Tucker Stone has a column up on Comixology about marketing and managing the Bat-brand. It feels a bit like a continuation of our back and forth about Bob Haney’s Batman, so I thought I’d continue the continuing continuation. Or something like that.
Anyway, Tucker says in part:
Now, if The Shield had operated the way the Batman comics do—what would have happened to it? Say that Shawn Ryan only decided to write specific episodes of each season that had to do with his overall idea of a long-ranging “important” story, he’d only vaguely described it to the other writers, and they’d decided to just insert various one-shot stories that didn’t match up to the ones surrounding them—characters had sex and then never mentioned it, dead people showed up alive and well with no explanation (just an assumption that the viewer would “figure it out”) and each and every episode was directed by directors of varying talent and wildly divergent style, like Yasujiro Ozu for three episodes and Michael Bay for a couple of bookends…..
It seems to me that you can’t get to that point where you can create great art while operating in a controlled environment until you quit pretending that you’re in the same business that companies like Picturebox or Image Comics are in—super-hero comics, the ones the big two publish, aren’t what people crave when they go looking for art. You stop hiring big name writers and telling them they’re free to do whatever they want, and you instead figure out how you get to the point where you’ve got the people who go into the comic shop every week buying every new issue that has their favorite character in it. It might be fun to cater to the 40,000 of us who want to keep up with Grant Morrison or Paul Dini. But you’d be better off figuring out how you cater to the millions who just like Batman.
Basically, Tucker’s arguing that, if Batman comics are going to be either good or successful, you need to treat them as corporate product, rather than the genius effulgence of individual auteurs. Individual auteurs can do interesting stuff occasionally…but the relentless demands for more product, and the exigencies of a corporate character, mean that all-auteur-all-the-time is going to inevitably involve a lot of auteurs who don’t know their auteurish asses from a whole in the ground, and so you’ll get a lot of dreck. As an added problem, the inconsistency in the vision makes the stupdendously popular property unmarketable to everyone but a small group of cultish fanatics.
There’s definitely something to this. My son has been watching the Batman animated series with some eagerness…as for that matter has my wife. I’ve watched a few of the episodes too, and they do seem to be pretty much exactly what a Batman series should be. Each episode is self-contained; they do have very limited continuity — characters (Superman, Green Arrow, what have you) recur, but not in such complicated ways that you can’ t figure out what’s going on. The style is…well, stylish, and it’s consistent — Batman and Robin look the same in every episode, though I’d doubt it’s the same team of animators working on every single one. The villains are colorful and a little scary, but the episodes are definitively kid friendly — people aren’t getting killed or raped; Batgirl doesn’t get gut-shot and crippled. They’re clearly inspired somewhat by the TV series, somewhat by silver age stories…they’re nice. They’re professional. They’re well done. And you do look at them and say, these must have a larger audience than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. These are, overall, better than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. Why don’t they make comics like this (of course, there have been comics based more or less on the animated series…but why isn’t that the standard rather than a sort of bonus sideline?)
So there’s that. But then, on the other hand, you’ve got manga, which are each (generally) by one creator, but which often have spin-off which carefully follow the original vision. Nana for instance; the movie version is very faithful to the original, and I think there’s also a faithful anime, not to mention music and other marketing. Yet the fact that the series are, in some sense, often the basis of marketing empires, and the fact that the creators are auteurs, doesn’t put them in the same mess as American comics, either in terms of sales or in terms of aesthetic inconsistency.
One thing is for sure, though. American mainstream comics have somehow reached a point where they can neither effectively market the amazingly popular characters they own to a mass-market, nor can they figure out how to create appealing new products for a mass market. If they’re lucky, they can sometimes get a hit out of their back-catalog, like Watchmen, but that seems to be the extent of their powers. If they were deliberately choosing to forego mass success for individualistic aesthetic excellence, that’d be one thing — but I don’t think anyone would claim that that’s the case. As it is, you just have to shake your head and wonder how on earth they’ve arrived at this pass…and how much longer they can keep it up.
Thank you for writing this. That really exemplified the conclusion that I was lurking around, and couldn’t arrive to prior to publication.
Hi Noah (and Tucker) –
I liked someone’s idea (Tom Spurgeon’s? Sean Collins’? Yours?) from a while back that there should be something a regular series called “Batman” that would give straightforward, self-contained Batman stories (the heavily brand managed title) and then a comic called “Detective” which could be for all of the shambolic, crazy, continuity-heavy, crossover stuff.
I definitely prefer shambolic super-hero comics to the ones that have had all their idiosyncracies streamlined out of them (that’s what super-hero movies are for).
Re: idiosyncracies and manga – I’ve been rereading the early volumes of Dragon Ball and I just can’t get over how weird everything is. Which is part of the reason I probably react badly to phrases like “brand management” – if Toriyama et al. were constrained by “brand management” issues, Dragon Ball wouldn’t have been as personal (and as weird) and probably wouldn’t have been as successful.
That said, US super-hero comics are a different beast, and, in practice, a bit of brand management can be a good thing. The tack taken by the current Amazing Spider-Man team – where you have various creative teams working on done-in-ones, two-parters, and multiparters and “Spidey’s Brain Trust” functioning like a showrunner to make sure everyone is on the same page – has made for consistently enjoyable comics. Where the previous Straczynski-written era were awful, precisely because what JMS was doing was so far apart from all the things that had made Spider-Man such an appealing character/concept in the past.
Given your points about the insular quality of today’s comic books, I think it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year with the bad economy and upcoming price increase for the floppy to $3.50 or $3.99. It wouldn’t surprise me if most monthly titles don’t survive and DC and Marvel complete their transition to nothing but mass market trades and digests.
Wow. Geez. INTERESTING idea.
(And, well, I never really thought about how TV shows work before, but I am single. And single people don’t watch TV.)
Yeah. It’d give people a shiny, newspaper-strip like comfort zone, which might be what all this obnoxious continuity bullshit is aiming at and failing to achieve, anyway.
(My blog just ran Trinity Annoations, so I’m pissed.)
This would probably drive me away from new mainstream comics, but who cares about me and my piddly little 40-50 bucks a year. Your average consumer wants slightly challenging comfort food, and comics have been really failing to deliver that.
I think the shift to nothing but trades and digests is a tricky and unlikely shift. Most of these trades and digests are compilations of previous floppies…Comics take a while to make…and I think the floppies allow for some income while enough issues are produced to stick together into a trade. Without the floppies, where would the material come from. Will creators be wiling to wait for their dough…It would require an entirely new economic model AND a new creative model…I don’t think DC or Marvel are remotely prepared for either.
Eric,
Given the rate some artists work these days, its not like the top selling books are coming out it a timely manner anyway. Look at how long it took them to publish All-Star Superman. Years later, I’m still waiting for the last issue of Planetary.
Both companies already have their floppies written in arcs so they collect nicely into trades, so the only difference is format and release schedule.
Pay the writers some money up front and for the superstars, add residuals on the back end. It’s the way Hollywood works and most comic book writers these days come from there anyway.
Pay the artists when they hand it the artwork, otherwise you would never see pages from some of these guys.
Make it even easier. Marvel and DC each have over 60 years of back catalog they can publish. Who needs new stories when the old stuff is more accessible and already paid for? It must be working, given how the bookstore is filled with Marvel Essentials and Showcase Presents books.
I’m not saying new material would totally go away, but the current model of flooding the direct market with monthly books very few people are buying makes less and less sense as sales figures keep dropping. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, especially in light of economic conditions. Detroit used the same model and look how that is turning out.
Detroit paid its workers well, though.
Jon, that wasn’t my idea alas.
Bryan, I too wonder why they feel the need to produce all this new material when they’ve got such a huge back catalog. It is hard to imagine there won’t be some drastic reduction in the number of titles with the current recession….