So You Want Something New, Do You? (Sure you do.)

By Ralph Mathieu

By Katherine Keller
January 18, 2010

Ralph Mathieu is the Award Winning owner of Alternate Reality Comics and has been selling comics for close to 15 years.

Over on a comic book retailer forum the other day, a retailer from California questioned why DC had so many Batman titles coming out on that particular week. This question is an interchangeable one that gets asked repeatedly about the Avengers titles, the Spider-Man titles, the X-Men titles, the Dark Reign mini-series, etc. Mostly he was concerned with why companies seem to release their family titles (and I'm using this term to mean groups of Spider-Man titles, groups of X-Men titles, etc.,) in clusters, meaning why do all of the Wolverine or Batman titles come out in the same week instead of spreading them out?

Well, companies don't plan for these titles to come out in groups, but because comic writing / drawing isn't always created on the same timetable the rest of us follow, and because there are so many spin off titles / mini-series / one shots for a certain character or group of characters, this scenario is going to happen often.

I think a better question is: "Why do the companies have so many family titles in the first place?" Do we really need over twenty X-Men titles or over ten Batman titles a month? The best argument I've heard from the companies for the existence of these group of titles is that they partially exist as a talent-development source. Sounds good in theory to me (as does almost anything being done so that more people get to work in the comic book medium). But I just wish it wouldn't be done on the back of over-saturating characters and by bleeding the pocketbooks of the fans who'd feel like they'd be missing out if they don't get all of the titles featuring their favorite characters.

I think comic book publishers produce group titles to increase their market share and crowd retailer's shelves so that they have less room for titles from other companies. It's also true that publishers produce multiple character / team title books to make up for the main title (the tent pole titles) being late and / or said main titles not selling as well as they used to.

So, while yes, they are diluting their characters with these countless spin-off titles and more and more people are leaving these "lesser" titles on the shelf (or just quitting the characters altogether because they can't follow all of them or they've become tired from all the various versions that are being produced), the companies must still be making some kind of profit on them even factoring in the production costs and dropping sales.

Why do publishers continue to produce multiple character titles if the sales on those secondary titles continue to decline? Because when people ask them to produce new characters / concepts, they don't buy them in numbers that approach the sales numbers of even the lowest numbers that spin off titles from iconic, known characters generate.

A few examples of some excellent titles that weren't supported in the kind of numbers that encourage others to be original and / or ended up being canceled because their sales weren't enough to offset continued production are: Kinetic by Kelly Pluckett and Warren Pleece and Hard Time by Steve Gerber and Brian Hurtt (from DC's short lived Focus imprint); Blue Monday by Chynna Clugston (Oni Press); Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart and Albert Ponticelli (Vertigo); and The Unknown and Unthinkable, both written by Mark Waid (Boom! Studios).

There are a few surviving titles that spring up every once in a great while that aren't just spin-offs or watered down versions of characters or concepts that already exist such as: Chew by John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image Comics), The Goon by Eric Powell (Dark Horse), and Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips. However, I'd say this happens only once in about a hundred releases of anything that is truly different or takes an old concept and puts a different spin on it.

Certainly the comic book industry isn't unique in its constant retread of characters or concepts; we just need look at the movie industry with its constant stream of sequels and remakes and all the money those properties make. (Think: "Where are all of the people who aren't flocking to the excellent new Cohen brothers' movie A Serious Man, or Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker?")

For the those of you out there reading this who actually want to read new and different comics that are being produced, here's some of my suggestions for comics and graphic novels that don't just offer the old "been there, done that":

Unknown Soldier, Logicomix, Daytripper, Asterios Polyp, The Year of Loving Dangerously, The Imposter's Daughter, The Ghoul, Whatever Happened To The World of Tomorrow?, Chronicles of Wormwood, Phonogram, The Color of Earth, 20th Century Boys, and Beasts of Burden. Actually, being that you read Sequential Tart (and thank you for that!), you've already branded yourself as a discriminating reader — now go forth and multiply so that more great comics like the above can be produced and supported!