I attended the Four Color Reality Panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2009. It was described like this:

6:30-7:30 Four Color Reality: Making Comics Relevant to Readers Across Cultures— Comic book stories have become the core of American pop culture—is there a big-budget spectacular that doesn’t in some fashion owe its existence to comic book roots these days? But sales of traditional-format comic books themselves have been in decline for years. This panel explores one reason for this shrinking market: the divergence between the identities of mainstream comic icons, who are typically straight, white, male, and American, and the demographic makeup of a new generation of readers. How can the comic book industry connect with changing audiences—not just of diverse races and backgrounds, but of different cultural and national origins as well? Moderated by Jeff Yang (editor-in-chief, Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology). Panelists include Dwayne McDuffie (Milestone Comics, JLA, Ben 10: Alien Force), Gail Simone (Wonder Woman), Gene Yang (American Born Chinese, The Eternal Smile), Stuart Moore (Wolverine: Noir, The 99), and Jai Nitz (Blue Beetle, El Diablo). Room 3

Jeff Yang had a powerpoint presentation that kicked a few facts to start off the panel. One was a comparison of readerships between now and fifty years ago. Back then, comics were read by both boys and girls, at about a 50/50 ratio. In 2008, or 2009, I forget the exact year he quoted, it’s 90/10 in favor of boys. 90% of comics readers. He also showed a few quotes. I have the Paul Levitz quote exactly, since I took a picture of it, but I may have slightly paraphrased/cropped the Gary Groth quote.

Like all American media, [comics have] reflected the culture, which means there were things in the 1930s and the 1940s and the ’50s I’m sure we’d be less proud of today…
But in modern times, there have been either heroes or supporting characters introduced in our line that represent different ethnic groups and the world.

-Paul Levitz

It’s the chicken-and-egg question. The market is mostly teenage white boys. The reason is that the content has been aimed at white teenage boys. That’s why women and black adults don’t read comics. Most literate, intelligent people don’t read comics. We’re trying to change that, but it’s really difficult to do.

-Gary Groth.

Near as I can tell, Yang pulled the quotes from Facing Difference, a text book that was written in… 1997. The specific article is from the November 14th, 1993 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

One more time: November 14th, 1993. That’s sixteen years ago, give or take a few months. So, let’s get into my problems with the panel, and then loop back around into specifically talking about those numbers, and what they mean.

My (former) biggest problem with the panel is the way it seemed to conflate superheroes with comics. I didn’t quite believe it, but I took the 90% number at face value during the panel, despite my reservations. But even then, there is no way that number is accurate for comics in general. Maybe, maybe, for superheroes, but not for comics, which cover a range of genres and interests. Even leaving out manga, which is a dumb thing to do but something people do anyway, you aren’t going to see 90:10. You aren’t seeing 50:50, but you definitely aren’t seeing 90:10.

And even then, should we be looking at superheroes for racial sensitivity, anyway? This past year has convinced me that the only sensible answer is… no. Superhero comics, by and large, aren’t built for nuance. They are built to punch bad guys, be deconstructed occasionally, and to have large explosions. Nine times out of ten, superheroes are going to approach a subject from a black and white point of view, there is right and there is wrong, and that really isn’t how race and racism works. You can’t beat up racism. There are too many shades of gray, too many varied experiences, and too much baggage for that to ever happen. Sorry. Time to look elsewhere. There’ll be the occasional gem, but then there will also be Superman making proclamations and an entire generation rolling their eyes so hard that they go blind.

My new biggest problem with the panel, the problem I didn’t have before I started doing research with this post, is the research that apparently went into those figures that helped to set the stage for it. Numbers (with no sources) and quotes on the state of the industry from 1993 have about as much to do with the numbers and state of the industry in 2009 as the murder rate in New York City in 1936 has to do with the crime in NYC in 2009.

It’s irrelevant, and using those numbers, comics or murder rate alike, to bolster your point is intellectually dishonest.

Since 1993, we’ve seen an industry contract and nearly collapse. We’ve seen the rise of graphic novels and trade paperbacks as a viable way of reading and producing comics. We’ve seen a burst of movies based on comics. We’ve seen Time Magazine give Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home book of the year. Not Comic Book of the Year– Book of the Year. We’ve seen an explosion of fandom thanks to the internet. That explosion led to an explosion of female fandom online, with Scans Daily, Girl Wonder, and When Fangirls Attack probably being the three highest profile sites focused around girls’n’comics. Manga wasn’t a going concern in 1993. “Real” publishers didn’t care about anything but Maus in 1993. Bone hadn’t sold several million copies in actual book stores. Batman: The Animated Series was just getting going. And so on, and so on, and so on.

1993 isn’t 2009, and you cannot, absolutely cannot, use 1993 to make points about 2009. Those numbers? They were valid, once. Then that time passed, we moved on, and we’re in a different world now. 90% of comics readers being male in 1993, which I feel is already a dubious number but that’s just off gut instinct, has zip to do with whatever the ratio of male to female is these days.

I can understand where Yang was coming from with this. Race and gender and comics? It’s better than it was in the ’40s, yes, but it could always be better. But, pulling out figures from 16 years ago and using them to frame and position a discussion about the comics world of today is a mistake. It’s dishonest. It’s arguing against, what, a strawman? It was true at one point, perhaps, but isn’t now. It’s not a valid position to argue from.

And I mean, I’m ostensibly on Yang’s side. Should comics do better with regards to whatever ism comes to mind? Yes! Absolutely! Let’s get that range of portrayals going. But, to argue from data from 1993? That’s not how it works. If I’m on your side, and I have huge issues with your data, imagine what a theoretical nay-sayer is going to say.

Things are, and have been, getting better. I’d like to think that readers are getting smarter and more, for lack of a better word, diverse. My personal experience has certainly suggested that, and the experience of the circles that I run in.

But, really, we’ve got to do better. Halfway research and outdated figures don’t cut it, not even remotely. It doesn’t prove anything, and it doesn’t say anything beyond “Man, yesterday sucked, didn’t it?”

Courtesy of Jamie Coville, you can listen to the audio from the Dwayne McDuffie spotlight panel at SDCC09. Here’s a link to the rest of his convention mp3s, if you’re interested. Hat tip to Dwayne McDuffie, as he found it first.

Shouldn’t all comic-cons do this direct from the microphones? It’d be nice to be able to download audio of any panel from the show after a week or so.

It’s our tenth fourcast and the last from San Diego Comic-Con 2009. As befitting an event of this magnitude, we’ve got a couple of guests.

-Esther hits us with an introduction
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental is our theme music
-Esther chats with Gail Simone about Wonder Woman, Secret Six, and other things for about ten minutes
-David talks to Graeme “iam and io9” McMillan for about twenty minutes, mulling over everything under the sun
-I came this close to taking Graeme’s “Prrrr… sexy” and turning it into a ringtone to put up on the site. Just FYI.
-C.E.Outro

Next week, we’re back to our usual format.

If you’re new to the Fourcast!, subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed or subscribe on iTunes. Our full-blown RSS, with space-age things like “text” and “images” is here. Befriend us on Facebook, too!

And we’re back.

Yesterday, Wolverine jumped at Magneto and started clawing at him while defending Canadian health care. That’s about it, sorry to say. Let’s keep it going.

ManiacClown and I will be back tomorrow to watch the tag team match of Hulk and Colossus vs. Sabretooth and Mystique. Wait. Is that actually supposed to be a challenge?

Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Here we are in the latter half of 2009. Finally, the five issue series they were hyping in 2007 — when they first started soliciting Ultimate Power #8 — is coming to a close. Through Ultimatum, we see the Ultimate line giving birth to the Ultimate Comics line, only it’s the kind of childbirth that horrifically kills the mother and gives us a baby caked in blood.

But where were we? Magneto attacked the entire world and now the surviving heroes are out to stop him. With one arm left, he stands defiantly before those who would slay him.

Thanks to ManiacClown for coming up with whatever it is Wolverine is ranting about. We’ll be back tomorrow to see Magneto’s rebuttal.

Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

I am terrified of flying, hate any mention of planes in danger, and yet I found the strip of Streaky The Supercat taking the tail off an airplane because it had the picture of a mouse on it to be the most adorable thing I’ve seen this week.

I’m pretty sure that Amanda Conner needs to be classified as a deadly weapon.

Feel free to comment with your favorite part of Wednesday Comics below.

This’ll actually be our second Watchmen contest… here goes!

This one is easy. The kind folks at M80 want to give away a copy of Watchmen on Blu-ray. At some point over the past year, probably after I bought a PS3, BR became my favorite way to watch movies. Tons of special features, top notch quality, all that fun stuff that nitpickers love. I assume the Watchmen Blu-ray will be similar.

If you want it, here’s what you’ve gotta do. Leave a comment here with your first name (your actual first name, not your fake first name for the internet) and your favorite Watchmen character. You don’t have to justify it, you just have to name it. I’m going to go through the comments on Friday and randomly pick out a winner. I’ll email you for your address, you’ll send that to me, and then you’ll get a Watchmen Blu-ray in the mail.

A couple notes– US residents only, please! Also, please make sure you own a Blu-ray player. And if you don’t put a valid email address in the comments… I’ll have to pick someone else. So don’t put nospam@nospam.com. We’re not (ever) gonna spam you.

Our Wolverine contest from last week is up, and I’ll be emailing the winners tonight. Watch your mailboxes, and look for a post later this week on the best ones.

I’m generally of the opinion that the world would be much better if I ran it.  (What?  Like you’re not?)  This principle applies to panels, and all of the things said by all of the people on them.

It applied especially to the Sunday Conversation With Dan Didio panel at Comic-Con.  I generally like these panels very much because they leave aside the usual slideshow of covers that we will be seeing in eight months to two years and the painfully awkward questions.  Instead, they’re a bunch of people talking about comics.  Dan Didio generally does a great job of moderating the responses from the audience, and a panel of comics professionals cuts in with funny commentary.  It’s a really enjoyable panel.

One of the questions this year was, “What was a big ‘wow’ moment you’ve read in comics?”  That was where the panel spiralled down from something fun into the realms of what I can only describe as extreme unacceptability.  Every single reply was “When ____ got killed.”  Every one.

People!  Stop encouraging them!  We just barely got them to stop playing darts with the members of Young Justice!  Maybe it’s a question of when you started reading comics, but to me, standard character death that comes with every single big event is the most predictable and un-‘wow’ thing in the world.  You can practically set your watch by it.  How were any of those people shocked?

But what’s more, one of the other questions was, “What do you like to read in comics?”  My answer?  Fun.  A lot of it.  I want to have a blast when I’m reading.  I want the characters to have a blast.  I want the comic I’m reading to be so much fun that if you gave the reader the option of falling through the paper and joining the characters, they would do it in a heartbeat.

I don’t know if the panel was Bizarro World or if I’m truly that alone in preferring comics in which a hero’s death isn’t the most memorable event.  Aren’t there so many better things to remember?  And if there aren’t, shouldn’t there be?

Back in the early 90’s, the comic company Valiant struck a deal with Nintendo. Over the next two years or so, Valiant would release a multitude of series based on Nintendo franchises. There were a couple that felt natural. Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda each had their own cartoons at the time, so they would get picked up. Captain N: The Game Master would also get his own comic, though transformed due to the inability to use videogame characters outside of Nintendo. There was even a series called Nintendo Comics System that acted like an anthology of stories featuring those I mentioned and miscellaneous games like Dr. Mario and Punch Out.

Around that time, Nintendo’s Game Boy was still fresh on the scene and they wanted to do whatever they could to get the word out. Sure, advertising was easy for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Captain N was one big commercial for the console and all its games. Well, all the games that weren’t on that crappy knockoff cartoon Power Team (anyone else remember that? It had the monster truck Bigfoot, a basketball player and a talking tomato). Anyway, outside of commercials and magazine ads, how do you advertise what is essentially a lesser NES that you can carry around with you?

With the Captain N cartoon, they eventually introduced a Slimer-like character named Game Boy who was one, big, annoying Game Boy levitating around. With Valiant, they went in another direction. They gave it its own comic book.

I’m sure by now you’re already asking the million dollar question: “How exactly does a Game Boy comic work?” That’s a very good question and having found out the answer, I just had to get my hands on this 4-issue series.

Read the rest of this entry �

Last weekend was my third Comic-Con and the first one in which I couldn’t get into the panels I wanted to.  David, on the last fourcast, disagreed with my belief that the Con has grown too crowded to be effective, but I met a few people who agreed with me and we all had different theories on why the Con seemed to have reached critical mass and exploded into something unwieldy.

I had heard that Comic-Con had reduced the number of tickets sold, and when I went online to buy my own tickets, I found that the four day passes were almost sold out much earlier than last year.  I thought that would make it easy to get into panels.  Sadly, on Thursday I saw that the Con had gotten so crowded that any tv or movie panels had a two to four hour line and that many of the comics panels had a one hour line.  Even if you were willing to wait, it was often a toss-up as to whether you got to see the panels you wanted to.

My theory is that the early sell-out of tickets meant that the Con had started attracting hardcore fans.  People, like me, who had been there several times before.  Not only would they target panels more specifically, they’d know to get in line early, and when that failed, get in line even earlier.  Not to mention the recent recession might have driven people away from the vendors and up to the panels.

A friend of mine, Graeme McMillan from io9, thought that there were the same amount of tickets sold, but that everyone showed up this time around, instead of the regular percentage of no-shows that any event gets.

And then, of course, there were the outright cynics who thought that the Con would sell tickets to the entire population of the world if it could, and it did, and there was no use acting surprised that things were overcrowded.

Although everyone I met at this Con was wonderful, and I did enjoy seeing writers and editors close up, I feel like maybe I should hold off on San Diego next year.  Granted, I won’t get a chance to get an over-sized Dr. Who bag at another Con, and I won’t see the life-sized lego replicas of Boba Fett, but I’d sacrifice that to get into the panels I want to see without waiting for hours in a line that snakes around the entire building first.