One of the many oddities of the American comics industry is its unusually narrow audience. Having retreated to the direct market, and then devastated any vestige of a casual readership in the absurd 1990s market crash, the American publishers find themselves playing to an audience that consists almost entirely of fans.

Not unreasonably, publishers are increasingly desperate to escape this cul-de-sac. And they seem to have finally realised that it can't be done from within the direct market, meaning that the only viable way forward is to make an inroad on the manga and bookstore readership (which really does include more casual readers). But this movement is only in its early phases. For the most part, American comics find themselves playing overwhelmingly to an audience of fans. A 'casual reader', in this context, is little more than a fan of another book who thought he'd give something else a try.

There is nothing wrong with fans, per se. The problem is not the large number of fans, so much as the near-total absence of anyone else. The fans are supposed to represent the devoted extreme of a wider fanbase. Comics have a hopelessly lopsided demographic, the equivalent of going to your local multiplex on Saturday night and finding it populated exclusively by film buffs who watch three movies a week. No doubt the cinemas are delighted to have these guys in the crowd, but they're even more delighted to have the casual audience members who must outnumber them twenty to one.

'American publishers play to an audience that consists almost entirely of fans.' The fans are an odd audience. A normal person, knowing nothing about fandoms, might assume that the fans actually like comics. They might think that, if they went to a convention or a comics message board, they would be besieged by people overwhelmed with enthusiasm and love (perhaps of a rather tiresome sort). And they would find a bit of that.

But they would also find a hell of a lot of complaining, grumbling, general discontent, cynicism and so forth. Far from discussing their love of comics, the fans seem to spend more time debating the precise reasons why they suck, with particular reference to why things aren't as good as they used to be - whether 'used to be' goes back two years, five, ten or twenty. This, of course, is the basic joke of THE SIMPSONS' Comic Shop Guy. For a man who's devoted his life to comics, he doesn't actually seem to like any of them very much.

And remember, these are the people who really adore comics. Just imagine what the people who can't stand them must be like.

In fact, this behaviour isn't unique to comics. You can find it in a lot of well-established fandoms. Whatever the subject, whatever the medium, the longtime fans will generally be united in agreement on one thing: this is not a golden age. They may disagree about exactly which period was the golden age, but this certainly isn't it. At best, it may be a pale imitation of the golden age. At worst, it's a pale imitation of something that wasn't even the golden age in the first place.

Here's the problem. If you're a fan now, then it wasn't this week's comics that made you a fan. Frankly, if you're reading comics at all, you've probably been a fan for years. The comics that first made you a fan probably came out years ago, and were by completely different creators. They might have featured the same characters, but the approach is likely to have been different.

'Fans seem to spend their time debating the precise reasons why comics suck.' Fans, by definition, form an emotional attachment to the work, and tend to have pretty high expectations of what's to come. Moreover, they tend to have fairly well-developed and solid ideas about the characters and the stories. This is not to say that fans (or most of them, at any rate) are locked into one particular interpretation or status quo. The audience has aged over time, and most of them do want to see things change and move forward. Often, in some ways, they'd like to see more change than the publisher would like - the Spider-Man mythos ossified years ago, but the character retains a lot of fans from a period when it was driven by soap opera plots that still seemed to be heading somewhere.

The catch is that the fans want to see things develop in a way that is consistent not merely with the letter of the original stories, but with their personal interpretation and expectations. A radical reinterpretation of characters or events gets into very dangerous territory with this audience, particularly if it has knock-on effects that require it to be treated as a significant part of the mythos. Swerving the storyline off in an unexpected new direction, or drastically changing the style of the book, can run into similar problems.

These approaches may be perfectly good judged purely on merit, but they're simply not what the fans want to see. At best, they don't provide what the fans are looking for. At worst, they actively undermine something the fans perceive to be part of the magic that attracted them to the title in the first place. Cue tantrums. (Extreme examples are the ludicrous Clone Saga, which invited readers to accept that they had been reading about the wrong character for most of their lives, or the more successful attempt to replace Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, which alienated Hal's fans even more than strictly necessary by trashing his character into the bargain.)

'If you're a fan now, then it wasn't this week's comics that made you a fan.' The problem is particularly pronounced in comics because it's such a closed audience of fans. In other media, there's more freedom because there's a greater turnover of casual readers and a greater possibility of establishing new fans to replace ones who turn on the current product. Of course, other media also have the advantage of being less reliant on dragging out the same old concepts and mythologies decades after the possibilities were exhausted, which is another obstacle to satisfying the fans. But where similarly long-running franchises exist, the fan's attitudes are much less relevant. Star Trek has a huge fandom, but it depends on normal viewers to justify its place on television. Soap operas have a sufficiently heavy turnover of viewers that they don't need to worry too much about comparisons to bygone years.

It's no coincidence that the happiest and most upbeat fandoms in comics tend not to be fans of titles, characters or publishers, but fans of individual creators. There's still the possibility of the creator losing his touch and producing work they don't want to see, but at least these sub-fandoms tend to be oriented around the work the creator is doing right now, rather than a desire to recapture something he was doing at some point in the past. And unlike readers who've been shaped into fans of characters or titles, they don't have to accept later work as relevant when it senselessly trashes a story they liked, since it's by a different creator and doesn't count.

At least somebody's happy. Otherwise, the overwhelming fan inclinations of the audience represent a real problem - an audience who find themselves trudging through material they don't like in the hope that it'll recapture something of earlier material that they did. The standard advice to such readers (when they get vocal about it) is to stop whining and stop buying the books if they don't like them. True enough; a healthy medium can't be based on catering to them. But then, this isn't a healthy medium, is it?

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

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