After a long night of drinking at ye olde Goth night, we at the No-Fly Zone occasionally just stoop to taking shots at superheroes. All right, so that’s pretty much every other week. But still, the lingering buzz of absinthe and the stench of clove smoke make it difficult to summon new ideas. Making fun of men in tights that beat up each other is a fountain of hilarity. When we take said shots, we often point out that DC’s continuity has become entirely too long and complicated. Marvel’s is pretty bad, but it’s not quite the uncontrollable minutiae beast the competition sells. It seems like only the most dedicated fanboys and Grant Morrison have the mental hard drive to keep track of it all. We also like to point out that the way Marvel and DC serializes and orders its stories alienates potential readers. Someone new to comics doesn’t want to piece together a single story from two issues of five different series. The system is flawed and everyone knows it. Fans keep buying and the beast just won’t die. We also point out, quite regularly, that most readers want to walk into a bookstore and just buy a graphic novel. Watchmen sold like crazy when the movie came out. It’s one book and not 30 years of storylines spread in a disorganized fashion across hundreds of comics. Vertigo has shown us that they will buy a series of graphic novels numbered in a sensible manner, as well. While we won’t claim that the NFZ suggested these things first or showed DC the way, the publisher has apparently gotten on board with a few of these ideas. Next year, they’ll release the first of a series of rebooted Superman and Batman graphic novels in an entirely new continuity—the classic stories reset in modern times for new readers. J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis will take on Superman: Earth One and Geoff Johns and Gary Frank will be on Batman: Earth One. DC will release two books in each series a year, sequentially numbered. This feels both encouraging and like more of the same.
New readers don’t want crises, crossovers, or complications. They want a solid story with good art. If it’s worth spreading across multiple volumes, that’s fine. But, they don’t want to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of story-bites released in magazine form over a series of months or even years. Marvel and DC’s publishing model for the direct market is utterly convoluted and doomed to fail in several years. Die hard fans willing to put up with it—or that actually like it—will eventually phase out. New readers are more likely to find comics in the bookstore with Manga, graphic novels, and trade paperbacks. This is theoretically a good thing for anyone who has come of age watching Batman and Superman in movies and cartoons and wants to read comics.
Ever since Marvel released their Ultimate line, everyone asked if DC would follow suit. The publisher answered with the All-Star line, which places its most popular characters in iconic, out-of-continuity stories. The line launched with mixed results. All-Star Superman was great, but plagued by delays. With Grant Morrison, that’s not terribly surprising, though we love him all the same. All-Star Batman just showed that Frank Miller has a disturbing sense of humor. It took a weird, darkly comic approach to the material with an utterly sardonic tone. It was like listening to someone read a story out loud in a mocking, high-pitched voice. DC has also rebooted or tweaked Batman and Superman’s respective origins several times over the years. They did it with Earth-1 and Earth-2 the first time. When the multiverse got out of control, they did it again with Crisis on Infinite Earths. There’s also Batman: Year One, Superman: The Man of Steel, and a few other tweaks and rehashes from over the years. DC may not have done a total out-of-continuity reboot a la the Ultimate line, but it’s come close. But, keep in mind that the Ultimate line hasn’t proven to be the runaway success everyone thought. It launched to great acclaim and it’s still around. It also uses a sensible, sequential trade program without the excesses of the regular Marvel slate. But, it hasn’t overtaken the original Universe and sales aren’t what they used to be. It might attract some new readers, but it’s still difficult to get people to start a story now nine years old. If DC only intends to publish two volumes of each series a year, then this might remedy part of the problem. However, it seems obvious enough that relaunching established characters doesn’t bring in new readers in droves. In all likelihood, they still think they’re jumping into a story 40 or 50 years in the making.
It would be really nice to just grab a nice, fat omnibus sized graphic novel a couple of times a year, rather than 12 issues a month. Hell, you can already do that in most cases. However, the current direct market system uses the sale of individual issues to gauge a series’s success and justify hardcover collections. If no one buys the issues, then the series dies and we don’t get trades or hardcovers. But, the comic industry has long had its collection programs in reverse order, and it’s designed to bilk readers for more money. First, you buy the issues. Then, maybe you buy the trades. But, hang on—here’s the luxury hardcover. In the book publishing world, the hardcover comes out first, then the cheaper trade paperback, then the really cheap pocket book—the moral equivalent of a comic magazine. DC’s plan to issue original graphic novels from day one could start a promising trend towards new a publishing model—one not designed to make the reader buy a story multiple times.
Here comes that familiar NFZ doom and gloom. If DC doesn’t aggressively market this program outside of the direct market, they might as well not bother. Potential readers—scared by the formatting follies of American comics and the decades of continuity—probably zoned out Superman and Batman ages ago, outside of their licensed media counterparts. Seeing a new graphic novel on the shelf won’t change their mind, even if it has a big number one printed on the spine. DC needs to clearly advertise Batman: Earth One and Superman: Earth One as reboots to bookstore shoppers, and not just the direct market.
Now, while it’s great that DC wants to attract new readers, they’re still going back to the well with decades-old characters. It’s arguable that the audience for those characters—in comics at least—has reached maximum capacity. A rebooted universe will just attract the same set of readers that bought every other attempt. But, as Timothy Callahan points out in this week’s When Words Collide over at Comic Book Resources, it seems that most of the reams of new characters Marvel and DC publishes every year never go anywhere. After the initial shared universes were established in their first couple of decades, only a few new creations have stuck around over the years. Most of them end up as B-list character, team members, guest stars, and fodder for the occasional miniseries. This means, again, that the comic industry is relying on the same set of readers it has for the past few decades that want the same characters they liked as children. They don’t want new characters or stories, and new readers don’t want to start in the middle of a story decades in the making. The diehard readers will phase out over time and new readers will want new stories. Restarting old characters doesn’t make them new, because they are simply retellings of one shade or another.
Then again, we could be wrong. We still read stories about Hercules, Robin Hood, and King Arthur, and no one says we need new myths to replace the old ones. But, no one is resting an entire industry on the success of those characters. We’ll see how DC’s new effort pans out.
You are now exiting The No-Fly Zone.
Kurt Amacker is the writer of The No-Fly Zone, Mania’s weekly alternative comics column. He is also the author of the comic miniseries Dead Souls, published by Seraphemera Books. Dead Souls is available from the Seraphemera Books website, Amazon.com, and at comic shops everywhere. He can be reached at kurt_amacker@seraphemera.org.
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