We fanboy bloggers sure write about superheroes an awful lot. In fact, we don’t just write about superheroes; we write about COMIC BOOKS! We share our love for comics and their glorious four-color heroes while often deriding filmmakers for not getting the story right when they adapt them. Or the characters. Or the costumes. Comic book fans are finicky. They’re also an incredible minority. In truth, many of us bloggers are relating to our experience as comic book fans earlier in our lives, not as comic collectors now. Many prominent bloggers are my age or slightly older – meaning that we all lived through the glorious Bronze Age of comics before the speculation boom of the ’90s, and it really meant something to be into comic books.
In the run-up to the speculator market, comic books were still trying to find their place in the world. Young fans from the ’50s and ’60s were all grown up and the values of their collections were beginning to become news stories. Suddenly, comic books weren’t just kids’ things – they were an investment. And that’s when things got bad. Dealers moved in and created a speculation grab. Comic shops joined in and soon the comic book companies themselves followed suit. In 1991, Marvel released the single bestselling comic book of all time, “X-Men #1,” a relaunch of the entire X-men series, reorganizing the teams and bringing a number of classic heroes back into the fold with now established, fresher heroes. It sold eight million copies. The fact that it had five variant covers, all of them equally collectible, had a lot to do with it.
And then they killed Superman, and three million copies later, nothing would ever be the same. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie. In 1996, the industry went belly-up. Comics devalued, shops went under and Marvel filed for bankruptcy. It would be Marvel’s attempts to save their company that would lead to the wholesale sell-off of the movie rights to its characters – characters Marvel has only recently begun to recollect under the aegis of Marvel Studios (owned by Disney). Why did the industry crash? Because guys like me got burned too many times, gave our cherished comic collections to our friends and moved on with our lives.
Many of us still have attachment to the characters and stories we read in our youth – but movies are a business, and when it comes to business, you have to look at the numbers. The bestselling comic book of all time sold eight million copies. Last year’s bestselling comic book was “Amazing Spider-Man 583.” It sold over 500,000 copies because it featured Barack Obama on the cover and was released before the Obama fever this nation was under broke. The next highest-selling comic book sold about 200,000 copies and was the beginning of a special crossover event. To give you an idea of how bad things are, the average issue of the two X-Men titles sold roughly that same amount, every month, in a beleaguered 1996. Last year the bestselling, non-crossover issue of an X-Men comic (once the most popular in the world) sold only 93,500 copies.
So at this point, many of the comic book fans reading this are beginning to wonder aloud: “Yeah, so what’s your point? Everyone knows the comic industry is in the dumps – but it’s been doing better.” My point is this: In 2008, 70+ million people paid to see The Dark Knight in a theater here in the United States. During the same two months this was happening, the Batman comic book was selling at its highest point that year: 103,000 copies. So for every 700 people paying to see Batman on the big screen, only one of them was actually buying a Batman comic book. one in 700. Kind of puts the whole notion of comic book-to-movie continuity and the adherence to the character a bit more into perspective. Even more so when you consider that last year, when there wasn’t a Batman movie in theaters, an issue of Batman sold only 65,000 issues. Those are the die-hards – the ‘I buy Batman every month’ guys. The one out of every 1,000 people paying to see Batman.
Conceptually, doesn’t it make more sense to think about entertaining the other 999 people who won’t be upset if the cape isn’t era-specific or if they get a side character wrong?
Personally, I’ve been that angry guy, upset that they fumbled my favorite character’s powers and story arc. But as of late, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to get angry. I stopped reading the comics. Sure, I read a graphic novel every now and again and can quote comic history by chapter and verse. But who am I kidding? Worse things have been done to-the characters in the continuity of the DC and Marvel universe since I’ve stopped reading than has been done to them in bad movies. Look at Comic-Con. COMIC Con. Did you read any interesting news out of “Comic”-Con about, you know…comics? If you did, you are in the minority. The rest of us read about movies.
And maybe that’s where the rest of us need to put our heads.
Last year, a buddy of mine – a prominent critic – made a remark about how Wolverine was treating the character of the White Queen, making her look like a disco ball. His head practically exploded and he unleashed his anger onto a waiting Internet. The problem? They got the White Queen right. She’d been turned into some living diamond thing 10 years earlier. It doesn’t matter that during the decades of comics we had read, the White Queen was not made of diamond, because she is now, and they got it right. Where do we draw the line? In the comic history of Superman, Lex Luthor hated him because he accidentally knocked over an experiment that turned Luthor permanently bald. That changed as Luthor became a recurring and classic villain. But that’s history. Where do we draw the line? And when do we stop complaining about getting it right as opposed to telling a good story?
Isn’t the real task to make a movie that audiences enjoy? I look around, and while I see a growing acceptance of comic book culture and more and more people claiming to be comic book fans, all I’m really seeing are a bunch of people who like comic book movies and who don’t actually read comic books. The industry may have seen some growth, but not the kind of growth the films have seen. So maybe it’s time to put some of our ideas to rest.
