Author: Ryan

The direct market in North America is primarily built around superheroes, so it’s inevitable that most writers and artists who want to make a living have to work in the genre at least occasionally. Unsurprisingly, not all writers are terribly well suited to it, even those who are otherwise highly skilled.

Peter Milligan: Milligan’s written some superhero-based material – X-Statix was a solid satire with heart, and Enigma had some interesting ideas about the genre – but for the most part he just can’t play it straight enough to pull off a mainstream superhero book. They might not be bad, but they’re certainly not up to his usual standards, and usually just disappoint his fans and piss off fans of the book and characters. Milligan often writes with a wink and a nudge – you know this stuff is silly, right? – that isn’t appreciated by audiences who take their franchises very silly.

Neil Gaiman: Both 1602 and Eternals seem billed as “Neil Gaiman does superheroes”, which isn’t a terribly good use of either the writer or the characters and concepts. Gaiman likes his stories full of characterization and obscure mythology and literature; Sandman may have its roots in the genre, but it quickly evolved into something else. He can do superheroes, of course – some days I think he could do absolutely anything – but it just seems like such a waste of his talents.

Greg Rucka: Queen & Country is a fantastic book. Gotham Central was pretty good, even if Rucka seems to be replicating his “tough and self-destructive female protagonist” bit too much. Everything else he writes runs the gamut from “okay” to “bleah.” He’s good at gritty, real-world stories, an approach that’s all right on Batman or Wolverine but still doesn’t do enough with the concept, and downright boring on something like Superman. Even the politics and espionage suffer in his superbooks: OMAC Project was an unreadable mess, and Checkmate feels like a dumbed-down Q & C further weighed down by DCU trivia.

Warren Ellis: Aside from Nextwave, which is more about poking superheroes with a stick, and Authority, which was about giving traditional superheroes the finger, Ellis’ superhero work seems so uninspired: Like Milligan’s work, it might not be bad, but you can’t help reading it and thinking “this should be so much better.” I’m not sure if it’s entirely the genre, or if Ellis has simply grown dispassionate about books he doesn’t own; newuniversal should be an interesting experiment, mixing the sci-fi weirdness he loves with some tweaked genre conventions.

Garth Ennis: Duh.

According to the October sales ranking, Wildcats #1 was the 14th best-selling comic in the direct market.

That’s got to be pretty disappointing: Jim Lee, Grant Morrison, a variant cover by Todd McFarlane, a much-hyped relaunch of a once-successful property created by one of the hottest artists of the past decade… and it gets you 14th? Obviously Civil War and 52 are eating up the market, but that’s a disappointment any way you look at it.

The rest of the Wildstorm relaunch isn’t doing so hot, either: The first issue of The Authority comes in at #27, Gen 13 debuts at #34, Deathblow #1 places 51st, and the second issue of Wetworks slides all the way down to #68.

All the big names and hype appear to have accomplished very little, and most of these titles are bound to slide down the charts with their second issues; the delays to Wildcats and Authority can’t help. And unless they see strong TPB sales – something I can only see happening for Authority and possibly Deathblow – I wonder if this will be Wildstorm’s last kick at the can.

Or, My Life in Comics. These aren’t by any means the best comics I’ve ever read, but some of the most important in terms of what I read now and why I read them at all.

ROM #59 – October 1984

This is the first comic I ever remember buying (or, at least, having bought for me, since I was only 7). Rom and his sidekick, Starlight, shrink down to microscopic size (with help from Ant-Man) in order to fight evil bacteria on an ant. I think. I haven’t read it in a long time, nor do I really plan to; some childhood memories shouldn’t be revisited.

Still, this is the kind of awesome, crazy sci-fi fantasy we don’t see as much in comics today, and it was pretty impressive, particularly to a 7 year-old. I read a few Rom comics after that – though I never read the beginning or end of this particular story. One of the things I really remember about the book was an ad for Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar on the back cover: It looked like the coolest thing ever to a kid who thought Star Wars was the greatest film ever made. I’ve still never read it.

Uncanny #209-210 – September 1986

Kicking off an almost decade-long obsession, these two books came in a pre-sealed package I think I got in a departments store on a family trip to Florida. There was also a pack that included a couple issues of Alpha Flight which were less significant in every possible sense.

#209 is the second part of a fight with super-sentinel Nimrod, who proceeds to beat the crap out of most of the X-Men and the Hellfire Club, until Shadowcat helps Colossus escape being buried alive and deliver a serious smackdown on the robot. There’s also a subplot about Rachel wandering around a weird amusement park after being gutted by Wolverine, which didn’t make much sense considering I hadn’t read the previous issue. Wolverine himself doesn’t do a heck of a lot here – he frightens off a bunch of Hellfire goons. But it was pretty obvious he was cool.

#210 is a pretty stark contrast as the X-Men recover from the fight in one of Claremont’s typical slowdown issues. It spent a lot of time discussing past events and hinting at future ones – it leads into the Mutant Massacre – but was much more mellow and in-depth than any comic I’d read before. I knew this was good stuff, and I wanted to read more.

Sandman special #1 – 1991

For the longest time, I read superhero comics. Lots of them. Mostly X-Men and Marvel books, but I wandered every now and then. Eventually, I heard people talking about the Sandman thing, and even though no one ever seemed to adequately describe what it was about, it sounded cool.

I found myself looking at this issue – complete with a glow-in-the-dark cover by Dave McKean that’s actually kind of cool – and picked it up, and it’s as good a starting point for Sandman as anything else: Since I’ve always liked Greek mythology, the story of Orpheus was an obvious winner, and the sequence in Death’s modern-day apartment was confusing yet enticing. Throw in some nice Bryan Talbot art and a bunch of scary naked women and we had a definite winner. Soon after I started the main series in the middle of Brief Lives, which confused the heck out of me in the best way possible.

Archer & Armstrong #0 – July 1992

Along with Sandman, this is one of the books that opened my eyes to the possibility of doing books about something other than super heroes. Archer & Armstrong may be kind of a superhero book, but not entirely: No costumes (aside from the Unity crossovers), and less fighting evil than bumbling from one story to the next. The basic plot of this issue features Archer being almost murdered by his pervert parents, learning martial arts in the middle east, then starting a fight in a bar with a man he’s told is the devil. I’d never read anything quite like it before – nor since, to be perfectly honest – and I was hooked. The awesome Barry Windsor-Smith artwork was a big plus, too: Distinct and memorable, yet cool.

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #1 – 199?

Wherein I dip my feet into the world of small publishers. This came out originally in 1995, but the copy I bought was an 8th printing or something, so I probably read it in 98 or 99. I was reading comics only sporadically, having gone off to university and discovered alcohol and women, but stumbled across this in a comic store. It was pretty awesome: Morbid and funny and totally nonsensical. Nowadays I prefer Jhonen Vazquez’ work on Squee or I Feel Sick, but this made a huge impact and led me to Lenore and the rest of Slave Labor’s awesome output.

X-Force #116 – May 2001

It’d been a long time since I’d read comics regularly. The late nineties mostly sucked, and I’d found other things to spend my limited funds on. I’d pick up a book here and there, but nothing regularly. That all changed when I walked into a store to browse one day and saw one of the most unexpected comics ever: Mike Allred drawing X-Force.

Madman doesn’t have a place on this list, but it’s still one of the most enjoyable superhero comics ever; Allred’s got a tremendous sense of fun and adventure, and a great clean and expressive style. X-Force brought back memories of Rob Liefeld and polybagged comics full of totally extreme and generic hyper-vigilantes. So the combination was kind of unholy. Throw in Peter Milligan, a guy I was familiar with (but didn’t revere as I do now), and you had a winner. This was a great, funny take on superheroes, and largely redeemed a company and industry I’d almost written off as marketing hype whores. I didn’t think Marvel was capable of putting out a book with this much originality, but they proved me wrong.

X-Force led to New X-Men, which led to coming back to the store regularly to buy more and more books. And that’s where we are now: Spending too much money on comic books.

Damn you, Rom. It’s all your fault.

I was kind of bummed that Cully Hamner was leaving Blue Beetle, since he had the perfect style for the book.

But the new guy, Rafael Albuquerque, is looking pretty awesome. Perhaps most importantly, he seems to be drawing the teenage cast as teenagers. Look – different characters have different body types! Yay.

John Rogers writing solo didn’t worry me, since his solo-penned #7 was the best issue of the series. Now it looks like the art will be in good hands too, particularly if if can avoid some of the last-minute fill-ins the book has seen.

Good book. Go buy.

I’m not even going to comment on this.

As a matter of fact, I don’t even recommend you read it. It will just make you feel dirty, angry, repulsed, or maybe simply pity for others. Or maybe superior to others. I think I’m leaning that way.

Really, don’t go there.

Here it is. It’s about Supergirl. And it’s at Newsarama. That’s all you need to know, right?

(You went there, didn’t you? Even after I warned you? Shame.)

Spurred on by this post over at the Newsarama Blog, I realize that yes, in fact, most indie comics do suck.

Don’t get me wrong: I like many indie comics. It all depends, though, on what “indie” means, a question that gets asked frequently on message boards all across the web. The best consensus anyone can come to is “anything not Marvel, DC, Image, or Darkhorse”, but even the latter two companies act pretty indie at times, seeing how they have to operate in the cracks left by Marvel & DC’s stranglehold on the direct market. Of course, every now and then someone refers to Art Spiegelman or Marjane Strapi as “indie”, which seems fairly absurd given that they’re published by Random House.

It’s just that the more “indie” you go, the suckier the comics seem to get. So, let me qualify my opening statement: Self-published comics suck.

There are probably exceptions. But I haven’t found any, and I’m not terribly inclined to look very hard. Because most of the self-published, or “published by a very tiny publisher located in some guy’s basement in Saskatoon”, comics I’ve seen have been terrible. The art is often generic and clichéd, and the stories are usually recycled concepts that have been done a hundred times over. We really don’t need more stories about superheroes or zombies.

The indie superhero market is particularly bizarre: Superhero fans are notoriously loyal to their properties. They don’t want superhero comics, or often even comics at all – they want the latest issue of X-men. I’m not even sure why DC continues to publish most of its Wildstorm titles, and those at least have a pedigree of star creators and used to be pretty hot stuff. Exactly why someone wants to publish a new superhero book when the superhero audience already has the books it wants completely escapes me.

Even some of the recent bigger indie publishers have been pretty bland: Neither Alias nor Speakeasy offered much of interest, and it seemed the books that were promising didn’t get any press until they moved to other publishers.

Even their websites are pretty sucky. Seriously: If you want to start up your own business, take a course in Dreamweaver or something. If you’ve got a tiny publisher with two books, there’s no reason for your site to be a cluttered mess that looks like a 13 year-old’s Myspace page.

So why do people self-publish, or start their own company? In the purest, most altruistic sense, perhaps they’re really committed to the book and want to maintain complete control over it. As admirable as that is, it’s also problematic: Creators who are their own editors/publishers are seldom doing anyone any good. (cf. Robert Jordan)

No, the main reason seems to be that people want to make comics but simply aren’t good enough to be accepted by existing publishers. Seriously: If your book is that good, why not pitch it to Oni or Slave Labor or Image or Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics or IDW? These publishers put out a lot of very good books, and that gives them something no self-published comic can offer: A stamp of quality. Every book they publish may not be gold, but they’ve put out enough good books that I trust them to adhere to a certain level of quality.

Oni & SLG in particular have very strong brand identities: I know what an Oni book is like. I know that these publishers have printed a lot of books I’ve liked, and that they’re likely to continue doing so. They may print some substandard crap from time to time, but it’s still crap I’m going to look at, if not buy. If New Indie Title looks like crap, I probably won’t give it a second look; New Oni Title may look like crap too, but I’ll probably at least flip through it because Oni usually knows what they’re doing.

Granted, these publishers didn’t build up their reputations overnight. But in most cases, they started up with specific aims and ideas. They didn’t (as far as I know) start with the aim of publishing their own books – they found other people’s books that they believed in to publish. And they had vision, even in the early days, that they were filling a niche that wasn’t being serviced by other publishers. The first SLG book I ever picked up was a copy of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, and as much as it’s kind of a juvenile philosophy-and-angst 101 comic, it still made a statement.

Most comics are pretty much crap. Perhaps your hot new self-published book puts them all to shame. But if it’s really that good, why not work with an existing publisher? Why not let someone else handle the marketing and production while you concentrate on making the book as good as possible, ideally while working with editors and publishers who have worked on many good books? It just seems masochistic to do otherwise.

On the other hand, maybe your idea really is just that good, and you’ve got a savvy and professional business plan to back it up. If that’s the case, then good for you – we need more comic publishers like that. But just take a look around and see if you can really compete with all the established companies out there: It’s a pretty high bar, and I’m only spending my money on the very best. If you think you’ve got the next Bone, you ought to sit down and consider just how awesome Bone was.