Steven Grant Rules
June 27th, 2008 by david brothers | Tags: DC comics, final crisis, Marvel comics, secret invasionFrom this week’s Permanent Damage
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Speaking of upheaval, all this, including the underlying idiot notion that karma would rise up to bite Dan Didio on the ass for Chuck’s ill-treatment, got exacerbated by the revelation that Marvel’s SECRET INVASION #2 was the top book of the month, with DC’s supposedly pivotal FINAL CRISIS #1 coming in second, along with the speculation that “we can’t imagine anyone at DC is very happy about that.”
What?
It has become ridiculously easy to confuse reviewers’ commentary on comics with the real-world facts about those comics, but usually the one doesn’t have much more than peripheral connection to the other. I’ve mentioned in the past the dichotomous, contradictory standard “fanthink” on the matter: the comic that we like that fails failed because the audience isn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate it, the comic that we don’t like that fails failed because the audience couldn’t be fooled by crap. Corollaries: the comic that we like never fails because it’s crap and we’re the ones who got fooled by it; the book we don’t like that succeeds always succeeds because the rest of the audience is dazzled by crap.
The bold’s the important bit, the whole piece is well worth a read. The idea that Final Crisis wasn’t #1 because it’s “too smart” is dumb, possibly terminally so.
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I agree, anyone who thinks that Final Crisis didn’t outsell Secret Invasion was because it was ‘too smart’ is a fool. But one could argue that Secret Invasion was more accessible than Final Crisis, or that it was more ‘high concept’. One could also argue that DC’s marketing strategy (the never-ending stream of ‘event comics’ that are a part of a sprawling macro-narrative) is less successful than the Marvel strategy, which superficially appears to be less focused on explicit world building.
And I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the conflation of quality and sales. Even though the two are often correlated, I find it hard to believe that one causes another.
The thing is that a lot of the fans that are endlessly discussed in articles like these (from creators or the first tier bloggers) don’t have the time, ability or inclination to really flesh out what they mean to say.
Take Blue Beetle for example. Some people who make the ‘audience is unsophisticated’ argument are really saying that DC doesn’t market the book to the appropriate audience (whether that audience is children, adolescents, or people in minority communities), and that’s why it fails. Others are unhappy about how difficult it is for new characters to catch on with a traditionalist fanbase, etc. But when it’s expressed, it all comes out as ‘the audience is unsophisticated’, especially on message boards.
I’m really unconvinced by some of his other arguments, particularly as they relate to the comics publisher vs. media company dynamic. I still think that the primary difference between DC and Marvel is that while Marvel is a media company that can channel the creative talents of its comics creators to expand the business in other media, DC is a smallish unit of a large (poorly run) media company, and has not been given the autonomy that would be necessary to achieve similar results. In the event that Didio leaves the company (either for other opportunities, or if DC actually lost money), Time Warner wouldn’t recruit a media guy because they want DC to be perceived as a media company, it would do it because it only has a vague notion of what DC is. Marvel is perceived as a media company because of its actions, not because of its EIC’s background.
I would also argue that much of the backlash over Final Crisis isn’t because of some kind of snowball – avalanche effect, but because the ‘culture of secrecy’ described in the article caused confusion. I imagine that this would especially be the case with fans who didn’t read Grant Morrison’s interview on Newsarama.
“The thing is that a lot of the fans that are endlessly discussed in articles like these (from creators or the first tier bloggers) don’t have the time, ability or inclination to really flesh out what they mean to say.”
They have to be taken at their word. Nobody can, over the internet, read their mind, and if they say that some book fails or succeeds for some reason, or they issue vicious ad hominems whenever some creator is brought up, that’s what enters the discourse, not what some apologist for fanboys or someone who wants to moderate (in the sense of making less violent) or someone who gives a ‘benefit of the doubt’ wants to think they said.
The fanbase can’t have their cake and eat it too. They’re as much a part of the problem as anything else, and there’s next to no one stepping up and admitting so.
They have to be taken at their word. Nobody can, over the internet, read their mind, and if they say that some book fails or succeeds for some reason, or they issue vicious ad hominems whenever some creator is brought up, that’s what enters the discourse, not what some apologist for fanboys or someone who wants to moderate (in the sense of making less violent) or someone who gives a ‘benefit of the doubt’ wants to think they said.
I don’t really think that the ‘discourse’ engaged in by whatever tiny percentage of fans that are interested in posting on messageboards or on their livejournal page is particularly important. And I have a real problem with this notion that those people are representative of the majority of fans online, let alone the ones who aren’t online. .
And I’m not calling for mindreading, or giving people the benefit of the doubt, it’s just that most people I’ve read (including Mr. Grant) who complain about the unsophisticated audience are using the argument as a stalking horse for a separate issue. It’s a weakness a lot of people have (especially those who are fans of some part of the entertainment industry), so I don’t take it particularly seriously.