Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #8 by Drew Barth

The Royal Road of Comics

Last week was looking at the numbers and making some guesses about why some comics sell and potentially why others aren’t doing as well, but what makes those comics good? What makes them resonate with readers in such a way that they keep coming back, month after month, trade after trade, to see what’s going to happen?

There are reasons outside of the comic being good that keeps readers. Looking at what sold well last year shows characters like Batman, The Flash, Thanos, and Spider-Man selling well even if the stories aren’t the best. But what’s familiar still sells. Despite everything.

The nineties were a dark time for us all. But all of that isn’t to discount any of those characters, they still have wonderful stories connected to them that survive any and all retcons and reboots. What we want to look at more in-depth, though, is just what makes these stories good.

I’m borrowing from manga creator Hirohiko Araki when it comes to breaking down the main fundamentals of what makes a strong comic. In his book, Manga in Theory and Practice, Araki outlines what he refers to as “the royal road of manga” that consists of: characters, story, setting, and themes. The four principles are fairly straight-forward to the point where they can work in nearly any narrative medium. But what I wanted to do with those principles is to hold them up as a lens through which to look at some more of the items on that top-selling graphic novel list. We could see potentially why things sell so well due to market circumstances around them, but how do the principles of the “royal road” come more into play?

If we’re going to start anywhere, we’re starting at characters. And no other story works as well with characters as Paper Girls. The first and fourth volumes of this series ended up besting Batman and Watchmenlast year and it’s easy to see why. Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang created a group of four teenagers in the eighties delivering newspapers before the world basically ends around them. There’s time travel and tech wars. It’s fun. But at its heart are the four protagonists: Erin, Mac, KJ, and Tiffany. The four of them together end up creating what’s akin to a perfect D&D party with lawful, law breaking, puzzling, and inquisitive characters that are dropped around the time stream and made to fend for themselves. Their four voices are distinct in a way that is both true to their time period and their ages and not a one sounds alike at any moment. You are reading about four people awash in dizzying adventure and it feels like wonderful genre-realism in each of their characters.

Story is the driving force of any comic. While a good character can help prop up a bad story, they can only go so far before it all collapses. When we go further down the list, we see a series that is defined both by its strong characters as well as an equally intriguing story into which those characters are dropped: Lumberjanes. Lumberjanes is a series about five friends in a summer camp for girls and summer doesn’t ever seem to end. The forest around them holds any number of magical and maniacal creatures and the counselors are tight-lipped on what happened in the camp’s past. It’s full-blown X-Files summer camp here and it’s some of the best comic storytelling I’ve seen since the series debuted in 2014. The fact that the first volume, from BOOM! Studios, is still selling this well is only a testament to the strength of its story.

Continuing down the royal road, we stop at setting and setting is something that, in comics, really is vital to how a story gets told. In Batman, we have Gotham City. In Star Wars, we have a galaxy. But in a series like The Wicked + The Divine, we have London. Just London. Although it’s London shaped by the existence of reincarnated gods that are, more or less, pop stars for two years until they die, but it’s still London. There’s only so much a city can change as a result of these reincarnated gods walking around, though. The real setting lies in the broader cultural contexts in which the world has changed. As these gods only reincarnate once a generation, a setting detail that’s brought up within the series is which generations deserve to have those gods? The last time the gods returned was in the 1920s, do they need to come back now? When so much of the story has to do with fandom and waiting, then it becomes vital that the gods exist in this specific moment. The world has created a culture around the gods returning and we see it constructed through the eyes of a fan. This isn’t a weird version of the world, it’s the one created for this specific purpose and it so perfectly balances the realism with the differences the story demands that it doesn’t even feel like an alternate world.

And the final stop on this royal road is theme and of course I’m going to talk about Saga here because I can’t stop talking about Saga. It’s because Saga has everything mentioned above and so much more. There is a reason it sells consistently well every year since its debut, that it out-sells most everything from DC and Marvel, that all nine volumes of the series are in the top thirty-five of this year’s best sellers list. Do you want to talk about loss? Got that. Grief and tragedy? In spades. How about redemption and unwavering morals in the face of horrendous death? Of course. But what Saga does so well compared to its fellows is how much these themes change and grow as the series progresses. Characters age and change as time goes on, but there’s always that thematic core of family and being together despite the universe ripping it all apart that it’s impossible not to be engrossed. It is Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughn’s masterpiece because it follows the ideas of the royal road so well. This is a series that bursts with imagination and humor and humanity at every opportunity. Saga begs to be read and its readers will beg non-readers to read it as well.

But there’s always more comics. There are graphic novels that don’t appear on the best selling list that likely do all of the above even better than anything I’ve talked about here. But that’s the fun with comics, like with all narrative mediums. The deep-dive to discover the new things that smack your brain around like a lemon-wrapped gold bar. There’s so much story out there to find and read still.

Get excited.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #7 by Drew Barth

Looking at Numbers

Not too long ago I received an email from Diamond Book Distributors about the top selling graphic novels of 2018. These are the kinds of lists I love to see because there’s always a direct comparison between what’s considered to be a critical favorite and a commercial favorite. In comics, those sorts of things typically end up lining up, namely in the case of series like Saga or Monstress. While I was going through the list, though, I noticed something kind of odd. No Batman, Thor, or anything from DC or Marvel.

Diamond Books is actually a subsidiary of Diamond Comic Distributors that works with independent publishers to distribute graphic novels to non-direct market venues. More or less, they work with Image, Dynamite, Aftershock, etc. to get their work into chain bookstores. But it’s only the graphic novels and collected editions; all monthly issues regardless of publisher still go through Diamond Comics. And in comics, they all only go through Diamond.

(But Diamond as a distributor for comics has a monopoly over the industry due to them being the only distributor that works in a way that’s conducive to the comic market. More or less, their business practices work on a much quicker timetable compared to many larger distribution platforms like Random House or Simon & Schuster. Where traditional distributors have payment deals for publishers that may delay payouts for six months or more, Diamond works in one to two months—something beneficial to an industry that needs to know how well a series that is printing month-to-month is doing. So while I don’t like the idea of a monopoly in the industry, they have remained the most viable option in town. Plus, with their persistent and transparent sales numbers, we can get good ideas about what is and isn’t selling. Hence, the lists they’ve put out recently.)

Anyway. Because there are two distinct distribution branches to comics, we can actually see how certain series are doing both inside and outside your local comic shops. And these are two completely different kinds of places in which comics are being sold. A reader who trade waits (someone who reads a series through the trade paperback collections and not the monthly issues) may be more inclined to get their comics from a bookstore due to things like memberships, discounts, coupons, or location. It may be incredibly difficult to get to a comic shop on a weekly basis in most parts of the country, so when we look at a list that works exclusively on the bookstore level, we’re better able to see what access does to the comics involved.

When looking at just the top ten from each list, we’re seeing a snapshot of what was big at the time. Of course the top selling book in comic stores is going to be The Infinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin, George Pérez, and Ron Lim due to the release of Avengers: Infinity War. Although that graphic novel has been selling consistently well for years now, it’s the film that would help push it to the top spot. And there’s always mainstays like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’sWatchmen that have stayed in the top selling category for actual decades now.

In terms of more recent material, Saga continues its reign as one of the best selling comics of this decade due both to its popularity and readers’ propensity for trade waiting on the series. With the announcement of Saga going on hiatus earlier last year, the sales of its ninth volume were absolutely going to increase to the point where it was just behind The Infinity Gauntlet. But that’s just in comic shops. While volume nine sold well there, volume eight ended up reigning in bookstores. Why? It could be any number of reasons. It could be that the release of volume eight coincided with one of Barnes & Noble’s buy-two-get-the-third-free sales or simply because it had more time on the shelves than volume nine did. Many of the factors aren’t really shown in-depth in any of these lists, but it’s still interesting to see how different sides of the retail world differ in a series like Saga.

Then we have a series like Deadly Class that just had the first few episodes of its TV series on Syfy premiere not too long ago. While the first volume of the series sold well—coming in at #35, enough to beat the likes of Darth Vader and a Spider-Man/Deadpool crossover—it only did so in comic shops. It doesn’t even crack the top fifty in among independent titles in bookstores. And we can tell the increase in Deadly Class sales is due to its new TV series as it jumped up nearly a hundred spots from the previous year’s list. This kind of information goes a long way to show the industry what sells best where. In the months leading up to the Deadly Class series premiere, I couldn’t get through many monthly issues without seeing an ad for the show somewhere. But then I wouldn’t see Deadly Class trade paperbacks that often when going down the graphic novel aisle at Barnes & Noble. The difference could be from bookstore retailers knowing that this particular series doesn’t sell as well as others and instead give their limited shelf space to what they know will sell better—all the while comic shops still sell it well due to the series being perhaps more familiar to the comics crowd.

All of this to say that comics is a strange business. It’s difficult to tell which series is going to sell well outside of those that provide the basis for films and TV series. Well, I mean good writing is always going to help a series, hence the reign of Saga throughout both lists. But when doing the number crunching we can still see how Marvel and DC still control the vast majority of comics out there. Smaller presses are finally making more of an impact—Image on its own has roughly 10% of the market now—and yet it still feels like such a small portion of the overall whole of comics. Although these lists don’t take into account other publishers like Drawn + Quarterly or Top Shelf and BOOM! Studios only works with Diamond to get their books into comics shops, there’s still things to be learned from watching these lists to see what people are reading. But then why are these specific graphic novels popular? What makes these stories resonate with readers that they would make it onto these lists?

Is that a part two I hear on the wind? I think believe that’s a part two I hear on the winds from the future. Get excited.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.