In June, there will be 1,634, 701 comics titles released. That is an increase of 17,200 on May and it is becoming clear as a mole's arse that this kind of growth is unsustainable. Admittedly, Marvel and DC employ over 1million people each, making them the two largest employers in the world, but how long before the bubble bursts, spewing a sort of creamy streaked faecal residue over everything?
Shortly before his first death in 1974, comics legend Jack Kirby said in an interview with a transvestite that he felt by 2010 there would be more than 1.5million comics on sale every month and he believed that as many as all of them might be very poor. Shortly before Kirby's second death, some years later, he smeared blood streaked vomit on his nurse's exposed nipples - it was all he could muster.
It has to be said that now there are more comics than there are potential story lines, there is a propensity for repetition and for the totally mundane. The 3-part Spider-Man: Crochet School is a perfect example; a comic series, which according to crochet professionals was lacking in factual accuracy and a true depiction of Peter Parker. Another example would be Justice League Antigua, essentially an excuse to have semi-naked super heroes swanning about on a Caribbean island drinking coconut milk and performing felatio on unsuspecting locals. Ultimately, Spawn: Bored was very much a lowlight in comics mediocrity, but at least some people saw the humour in it.
Of course, there's going to be a lack of quality control when all you employ are dribbling lobotomised idiots on a government funded return to work scheme for the mentally retarded and the dysfunctionally crap; but this is one of the ways that both DC and Marvel manage to avoid paying both hefty tax bills and obscenity law fines; Image don't mind paying them because they get tax breaks on having to pay them because they aren't good enough to employ more than a million people. A perfect example of this lack of QC is Nujjees from DC. It's about a toy monkey that eats metal and then dies. It was a mass of swirling bright colours and gurning faces; yet sales were tremendous among the slightly insane and weirdly bananas category.
Ostensibly, the main reason for people buying 2.7billion comics a month is because the world is a wonderful place and we're all very rich and healthy thanks to the real life superheroes, whose comics we talk about have made the world a safer and better place. People like to read the drawn adventures of their favourite heroes rather than watch them on television or in real life. The controversy recently that some stories were made up and didn't really happen sent shock waves through the industry. This led to the unprecedented move by Jim Shooter to attempt to buy the patent for $1. He cited a little known clause that fortunately was made up and forged to look like a true thing. But the repercussions could be devastating.
Possibly the worst thing happening to comics at the moment is the proliferation of gay comics and comics aimed at paedophiles. I know that the two groups are not mutually inclusive, but do we really want our children subjected to graphic pictures of men doing it? Do we really want to see evil child rapists doing unspeakable things to girls under the age of 10? Well, it appears we do! Marvel's X-Men: Paedo Time was the highest selling comic in 2008 (a copy was sold at the summit of K2); DC's biggest selling comic of 2009 was Superman: Chicken Fucker and this year's biggest selling book so far was Green Lantern: Homo Paedo Kids on Acid, which tells the story of a group of sexually abused teenagers who take drugs and start having sex with people of similar gender. The only criticism all reviewers had with this million selling title was Green Lantern only appears in the last 3 frames of the 26-part maxi-series.
What does this say about the reading public? The USA now have more comics about illegal sexual practices than Japan has comics about changing a baby's nappy - 42,716 at last count and all of them rank inside the top 50,000 best sellers. Speaking of which, has it not become a pointless exercise to produce a magazine called Comics Sales Figures Monthly if all it is going to have is 2700 pages of lists, month in month out. A little bit of analysis wouldn't go amiss. CFSM is, of course, one of the smaller selling magazines about comics. It's total yearly sales is only 44, but at $35,000 a page for advertising, they only need to sell 40,000 pages of advertising a year to break even.
Magazines about comics have existed for hundreds of years, even before comics had been invented; but 2009 saw the birth of a new phenomena - the magazine about comics magazine news. This was a great success for the publisher and the first issue sold over 2million copies. However, by #3 sales had dropped to 118. Many believe the decision to print the entire magazine on weasel leather from #2 was a deciding factor. Splotch is now the most successful magazine about comics in the world. Produced by a blind dwarf and a paraplegic ex-financier from Oregon, Splotch mixes news and views with high definition photographs of 17 year old virgins' delicate parts and, of course, it's Look Where I Took A Shit section has won numerous awards, including one from the British Grape Federation.
Overall, the industry is so healthy it can afford to buy many small under-developed countries, as Marvel attempted recently when it tried to buy the Maldives (rumour has it when the company failed, it tried to sink the island with a big corkscrew like device - obliterating 5 before being driven away by the legion of dancing skulls). The future for comics however isn't so rosy. Producing comics by artists so substandard readers have problems working out not only what is going on, but also who is who, is ridiculous and a recipe for some uneatable Sunday dinner. Editor in Chiefs have both pinpointed the need to gag the slaves while they are being tortured and to get the most out of artists like Anthony Williams; who has had his hands sewn back on and is currently undergoing rehabilitation before returning to draw 30 comics in a calendar month.
Many of the smaller independent writers, who are either blacklisted from major publishers or are just ignored, now use computer generated comicbooks, where they feed a script into the computer and the finished comic comes out the other end; pencilled, inked, lettered, coloured and edited, all by a computer programme. The only problem is that editor software is temperamental at best; often comics come out with misinterpreted dialogue.
In conclusion; all cats are grey; my doctor has got 4 fingers, the state of play amongst the major rivals is one of trepidation and cautious pessimism and who is having what for tea tonight. The obvious parallels can be drawn, but we haven't got enough pencils.
Live prosperously and long.
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