Here’s Your Future
Originally published at jaredaxelrod.com. You can comment here or there.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan Didio says something remarkable.
The worst-case scenario for DC’s new strategy is that few new readers stick around and existing ones are alienated by the changes. But the relaunch’s architects said it’s a necessary risk.
“The truth is people are leaving [superhero comics] anyway, they’re just doing it quietly, and we have been papering it over with increased prices,” DiDio said. “We didn’t want to wake up one day and find we had a bunch of $20 books that 10,000 people are buying.”
What’s unusual in that statement is it’s refreshing honesty. One can argue about the good and the bad that Didio and the rest of the folk behind DC comics has done over the past few years (which is pretty much the same thing Quesada and the folk behind Marvel comics has done), but its nice to see that someone is admitting to the problem in public.
I have a friend Ryan who I hold up as the guy corporate superhero comicbook companies are banking on. Ryan is emotionally invested in the characters and their histories, has thousands of comics and buys more every Wednesday. Ryan cares about the relationships of these corporate trademarks in a way that I don’t. He’s the person both Marvel and DC have been marketing to for as long as I have been reading comics. On the one hand, that’s great, because Ryan will buy their product every Wednesday. But as Didio pointed out, there’s less and less Ryans out there.
Here’s the thing, though. While its great that DC is starting over, I’m not certain it matters. Superhero comics have in them a very visceral, specific appeal: everything is over done. Men and women with exaggerated physiques punch through walls and fly through the air. Emotions are communicated through screaming and anguished poses. It is a genre where a casual routine conflict is nothing less than saving the world. You can get away with that sort of over-the-top storytelling in ways that you cannot in other media.
Or rather, you used to. This is the trailer for DEUS EX: HUMAN EVOLUTION, a videogame that was recently released:
Click to viewWhat can superhero comics possibly offer a kid who plays that game? It’s an old saw that all corporate superhero comics offer are familiar faces, but that’s seems to be the case. You can read about a guy in Spider-Man mask save the world, or you can control a super-powered character to do the same thing. Which is more rewarding?
Now granted, there is no ground in that trailer that has been tread upon by Masamune Shirow in APPLESEED and GHOST IN THE SHELL. But its telling that a videogame using concepts 25 year-old from manga feels more modern than any superhero comic on the shelves right now.
Comics as an art form will never die; telling stories with a series of pictures and symbols were what cavemen used to do for fun. Comics main strength is how few people it takes do it. Unlike theater, film, or video games, comics is one visual storytelling medium that can be done with only one person, or a small group of collaborators. When PENNY ARCADE can hold its own convention twice a year and when Alison Bechdel’s FUN HOME is the toast of the literatti, comics are in no danger of disappearing. And superhero stories, like any genre, remain a valid medium through which one can tell personal stories.
But corporate superhero comics? Characters whose lives are dictated by committee, who are chained to history that goes back farther than their readers have been alive? Where’s the future in that?
Even Walt Disney knew there was time to stop making Mickey Mouse animated shorts. Perhaps it is time that Superman and Spider-Man stopped being anything but theme-park mascots, big-budget movies and Saturday morning cartoons.
DC comics’s reboot of their entire line was done out of the fear of a future where people stop reading corporate trademarks fighting each other. In world video games can outdo superhero comic’s best trick, that future doesn’t look likely, it looks inevitable. After 70 years of dominating the medium comics, corporate superhero comics maybe through.
Considering the talented women and men that these corporations have abused throughout their history and the stranglehold they have put on the medium in general, I look at this future and I am hard-pressed to see the downside.