Something I miss about comic books.
If I might blather for a moment...
Letter columns.
I want my letter columns back, dammit. One of the things The Walking Dead gets right is the very, very long-form lettercol; I miss the days when "Uncle Elvis" managed to comment on, as near as I can tell, every book published.
(And whatever happened to Uncle Elvis? Or T.M. Maple?)
Seeing the letter columns replaced with advertising and the general shift of the letter column to online forums and message boards -- which generally have an awful signal-to-noise ratio -- has fairly melancholy undertones to me.
For a while, the Vertigo books -- notably Transmetropolitan and Preacher -- has amazing lettercols; lots of humor (albeit rude and bleak, given the books they were appearing in) and lots of fan outreach. Garth Ennis regularly asked some tough movie trivia and gave away autographed scripts (and possibly artwork); Ellis used the too-brief Transmet lettercol as a sort of prototype for his current blogging style, it seems.
It was all very involving and energizing, and something about the effort necessary to write the words down and mail them in seemed to make folks really try to be clever and engaging. It also really helped Ellis and Ennis establish very clear authorial personas, for lack of a better term; you got a sense of who these guys were and are, and it helped forge a kinship with them that probably carried over into sales of subsequent titles they worked on.
I do really miss it.
(I remember a good friend of mine, Josh, being so pleased that an excerpt from a submission to The Maxx lettercol made the cut -- and it was damn funny, too. You just can't get that same sense of accomplishment and validation from posting to a forum. Or rather, if you can, you should summon medical attention, immediately.)
If I ever wind up doing a creator owned book, I am totally doing a letter column. I think one fewer ad for Axe body spray or the next awful EA video game is a fair price to pay for one measley page of fan outreach, one that confers a certain amount of "fan ownership and involvement" than an online forum post ever will.
Corrollary: there's no excuse for all-ages books like the excellent Marvel Adventures titles and Johnny DC fare like Shazam! and Supergirl! don't have kid-friendly letter columns or, sigh, a really well-done online space. Birthday announcements, kid-drawn fan art gallerys, do-it-yourself fan club kits. Why, Big Two? Why don't you do this?
(I also miss Hostess Fruit Pie ads featuring the Hulk or Batman. But that's a screed for another day.)
