Xenagia: Rants from the Future #1: An Introduction about Graphic Novels

Rants from the Future #1: An Introduction about Graphic Novels

Welcome to Rants from the Future. Herein I'm going to ... editorialize, talking about the genres of fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, what's going on with them, and why I like those changes (or, perhaps, why I don't).

I'm going to start off with a topic near and dear to my heart: comic books.

Comics: About the Form

When you think about comics, you probably think about the literal books: 32 pages of content, replete with about 10 pages of ads, all printed four-color on pulpy newsprint (or perhaps high-gloss paper, if you're a more recent reader). Certainly when we say the phrase "comic book", that's what's literally meant.

By that definition, I haven't bought a new comic in five or six years.

That's because of the rise of graphic novel, a term that was originally used to describe bound standalone stories, such as Will Eisner's A Contract with God, that started being published in the 1970s. More recently, however, it's come to mean any sort of square-bound bookshelf comic book, and today that primarily includes trade-paperback (TPB) sized ad-free collections of comics reprinting the monthly books. Those collections are actually the sorts of graphic novels that I find more interesting, because they create an entirely different medium that you can read comics through.

A Short History of the TPB Collection

When I was a youngster, comic-book collections were just a gleam in most publishers' eyes. Fireside Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, put a couple out in the 1970s that I was always looking for in my youth. The titles, such as Sons of Origins! and Bring on the Bad Guys! were entirely evocative, while the comics that they collected, which were largely stories from the 1960s, were entirely unavailable at the time.

Sadly, it took about twenty years after Fireside's first explorations for Marvel and DC themselves to get serious about putting out graphic novels of any sort--and even then early experiments mostly involved new stories (like the Marvel Graphic Novel series, kicked off in 1982 with The Death of Captain Marvel) rather than reprints.

A Change of Perspective

When my late friend Rory Root founded Comic Relief in the late 1980s, he called it "The Comic Bookstore". If you heard that slogan pronounced, you might not notice the different in emphasis from the average "comic-book store." But, Rory understood the difference and he embraced it.

Rory saw the future, and he knew that the day was fast approaching when comics would be widely available in TPB collections. When I first started going to Rory's shop, there were already many examples. I distinctly remember picking up the Cerebus phone books, each of which collected 25 or so issues of the comic, in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Marvel and DC had taken to publishing some of their most popular stories in collections--but only these scattered gems.

As publishers slowly turned to reprinting their comic books in TPB form, there were hitches. Some of the publishers just didn't understand the potential to collect stories. I remember well Rory ruefully talking about how Jeff Smith had decided to collect his award-winning Bone comic. He'd done it in three collections, covering issues #1-6, #7-12, and #13-18, respectively.

The problem was that those collections didn't correctly represent the stories collected within. The first volume was OK; it matched the "Out from Boneville" story. The second volume was where the problems began; it included all of the second story, "The Great Cow Race", but it also frustratingly included one issue of "Eyes of the Storm", and the third volume didn't even include that complete story, which ran through issue #19.

(Smith quickly revised how he did his collections when he moved on to second printings, with, as I understand it, some advice from Rory.)

Just as publishers would have to learn how to adapt TPB collections to encompass stories, writers have also learned to adapt their stories to fit neatly into TPBs. Some readers bitterly resent this, saying that writers are "writing to the graphic novel" while ignoring the needs of monthly readers and that they're telling "decompressed stories", meaning that less is told in more space.

However, those aren't my rants. I'm very happy with the way stories are told right now, but that may well be because I only read the collections nowadays. I made the switch around 2003. At the time I was doing what many comic book readers were doing: reading the individual issues, then buying the collection too, when it came out. However, I increasingly realized that almost everything I read was being published in collections.

When Kurt Busiek's Power Company was cancelled in September, 2003, I came to the realization that it had been just one of two comics that I was reading that weren't being collected at the time (the other being Legion of Super-Heroes), so I stopped buying single issues and instead started waiting for the collections to come out.

(To my annoyance, there's still a bit of a gap in my otherwise pristine, nearly complete 50-year Legion of Super-Heroes collection because of this; someday I'll have to go back and find the last couple of "reboot" issues.)

A Change of Economics

I haven't been ranting thus far, so let me now live up to the name of my column.

For me, the golden age of graphic novel production was 2003-2005. By the start of that period, all of the major publishers were reprinting all of their major comics in trade paperback collections. Sometimes these collections would appear a mere month after a story was completed, but sometimes they'd be as far as a year out.

Though I say it was a golden age, it was a bit rocky for my ersonal comic buying, as this was the time period when I was having the individual-comic jitters, having to wait through a year of two of detox before I could finally pick up a collection that completed the story that I'd been reading before I gave up on individual issues. But, that's often how it is with golden ages: we only recognize them in retrospective.

Then in 2005 another change occurred, and just as I loved the previous change, which had brought the ubiquitous TPB collection, I hated the new one. This new change was brought about by the New Avengers, Brian Michael Bendis' revival of the classic Marvel title. When the first graphic novel collection of the series appeared on shelves, it appeared not as a TPB, but instead as a hardcover.

I didn't think much of it. I plunked down my $20, a bit more than the $13 or $15 I would have paid for a TPB, and happily brought my new book of Bendis goodness home. When the second of these "Marvel Premiere" volumes came out, I did the same, and the third, and the fourth ...

The problem was that Marvel soon grew gluttonously happy with its extra revenues. Over the years more and more books came out hardcover first. DC soon followed suit. I realized that I couldn't afford to buy everything in hardcover, and so stopped buying anything in hardcover (with a rare exception). And that brings us to today.

It seems like Marvel puts out all of their major titles hardcover first, with TPBs usually appearing before the next hardcover is released. It's not terrible, but it puts me another six months behind their published story lines.

DC, meanwhile, is much more frustrating. They're much more selective in what they hardcover, which is nice on the one hand, but also leaves me only seeing bits and pieces of their global story arcs. Worse, they sit on their hardcovers for years. Right now I'm eager to read more of Geoff John's Green Lantern comic, but there are three or four hardcovers which haven't been reprinted as TPBs yet; I'm literally years behind on the story line (even though I've seen its repercussions in other titles).

The big publishers have clearly seen what a cash cow graphic novels can be, and so in more recent years they've even pushed past the hardcovers, putting out larger omnibus collections, super-special "Absolutes", and more. Some of them run up to $100 or so, which is so far out of my pocket-book range that it's not even funny.

Thus, what seemed at first like a huge renaissance, which could bring comics back to the masses and preserve them in a form that could stand up to the years, now seems to be turning into something that's slowly pricing me out of the comic-book-reading business.

So, Marvel, DC, Image, and the rest, let me say this: pay some attention to your customers' wallets, especially in this crappy economy.

I don't mind the hardcovers, but if the publishers continue allowing them to drive their publishing schedules, if they continue to increase their hardcover-first lines while delaying their TPBs even more ... they're only going to end up hurting themselves.

And me, because I like reading comics.