I think for most people, though, there isn’t too much awareness of just how crap it’s all gotten…they would pick up a Batman book based on liking the cartoon, or the recent movies, and if it happened to be good, they would never have cause to think that the superhero culture has become offputting. If the superhero fantasy of power and identity wasn’t accessible, no one would’ve seen The Matrix or Diehard, would they?

But I do think there’s a problem with reading different forms of comics. Reading strips is easy: it’s just scanning. Longer narratives don’t respond well to scanning, though. I think it was Don Simpson who had a thing about this, when you see someone new to comics reading one, they’re just flipping through the pages, stopping, looking, flipping again…they treat it like a magazine, they treat every panel as its own thing, they don’t connect it all up and they don’t see why they should: to them, that’s how you read these things, you don’t read them like a regular book. To break that, you’ve got to really put some mustard on what they’re seeing, something that makes them accept the form-specific method of reading comics — something to make them care about what’s going to happen, enough that they’re willing to page forward through the story instead of just scanning and sampling it.

But…hmm…seem to have mislaid my point around here someplace…

Try asking random people on the street to name a comic character. Unless you specify a comic book character, I’m guessing more people will come up with Snoopy, Garfield, or Dilbert than Superman or Batman.

This isn’t really true, either, even if you restrict yourself to English speaking countries. The comics to which people have the easiest access are the ones published in the newspaper every morning. (You might include webcomics, too, inasmuch as they’re free to anyone with internet access… but as much as I like some of them them I wouldn’t count them as “accessible” because no one who isn’t interested is going to seek them out, or know how to find ones they might want to read.)

Most people will never walk into a comic shop, and comics newbies may find even the Marvel and DC collections in “graphic novels” section of the bookstore offputting.

Something I should have emphasized when I posted earlier is that the problem with superhero comics (and one reason the percentage of good superhero work is weirdly small) is less an inherent problem with the genre than a problem with superhero comics as they exist in our culture. There’s a fairly monolithic aesthetic to superhero comics. This is, I think, because the genre has always been dominated by Marvel, DC, and eventually Image, and all others tend to imitate them. Over the years the genre became inbred and the “superhero aesthetic” grew increasingly exaggerated. It’s an aesthetic that outsiders are likely to find ugly and maybe a bit sleazy.

Speaking of inbreeding, superhero comics these days depend on astonishingly ornate continuity. (I used to read the Giffen and DeMatties Justice League books when I was in my teens. Years later, in a fit of nostalgia, I checked the Grant Morrison volumes out of the library. They were completely incomprehensible. And I say this as someone who understood The Invisibles.)

So readers may have easy physical access to superhero comics, but I’m skeptical that very many people outside the direct market comic-shop culture–even if they’re people who enjoyed Heroes or The Dark Knight–are likely to find them “accessible” in any other sense.

And as for the latter, I refer you to Sturgeon’s Law. There are enough *good* superhero comics out there that you could read only those and still have enough good reading matter to last a lifetime, just as there are that many good records by white men in their 20s with guitars. And if I was covering the whole of popular music I’d probably put *something* by a white male guitar group in there…

And while it isn’t impossible to produce good work in the superhero genre–i.e., Watchmen–it has produced less than its fair share of good work.

TBH, I’d be very disinclined to suggest that newbies read Watchmen. Again, my experience is that people who don’t have a long history with the superhero genre don’t warm to it, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. The youthful Moore’s purple prose doesn’t help much, neither.