Article 10: Make 'Em Laugh

Comics breaking through into the mainstream? Is this a joke? It doesn't have to be. For an ailing industry, laughter may be the best medicine.
06 August 2001

So we want to expand the industry. Let's take that as a given. Conventional wisdom is as follows:

To do this we need to get more readers. Which means we need to make comics they actually want to read. Sure, there's a ton of other problems to sort out as well, but run with me here. We need to make comics that people want. To do this, we need to offer a wider range of material, because they're obviously not interested in superheroes. Agreed?

Well, to be honest I'd dispute that the public aren't interested in superheroes - after all, they go to the films, they watched the TV shows, they've kept many of the characters as pop culture icons. I'd say they just don't want to read about them on a monthly basis in a vastly overpriced and inconvenient format. But sure, we need a wider range. No real argument there. So, what do we want to expand into? What's our key to the mainstream market?

Comedy.

Saviour of the industry. Really.

Allow me to explain. Contrary to what people sometimes seem to think, getting the mainstream audience to read comics is not a matter of waving a good non-superhero comic in front of their face, at which point the scales will fall from their eyes and they will leap to their feet yelling "My god! This is brilliant!" This is not just a case of trying to sell something they never knew they wanted. We are trying to sell them something they actively don't want.

The audience is hostile to the very idea of reading comics. They're for children and retards. Don't come to me with your anecdotes of how you persuaded one of your friends to read PREACHER. Not good enough. We'd talking about a mainstream audience. Not just your mates. We're talking about your mum. Your postman. Your boss. Pensioners. You know, the public.

Now, the public have preconceptions about comics. They think they know what they'll get with comics - namely, simplistic crap in some kind of action-adventure genre aimed at children - and while this is exaggerated, they have a point. They don't want to buy this stuff because they assume that it won't entertain them. And it probably won't.

Conventional wisdom says, here's how we deal with this. Let's wheel out a load of really good comics and shout about how these are completely unlike all your preconceptions about comics. Behold WATCHMEN, which is a superhero story but very clever, almost like a real book. Behold MAUS, which is about something very serious and has mice in it, which is kind of arty. Behold SANDMAN, which is clever and arty and mostly very unlike a superhero book. See how comics have changed. Et cetera, et cetera. You've all read it a thousand times.

The underlying assumption here is, if a load of plausible critics tell the public that these comics are not like old comics, then their preconceptions will be overcome. They will buy these acclaimed books, and they will be exposed to the Wonderful Possibilities of the Medium (TM).

I'm not convinced this works. The sort of books that tend to get pushed for this purpose are a bit suspect to start with. They tend to get chosen to show how clever, imaginative and generally intelligent they are. Art with a capital A. This is fine for the tiny minority of the public who actually like the idea of thinking. It brings in some new audiences, but still not the mainstream. Look who SANDMAN brought in - goths and Tori Amos fans. And very welcome they are too, but they're not my idea of a mainstream audience.

The general public just aren't in the market for this sort of material, whether in comics or any other medium. They don't want to think. They want to be entertained. Now, that doesn't mean we have to give them dumbed-down crap. But it does mean that we need to find a different selling point. We've been sending the wrong message - that comics are cleverer than you thought. The message we should be sending is that comics are more entertaining than you thought.

So we bring on the wide variety of other genres, right? Well, yes, we do - but say you're a reader of romance novels. What's your incentive to start picking up comics as well? Are you desperately short of romance novels? Do you have a burning desire to see romance stories rendered in static illustrations? Basically, why would you want to turn to comics when you were being perfectly well served by other media already? You don't really believe in comics as a romance medium. You don't really believe it does that sort of thing. Big resistance to overcome.

Here's the big advantage of comedy: the general public already believe that comics can do comedy, and do it well. The resistance is much lower.

In fact, compared to virtually any other genre out there, the public are positively receptive to the idea of comedy in comics. They read the comic strips in the papers. They liked DILBERT. They don't mind DOONESBURY. They own a FAR SIDE desk calendar. (Okay, strictly speaking that's not a comic. As if they're going to care about the difference.)

These are the comics we almost never talk about. The comics that are nowhere to be found in our subculture and that we've blanked out of our consciousness. We've been trying to get into the mainstream by building on our little direct market and the stuff that hardcore comics readers buy there. The public couldn't give a toss about any of that. The comics they're receptive to - the only comics they're receptive to - are humour strips. Surely it stands to reason that this is a key market we should be building on?

Take Britain's adult humour comic VIZ, which may be something of a spent force these days, but still sells in numbers that most North American comics can only dream of. In its day it sold ridiculous numbers. It broke through to the mainstream partly on word of mouth, but largely because the public actually liked the sound of it. Humour comics aimed at adults, largely presented in a format not too frighteningly different from what they remembered seeing in British comics as kids. The VIZ hype wasn't based on it being arty (which it wasn't) or intelligent (which it sometimes was), but on it being entertaining. And it sold.

Of course, the British comic industry (such as it is) then shot itself in the foot by releasing a ton of third-rate VIZ clones instead of building on the new audience with something a bit more diverse. But the point remains - the one new comic in recent years to have achieved significant sales to an adult audience was comedy, marketed as comedy, and not a moderately arthouse trade paperback marketed as comics' answer to ULYSSES.

So where the hell are the comedy books? HATE had a certain degree of crossover potential, but it doesn't exist any more. Vertigo sticks out the occasional comedy book. RIFLE BRIGADE has some possibilities if you can get it into the comedy sections of bookstores, not the godforsaken "graphic novel" area. But CODENAME: KNOCKOUT? Hardly. Marvel is reviving HOWARD THE DUCK, but ever since the film that's been a poisoned property. The public won't take that one seriously again without a struggle. NIGHT NURSE? Perhaps. Alan Moore used to have a few comedy strips in TOMORROW STORIES, but mixed in with stuff that was a much harder sell. DC has a few kiddie titles licensed from cartoons, but it's not quite the same.

Independent publishers, then? Kevin Smith does the odd film spin-off, but they're really just bonuses for fans of his films. Oni has books like BLUE MONDAY and HOPELESS SAVAGES. There's Judd Winick and Evan Dorkin. And Archie, if you want. They're there. But still, comedy is hardly a prominent part of the industry right now.

Sometimes I think the comics industry is going through a very adolescent phase, in which it wanders around shouting at everyone that it's grown up and has put away childish things, and is now very serious and thoughtful and like the Manic Street Preachers. Comedy offers a great potential market, but we're too busy trying to make everyone take comics seriously to take advantage of it.

When the great mass-appeal comedy book comes along, there's a half-decent chance that people might buy the damn thing. More than you can say for almost any other genre. Surely this is an obvious way forward that isn't getting anything like the attention it should?

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

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