Mike Gold: Where’s Our Next Buck Coming From?
There was a time when if you were reading comics as an adult, it was generally assumed you were too stupid to understand real literature. Many of us wouldn’t read comics in public venues for this very reason.
Not me; I couldn’t care less. When it first came out, I even read Hustler Magazine on Chicago’s vaunted “L” trains. But many of my friends felt that way, and that’s why Phil Seuling’s early New York Comicons were so liberating. In the late 1960s there would be less than one thousand of us talking to one another in an elegant Manhattan hotel ballroom, and each and every one of us were awestruck by the fact that there were so many of us.
As we became the first generation since Fredric Wertham torched the medium to get into the business, we used this feeling of isolation from society to promote the level of storytelling. Comics became more character-driven and less Pow! Biff! Bam!. Before long adult fans would be able to point to a more mature level of story and art. We believed our medium was becoming sophisticated.
In retrospect, I take issue with that. We’re telling stories about people with ludicrous abilities who dress up in fantastic, gaudy costumes to either commit or fight crime and/or evil (to borrow from Dick Orkin’s Chickenman). There’s a limit to that “sophisticated” brand that we were too proud to notice.
Popular culture works like a snowball atop a mountain: by the time you hit ground level, that snowball has grown to a boulder the size of Colorado. Grim and gritty – a term I came up with to help sell GrimJack – became dark and disgusting. Heroes became as ugly on the inside as the villains were on the outside. We evolved to excess.
Before long the American comic book medium, still overwhelmed by heroic fantasy, had driven out all the stories that work for the younger audience while limiting the older audience to a steady diet of redundancy. It is possible to create a story that works for 12 year-olds (and their precocious younger siblings) as well as for 24 year-olds, 36 year-olds, and even 61 year-olds. Off the top of bald pate, I can think of a few writers who did just that, and did so brilliantly: Steve Englehart, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Louise Simonson, Archie Goodwin, and our own Denny O’Neil… to, indeed, name but a very few.
All too-many comic book store owners became the villains of their own childhood: “Hey, kid, this ain’t a library!” Driven by admonitions from certain of the larger comics distributors in the 1980s, kids were perceived as not having enough money to be worthwhile customers. They took too much time making their purchases. They didn’t know what they wanted. They couldn’t engage in a conversation about who stole what from whom when it came to The X-Men and The Doom Patrol.
Kids were shooed out of comic book shops, and publishers – again, at the insistence of certain comics distributors – pulled away from producing comics that were marketed towards the younger audience. Instead we started cranking out a steady diet of R-rated superhero comics, many of which were quite good and worthy of publication. But they became the snowball that ate the comic book shops.
I always thought this was a mistake, and I thought so for one simple reason: if you chase away today’s 12 year-olds, who’s going to be your customer or reader in five or ten years?
Today, we have a small fraction of the number of brick-and-mortar comic book shops we had just one generation ago. Go figure.
But, today, it appears we’re beginning to see some drift towards retro-expansion. More on this next week.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
As always, the solution is — more Super-Pets!
My dream-team Marvel / DC crossover!
There’s a Renaissance of high quality, true all-ages comics these days that I really have hopes will enchant the younger generation and continue to delight the rest of us, if only people would give them a chance.
“All-ages” has such a negative connotation that so many people won’t even touch the books, dismissing them as “kid’s comics” without even knowing what they’re about. In my local comic shop everything that even smacks of being child-friendly is relegated to an area called “Kids” (including all Archie Comics books, which I not only enjoy but find better written than many “serious” comics) and, unlike everything else, are sealed in polybags, presumably so kids won’t ruin them with sticky little fingers. I have no problem opening a polybagged book if I think I might want to buy it, but I’m sure not everyone realizes you have a right to peruse before you purchase.
The truth is that the well-known all-ages books of today like Mouseguard, Stuff of Legend, Princeless and Cowboy aren’t KIDS’ books, they’re EVERYONE books.
I’m absolutely with you on the Archie titles, Brandon. And for the past several years Archie’s been a lot more gutsy about content — particularly when you consider the fact that they’re more dependent upon newsstand sales where a lot of controversial books get returned to the distributor without getting any display.
I’ve enjoyed Archie books a lot more than anything “mainstream” for the past several years. The four Big Two books I read just barely make the cut to stay on my pull list.
I was that kid. Fordham Comics was my first experience with “Comic Book Guy.” It was this Asian dude who acted like the mere fact that I came in to spend money looking for New Warriors 1 (because I discovered New Warriors 2 at my local newsstand) was messing up his day. HOW DARE I?!! He must’ve had a hot date at three in the afternoon. I’ve always said that “sophistication” in comics did not have to go too much further than the type of work that Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, Len Wein and others were turning out in the pages of New Teen Titans and Uncanny X-Men. My other personal favorite was Icon which was written by the late, great Dwayne McDuffie (whose Double Dragon series I really liked, too). I also thought that Archie Comics did a wonderful job of producing accesible comics for both kids and adults with their Archie Adventure series. I have runs of TMNT, Knuckles, and Sonic (which was the weakest of the three). Those were true “All Ages” books.
Vertigo, Paradox Press, Max, and even stuff like Humanoids’ The Metabarons (which is a great, great read) all have their place in the industry, but as you said, it became snowball of excess.
I can’t wait to see what you have to say about “retro-expansion.”