Another problem with Barrucci's recipe for greater success is his, let's be honest, embarrassingly narrow definition of comics.
Quote: "Comic books are the best, most original, most beautiful art form ever - the perfect merging of art and story, hitting readers with a full experience.Where else can you go and get a monthly dose of Superman, Spider-Man, Justice League, X-Men, Transformers, each and every month, whether or not you've got the same writers or artists or different."
Arrrgh. Yeah, look at all that wonderful variety! An alien who hits people! A radioactive spider guy who hits people! A group of various strong flying people who hit people! Mutants who hit people! Robots who hit, well, robots! I love superhero comics in particular and genre-based comics in general, and I don't subscribe to the idiotic notion that it's the prevalence of superheroes in comics that keeps comics from gaining more of a foothold in the popular eye (they seem to enjoy them to the tune of several hundred million dollars per movie over in the film world, thank you very much, and TV shows like Buffy and Smallville and the animated DC character cartoons do just fine), but if this is the best you can do in enumerating the books that make comics great, you probably don't deserve to be telling anyone how to get their collective act together. Hell, of the books he names, only Spider-Man and the X-Men currently have monthly editions that pass even the relatively lax critical muster in the superhero-fan world, for Pete's sake! And this is to say nothing of the fact that Barrucci makes a living off the kind of non-comics ephemera--essentially, toys and ridiculously expensive and unspecial "special editions"--that crowd out regular comics for shelf space and hard-earned dollars in the first place.
Moreover, the "whether or not you've got the same writers or artists or different" angle is disturbing. The indie/underground/altcomix scene has long argued that the rotating creative teams on the superhero books, if not the very fact that (for the most part) separate people are writing, drawing, inking, lettering and coloring even the best books from the big companies, strip the comics of much of the artistic cohesiveness they might otherwise have. To a certain extent this might not matter--only a relatively small percentage of moviegoers go see movies for their directors, for example--but in other media, audiences certainly follow individual actors, musicians and authors. Encouraging newcomers to comics to blindly follow characters around regardless of who's writing or drawing them will inevitably lead to those new readers coming across a really, really terrible version of that particular character. Though I see how it's important at least initially to engender interest in characters (I got into comics because I loved Batman, not Frank Miller or Grant Morrison or whoever was writing him), it's much better in the long term to cultivate readers with the capacity to recognize and reward talented creators with repeat business.
Article comments
1 - Bill Sherman
Totally agree with you on this 'un, Sean: a great screed!
2 - Phillip Winn
I used to read comics, as a kid. I suspect there are lots of people like me, who put away what we perceived as childish things when we grew up. And still, at least once every couple of months, I daydream about a certain Fantastic 4 storyline that kept me up nights way back when...
The sad part is, I'm even a geek who would have no trouble being seen with comics and so on, and I work right around the corner from a comic store. Guess how many times I've been in there. Go ahead, guess.
That's right, none.
What's my problem? I'll swing by this week. Thanks for the kick in the pants. :)
3 - Phillip Winn
To my shame, the comic store is closed. I guess I should have gone sooner.
4 - Barry Buchanan
Here's my idea of a slogan for the
the new ad blitz:
I picture it like those imposing billboards...
"Buy more comics or I'll turn off the sun!"
-God