I’m not familiar with Mark Waid, who is the former chief creative officer of Boom! Studios, but a recent tweet by Richard Nash says: And don’t pretend it’s just comix … If you’re in publishing, you should listen to what @markwaid has to say ….
You can find the interview at Comics Alliance. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there, but one of the things that really shocked me was this:
CA: In our interview with Chip, he also talked about the barriers of the comic book format itself for new readers, including how and when comics are distributed, and even how to read them. He thought this could be a major impediment to breaking in new readers. How serious of an issue do you think that is?
MW: I think it’s a huge impediment on a couple of counts. First off, all of us who have read comics since were kids, we all lose sight of the fact that smart adults can’t figure out how to read comics, which is mind-blowing. Just a couple weeks ago, I was in Indiana guest-lecturing at an anthropology class about comics, and I passed out some pages of comics to make some points. And some of the kids who didn’t read comics came down afterwards – these are bright kids who have light behind their eyes – and they were saying, “I’m not exactly sure how to read this. Do I read the balloons first? Do I read right to left or up and down?”
For you and me, it’s like asking us how we breathe; we just know this stuff. But comics is like any other foreign language; you learn it easiest and best as a kid, and if you have to learn it as an adult it’s much harder to pick up on. Just the reading of comics, the mechanism is an impediment. Second, there’s a reason that newspapers don’t still publish serial fiction like [Charles] Dickens. Nobody wants to read it that way anymore. Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness. Especially in the digital age, people want everything now now now. Unless I’m overlooking something, I can’t see any other place for real serial fiction like that.To some degree there’s television, but even in television episodes you basically get a beginning, a middle and an end.
