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Haus: I'm not sure how you're defining fantasy, Janean, if the Sandman (cars, guns, modern day setting) is - rereading the Sandman tends to reveal how surprisingly geeky a lot of it is, at least until Gaiman gets to calm down and stop using the Justice League.
Yeah, the first ten issues or so are a) more a horror comic than anything else and b) beside themselves with excitement at the opportunity to play with the DC universe's toys, closely following in the footsteps of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. After the Element Girl issue IIRC we're dealing more with nods to the DC universe, stuff that you don't have to get but that's fun if you do. I'd call the comic fantasy then because of the many fantasy elements it includes. Fairies, castles, gryphons, werewolves, demons, immortals, angels, the machinations of various gods. Gaiman's trick, now much-repeated, is to mix all that in a with modern-day setting and cars and guns. It's not The Belgariad but I'd call it fantasy more than anything else, just like Moore's Swamp Thing included tropes from many other genres but remained a horror comic.
In terms of picking up on the success of The Sandman, the Dreaming was clearly the first, unsuccessful attempt. The House of Secrets again sought to cover similar ground. Then there was Lucifer, again sharing an aesthetic and some characters with Sandman, and now the same profoundly irritating "but what if the Big Bad wolf was a down-at-heel gumshoe, protecting the little pigs from a serial killer? sort of conceit that Gaiman specialises in. There's a continuing campaign to get at the same audience, which is presumably seen to be big enough to support one running title, although Lucifer and Fables ran alongside each other.
DC certainly continued making money from Sandman within the comics market, and the Gaiman-blessed spin-offs will no doubt continue. They're more like the various attempts to extract more cash from fans of Claremont's X-Men - new titles with the same characters, miniseries with the same characters. From what I know about sales figures, and I'm no expert, they've only been reasonably successful at milking more money from comics fans. In contrast when Gaiman comes back to do Endless Nights it makes the bestseller list of the New York Times. We could label Gaiman and Sandman as a non-recurring phenomenon, and say people who wanted to read fantasy were already being served by fantasy prose novels and by fantastic manga but it seems to me that if a fantasy audience is willing to read one comic, they'd be willing to read another.
This is the importance of genre fiction to comics, IMHO. Compare: "Want to read a comic?" "No thanks, I don't read comics." with "Hey, you like sci-fi, don't you? Check this out, it's like William Gibson." "Heavy Liquid? Okay, but it better be good." People like to read things they're familiar with. If they like the crime genre, they'll be more likely to read a crime comic. If they worship George Romero they're more likely to try The Walking Dead. My gay aunties haven't ever read no comics but they were keen on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home last time I saw them.
Possibly the reason why mainstream comics from the larger publishers tend not to stray too far from certain genres is that you need to be in a comic shop to buy them in the first place. The Dark Tower comics might be a good example there - the people who will buy them will, I imagine, mainly be the subset of Steven King fans who regularly buy comics... is there a breakout market?
Right now the Dark Tower comic is primarily being bought by comics fans or at least people who've bought them before. The percentage who bought it and have never set foot in a comic shop before is, I'd guess, miniscule. When it's collected into a trade and appears in a bookstore, the likelihood is that Dark Tower readers who've never bought a comic before will be tempted to buy it because it's Dark Tower, and they like Dark Tower. That could be a breakout market. Of course, that depends on the comic in question being any good. It would help if the Stephen King element of it wasn't being so heavily diluted. |
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