In March, the New York Times inaugurated its Graphic Books best seller list, just in time to acknowledge the runaway sales of Watchmen, as the trade paperback reaped the benefits of movie hype. ("Comics have finally joined the mainstream,” wrote George Gene Gustines in the NYT's Arts Beat Blog, perhaps a little self-servingly.)
At Comic-Con, the line for Bryan Lee O'Malley created a lively wall of fans of his graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim, currently in film production with Michael Cera as its lead. O'Malley has been popular for a long time, but news of the movie seems to have pushed that popularity to comics rock stardom. (I admit that I had a twinge of "I liked Bryan Lee O'Malley before he was cool! Even before Scott Pilgrim!" as I inched my way around this wall.)
But this isn't just another commentary about comics and Hollywood. I've been thinking about it in the context of what Comics Reporter writer Tom Spurgeon recently wrote: "A successful convention rarely leads to increased industry success because the infrastructure is damaged in fundamental ways...." You can substitute "convention" for "comic book movie" in that sentence—or anything at all, really—and it remains just as true.
It's something I've been thinking about for a while. How long can cosmetic changes give the appearance of stability to a house—or an industry—when there are major flaws in its foundation? Movies, it seems to me, are mere surface when it comes to the health of the comics industry as a whole. One or two books a year benefit from movies, but do others? Is the comics industry as a whole getting stronger because comics are being used to make money in another industry?
I can't say that it has. Five years ago, much of the talk in the industry was about "Team Comics" and full of phrases like "a rising tide raises all boats." Now a sense of grim survivalism seems to pervade those who are not in the flush of Hollywood attention (or part of larger, more stable publishing companies). As Spurgeon noted, the infrastructure is the problem, though I've come to see it less as "damaged" than built to support something different from what we're asking of it. It's not been designed for robustness and diversity. The industry is top-heavy in terms of numbers and, at that top, narrow in terms of content. And all the movies, all the great new graphic novels, all the work publishers do to truly make comics part of that mainstream Gustines wrote about, can't change what is beneath the surface.
I had dinner at Comic-Con with a friend who used to work in theater, and he brought up the theater rule to always support the show, to always be positive when asked how things are going. In a sense I am positive: I see more and more diverse and great work being done in comics all the time. But the more realistic side of me takes over when I think of how difficult getting them to that long-sought-after mainstream has been.
