Once an escape from texts, comics are prompting more of them

 

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — Remember when some of the kids in your class –not you, of course– would pass the course simply by skimming through the comic book version of the great piece of literature that you all had been assigned to read?    It used to be that comics were shortcuts for those who hated to read, a refuge for those who preferred pictures to vocabulary, and a way to amuse oneself in the waiting rooms of your doctors and dentists.

But now comic books are becoming the subjects of learned treatises.  We recently reviewed on these pages, Larry Tye’s Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero.  Can  we not expect similar books about other super-heroes, not to mention the various denizens of the Looney Tunes and Disney universes?     https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2012/06/11/superman-was-he-a-jew-or-a-christian/

Now comes Rob Salkowitz’s Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, using last year’s Comic-Con convention here in San Diego as a vehicle for exploring the various marketing and distribution issues facing an octogenarian industry.  Like the Comic-Con convention itself, the book provides us with a sensory overload of information; it’s the kind of a book that only an industry wonk could happily comprehend in full in just one reading.  To really appreciate it, one needs to take a course in communications — which, by the way,  is Salkowitz’s academic field up at the University of Washington.

There seem to be as many byways and side discussions in the book as  there are aisles in the Exhibit Hall of the San Diego Convention Center, where if you stop long enough to consider where you’re going, you just might get run over by someone dressed as a Star Wars storm trooper,  or, if you’re male and luckier,  by a lithesome beauty in a Cat-Woman costume.  If you aren’t among the 130,000 persons who attend this annual extravaganza, you may not be aware that in addition to all the exhibits and sales booths at Comic-Con,  there are at almost every hour competing panel discussions — some being mega-events featuring big Hollywood personnas like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, and others being relatively minor affairs, focusing on the craftsmanship of a veteran comic artist.

There are a lot of threads in Salkowitz’s yarn shop, so suffice it here to reprise only enough for a skein.

First, the comic book industry that we grew up knowing, that is the one producing multi-colored booklets containing sequential drawings about characters we loved, is nearly an industry of the past.  Ever wonder what it might have been like at the end of the horse and buggy era?  Go into a comic book store.  If it’s typical, you’ll find a bunch of die-hard fans, familiar with every nuance of their favorite super-heroes’ universes.  Take Superman fans, for example.  The ones poring over the comic books packaged in protective see-through wrappers know all the different colors of kryptonite and just what effect each had on Superman.  At the next bin, the fans — most of them aging– can tell you every crime-fighting device Batman has utilized in battles with the Joker.

Salkowitz says these comic book stores are dysfunctional because rather than inviting new readers in, their very male, clubby atmosphere deters many newcomers–especially women–from coming in to browse, and to potentially become new customers.  Yet, such stores continue to be the main distribution channel for comic books, and comic book publishers are wary of offending these customers.   Comic book dealers actually buy the comics — they don’t take them on consignment the way the old newsstands once did — and thus they are a certain source of income, a tried and proven outlet.

Yet, time and technology has been marching on, and Kindle tablets, iPads and other electronic readers have become a new channel for distribution–offering not only instant access for story-hungry readers but the opportunity to lure new, younger customers.  Naturally, the proprietors of comic book stores are not at all happy that more and more comic book publishers are going digital.

Recently a number of comic book publishers “re-booted” their treasured stories — that is, they decided to tell them all over again, so that a new generation of readers could become acquainted with characters who otherwise would be the preserve of the consistency-demanding old guard, who have been collecting comics for years and want the story lines to remain true.

Even as the J.J. Abrams’   2009 Star Trek movie starring Christopher Pine and Zachary Quinto allowed a new generation of trekkies to appreciate the adventures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, changing some of the details of these characters’ back stories in the process,  so too does the re-booting of comic books permit the various Super-heroes to be updated, modernized, and synchronized with current tastes.

As the Kirk and Spock versions portrayed by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are becoming passé, so too are previous versions of characters in comic books, a medium where for the sake of revitalization, everything you’ve read before can be attributed to a dream, or a hallucination, or a journey into an alternate universe.

Movies about super-heroes and other comic-book characters feed off the comic book industry, and in turn generate new spin-off comic-book stories.  When you have 130,000 fans determinedly trudging through the jammed-packed convention hall, you have 130,000 people who may be messaging all their friends on Twitter, or Facebook, or other social media all about the new movie they saw previewed, the souvenir item now on sale, the videos that are coming out.  Comic book characters live simultaneously in many media — their birthplaces  in the comic books being only one.  You can find them in movies, newspaper “funnies,”  television shows, video games, TV commercials, billboards, toy stores, logos, as well as an amazing variety of merchandise.

Comic-Con returns to San Diego July 12-15.  Those who want to be less bewildered and more savvy as they wander its byways will want to read this business-oriented book.

Alas, there is no comic book version of it.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com