In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a modest-sized comic-book store
called The Million Year Picnic, presumably named after the short story
from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The shop is
packed, ceiling to floor, with comic books, but it’s not a
stereotypical comic-book store. Many of the clerks are
female, for one thing, and they’ve also got a fine selection
of European comics. But the best thing about The Million Year Picnic is
that when you walk in, you’re not immediately assaulted by superheroes
and colorful bundles of undignified superhero
paraphernalia.
While superhero movies have thrived in the past 10 years,
corporate superhero comics are on the verge of
extinction. One of the better-selling Marvel comics of last
year featured zombie versions of Spider-Man,
Giant-Man, and other heroes cannibalizing each other. Children
stopped reading comics decades ago, and the audience age keeps
climbing: It’s not outrageous to believe that the average
superhero-comics fan is a man in his early to mid-30s.
At the same time, comic books—or graphic novels, if
you’re a fussy lit-snob—have become the
second-fastest-growing subsection of bookstore sales in the nation (the
first, if you really want a fright, is Christian inspiration). Nearly
every bookstore in Seattle now has a comics section, and there are
dozens of talented cartoonists—Forney, Woodring, Barry,
Burns—living in the Pacific Northwest.
So why doesn’t Seattle have its own Million Year Picnic? Why is it
that, upon entering almost every comic-book store in this town, the
first thing that you’ll see is a Wonder Woman doll that will more than
likely wind up in the possession of a grown man? The
downtown Zanadu Comics (1923 Third Ave) has a decent selection of
so-called “alternative comics,” but they’re shunted off to the side,
next to the porn comics and the collection of vintage Playboys. You first have to walk by bins
pregnant with Batman statues and Superman play sets to even get to the
comic books, and the atmosphere can be off-putting: Once, when I
brought an attractive female friend into the store, she was
twice approached by slavering male customers and asked if she
needed help finding anything.
This weird adulation of corporate superheroes may be paying the
bills for these stores, but it’s not helping them in the long run. The
aging fan base will do nothing but shrink, and the tens of thousands of
new comics fans created in the last five years will find nothing
appealing in these gaudy shops full of adult men buying cheap
little morality tales splashed with colorful ink and a
nostalgia for childhoods long past. Comic books have grown up, but
these engorged children can’t let go of the medium’s now-irrelevant
pulpy origins.