Quarter Bin #18 "The Victorian"

One of the interesting things about comics, which I hope I’ve alluded to in the past, is that it’s a medium that’s so much harder to reach a consensus on than a lot of others, especially as the years advance. Movies are built to be mainstream, but even the independent scene isn’t terribly difficult to follow, depending on regular distribution. Music, and when the public thinks about music it’s generally mainstream (it’s when you talk about individual tastes and different regions you can begin to appreciate how insane the music scene is for most artists). Books are almost built for the mainstream, too, even in the digital age, where readership is all about visibility, but books are something you can easily track down, through any number of channels, both in physical stores and online catalogues. TV is perhaps most analogous to comics, in that you begin with the major networks, broadcast free and with regular channels of advertisement, and then you get into the jungle of cable, which in recent years has done a better job of defines itself with original content, whether with reality programming that has influenced the networks, or in the scripted material that reflects what the networks do best, but in ways they can’t. But the more cable has expanded its viewership, the more diluted the potential viewership becomes. No one wins when everyone wins.

But that’s not exactly what this is about. Even if most shows with high visibility are now released to some home entertainment platform, there are many more, from the past and even from the present, that have slipped through the cracks, and potentially live only in the memories of the fans they were able to capture on original broadcast. It’s kind of like that with comics. There’ve always been major publishers with high awareness in the market, and also the smaller ones, who maybe get exposure and maybe don’t, publishing comics the vast majority of readers will never hear about. Try flipping through one of those Diamond catalogues and honestly admitting you’ll be able to espouse the merits of every publisher and comic contained within them. How many of those comics are even in ten percent of actual, physical comics stores?

And it’s not just new series being launched, forever destined to remain in single-digit issue counts. Sometimes, a series can be published for years, even decades, without that majority of readers ever being aware of them, and it’s not just because most people associate superheroes with comics, or even the graphic novel crowd, and will never bother with anything else. There are far more comics, with limited availability, than even an inclusive catalogue can adequately represent. Most people will assume, if they think about it at all, that comics being published through such limited means, will probably not be very good, and maybe they’re right. The vast majority of creators who transition from an independent publisher to Marvel or DC will still have come from a company like Image, which can afford to set obvious standards in its output, and not from some obscure series or company.

Which brings me to contradictions like THE VICTORIAN. Now, granted this was a book published by a respected small-press label like Penny Farthing, but even that wasn’t enough to truly get it noticed, not even when a respected creator like Len Wein took over writing duties. I only heard about THE VICTORIAN from Diamond (naturally), thought it looked interesting at the time, something like an indy STARMAN (appropriately enough), but never thought in a million years I’d have the chance to actually physically come across it, unless I went digging on my own. (There is certainly satisfaction in the hunt, but the majority of consumers operate on the belief that anything worth finding should be easy to find, and this principle doesn’t necessarily consider exclusivity as a factor.) Not long after this discovery, actually, I came across the reprint volumes of Dean Motter’s MISTER X, which even the reprints and constant glowing praise from his peers couldn’t rescue from the same obscurity it had already existed in on original publication (for a while, Dark Horse began to support Motter, and I’ll be getting back to these efforts here at Comics Reader at some point).

Fast-forward a few years, and I was randomly digging through the back issues at Escape Velocity, and had recently rediscovered that Diamond catalogue and remembered THE VICTORIAN. I didn’t think it would be likely, but I decided to check and see if the store actually had any copies. Turns out it did. So:

THE VICTORIAN SOURCEBOOK (Penny Farthing)
From December 1999.

THE VICTORIAN #1 (Penny Farthing)
From March 1999.

THE VICTORIAN #23 (Penny Farthing)
From April 2004.

Escape Velocity actually had a few more issues, but I contented myself with this small handful, just to see if the reality of the book matched my expectations. The SOURCEBOOK covers the first six issues of the series, and isn’t actually a very good introduction, featuring bad editing that jumps around key points without specifically letting the reader understand the appeal of the endeavor. The first issue, however, is plenty amazing. The twenty-third issue, two issues before the conclusion of the series, is more than enough to convince anyone that this really was a special book, like Y: THE LAST MAN, or a comic book version of LOST.

THE VICTORIAN is the product of Trainor Houghton’s imagination, though to my knowledge he never actually wrote a single issue of the series. Marlaine Maddux was the original writer, before Len Wein came aboard. To describe THE VICTORIAN is like presaging the current steampunk fad: a secret society from the 19th Century produces competing individuals who find themselves in our modern era, one who wants to reshape the world to his specifications, and the other, our title character, who will do anything to stop him. The cast of characters who help both of them are quickly developed in the first few issues, and remain important to the end.

I tracked down THE VICTORIAN, ACT V: SELF-EXSOULMENT, published in 2008 (previous collections were released in 1999, 2002, 2003, and earlier in 2008), so I could see how it concluded, and once again I was not disappointed. If this book had been published by Vertigo, or even IDW, for instance, it’d have greater readership, even now. Instead, and I can’t speak completely for how it was received by the greater comics community, it went almost immediately to obscurity. General fans wouldn’t have known it existed, and, doubtless, all the major awards went to other comics, either popular ones or graphic novels.

THE VICTORIAN is a great comic, and it deserves wide recognition, but it will probably never come. I could explain its pleasures in greater detail, and perhaps get a few more readers interested, but that would be like saying it’s enough to feed a few homeless people, and let the rest fend for themselves (which is not in any way saying charity is wrong). It’s frustrating when a national publication (when it was a national publication) like WIZARD spent all its time doing everything that the regular comics reader would already have been able to find out on their own, and let the comics scene otherwise slip completely out of focus, because that’s exactly what it’s like in general. The Internet was supposed to make everything so much more accessible, and it’s only made culture feel a lot more like cable television, if even that, just a lot of people clamoring for attention, and getting a lot of small audiences and no audiences as a result. You’d think a bad economy that was supposed to shrink the comics market would have made this easier, but that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happened. DC undergoes another relaunch, IDW blossoms into a new Image or Dark Horse, and everything else remains pretty much exactly the same (oh, and WIZARD ceases publication).

Until recently I worked in a national bookstore, and I took great pride in maintaining the comics section, marveled (no pun intended) as new product constantly surged into the warehouse, and the collections not printed by Marvel or DC had just as much room to fill. Not everything was represented, naturally. There still seemed to be more enthusiasm for manga, a greater sustained presence for complete runs of a series. That’s a different story, a different gripe. But there are so many comics, and so little effort at maintaining a constant, representative presence, it just boggles the mind. Why can’t someone have a store that can hold all these graphic novels, not just new releases and the perennial reprint favorites, but those that give a true face to what comics can and have accomplished over the years? Why can’t a book like THE VICTORIAN, or MISTER X or WASTELAND, be found easily?

People will say economics, and believe that covers the whole story, the whole necessary explanation. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe it’s simply because no one wants to put the time and energy and enthusiasm necessary to help something like a graphic novel store succeed. I’m not talking about a comic book store, where most people will think about new releases or back issues, or the places in big markets that can afford to inventory all of these things, in significant quantities. I’m talking about a place for readers who just want to read what comic book creators have produced over the years, both the stories a lot of people know, and those most people don’t. Is that really so impractical? Are we really at a point in our cultural evolution where it’s impossible to attract large audiences to quality material? I know digital seems to be the way to go, but it can’t and it shouldn’t be the only way to go. Even if it’s just collectors swapping fond memories, what about a store, or a series of stores, where old trade paperbacks go to be resold? Have you ever been to a used bookstore with a huge graphic novel section?

Again, economics, pipe dreams, the American Dream. I believe in comics, not just the ones everyone knows, the ones everyone awards, but the ones everyone ought to be reading, whether or not they’re still printing fresh material, stuff like THE VICTORIAN. Yeah, I found it, but it should be easier, a matter-of-course, for something like that, not simply forgotten, but enjoyed by new generations.

It would be nice.