Here's What Bugs Me About Comics
I love comics so much — some of my earliest memories involve visiting the Million Year Picnic and New England Comics, and gazing in wonder at all the colorful covers, and I've been reading and collecting comics since my early twenties. I think comics are one of the most vibrant and engaging storytelling forms in the world, and I've been so grateful to get to write some recently. But there's one thing I find a bit frustrating about the comics industry, which has been bugging me as a reader recently.
Simply put: I feel like the big comics publishers are largely geared towards people who buy single issues. Whereas I only read the trade paperback collections, and this is true for everyone I know these days.
I used to love the single issues, partly out of nostalgia for those childhood visits and partly because there's something magical about a serialized narrative with monthly twists and cliffhangers. But these "floppies" quickly turn into clutter, because I can't store them on my bookshelves with their spines out. I've gotten rid of most of my single issues, but I still have a kitchen cupboard full of random issues from the 2000s and 2010s, and I have no idea what those issues are without pawing through them one by one. I've invested in cardboard longboxes, but then I don't know what issues are inside which longbox unless I painstakingly sort and document them. It's gotten to the point where I've been trying to replace some of my most beloved back issues with trade paperback colllections, but that gets expensive fast.
But as I quickly learned when I was writing for Marvel last year, the big comics publishers still care a lot about single-issue sales. Sales of a twenty-page comic book seem to be a major barometer of a series' success, and all of their promotional energy goes into pushing those issues, especially the first issue of a new series. By contrast, when the trade paperback comes out, there's little fanfare and it's easy to miss it.
To find out more about why this is, I talked to Brian Hibbs, veteran retailer and owner of my local comic book store Comix Experience. (I highly recommend Comix Experience's Graphic Novel of the Month Club, which delivers a fantastic read every single month. They ship all over the United States! It makes a wonderful gift for your loved ones.)
Brian told me that his store makes most of its money selling trade paperbacks and graphic novels — but that single issues sold way more by volume, and there were a lot of consumers who were more willing to pony up $3.99 to try a comic than plunk down a whole $25. Which does make sense. Also, Brian pointed out that the individual issues help cover the cost of pagerates for writers and artists, and artists tend to get paid a lot less for graphic novels that weren't single issues first.
Still, I have a gripe, and that is: I wish the big comics publishers would put a bit more emphasis on the trades, and make them easier to find out about.
This is something that's been bugging me as a reader, more than as a creator, to be honest. I'll give you a lightly fictionalized example of something that's happened lately.
Let's say a writer I love has just started writing the Kumquat-Man comic. I see a lot of fanfare for the first issue of her run on Kumquat-Man, so I'm like, "Great, when does the trade come out?" I go to the publisher's site, and they have a special landing page for Kumquat-Man, explaining about all his Kumquat-based powers. Then they go on to recommend some issues from the early 2000s — and there's no mention of the Kumquat-Man comic they just started publishing!
A little time goes by and Amazon starts listing a trade paperback of this writer's Kumquat-Man run, which is coming out in five or six months. Great! I'd like to pre-order it right away — but there's a problem. My local comic book store can't place that pre-order yet, because it's not listed in Previews and won't be in the store's system for a few months. I end up putting a note in my calendar for a few months from now, to remind me to nudge my local comics retailer to pre-order this trade for me. To be clear: I could pre-order earlier if I wanted to get it from Amazon or Bookshop.org, but I want to support my local store. So my calendar ends up being cluttered with reminders to pre-order stuff.
This is a problem for the single issues too, but to a lesser extent. Major comics publishers will promote their latest single issues on their homepages, but it's sometimes hard to find a simple list of every comic they've published lately starring Kumquat-Man or whoever.
I often find that I miss trades when they're coming out — and trades vanish from the shelves pretty quickly. They tend to go out of print fast, and then their prices skyrocket at alarming rates. I mentioned before that I'm trying to replace some of my most-loved back issues with trades, but sometimes I'll find a trade that retailed for $20 five years ago is now going for $50 or $60 everywhere I look.
I feel like trade paperbacks have a big problem with discoverability. According to some retailers I've spoken to (not Brian in this case), this stems in part to an issue with metadata. Metadata is what allows you to search on stuff and find what you're looking for, and a Kumquat-Man trade should ideally be tagged with all of the creators who were involved, plus all the major characters who appeared. In practice, though, the metadata on trade paperbacks is often really spotty, so even on Amazon (which usually has somewhat reliable info about prose books) it can be hard to find stuff by a particular creator, or featuring a particular character. If you want to make sure to catch all of Kumquat-Man's appearances, you need to become an obsessive superfan.
It should be very easy to see at a glance who wrote and drew a comic, and also to search for every trade paperback featuring a particular creator. But for various reasons, this information is easy to find for single issues, but much more elusive for trade paperbacks. I want to be able to stalk the creators I love, and this industry makes it so hard!
When I told Brian that I often have a hard time knowing what trades are coming out, and which things to watch for if I want to stalk Gail Simone or Vita Ayala, he pointed out this can be a problem with prose books too. And I was forced to concede that he has a point: how often have my author friends had a novel come out, but I don't find out until months or years later? (Especially now that Twitter has been X-ed out, this is a huge issue.) As a book review columnist, I've found I spend an ungodly amount of time just scanning through various sites to figure out which books I should look at. Nevertheless, see above, re: Metadata. I find trade paperbacks uniquely frustrating because they often aren't linked to all the main creators who worked on them.
Comix Experience puts out a lovely newsletter (in print and online) with lists of everything coming out, but I'd really love an internet resource that lets me say, "Hey, tell me everything Saladin Ahmed has written lately," and get a list.
And as the Kumquat-Man story indicated, I find the internet presence of the major comics publishers frequently less than user friendly. I see a lot of static content that hasn't been updated lately, and no easy way to track a character across all their appearances.
This system, like a lot of the comics industry, seems to be geared heavily towards the habitual consumer, the comics stalwart who tracks new releases assiduously and/or has a pull box at their local store. It's definitely not geared toward casual readers who maybe saw the last Kumquat-Man movie and are curious to read about the character.
According to Brian, some of this is due to the fact that there are two different markets for trade paperbacks: specialty comics shops and bookstores. And these two markets never talk to each other and don't understand each other. Comics shops get a new catalog every month, whereas bookstores get seasonal catalogs. As I mentioned above, I prefer to get my graphic novels and trades from a comics shop, because I get amazing recommendations for other stuff I might like and because of the great conversations I have about comics — whereas in a bookstore, graphic novels are just one of the many things they sell.
And yet, I think more discoverability and promotion of trades will help both sets of retailers. I know that I would buy more trades if I had better awareness of them, and I get the sense this is true of a lot of my friends. My home has no more room for longboxes! I can't fit any more issues into my kitchen cupboard, and there's no place to put my oregano. Please help!
Reminder: Stop KOSA!
I wrote a while back about the Kids Online Safety Act, a "save the children" bill that would censor the internet. Well, KOSA is back. Snapchat's parent company has endorsed it, and there's a big hearing about it on Thursday with tech CEOs. Please call your senators and ask them to stop this bill!
Here's what I've been saying in my emails to folks:
As you might know, the Kids Online Safety Act purports to protect teens from algorithms that promote content that causes eating disorders, self-harm, and other terrible effects. But as a number of civil rights organizations have warned, it could lead to widespread censorship of LGBTQIA+ voices, as well as information about abortion and other topics.
To my mind, the biggest problem with KOSA is the enforcement mechanism: it allows the state attorney generals of all fifty states to file lawsuits against platforms if their algorithms are surfacing content that could be deemed harmful to teens. I'm very concerned that state AGs will cite spurious studies as a pretext for filing frivolous lawsuits, which could have a chilling effect and cause content to be hidden. There's also a nebulously-worded "duty of care" standard which places a heavy responsibility on platforms, and some observers fear platforms will need to verify people's ages in an invasive manner.
The Heritage Foundation has stated openly they believe this bill can be used to silence LGBTQIA+ voices online, and so has co-author Marsha Blackburn. Democratic co-author Richard Blumenthal, in a recent interview, admitted that state attorney generals might overreach, but insisted that the courts will prevent any abuse of the bill. (I don't have that much faith in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals right now.) Blumenthal also said that the bill wouldn't affect content that the reader "seeks out," but this is a recipe for LGBTQIA+ content being hidden unless you specifically look for it — which means LGBTQIA+ creators will be denied a wider audience for their writing online.
I'm deeply concerned that this bill could lead to a chilling effect as platforms seek to avoid costly lawsuits — even the threat of lawsuits may be enough to chill free speech — and LGBTQIA+ voices will be silenced as a result.
My Stuff
Speaking of the discoverability of trade paperbacks... Marvel has put out two trades featuring Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created: New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. First Escapade and the New Mutants get captured by those evil transhumanists, the U-Men, then they decide to deal with their trauma by robbing a supervillain. If you want the very first appearance of Escapade, you need to find a copy of the 2022 pride issue, which is on Marvel Unlimited but otherwise (sob) out of print.
I'm still reviewing science fiction and fantasy books every month for The Washington Post.
This Saturday at 12:30 is the next Trans Nerd Meet Up in San Francisco. Trans nerds, come say hi!
Annalee Newitz and I are still co-hosting the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and our upcoming episodes are flipping great!
On Sunday Feb. 11, I'm going to be at Book Passage in SF with Ishmael Reed, Joseph Cassara, and Dave Eggers, discussing our contributions to the novel-in-stories Fourteen Days.
I've also written some books! The Unstoppable trilogy is a fun young-adult space fantasy with loads of ambient queerness. Never Say You Can't Survive is a guide to writing yourself out of hard times. Even Greater Mistakes is a weird, silly, scary, cute collection of stories.