(Graphic Novels) Last weekend, the new X-Men movie managed to snag an estimated $155 million worldwide in its first two-and-a-half days in theaters. Between this and last Saturday's Free Comic Book Day, the press has briefly turned its attention to comic books and their sister medium, graphic novels. Consequently, it's time to take a look and see what they have to say.
For the most part, the resulting press has been quite good. The St. Paul Pioneer Press, for example -- hmmm, where have I heard that name recently -- kicks in with about as lucid and informed review of the graphic novel's progress as you're likely to find:
"Other media are pitching in. Columns and reviews about graphic novels have recently been started in trade journals for librarians, booksellers and the publishing industry. Trade conventions feature seminars on how to buy and sell graphic novels. Last December, a cover story in the New York Times Book Review was a review by best-selling print novelist Nick Hornby of six graphic novels.
" 'It's not something that's happening overnight,' said Chris Oliveros, publisher of Drawn & Quarterly, a Montreal-based company specializing in literary comic books and graphic novels. 'It's reaching people who never, ever thought an interesting story could be told in comic book form.' "
The article also goes on to note that "an e-mail list for librarians who want to discuss graphic novels has more than 600 subscribers", which isn't bad at all for such a specialized field. It's the bookstores, however, where the most dramatic changes have taken place. As The New York Daily News puts it:
"According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks retail book sales, graphic novel sales account for 2.5% of the overall adult fiction market. Marvel's trade paperback division has tripled sales over the past year alone, while D.C. Comics' trade paperback unit is the fastest growing in its publishing group."
(Memo to Tokyopop's publicity department: start cultivating newspaper writers. There's a hole in the above quote big enough to drive a truckload of Love Hina collections through.)
That "2.5%" figure sounds small until you realize just how many genres and categories your average bookstore covers -- according to this page, the Book Industry Systems Advisory Committee of the Book Industry Study Group lists books in roughly 3000 categories and sub-categories. Graphic novels may not have stormed the bookstores, but they've proven themselves to have a stable following, and the growth trends look good in a wide variety of genres. Considering what happened back in the late 1980s and early '90s, this is a decided improvement. As I wrote the week this weblog first premiered, ten years ago longform comics suffered an entirely different fate:
"Curious readers attempting to check out this whole graphic novel business got a handful of crappy superhero books thrust back at them, 'graphic novel' tags hastily affixed to the front covers like they were that year's pet rocks -- which in hindsight is exactly what they were. Art comics, meanwhile, simply hadn't built up enough of a backstock in book form to compete with the glut of crap Marvel and DC were cranking out, and promptly got drowned out in a sea of garishly-colored white noise."
The backstock is there now, and perhaps more importantly, there's a much wider variety of genres with which to tempt bookbuyers. With the appearance of English-language manga volumes, there's even something teenagers and young adults find to be worth reading this time around. Marvel's certainly been cranking out the books, but this time they haven't had nearly as much success in pushing everyone else off the shelves. This isn't the Direct Market we're talking about; like it or not, this time they'll have to compete in a playing-field they don't dominate from out of the starting gate.
Still, the danger of a repeat of the last time around isn't over yet; the general public still isn't particularly educated as to how much variety the format contains, and that can still lead to trouble. Case in point: in Snow Hill, Maryland, library officials are under fire from county commissioners after books with inappropriate content found their way into the hands of youngsters (the only one mentioned by name was Enki Bilal's book The Dormant Beast). The Salisbury Daily Times reports:
"When novels first came out, they were in comic-book form and contained milder content, [library director Stuart] Wells said. In 1992, a graphic novel about a son's recollection of his father's experiences during the Holocaust received the Pulitzer Prize. Wells said the American Library Association praises the books for drawing young adults to reading.
"Now mostly hardbound, the novels causing controversy contain swear language and violent, nude and sexual drawings."
Like I said, the public's relative lack of understanding as to what a graphic novel is can still lead to trouble -- as can works that look like they should appeal to children but were instead intended for adults, if they aren't properly tagged. Even so, it could be worse. We could be stuck solely with the Direct Market, where virtually any comic that doesn't appeal to the Pervert Suit fanatics dies on the vine, and the threat of a resulting industry collapse is waved off with a fanboyish dismissal. Even worse, we could be stuck with the newsstands, where all content is assumed to be for the kids -- and subsequently, comics have vanished. In Australia, the paucity of comics shops has left readers in exactly this position, as The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
"Saturday was Free Comic Book Day in US stores to promote the decision to release Donald Duck Adventures and Mickey Mouse and Friends again after a four-year drought.
"But Mr Zachariou wonders if the move has come too late, and whether those new comics will ever be seen by most Australian children.
" 'Comics are dying at newsagents,' he said.
" 'Distributors used to deliver a bunch of comics to every newsagent every week, and many kids who had trouble with books got into reading that way. Now newsagents have to place a special order to get a comic, and most of them don't bother. Even if they see a comic like The Simpsons or Archie, a lot of parents think $6 is too expensive.' "
The article goes on to set the number of comics sold in Australia each week at a few hundred. Thankfully, cartoonists and their readers in the rest of the English-speaking world do have another option, and it seems to be expanding rather than contracting... at least for the moment.
It's difficult to find a line between nihilism and lingering hope in such circumstances. Since I started off on an optimistic note, I'd like to leave you with a quote from Mark Evanier, found in a recent entry from his weblog:
"I do not recommend trying to make one's career in the comic book business these days. It is not a healthy field in which to invest the kind of creative energy and passion that is usually required to break into a new line of work, and I think it will get worse before it gets better."
Follow your dreams, kids, but don't lose track of the bottom line -- we're starting to win the revolution, but nobody's close to declaring victory yet.
