Over the last 5 years, as I've been overtly re-discovering and openly embracing comic books, I've come to a single truth: tons of people LOVE comic books and LOVE to talk about them.
I remember one woman, my guess would be around 60, shyly smiling and giving me a thumbs up at my Spider-Man shirt as we were getting off a plane, quietly talking about her life-long love of the character, even from the days of the first cartoons. Walking past the Supreme Court building in New Orleans, a guy working there saw my Avengers t-shirt and just had to share with me his Captain America wallet (very cool wallet, way too big for me though). People of all ages, across all spectrums of race, gender and sexual orientation have shared with me, often in some quiet yet excited way, their love for comic books.
When I think about my days as a kid collecting comic books I realize that maybe this isn't just a recent trend in my life. I remember being 14 at camp in northern Michigan, a mix of upper middle-class Detroit suburban kids (most Jewish), a large contingent of kids from Mexico (majority Jewish too actually) and kids of a more mixed group from the Chicago area. I ended up as the only one who had brought comic books. I remember kids sort of looking at me funny or asking me about actually bringing them.
But I also remember lots of kids, kids from Farmington Hills, Michigan to Southside, Chicago to Mexico City, asking if they could read and borrow my comic books. My Secret Wars #4-#8 paid for it in terms of collectability, but a kid suffering from horrible anxiety and depression got to share something personal with a lot of people.
If we really had any doubts we could just check out the top grossing films every year.
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But there's a gap between buying Secret Wars in 1986 and shelling out $10 for Doctor Strange. And I'm starting to think that gap needs to be talked about. Because when a bestselling novelist with successful series of novels (not just one or two books, fucking series of novels) quits twitter and tells the world that it's because of comics, more of us need to be addressing this.
Because, honestly, it's past the point of wrong. It's past the point of disgusting. The fact that misogyny and racism now imbue every discussion within comic books (and geek culture maybe) should be more than cause for concern. It needs to be dealt with now. It needs to stop.
That last paragraph should be the conclusion of all this. But my musings on why all this exists comes a very distant second to the fact that it has to fucking stop.
So if you don't read on, if you don't care about some of my thoughts about why and what we can do about it, it's all good.
First and foremost: Fucking stop!
With that in mind, let's get to the gap.
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Arbor Drugs in Oak Park, Michigan. That's where I first discovered comic books off the rack.
I remember any time we were in a supermarket or drugstore flying over to that rack and checking out the latest comic books. As a young kid I wanted Spider-Man and Batman. As I got older I looked for Teen Titans and X-Men. I could walk and bike ride to the drugstore or to the supermarket. The closest comic book store was 4 miles away.
My story's not different from so many. And I sure as hell don't want to romanticize the kid going in and getting a comic book off the rack.
Although, now that I think about it, the ability to grab a candy bar, a Faygo and a comic book was fucking awesome.
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Sorry for the business lesson but I do think it's important to understand retail distribution and how that distribution led to a change that had a dramatic effect on comic books.
Retail Distribution 101: most retail distribution goes through specialized distributors.
It makes sense when you think about it for a second. Picture a Walmart or a Target or even a Best Buy. Think about all the products from all the brands that they have. Think about all the reference numbers for each item and all the reference numbers for all the sub-groups of those items (for example: one style of plain t-shirt can have several reference numbers due to colors and sizes). Imagine having to handle all those products, with all those reference numbers from all those manufacturers. Yikes.
At the same time imagine a single company trying to reach every single retail shelf it can. Even more yikes.
The retail market handles the brunt of this craziness via specialized distributors. These distributors carry an entire portfolio of several manufacturers and their products. This way retailers are able to deal with fewer companies for their purchases, companies that are also specialized in distributing to them and understanding their needs.
Now imagine products that sit on shelves and don't sell. You've seen lots of those. What do these retailers do with them? Good question. They send them back. All of them. It doesn't matter how long your product has sat on a shelf of a retailer, if it doesn't sell, they're returning it.
Newspapers and magazines follow this distribution pattern. Specialized distributors get them out on racks, in stores and markets and in kiosks. They then pick up the unsold material and, almost always, send it back in some way to the publisher.
As you can imagine that system can have an effect on what is actually published. If a magazine loses interest over time then it becomes a pure liability in unsold product and returns.
I worked for a guy in Spain who understood this to perfection and made a lot of money off of it. For him the revenue system beat out any importance of the content itself. He'd launch magazines, many often just re-brands, as new magazines can get big sales at launch and carry them for some months. Once a magazine started to dip too much in sales he cancelled it (sometimes even with a special last issue) and put a new one in its place.
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However even he'd have to tip his hat to the comic book industry. They found an even better way to work the system.
Marvel and DC and most others, most say more than 90% of the distribution of paper comic books, go through one distributor, Diamond. That alone isn't too crazy as, again, most retail markets require specialized distributors. It's easy to understand that there would be very, very few companies that could handle mass distribution of what is still a niche market (no matter how large the niche).
But sometime in the 90's, Marvel or DC or Diamond or maybe all three decided that they were done with mass distribution and especially done with returns.
And so they stopped doing it.
That's it. Fuck it. I'm outta here. Peace!
And just like that comic books got kicked out of every drug store, supermarket and kiosk in the US.
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You'd think this could be nothing but boon for comic book shops. They became, for the most part, the exclusive retail space anyone could find and purchase comic books.
Not the case however. Diamond and the big publishers could leverage smaller stores into eating unsold goods whereas the large chains that made very little of those sales had no problem losing what amounted to peanuts versus accepting some sort of no-return policy.
The individual small businesses that lived off the sales of comic books didn't have that kind of power or leverage to say no. What they ordered they had to keep.
So instead of shops carrying comic books and selling comic books and trying to reach a wider audience, shops had to find out which of their customers were going to buy whatever comic books that were coming down the pipeline and a system of pre-ordering juuuuuust enough to sell but not not so many that you'd have to eat too many returns became the norm.
An entire industry started to base its distribution on pull boxes. Books bought at full price were a fraction of that price weeks later just to get rid of the stock.
You can find a lot of articles about this business move and its effects because, honestly, 20 years later we are seeing the effects.
On the creative side risk aversion became the standard. You can't test as much when all sales are determined on pre-orders. No soft launches. No attempts at growth into new areas. No caring about reaching new markets. No Seinfeld-esque holding onto a good series with poor numbers for a while to see if it gains traction.
Actual access (or mass access, which may convey the idea better but sounds horrible) got slashed and burned. Avenues to reaching a wider audience disappeared. Kids couldn't just grab a comic book and some candy at any store. They had to go to the comic book store. For me that meant getting parents to drive us to the store. But you're talking to a (upper) middle-class white kid in the suburbs who just went over to the next suburb. Entire neighborhoods and even cities, ones that had no comic book shops anywhere nearby, lost easy access to comic books.
Without growth you find stagnation. Not a good thing in business. As sales went down the big two tried to compensate with more huge crossovers, new universe (re)launches but they really made up the difference by raising and raising the prices of the books themselves, making comicbooks even more prohibitive for many.
With a smaller reach and a smaller window for experiments, the comicbook industry, more than ever, catered to a very select group. You have stories and characters that already didn't reflect society (and I don't mean superpowers) getting even more insular. Writers from that group wrote material for that group and based more and more on only that group's perceived desires, essentially inbreeding its readership.
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You can see the difference along generational lines.
At my last job I was the old geek. I had a bunch of superhero bobbleheads on my desk and most Fridays you'd catch me wearing a comic book t-shirt. Everyone loved to come over to my desk and play with my guys but two especially liked talking about them to me. They were both millennials: a woman, white and in her early 20's and a man, black and a bit later down the 20's age line, both lifelong fans.
However, unlike me, they didn't start their passion by reading comic books. In fact, other than borrowing or buying the occasional collection at a bookstore, they almost never bought paper comic books.
J, the man, had started his love with Bruce Timm's Batman, staying hooked on Batman ever since. M could tell you of a few animated series, Batman being one, that got her into comic books and geekdom (it should be said that M also loved The Walking Dead and manga and other good geek stuff as well).
So we have me, the white male dude in his 40's talking comic books with two millennials either not-white or not-male. And now here's the important part, the billion dollar question:
Guess who's background in comic book characters matters more? Guess which one's more legitimate?
NO ONE'S!
That's right. No one's. The fact that I can remember a year long search for X-Men 133 or that I read the original Secret Wars or Crisis when they came out does not legitimize my love over theirs. Hell, often those cartoons and other non-traditional forms of comics have had great impacts on the books themselves. DC doesn't make tons off of Harley Quinn without Timm's Batman.
And yet, thanks to history and exacerbated by the last decades of the insular comic book reading world, we get all these older, white, cisgendered, heterosexual males yelling about what's right.
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When has comic books not been white, cisgendered, heterosexual and male? That's always been true. I was reading some 80's comic books the other day. Whoa.
However in the last 20 years the actual comic book printing market, the one where publishers print a version of a comic book and a customer enters some sort of shop and purchases the comic book, has been based on the same system with the same target market and the same major companies trying to reach that target market.
New blood, new ideas and new characters are awesome. Something that should be celebrated. But when you restrict access, such as specialized only distribution or unreasonable price points (and yes Marvel and DC, your prices are beyond unreasonable. You charge the same for a 15-20 minute read that others charge for entire books), you limit not only the number of readers, but the type of readership you have. When you mostly cater to that market, when you consider that market the default norm, you're limiting the expansion of those new ideas, new thoughts and new blood into the medium.
And you know what you get with that?
You get inbred geeks.
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Guess what fellas, the comic books we read as kids? Not really representative of our society. In fact, there's a lot that's not only not representative, it's actually reprehensible.
I'll demonstrate just one area. Comic books have a lot, and I mean a whole lot, to do to even get to zero when it comes to women. Let's start with the obvious: fetishizations. This starts with the outfits and the overly sexualized drawings themselves. But the treatment goes beyond just the costumes or that somehow entire universes have spent decades having females (and I don't say women because of the age of some of those female characters) only with DD's.
Fetishization means the sexualization of traits that aren't necessarily sexual. You especially see this with racist tropes and women of color but it even filters down to white women. As someone born with red hair I can tell you that there are not as many red headed women on the planet as you see in comic books.
In fact, let's talk redheads. Again, this is nothing compared to the treatment of non-white women (and there are already a number of great sources that have written some important treatments on this that you should read). Let's talk about the sexualization of red hair.
You have Mary Jane Watson, Jean Grey, Barbara Gordon, Medusa, Koriand'r, Natasha Romanov, Pamela Isley, Angelica Jones and any woman involved in a serious relationship with Dick Grayson. Mystique, who has blue fucking skin, is a redhead. Her kid Kurt, who has the same blue fucking skin, has hair much more in line with his overall pigmentation.
And yet major Hollywood studios walk on eggshells and the Internet explodes if one of these overly fetishized redheaded characters is played by a black actor. Yes, it's racist thinking Mary Jane can't be black (and if you have any doubts about that, please read this article). But on top of that, that view of women, that need for the redhead, is already based on the sexualization and fetishization of a trait that is not sexual, red hair.
And, once again, this is microscopic compared to the treatment of women of color.
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So what can be done? A lot.
Let's start with the industry itself.
It's time to end the stupid distribution system and basing all other book distribution (digital for example) on said stupid system. Sorry Diamond, Marvel, DC and those for whom the no-risk system works. Things change. Evolution is good. Your system restricts access and inclusivity and leads the market to be driven, still, by a very specific minority (older, white, cisgendered, hetero, male).
It's time to end, to really end, the dominance of the same pool or type of writers (white, cisgendered, hetero, male) handling all the major everything for the major publishers.
This has to be forced. Yes forced. I don't mean that we need legislation or a boycott (yet anyway), but gradual change only supports those already in power.
G. Willow Wilson and Kelly Sue DeConnick can obviously handle any Avengers or team series, not just ones with all female casts.
Right now there are several black women creators more than capable of writing great runs of Batman. And I mean Bruce Fucking Wayne as Batman.
It's time to let those new creators also have a chance to bleed new life into our old books.
It's time to let them have a shot at creating new characters within the main hero pantheons. I think it's great that Sam Wilson is Captain American, Jane Foster is Thor, Amadeus Cho is Hulk and that X-23 is Wolverine (I'm especially enjoying the last two). But at the same time we need more, diverse blood from the start.
We need more Kamala Khans (Miles Morales, the one character that actually worked in the Marvel Ultimate Universe, fits here too). Kamala Khan to me is the most underrated character in comic books. No disrespect to Carol Danvers, her writers and her fans, but Kamala Khan deserved a movie first. It wouldn't have mattered if Kamala had been called Ms. Marvel or Density Girl, she's a ridiculously amazing character, by far the greatest example today of the old Peter Parker ideals. And what's great is that her source of those very same ideals is completely different than Peter Parker's source. That's awesome.
We need more of that. Much more of that.
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We comic book readers can do more too.
Support diversity and inclusivity with your purchases. Purchase books from smaller studios and more diverse writers. Right now you can find incredible books written by LGBT creators, writers of color and writers from other parts of the world beyond the US and Europe.
Black Mask Studios has a diverse and talented pool of creators, one they purposefully cultivate with their hiring. Peep Game Comix, who call themselves "Your #1 Black Comix Shop", have a constantly growing selection of some really great books (I find DayBlack to be one of the most interesting, artistic and original treatments of vampire mythology I've ever read). Those are just two examples that pop quickly into my head. I'm doing an injustice to many, many more.
Purposefully read other, more diverse opinions. They're out there. If you're really having trouble finding them (and that means you definitely don't use Twitter) shoot me an email. So many black comic book bloggers are writing incredible pieces about race and comic books as are amazing women and LGBT bloggers discussing sex and gender representations. CBR won't die if you check out some other views.
Use your dollar (if you can) to support fair pricing practices. Maybe explore subscription options or sales. I happily shelled out $60 for an entire year of Marvel Unlimited where I have access to thousands and thousands of books. I would do the same if DC and Image had similar offerings.
I'll support others that work on that model, with the exception right now of Comixology Unlimited as it's actually incredibly limited at this time. If they improve the offering I would love to access their library on a subscription basis.
Open your fucking mind. Your childhood hasn't been ruined because a black actor will play your favorite white character or they've decided to go with an all-woman team. Only you can ruin your childhood; it's in the past dickhead. You grew up with your favorite characters that way but those days weren't everyone's golden age.
Remember change is constant. Evolution is a good thing. When the pool shrinks you get inbreeding.
Don't be an inbred geek.
Comic books reflect society. When they were (and still mostly are) white, cisgendered, heterosexual and male they reflected (and still do) the dominance or even supremacy of white, cisgendered, heterosexual male culture.
Now they can reflect another truth, the (unfortunately way too slow) change coming in questioning and outright challenging that dominance. The end of that dominance is a good thing.
For everyone.
Even you.