Skip to main content

Free Comic Book Day 2014




The Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) crowd is always an interesting gauge of how comics culture is evolving. A few years ago, the narrative around comics was dominated by concerns about an aging demographic. The logic was that an older, white and mostly male audience was not enough to keep the comics industry afloat. Today, thanks to the success of comics on the small and big screen, there is a lot of excitement around comic book culture. Yet, there remain some question if that success if changing the comic book print industry.

Some would argue that comic excitement is confined to "The Walking Dead" or "Avengers" fans that don't read the comic books. FCBD tests the hypothesis in the most basic way. If a more diverse audience comes out to comic book shops, than there might be greater interest generated by these adaptations that can be leverage by the print industry.  Having gone to several FCBDs with this in mind, I can see the demographic and scope of comics culture is changing. By far the biggest shift is more women in fandom. The growth of the non-superhero Indy comic books has translated into more women reading comics. This is not news. The real news is these women also read superhero comic book. You can see that at FCBD. They mix in superhero titles featuring Batman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman while picking up titles such as Saga, Mouse Guard or Pretty Deadly.

So, established characters do benefit from greater interest in comics. However, I think this attention does not extend to associated characters. What do I mean?  From my observations, some of these female readers know and enjoy Batman, but they don't care about Nightwing or Red Hood.  Listening to the crowds at FCBD I can theorize the reasons. Clearly, female reader enjoy Batman, but many of them have a relationship linked to mediated version of the character.  Christopher Nolan's Batman Trilogy inspired great interest and Batman's overall narrative history is widely known.  The details can become murky quickly. So, the many Robins in the Batman universe are not worth the time or energy necessary to understand.      

The upside for comics is more sales, but not necessarily strong superhero comics sales. This narrative has come through in the comic media, but the decline is framed in more dire terms.  The reality of may be less dire for the overall industry as more readers allow a less superhero centric comic culture to engage with mainstream culture. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mythology and Superheroes in Comics

Ohhh my goodness... When I decided on trying to analyze the mythological origins and references in superhero comics, I had no idea the can of worms I was opening up... On the one hand, it was awesome to see just how many connections there were between superheroes and psychology/mythology/philosophy, but all the information also made it terribly difficult to distinguish what I should be using and how to tie it all together. When I was talking to one of my sorority sisters about it she said, "Oh yeah, well, research essays are kind of like putting together puzzles..." and I think that really sums up what writing this paper was like for me. Fortunately, I was really interested throughout the whole process and I very much enjoyed writing the paper. Being a psychology major, I was especially interested in reading about the Jungian archetypes that had a lot of parallels with major modern comic books superheroes. I was also able to incorporate Joseph Campbell's "hero cycle...
2 comments
Read more

Why blame comics for societal failure?

Why blame comics for societal failure? Society blamed comics for the societal failures because it was a fairly new industry, and as things seemed to go “wrong” they figured it must be comic books. When a child grew up during the war, his father was probably killing people and the military and his mother was probably making things in factories to help kill the opposition. The only things kids had to “babysit” them was comic books, and they read many different kinds. So when kids starting acting differently in this new generation the figured it must be the comic books. Society didn’t want to believe it may have been the internal and external scars war causes on the soldiers and their families. Also the fact that young unattended children are reading these comics may not be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality. When society fails it always needs a scapegoat then it was comic books next it was rock and roll. Society naturally resist change.
2 comments
Read more

#FUTURES: Tomorrow Idris Elba will be the Last Man Standing

There is some bad buzz around Pacific Rim on the web. I suspect the possibility of a giant robot movie being awesome is too much for some people.  The internet is full of dark corners, but until we see the movie we won't know the box office.  What we can tell right now is that Idris Elba is doing his part to make the movie a success. A standout performer, Elba has made a name for himself in countless productions .  He achieve wide recognition for his turn on the big screen in films such as Thor and on the small screen in the BBC's Luther . Of course, the open question about actors of color in any film is whether not they will help or hurt the box office.  Will Smith recent disappointment with After Earth opens the door for this conversation. His lack of success sparks the question who will be the next "bankable" star of color. There can be only one! See what I did there:-)  These sentiments reflect a Hollywood centric approach that ignores Nolly...
Post a Comment
Read more