Episode 23: Where Do Comics Readers Come From?

In my thirty years of comics, I’ve noticed a couple of big inflection points that brought new generations of readers into comics.

When you listen to interviews with enough comics creators on enough podcasts, certain similarities keep popping up, based on their generations. You can see where comics fans were born in mass numbers.

Can we learn anything from that to predict the next generation or, even better, create the next inflection point?

I’m afraid, like much of the world today, things are so spread out and de-centralized that these inflection points aren’t easy to pin point anymore. They may not even be possible.

Let’s start back almost 35 years ago for the first big push:

The G.I. Joe Commercial(s)

Many people around my age (early 40s, maybe skewing 4 or 5 years older and younger) came to comics via the G.I. Joe television commercial for comics. Not all of us. Not even me, to be honest — I ate up GI Joe, but don’t remember the commercials at all. I didn’t even start reading comics until five years after those famous ads.

But a lot of people currently in their late 30s to their mid-40s were introduced to comics that way. It comes up repeatedly in talking to readers of a certain age.

Saturday Morning X-Men Cartoon

The next wave came from the FOX Saturday morning X-Men animated series of the early to mid 90s. I remember this one well. I was a big animation fan at that time, mostly from Warner Bros. animated series like from Tiny Toons through to Animaniacs, Freakazoid, and the Batman series, as well as Disney Afternoon shows from DuckTales through to Gargoyles, TaleSpin and others.

I remember thinking that new X-Men series was pretty cool. I had been reading the X-Men comics for a couple years already at that point, but there weren’t many comics being translated to movies or animated series at the time. The novelty certainly helped them.

The series got off to a legendarily bad start. The animation wasn’t finished when they aired that first episode. I don’t think they made it more than two or three episodes before going into reruns to buy time to make more. It was a bit of a mess, honestly.

Except: For a new generation who never read comics before, this animated series introduced them to superheroes. You hear it repeatedly in interviews with creators in their late 20s and early-to-mid 30s, particularly women.

Borders-era Manga?

If we skip ahead another decade or so, I’d have to guess it was the Borders-era Manga explosion. That brought kids into bookstores to sit in the aisles and read those little black and white books.

There doesn’t seem to be one book in particular, though “Sailor Moon” comes up a lot. But was that from the manga or the animated series? I don’t honestly know.

Side note: It the X-Men series brought a lot of women into comics, the manga boom turned out to be an avalanche. The comics and animation schools are often majority women now, and so many of their chosen styles are directly manga-influenced. (The Disney influence is close, too.)

What Comes Next?

Will superhero movies and TV shows bring the next generation in? When we listen to podcasts in ten years with the up-and-coming creators in their late 20s, what will they cite as their introduction to comic books?

Will it be Raina Telgemeier? Will it just be Scholastic Book fairs, in general? Will everyone making comics in ten years think that comics are novels with spot illustrations à la “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” or that one with the dog kid? Will they all quote from Telgemeier’s recent “Share Your Smile” the way my generation knows “How to Make Comics the Marvel Way” inside out by heart?

How long will it take before we recognize that next wave? Will it have a singular defining moment? In today’s day and age where everyone can curate their own content, it seems impossible to think there will be a single entry point for everyone, but will a certain class of media influences dominate?