There's No Geek Rage Like Old Geek Rage

[lifeonqueen]

One comment on Canadian politics before I get on with the geekery: Bwahah - also, does that first point mean that Mulroney basically did everything Stevie Cameron said he did and, if so, did he perjure himself when he sued her?

More for electriclandthan anyone else: long interview with Jeff Smith about Bone, making & marketing Bone, his work on Shazam for DC and his new series Rasl. Smith gets extra points for proving his cool with the Jaws quote at the end.

Interesting post from comics blogger Occassional Superheroine that, in conjunction with an old comment from Marvel EIC (eejit-in-charge) mentioned in the Smith interview that '10-year-olds don't read comics' (those members of the geekery with our comic-reading bona fides will know this is both absolutely true and utterly false), the article about black superheroes printed in the Star last (?) spring, and my visit to Dublin's Forbidden Planet, has got me thinking about the future of comic books. Even though I've kicked, like any ex-junkie I spend a fair amount of time thinking about my old high. OS's post was specifically about the vibe at the New York Anime Festival (it's from 10/12 if you want to read it) but her general point - that there is a reading youth culture out there and that comics "Big Two" don't get it - is neither new nor, IMO, disputable. But it keeps needing to be said because the Big Two, as personified by Marvel's chief Eejit still don't get it.

I picked up two issues of Powers and the Fables: "Sons of Empire" trade. I figure that will be it for comics and me for the next three months unless I visit the two locations in Southampton (megastore and bargain store - foul play, ref!) over Xmas (there's a thing that I think someone in Canada needs to own that was a bit steep for my budget Monday - if it's cheaper in pounds, it could end up in an airmail pouch). I looked at Northlanders and checked if there was a new Brubaker Captain America trade in stock (no). If the reviews are good, I might pick Northlanders up in trade. I want to take a look at the complete "Death of Captain America" arc before I commit money to it. I look at buying comics like panning for gold or investing in stocks: on the one hand, you've got to wade through a lot of crap to find the gold; on the other, I'm only interested in investing in something I know is going to give me a profitable return on my investment. So (taking grad school out of the equation), as my income has gone up exponentially from when I started reading comics, the amount of time and money I'm willing to spend to read them has diminished to almost nil. Most of the geekery I run with are the same. But if the old and the affluent are slowly winding down their interest in comics, who's going to take their place?

At the moment, the official answer seems to be "dunno." Gen X and those of us who followed on its heels benefited from the industry boom of the 90s and the 80s shakedown of the superhero genre that gave us The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and DC's Vertigo line. I grew up reading comic books. More importantly, comic books grew up with me. They got dark, people got married, people died, Dark Horse started publishing books by indie creators aimed squarely at the adult (or early 20-something audience - it felt pretty adult then). Then the market, glutted on multiple-cover printings, 18,000 X-men and Batman titles and the general hubristic excess of an industry where Rob Liefield was allowed to create and publish not one but a whole universe of comic books (surely a sign of bubble market if there ever was one) busted. X-Men no. 1 sold over eight million issues. All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder no. 1 was considered a runaway bestseller in 2005 for selling 260,000 plus copies. Average circulation for a top-selling comic book in North America today is a little over 100,000 issues. The mighty have fallen and they can't get up.

As for manga and anime, I remember when they were not only new but cool (this was back before the hordes of twittering 13-year-old girls dressed as Sailor Moon - although that still titillates a certain percentage of comic book readers and SF fans we don't like to talk about).

Back in the day, Japan and manga were held up as examples of comic art as a storytelling medium rather than a genre (as comics still tend to be treated in North America today) and one who's audience was made up all genders and age groups by the hardcore geeks. I can't quite imagine that argument being made by the same group today. Partly, time enough has passed for reality to shine through the cracks in that argument (I've read that women tend to read less manga as they grow older and that, beyond a certain age, manga aimed at the female audience (shoujo manga) tends to be ghettoized in stores (much like SF, off in some corner or another), which makes women uncomfortable, particularly if they have to push past a half-dozen men looking over racks of pornographic comics). Mostly, however, I think the tide of young manga readers - including but far from limited to the Sailor-Moon set - has turned the common geekery - the overwhelmingly aging, white, middle-class, male lot of them - against this "manga" thang. "Why don't you read manga if you don't like it" has become a common messageboard putdown for women uppity enough to say that they want more female characters and less sexism in superhero comics. As OS writes:

It's a movement in which males and females more or less equally participate. It's a movement that is racially inclusive. It's a movement in which consumer participation and customization is essential. It's a movement not about collecting but experiencing...

And whether Peter Parker is married or not or Batman is Bruce Wayne or not makes not the single whit of difference to them.

Girls and women aren't don't dominate anime the way that men dominate comics but they represent a statistical majority the same way women actually outnumber men in media fandom. And, in North America, anything valued primary by women is intrinsically less valuable than something valued primarily by men. Unfortunately, we all buy into that paradigm, particularly if the females in question are 13-year-old girls because, while Feminism's Achilles heel has always been that most women hate other women, virtually no-one likes 13-year-old girls - except for anime and manja creators and the producers of Hannah Montana (and those dudes we don't talk about) who like them very much indeed.

By this specious reasoning: Lone Wolf and Cub is cool; Fruits Basket is not. To extend the metaphor, reading Stephen King, cool; reading Nora Roberts, not (although King recently dubbed Roberts cool in his EW column and, as anyone who's familiar with her work and self can tell you, Nora Robert? Icy). Or more on point: Peter Parker, cool. Mary Jane, not - that's why radioactivity turns him into a superhero and her into a cancer victim.

So you have manga and anime that have large, young, mutli-ethnic, gender-neutral audiences and you have the hardcore comics guys, who don't like the product, don't understand it and have largely ceded the field because 10 year olds don't read comics and "ick, girls!" This begs the question: if 10 year olds don't read comics and you've basically factored 51 per cent of the population out of your marketing endeavours, your audience will come from where exactly? Not the Ben-10 crowd. As OS points out, Teen Titans ain't Teen Titans Go!. That doesn't exactly make me unhappy, since a little part of my Marv Wolfman-George Perez-reading soul died when Raven complained about someone going into her room in the cartoon's premier episode. Unfortunately, that presents a marketing problem for comic book publishers.

When Warner Brothers made the Harry Potter movies, their first concern was to create as faithful a representation of Rowling's world as possible: they wanted every kid who read Harry Potter and every person who knew a kid who read Harry Potter and picked it up for themselves to come out of the movie feeling like the book itself had been brought to life. And it worked: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone grossed nearly a billion dollars world-wide - money enough for even a Hollywood accountant to find the net profit. There's no such consideration for or value given to being audience-friendly in the DC/Marvel universes. Make a Superman movie, a Batman movie, an X-men movie, a Spider-Man movie and the B2 will put out a comic adaptation of the screenplay but Jack and Jill off the street won't find Brandon Routh's Superman, Christian Bale's Batman or Bryan Singer's X-men in the pages of comic books. People write reams of fanfic about Rogue/Wolvie from the movies but you won't find that Rogue in any of the 124 X-men titles currently published. It's a huge missed opportunity. And it drives away potential readers. As the Star article on black superheroes pointed out, the people who see the Justice League cartoon (which was great storytelling) walk into a comic shop and expect John Stuart to be Green Lantern not some white guy. And, ironically, the current attempts to simplify comic book continuity aren't helping.

The thing that the B2 don't seem to grasp is that the audience they want is an audience that is smart enough to understand the difference between alternate universe stories and mainstream stories. Slap and "elseworlds" or an "ultimates" title on it and most people are capable of understanding the concept. Ultimate Spider-Man, which benefited from over 100 issues of the same writer (Brian Bendis)-artist (Mark Bagley) team, sells a healthy 60,000+ issues a month (about two thirds of Marvel's flagship book, The Amazing Spider-Man but ASM has been in the middle of OMG!WTF!DRAMA storylines since Civil War and is currently in the process of retconning Spidey's marriage to Mary-Jane out of existence (according to rumour, anyway) so pinning down the true size of the audience once the rubber-neckers and cross-over whores fall away is tricky). The other Ultimate titles are way down the sales chart but I argue that the problem isn't that the audience doesn't understand the "Ultimate Universe" but the succession of blown deadlines (Ultimates) and creative team changes (UX-M) drove away part of the audience while setting other to wait for the trade.

"Waiting for the trade" has become a problem in itself, I think. Trade paperback collected editions of comics are marginally cheaper than buying each issue and, generally, include an entire story arc or act, which beats the month-long wait between cliffhangers. In the last three or four years, however, they've become so commonplace that the trade is virtually being solicited in the Diamond Shipping Guide the month the first issue hits the stands. As with me and Northlanders, where's the incentive to take a flyer on two or three months of issues (and part with $12-15) when you know a successful run will be collected in a trade in six months and an unsuccessfully but critically acclaimed run will also end up in in a trade? If monthly issues become a loss-leader for trade editions, what happens when the monthly market slips below profitability? And if no one is buying comics week-to-week, who's going to create the buzz that greases the market for trades?

All of which brings me back to the question of where is the next generation of comic book readers going to come from as DC and Marvel continue to play GM and Ford to this latest wave of foreign imports? I mean, look how well willful blindness and hidebound thinking worked for Detroit.

Are manga and anime the solution for North American comics? Probably not and there are signs that their popularity may already be peaking anyway. But the popularity of manga demonstrates that there is an audience for "visual storytelling" (just like Harry Potter demonstrated that, given a story that interested them, 10 year olds read like fiends) that the B2 should be trying to attract. One way to do that might be to take a hard look at comics and go back to all-ages storytelling and make the all-ages books the flagship lines, rather than shunted off into discrete "under 12". At the same time, create a mature line that includes characters like Spider-Man and Batman in their own continuity that really is written by and for adults but focus on stories like Jeff Smith's Bone that appeal to all ages, stories that I can enjoy but that I also feel comfortable giving my six-year-old nephew for Christmas. Ditch the boy's club mentality in the corporate offices and creative bull-pens. Re-learn how to use cheesecake and beefcake shots appropriately (see Alan Davis for lessons), and can the T&A pin-up art. Stop aiming stories at the same sliver of 20-30s white guys who've been reading the titles for 30 years and try to think outside the box. Respect the characters' history and stop with the revamps, updates and recasting - if people have been reading Superman for 70 years, accept that the character works and leave it alone. Focus on writing. Focus on art. Stop short-changing the one for the other. Set deadlines and expect your employees to honour them. Stop launching titles with fewer than a half-dozen books in the can. Make a point to hire creators that reflect a variety of genders, races and points of view and tell stories involving characters who are not white, male or superheroes from time to time. Respect your readers.

And then maybe, you'll find that 10 year olds are reading comics again.

*phew*

I needed to get that out of my system apparently. I think I'm suffering some sort of geek ennui: the other week it was the Speed Racer trailer, this week I find myself not caring about the new Indiana Jones movie, I Am Legend, an A-Team movie, a new Conan movie and the new Dark Knight trailer. When Christian Bale in the Batsuit does nothing for a girl, it's a sign.

After my hissy fit about Speed Racer, I went on to write:

I think the point at which I decided the American film industry needed
to be an overhaul of Carthagean proportions was when I realized they'd
made an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. And while SR doesn't offend on
quite that level, who the fuck cares? He-Man movie? Ditto. They're
fucking making GI goddamn Joe, for Chrissakes - with that
self-satisfied arrogant prick who played Darth Maul as Snake Eyes. I
get that there were a lot of people who loved Transformers,
personally, I think anyone who was actually old enough to watch
Transformers on channel 29 afterschool during the 80s and still gives
a fuck should seek help.

Where are the Aliens? Where are the Terminators? Fuck even Star Trek
and Star Wars were new ideas (or new spins on old ideas) once. The
entire US film industry is so focused on the summer blockbuster and
the holiday Oscar movie, anyone wanting to do something new
practically needs to go to Japan, film it there and then wait for some
Hollywood dickhead to offer for the US rights.

Giving Michael Bay 300 million to make what was essentially a
computer-generated cartoon of a cartoon some Korean made a buck
sixty-five an hour to draw 25 years ago is probably the most egregious
example of the utterly soulless and creatively bankrupt shithole that
Hollywood has become. And I like Hollywood movies - big, dumb and
stupid: check, check and check. Love'em. Sweaty summer nights spent in
cool, air-conditioned movies theatres? Close to the most fun you can
legally have in a dark room full of two or three hundred strangers.
But they're killing it, killing it with a small-minded, timorous
business model that rewards artificial benchmarks (opening weekend
gross? Means jack in terms of profitability) and floods the market
with shit, then whines that they can only afford to make movies that
appeal to the widest possible audience because their last three
remake/sequel/adaptation pieces of shit tanked. Meanwhile, rising
ticket prices inflate box office reports, while hiding the fact that
the theatre-going audience had shrunk every single year for the last
20 years.

And that was before I read about Singleton directing The A-Team or the plot details for Terminator 4. It's like for every Battlestar Galactica (The Lord of the Rings) we're being force-fed six Bionic Womans and a Live Free or Die Hard and it's about driving me batshit. I don't want to see another movie with Indiana Jones. You know when I wanted another Indy movie? 1988. I didn't then and don't now want to watch a 60-year-old Indy bitch about his arthritis from being dragged under the truck that time. I don't want to know that he never got together with Marion Ravenwood or that he had a son he never knew about - a plot device that becomes progressively sadder and more depressing the older I get. The first three movies were great but their time has past - how about someone at Lucasfilm/Dreamworks use their big, billion-dollar brains and come up with a brand new idea for a movie?

Frankly, everyone involved with the A-Team should be nuked from orbit just so we can be sure that we got them all and GI Joe is just so fucking sad it makes Transformers look like an act of creative genius. At least, with CGI, you can make an argument that a film would create something new on screen we hadn't seen before. Has there ever, in the history of Hollywood, been a shortage of stupid war movies? Meanwhile, I'm tired of adaptations that "simplify" (meaning to excise or rewrite for the perpetually bewildered everything that made the story interesting in the first place) the source material for the movies as if film audiences were, by virtue of watching rather than reading, stupid or it is impossible to convey complex ideas cinematically. To which I respond a) fuck you and b) go see Atonement, Ken Branagh's Hamlet, or Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and buy a fucking clue. But skip The Golden Compass for God's sake.*

As for The Dark Knight, it would be easier if I didn't think the batcycle do-hickey looked silly. It just looks... dumb. Batman should be cool and cool is hard to pull off IRL environs, what with the ears and the cape. The ears and the cape and the Big Wheels-esque bike remind me of a five year old on Hallowe'en. It's not a very cool mental image.

Things I do care about: the first stills from the upcoming Hellboy movie (also an adaptation but at least a fresher one - and Guillermo del Toro has a thing or two to teach about complexity and film (Pan's Labyrinth)) are out and they look cool.

There are also some character shots from Greg Rucka's graphic novel Whiteout on Newsarama. I'm not so sure about this one. While I would love to see a film version of Rucka's Queen & Country series, I hear they've messed with the plot and, to be honest, Kate Beckinsale looks too refined and too English to play Carrie Stetko, a scruffy US deputy marshall who is banished to Antarctica for failing to play well with others.

And, for shits and giggles, the best unfinished Batman story ever from the guys at PVP.

Finally, I am:

Which Chow Yun Fat Are
You?

You
are Ko Chun, the Rain-Man like master of cards from God of
Gamblers. No one, including you, quite understands your gifts -
however, they have never let you down. Your boundless confidence in
your own abilities is exceeded only by your child-like pleasure for
the simple things - like chocolate. Your friends often end up having
to take care of you, rather than the other way around.
Take this
quiz!










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What Is Your Daemon?

DOG - Your daemon may be a dog if you are loyal and caring, and like to know what is expected of you. You probably are very family oriented, and have a small group of friends that you are very close to, rather than a large group of acquaintances. You dislike confrontation, but you will stand up and fight for the people and issues that you really care about. You may prefer someone else to take the lead in a situation, although you would rather take the lead yourself than have the situation fall apart. You probably enjoy routine and order, but that doesn't mean you don't like to have fun. If anything, your friends probably know you for getting intense, child-like pleasure in the small things in life.
Take this quiz!








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And from what I've seen of Pullman's universe, will probably enjoy a lovely career in the service or law enforcement industries. Urgh, made of fail, Pullman, made of fail.

*evilgrin