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080800: COMMENT- Peering from the Cave: Looking at Comics after a Five-Year Lapse First, a little background: I am, I guess, the doyenne of graphic novels, having published Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics back in April 1995. At the time I was already burning out on comics, but the flame totally died at the 1995 San Diego Comics Con. Several unpleasant experiences there soured me on comics and comics creators. As a result, I didn't set foot into a comic book store for nearly five years. My cave wasn't entirely bare. I glimpsed comics at the supermarket and graphic novels in bookstores. (The latter made me cringe, as they were a constant reminder that my book was incomplete.) I saw the animated X-Men, Superman, Batman. I saw The Mask and Mystery Men but turned my nose up at Spawn. And news about the comics industry trickled in. As a big fan of independent and foreign comics, I giggled at Marvel's financial woes and lamented the rise of Image. I nodded knowingly at the expected collapse of the collector's market and the demise of all those card-and-comic stores that sprang up to milk ignorant youth of their allowances. (Anyone care to draw a parallel with dot-coms here?) Then-the Internet! Despite being wired for most of those five years, I avoided comics sites. I knew comics people were setting up websites, but I never visited them. January 2000: My interest in graphic novels had regenerated, and I thought it would be fun to start reviewing them again. I didn't act on this thought until a graduate student in YA librarianship contacted me to ask whether I had ever written a sequel to my book. "Hm," I thought. "There's still interest. OK, go for it." Of course, that meant catching up... and catching up meant emerging from my cave and going blinking into the bright unfamiliarity of a comics store. * What did the year 2000 hold in store for me in terms of comics? Had independents all but evaporated? Were Marvel and DC moribund next to the vigorous Image? Was manga eating up shelf space? I was almost afraid to go into a comics store. But duty and curiosity called. The choice of comics store to return to was easy: the Mile High Comics (MHC) superstore in Thornton, Colorado. As the biggest and best-known comics store in the Denver Metro area, it seemed as good as any to observe changes and trends. Also, I'd spent some time there looking for graphic novels and remembered the layout pretty well. Thornton is not the most attractive part of the Denver Metro area, and when I parked in the small strip mall where MHC resides, I noticed that the neighborhood, at least, had not noticeably changed. Maybe some of the shops were different-I didn't remember that Mexican bakery over there-but no one had felt the need to do much to the outside of the strip mall, which is rather shabby. From the outside, at least, MHC hadn't changed either. As I expected, the windows were covered with comics/SF/fantasy posters, most prominently one for Titan A.E. Worn laminated paper signs on the main set of doors (there were two sets) warned patrons to leave bags, backpacks, etc. at the front of the store. Through the glass between the papers I got tantalizing, undistinguished glimpses of color. Feeling just a little like an alien, I pushed open the slightly battered doors and entered the temple. Immediately I noticed a change: the south side of the store looked lighter, airier for some reason. What's missing? I wandered over, looking first for my babies, the "adult" graphic novels, which used to occupy a set of bookcases along the south wall. They weren't there; in their place was a line of glass cases filled with collectibles: books, statuary, action figures, etc. And looking into the cases, I realized what the change was. Five years ago, much of the south side of the shop consisted of small stand-alone shelves crammed with graphic novels and books from Marvel and DC. Now, those shelves had mostly been removed to make way for enormous table-bins of old comics-bins much bigger than those of five years ago. There were still a few shelves left, but they were off to the side, near the wall. I also saw that the walls were festooned with action figures, not comics. Judging by their choice position at the front of the store, where they'd always been, the Marvel comics were obviously still the bestsellers despite their mid-90s financial woes. But I was astonished at the abundance of Marvel collectibles. Such a lot of memorabilia! So many displays of action figures and other formerly ancillary items! I estimated that a good 50% of the space in the Marvel section was reserved for those boring things. Another change: Rather than being mixed in alphabetically with all the other comics, as before, the newest Marvel titles were displayed in their own shelves along the wall-as indeed were the comics of the other major sections. Though this was convenient for the customer, it also had the effect of preventing said customer from easily seeing titles from other publishers. Truly, it was a Marvel universe. As for Marvel graphic novels and trade paperbacks, they occupied a single set of stand-alone shelves, the last remnants of the shelves of five years ago. Most of the books were recent superhero trade paperbacks or Silver Age compilations; the old Marvel Graphic Novel series titles had obviously not been reprinted. Feeling a bit grimy, I moved on to the DC section, not quite as prominent as their main rival, and slightly farther back in the store. Here there were more new comics, fewer collectibles and action figures (though still quite a few), more graphic novels and trade paperbacks, especially Batman and Sandman titles. I noticed that DC had had the good taste to pick up Will Eisner's material after Kitchen Sink went under; clearly, my old impression that DC was the "classy" publisher was still valid. I was also pleased to see that the Piranha Press and Vertigo imprints were still going strong. One surprise: both DC and Marvel had gone reprint-happy, with new monthly issues of classic Golden and Silver Age titles; I even saw Watchmen. Has the creative rot endemic to the rest of the creative media affected the Big Two to the extent that they're now making a significant buck off the nostalgia trade? Something to find out. Behind DC was the Dark Horse section. Another surprise. I hadn't realized that Dark Horse had grown to be one of the major publishers-enough so to be allotted its own section in MHC, at least. I began to look for other independent comics, as Dark Horse used to be integrated into that category. But they've obviously risen, or fallen, from that level. Idly, I noticed Concrete was still available. I also saw Aliens and several other movie tie-ins, none of which interested me. I moved on. And there was the Image section, raising faint hopes in me that its back-of-the-store positioning meant that it's less popular than I've been led to believe, or at least that it's not doing as well as it used to. (I could never warm up to a company that wouldn't use writers-even Marvel was never that bad.) Never having bought any Image comics except 1963, I recognized nothing on the shelves except some creators' names-James Hudnall, Rob Liefeld, etc. Image didn't seem to be collecting too many of their titles into trade paperback format, but they sure put out a lot of bric-a-brac. Seems appropriate: the company that eschewed story in favor of art would naturally gravitate toward image-only collectibles. At this point I was a bit worried. Where were the independent comics? All I could see were more glass cases of collectibles and a line of obviously ultraviolent comics safely behind a counter. So my worst fears had come true-Marvel's control of the comics distribution system had destroyed independent comics to the point where even MHC didn't carry them? No, wait; there was one more "square" of shelves. From my vantage point they seemed to contain only comics-related magazines. Still, I trudged over. Ah! There they were at last! Though about a third of the titles in the racks really were magazines, and there weren't a lot of comics titles represented-nowhere near the number from five years ago. I saw Donna Barr's Hader and the Colonel, but The Desert Peach and Stinz were absent. I saw a few works by Peter Bagge, Charles Burns, Dan Clewes, Phil Foglio. A Cerebus collection was on the lower shelf. A title I heard about recently, Strangers in Paradise, was well represented, with several collections and single issues. Displayed prominently was an issue of The Simpsons-not my idea of a traditional alternative comic, to be honest. I keep wanting to lump Bongo in with Harvey and Archie. A disappointing variety, to say the least. But well beyond the things I saw were the things I didn't see. Where were Elfquest? Bone? Other Fantagraphics titles? Last Gasp? Any leftover Kitchen Sink stuff? If I mentioned Eclipse or Comico or First, would the store employees even know what I was talking about? What, no manga? How about British stuff, or Continental stuff? Ultimately, I did find most of these things, though whether by design or by accident, they had been set adrift around the store. The Fantagraphics books weren't just out of reach, as they had been five years ago, but actually behind glass now, in a case. It was hard to see what was in there, but presumably a number of mothers felt more secure with all those naughty books locked safely away from their impressionable children. There were probably some other books by similar publishers in there as well-I'd guess Last Gasp and some of Kitchen Sink's racier works. I did make out some Crumb books. Elfquest had a small rack of its own in the middle of the south side of the store, for some reason separated from the few Elfquest collectibles in the same glass case as the Fantagraphics books. I saw a Bone calendar, so presumably Bone titles were available elsewhere, but I didn't look very hard. I found the manga as I was checking out with my purchases-a surprisingly small section, given the popularity I believed it to have. MHC had many well-known titles, though, like Barefoot Gen and Akira and Oh My Goddess. There were also some that hadn't been translated. Besides Viz, the more recent publishers Mixx Manga and CPM Manga were well represented. But there seemed to be more videos than comics. And-oh joy! I found the main stuff I was looking for. A long set of shelves acting as a division between the northern and southern parts of the store-the southern comics area vs. the more "miscellaneous" northern section of a few game supplements, kids' comics, battered hardcover SF novels, and the like-had a good selection of independently published graphic novels on them. I saw European and American titles, many from defunct publishers, many looking worn and forlorn. In fact, it looked as if the MHC management had taken all those graphic novels I poked through in 1994 and put them here, where they've been waiting for me to rescue them. (And whoopee! They had a copy of my book for sale, too, though I couldn't help but wonder if the one on the shelf was the sample copy I gave them back in 1995.) * This was a five-year hiatus that I almost wish I hadn't broken. The state of comics is noticeably inferior to that of five years ago. I knew the independents were dying, had been dying since before I dropped out of comics, but knowing it didn't make it any easier to take when I saw the feeble collection at MHC. I hadn't expected graphic novels to be nearly as moribund as I found them-I remember how, for a brief moment, the mainstream media started paying attention to titles beyond Maus, Watchmen, and Dark Knight. But that trend didn't last. What credibility graphic novels had seems to have dissipated-and frankly, I couldn't begin to tell you why. I wasn't there to watch it happen. If there is a glimmer of hope in this mess, it's the Internet. Although it's hard enough for an artist to get noticed, at least that person's site is there and viewable by anyone who is interested enough to do some searching-which cannot be said of paper books; if they're not there, you're SOL. The Internet also brings distant communities of people together: fan bases, YA librarians looking for title recommendations, budding artists. Suddenly, that isolated Desert Peach fan in Podunk, IA has soulmates. That can do a lot for a small press title. I'm not going to predict anything for the next five years. I can hope that the Internet revolution begins to affect the way mainstream comics are published and sold, much as Napster is making the record companies crazy today. I can hope that the mainstream media rediscovers the joys of sophisticated comics and begins to promote them again. Whatever the results, at least this time I'll be watching-and doing my best to make the good guys win.
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