Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Jim Shooter, kieron gillen

Kieron Gillen, Jim Shooter, and Comic Accessibility

In two completely unrelated blog posts today, Kieron Gillen and Jim Shooter looked at the issue of accessibility in comics today. First up, Gillen, from his blog earlier today, in discussing accessibility as it related to Uncanny X-Men, Volume II, #1:

… {T}he concept of accessibility is in mainstream American comics {is different} than any other form that I can think of. It's made me think that telling everyone everything they need to know may not be enough, which is sobering and fascinating – especially because I suspect writing for genuinely new readers and writing for lapsed readers are two entirely contradictory things. Because for the former, you have to explain what they need to know – and for the latter you need to explain less of what they need to know (because they know a bunch already), and more of the differences. And doing both hurts the experience for new readers, because it leadens the script with a whole bunch of stuff that's genuinely unnecessary.

Shooter's story comes from a meeting of the Friends of Lulu, and a discussion on how to get comics into a wider audience. He wrote:

… {P}eople who didn't have a clue went back to expounding about the vast numbers of new readers that could be had if only the publishers weren't too stupid to pursue their wonderful ideas about getting the books "out there." They preferred their fantasies. They had no interest in reality. Didn't want to hear it.

So, I skipped ahead to the part they really didn't want to hear. To interest vast numbers of new readers, comics would have to be a lot more accessible and a lot more entertaining—in a word, better.

Later in the post, Shooter states,

If we as an industry now routinely created wonderful, compelling works, if comics were as good as they could be and ought to be — and as clear and accessible as most TV, movies, books and other entertainment media offerings — the audience would find us. Just as the audience found a wonderfully well-written property in a genre that had pretty much been confined to the fringes before, Harry Potter.

Neither offers a very positive view of how one reaches new readers, and from reading Shooter it seems pretty near impossible with the current crop of creators in the industry today.

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