Random thought of the week: Leinil Francis Yu is the new Travis Charest.
What is it about comics that draws us in? I mean, with all the entertainment choices at our disposal, why are we spending any money on comics? They lack permanence: rather flimsy, easily torn paper stock and three staples. That’s it. Novels are also paper, but for about $2 more you get anywhere from 150 to 500 more pages, bound solidly with glue. CDs and DVDs, with proper care, can last a lifetime. Video games? I plop my $49.99 down for Madden once every three years or so. I go through controllers and even game systems faster than that. Comics? I read ‘em and I box ‘em. Oh yeah, no hermetically sealed polybags and chemically treated cardboard backers for me. You know why? Because I will never get rid of them so I don’t give a damn if they get slightly dog-eared. 
I’m not trying to pay for my theoretical future kids’ college with Youngblood #1, Aliens Vs Predator #3 and Action Comics #700 (worst cover for a milestone issue ever?). Sure, there’s Overstreet, there’s online grading sites, but when you get right down to it, they’re only worth whatever you or I decide we’re willing to pay for them. And nobody’s offered me a dollar amount I’d be willing to sell my whole collection to receive. And it really doesn’t have to be dollars, I’d accept payment in Euros, Yen, Pesos, Lira–even unmarked non-sequential Canadian pennies.
No my friends, we buy them because we LOVE them. This isn’t a hobby you just kinda drift into, pick up a Birds of Prey and a couple of things with big a X on the cover and never come back. You buy them because you can’t go without it. DVDs and theatrical movies require too much commitment. You have to have 2+ hours at your disposal, more if you’re going to and from the theatre. Comics? You can read ‘em on the crapper while pinching out that chimichanga from Tuesday. How great is that? Pre-heating the oven for your spectacular Pizza Rolls lunch? That’s going to take a good 10 minutes. You oughta be able to get in a Nightwing or Green Arrow or something not written by Bendis–save his stuff for the chimichangas. Heck, you could read the whole first trade of Batgirl in 10 minutes! And you’re only suspending your disbelief, unplugging yourself from the world of vice-presidential buckshot, Barry Bonds’ ass syringe and local news talking head who smile while describing the school buss accident that put 9 tots in the ER, for 10 minutes or as long as you want! You’re not stuck finishing the movie (in my case, I’m trying to catch up on ‘24‘, so if I start I’m usually hosed for the next 5 hours) or waiting through crappy previews for crappy movies you don’t want to see in front of the overpriced remake of the free television show from 1981 that you apparently DID want to see. You control your entertainment destiny.
Or do you? Because when I’m at any of my local comic shops and strike up a conversation with the clerks or patrons, I hear the same things from everyone. “This book sucks. Why do they keep letting (insert Fabian Nicieza’s name here) write anything?” Or “Who thought having John Byrne pencil this was a good idea? I mean, I’m all about legends, and I respect them, but I don’t want the Red Sox rolling Ted Williams’ headless corpse up to the plate for one more at bat, you know?”
But the fact remains that we, the Readers, don’t often think on how the whole thing works, and we have even less say in the way our chosen hobby works. We’re at the mercy of a great many factors that we have little, if any, control over. We have Corporations, with Board Members and Shareholders and other evil denizens of Mephisto’s realm, who tell their Publishers to tell their Editors-In-Chiefs to have their Line Editors tell their Creators that the readers want more Wolverine, more Batman, more clones of Gambit, more Plastic Man, and more Cowbell, baby!
And we, the Readers, follow that system like lemmings off a cliff.
We let Diamond hold a monopoly on shipping that sees them skim more off the top than Tony Soprano takes from his earners. There’s probably a whole column on Diamond waiting to be done, I’m going to be doing some consulting on this point before I get real heavy on it, but there’s no way having only one distribution company in the whole industry is a good thing. It’s bad for small press, it jacks up the price we end up paying and above all else, it’s just damn un-American. Communists!
We let them sell us a bill of goods that include summer blockbuster events that read like, “And One Shall Surely Die When A Child Shall Lead Them Into Space Where No One Can Hear You Scream”¦this summer”¦you must buy everything from Power Pack to Supreme Power”¦brought to you by the fan favorite team of Chris Claremont and Kevin Smith with Frank Miller and Whilce Portacio”¦like we said, coming 3 summers from now”¦From the House Of Ideas We Reuse Every 6 Years.”
We let them get away with some shoddy quality control. It’s the 21st Century, the Y2K bug is over, you can print pictures from your telephone that look better than what you could get from an actual camera 10 years ago. And yet I still end up with comics with off-set printing. Words come out so fuzzy they make me think Mary Jane has mutant powers to create earthquakes or Aunt May has epilepsy. Luckily, as a retired Herald of Galactus, Aunt May can’t get epilepsy, and Mary Jane doesn’t wear an ‘X’, so I can safely assume that the printers screwed up my book.
We have editorial teams who can’t be bothered to make sure their writers can spell and use proper grammar, or at least employ the spell check feature EVERY word processing program has. They can’t double-check the letterer for accuracy and completeness, or get more than 3 consecutive issues out of Ryan Sook.
We have writers who can’t get over Stan Lee. I love Stan. I love looking for him in every Marvel movie. It’s like “Where’s Waldo” without the striped cap. But even people who DON’T read Spiderman (I don’t hyphenate it, and I don’t want to hear about it) know that with great power comes great responsibility. This isn’t pro-wrestling. There’s no need to market the same catch phrase for year after year and generation after generation. Why is it OK to change his powers, change his costume, but never change his dialogue? It’s a paradox; some writers seem to regurgitate the same stuff over and over and are unable or unwilling to embrace change. Others seem unable to leave things alone. Every new creative team reworks the costumes, reassembles the teams, and especially in Marvel, reboots the book’s continuity. Green Goblin just died in the last issue of Jeff Ritte’s run on Spectacular Spiderman? No problem, he’ll rise from the dead when Jim Trabold takes over next month. And there will be much power and responsibility for Pete to fret over. Everything changes and yet it’s always still the same.
And the whole thing comes back on itself. Marketing is a joke, so nobody outside of comics is seeking the new adventures of the Blue Beetle or Nova. There’s no cross-promotion between the motion picture industry and the comics industry. Old readers become old people with old problems–car notes, home mortgages, kids’ braces and glasses, school tuition. So they cut back, and because the industry hasn’t attracted new readers, the Corporation and the Board freaks out, they demand sweeping changes, which we have come to expect. The books we actually DO like get new creative teams or cancelled altogether, which just pisses us off and sends us to the XBOX or PS2 or the DVD player. They make the books “New Reader Friendly” despite the fact that the few new readers don’t want them anyway. Marvel created a whole line for new readers, retelling the old stories in new ways under a thin veneer that reads, “Free of the chains of continuity.” Yeah, the Ultimate Cashcow is also the Ultimate Slap In The Face. But we buy it. The Distinguished Competition embraces their continuity for about five years at a time. And then all bets are off. Zero Hour pushed the reset button, One Year Later pushes the Fast Forward button, and inside three years they’ll hit the Rewind button and put Dick Grayson back in the green underwear. The only character immune to any of this is the Martian Manhunter, a character so ridiculous even the Space/Time Continuum can’t figure out what to do with him. But we buy it.
We buy it, and we perpetuate the cycle. Now, we could cast our vote. We don’t go to the Comic Shop without our ballots. The ballots have the faces of dead Presidents on them, ones that actually won popular elections. We could quit buying the crap. We could demand better stories, tighter continuity, stronger targeted lines of books, and better art and production quality. We could bring down the Diamond Monopoly, revitalize our industry and attract legions of new Readers, which means new revenue, with “The focused totality of our Purchasing Powersâ„¢.” But we won’t. We can’t be without it, bad as it can be. We’re on 4-color crack and we don’t give a damn. We’ll stand around in the Comic Shop and complain to all within earshot that Thunderbolts was better under Busiek, that canceling She-Hulk just to relaunch it despite it being EXACTLY the same makes no sense, that Wolverine was better before he had an Origin. We bemoan how Superman can still get away with wearing his red undies on the outside of his tights in Dubbya’s America, how even the Queer Eye fellas can’t fix the Martian Manhunter, and how every woman on the Outsiders boils down to being incredibly freakin’ strong.
And we’ll buy it all again next week too. All of this is just the prologue.
Welcome to my nightmare.
