Reach Out And Touch Someone

The comic industry is desperate to bring in new and lapsed readers - but will efforts such as Free Comics Day reap any rewards if the industry continues to look and behave like a clique?
29 March 2002

One of the current comic industry buzzwords is 'outreach'. This term refers to the industry's attempts to gain more paying readership among those who don't read comics and those who used to but have lapsed.

It is a concept that has been seized upon by the major powers in the industry, with DC's recent BATMAN: THE 10-CENT ADVENTURE, Marvel's forthcoming nine cent FANTASTIC FOUR and such promotions as Free Comics Day on May 4th.

Such initiatives are all very well and good, and obviously make sense from a business point of view, but beyond these initial concessions for the newcomer, the comics industry and medium as a whole seems unfriendly from a new reader's perspective. You may find that a little hard to comprehend, but you're reading an essay on a comics website, so a certain amount of knowledge about the way the industry works is presupposed on your part.

To give you an idea of how a 'non-comics' person might perceive comics, I'll set a challenge for you. You have to talk about comics and why you enjoy them, without making them seem boring or nerdy, to someone who thinks that all comics are essentially some sort of four-colour newsprint version of Adam West and Burt Ward prancing around in tights with the odd garish 'POW!' sound effect.

Sounds relatively straightforward, no? Okay, now try explaining what a 'TPB' is to the same person. Or who Grant Morrison is and why everyone should have heard of him. Or how and why AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is different to ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN or PETER PARKER, SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL MANGAVERSE SPIDER-MAN. Or why the difference between organic and mechanical 'web-shooters' is apparently of earth-shattering importance to certain people.

Or, and this is the killer, try to explain what all this 'Sequential Art' rubbish that hardcore comics people talk about is. Comics are comics, right? They're not 'Art'. Everyone knows this. THE BEANO isn't Art. SUPERMAN isn't Art. The only time comics are art is when Roy Lichtenstein prints them on a bloody great bit of canvas, surely? And even then, he must be taking the piss, right?

Of course, this is all without mentioning how much a 'healthy' comics consumption costs on a weekly or monthly basis.

I challenge even the most ardent of comics evangelists, spin doctors and salespeople to make that lot seem interesting, exciting and a good advertisement for comics.

It also strikes me as typical that what other industries consider to be their big showcase events - the expos and conventions that make the news, which members of the general public attend in droves - are geared in the comic industry toward people who already know loads about comics.

Fanboys after sketches and signatures from their favourite creators; collectors looking to find that elusive copy of BASTARDMAN #123; budding artists and writers wanting to show their portfolios to the assembled editorial types from a dozen different publishing houses. Not exactly curious novices, especially if one considers the time and money they must have expended in order to cover the distances involved with getting to a major comics 'festival'. Nobody without a relatively serious interest in comics is going to fork out the cost of travel and hotel bills just to wander until their feet hurt around a bloody great hall that quite probably contains more unsavoury people in one room than one might otherwise normally meet in a whole year

It is also typical that the best comics out there, the ones that really get the critical praise in abundance, can often be the most difficult to find. The reverse is also true; some of the least interesting comics are the ones to be found on newsstands, with the largest potential readership.

What if a new comics reader has heard something about how great this MIRACLEMAN comic is? (Not an unlikely eventuality, given the amount of column inches the McFarlane/Gaiman debacle is getting in the comics press and on comics websites.) Say this reader quizzes his local comic store owner if he has any MIRACLEMAN. If he doesn't get laughed straight out of the shop, he might be lucky enough to get the following response:

"Sure; you see the mylar bags up on the wall there? The ones that have the ridiculously large price tags? The ones that only contain issue numbers 3, 5 and 7-10? That's all the MIRACLEMAN you're able to get in this shop, my friend. If you're really desperate, try eBay."

Now, I know I'm playing devil's advocate here; many of the problems above are not unique to comics, but the other sorts of industry that exhibit these problems almost all cater for niche markets, with a consumer base of collectors and specialists. Comics are in danger of being regarded in the same light as cigarette cards, antiques or other such curios hoarded by obsessives.

The comics industry has already had its fingers burnt with the 'crash' of the early 1990s, caused mainly by the industry pandering to the desires of collectors and speculators with unnecessary cover variants and 'collector's issues'. Hopefully this mistake won't be repeated. It would seem to be common sense from a comics neophyte's point of view that comics should be aimed at readers rather than collectors. This presumes, of course, that people buy comics for the content, rather than rarity value or what issue number they are.

I would suggest that the effort put into such loss-leading projects as THE 10-CENT ADVENTURE to achieve 'outreach' is potentially going to waste if new readers don't see anything that appeals to them beyond the initial gesture. Now, I'm not going to open the can of worms about what genres would appeal to the wider public and so forth, as it is patronising in the extreme to suggest what the public want on their behalf, or to say 'people don't want to read silly spandex superheroes' or 'people don't want to read boring weird indie comics'.

All I will say is that people will be much more likely to read comics if they don't have to feel like they're joining some sort of cliquey cabal. Surely using one's 'outreach' project as a starting-point for a massive crossover story is being a little presumptuous? Having to buy DETECTIVE COMICS #766 in order to follow the story from THE 10-CENT ADVENTURE doesn't seem logical. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps DC would have been wiser to have made the 10-CENT ADVENTURE a stand-alone story, not a largely irrelevant preface to a larger story. The fact that half of it was filling in backstory and continuity didn't make for particularly enjoyable reading either.

There's nothing worse than half-hearted concessions, which please neither new nor established readers. If you're going to reach out, stretch the whole way.

Lindsay Duff is a literature graduate and researcher.

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