Article 10: Critical Distance

The critics' favourite books are rarely the ones that succeed. In fact, they're often the ones that get cancelled quickest. Long-time reviewer Paul O'Brien explores the gap between the critics and the mainstream audiences.
17 January 2005

As I'm writing this, I'm back in town for 48 hours in the middle of several weeks' posting to the north of Scotland. Which, unfortunately, leaves me without internet access or a convenient comics store. Or, for that matter, a cinema. Or a decent pub.

In fact, I'm rather enjoying it. January seems to have been deemed the national detox month. I can't be bothered eating muesli for a month, but cutting myself off from the world for most of January and isolating myself in a tiny hotel ten miles north of Peterhead is doing wonders for me. Another couple of weeks and I might actually start missing some of this stuff.

Anyway. Checking through the news sites, I see that while I've been away, DC have finally got around to cancelling BLOODHOUND, KINETIC and HUMAN TARGET, and possibly HARD TIME and FALLEN ANGEL as well. Took them long enough. HUMAN TARGET was doing under 10,000 copies.

All of these books fall into a curious limbo category. None of them are dazzlingly experimental or bafflingly off the wall. HUMAN TARGET is a little bit odd, and that's about it. But none of them could be described as art house comics. They're aiming at a mass audience. Yet they end up in the purgatory of critical acclaim - books that are liked and somewhat admired, but that nobody actually buys.

I could sit here and list examples for paragraphs on end. We all know the books - a hardcore audience sings their praises, the word of mouth achieves absolutely nothing, and the title staggers to a premature grave. In today's market, the premature grave usually turns out to be somewhere between issues #12 and #18.

Of course, this is hardly a comics-specific phenomenon. Film critics are forever championing adorable little indie films that nobody bothers to see. Music critics do likewise. In comics, matters are complicated by the fact that 'critical acclaim' is usually indistinguishable from 'the internet likes it but nobody else does'. After all, that's the area of fandom from which most comics critics emerge.

Comics also have a secondary level of critical acclaim, based around the Comics Journal audience and such forth, focused on material which really does appeal to a minority audience almost wholly divorced from the direct market mainstream. Some of these people have a better claim to being true critics in the academic sense.

I'm going to stick with the word critic because it's shorter to type, but let's acknowledge here that the critics I'm thinking of in this context are basically that faction of online fandom who stare monthly at the sales figures in absolute astonishment that their favourite titles sell so poorly, and then exchange messages with one another about how awful it is.

Why is there such disconnect between the critical favourites and what actually sells? It's hardly surprising that the critics regularly seize on books that nobody else is buying. After all, they tend to be the sort of hardcore fans who are more inclined to blind, random purchases of new books they know little about. Consequently, they're more likely to stumble upon poorly-promoted good comics that sailed under other people's radar. But, having found them, why are we so consistently useless at actually getting anyone else to buy them?

Part of the problem, of course, is that the critics basically just talk to other people who already agree with them and rarely manage to generate true word of mouth interest outside their own community. Watching the sales figures over the last few years, I've been struck by how rare it is for a low selling title to be turned around by critical acclaim. From time to time, a second-tier title catches fire and starts genuinely climbing its way up the charts, but it doesn't happen often. These tend to be the books that actually had some mainstream readers to start with (in the sense that some parts of the direct market are more mainstream than others, at least).

No such luck for the low-selling titles. They're pretty much trapped in a ghetto from which they will never escape, barring drastic overhauls that change the book beyond valid comparison. These comics sell almost exclusively to the critics and those like them.

It's an audience that, for the most part, only talks to itself, and makes little secret of its vague disdain for the mainstream readers. I mean, they read Wizard, for god's sake! The fact that they don't have the faintest inclination to read our comics is tacitly taken as evidence that they don't 'get' them, thus allowing commercial failure to be reinterpreted as proof of our superiority.

The critical community tend to make little secret of this attitude in relation to the Wizard fanboys. Somewhat similarly, one level of highbrow up, the Comics Journal audience seem to have remarkable difficulty promoting their favourite comics without breaking off to sneer at the rest of the world for not reading them already.

I can't remember the last time one of them actually recommended a comic to me without attaching a condescending reprimand for my poor choice of reading material. This doesn't exactly inspire me to follow their recommendations, which are much better at loudly proclaiming their own good taste than at actually persuading anyone else to agree with them. The Wizard readers doubtless feel the same about people like me. In this context, the potential for word of mouth to operate is extremely limited.

But this is hardly the only barrier that stops critical acclaim from translating into sales. The critics have a habit of seizing on material that only has niche appeal, while sulkily dismissing most top sellers.

Of course, a lot of those top sellers really are bad, and many of them sell largely through brand name and inertia. It would be fascinating to know how many of UNCANNY X-MEN's readers buy it because they actually like it, as opposed to those self-identified X-Men fans who buy the comics because... well, because they're X-Men fans. Much the same exercise could be carried out for most long-running major superhero franchises and I suspect the results would be uniformly depressing.

That aside, however, critics tend to read an awful lot of comics, even by the standards of the fan-oriented comics audience. This makes us jaded, if not downright cynical. It makes us overcritical of perfectly decent stories that strike us as hackneyed and derivative, but which may not come across the same way to an audience less familiar with the earlier versions. While such comics may not be good, as such, they can certainly be better than we give them credit for, at least when considered against the audience who are actually expected to read them.

This sort of reaction is almost unavoidable for critics, since the more you understand about how the tricks work, the less likely you are to enjoy seeing them done (except by very skilled hands). There's almost a standard formula for improvised comedy sketches, which is blindingly obvious when it's pointed out to you. I wish I'd never learned what it was, because I've never been able to enjoy improv as much since then. It's much the same thing.

The same attitude tends to turn critics into neophiles, disproportionately keen on anything that is new, experimental, different or ? more likely in comics circles ? at least slightly unusual. Trying something new is acclaimed as a worthwhile end in itself. In one sense, it is. It's a good thing that people are out there experimenting. Good for them. But the nature of experiments is that a lot of them fail. The mainstream audience isn't necessarily looking for anything new or different, and doesn't prize that so highly. And why should they?

The better ideas eventually get drawn into the mainstream, in a diluted form, by way of influence on other creators. That's how it works. It's also a stage of the procedure that tends to get overlooked.

A related aspect is that critics tend to be more receptive to the idea that they're fans of the medium, and should try comics in other genres. More mainstream readers rightly consider themselves fans of superhero comics. Consequently, they don't identify non-superhero comics as part of their fandom, and tend to approach them in much the same way as non-comics readers do, albeit with perhaps a slightly greater degree of receptivity (since at least they see the adverts).

A huge majority of direct market readers, I suspect, react to manga in the same way. It's not something they regard as falling within their fandom, and they don't really feel inclined to go exploring it as a matter of sequential art duty. Which is fair enough, if you ask me.

None of this, of course, necessarily indicates that critics are barking entirely up the wrong tree. But we're very bad at seeing comics from the perspective of the more casual and more mainstream reader ? and when we do, we tend to see any difference of perception as their problem. Perhaps it's really ours.

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

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