Steve Oto of Alternate Realities in Scarsdale, New York saw Steve Bennett's comments on comic formats (see 'Confessions of a Comic Book Guy -- Resolved: Comics Should Be Less Expensive') and suggests a Japanese-style format for American periodical comics:
Usually, I'm satisfied with just reading everyone's comments on the various topics that pop up on this site whether I agree with them or not. However, recent discussion on the future of the format of comic books has encouraged me to put in my poor two cents.
Being a fourth generation Japanese-American, I was lucky enough to grow up enjoying both Japanese and American comics. Therefore, the anthology format used in the Japanese weekly comics like Shonen Sunday and Shonen King were familiar to me even before they began to appear here in titles like Crossgen's Edge and Forge and even the Action Comics Weekly back in the late 80s. I remembering thinking that these U.S. anthologies weren't quite the way that I personally would have liked to have seen them and that the time was not right to introduce the format to an American audience. Now I'm thinking that the time may be coming around soon.
A common complaint that I'm sure we all hear at our respective stores is that the price of comics is just too high. A customer buys four comic books and he's shelling out at least ten to twelve dollars. The customer who likes Batman and buys Batman and maybe Detective cannot afford to purchase Robin, Catwoman, Birds of Prey, Batman: Gotham Knights, Batman: Legend of the Dark Knight and all the Bat-mini-series that happen to be coming out that month as well. But what if the publishers went to the thicker phonebook-type format (currently seen in Viz's Shonen Jump) that the Japanese weeklies use, with each issue centered around a particular 'family' of books?
Let's say on the first Wednesday of the month, for $14.99 (just to pick a number out of the air), DC publishes Shonen Batman (for lack of a better title). Maybe it could contain the equivalent of an issue of Batman, Bat LODK, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman and one chapter of some 6-issue mini-series; maybe even a little more if DC feels so inclined. On the third Wednesday, again for $14.99, they could come out with Shonen Batcave, containing Detective, Batman Gotham Knights, Robin, Birds of Prey, Gotham Central and chapter 2 of that 6-issue mini-series. Suddenly, you have a Bat reader who never read Gotham Central before but will now because it's included in the big thick comic. Maybe he'll skip the Robin section 'cause he just hates Robin but there's a good possibility that he'll glance through the Robin since it's right there in his hands and he's paid for it already and maybe he'll like it. Maybe this reader, who was only shelling out six bucks a week 'cause he could only afford to pick up two comics, will be willing to pay an extra couple of dollars more than usual to get three times the comics. And if he's hooked, maybe he'll now buy both Shonen Bat-books each month, thus spending $30 a month, instead of the $24 a month that he was averaging with two books a week.
This format could work for a Shonen Superman on the second Wednesday that contains Action, Superman, Adventures of Superman, Supergirl, Superman/Batman and a chapter of a Superman mini-series. On the second and fourth Wednesdays, watch for $12.99 Shonen Justice League and $12.99 Shonen Justice Society. You get the idea. Marvel could do this as well (e.g. Shonen Spider-man, Shonen Ultimate, Shonen X-this, Shonen X-that).
It would be like buying the Marvel Essentials or the new DC Showcase Presents every week. Problems exist, of course. Again, I'm used to the black & white format of Japanese weeklies and it doesn't bother me but American readers seem to find black & white comics to be distasteful. I grew up on the cheaper newsprint and if that means less expensive comics, I wouldn't mind that at all. But I can imagine a large faction that demands that its comics be in full color on slick paper (maybe the same people who will also complain that it costs too much).
When I mentioned my format idea to a customer, he argued that such a thing would make him mad. He happens to buy comics based not on the characters or storylines, but on the creative team. He won't care to read a Batman story written by 'some shmoe' but will buy any issue of Batman written by, say, Warren Ellis. For those readers, I would argue another solution that the Japanese system utilizes. In the Japanese weeklies, after a storyline has been completed, those particular episodes are collected into digest-sized paperbacks. For the 'Ellis' junkie, all those individual chapters of Batman or Nightwing or Batgirl can be compiled from the different Shonen versions and reprinted in the same trade paperback format that is currently being used. Therefore, the Ellis junkie eventually still gets his Ellis-only bat-story without the fluff of the other titles.
