The Death Of The Fanboy

Why do I still buy comics?

I ask myself that every time I visit my local comic store in NYC.

To be honest at this point I can barely count myself as a comic fan.

I used to spend 60 dollars a week on comic books, I would constantly read comic news and post on forums.

So what happened?
There are a number of factors that broke my fanboy spirit.

 
These reasons are the same that I think are alienating a large number of fans and may actually really hurt the industry in the long run. I know that sounds rather melodramatic but I constantly meet comic fans that barely read comics anymore. If you want to know my reasons for ending my 20 year love of the comic medium you have to understand that it was not one event but rather a number of factors that contributed to me walking away.

The first thing that began to bother me about mainstream comics was the complete lack of non-white superheroes.
It says a lot when we have an African American president but yet we only have a handful of non-white superheros in comics.

This is a touchy subject in the fan community because we don’t want to think that there is racism in something that we loved as children. I am always amazed at the excuses I encounter at conventions from both fans and creators alike. They always throw out the name of one or two costumed minority heroes as if that is supposed to be a safe card. "We're not racist we have Blue Beetle!"
My personal favorite is “We shouldn’t make characters based on race.”

Well no one is asking you to. We're just asking to stop acting like white heroes are the standard.

A lot of this is the constant resistance of the comic industry to change. If it worked in the 60’s why should we change it?
Its rather funny to me how symbiotic the relationship between the industry and its fans are.

Fans are always resistant to a change in a character, because its not the character they grew up reading. And the industry is resistant to make a real change in its overall direction because it’s the way things have always been done. The other element that makes the introduction of a representation of different races, ethnicities and culture in comics is fear.

Some writers are practically fearful of touching the subject hence they get labeled as racist and as a result, trying to avoid this only results in writing stories or scenes that are in fact, racist.

Sometimes you have to take risks because it is a waste of your time to please everyone. For all the idiotic things I have read that are published that involves this issue, I give them credit that at least they are actually trying. Ignoring the problem only makes the issue worse. Although there are somethings that I have read that just try my patience and leave me wondering why they cant see the racist undertones in their work. I don't expect this to always be the mentality by writers or the heads of the comic scene because as time goes on and new blood infuses the industry things will change; it is hard to contain a idea or a growing awareness in the world.

It's just the simple fact that there is resistance to the truth that not everyone comes from the same neighborhood, have your same values, or looks the same that frustrates me.

The second factor of the death of my comic fanboy soul was the disturbing violence and sexism toward women in comics. In the last few years, its pretty bad to not have a penis in comics. Stories can turn very dark and be quite shocking. Women are being stuffed in fridges, beaten, tortured and raped in mainstream comics.

The moment when I truly had enough though was the torture and death of the character of Spoiler (a teenaged superhero who was also the love interest for Robin) during the War Games storyline in the Batman comics.

I think what was most disheartening and disturbing was not only the physical violence toward the character but the psychological torture she experienced at the hands of in storyline. She is tortured physically (with some really dark sexual overtones) by the villain then a few issues later beaten, mocked and fatally shot by the bad guy. To see a formerly strong female character being broken in such a ghastly manner was all just a bit to much for me because it represented the problem women face in comics. I am not going to sit here and say that there has never been sexism in comics. Nor will I claim to speak for the female gender. But instead of the problem getting better overtime its only gotten worse.

The fact that covers like these get approved by Marvel just proves my point.

It galls me when fans and creators can say with a straight face that sexism does not exist or worse is acceptable in comics.

An excuse I often hear is that comics are male fantasies and are not meant for women. This is just once again the warped minds of fans basically sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that there is nothing wrong in their fandom.

At this point it doesn’t even shock me when creators forget to think before they speak, like when J. Michael Straczynski recently said of his revamp of Wonder Woman’s costume "What woman only wears only one outfit for 60-plus years?" How can we expect to see a rise in the quality of the stories when even the people writing them don’t rise above obsolete ways of thinking?

Another strike against my love of comics was the trend of decompression. Growing up it seemed like I got more out of my money from comics.

Sure they were cheaper, but a story had a beginning, middle and end that was solved most of the time in one issue. This changed when the trend of writers focusing on interactions between characters.

A conversation that usually could be in one or two panels now took 5 pages of a comic book. As a consequence plots dragged on for multiple issues and storylines now took almost a year to resolve when in the past it was only at most 3 months. My favorite example of this was an issue of New Avengers were the entire issue revolves around SHIELD (the big brother of the Marvel Universe) debating whether to call the team or not during a crisis involving a powerful being.

The entire 22 pages could have been done in 2, maybe 3 pages but instead it was stretched out to an entire issue! Lets face facts the price of comics has gone up quite dramatically over the years with the latest issues costing basically 4 dollars. Folks shell out more money for comics yet we get less story now then we did when we were paying a dollar an issue.

Am I the only one seeing the stupidity in this?

I don’t think it would bother me so much if this was an occasional thing, but it is issue after issue. Some critics accuse the writers of purposely doing this to sell more trade collections but I disagree, in my opinion its just overindulged writers with a lack of editorial control. If this trend continues, will single issue comics last more than 10 years or will everything be collected as trade paperbacks?

My opinion leans to the latter.


I hate to sound like a whiny old man on this, because sometimes it works.

Its nice to have scenes or issues that don’t move the plot along but give us good dialogue. One or two pages or even a single issue on that is fine because it livens up the comic. I enjoy that very much, but when it becomes 22 pages of nothing happening in every issue that could have been solved in 2 or 3 pages it becomes too much too bear.

The final nail in the coffin of my love of comics is the constant barrage of company wide crossovers.

It used to be that the crossovers were once every two or three years if not longer. But suddenly the comic industry went crossover crazy!

DC had Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, 52, One Year Later, Amazons Attack, Sinestro Corp War, Countdown, Final Crisis, and they just finished Blackest Night and jumped straight into Brightest Day.

Marvel is worse with Civil War, Civil War: The Initiative, World War Hulk, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign, and now, The Heroic Age.

These are back to back events, one right after the other. You know back when there was a crossover, it was special, it meant something, it was something to look forward to while reading your comics. Now you have no time to savor or even anticipate the next event because as soon as one ends another begins. Also it becomes very obvious to the reader that none of the events have any effect on the universe of the respective companies.

Sure characters may die, but they are just resurrected (as long as they're white) later down the road.

If a villain lets say becomes President or the head of some big brother organization they will just lose that power and go back to being thugs.

It’s also frustrating when a comic series your enjoying gets interrupted quite abruptly to feature a tie-in issue for the event that will go nowhere and does not contribute anything to the overall arc. It's not about telling a good story, but rather squeezing a buck out of your fan base. And if it works once for the industry then they are going to squeeze it until they get that last drop. It’s an easy way to boost sales but if you were smart you would think about implementing a long term strategy to slowly boost your readership but see that would involve actually thinking ahead.

With the economy the way it is you would think that they would want to lower their prices or put in better content so that they don’t loose their clientele who are looking for anything to eliminate in order to make rent this month. That’s the problem with the industry they never look ahead and expect their fan base to always be there. And to a certain extent their right, people will always buy comics in one form or the other. The sales will never be what they once were and the quality is only going to get worse.

A lot of former fans walk away for childish or just nitpicky reasons.

A character is written in a different way, a creator they don’t like begins to write their book, a character changes costume, dies or some other trivial issue. They think that they own the character their read about and flip out if someone else plays with their toy. I don’t believe I am like that, I know full well that my opinions may not be supported. They are just my reasons, if you enjoy these events and stories then good for you. It's just not for me, and sometimes you have to walk away if you feel so strongly about it.

I still read the occasional comic here and there but its never going to be like it used to be and that makes me very sad. Comics used to be fun for me and I could be like a lot of fans, sitting on the sidelines gripping about how unfair that the comic world doesn’t go in the direction they want it to. But who wants to live that way?

I guess we all have to grow up sometime.