I’ve been sitting at my computer for a good twenty minutes now trying to find my way into a few big ideas that have been at the back of my mind for a while now.

I think I’m just going to stumble, messily, through them and see what comes from it, so bear with me.

Yesterday, a couple of friends took Sam & I on a journey into Long Island to visit the Round1 Arcade in Hicksville. For those of you who don’t know, Round1 is a Japanese chain. They have bowling alleys and karaoke rooms, claw machines that you can actually win things from, and lots and lots of arcade games.

It’s a geek space. Effectively, it’s a geekier Dave & Busters. It was a lot of fun, even though I am terrible at everything that isn’t a racing game. Thankfully, my broken wrist and messed up knee saved me from having to embarrass myself on anything as daring as a Dance Dance Revolution machine… So I was mostly just having a few beers and enjoying the ambiance of the place. I especially enjoyed how busy it was on a Saturday night, forty five minutes outside of Brooklyn, in the New York City suburbs. They did not have a Batman photobooth, but they did have one of these… (image missing)

And as Sam racked up slots on the leaderboard of Big Buck Hunter HD, I was looking around at the people who would come to this kind of place on a Saturday night. And to be honest, it was a very familiar crowd. It’s a crowd I see often. At every comic book signing. At every comic convention.

These are the folks who have probably watched a cartoon in the last year. Who have bought a handful of video games. Who have a favorite horror movie, and a favorite superhero movie and who could tell you why. They are mostly in their late-teens to early thirties (effectively, post-high school, pre-having children). They probably have a few fun party games at home, in the mode of Cards Against Humanity. There were guys with ponytails waiting in line for DDR. Girls with blue hair and nose rings waiting for a chance to play the claw machine that might nab them an Evangelion statuette. Folks considering whether to spend their tickets on a Pickle Rick neck pillow or a Nightmare Before Christmas hat. Or a few Funko Pops. They are probably all a little bit intense about the things they like, and while they’re not necessarily collectors of physical objects, they are collectors of interests. They choose their specialties, whether it’s Magic Cards, or Harry Potter, or what have you, and in their friend group they are the person who knows the most about that.

These are the geeks.

These are OUR people. These are the folks we want to come to the comic shop every Wednesday and pick up our comics.

But they don’t.

Not most of them, anyways….

I’d bet you a lot of the people in that Round1 have read a couple comics or manga, recommended by a friend, but I’d also bet you that most of them haven’t been to a dedicated comic shop. If they’ve been, it’s only maybe once a year. Maybe once every couple of months in very rare cases. And they’re more likely to buy a toy or a deck of Magic cards than a comic. They may have been to New York Comic Con once or twice, but more to experience a kind of Geek Mecca, than to specifically support comics. And when they go to New York Comic Con, they normally go knowing what they want to get.

If they are a Deadpool fan, they are showing up to get a totem of their Deadpool fandom, and then they are going home.

I’ve been having a conversation with some of my comic creator friends for a while, where I ask them to picture the bookshelf of the average Geek. Someone in that 18-35 range. Someone who has a bit of a disposable income, but nothing crazy… I’m not talking about the die-hard collectors who have bookcases and bookcases, I’m talking about the much more common occurrence where there’s one bookcase, and more commonly, one shelf of “geek stuff” in the whole house. It’s the shelf they’ll decorate with a couple (and only a couple) of action figures or funko pops. But let’s be generous, and say that they have a whole geek bookcase, four shelves high, and they’ve put their video games, DVDs, board games, and Harry potter books on three out of the four shelves, and they’ve dedicated one full shelf to comic books.

One shelf. Let’s call that twenty-five trade paperbacks, total.

Let’s get a few classics up on that shelf. Let’s say they get a copy of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, the one volume edition of Bone, Batman Year One, and The Dark Knight Returns. That’s close to a mainstream comics starter set, and are perennial best sellers. So, one fifth of that shelf are the classics. Let’s say on top of the classics, this person is a die-hard Batman fan. So they go a step further with Batman. They get Court of Owls, Hush, Black Mirror, Arkham Asylum, and The Long Halloween. That’s 10/25. They like the Marvel movies, so they pick up five contemporary trades from Marvel (since Marvel tends not to keep the classics in print), pushing them to 15/25. They’re a connoisseur now, so they pick out an Image title that catches their attention (Maybe The Walking Dead, since they’ve heard of it as a TV show), and pick up five volumes of that, or they pick up five volume ones of different books. And then because they want to show the folks at the comic shop they’ve got some breadth to their tastes, and don’t JUST like the mainstream stuff, they pick up a few artsy Graphic Novels. Let’s call them Persepolis, Fun Home, Maus, Black Hole, and Jimmy Corrigan. These are the “See, Ma? Comic books are art!” books.

Now, the sets might be different. Might have random DC rather than Random Marvel. Deadpool might be their diehard favorite rather than Batman, or they might go for a block of Rick and Morty trades. They might pick a favorite writer or artist instead of a favorite character. They might have a YA block of five rather than the literary block of five… But that’s twenty five books.

And that’s their shelf, full.

If they’re really hooked, they get to work filling a second shelf, and maybe they try to follow a few monthly comics if they have extra money floating around. They probably can’t keep it up if they start having kids and extra costs, and they phase out, and choose to revisit their shelf when they want that fix. Maybe they cycle one or two books off their shelf per year after that.

And those are the DREAM customers

More often? The folks in that Round1 only have a couple of comic trades on that geek shelf, and because they started with ones that didn’t connect with them, they don’t go beyond two or three.

Or they have 25 volumes of manga on that shelf, because it’s easier to understand where to start without somebody telling you. It used to be, even just 10 years ago, that certain fans couldn’t fill those shelves with books that reflected who they are, but even that’s started to change. The folks who want 25 queer comics of all shapes and sizes, can fill a shelf today like never before. But once they fill it, it’s filled.

If they go to a comic convention, they might broaden their collection by buying a book and getting it signed, because then it doesn’t go on a shelf, it goes in a frame. It’s a totem of fandom like a Deadpool print or a Joker Funko Pop, rather than a book on a shelf. But it’s treated like that, too. They get slabbed or framed and serve a wholly different purpose than readable entertainment.

But our dream audience has 25 slots on a bookshelf, and most of the lists they find online about how to fill those slots will recommend they fill more than half of those shelves with comics that came out 30 years ago. Every book we make is fighting for space on a shelf against Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and every great creator that followed.

Our entire industry is built on the people who decide to branch out beyond the first shelf, but exponential growth isn’t possible. It’s only the rarest cases when people can have a Beauty and the Beast style library. And this also goes for the people who pick up single issues… Once you have a stack of longboxes, the moment is going to come where you have “enough” comics, and every new comic that comes out needs to be better than the ones in those boxes in order to be worth it. And as tastes change, you’re more likely to prefer to go back and read old favorites than read something new.

So every year, comic creators are fighting for shelf space against every comic that has ever come out (especially since so many continue to be in print), and every comic that CONTINUES to come out. And comic shops are fighting against the fact that everyone can fill up those 25 slots on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble.

I think about this a lot when I’m writing Batman.

Because holy shit are there a lot of Batman comics out there! If you’re just doing what’s been done a hundred times before, you’re not going to get on that shelf. They can GET the book you’re riffing on and put it on the shelf. So it takes something crazy or innovative to catch a reader’s attention, and decide whether it deserves one of those five Batman slots. And that’s just the comics….

I was talking to Scott Snyder about the difference between when he started on Detective Comics, and me starting on Batman (2011 v 2020). When Scott started there had only been Two theatrical Batman movies in the previous decade, and Four Animated Movies.

In the following 9 years, there were Five movies featuring Batman or Bruce Wayne, a staggering Thirty-Eight Animated Movies Featuring Batman (and I’m probably miscounting on Wikipedia, there may be more). There was A five season Gotham TV show. Appearances and mentions on various other TV shows, live action and animated. Not to mention a decade of Scott Snyder Batman comics, and a bunch of Tom King Batman comics, and all the other Batman comics that have come out, including my own. And Video Games! And more!

So I’m not just fighting the comics, I’m fighting a multi-media Batman empire, for limited shelf-space. And I’m trying to figure out what I can offer that isn’t being offered elsewhere.

This is a long way to get to there’s a huge incentive to create something new like Punchline. Create a compelling character with a cool design that readers can ONLY get from your comic. If you can make a new character their favorite character, you might get some shelf-space… And if their favorite character is The Joker? Maybe you can pull together a bunch of cool Joker elements in a configuration they haven’t seen before and do something Shelf-worthy.

And that’s on the most salacious comic book character that exists. That’s Batman. Everyone and their mother know who Batman is. For other characters, folks might only give them ONE slot out of 25. And it’s probably already filled.

But the readers exist. The geeks are out there.

One thing I found interesting going to Round1, as opposed to the Barcades that have popped up everywhere, is that there weren’t a lot of classic arcade games. There were a few, sure, and a couple of remixes of old games, but there was a startling amount of new and different games. Folks weren’t there to revisit something from their childhood, they were there to have fun in the moment. They weren’t there for nostalgia or reflection, they were there to be entertained in the here and now.

And I wonder if that’s what we’re missing. If we’re spending too much time navel-gazing.

I predict there will always be a market for Batman comics, just like there will always be a market for Sherlock Holmes. Or Peter Pan. Or Dracula. The great characters stick around, they outlast us all, even if they come in and out of popularity in waves… But for the Sherlock Holmes fan, it would take a very daring, surprising take on Holmes to let that take find its way onto to their shelf, let alone to push off one of the Arthur Conan Doyle classics.

Shouldn’t we be trying to create our own new characters? Heroes of all stripes, not just Superheroes. Dynamic characters with vibrant personalities and cool looks, that readers want posters of and want to commission artists to draw? Shouldn’t we be creating whole new mythologies for readers to get lost in, rather than crowding old mythologies with more story? Are we drowning the Superhero genre with a glut of content, when we’ve already hit critical mass?

I think that’s the secret of Manga’s success in the US, and it outstripping western comics globally. They aren’t singular. They don’t cannibalize each other. If your favorite thing is Death Note, you start with volume one and you keep reading until it’s over. You don’t get an unlabeled volume that requires you to know 30 years of convoluted, contradictory continuity. Which doesn’t mean they don’t want the things that made us love superhero comics to begin with…

They want the soap opera, the big characters, the big stakes, the action, and the stunning art. They want a bit of sex and danger. They want worlds they can get lost in, and fall in love with the characters, and feel and think things they don’t feel and think in their day to day lives. Any trappings standing in the way of that are a barrier.

Manga’s success is entirely because we’ve created like a hundred barriers to protect a certain way of doing comics. They are a mass market product, with thick 200 page black and white volumes that sell for the cost of two of our 20 page floppy single issues.

Sometimes it feels like rather than fighting for the mass market, fighting to get those 25 slots, we’re staking everything on the rare readers who give comics multiple bookcases. The ones who have a few hundred trades, and come to shops a few times a month or even weekly. And we’re missing out on the larger geek audience that exists.

Which isn’t to say we SHOULDN’T make stuff for that smaller audience, but we need to recognize its size and its limitations.

If you’re a high schooler, and you grew up with Raina Telgemeier, and you’re ready for comics. You’re in college or just out of it, or working, and you finally have your own space with a bookshelf you choose to fill however you want… You are a geek, and you want to find your own unique set of 25 comic books that represent the kind of geek you are…

What are WE doing as creators and companies to get you to choose our books, rather than ones from decades ago, or ones made on the other side of the planet? How are we holding the door open to you, and giving you something that isn’t just the same thing your dad grew up with, or your grandpa, or great grandpa?

How do we create the new characters that break through the noise, characters who haven’t made the jump to other media, how can we make readers fall in love with the new, and convince them to lend us some shelf-space?

I think these are questions a lot of creators and companies need to be asking themselves.