Marvel Comics and the “most intricate fictional narrative in history” (2013)
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This struck me. As a European, from one of the countries where comics stands strongest (Norway), I remember as a child, be shocked at hearing that in the US it was common, for the purposes of determining advertising reach, to count multiple issues per reader at one point.
Because in Norway, it was normal to calculate 3-4 readers per comic for of the most popular titles. Like (in the 80's; while still going, they've been displaced by homegrown titles "at the top" as far as I understand) Donald Duck & Co. and the Phantom, which both sold in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 per issue through much of the 80's (every week for Donald, and every two weeks for the Phantom) in a country of then ca. 4 million people. So for Donald it would not have been unreasonable for an issue to have been read by one in five people, including a lot of adults.
Comics, as a culture here, was always about fun and sharing, not really collecting (there are certainly collectors too, but it's never been as big as in the US).
Many Marvel and DC titles also sold more in translations in Scandinavia (sometimes each country in Scandinavia might outsell the US for certain titles) than they did in the US, though their popularity has diminished since the 80's.
Though it was not hard to see why "our" versions sold better when I saw my first US comic: Thin slivers full of advertising. We expected 60+ page issues, often expanded issues with up to 100 pages, and usually only 3 pages of advertising or so (inner cover and back page); maybe an advertising inlay.
My first exposure to Marvel (as had "always" been the case in Norway - we never had the proliferation of titles following different aspects of a character) was also far easier to digest (though it used to be more chaotic):
From 1983 onwards, a new publisher took over. Where the previous one had published a mish-mash of stories from the different Marvel titles, out of order, the new one followed a very simple format, coordinated throughout the Scandinavian market: Spiderman, Hulk, Project X each got one title that weaved together a single coherent-ish narrative for their title character from the different Marvel titles + extra stories about the other Marvel characers. In addition each title carried a single number scheme that placed them chronologically relative to each other. Focus was on ensuring that you could either follow one of the main titles or all of them in numbered order, and get a narrative that was understandable, if necessary "filled in" by a "fact page" or similar explaining the background of a "new" (to us) character that had to be thrown into the mix for the narrative to make sense.
Especially relevant with the new X-Men movie: Project X lasted 13 issues on its first run, and ended with Days of Future Past.
It got another 13 issue run again a couple of years later. Since then I stopped following superhero comics for many years so I don't know if they tried again, but superhero comics have never done particularly well in Scandinavia, which to me makes the US comics market even stranger.
Because our market, is dominated by, well, comedic comics, many of which through the years have been series that only got newspaper strip treatment in the US. The format is generally a main title, which gets the most pages aggregated from new and classic strips, coupled with a number of rotating sideshows. Examples includes Beetle Bailey (which has run continuously since the 70's), Hagar the Horrible (currently not being published), Calvin and Hobbes (which kept running for a few years after the new strips dried up), Opus (/Outland/Bloom Country), Ernie, The Far Side.
Many of these will start as a side series in one of the titles, and then "graduate" to a full series, and occasionally go back to being a side series in another title once their popularity diminishes (or when new material dries up - e.g. Calvin and Hobbes still show up).
In return, we've long had the bizarre situation where US comic artists that are virtually unknown in the US, tour Scandinavia and get large articles in national newspapers about their book signings, and we get special stories weaving the Scandinavia into stories. Some of them (Ernie for example) have even snuck in their Scandinavian editors as characters in their series at times.
These type of titles of course evades all of the narrative issues: Their universes are if not static, then at least rarely bound by their story lines.
But the most popular comics today are homegrown comedic series. At least three currently have regular (monthly) titles: The Collective (Kollektivet) - a story about a group of badly mismatched friends that started out as a housing collective, Pondus - a story that started out as a story about two soccer crazy bus drivers -, and Nemi, which is the most internationally known of them, thanks to being the least peculiarly Norwegian one of them...
All of these interestingly have in common that their universes evolve. Particularly Pondus and Kollektivet. Pondus has for example evolved from a simple series about two football-loving, beer drinking bus drivers getting into bizarre situations involving ugly women (the artist claims a US syndication deal stranded on his refusal to re-draw strips to make the women that one of the main character constantly hits on less ugly), horrible passengers etc. to a one of them buying a pub, and the perpetual bachelor (with the ugly women) finding himself a nice woman, getting married, having a child, and running a record-store with his dad. They escape the narrative "nightmare" that Marvel and DC deals with by not sharing their universe with anyone (the occasional friendly jabs between the different comic artists, where they've made fun of each others characters in various ways, excluded).
Pondus and Nemi sell more than most Marvel and DC series do in the US on a monthly basis in Norway alone, with their artists in full control and making enough to tell the publishers where to stuff it if they get too much interference. These magazines, and slots as side-series in other comedic comics supports a relatively large number of other comic artists, though most of them can not live full time of their series (one of the more popular series, for example, is drawn by a high-school teacher). Compared to the US, we have a market that does amazingly well in sales, despite far fewer titles, but does not sustain as many artists. On the other hand, the stories are far more diverse, and one of the reason we sustain fewer artists is that the series are not "cookie-cutter" series managed project-managed by the publishers.
To us, in many ways, when it comes to comics we are much closer to the Franco-Belgian comic culture than to the US. French and Belgian series like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Spirou have always done exceptionally well in Scandinavia, regularly getting reprinted in huge numbers.
Here's an example:
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2011/04/16/the-comi...
I guess other funnies may have had similar runs.
They're very different from the format I have in mind, as they're published much more rarely (as the magazines often only need a handful of new pages per issue, and supplement with re-runs and side-series), in book form rather than magazine form, and rarely sold outside of specialist comic book stores or book stores. The chronological book editions are more aimed for collectors than for casual readers, with conversely tiny print runs in comparison.
We get the chronological collections for collectors in Norway too, but they're relegated to the same role as in the US (Asterix got the most fantastic collectors edition back in the 80's: You could get all of the ones published by then in hardcover on extra heavy paper, with gilded edges, bound in wild boar skin...).
There's anyway lots of not so super U.S. comics, stuff like "Archie" or "Duck Tales" would be big ones. I sort of wonder how much U.S. stuff is being recycled into the books you are talking about. I don't mean I think it is for sure happening, I actually mean I wonder about how much it happens.
edit: http://www.atomicavenue.com/atomic/titledetail.aspx?TitleID=...
> There's anyway lots of not so super U.S. comics, stuff like "Archie" or "Duck Tales" would be big ones.
There's lots of them, but they are "special interest" that are published in tiny little runs for the most part, and most of them don't get much retail distribution (at least not any more). Archie being the closest to an extant "mainstream" non-superhero series (Archie is also reprinted in Scandinavia, but has never been a big seller), but even Archie is tiny: The main Archie title sold for <30k/month as of a few years ago.
Duck Tales is an interesting one to bring up, as it belongs to a separate tradition: The cartoon spin-off. There's lots of them, but most of them don't sell very well, and few of them get translated much. The Duck Tales stories do get published in Scandinavia, but as far as I understand they sell tiny amounts compared to the weekly Donald & Co magazine.
> I sort of wonder how much U.S. stuff is being recycled into the books you are talking about. I don't mean I think it is for sure happening, I actually mean I wonder about how much it happens.
Most of it does, for any series that gains traction. There are certainly US series that doesn't make it (but the US editions will be for sale in any comic shop), but for the ones that do, pretty much every single thing that gets printed in the US makes it to the European editions. E.g. Beetle Bailey has been published about monthly from the mid 70's in Norway, increasing to 3 times a month in the 80's, and twice a week for about the last 20 years - they've published every little scrap of Bettle Bailey material they've managed to dig up, and still the magazine is mostly re-runs and side series, and this is fairly typical.
Usually the death-knell for these magazines is that they simply "run dry". Calvin and Hobbes for example, kept going for a few years after Watterson stopped drawing, but unlike Beetle Bailey, his ten year run was simply too short to give them the same kind of flexibility in ongoing extensive re-runs, as the target audience would know and remember almost everything they'd print.
On top of publishing whatever they can get from the US editions the European publishers often commission extra material to help fill the generally higher page count editions, or special additional series. E.g. there's a long standing "Donald Pocket" series where the majority of books are written specifically for various European regional markets by European artists. And the Scandinavian Donald magazines includes a lot of specially commissioned stories from artists like Don Rosa (US) that are often not published in the US because there's no outlet for them (Don Rosa have had a few stories published in US comic books, but the US Disney comics sales keeps imploding every few years leading to repeated mass cancellations)
To get back to Beetle Bailey, there's another interesting example: The Scandinavian magazines regularly publishes draft strips that Walker or his assistants found too rude to expect to be accepted by his US publisher due to language (sexual innuendo, bodily functions etc.) or nudity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Scrooge#U.S._publication_...
US comics are more intricate and harder to follow, but it's potentionally more rewarding. This, in turn, creates more passionate and more religiously following fans.
On one hand, you can have a lot of customers; on the other hand, you can have smaller, but more loyal customers.
US comics have chosen the second path, in approximately 1980s. And I, as a European fan of US "Big 2" comics, don't really mind.
I'm not sure that this generalisation holds, I grew up with comics like Laureline and Valerian by Christin/Mezerieres, the work by Jean Giroud aka Moebius, and I'm sure there are many of other european made comics I read back in my youth which are quite advanced story-wise, there's more to european comics than Tintin and The Smurfs :)
On contrast I've often found the formulaic superhero style stories dominating US comics to be rather 'simple', but of course that's a generalisation as well.
Just look at what happened to the Star Wars extended universe - and that with a much tighter creative control.
I recommend comics about competitive wine tasting.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_(comics)
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalped_(comics)
3: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Sept_Vies_de_l%27%C3%89perv...
From my childhood, in advance of one of the Superman reboots in the 80's, I remember a particular issue where they'd rounded up several artists to each do their take on the "end" of the previous continuity, or the a version of the origin story. It didn't matter that they did not fit into a single coherent canon.
If anything causes it to be a trainwreck, it is that they try to maintain the idea that there's any kind of coherence.
I like that there's different takes on the characters.
Unfortunately, you can't see any of that from the cover of the comics, and the best writers share shelf space with a whole lot of dreck, as well as a bunch of not-dreck that assumes you've already been reading the series for ten years.
My advice is to buy collected story arcs rather than individual issues, avoid crossovers, favor single-character rather than ensemble books, favor series relaunches or miniseries, and once you've found a writer you like, buy for the writer and not the character.
I understand it is a story about Marvel, but their story was influenced by these players also, not just DC. Anyway, great reading.
Watchmen was not so much a satire, but a humanized version of what a superhero could be. But that is eclipsed through the end by its deep sociological question and its dubious answer. For me, the genesis of the comic genre that deal with mature subjects for mature audiences.
For me these were the guidelines used by Hollywood to make the comics to cinema transiction right. Teenagers by themselves can sustain the comic business, but not the movie business. So i understand the role of the Graphic Novel as the ingredient needed to make comics an art media for ali audiences. Something that Pixar made for animations through clever humour, for example.
Similar could be said for the "Superhero without superpowers" plot device, and "Heroes with fairly regular human problems" plot device. The plot devices were old and well tested by the time they were used in The Watchmen.
On the other hand, the idea of using a limited series outside of the normal (cannon) universe to both introduce new heroes and kill them off in the same book/series was a deviation from the usual comics industry methods (for maximizing profits). Of course, DC eventually did a follow-on prequel "Before Watchmen" in 2012 after the release of the movie adaptation of the original in 2009. The price of success in comics is typically repeated dilution.
Permanently killing heroes became normalized in 1988 with "A Death In The Family" when they killed the second Robin in Batman (and started the "Replaceable Robin" and/or "Replaceable Sidekick" trope).
I've never seen the Watchmen as an analogy to the comics industry. After all, it was from one of the big two publishers. To me, the Watchmen was mostly just a product of its time; at the height of the seemingly endless threat of the cold war when everyone wanted the cold war to end. The trope of "endless threat resolved with substantial losses and significant change" was fairly prevalent in stories from the mid 80's. To some degree, the trope is still reused in current works, but to a far lesser degree. The toughest thing to grasp is what the mid-80's were like, and unless you're in your mid-40's or older, it will be tough for most to imagine. If I didn't know what the time was like, I doubt I'd consider the Watchmen to be such a fantastic story.
Alan Moore actually originally wanted to use a bunch of characters that DC had just bought, in order for the characters to be recognized to the readers before he revealed their flaws and/or killed them off.
Needless to say, the DC editor that read his proposal did not believe DC would be willing to have characters they'd just spent good money on killed off, or (much worse - death does not need to be permanent in these universes after all -), morally compromised in a way that readers would not forget. So Moore was convinced to go back and find a way to make it work with new characters.
> "All but the last issue feature supplemental fictional documents that add to the series' backstory ... Structured as a nonlinear narrative, the story skips through space, time and plot."
Reading it now, it stands out to me first and foremost as a symbol of typical British deadpan satire, applied to superhero stories, just as the "normal" superhero stories themselves were more out there than ever.
While the shops were full of series with superheros in costumes trying to beat each other in most ridiculous abuse of colour and spandex (incidentally, I think the moment it became truly clear how ridiculous many of these costumes were, was as Hollywood started trying to give them bigger budget treatments, only to find out how incredibly hard it is to put them on a movie screen without making it comical), saving the world with more and more ridiculous deus-ex-machina and bizarre powers, there was a series about a bunch of semi-retiree "superheros" without powers, full of moral issues and drenched in cold war seriousness. (Sure, the cold war was everywhere in comics, up to and including playing central roles in origin stories, but rarely given a grown up treatment).
While X-Men, for example, issue after issue had characters whine about how they could not justify killing without ever getting into the meat of the issue (despite the occasional fantastic story line like Days of Future Past), here was a series where someone who had been presented as one of the heroes was prepared to go to that kind of length to re-make the world in a way he thought better. Where one of the "heroes" dies in the first issue, only to have his image ripped to pieces bit by bit. Where all of the heroes are deeply human and flawed, and not necessarily in ways that made you like them more for it. And the eventual-antagonist wasn't stopped at the last minute, with the countdown on a doomsday device at 1, and there was no great save.
It also different in presentation: Readers were treated as grown ups with more than 5 minute attention spans, while if you read X-Men from there period, the amount of unnecessary exposition is tedious to the extreme. I'm actually re-reading those issues now, and it is fascinating to see how much I've "supressed" from my childhood. E.g. the amount of times the saw it as necessary to explain the powers of every single member of the team, or have characters carry out de-facto silent soliloquys rather than trust that the reader would be able to figure things out for themselves, is just bizarre seen with modern eyes.
Note that Watchmen was not the only series to do better there, by far. Phantom for example, amongst many, did not have nearly the amount of exposition, to name another "superhero" without special powers. And more serious literary treatment was also not new (including Alan Moore's fantastic run on Swamp Thing), but it stands out for its combination.
It was "superheroes" in the real world given a serious literary treatment against a dark and serious backdrop, handling moral issues seriously. And it was a clever caricature and satire over a genre that itself largely is a caricature, but that very often is not very clever caricature.
I was frustrated by that specific change in the film, as in the comic it is building and building and building and then absolutely shocking at the end.
You're probably right, but as someone growing up in an objectively racist household, I can say with certainty that the X-Men titles had much more effect on my outlook than Watchmen ever will. Sure, they were really far from perfect, but I always found that Marvel never hesitated to touch real-world issues in a way that DC rarely did. Take Rachel Summers for instance. Introducing a teenage mutant with survivor's guilt, after being forced to track fellow mutants in the future, this was pretty grownup for a medium often dismissed as mindless entertainment.
Of course, it had plenty of crappy moments too (how many times did Xavier regain and then lose the ability to walk?), but I'll always have fond memories of them. Not to say that Watchmen, Sandman or V for Vendetta are not masterpieces, because they are.
Was absolutely hooked until John Byrne left (soon thereafter). He and Tony Perez on the DC comics side were for me comic creating legends.
Edit: George (not Tony) Perez. Could of sworn it was Tony, but it has been nearly 3 decades ;-)
This narrative spans 50+ years of writing across many (hundreds of?) titles. It combines comic books, regular books, TV and movies.
Willow Rosenberg?