Being a kid in Australia in the late nineties was a very strange experience, particularly if you loved comics as a medium. Because the sorts of comics that people think of as “mainstream” comics, superhero books from DC and Marvel, did not exist. They were not accessible to me in any meaningful way. If I had been born ten years earlier they would have been at the Newsagents, ten years later they would have been in big fancy hardback trades in the library, but the only place superhero comics existed for me at that time was in episodes of The Simpsons.
Oh, and The Phantom. Every single Newsagent I ever went in to as a kid always had four random issues of The Phantom in stock. These were twenty page black and white reprints of deeply disjointed and confusing newspaper strips from 1979 or whatever, part two of four in some saga titled “The Revenge of the Missing Leopard…’s Handbag!” The Phantom WAS superhero comics to me.
What... What's he going to do with that skull?
So it is unsurprising I did not get into them as a child.
Although, quick sidenote: I did have one friend who was bizarrely obsessed with collecting Phantom comics. Not reading them, mind you, never reading them, just collecting them. I remember spending multiple afternoons with this kid and his “Phantom Comics Price Guide!” trying to see which of his comics that he bought for two dollars at the newsagent a week ago was now somehow worth thousands. A lot of, “Wow! This comic from 1967 is worth twenty bucks! Oh, wait, no, that’s for the first edition, yours was published in 1994, never mind. It is literally worthless. Yes, even if you kept it in its little plastic bag.” Repeat that for about four hours, you get the idea.
So, no, I did not like superhero comics.
But I loved comics.
I loved them in a way that, truthfully, I don’t think I have ever really loved any other medium. I love film, don’t get me wrong, I am a massive film nerd, and if I continue writing these columns for very long AT ALL I will write some things about Fred Astaire musicals that will make those gushing bonus feature old- man fanboy talking heads on every classic DVD release say, “alright, buddy, tone it down a notch. Geez.”
But I think the medium of comics is my true love.
I love the mixture of the visual and the textual. The way that the passage of time in the story is this beautiful collaboration between artist, writer, and reader. The way the medium allows for, even encourages, cartooning; exaggeration, facial distortion, impossible body positions, expressionistic use of line and colour. The way the reader can pour over the artwork in a way the watcher of a cartoon simply does not have time for. The way that so much storytelling short hand can be done by the visuals, meaning you don’t need to have a three page description of a room to convey exactly what the room looks like. I love the way it allows for formal experimentation – playing with time, with framing, with the way information is presented – that cannot be done in any other medium. I love the bright colours. I love comics.
But none of this came from superheroes.
To me, comics weren’t superheroes. Comics were newspaper strips. They were Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes, and Footrot Flats. They were cutting out Hagar the Horrible strips from the newspaper and gluing them into my own makeshift collections, with the intention of annotating them about their historical inaccuracies.
Comics were Disney comics. They were weird five page stories I would find hiding in the pages of Disney Adventures about Timon and Pumbaa meeting the Backstreet Boys. They were collections of Carl Barks’ Donald stuff or Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey strips I would somehow stumble across.
This is a real, actual comic that was released by the Disney company in which N'Sync gets sucked into a computer. Who the hell needed stupid nineties superhero comics when I had this?
Comics were Asterix and Tintin, European comics borrowed from the library. I would marvel over the fact that they were translated, particularly Asterix. Someone managing to convert that many puns into another language seemed impossible and magical. I would just stare at the title pages, at the words “Translated by Anthea Bell,” and think she must have been at least a genius, if not an actual wizard.
Comics were The Beano and, to a (significantly) lesser extent, The Dandy, British kids comics that were never any good at all, but were cheap, and weekly, and available everywhere. Hey, at least they were comics, and maybe if I read enough of them I’d be able to work out why there appears to be a second, English, Dennis the Menace. Is he the American Dennis the Menace’s cousin? Is he from some sort of parallel universe? Is there something wrong, on a profound and fundamental level, with whatever the hell Gnasher is?
PICTURED: Gnasher. Presumably some sort of non-euclidean demon squiggle baby. Should not exist.
Comics were my mother’s collections of Leunig cartoons – all melancholy and inscrutable and painfully, achingly beautiful. And funny. But funny in a way that thirteen year old me just simply could not explain. It was like if you took all of the depression of Peanuts comics and distilled it down to its purest essence by removing all the humour that makes the sorrow bearable. Then somehow you crammed that ball of abject misery into the most absurd Far Side strip ever published. Then you gave that mess to the world’s saddest Icelandic eight year old and told them to redraw it. Just unbelievable stuff.
Not pictured: my tears.
Comics were, for a brief period, Mad Magazine, before I had the sudden and overwhelming realisation one day that Mad Magazine was absolutely terrible, and that I had literally never found it funny, even once, not even as a twelve year old.
Comics were black and white reprints of Looney Tunes comics from the 50s that newsagents only ever stocked during school holidays. They were exclusively sold in triple packs, advertised as “Three Great Comics! One Great Price!” You could see two of the comics, the ones on the outside, they both had Bugs Bunny on the cover, that seemed good. Then you’d open it up and you’d find some awful Classics Illustrated: Ding Dong’s Big Day by Charles Dickens or whatever wedged in between, and feel totally ripped off. Then you’d read the Looney Tunes comics and feeling ripped off all over again (but ripped off in a mind-bending, reality warping way – “Oh look! It’s a Roadrunner and Coyote comic! This should be good. Wait. Why are there word balloons? These character don’t talk. Wait. Why does the Roadrunner have four identical sons who follow him around everywhere? Wait. Wait wait wait. Why do the four identical sons all speak in rhyme? Why is this happening? How was this allowed? There is no God.”)
Why... why would they do this?
Comics were my sister’s Archie Double Digests, always lying around the house everywhere, available whenever you wanted them, the background noise to daily life, always the same, always comforting in their weird, creepy, sexist way.
And I know I already said this, but I want to make it absolutely clear. Comics were Peanuts. Endless Peanuts collections, bought from endless garage sales and op shops. I remember once when I was thirteen seeing a brand new Peanuts collection sitting in a Dymocks bookshop, and thinking it looked weird and wrong, unnatural even, with its unbroken spine and all its pages intact. If you didn’t have to sticky tape it back together as you read it, it wasn’t a real Peanuts collection, as far as I was concerned.
That was comics when I was a kid. I spent my whole childhood obsessively reading comics and literally never once read an entire superhero book. One time I stayed over at a friend’s house who had exactly one Spiderman comic in his possession, and I tried to read it, but it was totally incomprehensible, and not even in a fun way. Just boring garbage.
So when people refer to “mainstream” comics as Marvel and DC superhero books, I just don’t get it. What is mainstream about them? What is mainstream about comic books published by “The Big Two” that aren’t widely available anywhere but specialty shops? Nowadays you can get collections of superhero books in bookshops, but you can also get lots of other different kinds of comics, and guess what? The other comics sell better. I just looked at The New York Times Best Sellers list for February 21, 2016. They have three different sections for comics. They have “Hardcover Graphic Books,” “Paperback Graphic Books,” and “Manga.” This is a list of the bestselling comics of any given week, according to the mainstream press. Out of those thirty potential bestselling slots, how many of them do you think should go to the mainstream comics? Obviously DC and Marvel are shut out of the “Manga” section, which seems like it is listed separately because of some faintly racist assumptions about what “real” comics are. But they still have a potential 20 spots out of the 30. They could still have 66% of the market, which would seem pretty mainstream to me.
It turns out they don’t have 66% of the market. They have 6.6%. Out of the thirty bestselling comics for the week of February 21, 2016, exactly two of them are “mainstream” superhero books. There is Batman: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, a comic from 28 years ago that has been described by Alan Moore himself as “clumsy, misjudged, and [of] no real human importance.”
So that’s one of the two.
The other one is DC Comics: Secret Hero Society Volume 1, which is a thing I have literally never heard of. I’m just going to go and look it up.
What the hell? That’s not even a DC book. It’s a kid’s book published by Scholastic, who presumably licenced the characters from DC. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are children in a high school. I mean, the art’s by Dustin Nguyen, and looks absolutely fantastic, so I’m glad that the book exists. But it isn’t a real “mainstream” superhero book at all.
So that’s back down to 3.3%. Mainstream comics have exactly 3.3% of the market.
Oh, I just rechecked the lists, and The Sandman: Overtures is on there, which is published by Vertigo, which is owned by DC. It’s sort of a superhero comic. So yeah, ok, if you wanted to argue that it was 6.6% I wouldn’t quibble.
But still.
If the only American superhero comics that are selling are a children’s book published by Scholastic presumably so DC can get in on the lucrative School Book Fair game, a fantasy book that operates as a prequel to a comic stoned people liked in the 1990s, and a stupid Batman comic from thirty years ago, then that is not mainstream. It just isn’t.
You know what is mainstream?
I mean, aside from Manga, which is obviously what actual teenagers are actually reading? Perhaps because they don’t have to understand 80 years of convoluted comics continuity to know what the hell is going on?
You want to know what is mainstream?
Raina Telgemeier.
Owning 2016 comics like a goddamn champion.
She is 2016 mainstream comics. On the New York Times Paperback Graphic Novels Bestseller list of February 21, 2016, Raina Telgemeier wrote and drew fully 70% of those books. Seven of the ten bestselling paperback graphic novels are by the same person, a person who the “mainstream” comics media almost never talks about. My only guess why is that her comics are for girls, and mainstream comics are a big, poorly constructed pillow fort with a real ugly “No Girls Allowed” sign out front.
Very Serious Mainstream Comics. Obviously more important than a bunch of gross girls feelings books.
I would just like to reiterate: 70% of the Paperback Graphic Books Bestseller list was written and drawn by one person. 0% of that same list was published by Marvel or DC. Out of all 30 of the comics on the New York Times Bestseller list, Raina Telgemeier wrote and drew 23.1%. Marvel and DC, together, published 6.6%. This is the same percentage of the total that is taken up by One-Punch Man, a really hilarious superhero comic that has two volumes on the Manga Bestsellers list. So DC and Marvel aren’t any more mainstream than a Japanese writer who calls himself ONE, just like that, in all caps.
I didn’t love comics less as a kid because I wasn’t into superheroes. Kids today don’t love comics any less because they are reading Raina Telgemeier, or Kate Beaton, or One-Punch Man. Comics that are sold in specialty shops are not inherently more valid than comics that are sold in bookshops.
So please. Comics nerds everywhere. Expand your horizons. See what great stuff is out there, just waiting for you to discover it. Not every comic has to have Batman in it.
Batman can be in some of them, though.