EVERYDAY SHOULDERS
by Joseph Szilagyi.

Imagine, if you would, a picturesque Sunday morning in the City. The air is warm, the birds are singing, and people are out enjoying the day. You hop on board the bus, eager to get down to the free concert at the waterfront; the love of your life sits besides you during the ride. You both enjoy your coffee and the mostly pleasant ride. Things between the two of you had reached a nightmarishly dark point, and at long last, things have sorted themselves out.

You are happy.

The love of your life dies that day. The bottom falls out; the nightmare rears back, fangs bared, and kicks you in the face. The color in the world, unlike what they say, doesn't drain out and become dull. It becomes angry and foul, where everywhere you look you see your love's face, taunting, like a chameleon on a tree branch, just barely visible and forever hidden. The story, and life, continues.

Now imagine if you would again, another picturesque Sunday morning in the City. You are up above it, looking down. The thermal updrafts from below blow across your face, and the only thing you can hear is the sound of the wind mingled with your own heartbeat. In the distance, the world curves off on the horizon. Down below, you suddenly see -- with your awesome vision -- a bus on its way to the waterfront being tossed aside by a costumed madman. You streak downward, a blur of brightly colored clothing, and put out the flames of the now burning bus, saving almost all of the people within. Almost immediately, you begin trading punches strong enough to crack diamonds with the villain, before you finally subdue him by electrocuting him senseless at the nearby power plant. In the course of minutes, the two of you have turned the waterfront into a scene of crushed buildings and total destruction. The story, and life, continues.

All right now: which one of the scenarios sounds like you, the reader? Ever had a crushing emotional blow, something so dark you thought it would bury you? Or maybe the second scenario better describes your life. You fly through the air, defend your city from super-powered sociopaths, and can move so fast that the sound of your own passing won't reach you for a minute or two? Ask yourself, "Which of the two would be a story about me? Which is the one I can really relate to?"

There's an awful lot of talk these days of the slump that comics are in, and why it is. People are pointing fingers in a lot of different directions, looking for solutions to the problem. They say Pokemon, they say video games, they say wrestling, they say superheroes. A lot of solutions, but none of them are exactly turning things around. Of course, some of them are having an impact. Comics that are licensed properties of the WWF and video game characters are doing well, while the Pokemon craze, comics and all, continues to rampage it's way across North America. As for superheroes, some of them are doing pretty well, too.

Some. The big ones are -- the X books, the Superman books, and the Spider-Man books. But how many of them are helping to turn the slump around? The superhero titles being published today aren't exactly pulling in a large number of new readers to comics shops. A perfect example is when a new superhero comic book tries to start out these days. Not too many of them have exactly flourished. There isn't a large group of non-comics readers out there who are going to buy the latest superhero title. Many of them look down on the genre. No one can deny this. As much as loyal fans and professionals can sing the praises of comic books and sequential art, one thing remains true:

We're fringe. We aren't exactly mainstream. People don't exactly come crawling out of the woodwork when even a big name creator launches a book, screaming for copies. The comic book companies today basically rely on the existing fan base, the one that already shows up on a regular basis at the direct market shops to buy their favorite series. There used to be a lot more people showing up, spending a lot of money, but that dried up. Nowadays, there is no real speculator's market for comics. Take away this current fan base and the industry would certainly die.

The problem behind the slump is that there's little effort to create new comics readers. People who are outside the fringe world of comics don't get to see everything that goes on within our little universe. They don't see the wide diversity of books being published. Unfortunately, neither do many of the inhabitants of our universe, but that's a column for another day. The people on the outside only see aliens, spandex, and really bad movie adaptations. It's almost ironic that one of the few decent movie adaptations, BLADE, was barely even advertised as being originally a comic book.

The modern comic book industry was built on superhuman backs. No denying that, and I'm not saying we should dump superheroes. Escapism is one thing. Many of the people reading comics today began because of these stories. But the people who are out there who don't read them aren't going to be brought into the fold by superheroes. Have you ever tried to get friends into comics, by handing them a few issues of Superguy and making them read a few? I'm sure many of us have. Had a lot of luck converting them over to our side with those?

I didn't think so.

I've got an idea of why. How much do you think most people can relate to tales of superhumans? Many people have dreamt of flying, say, or of doing things beyond normal, but how many of us have actually done so? It's a simple question of being able to identify. People can identify with the gut-wrenching loss of a loved one. People can't identify with stopping a criminal from knocking buildings over out of spite.

In my own personal experiences, the most success I've seen and heard about in bringing in new readers has involved non-superhero books. The two best examples would be Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE and PREACHER by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. Strip both of those titles down to their cores, and they're both about human emotions and relationships. I've personally hooked people into comics with these, and I'm sure others have as well. Unfortunately, I've also had one little problem come up in this process.

Me: "So you liked that, huh?"
Friend: "Yeah, that was really good. Got any more?"
Me: "Sure, got a few more issues here."
Friend: "No, no, I mean any more comic books like this?"
Me: "Errr... want to read this one? Lots of shit blows up and this guy comes back from the dead. Again."

So here I have someone who's suddenly excited about comics, and who's ready and willing to go dancing down the sequential pathway, except there's only a handful of people in the dance club that they're interested in. The truly sad thing is that our little comics universe is this dance club, and there's a whole great mass of readers, waiting just outside the doors. They wouldn't mind paying the admission to come and join the party, except that there's almost no one inside that is their type.

The hopeful thing is that there really are a lot more of them then there are of us. The whole slump could be turned around, and the industry could be growing again. But only if we'd only let a pair of everyday shoulders share some of the load that the superhumans have been carrying for most of the century.

Joseph Szilagyi, At The Cusp of a New Century.

Joseph Szilagyi is a regular contributor to PopImage.

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