It's apparent I haven't written for this blog in...oh, seventy years. Two and a half years, to be exact. I was thinking last week that, being between books at the moment (I'm in edits on one and pre-writing on another), maybe I would start up a new blog. Then I remembered I've had a whole bunch of blogs before and maybe I should just go back to this one.
Rather than doing anything remotely ambitious, I figured I'd talk about comic books.
For the record, the novel I'm starting to put notes together on has a lot to do with comics, comic book conventions and how fantasy narrative works. So I have an excuse.
In case you haven't heard, DC Comics, a company whose output makes up probably 40% of the floppies produced every year ("floppies" here refers to single issue comics, usually between twenty four and thirty six pages long with half that again in advertising, much of which is for other comics or comics-related merch), is about to do a company-wide relaunch of its superhero universe, releasing fifty-two number one issues in the month of September. If you're a comic book fan, this is huge news. In fact, it's hard to think of a cognate to this in any other form of entertainment.
Of course, it's a marketing move. Maybe not 100% a calculated marketing move, but largely a marketing move. DC has perennially lagged behind its competitor, Marvel Comics, in market share and this is what they're doing about it. Many of the characters are getting redesigned. Most if not all of them are going to be younger than they were before. And they're shedding the years of convoluted "continuity" that's come before, a sort of narrative baggage that the characters have been carting around for decades.
Continuity is another tricky thing to explain to an outsider, so let's try an analogy. If you were going to start reading the Harry Potter books (or watching the movies), you wouldn't start with the fourth one. Built into the fourth book is the expectation that you've read the previous three; there's a degree to which the narrative won't function if you don't bring that other knowledge in with you.
Now imagine that Harry Potter books have been coming out for fifty years. And that Harry lives in the same narrative universe as characters from the Narnia books, the Dark is Rising books and Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, each with fifty years of constant narrative trailing behind them. That's what comics continuity is like: dozens of characters who have amassed fifty years worth of intertwining, often contradictory stories (hard-core fans will do amazing mental acrobatics to reconcile discrepancies in continuity, as will comic book writers, many of whom started out as hard-core fans). And any of these stories can be called up into relevance at any time.
You can see where this might be daunting for a new fan. Someone who walks out of the Green Lantern movie, goes to their local store and picks up the latest issue will be left to stare blankly at a story that includes not just Green Lanterns, but Yellow, Orange, Violet, etc. This Lucky Charms of Lanterns situation is easily understood by someone (like me) who's been following the book for years. But it's illegible to a noob.
So in an attempt to bring in new readers, DC is ditching most (although not all; back to that later) of its continuity. And they're offering same-day digital availability of all of their titles, a move which might be more significant for the industry than everything else.
All of this has caused calamity within the comic book community and has gotten some amount of press in the world outside. A lot of fans are pissed off about the erasure of continuity. Which makes sense, especially for DC fans, because the DC universe is, in a way, about its continuity. Not only does DC trump Marvel in having superhero legacies (many DC icons have been, at one time or another, replaced by their sidekicks or someone new picking up the torch. See Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Starman. Of course, most of these torch-passings have been reversed eventually), the DC universe itself has been in a sort of existential crisis (that was an inside joke) about the contradictions in its shared narrative for decades. In an effort to "make it all fit", they've tried multiple dimensions, hypertime and the occasional rewriting of the timeline from scratch. Even this relaunch doesn't come out of nowhere: it supposedly flows out of the "Flashpoint" miniseries that wraps up tomorrow. We'll see about that.
But leaving aside the debates within the comics community (pants? no pants?), the question of whether or not this will bring in new readers remains. And while I'm rooting for this to be a huge success, here are a couple hurdles I can see.
1. Floppies are bite-sized. Most of us have watched enough television that we can handle serialized narrative. You hit the "Oh snap!" moment at the end of an episode of Lost, the screen goes black and you understand you'll have to wait a week for another fix. Most of us probably prefer binging our way through a full DVD worth one Saturday on the couch, but the waiting is part of a novelty cost: we get to see it right away. Then it's hurry up and wait.
But imagine if each episode of Lost was a half hour long. And they came out once a month. That's about the rate narrative gets doled out in comics.
For those of us who have been comics readers for a while, this is fine. We have several titles we follow and there's a ritual to going down the comic book store on a Wednesday and seeing which of the titles you dig has come out, then rushing home and moving incrementally ahead in the adventures of your favorite characters. And because the stories are going on in a shared universe, it becomes a little easier to keep incredibly long-form narratives in your head. Something that happens to Spider-Man may be referenced in a Captain America or Iron Man comic.
But these are very ingrained habits, and are foreign to most non-comic book readers. I'm not saying someone who doesn't read comics can't do this, I'm saying it may be difficult to get them to start. I started my wife (who is much smarter than me) reading The Unwritten and she really liked it. Until she had to wait every month for a new issue. By the time the next issue came out, the last one was more or less forgotten.
Among comics fans, there's a somewhat recent phenomenon referred to as "waiting for trade". What this means is that you stop following a comic on a monthly basis and wait for a whole storyline to be collected in a trade paperback. This is a much more natural form of reading and what most people probably prefer. The switch to reading in fits and starts, even with DC's commitment to getting books out on time, is going to be a tough sell to most readers.
2. The insularity of "top creative talent". It should first be noted that there have been numerous attempts to bring non-comics writers into the industry. Writers from Lost, Battlestar Gallactica and other series, as well as bigwigs like Stephen King and Kevin Smith have been given the keys to the shiniest narrative toys and told to let loose.
The results? Mixed at best. But the sales have generally been strong.
I will be the first to admit that many non-comics writers have failed to take advantage of some of the particular opportunities presented by the comics medium. I will also admit that most established, high end comics writers excel at exactly what they're doing. But outside of the industry, they're not marquee names.
This is particularly problematic within the DC relaunch, where many of the would-be marquee names are remnants of the nineties comic boom, their names largely forgotten (or never known) to the outside world and often snickered at within the industry. DC may have a hard enough time getting the fans excited about a book by Fabian Nicieza or Scott Lobdell (both keepers of the sprawling X-Men franchise through most of my teen years), much less getting anyone else's attention.
Yes, what this means is I want the writing staff of The Wire to take over the Batman books. Nothing against Treme, but seriously: right now.
3. The ladies were not excited about pants.
When the relaunch was announced, one of the points DC editorial stressed was that all of its female characters would now wear pants. Not hot pants, regular pants.
In the minds of DC editorial, this seemed to be a major victory for feminism and a guaranteed increase in female readership. Of course, as game time approached, they reversed this decision and re-de-pantsed Wonder Woman. But pants (or tights, or whatever) are mostly colored in skin in a comic book, and the objections to Wonder Woman go deeper than the fact that she wears short shorts. It might not be a bad idea to enforce an editorial mandate against up-skirt shots and down-shirt shots by DC artists. If DC wants to really bring female readers on board, there are two major ways to do it.
Female writers and female artists.
I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing Wonder Woman, because I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing pretty much anything. But this should have been
an opportunity for DC to frontline its current roster of female creators (which I think is pretty much Gail Simone, Nicola Scott and Amanda Conner) and bring new female creators into the fray. They should have been recruiting from all over the industry and beyond. What about Carla Speed McNeill writing the Legion of Superheroes? Or Karen Russell writing Element Girl? Hell, why not Sophia Coppola writing Catwoman? DC had a chance to bring in the ladies and all they had to offer was pants.
4. We're scrapping continuity. Well, not all the continuity. Marvel put out three huge superhero movies this year. DC put out one. Now not everyone was super-keen on Green Lantern, but it wasn't horrible and while it wasn't wildly successful, it wasn't an utter failure.
Folks coming to the continuity-free New 52 after digging on the Green Lantern movie might be surprised when they pick up Issue #1 of Green Lantern and find the man slinging the ring isn't Hal Jordan but Sinestro. Who is technically a Korugarian and not a man, but let's not split hairs.
Point here is, not all previous continuity is being jettisoned. It looks like all the continuity that DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns likes (or wrote) is still in play. So rather than a clean slate, we get a slightly muddied slate.
This brings up a numbers issue I'd like to address, one that illustrates just how dire the straits of comic books are right now. The lynchpin of the relaunch, Justice League #1, written by Johns and drawn by Jim "I only draw a comic every five years and it sells like crack" Lee, was pre-ordered at 200,000 copies. Biggest pre-order in a long long time. The comics industry is tumescent over numbers like that. The Green Lantern movie was pretty much considered a failure within the movie industry. It grossed $18 million in its first weekend. That means, figuring for a modest $10 ticket price, 1.8 million people saw the movie in its first weekend, almost ten times the number that will read what looks to be the best selling comic in three years.
I've gone on long enough. I'm hoping to post again on all the reasons you should get your ass down to the comic book store this month and start reading DC comics, but for now, while I'm pulling for them, I wish they'd gone a little bigger and a little smarter.
I'm also glad the Green Lantern books aren't getting the big continuity wipe. Because I'm a huge GL nerd.
Coming very soon: reasons you, yes you, should go buy some DC Comics starting tomorrow.
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