Camera Obscura: Design For Life

Coffee. It's cheaper than comics and it's got a better kick. Instead of just competing with each other, comics need to compete with the more affordable pleasures in life - and that means offering a spectacle that coffee beans just don't have.
09 September 2002

Yes, I know it's been a while. Yes, I know you hadn't noticed. I've been moving house and having a real life for the last while. It's the having a life bit I want to talk about, because the moving house was ghastly and dull.

This is something that bothers me from time to time - the need for comics to compete with Real Life. Superhero comics have less of a problem, since they're either bought by kids (or for kids, by their parents) or they're bought by a captive market of slightly nerdy teenagers or adults who ought to know better - the lifelong comics fan, basically.

But step outside the superhero genre, and you start to hit problems. (OK, the superhero genre has problems too, but we'll ignore the constant slow dwindling in the numbers of "lifelong comics fans" that spells eventual doom for the genre for now). Outside the comics mainstream you really need to be able to pull in people who don't typically read comics. You need to convince them that the five quid in their pocket is better spent on a couple of comics than on a coffee and a trip to a museum.

This is hard going. Frankly, I'm a huge comics geek, and I would rather have the coffee and the trip to a museum.

Last time I went shopping, I bought six CDs and a book for 35 quid (FOPP have finally opened in London, and might as well just take a chunk of my paycheque automatically every month). Oh, and four comics for around 15 quid. I admit, the comics bill includes LUCIFER: NIRVANA, in prestige format, and an edition of the trade paperback serialisation of LONE WOLF AND CUB, but given that LONE WOLF AND CUB represents about the best value for money on the market right now, and I still managed to read it over my coffee, I trust you can see the obvious point?

Comics don't represent value for money. Which means that they've got to offer an incomparable experience. Something I can't match anywhere else. They've got to catch my eye and dazzle me.

I'm not talking about a Pop Thrill here - I have an irrational prejudice against Pop Thrills. I'm talking about something that'll flip switches in my head and stay with me, like that bar I used to go to with the owner's pet snake wound round the beer taps. Like the sight of a roomful of hairy bikers violently moshing to Jailhouse Rock. Something to reassure me and them that the world is a much more interesting and horrible and weird and mad place than I thought it was ten minutes ago.

How many comics can you think of that can do this?

How many comics that don't feature superheroes can you think of that can do this?

Because no matter how good NEW X-MEN is, and no matter how clever the re-invention of CATWOMAN may be, they're still, to the average consumer, superhero comics, and therefore to be dismissed as for kids. Furthermore, they're not offering me much reassurance that the world is interesting, because they're clearly marked as genre fiction and have almost fuck all to do with the actual world. Whether you agree with that or not is irrelevant. Whether you think that the people who dismiss them like that are missing out and simply being snobby is irrelevant. They are not spending their money. This is the only thing that matters.

So, how do we get them to spend their money?

If comics have got one intrinsic strength, one totally unique selling point, it's that they look like nothing else on earth. The sheer power and versatility of the medium is unmatched. It's my view that they communicate better than almost anything except music, and have a toolset that's specifically designed to flip headswitches, when it's actually used.

How many comics look like that? How many comics entice the casual browser in? It's an oft-overlooked Evil Of The Direct Market that it encourages complacency in book design. So long as the profile in Previews (and online, these days) is half-decent, a book is going to get the same number of orders no matter what it looks like.

So most companies don't put the effort in. Even on the occasions when a big publisher does give a bit of thought to the covers of their line, it tends to be with the thought to giving them a common theme for the month, homogenising them further in the eyes of the casual browser. It's not making the books look pretty and appealing to new buyers that's the goal here, it's stamping the corporate brand on them, reminding the fans that all these comics come from one publisher.

I was in Magma Books, off Charing Cross Road the other day. It's a bookshop full of design books. It's a shop full of books about communicating, about selling things to people. There's a huge body of reference material in there about communicating in words and pictures, refining that one singular experience I was talking about earlier into something that will grab you by the frontal lobes and shake. OK, these books are also about using design to sell something, but then, frankly we could do with some lessons in selling things at this point...

It's interesting to look at the few comics they've got available in Magma. JIMMY CORRIGAN. GHOST WORLD. DAVID BORING. Books put together by people who understand that how you say something is just as important as what you're saying. People who bring some design to their books.

It's not that people are reluctant to spend the money on something with a high price tag, but it's got to look like it justifies that price. And no matter how good a comic is, it's still got to work twice as hard to justify the tag, because it's got the a whole sack of stigma to overcome.

Because the sad thing is that while I said above that comics look like nothing else on earth, that isn't entirely true. They look much too much like other comics.

Perhaps it's time we started thinking about how to make them look like adverts. I mean, they sell, don't they?

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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