For many years, I've decried comics with what I felt to be weak storylines, even dropping a couple of personal favorites because of it (Captain America being the most popular). I've always sai that Fantastic Four was my favorite comic of all time, but it's really sharing the spot with James Robinson's run on Starman. When I got new issues of it, I actually read the text first time through, and ONLY the text. The second time through, I married the words to the images. The text alone read like a literary classic, for me. When I don't have anythign good at hand to read, I go back and read them.
Just the words. A lot of comics these days miss that point, selling the artwork over the story. ---------[ Received Mail Content ]---------- Subject : [scifinoir2] Comics: the Problem is the Medium Date : Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:17:23 -0000 From : "ravenadal" <ravena...@yahoo.com> To : scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com http://blackgeekdom.com/blog/ The problem is the medium not the characters. I have come to a conclusion that people love the capes they just dont like comics. It hard to separate the two because of the close association between the two. When people see Superman they think of comic books but they won't buy a comic. My question is why? They only conclusion I can come up with is that they just don't like reading comics. Most devoted comic fans at least those on message boards seem to think that the publishers are the problem ( with continuity dense stories) or the price of the comics ( soon to be $3.99) themselves. I think people don't like or get the medium so changes in story content or a drop in price won't fix the problem. Looking at some numbers from this past year The Dark Knight movie as of this week has earned $531,006,084, Iron Man earned $318,313,199. Marvel comics makes twice as much money from licensing than it does from publishing (In other words they make more money selling Spider-man toys and t-shirts than they do on the comic book). This tells me that its money in comic book characters and that comics are a smaller piece of the pie than we think. Smallville is averaging around 4.5 million viewers a week which translates to to around 18 million viewers a month. If you compare it to comic sales you will see a disconnect. According to Diamond which distributes around 90% of comic in the US, the top 300 books combined for a total of 5,765,870 issues in November, 18 million viewers for one show vs 6 million in book sales for all comics, to me it indicates that comic readers are a small group in comparison to people who have a interest in the characters. I keep thinking about the Ian Fleming's James Bond character he wrote twelve novels and two short stories, I have a feeling most Bond fans have never read these novels. They love the character and the films and yet they have little interest in the novels. Its gotten to the point where the novels only come up in trivia contests. I would hate to see that happen to comics. Any suggestions on how we can get more people to read comics or is it a loss cause ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQdwk8Yntds
