I’m pretty avid reader and collector of comics (mostly trade paper backs) while do realy like super heroes why are 10 selves for the Marvel, Image, and DC 1 self for DC’s Vertigo line and 1 self for everyone else.
I haven’t read a lot of non-super hero comic books, but what I have read from Vertigo and the dozens of other independent publishers has been excellent stuff (be it only when the titles have already established followings like Preacher or JTHM).
Now I’ve read enough good super hero stories to know that the genre in the hands of good writer can be great fiction and provided insight into the human condition. But why great books like Love & Rockets, From Hell, Bone, and 100 Bullets have to share such a small part of the comic shop?
The independants and smaller press books don’t have the advertising or distribution that can compete with Marvel, DC, and Image.
Dark Horse and a few others get around to the mass market, but otherwise, you really have to go to a comic book store to find a wide array.
Comic book stores order primarily through Diamond, which is inherently a comic book monopoly. If you want every comic book store in North America to know about your book to stock it, you have to go through Diamond Distribution.
Superhero comics outsell other genres by a wide margin. I suspect most comic book stores carry the others only because the love them, while they make their money from the superhero lines.
Part of the reason is probably a remnant of the anti-comic hysteria of the 1950s.
Back in 1954, a fella named Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent. It was a paranoid rant about the evils of the media aimed at children, comic books in particular. At that time, superhero comics competed with horror and crime comics in a big way. Comics like The Crypt Of Terror, The Vault Of Horror, and The Haunt Of Fear were making a killing (har).
Anyway, people took Wertham’s book very seriously, there were congressional hearings, and basically it was a big ol’ mess. Out of the ashes arose the Comics Code Authority, a self-censorship group aimed at saving the industry by cleaning it up (else a government crackdown was sure to follow). The Code established some pretty strict rules for comic publication. A comic that didn’t follow the rules couldn’t bear the CCA seal, and the publisher was at risk of shutdown.
Some of the CCA rules included: “Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” “Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honourable behaviour shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a licence for morbid distortion.” “Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.”
Anyway, you can see how these rules lend themselves much better to superhero stories than to horror stories or crime stories. The other comic genres, unable to write good stories under the new rules, fizzled and died. Superhero comics filled the gap.
That sounds a good possibility Max Torque. The comic books I remember from UK when I was into such things, were never super hero based. It would instead be some form of skilled human as the Hero (Judge Dread for instance). We never suffered from the CCA thank goodness.
http://www.comiclist.com/new.html has a representative list of what’s actually available from week to week. A slight majority of these titles are not superhero; but the vast majority of the non-Marvel/DC/Image/Archie/Dark Horse titles sell about 2000 copies; even a marginal Marvel/DC superhero book sells a minimum of ten times that, and a couple hundred thousand if it’s an X-Men or Batman tie-in.
I think the age range at which people are interested in reading comic books has something to do with it.
Kids younger than 6 or 7 won’t be able to read the speech and thought bubbles. Kids older than 13 or 14 are going to be too busy wallowing in angst and snorting cocaine to spend much time reading anything. And once you’re out of puberty, you’re supposed to have “graduated” to books without pictures in them and consider anything even vaugely cartoony as “kid stuff.”
And what kinds of things are kids in that target age range of 7-13 interested in? Sex? Maybe a little, as a lurid kind of fascination for something they’re not getting. Responsibility? Heck no. Power. Yes. They’re chafing under the fact that they’re still dependent on their parents for their livelihood and itching to get out and prove themselves, and they wish they had some kind of “edge” that would let them out-compete all the rest.
What better edge could a kid hope for than being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound? Superheroes and the powers they posess are the personal fantasies of nearly every kid, particularly boys.
Well, I’d put that number down more to 22. But… I’d say that’s about right.
At the comic book store I work with, there are less than 10 children that have subscription boxes. The rest of the 190 subscriber boxes are adults. Generally they range from 21 to about 55 or so.
As you note, the Code has become pretty irrelevant. The old horror comics of the 1950s experienced a slight surge in the 1980s when classic issues of Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror and others were reprinted. I bought a good number of 'em; they’re great. I remember a furor in the 80s when Marvel began publishing their massive cross-title “Inferno” series, which pretty much told the tale of “hell on earth.” A lot of people started asking if the Code meant anything anymore, and it seemed the answer was “not really.”
But my point was that after the great purge that followed the creation of the CCA, just about everything but superhero comics was wiped out. By the 70s or 80s, superhero comics were the norm, and nothing else could get a decent foothold in the market, because hero books were expected.
Incidentally, if you’ve read the Watchmen series, Alan Moore did something very interesting. In the world of Watchmen, regular folks (well, and Dr. Manhattan) put on costumes and fight crime; superheroes really exist. As a result, apparently, superheroes don’t appear in comic books; instead, they have pirate comics. Yo ho ho!
I think Miller helped the crime genre allot with his first “Sin City” series. Writers like Warren Ellis are experimenting with the genre and a lot Bendis’ non-marvel work avoids using super heroes unless he can get a good crime story out of them (Powers is so good).
PS Judging by Avatar’s free comic book day promo that they are trying to be a publisher very oriented to crime and Horror comics, Guess they don’t want to be the next Choas Comics
I object to the premise – it assumes that super-hero comics dominate the industy, and they simply do not. They dominate the perception of the industry, and I certainly cannot argue that they don’t have the highest sales, but for close to the last decade there has been a wide range of comics material available that has nothing to do with superheroes (before that, too, but back then non-superhero distribution was spotty; it isn’t anymore). Domination to me connotes near uniformity, and there’s nothing at all uniform about today’s comics market. Unfortunately, a good third of retailers simply do not stock books published by anyone other than Marvel, DC, or Image, despite the fact that when it’s stocked, the other stuff can sell – and can attract a much more financially secure demographic to the store.
I think it has to do a lot with how the US views comic book, comic strips and animation. It’s for kids, unlike in say Japan where they make comic books of every type (romance, horror, erotica, suspence, etc) and they’re sold on the newsstands like we sell magazines and you see businesspeople reading them on the subway on their way to work.
Comics are seen here as for young kids (mainly boys) only, and young kids wanna see the action and the black vs white good vs bad simplicity a lot of super hero comics offer. If I had a kid I’d definitely search for some comics that were age appropriate and didn’t have too large doses of sex or violence… so many super hero comics are so full of this stuff that many females who want to read comics feel shut out by them. I’m sure there are some really great super hero comics out there that don’t fit into that stereotype, with the huge breasted females in the skimpy outfits and 4" high heeled boots, but I don’t have the time or money to search out these titles. I have read a lot of excellent non super hero comics, like Maus and The Watchmen and Mage, but somehow the super hero ones just don’t seem to interest me, and that’s the majority of what’s out there.
So my opinion as to why are there so many super hero comics is that’s what the main buying audience (pre-teen and teenage boys and young men) wants. That’s also why you see so many video games full of the same sex and violence - the people buying the bulk of comics are the same ones buying the bulk of video games. As an adult I have nothing against sex and violence in my entertainment … but I want it in a different flavor than they present it.
You guys have no idea how much the section of my life devoted to entertainment has been enriched ever since I discovered anime and manga. Finally, fantastic stories with great artwork about things I care about - relationships and the big life issues, with a good dose of action thrown in to keep it from devolving into sappy melodrama. I love Utena, and Fushigi Yuugi, and X (or as my friends and I call it "the loving destruction of Tokyo). The sex and violence shown in these titles have a really different feel to it though, because its designed by a different culture for a differnet audience (adults, mainly female).
I agree that how the public views comic views the comic book medium is and important part of the explanation. But saying that the industry only has Super heroes is a lie because “romance, horror, erotica, suspence, etc” can be found.
Watchmen is a super hero book and Mage is debatably a super hero book. Krokodil also provided evidence that the majority of Comic books published aren’t super heroes (be it that they sell far fewer issues).
did you read anything eles in this thread or did you just post
What are you saying that comics have bad art work and never deal with “relationships and the big life issues” and always fall into melodrama. To be honest to seems to say more that you never bothered looking for comics about things you care about; “Love & Rockets” and “Strangers in Paradise” come to mind. The only difference between comics and manga is the readers in Japan don’t place stereotype the Graphic narrative medium. If you had bothered to look you would find comic books that you would enjoy just us much as manga you read, because they are same art from distribution and publication are handled in different and arguably better ways, but medium is the same.
I can put up with the bad-to-mediocre superhero stuff out there if it keeps the publishers and shops etc alive. But that goes for any genre - there’s excellent stuff and there’s crap. (Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’ take on Daredevil spring to mind as one of the former).
I share Lear’s confusion: When there’s so much good stuff out there, why do the shelves get filled each month with bad comics? Why do people go for boring, repetitive, poorly written comics?
But, as I said, as long as there’s room for quality and niche stuff I’m happy. Wish I could do something to point out the quality of small-press/indie/autobio stuff to a wider audience. It get’s cold and lonely being the only one…
Wertham also went after Batman, claiming that there was a homosexual relationship between Bruce wayne and Dick Grayson. That is why Aunt Harriet was added to the comics and Alfred was dropped for a few years.
And that is precisely why the comic book market is dying. There aren’t any new young readers coming in. And even if they did come in, they’d be hard pressed to find a comic book that would be appropriate reading material for a 7 year old.
Marvel has completely abandoned the Comics Code and as a result we now have Nick Fury saying “Fuck” and “Shit” on a regular basis in his comic book.:rolleyes:
I just picked up a tradepaperback of Stories from Bizarro World, which was stories about the Bizarro World which were written in the 1960’s. They could never be written today, because A) They would be considered too juvenile and B) They don’t follow continuity.
to spend much time reading anything. And once you’re out of puberty, you’re supposed to have “graduated” to books without pictures in them and consider anything even vaugely cartoony as “kid stuff.”