I Endorse This Product And/Or Service

I thought the first one was stupid. It was “abandon your entire current audience and distribution system in the vague hope that you will suddenly be able to pull a new audience, despite the fact that your previous attempts to reach that audience (Marvel Adventures, Manga universe, M2) have sold at near cancellation levels. Because adults are not going to buy your ‘new content’ and new lines — it’s been the holy grail to create new characters that sold as well as the iconic old ones, and no one has been able to do it. And kids aren’t going to buy your repacked for 12 year olds iconic comics, because _kids don’t have access to comic stores_.

Marvel does absolutely need to get into the bookstore audience and distribution model that gives Naruto half the top ten list every month. It’s not going to get there by his method, though.

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1) I think aggressive promotion of the children’s comics Marvel produces already (expansion, as well, though they’re already doing that) is a great idea, and could be done along the lines he describes it.

2) However, I think there’s no reason to stop publishing teen-and-up comics with Marvel’s big names, because I think there’s a potentially much larger market available for them too. The twenty-somethings who go to see comics films in droves, for example.

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I think this guy is to cure an ailment he hasn’t correctly identified yet.

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When trying to talk to die-hard ‘western comics’ fans (unsurprisingly this usually means Super Hero fans rather than fans of the medium) about the stuff coming out of Asia it isn’t unusual to run into some incredibly xenophobic and blatantly racist commentary. Usually it goes something like-

“Read any manga?”

“I don’t read those Japanese porn cartoons/the Japanese are a bunch of pedophiles/the Japs are a bunch of fags (a twofer; racism and sexism just because the men don’t all look like Wolverine)/ etc.”

-that. I’ve been buying the stuff for over a decade (around the time the Spidey Clone Saga was starting and viz graphic novels cost about $20 each) and I keep hearing the same tired racist remarks over and over by a bunch of people who claim to know what they’re talking about AND never read manga. Often in the same sentence.

And that should be ‘their tribulations’. Why did I only catch that now?

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Thanks for the links again! I don’t think parts two and three will get the same degree of comment that part one did, because it’s just not as controversial a suggestion to say, “Marvel needs to advertise and distribute better” as it is to say, “Marvel’s current advertising is aimed at kids, and its content is aimed at adults. That’s a recipe for failure.”

Because that’s the key point. It’s not, “Abandon adults for kids,” it’s “You’re already telling kids, ‘Come buy our comics’, and then when they do, they’re terrible.” There’s this huge disconnect between the public image of Marvel (cartoons for kids, movies for tweeners and teens, merchandise for kids) and their content (fanwank for die-hard thirty and forty-year old fanboys who insist that they want to read mature, grown-up stories…but that they have to involve Batman and Spider-Man, just like the stories they read when they were a kid. Seriously, does any other medium have this problem? Does Sesame Street feel like they need to pander to grown-ups who used to watch the series, but now want to see it become an edgy urban drama? Do people complain that ‘Highlights’ is too kiddified now, and they should have an issue where Goofus rapes Gallant? If you’re grown up enough to want mature comics, you’re also grown up enough that you shouldn’t need them to feature guys in tights punching each other.)

…but I digress. 🙂 The point is, Marvel’s doing multi-media cross-promotion like Naruto, but it never gets kids into the comics because the comics aren’t on-message with the promotion. That’s the point of the first column; adults aren’t getting into comics en masse because they’re advertised to kids, and kids aren’t getting into comics en masse because they’re written for adults. It’s the worst of both worlds.

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There’s this huge disconnect between the public image of Marvel (cartoons for kids, movies for tweeners and teens, merchandise for kids)

I don’t even agree with this; Marvel’s movies are clearly not aimed at “tweeners”; they are aimed at the same 15-35 sweet spot that most movies are. Hell, their toys do too — kids may buy spiderman sheets, but they aren’t the audience for the most expensive sculpts and figures. They weren’t running an Iron Man ad during the Super Bowl to get the Hannah Montana crowd. Their public image covers the same range as their print audience. To abandon that entire range to focus on 12 year olds is not a recipe for saving, it’s a recipe for suicide.

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Thanks for clearing that up, Onion. Much obliged.

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…and telling your readers what they _should_ want usually works so well!

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