Accessibility in long form super hero serials! As someone who just had a First Issue hit the stands,

Accessibility in long form super hero serials! As someone who just had a First Issue hit the stands, I’m curious how my reader-friendly ambitions were met. COPRA has a large cast with a lot of back story, but I treated it like the debut it was. “Every issue is someone’s first.” None of the comics I read as a kid were 1st issues, yet I still fell in love. Suicide Squad 13, Batman 420, Daredevil 256… all were involved mid-arc stories. I wasn’t deterred. I was hooked. They gave me enough to keep me coming back. Different world, tho; starting at the beginning of a series is now a given, it’s not the luxury it once was. Titles used to operate like sitcom episodes (drop by whenever) but they’ve been operating like HBO shows (commit and consume) for a long while now. When Jim Shooter became Editor-In-Chief at Marvel, he noted that the 70s cult faves (Howard the Duck, Warlock, MoKF) were dense, impenetrable, and confusing, so he pushed a line-wide effort to clarify the storytelling. Sales DID rise; was accessibility a key factor? Shooter blogged about his difficulty in making sense of modern comics. He’s notoriously picky, but personal taste aside, if he who was in the business *for decades* couldn’t figure it out, what hope would a casual reader have?80s Example: Giffen/Bierbaums’ “5 Years Later” Legion is polarizing. Not considered a great jumping on point, but the heads praise it. I thought it aggressively Members Only but have since come around it in a big way, absolutely loving it. What’s the metric of its success there?90s Example: The Jim Lee X-Men 1 was a big poppy comic full of glitz & history. How accessible was it to new readers? Claremont was working with 15+ years of quasi-improv world building at that point. X-books in general were a lot to reckon with, but that never stopped sales. So yeah, this has been on my mind for a bit. I was in the unique position to address both extremes with COPRA #1, and I hope I struck a balance that makes you come back for that second issue. (NOV 6 – plug!) It’s where thought balloons make their triumphant return, btw.  XOXO -- source link

More pics about