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Hello Again -- by Bryan Miller
There is a spectre haunting comic book shops.
No, not that Spectre.
This particular ghastly apparition is not the green-hooded hero purgatory for to-be-reincarnated DC characters but something far more dastardly: 1992.
Remember 1992? Remember The Death of Superman followed by World Without A Supermen, then Reign of Several Supermen Who Are Not Supermen and subsequently Okay, Superman Is Back But Next Month He Glows Blue And Your Grandmother Will Keep Asking You Why He Doesn’t Look Like George Reeves? Remember Knightfall and Knightquest and Knight-Knight, Healthy Sales Charts, We Hope To See You Again In the Future?
It’s back, so settle in.
At this very moment, DC and Marvel are in varying stages of launching their Big Events. For Marvel it’s House of M, of course, and for DC it’s...well, something that started off in the Azzarello/Lee Superman books that are choking quarter bins across the nation and which apparently has some connection to the Blue Beetle getting shot in the face.
Crossovers are bad for comics as an art form — not inherently, perhaps, but practically speaking it works out that way 99 percent of the time. Of course, none of the books involved in the various company crossover events have reached the level of high art, or even low art with noble intentions in a good long while, so that’s hardly the issue. The real problem is that these crossovers, and more importantly the editorial mentality that fuels them, give one clear message to the casual reader, and that message is “Fuck off.”
Admittedly, mainstream books have not courted casual readers for some time, but neither company has outright ostracized them either. While a decent majority of many stores’ revenues (particularly stores located in smaller markets without large populations of potential customers on which to draw) comes from dedicated readers who spend $20 to $50 per week on new comics, the number of customers in a given store who read $20 or $30 worth of new comics per month is not insignificant. Hardcore fans typically either read nearly every book published by a given company or imprint or starring a given character, or they have a dedicated attachment to a certain set of books. In the case of the former, well, these folks scarf down whatever is served, and the latter group tends not to be particularly adventurous. It’s often the casual reader who tries new books, follows certain creators, and, of course, is a potential future hardcore reader, assuming a company has enough product that will interest him or her.
The casual reader, it seems, is an endangered species — or at least that would appear to be the mindset of Marvel and DC. Both companies have made it clear that in the future more of their books will be increasingly interconnected, requiring the reader to purchase more and more disparate books to get complete stories. In other words, if you were in for a penny before you’d better be ready to be in for several pounds each week.
No longer can someone jazzed from watching Batman Begins enjoy a guilty pleasure Batman book because every issue is tied to Infinite Identity Theft Crisis Point Countdown. If War Games was a test of patience, then DC’s upcoming event is an outright challenge: how much extra money are you willing to spend to parse out the details of a complex story in which the end result will still be someone in a bat suit punching Killer Croc in the nose? Will you spend an extra $5 per week to keep current? What about $20? Willing to dedicate a calculable percentage of your brainpower keeping a detailed Nerd Diary of exactly what is going on and how Detective 824 has to be read before Flash 146 because they both talk about Captain Cold's time in Arkham after the Crisis blah blah blah?
Not that Marvel is any better. Even if half the books one might find interesting got matched up with perfect creative teams, they'd still be tied for six months to House of M. (just what we need; six months of crossover just to have Wolverine stab Magneto for the ninth time), and immediately after that everything published will either directly relate to the X-titles or be part of the four month Spider-Man crossover.
Like it or not, this is the mentality driving the Big Two right now, and the crystal ball/spoiler factory that is Previews indicates that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better. The declaration is unspoken but clear: if you used to enjoy X-Statix, Batman, Flash, New X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man and Action Comics, then piss off, clear out and make way. Both companies are no longer catering to a wider selection of readers who may find a variety of sub-superhero genres to their liking; now nearly every book in the main lines will undergo a Bendification, or perhaps a Johnsification.
Forget about attracting new readers. Whether or not they exist and how one might possibly go about attracting them seems to be a dead issue with both companies. That’s a dire enough situation, but the current trend can do nothing but further alienate the hearty few still hanging on, hoping for a little bit of fun from the spandex-clad set.
It’s not just a dumb move artistically, but financially as well. Take War Games as a microcosm. At my local store, as War Games started, sales on Batgirl, Nightwing and the second-tier Bat books perked up. Success, right? Sure, but Enron was successful for a couple of years, too. Sales on Batman, still riding high from Loeb/Lee (even after the plodding 6-issue arc from the 100 Bullets team), dropped hard. Overall sales on the Bat-books remained slightly elevated, but as the crossover wore on they eased off, and when the end came, all those Batgirl and Nightwing readers vanished while Batman sales took a hit from which they still have not recovered.
As a counter-example, one need only look at the sales of Marvel’s Ultimate books. The total sales of all the Ultimate books combined dwarfs the sales of all other Marvel books combined, in terms of readers per number of books. Move Astonishing X-Men (another standalone series) over to the Ultimate side and suddenly the near majority of Marvel’s successes come from the remaining handful of books that are not in any way intertwined.
What lesson have the companies taken from this? None, it would seem. Meanwhile, familiar faces from the local comic book store continue to vanish amidst complaints that all the stories seem the same: all the books are too connected, the hobby is too expensive to keep up with so many different titles. (My own pull list, which used to include 8 or 10 in-continuity Big Two books now consists of three: two Ultimate books and Seven Soldiers.)
The hardcore fans will remain, and even some tolerant moderate readers will stick out the long blur that occurs in the middle of a crossover when you realize you read the prologue three months ago and still nothing interesting has happened 17 issues and $50 later — with three months still to go. There won’t be some mass exodus, but a slow leeching of interest and dollars from fans increasingly alienated from books and characters they were willing to pay money for even when the product was mediocre. It won’t matter if you just like Wonder Woman or you’re keen to read Ed Brubaker’s work if you have to read five other titles to figure out whose neck Wonder Woman is snapping or if Brubaker’s stories are continuations of a Brian Bendis book you never even considered buying.
That was the situation in the early ‘90s, and it’s come around again, only without spectator interest and at the first time in well over a decade that the general non-comics reading public seems at least moderately interested in the medium again. It’s not just a move in the wrong direction, but the worst possible direction. How many people will keep counting down all the way through the Crisis? Will you?
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