Comic Books May Not Survive The Digital Age

What made you start reading comics?

Was it the cover art, a well crafted story, the violence, the bibliography of the characters, the movies?

For myself the art deep inside of a comic drove me to fill ten comic book long boxes over the last 30 years. Today purchasing comics has dropped on my list of priorities. I have rent to pay, a car to keep running, I even like to eat on occasion and the new paper in comics doesn't digest well compared to the old pulp pages.

Block buster movies based on comic books are keeping an aging industry alive when all indicators show that paper comic book sales are waning. [Only Two Comics Over 100K] In the eighties, the height of my buying frenzy, entertainment was done on the cheap when it came to superhero films and television shows. [Dr. Strange 1978] In my youth I cannot recall a time when television stations were without some form of visual hero worship but we all knew that comic books were just better.

The reader, you and me, provided the sound effects, the voice overs and narration. I knew exactly how Captain America spoke by the regal and commanding way Jack Kirby, John Buscema or John Byrne drew him.

I could tell by the words Superman used in battle or by how he carried himself as Clark Kent what his voice sounded like from just the panels of his comic book. I filled in other details of a superhero book from my fervent imagination. When I lacked the vision to know what space looked like to the Silver Surfer, or what the effects on an explosion would be on a tank crushed by The Incredible Hulk, comic book creators would provide.

Respect

 

There was something else even more important than my worship of amazing artists and masters like P. Craig Russell, Paul Smith, Jim Pollard, José Luis García-López, Kevin Nowlan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Matt Wagner, Walt Simonson, Teri Austin, John Byrne, Jan Duursema. Something else more important than my respect for writers like Chris Claremont, Len Wein, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Alan Davis. That was my knowledge of those men and women sitting in a building bent over a desk or a drawing board working just for me, because they were like me. These people were for the most part disenfranchised, bullied in school, broke, hungry and driven by their imagination.

This isn't to say that artists working in comics today are movie stars going to and fro in limousines and drinking champagne from the hollowed out skulls of comic con nerds. The creators in my day had ink stains on their hands, graphite smudges on their palms and only dreamed of movies like Bryan Singers 2000 film X-Men or the first release of Jos Whedan's 2012 blockbuster The Avengers. They had no idea how they would survive long enough to retire and you don't see very many comic book artists over 50.

The End Is Nigh

The desire to hold, read and collect comic books is now in our past and fading fast. Drawn by the allure of digital media, the nearly live action cinematic concoctions of Hollywood, Cosplay and the age of the 'selfie', any and every artist to put down a pen and pencil on Bristol paper available in the instant you desire it. The true comic book fan is voluntarily being vanquished by the immediate gratification entertainment industry. And all of us, sometimes me included, have volunteered for surrender.

Everything on this world transforms

In this universe something always eats something else, that's the way things are. I have no desire to live in the past and I admire the technological breakthroughs of the last two decades. But what preconceived the great comics you read today and watch on the big screen came from that visceral feeling of holding something hand made. The greatness in this genre is the amalgam of storyteller with the story and the commonality of the creators who made them. Digital media is amazing but it loses the connection to us in its cold numerical synchronicity. What's being lost in this disconnect is love. The love of something that at one moment in time was only for a very few. Now the superhero mystique is ubiquitous throughout the world as chewing gum and just as easily spit out.

I'm keeping what love I have alive in the form of an almost new genre, when it is compared to the corporate giants like Marvel and DC comics, Indy Books. Independent publishers, Web Comics and Alternative comics are fresh, innovative and read like comics born of a new age, like the first time I saw Wolverine eject his claws in the eighties.

When this current wave of super hero digital media gratification ebbs, the survivors, like the tiny mammals that outlived the Pleistocene era when the lumbering giants could not, small alternative, independent comic book publishers like First Comics (The first publisher I sent work to in 1980), Alterna Comics, Antarctic Press, will come out of their burrows and climb the once foreboding trees.



List of Independent and Alternative comics resources:

• Indy Pop Comic Con 
• Outside the Lines: The 10 Best Alternative Comics 
• Top 10 Indie Comics You Should be Reading 
• Alternative Comics Wikipedia
• INDIE COMICS MAGAZINE
• ASPEN COMICS