Atomic-Robo.com

Here I am, two days away from the release of my first print comic, so obviously I’m qualified to tell you — in two parts — exactly what’s wrong with the American comics industry and how to fix it.

By that logic, because I’ve seen pictures of space, I’m also qualified to plot the course of interplanetary probes!

But, seriously. I don’t claim to have any special insight, much of what I have to say here has been said a thousand times on forums, message boards, and other blogs by comics readers. But maybe when I say it, as someone who’s published a commercially successful online comic and who was recently picked up by the print industry, it’ll sound a little less like theory and a little more like something to pay attention to.

It’s no secret that American print comics ain’t doin’ so hot. What we today consider to be great sales figures would have gotten a title cancelled fifteen years ago. We can blame a multitude of factors, but they’re all going to boil down to this: there just aren’t as many readers as there used to be. The solution appears obvious: get more readers. How to go about that isn’t as obvious, so we can hardly blame comics for not figuring it out yet. The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t feel like they’re actually trying. In fact, it feels like they’re actively fighting against new readers.

There are three primary external factors choking comics to death.

1. The glut of entertainment sources now available to the average person. Everyone I know has cable or satellite television (often coupled with a TiVo), movies, CDs, DVDs, multiple video game consoles, PC games, an assortment of periphereals (fancy HD television and home entertainment system, high-end PC, etc.), high-speed internet, and books. Admittedly, for most of them it’s RPG books, but I know a few people who read the real things. Like you’d find in a library! I know, right?

2. The lower perceived price-point for these sources. Technically a $2.99 comic book is cheaper than a $25.00 DVD. But the DVD gives you a couple hours of movie, a ton of bonus features, several commentaries, and social options. You can watch a movie with friends and family, have a little viewing party, whatever. A comic book is just 22-pages, a few minutes of entertainment in total, and it’s only a part of the story, and you’ll have to wait four weeks for the next part. And you’re not going to invite anyone over to read Superman. Interestingly, there’s a social option for everything listed under #1 up there other than “the library kind” of books, and that’s such a paltry addition to the list it’s there as a joke.

3. The ease with which one can acquire these sources. You can buy Halo 3 at 7/11. My god. The ubiquity of digital entertainment has hit critical mass. You can buy CDs, DVDs, and video games at most grocery stores. Hell, the different specialty stores that sell anything in #1 cross polinate each other’s items because there’s customer crossover. Not so for comics, though! You have to go to a specific store to get comics and I can just about guarantee you it won’t be as nicely lit, decorated, or arranged as, say, a Best Buy.

So the kind of person who might buy a comic book has available to him a wide range of other choices that have more bang for the buck and are easier to get. And, let’s not forget, they’re easier to get into.

For instance! If you buy a movie and you have no idea what’s going on, then it’s a failure. If you buy a comic and have no idea what’s going on, then it might be a failure, but more often than not it’s probably because you didn’t do enough research into its convoluted and contradictory history and/or you didn’t buy enough tie-ins.

What the fuck?

When your audience is given the choice to “Watch some TV, or give yourself homework, or buy things you don’t actually want in the hope of understanding the thing you might want” can you honestly say it surprises you when they choose TV?

This brings to the three factors choking comics from the inside-out.

1. Continuity. Now, here’s the thing. I love continuity. Italics love. The DC animated shows by Bruce Timm/Paul Dini are works of continuity genius. I could dedicate a whole post to this — and undoubtedly will someday — but for now I’ll just say they maintained a cohesive timeline across six different shows (eight if you count Static Shock and Zeta Project) for fourteen years. Meanwhile, DC comics can hardly maintain a coherent chain of events across six issues of a single comic (Countdown, anyone?). Poorly maintained continuity is a wall to new readers. There are those who will excitedly seek out and read about a history or mythology (yo!) but limiting your potential audience to that one specific slice of dweebs at the expense of everyone else in the world is bad business.

Look at it like this.

Would Raimi’s Spider-Man movies had done as well if viewers were required (and expected!) to be familiar with the events of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends to have any idea what was going on? Obviously not, that’s a guaranteed formula for financial ruin. No one would do that. Yet it’s company policy for the comics divisions of Marvel and DC!

2. Tie-ins. A simple and tempting way (from the publisher’s point of view) to increase sales on a number of titles by forcing readers to read each of them to understand what’s happening in any of them, thus bringing “new” readers to all involved titles. It’s a complete failure of imagination. I mean, first of all, “new” readers? Really? Seems more like shuffling around existing readers at the risk of pissing them off. If you want genuinely new readers, a tie-in is probably the worst thing you can do. They make it more costly and more work-intensive for new readers to get into a book. Tie-ins do nothing but perpetuate the idea that comics are nothing but continuity porn for myth-hungry nerds. Any spike in sales that might occur is wholly temporary anyway. Do you know how to not get people to keep reading Daredevil? By forcing them to read about him when all they really want is to read Spider-Man.

There are much better ways to get a title noticed these days. For instance, you can give it away. If you’ve got a hundred back issues of a title lying around, it’s not going to kill you to put a “best of” selection online for people to see what they’re missing. Don’t be a jackass about how they can be accessed either. Don’t hide them, don’t use PDFs, don’t use Flash, don’t make navigation a pain. You let people check out these comics on their own terms, you will get sales at least at the trade paperback level. More on digital solutions later.

3. Crossovers. Really, I classify this as a mutation of tie-ins. If we can characterize tie-ins as shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, then crossovers would be yelling about how there are no lifeboats. Only, ha ha, there are lifeboats, but now they’re on fire. Ha ha, no they’re not. Because there never were any in the first place! And so on until it turns out what the Titanic actually hit was a lifeboat and nothing will ever be the same! Seriously this time! This isn’t exactly a scientific defintion, but it seems the difference between a tie-in and a crossover is the sheer scale of the narrative excuse for doing them. Both are transparent grabs to get more sales from the same number of customers, but the crossover tends to do it with earth-shattering events that will change everything forever…until it’s easier to ignore.

And that brings us back into continuity. How can you expect to get new readers interested in your stories when your own creative teams can’t keep track of which elements of which version of which labyrinthe history applies?

How can the American comics industry hope to survive with this many foes aligned against it? We’ll talk about that on Wednesday.