Mighty Chew

(FAIR WARNING: I'm not 100% sure this will go anyplace substantive. I have questions but no answers. I hope we can discuss in the comments.)

Yesterday's release of the DC Comics solicits for January 2010 revealed that issue 12 of The Mighty will be the series' last.

This bums me out, as I really enjoyed this series; I honestly could not believe it was being published by DC at times, not because it was horrifically violent or featured lots of gratuitous nudity (it had neither), but because the storytelling was so smart and methodical. I won't get too far into it, at the risk of spoiling for those who may read it someday (this would be a GREAT trade paperback purchase and an even BETTER dollar-bin roundup). It's essentially a suspense thriller about a superhero who may or may not be insane, told from the point of view of his all-too-mortal lieutenant and friend. It's a great comic.

Thing is, there's lots of great comics within what I'll term for the purposes of this conversation the American genre mainstream -- basically the Big Two and the other large, medium, and smallish publishers who also publish primarily superhero, action, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc comic books.

It seems universally true (to me at least) that for the most part, the books that sell in the top 50 or 100 are usually not as good as those that fall beneath that rough line of demarcation. I say that as someone who enjoys Bendis and Brubaker a whole hell of a lot, worships the water Grant Morrison walks upon, and even occasionally gets into the gore-infested melodrama of Mr. Geoff Johns.

But if you think about the really great mainstream genre comics out there, it's almost always stuff that is either "comfortably" in the midlist or pretty much always in danger of cancellation. From the past few years alone, so many examples come to mind -- Agents of Atlas, Captain Britain and MI:13, Secret Six, Incredible Hercules, Jay Faerber's books for Image, Checkmate, Blue Beetle. These are just from the top of my noggin. Pick through your own brain, or poke around your longboxes sometime, and you'll no doubt find your own pet favorite series that ended too soon because it sold too little, in spite of high quality, many positive reviews, and maybe even a fan campaign to resurrect it. (Shit, forgot Manhunter. Especially Manhunter.)

So this got me to thinking about not the whole "why don't people really like the good comics that it seems like everyone agrees are good but nobody buys" argument, which is kinda played out, but a more specific argument. To wit:

Why did The Mighty fail, and Chew succeed?

I like Chew, a lot. I like The Mighty better, I think. But this isn't a value judgement on either comic. It's more about two mainstream genre comics, one that sank like a stone over a year, and one that already seems to have drummed up enough buzz and sales to see it through two or three years.

Obviously it's not strict apples to apples, and maybe that's all the answer we need. The Mighty was a superhero book from a superhero publisher that didn't take place in said publisher's mainstream superhero universe. It was marginalized from the start. Chew is not a superhero book and has no aspirations to be one. The Mighty has a much less poppy "hook" than Chew, which is about a guy who eats dead people to find out about how they died. (Damn, that's a great high concept.)

There's also huge differences in the philosophies of the publishers; Image is clearly willing to nurture a title like Chew for long enough to let the book either make an impression or fail to do so, and even after it fails to do so, it may keep publishing it anyway, because those guys are cool like that. I have no knowledge of their inside baseball but one look at a smash TPB hit like The Walking Dead proves that it must be worth it for them to try lobbing out interesting books into the marketplace and trying to see what will "stick" in a similar way.

DC...well, like I said, I have no idea why DC even agreed to publish The Mighty. It's not a DCU book. They rarely publish non-DCU books. This might not have been the best fit for something like Vertigo but it could easily have folded into the Wildstorm line instead, not that doing so would have helped or hurt its chances much, in my opinion.

Does Image just care about comics more than DC does? There has certainly been plenty of press and buzz surrounding Chew, some of it organic to the book and its hooky concept, but some of it definitely stoked and driven by the Image marketing and exec team. On the other hand, I do recall interviews promoting The Mighty upon its initial debut.

Are we just that shitty a readership, that we can't spot the good books from the massive wall of absolute pablum wretched up onto the stands every week? Maybe so. According to estimates The Mighty 1 sold around 17K; by issue 3 it was at half that number; by issue six it was under 6K. So some of us tried it and gave up; fine, it's not everyone's cuppa. But that first issue was so purposefully slow and careful that I wonder if it didn't push people from picking up a second and third installment. I guess that could be our fault as lazy addled readers, or the creators' fault for not putting enough BANG in their big debut; I still thought it was an awesome opening.

Oddly enough, Chew started at around 5K in sales reported for its debut month (with more thereafter as the issue went through multiple printings), and had hit 13K by its third issue. So a nice sizeable climb...but ultimately in the same ballpark as The Mighty, honestly. And frankly, DC just has much deeper pockets than Image, at least I would think they do.

So why not just keep publishing The Mighty for a while longer, put out some trades, try to nurture the book more than just a push off the ledge with a few Newsarama articles to help it fly?

I don't know. I'm running out of questions and I'm pretty absent of answers. I'm bummed; not like indignant and angry, like you are all morons cause you didn't buy this comic book I liked. How sad would that be? Pretty sad.

But every couple years, I'll pull out my meager stack of Mighty issues, and I'll read them again, and I'll wish I had more to read. I don't know why I won't have more, and I don't know if there are easy answers to these questions. I just wish more of the good stuff got more of a chance to be even better, I guess.