PANEL BEATING: MULE VARIATIONS
Someone is killing comics. And it could be you.

Let me tell you a secret. Lean in and I'll whisper it to you. Ready?

I don't collect comics.

How can I say such a thing? Of course I do! I review them for PopImage, for Heaven's sake! Every week I spend anywhere between 10-50 of my English pounds on them! How can I possibly say that?

I can say it because it's true. I don't collect comics. I read comics. There's a big difference.

I've never been a collector, of anything. I'm a consumer, sure. But consider this - if you read, say, a Jeff Noon novel, and you loved it - I mean, you thought this guy was, like, the best thing to happen to science fiction for, like, ever, no rilly - what would you do? You'd go out and buy more of his books. Of course you would.

But would you scour the land, looking for editions in the same line, with the same style of covers, willing to pay extortionate prices for them? Of course you wouldn't. That's just silly, right? I mean, a book is a book is a book.

Hello. Wake-up call. That's just what a hell of a lot of comic book readers do. They want "first printings". They want "original editions". And they pay for the same book - the same book, for fuck's sake - four or five times, just because it has a different cover. This is, to put it politely, insane.

If I like someone's work, I'll try and get more of it. And yes, that does extend to artists... up to a point. But what's the real difference between buying four "variant" copies of an issue of DANGER GIRL, or waiting for the collected edition with those selfsame covers reprinted in a gallery? You can still look at them, you can still admire the art, you still own them. So why do you want to pay four times as much, just so those images are on the cover rather than on pages?

Considering most people who subscribe to this madness are also the people who "bag and board" everything, sealing their comics in lead-lined vaults twenty feet underground, they're not likely to see them any more often. And most of them will be highly offended if you suggest they're doing it to sell them on at a later date. They'd never sell their comics. The very idea!

(The "hardcore" comic collectors who whine about POKEMON, accusing it of crass commercialism, and being an exercise in nothing but merchandising, never cease to amuse me. Always good for a public mocking, those ones.)

Now, to be sure, there are collectors in every field. There are people who seek out first printings of novels, people who collect every record, in every format, that a band has ever recorded. There are people out there who collect garden gnomes. Are you starting to get the picture yet?

These people are in a minority. They are not the usual consumer. They are, as we say in Old England, completely barking. But hey, that's OK. If they're happy, fine. Whatever floats your boat.

But why is this the prevailing attitude in modern comics? Why didn't we learn, after the speculator boom fell over, died of massive hemorrhaging and generally fucked off because it wasn't wanted, that this is not normal?

The publishers putting out variant covers aren't the ones stifling the market. They're not the ones keeping a roof over Joe Madureira's head, despite the fact that only one issue of BATTLE CHASERS shipped in 1999.

No, it's us. The consumers. The collectors.

We're the ones killing the industry. We're the ones who give comics a bad name, and give the masses their stereotypical image of a nerdy, obsessive, boy-faced man-child. We're the ones who tell the publishers that if they produce five copies of the same book, but with different covers, that we'll buy them all.

Wouldn't we rather have five different books? Take all the variant covers that have been released in the last ten years. Add up the revenue from all of those covers. That's quite a sum. Enough for Todd McFerrari to buy a few more baseballs, surely.

Now imagine - go on, just for a minute - that all that money had been spent on different comics instead. Go on, think about it. It's like those horrible anti-smoking campaigns, isn't it? The ones where they grab some hapless 40-a-day-for-40-years smoker and present them with a brand new Ferrari. And they say, Look at what all that money you poisoned your lungs with could have bought you. Look how much money you wasted.

It's a cruel thing to do. The smoker protests that they were addicted, or that they could never have actually saved all that money. That they liked smoking, they didn't want a Ferrari. But it's not true, is it? Everyone wants a Ferrari. Or a world cruise. Or more comics.

Now think about what sort of message we could have sent to comic publishers if we'd bought more comics, instead of the same ones with different covers. Think about how many more creators would have seen their books in print. Think about how many more comics would have seen print.

If only we'd known? Bullshit. We knew all along, and we still did it. If this carries on, in 10 or 20 year's time we'll be able to stand on top of the world, holding aloft a chromium-hologram-fluorescent-gatefold-three-hundred-part cover and say: We killed comics.

Top o' the world, ma.

Antony Johnston is Reviews Editor of PopImage. And he's fucking seething.

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