WATERCOOLER COMIX: HIT THE GROUND RUNNING
What do you want? From your comics, that is.
Do you demand the same standard from your comics that you demand from the movies that you see on a Friday night? Do you insist on the same quality and variety of "programming" in your comics that you get from the shows on your local television network?
Do the comics you buy reflect the breadth and depth of music you hear on national radio, or watch on MTV?
If you answered "Yes" to any of those questions, then you may as well stop reading now.
Go on. Get out of here. Go and sign the "Ultimate Nightwatch NOW!!!!!!!!!!" online petition. I don't need you. Comics doesn't need you. Go on. Get.
Comics is a marginal medium. For the most part, it still exists on the boundaries of popular culture. Don't let a pretty girl wearing a Superman t-shirt fool you: as far as the general public are concerned - the people who go and see movies like Bridget Jones' Diary and Goldmember, and come away satisfied - we're still weirdos. Cases of arrested development to be patronised at best, misfit obsessives and borderline psychotics to be derided and avoided at worst.
It's funny, when you think about it: people bought Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones books by the truckload when they knew there was a movie coming out. Sales went through the roof.
And yet, despite the box office success of Spider-Man and Road to Perdition (taking a combined total of $500 million in the US alone), sales of comics only went up by 8% in the last quarter. This does not suggest to me that the people who came out of the cinema saying, "I can't wait for more of THAT" went directly to their local Four-Colour Fancies and asked for a large bag of Spider-Man comics.
Well, not all of them, at any rate.
Even movies like Spider-Man are, by their very nature, novelties. And the last thing that comics needs is to be regarded as a novelty, a fad, or a blip on the pop culture radar. It's all very well and good people buying Punisher hoodies and Captain America boots (I once had a crush on a girl who wore Captain America boots...whatever happened to her?), but you do realise, don't you, that those clothes will be in the jumble this time next year. Fads have a nasty (or nice, depending on your point of view) habit of fading away. That's why they're called "fads." Kind of. Today's �15.99 novelty is tomorrow's �4.99 clich�.
For those of us who care about comics - and by that, I mean the people who care about the medium as a whole, and not their own little provincial part of it - the solution is clear:
Comics need to become ubiquitous, again.
They need to be everywhere - and not the "everywhere" that means "isolated comic shops, two feet of newsagent shelf space and a ratty copy of Maus in the local library," but the "everywhere" that means...well, "everywhere."
Perhaps, instead of trying to make comics trendy, which doesn't necessarily do anything to de-ghettoize the medium (because, eventually, the tourists go away, again), we should seek to make the buying of comics as matter-of-fact as buying the latest issue of TeeVee Week.
All the recent exchanges of contracts here, there and everywhere with a view to getting comics into bookstores sounds like a damn good start to me. Media attention for books like Jimmy Corrigan (as well as stars of the medium, like Grant Morrison) is another. And, yes, even the current spate of comics-to-other-media translations helps, if it's managed in the right way.
But the ultimate goal of all this has to be getting the right books - the best books - into the hands of the ordinary punter, and keeping them there. Not just flogging more copies of Forty-Year-Old-Manchild Man, but making sure that there's a market for all sorts of comics, from A Contract With God to Zero Girl. And markets need space to set up shop, whether it's a couple of shelves in your local Bookynook, or the relatively limitless space of an online store.
And what are the best books? Ironically enough, they are the books that are born of - and inspire - the sort of passion for the medium that gets us laughed at. The sort of books that have us saying, "Wow! This is something I want to share with somebody!"
The sort of books that are thrilling, moving, engrossing, essential reads.
The sort of books that you take to work the next day and talk about.
Ladies and Gentlemen: we need WaterCooler Comix.
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published on the comics culture website Gray Haven Magazine