Big Hero 6 and the Lost Audience

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AUDIENCES CROSS OVER:

I wish I could say the news about THIS  was surprising but in the business of Hollywood it's not.  I think it illustrates something about audience crossover between media.  In brief, massive success in one medium doesn't always translate to bigger numbers when accessing the adapted source material.  I'll try to outline why here.
 
Big Hero 6 (TRAILER HERE) is a Disney Animation adaptation of a somewhat obscure Marvel comic.  As the article above states Marvel Comics won't be reissuing the older material except for a short mini from 2008 and that's only in digital form.  What we will be getting is a manga adaptation of the film.  The article is HERE.  Irony abounds because Big Hero 6 was initially conceived as aping Japanese comic book conventions in superhero form.    

The article above points out why Marvel is doing this and it's not surprising.  Disney gets to make the property their own while Marvel Studios focuses on it's ever expanding superhero roster of films.  The money keeps getting made and this is a good thing.    Guardians of the Galaxy was the biggest success of 2014 because it was well made and everybody involved had a good time.  But I can nearly guarantee that those that enjoyed the film won't attempt to seek out the inspiration.  

An author I like works in both novels and comic books.  In one case he wrote three novels featuring characters from his comic book series.  They weren't adaptations but original stories.  He said something that stuck with me during one of his signings.  He found that the comic book readers of that series sought out the novels featuring the same characters.  But the novel fans did not seek out the comic books.  I am sure he was painting with a broad brush there but the point remains.  Fans appear to seek out anything.  But the average audience won't.  And if this ARTICLE'S stats haven't changed much the audience is there but it's rather small.

I think there are two reasons for this audience disconnect.  The first is pure economics.  Comics are insanely expensive these days for lots of reasons.  When I got into comics as a kid they were slightly easier to find but they were also less expensive.  Average cover price was about $.75.  Now they're $4.00 or so.  Per issue.  You'd also think that trade paperbacks of collected material--the only way comics get into bookstores these days--would be cheaper.  Not so.  Digital comics mimic their paper counterparts in price and that's not going to change anytime soon.  Film ticket prices have been going up but it's still cheaper to get two hours of entertainment than about twenty minutes of a comic book for the same price.

The second reason requires some training.  Some people don't understand how to read a comic.  Panels flow in a particular order to convey the story and if a writer and/or artist doesn't understand how that works you get an incomprehensible mess.  Scott McCloud wrote and illustrated a graphic novel called "Understanding Comics" that explained the theory behind how a comic works, how it's put together as well as the history of the medium itself.  It's fascinating reading but one critic I remember pointed out that unless you knew how to read a graphic novel it wouldn't work.  This isn't just learning to read a comic.  This also applies to reading subtitles on a screen.  Some can't do it.  This is why we'll get a new English dub on foreign material. 

The economic reason can't be fixed but the education reason can.  Those that create the source material that gets adapted into something else have a responsibility then to make it the best it can be.  A good film will pay for itself and then some.  As will good source material.  I want graphic novels (and superheroes are only one part of this medium) to be on the same shelf as all the other things we read in bookstores and online.  I want it to catch up to the rest of pop culture.  It's getting there.  Slowly.