How do Famous COMIC BOOKS Maintain Their Audiences?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
in The Commons
Batman and Superman comic books have been coming out regularly for something like 80 years. How do they get the public to keep interested and buying the comics after such a long long time? I've never been a reader of comic books, so what possible storyline could continue for 80 years? I understand that these superhereos can fly and are super strong and have some weird superpowers, but is that enough to keep everyone's interest for nearly a century?
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I would say it is the enemies. You have to have some interseting enemies to challenge the hero, (s)he can overcome at last.
I think it's two-fold. They don't necessarily try to retain people outside of their target demographic, so when someone "outgrows" comic books, someone else is growing into them. And they always update the story arcs to fit the times so it stays relevant to their audience.
@Fauvist: Are you wondering about the superhero genre alone or do you mean comics which exist for generations in general? E.g. Asterix exists now since over 60 years and Donald Duck even longer.
None. That's why they run new ones regularly.
It's not one story for 80 years, usually it's a five or six issue storyarc, and then when that arc is done, a whole new story begins. It also helps that writers come and go bringing new arcs, and changing artists periodically gives the book a fresh flavor. The stories can be incredibly well written. I haven't read comics in a few years due to different reasons, but I worked in a comic shop on Mondays to help my friend have a day off in the mid to late 2000's. I sat there and read every book that was released and there were stories told that were better than any novel I'd read or movie I'd seen.
I mean superhero comic books. Other kinds of comic books maintain an audience due to the fact that they're funny, or cute, etc. Asterix is totally foreign to me.
Your answer is going to depend on who you ask.
A while back DC Comics realized that comics with a gorilla on the cover sold more issues. So they found reasons to stick a gorilla on as many covers as they could.
Also realize that Superman and Batman are the exceptions. No other (superhero) character has had a consistent publishing run from the Golden Age until today.
An argument can be made that Wonder Woman qualifies, but her comics have been cancelled and brought back a number of times.
Two other things to bare in mind... Had they been any other characters, the Superman and Batman comics would have been cancelled many times in the past. They were kept going as readership waned because they are the "flagship" characters. They make money outside of their monthly sales through licensing and such. If the comics were cancelled, then the value of the IP would diminish.
The other item is more "nerdy" so to speak... The Superman from Action Comics #1 is not the same character as the Superman being published today. The same way Mickey Mouse isn't the same as he was in Streamboat Willie. Supes (and Batman) evolved over the years and those evolutions were written into the canon of the character as sub-divisions.
In DC Cannon, World War II (the Golden Age) Superman lives on Earth 2. Modern Superman lives on Earth 1. Then you have the retcon events that further reset the character. The Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman vs. the Post-Crisis...
Pre-Zero Hour vs Post. Pre-Hypertime vs. Post. Pre-Infinite Crisis vs. Post. Pre-Flashpoint vs. Post. Pre-New 52 vs. Post.
Each time they did one of these retcons, they reset the characters to varying degrees.
Primarily by bringing in new writers. This usually results in some sort of retcon (RETroactive CONtinuity change - something covedred in a story ten years ago was wrong/never happened/had a different result) or parallel universe (yeah, it happened - but not here, it was over there and THAT universe's hero/villian).
The other method is by bringing in new readers who aren't immersed in the old continuity.
I pretty well gave up on the mainline comics years ago - among other reasons, Gotham seems to be a major city that doesn't have the money to put locks on the cell doors, so Batman spent all of his time back then collaring the same villians over and over again.
I quit looking at the numbers a few years ago, and I understand there has been some recovery - but in the 1990s mainline comics were selling over 100K copies of an issue and anything running in the lower 30K range was likely to get dropped. In the 2010s the mainline comics were selling in the mid 30K range. This wasn't just comics, it was most periodicals - Analog SF went from mid 60K copies in the mid 1970s to under 7K copies ten years ago. And that's when I quit looking at the readership numbers.
I think you're kind of answering your own question here. Superhero comics don't interest you. Comics that are funny or cute might. It isn't that everyone is interested in superhero comics, but they have an audience who does like them and keeps buying the comics. No reason why "funny" or "cute" could keep some people's interest, and other adjectives couldn't be more interesting to other people.
Others here have already answered the part about 80 year long story lines.
Think of superhero comics as soap operas for young boys. Why the hell has General Hospital been running for nearly 60 years? I don't know, but someone who follows soaps could make a very impassioned case for it. Characters die and are resurrected (or not), new people take on familiar roles (multiple people have been the Flash, Green Lantern, Iron Man, etc.), there are romantic plotlines, personal crises, alternate universes and timelines, and so on. Team comics, like X-Men and the Avengers, have rotating casts. Some characters have the ability to bend reality, which obviously lends itself to plotlines outside of the established continuity.
I have comics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. At that point I was a single parent and money was tight, and a comic that was previously $0.10 was now running $1.25 or more like $5.00 was beyond my means to keep up. But for a little girl, Supergirl, Saturn Girl, the Scarlet Witch, and even Spiderman gave me heroes to read that I could relate to and wish I was able to grow up like. Heck I even have Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.
Now consider how many people through the ages have told the stores about King Arthur or Robin Hood. Why? Because we need heroes. Each culture has tales of heroes that are passed down in tales or today in written or video form. Comics is just another. One where the hero is reimagined to face new foes or current issues that a new generation has to deal with.
Even computer games to some extent seem to continue this, not that I play them myself. Hopeless at it.
Now that's a name I never expected to see referenced here. :)
And very appropriate as she, and the rest of the Legion, suffered greatly across all of the retcons and such.
is this person in the OP serious lol. If they didnt have such a reductive view of the format maybe it wouldnt be so confusing tot them.
Another thing in addition to (or relating to) retconning that superhero comics aren't afraid to do is retelling stories. If the Jean Grey/Phoenix story was well received a decade ago, why not tell it again with new writers and new artists? It then becomes like folklore where one story gets multiple interpretations over time, and can keep an audiences interest by telling something they are familiar with in a fresh new way.
*This was stuck in drafts while someone else brought up Robin Hood, a great example of this :)
I'm the OP. What do you mean "reductive view of the format"? What's a "reductive view"?
The sad thing is, they work in media. They should be aware of how serialised storytelling works. They should not be making such basic mistake as confusing the medium with the content.
It's reductive because you seem to think that interest in superhero comics is driven solely by the fact that they have powers (which isn't even always true, as in the case of Batman). Superheroes survive for the same reason that any other long-running characters do: because people like the characters. Batman is generally a morally grey, personally conflicted and tortured problem solver where Superman is a bright-eyed do-gooder. Even just on the basis of that difference, there are obvious reasons why one or the other, or both, would appeal to people. This is before we get into their rogues' gallery, where some villains are beloved in their own right.
My question is about the storyline, and how you maintain a storyline for 80 years. If the storyline is episodic, how do they have 80 years of episodes without infinitely repeating what happens.
The same way soap operas do. The. Exact. Same. Way.
Please keep to the topic, not the character of posters.
Super hero comics have maintained their audiences mainly because the enduring characters are some sort of archetype. Superman's greatest super power is his morality. He is an all powerful being who could dominate and subjugate the planet but he CHOOSES to be good. He is the model good samaritan. Batman on the other hand is a human who chooses to transform his pain and suffering (the death of his parents) into something good. At least he tries to.
Someone above mentioned the bad guys who, in the best stories, end up being the antithesis of the main characters. The Joker for example chooses to take his pain and suffering and throw it out into the world and make everyone else suffer as much as him. These character archetypes create universal stories about the human condition that are timeless.
I think there've been a few others giving good explanations, but focusing on the question, if you're looking to do something similar, a few key things to consider are:
Focusing on shorter story arcs that build into a longer narrative. Don't worry about telling an 80 year long story, tell 160 six-month long stories.
Don't worry about changing the framework too much, if you have recurring characters people will follow along, even if things like the location and even the genre of the story change.
Don't be too precious about the "source material". If you repeat stories in different ways, or need to ignore something that was published a decade or two again, go ahead and retell it or ignore contradicting stories from the past. Audiences for these stories expect this and don't have an issue following along.
As others have pointed out, you don't. What is the "storyline" of Superman? Superman does Superman things. It's all about what is happening right now,and, again, the character.
There is repetition, but different villains lend themselves to different types of storylines, plots (often poorly and belatedly) parallel real-world issues, different characters are introduced and drive their own plotlines, etc. A good (depending on one's perspective) example of a shake-up was when Superman died in the 90s. Multiple Supermen sprung up, some claiming to be Superman himself as a cyborg, a young clone, and so on, and some simply trying to fill the void left by Superman in their own way, before Superman himself returned through some hand-wavey explanation that I don't remember. Batman in particular has a long history of alternate versions, like Gotham by Gaslight, which took place in Victorian England. Superheroes are archetypes, much like, say, Sherlock Holmes. What is the tv show House if not "what if Sherlock Holmes were a doctor"? The same sort of things happen in comics. Characters are reinvented and reimagined, storylines evolve, characters come and go, and so on.
You touched on something I didn't consider, and that is the effect of, I don't know what you call it - "magic", maybe. If your story doesn't have to conform to reality - it gives you infinite options to manipulate the story. So instead of having to repeat the same plot devices over and over like Shakespeare did - Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, and Othello, and King Lear and many others "go mad". Same with Shakespeares repeated use of suicide or it's contemplation - Hamlet, Ophelia, Romeo & Juliet. With a superhero you can just invent something that is impossible to happen.
You are starting from false premises, which is the main problem.
There are no 80 year storylines. They don't maintain their readerships. They do repeat stories.
Superman may have been one of the first "superheroes" but there were hundreds of superheroes shortly after that. Most people don't remember any of them. If the archetype was the most important part, everyone would remember the original Captain Marvel (the Big Red Cheese, not the MCU Captain Marvel). A kid who turns into a super powered adult with an even more positive outlook than Superman... That should have worked for decades. It's pretty much how Spiderman originally was.
He's forgotten because he didn't evolve with the times. Readership dropped off. They stopped publishing comics with him in it.
You can't really look at all the different Batmen and think they were the same, other than the costume.
Batman from Dectective Comics #27 was a dark vigilante, much like the Shadow.
Batman after Robin showed up was more light hearted and less dark.
Batman in the 60s, both Adam West and the comic, were outright outlandish comedy.
A more jarring comparison would be Tim Burton to Joel Schumacher to Christopher Nolan to Zach Snyder. They don't even pretend that these are the same characters. No story continues across the movies. They are just stand alone entertainment. Each one reflecting the interests of the then current viewers, to varying degrees of success.
I don't see how you could possibly not have considered "magic" since your initial premise centered around them having supernatural powers.
I would argue it from a different perspective: they haven't. Comic readership has steadily declined. Sales are but a fraction of what they were during the Gold and Silver Ages. I loved comic books as a kid. And I'll always have a soft spot for them. But I'm old (in my 50s.) I'd say nostalgia sustains the comic medium.
How many net new readers are getting into superhero comics today?
I'd argue today that movies and videogames get all the attention and entertainment dollars that comic books once did. I don't see a lot of growth for superheroes in the comic-book medium. But they're doing just great in movies, tv shows and videogames!
Yeah, I mentioned this above. My friend was a Junior High English teacher; 20 years ago he was complaining that kids just don't read anymore, and it's gotten much worse since. Then there's the economics. Back when I was twelve I'd get my weekly fifty cents allowance and make a bee-line for the corner grocery. I'd buy two comics and an apple pie - and save the other twenty cents. Two comics now runs between eight and ten dollars. I'm resonably certain that the average twelve year old now isn't getting between fifteen and twenty dollars a week as an allowance.
Can I ask you what the comics were? And what made them appeal to you?
I did consider superpowers as an element of magicality, but I had no idea reality was being warped to the extent that it was being used to shape storylines.