comic book reviews
Analyzing the Impact: A Scholarly Examination of Comic Book Reviews
Notable for its absence in the popular press is an analysis of the role of the comic book review. Every day, comic book lovers read, rate, and review comic books online; yet, this phenomenon remains understudied. Moreover, despite their passionate love for the medium, almost nothing is known about these online commentators. A quick online search, however, reveals that there are many websites that provide readers with the opportunity to rate, comment, and review comic books. Because little attention has been given to this mass array of comic book reviews, the study of comic book reviewers (or comic critics) is fertile ground. Numerous media psyche studies are dedicated to uncovering why an audience is attracted to mass media fiction, and some further research identifies the narrative characteristics that engage audiences with the characters and story. Yet, few scholarly studies thoroughly examine the qualities of the stories within the comic books that people seem to be most preoccupied with and lend great importance to the story or the writers’ actual creative talents, particularly those scholars dedicated to the analysis of digital media. Since no attention has been given to the consumer reviews, a content analysis was conducted in order to measure the social and psychological impact of these comic book reviews.
Comic book sales have experienced an almost threefold increase during the past 10 years. This incredible growth can be directly attributed to the increasing success and popularity of superhero films and television shows. Social science has attempted to explain the appeal of this genre to mass audiences by exploring the psychological implications, effects, identification, and wishful identification for audiences, by identifying some motives of consumers, by explaining sickness as catharsis through melodramas, by focusing on gender relations, and by exploring the factors that influence superhero consumerism. However, there has been little exploration of the factors that may influence consumer purchasing decisions aside from the storylines or the visual representation of and identification or wishful identification with the characters. Moreover, no scholarship has investigated professional reviews.
The age continues to lurch forward at a rapid pace. The print world had one journal, and now such journals are complemented with electronic publishing and a germinating number of academics utilizing the field to explain symbology, discuss gender issues, and examine social fairness and justice. Often in-class assignments are creative affairs, examining emerging artist experiments and news from blogs displayed on the Internet. As this medium has continued to expand and develop, our teaching approach to the tutelage of students regarding the value and importance that it brings into the cultural mainstream needs to be inclusive of the critical reports written about the comic book form, and to some degree suggest their importance to the study of this medium.
The scholarship surrounding comic books quickly expanded to the “1000 Words” column in The Comics Journal, an entire issue exploring these books in Art Journal, and thematic editions of journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture. Quickly the term “ages” emerged to denote significant eras of comic book scholarship such as the Golden Age (seventy-five years or more ago), and the Silver Age (fifty to fifty-five years).
As comic books evolved as a medium in the 1940s and 1950s, sophisticated reviews began to appear and different critical perspectives began to emerge. These perspectives range from predominantly literary or storytelling issues to the art itself to the social and societal implications that the work presented both in the story and extratextually. During this time, the journals studying the comics were published by fandom, but by the 1970s, the first comic book critiques appeared in academic literature. The work of fans (and fans with a bit of scholarly rigor) continued in the 1980s, but the first academic journal specifically devoted to the comic book medium did not appear until 1990.
Many of the expectations we have for comic book reviews are based on prior data and statistical information. Tracking the evolution of comic book reviews allows for a moment in time to be frozen and then carefully studied. Every number that is listed in our reports plays a role in setting benchmarks and establishing support wherever it is needed. Over time, we can see how the moods and attitudes of comic book reviewers have shifted as they themselves seek to establish and manipulate the format of comic books. Review data stretches in many different directions, but the question must be asked as to what those directions are. Only through understanding can we hope to successfully manipulate the information that we have constantly at the ready.
Reviews serve as a barometer for how popular culture is being shaped. By setting standards and benchmarks, reviews critique various corners of popular culture. They also let audiences know what is currently worth viewing, reading, or listening to. While not every review is going to be positive, reviews allow for both those that consume popular culture and those that produce it to know where their work stands in the eyes of the public. As popular culture continuously shifts and evolves, it becomes ever more important to analyze just how and who is creating popular culture. Another important part of what is being studied is analyzing what critics are saying about popular culture.
In my regression analysis, I found that “Recommended” books receive almost six more orders than books not on the list, all else held constant. The variables that I have included in the regression are mainly there for robustness analysis, as well as for additional analysis to understand what is driving the variable “recommended.”
In order to determine if popular reviews encourage more sales of comic books, I first had to figure out what popular reviews actually constituted. For the purpose of this study, the popular comic book reviews would be those that appear on the “Recommended” list on the popular comic book review website, comicbookroundup.com. This website already calculates a general consensus of what the reviewers are saying about each book. Not only that, it has a Recommendations list that highlights only the books that are highly praised by the reviewers based on scores awarded and reviews eligible. This allows the website to show the highly praised books regardless of the number of reviews that the issue has. Despite the actual number of reviews on the comic book issue, the book’s popularity is elevated to the list for everyone to see, even those that do not have a chance to look at the reviews themselves. Because of the exposure, this website seemed like the perfect place to analyze the effect that comic book reviews had on sales.
Moreover, if popular reviewers of and critics about areas like contemporary literary texts, contemporary viewing fare, and contemporary objects related to viewing fare be worthy of sustained critical interest, comics – print and audiovisual reviews of them – ought to be at least as equally deserving. In short, we might want to see reviews of comic books, and reviews about comic books, in a larger venue and with a broader historical view.
The print and audiovisual texts discussed here are just a few examples among the many review sites devoted to comics. Many conventions that review sites bring to their texts likely apply to some of the more grassroots reviewing-kinds of functions fulfilled by even a lone blogger. It is my hope that there be deeper critical work to come. Volumes, even. To name only a few aspects, there are more serious lookings to be pursued of racially ‘inclusive’ reviews, big-two corporatization and their crossovers and their own comics-to-film media link, specialized markets, varied audiencing, and other clusterings of like and difference. The sheer quantity of possible interpretative and interpretative patterns which comic books – print and audiovisual alike – possess makes this latter hope perhaps a more plausible one.
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