Comic shops are fickle creatures. A couple of bad experiences and you won’t have a shop for long. Bad management can cripple a store too. Does your market buy on average 30 issues of Uncanny X-Men every month? If so, why are you ordering 60 issues every month? My man Mike has a pretty good handle on this. He keeps an eye on what he sells and orders accordingly. He seldom has more than about six extra issues of any single title from any given month, except for Spider-man stuff. He’s a big fan of that wall-crawling menace. Less overhead means he’s selling most of what he orders. And he’s usually able to order back issues if I missed something, so we both make out (though I don’t think the discount for special orders is as good as he gets for advance orders). But one thing he hears me say an awful lot is: “I’ll wait for the trade”. It’s my mantra these days. And its also part of a paradox, like which came first, the chicken or the egg. Science has deduced that the egg in fact came first, and that the chicken that hatched was a mutation of the bird that laid it. See? Chickens are mutants. That explains two things: why I don’t eat chicken, and Beak, late of the Exiles. I always thought he was a ridiculously useless and uninteresting character but maybe I should have more respect for him; chicken-folk are apparently one of the earliest mutants. Maybe Jimmy Jack Howlett (aka Jimborine) skewered Beak’s great-great-great grandchicken under a cold and lonely Canadian moon all those years ago. Or maybe my allergy drugs are finally kicking in.
As I’ve stated many times, I’ve been collecting comics for years. I can’t help it. It’s like 4-color crack with ads for movies I have no intention of ever seeing. But they take up a lot of space in Castle Ritter, and lets face it, they’re rather flimsy. Another problem with them is inconsistent availability. I’m lucky enough to have a good comic store near me, but even they sometimes short order a particular issue or miniseries usually the second or third issue, for some reason. And sometimes, as was the case with Daughters of the Dragon, I don’t decide to read a series until it’s practically over with. By the way, I can’t get over how tremendously fun Daughters of the Dragon was and how tremendously tedious Battle For Bludhaven was, despite having the same writers on each. Anyway, I got lucky, and found all six issues of Daughters of the Dragon at the shop, but more often than not, I find all but issue 2 or 3. I have eyeballed many a miniseries in the back issue boxes at my store and others, and almost always there’s one lone issue that escapes me. It drives me nuts. So how do I fix that? I wait for the trade.
Other times it’s the publisher’s fault. It could be a case like Batman. I love Batman, he is certainly my favorite high-profile comic character (I tend to enjoy the B-listers like Starman and Moon Knight and Lobster Johnson most of the time). But the Bat Department at DC likes their tight continuity. So do I, of course, but my wallet balks at it. I can’t afford to buy three to five Batman titles, Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman, Batgirl (as applicable) and Birds of Prey every month. I stick with one, Birds of Prey, and await the trades for the big stories. I find it works best for me because sometimes a “tie in” issue has only a passing relation to the bigger Bat-universe story, and DC’s brilliant trade editors have been good about cutting away stuff that doesn’t directly tie into the main story. If Robin only deals with Batman’s crisis for 3 pages, the trade only has those three pages. Big cross-line or cross-company continuity is what makes DC’s universe so vibrant, but it also makes it cost prohibitive.
Then there are situations like the ones that seem to creep up at Marvel so often. They seem to rush into things too often. How many miniseries have they published in which “tie in” books come out BEFORE the events in the miniseries itself see the light of day? It’s happening right now in Civil War. Issue 4 of the main miniseries was pushed back, but the “tie in” issues are trudging forward. And need I remind anyone of the delays that occur with alarming frequency with both miniseries and regular ongoing books — Joe Quesada’s Daredevil: Father, Kevin Smith’s Black Cat, Warren Ellis’ Iron Man and Brian Bendis’ Secret Wars just to name a few? Marvel would be prudent to wait until an entire arc or miniseries was in hand, scripted, penciled and inked, before soliciting the title in Previews. But they don’t, apathy builds up and people just forget about ever going back for those last couple issues. I mean, Black Cat’s final issue came out a good couple of YEARS after the rest of it, I’m sure a few people waiting for the last chapter DIED before it ever saw print. Do I want to have to remember what issue I last read when Iron Man was shipping between two and six months late? Nope. I’ll just wait for the trade.
And therein lies the rub. If everybody just waits for the trade, there won’t BE any trades. Because comics are typically collected into a trade paperback format when there’s a certain level of interest in a series. And the obvious way to judge if folks are interested in a given series is, you guessed it, sales. So if we all stopped buying the Batman books and waited for the trades, we’d be waiting a long time. Why would DC want to print $14.99 to $19.99 version of a comic that none of us are buying for $3 a pop? They wouldn’t. I suppose that explains why I’m STILL waiting for a trade of the now two years old Firestorm series.
The shame of it is I believe most comic book reading individuals enjoy the format. You get one story, usually tightly plotted with some semblance of a beginning, middle, end story structure. You get it all in one handy volume, no searching through your own back issues for the elusive Punisher #103 that somehow got mixed in with your Ruse and Scion from CrossGen. There’s a feeling of permanence with trades, even the softcovers feel more durable in your hands. And the deluxe hardcovers, for the money, damn well ought to last for the rest of your life. I also think a collected edition gives (and I hesitate to say it) the comics a certain kind of legitimacy. Barnes and Noble, to my knowledge, doesn’t sell individual comic issues. If they do, the store by me hides them. But they have a surprisingly solid selection of trades. The Borders store near me has a rack of recent issues, often thumbed through and creased by children whose parents don’t love them enough to teach them to keep their hands off things. But they too have a solid amount of shelf space dedicated to trades, and it’s even more impressive when you factor in the manga books.
I’m extremely fortunate to have a store within a reasonable drive of that is, for all intents and purposes, a dedicate trade/graphic novel shop. It’s a pretty cool little place called Star Clipper. They have a wall of new release comic issues, and several lengthy aisles of NOTHING BUT TRADES! It’s like the heavenly choir singing to me when I walk in: manga, independents, everything you could ever think to ask for from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Devil’s Due and even some CrossGen still fill the shelves. Their location on an eclectic street with high pedestrian traffic doesn’t hurt — as any successful business owner will tell you, it’s all about location — but nobody goes into a store like that without some interest in comics. Could they exist without people like myself buying scores of individual issues regularly, giving the publishers some concrete numbers with which to gauge interest? Hard to say. But they do offer some unique pluses. The store is clean. As I said last week, I’ve been in stores with uneven floors, heavy smoke, and aisle too small for two skinny people to walk side by side in. They have an area with several chairs and don’t mind if you browse and read a little. You don’t get the, “Hey, this ain’t no library!” mentality there. The employees are all very knowledgeable and boast a huge range of interests. Some of them read indy stuff exclusively, some of them read the Marvel and DC offerings, some read a lot of manga. And most importantly I’ve observed them exercising some unbelievable patience, something you don’t get at a lot of stores no matter what they sell. From the guy who can’t remember what he was looking for to the lady whose knowledge of comics starts and stops with Archie and wonders if Sam and Twitch is appropriate for a 6 year old to the strange people who wander in from the street (and Delmar has some S-T-R-A-N-G-E people) they will answer any question put to them to the best of their ability and never criticize you for liking something they don’t.
In fact, it was in speaking with one of the good folks at Star Clipper that a comment was made regarding atmosphere. The appeal of their store beyond folks like me who just dig trades is that it’s inviting. They have unique snacks, well, unique unless you’re in Japan. Pocky (cracker or pretzel-like sticks dipped in chocolate), Japanese candy and even some Japanese soft drinks can all be had while perusing a copy of my man Chuck Austen’s “Boys of Summer” manga by the light of the window looking out on the famous Delmar Loop. So what, you say? So most comic stores I’ve been in don’t offer much in the way of refreshments, nor a place to encourage people to sit and read. That’s what I mean by inviting. Trades are a good way to get people to read comics. There seems to be a natural disdain for comics as an acceptable literary medium.
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The mass-market retailers usually hide the trades in some musty corner of the store, away from casual observation and so far removed from fiction as to be ridiculous. The Borders in St. Peters used to put trades and graphic novels in with the art books. Yet prose novels about the X-Men are perfectly acceptable to include as fiction? It’s this kind of mentality that keeps people AWAY from comics. |
People have looked down their noses at comics and since probably the late 50s, at least, regarded them as being subversive. And yet the movies based on Batman, Superman, Spider-man and the X-Men have made hundreds of millions of dollars. So if the interest is there, why aren’t they reading the comics? Some people might not be comfortable going into a shop that’s poorly lit, dingy, unkempt and/or just outright disgusting and bordering on condemnation. Some people might be intimidated by the arrogance of some store clerks who seem to take a certain satisfaction from patronizing and ridiculing someone’s interest. I’ve seen clerks derisively chide a customer for wanting to read Spider-man instead of Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan. It’s off-putting to say the least. I’ve left items I had wanted to purchase behind and left because of the incredibly condescending customer disservice I see at certain places. Hell, I’ve wanted to go ten kinds of “Hulk Smash” on them for actually having the gall to try and foist Mark Millar’s junk on an unsuspecting patron. The mass-market retailers usually hide the trades in some musty corner of the store, away from casual observation and so far removed from fiction as to be ridiculous. The Borders in St. Peters used to put trades and graphic novels in with the art books. Yet prose novels about the X-Men are perfectly acceptable to include as fiction? It’s this kind of mentality that keeps people AWAY from comics. And it takes people like the Star Clipper staff and you, my faithful readers, to bring comics to the readers — or readers to the comics — so long as the awareness of comics as a form of entertainment is raised. Trades offer a the best potential for that, and places like Comic Relief (where I get my weeklies) which stocks a lot of trades and Star Clipper, which offers a friendly and relaxed environment, help a lot.
I, for one, would advocate an experiment in graphic storytelling and formatting. I would be perfectly willing to try a line of comics that would be published solely in trade format. No monthlies, unless there’s enough titles in this line to release a trade a month. Lets pretend that the Bat-books adopted this format. January is Batman, February is Nightwing, March is Detective, April is Robin, May is Catwoman and June is Birds of Prey. And lets say each month’s trade is the equivalent of six regular issues. Could you stand to wait six months between trades? I could and in fact do when it comes to everything but Birds of Prey from the Batman line right now. I can read short series and a wider variety of monthly titles, and get my nice, big Batman story in one volume, usually with some extras like those four pages that tied in with Nightwing or some unreleased sketch art. Trades are like the deluxe DVD packages. You can get the single disc package with just the story, or you can get the double disc set for a little more and get the documentaries, storyboards, bloopers, and deleted scenes. Unless you’re paying for a sturdy hardcover like Kraven’s Last Hunt (which everyone should own a copy of) trades average out to about the same price as the separate issues cost, and you don’t run the risk of missing an issue somewhere.
I think this kind of format could also lead to tighter story planning. In Dennis O’Neil’s The DC Guide To Writing Comics he discusses what he calls the Levitz Paradigm, the system Paul Levitz used when he was writing monthly comics. He would have a sort of round-robin format for plot points, elevating and increasing the space allotted to one plot point as another one came to a close. It works similarly in television dramas. That innocent kiss between two friends on a soap opera becomes a full fledge wedding and an attempted murder six months later. I don’t know that the Levitz Paradigm, while certainly not a bad system, works so well in all cases. I think Thunderbolts could be an example of this. It seemed that Fabian Nicieza was trying to do too much at times, weaving so many plot threads into the Thunderbolt tapestry at once that it became too convoluted. And it seems that since the Civil War broke out and gave him something to focus his story structure on, Thunderbolts has been a markedly better read. I think a trade only format might help writers to focus on telling one rock solid story rather than trying to line up future tales at the expense of the present superheroic conflict.
Before trades grew in popularity, there were graphic novels. And some of the most amazing stories I’ve ever read were told in this format: Walt Simonson’s “Star Slammers”, Jim Starlin’s “Death of Captain Marvel”, and Chris Claremont’s “God Loves, Man Kills” to name a few. Why not use the format to tell superlative stories, stories that focused on a single conflict in a hero’s life instead foreshadowing endlessly? I have always viewed certain exemplary miniseries and story/or story arcs as works that should have been given the standalone treatment. I hope the industry comes to realize that they could utilize the format better than just appealing to people who already read comics. If trades are collected based on sales, how many people who are browsing the comic shop already bought the story in the monthly format? Probably lots. And will many of them buy it again as a single volume? Probably not. And will the people who did not read the individual comics even want to read the trade? Probably not. But would people who do not read comics regularly or do not have access to a local comic shop be inclined to read them if they could be found in a single volume at a Wal-Mart or book store? Would they be more inclined to become interested after reading a good, focused, self-contained story and perhaps seek out a comic store or go online and look for more? I think so. The comic publishers are like early humans. They have fire and stones and sticks — comics, trades and Hollywood mediums — they just haven’t figured out what they can do with them yet. God save Shakespeare’s retarded ass when they do. On that day I’ll say…
Welcome to my good dream.
