First! Go read a post on Rachel’s blog: In Which I Go Comic Book (It’s like that Brian McKnight song—but worse). Or, if you don’t want to read it, let me sum up what she has to say. She’s not super familiar with the comic book medium, but the fact that DC is going to be starting all of their series at #1 again is a little annoying because it means that years of character development has been wiped out. Here’s what she has to say:
People feel quite strongly about the fictional worlds they imaginatively inhabit. For comic book readers who invest hours of thought and mind-painting into the universe of their choice, they become as attached to character development and progression and relationship as the 19th Century Dickens reader on tenterhook for the next installment of, say, Great Expectations ( the most comic-booky of the Dickens’ novels, perhaps).
I was going to post a comment there, but it got long and full of rambling, and so I decided it would be better to post my thoughts on it here.
From a certain point of view what DC’s doing makes sense… I mean, for anyone getting into comics for the first time, it’s confusing as anything to attempt to read anything about one of the famous superheroes… And someone who is unfamiliar with the genre will probably want to start with something they know a little bit about – so the characters who are in television shows, movies, cartoons, etc. But going in and seeing that what is readily available in comic book stores are going to be pretty far into the series, or finding out that you have years worth of back issues to read if you really want to know all of the character development, etc….. it can be quite scary! It certainly was for me, and I only read comics a little bit. Like any business, DC would want to expand their market and having the consumer start partway through a series IS extremely intimidating, especially when the reader has no real idea what’s going on.
I don’t read much of DC, so I’m not completely familiar with how they deal with their storylines. But I think Marvel does it well. Yes, there are many different series about the X-Men going on at any given time. You can always find a new series that you can start, and you just need a little bit of background info on the characters involved, but you still see the beginning of the story. For the most part you get the same characters in any of the arcs, but they’re sometimes different depending on the series you read: Astonishing X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Marvel Noir… Wolverine, for example, is in all of them, but in one of them he’s a detective in an almost film-noir story, but in the others he’s the same Wolverine we know from other things. I mean, it’s almost like you need to think of each series as a separate fanfiction story (and yet not really fanfiction, because they are all canon) in which it’s an alternate universe where anything else that has happened in another story has absolutely no bearing in the one you’re reading now.
This could also be why the smaller presses are gaining in popularity, I suppose… their characters don’t have the huge backstory, you don’t have to invest five million years reading all the previous comics to know what’s going on. Like The Walking Dead – these are all new characters. Like the Firefly, Farscape, Buffy, Muppet comics – these are ones that people invested television or movie watching time into already (mediums that are a lot less intimidating than starting comic books is)…
I think DC’s decision is smart as far as doing what you can for a business to survive and make money, and allowing new fans to be introduced in a non-overwhelming way, ESPECIALLY with the massive amount of superhero movies that have been produced in the past few years (and all the ones that are going to be made in the near future).
What do you think?