Happy New Year: 2010

After being up late on New Years Eve, I woke  up early the next morning from my dog wanting to go outside.  Looking at the bills on my desk, among the other things I needed to get done before returning to work on Monday, I decided that it would be a good idea to blog an entry to start the new year.  This would beat out writing checks and dealing with bills.  The big question would be:  What to write about on New Years Day?

Most of the people who read my blog are comic fans,  I’ve never been a big fan of exposing my personal life on the internet, and it’s always fun to talk about comics, so I guess that will be the topic again today.  I know!  Let’s talk about the state of the comic book industry in general!

There are some perceptions out there that the comic book industry is on life support.  I don’t feel this way AT ALL.  In fact, I think that it could be argued that the comic book industry has reached a stable plateau.  I would compare comic books to radio.  Radio is not dead, it just fell to a point where it has become stable.  I don’t see Radio going away, and I don’t see comic books going away either.  Now this is just talking about the books.  It gets more complicated when you take into account that the mainstream media has given comic books a cult status of sorts.  The Comic books industry has become a place for experimental ideas that other media groups, like  TV and films, can farm and grow into new projects.  You got a big budget Watchmen movie (Nothing is more “comic book” than Watchmen), discover a Green Lantern film in the works, and then realize that you can’t name every comic book hero movie anymore because there have been so many of them.  From Sin City to The Phantom, Spiderman to Superman, Daredevil to the Hulk movies, when you think about it, there have been a lot of films about comics.  Nope, comics are not ”dead” at all, they’ve just become a place for ideas to form before bigger media outlets spend millions of dollars to produce a TV show or movie.  And the interesting part is that most of these ideas have been here for a long time; they are just starting to reach new audiences.  The average person might not know who Hal Jordan is, but once the Green Lantern movie comes out, it’s far more likely that someone will remember that name then before.  Tony Stark is Iron Man, and he’s also Robert Downey Jr. too to some degree.  Between a famous actor and a colorful Superhero persona, we get a better chance for the viewers (aka the public) to retain the information of his identity over time.  Clark Kent is Superman, Bruce Wayne is Batman, and finally the rest are starting to go mainstream too.

Back to the books themselves, it is no surprise that customers are still buying them.  They read a lot different from how they were so many years ago. ( Note that we are only a year and eight months away from the 50th anniversary of Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) and the first appearance of Spiderman.)  There are less words in them than before, but they read with better dialogue then the long expositions of the 1960′s books.  They are a lot more expensive than they used to be.  Characters today die more and come back more, or at least it seems that way more recently.  The heroes tend to be a bit more grey than black and white like they used to, and every one of our favorites have returned at least once.  And did I mention that people keep buying them?

The comic book industry looks good going forward, so don’t expect a collapse in 2010 or anytime soon there after.  What you CAN expect is that comics are a business, and they will keep doing things to try to get more of your money.  Some of the things you’ll like and others you won’t.  That’s the nature of the creative business of storytelling.   Read your comics into 2010 and beyond, and enjoy them.

Happy New Year!

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