Mike Gold: Icons
Not counting reprints of the newspaper strips, Tarzan of the Apes has been in the hands of no less than seven U.S. comic book publishers. That’s roughly one outfit per decade. Most enjoyed long and healthy runs by the standards of the time, legal quibbles notwithstanding.
Currently The Lone Ranger is in the hands of Dynamite Publishing. In those same 70 years, John, Tonto, Silver and Scout enjoyed lengthy runs at Western Publishing (Dell and Gold Key, which were two separate companies) and a shorter term at Topps.
The 1970s property Planet of the Apes has been kept alive by comics publishers, initially Marvel and now Boom! Studios.
The Shadow? Five comics publishers, extending the life of the original pulp and radio hero by more than a half-century… and counting.
The original Twilight Zone television show was cancelled in 1964; the Western Publishing comic book series ran until 1982.
The list goes on and on. What is it about the comic book medium that keeps iconic characters and concepts alive when their originating media cannot?
Math.
Television audiences are measured in units of one million, and very generally speaking you need at least ten of them to survive. Movie audiences are measured in units of ten million dollars and you need lots of those to survive. Mass-market paperbacks, radio drama, pulp magazines and newspaper continuity strips are virtually dead. In most cases, more than just “virtually.”
Comic book audiences are measured in units of one thousand, and these days you can achieve regular publishing with only five or ten such units, depending upon costs and foreign revenues. It’s a lot easier to grab five thousand readers than it is ten million viewers or one hundred million dollars at the box office. All you have to do is appeal to each property’s hardcore audience.
And this is why comics thrive. Appealing to the hardcore, to the most faithful, requires reaching and maintaining a higher standard of entertainment. Us fanboys and fangirls are damn picky. Unlike the movies we do not necessarily demand “name” talent, but we do demand that the writers and artists remain faithful to the source material while telling their stories in a contemporary manner – while being awe-inspiring at all times.
In comics, we’ve got a special effects budget that has no limit and our turn-around time is usually shorter than that of other media, e-books notwithstanding. We can stay on the cutting edge. We are limited only by our skill and our imagination.
Most important, we have fewer cigar-chomping asshole businesspeople mindlessly calling the shots. Well, certainly at those publishers that aren’t owned by major Hollywood studios.
I’d be impressed – very impressed – if I were to see a Zorro television series or a movie that is half as good as the storyline just completed by Matt Wagner and John K. Snyder III in Zorro Rides Again. But, trust me, I won’t be holding my breath.
When it comes to the icons of heroic fantasy, we do it better.
We do it best.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
It’s the eternal question – where’s the balance between doing an absolutely perfect adaptation that will only appeal to current fans, and making changes that only MAY open the character/story up to more people, at the risk of alienating your core (guaranteed?) audience?
DC took a BIG risk in the New 52 by doing a great deal of the latter, and it appears to have paid off. As good as the stuff Dynamite et al have been doing with the classic characters, one wonders if the number of readers could be opened up a bit if things were modernized.
NOW’s not-so-recent Green Hornet book may be the best update of a classic character to come along in a long while. The recent Flash Gordon, not so much. Garth Ennis’ Dan Dare was stellar, but was hobbled by being virtually unknown in the US.
Ennis’s Dan Dare WAS great, but you’re right: I was well familiar with the character. I think newcomers who have any experience reading contemporary comics will get the cultural grounding — the British traditions — but I’m not sure they’d be as appreciative of the characters themselves.
Dynamite has, I think, done varying degrees of modernization. Not crazy about the changes in The Spider, I think I’m more tolerant of Flash Gordon than you are (I like the Ming mini-series), The Shadow appears to be a nice pastiche of the radio and pulp versions, although I’d advocate a stronger use of the supporting cast. But I think The Shadow defies modernization. Zorro also defies modernization, but the approach we’ve seen in the recent Zorro Rides Again is quite contemporary in style and technique.
As for the New 52, I’d liked perhaps a dozen of the titles by the third month, but since then I’ve probably cut that list in half at best. That’s pretty much back to the number of DCU titles I liked prior to the reboot.
Dynamite’s Shadow is awesome. I think I read Ennis is leaving it, though; if true, I’ll be bummed.
His Dan Dare was fantastic, too, but like you said, a reader not familiar with the character might not get it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though I was disappointed by pretty much every other Virgin book I looked at.