As long as I’m talking comics, I’ll
mention something I bought at Wal-Mart last week. This is a digest-sized Avengers comic that
was on display at the checkout. I’d seen
it solicited, but not actually seen it anywhere. (I never saw their first one, which I think
featured Spider-Man.) It was $7, but
when you consider that even at a smaller size, its 250 pages, and a regular 32
page comic is $4, it’s a bargain. I
haven’t read it yet (boy, have I accumulated a pile of reading material here
lately), but I’ve paged through it. So this isn't so much of a review of the material, which I'm sure is fine, but rather the concept.
The first part reprints the first
Avengers stories. Iron Man is wearing a
clunky gold suit, and they haven’t found and thawed out Captain America
yet. The next part is a series of tales
from the 80’s with a guest appearance by Spider-Man. The last half features more recent stories. Some of these may have been from the kids’
magazines Marvel has tried out. In any
case, they’re not the mainline Avengers comics and are based on the more
kid-friendly animated versions that have come out since the movies. That probably says a lot about most of the
comics Marvel publishes for comics fans.
They all used to be kid-friendly.
It says “Marvel” on it, but it’s actually
published by Archie. (There were Archie
comics with it on the rack.) This seems
like a commentary on both companies on some level. It’s a good idea and should be expanded to
include DC comics as well. Marvel and DC
can’t really reach the newsstand anymore.
They’ve both tried publishing magazines for the rack. Archie at least has a small foothold.
Unfortunately, I’m wondering how much
longer Archie will be around. They lost
their Sonic license and can’t produce their popular horror comics on any sort
of schedule. Their flagship Archie is
about their only monthly comic; everything else is reprints. This superhero digest could be good for both
Marvel (wider distribution than comic book stores or Internet and more closely
supports their movies) and Archie (publishing something that sells).
There’s no chance of putting new material
in these digests, but I’ve often liked the idea of a general audience magazine
version of Marvel, DC, and Archie characters with new material. They’ve all tried it, but it’s never
worked. Its either bad rack placement,
price, or lack of commitment (or something else, I’m just guessing). Marvel and DC are too involved with direct
distribution to really focus on it.
Worse, most of their mainline titles are currently not suitable for such
a format using reprinted recent material.
DC did a reprint magazine not long ago,
also at Wal-mart, but the decompressed story style and use of several titles,
made it more of a sampler. Marvel’s
taken a few shots with kid-friendly new material in magazines. Archie had Life With Archie, which started
off as an odd mix of looking like a teen girl magazine, and featuring adult-ish
Archie stories, but still drawn in the usual cartoony house style.
I think the magazine format for comics
could work on the newstand, but they need a line of them to take up more shelf
space and be more conspicuous. They’ll
probably need a different publisher to make them udner license. I’m thinking of a couple of team books
(Avengers, Justice League) and solo books (Spider-Man, Batman, Superman,
Archie, Betty and Veronica) and maybe even spotlight books (rotating central
characters like Guardians of the Galaxy, Wonder Woman, etc). Use the classic mythos of the
characters. Stay away from heavy
continuity. There should be multiple
stories per issue. They wouldn’t have to
all be self-contained, there could be serialized stories lasting several
issues. Lastly, it should be
all-ages.
Unfortunately, the entire magazine rack
section at my Wal-Mart has disappeared.
I’m not sure yet if its been moved or is gone. I guess I’d just like comics to be fun and
easily available again. This digest is a
step in the right direction.
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