Month: July 2009

Losing one’s sense of shelf

“Ruined? They’re fine, sitting right there on the shelf.” – James M. Cain

It’s often argued that a movie adaptation, however awful, doesn’t do anything to the original book. But what about to its sales? Mike Sterling reports on a recent drop-off in the Watchmen trade paperback sales:

Oh God, I hope you’re the only person calling it that. Anyway, Tom’s referring to my constant experience with comics sales as tied to their movie tie-ins…in particular, that if there’s a sales bump, it’s almost always before the film’s release, to be followed by a paucity of sales following the release. In my case, Watchmen, formerly a consistent seller, peaked prior to the film coming out, and then stopped selling at all since then.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Other bookstores carrying the book (though it doesn’t look like they’re selling any either), interest dropped off after overexposure in mass media, the local potential audience is saturated, or whatever, and it takes time for demand to build up again. And I’ve been in contact with stores in other parts of the country where Watchmen is still selling, so maybe it simply varies region by region.

I don’t have numbers or even chart rankings right in front of me, unfortunately…the “archive” section of Diamond’s website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment…but for May 2009, the Watchmen TP is near the bottom of the Top 300 Graphic Novels sales list. Again, it’s probably just oversaturation…a ton of copies entered the marketplace over the last few months…so a dip in orders is to be expected. If things are still the same in a year or so, and we still haven’t moved many copies, then that may be a point where worry should set in a bit.

Has bad publicity on the film — it received mixed critical reviews, even from fans, and was overall a box-office disappointment — hurt the original book? It would be interesting to take a look at unsuccessful movie adaptations and their subsequent effect, if any, on book sales. I suspect there are a lot of factors to consider, like the age of the book and how well it was selling beforehand, as well as the many factors Sterling mentions above. Maybe successful adaptations result in a similar drop-off. Maybe there is no correlation at all. But it would be interesting to see some actual figures.

Til death and then some

There have got to be better ways to meet women: Teenage girl dug up to be ‘corpse bride’:

In rural China, superstitious villagers have for centuries sought out the bodies of recently deceased woman to be ghost brides for young men who die single.

Even more scarily:

Last year, a gang in southern China was arrested for strangling young women to sell as ghost brides when the supply of female corpses in their area ran short.

I’m hopeful that I won’t die single, having never married, but if I do — please, don’t dig up any dead women on my account. I’m just saying. Via Jeffrey Ford.

What I’m reading

I just started The Gathering by Anne Enright this morning on the train, and so far I’m enjoying it. In particular, I really liked this passage:

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

We can’t all be heroes

Because, with that one big exception, DC’s heroes are from a different era. They’re from the era when they were creating gods. And the thing that made Marvel extraordinary was that they created people. Their characters didn’t living in mythical cities, they lived in New York. They absolutely were a part of the world. Peter Parker’s character was a tortured adolescent. DC’s characters, like Wonder Woman and Superman and Green Lantern, were all very much removed from humanity. Batman was the only character they had who was so rooted in pain, that had that same gift that the Marvel characters had, which was that gift of humanity that we can relate to. – Joss Whedon

I’ve been thinking a lot about antiheroes lately, ever since reading Noel Murray’s AV Club post, TV’s Antihero Era Enters Its Second Decade. Murray traces the recent upswing in television antiheroes — flawed characters, some even deeply and irredeemably amoral — to The Sopranos, and he’s actually a little tired of it. Writing of the new Showtime half-hour Nurse Jackie, Murray says:

…I hope the creators don’t feel obliged to make the heroine’s addiction and infidelity the driving dramatic force of the show. I gave up on TNT’s Saving Grace when I realized that no matter how incredible Holly Hunter’s performance may be as a cop on the verge of a breakdown, the show’s combination of rote procedural plots and gratuitous grimness was going to continue to be a turnoff. Complex heroes are fine — appreciated even. But tortured, amoral TV heroes? That’s just about been done to death.

Which is funny, because my one problem with Nurse Jackie, of which I’ve only seen the first two episodes so far, is that it’s maybe not quite tortured enough. It’s a half-hour dramedy, and that format all too often leads it into broad sitcom territory. It’s a problem that recurs to a lesser degree with House, another antihero-driven medical show; no matter how good the writing or acting is — and I think both are usually excellent on both of these shows — things can be a little campy when you too often play an antihero’s transgressions for laughs. (As Stan Lee jokes here, “The world is so crazy that if you present things as they really are, it comes across as broad satire.”)

I’m not a big fan of uncomplicated characters, righteous crusaders who always make the right decisions for the right reasons, characters who are essentially ciphers around which the problem (or monster) of the week happens. As Murray’s fellow AV Club writer Zack Handlen says in his comments to Murray’s post:

We all like watching somebody be impossibly cool and good at his job, but when it comes to the long haul, I’m much more interested in somebody who has to pretend how to be normal.

I like The Mentalist, for instance, but I can easily go weeks or months without seeing an episode, and I often wish they would play up the darker edges of the main character. (As I’ve noted before, they do tend to soft-pedal it at times, and the show gets by mostly on Simon Baker’s charm and a pretty decent supporting cast.) The only sitcom I watch with any regularity is How I Met Your Mother, which, despite its sometimes absurd touches, is firmly grounded in real and honest characters. (In many ways it’s like Friends, if Friends had developed characters instead of just comic types.)

But, like Murray, I don’t need everything dark and gloomy and antihero-y. All I want are stories that are honest and entertaining, characters who are real and reflect the flaws that real human beings actually have. Which is why I prefer antiheroes to superheroes. As another AV Club writer, Todd VanDerWerff, puts it:

All of this just plays up exactly why shows where it seems like it would make just as much sense to make the hero superpowered, like The Mentalist or Psych, choose not to go that route. Any time you give the hero powers, you have to figure out a way to believably limit them, and believable limitations on something like all-encompassing telepathic abilities are hard to come by.