I really don’t understand why people keep trying to tell Marvel and DC how to do business. These are wholly owned subsidiaries of major multi-national entertainment conglomerates with a poor track record of rewarding the contributions of the individual.
Marvel is owned by Disney – a company that has set industry best practices for selling product to little girls. Does anyone honestly believe that if Disney wanted Marvel to sell more product to that demographic that they would be unable to do so? Or is it more likely that Marvel represents Disney’s inroad into a male demographic?
DC just went through a major branding exercise, which is usually an expensive, complex multi-year process. Is it remotely possible that demographic targeting, genre diversity and price point optimization were not considered during the planning stages? Or is it more likely that DC specifically targeted the demographics that it wanted to target?
Not all comic book companies can be all things to all people. And it is increasingly obvious that Marvel and DC do not want to be anything but superhero publishers selling superhero comics to superhero readers through the supply chain that they have spent two plus decades optimizing to do so. And yes, this limits the amount of money they bring in from demographics outside what they consider to be their core target – straight white males.
But it’s not as if Marvel and DC are the only game in town.
It would be refreshing to see an article that started with “Marvel and DC are not producing the kinds of comics that appeal to other demographics” that went on to say “but there are other publishers that do and you should be supporting them” instead of presenting a carefully thought out argument about how Marvel and DC should completely change their business practices.
Corey Blake , for example, wrote an entire article that basically boils down to “Marvel should start acting more like Fantagraphics” without actually mentioning Fantagraphics – presumably because he still thinks that there are only two comic book publishers in existence instead of more than thirty.
If half of the energy spent tilting at the Big Two windmills was spent pointing out that there is already a pretty diverse selection of comics available for purchase, I think there would probably be more comics readers. But that wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying as bitching about the fact that homogenized corporate IP farms are not paying attention to other demographics, would it?
It’s easier to bemoan what could be than it is to celebrate what is because no real action is needed. “I tried to tell them what to do and they chose not to listen. What are you going to do?” Buy comics from someone else maybe?
A very common phrase that I have seen from some very smart people is “they’re leaving money on the table.” Presumably “they” are Marvel and DC, but “they” could very easily refer to anyone publishing comics that has not put together a comprehensive marketing campaign designed to combat the idea that comics is only superheroes aimed at straight white men.
Where most people see a problem on the part of Marvel and DC, I see opportunities for smaller, more agile publishers to sweep in and cater to these demographics who are clamoring for more diversity. After all, these comics already exist and I think it’s time to change the conversation.
J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman, the writers of Batwoman, just left the title after DC editorial refused to allow the character to marry her female fiance.
I think I wrote the kind of article you’re looking for RM: at the Atlantic a bit back I had a piece urging people to read something other than DC and Marvel.
The thing is, people who read superhero comics tend to be really committed to the characters. It doesn’t seem to matter how bad the stories are or how awful editorial is; they still want to read new Wonder Woman stories, or what have you. I doubt that’s going to change.
Simply put, I was in a bad mood when I wrote this. And it’s principly aimed at pundits who write long, in-depth business plans for Marvel and DC that have no hope in hell of ever being adopted.
But yes, that article is exactly what I’m talking about. More of that, please.
That’s fair enough.
DC editorial seems to be particularly screwed up at the moment. I think firing Didio would probably go a long way towards creating a less unpleasant working environment for folks there…though you’re right that the content probably wouldn’t be any better.
Reminds me of a great analog. Polygon, a newer gaming mega-site, has an in-house podcast called The Besties. When the Xbox One news came out earlier this year, Microsoft revealed that they had made a bunch of controversial decisions about having your Xbox One always connected to the internet in order to operate.
They had a discussion about it on The Besties and the Senior Editor sighed deeply and bemoaned the fact that when something like this happened a bunch of nerds whine about it on NeoGAF for months but then they go out and buy the console anyway, essentially reflecting a pretty nasty relationship where consumers are so fucking stuck on brands (batman, halo, whatever) that they will put themselves through anything they have to in order to fulfill their responsibility to that brand. It’s a sordid affair.
(Note that in the Xbox One case Microsoft reverted to a more conservative position quickly thereafter, creating, in that case, a happy ending [?])
I think there is a difference between target demographics and “leaving money on the table” and the issue with the Batwoman creative team, which is only implicitly part of the article via that image (not sure who chose that). I think the Batwoman thing is about representation and politics and basic humanity which is outside of the demographic aspect. You can target the existing superhero demographic AND still show people of color and lesbians getting married and female characters that aren’t half-naked and less rape-y plot points and such.
I chose the image. Which may have been a bad idea. Though…my understanding is that DC’s refusal to let her get married has more to do with a blanket “no marriage” policy rather than with a no gay marriage policy. FWIW.
As someone who works for a company that owns/represents a lot of beloved characters, Noah’s hit the nail right on the head, here.
These characters are part of our collective consciousness. They represent a lot more than just people in suits. Most of us grew up with them, and we want to be able to see them reflecting narratives that we identify with. For those of us who’ve recently acquired or who are still fighting for certain civil rights, for those of us who are still subject to a lot of discrimination, seeing the characters we love and grew up with fighting those same battles is gratifying in a way that seeing new characters we don’t know is not. It’s great that those stories are being written and told, and I appreciate every one of them, but there’s something much more powerful about seeing those stories told through the lens of characters that are practically part of our everyday lives.
As an example, I want to talk about the coming out experience. We all have had friends who’ve said homophobic things or held homophobic beliefs, until someone they knew came out, and suddenly their perspective was changed when they realized and understood that someone they loved, an individual in their lives and not some weird abstract person they’d never met, was affected by these prejudices. When a beloved character comes out, it can have a similar affect, in that it asks people who have not thoroughly explored their own prejudices to do it in the context of a character they know and love, and also tells those of us who grew up feeling alienated and marginalized that we’re not alone in a very powerful way. That’s why it’s important for these stories to be told through the lens of characters that are part of our cultural fabric, and that’s why I’ll continue to demand change from the companies that own the rights to these characters.
I agree with Derik that there is a difference between providing large corporations with unsolicited business plans and calling them out on skeezy art competitions that have to with naked women trying to commit suicide. Different scale.
Tea – how old do characters have to be to become “beloved?” Love and Rockets has been around for 35 years and deals with a lot of the issues that you touch on. “Collective consciousness” is a very fuzzy concept that is provably malleable. Scott Pilgrim and Harry Potter joined our collective consciousness in a very short period of time.
“I really don’t understand why people keep trying to tell Marvel and DC how to do business.”
1) Superhero comics and organized fandom are closely intertwined, and fandom had a big impact on the revival and revamping of the genre in the late 1950s and after. In a sense, fandom underwrote the development of these comics; the genre belongs to fandom. So naturally people want to believe that there is still a two-way street there, i.e. that the publishers of superhero comics are still listening.
2) Sales of Marvel and DC comics sustain the direct market, and therefore what happens with marquee characters at Marvel and DC means a lot within the fan culture built around the direct market. Marvel and DC have a disproportionate influence on other sectors in the comics field, so what they do is always news.
Having said all that, RM, I essentially sympathize with your point. And although I think I understand Tea’s point as well, I think Tea’s position puts us in an unsolvable double bind, because what we’re talking about is the possibility of fresh, meaningful cultural argument within corporate-owned, work-for-hire comics, which is something I don’t think we should hold our breath waiting for. Really, waiting on these supposedly iconic characters to be done right is a masochistic exercise; the economics of the industry, its workplace practices, its legal stranglehold on IP, all of that means that we’re going to see very little meaningful cultural argument in those books. The last time mainstream superhero comics did something to be proud of in terms of representation, the last really sustained effort at making the genre better, more expansive, more inclusive, the last concerted effort at doing something progressive within the genre, as far as I can tell, was the too-brief Milestone experiment of the mid-90s. Guess what? All new characters.
I think this article is just a gussied up version of the less sophisticated argument that gay folks, women and POC are simply not the Marvel/DC core audience and if the comics aren’t appealing to them it is because it is b/c the Big Two know where their bread is buttered. You see it on the interwebs all the time and it is a specious argument. It assumes that straight white males can and will only like the same kinds of stories and representations. Certainly you can’t make a comic that appeals to everyone, but you can make ones that appeal to more than one group of people at a time.
Furthermore, you can argue that there are lots of other comic book alternatives out there, but they are not always as easy to get or to learn about depending on your level of engagement as a comic book fan and your access to the internet and/or a comic store that knows about them/stocks them.
Instead of complaining about complaints, why not make this essay be the essay you say you want to read? You mention Love & Rockets (among my favorites – the first chapter of the dissertation I am working on is about L&R), but is L&R really going to be a surrogate for someone who wants a decent set of new Wonder Woman stories or is a huge fan of the Fantastic Four?
Give us a list of comics that could “take the place” of our favorites. What is the alternative to Superior Spider-Man or Action Comics that you’d recommend?
The world of comics is much broader than superheroes, but folks like superheroes and they represent a huge percentage of the market – Doesn’t your argument essentially boil down to “learn to like something else”?
Charles – there’s a larger conversation waiting to be had about how the Direct Market is demographically focused on superhero readers, which means that if you wanted to produce a comic that was not aimed at default superhero readers (gay positive, multicultural, etc), it would probably not succeed. In fact, there’s probably room for an entirely different supply chain to exist that doesn’t overlap with the Direct Market at all.
RM, I agree. We have serial fiction that places characters prominently in our cultural landscape in relatively short order. It’s called television. What’s even better, television is able and willing to let those characters die, figuratively speaking, and become part of our history and cultural memory. But as Charles points out, Fandom + Industry are an unstoppable life-support system. They will never let anything die.
(I also realize that this is the worst kind of criticism, the ultimate form of nostalgia: “Why won’t DC and Marvel [and Los Bros Hernandez] just blow it all up?”)
Would you say the Morales Spider-Man counts, Charles? Or Birds of Prey?
It seems like there are occasional small scale gestures…though they often get erased quickly (which happened with Milestone too, more or less, I think?)
I’d love to see some new company make fresh superhero comics… some modern creative equivalent to the 1960s Marvel bullpen- with newer and fresher concepts and without the creative rights issues. But I don’t think anyone is doing anything like that in comics, at least not in a way I’m familiar with or enjoy.
There’s the work for hire stuff at valiant (not familiar with it, but its a corporation trying to be Marvel- lite, is my impression) and there’s a bunch of “adult” grim and gritty Image stuff, some Boom studio Stan Lee stuff (trying to be Marvel- lite- lite- see creative rights issues once again) but nothing that really catches my eye.
Chris Roberson and Dennis Culver have a fairly pedestrian “what if Lex Luther was a good guy” comic at Monkeybrain… Invincible is an Image superhero book I find rather boring… Bandette at Monkey brain is really good, but the creative team is slow so it rarely comes out.
I haven’t tried the JMS Image stuff… maybe I should give it a shot. I can’t say Mark Waid’s web comic superhero stuff does much for me.
Some of Bendis’s creative owned stuff is probably good- when it comes out, which isn’t often, since he focuses on work for hire material.
Slim pickings all round, is my point, at least for this superhero fan. Many people would say I’m too picky, of course.
Osvaldo – My gripe was specifically aimed at people who should have access to information about new and different comics. The article that I cited provided a good overview of why Marvel and/or DC should try to publish comics from different genres to draw in new readers.
Having said that, I don’t think that there’s anything that will serve as a surrogate for someone who wants a Fantastic Four story. Astro City, maybe? Pantheon? If someone really wanted to read a comic about gay superheroes, they could always pick up Spandex.
I would like to point out that “superheroes are a large part of the market” is missing a key phrase – “English-speaking.” In the French market, for example, superheroes exist, but don’t occupy an inordinately large portion of the market. They are simply another genre, just like everything else. Focusing on superhero publishers just because they happen to be the biggest is pretty much the opposite of how business works – usually, people look for what’s not being provided and sell that because there’s less competition.
I’m always a little suspicious when people argue that a private company should be able to sell whatever they want without criticism. I’m also skeptical of any “then let’s support THIS company” as a “market solution” to what is really a more complex social problem.
DC and Marvel aren’t just comic companies, they own the rights to American Icons – Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men. Thus they are in an infinitely more powerful position to dictate the terms of American culture, and not just for comic fans. The characters of Marvel and DC comics transcend the medium in a number of ways, and it’s not just about providing comic books for an underrepresented consumer base – it’s about forcing the people who own the patents on our collective mythology to be responsible stewards.
So while I’m glad they took the time to point out that yes, there are plenty of other companies, publishing awesome comics that deserve our support, that’s not the entirety of the “for the love of god, stop catering exclusively to what you imagine straight white males want to read” conversation.
It’d also be nice if the author of this blog took some time to mention/link a few underground publishers – say Oni Press? or maybe WARP Graphics?
The original draft of my article contained a list of all the other publishers that I knew about. Here it is again: Image, Dark Horse, Boom, Dynamite, IDW, NBM, Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, Oni Press, Secret Acres, Adhouse, Koyama Press, Cinebook, Self Made Hero, NoBrow, Tugboat Press, Picturebox, Sparkplug, Topato, Uncivilized Books, Toon Books, Retrofit, Papercutz, Lost Art Books, Hic and Hoc, Grimalkin Press, Monkeybrain, Fanfare / Ponent Mon, Viz Media, Valiant, Aspen Comics, Random House, Hatchette, Zenescope, Avatar, Dog City Press, First Second, Abrams and Pantheon.
RM, did I leave that list out? I didn’t see it; it wasn’t an intentional ommission. I could put it in the body of the post if you’d like.
Re your point that people should look to provide what isn’t being provided…you’d think that would be the case, but I don’t think that it’s actually the way most businesses operate. Generally people see something successul, and try to imitate that because it seems less risky. So you get 15 superhero movies instead of one. Businesses, especially entertainment businesses, follow trends and try to tap into existing audiences.
That’s in part because creating new audiences is hard. People don’t have spontaneous wants; what they want to read is tied into what they’ve already read and liked; they’re generally looking for more of something like that (perhaps with a few tweaks) rather than for something entirely different. Talking about underserved markets is therefore a little confused, inasmuch as the market isn’t really there until someone puts it together.
Which is a little depressing, but I think it’s often the way things work, and is part of why Marvel and DC have been able to dominate the comics market for so long despite their obvious problems.
Noah – The list was a footnote and it’s not necessary to put it into the main body of the post.
Now that I think about it, you’re right about existing markets (and I’m wrong). One of the problems with the cargo cult nature of the Direct Market is that everyone thinks that the comics market is full of people who want to read comics which just isn’t true. I like to compare comics to DVDs – “You like DVDs? Check out my DVD.” is absurd, but if you change the medium to comics, it’s the standard marketing approach.
A few thoughts:
1) asking these people to think outside marvel/dc is futile. That’s just how they do. These are people whose biggest names can ask seriously how Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse could be so sophisticated when it first appeared years before Action Comics #1. Every time Chris Mautner writes about, say, Jiro Taniguchi at robot6, an angel loses its wings.
2) the armchair quarterbacking/fantasy-league-football aspect of industry commentary seems to me related to those kind of posts you see like “Here’s why Marvel should hire me to write the ultimate Dum Dum Dugan mini-series. I’d start by returning Turner D Century to his rightful place as one of the most fearsome villains in the entire Marvel universe…”
3) That said, you give the industry and big corporations way, way too much credit. Corporations make stupid decisions and fuck-ups all the time. And to the rhetorical question “Is it remotely possible that demographic targeting, genre diversity and price point optimization were not considered during the planning stages?”, the answer has got to be — yes. in fact, when we’re considering DC, the answer has got to be fucking hell, yes. How many failed imprints have they launched over the last decade (I can think of CMX, Minx and Vertigo Crime — any others?)? How long did their prior corporate logo last? How much time passed between their last big reboot (Final Crisis) and this one? They fucked up the 3D covers thing, they fire “creative” teams after two issues, or sometimes between the initial announcement of the team and the actual publication of their supposed first issue. DC at least really does seem to be a mind-bogglingly incompetent train wreck — presumably because the actual comics represent such a minuscule proft compared with the sales of lunchboxes and underwear that the higher-ups don’t think it worth the bother to send in grown-ups to run the place.
To that last point of Jonesy’s, I recall that DC had people pitching books to them in early 2011 without telling them they were about to reboot the line. They were doing elaborate continuity resets and character restorations just months before they wiped it all clean for the New 52. So no, I’m not inclined to take it on faith that they must have planned the reboot carefully because as we all know, wholly owned subsidiaries of major multi-national entertainment conglomerates never make mistakes!
(I’m going to touch on some stuff others have covered already above more elegantly, but hopefully from a different perspective.)
First, I write about comics regularly, but more importantly I sell comics for a living at JHU Comic Books in New York City, which informs a great deal of my attitude towards comics. I also love superhero comics. (Well, good superhero comics.) But most of the comics I read (and I read a lot of comics) are non-superhero. While I don’t write about everything I read, I think my reviews are a good indicator of the broad range of stuff I consume.
While the depth and breadth of the variety of comics I read is not common, it is becoming more so because of the efforts of progressive direct market retailers like the one I work for. (I am not speaking for my employer here, by the way, just myself.) The best tool for getting new comics, new ideas, new publishers, new creators, new genres into the hands of readers is in the direct market. Being in Manhattan and working for JHU may give me a skewed outlook – we get many, many folks who are willing to try something, anything new, and we provide the guidance to get there. When I make my recommendations, most of the time the customers walk away with something non-superhero. But that isn’t to say that I don’t recommend cape comics, or that there aren’t good ones out there. Maybe I’m just very lucky to work for a retailer that carries an uncommonly broad range of material and a customer base willing to try these things out. But it is increasingly the case that those who try out new things started out with the old things first and moved over because of our efforts.
But, ah, the power and gravity that superhero comics have on superhero fans is quite large. Part of it is the emotional connection to these wonderfully bizarre stories and characters and universes, and that is hard to break. So much of the frustration bubbling up of late – which is largely centered on DC, though it’s out there for Marvel, of course – is that fans are being given increasingly shitty where the fault is not in the creatives because the creatives are simply not being given the chance to create. By any measure, Marvel has been a much more creative-driven company of late (with obvious caveats, natch) where DC has been nothing but a morass of inconsistent editorial interference. People are PISSED about this. It’s only natural that they will complain, and why not? If you can get quality comics featuring characters and settings you enjoy but its not happening because of some petty bullshit, well, damn, you’re going to sound off about it. And Batwoman is (now was) one of those comics. It’s good for the industry and its good for the medium when the stuff that sells the most is good and its bad for us all when the product is bad. And hey, not just as a retailer but as a fan, I want good superhero comics, damnit. (And this is an achievable thing. And there are quite a few good non-big two superhero books… Invincible, Powers most of the time, The Boys, JMS’s, and more.)
And this is where retailers come in. When I encounter folks pissed about their shitty comics, rather than adding to the echo chamber I point them to the antidote, and there are so, so many. While I totally understand (and support) the kvetching, I also agree that the best way to vote is with your dollars, and if you asked my opinion I can show you the best bang for your buck. It’s my job, sure, but it’s also my passion, and the best retailers are going to be able to – have been able to – turn them on to amazing shit they wouldn’t have considered otherwise. The motivation is monetary (capitalism!) but goodgoddamn do I get a rush getting good new comics into people’s hands. Superhero comics do prop up the direct market, sure – and I love the damn things and want them to be good. But they also play an important role as a gateway drug into the harder stuff.
Of course there are the folks who don’t care how good the new stuff is, they’ve have had their fill of steak and potatoes and they just want their funnybooks where the colorfully dressed people punch each other for 20 pages. These folks are about as interested in Hawkeye or Saga or Chris Ware or Jacques Tardi or Naoki Urasawa or Michael Deforge or Moebius as a deaf person would be interested in NPR. I can show them my Maggie the Mechanic tattoo and the goosebumps that visibly arise when I talk about Locas but even the Ti-Girls can’t win them over. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
So power to the complainers. It might not make a difference, but you have a right to get on the soapbox – hell, it might work, but you’ve also got to know when to close up and try something else.
But more power to the explainers. Those who can intelligently guide the way to quality. To the writers and retailers and fellow fans who don’t want to focus on the bad and know the good to show.
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Here’s a great article that serves as a solution to the problem:
http://chacebook.com/2013/04/27/13-comics-to-read-in-2013-chacebook-edition/
Well, this is a darn good article to the point. However the problem isn’t necessarily Marvel and DC not making material for other folks. The problem is most folks don’t know its out there, and its good. We have a comics/nerd culture “journalism” of sites such as MTVGeek, CBR, Newsarama, ComicsAlliance, IGN and ComicsBeat that will not promote other creators unless they are of the Eisner nominated artsy folk(I love some of them too!) or Marvel/Creators doing Boom,Image,or IDW books. The think to solve is how to get these journalists and writers to cover other projects that might increase the comic book / Graphic novel readership thats not into BIG 2 superhero books. Just my experience and my 2 cents.
I agreed with you before you even wrote this:
http://goodmenproject.com/komplicated/comics-dccomics-and-marvel-will-not-hire-black-writers-you-know-why-hannibaltabu/
I think it’s always amusing when writers or posters in this realm (you guys, TCJ, etc) assume that people who read superhero comics don’t also read other kinds.
Well…I think there are a fairly substantial number of folks who only read superhero comics, actually. That doesn’t mean no one who read superhero comics ever reads other comics, of course.
“I think it’s always amusing when writers or posters in this realm (you guys, TCJ, etc) assume that people who read superhero comics don’t also read other kinds”
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2012/10/07/2012-top-100-comic-book-runs-master-list/
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2009/11/27/top-100-comic-book-storylines-master-list/
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2010/12/07/top-50-comic-book-writers-master-list/
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2010/12/07/top-50-comic-book-artists-master-list/
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/08/11/comics-should-be-good-top-50-countdown-master-list/
The natural interpretation of these lists is that many of those readers only read superhero comics.
follow-up: of course, it is certainly possible that people who rate John Byrne, Alex Ross, Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis over, oh I don’t know, McCay, Herriman, Caniff, Stanley, Barks, Ware, Woodring, Los Bros, Trondheim, Tardi, Moebius, Otomo, Ito, Tezuka, Taniguchi…are equally familiar with other genres.
Or it’s possible that they’re not out of their minds and have overwhelmingly read superhero comics. But if some of those readers like The Walking Dead and Y the Last Man as much as they like Larry Hama’s work on the tie-in to a popular brand of boy’s dolls from the 1980s, then god bless them.
Clearly, one website’s readership’s lists are an acceptable blanket condemnation of anyone who’s ever picked up a cape comic. I am humbled.
Anyway Noah, it’s more the tone that anyone who willingly chooses to read superhero comics and care about their quality in this day and age instead of just giving up on the whole enterprise a lost soul who just doesn’t know better. How precious. How patronizing.
andy, right back at you vis-a-vis the “assumptions” of HU, TCJ, etc. there’s enough humility around for everyone to share.
I was at SPX today, and almost every complaint about homogenized superhero comics can probably be made about contemporary small press.
There’s a relative sameness pervading contemporary small press that I don’t remember seeing during the small press explosion of the 1980s.
Zombies, cutesy creatures/monsters, or reality-based angst comics seemed to be bulk of what’s available these days.
In the 1980s, I was snapping up dozens of small press comics every month. At SPX, While I spent about $120, I was hard-pressed to find stuff I wanted to sample. One of the more interesting things I found was actually what creator Pat Barrett himself only half-jokingly labeled a screed: “How to Make Comics the Whiner’s Way.” I thought it was actually a pretty good indictment of what appears to be a substantial faction of today’s small-pressers.
I also dropped $50 at Roger Langridge’s table buying one of his original IDW Popeye comics pages. It was a simply gorgeous page whose art hearkened back to the days when cartoonists were masters. It’s flawless design and execution should be textbook material for any aspiring cartoonist — especially many of the folks who were sitting in the same room with him today.
An aside: It was a bit jarring to see the Fantagraphics booth, but no Kim Thompson. May he rest in peace.
GI Joe #21 is better than all of the Walking Dead and Y: The Last Man combined.
In regards to Mr. Hatfield’s comments as to fans’ proprietary feelings about towards the big two, I’d have to offer up the analogy that they’re like the first wife that waitressed and did temp work to put her partner through law school. Now that he’s made partner, he’s ditching her for someone younger and hotter. Those are the breaks, baby!