Comics' Biggest Problem

So I've been reading comics almost all my life, and when I say that, I mean I started reading comics at two years old when my mother, I'm guessing, grabbed a copy of Popeye the Sailor Man at a grocery store and gave it to me while I was riding in the cart.

And I've been a professional comics book nerd for 15 years, and I can say with some authority that comics has a problem. And I'm gonna tell you what that problem is in just one second.

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So the problem with comics is, despite all my bona fides, if you were to ask me, "Hey man, my kids really like Brand New Day with Spider-Man. I'd like to get them the comics. Where should I start?" I can't answer that question. I genuinely don't have any idea where to start with Spider-Man or honestly any of the other major characters.

This sort of problem, the lack of an entry point, is something that is actually weirdly unique to comics. It's not quite the only place that does it, but it is astonishingly rare if you think about it.

So take One Piece, right? Which is a manga that has, I don't know, 90 or 100 volumes as I record this. Yeah, that's a lot to wade through, but if you wanna start One Piece, you just start at the beginning and you work your way through it.

And if you wanted to read the James Bond novels, not that there are that many of those, you'd start at the beginning and work your way through it. And that's usually the case for most fiction. That's television shows, animated shows, movie series. It gets a little whiffy when you get to stuff like the MCU, which is interconnected in kind of a web-like sort of way.

But generally speaking, you have these easily defined entry points, and Western Big Two comics just don't most of the time. So we can find that we have these runs that we can point people to that we're like, "Oh yeah, this is good." But even then, those are often steeped in so much mythology and lore that it's a really hard entry point, you know?

And sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't. When I was a kid, you could buy comics anywhere you wanted: the grocery store, the convenience store, that sort of thing. But you were not generally getting the same comics every month, so you might pick up some of Chris Claremont's very soap opera-y run on X-Men and have to kinda dive in and just sort of figure out what was going on.

But if you are not already predisposed to like comics, the fact that there's not a good entry point to most of them is a legitimate problem. It's one of the reasons that when a movie based on a book comes out and the movie's successful, usually book sales will skyrocket.

That often doesn't translate into comics. People wonder why the MCU hasn't translated into massive success with the Marvel comics, and a lot of it is that there's just no entry point, and the comics that are coming out tend to be so interwoven, interconnected, event-driven that there's just not a way in if you're a new person

I would suggest, and this is bold coming from a mid-level writer, the one thing that would be very cool to do, and one thing that honestly DC is kind of doing right now as I write this, is to create a separate continuity sort of thing with limited crossovers that starts at the beginning of a character's sort of journey and distills their iconic characters and moments down.

So that if somebody asks me, "Oh, I wanna read Batman, where do I start?" I'm not fumbling around just suggesting stuff like Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One or, you know, the Court of Owls. All that stuff is great, but that's not a great answer to where do I start for Batman for somebody who is a complete newbie to comics.

Whereas you could give them Absolute Batman, and they could just start reading at the beginning. And even though the Absolute universe is a complete uni- universe unto itself, it is a thing that can be entered and understood by newbies with minimal friction. And the point isn't that all comics should be built that way, right?

There is absolutely a space for comics that are for people who have been into comics for decades. The massive continuity and diving into those details is wonderful, but it is friction. And the more friction you put between a potential reader and a book, the more of those readers you're going to lose.

One of the reasons that things like Dog Man are successful is that there is no friction. You can find them kind of anywhere kids are. They're relatively self-contained. You can start at one and read through them, and you're good to go. And it's the same way that is part of the reason I think that manga has been as successful as it is.

Now, manga has the advantage of having a winnowing process so that we're kind of getting the best of the best, or certainly things that have been successful enough to go long enough to be translated. So being relatively self contained is not the only advantage.

But in general, the fact that you can start with Tokyo Ghoul or Naruto or My Hero Academia and find an easy path through it, even if it's a long one, is a real big advantage that, you know, we're just kind of losing with comics.

So I think comics should make a space to really make an effort to mimic that kind of stuff and give an entry point to new readers and then make sure that those new readers have access to it in as many places as possible. That, I think, is going to solve the problem with comics.

-Justin