StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 3, page 37
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The first place. The stories were all true. The past is here, still, buried in the ancient code. A place of gods. A holy place, a tomb, and we’ve disturbed it, and earned its curse.
There’s no redo.
We were foolish to try and find it. Poor Wu, poor Sergei, poor all of us who came to Pacmandu.
Comics: what have
they done for Us lately?
Frederic Himebaugh
The golden age of comics introduced the superhero in the 1940s. The silver age of comics brought the superhero back in the late 1950s and 1960s, within the smothering embrace of the Comics Code Authority. The bronze age of the 1970s and early 1980s saw more diverse themes and a wider collection of publishers, even as sales grew, like a Spinal Tap audience, more selective.
What element can serve as a metaphor for the age we find ourselves in today? Iron? (Too primitive.) Platinum? (The industry couldn’t afford it.) Argon? (Rare and inert?) I think we have a winner: Argon it is! The capital fact of the comics industry is the inexorable decline in sales, a trend that goes back for decades.
There are many causes for the decline. New media have lured young people away from reading of all kinds. Speciality comics stores took over distribution when spinner racks full of cheap comics disappeared from drug stores, and the medium became invisible except to an ever shrinking niche. A boomlet of sales in the 1990s proved to be driven by speculators, and led to a bust. (Shall we call the 1990s the Hydrogen Age? Ah, the humanity!) Sales inched up in the aughts, but then the recession hit.
The sales numbers usually quoted are those from Diamond Distributors, the overwhelming source of hard-copy product to comics stores. We quote them because we can, not because they tell the total story. Electronic downloads of comics are a (presumably) growing part of the market, but no one shares those figures. There is no indication those sales are yet significant. Two publishers, namely DC and Marvel, are cushioned by significant revenue from movie deals, but even they want badly to reach new markets, which is to say, they devoutly wish your sister and your grandma and your plumber and your priest would buy their wares.
Can that happen here? A place exists where it does, a strange and magical place, where comics are written for, and regularly purchased by, boys and girls, professors and professionals, feminists and fetishists. It’s a place called...
Japan.
Why Japan? It’s not that manga is a magic word (I don’t think), or that manga-style artwork has special powers to attract and sway impressionable minds. (Domestic publishers found that out when hard-core fans reacted with indignant apathy to attempts to make US-style comics more manga-y.) We need to understand this phenomenon so we can predict if it can be duplicated in English-speaking culture.
Japanese manga history has something – I should say, someone – that American comics do not: a George Washington, a Gandhi, a Michelangelo. His name was Osamu Tezuka, and he lived from 1928 to 1989. His output is huge and wide-ranging, and his influence can hardly be overstated: he is called the God of Manga. Because his influence extended to anime, he is sometimes compared with Walt Disney, but Disney had no influence on comics to compare with Tezuka’s. He is most famous as the creator of Astro Boy, but his topics covered themes for adults as well as children. In fact, he bears most of the credit or blame for the tendency in manga, even more common than in Western comics, to draw faces with enlarged, anatomically impossible eyes, even in manga for grown-ups. (One really ought to hear a squeak when a Tezuka character looks from side to side – that would be the sound of its eyeballs rubbing together.)
Tezuka’s example – he gave up a career as a doctor in order to draw manga, a decision which at the time was an act of financial hara-kiri – encouraged others with big talents to enter the field, and the result was that Japan boasts the most sophisticated comics in the world. The Japanese love, or at least accept, experiments in page and panel layout. They also famously consume manga with themes serving every niche imaginable. This extends far beyond the usual genres of action, romance, mystery, horror, SF, etc., though the sales of those genres would be remarkable in the West where superheroes dominate (as they are wont to do). One need not be a fan of manga per se to read manga in Japan; if one is a fan of, say, tennis, then one will likely read tennis-themed manga; the same is true for all kinds of pastimes, including those not necessarily associated with children or teens.
For indeed, as I mentioned, Japanese adults consume manga voraciously. Besides the dead hand of Tezuka steering the ship of Japanese culture toward the harbour of manga, there is a topographical predestination at work: density is destiny it would seem, as Japan’s overcrowded islands cause a great many commuters to depend on public transportation. This commuter culture encourages the habit of reading while riding trains and buses. Relatively short trips biases this population toward reading material that is easily interrupted and resumed – that is, toward manga. Especially, manga in the typical manga form factor, which is that of a medium-sized paperback book. That’s the theory, anyway. According to the theory, places like Manhattan Island, or even the heavily-urbanized parts of Europe, lack the critical mass to create a manga culture.
Manga culture cannot be explained solely by pointing to one remarkable individual, or to time spent trapped in close quarters with strangers one is eager to ignore. There are many reasons why manga is big in Japan, and many of them can be summarized by blaming the unique qualities of Japanese culture. In short, Japan is manga-crazy because Japan is... crazy.
From a western viewpoint, Japan is inexplicable, more odd even than the almost-infinitely diverse universe called China. Perhaps its weirdness stems from the ease by which it has embraced and co-opted certain Western habits, especially Western technology and dress. In very select ways, Japan has out-wested the West. This creates a cultural vertigo; the alien and the shockingly familiar, juxtaposed, will always be more unsettling than a truly alien landscape, such as one would likely find on, say, the planet Vulcan.
And its not just the Sony-fication of modern Japan. There’s also a deep schizophrenia about the place – one exemplified by the oeuvre of Tezuka. I’m taking about the uneasy marriage, the partly intersecting/partly repelling yin and yang of two Japanese cultural forces: kawaii and wabi-sabi.
Kawaii means cuteness. It is a Japanese cultural predilection that is responsible for, among many other things, those big eyes in manga. It is the reason why every prefecture of Japan has an official cartoon mascot, called yuruchara. (Imagine crossing a state line in the US and seeing one of those billboards that say, “Governor Hogg Welcomes You to Alabama!”, or whatever, and next to the photo of the governor is some ridiculous cartoon rabbit winking at you. This is the point down to which Japan’s government has sunk.) The reliance on cuteness is almost life-threatening at times, since it even infects warning signs, confusing their meaning. My personal favourite is Mimi Chan, of Sakai City, which is an anthropomorphized mauve and yellow flower that sucks on both hands/petals at once in a glorious collision of blood-freezing cuteness and relentless, savage, implacable infantility.
And yet!
And yet, nestled cheek-by-jowl with this childish indulgence, is the mystery that is wabi-sabi. This is the Japanese aesthetic of impermanence and imperfection (especially that imperfection that arises from organic growth). It expresses itself in a rejection of machine uniformity, in asymmetry, and in simplicity. It is the aesthetic which informs the practice of tearing down and rebuilding wooden Shinto shrines at regular intervals, in contrast to the Western reverence for enduring stone monuments such as the Parthenon. It informs the minimalism of the washitsu (the traditional Japanese-style room). It informs Japanese sword-smiths when they make a small nick of imperfection in an otherwise perfectly forged sword, lest the gods be offended.
This obsessive focus on restraint, and the paradoxical pursuit of a higher perfection through imperfection, is arguably the summit of the human pursuit of good taste. How it can coexist with so much of the aggressive vulgarity of kawaii is a profound mystery. One could theorize that kawaii is the yet higher order, the taste beyond good taste and bad taste – but these are deep waters, and more to the point, it’s B.S.
Whatever may be the cause, whether Tezuka or subways or an inscrutable aesthetic bipolarity, Japan has a comics appetite that Western publishers can only envy. Meanwhile, in the West, the hand-wringing continues apace. Is it warranted? Will it end?
Comics Around The World
The United Kingdom’s comics history is similar to that of the USA, with a long decline in sales that some hope has been arrested in the last ten years. French language bandes desinées have seen decline of serial comic books, but collections (albums or graphic novels) remain reasonably strong, partly due to their ability to cross borders into parts of Belgium and Switzerland. Germans have never consumed comics at rates equal to the French or the English, and that disparity continues today.
Italian comics are noteworthy primarily for their charming name (fumetto – literally, “puff of smoke”, a reference to word balloons), a strand of characteristic erotic comics, and one particular best-selling zombie apocalypse series called Dylan Dog, which boasts the most magisterial blurb imaginable, by legendary historian and novelist Umberto Eco: “I can read the Bible, Homer or Dylan Dog for days on end without ever feeling bored.” Wow.
The most likely candidate for the nomination of Japan 2.0 is South Korea. Proximity to Japan, and similar culture (viewed distantly; no doubt Japanese and Koreans could name a thousand differences at the drop of a gat), especially occupying as they do the periphery of the overwhelming Chinese empire, all make Korea a copy of Japan to inattentive Western eyes. South Korea in fact does boast a lively manhwa publishing industry, which comes in a form factor similar to manga; indeed, the only noticeable difference is that manhwa reads left to right. (One feels almost disappointed by that directional familiarity upon picking up what looks like manga, but is manhwa: “Hey! I can adapt to crazy oriental backwardness! Don’t coddle me!”)
Unlike Japan, however, the dominant popular cultural force in South Korea is gaming. Korea is the pioneer in professional, corporate-sponsored gamers. Yes, this means there are people in the world, mostly Korean, who play Star Craft: Brood War for a living. As in: that’s their job.
Meanwhile, the rich diversity and artistic quality of the North Korean publishing...
(No! I can’t go on! I cannot bring myself to lie to you!)
China might have been a promising market for manga. One had hoped that huge population, with its growing economy, could do for the graphic novel arts what it is doing for Western classical music (which means, a lot: China is presently cranking out huge numbers of astoundingly virtuosic pianists and violinists and exporting them to stunned Western music conservatories and orchestras). But, if it is destined to happen, at least it is not happening now. The Chinese comics publishing industry has hit a slump, bottoming out in 2006. Several key comics magazines have been cancelled, due to declining sales, mismanagement, competition from Japanese imports, or (so it is rumoured) because of old-fashioned attitudes about comics among the ruling elite, which still exercises censorial control over media.
Comics In The Us: The Big Two
(Or Three, Or Four Or Five)
Old hands in the US comics biz will sometimes refer to the Big Four of publishing. They mean Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse. Looking only at publication numbers from Diamond Distributors, however, and looking only at recent years, one sees a Big Two: Marvel, DC, and a host of others all below 8 percent of the “direct” market. When you consider that Marvel and DC enjoy movie revenues that the others do not, the separation only grows.
On the other hand, if you insist on widening the tent, then you should talk about a Big Five, for IDW (Idea + Design Works) is not far behind #3 (Image) and #4 (Dark Horse). But a list of top-selling comics titles in any given month will be dominated by Marvel and DC. Dark Horse’s biggest sellers are Joss Whedon titles (Buffy, and Serenity spin-offs) plus Hellboy. Image makes the list due to its beloved Walking Dead series along with a few other titles including Cowboy Ninja Viking, which got a favourable StarShipSofa podcast mention. IDW’s cash cow is a True Blood tie-in.
In spite of the dominance of the Big Two, or maybe because of it, a dreary sameness pervades their lineups. The most exciting work comes out of the Midsize Three. The bold graphic designs of Jonathan Hickman the Image writer (see especially Nightly News and Pax Romana) beats the somewhat more constrained (but still enjoyable) Jonathan Hickman the Marvel writer (see S.H.I.E.L.D). This is hardly surprising:
With great success comes great conservatism.
Beyond a desire to stick with formulas that work, the Big Two have the most invested in maintaining the present business model that depends heavily on monthly sales via comics stores. This means, tragically, that electronic sales are a direct threat to the status quo... unless those sales are priced identically to hard-copies. And that makes no sense from the consumers’ point of view.
DC is determined to shake off its cobwebs. In 2011, it announced a reboot of 52 different titles – the bulk of its lineup. DC is famous for its reboots, but never has it coordinated reboots in bulk like this. Longtime fans of some of the hoarier series – those in love with what can be called “continuity porn” – are howling, but it’s unlikely they will walk. Meanwhile, this reboot is an attempt to attract new readers who have found jumping into series midstream a daunting, bewildering task. Time will tell how successful the attempt will be.
The big reboot is a bold move on DC’s part, and at this point (late August, 2011) it looks promising, with pre-orders of many DC #1s at sky-high levels (by today’s standards), some reaching levels not seen since Marvel put newly-elected President Obama on a Spider-man cover in 2009. By the time you read this, more information may be trickling in, and we’ll begin to know if those mythical new readerships are emerging from the mists.
Alan Moore has nothing good to say about all this. (Those familiar with Moore’s curmudgeonly public persona, or his long-standing feud with DC will hardly be surprised.) When interviewer Zack Smith of Newsarama.com recently asked Moore about DC’s big reboot, he admitted he had not even heard of such a thing. Then, he continued:
“I suppose my basic feelings about the comic industry as it stands are that I just hope its final death rattle isn’t too humiliating or too desperate, because it’s deserved. If the industry is incapable of coming with new ideas and a future that it can evolve into, then it really doesn’t deserve to survive.”
This reboot draws attention to an interesting difference in the way DC and Marvel handle continuity, and indeed, the difference in their philosophies of Time itself. (Oooh. They have philosophies of time. That sounds so smart.) The problem can be stated simply: when popular stories stretch out into years, and then decades, should they age? Should changes in styles, technologies, and culture be recognized, or should the characters stay stuck forever? No, says DC and Marvel, they should not stay stuck. On the other hand, they should never grow old either.
DC solves this dilemma generally by reboots: they start the story over, set in the present. (This means the origin stories, which are often the most compelling, can become fresh sources of interest and revenue.) Marvel, on the other hand, generally keeps all new issues in the present day but lets their characters age according to “Marvel Time”, which runs slower than our time. It is all very flexible: Peter Parker spent his last three years of high school from 1962 to 1965 but spent his first year of graduate school from 1979 to 1983; meanwhile, Susan Richards was pregnant for nearly 12 months in 1968 and 1969—the first hint that the Fantastic Four series was stretching more than just the arms of Richard Reed. Theoretically, Spider-man et al. will turn into old men and women some day, but never fear, Spidey fans; at the present rate, that won’t happen anytime in your lifetime or mine.
It’s interesting to use S.H.I.E.L.D., a long-running Marvel series that was recently taken over by the aforementioned Jonathan Hickman, as an example of what is, and is not, possible in Big Two comics series. The story as reimagined by Hickman surprises and compels, but it is not anywhere as shocking, subversive, evil, and giggle-enducing as Hick’s solo effort Nightly News, published by Image. S.H.I.E.L.D. is a steampunk story of Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, et al. Saving the world with hi-tech toys. The art is Renaissance beautiful, with backgrounds that fade into sepia scribblings that pay homage to Leonardo’s famous notebook. Hickman also calls for arcane, vaguely conspiratorial charts. These are his trademark, and have earned him the nickname “the Unabomber” among Marvel editors. The art is top-notch, and the charting makes it edgy by Marvel standards, but my heart belongs to the more freewheeling conspiratorial arcana of his Image titles Nightly News and Pax Romana.
In spite of these complaints against DC and Marvel, there are things the Big Two can do for us. Their artists make the best drawings in the biz, and the way they handle panel flow, although not exactly innovative, nevertheless makes use of the whole bag of tricks, and does so in an understated way that exudes the confidence of maturity.
I was impressed, for example, with a page from Superman: Earth One, a retelling (a temporary reboot, you might call it) of the Superman origin story that bypassed the monthly comic book roll out and went straight to graphic novel format in hardback and trade paperback. (This is the “hoodie Superman” book, so-called because of it’s cover art. In fact, the teenage Superman is drawn with a perfect, young-Tom-Cruise look to him that impresses. It’s a step away from the iconic Superman, yet looks very right. Kudos to penciller Shane Davis.)
