Days of Future Past

1 comment on Hacker News

1. PositivevidarhJun 15, 2014

   > For a short while, comics became insanely collectible, and Marvel figured out how to cash in.

   This struck me. As a European, from one of the countries where comics stands strongest (Norway), I remember as a child, be shocked at hearing that in the US it was common, for the purposes of determining advertising reach, to count multiple issues per reader at one point.

   Because in Norway, it was normal to calculate 3-4 readers per comic for of the most popular titles. Like (in the 80's; while still going, they've been displaced by homegrown titles "at the top" as far as I understand) Donald Duck & Co. and the Phantom, which both sold in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 per issue through much of the 80's (every week for Donald, and every two weeks for the Phantom) in a country of then ca. 4 million people. So for Donald it would not have been unreasonable for an issue to have been read by one in five people, including a lot of adults.

   Comics, as a culture here, was always about fun and sharing, not really collecting (there are certainly collectors too, but it's never been as big as in the US).

   Many Marvel and DC titles also sold more in translations in Scandinavia (sometimes each country in Scandinavia might outsell the US for certain titles) than they did in the US, though their popularity has diminished since the 80's.

   Though it was not hard to see why "our" versions sold better when I saw my first US comic: Thin slivers full of advertising. We expected 60+ page issues, often expanded issues with up to 100 pages, and usually only 3 pages of advertising or so (inner cover and back page); maybe an advertising inlay.

   My first exposure to Marvel (as had "always" been the case in Norway - we never had the proliferation of titles following different aspects of a character) was also far easier to digest (though it used to be more chaotic):

   From 1983 onwards, a new publisher took over. Where the previous one had published a mish-mash of stories from the different Marvel titles, out of order, the new one followed a very simple format, coordinated throughout the Scandinavian market: Spiderman, Hulk, Project X each got one title that weaved together a single coherent-ish narrative for their title character from the different Marvel titles + extra stories about the other Marvel characers. In addition each title carried a single number scheme that placed them chronologically relative to each other. Focus was on ensuring that you could either follow one of the main titles or all of them in numbered order, and get a narrative that was understandable, if necessary "filled in" by a "fact page" or similar explaining the background of a "new" (to us) character that had to be thrown into the mix for the narrative to make sense.

   Especially relevant with the new X-Men movie: Project X lasted 13 issues on its first run, and ended with Days of Future Past.

   It got another 13 issue run again a couple of years later. Since then I stopped following superhero comics for many years so I don't know if they tried again, but superhero comics have never done particularly well in Scandinavia, which to me makes the US comics market even stranger.

   Because our market, is dominated by, well, comedic comics, many of which through the years have been series that only got newspaper strip treatment in the US. The format is generally a main title, which gets the most pages aggregated from new and classic strips, coupled with a number of rotating sideshows. Examples includes Beetle Bailey (which has run continuously since the 70's), Hagar the Horrible (currently not being published), Calvin and Hobbes (which kept running for a few years after the new strips dried up), Opus (/Outland/Bloom Country), Ernie, The Far Side.

   Many of these will start as a side series in one of the titles, and then "graduate" to a full series, and occasionally go back to being a side series in another title once their popularity diminishes (or when new material dries up - e.g. Calvin and Hobbes still show up).

   In return, we've long had the bizarre situation where US comic artists that are virtually unknown in the US, tour Scandinavia and get large articles in national newspapers about their book signings, and we get special stories weaving the Scandinavia into stories. Some of them (Ernie for example) have even snuck in their Scandinavian editors as characters in their series at times.

   These type of titles of course evades all of the narrative issues: Their universes are if not static, then at least rarely bound by their story lines.

   But the most popular comics today are homegrown comedic series. At least three currently have regular (monthly) titles: The Collective (Kollektivet) - a story about a group of badly mismatched friends that started out as a housing collective, Pondus - a story that started out as a story about two soccer crazy bus drivers -, and Nemi, which is the most internationally known of them, thanks to being the least peculiarly Norwegian one of them...

   All of these interestingly have in common that their universes evolve. Particularly Pondus and Kollektivet. Pondus has for example evolved from a simple series about two football-loving, beer drinking bus drivers getting into bizarre situations involving ugly women (the artist claims a US syndication deal stranded on his refusal to re-draw strips to make the women that one of the main character constantly hits on less ugly), horrible passengers etc. to a one of them buying a pub, and the perpetual bachelor (with the ugly women) finding himself a nice woman, getting married, having a child, and running a record-store with his dad. They escape the narrative "nightmare" that Marvel and DC deals with by not sharing their universe with anyone (the occasional friendly jabs between the different comic artists, where they've made fun of each others characters in various ways, excluded).

   Pondus and Nemi sell more than most Marvel and DC series do in the US on a monthly basis in Norway alone, with their artists in full control and making enough to tell the publishers where to stuff it if they get too much interference. These magazines, and slots as side-series in other comedic comics supports a relatively large number of other comic artists, though most of them can not live full time of their series (one of the more popular series, for example, is drawn by a high-school teacher). Compared to the US, we have a market that does amazingly well in sales, despite far fewer titles, but does not sustain as many artists. On the other hand, the stories are far more diverse, and one of the reason we sustain fewer artists is that the series are not "cookie-cutter" series managed project-managed by the publishers.

   To us, in many ways, when it comes to comics we are much closer to the Franco-Belgian comic culture than to the US. French and Belgian series like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Spirou have always done exceptionally well in Scandinavia, regularly getting reprinted in huge numbers.