What are they reading in Prospect magazine? Why, comics:
Two recent American novels have spirited the topic of superheroes out of its usual quarters in comic books. In Superpowers by David J Schwartz, five college students attend a party and gain amazing abilities overnight, for reasons left wisely unexplained… More successfully, Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman alternates between two narrators, the evil genius Doctor Impossible and the aspiring superheroine cyborg Fatale… both a send-up of the superhero genre and a loving homage to it.
Instead of reading poorly-written1 novels about superheroes, why isn’t this person reading superheroes in their natural habitat – the comic book?2 One of the reasons – I would argue often the main reason – why the sort of person that reads Prospect magazine doesn’t read comics is simply the design of most comic books. For every comic that has a reasonably well-designed cover, you’ll find at least one that’s average and at least five that are downright embarrassing. Here’s a nice picture to break up the text, from the cover of All Star Superman 10:
To most people, books are a persona signal, an outward sign of the sort of person that they want to go Kevin has the answer:
This, of course, got me to thinking about how comics, particularly the ones coming from DC and Marvel, compare in design to what’s on the book market lately and what I would do to sell graphic novels and trade paperback collections alongside Twilight and whatever adventure Tom Clancy’s Op Center has found themselves on this time… I think a lot of the comic book design mentality revolves around a culture that already exists, particularly in the case of Marvel and DC’s superhero lines.
He then goes on to deliver some nifty designs that show that you can communicate what a comic is about using cover design. His tastes are the opposite of most comics – minimal and representative – but the point is that good design helps to sell books. For example, this cover for Daredevil is fantastic, the design matching the themes of the book perfectly.
I grew up reading the classic newsstand comic – cheap four-colour action wrapped in a garish cover – and never had a problem with it then, so why is it a problem now? It’s a problem because comics are trying to compete in a crowded marketplace, and they’re a visual form – so why on earth wouldn’t you market them visually? In a culture where superheroes are now a mainstay of the film industry, you don’t have to be embarrassed by the content any more – but you can still be embarrassed by the packaging.
Nuff said.
- The original quote says the first suffers from “poorly differentiated characters and an excess of narrative viewpoints”, while the second proves that the “inclusion of every comic-book trope in his world can be distracting and the plot twists are underwhelming” [↩]
- Of course superheroes are now migrating from to a new natural habitat, the cinema, but that’s literally another story. [↩]