Robot 6 puts together a couple of quotes of various comics professionals bitching about the superhero audience and its expectations. Mark Waid kicks off:
The audience doesn’t know what it wants. If it knew what it wanted, it wouldn’t be an audience. It just knows that it wants to be entertained somehow, and that’s a perfectly reasonable expectation. I wish we were better at it. The 50,000 hardcore fans of periodical print comics that we have left, the ones we haven’t and can’t drive away, seem to indicate with their buying patterns that they’re interested only in nostalgia, which is terrifying. And I understand why publishers cater to that; they’re kinda forced to, given that the print distribution system is targeted SOLELY TO THOSE 50,000.”
There’s the rub. Waid may or may not be right that the audience doesn’t know what it wants (though it’s certainly vocal about its preferences), but it does know what it doesn’t want. And what it has wanted less and less over the last two decades is superhero comics. Print runs that in the late eighties were reasons for cancellation were bestsellers in the mid nineties and by now are only reached by the top two-three titles in any given month, if at all. Waid talks about the fans “we haven’t and can’t drive away” and this is more true than he may like, because fuck me, DC and Marvel and their imitators have done their best to drive fans away. Pointless crossovers, cover gimmicks, an endless milking of hot characters, the deconstruction/reconstruction of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the sheer disdain for readers shown by letting issues be late for months or years, the sheer shit that has been published over the years, no wonder readership has been dropping steadily.
What has saved the superhero publishers, at least for some time, is the sheer loyalty fans have shown towards the characters. It’s the same sort of loyalty that people show towards their favourite sport teams; no Cubs fan will stop watching them just because they lose every game, just like a hardcore Spider-Man fan will stop reading his comics just because Marvel made him into a clone, or decided they didn’t like him married. But at the same time a team that always loses and doesn’t offer its fans anything worth being a fan for will not get many new ones, just like the long runs of mediocre Spider-Man titles will not have gotten him many new readers. They’d rather watch the movies or the cartoons, much cheaper too.
It always annoys me a bit when writers talk disdainfully about their readers, when somebody like Johanna Draper Carlson says “When did fans get the idea that they could dictate content to creators? If you aren’t enjoying something, stop buying/watching/reading it.” As if the only role fans get to play is to consume and cannot have any say about what happens to their favourite characters. Because certainly with superhero comics the readers are there for the characters, to see Spider-Man or Green Lantern in action, without necessarily caring or knowing the creators working on them. Fans have just as much if not more invested in their comics as the creators have. They deserve more than just the privilege of plunking down their three or four dollars each issue.