See what I mean by balancing act? Marvel needs better sales for its comics if it's to continue being a profitable company once the superhero movie fad fades. As the Direct Market continues to dwindle, its ability to keep the company profitable dwindles too. Last January I wrote that those making their living selling to the comics shops have two choices: either retailers have to somehow be lured into providing a greater variety of material in order to attract a wider customer base, or a way has to be found to get the material into another market before the present market collapses. With Trouble, Marvel takes a small but significant step in both directions.

Each path has its own set of seemingly intractable problems for the company. Take the Direct Market first. The comics shops have built-in structural and ideological weaknesses which tend to retard any and all efforts to build up their customer base. It's almost like the old joke from the Blues Brothers movie: "We got both kinds of music here, country and western!" The monomania towards superhero comics may please the market's diehard customers, but such cliquishness tends to put off almost anyone who doesn't share its adherants' obsession. Don't believe me? Listen to the opinion of someone deep enough in the profession to know — Marvel's own editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada. In a recent email exchange reproduced in Rich Johnston's "Waiting For Tommy" column, Quesada notes:

"Bill J[emas] is absolutely right, it's not about a fear of success meaning a fear of impending bust, there's a bit of that but what it really is is a fear of people invading the nice little sanctity of the comic book club. Retailers don't keep dirty stores because they don't know how to clean, they all most likely have nice neat homes, they keep the dirt there as a barrier to keep the invaders out. This is revenge of the nerds to the highest level and it's not even being done on a conscious level. These are the geeks that joined the AV squad to be with other geeks, they don't want the football players or the cheerleaders joining their little deserted island, their safe haven on this planet."

Let's step around the fact that Jemas himself has fueled such fears by encouraging retailers towards another goddamn speculator bubble; Quesada has a point, here. A plurality — not all, but probably a majority — of comics-shop owners got into the business in the first place in order to convert an obsession with superhero comics into a livelihood. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but the result is oftentimes an almost hostile attitude towards anything which diverges from said obsession coming through the front door. I'm not even talking about indy comics or manga, here; the occasional contempt I've seen retailers display over the years towards such borderline products as Neil Gaiman's Sandman (and its Goth-leaning fanbase) has left me befuddled time and again. There's almost a whiff of heresy about the whole affair, as though the slightest deviation in funnybook orthodoxy would render the enterprise pointless from top to bottom. I've lost track of the number of times I've advocated a greater variety of material in the shops while surfing through comics-related message boards, only to find myself facing accusations that I "hated superheroes". How does one get from Point A to Point B in that little logic-loop? I'm still puzzling that one out.