Playing the Percentages - Comics Style
Last month, Marvel released 57 titles (some of them had more than one issue), not counting the Marvel Age products.
The same month, DC released 64 titles, not counting the DC Animated line of comics as well as the translated comics, but counting Vertigo and Wildstorm.
Okay, so here's the question....of those 57 and 64 issues, respectively, how many of them do you think would qualify as "good"?
Tadhg and I did this together awhile back, and we used a very general level of what constitutes "good," which counted that, even if we did not personally like the book, we allowed it to count as "good" if there was (within purely our opinions) a substantial enough critical acceptance of the book to keep us from calling it "not good." For instance, had we personally disliked Fallen Angel, we still could not go as far as to call it "not good," as there is a large amount of acceptance out there that says Fallen Angel is a "good" book.
Therefore, using this fairly lenient standard of grading, how many of the 57 Marvel titles and the 64 DC titles do you think would be considered "good"?
The same month, DC released 64 titles, not counting the DC Animated line of comics as well as the translated comics, but counting Vertigo and Wildstorm.
Okay, so here's the question....of those 57 and 64 issues, respectively, how many of them do you think would qualify as "good"?
Tadhg and I did this together awhile back, and we used a very general level of what constitutes "good," which counted that, even if we did not personally like the book, we allowed it to count as "good" if there was (within purely our opinions) a substantial enough critical acceptance of the book to keep us from calling it "not good." For instance, had we personally disliked Fallen Angel, we still could not go as far as to call it "not good," as there is a large amount of acceptance out there that says Fallen Angel is a "good" book.
Therefore, using this fairly lenient standard of grading, how many of the 57 Marvel titles and the 64 DC titles do you think would be considered "good"?
posted by Brian Cronin at 2/02/2005 08:56:00 AM
7 Comments:
I'd be generous to say 10 percent. I'd be more realistic to say five.
Considering approx. 50% of Marvel's regular output is either directly connected to Spider-Man or the X-Men, I'd say 10-15% of it all is good. For DC, with approx. 35% of their output directly connected to Superman and Batman, I'd say 25% qualifies, with half of that coming out of Wildstorm or Vertigo.
Well, using Goddard's Law, only 1% of either is good.
"Good" is so subjective, but using the "substantial critical acceptance" as a benchmark, I'd say in the neighborhood of 10-20%, depending on which critics you talk to. Which leads me to another point: Comics criticism, at this stage, is so nascent and disorganized, it's almost impossible to form a general consensus on a given work that measures up to those that exist in the fields of film or literary criticism.
According to my research Marvel/Icon realeased goodness at a rate of 16% (9 of 57) and DC/Vert/Wild released goodness at the rate of 33% (21 / 64).
Method: Count the books on my pull list (though not an actual pull list) while keeping in mind the wait-for-trade properties in Marvel's camp.
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I come up with 26% of those comics as being decent or better.
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