Mike Gold: Too Much Is More Than Enough
Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was this publisher called Harvey Comics. They were in business to sell comic books to children: Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Hot Stuff, Sad Sack, Little Dot, Richie Rich… well, mostly Richie Rich. As in “I counted 47 different Richie Rich titles from Harvey Comics, not including the daily and Sunday newspaper strip.” Most were bi-monthlies and quarterlies, so to be fair I doubt Harvey released more than a four or five Richie Rich titles every week.
The modern-day equivalent to Richie Rich is Wolverine, who appears in dozens of Marvel titles each month. The sundry Avengers titles, the sundry X-Men titles, Wolverine, Savage Wolverine, Wolverine Max, Wolverine’s Bank Vaults, Wolverine Dollars and Cents… When it comes to that mad little bugger, well, no unemployment lines for him.
Batman is almost as heavily exposed: his various titles, his “family” titles including Batgirl, Batwoman, Nightwing, Robin, blah blah blah. He’s got Batmen stashed all over the world; perhaps the universe. Multiverse. Whatever.
Spider-Man, Iron Man, certainly Captain America… there’s no shortage of work for these guys, either. So why am I bitching? What, am I opposed to the free market?
Aside from the fact that the “free market” is a bigger fantasy than the multiverse, I do not begrudge a publisher its opportunity for success. However, there is the element of uniqueness that makes comics fun. That element is lost, rather rapidly, with overexposure. There are something in the neighborhood of 7200 members of the Green Lantern corps, and if I’m not mistaken all but the Moslem dude has his own comic book. Sarah Palin just found a power ring in her Rice Krispies.
When was the last time there was a truly original, a truly unique, successful superhero launch? Spawn and Savage Dragon? That was 20 years ago. DC Comics rebooted its universe 14 times since then. Before that? What, maybe Judge Dredd (depending upon your definition of “superhero”)? That was back in 1977, when Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President.
Have we lost our originality? No, we simply don’t have publishers with either the backbone or the resources to pull it off. So instead we clone ourselves. The major superheroes are little more than a fourth generation photocopy of what made them unique.
If the marketplace supports mega-multiple titles for its half-dozen most popular characters, why shouldn’t publishers meet that demand?
Because, today, Richie Rich is not being published at all.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
“Sarah Palin just found a power ring in her Rice Krispies.”
That would be SO cool! All she would have to do is will that the news media had to report the truth and not what they wish was true. Oh wait… with what came out of the 25,000 pages of her email, maybe she already has one.
“Because, today, Richie Rich is not being published at all.”
I think that the reason that Richie Rich is not being published today has less to do with over-exposure than changing market taste. Was Sad Sack over-exposed? He’s not being published either.
“I can see OA from my back yard.”
Yeah, Sad Sack was overexposed. Not like Richie, but there were zillions of Sad Sack titles. Baby Sad Sack, Navy Sad Sack, Sarge, General… all sorts of stuff.
I think the trick here is property management. Superman and Spider-Man aren’t the same as they were in the 60s and 70s; Richie and possibly even Sad Sack and certainly Casper all could have survived by focusing the readership on a reasonable number of titles, avoiding the “Did my kid read this? screw it!” concern while slowly keeping them up with the times.
The only series that I think needs a new title is IDW’s G1 Transformers universe and I want an ongoing prequel series because the piecemeal approach that IDW is using makes it a lot more confusing that it needs to be, all because there are a lot of characters in that franchise that have never been really used well and in some cases not at all.
When I look at the size of some of the franchises, I wonder how any younger fan can even follow them. One of the reasons I’ve bought so many titles for so long is that I’ve been fortunate enough to have my income rise with the cover prices. Back when I bought all my comics at the newsstand, a really big week would have been ten comics, which would have cost…three bucks in 1976.
In 1977, I was buying every single DC super-hero book, plus Warlord, because hey, Mike Grell. That year, buying all the Batman books meant eight issues of Detective (bi-monthly, then 8-a-year, then bi-monthly again), twelve issues of Batman and six of Batman Family for a total annual cost of about $12.80 (BF was a dollar–the other two started the year at 30 cents but jumped to 35 somewhere around the June cover dates). Oh, and six or seven Brave and Bolds. So call it fifteen bucks for the year.
Buying all the Superman books cost a little more because Superman and Action were both monthlies, plus there was the $1.00 bi-monthly Superman Family. And if you threw in World’s Finest, which had the Superman/Batman teamups and was another dollar every other month, well, you were still only spending about $35 per year to buy all the Superman and Batman books.
Today, we have Detective, Batman, Superman and Action at $3.99, Batman and Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Batman Inc., Supergirl, Superboy, Worlds’ Finest, Red Hood and the Outlaws and Legends of the Dark Knight at $2.99. That’s $43 a month just for Superman and Batman-related titles. That list includes several titles I don’t buy, but doesn’t include the occasional $4.99 annual or the upcoming $7.99 Detective Comics #19 (because God forbid we should put “900” on the cover in the New 52).
Boy, I hope I didn’t screw up any of that HTML.
So, what does 2013’s twelve-year-old fan do? “Hey, Mom, five Bat-books came in this week. Can I have another nine bucks?”