There seem to be a lot of pre-mortems going on. At Howling Curmudgeons, Matt Rossi suggests that indie publishers are poised to dethrone Marvel and DC. It’s interesting reading comparing the allure of creator ownership versus toiling on franchise characters:
“(W)ithout new characters, the Big Two will just keep degenerating, and it makes less sense all the time for a creator to hitch her wagon to these companies in exchange for control over her brainchildren, when instead you can come in, push around the same blocks as every other creator working in the assembly line, pick up your freelance money, and try and build enough of a name and rep to eventually attract readers to your own creations.”
It’s interesting to think about, but I wonder if recent events don’t undermine the argument a bit. Look at the recent cancellations at DC (Bloodhound and Human Target, and the axe hanging over Fallen Angel). When creators do step outside the franchise box to create new characters for the Big Two, sales tend to be dire. Would creator ownership reverse that trend? How many Big Two readers care about who holds the deed? (Not that they shouldn’t care, just that I don’t think it factors into their buying patterns most of the time.)
Is there anything critics can do to reverse the trend? Not in the opinion of Paul O’Brien, who talks about the disconnect between critical acclaim and sales in his latest column at Ninth Art. Once I worked through the guilty recognition some of O’Brien’s comments inspired (“It’s an audience that, for the most part, only talks to itself, and makes little secret of its vague disdain for the mainstream readers. I mean, they read Wizard, for god’s sake!”), I found a lot of good food for thought (as usual):
“Trying something new is acclaimed as a worthwhile end in itself. In one sense, it is. It’s a good thing that people are out there experimenting. Good for them. But the nature of experiments is that a lot of them fail. The mainstream audience isn’t necessarily looking for anything new or different, and doesn’t prize that so highly. And why should they?”
Brian at Comics Should Be Good introduces the concept of nepotistic continuity, “when a writer uses strong continiuty in his or her comics, but only when it is in reference to something (a work or a creation) that THAT writer did in the past.” He cites Chuck Dixon as a perp of note, and I would suggest Fabian Nicieza as another. I never stood a chance of sussing out the big “who is…” mysteries in Thunderbolts, because I’d never read the comics that featured whoever it was that Scourge and Crimson Cowl turned out to be. When I saw that he was launching another “who is…” story in New Thunderbolts, I took it as a perfect jumping off point.
From one perspective, New Avengers is a textbook example of nepotistic continuity. Brian Bendis features Luke Cage (the love interest from Alias/The Pulse), Jessica Drew (who was initially intended to be the protagonist of Alias/The Pulse and appeared in Alias), Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson (who otherwise appear almost exclusively in another of the author’s titles, Daredevil), the Purple Man (the arch-villain of Alias), and Spider-Man (who sounds a lot like the author’s Ultimate version of the character). The difference is you don’t really need to have read any of those titles to understand what little is going on in New Avengers.
Ian Brill at the Brill Building takes a wider look at continuity in super-hero comics:
“It is as if these books have no problem that they are running in circles. Certainly the long-time fans do not care, even if it means that anyone younger (or just anyone unfamiliar with continuity) that shows a little interest in a book feels like they need a guidebook.”
I find myself having less and less patience for these kind of navel-gazing stories, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Are my tastes changing, or are the current practitioners of this style of story just not very good at it?
Fortunately, there is at least one Big Two creator who seems to strike a perfect balance of using franchise characters in fresh and exciting ways to tell fun stories: Dan Slott. At Cognitive Dissonance, Johanna Draper Carlson perfectly summarizes my reaction to Slott’s She-Hulk and Spider-Man/Human Torch.