Supporting Creators and the Meaning of Satire

This is how Dictionary.com defines the term satire:

Satire

[sat-ahyuhr] –noun

1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.

3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

I bring this up because of the recent flap over The Goon creator, Eric Powell's recent video advocating increased genre diversity and originality in comics. The video made heavy use of satire and bitingly crude humor to make its point. Anyone familiar with Powell's work on The Goon should not have been shocked by the content of the video. Yet, here we are.

Seriously?

Often times, when satire does its job well it is because it digs uncomfortably close to the truth. The message Powell was attempting to get across is undeniably true; the comic book industry is dominated by Marvel and DC superhero stories to the point where it can be tough for creators to make a living unless they are working on one of those superhero books. Where many probably felt offended by the video was in the depiction of how creators humble themselves by working on superhero books for Marvel/DC. The way Powell got the point across was by showing a struggling indie creator getting "anally raped" by a superhero — which would be shocking if this weren't coming from the guy who did an issue of The Goon titled Satan's Sodomy Baby.

Anal raping aside, a lot of comic book fans and creators felt personally attacked by Powell's video. My question to them is this: Why did you take a video created by a guy who makes his living off of poop jokes — a video that was obviously intended to be satirical/funny — so seriously? I know when I saw it, I laughed and thought, "Wow, Powell has a point there." I could have gotten bent out of shape because, yeah, I buy quite a lot of mainstream superhero books. I could have felt shamed by Powell's public ridicule of something I enjoy, but then again, I know what satire is. I also happen to completely agree with the message he was using satirical humor to get across; A healthy, diverse comic industry should include superhero books, but not be made up exclusively of them.

Powell's brand of humor rubbed enough people the wrong way that he subsequently removed the video from Youtube and Facebook. He also posted a clarification, basically spelling out that the video was meant to be a funny/satirical jab at the dominance of mainstream superhero comics with a call-to-action for creators to band together in order to strengthen and diversify the industry.

While I find it sad that so many missed the point and took offense with what Powell had to say in his video, I think the controversy may actually help more people become aware of the underlying message. The comic book medium can, and moreover, should, be about more than just superheroes that were created 50 years ago. Like movies and television, comic books are a medium rooted in the visual. Unlike movies and television, comics have not fostered an environment in which multiple genres can thrive. That surely needs to change, both for the creators who want to see their own original ideas put to print, and the readers who want to read them.

Turning to the Positive

Steve Niles, writer of 30 Days of Night and Criminal Macabre among other works, has been posting on his blog about this topic a lot lately. While his message is basically the same as Eric Powell's, his delivery is much less brash. Niles believes the best way to provoke change in the comic industry is for people to band together in a grassroots-style effort. He summed up his feelings thusly:

If you like something, tell your friends. If you love it, tell the world. But if you hate something, just throw it away, don’t buy it again and move on.

Niles' message is punctuated by his desire to keep the conversation positive, something that Powell didn't necessarily do a very good job with. Of course, while Niles wrote a very positive, pro-creator, "Kumbaya" piece, it was Powell's controversial video that really jump-started the conversation in the mainstream comic media. Go figure.

Read Creator-Owned Books and Tell Your Friends

All of this recent noise about creator-owned comics and genre diversity boils down to this; if you read and enjoy independent, creator-owned comics, tell people about them. Tell your friends who read comics. Tell your friends who don't read comics. Tweet about them. Post about them on your Facebook wall. Get the word out however you are able.

I know a lot of people who honestly believe that comic books are all about superheroes, and because they aren't interested in reading about superheroes they won't step foot into a comic shop. What they do not seem to understand is that there are lots of comics out there that cover all kinds of genres. From sci-fi, to pulp-noir, to old west, to romance — there really is something out there for everyone if you know where to look. The problem is in actually knowing where to look and picking up an off-beat book before it disappears into a nose-diving sales chart. If we do nothing else, let's point them in the right direction.

Regarding the Current State of Digital Comics

It should come as no surprise to those who follow this site that I believe digital distribution is the future of the comic book industry. Lately, there has been a bit of renewed chatter on the forums and news sites about the potential pitfalls of our digital future. Mark Millar, whose comics are some of the most downloaded on digital distributor comiXology, weighed in recently on the issue and explained why creators should be cautious about giving up too much in the race to be relevant in this new frontier. In a nutshell, despite his success on the comiXology sales charts, Millar wants his fans to continue to buy his printed books because that is still where most of the money is at for creators.

Digital comics haven't supplanted printed comics for creators looking to make a living, but what about readers? Is the printed comic still the superior format for us? Let me tell you; Digital comics are surely the future, but presently print still rules supreme for creators and for readers. Let’s take a look at digital comics and why the burgeoning format is not ready for prime-time and where we need to go before digital comics can truly supplant print.

Method of Distribution

When talking about digital comics, the question often is asked, "where should I be buying them?" The answer is not an easy one.

ComiXology is probably the digital store with the most clout and the largest selection, but I have found their iOS mobile app to be slow, buggy and generally annoying to use. Panelfly is another option with a much nicer user interface, but at the cost of limited title selection. Graphic.ly is a relative newcomer that made a big splash when they acquired the popular iFanboy podcast, but like Panelfly, they too have a limited selection. Most comic publishers have a dedicated mobile app to download their digital issues, but it appears that most of them are based on comiXology's flawed software.

So where exactly is the best place to buy digital comics? Despite the many flaws, comiXology is currently your best bet. Sure, the app is slow and you will occasionally run into a bug here or a crash there, but no other digital store has the selection that comiXology does nor do they have the sort of momentum as a business that inspires confidence. When I buy a digital comic from comiXology, I am pretty certain that I will be able to view that comic for a long time as comiXology is not going to close up shop anytime soon.

If you can not find what you are looking for on comiXology, your next best bet is to check out the individual publisher's digital store. If a book is available digitally, if should surely be on the publisher's store. Of course, this is assuming that you even know who publishes the book.

This fragmentation of content is one of the major drawbacks of the current digital comic book marketplace. Ideally, each digital store would have the exact same selection and the only difference between them would be in the user interface. It would be kind of like how we choose which shop to buy our printed comics at; choosing the one that is most convenient and comfortable for us rather than the one with the most books on the shelf. Until the market for digital comics offers us that sort of choice, printed books will continue to hold this as an advantage.

A new, and simultaneously fascinating and perplexing development is comiXology’s announcement that they will be allowing brick and mortar comic retailers to sell digital comics via an affiliate program. What exactly is comiXology getting out of this deal and what does this mean for us, the comic buyers? At the moment, I have no answer for either of these questions. We will all have to wait and see what develops.

Reading Experience

Before I go any further, I should note that I currently do not own an iPad (or other knock-off tablet device, although currently there aren’t any tablets on the market that I think would have a large enough screen to truly rival the iPad when it comes to viewing a comic book page), so my opinion of reading comic books on screen may be slightly skewed. Having said that, I find reading comics on an iPhone or iPod Touch screen sucks.

Having each page broken up, panel-by-panel is a major pain in the ass to read. Read panel one — finger swipe; Read panel two — finger swipe; Read panel three — Forget who said what in panel two, swipe back, reread — swipe ahead two spaces ... and so on. Reading comics in such a disjointed manner is very off-putting for anyone but particularly for those of us who have been reading printed comics for years.

Ed Brubaker said a while back in a tweet,

My problem with digital comics, or rather one of them, is that so far they change the unit - for me, in comics, the page is the unit.

This is exactly my current problem with reading digital comics. Of course, when Brubaker made that comment the iPad wasn’t publicly available yet. The extra screen real estate the iPad provides solves a lot of the readability issues digital comics have. The page, as Brubaker said, is once again the unit, allowing us to view the comic as it was intended to be viewed.

With future tablet devices just around the corner, the digital reading experience — which already rivals print in some regards — will soon be a non-issue. There will still be some who won’t accept reading books on a screen, but for most of us the convenience alone will more than make up for anything lost in the translation from physical to digital.

Supporting Creators

As a comic book reader who loves the medium and wants to see it continue to grow and thrive, I know the best way to ensure this growth is to reward the creators. We, the comic fans, need to realize that our purchasing habits have a profound effect on the industry and those who work in it. Whenever we make a major change in how we acquire and read our books, we need to be mindful of how that change financially impacts the industry.

Of course, while keeping creators in mind is important, we also should not forget that the customer is always right. If tomorrow the vast majority of comic readers decide that digital is the way to go, then comic book publishers and creators had better figure out how to make that format financially viable for them. Some independent creators have recently chimed in to the discussion, calling on their peers to forgo comiXology and other storefronts with a connection to Apple, Inc.’s ubiquitous iTunes Store in favor of publishing books through other means. While this, “roll-your-own” method may be more favorable to an established creator from a control standpoint, it may not work well for everyone.

Artist Scottie Young recently detailed his success selling digital copies of his book, The Adventures of Bernard The World Destroyer in a post on his blog titled Behind the Digital Experiment.

Of self-publishing, Young says:

I've learned long ago that while it may take a little money up front, I can make more money selling a fraction of the numbers because I'm cutting out all the middle men. No distributor, no store, no publisher. It's just me and you. (and paypal) The same is holding true so far on this digital experiment. I'm charging $2 and the only cut is the Paypal percentage.

Cutting out the middlemen in a situation like Scottie Young’s is shrewd business, but too often we forget that middlemen are there for a reason beyond the need for a means of distribution. Middlemen such as a publisher can be seen as a content legitimizer. When you pick up a new DC book you can be sure that what you have in your hands is at least as good as the worst book DC currently publishes, and hopefully much better.

In an earlier article, I made reference to a concept I like to call, “friction of the unknown.” Basically, what that means is that the less you know about something, the lower you value it. As I said in that article:

Friction is the enemy of discovery. Picking up a new book involves more friction simply because you don’t know if the reward — a good read — will be there. That makes the asking price seem higher than identically priced, though possibly inferior books that are known to you. It’s the same reason that people eat at McDonald’s; it may be inferior in every way to almost any other restaurant they could go to, but they at least know exactly what they’re getting for their money.

Scottie Young, through years of working for mainstream comic publishers like Marvel, has garnered enough fans and a good enough reputation that he can sell his work directly to those fans without a stamp-of-approval from a publisher. People know what they’re getting because people know Scottie Young and his previous work. Other, lesser known artists will have a harder time duplicating that sort of success on their own simply because we have no reason to trust the quality of their work without prior experience with it.

Self-published digital might be a potential boon for established comic book creators, but it may not be ideal for new or lesser known talent. Those creators may be better served going through comiXology or something similar, even if the profits are smaller per unit sold. A case could also be made for indie publishers to use the Underground Model for digital distribution, though there are obviously risks involved there, too.

Right now, there are no easy answers to how comic creators can best turn digital distribution into a financially viable platform. While the road ahead may be difficult, I am confident that there is a solution. It was not that long ago that the sudden popularity of trade paperbacks was destined to kill the comic industry. Of course, that never happened because publishers adapted to the buying habits of readers. If those habits suddenly shift towards digital downloads, the industry will just have to adapt again.

Where We Need to Go From Here

Currently, digital comics can not all be found in one simple location, are a pain-in-the-ass to read unless you own an iPad and do not make much profit for creators. These are all areas that need to be addressed before digital can even begin to take the throne from print.

Also, there is the messy matter of what happens to brick and mortar comic book shops once digital truly takes off. Will local shops die off, or will there still be enough people buying trades and other collectibles to offset the drop in single issue sales? I certainly hope that local shops can find a way to keep going, as there is no digital replacement for the sort of environment of like-minded individuals that a comic shop can provide.

Ideally, what I would like to see happen is for digital distribution to allow for a bevy of new readers to discover comic books. This influx of fans would then drive trade sales up as many of these fans will have a collector’s natural inclination to want to own physical objects to display on a shelf. Ultimately, if digital can attract more people to the comic book medium, I can not see how that could be a bad thing for comic publishers, creators or shop owners.

Digital distribution has a lot of potential to truly revolutionize the way we consume content; be it news, comics or any other form of information. Some day soon the standard way we read comics will be on-screen, but before that can happen the method of distribution needs to be standardized. Maybe comiXology will win here, as they have a pretty good head start. Also, tablet computers need to become ubiquitous, as they seem to provide a superior viewing experience that mimics print much more effectively. Finally, creators need to find a way to make the format work for them financially. After all, digital comics may be the best thing since the invention of movable type for content consumers, but if the content creators can’t make a living selling digital downloads, then the format is doomed.

I suspect we will see solutions to all of these problems much sooner than later.

Pricing, Piracy and Discovery: What the Comic Book Industry Can Learn From the Strange Case of ‘Underground’

The comic book industry has a problem right now. Comics aren’t picking up new readers. Sales continue dropping month after month. It isn’t pretty. So what exactly is the problem and what can the industry do to right the ship?

One of the major possible culprits for slipping comic sales and dying readership is pricing. Comic readers have been complaining about how expensive their habit is becoming for quite some time, and with the average book costing close to $4, who can blame them? DC recently dropped some of their prices, but Marvel still seems to be hanging in there at $3.99. Hell, a few weeks back I paid $6 for Ultimate Spider-Man #150 which consisted of a regular sized main story with a reprint of an old annual that I already owned jammed in the back. Not cool, Marvel. Not cool.

Of course, $6 comics are one thing, but high prices might not be the only culprit. In an article published on Oct., 20, It’s Official: Q3 Comic Sales Sucked, icv2 had a different theory as to what’s going on:

Pricing may be part of the problem, but the real issue is a dearth of major hits. Like all entertainment businesses, the comics category rises and falls on the strength of its strongest titles, and the strongest titles just aren’t that hot right now, especially in the core superhero lines of the Big Two. Marvel took a break from major events this year ... and hasn’t had any big PR successes for a while, and DC has seemed like it was moving through molasses for much of the year as its New York staff waited for the other shoe to drop in the company’s ongoing reorganization.

On the surface, this might be partially true. Yes, there isn’t a really big “event” story going on right now the likes of a Siege or Blackest Night, but there are still plenty of good books on the shelves. People just aren’t buying them. Yes, the big event stories tend to draw big sales numbers, but those numbers are mostly made up of current readers of other books who feel obligated to pick up, say, Blackest Night because they want to keep up with everything that’s going on in Green Lantern Corps or The Flash. The numbers go up, but they’re coming from the same pool of die-hard fans.

So the problem still remains; the comic industry needs to find a way to get new fans. One possible avenue which I discussed not too long ago is digital comics. Digital downloads let comics reach a much wider audience than traditional modes of distribution. Of course, not all digital comics are paid for, which brings me to the curious case of Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s Underground.

The story goes something like this — Someone who owns the issues of the Image limited series Underground scanned all the pages in and posted them on 4chan for anyone to download and read. Steve Lieber, the artist and co-creator of the book, found the message board post and rather than tell them to stop pirating his stuff, carried on a conversation with the people who had read the scans and encouraged them to buy the book in trade. Then this happened.

After Underground was distributed freely on 4chan, sales of the trade skyrocketed. It’s really hard to say why exactly this happened and it might be a total fluke, but I think a few general lessons can be taken away from the incident.

The first thing that I think becomes obvious when looking at the case of Underground in the context of the overall comic industry is that pricing does matter when it comes to anything new and unknown. Sure, there is always going to be a pretty big audience for books like The Avengers, Batman or Spider-Man even at a $3.99 cover price. New books with unknown characters, on the other hand, require a much lower price in order to attract readers. In fact, for books outside the mainstream, the lower the price the better.

Let’s look at it like this; everything has a certain friction to it, be it going to work in the morning, checking your email regularly or buying your comics on Wednesday. The less friction there is to an action, the more likely you are to do it. Actions with a reward associated with them lower the overall friction so that things like going to work in the morning — which can surely be difficult, but is just as surely necessary — end up being worth the effort.

Friction is the enemy of discovery. Picking up a new book involves more friction simply because you don’t know if the reward — a good read — will be there. That makes the asking price seem higher than identically priced, though possibly inferior books that are known to you. It’s the same reason that people eat at McDonald’s; it may be inferior in every way to almost any other restaurant they could go to, but they at least know exactly what they’re getting for their money. A lot of great off-beat and independent books languish in obscurity and poor sales due to this level of friction. Eventually sales may pick up due to good reviews and word of mouth, but all too often it can be too late to save the book from cancellation.

So new books can do themselves a favor by keeping the price low to reduce the “should I pick this new book up?” friction for the audience. It might sound unattractive because creators — particularly the independent and self-published creators — want to get paid, but it may be worth it in the end if it helps a book get discovered by its audience.

That brings me to my next observation taken from the Underground incident; sometimes pricing something low means giving it away for free. The thought of some stranger distributing your hard work freely via the shady side of the internet is annoying, but ultimately in this digital age we live in it’s inevitable. Publishers and copyright holders have been devoting a mountain of time and resources towards fighting piracy; an effort which has proven time and again to be futile. Steve Lieber, by reacting to the 4chan users in a non-confrontational way may have found a more productive method of dealing with piracy; he used it as a means to engage new readers who had just discovered his work.

There seems to be a common misconception out there that all people who pirate content are inherently dishonest and won’t pay for things even if you provide them with a means to do so that’s both inexpensive and easy. This might be true for some, but it certainly isn’t always the case and I think the Underground incident on 4chan proves this. A big chunk of piracy as we’ve come to define it in the digital age is all about discovery. It’s how we share stuff that we like with our friends. It’s like the new mix-tape. These illegal downloads may be harmful on the surface, but they could be an important way in which independent creators can get their work in front of a greater audience. Remember, friction is the enemy of discovery and downloading a comic for free has very little friction associated with it.

The comic industry is currently dealing with the exact same problem that is plaguing all print media; how to stay relevant in a world that is leaving behind the traditional modes of distribution they have always relied on. It’s a major problem, but also a great opportunity especially for the smaller publishers. While the big players like Marvel are putting readers off with $6 issues of warmed-over material, the indies can reel in fans by reducing the friction and giving them more for less. Maybe that means cheap downloads from an online store or maybe letting a little piracy go without legal action. Either way, the key to the future of the industry is in how well publishers can turn modern technology to their advantage and reduce the friction of discovery.

Review: Thor #615

Sometimes it's easy to forget, but it wasn't that long ago that Marvel's numero-uno, blond powerhouse, Thor, was nothing but a fond memory. After breaking the never-ending cycle of Ragnarök in Avengers Disassembled: Thor, the God of Thunder and the rest of his fellow Asgardians disappeared from the Marvel Universe for several years. Only recently has Thor begun to reestablish his rightful place as the Mightiest Avenger.

In a lot of ways Thor #615 is a continuation of the story that J. Michael Straczynski started back in 2007 when he brought Thor back and put Asgard on Earth, but it also is a departure from the stories that preceded it. The creative team of Matt Fraction (writer), Pasqual Ferry (penciler) and Matt Hollingsworth (colorist) manage to do the difficult job of continuing to build on the work of prior creators while bringing an entirely new perspective to the book.

The first thing you'll probably notice when you pick up Thor #615 is the art. Pasqual Ferry's pencils are incredibly clean and his layouts are dynamic. Ferry's work here has a cinematic quality to it; like the characters in each panel could start moving at any moment. Add in Matt Hollingsworth's vivid color work that really emphasizes light and you have a very beautiful and unique world for these Norse gods to exist in. In the past, Thor comics have tended to be rendered in a very detail-heavy style with a more muted color palette. This makes Ferry and Hollingsworth's work even more of a breath of fresh air in comparison. The Nine Worlds have rarely looked as magical as they do in Thor #615.

If you flip to the center of the comic you'll find an excellent "hero-introduction" two-page spread of Thor standing majestically in front of the ruins of Asgard, helmet in hand, cape billowing behind him cutting through the blues and browns of the background with a swath of red. The scene looks less like pages from a comic and more like an artistic representation of a still from a movie. You can almost hear the John Williams score playing in the background. If you flip back a few pages you'll find the "villain-introduction" two-page spread which gives us our first look at the nasties that Thor is eventually going to have to deal with. Ferry and Hollingsworth give us some really menacing-looking adversaries with red skin, all dressed in black with glowing yellow flourishes. In fact, the character designs are very Kirby-esque, making them certainly look like god-sized trouble. The only bit from these pages that didn't feel quite right was the little galaxy — or whatever it was — inside of each of the villains' word balloons; but that’s just a little detail that doesn’t really detract from the overall excellence of the book’s visuals.

With Asgard in ruins a big shift in direction was pretty much inevitable for Thor, and Matt Fraction begins to lay the groundwork for that shift in Thor #615. Fraction throws a lot at us in this issue but manages to do it in a well-paced, entertaining way. The story opens with an amusing scene between a scientist and one of Asgard’s “top scientific minds,” discussing what can only be a set-up for the villain-intro that occurs a few pages later. The little moments that Fraction puts in featuring the doomed Light Elves in Álfheim make the villains’ first appearance even more effective in invoking malice. Now that Loki is (apparently) gone, Thor is going to need some fresh villains to tussle with, and Fraction seems to have come up with some intriguing new enemies.

Speaking of Loki, Fraction gives us a wonderful character moment when Sif approaches Thor and finds him lamenting the loss of his troublesome brother. It’s another fairly little detail in a book packed full of them, but Fraction seems to understand that it’s the little things that go a long way towards building effective characters and engaging drama.

Another example of the little but important details is the new spin on the Donald Blake/Thor symbiosis that Fraction establishes in this issue. Rather than having Blake disappear completely when “Thored-out,” Fraction has decided to keep Blake around as a voice in Thor’s head. It’s a change that may rub some fans the wrong way, but I can certainly see why it may be a good change for the character. Too often it seems as if Donald Blake is an afterthought in Thor’s world; sometimes many issues will pass without seeing him at all. With Blake always present inside of Thor, Fraction can keep us connected to the human side of the God of Thunder.

With all of these elements working together — Fraction’s deft understanding of character and dramatic development, Ferry and Hollingsworth’s mastery of their respective mediums — Thor #615 truly marks the beginning of a new era in Thor comics. Without taking anything away from the creative teams that came before, Thor had been losing steam a bit prior to this issue. The stories were solid, they just didn’t seem to be bringing anything new or exciting to the table. The good news for fans is that as of issue 615, Thor is definitely exciting again. In my opinion, the last time a mainstream superhero comic hit all the right notes the way that Thor #615 does was when Fraction first teamed with Salvador Larroca on The Invincible Iron Man. Considering that book earned an Eisner Award in 2009 for Best New Series, it’s good company to keep. Let’s hope Fraction can duplicate that success with Thor — so far things are looking good.

The Comic Book Industry: Death By a Thousand Deadpool Mini-series

If you’ve been following the news around the comic book world this week, things are kinda looking grim.

First, Warner Brothers announces that they’re “reorganizing” DC Entertainment; which basically amounts to bisecting it into comics (New York) and multimedia (Burbank) branches while also cutting away some “dead weight” in the Wildstorm and Zuda imprints. Oh, and layoffs too. Did I mention the layoffs? I hear Geoff Johns has already interviewed Kyle Rayner and Wally West and the word is their services are no longer required.

So things at DC are not looking good.

On top of all of that messy news the sales figures from August were released. Yikes. Pretty much every book’s sales plummeted like lemmings with little lead weights tied around their necks racing off a cliff. John Mayo, a staff writer for Comic Book Resources wrote a really good analysis of the numbers and what they mean. It’s a good read, so you should check out the entire piece here, but the main conclusion he draws about what ails the comic industry is pretty well summed up in this paragraph:

Event, multiple covers, re-launches and other sales techniques have been bolstering the short terms sales and hiding the long term problems. The monthly comic book sales have become like a growing forest of dying trees. New titles are launching at what would have been cancelation levels just a few years ago. Sales of ongoing titles have been sliding issue after issue for years. It seems as if the budgets of the readers and retailers aren't as deep as the publishing lines are wide. There are too many titles which are too indistinguishable from and too interwoven with each other. Nothing makes each individual title unique and able to stand alone. This leaves readers feeling they have the choice to get all of the titles in the group or none of them.

Basically what John is saying is that the comic industry is dominated by Marvel and DC pushing out dozens of mediocre books that only sell well when they’re launched, re-launched or tied to a major crossover event. Take away those gimmicks and you have August’s brutal sales figures.

So, knowing that the books they’re currently producing are not particularly good enough to draw new readers without big event gimmicks or transparently artificial “First Issue!” re-launches, Marvel and DC have two choices. They can either pare back on the number of books they produce and make sure that those books are top-notch, or they can continue to prop up sales artificially with cynical sales gimmickry. I bet you can guess which path both companies will choose.

Of course, Marvel and DC both put out some really excellent books; those books just often get lost in the avalanche of garbage minis and redundant team books. For example, I wrote recently about how good I think Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman’s doomed Atlas series is. We’ll have to see what the sales numbers look like, but Marvel’s One Month to Live miniseries has also been quite excellent. DC also has some great stuff on the shelves, primarily in their Vertigo lineup (which, thankfully, was spared in the recent reshuffling).

It’s obvious that Marvel and DC can produce excellent books, they simply have to find a way to get people to buy them without resorting to their typical “tie-it-in-with-a-crossover” tactics. I think people would be more willing to buy off-beat books if they didn’t feel obligated to keep up with the latest spate of event tie-ins. There’s only so much money in a persons budget for comics, and sometimes we all pass over books that could be really good because we’ve already put our cash down on the 20 latest books with a “Brightest Day” or “Heroic Age” banner across the top. Those new and off-beat books would also stand out more on the shelf if they weren’t surrounded by 50 awful Deadpool books and about 45 completely forgettable Superman titles.

The lesson that Marvel and DC need to learn here is they can inflate their sales numbers with gimmicks all they like, but eventually those gimmicks are going to fail them. People are growing weary of the constant event cycle and have been complaining quite loudly about it. The right solution to this issue — one that won’t just act as a band-aid over a hemorrhaging wound — is for Marvel and DC to focus on quality over quantity. It’s that simple.

Imagine if DC put out just ten books with ten awesome creative teams rather than 40 books with maybe 18 halfway decent — but not stellar — creative teams. If that were the case, I would probably be picking up ten DC books every month — which is about eight more than I pick up now. Quality creators and quality stories sell issues, not gimmicky sales tactics and market saturation.