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.
