Pretty interesting OpEd piece from Jennifer de Guzman of Image comics from their weekly retailer email. This attitude is why Image is creatively gangbusters right now and poor DC keeps cancelling titles (even the ones like Dial H, which *are* good) "The New York Times recently published a profile of legendary Vertigo editor Karen Berger that got me thinking about the future of comics. Calling her “Comics’ Mother of the ‘Weird Stuff,’” Dave Itzkoff’s piece notes how she presided over the publication of an astonishing body of work at Vertigo that included comics by Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Brian K. Vaughan — and how she was able to build the Vertigo “stable” and backlist because she was given the freedom to take chances on work that wouldn’t necessarily be the most profitable for DC. In the process, DC got titles like Sandman, Hellblazer, and Y: The Last Man that are now considered canon. In contrast, current DC co-publisher Dan Didio places emphasis on publishing work that’s instantly “accepted” by as many people as possible in his quotes in the piece, spurning the kind of stories that he says appeal to “a very small slice of our audience.” Such a model, to my mind, takes few chances and builds little passion in readers — and does little to draw in new readers. I was a relatively new comics reader when I cracked open Death: The High Cost of Living when I was sixteen. By 23, I was on a career path very much like Berger’s (“another English major looking for a job”), and I’ve spent that career with independent publishers who look for books that will do more than simply carry on a tradition or have the most milquetoast appeal to the broadest demographic swath. When I was editor-in-chief at SLG, I saw how Jhonen Vasquez’s comics inspired adoration; here at Image, I’ve experienced the phenomena of THE WALKING DEAD and SAGA. These are comics that create comics readers, who re-invigorate readers who had grown weary of the same stories appearing again and again in the medium. They’re comics that will carry us to the future, instead of drudging us through the past again and again." -JdG
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:24:57 +0000
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