#Thanos Reading Order (1973 - Present) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gerryconway · 5 years

Text

Superhero Comic Book Publishing: Time to Change

So I've been reading rumors (and had a recent conversation with a top exec at one of the Big Two) about the potential end of Marvel and DC as publishers of original comics, and I Have Thoughts.

These thoughts are the product of fifty years experience working in and around the superhero comic book business, writing and editing for both Marvel and DC. I'm no business expert. I'm not a student of publishing. I can't analyze a spreadsheet or write a business plan. I'm not an MBA. The closest I've come to owning and running a company was helping my second wife develop her small business (though I believe some of the lessons we learned about the perils of expanding a business are relevant here).

No, what I'm about to discuss isn't the result of a deep understanding of big business, market share growth, the realities of corporate politics, or any of the realpolitik aspects of modern day publishing as understood by the people who've brought both companies to this moment of near collapse.

I'm just a long-time observer who's worked in the superhero field almost since its modern inception in the 1960s.

Perspective: when I started writing comics professionally, Marvel was publishing about 12 titles a month, and DC (then National Periodical Publications) was publishing about 30. Comics cost 15 cents and offered between 20 and 25 pages of story. (I'm not going to work with exact numbers because for my purposes here exact numbers aren't relevant; like I said, I'm no MBA, and this is based on personal observation, memory, and experience. If I get a precise number wrong, sue me, it doesn't matter.)

Background: How the 1960s and 1970s got the business to where it is today, and how that era reveals possible ways out of the current crisis.

It was during the 1960s, a period of modest output (compared to today), that almost ALL of the roots of modern superhero comics mythology were created. Modern incarnations of The Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Aquaman and Mera, Wonder Woman, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Black Panther, X-Men, Daredevil, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man--

The list of characters and storylines and mythology created in the 1960s (with overlap from the 50s and into the early 70s) is just flabbergasting-- especially when you consider the size of the companies and the number of creators who accomplished it.

When I started writing for DC Comics in 1968, their offices consisted of half a floor in a modest office building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Eight editors (or maybe seven, I'm not sure) and one editorial assistant worked under one editorial director and one publisher, with a production department headed by one production manager, one assistant manager who doubled as a colorist, one proof reader, and two or three production assistants, and a receptionist. Each editor was responsible for five or six books and only one editor had enough pull to have an assistant. (Mort Weisinger, who edited the highest selling range of books, had Nelson Birdwell "helping" him with the Superman line-- in fact, Nelson did all the hard editorial work while Mort snarled at people.) Four of the editors shared a single office; two others shared an office; and the two most "important" editors had an office each. That's how I remember it-- I may be off on the specifics but the general picture is accurate. This was how the company that controlled the largest market share of the comic book publishing world, possibly more than seventy percent of sales, looked in 1967-68.

Marvel Comics was an even more bare bones operation. With most of its business operations handled by Magazine Management, Martin Goodman's main publishing operation, Marvel Comics itself in 1968 operated out of a small office on Madison Avenue barely the size of a large modern conference room. The company had one editor and one assistant editor, one production manager, one assistant production manager, a part-time art director, a couple of production assistants, and a receptionist. The receptionist had a cubicle; the production staff shared a "bullpen"; the assistant editor and production manager split an office that wasn't really an office, more of an alcove; and the editor (Stan) had a private office not much larger than an average editor's today. This was the company that was revolutionizing storytelling in modern comics-- and while its individual titles were selling extremely well, its market share, due to an onerous distribution deal with its chief competitor, National Periodical Publications, was much less than it might have been.

That's how the superhero comic book publishing business looked in 1967-68. Prosperous but culturally insignificant (at least, not obviously significant). A pair of modest small enterprises, family owned and operated (NPP was bought by Kinney in 1967; Goodman retained ownership of Marvel until 1968), with rigidly controlled costs and a decent, relatively predictable profit margin.

Five years later, in the early 1970s, EVERYTHING had changed. Both companies were now controlled by larger businesses, and both were under pressure to expand market share and increase profits. Simultaneously comic book readership was dropping as the baby boomer audience aged out. The superhero comic book business was in a crisis-- and each company responded in hysterical counter-productive ways. Marvel, no longer hampered by its distribution deal with its competitor, worked to expand its market share with an explosion of new titles in multiple genres-- without proportionately expanding its editorial support structure and production staff. DC Comics experimented with new titles and new formats, without an overall publishing strategy or company-wide creative approach, continuing its tradition of independent editorial fiefdoms.

For most of the 1970s, in other words, both companies, Marvel and DC, faced creative and economic chaos. That chaos produced memorable and influential work-- Kirby's Fourth World was born, I killed Gwen Stacy, the X-Men were reborn under Chris Claremont, Jim Starlin created Thanos and killed the original Captain Marvel, Batman began getting dark-- but the companies themselves were flailing. Management at both Marvel and DC were clueless how to proceed. (As someone who held editorial positions at both companies in the 1970s I can attest top executives at DC and Marvel were way out of their depth.)

No one working in comics in the early to mid 1970s had any realistic expectation the business would even exist by the end of the decade-- news stand sales were that bad and getting worse every year. Cost cutting was rampant. Marvel reduced page count to 18 pages (and tried to hide it by paying writers and artists for 1 page that was printed as a "double page spread"). DC maintained a higher page count while adding reprint pages in order to increase the price. Short term fixes for a devastating long term crisis.

Two events saved superhero comics from disappearing in the late 1970s, and each produced effects that fundamentally altered the economics and creative direction of the business up to the present day.

The first event was the creation of the Direct Sale Market by entrepreneur Phil Seuling in 1973. There are many articles available describing how the direct market expanded through the 70s and 80s, so I won't repeat the details here, but in a nutshell, the direct market offered comic book publishers a way to guarantee the profit on individual titles compared to newstand sales. Comics sold through newstand distribution were returnable; sales to the direct market were not. Returnability meant most of a title's print run was wasted. (Typically in that era a publisher would print, say, 200,000 copies of a title to sell 70,000.) In addition, the direct market offered predictability-- eventually publishers would learn in advance how well a title might do because of pre-orders. These positives, of course, have a downside, but we'll get to that later. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the direct market for comics was viewed by almost everyone in the business as a god send that saved a dying business.

The second event that saved superhero comics was the arrival in 1978 of the first mainstream superhero blockbuster movie-- Superman. That movie and its sequels, followed by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989, fueled the growth of "serious" superhero mythology in mainstream pop culture (as opposed to the kid-friendly Superman series of the 1950s and the camp comedy of 1966's Batman TV show). Those movies (and other baby boomer inspired genre entries into mainstream culture like Star Wars and Indiana Jones) began the gradual colonization of pop culture by superhero mythology which exploded into fruition in the 2000s. In the 1970s, however, the main effect Superman the Movie (and later, the Batman film) had on comics was to temporarily increase sales and thus allow both companies to avoid dealing with longer-term creative and economic questions about the fundamental viability of the industry's business model.

The combination of both events, the development of the direct market and the arrival of the blockbuster superhero film, saved the comic book business as such in the 1970s-- but at the same time created and reinforced conflicting tendencies that today have produced a potentially fatal contradiction in how super hero comic book publishers approach their business.

On the one hand, the growth of the direct sale market into the de facto sole distribution point for superhero comics (the recent Walmart experiment and the digital comic market notwithstanding) has resulted in an incestuous and shrinking niche market for the sale of physical comic books. As recent reporting makes clear, this is unsustainable as a business model. Both Marvel and DC have resorted to increasingly desperate and counterproductive marketing ploys to maintain market share and profitability in a decreasing pool of readers-- a ridiculous explosion of variant covers, "special" events, crossovers, mini-series, extortionately-priced first issues, reboots and rebirths and renumberings, spin-offs and multiple versions of the same superhero teams, more events, more crossovers, more tie-ins. What all of these efforts have in common (despite some high-quality creative work on individual titles) is a complete absense of long-term strategic thinking in either the creative or business sense. What's the plan here? How is any of this short term market share maneuvering going to build and sustain a stable long-term readership? And, in particular, how does it fit with the other, even more significant development in the superhero comic book business-- the ascendency of superhero mythology in pop culture?

That second fact-- the mainstreaming of superhero mythology, begun by the Superman movie in 1978-- is the most significant development in the modern history of the comic book medium, and NEITHER company has developed an effective strategy to address it in their creative approach or their business model. The primary reason they haven't, I believe, is rooted in the first of the two events that saved comics in the 1970s, and is at the core of the contradiction that's crippling the superhero comic book business today-- the direct market and its lock on the distribution of comic books.

On the one hand, you have superhero mythology in mainstream media-- a mass market appealing to millions upon millions of consumers world wide, a potential audience beyond anything imagined by comic book creators half a century ago in our most weed-enhanced fantasies. And on the other hand, you have superhero publishing in the direct market-- a shrinking niche market numbering in at most a hundred thousand, dominated by a core readership of a few thousand, whose financial support is strained to the breaking point and beyond by ruthless and extortionate marketing of low-value-added gimmick publications that thwart long term emotional investment.

In a rational universe, both companies would be examining their core business strategy to stake a claim in the mainstream market-- a claim they have a moral, creative and financial imperative to demand as the originators of the mythology being celebrated. If ever there was a moment for the Big Two comic book publishers to think outside the traditional box, this is it. Instead, they are consumed with chasing the diminishing returns of the direct market-- creating properties to exploit a readership exhausted by the financial and emotional demands of predatory publishing techniques designed to milk as much profit from a shrinking audience as possible. This isn't only cynical, it's stupid and counterproductive-- not to mention ultimately an expression of creative bankruptcy.

So, having analyzed the problem from my own admittedly limited viewpoint-- a viewpoint privileged, somewhat, by fifty years of experience-- do I have any solutions to propose?

Yes, I do.

The superhero comic book business is in a death spiral, and everyone in the business seems to know it. A crisis as serious as this cannot be addressed by fixes at the margins. We need a fundamental break with the business practices that have brought the companies to this point. A radical solution to a radical crisis.

Both Marvel and DC need to redefine themselves as creative entities. What is their CORE purpose? What is their CORE contribution to the larger enterprise of creating superhero mythology for mainstream media?

Is their core purpose publishing paper pamphlets for sale to a small readership of tens of thousands? Or is their core contribution creating stories and characters in comic book format that can be transformed into other forms of media?

If it's the first, their business is a dead end, and nothing they do will extend its existence past the next few years. The direct sale market is dying. There's no time to develop other methods of distribution to profitably replace it. The publishers have tried expanding into bookstores, which, like the comic book stores, are dying. They've tried expanding into big box stores like Walmart, but that experiment seems to have failed. They've sought sales in digital format, but judging by reports of my own sales in that medium, it's not a panacea-- yet. Traditional comic book publishing for profit by the Big Two seems hopeless, by all the available evidence, at least as presently constituted. Maybe, if both companies scaled back overhead and production to 1967 levels-- Marvel producing 12 books a month with a small office and a skeleton staff, DC producing 30 with a slightly larger editorial footprint-- they might survive as pure publishing entities.

But survival shouldn't be a goal.

Instead, I suggest both Marvel and DC dramatically redefine themselves as creators of comic book content first-- and profitable publishers second, if at all.

One advantage both companies have as corporate subsidiaries that they never had as independent family businesses is something they need to embrace and promote to their corporate masters as a positive principle-- neither company needs to turn a profit, at least not in the short term, and not as publishers. Instead they should redefine themselves primarily, in the modern lexicon, as IP creators. Intellectual Property is one of the most important drivers of modern corporate media success-- if not the most crucial component. Comic book publishers are easily the most cost effective creators of IP in modern media. For a media corporation to require profitability of an IP generator like a comic book publisher, when even the highest levels of publishing profitability pale beside the far greater value of the IP itself, isn't just short-sighted, it's counterproductive and self defeating.

Marvel and DC should see themselves primarily, if not solely, as IP generators, and sell themselves to Disney and Warnermedia as such. Publishing should be the tail of the dog; the dog is creation.

If the companies do follow this path, they'll also need to radically rethink their approach to publishing-- ironically, with potential benefit both to themselves as profitable enterprises and to their customers in the direct market.

For example, if your goal as a company is no longer to increase or maintain market share in the direct market, but instead to generate exciting and long-term potential IP, you don't need predatory publishing practices like variant covers, or twice-yearly "events," or extortionate pricing, or required pre-orders. You could even begin to accept returns, lightening the financial pressures on dealers and encouraging them to risk new series. You could reduce the number of unnecessary spin-offs and reboots. You could devote energy to nurturing creatives and long-term storylines.

At one point in the mid 1970s I had a dust up with Marvel's production chief, the late John Verpoorten. I was complaining that a revision to the production schedule would negatively affect the aesthetic quality of a book I was writing and how could he justify that (I was young, naive and arrogant). John looked at me and growled, "From an aesthetic point of view we can maybe justify ten of these books." I was gobsmacked and obviously never forgot his point.

Redefining their core mission as IP generators would allow both Marvel and DC to address John's point positively: is there an aesthetic reason to publish this story? Does it say something new and valuable about our characters, or is it just an effort to increase market share? Does it add to the mythology, or diminish it? Is it good?

Publishing sales success has rarely been a reliable predictor of a superhero story's viability in other media. Venom is a popular comic book character with mixed success in sales-- but a worldwide hit as a movie antihero. The JLA Detroit era heroes ended ignominiously in a market driven by direct sales, but individually have provided useful source material for CW TV shows. The Green Arrow was never a sales leader in comics. Before the Batman movies, Batman was a mid-level but important DC comic. Deadpool was a popular second string character but again never a sales leader before Ryan Reynolds put on the mask.

There's a way forward for both the superhero publishers and the direct market-- but not if the publishers continue to define themselves first as publishers. That day is past. The publishers will have to be bold if they're going to thrive in the post-direct market world. The first step is for them to decide what they do best. In my view, what they do best is create comic book stories. Those stories transcend the traditional sales platform that produced them. It's time for the bird to leave its nest.

#comics #superhero #dc comics #marvel #direct market #publishing #Warnermedia #Disney #superhero movies

127 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 7 years

Text

Tell Me A Story: 15 Weird Superhero Comic Book Formats

Over their several decades of existence, American superhero comics have had to adapt to changing market conditions and changes in reader habits. Anthologies were more popular in the Golden Age but dwindled away as the Silver Age ended. Early Marvel superhero books incorporated continuing subplots to create super-soap operas, and DC naturally followed suit. Today, even as the individual issue with 20 story pages still dominates as the standard comic book format, many readers wait for collected editions.

RELATED: The 15 Weirdest Comic Book Swimsuit Specials

And yet, every now and then there are isolated instances of experimentation in which a publisher bends those dominant formats to either stretch storytelling possibilities or just to attract attention. Never mind the menagerie of 1990s-era cover gimmicks or the modern effects that digital and motion comics can achieve; good old-fashioned print had some surprising tricks. Today, as the “Kamandi Challenge” revives an old DC experiment, we look back (in no particular order) on some odd and unusual ways to present superhero stories.

ROCKIN’ ROUND-ROBIN

If you think creative teams don’t stick around as long as they used to, then you need to consider the round-robin format used in 1985-86’s “DC Challenge” miniseries and currently in use by the “Kamandi Challenge.” Each issue has a different creative team and the only real rule is to end on a cliffhanger for the next team to resolve. Notice that the rules don’t include “tell a coherent story,” because as much fun as the “DC Challenge” teams apparently had on each of their issues, boy-howdy was it hard to follow!

It started with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Adam Strange and some demons in Mark Evanier and Gene Colan’s “DC Challenge” #1, but before it was over, Nazis had won World War II, Superman had a red sun for a head and the JLA Satellite was full of confused super-people. Nevertheless, the round-robin can stretch the capabilities of both readers and creators, and it truly shows off comics’ limitless potential.

A BIG DELIGHT

Likewise, we include the ubiquitous one-page Hostess Cupcake ads of the 1970s for the only rule they appeared to have: Make sure the product is the star. That was the point, of course; but for readers used to Batman and Daredevil fighting ninjas and serial murderers in their regular books, the ads were a bit jarring to read.

Although they featured even wilder plots than the regular comics (birds stealing the Statue of Liberty, for example) and used ultra-powerful characters like Green Lantern and Captain Mar-Vell, the day was always saved by the timely appearance of Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes or Fruit Pies. Granted, who among us can resist rich chocolate taste and/or creamy filling. But the ads were so prevalent that, after a while, one got the impression that the Justice League and Avengers could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by stuffing the Anti-Monitor or Thanos full of sweet treats.

COMICS WITHIN COMICS

In the early 1980s, DC previewed new series with 16-page stories bound into the middle of selected single issues. The “Amethyst” preview was in “Legion of Super-Heroes” #294, “All-Star Squadron’s” was in “JLA” #192, and a little series called “New Teen Titans” was first seen in the middle of “DC Comics Presents” #26.

These previews didn’t have anything to do with the titles they appeared in, but later in the decade, “Bonus Book” inserts tied in more closely and featured up-and-coming talent. Today, the format is back, sort of, through “Dark Knight III’s” bound-in mini-comics. Basically they’re backup stories, but since they’re physically in the middle of the issue, you have to get around them in order to finish reading the main story, and then circle back and hope you read everything in the right order. Whatever you do, though, don’t risk your comics’ value (or its staples) by removing the inserts.

HEARD ANY GOOD PICTURES LATELY?

Another staple of the 1970s, Power Records specialized in book-and-record sets where kids could read along with an audio dramatization. Along with superheroes, the label featured sci-fi franchises like “Star Trek” and “Planet of the Apes.” While Power adapted existing issues, like September 1972’s “Fantastic Four” #126, December 1973’s “Captain America” #168 or January 1974’s “Incredible Hulk” #171, Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios also produced original stories for the label.

These included the Batman tales “Stacked Cards” and “Robin Meets Man-Bat” (reprinted in “Batman Illustrated By Neal Adams” volume 3); Superman stories by Cary Bates, Elliott S. Maggin and Ross Andru; and a 1976 Conan adventure by Len Wein, J.M. DeMatteis and John Buscema that was reprinted as November 1980’s “Conan” #116. Although the novelty comes from hearing an actor screech like Man-Bat or roar like the Hulk, we imagine “writing for the record” is a skill set all its own.

NEXUS IN STEREO

Sometimes the soundtrack is part of the main series. “Nexus” was a superhero series set 500 years in the future, initially published under Capital Comics and now owned by Dark Horse. Writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude’s independent sci-fi superhero classic started out as a magazine-sized black-and-white comic.

Bound into its third issue was a “flexi-disc” with the “Nexus” theme song (co-written by Baron) and an audio dramatization. An editorial explained the benefits: “The intonation of a character’s voice, background music to set the mood and electrifying sound effects all add new depth and dimension to the printed words and art.” While flexi-discs wouldn’t be in every issue, the editorial promised “next time we do this it’ll be even better.” However, there was never to be a “next time,” unfortunately, as the flexi-disc doesn’t show up in reprints and there weren’t any future issues that came accompanied with flex-discs to enjoy. However, “Nexus” turned out to be memorable enough without the audio accompaniment.

INDEPENDENT VOICES

Although it’s not really a distinct format to pair mainstream, corporate-controlled characters with comics creators from more of an independent background, anthologies like the “Bizarro Comics” and “Strange Tales” series are often both entertaining and illuminating.

“Bizarro” allowed DC to reprint Kyle Baker’s instant-classic “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” and “Strange Tales” gave us Kate Beaton’s take on Rogue and Kraven. Tom Scioli and John Barber’s “Transformers vs. G.I. Joe” series, which merged the superfans’ knowledge with their unique styles and filtered it through a ’70s Jack Kirby lens, is also a good example of combining the best of both worlds. Of course, with the Internet, it’s become easier than ever to find cartoonists’ “unsanctioned” takes on superheroes, but the official sanctioning of a DC or Marvel anthology may sand down some rough edges. Still, the freedom these creators normally enjoy usually transfers pretty well, and we’re all better for it.

NEXTWAVE EXTRAS

Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen’s 12-issue cult-classic “Nextwave” (2006-07) took shots at a lot of superhero-comics targets, but it also used some memorable gimmicks to grow an audience. Mixed into Fin Fang Foom’s pants-related anger, the filthy half of the Captain’s codename and Machine Man’s contempt for fleshy ones was the “Nextwave” theme. So too were things like issue #5’s “Crayon Butchery Variant.”

Yes, quite a while before adult coloring books became a thing, “Nextwave” encouraged its readers to cast off the shackles of hues imposed from on high and color the issue themselves. Granted, this was a variant, so readers had to make an extra effort to get it. So unsurprisingly, the non-colored version of the issue hasn’t been reprinted in any “Nextwave” collection. As a further incentive, though, Marvel conducted a coloring contest, and the winner’s name (Matthew Keegan, whose entry can be seen here) was forever immortalized in said collections.

EASY LIKE SUNDAY MORNING

The 12-issue weekly “Wednesday Comics” was designed to emulate the classic comics pages of Sunday newspapers, when adventure strips like “Prince Valiant” and “The Phantom” got ample room for their Sunday-continuity installments (Feel free to ask your grandparents for more details.). Each issue of “Wednesday Comics” folded up into a standard 7″ x 10″ comic-book size, but opened into 15 gigantic 14″ x 20″ broadsheet pages.

The features included DC’s A-listers as well as Kyle Baker’s “Hawkman,” Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook’s “Kamandi” and Paul Pope’s “Adam Strange.” Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred’s “Metamorpho” even did two pages which combined to form the Periodic Table of the Elements. “USA Today” also published John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo’s “Superman” strip. The collected edition is similarly impressive, and includes a “Plastic Man” short feature; but nothing beat the love-of-reading experience from picking up each issue as it came out.

EVENTS PUBLISHED IN REAL TIME

One series which demanded to be read as it came out was 2006-07’s sequel to “Infinite Crisis,” the year-long weekly “52.” Since all of DC’s ongoing superhero comics had gone through a one-year time-jump, only “52” chronicled the missing year. Its brain trust, which included writers Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka, and layout artist Keith Giffen, further imposed a strict real-time rule that each issue would cover one week. The only cliffhanger involved one issue ending at 11:59 p.m. and the next starting at midnight.

The method was popular enough, with some fans reportedly waiting to read each day’s events as they “happened,” meaning a fan on a Tuesday would stop reading on when he or she reached the part of the issue dealing with a Wednesday. There had been real-time comics before (the “Batman: No Man’s Land” epic played out over the course of a year, for example, from January to December 1999), but with elastic timelines a staple of superhero storytelling, “52’s” adherence to its internal rules was both a clever gimmick and a steadying influence on its pacing.

TRIANGLE TIME

Some superheroes are simply too big for one book, but when a hero has multiple comics titles being published, those books don’t necessarily have to flow together. When they do, however, the results can be quite engaging. In the early 1980s, Bat-writer Gerry Conway structured issues of “Batman” and “Detective Comics” so that “Detective” continued “Batman’s” stories, and vice versa. The format ended with 1986’s “Batman” #400, but not long afterwards the three Superman books (“Action Comics,” “Adventures of Superman” and “Superman”) picked it up.

To keep everything straight, the Super-titles put the reading order in a little triangle on each issue’s cover. It lasted about 10 years, before including the addition of a new monthly series (“Man of Steel”), as well as incorporating a new quarterly book (“Man of Tomorrow”) for the months that had five Wednesdays in them. It could be overwhelming at times, but the four series combined to tell some true epics, including the “Death of Superman,” “Funeral For A Friend” and “Return of Superman” story arcs.

PAGE-HOPPING

We’ve already talked about comics within comics, but Walt Simonson’s “Fantastic Four” #352 (May 1991) presented a story within a story, and the “inner” story was out of sync with the “outer” one! The main (“outer”) story involved Doctor Doom, Ben Grimm reverting back to the Thing, and Ben’s girlfriend Sharon Ventura giving up her own career as the Thing in her absence.

Doom had captured the FF and challenged Reed Richards to a duel using time-jumping devices. Their fight, which was waged across increments of minutes and seconds, was the “inner” story, and it unfolded in out-of-sequence vertical panels that ran alongside the in-sequence main story. Readers had to follow the timecodes in both stories in order to keep everything in order, and could check their work with the occasional panel where the two timelines intersected. It was a great use of single-issue real estate and the kind of innovative technique “FF” helped pioneer.

DIAL “R” FOR READER

Created by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney for January 1966’s “House of Mystery” #156, “Dial H For HERO” was one of Silver Age DC’s crazier concepts. It involved a magic “H-Dial” which would turn its owner into a randomly-generated superhero and, more often than not, a one-off character created specifically for the story.

The feature ran until issue #173 (March-April 1968) but was revived in February 1981 via a special insert (remember those?) in “Legion of Super-Heroes” #272. (It then moved to “Adventure Comics” and was a backup in “Superboy.”) This time, writer Marv Wolfman and artist Carmine Infantino’s gimmick was using characters submitted by readers, who both received credit for the idea and had a T-shirt sent to them in exchange for their intellectual property. While it was probably a time-saver for the creative team, no doubt they also wracked their brains trying to figure out how to work Lawnmower Lass, or whomever, into the stories.

THIS COMIC CAN KILL YOU

In “Animal Man,” Grant Morrison famously broke the fourth wall to introduce himself to the main character, Buddy Baker. Over 20 years later, Morrison would revisit the idea of characters addressing the reader directly in his “Multiversity” miniseries, especially in the “Ultra Comics” one-shot, which was an installment about a character named Ultra from the “real world” of Earth-33, who was a comic book come to life.

In other words, “Ultra Comics” was about itself, and by reading the issue, readers participated in the character’s life, including his birth and (very short) career. At the end of the issue, Ultra sacrificed himself by trapping his foe within the pages of the comic, begging readers not to let it out. To that point, “Multiversity” was already pretty meta-textual, so “Ultra Comics” was over the top on a number of levels. Nevertheless, the reader-participation angle gave the miniseries an entirely new dimension.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE COMICS

One of the many tools in Ryan North’s utility belt is a knack for choose-your-own-adventure storytelling. Besides his great mostly-prose Shakespeare adaptations (“To Be Or Not To Be” and “Romeo And/Or Juliet”), he’s also written a couple of chooseable-path comics. In November 2012’s “Adventure Time” #10, he and artist Shelli Paroline crafted a labyrinthine tale about the Ice King putting our heroes under the control of a mysterious force (guess who) which got more and more twisted as the issue played out. The ending even depended on the sheer number of options the story eventually encompassed.

More recently, in June 2016’s “Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” #7, North and artist Erica Henderson allowed the reader to guide Squirrel Girl to victory against Quoggoth, Swarm, and/or Doctor Yes, with Galactus himself as your host. Chooseable-path comics aren’t new (see “The Unwritten” #17, for example) but North has brought them back into the limelight and made them a one-man trend.

TITANS SEPARATELY

Superhero comics of the early ’90s get well-deserved attention for the cover-enhancement craze. Therefore, to stand out from all the chromium and foil, DC promoted September 1992’s first issue of “Team Titans” with — wait for it — alternate interiors. That’s right, not only did “Team Titans” #1 feature variant covers for each of the five Titans, each variant also included the 18-page origin of its cover-featured hero.

Accordingly, if you wanted to get the whole story, you had to buy five different issues (all of which were written by Marv Wolfman). That was overkill, since the variants all shared the same 22-page main story; and on top of that, the main story was Part 3 of a Titans-franchise crossover! Those of you doing the math will realize that if you bought all five variants, you got 4 extra copies of Part 3 of the crossover. Needless to say, DC decided to keep the variants on the covers only from then on.

Got a favorite storytelling strategy or comic book gimmick? Tell us in the comments!

The post Tell Me A Story: 15 Weird Superhero Comic Book Formats appeared first on CBR.com.

http://ift.tt/2jeTgfi

#Aion_Rsa

1 note · View note