.

The bande dessinee format doesn't seem to have caught on in America; European reprints of that material in the larger graphic album format they're written and designed for have not generally made a splash; witness the latest repackaging of Tintin in smaller hardcovers closer to American comics-page sizes, for instance.

The major exception to date is, of course, manga, for which read "Japanese comics format," and particularly manga in digest form. Digests seem to command more space than the phonebook-style compilations that solve the cashflow problem of comics publishing in Japan; the economics of exporting a proven sales commodity in collected editions are quite different anyway. But then Japan, like Europe, never considered comics a children's medium in the first place; manga explodes in the 1950s in Japan, right around the same time that U.S. publishers and politicians made it crystal clear that comics were juvenile literature and that alone in their country.

The youth-oriented Shonen Jump, of course, splits the difference in publishing models by running monthly rather than the weekly format it used to use in Japan. But then, the Jump tends to foreground material that exists in cross-media form already, and many of its lead features either come to America alongside anime dubs or actually turn up after the dubs can do some promotional groundwork.

American non-superhero matter tends to succeed despite a lack of cross-media tie-ins; animation has long been age-segregated as a medium here as well, to the point that material like the Akira dub and Heavy Metal weren't mainstreamed until the 1980s. Prior to that, you had to look to the likes of Ralph Bakshi for "adult-oriented" animation in America. And frankly, I suspect that the first American generation of manga habitues came in through shonen-manga adaptations in anime and then learned of venerable classics like Lone Wolf and Cub; if adult-oriented manga, or at least non-age-specific manga gets lots of bookstore space these days, it was likely by piggybacking initially on the somewhat broader age range signified even by the term "shonen" than purely on its own merits and appeal.

Those merits are why that material has thrived and survived -- I'm not shortchanging the power and beauty of these works nor their genuine maturity as examples of an art form -- but the initial access depended on a combination of exoticist appeal and the prior success of matter that could be integrated somewhat with mainstream expectations of "what comics and cartoons are for." Even now, anime aimed at children is the most frequently-aired sort; it takes a long time to mainstream adult-oriented examples of a medium that's been deemed "juvenile" or "geekdom."

American nonsuperhero comics, alas, have to work backwards: their initial cashflow, and thus their ability to attract collection publishers and bookstore sales reps, generally still has to come from measurable success in the Direct Market (granted that this measure usually involves different criteria than those applied to superhero comics). The dream of a direct-to-TPB mature work has its exemplars in the likes of Maus, but it can't be forgotten that Art Spiegelman came up through underground comix and that, really, Maus is an exception in terms of both its . Similarly, Chris Ware made it to public attention partly by knowing Art Speigelman and partly by publishing serialized strips in print periodicals. The fall of the American newspaper comics page and the folding-in to the DM of underground comix may have closed those avenues of support and exposure off to today's non-superhero creators.

Think of the newer generation of non-superhero writers dealing with mature themes: how many of them have to make their way writing for superhero comics anyway? Terry Moore, the "British Invasion" creators of the 80s and 90s, and the various indy creators who've signed on to Marvel's recent ventures into indie-cred superhero projects can probably answer you better than I. Hell, even Ware finds it necessary to comment on superheroes-as-"comics" in his work in the end.

Fantagraphics has made itself into the label for mature American comics, of course; it can get straight to mainstream point-of-sale venues like bookstores. But Fantagraphics is in many respects the major player in that game, and its coffers are not unlimited; it can't publish every worthy or promising material and put its weight behind every creator laboring to do something besides superheroes in American formats and markets. Someone is falling through the cracks there without DM support.

Fantagraphics initially supported itself via a pornographic imprint, which whatever its merits, hardly erased certain stigmata appended by the mainstream public to comics readers and especially the early aficionadoes of nonsuperhero comics. I say this in the service of recognizing necessity and offer no moral evaluation of my own, mind you; the long-term artistic results and track record of Groth et al. speak for themselves. And the company had a bankruptcy scare as recently as 2003, saving itself via corporate restructuring and an appeal to comics fandom...but also by shifting some of its efforts into reprinting classic comic strips rather than devoting itself fully to pushing new material. And Fantagraphics certainly still takes in some significant percentage of its income from the DM.

I therefore contend that the American superhero market, that is, the main cashflow mechanism of the major distribution of new comics material of any genre, still matters tremendously to producers, publishers, and readers of American nonsuperhero material, so often considered synonymous with mature comics.

This doesn't mean that readers and supporters of such material should ever give one damn about ; it does mean that they should take in DM sales trends, which will generally mean taking in superhero-genre sales trends, as part of an ongoing effort to work towards a comics market and a perception of comics as a medium that might yet produce the full diversity of genre and readership seen outside the States.