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Can We Save the Superheroes?: an audio report by Andy Waterfield

This week, I had the pleasure of making my first contribution to The Pod Delusion, a weekly podcast about, well, interesting things, from a skeptical/rationalist perspective. I chose to discuss the present state of the mainstream comics industry. An edited version of my report can be heard as part of the full episode below.

The full report can be heard here:

Oh, and here’s the original transcript:

“Hi, I’m Andy, and I’m a comics reader.”

Sounds like something you might say whilst stood in a circle at a support group, doesn’t it? Even though I’ve been reading comics since I was four, I kept it to myself for the most part until I was 15. This comics ‘closet’ was the result of a combination of popular stereotypes, and the bizarre drive, peculiar to adolescents, and unremarkable adults, to avoid any pastime that might distinguish them from their peers in any way. I didn’t read comics, because nobody else I knew read comics, and I’d be damned if I was going to stick my neck out for what is a fairly solitary pursuit by it’s very nature.

I’m 24 now, and I still read a ton of comics. It’s not something I include on my CV, nor do I slip it into introductions as social gatherings, but if I’m wearing shorts, people tend to spot the S-shield tattooed on my left calf. It’s red on black, denoting Superboy, rather than Superman. Yeah, I like comics enough to have a Superboy tattoo.

I love comics. Because I love comics, I hate the term graphic novel. It’s a term for apologists’, the kind of people who are still stuck in the mindset I had at 14, scared to tell people they read comics, for fear that people might see them as intellectually or emotionally stunted. In it’s use as a blanket term for the entire medium, graphic novel implies that the form is limited to what would, in prose, be called novels. This is clearly bollocks, as anyone who has read the magnificent and heartbreaking biography Maus, will attest. It is an account, beautifully crafted by Art Spiegellman, of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. Nor is Joe Sacco’s astonishingly attentive and nuanced comics journalism an example of a graphic novelist at work. Comics is the term that people understand, so comics is the term I use.

Oh, and when I was little I asked an assistant in the Peterborough branch of WH Smiths whether they had any graphic novels. She gave me a bit of a look, then asked, “How graphic do you want?” So, yeah, pretentious and useless term, so I won’t use it.

As I was saying, I love comics. I love that a handful of people, or in some cases, only one, can create stories of incredible scope and imagination. I love that comics force both sides of the brain to work together, in order to process words and pictures in unison. Most especially, I love how comics have so often been home to the cutting edge of popular culture. Like I said, the only limit comics creators have is their imaginations, the edges of the page, and the skill of the artist. That’s why Hollywood spends tens of millions of dollars, and puts scores of people to work for years, on telling a story Jack Kirby could’ve rattled out in a few weeks in his basement studio.

I’m a comics evangelist, and I want to put comics into as many hands as possible. I want comics to be as varied and surprising as possible. In the Far East, this is already the case. In Japan and South Korea, there are all sorts of comics, available in all sorts of places, for all sorts of people. There are even comics about fishing. Fishing! Of course, over there, they’re called manga, but it’s the same medium. They just read in a different direction.

Meanwhile, here in the English-speaking world, comics have to be sought out, either at specialist retailers, or in little alcoves of bookshops. The reasons for the specialist retailers are manifold, but I’ll try and break it down for you here.

The first point to understand, is that a great many comics readers are utterly irrational about their consumption of comics, their relationship with the medium, and the industry. For a start, a single issue of a comic book will cost them $2.99. That’s about £1.83 at the present rate of exchange, but non-US readers pay a mark-up for import costs. Said comic usually contains 32 pages of story, so unless it’s really dense, you’re looking at five to ten minutes of entertainment for what, on the minimum wage, is about twenty minutes of labour. They cost this much, partly because a lot of what the industry calls “the core readership” are extremely concerned with paper quality. Not storytelling, or art, but paper quality. Oh, and most of the time, you don’t get a full story either. Most mainstream comics stories are told in four to eight issue ‘arcs’, so you’re probably gonna have to wait till the leaves turn a different colour to find out how the story ends. Oh, and there are adverts. Lots of them.

If you don’t want to jump through the inane hoops of the weird world of ‘floppies’, as single issues are called, you can opt for the trade paperback, which collects one or two story arcs, has no ads, and is usually cheaper than the floppies would have cost you. Except that is comes out months after the final collected issue hit the stands, or sometimes over a year later, so any exciting upcoming story you read about on your favourite publisher’s website is going to take at least a year to get into a sensible, ad-free, non-shite format. This is especially important to note, given that the largest of the US comics publishers, Marvel and DC, are always extremely keen to get mainstream news to cover their latest event. Apparently they labour under the assumption that interested parties reading said article, will maintain that interest long enough to track down a comic shop. Then, upon finding the first issue of said exciting new story, our hero is expected not to balk at the cover price. Assuming they’re ready to pay almost three dollars, often more, for said floppy, Marvel and DC expect them to come back every month for the next five months, to feel the full impact of the Death of Captain America, or Batman RIP, or whatever they’re peddling that month.

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about superheroes, it’s because the bulk of comics sales are made up of superhero comics. It’d take me an hour to explain why that is, so just go with it, eh?

Also, because comics are so bloody expensive, it’s rare to see anyone under the age of fifteen in a comic shop, unless they’re with a parent or guardian, who is either feeding their own habit, or trying to find something for their young charge. The trouble is, because so much of the core readership is getting older, they’re not content with the kind of clear cut, good versus evil, stuff they grew up on. But they still really want to read superhero comics. And that’s how superhero comics got nasty. Take Identity Crisis, DC’s flagship event book of 2004. In the first of it’s seven issues, the Elongated Man’s wife, Sue Dibny, is brutally murdered, and it emerges that Dr Light is the chief suspect, since he raped her years prior. That’s right, DC Comics’ biggest superhero story of 2004 was about the hunt for a man who had raped the Elongated Man’s wife, and thus was the most likely suspect in the investigation around her death. It had Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman on the cover, they of Saturday morning cartoon and lunch box fame, but it was definitely not for kids.

Of course, the publishers slap these issues with ratings, using their own ratings systems, but these aren’t always easy to spot, and most consumers assume that a comic with Superman, hero to children the world over, is aimed at, or at the very least, suitable, for children, or at least older children. Unfortunately, that’s far from the reality, in many cases.

So, what have we got so far?

• Specialist stores make most published comics all but inaccessible.

• Superhero comics account for the majority of available material.

• Pricing makes them far more expensive than most people are willing to pay, especially given competition for their time and money from the internet, video games, movies, etc. And they get adverts.

• Aging fanbase of faux-sophisticates want ever more adult stories about the characters they loved as children.

What am I missing? Oh, yeah. The vast majority of mainstream superheroes are men, and the women are all too frequently seen wearing glorified underwear, and heels, where the men have some form of spandex body suit, and often body armour or other sensible, rad stuff you might want to wear while dodging gunfire. Also, what woman, knowing she was likely going to be fighting, in mid-air, upside down, would wear a basque and briefs bearing the colours of the American flag? That’d be the Amazonian warrior princess and arch-feminist, Wonder Woman. Like I said, comics are utterly batshit.

To sum up, the comics industry is on it’s arse. Where the big books of the early 90s sold hundreds of thousands, often millions, of copies, the big books now sell tens of thousands. The core readership is either scaling back their buying, giving up completely, or dying. The industry needs to make it as easy and attractive as possible for new readers to get into comics, and fast, or they’re going the way of the dinosaurs.

The big players in the industry have been tentatively poking around at the concept of digital comics for over a decade now. Marvel started it when I was a teenager, posting key issues up on it’s website, so readers could check them out, then, hopefully, find a comic shop, buy it, and show up for the next five months to read the rest. We’ve heard that story before.

However, recent years have seen the decline of the physical format across the board. Newspapers have been dying a slow death for a decade, Amazon now shifts more e-books than physical format books, CD sales are laughable compared to a decade ago, and film and telly are shifting more and more in to the online world. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and if you’re listening to podcasts, you’re probably familiar with the obvious ones, like convenience, cost, storage, etc.

Basically, the comics industry needs to follow suit, and it needs to do it in a way that makes it’s wares easily available, easily affordable, and it’s often complex continuity accessible to new readers (Batman has been kicking hubcap thieves around alleyways since my Granddad was a lad. Like my Granddad, Bats has quite the history.). Obviously that last point isn’t a big deal for newer titles, of which there are many, most of which, especially on the independent side, have nothing to do with superheroes, but your average uninitiated punter associates comics with superheroes, so odds on they want to see someone bad get punched in the face by someone in skintight primary colours at some point in the proceedings.

DC made a big (in the comics world, at least) splash this week, with the announcement that they’d be relaunching their entire line, with all new numbering, in September. This means that every DC book that comes out in September this year, save for Flashpoint 5, which will kickstart the whole reboot, will be the beginning of a new story, with a new issue 1. It is the perfect opportunity for new readers to jump on board, and check out comics for themselves. After all, the likes of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are everywhere in our culture, even if most of us don’t bother with the medium they started in. Batman movies are huge. Superman sells endless t-shirts, and the story of his bloody adolescence supported a ten season teen drama series in Smallville. Fact is, the general public love superheroes, and this is a great moment for those casual fans to try comics.

“But what about all your earlier gripes?” I hear you cry. Well, the great thing about this move, is that DC is promising day and date digital release for every book in their entire line. What this means, is that the casual reader, or the hardcore reader who is ranting about comics from underneath his 14 feet of comics shelving, his little legs sandwiched between two stacks of yet more comics, need never set foot in a comic shop ever again. 

Let me clarify something here. I love comic shops, or at least the good ones. A good comic shop is full of helpful and knowledgeable staff, and other fans to talk comics with. That said, record shops were exactly the same, and chatting to the person behind the till when I bought CDs hasn’t stopped me abandoning physical format there. Either way, there’s always going to be a significant proportion of the readership who want to pay over the odds for a pamphlet containing a sixth of a story and a plethora of adverts. I wish those poor souls well.

Once people are sold on the radness of a weekly Batman fix (there are lots of Batman titles), they’re much more likely to start checking out what the rest of the medium has to offer. This could mean the mature material put out by DC’s Vertigo line, with fantastic titles like the feminist sci-fi epic, Y: The Last Man, or DMZ, which looks at life in a war-ravaged New York, not entirely unfamiliar to Kabul or Basra, or they could check out smaller publishers like Image, Oni Press, or Dark Horse. Either way, once they’re in the door, and enjoying the medium, with easy access to more material, it’s going to be a lot easier to get them to stay.

Now pricing is unclear at the moment. What we do know, is that DC won’t have to pay Diamond (comics’ only distributor – seriously) to get digital comics to shops. That means no warehouses to run, no drivers to pay, no fuel to expend. Digital comics are not only super efficient, but they’re much more environmentally friendly, what with the no paper thing too. Because digital comics don’t need to be bought from brick and mortar comic shops, the bit of the cover price that went to paying retailers’ leases, employees, and other bills, as well as profits, is unnecessary too. To put it mildly, digital comics should be a lot bloody cheaper than physical format. Oh, and no bloody adverts. Seriously, if they put ads into a paid product, they’re taking the piss.

Since they’ll be sold through the digital marketplace, it should be relatively straightforward for the paying punter, be they a parent or not, to sort through the available fare by age rating, or even by content. This is especially important if titles geared toward older teens or adults make reference to sexual assault or rape, so survivors can decide ahead of time whether they want to read something which may trigger them. DC though, have yet to announce how the marketplace will be organised.

The really awkward bit, and the bit which we might have to wait, or even fight for, is the format. Just as consumers of digital music now expect to be sold DRM-free music in a format they can open and enjoy or manipulate with the software of their choosing, so too should consumers of digital comics. Unfortunately, DC is owned by Warner, and Marvel by Disney, so as far as the big two publishers go, I’m not holding my breath.

The response from the notoriously stubborn, insular, and self-entitled world of comics fandom has been predictable. There’s much hand-wringing about how the reboot will throw away years of cherished continuity, rendering their bizarre sense of superiority over readers who haven’t been obsessing about X-men trivia since the late-70s entirely obsolete. Many have cast their Wolverine mugs into the air in anguish, appalled that DC dares to entertain the notion that new readers are desirable. Apparently the prevailing wisdom in some circles is that a business, when faces with dwindling sales, should simple try to sell more stuff to the customers it already has, and coddle them with whatever nostalgic crap they demand until the last one is buried with his mint holofoil covered copy of Uncanny X-men 300.

Here’s what I have to say to the loud and conservative bleating from comics fandom: Shut your stupid mouth. The comics industry has been dying a slow death for two decades now. It has pandered to your bizarre need to read the same bloody stories over and over again, with few exceptions, on ever more expensive and inexplicable paper stock, for my entire life! As an existing readership, we alone cannot hope to financially sustain this industry, which has, for so many of us, provided us with characters and stories that have entertained us, moved us, inspired us, and in rare and wonderful cases, illuminated our worlds and ourselves. The second largest comics publisher, with arguably the finest history, DC Comics, is seeking to help new readers to join us, because this stuff, these strange and wonderful tales, in this deceptively simple, yet endlessly subtle and complex medium, should not be horded jealously away. These stories ought to be shared.

I’m going to close with a quote from Grant Morrison, easily my favourite comics creator, and a long time evangelist of the medium. He said this in 1992, but now, nearly two decades hence, it’s more relevant than ever. Except the Forbidden Planet bit. Best to ignore that. Also, imagine I’m saying this in a Glasgow accent, with a knowing smile crossing my bald head.

“I really do think that the battlelines have been drawn. I want to see comics as apop medium, I want to see the Forbidden Planet empire reaching out to every city in the world like McDonald’s. I want to see comic creators and retailers in Vogue and on telly, but ranged against that brilliant global vision are the cornershop bankers who just want to sneak home with their brown paper bags and their Betty Page video’s and who’re just desperate to keep comics at the level of stamp collecting and train-spotting because they can’t face up to the glare of the real world. Which side will you be on? — its as simple as that.”

This has been Andy Waterfield reporting for the Pod Delusion.

If you’ve found yourself strangely entranced by my ranting, you might want to check out my webzine and podcast about punk rock and comics, I Live Sweat, at ilivesweat.tumblr.com