START // 1.16.03

CHANGING CHANNELS
by Alasdair Stuart

I interviewed a couple of people recently. In my ongoing attempt to not sleep, well, ever really I'm in the middle of interviews with the following people:

Roger and Vince are most of the team responsible for the excellent RAVEN, the first issue of which I reviewed a little while back. Roger and Vince are very nice guys, disturbingly talented and have a very odd view of what they want RAVEN to be.

Instead of a comic they want it to be like reading a night in front of the tv.

Every story in RAVEN is designed to mirror an element of tv scheduling. One is the big budget drama series, another is over the top comedy whilst another still is the equivalent of a cartoon. Future stories include analogues for 'big budget detective series' and astonishingly, 'reality game show'.

It's an idea which is simple, effective and has lodged in my brain for the last week, thankfully knocking Avril Lavigne's 'Complicated' out.

Think about it. What Roger and Vince are doing here is comics by stealth. Everyone gets the tv schedule, everyone knows how it works. God knows, I've spent enough nights in slaloming neatly from the news to The Simpsons, Fresh Prince (Now on it's eight hundredth repeat over here), history show, detective show, comedy and finally sleep. It's not so much a cultural artifact as a way of thinking that we're all used to, all accustomed to on a subconscious level. We don't just understand this, we understand it in the same way we understand breathing. It's just what we do.

Why are they the only people who get this? And would it work with existing companies. Let's pick a company for a moment, DC for example. Instead of pumping out the usual melange of superheroes, horror, science fiction and goofball comedy what if they were to configure their releases in the same way as a night of tv programming?
There's at least two ways to do this. Firstly, use each week as a night of television. So, assuming eight books a week, you've got something like this:

KIDS SHOW-Cartoon Network
TEENS SHOWS-Smallville
TEENS SHOWS-Gen 13 (I know, I know but bear with me)
WRESTLING/ACTION-Superman
ACTION/DRAMA-Green Arrow
PRESTIGE DRAMA-21 Down
SCIENCE FICTION-Global Frequency
LATE NIGHT DRAMA-Hellblazer

Or alternately, you treat each week like a section of a night's programming, so…

WEEK 1-Kids
Cartoon Network
Scooby Doo
Justice League Adventures

WEEK 2-Teenagers
Smallville
Gen 13
Young Justice (Or replacement)
Titans (Or replacement)

WEEK 3-Wrestling/Action
The Superman books
JLA

WEEK 4-Action/Drama
Gotham Central
Green Arrow

WEEK 5-Prestige Drama
21 Down
Midnight, MASS

WEEK 6-Science Fiction
Global Frequency
The Resistance

WEEK 7-Late Night Drama
Hellblazer
Mek

WEEK 8-Special Event/Repeats
Institutionalise the reprint once and for all by putting out something similar to the Marvel Must Haves. Or just cram a week full of trades.

Now, I'm just riffing here, but this seems like a way of organising things which would be a little more interesting and a great deal more accessible. As a retailer, I would love to be able to put up signs every third week saying:

KIDS' WEEK IN COMICS!

With a list of stuff that's suitable. Or teen week, or whatever. By structuring in this way it gives us the opportunity to target specific groups and makes the entire publishing operation, seemingly, look a lot more targeted.

Of course, I'm just using random examples here but I can't get past the idea of the tv scheduling approach as a means of raising the industry's game. We can't, and in some cases seem not to want to, get respect any other way so surely the easiest way to beat the enemy is to become them. Perhaps it's time to think of marketing comics like a TV with pages, not a book with not enough words.