Comic Mania in Elgin aims to attract a younger audience
As Elgin's Gail Borden Public Library hosted its seventh annual Comic Book Mania on Saturday, July 16, professionals like comic book artist Mark Stegbauer and comic book merchant Jesse Buck worked to persuade more kids and teenagers to start reading comic books. But 55 years ago, their predecessors faced an opposite challenge.
In the 1960s, when writer Stan Lee and a handful of artists in the Marvel Comics "bullpen" revolutionized the comics world with more realistic characters like the Fantastic Four and the Amazing Spider-Man and the Avengers, these colorful "funny books" were something for children.
Desperate to make their superhero tales palatable to older teens and even college students, Lee's "Bullpen Bulletins" proudly told how rock stars read the books and how college courses analyzed them. For a while, the company even changed its brand name from "Marvel Comics Group" to "Marvel Pop Art Productions."
A half-century later, Marvel and D.C. superheroes like "Spidey" and Ironman and Batman are arguably more popular than ever - on the big screen as superhero movies lead the summer and Christmas movie box offices every year. But now, ironically, it is grown-ups - mainly white males - who buy most printed comic books.
"We're the cool kids right now. I'm not gonna lie," said Buck, who owns Modern Age comics stores in Algonquin and Crystal Lake. "Everybody loves comic books because of the movies."
But the millions of teens who love Ironman and Batman in the theater don't necessarily show up at Buck's stores to lay down $4.95 for the printed versions of their heroes. Buck said total comic sales are only about 25 percent what they were in the 1990s, when comic collecting was hot and many men bought multiple copies of each issue - as an investment.
Guests attending Gail Borden Public Library's Comic Book Mania could pose for photos with "cosplayers" from the Illinois Chapter of the 501st Legion, dressed as characters from the "Star Wars" saga. They could visit with 25 professional artists and writers in an "Artists Alley"; thumb through boxes of current and historic comic books offered by Modern Age Comics and by Keith's Comics of Roselle; and listen to talks by industry people like Stegbauer.
Stegbauer, a 46-year-old part-time artist from Madison, Wisconsin, whose credits include "inking" three issues of "Spider-Man," was there to interest children and teens in a four-issue series he and writer Steve Bryant of Bloomington have just published called "Ghoul Scouts." And he said it's no coincidence that this group's five heroes are all children, or that they include two girls, an African American and a Latino.
Stegbauer said the industry knows that to prosper, it must expand the readership beyond white males. So it also is no coincidence that industry giants Marvel and DC have at least temporarily made Captain America black, made Thor female and made one version of the Green Lantern gay.
When Spider-Man was born, Stegbauer noted, comics could be found in grocery stores, drugstores, convenience stores. To find one today, you'll pretty much have to go to a specialty comic book shop like Buck's.
For entrepreneurs like Stegbauer, that's a good news/bad news situation.
"When I was young, the only publishers' books you could find were those from Marvel, DC, Harvey and Archie," he said. Today, by contrast, hundreds of little publishers can get their books into the specialty comic stores - but people who aren't already hard-core comic readers never think of stopping in at such a store.
But if the art form can win back those 8- and 12-year-olds Stan Lee once was trying to live down, it will be worth it, Buck says.
"People think of it as entertainment. But it's really reading."