Editorial: Cassandra Complex - X-Treme X-Atlantic

From one extreme to the other: Antony zooms round San Diego, then relaxes in Oxford, all the while musing about why no-one seems to read their comics more than once.
08 August 2003

AFTER ALL SHE FEELS NUMBNESS INSIDE

This past month has been one of extremes, for me. I've gone from the largest Anglophone comics convention in the world, to the smallest of the same, and the weather has gone from black clouds bucketing rainstorms to the second hottest week in Britain's recorded history. May you live in interesting times, as they say...

YOU BETTER RUN

First up was the San Diego Comic-Con, and an eleven-hour flight from Blighty, during which my in-flight entertainment system refused to work. Thankfully, that wasn't a herald of things to come.

San Diego was very big this year, as I'm sure you'll have already read in the various write-ups and on-the-spot reports out there about the con. What most of them may not have told you, though, was that the majority of this extra space was taken up by vast exhibition islands which had absolutely nothing to do with comics.

Now, I'm not complaining about that - SDCC became a 'pop culture' exhibition a long time ago, and has been about more than comics for many years. If anything, I was actually glad of it, because if you're only there for the comics, the con was essentially no bigger than the last few years has been. There was ample time to wander round and see everyone, so long as your feet could stand up to it.

(I've never quite understood why people complain there isn't enough time to see everything you want to see at San Diego, anyway - even if you really do want to visit every single booth, you'd have to be walking pretty slow not to do that if you're there for the full four days. And I doubt there's anyone who really does want to see everything, anyway.)

What had definitely changed this year was something almost intangible - the atmosphere. It's hard to pin down, but there seemed to be much less of an air of... desperation, for want of a better word... about comics people in 2003. Everyone I met seemed relaxed, in good spirits, optimistic about the future, and generally pretty chilled out.

Also notable was the diversity of the crowd, which played a big factor in my own lifted spirits over the weekend. I don't know if there's any definitive way to find this out for sure, but I'm positive there were a previously-unseen large number of women, children and what you might call "normal people" attending this year. The socially-maladjusted obsessive, while present, was in an undeniable minority. And that's about the best progression we could ask for in this medium.

FOREVER AFTER

One of the more interesting exchanges I witnessed at San Diego was between Greg Rucka and a fan. Greg and I had missed one another all weekend, so I ended up grabbing an hour with him on Sunday while he was signing at the Oni booth.

Halfway through, a fan approached with a copy of Greg's latest novel, A FISTFUL OF RAIN, for him to sign. She'd evidently bought it the previous day, because Greg remembered her - and she'd already read it. In three hours.

(Greg's what they call "a real page-turner" in the world of back cover blurb quotes - he writes in a manner that just reads very fast - but three hours for a 300-page hardcover book is pretty bloody impressive, regardless.)

Anyway. Greg gaped, the fan smiled and said, "It was really good," and Greg pulled out his pen with a shake of his head and a despairing, "That took me a year to write!"

To which the fan replied, "Yeah, but I'll read it again, I promise..."

Now, all amusement aside, this got me thinking about the amount of time creators put into a piece of work versus the time it takes to consume. This is particularly relevant in comics, because it's possible to read them so quickly; how many times have you heard someone complain that the latest issue of something which cost them three or four dollars only took them ten minutes to read? Damn those money-grubbing publishers!

But, you know, that thing took a long time to put together. And when you think about it, almost every medium is the same; movies take up to a year to put together, from start to finish, and are watched in a couple of hours. A sixty-minute CD rarely takes less than three months to produce, sometimes years. A one-hour television drama will take between three days and a month, generally falling somewhere around a week for filming and post-production. With novels, you're into silly numbers; even the fastest writer still takes a month to produce a book, and the slowest can take decades. All for a book that will be read in a day or two.

And yet, few people complain about such a ratio in these media. And I think the main difference lies in repeats.

TV shows get repeated all the time. Everyone drags out a favourite old album once in a while, or re-reads a favourite novel (I have a friend who used to re-read the entire LORD OF THE RINGS every new year. Nutter). Liked the movie? Buy the DVD, and watch the premiere on TV, and then watch the DVD again, and...

How many people actually re-read comics?

Sure, we all sling them on the shelf, or in a box, and think "One day, when I have eight months with nothing to do, I'll pull out my entire collection and re-read them all in one go!" But we all know it's never going to happen.

Surely it can't be a question of time. Even FROM HELL only takes a day or two to re-read (as opposed to slogging through it for the first time), and as I pointed out, everyone else seems to be complaining that their favourite comic only takes them fifteen minutes to read.

So maybe it's a question of quality. Looking at my own shelves, I can see only a small percentage of stuff I've actually re-read. FROM HELL, PREACHER, SANDMAN, QUEEN & COUNTRY, BERLIN, WATCHMEN, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, V FOR VENDETTA, THE INVISIBLES, THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT... It's a great list of good comics, but it wouldn't fill more than one shelf out of the ten which currently hold my library.

And the thing is, there aren't any comics on those shelves which I didn't like. If I don't enjoy a book, it goes straight on the "not for me" pile, and ends up either recycled or given to a friend. So yeah, I have a vague "I'll re-read that someday" feeling about the rest of my library, but it's hardly a driving urge.

And I honestly couldn't tell you why that is. It's starting to unsettle me, a little.

BACK TO EACH YEAR

At the other end of the convention scale, I was at CAPTION this past weekend, in Oxford. I wrote a report of last year's CAPTION in a previous column, so I won't repeat myself; suffice to say that, apart from some minor hiccups in location booking, it was pretty much the same as last year, but with more interesting (to me) guests; Carla Speed McNeil came over for her first ever European visit to answer all manner of questions, and Bryan Talbot popped down with his slides to do a couple of talks on his art and methods. The weather was fine, the drinks were cheap (apart from in the after-hours pub, but that's a whole different story) and everyone was smiling.

It may not have been a patch on San Diego in terms of scale and size, but CAPTION gave me every bit as good a feeling about comics' future.

Maybe I should change the column's title to POLLYANNA PREDELICTION...

Nah.

ETERNAL ODYSSEY RETURNING

I absolutely loathe flying the return leg from the States. You've finally managed to adjust to the time difference, and they force you to go to sleep at two in the bloody afternoon. My body clock gets fucked in all manner of interesting ways, and I'm basically useless for the next 24 hours after landing.

So one small redeeming factor this year was the onboard ambient radio station, which was previewing the new album by Delerium. Even if you don't know the name, you've likely heard Delerium - you couldn't move for hearing the Airscape remix of SILENCE (with Sarah McLachlan on vocals) a couple of years back. The funny thing about this ambient, Deep Forest-esque, world dance music band is who they actually are - Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber, the same guys behind industrial noise agitators Front Line Assembly. It's a simple equation of mood; FLA is nihilistic, Delerium is optimistic.

And this new album, titled CHIMERA, is a worthy addition to their growing library, with much more emphasis on the guest vocalists. They've even turned the angst-o-meter down a little, especially on standout songs like AFTER ALL and RUN FOR IT, which is no bad thing.

You can listen to some of CHIMERA at the official website. (I've just done a quick search around the Web for reviews, and note with interest that most "hard-line" fans seem to hate the album. Just another case of what I was talking about last month, then...).

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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