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FINDING A NEW FANDOM IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
I grew up in the 1980s. I was first introduced to comics—specifically DC Comics—by my mother when I was around 4 years old. She’d come home from work and I’d be on the couch, playing with my GI Joes or He-Man toys and she’d drop a copy of Action Comics or All-Star Squadron or Brave and the Bold or Justice League of America in my lap. And then I read.
I eventually found Marvel and read that, too. I became a “comic book fan”, going to the local convenience stores and find that monolith of unparalleled goodness: the spinner rack. The joy I felt from finding one of those anywhere always sent a jolt of happiness through my tiny body. The same feeling I got whenever I’d spy an arcade cabinet in a restaurant lobby or dentist’s office. I knew that spinner rack was there for me.
My cousin and I would learn that these unique holy sites existed; places where they sold ONLY comic books. It seemed like a nonsensically joyous concept; a place that removed all of the redundancies of going to a market or convenience store and needing to dodge, bob and weave around store patrons who were there buying broccoli or chewing gum or toothpaste to get to my precious comic books. Here—in a COMIC BOOK STORE—every cubic foot of the place contained objects of divine interest.
I read DC and Marvel for years. In the early 90s, we found Image Comics, too. There was an overabundance of wonderful content made just for my cousin and I. We’d go to the comic shops and spend literally hours rifling through $.50 boxes and piling up our collections. $5 from my mom or dad would result in a little treasure stock of four-color superhero fiction.
RESPONSIBILITIES COME BEFORE FANDOM
In the mid-90s, after an unexpected family tragedy, comics were no longer a priority or an interest. I was a kid who now had to be the Man of the House. I had to get a job to save our family home from foreclosure. Superhero comics were forcibly removed from my personal cultural zeitgeist.
In late 1998, my mother saw me off as I joined the military. She was proud of me. When I returned home in 2001, I brought with me a fiancée and my mother’s first grandchild, a newborn boy. I was a father. I had responsibilities now. At this point, in the early 2000s, superhero comics were merely a peripheral interest that I still loved but had little time and money to devote to.
After my second son was born in 2002, my wife and I embraced responsible parenting and so video games were the last of my hobbies to go. WORK was on the menu. I started doing commissions. My first ever drawing that I sold on eBay went for a whopping $1.80. Yes. $1.80. But with each successive art sale, that price grew. It grew enough that drawing became a full-time job.
I drew everyday taking on commissions to pay the bills, but as the years flew by, we still struggled financially. I would cradle and admire my old comic collection that my parents helped me accumulate, but getting back into the hobby wasn’t an option. The money just wasn’t there.
It wasn’t until I started crowdfunding my comics in 2013 that the money started to increase. Between my wife’s income and mine, we were lower middle class, but our expenses were low. I started to actually think about buying DC and Marvel Comics again.
REDISCOVERING MAINSTREAM AMERICAN COMICS TO UTTER CONFUSION
Around 2014-2015, I took my family to a local bookstore that happened to sell comics—the only store in town like this which would eventually shutter its doors—and found a fairly wide selection of new comics at that time. I excitedly walked up to the racks and perused the titles.
I saw the DC and Marvel Comics titles I recognized(X-Men, Wonder Woman, Avengers, Teen Titans) and the cover art looked good. Few artists I recognized; different but good. I started to find rows of Image Comics. I remembered Image. I loved the early books: Spawn, Pitt, WildCATS and even Youngblood. I met the Extreme Studios guys at a convention and got their signatures.
Image was a little harder edged; made for teenage boys. Perfect for me in the early-90s. I expected that sexy, hard-edged, testosterone-fueled escapist entertainment.
However, these Image books were unrecognizable. I didn’t see anything familiar. Instead of awesome, sexy, bold, eye-popping titles like The Darkness, Witchblade, Cyberforce, WildCATS or Pitt, I saw a litany of bland college zine-level books that lacked the dynamism, visual flair and character designs I remembered. These books looked like adaptations of SYFY TV shows: regular people in regular clothing sitting around and talking about their feelings with occasional fantastical elements being sprinkled in.
Gone were the bombastic, wise-cracking characters in flashy, colorful worlds dealing with reality-bending threats. Their exploits were replaced with average people dealing with average people problems, sitting around and talking about their feelings.
A CRISIS CRISIS
But on the other end, it seemed like DC and Marvel were trapped in an endless, contiguous loop of crisis events. The first major “event” for DC Comics happened in 1986 with Crisis on Infinite Earths to simplify the confusing continuity the brand dealt with for half a century up to that point.
Years later DC had smaller multi-title “crises” like Legends, Millennium and Zero Hour which seemed to come out every year or every other year.
Now? Events daisy-chain from one to the next, lessening the impact of each. There are multiple reality-shattering crises in a single year. At this point, what kind of reader would want to “escape” to these universes where just being an ice cream man, middle-management exec or personal trainer within DC or Marvel could result in you being deleted from one of an infinite number of multiverses just because some gaudily costumed super-menace decided to dig up the MACGUFFIN-TO-END-ALL-MACGUFFINS and unleash its power… for some reason.
But where did the stories go? You know? Smaller, relatable stories that may have to do with people who wear their underwear on the outside.
FOR HEROES TO MATTER, THEIR STORIES NEED TO END
I remember in the early 2000s, during a visit to my mother’s house, she gave me a short box of some of my old comics. I was thrilled to get them back. As I flipped through them, showing this mini-collection to my wife, I was brought back to those wondrous times having my nostrils burn with the smell of newsprint after spending an afternoon in a local comic book store.
While our financial situation precluded me from going back to my beloved superhero comics that I loved so much, my wife asked me a rhetorical question: “If a new fan wanted to get into—say—Spider-Man comics, where would they start?”
I thought about it for a second and then I made this face…
I… didn’t have an answer.
I loved Spider-Man. I remember the cheesy 1970s TV show and the awesome 1980s cartoon, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I loved THE CHARACTER of Spider-Man. I owned a bunch of Spider-Man stuff, from toys from school supplies to coloring books to posters, but I couldn’t think of a solid chronology for him in print. He’s always been involved in some great stories, but if necessary, where would I start to enjoy the character’s journey from the first step?
Well, Amazing Fantasy #15 is his first appearance, but good luck finding a copy. Even if you could read that comic, what then? Amazing Fantasy #16? 17? And there have been numerous comics bearing the character’s name since his inception: Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter Porker: Spider-Ham, .etc.
I threw my hands up and told my wife, “I don’t know.” It was after this that I quickly realized that—and this will be a controversial stance to many—Spider-Man’s story should’ve ended decades ago. Whatever Peter Parker’s ultimate goal is, he should’ve achieved it, or not, and the character move off into the sunset.
I’m not saying that linearity and continuity can’t be a narrative and creative intention with comic book characters. Judge Dredd has maintained a single continuity for 45 years and the character has aged in kind with the passing of time. However, Dredd is an exception and not the rule.
Spider-Man, for instance, hasn’t really aged in 60 years and his storylines are constantly reset, ret-conned, retold and reimagined. There really isn’t even a “Spider-Man” anymore. “Spider-Man” is really just a brand that can be slapped onto any character that Marvel wants to push. Those bug-eyes are now like a form of meta-cosplay for characters within Peter’s universe to the point that it seems like half the Marvel universe is now a Spider-something…
Batman has not fared much better. The Bat-franchise has extended from our world into Bruce Wayne’s to where “the cape and cowl” is little more than a franchising opportunity for would-be vigilantes who want to make a name for themselves within DC Comics but don’t want to strive to develop their own identities…
It won’t be long until Alfred reveals that he crafted himself a Bat-suit to better clean Wayne Manor.
I was then struck with a “My life is a lie” moment of realization when it occurred to me that none of the characters I grew up loving from DC and Marvel had a story. Stories have endings. From a commercial standpoint—due to the American comic book business model—none of these characters could have endings. They HAD to be perpetually exploited because they were just brands. Each character was a premise with interesting starting points that allowed them to be infinitely shaped and warped into whatever DC/Marvel needed them to be to further exploit them.
I realized that I was a long-time customer of lifestyle brands, not just a superhero comic book fan.
DC/MARVEL: FROM UBIQUITY TO EXCLUSIVITY
When I was an American comics super-fan in the 1980s, you could pretty much get comic books everywhere. That wonderful beacon of nerddom—the spinner rack—was ubiquitous. You’d find them in supermarkets, convenience stores, newsstands, gas stations, and even in dentist’s offices and arcades. My father used to take me to a car parts shop when he needed stuff for his workshop and they had a spinner rack in there, too!
It got to the point that you could almost buy a comic book by accident! They were fun, disposable, four-color entertainment that cost about the same as a pack of gum. Throw them into the shopping cart with your carrots, steak, bag of chips and cat food. It’s all consumable.
This began to shift in the 90s when the market began to change. For brevity’s sake, the comic book business used to be that everywhere comics sold, the retailers had the option to sell back any unsold inventory to the publishers. If a supermarket bought 20 copies of Iron Man #18 and only sold 12, they could sell the remaining stock back to Marvel so the supermarket had little risk. Returnability was an option.
With the economy and culture moving as it always does, and with the advent of the Internet, comic books became less and less desirable products to take up space where the general population often visited, where those spinner racks stood tall. Returnability became a growing problem for DC and Marvel. Too much turnover.
However, one option became a great ark of survival: the Direct Market. The direct market meant that specialized comic book stores would be THE place to find DC and Marvel publications as well as independently published comics.
The comic book store became the last oasis for the industry to thrive. The business model for them was that they bought product from the publishers and then it was theirs. They didn’t have the option to sell-back; no returnability. This irrevocably changed the industry with a shift to selling to shops rather than selling primarily to readers.
SUPERHEROES COMICS: NICHE CONCENTRATION
With comics mostly leaving the mainstream retail business and concentrating mostly into specialized comic book shops and with minimal exposure in chain book stores like Barnes and Noble, the readership followed a similar trajectory into a concentrated fan-base.
Those who were kids when comics were more ubiquitous in the 80s were still fans, but they’d be funneled towards their LCS(local comic shop) to satisfy their fix. Younger fans would be far more difficult to wrangle in, especially with the entertainment matrix expanding almost exponentially since the 1980s, which video games now being mainstream along with high-speed Internet, smartphones, YouTube, digital media and a growing, competing industry called MANGA.
A BRUSH WITH ANIME AND MANGA
I’ll be honest with you; I’ve always had a strange, elusive relationship with Japanese media. On the face of it, I’ve actually been deeply ensconced in Japanese art and entertainment since I was a kid. I grew up on Voltron and Tranzor Z, both which were adapted from original Japanese releases. Shows like Inspector Gadget and The Real Ghostbusters were developed in America, Canada, France and elsewhere, but were animated in Japan.
I have very vague memories of watching reruns of Battle of the Planets when I was little. A fiery phoenix soaring through the spaceways; costumed bird-people doing martial arts; giant robots and monsters, .etc. It was incredible.
However, all of this media was imported from Japan—sometimes fragmented and poorly translated. It was still good, but most of the native Japanese media had very limited access for Americans. I’d go to video stores and see the rare anime movie but that was it.
For me, my greatest exposure to Japanese culture was Nintendo! I basically lived in the worlds created by Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo and many others. Super Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania, Gradius, Contra, .etc. All developed by Japanese companies like Nintendo, Capcom, Konami and others. For whatever reason, I never thought of it as foreign media.
Despite sporadically being reminded of anime by seeing Fist of the North Star or Akira or Lupin or something similar in passing on TV, I never thought of the art-form as being for me.
I thought Manga and Anime were for… other people. In fact, back in the day, Anime was called Japanimation. Yeah, that far back. And I never ever actually even ever laid eyes on a Manga in the 90s. I only knew that the cartoons were based on something, whatever it was. Japan was mysterious and its influence always off in my periphery, never aggressively declaring itself.
Then, in the 2000s, when my boys were growing up, I noticed Anime becoming more ubiquitous on TV where the shows appeared on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Weird names like “Inuyasha”, “Yu Yu Hakusho” and “Bleach” popped up that I promptly ignored. This is what other people watched, though. Didn’t even give it a chance.
Ever so often, an anime would slip through my indifference and pique my interest like Big O, which is about a billionaire who owns a giant robot. How could I not love it? A cross between Batman and Voltron. The animes that appeared on my radar were few and far between, but they still lingered in the background.
SUPERHERO COMIC SNOBBERY
Growing up, DC and Marvel were like a religion to me. I read the stories of Superman, Batman, Hulk and Spider-Man the way some read about the stories of the Apostles. Those characters were my personal culture. Even if I didn’t buy and read every comic that came out, I considered myself an American Superhero Fan™.
I never engaged in the DC vs Marvel debate. I never engaged in the Console Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. But in the 2010s, when I learned of the growth of Manga in the west, I immediately mocked the entire industry. It was like a weird emotional reaction.
“These weird Japanese comics can’t hold a candle to my beloved DC and Marvel!” But at that point, it had been many years since I regularly bought comics. A combination of poverty and difficulty of access essentially ended my comic fandom in the early 2000s, but I still held my superheroes in high regard.
Some terrible assumptions I made:
“These Manga characters only appeal to people in Japan and a minority of weirdos outside of Japan!”
“These weird-looking Manga characters could never be adapted into movies. They’d look terrible!”
“Manga is a fad.”
This all came to a head when I was on an online forum and saw this image:
The central character in the image is called Saitama, protagonist of the Manga, One Punch Man. There he was, dead center of the image, having conquered several iconic American superheroes. This was sacrilege to me. Superman, Captain America, Iron Man and Batman were as American as apple pie and cornerstones of pop culture, having garnered global recognition over the course of many decades and this “fad/meme character” was portrayed as being better than all of them.
I actually got offended.
It appeared to me—in my ignorance—that One Punch Man was a parody of my beloved superheroes and an intentional mockery of the genre I cared so deeply for.
Once again, I dismissed Manga as an art form and especially this Saitama. “He’ll be forgotten within five years,” I told myself. “Superman, Cap, Batman and all the rest are ironclad. DC and Marvel ARE COMICS,” I repeated in my head.
After several months of being reminded of this pesky, bald mascot for Japanese comics, I finally resigned myself to just doing a web search of some One Punch Man Manga pages and seeing for myself what all the hubbub was about. I prepared to laugh and when the search turned up hundreds of pages of scanned art, I saw what everyone was talking about. My self-assured smirk went away at the sight of these…
…and the voice in my head screamed “THIS… IS… AWESOME!”
Incredulously, I went into dangerous territory: some online Manga forums. I asked like the complete greenhorn that I was what it would take to actually get into One Punch Man if I wanted to read more.
They told me, seemingly confused, “You just buy Volume 1 and go from there.”
That’s it? Volume 1 and then—presumably—Volume 2, 3 and so on?
I ended up “sailing the high seas” and found a digital copy of One Punch Man Volume 1. I read it and couldn’t believe how incredible it was. I was reminded of my youth and just being enveloped by John Byrne’s Superman and how awe-inspiring the art and story was.
I realized the sobering truth: One Punch Man wasn’t a mocking satire of American Superheroes; it was a LOVE LETTER TO THEM.
TO BE CONTINUED!
Excellent points and understandable arguments. Stories should have endings, and Peter's story should have involved him & MJ getting married with kids and maybe him teaching at Avengers Academy so a new generation of superheroes don't repeat his mistakes as a solo teen hero.
Weirdly enough, YOUNG JUSTICE the cartoon treats its timeline with better respect and dignity than the comics do their characters. But that's all DC can do to give their characters good presentation, as the comics just become virtue signaling or demolishing the established character for quota diversity instead of organic diversity.
> It won’t be long until Alfred reveals that he crafted himself a Bat-suit to better clean Wayne Manor.
Sadly, BANE killed Alfred and he's staying dead for the foreseeable future of DC under WB under Discovery. A mercy he won't get franchised into a solo movie.
Great points! Especially about continuity, I don't mind spin offs and elseworlds stories but with the constant reimaginings and reboots it is impossible to get invested or care about anything, Razor another Youtuber I follow albiet one I don't always agree with as he gives manga and anime some rough treatment talks about how modern marvel has killed continuity of any kind, in stark contrast to Frank Millers gritty Daredevil series that actually not only has continuity but has terrible consequences befall characters including the main hero and rather than do what most comics do and retcon or walk back those things in later issues, actually has the later comics show the fallout of said events and dares to show things change as a result. Also I love Fables for that exact reason, everything is in continuity. It may sound like a minor thing but it is exceptionally hard to get into a story with no continuity or knowing it will be cancelled and rebooted soon.