Jimmy Palmiotti has more comic book credits
under his belt than can be sensibly listed in a sidebar biography.
He's done lots. Trust us. We don't lie. Much.
Notable amongst the above mentioned credits
are: Co-creator of 21Down, The Resistance,
Gatecrasher, Ash, and Painkiller Jane. Editor
and founder of Marvel Knights, working on Daredevil,
Black Panther, Punisher, Killraven, and
The Inhumans. Writer/co-writer on Beautiful Killer
and Superboy.
Jimmy is also one of the comic industry's
most popular ink artists, having put his pen to Superman, Batman, Catwoman, Midnight Mass, Codename ; Knockout, Sci -Spy, Punisher, Nick Fury, Brotherhood, and many, many more.
Justin Gray has been extremely lucky in
that he has managed to slide his way into a number of exciting
and interesting situations for which he was distressingly under
qualified. He traveled to the mountains of the Dominican Republic
and mined amber with the local people, spending his nights partying
on the balconies of Santa Domingo. Along with eccentric inventor
Roy Larimer, Justin has delivered previously undiscovered species
of insects to the curator of entomology at American Museum of
Natural Histrory.
Currently Justin is co-creator and co-writer
of 21Down and The Resistance, with Jimmy Palmiotti,
as well as being co-writer of Chastity Re-imagined from
Chaos! Comics.
His upcoming projects include a piece of
sequential fiction for the official Matrix
Movie Website with artist JG Jones.
So, Spider-Man makes a boatload of money [sorry Stan, your check isn't in the mail] and we have free comic day, which was a great idea, and another summer of conventions, which have already started. Is this the new renaissance of comics born on the strength of a record-breaking movie? Are we finally going to go back to the days of big sales and diverse titles? More creator owned visions? Well, folks... it isn't looking better.
What it looks like is a nostalgic longing to return to the past rather than creating a new future.
To the world at large, comicbook’s are silly superheroes and that's it, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, and after the second movie, Blade as well. I witnessed the daredevil trailer the other day and... DD looks like a leather boy on the west side of N.Y. minus the ball gag. I hope there is more to that movie than what we saw, but even so...its all back to the same old, same old.
Everyone around me in this industry complains about how no one outside the usual circle reads comics and if you are from the outside looking in, we are a limited medium...at first glance [and most of the time, last glance] there seems to be nothing but superheroes on the racks in comic stores. Maybe just calling it a comic store is our first mistake...but that's for another day.
How can the bigger companies say this is a great time for comics when all they do is 200 versions of the same character and pat themselves on the back because it sells? Well... they can all be happy that the ONLY thing selling is superheroes, and they are lucky to be in that business... but are we really helping ourselves when intelligent people that finally take the plunge walking into a comic shop get bombarded by the same old thing they feared they were going to run into? Sure, some comic shops work really hard to steer people to the non-mainstream sections, but these are usually in the back, on a rack facing the back of the store or shoved in the bottom sections of the displays. As usual, they are in the business to sell books, so I understand the need to keep the "blockbusters" in plain sight. My point is that we need to create more genre-oriented blockbusters. We need to start showing people that, just like special effects these days, we can do anything, tell any type of story...expand the ideas...not just take a new twist on an old idea and get excited about it. What we need to grow as an industry is diversity...and we need it quickly.
A lot of you will tell me, “hey Jimmy, there are a lot of different books being done these days”, and I agree... but they are increasingly difficult to find.... my 5 local stores handle nothing published by fantagraphics, top shelf, gemstone and so on... it has gotten so bad they put brand new vertigo books in the back of the store.... when they order it. My one local store just orders the top 20 books. That's it. They are becoming like the quick fix 7-11, when I, as a consumer, need a supermarket to stimulate my diet... micro-waving meatball heroes on a regular basis is gonna kill me.
Justin: I read comics when I was a kid, most everyone connected to the medium has. When girls moved into the picture, my comics found themselves tucked in a nice dark corner, abandoned for fear of exposing them would restrict my potential for getting laid. Why, because the sexy babies looked at comics as uncool.
This is not an uncommon story. Eventually I wandered back into a comic shop only to find that things hadn’t changed all that much. The most noticeable change occurred in me. I could no longer relate to what had once been a significant part of my childhood. I tried to find material that appealed to me at 22. Then again at 25. I was having a difficult time. Still am.
I tried to understand why a guy like Reed Richards wastes so much time building a flying car, tapping into alternate universes and constructing massive gadgets when he could uncover an energy source that eliminates the need to buy oil from the Middle East.
Rudy Guliani could clean up Gotham in two terms of office and he doesn't need to live in a cave or wear a pointy hat to do it. Yeah, there might be some pervert suit profiling but hey, they are villains.
Superman, for example, could one day say, fuck it, you stupid people never learn and I'm not really helping you grow by pulling your ass out of the fire every month like an overprotective parent. It gets boring playing nursemaid to an entire planet of people that keep making the same mistakes. Try a couple of hundred years of enslavement to Darkseid and I'll come back to see if you're mature enough to make a better world.
So I realized that the comics of my childhood were exactly where they needed to be, in the past still running that happy loop for new generations of readers. It wasn’t their fault that I had changed. I was ready for something new…Unfortunately the new generations were thinning and something new was hard to find and even harder to buy.
Like Jimmy said, variety is important. Diversity is what drives any market. Diversity doesn’t mean wrapping other genres in a leotard, it means offering a wide range of stories and ideas. Nothing wrong with superheroes, I repeat, nothing wrong with superheroes--so please don’t crowd my mailbox with hate mail, but if the goal is to bring in new readers and expand the medium, then the cape and boots crowd can’t do it alone.
Taking the medium into different retail outlets is slowly becoming a major focus of some of the big companies, but will it be more superheroes on the shelves tucked away in a section behind the making of star wars and guide to Buffy monsters? Will there eventually be comic books logged in the literature section? I hope so, but right now I’m having a difficult time finding non-superhero books in stores dedicated to selling comics.
See, the funny thing is that when I give people, (that don’t read comics), a comicbook to read, they like it. I’m always passing comics on to women because that is the untapped market. Unfortunately the idea of walking into a comic shop doesn’t appeal to most women for obvious reasons. However, put Love and Rockets, Ghost World or Liberty Meadows in Express, Wet Seal or any of the trendy clothes shacks and you might see some female readership. You have to hit them where they live.
Fortunately there are other options for people seeking diversity. http://www.orderingcomics.com set up by Warren Ellis is an excellent resource for lesser known, hard to find books. The site cuts through the fat and saves you the time and money involved with tracking down titles that might appeal to you. Hey if you’re worried about what your friends might think, just slip a copy of ROSEMARY'S BACKPACK inside your Amazing Spider-Man and no one will be the wiser.
