FFF Results Post #174—Clearly Comics Were Better When I Was A Kid

On Friday, CR Readers were asked to "Name Five Things About Comics From The Year Before You Were 18 That Could And Should Inform The Way Comic Books Are Done Now." This is how they responded.



Tom Spurgeon

1. Make comics for everybody, even girlie-girls.
2. Sell comics where people can buy them.
3. Put gorillas on the covers if that works.
4. Anthologies are great for developing relationships with talent.
5. Letters pages of some sort are good.

*****



Scott O. Brown

1) A multitude of distributors.
2) Newstand availability.
3) Priced under a buck.
4) Cheap paper for the serials, nice paper for the trades.
5) New William Messner-Loebs writing and/or art on a monthly basis.

*****



Tony Collett

1. Superheroes aren't the only genre.
2. A page devoted to company identity (Bullpen Bulletins, Daily Planet, Archie Club, etc) makes your readers feel like a club and that they belong to something.
3. Good things come in bigger packages (treasury editions, 100 page spectaculars, Dollar Comics, giant size/annuals, etc)
4. Selling comics 3 in a bag isn't a good thing. You might have at least one, don't want at least one, and it's hard to determine which comic is in the middle.
5. Superheroes aren't the only genre*.

*I felt so strongly about this I wanted to make it 1,3, and 5 on my list, but I had other thoughts that made the list.

*****



Aaron White

1. Ads in comics should focus on muscle building schemes, kung-fu lessons, and absurd products like erasers "for smart people."
2. Brunettes should have blue highlights.
3. All role playing game-based comics should be third-party knockoffs rather than licensed.
4. I was a kid during the black & white comics glut and thought it was awesome to have thousands of totally idiosyncratic (if mostly crappy) comics. More gluts please.
5. Two words: Spider. Buggy.

*****



Stergios Botzakis

1. Use footnotes to back issues by editors with nifty nicknames
2. Distribute selected books to newsstands, pharmacies, convenience stores, and supermarkets
3. Sell digests! (This seems a no-brainer now, especially if they go to a manga-sized format)
4. Hire dependable writers/artists who can consistently put books out on time, or a whip-cracking editor who runs a tight ship
5. Not have Wolverine or Batman in every other book coming out

*****



Don MacPherson

1) Top-tier comics artists produced more than four to six issues a year.
2) Comics conventions were actually comics conventions rather than pop-culture expos.
3) There was no monopoly in comics distribution.
4) Cheaper paper and stronger ad revenue kept comics prices down.
5) Gimmick covers didn't exist (or were at least incredibly rare).

*****



Nat Gertler

1. The default assumption should be that an issue has a complete story.
2. Third person narrative can move events forward and give you more story in the space provided.
3. Writers taking superhero writing seriously should construct, not just deconstruct.
4. Covers images and cover text can make one curious about what's going on, rather than just conveying the information that Spider-Man swings from buildings.
5. Hostess snack products can stop the most powerful villains. Why mess with the cosmic cube when you have cupcakes?

*****



Buzz Dixon

1. Adult oriented material in black and white comics
2. More magazines carried comic strips/serials in their pages
3. More artist/publisher collectives ala underground comix
4. Far more sports/automotive oriented titles
5. Better quality of fandom

*****



BrainAllGone

1. Lettercolumns and editorial pages which read more like parts of a conversation than platforms for one side
2. Competing distributors, to at least try to hold off the dangers of a monopolistic system
3. More emphasis on building readerships for ongoing titles than on goosing sales with miniseries and events
4. More diversity of genre, especially in the major publishers' main lines
5. Strict adherence to a ship-week-based schedule, so readers don't have to guess when the next issue will be published

*****



Uriel A. Duran

1) Make covers with shiny metal inks or holograms,just to show that comics ain't cheap literature
2) After killing an iconic character, create some suspense by creating four new characters supposed to be him
3) Adaptations of cable animated series
4) Let the market be flooded with speculators until your city finally have comic book shops of its own
5) Dare to publish silly stuff like a Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley one-shot just for the sake of fun

*****

adapted from a suggestion by Christopher Duffy

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posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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