EgyptUrnash

March 5, 2013 2:33 pm @ilovecomics The superheros have a lot of inertia but I think the writing is on the wall. I spent this weekend at Seattle's comic con; while there was no shortage of corporate-owned superhero comics, merch, and costuming there, there was a lot of stuff in other genres on sale. The biggest publishing booth there was Image, who's only got a handful of legacy superhero books - everything else is other genres. And the next size down? You had Dark Horse holding down a whole block of booths… right next to Topatoco's same-sized block. I don't think there was a single superhero in either booth. Admittedly my view of the con may be biased as I was there to sell my own SF book, and was mostly looking at the non-super stuff. But I feel like only about a quarter of the new work on sale was supers. Outside of comics you still have a ton of people who assume that comics = superheros of course!

March 4, 2013 4:21 pm > Hopefully, once it becomes clear that nobody has anything to prove anymore, the defensive generation will be replaced by one that sees superhero stories as stories. It has been. They're just not reading superheros. There's a generation of creators who grew up reading manga. All kinds of genres of manga, not just stories about dudes with secret identities and spandex suits punching each other. Some of them are making comics that are deadly serious, sure. And a lot of them are making comics that are mostly about having fun. My favorite current example is Homestuck. A big sprawling tapestry of a comic that sometimes takes itself deadly seriously but more often than not is about mocking itself, big serious adventures, and the foibles of its audience. And it's pretty damn huge with teens. You can see a couple hundred people dressed as the many characters in the story at any big comic con now. Especially if its creator is there. Nobody in the "serious" comics world focused around superheros knows what to think of it. Superheros? Man, that's what DAD gets when he goes to the comic shop. And I, for one, am absolutely delighted to see the sun setting on the day when "comics" means "superhero comics".