Skip to Content

Arrêter la fuite en avant

Dans une critique sévère publiée il y a quelques mois, Graeme McMillan accusait quelques-uns des grands auteurs contemporains de bandes dessinées américaines d’être les responsables de la stagnation de l’industrie. Il affirmait : “« For an industry that feeds on its own past to go 20 years without fresh characters or concepts is death. The most telling sections in “Leaping Tall Buildings” are thus those written about industry powers like Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Grant Morrison and Dan DiDio. » These are the men most responsible for the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes.. (« The Four Men Who Have Destroyed the Superhero Comic Industry », www.newsarama.com, 30 mai 2012).

Est-ce un problème d’auteurs ou la volonté des éditeurs que de créer des événements. Nous considérons que Chris Sims pointe deux problèmes majeurs dans son analyse de l’évolution de la bande dessinée depuis les années 1990. D’abord, la montée en puissance des collections qui tend à mettre de la pression sur les numéros 1 d’une série indépendamment de son développement futur ou de ses qualités artistiques. Ensuite, les événements publicitaires s’avèrent contre-productifs. Sims prend en exemple la « mort » de Superman : « DC’s bright idea of « killing » Superman, which produced one of the best-selling comics of the modern era. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear to me that this was probably a terrible idea — and not just because it was a story where Superman and a giant bone monster in green bike shorts punched each other to death. It’s great that they sold a million comics and bought Dan Jurgens a solid gold statue of Booster Gold or whatever, but they also had a truly massive amount of media coverage that told people that Superman was dead, and lured them into a shop where they bought a comic that — if they bothered to actually pop open the polybag and read it — ended with Lois Lane cradling Superman’s lifeless body. In real life — in most fiction — that tends to be the end of things. They told the biggest potential audience they had ever had that Superman was dead. Dead. Which, to rational people who are not familiar with how comic books work, means « there will be no more Superman stories so it is completely unnecessary for you to ever return to this shop and buy another one of these. » », (« What’s Up With the 90s », www.comicsalliance.com, 27 juillet 2012).