Drunken Comics Rage

Being as we are in full blown summer event mode, I've been doing some thinking on the idea of the "event".  There's an interview over at Newsarama with Grant Morrison discussing Final Crisis that I found to be an interesting read. There's some amusing comments around the apparent contradictions in continuity between Countdown and Final Crisis. He's much more polite and tactful about it, but the gist of it is "DC completely fucked me when they wrote Countdown, in spite of the fact Final Crisis was well into being written." Nothing like taking the major event you announced a year ago and cutting it off at the knees before it gets started.

Now I have no problem forgetting about Countdown and just accepting FC on its own merits.  It's actually quite easy because I didn't read Countdown to begin with. I even have faith that Morrison will tell his story and not something that editorial dictated to him. But with just one issue out I already have some deep rooted concerns that the book won't make much sense at all without a Bachelor's Degree in DC mythology. I do not have a Bachelor's degree in DC, unfortunately. I stopped something like 2 credit hours shy of an Associate's degree.

But with all that said, it got me to thinking: What makes up an event book? Or I guess to be more accurate: What should make up an event book?

I have always been of the opinion that the goal of an event book (above and beyond being entertaining) should always be to bring new readers in. I tend to believe publishers miss this key goal or at minimum, lose it in the mix. Just because you've sold 150,000 copies of your event book, it does not mean you have gained new readership. In all likelihood it means you have just managed to gather the majority of your current readership in one spot. That's not to diminish sales of the event book itself, it's just to say that if I were an EiC I personally would be more intrigued by upticks in sales for the monthly titles after the event. More importantly, a sustained uptick in sales post-event. That would be a better indication of an increase in readers.

So we've established the premise of new readership as the goal. Let's talk a bit about what an event book should have. Before diving into the essentials of a good event story I think it's important to lay down a few key assumptions we're making for this discussion:

1. New readership means new monthly comic readers. Yes I know that the TPB market is ever growing and new readership anywhere is a good thing. But for this premise we're talking about folks willing to buy single issues monthly. Additionally, let's consider that by the time an event book is in TPB form, the hype around the event  has come and gone. How many Average Joes in a Barnes and Noble looking at a shelf of comic TPBs do you think can spot the event book in the mix? If they aren't already a monthly comic reader (or close friends with one), not many.
2. The publisher of the event book has found a means to hype the book outside the "normal" channels. In other words, cons and comic blogs do not count. The important thing here is to drag in new readership and again, few people paying to attention to those media streams are not already buying monthlies. Mind you I don't know how one accomplishes this exactly. We'll say they all appeared on the Colbert Report.
3. The event book is from one of the "Big Two". I know that almost goes without saying, but think it more likely that the rest of the world gets sucked into an event involving Spiderman or Superman than say a crossover between Hellboy and Spawn.

So with those assumptions in place, let's look at the key elements to a successful event:

#1. A high level, easy to understand premise: I think I might go so far as to say this is the most important piece of the puzzle. All other things flow out of this. The series itself is more than welcome to delve into more intricate facets of the premise, but it should really be able to be explained in a sentence or two. And those sentences shouldn't require much (if anything) in the way of previous knowledge of the characters.

I think a good example of this is the current Secret Invasion event. "Doppleganger Alien Invasion" is a pretty easy to understand concept. It's a concept that's been done in tv, books and movies for years. Sure there's a lot more to it if you have read the last three or so years of Marvel comics, but if you haven't "Doppleganger Alien Invasion" really tells you all you need to know.

I even give Infinite Crisis credit for having a high level simple concept in the beginning. "Modern heroes have grown dark and cynical. Golden age heroes reappear to show them the error of their ways". Easy to understand right? The problem is it didn't stick to that premise and veered way the hell off into something else entirely.

A (relatively) recent example of an event that totally misses the boat on this account is House of M. I enjoyed the story, but I also know you can't conceivably boil this story down to a meaningful sentence to anyone who hasn't read previous Marvel books. World War Hulk is another example. You can boil it down to a sentence or two, but it raises so many other questions for folks who are new to the story. "Heroes fire the Hulk into space. He comes back, mad." Sure that's easy to understand, but isn't the first question you as a new reader are going to ask "Why in the hell did heroes shoot his ass into space?" I know I would.

#2 The story has to be BIG: Not epic, BIG. That's an important difference. Epic implies length not just of time but of volume. Lord of the Rings is epic, but the also spend a lot of time walking between places and singing songs (at least in the books). We don't have epic amounts of time to hook new readers. We need to be blowing the doors off the place from minute one.

I believe Warren Ellis once described his run on the Authority as "What if Jerry Brukheimer made comic books?" At least I think he described it that way. Maybe I was just drunk and thought I read that. Even so, I'm sure Mr. Ellis would appreciate that a misquote came from a drunken mind. Anyhow, he should have made the statement because it's pretty damned accurate, and not surprisingly a pretty good benchmark for the level of action you should see in an event book. The readers should be left in awe at the end of every issue. There's should be major threats, massive villains, and even more massive heroes. We're talking balls to the wall non-stop shit exploding everywhere.

To be continued . . .

Filed under: DVO Reading Rage