Article 10: Press On

Wizard is the loudest voice in comics journalism. It's puerile, it's adolescent, and it knows its audience. Thankfully, there are more alternatives now than ever before - but there are still a couple of gaps in the market.
02 September 2002

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, comics aren't really important. If they were all to disappear tomorrow then the unemployment rate would go up a bit, and many of you reading this would be rather annoyed. But life would go on, in a totally comics-free world. The same one, in fact, where most of the English-speaking world has been living very happily for years now.

If comics aren't really important at all, then comics journalism is obviously even less so. Which begs the questions, what is comics journalism for, and what should it be trying to achieve?

This sort of discussion usually leads fairly quickly to everyone lamenting how annoying Wizard is. Which is understandable. It's an extremely annoying magazine, at least to me. But then, I'm not who it's for. Although Wizard is often attacked for its ridiculously narrow horizons and boringly adolescent humour, that misses the point. It's aimed at teenage boys. It doesn't really care what anyone else thinks of it.

Why should it? It may be the most prominent magazine covering comics, but that doesn't mean it should feel any obligation to promote material which its readers aren't remotely interested in. It's not like any of this desperately matters. It's not the budget deficit. Comics journalism, like most entertainment journalism, is about telling your audience things that interest them, not things that they pressingly need to hear - since unless they actually work in the industry, they don't pressingly need to hear any of it. If you want a different type of coverage, start your own magazine.

Of course, you don't need to start one from scratch. There's a wide variety of comics journalism out there for you to choose from, even if they don't all shift the same sort of numbers. You can have highbrow, middlebrow or unibrow. You can have gossip, you can have crusades, or just plain old news reports, light on the editorialising. All bases covered. Something for everyone.

Or at least most people. A couple of gaps in the market spring to mind.

Ever prolific with his opinions, Warren Ellis recently wrote a column suggesting that what comics journalism is missing is somebody prepared to approach the subject with the sort of passion and attitude that you find in a lot of British music journalism. He certainly has a point. Nobody is doing this. About twelve years ago there used to be a British comics magazine called Speakeasy which I remember being roughly along those lines. Its publisher axed it (under the guise of relaunching it as a comic, BLAST, which tanked in rapid order) and nothing ever really came along to replace it.

Of course, it's not like this style of writing has done wonders for the British music press, which now exists in a sadly delapidated state. The NME is still there, but long since overtaken in sales by nu metal publication Kerrang. The dance music press is in decline; Select was axed years ago, and about the only other remaining options are Q (music for your dad) and The Wire ("Norwegian jazz is really creating a buzz these days...").

Attitude is an overrated virtue. The NME exists in a permanent locked-in-fifth-gear mode where everything falls into two categories. Number one, it's new, fantastic and rocks like a bastard. Number two, everything else, which is therefore shit.

This admirable disregard for liberal concepts of "your tastes may vary" makes the NME all very well when it's tagging along on a musical movement which actually has some merit and momentum behind it. But even when the music scene is at rock bottom, the NME always has to be exciting about something, no matter how trite. For every Britpop and Madchester that they managed to sell to the mainstream, they have at least five embarrassing debacles which never made it outside one square mile of Soho.

Once you've been reading it for a few years, you realise something about the NME. With a few writers as notable exceptions, for the most part the NME is crap. It's the critical equivalent of a stopped clock - by always randomly latching onto something at any given time and hyping it to the hilt, it tells the right time twice a decade.

Nonetheless, on those occasions when it stumbles into synch with the zeitgeist, it does play a valuable role. It can help to send a subculture movement over the top into mainstream success. And even though it's crap, the NME is worth keeping around for that purpose.

For similar reasons, a comics equivalent would probably be rubbish unless it was tied specifically to a particular moment, and had the good sense to die quietly once the moment was gone. But it would still be worth having around, to give a push to creators and movements that have the potential to go further if only somebody was there to shove them out of the underground and into the mainstream.

In the absence of a strong journalistic presence in this area, it's fallen to the not-long-for-this-world Warren Ellis Forum to perform that role in the English language comics market. Perhaps its imminent demise will inspire somebody to fill that gap. The result will probably be divisive, infuriating and frequently self-righteous - not to mention largely crap. But if it helps to promote material that deserves the exposure, that can excuse a multitude of sins.

That's one gap in the journalism field. Chances are I'd hate it, but I'd still like it to exist. It is this sort of mild, tolerant attitude that makes me entirely unqualified to do it myself.

The other gap is boring but more important to an understanding of the industry. Like it or not, comics exist within the publishing industry, and you can't have a full understanding of the medium without understanding the financial pressures that it exists under. Aside from those who actually work in the industry, the market for this kind of thing is fairly small. Of course, comics journalism exists to tell readers the sort of thing that they want to hear, and this is why most sites' news agenda ranks the publication of Marvel's quarterly accounts as of roughly equal importance (ie, interest) to a change of penciller on FLASH. The top 300 charts are pored over exhaustively, because they're readily available and easily digestible, but much less attention is given to other sales patterns - despite their obvious importance.

Dan Raviv's book COMIC WARS is a rare example of extended comics journalism focusing on the financial rather than creative aspects of the industry - perhaps because its author isn't a comics journalist. It's a book about the battle for control of Marvel during its bankruptcy days.

One thing I find very amusing about COMIC WARS is that it gets through almost 300 pages on Marvel's condition without the editor-in-chief playing any significant role whatsoever. Bob Harras' sole entry in the index is a reference to page 158, where his appearance in the book reads, in its entirety: "Over at the company's headquarters on Park Avenue South, comic book editor Bob Harras, who had been there since 1983, was amazed to find that his bosses had vanished."

The important decisions that shape the industry are being taken at a higher level by people you've probably never heard of. Bill Jemas has rather generously publicised his existence; most comics readers would struggle to name his predecessor, or anything that that person did. (Jemas gets five pages of the book, but then he only joined Marvel right at the end of the story.)

This mind-bendingly tedious corporate activity plays a huge part in the development of the major publishers. The majority of readers find it painfully boring, which is why most comics journalists steer well clear of it all. Presenting it in a way that normal people can easily understand is a difficult task, but that's journalism for you. Coverage of these issues exists, but doesn't have nearly the prominence that its importance merits.

Somewhere out there, there's a gap in the market for somebody who can write interesting and informative articles about the economics of the comics industry. Not many people will read it, but those of us who do will be very grateful.

It's only comics, of course. But if there are genuinely important comics stories out there, then this is where a lot of them are hiding.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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