Everyone, it seems, loves comics. Literary critics raved over the comic-book themed Michael Chabon novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Smallville, the current television series depicting Superman’s early years, is a cult success. Alternative-comics writer Daniel Clowes won an Oscar nomination for Ghost World. The comic book-inflected Freedom Force is one of the hottest new games on the market. And there’s been a steady stream of creatives from other media industries crossing over to write comics-ranging from filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) to television scribes Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) to bestselling novelist Brad Meltzer (The Millionaires). Longtime DC Comics editor Dennis O’Neil calls comics the “R&D division of the entertainment industry.”
Comics publishers are doing everything right-expanding creative rights for artists, tapping new global markets, reworking old genres to keep franchises alive and vital. Throughout much of Europe and Asia, comics have large readerships, are the subject of major arts exhibitions and even have their own museums, and attract lively critical debate.
The problem is that almost nobody in this country actually reads them. By some estimates, there may be as few as 500,000 comics readers in the United States today while the blockbuster new Spiderman movie is apt to attract ten to twenty times that many viewers on its opening weekend. On May 4, selected comics merchants will be giving away comics for free, trying to coax “newbies” into their dank, dark, subterranean hideouts. In their heyday, comics were distributed like magazines to newstands and drug stores. Some years ago, they went independent, developing their own retail outlets and systems of distribution; this move to a niche marketplace enabled publishers to distribute a broader range of titles, but it might have been a fatal mistake in cultivating a readership. What would it even mean to be a casual reader in a world where you have to consciously choose to go into a forbidding comics shop before you have any clue what is available?
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