Mark Millar Explains It All

Mark Millar has a theory. According to him, Hollywood's movie machine is going to kill comic books - or at least, put them in a kind of catatonic state. You can read his case on the Newsarama forums.

He makes quite a good argument, but I'm not sure I agree. I favour a forecast that shows interest dribbling away really very slowly, and being on the upswing again before dipping to critical levels - fore one thing, I think there's an ever growing core fanbase that won't desert the comic book movie, or comic books, overnight, and what's more, I also predict that we're on the cusp of comic books actually really genuinely being taken seriously.

In five or ten years the tipping point may well have been reached, and while I think Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Maus and work by Dan Clowes, Joe Sacco, etc. will have played a major part, I think more of the credit will eventually lie with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I'm expecting anothter Buffy or two on mainstream TV, following in her wake. A show that expands the possibilities of genre storytelling, makes it smarter, sharper and more broadly accessible all at once. A show that brings the middle ground of comic books to a big, TV audience and primes them for the printed form, essentially. Maybe Battlestar Galactica is half way to being one of these shows itself - the missing half being the big, big viewing figures.

I think that TV will get enough like comic books, at the same time as gathering credibility in it's own right, that very soon, the crossover from TV to comics will be possible for a much wider group.