From the Summit to the Gutter

When comparing the extremes of the comics sales spectrum, sometimes we look to Fawcett's onetime success with its variety of Captain Marvel-themed books, merchandise which allegedly moved 1,500,000 units per month during the heyday of that comics publishing concern. From this point, we lurch through the decades to modern times, where books that sell around 20,000 units per month gasp out a desperate survival as their peers, like dinosaurs, fall dead all around them.

While comics have suffered a number of downturns over the decades, the implosion of the 1990s and beyond seems to represent a qualitative difference. The slumps of the forties and fifties had to do with things like the ending of military contracts, the aging of the readership, and a distrust of popular entertainments. To some extent, later slumps involved these elements, plus the occasional consequence of massive defections of key comics talent.

New forces seem to play in the modern contraction of the comics market. Circa 2000, why don't people buy more comics?

Image-Consciousness and Darwinian Forces

The very notion of comics embarrasses some people, though some of these folks have never put much thought into the notion. One might note with some irony that many folks exist with no self-consciousness at all about accumulating books of cartoon (say, for instance, of the work of Bill Watterson, Gahan Wilson, or Edward Gorey) who would nonetheless feel as awkward if company came over and saw a stack of Avengers comics as if said visitors had caught them with a stack of hard-core same-sex erotica in which the principals painted themselves as circus clowns.

The desire not to have others perceive them as "geeks" runs so strong in some individuals that they will avidly become ridiculous in order not to seem ridiculous.

However, for others, the issue becomes a matter of Darwinian forces. Any creature that fails to attract a mate will generally fail to contribute to posterity. Any creature that deliberately does things which reduce its appeal in the breeding pool increases the likelihood of its own extinction.

Human beings, though blessed with free will, still act on instinct in some matters. The human male, in particular, generally will either submerge or conceal those behaviors that threaten to scare off potential mates. Where the human female fails to recognize a robust appetite for comic books as the fundamental measure of virility, men will conceal, cure, or prevent the habit preemptively in order to remain eligible for the sex act.

This may, fairly enough, strike some as rather arbitrary. After all, plenty of entertainments do not disqualify the human male as frequently from the chain of pursuits that can result in procreation. Justly or unjustly, a critic might make similar claims about the childishness of watching adult cartoons (anime, "South Park," or whatever); about the vehement arrestedness of professional wrestling; about appetites for tasteless erotica; about a passion for auto racing; or about watching sports.

In many cases, males purge themselves of (some) vices without really recognizing what females can ignore or forgive (or even share) the statistically unusual consumption of linear art. In general, we lack the margin of error to take such risks, though. The odds do not lie with us, since a male who decorates his apartment with St. Pauli Girl posters and a beer can collection does not have the same chance of reproducing as does a female who, at thirty, still maintains a stuffed animal collection.

Males will continue to use protective camouflage as long as the reproductive rituals of the species demand it. Until reading comics becomes something that qualifies a male as the companion to have, human beings who want to preserve and pass on the contents of their endangered Y-chromosomes will do as little as possible to put their sexual and reproductive futures at risk.

Alternate and Competing Entertainments

Some of us might recall the particulars of youth in the 1970s. What one sees these days on seventies-nostalgia shows tends to depict modern folk in the clothes of twenty-five to thirty years ago without getting too deeply into the real logistics of the day.

A youth of that day had no PlayStation, no Internet access, no cable television, no VCR. In many places the shopping malls that teenagers now inhabit would wait years before someone got around to building them.

The amusements of that era also inclined slightly less towards things like selling/consuming dope, involving oneself in unfortunate teenaged pregnancies, or participating in campaigns of gang violence. To some extent we might attribute this to a slightly differing set of ambitions; to a greater extent, we might credit the absence of opportunities in these tracks.

Entertainment, back then, might mean the television, a much tamer beast than in the modern day. When this form failed to amuse, as it did frequently, one might turn to other broadcast media, like radio (which offered mostly music and news).

The alternatives to reading something - to reading anything - did not present as much competition for the average Joe or Jane of a generation ago. In the absence of blinking lights, in a rarified environment for purely physical thrills (whether licit or il-), a comics magazine stood a better chance of having its own attention-grabbing mechanisms overpower the general noise of a world filled with distractions.

Consumer Fatigue

Today one does not see a comics consumer who displays freshness, youth, and enthusiasm. One sees, instead, a war-torn veteran, bruised and surly over a thousand and one abuses by marketing-driven products that compel up to the point of purchase but disappoint when consumed.

Many people refuse to suffer ongoing abuse and step away from their abuser. At this point, comics readers become ex-comics readers.

Comics abuse in a number of ways. The mega-crossover event ranks fairly high on the recognized list of comics crimes; a story that requires a reader to purchase most or all of a publisher's entire product line to complete (and sometimes to understand) represents the triumph of marketing over aesthetics. These events seldom fail to disappoint, even if the occasional piece does have some merit.

Even the much-lauded concept of comics continuity in some ways represents an abuse of the consumer. To a much lesser degree, comics continuity can make a publisher's entire product line since the beginning of its publishing history into a single megacrossover event.

Other mechanisms help create a cumulative ill-will in the comics reader that might ultimately drive him into other pursuits (such as, say, same-sex clown cyberporn). The multiple-cover gimmick mainly abuses the completist and the collector rather than the casual reader. The "This issue! A HERO DIES!" gimmick abuses a much broader array of readers. More frequently, at least in the big picture of comics history (going, if one may, back to 1938), a laissez-faire attitude to quality control can abuse the reader.

Julius Schwartz, one of the architects of the Silver Age of Comics, at some time enunciated a principle that now bears his name. One translation goes "Treat every reader's comic as his first comic." Not all comics seem to have heard of the principle.

Even where he has escaped abuse, though, the comics reader might acquire simple comics fatigue. How many times can Galactus come back before the notion induces more nausea than fear? If his first appearance broke ground and hyped the concept of comics menace up to a new plateau, subsequent appearances tended to reflect the apathy-inducing phenomenon of stakes inflation. After the first hundred times someone saves the world, it loses its appeal. The hundredth time an invincible villain goes down in humiliating defeat, his credibility as an invincible force begins to erode somewhat.

Perceived Expense

The average American enjoys and spends much more disposable income than seemed available in the mid-1970s. I don't remember knowing anyone whose parents would allow a child the funds necessary to create a good collection of Pokemon paraphernalia, adjusted to seventies dollars; more likely, such money would go into things like trust funds.

Therefore, even in an economy in which minimum wage can't quite buy two comics per hour (adjusting for taxation), we might wonder why folks don't blow more money on comics.

As far as the spending habits of children go, parents still can control purse strings. A parent, furthermore, might remember his own childhood, and note the change in costs of things during his or her lifetime.

Some of the resistance to purchasing comics may result less from expense (a parent who lets his kid buy hundreds of dollars of Pokemon merchandise could afford to let that kid blow the same sums on comic books) than from perceived expense. Someone who remembers a product costing fifteen cents will have more resistance to overcome to pay three and a half dollars for that product than someone who never remembers the product costing less.

Recall, if you will, what the first comic you purchased cost. Depending on your age, you might remember a number anywhere between ten cents and three dollars. For me, the number twelve cents comes to mind, which means I got to witness something like a twenty-five-times increase in the cost of comics.

Fad-driven juvenile merchandising (regardless of the quality of the product) doesn't endure long enough for consumers - meaning the people who pay for it - to watch such an incredible bloat in the ticket. Fads don't last long enough to build a specific resistance to the next price increase; the item just appears, newborn and expensive, then becomes slightly more expensive, then disappears, taking the memory with it.

Accessibility

Ignoring considerations of price - though that subject could provide hours of despondent exploration - two major barriers restrict access to comics.

Physical access can keep some potential consumers away from comics. Some small sales take place in news stands, grocery stores, and convenience stores, but if a reader wants a specific issue of a particular title, he generally must find a specialty shop. Some comics shops, as well, don't promise an especially pleasant shopping experience. Long-time consumers might exchange stories of the bad shop, where counter help ignored customers while recounting their fabulously uninteresting "Magic, the Gathering" stories and freeloaders blocked access to the merchandise by standing around reading books they never intended to buy. The existence of modern delivery systems like Internet sales, however, make possible the purchasing of comics with much less need to actually visit a shop.

Conceptual access represents a larger problem. When comics relied less on the shared universe and cumulative continuity models, each physical unit acted as a story unit. In a more modern editorial model, however, understanding stories can require considerable previous exposure. Depending upon the writer, and in direct proportion to his knowledge of what has gone before, a comic book might prerequire a very thorough reading. Comics has become somewhat unique in this. A Steven King novel generally does not require (for example) a broad background in Tom Clancy, Umberto Eco, Maya Angelou, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, and dozens of other authors to make its events completely comprehensible. An episode of "The Simpsons" does not require a memory of the events on a season of "Underdog" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth" cartoons. Comics, on the other hand, much prides itself on a self-referential and very specialized knowledge that accumulates in longtime consumers but becomes a barrier to entry by new readers.

Prognosis

During the recession of the early nineties, Ray Bradbury speculated that a recession occurs when large numbers of people believe that a recession has occurred. With this notion of the self-fulfilling potential of prophesy, we would do well to avoid predicting a definitive and permanent demise of comics. Popular pursuits, pronounced dead, have resurfaced in later years.

Probably the recent past offers the most likely view of the indefinite future of comics. Imagine more experimental titles; more short-lived series that don't quite make it; and the focusing of hot talent in a few key franchises, with titles outside these themes generally enjoying a more tenuous existence.

On the other hand, the recent past has also shown that comics has a mostly-untapped back catalog with considerable appeal. Had the first Marvel Essentials volume failed to attract readers, the next fourteen or so would never have appeared; and, furthermore, such material makes the approach into current comics a little easier by easing the prerequisites of years of prior reading (or, the next best thing, years of traveling all over the place trying to find obscure back issues to complete story lines).

The resurfacing of back catalog items means that comics can now create, resort to, and build upon a canon, something it has not truly had in its first sixty years, owing to the inherent ephemeralness of comics (particularly since the Marvel Revolution of the sixties).

Rather than predicting the immanent extinction of the medium entire, I would predict instead a bit more shrinkage of the market, followed by likely structural changes as the basic comics unit moves from the monthly issue to the story. The quiet but continuing success of anthologies and graphic novels suggests that the future of comics will involve a different emphasis and perhaps a light variation of form rather than a complete extinction.

This could mean, among other things, an end to the comic as a monthly (or semimonthly, quarterly, or whatever) form. Deadlines and art don't necessarily mix well, a point I've tried to make before (Michaelangelo didn't produce the Sistine Chapel to meet a deadline).

But complete extinction? I don't see this. Demand economies allow products to expire when no consumers remain for them. Supply, therefore, will follow demand, and the complete extinction of comics essentially prerequires the extinction of the comics consumer.

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