Ask Maridee

Quick mention of my comic series included:

The comic-book publisher is teaming with the Sesame Workshop to bring longtime TV stars Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Elmo and all the gang to comics for the first time in Sesame Street’s 43-year history.

Ape CEO David Hedgecock says he’s been working with Sesame Workshop for more than a year and a half to close a deal, which was longer than normal in negotiating licenses. (The company also publishes Richie Rich,Strawberry Shortcake and Casper the Friendly Ghost comics, among others.)

The artist who has been working on Strawberry Shortcake - Amy Mebberson - just announced that she and James Silvani will be working on this one too.

(Source: USA Today)

Tom Spurgeon’s essay Breaking a 26-Year Weekly Comics Buying Habit  tells the story of a devoted comic book reader who became disillusioned with mainstream comics and walked away. It comes down to three major points:

1. Mainstream comics are a duopoly (Marvel, DC) distributed by a monopoly (Diamond)
2. The duopoly produces superhero stories almost exclusively
3. Superhero stories tend to -
   -retread storytelling devices (like angsty first-person captions)
   -repeat and reboot the same origin stories instead of growing the universe with risky new characters
   -move at a pace that’s too slow to maintain interest

My story might be entitled “Why I Never Started a 26-Year Weekly Comics Buying Habit,” because while these obstacles forced one man to an ultimate conclusion, for me they were a barrier to entry. I know that there are women who read and love superhero comics; I read their essays and their enthusiastic blogs, I listen to their podcasts and I interact with them online. I thank them for keeping us in the conversation. But as a woman who doesn’t read superhero comics, my experience may give some insight as to why the duopoly fails to capture so many female readers at a malleable age.

From the time I was old enough to read, I knew there was a stack of comics in the closet. I didn’t know where they came from and it didn’t occur to me to ask for new ones, so I would read and re-read the stack I already had. It was a hefty assortment that included Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse from Dell Comics, Sugar and Spike, various Archie titles, some Children’s Classics Illustrated  and Harvey comics like Caspar, Richie Rich and Wendy the Good Little Witch. I was a small child in the late 1970s reading comics published in the 1960s, so ads for mail-in toys and other promotions, long since unavailable, were a constant source of disappointment. But the stories were always fresh.

Continue the Story

I’m writing a summary of the main points of this fantastic article by Tom McLean, which everyone absolutely MUST READ:

The industry of comics has, like every other aspect of showbiz and publishing, had to struggle with the changing landscape of making it work in the 21st century. If you had told me 20 years ago how easy it was to publish, promote and distribute comics in the digital age, I would have expected the doors of creativity to swing wide open and deliver a new Golden Age of super cool stuff. But instead, we have come to an industry that’s dominated by monopolies or near-monopolies. Its increasingly corporate nature has slowly but surely wrung the innovation and fun out of mainstream comics almost entirely. Even more sad is the creative decay, the decline in quality of comics and their near-universal slavish devotion to imitating other media or less-interesting elements of comics’ own past. I swear, I hope to never again read another superhero comic that uses first-person narration in captions. It was different when Claremont did it back in that 1982 Wolverine series, but it’s been run into the ground so much since then that by now it’s gone all the way through the planet and is halfway to Mars. 

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