Multiversity 101 is back, and so is our weekly opportunity for soap boxing! Hope you like long-winded sometimes preachy rants, folks.
OH, San Diego Comic Con weekend! I have a love/hate relationship with it. I hate it because it means that, even if I go on vacation, I have to check my phone every half hour for “breaking news” (yes, have to). I love it because sometimes that breaking news is pretty darn epic and features headlines like “Image Comics Goes Nuts, Announces a Million High Profile Books”, in reality announcing 12 new creator-owned books. Add that to the previously announced Image books from that Friday, the return of Hellboy (how that hasn’t been making it into people’s “Best of SDCC” lists is beyond me) and the slew of new Monkeybrain books and it’s pretty easy to look at SDCC 2012 as fitting in well to the “Year of the Creator” (as we dubbed it some time ago after voting Image as the Best Publisher of 2011, and others as well I suppose). Suffice it to say, creator-owned comics as a whole won Comic Con this year.
But what does that mean? Hasn’t Comic Con previously been “won” by the likes of Marvel and DC, with their Avengers and Green Lantern footage? Why isn’t the Earth shattering with comic site news posts like “LEAKED MAN OF STEEL FOOTAGE FROM COMIC CON” (still haven’t found that, personally) and/or “CHECK OUT THE ANT-MAN TEST FOOTAGE OF COMIC CON!” (or that)? When did this shift happen in the way we salivate over announcements in the comic medium? At what exact point did everything shift to inherent snark towards your average Marvel/DC announcement 100% of the time versus a rabidly positive reaction towards creator-owned stuff? Or do I just not read enough comic sites?
It admittedly wasn’t a great year for the Big Two at Comic Con. Marvel announced Marvel Now! before the con and came to the show with a slew of “AvX” spin-offs and little else, although I’m admittedly stoked for “Red She-Hulk” and more stuff with the X-Babies. Sure, maybe if Marvel had waited on their Marvel Now! announcement we’d be talking about this differently and that would be the biggest news of the con, and hey, certainly a number of comic news sites have been running Now!-related interviews everyday since then (see: Comic Book Resources, Newsarama and iFanboy if you’re interested). But with that news being released in advance of the show it was easy for the excitement to fizzle out before the Con had even started, and when SDCC began it was already “sooo last week.” Now we’re simply in that comfortable phase in which teases are given and interviews are conducted, as is par for course.
Really, the coolest announcement Marvel had was that there would be a Guardians of the Galaxy film and a logo was shown, and that wasn’t exactly new news.
Meanwhile, DC coasted through the con on the announcement that yes, their heads are firmly in the past and apparently their only means of survival in today’s market is by resurrecting old comics. Ok, fine, yay new “Sandman,” I’m excited to read it too — but it’s been 16 years since “Sandman” #75 and 9 years since “Endless Nights.” Heck, it’s been 23 years since the Sandman himself was captured in place of Death in “Sandman” #1. Let’s be honest: is this a story that really needs to be told, even with the amazing JH Williams III on art? I’ve got no doubts that it’ll be beautiful and I’m sure Gaiman has a good story in him for this, but what’s the point? Wouldn’t it be more impressive if the announcement were something like, oh, I don’t know, “Gaiman and Williams III Collaborating On New Project That Isn’t Sandman”? Rather than make the next “Sandman,” the folks at DC are content with making another “Sandman.” There’s a pretty big difference between those two lines of thought.
And was there any memorable news regarding their famous comic properties? Not really, no? OK, let’s move on then.
This is what makes it a bit disheartening to be a fan of these two comic publishers in 2012. As a reader who follows creators over characters, I’m happy to see new books announced by folks like Jonathan Hickman and Rick Remender, and I’m eager to see what comes next from the likes of Kieron Gillen or Scott Snyder. A stigma has been delivered that it isn’t “cool” to like superheroes anymore, but hogwash to that; I’ll happily read a comic with Batman in if there’s a good creative team on the book. This entire rant/essay (as I’m fine with admitting this is) isn’t here to disparage either companies. At the same time, though, looking through my longboxes and shelves reveal a very obvious split between comics “now” (as in, what I actively collect) and comics “then” (what I wanted at a more optimistic time), specifically in relation to the products that these two companies are currently producing.
Continued belowOr, even more specifically: a lot of the comics I’m currently buying from both Marvel and DC will probably be buried in a longbox soon to be lost forever to the sea of time.
The reason for this is simple: with such a huge emphasis on the marketing of comics to the fictionalized ideal of “the new reader” and/or with the hope to make sales via headlines, very few books in mainstream titles leave an impact. This isn’t a statement to wash over Big Two books as a whole, and there are certainly comics I really love from the superhero world right now (Greg Rucka and Marco Checcheto on “Punisher,” Jeff Parker and friends on “Hulk”), but series heavily involved with franchises no longer have any long-lasting vitality to their stories because everything’s constantly shifting to appease a status quo. “Avengers” and “New Avengers,” for example, are strikingly different books than when they relaunched but two years ago, because since their respective relaunches they’ve had to go through “Fear Itself” and now “AvX.” You can’t read some of it without knowledge of those events, which shoots the “new reader” angle down, in another few months they’ll be entirely new beasts via a relaunch, which gets rid of the legacy angle. I wouldn’t doubt that Jonathan Hickman will write an entertaining “Avengers” comic (his “Ultimates” had a great start), but with a book like this how long is it really going to be before Hickman’s plan has to work in tandem with an event, a crossover or any other conceivable element created by someone else that will inevitably interfere? (With it launching in December, I give it five months.)
DC does their dance in a different way. Due to the relaunch of their line being done with the specific goal of delivering products consistently regardless of interior content quality, many of their biggest franchises are falling to the wayside. Superman should be the biggest character in superhero comics whenever a new issue of the book comes out, and yet that book has failed to hold a steady creative team since launch — and apparently DC managed to scare away George Perez from wanting to work on it anymore, which is incredible. DC’s focus is firmly on two things, if their actions are any indication: “Before Watchmen” and Batman. Everything else is left to fight for some kind of footing, and the quality (or lack thereof) of the average DC book is incredibly apparent when you’ve got creators leaving books left and right with stories unfinished, only to be replaced by whoever is seemingly available. I would go so far as to say that, when looking back at the New 52 twenty years from now (or less, really), only perhaps a small handful will be memorable, and I would doubt if any of those are referenced as lovingly or affectionately as something like Perez and Wolfman’s run on “New Teen Titans” or Robinson’s “Starman,” two highly influential comics on the entire medium from DC, let alone their own “continuity”.
So why would you invest in books like that — books that will assuredly turn their backs on you whenever the Next Big Thing comes along, or books content to trod along aimlessly — when you could invest in any of the books announced by Image at SDCC? Books that aren’t even out yet and won’t be for a few months, but who will inherently treat you with more respect from the get-go?
It wasn’t that long ago that Image Comics was known for Spawn and Savage Dragon, and those titles were often love it or hate it books. Heck, people like to openly deride or scoff at it, but I find “Youngblood” highly entertaining; there are very few who will talk about how they enjoy it as well it seems (I can think of one person off the top of my head). But now when you talk to people about Image, they don’t talk about these titles. What are they speaking of? “Morning Glories.” “Chew.” “The Walking Dead.” “Saga.” “Hell Yeah.” All new books, all launched within the last decade, and all of them featuring things you could theoretically find in any superhero comic (minus that sense of desperation for new readers). Not only that, but Image also relaunched a bevy of comics themselves, receiving more universal praise than you’ll find at the Big Two, with “Glory” and “Prophet” being two books you consistently hear people throwing praise around for. New or old it seems, Image is making waves left and right.
Continued belowLooking at the Image announcements is particularly fun as well. Here you have a slew of talented creators, all of whom are fairly known for superhero work and who are now working on creator-owned projects instead. Image received the reputation in the last five or so years of being where you could find some of the best in new and upcoming creators who would then move over to superheros (Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, for example, and now Justin Jordan and Nick Spencer). SDCC 2012 sees the reverse of this; now established names are bringing their titles to the company. “Pretty Deadly” may easily be my favorite Image book announced at the con, featuring Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios working together again, and that’s a team that you and I can trust via their work on “Osborn.” And Greg Rucka and Michael Lark together again? I first read Rucka and Lark together in “Gotham Central,” a book that can be dubbed as an ancillary Batman book, and yet it seems to have longer sustainability than any of their current Batbooks, finding a new following just recently with the re-issues of the books. Words can not fully express how excited I am for more work by the two together; sign me up, no questions asked.
Not only that, but it’s important to note that folks like Matt Fraction are returning to Image. I can’t pretend to know how things work behind the scenes, but after taking his creator-owned property from Image (“Casanova”) and bringing it to Marvel’s Icon, you’d think that his next title of a similar nature would find a home at Icon. Yet Fraction’s next creator-owned project with Howard Chaykin is back at Image — just like Brubaker and Philips brought “Fatale” to Image instead of having that released through Icon (their past two collaborations, “Criminal” and “Incognito”, have all been published through Icon). Again, I have no particular insight to the hows and whys of it all, but its an interesting move to see, especially with Marvel’s Icon putting out a good deal of creator-owned work from the likes of Bendis, Millar and friends. With the amount of talent working at Marvel, Icon should be Marvel’s Vertigo, shouldn’t it?
The creative zeitgeist is not just at Image, either. Look at Dark Horse’s last year: they’re now home to books like “Mind MGMT”, “Resident Alien,” “Alabaster” and “The Massive,” all of which are but a few issues in, are 100% awesome and are all equally engrossing reads for a variety of reasons reaching towards a variety of audiences. (Seriously: “Mind MGMT?” One of the best new books of the year.) Dark Horse also proves how easy it is to produce quality licensed work with their recently relaunched “Conan the Barbarian” and various Star Wars properties, simply by giving them strong and consistent creative teams. I’ve heard more talk of both Conan and Star Wars in the past year than I’ve ever heard in all my time reading comics, and that’s all thanks to Brian Wood joining Dark Horse to write a book for each, as well as folks like John Jackson Miller and John Ostrander adding their own spins on the Extended Star Wars Universe with artists like Stephane Roux and Becky Cloonan. Throw everything Mignola and Powell are doing with new “Hellboy” and “Goon” as well alongside the rumored return of “Umbrella Academy” and the eventual release of “Killjoys” by Gerard Way and Cloonan and you should certainly expect to be hearing a lot more about and from Dark Horse later this year and all through 2013.
Heck, thanks to Dark Horse Comics, I can read “Blacksad” without a French to English dictionary. That’s praise enough in and of itself.
So if you look at the Big Two versus the Smaller Dozen, what do you have? With Marvel and DC, you have comics being done to be in the Here and Now, comics to catch your eye and draw you in because Character X makes an appearance or Event Y happens. With Image, Dark Horse, IDW, Top Shelf, Oni, Archaia and more, you have comics being made because someone has an idea, someone loves the medium and someone really wants to tell you a story through it in a supposedly new and unique fashion. They’re creating something they hope will last, specifically in terms of those who choose to read it coming back to it frequently, or even sharing it in collected form with others like so many personal artifacts. I’m not saying you have to pick just one or the other, but one of those two is clearly better than the other (all theoretically flawed executions aside, of course).
Continued belowLook at it this way as well: in the past year, how many time has Marvel or DC had to respond to some kind of overwhelming fan critique/complaint, defending their actions and trying to justify it all? “We’re sorry we killed this character, we’re sorry we did that thing, it was for the benefit of the story,” etc, yadda yadda. And in that same amount of time, how many statements of a similar fashion have you seen from Image? Dark Horse? Any of the aforementioned creator-owned centric companies I mentioned?
Eric Stephenson, the King of Comics (seriously!), recently said in a post-Con interview with Tom Spurgeon:
Part of what we do is make good comics, and we want to be the best version of Image Comics. But part of what we do is create a sustainable market. It has to be a part of what we do. Things like Saga and Walking Dead and Fatale, these are things that people want to return to. People can recommend these things to their friends, even people that don’t read comics. As opposed to tailchasing events, these yearly spike makers, but who’s going to be talking about AvX ten years from now.
Stephenson does a pretty good job of hitting the nail on the head: content over quality is what we deserve, but it’s not always what we’re likely to get. It’s a lot easier for me to turn people on to a book like “Morning Glories” because they liked LOST than it is for me to recommend perhaps any Batman book on stands to fans of The Dark Knight Rises. Part of this is because of the inherent caveat of “Oh, well, you should probably know X, Y and Z,” and “no, it’s different in the comics than the movie because of A, B and C.” People who haven’t already been reading “Avengers” but liked Avengers may be willing to try a comic or two, but it’s a lot easier to invest (in more ways than one) in something like “Saga,” “Walking Dead” and “Fatale” because you’re there from the beginning and there are no additional requirements to reading it; there’s no continuity to memorize, no need to be on Wikipedia for hours to read about That Time That Thing Happened. You don’t have to worry about things changing because of an evolving market either (well, you have to worry about it being cancelled, I suppose), or your book having to cater to an event happening on the other side of the Universe. When you read “Walking Dead,” you read “Walking Dead” — that’s it. It’s a lot easier to comfortably put money down on the table and emotionally invest in a book like that, and that doesn’t seem like something your average Marvel or DC book is too interested in these days.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course. For example, “Journey into Mystery” has been one of the most solid titles since it re-launched, and “Thunderbolts” has been an absolute joy, especially if you’ve read it from the beginning of Parker’s run (and even then, there area a few nice jumping on points within it). Snyder’s and Morrison’s work on Batman have both been huge titles, and are tremendous for both those who have stuck there from the beginning and those coming in now via the DC New 52 (plus, it’s Batman!). But those are small dots in a larger picture of content. I can sing the praises of “Journey into Mystery” until my lungs collapse, but I fear that will never have the same name-recognition or widespread following as the Avengers, “the Avengers” or The Avengers.
Let’s rewind a bit. Now, I fully believe people will be talking about “AvX” in ten years; of course they will! People will either be looking back in 2022 and saying comic events were so much better a decade ago, or they’ll be talking about how, with whatever event happens that year, you can “trace the seeds of it” all the way to “AvX” and Marvel Now! That’s kind of just how these things go. What Stephenson is pointing out, however, is that “AvX” is not going to be spoken of in a decade to the same extent we still talk about things like “The Dark Knight Returns.” This isn’t a book built for longevity in the medium, but rather a book for the frequently mentioned Here and the Now; any form of investment in it seems ill-fated. Throwing aside the notion that you may think “AvX” is the Citizen Kane of comics (maybe it is!), it’s a stepping-stone book. It’s not something created for you to want to come back to it repeatedly years later for what it offers to the medium, and I don’t think there’s anything to learn about storytelling from it other than maybe how to get a large team of people to work together. It’s not going to be a staple read for future generations, however, as it is rather a segue comic with some talented creators behind it so that something ALL-NEW and ALL-DIFFERENT can happen in a few months.
Continued belowTranslation: it’s longbox fodder.
Surely Marvel is aware of this, though. As Axel Alonso stated in Marvel’s Next Big Thing panel, “In summer time, you guys want summer movies, summer concerts, summer beach reads. We give you summer comics.” So none of this is a surprise, but it is just a little bit sad. It’s the mentality of a snake eating its own tail, a never-ending cycle of regurgitation. You can cross your fingers and hope some good stuff will come out with all the rest, and inevitably some will, but you could say that about any other big change at Marvel or DC in the past decade. The same snark, the same critiques, the same everything — all I’m saying now about the changes at Marvel is basically what people, myself probably included, said post-“Siege” with the birth of The Heroic Age, for example. The only difference between then and now is what books we’re discussing.
Personally, I’m fine with admitting I’ll always read superhero comics no matter the company, and I think your “average” comic fan would agree with that statement. For all the guff I’m giving them here, I’m not “quitting the game” or anything like that. I love Spider-Man as a character and an idea, and hey, I also happen to think Dan Slott is doing a fantastic job on “Amazing Spider-Man” right now, so there’s little chance I won’t be reading that book this time next year. As long as there are good comics to be read, I will happily read them. I’m fine with even relenting to the fact that, you know what? All of Marvel Now! may be THE BEST THING EVER. “Before Watchmen,” for all the negativity it got pre-launch, has received positive reviews. I still haven’t read a single issue of it all and I never will, but that probably counts for something somewhere. And hey, even if you don’t like the traditional superhero offerings, you can get into plenty of creator-owned superheroes and similar archetypes from Image, BOOM!, Dynamite, Dark Horse, IDW — just about anywhere you look. Superheroes are everywhere and they are for everyone!
And yet, for anyone who has spent a portion of their life even somewhat dedicated to the idea of these costumed crusaders, it is a bit hard to get excited about the never-ending game of Creative Musical Chairs at Marvel and DC. The lack of consistency across the board is simply brewing a great sense of apathy. I have no doubt in my mind that “Uncanny Avengers” by Rick Remender and John Cassaday will ostensibly be a damn fine comic, because I know Remender and Cassaday are great creators. However, my inherent fear is that there is no real point to reading this comic over, say, Remender’s next creator-owned endeavor with Greg Tocchini that he keeps teasing on Twitter, or “Planetary” for the umpteen-billionth time. “Uncanny Avengers” is assumedly a temporary title, and I can’t honestly believe that in a few years time it won’t just be some other comic with a different creative team due to some other event to be announced for Summer 2013. That’s a bit of a bummer.
But then: if I tell you that you can buy a new comic written and illustrated by Brandon Graham in a few months, that’s just excitement in a box. No doubts and no hesitations there; if you’re a fan of Graham’s “King City” or “Prophet”, it’s quite easy to be ecstatic for the release of “Multiple Warheads.” That is the Ultimate Victory of any comic in the end.
This isn’t the universal opinion either, of course. Some people happily admit that they read comics for characters and care little about creators. That’s fine, I suppose, and if Batman being in a book means you want to read the book, more power to you. It doesn’t do anything to change the aforementioned snake-eating-tail nature of company-owned comics, but hey, read whatever makes you happy.
I would hate to pretend that any of the above hasn’t been said before. I’m pretty sure it all has, albeit with different examples used (as mentioned twelve thousand words ago). Regardless, the past few years in comics have been interesting to watch. With more and more websites popping up daily each filled with commentary of their own, the comic landscape has featured a massive change in how it’s viewed and received. The importance of the creator has been multiplied tenfold, with an almost universal de-emphasis on reading comics for characters as opposed to the people working to bring those characters to life. You hear more about Scott Snyder and Grant Morrison than you do about Batman (maybe), and that’s a good thing. We certainly don’t live in any form of Enlightened Environment where the creator reigns as king yet and the behind-the-scenes comic industry still seems a bit Game of Thrones-esque (incest and all) in which the classic quote can be arranged to “when you play the game of comics, you sell or you die. And yet, when the biggest comic news to come out of San Diego Comic Con is linked to that of the creator-owned, then you know we’re certainly on the right path. Viva la Creator-Owned Revolucion.
