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A few weeks ago I had dinner at my parents house with one of my Dad’s old co-workers. She became one of his very good friends and was quite famous around our house for inviting us to these blow-out Christmas parties, with 5 christmas trees and tons and tons of food. There was this one particular brand of chicken wings made with soy sauce that I found myself going for again and again (I was 10 at the time). At this most recent dinner she regaled us with stories about her life as a notary in the BC interior. They were baudy tales involving drunkenness, animals, and a police incident or two. She made a remark in the course of her stories that really impressed upon me. She said that cable TV and the internet were the death of the night life out in the interior. Before all this technology took over, the people of these towns would get together and produce the kinds of parties you imagine only happen on 5th avenue of some squeezed out metropolis. One of their hawaiian themed shindigs involved filling an entire basement with real sand, and all the guests came in their best hawaiian shirts and swimsuits. It was like she was describing a time when dragons roamed the earth. I looked down at my plate and felt a little sad.

It’s no secret that in adult life it’s harder to get out with your friends and hang out. Household chores are never more important to do than when it’s your own toilet that needs scrubbing. Friendly gatherings just don’t come together on Friday nights like they used to, so you have to start engineering your social life. However, in this age when music and movies can come out of an Internet cable, we want our personal interactions to be as convenient as our consumer transactions. In school we spend years in close contact with people we don’t like, whether you’re popular or not, so you expect more out of your adult life. It doesn’t work that way, and nor should it.

Every year I find myself going to anime conventions, and every year I find more to complain about, whether it’s over-zealous security, unintentionally hilarious fanfic readings, or the throng of Narutards, Bleachketeers, or whatever popular costume that’s featured that year. Yet still, I get that feeling of expectation in my bones every time I head out to one. It’s like I can feel the turning of the seasons when I see the costumes and the artist’s alley. But why would I put up with the crowds, the Line Nazis and Otaku Body Funk in order to experience this?

The answer occurred to me when I read this article on cracked.com called “7 reasons the 21st century is making you miserable”. Basically, by trying to maximize only the good interactions we have with people, we miss out on a great portion of the human experience. Hanging out with real live humans, even if they’re annoying, is a source of joy for us. We are social animals. If we catch someone doing something stupid, you can almost feel the rush of group-bonding chemicals as you gossip with your friends about that person. Being gossiped about or even confronted about our flaws drives us to better ourselves. At the very least, it reminds us that we are part of a strong, healthy society, something that can’t be replaced by cable TV or the Internet. So my advice is to get out there, go the reunions, the keggers, and the tupperware parties! Use that computer to supplement social gatherings instead of escape them! And most important of all: Live.

The nature of my work allows me to listen to internet audio of all kinds, so naturally I download the geekiest podcasts I can find. I usually only write in this space if I have some kind of conclusion, and today it is this: The North American comic book industry is laughably out of touch with reality.

More specifically, I’m talking about the larger companies, Marvel, DC, and Image. All they seem to do is languish in the creative tide pool that is superhero comics. There is constant talk about how they’ll be able to re-invent characters 20, 30 or 50 years old. The current crop of superhero films are running off of storylines that haven’t been published in just as many years. Nobody seems to be asking, why do we need these characters at all? After all the arguments about continuity, non-continuity, ret-con and elseworlds, are we so creatively bankrupt a society that we can’t end, I mean finally end the Supermen, Spidermen and Batmen of the world and come up with some new characters? Why are we dealing with titles that change so many hands creatively? And why is Brian Michael Bendis the most critically acclaimed writer in the industry?

No, seriously, why? I can’t make it through one of his books without acquiring a bad taste in my mouth.

Most importantly, the podcasts, the fansites and magazines still seem to consider Manga and graphic novels as this new foreign thing, but if you look at the bestseller charts at Barnes and Noble, the graphic novels you see are predominantly titles like Bleach or Naruto. When Japanese comics written for a Japanese audience are outselling American comics, then it is truly a desperate situation. I’m not about to proclaim that the American comics industry should roll over and hail glorious nippon, far from it. However, it needs to get with the program if we consumers are going to see better comics.Here are 5 ways to get back on track.

1) New characters

The industry is full of talented and varied artists, yet few, if ever are allowed to create titles on their own. The new crop of stories may not be the next Spawn, in fact 90% of them won’t be. It’s going to be the one or two megahits that pay for the rest of the titles that are shuffled off to the bargain bin. This is the cost of doing business in any entertainment business, be it movies, music, or publishing.

2) Finish it already!

Now if we’re going to introduce a new crop of characters, and there is a certain amount of budget committed to marketing each one, there should be a way to tie off loose story lines and cancel a title gracefully, rather than leave the few fans it has with open questions and closed wallets. A complete, cohesive story is much more likely to cross over into other media, like movies.

3) Cut the Turkish Prison crap

The Death of Gwen Stacey was regarded by many as the day that comics lost their innocence. Peter Parker’s girlfriend was a victim of Spider-man’s success as a superhero, and the void that she left brought Mary Jane into Peter’s life for good. That one death precipitated one of the greatest storylines in comics. These days when I pick up an issue of Ultimate X-men, they often kill hundreds of people in the space of a single issue, and I feel nothing. I saw the action figure of Gwen Stacey’s corpse from Ultimate Spider-man, so I’m pretty much precluded from picking that book up ever. It’s almost as if critical acclaim in comics now comes from torturing the characters in the worst possible fashion. It’s not fresh or innovative anymore, it’s just depressing!

4) More stylized art

The trend toward big eyes and anime style in comics is not necessarily a good one. Lots of published “anime style” comics lack the foundations that made the originals so appealing. Furthermore, artists in the west have a duty to produce art that is completely distinctive from anything else in the world. Mike Allred of Madman fame is a good example of the kind of unique and specific art that is needed to create new brands that will revitalize the industry.

5) New business model

I personally have yet to see a benefit to collecting monthlies. I picked up my first Ranma trade paperback in 1993. It was 10 issues for about $2 per issue. Your average cover price for a monthly is about 5-6 dolars, and half of it is probably ads! In what universe is this considered economical? It’s too expensive for an impulse buy, and meanwhile Shonen Jump is publishing 250 pages for about 8 dollars. That’s about 10 times the content for only twice the price! The monthly comic book has become little more than a pamphlet for the trade paperback, and if they can’t make it into the hands of potential customers, then they can’t even perform that function. Web publishing may be only way to get new titles out to the general public at any recoverable cost.