DC Comics recently announced that in 2010 they would begin publishing original hardcover graphic novels featuring their flagship superhero properties. One way of reading that would be “The people who own Superman are going to print more Superman books” which absolutely sounds like the slowest news day imaginable. But it’s a little more noteworthy if you get how the comics industry works today, which in case you don’t, I will be happy to expound on.
The main focus of comics publishers is still the monthly issues of their various titles in comic book form. For a while, the best of the best runs of those monthly installments, the runs which added up to one longer story and really rocked the fanbase, might be collected in a trade paperback. Now, pretty much everything gets collected as a paperback at the earliest possible opportunity, and the best-of-the-best will eventually be reprinted again in hardcover, possibly oversized, loaded with special features, etc. But the key point here is that if you happen to be browsing Amazon or roaming the stacks at Borders, and you see a book like Batman: RIP or Superman: New Krypton, those are all reprints of comic books from the newsstands (minus the ads, which is fine because nowadays those are all for video games and movies and anti-drug PSAs as opposed to X-ray Specs and Sea Monkeys).
So the significance of the phrase “original hardcover graphic novels” in the news is that DC is going to jump straight to step three. Writers and artists will produce stories that will be sold in a single hardcover volume without previously appearing in monthly issue format. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. Business-wise, it (theoretically) maximizes the audience for the high-end format. Usually there’s going to be a certain set of people who buy the monthly issues of Superman, and another set of people who “wait for the trade”, and both of those sets are people who want to read all of Superman’s adventures but have different agendas as far as how timely those readings need to be (or possibly prefer one format over the other for nostalgic or artform-purist reasons). Occasionally someone will buy the monthly issues so that they can read the stories as they appear and avoid the horror of spoilers, and then also buy the paperback collection because it lasts longer or looks nice on a bookshelf, but no one has to buy both to get the story. And the hardcover collections are therefore a luxury item, and not a necessity even for a completist who has to read every Superman story available. An original hardcover graphic novel changes the dynamic, and basically forces story-completists to shell out for the deluxe format. And even if down the road DC reprints the new volumes in paperback, with a lower price tag, the more skittish anti-spoiler geeks will have to decide if it’s worth risking the lag time.
The other business decision which I assume is informing this initiative is the desire to lure in new readers. Original hardcover graphic novels can be shelved and displayed more prominently at brick-and-mortar bookstores and generate more sales. Plus (assuming everyone immediately grasps what I’ve painstakingly explained above) a casual reader won’t be turned off by the thought that buying a trade paperback requires prior knowledge; even if Superman: New Krypton is a complete story, it’s still a continuation of ideas from Superman: Camelot Falls which is a continuation of Superman: Exile, ad nauseum. Original hardcover graphic novels should be truly self-contained, without the references to continuity that are unavoidable in reprinted monthlies aimed at the hardcore longtime fans. Higher accessibility, in theory, is a good thing.
Of course, maybe the scenarios won’t really translate into reality, geeks will roundly reject this topsy-turvy distribution model, casual potential readers will remain indifferent or put off, and the whole original hardcover graphic novel experiment will bomb. Time will tell.
I hope they don’t bomb, though, which leads into the second reason why it’s interesting (for me): format dictates content. When writers have to crank out 22 pages of new material every month that reads at least tolerably well on its own, it may ultimately produce a story that reads well at 132 pages when collected, but it’s going to have very rigid rhythms. The original graphic novel format lets a writer tell a complete story at the proper pace, and have a long slow scene play out from pages 18 through 26, something you never get in the (collected or single) monthlies. I guarantee that some writers will be so locked into the old way of doing things that they will fail to explore this to the fullest, but at least the potential is there and maybe some real gems will emerge in the new format. I want to read them for that reason alone.
So that’s all interesting, but here’s where it gets weird. They’ve announced the first two (let’s just shorten the label right now) novels and they are entitled Batman: Earth One and Superman: Earth One. This is baffling to me, and possibly baffling to you, but depending on your geek-familiarity maybe baffling for totally different reasons.
Let’s start with the non-geeks in the audience. Does the combination of words “Earth One” mean anything to you? Does it evoke an idea? Are you imagining a NASA program, like “Apollo 13”? Or possibly an alien conflict, and a massive scoreboard: “Earth One, Xylflorg Zero”? Or maybe a political or philosophical movement espousing principles like how we’re all one big family of children of Mother Earth? Do you see how any of those concepts might connect to both Superman and Batman? More to the point, I guess, if you were vaguely interested in Batman and/or Superman, and you saw one of those books on the shelf at Borders, would the words after the colon make you any more likely to buy the book than you would be otherwise? I’d wager that the answer to most of the above questions is a negative-tinged shrug. “Earth One” is so blah and non-descript that it doesn’t even convey as much information as “Batman Begins” or “Superman Returns”.
Right, then, now let’s geek out. (I will try to keep this brief but it may very well tax my summarizing skills to the limit, so bear with me.) Back in the Golden Age of comics (the 1940’s) there were lots of super-heroes running around in addition to Superman and Batman. Guys like the Flash (who ran fast wearing a red jersey and blue pants and a Mercury-style winged helmet) and the Green Lantern (who carved a ring out of a magic meteorite and was basically Aladdin, inclusive of his purple-caped, red-and-green billowy outfit). DC Comics owned them all but as super-heroes’ popularity in general faded the second-tier guys stopped having their adventures published. Then came the Silver Age (the late 1950’s) and a super-hero renaissance and DC dusted off the old second-tier names but decided to re-invent the characters. Audiences got the Flash (now capable of doing everything super-fast and wearing skintight red with yellow lightning trim) and Green Lantern (a human recruited as a space cop and given a super-science ring weapon and a sleek green and black uniform) and many other revamps. Superman was still Superman and Batman was still Batman, with very minor concessions to the changing tastes and trends of the times, and Superman and Batman and Flash and Green Lantern could and did often team up in each other’s comics (and the Justice League of America). Then in 1961 a comic writer had an idea for a fun story: team up the original Flash with the current one.
Right off the bat there are some suspension of disbelief problems with that story premise. How can both of those characters be said to co-exist? Since the new Flash appeared, no one in the comics ever said anything about “that other Flash”, and how could that be reconciled? “Flash of Two Worlds!” answered all of that with two words: parallel Earths. OK, significantly more than two words as the whole story involved the 1959 Flash (Barry Allen) realizing that he could alter the super-speed vibrations of his body and instantly travel to an Earth almost identical to our own – except that this Earth was home to a completely different Flash (Jay Garrick) and no one had heard of Barry. Meanwhile back on Barry’s Earth people had heard of Jay Garrick but he was a fictional character, aka the star of the Flash comics of the 40’s – because the writer of those comics had seen visions of Jay’s Earth in his dreams!!! And the Flash comics starring Jay had been Barry’s inspiration to become the Flash when he acquired super powers!!!!! (Oh, 60’s comics, you slay me.)
What might have been a one-shot story playing around with the sci-fi implications of the many-worlds hypothesis actually ended up being a huge cornerstone of DC Comics for the next 25 years. Now the 50’s revamps didn’t wipe out the old 30’s and 40’s stories as if they never happened, they simply relegated those older tales to other Earths throughout the multiverse. Magic-ring Green Lantern (Alan Scott) lived on the same Earth as Jay Garrick, while science-weapon Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) still lived on the same Earth as Barry Allen. Even better, Jay Garrick’s Earth had its own Batman and Superman, just like Barry Allen’s did. This was a godsend because it explained why Batman and Lois Lane never seemed to age (Superman doesn’t really have this problem): the Batman who was a twenty-nine year old playboy fighting gangsters and Nazis was a completely different person on a completely different Earth from the twenty-nine year old fighting mad scientists and aliens, and the former started his career in the 30’s while the other started more recently (relative to whatever year it happened to be; as time went by some adventures might slide from being attributed to one version to the other).
In an effort to simplify keeping things straight, the powers-that-be at DC Comics (and by their fiat, the characters in the comics) began to refer to the various Earths by number (and sometimes letter): Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, Earth-S, Earth-X. If you picked up a Superman or Batman or Flash comic on the newsstand in 1962, it was set in the present and on what was considered the main Earth, Barry Allen’s, and this was Earth-1. Jay Garrick and the heroes who had been around long enough to have World War II adventures lived on Earth-2. (Evil mirror-mirror versions of the heroes lived on Earth-3, I am compelled to note.) I always had a problem with the Earth nomenclature because it doesn’t go in chronological order, by which logic Jay Garrick’s Earth should be Earth-1 because he came first, etc. (And in DC's own reference materials they would refer to Jay as "Flash I" and Barry as "Flash II" so the roman numerals were at odds with the arabic numerals of the Earths, which is hard to grapple with as a ten-year-old.) But that’s just my hang-up.
By the mid-1980’s there had been so many multiple-Earth stories told that the whole idea seemed insupportable, and the non-aging of characters was again becoming hard to swallow (if Earth-1 Batman just became Batman five years ago, fine, but does that mean Earth-2 Batman really fought crime non-stop from 1939 to 1981, or do we need to create Earth 1.5?) so DC blew the whole thing up and said all the old stories had no bearing going forward and all the characters were starting over. (Sort of. With exceptions. It was a well-intentioned mess they are still sorting out another 25 years later.) Designations like “Earth-1” became meaningless – in the new order there was one and only one Earth. Jay Garrick and Alan Scott had fought in WWII as Flash and Green Lantern and inspired their successors Barry and Hal, and were still around as semi-retired old men, but Superman and Batman had no 40’s adventures, as the singular Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne were young, modern figures. (I am of course as usual colossally over-simplifying, as the rewriting of comic book history as a single cohesive narrative has occupied forests of mini-series and special issues and can keep nerds at comic conventions up all night debating.) Just when you might think the dust of such revisionism had settled, however, along came a generation of comics creators this decade who had been kids right around the time that the wonderful playground of multiple Earths went away, and who never got over the loss, and who of course set about bringing it all back. (Sort of. With major changes.) The DC Comics universe is currently on the cusp of once again making a familiarity with the subtle differences between Earth-6 and Earth-K a requirement for understanding certain stories. And apparently that’s just giving the fans what they want, because as I’ve said many times before geeks eat up those elaborately detailed systems that make them feel knowledgeable and special. So, whatevs.
Once more from the top, then: Batman: Earth One? The hell? The very idea of “Earth One” is meaningless without an “Earth Two” to differentiate from. And yet the very idea of “Earth Two” is something DC Comics did away with in the mid-80’s but is toying with again now and which is a hyper-geeky, insular idea that could not be more forbidding to new, casual readers. The closest I have come to decoding the message is this: “Earth One” is supposed to mean “out of continuity, set in the present, using the best elements of the character’s mythos from throughout the publication history”. Which is significant only if you are a geeky longtime fan, although if you are, you’ve seen this before (the All-Star line, the Ultimate line, and any movie version of a character ever, including the DC-controlled direct-to-DVD animated versions). If you’re a non-geek casual fan, it’s not supposed to mean anything. But since it can therefore only serve to confuse uninitiated potential readers, and is really unnecessary for the keepers of the secret mysteries, it’s still kind of baffling.
The "Earth One" tag will make the job of selling the new book more difficult by making it blend in more with the dozens of Superman and Batman books already on the bookstore shelves. What would draw a reader to a book entitled "Superman: Earth One" as an introductory book that normal people can read over a book entitled "Superman: Birthright" or "Superman: Secret Origin" or "Superman: Punching Luthor in the Face?"
ReplyDeleteIf they can somehow get the Earth-One books to be treated differently, if they stand out on the shelves, they have a chance of capturing the non-comic-dork population. Given the history of the industry and the choice of "Earth One" as a title, I'm not optimistic.
That said, I'll buy these for my nephew.