Dear DC and Marvel,

Having taken - well, slept through - a couple of papers on the subject and written one thesis, I’m pretty much an expert on marketing. We all know basic marketing theory: you have a product to sell, some, um, stuff happens, and then people buy it. And we also all know that every year or so you get your underwear in a bunch and spout out about how you want to attract new readers.

That’s awesome! I think if there’s anything every comics reader wants, it’s for all their friends and family to realise that comics are the greatest thing ever, read them, and then talk about them all the time. But here’s what I don’t understand: almost everything you do to attract “new readers” is actually aimed at getting people who already spend money on comics to spend more money on different comics. You’re going digital? Awesome! People who already read comics will love that! You’re relaunching a title? Great! People who haven’t been reading that title will love that! But those other, weird, non-comics reading people? They don’t know that you’re going digital or rebooting a hero, and quite frankly, they don’t give a shit.

Usually, when people talk about the problems with attracting new readers, they draw on three main points.

1. People think comics, in and of themselves, are pointless/bad/for kids.

2. The way comics are sold - in monthly issues, in comics book stores (and now in online comic book stores) - is offputting.

3. Picking up a comic for the first time is incredibly daunting, because of a character’s lengthy backstory/history/frequent rewrites/changing personality/etc.

Now this is going to blow your mind, but I think I* have come up with the perfect solution to your problem:

Graphic novels.

Graphic novels, unlike that scandalous word “comics”, are seen as a Legitimate Story Telling Method, and they’re a complete story - or even just a complete story arc - in one book, so you don’t have to patiently explain to someone exactly why they want to spend $3 a month for twelve months to find out what happens at the end of the story.

Yeah, I know tpbs already exist, but this is where the “aiming at new readers” thing comes in again: write, in these graphic novels, stories that cut down completely on the whole “community and history of superheroes” shit. You know, the way you already manage to do in movies like Batman Begins and Captain America. Write a story about a young girl who discovers her father - now dead - was the greatest magician in the world, and that she’s inherited his legacy. You don’t need the Justice League to make Zatanna work for a new audience. You don’t need capes and costumes to tell Misty Knight’s story. And then, if you’ve done it right, and you’ve written a good story that people will want more of, they’ll head to google and wiki and find that there’s decades worth of stories about this character they’ve just fallen in love with, and that is awesome.

You’re welcome.

*and, OK, a lot of other people who have thought about this.