COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 318
Grr... holiday weekends. Love the holiday, hate the fact that I have to wait one more day for comic goodness. I understand the delay, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Luckily my local shop had a one-day special: 15% all TPB's. Just to get people to shut up and buy stuff. Well, it worked. That's good capitalism.
I met a friend of mine at the shop, she just returned to New York after another semester down in Maryland. The whole purpose of this meeting was to catch up - with each other and with her comics. She has a few regular titles that she reads, but they are diminishing quickly. Unlike me, she doesn't keep up with the regular comics press and releases, so she hasn't found suitable replacements yet. Such ended up being my job yesterday, of suggesting various things to her and getting her to buy them. I never realized what an effect I can have on some people in getting them to read or watch stuff. Gotta love that peer pressure.
But it does bring up the problem of non-comics geeks trying to keep up with comics. And yes, there is such a creature. They'll have the few titles they collect, but what they really like to do is curl up with a good fantasy book or spend an entire night coding in PERL or Java. So they won't be as informed as us, the traditional comics geeks. And people who are not geeks who read comics tend to get their "hot comic" info from Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly anyway. So what is to be done?
Such is our mission. I think we spend a lot of time in trying to get people who'd never read comics to read comics. Sometimes it's successful, a lot of the times it's not. My mother never finished the Kabuki books. My father never bothered to read the entirety of 300. Sure, he thought it looked cool, but he didn't bother to do anything other than look at the art. Meanwhile, I have friends who would like to read comics and don't know where to start, and I have left them to fend for themselves.
So I think I'll sit back and relax a little, and just make random suggestions, and find out that it actually works. The audience is eager, so I don't need to strain myself. It's all of matter of getting them into a comics shop and just offhandedly point something out, or carelessly flipping through a book with interesting art. They'll bite. Every move is calculated, every action a piece of bait you throw out for the fish. Not that your friends have anything in common with fish (though they might). But be sneaky. Obvious efforts tend to induce resistance.
My effort were so non-obvious, even to me. I'll admit all of what happened yesterday was an accident. By just listening to me talk, my friend ended up picking up Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories, switching that for Crisis on Infinite Earths, then finally choosing Earth X. She almost bought Barry Ween: Monkey Tales, but opted to wait for the TPB instead. And then she almost bought Batgirl, then put it back after considering she was spending way too much money right there (Hey, we're in college. We're poor).
Even better than spending your own money is getting someone to spend theirs.