On Thursday morning, Comic-Con begins in earnest. The focus shifts from the nuttiness of the exhibit hall to the crowded schedule of programming that takes place in meeting rooms throughout the convention center and the adjoining hotels. This is where Comic-Con performs the alchemy that unites fans with the objects of their affection while reminding creators of their power to inspire imagination.
Programs fall into several categories: spotlights, in which one creator (often a special guest of the Con) is interviewed or holds forth on his life, work, and personal interests; panels, featuring anything from a group of experts to the entire cast of a movie or TV show, discussing a topic of interest; workshops, where professionals discuss and demonstrate their techniques; meetups, where folks with common interests can get together in person; and events, like film screenings, Klingon mating rituals, or a performance by the Cirque du Soleil. The academic programming track associated with the Comic Arts Conference also features seminars and presentations of research papers. Almost all the programming allows for interaction between fans and creators, usually in the form of Q&A.
Program experiences come in all shapes and sizes. At the media-crazy high end of Comic-Con, thousands of people can line up for hours to get a glimpse of Robert Downey, Jr., or Angelina Jolie talking about how much they love old Marvel comics as they pimp their next action film; Sylvester Stallone might announce that his pal Bruce Willis has decided to drop by as a surprise guest on the panel; someone dressed as ET can ask a question, in character, of Steven Spielberg if he gets to the microphone fast enough. Much of this mayhem takes place in Hall H, which has become synonymous with Comic-Con’s mind meld with the entertainment industry. More on that later.
The “mainstream” comics panels, hosted in the midsized auditoriums by DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Image, feature big announcements about upcoming story lines and creative teams. Occasionally, they dissolve into screaming matches between a bellicose editor and a room full of disbelieving or disappointed fans. Smaller publishers hope for a favorable spot on the schedule—usually between bigger, more popular programs, so that they’ll be guaranteed a captive audience of folks who don’t want to lose their seats for the next panel.
In the more human-scale meeting rooms on the mezzanine level, kindly looking old men in blazers and cardigans, who days ago were riding golf carts around their retirement communities and are still a bit overwhelmed, sit for detailed public interviews about the “Golden Age of Comics” (the 1940s and 1950s). They slowly come to realize that hundreds of people still fondly remember the work they did back in their salad days, drawing pictures for funny books as they tried to climb the ladder as commercial illustrators. At the end of the panel, they choke back tears as a representative of Comic-Con hands them an Inkpot Award recognizing their contributions to a great American art form while an audience of several dozen middle-aged men stands and claps with earnest reverence.
Then, down the hall, a crowd explodes in a flurry of ecstatic tweets as the director of a new science fiction series announces that he brought a reel of previews, bloopers, and behind-the-scenes footage just for fans at Comic-Con. “Anyone want to see Scarlett Johansson’s wardrobe malfunction? No cameras, please; we wouldn’t want this all over YouTube (smirk).”
And so on, in nearly two dozen parallel tracks across the length and breadth of the upper levels of the convention center and the larger ballrooms of the nearby hotels, for four solid days. Capacities of the rooms range from a few hundred for smaller-scale panels to the cavernous Hall H, which accommodates more than 6,500. In recent years, even Petco Park, the 46,000-seat home of the San Diego Padres, across the street from the convention center, has been pressed into service for special evening events.
The programming schedule is released a couple of weeks before the start of the Con and is yet another source of anxiety for attendees. The 2011 Events Guide handed out at the Con ran to nearly 200 pages; the iPhone app takes several minutes to load up the schedule, even with a fast connection.
Given the specialized tastes of pop culture fans, there are always difficult decisions. In addition to straightforward time conflicts, there are logistics and opportunity costs to consider. It is physically impossible to get from, say, Ballroom 6A at the south end of the convention center to the offsite Hilton Bayfront in less than 15 minutes, so forget going from the fans vs. pros trivia contest to the Venture Brothers panel that starts immediately after.
Then there are the crowds. People will line up for hours and sit through two or three preceding programs in which they have no interest to catch one popular event later in the day. If you want to see a hot or highly-buzzed program, it may take a day of standing in line and sitting through meaningless demonstrations of 3D animation software, previews of generic cop shows, and discussions of the religious symbolism in modern representations of vampires that are scheduled earlier in the same room. Is it worth the hassle to get a glimpse of Bruce Campbell or Kevin Smith, or would you be better off trying for less popular panels and spending the rest of the time in the exhibit hall? Decisions, decisions!
Eunice downloads the daily schedule grids as they are posted on the Comic-Con website, prints them out, and pores over them with a highlighter. I use the Con’s mobile app. By the time Thursday rolls around, we are each prepared with our order of battle, fallbacks and second choices, and communication plan. Naturally, it all falls apart as we push through the unimaginably large crowd and set foot in the exhibit hall. The first full day of Comic-Con has dawned, and sensory overload has already begun.
Despite the unprecedented breadth of content and styles available today, American comics are still primarily identified in the public consciousness with superheroes, the crown jewels in comics’ pantheon of creative properties. That extends to Comic-Con, where costumed characters traverse all media and even protrude into real life by walking the aisles of the show floor in their colorful multitudes. For better or worse, the future of comics in popular culture is intimately tied to the future of the superhero.
To be into superheroes, you have to suspend a lot of disbelief. The genre asks readers not only to accept the existence of all kinds of supernatural forces, from aliens to magic to mutations that miraculously result in extraordinary abilities, but also to envision a world in which human morality and behavior, not to mention fashion aesthetics, are very different from our ordinary experience. Crucial plot points often hinge on facts and history that are unique to the “universe” that the publisher has created, sometimes over decades, with which fans are simply assumed to be familiar.
All these leaps of logic come naturally to kids, especially when they are facilitated through dynamic, colorful artwork and simple text. In the 1960s and 1970s, when most of today’s regular superhero readers were youngsters, superhero comics were at their seductive best. They were cheap. They were on newsstands everywhere. Amazing storytellers like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Chris Claremont, and John Byrne were at the peak of their powers. The imprint that these comics made on kids of that era was often permanent. The characters and story lines developed during this period form the core of the superhero canon and have been mined over and over again for current-day comics, movies, video games, and animated cartoons.
When comics moved from the newsstand to the direct market, they took their audience with them. The kids of the 1960s and 1970s grew into the teens and twenty-somethings of the 1980s and 1990s and demanded that the superheroes of their childhood mature (or at least develop) along with them. As the superheroes evolved to cater to a more sophisticated fan base, they lost the accessibility and the ubiquity that had brought in the previous generation of readers.
Today there is a growing divide between the aging cohort that reads superhero stories in comic book form and the younger generation, whose primary exposure to costumed crime fighters is likely to have been through other media. This gap is unsustainable—not just because it is unhealthy to rely exclusively on an aging audience for a pop culture product, but because the stories that fuel the transmedia popularity of superheroes can be told convincingly only in comic book form, at least in the first instance.
Costumed superheroes that originated in other media have simply not generated the same kind of mystique as those created in the pages of comics. Even licensed characters that have become successful movie franchises—Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, and Marvel’s Avengers cycle—are using plots that originated decades ago in the comics, and they run out of steam after three films at most. Many attempts to bring superheroes to live-action media fail because the film medium is too visually literal to carry off the suspension of disbelief that comics can routinely achieve. Grandeur on the page translates too easily into pomposity on the screen; few people will end up as fans of Daredevil or Green Lantern if they know those characters only from the movies.
The superhero concept is not unpopular, as any quick scan of box office receipts and video-game sales will tell you. However, many of the genre’s defining features have become stale and predictable, which accounts for the inability of even the most successful concepts to sustain franchises beyond a certain point. The whole idea of masked avengers righting wrongs does not connect with audiences in the visceral way that it did in the early days, the 1930s and 1940s, or again in the 1960s and 1970s, when superhero comics were fun and widely accessible. In the long run, the only way the superhero concept can stay viable across all media is through the continued episodic production of good stories in the sequential art format—that is, comic books, whether paper or digital. That will happen only if the owners of the popular characters find a way to expand their readership by rediscovering the connection between superheroes and the wider audience rather than just the hard-core fans.
The big publishers understand this, but are stuck in a dilemma. The popular, household-name superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman are more than characters. They are brands, properties and licenses whose value is based on their familiarity. They can’t change much without risking their value as recognizable icons, but without changing, they can’t hold reader interest.
DC and Marvel manage their universes of superheroes through an increasingly centralized bureaucracy of executives, editors, and creative directors, sometimes plotting out story lines in detail years in advance. Artists are selected for their personal styles and have some latitude for creative expression, but writers are hired (and fired) purely for their ability to bring predetermined story lines to life and keep fans coming back issue after issue.
The tension in the mainstream industry comes from balancing the increasingly centralized creative strategies of the corporate publishers with a medium whose artistic success depends on the power of individual creative voices and imaginations. The first item on our Thursday programming agenda was a spotlight on a writer who has built his career on exploring the relationships between iconic mainstream superheroes, the audience, and the culture according to his most singular voice and vision: Grant Morrison.
With his wide-ranging intellect, rock star charisma, and conspicuous financial success, Morrison has one of the great personal brands in an industry dominated by larger-than-life personalities. He is a polarizing figure among fans and professionals alike, inspiring equal parts awe, jealousy, and disdain. And, oh yes, lots of attention. He is undeniably a major talent with a head full of big ideas. If you are capable of being convinced that characters with supernatural powers who fight crime wearing long underwear and capes can have profound cultural significance, Morrison is the guy who could convince you. And if you are open to the possibility that one of the most intriguing and thoughtful literary figures of the twenty-first century makes his living writing stories featuring corporate-owned characters in the most commercially oriented, “mainstream” areas of comic book publishing, exposure to Morrison’s best work and commanding presence might just convince you of that as well.
Grant Morrison is a living embodiment of the contradictions that bedevil the future of the superhero genre. He has delivered a string of megahits over his three decades as a comic book writer, while simultaneously building a reputation as one of the most avant-garde figures in the industry. His early work on titles like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum distinguished him even among a cohort of highly accomplished peers like Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, and Mark Millar, who followed the visionary Alan Moore across the Atlantic in a “British Invasion” (Morrison is Scottish) of the American comics industry in the 1980s. In his baroque masterpieces The Invisibles and The Filth, Morrison successfully smuggled the sensibility of William S. Burroughs, the most transgressive postwar American literary figure, into the pages of DC Comics.* For that achievement alone, he would be worth paying attention to.
And then he wrote Justice League. And X-Men. And Superman. And Batman. And a bunch of operatic superhero sagas that played dice with the DC universe over the course of many months and piles of issues. Not only was this work solidly within the corporate comics mainstream, but Morrison eventually became part of the brain-trust that plotted out company strategy, helping to generate the marching orders that other creators had to follow.
Morrison’s superhero stories are always ambitious and often well crafted—if you like superheroes and care about their worlds. And that’s a big if. Seven Soldiers of Victory, Morrison’s 2005–2006 epic that unfolded in seven interconnected miniseries, featured unfamiliar versions of obscure DC heroes in a reimagined fictional continuity. It rivals the work of Thomas Pynchon in its narrative complexity, but it is impressive in the context of the tricks it plays with characters and situations that are familiar only to dedicated fans. Stuff like this exemplifies the problems that superhero comics have had in reaching a wider audience in recent decades. The best of the genre is genius if you know the code and gibberish if you don’t.
It is hard to get away from the fact that much of Morrison’s superhero work is a lot less interesting than he is. Like one of those celebrity chefs who specialize in reinventing comfort foods, Morrison himself may be inspired by the flavors of exotic herbs and mushrooms, but he dishes out mac and cheese.
He makes no apologies for this; rather the opposite. Morrison sees superheroes as figures in a modern mythology—manifestations of a primal subconscious of the human species that, in previous eras, have been called saints, legends, and gods. Telling their stories is important, meaningful work that can, if done properly, tap into the mainline currents of the cultural moment. In Morrison’s conception, superheroes have a future to the extent that they maintain this mythic aspect and don’t get sucked too far into the morass of realism—something that he believes soured the stew in the aftermath of gritty mid-1980s game changers like Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen.
He expounded on these ideas, and on the arc of the superhero through the history of comic books, in his 2011 book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, released around the time of the Con. I was looking forward to his balancing act between talking seriously about these ideas and serving as a marketing mouthpiece for DC’s imminent high-stakes relaunch of its entire comic book line.
“I’m not sure I want to see him,” said Eunice, who reads several of Morrison’s titles on a monthly basis. “He seems like he’d be arrogant.”
“Just check him out,” I assured her. I’d seen Morrison at panels over the years, and I always came away amused by how he handled questions from fans ranging from, “Will Colossus be coming back in X-Men?” to, “Why do humans feel the need to wear clothes?” (someone actually asked this)—sometimes back to back, or even from the same questioner. Though he clearly does not lack confidence, he comes across as simply a curious guy with a lot on his mind. The working-class Sco’ish accent helps, too.
Photo by Kristi Long
Writer Grant Morrison (seated) greets an admirer at a signing in Scotland.
We arrived 20 minutes before the start of the panel, partly expecting not to get in, but to my surprise, there were still plenty of seats around the room. Maybe it was too early in the day, and people were still busy in the exhibit hall. Maybe it was because there would be no shortage of opportunities to hear Morrison during the Con. He was slated to be on several DC panels and to hold a bunch of signings, as well as conducting his traditional mutual interview with Deepak Chopra (!) on Saturday afternoon. The fact that Morrison is probably the only person working in comics who could pull that off says a lot about why people love him and hate him.
Lights dimmed in the 500-seat room, and the sprightly Morrison took a seat on the stage. There was no moderator, so after the briefest introductory remarks, he went right to Q&A. Though he fielded the usual quota of oddball questions and sycophancy with charm and respect, it was clear what he wanted to talk about: Superman and the New 52.
Several weeks before the Con, DC Comics had announced a major reboot of its entire superhero universe, relaunching 52 new comics, with first issues appearing in September 2011. Most of the time, publishers use these reboots as a way to establish new story lines and new creative teams, giving them the sales push that comes with having a number 1 issue on the stands. Reboots, along with the annual “crisis/crossover” events that sprawl over dozens of titles for months, are the epitome of the “change everything/change nothing” paradox that the big publishers face on a constant basis. The New 52 initiative was notable because it included the most venerable titles in the DC catalog: Action Comics, Batman, Superman, and Detective Comics, which had run in continuously numbered series since the 1930s and were pushing toward their one thousandth issues. That raised eyebrows, suggesting a greater degree of commitment (or desperation) on the part of one of the industry’s “Big Two” publishers.
Morrison was center stage in this effort as the announced writer for Action Comics #1—the comics equivalent of directing a remake of Citizen Kane. Action Comics #1 is the comic book that introduced Superman in June 1938, launching both the superhero concept and the American comics industry. There is no more culturally significant, iconic comic book in existence. Restarting that particular series for the first time in more than 70 years as part of an overall revamp of Superman was considered a very big deal.
Morrison took up the challenge with gusto. He announced that his goal was to return the character of Superman to his historical roots as an outsider, a rebel, and a champion of the oppressed. This was what gave the pulpish, sketchy, science fiction–oriented conception of writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster such visceral power in the dark days of the Great Depression. America yearned for someone who would stand up to the bully, the racketeer, the wife beater, the crooked politician, the corrupt cop, the greedy businessman who treated his workers like dirt. Superman, an immigrant to this planet who donned the mild-mannered attire of Clark Kent just to fit in, was the revenge of the little guy: the nerd who wasn’t going to take it anymore.
In succeeding years, Superman morphed into a national symbol: selling bonds and riding bombs; the center of a “Superman family” of pals, relatives, and pets; a go-getting yuppie; a strict and disapproving father figure; and a transcendent icon. The shifting personas of Superman matched the rhythms of American culture as the depression gave way to the war, the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond. But somewhere along the line, the icon fell out of sync with the public.
Back in 1986, when DC did its first major renovation of the character, the beloved, slightly goofy Superman of the 1960s and 1970s was given a nostalgic send-off by star writer Alan Moore in a classic tearjerker called “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” How times have changed. Despite an eventful 25 years that saw our hero die, be reborn, change costumes, get a bad haircut, get married, and see his archenemy Lex Luthor elected president, the Superman of the 1990s and 2000s is unlikely to be either missed or fondly remembered when his backstory is swept into the dustbin of obsolete continuity. It wasn’t the fault of the creative teams; it just wasn’t Superman’s time. The go-go, gadget-driven 1990s and the tense, terror-splattered 2000s belonged to Batman, the self-made entrepreneurial crime fighter and the no-nonsense dark detective, not the idealistic immigrant exponent of truth, justice, and the American way.
Morrison believes that is about to change. In Supergods, he cites a theory by futurist Iain Spence that ties oscillations in youth culture taste and style over the years to changes in solar activity in 11-year cycles. Based on this, Morrison thinks we are heading into a new cycle that not only favors the Apollonian Superman/Sun God over the dark, nocturnal Batman, but also suggests that we are due for a return to first principles. Consequently, he is hoping that his revival of the primal Superman will catch the changing mood of American youth and propel this particular piece of superheroic mythology out of its Fortress of Solitude and back into cultural relevance. He wants to “occupy” Action Comics with a more transgressive and unruly Superman, and recent events show that his timing may be spot on.
I agree with Morrison’s conclusions, though I take issue with his methodology. In my view, American culture does have patterns and cycles, but they are driven through the much more earthly dynamics of generational change. The authors Neil Howe and the late William Strauss first put forward this idea in their 1991 book, Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584–2069. In their model, four basic generational types—Civics (builders and keepers of social institutions, including the World War II “Veteran” generation and perhaps the current-day Millennials), Adaptives (socially minded linear thinkers who breathe humor and humanity into those institutions, such as the Silent Generation born in the 1920s and 1930s), Idealists (dreamers who call for spiritual renewal and secular crusades, like the Baby Boom generation born between World War II and the early 1960s), and Reactives (pragmatic individualists and entrepreneurs, like Generation X, whose members came of age in the 1970s and 1980s)—march through history in an orderly procession, each enjoying periods of rise, dominance, and decay. The tenor of the times depends on which of the generations is in adulthood, adolescence, or maturity.
It turns out the big events of American history, including wars, economic booms and depressions, spiritual upheavals, and periods of corrupt politics, all correlate with specific alignments of generations and occur predictably in cycles. Using this model, Strauss and Howe, writing in the early 1990s, were able to accurately forecast the 1990s economic boom, Bill Clinton’s election and impeachment, a terrorist attack on the United States at the turn of the century, and the subsequent overreaction of the reigning baby boomer–dominated administration.
In my previous work, I’ve applied this analytical framework to the issue of technological innovation and adoption, but it also fits quite nicely around the history of comics. While Grant Morrison points to 11-year oscillations in youth culture between, essentially, hippie and punk aesthetics, the Strauss and Howe model covers an arc of 75 to 80 years. And according to that framework, the pendulum is swinging back to the generational milieu of the late 1930s, characterized by a clash of strident ideologies, political crisis, economic distress, and the emergence of a frustrated young Civic generation seeking an outlet for its creative, socially conscious ambitions. This earlier period is known to comics fans as “The Golden Age,” when the concept of the superhero first took hold.
In other words, we have returned to the cultural moment of the Siegel and Shuster Superman, just as Morrison is promising to return him to us. If he and his colleagues who are spearheading the DC New 52 initiative, are right—and initial sales results have demonstrated that they might be—the timing may be perfect to refresh the original mythology and restore a clichéd trope to mass-cultural relevance. As an artistic proposition, the benefits of that may be debatable, but as a driver of the continued salience and market viability of the comics medium, it would be just super.
When we left Morrison’s panel, we realized that it was already past lunchtime and we hadn’t had much to eat since the night before. At Comic-Con, it’s easy to lose track of things like food, sleep, and healthy levels of alcohol intake.
We stepped outside the convention center into the beautiful San Diego afternoon. The sidewalk in front of the convention center was a steady procession of fans carrying the gigantic, colorful Warner Brothers swag bags, rugged-looking exhibitors stepping outside for a smoke, fans adjusting their costumes, pierced dads in baggy shorts pushing strollers, and harried staff and security people directing traffic.
We walked south toward the new pedestrian overpass that spanned Harbor Drive and connected the convention center area with the restaurants and bars of the Gaslamp Quarter. That trajectory took us right past Camp Breaking Dawn, the encampment of thousands of fans of the tween girl vampire franchise Twilight, who were lined up starting in a maze of velvet ropes under tents outside Hall H and ending somewhere very far down the walkway along the harbor, behind the convention center.
Twilight, in case you’ve been sleeping in a tomb for the past half-decade, is the insanely popular young adult series by author Stephenie Meyer, featuring a love triangle between a teenage girl named Bella Swan, her brooding vampire beau Edward Cullen, and werewolf bad boy Jacob Black.
Meyer’s unconventional take on the whole vampire thing (the fact that vampires sparkle in daylight instead of turning to dust, and that they spend most of their time moping around and looking cool instead of tearing people’s throats out) has not earned her much love from horror/fantasy enthusiasts who like their brew a little bit stronger. I must admit that I have not cracked the cover of any of these books and don’t have much interest in doing so. I wouldn’t watch the movies for free if they were the only available entertainment on a 12-hour plane flight. I’m not sure I’d watch them if the alternative were a week’s stay at Gitmo.
And you know what? Who cares! I’m a 44-year-old guy with no kids. I am not the audience for Twilight in any way, shape, or form. But I’m all for any material that generates enough passion to get a completely new pop culture audience to stand in line for 40 hours and sleep on concrete for two nights just to bask in the presence of the actors who portray these characters in a film. That enthusiasm is the rocket fuel that drives the industry and the artform forward, and it doesn’t pay to be too picky about where it comes from.
As we were walking past, the camp was in the process of decamping. Hall H would be opening in moments, capping days of camaraderie and informal celebrations for the thousands penned in on the patch of land between the south end of the convention center and the Bayfront Hilton. Since Tuesday night, the entire scene had been one long sleepover party of thousands of excited teen- and tween-age girls (and their moms, big sisters, boyfriend wannabes, and the occasional hapless-looking dad). In a burst of amazingly good PR, some Twilight cast members showed up on Thursday morning to serve breakfast to the campers, mingle, and sign autographs.
Photo by Jackie Estrada
Tents are set up outside Hall H to accommodate the tens of thousands of fans waiting overnight for events like the Twilight panel.
The Twilighters first made their presence felt in 2008, when the line for the panel featuring heartthrobs Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner stretched for nearly a mile. Those at the front had been camping out in sleeping bags and chaise longues for days. What made this group remarkable was not only the tenacity and intensity of its fandom, even by Comic-Con standards, but its demographics. This group was about 95 percent female, most of its members under 25 and many under the age of 16.
I don’t think it will come as a big shock that, for most of the history of comics fandom, conventions have not been distinguished by high numbers of females of any age. That began to change in the 1990s, when strong and emotionally authentic female characters like Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the cheerful Goth-girl personification of Death in Neil Gaiman’s popular Sandman series activated the recessive fan gene on the X chromosome. The trend accelerated with the mainstream popularity of manga, which had developed numerous styles over the years to appeal to all genders and was sold in bookstores, beyond the boys-club direct market comics shops. The rise of the Internet poured gasoline on the fire, creating spaces for feminerds to come out of the woodwork and share their passions. Many of today’s best online comic and fantasy-genre news sites and discussion groups were started by, and remain powered by, women.
Today, there are increasing numbers of proud girl geeks of all ages; I count myself fortunate to be married to one. Crowds at conventions and even some comics stores now reflect a much more equal gender balance. As for the comics industry itself, not so much. But that’s a different conversation.
There are big differences between the mature, established, mostly Generation X women, who developed their interests through actual comics and comics-related media (and can be every bit as marinated in the minutiae of continuity as the hardest-core male superhero reader), and the younger cohort, who are largely drawn into the worlds of fantasy and pop culture through manga and young adult fiction: not just Twilight, but also Baby-Sitters Club, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and, of course, Harry Potter. But at least girls and teens are coming into the social and participative world of fandom rather than just sitting on their couches playing Xbox.
You would think that male comics fans would have no problem with women getting into both the hobby and the business. Traditionally, guys who are into comics and related subcultures did not suffer an overabundance of female attention during their adolescence. Now that they are grown-ups, they might see the advantages of having women around who share their interests and passions. Indeed, most of them do. But there remains a hard core for whom arrested adolescence extends beyond the persistence of childhood interests. These are the boys who put the “no girls allowed” signs on the doors of their clubhouse, and those signs are there still.
Perhaps this is why the Twilight phenomenon activates such intense passions among the Comic-Con crowd. Back in 2008, when the Con was “invaded” by thousands of young, female Twilight fanatics, some guys caused a ruckus by walking the floor with signs and T-shirts reading, “Twilight Is Ruining Comic-Con!” That attitude has gone underground, but it has not gone away. Sure, a lot of the hostility is wrapped around objections to the series itself and its lightweight treatment of the supernatural (fans take this stuff very seriously). But it’s telling that many of the same folks who pitch a fit over a couple of twinky, sparkly boy vampires mooning over Bella Swan have no problem with unorthodox treatments of the material that feature mostly naked girl vampires and sexually depraved demons, as can be seen in many modern horror comics. Commitment to the purity of subject matter is apparently only skin deep.
Like all reactionary cultural movements, the anti-Twilight sentiment at Comic-Con is rooted in the primal fear that tribal territory is being threatened by outsiders (leavened in this case by a generous helping of sexual anxiety). Young men of the Millennial generation are routinely outdone by their female peers across a wide range of academic, social, and professional achievements. Hardly a month goes by when we don’t see one of those “young men in crisis” stories on the cover of a magazine.
Camp Breaking Dawn is a concrete example that even in the traditionally masculine world of fandom, girl nerds can outperform boy nerds when it comes to demonstrating support for their pop culture obsessions. Through their numbers and their visible presence, they are forcing their tastes into the conversation, regardless of the disdain of purists.
Mainstream comics publishers could tap into this audience and make their offerings more female-friendly by cutting down on gratuitously offensive characterizations of women in their books, or perhaps by employing more female creators. But current evidence suggests that publishers see this as a zero-sum game: cut out the cheesecake and you’ll alienate the proven audience of male readers—and why risk that? Or perhaps the creative decision makers are simply the products of the same culture as their audience. Whatever the cause-and-effect relationship, most comics demonstrate through their design and marketing that they view male readers as essential, and any women who want to read along are welcome as long as they don’t insist on any of that icky frilly-girly stuff like you find in Twilight. Typically, female comics fans who speak out on this issue from a feminist perspective are roundly and rudely shouted down, sometimes from the podium.
It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating strategy for the long-run health of the industry. Women today are the loudest and most compelling voices in fandom; young girls are making some of the most popular self-published comics. Decades from now, Twilight will be fondly remembered (or ironically inflected) nostalgia for millions of middle-aged women, some of whom will be able to look back on the shared communal experience of sleeping out for days at Comic-Con and having had the time of their young lives. At the fifty-ninth Comic-Con in 2028, I am sure a reunion will be on the program calendar. Maybe one of the (by then) corpulent, middle-aged ex-teen idol stars will get a day pass from the rehab center to attend.
And where are the millions of young fans of Ben 10 and Generator Rex, two popular tween boy–oriented properties with much closer affinities to comics and comics culture than Twilight? You can’t buy a monthly comic book called Ben10 or Generator Rex, even though the properties belong to Warner Brothers Entertainment, parent of DC Comics, and were created by comics industry veterans. Where, indeed, is the next generation of male comics fans to take over from their nerd-pioneer forebears? I think I saw a few of them playing Game Boys and putting on their best “Can we go now?” expressions as dad pawed through the white boxes in search of that elusive copy of Avengers (1963 series) #135.
When it comes to the changing gender balance in the future of pop culture and fandom, the writing is on the wall… in blood. And it sparkles.
After returning from lunch, we decided to indulge a guilty pleasure and attend a panel on the sitcom Wilfred, which had just debuted on the FX network weeks before the 2011 Con. These kinds of miscellaneous programs fill out the Comic-Con schedule throughout the weekend, creating some controversy among purists. Many of them are straight-up marketing pitches for shows that don’t have anything at all to do with comics. Wilfred, an edgy but otherwise conventional sitcom, has only one contrived point of contact with comics culture: costar Elijah Wood is best known to the world as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as for a creepy cameo appearance in the 2006 Frank Miller film Sin City.
In Wilfred, Wood plays a washed-up and depressed young lawyer named Ryan with a crush on his attractive neighbor and an unusual relationship with the neighbor’s dog. Where everyone else sees an ordinary mutt, Ryan (and the audience) sees a slovenly guy in a cheap dog costume, played by Australian co-creator Jason Gann, who seems to channel the anarchic energy of mid-1970s John Belushi. Hilarity ensues.
Photo by Doug Kline
Actor Jason Gann entertains at the Wilfred panel.
Back in 2002, Gann and co-creator Adam Zwar came up with the concept in a short film directed by Tony Rogers. The short won the 2002 Tropfest and later went on to be screened at the Sundance Festival in the United States. It eventually got picked up for two seasons on Australian TV (in a slightly different version, costarring Zwar), then came to the United States courtesy of Family Guy producer David Zuckerman, who also participated in the San Diego panel. This kind of bootstrap do-it-yourself story, which is often punctuated these days with a star turn as a viral video on YouTube, has become a standard on-ramp to a mass audience in the transmedia age.
The panel was quite entertaining. The producers screened an unaired episode of the show, then Gann, Wood, actresses Dorian Brown and Fiona Gubelmann, and the rest of the ensemble charmed the crowd during the Q&A. The room frequently shook with laughter.
As far as the FX marketing department goes, it must have been “mission accomplished.” Fans who came to see Wood discuss his previous comics-related work and the upcoming Hobbit film may have been disappointed with the young actor’s reluctance to talk about his other projects, but they probably left with a good impression of the new show. If the producers were lucky, some of these vocal opinion leaders would post about their discoveries on their blogs, Twitter feeds, or podcasts, creating a groundswell of credible word-of-mouth recommendations. This is a necessary but not sufficient step for Wilfred to hit the Comic-Con jackpot, where the San Diego buzz propels a borderline show to mass success.
Wilfred is by no means the first rider on the Comic-Con publicity bandwagon, nor the one with the most far-fetched link to the fan base. Comedies, cop shows, and oblique “mystery” programs share the bill with network and cable offerings that have much more straightforward connections to the world of comics, such as the WB hit (and Comic-Con favorite) Smallville, based on the Superman mythos. J. J. Abrams brought Lost and Fringe to Comic-Con, where great word-of-geek-mouth helped propel them from cult to mass appeal. Perhaps the biggest success story of recent times is Tim Kring’s Heroes, a late addition to the NBC lineup that benefited from orgasmic levels of fan response when it premiered at Comic-Con in 2006.
The fantasy and supernatural subject matter of these shows endears them to fans of comics culture, but the connection is actually much deeper. Episodic TV resembles comics in that both media rely on serialized storytelling with a core cast of characters who develop yet remain fundamentally unchanged. Each individual episode or issue must stand alone to provide a point of entry for newcomers, but form a part of a larger story line to keep people coming back week after week.
Most prime-time TV programs weren’t always like this. From the 1950s to the 1980s, very few shows had any kind of continuing story lines from episode to episode. Even heavily plotted dramas, police shows, or science fiction series like Star Trek (the original series), which may have had recurring characters or occasional cliffhangers, rarely referred to prior events or offered any coherent sense of their characters’ histories and motivations.
The revolution that transformed episodic storytelling first took place in the pages of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, when Stan Lee and his collaborators (principally Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) wove long story arcs over dozens of issues and multiple titles, each of which also provided a satisfying individual reading experience and usually wrapped up the primary plot points in a single issue. In case anyone wonders why Stan Lee, the kindly old charmer with his name on every licensing deal, is so famous and well regarded today, that’s why. The bold artwork and wild flights of imagination and fantasy of the Marvel Silver Age gripped readers, but this sense of integrity to the entire comics universe (provided partly by Lee’s consistent writing and editorial voice) kept them coming back for more and buying anything with a Marvel logo on the cover. Before he became a brand unto himself, Stan Lee was one of the most important brand innovators of the twentieth century.
Chris Claremont, who wrote the wildly successful X-Men books for Marvel starting in the late 1970s, elevated the continuity aspects of comics storytelling to rarefied heights under the universe-building stewardship of then-Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter. X-Men was not just about good guys and bad guys, or mutants trying to fit into a world that was prejudiced against them; it was an ongoing soap opera with handfuls of overlapping subplots and long-simmering conflicts bubbling along under the surface at any given moment. Like a soap opera, it sometimes got so tangled in its own mythology that casual readers couldn’t make heads or tails of any given issue, but hard-core fans kept demanding more story, more X-titles, and greater complexities.
By the early 1990s, when top X-Men books were selling millions of copies (many to speculators, but that was unclear at the time), folks in the American TV industry started to take note. Series like the crime drama Wiseguy experimented with multiepisode story arcs. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 were among the first to use arcs that spanned entire seasons. Soon they were joined by cult classics in a variety of genres, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and many more. As collected editions (graphic novels for comics; DVD boxed sets for TV shows) became a more common mode of distribution and people could sit down and consume the entire story arc at once, the trend really took off. Today, the continuity-oriented mode is the rule across most of television, and shows that rely on a reality that “resets to default” every episode are the exception. Even a sitcom like Wilfred features episode-to-episode continuity that built, it turned out, to a rather troubling finale to season one.
Longtime comics fans are accustomed to this kind of storytelling. They expect it, and they have gravitated to television shows that provide the same sort of density. Well-executed shows in this style that have no connection to comics whatsoever are now discovering that they are attracting comics fans, who tend to be vocal advocates for stuff they like. Consequently, you see networks and producers bolting comics-oriented extras like illustrated online interactive games and graphic novels to properties like Breaking Bad in an after-the-fact effort at transmedia integration to mobilize this audience.
The feedback loop has only gotten stronger as innovations in packaging and presentation from the television programming have made their way back to the comics industry. When Joss Whedon’s popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel series went off the air in the early 2000s, Whedon conceived of doing additional “seasons” as comic book originals. Dark Horse Comics, which pioneered this approach, has duplicated it successfully with other titles. The “season” motif has taken off with other publishers as well, even when they are not adapting TV shows, as a good compromise between the ongoing series (hard for new readers to jump into) and the miniseries (with a built-in expiration date). Marvel Comics adopted this approach for a whole slew of new offerings in 2012.
We’ve also seen attempts at synergy where the brand strength of a well-known television series or popular creator gets carried over to the comic book adaptation and vice versa (such as DC chief creative officer Geoff Johns writing episodes of Smallville). This convergence points toward a very obvious transmedia strategy for both comics and episodic TV (or episodic webcasts in the case of a property like The Guild, which has successful live performance and comics manifestations).
But there are a few caveats. Whedon has an unusual talent: he is multilingual when it comes to media, telling his stories as well in comic book form as in television and using each format to its greatest advantage. The path that writers travel between comics and Hollywood has widened from a goat trail to a four-lane highway, but it is littered with wrecks on both sides of the divide. For every Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), who understands the differences between writing for performance media and writing for sequential art, there are many more who can’t quite master the craft. The results are a bunch of stiff, stagy, and overliteral interpretations of comics material on film and TV penned by A-list comic book writers, and a lot of vapid, uncompelling comics credited to brand-name, over-the-title Hollywood creative talent (and book authors, for that matter).
The blurring of the lines on the Comic-Con programming schedule between comics, genre-based movies and TV, and any continuity-based story offers a preview of the coming mash-up of pop culture genres, style, and delivery formats that is likely to occur in the near term—accelerated by the rise of devices like tablets that enable the seamless blending of media types on a single platform. This kind of programming at Comic-Con acknowledges that the gyre of popular culture is widening out from central points like comics-fantasy-sci-fi to encompass broader swaths of entertainment, even as the genres themselves are deepening with richer characterizations and social commentary.
There are those who theorize that all storytelling in the digital era is gravitating toward this transmedia style, in which books, video, comics, games, and online media all carry different threads of a master story line or explore different facets of a coherent universe. This is definitely a visible trend at Comic-Con, but we should be cautious about speaking in such sweeping terms, especially with properties that are closely associated with a single creative vision. Not every story wants to be told across multiple media, and not every creator is capable of telling a story across multiple media. And while we are currently at a high-water mark for ambitious, continuity-driven, dramatic pop culture entertainment, public taste may swing back toward stand-alone stories that do not inevitably form some larger tapestry of plot and meaning. Sometimes simpler is better.
Such thinking doesn’t serve the mood of the moment, in which the pop culture industry is driven by consolidation on the business side and an urgency to maximize the value of intellectual property (IP) assets across all the channels where the corporate owners have a footprint. In the 2010s, it’s all about transmedia and crossover. That’s why the personal brands of individual creators and the personae they cultivate on stage at places like Comic-Con weigh so heavily. The participation of creators and talent who have proven their bona fides to the Con cognoscenti signals that a certain mindset and approach stands behind the work. As the world of entertainment options continues to expand and the boundaries between styles continue to blur, the promoters of these properties need to find ways to break through the clutter and signify to potential audiences that “we get it,” even if the cultural affinity is not obvious at first glance.
Still, having a panel is a two-edged sword. The detail-oriented Con audience is tough, and if creators don’t come across as sincere and convincing, amateur critics will pick them apart and leave their carcasses to rot on Twitter. If you are a creator, it can be the most satisfying thing in the world to have an audience engage seriously with your work and ask challenging questions. On the other hand, if you come to Comic-Con trying to market a weak concept by tickling the fancy of some of the world’s pickiest media geeks, you’d better bring your A game.
After dinner and a flurry of text messages to determine where everyone was going later, Eunice and I headed back to the Hilton Bayfront to meet a group of friends at a “drink-up” meet-and-greet hosted by BOOM! Studios. BOOM! had been pitching the drink-up hard as an annual fan event for the past year or two, and it appeared from the text messages that we were not the only ones in our circle to decide to forgo the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party (our usual Thursday night stop) for something a bit different.
Every step of the walk from the restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter where we ate to the Hilton was a plunge deeper into Con land. Nearly everyone on the streets was a convention-goer, fully kitted out in everything from comic-themed T-shirts, hoodies, and buttons to full-on costumes. Everyone appeared to be in some early stage of drunkenness. Trendy restaurants were colonized by tables full of big bearded guys in baggy Wolverine T-shirts and women dressed as Lara Croft. In what looked like a typical singles bar, a small squadron of Imperial storm troopers played Magic: The Gathering at the bar with a fellow in a kilt with a large sword strapped to his back. Any ordinary San Diego denizens who were downtown for their night out must have thought they’d wandered into Mardi Gras on the Planet of the Nerds.
We walked past the convention center, where there were still small crowds bustling back and forth to film screenings, club meetings, game tournaments, and other scheduled activities that go on late into the night. A small line for Friday morning’s program had already formed outside Hall H.
There was a steady stream of people heading to and from the Hilton, which loomed in the middle distance, silhouetted by the harbor and the bridge. We entered through the reception area and followed the increasing din to the Indigo bar facing the water in the back. Several hundred people were crowded into the space, chatting and networking at high energy.
We got about three steps inside the bar area when a towering figure came bounding toward us out of the crowd. “Rob! Eunice! Great to see you guys!” Before we could reply, we were wrapped in the welcoming embrace of Chip Mosher, at the time BOOM!’s marketing and sales director. We’d met Chip a year or two earlier and had visited him a few times in Seattle and in his hometown of LA, bonding over comics and our shared Generation X frustrations with managing Millennial-age staff in the workplace (the subject of one of my earlier books). Chip’s energy meter, which doesn’t seem to dip below 7 under any circumstances, was cranked to 11 tonight. This was his event, and he was doing what he does best: making damn sure everyone knew they were in the coolest place in the comics universe at that particular moment.
“Let me introduce you guys to a few people,” he said, only half-releasing his embrace. He beckoned to a few casually attired young men and introduced them as BOOM!’s editor in chief and art director. We shook hands and smiled. It was too loud for anything but a perfunctory greeting, and the BOOM! staff needed to spend its time wooing freelancers and winning fans.
BOOM! is one of a handful of new entrants into the comics publishing industry since the late 1990s. It was launched in 2005 with a couple of horror comics, and it has since diversified to include everything that a smart, strategically positioned comics publisher would want in its catalog. BOOM! has superheroes (including Irredeemable, an original creation of respected veteran Mark Waid), humor titles (such as Shannon Wheeler’s Eisner Award–winning I Thought You Would Be Funnier), a line of books for kids (Ka-BOOM!), media tie-ins (Planet of the Apes), the license (recently reclaimed by Disney) to distribute Disney’s venerable Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge titles, and the inevitable pact with Stan Lee to produce some kind of superhero comics that bear his name and brand. The company has published graphic novels, art books, and alternative-type titles. It issues a steady stream of press releases and announcements, cultivates its fan base through social media, and hosts buzzworthy parties like the Comic-Con drink-up. And it was an industry pioneer in digital comics, doing the first simultaneous day-and-date release way back in 2007.
Photo by Ivan Salazar
ComiXology cofounders John Roberts (left) and David Steinberger (right) relax at the BOOM! Studios drink-up with Chip Mosher (center) and ComicsPRO’s Amanda Emmert.
For its trouble, it has managed to gain something like a 2 percent market share, good for about $5 million gross revenue on sales of about 200,000 units.
As someone who studies entrepreneurship in creative industries, I am constantly stunned by the low returns on ingenuity and effort that seem to haunt the comics business. BOOM! Studios is not alone in this situation. Publishers like Dynamite, IDW, and Avatar Press have all come to the (relatively) mainstream periodical comic book publishing business over the past decade with strong, well-packaged, well-produced offerings from some of the top creators in the field, and they are all fighting like dogs over scraps in a tenement yard.
It should be noted that the small publishers are in a fundamentally different business from Marvel and DC, the “Big Two” that have dominated the industry for decades. Marvel and DC, both of which are now slivers of giant media empires, own the rights to almost all the household-name superhero characters you can think of. They derive most of their income from licensing these properties to everyone from toymakers to fast-food restaurants, as well as developing them into movies, TV series, cartoons, video games, theme-park attractions, and Broadway shows. The income they make from selling comic books amounts to a rounding error in the corporate balance sheet.
In recent times, Marvel and DC each take upward of 35 percent of the total market in both dollar and unit share, while a host of smaller publishers track in the single digits. All told, everyone is fighting over a core audience that may number as few as 300,000 regular readers. The smaller publishers, especially those aiming for the same fanboy/direct market audience as DC and Marvel, can’t rely on licensing revenue, at least at first; no one has heard of their properties. They need to build readership for their original characters and concepts, or to get lucky by breathing new life into familiar old characters whose licenses they have acquired. That means that they actually have to create compelling characters and produce comic books that jump off the pages of the Previews catalog or the shelves of a comics shop. And that takes talent.
So how do companies that are fighting over single-digit shares of a tiny, dwindling market attract the kind of creative firepower that can help them compete with the big guys? This is where the entire industry benefits from the glow of Hollywood star power and the buzz of the “peak geek” cultural moment.
Lots of people want to do comics, from amateurs to big-name writers and actors. Small mainstream publishers are perfect venues for up-and-coming artists and writers with promising ideas, visiting dignitaries from other corners of the entertainment world, and for free spirits who want a more stable income than either independent publishers or self-publishing (either print or online) can provide. Smaller companies can also offer creative freedom that the Big Two, with their increasingly centralized creative and production processes, cannot. Their presence at the margins adds vitality and variety to the mainstream market, but their survival depends on the continued interest of other media in comics as a proving ground for concepts, talent, and audience appeal.
Licensed properties or copycat concepts that tie in to other media are pure short-term plays aimed at cashing in on a hot trend or an old-favorite franchise; original content is what builds brand equity for the smaller presses in the long run, especially since so many titles are getting the Hollywood treatment. In the quest for new, potentially licensable characters and media-ready story lines, the policies, history, and behavior of the corporate-owned “Big Two” put them at odds with the interests of the creative community. Few creators of original properties are willing to accept the kind of exploitive, work-for-hire terms that predominated in earlier times. No one wants to create the next hot character without the opportunity to participate in future media revenues or to have a say in the creative strategy. In early 2012, DC provided evidence that even legendary status, prior (nonbinding) assurances of creative control, and the respect of peers take a backseat to profits when it announced a series of prequels to the acclaimed Watchmen graphic novel (a corporate-owned property) over the vociferous objections of writer Alan Moore. Marvel successfully sued an aging and destitute freelancer for claiming credit for creating the Ghost Rider character and selling signed prints at conventions.
Established industry veterans with big fan followings like Moore, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis have gravitated to smaller presses so that they can retain creative and legal control of their creations and enjoy freedom from editorial meddling (though many of these big names also work on corporate-owned projects when the money is right). The star power of these creators within the world of comics helps convince fans and direct market retailers to place orders for unproven titles from second-tier publishers. As a result, a number of entrepreneurial “mainstream” (superhero and genre-oriented) publishers have been able to survive in the market despite the awful economics of the industry.
Oregon-based Dark Horse Comics, founded by Mike Richardson in the mid-1980s, was among the first to lure top-name talent with the promise of creator ownership and control, combined with a professional, forward-looking approach to the business and a keen eye for lucrative licenses (Star Wars, Buffy). Perennially in the top five for sales, it has offered perhaps the steadiest stream of original characters and concepts in the mainstream market over the past two decades, including Frank Miller’s Sin City, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, and John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke’s The Mask, all of which have been developed into creatively and artistically successful movies.
Image Comics, launched by a cadre of bestselling artists looking for a better platform than DC or Marvel could offer in the early 1990s, once seemed like a threat to take over the mainstream with its big, loud superhero comics. After some ups and downs and changes in strategy, the company struck pay dirt again in the late 2000s with Robert Kirkman’s era-defining zombie epic The Walking Dead, now a hit on the AMC network. Unsurprisingly, Walking Dead comics and graphic novels top the sales charts. Another Image property, Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory, is reportedly in development at Showtime. Both Chew and Walking Dead are creator-owned.
IDW Publishing, the number 4 or 5 publisher depending on the month, also works both sides of the transmedia street, with successful adaptations of CSI, Star Trek, True Blood, and Doctor Who to go along with its breakout, media-ready original series Locke and Key and 30 Days of Night. It also publishes archival editions of classic comic strips from the 1930s and 1940s as beautifully designed deluxe hardcovers.
Dynamite Entertainment and other smaller publishers like Avatar Press, Atlas, and First try to win readers by either bringing in fan-favorite writers and artists to refurbish venerable concepts with an up-to-the-minute creative sheen or giving them the freedom to launch projects that the bigger shops wouldn’t touch. Avatar’s Crossed, for example, is a zombie apocalypse title created by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows for those who find Walking Dead insufficiently gory and disturbing. Dynamite offers updated takes on properties dating from the pulp magazine era of the 1920s and 1930s, including Zorro, Doc Savage, The Green Hornet, Red Sonja, The Lone Ranger, and John Carter of Mars. Garth Ennis’s ribald creator-owned series The Boys, Dynamite’s best seller, fell into its lap after being kicked off DC’s Wildstorm label.
The competition barely dents the revenues of the Big Two, but it has led to some changes in the relationship between the content companies and the creative community. The corporate publishers would obviously prefer to own the IP rather than deal with uppity cartoonists who think they have rights to a character just because they came up with the idea, the story, and the design. Publishers mitigate the dissatisfaction this arrangement causes by paying premium rates to “hired-gun” talent to work on corporate-owned books, and by making special arrangements with top-name creators who invent new characters and concepts. Marvel Comics, which tightly controls its corporate characters like Spider-Man and X-Men and has vigorously defended others like Howard the Duck and Blade from claims of ownership by freelance creators, runs a subbranded label called Icon for big-name talents who want to keep their rights in exchange for lower page rates and less promotion. Mark Millar’s Kick Ass, adapted for the screen in 2010, came out of this process. DC has similar relationships with certain creators. Now all publishers may be under further pressure: Digital self-publishing offers new avenues to market that don’t require publishers at all.
But competition for talent runs both ways. Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for comics has created a gold-rush mentality in the industry. For ambitious creators, comics are a much better way to get your idea in front of a producer than sliding your dog-eared screenplay under the door of a men’s room stall at a trendy Beverly Hills eatery. Why not find an artist, get your masterwork published by one of the new firms that let creators keep their rights, then work with one of the agents who specialize in bringing these kinds of projects to production companies?
The visual aspect of comics helps you sell your idea. When filmmakers read comics, they see storyboards: illustrations of how shots can be blocked out and the story created visually. That puts comics a step ahead of written treatments and verbal pitches in terms of scoping out potential costs and logistics. A good artist creates a template for the production design and can even use likenesses to suggest possible casting. When production executives see comics, they see properties that already have a track record in other media, assuaging their fears of working with purely original material. They need not know that the comic may have only sold 5,000 copies, most of them to members of the cartoonist’s family. If it is professionally published and well packaged, it’s worthy of consideration. After all, comics are hot. Just look at all the people who go to Comic-Con.
This dynamic draws talent and money into the low-sales, low-revenue comics industry that seemingly could realize better returns elsewhere in the entertainment/pop culture universe. It has made the business extremely competitive, especially at the highest levels. Despite the flood of new publishers and titles on the shelves, getting work as a professional is harder than ever. The rising level of skill among artists is evident from just flipping through the pages of a modern comic book, which bears little resemblance to the cheap pamphlets that many of us snapped up for a quarter apiece at the newsstand or 7-Eleven back in the 1970s. The aisles of Comic-Con and every smaller show around the country are crammed with young Art Institute graduates toting portfolios of samples to thrust under the noses of editors. Marvel and DC have become especially selective, but it’s not easy for anyone.
All that heat helps bring Comic-Con gatherings like the BOOM! Studios drink-up to a boil. Even small publishers have reason to believe that they might be developing the next big media tie-in. Even artists and writers making meager page rates on books selling in the mid-thousands could get escape velocity faster than you can say “Bryan Lee O’Malley” if their quirky-funny-weird-stylish-genre-bending tale of fantasy and adventure strikes the right chord. So drink up and be merry, starving cartoonists, for tomorrow we all may… become rich!
