Want to Build Community In Comics? Keep It IN the Comics!
One of the reasons why Spirou Journal is such an interesting read from week to week is to watch how it builds its community.
In American comics, that was traditionally done in the letters column. Or Stan Lee would write an editorial on the Bullpen page directly to the readers, along with self-referential comic strips and promotions. “Marvel Age” made characters out of the Bullpen staff. Sometimes, in a more innocent day, they’d even list people with their home addresses who were available to become pen pals.
Spirou Journal does it in a way that feels more natural. From a North American perspective, it feels like a throwback. They don’t have a letters column, but they do have interviews with subscribers, art critiques for those who send in page samples (usually teenagers or younger), a weekly comic strip themed around a subscriber, and more. The editors have an editorial in each issue that’s a half page drawn gag. Haven’t seen that since Archie Goodwin in “Marvel Fanfare,” soon to be in Omnibus form, at last! (Yes, that’s an Amazon Affiliate link, and this site would get a commission on qualifying purposes. Thanks for not fining me, FTC.)
They half-page themselves so seriously.
There’s also a shared history in Spirou Journal with the subscriber base and other readers. Characters appear in the magazine for decades at a time. The creators can easily reference them as influences, just as the current readers still read their adventures.
The cast of creators is always shifting, but you see the same names returning again and again with new projects. These days, they’ll show up every year at Parc Spirou for a comics festival, too.
The late Raoul Cauvin was practically a character all his own. He wrote for the magazine for 50 years and would appear not infrequently to be celebrated on his birthday or whenever the editorial team wanted to celebrate him.
There’s also a pair of interviews with creators in each issue. One is about the creator’s history with Spirou or reading comics, in general, while the other is a tour of their studio or an interview about their work. Spirou humanizes its creators and presents them to its readers in a way that makes them more familiar. They feel like real people, and they talk like friends who happen to be making the comics they’re reading every week.
It’s part of what people use social media for today. Given the slowdown in social media usage, though, and Spirou Journal’s average readership being in an age group that doesn’t necessarily have social media, it’s smart to put all of this into the comics, themselves. You don’t need to subscribe to the publisher’s Substack or Discord or Slack or something.
The other nice thing is that the French publishers’ social media presence is comics-focused, and not entirely movie- and tv- and video game-focused.
The more the reader feels like part of a community by being included or by being introduced to other readers and the creators whose work they absorb every week, the more likely that reader is going to stick around for a long time.
It’s a lesson that seems long forgotten in North America.
Yes, as you point out, this is nothing new, for Spirou this dates back to text pages in the early issues of the 1930s and 1940s, as most european children litterature at the time (thy were many), similar, to what was happening in the US simultaneously, early comics had the Supermen of America (is that the right name?) just in the same vein that in the earlier pulp era the Shadow had the cypher decoding ring that you could use to exchange secret messages with your friends. All this is way before Stan’s fake Bullpen.
But this is an interesting subject to analyse further.
Why is it still going in Spirou and not, say, in Marvel Comics.
The answer is quite simple.
Spirou is still read primarily by kids.
Marvel books are not. The handful of 45+yo basement-dwelling completists who still constitute the foundation of Marvel’s customer base are definitely not kids any more. Some might still behave like overgrown teenagers, but they certainly aren’t. Some of them, myself included, are fast approaching retirement benefits age.
Not the same crowd at all.
In a way, it’s nice that Spirou, pretty much singlehandedly at this point, tries to instill good old human values into young children (I’m not saying morality, since it has a bad rap these days), before they eventually get steamrolled by social media, is commendable, certainly. Yet, probably, ultimately, pointless. Nice try though.
Sorry I got dark for a second there. I’m old and cynical. Used to be a Marvel reader 🙂 Also a big fan of DC books of yore, these days they’re even darker.