So, let’s define our terms. When I say “backmatter,” even to
weekly comic book junkies down at the LCS, I still usually get quite a few
blank stares and quizzical looks. This dilemma of recognition even comes down
to how you spell the very word(s) “backmatter.” Is it “back matter” (two
words), or “back-matter” (hyphenated) or “backmatter” (new compound word) or
even “BackMatter” (if you’re nasty) as some stylish hybrid? I’ve seen it every
which way, though I think “backmatter” is sort of settling into being the
default standard. When backmatter is usually discussed, I think most people’s
knee jerk reaction is to assume and envision what I’d now like to call
“traditional bonus material,” to distinguish the two different approaches.
Bonus material has, for a long while, been comprised of items such as
preliminary design sketches, raw script pages, or un-inked and un-colored
pencils, which you’d typically find in collected editions, or even the
occasional “director’s cut” style reprint of a single issue. I’m not just
talking about the resurgence of the lettercol either. Though, there’s certainly
nothing wrong with any of that. For the purpose of this discussion, backmatter
is a different animal. In the examples I’m going to use, I’m going to define
backmatter as leaning more toward being story-driven, not process-driven.
Modern backmatter, then, is “in-story” or “in-world” or “in-continuity” content
designed to enhance the world-building effort going on in the particular
universe the creators have developed. Let that sink in for a minute while I go
off on a tangent.
I wanted to detour a paragraph for a quick history lesson.
The first time I remember hearing the term “backmatter” was with three distinct
books: Local, Casanova, and Fell. Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly created a timeless
book in Local, 12 issues following 12 years in the life of Megan McKeenan, as
she travels to different cities and through different phases of her life. One
of the great things about the book was the inclusion of thematically appropriate
artist and writer soundtracks at the end of every issue, along with reader
submitted pictures of their own “locals,” serving as snapshots of the resident
culture of their cities or neighborhoods. It was an interactive bit of content,
in a very analog fashion (yes, it was very Brian Wood). It wasn’t really in-story, but again, I’m citing it
merely as one of the first times I heard the term. The other two books were
part of something Image Comics called, at the time, their “slimline” format
(another compound term, with limited traction it turns out), which was at a
cheaper price point for a book stripped of ads, sort of unplugged comics that
were quick and dirty and delightful. Casanova enjoyed a life well beyond those
origins, catapulting the whole gang, Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon,
to fame. If I recall correctly, Warren Ellis’ backmatter in Fell was more
process-driven, correspondence between himself and artist Ben Templesmith,
along with some real-world articles that may have served as inspiration for
some of the largely self-contained stories. Fell was a great book, while we’re
on it, though it basically stalled out at issue 9. In Casanova, well, the
backmatter was something of a confessional for Matt Fraction. Sure, there was
some process stuff in there and his thoughts on music or movies or the
industry, but the thing that sticks with me the most viscerally years later was
him being in the back seat during some road trip and coming to terms with a
gut-wrenching miscarriage with brutal emotional honesty. I’d certainly never
seen anything like THAT startling, forthcoming, revelatory material in a comic.
Bringing things more contemporary, we have what Joe Casey is currently doing in
his Image Comics book Sex. It’s basically a continuation of what occurred in
his other books, Godland, or Butcher Baker, The Righteous Maker, the guise of
accessibility, open dialogue with the audience, part letter column and part
rambling manifesto about creator-owned vs. company-owned, and the current industry
landscape. As pointed and entertainingly egotistical as Casey can be in that forum, it still
Leans toward more traditional bonus content and not in-story backmatter. For
this discussion, I also wouldn’t necessarily include things like the trademark
Jonathan Hickman infographics he began in his Image Comics work (which have
since seeped into his Marvel work) or the infographics used to depict the
“previously in” section of Joshua Dysart’s recent Harbinger Wars affair over at
Valiant. Don’t get me wrong, these things are stylish as hell, and I totally
dig them. I point them out not to denigrate their existence, only to say that
they’re not really backmatter. For the most part, they’re not in-story matter,
nor are they in the back, to be painfully obvious and literal.
There’s been a resurgence in the kind of backmatter I want
to talk about. It’s evolved to the point of being almost exclusively
story-driven. Let’s discuss a few of the varied examples I’m currently
enjoying; let’s talk about what they are, what they do, and why they’re
important. I’m sure there are others currently out there, but these are
top-of-mind for me based on what I’m currently consuming on a regular basis.
Sheltered by Ed
Brisson & Johnnie Christmas (Image Comics): Now, at the time of this
writing, there’s only one issue of Sheltered out, but it was a doozy. It goes
without saying that all of these books are great, so buy them if you’re not,
thus endeth the plug. The backmatter in this series, written by a credited Ryan
K. Lindsay, takes the form of a rudimentary sort of Web 1.0 “PrepNet
Newsletter.” It’s something of a how-to guide for the prepper community. You
might now ask, “what’s the prepper community?” And that’s exactly the point.
This isn’t something terribly well explored in comics. “Preppers” can be small
or large, often militia-like, groups preparing for The End, be it man made,
natural disaster, war, famine, political strife, the depletion of resources, or
something more biblically apocalyptic. Most readers are not intimately familiar
with this subculture, so it’s a nice way to get into the mindset that fuels one
of the major philosophical tenets of this pre-apocalyptic tale. It’s a way to
explain how the people we’re meeting live, how things work functionally, and
why they do some of the things they do. It’s a way to avoid blatant exposition
that would otherwise have to be shoehorned in for one or more of the characters
to spout, and would likely temporarily derail the main focus on the heated
interpersonal dynamics of the book. The creators made a smart decision to
include this, and I look forward to more of it from this great new series.
Lazarus by Greg Rucka
& Michael Lark (Image Comics): We’re two issues in at the time of this
writing, and we’ve already seen a mix of more traditional bonus content (stories about how the series came to be, the seemingly very healthy
collaboration between artist and writer, a few sketches and pieces of concept
art thrown in for good measure) and the type of innovative backmatter we’re
talking about. Lazarus follows Forever Carlyle, the Carlyle Family Lazarus,
basically it’s emotionally conflicted bio-enhanced enforcer, through her
growing disillusionment with how the family business is being run, and an
impending war with a rival family. In the second issue, the team provided a
timeline that ran vertically down the sides of the extra pages, establishing
the significant events and back-story of how this world crumbled financially, socially, and
geographically, how food as a limited resource became the only meaningful
commodity, how the business/crime families rose to power, and how this very
universe came to be. It was a very smart piece of world-building that catches the
reader up on useful and deeply interesting information that would have
otherwise taken several expositional moments spread across several issues to
do. It saved time, functioned as sequential art shorthand, and was pretty damn
cool aesthetically.
The Massive by Brian
Wood & Garry Brown (Dark Horse): The Massive backmatter was probably
the most daring in what it tried to accomplish. I might be biased, but I’d
argue it was the best backmatter effort, and one of the first to lead the way
in this new progressive wave, because it was the most bold and the most
diverse, a mix of all the other types of backmatter I’m going to discuss in
these examples. The Massive follows the crew of the Ninth Wave Marine
Conservationist Direct Action Force command ship, The Kapital, as it searches for
its lost sister ship, The Massive, after a cataclysmic series of global
environmental disasters. The backmatter was firmly in-world, story-driven
content that alternately took the form of: ship schematics, navigational charts,
CNN style interviews of the characters, prose journal entries, timelines,
previous campaign details, federal government dossiers on members of the crew,
faux documents, DHS memos, pictures, maps, the list goes on and on. It was a
dizzying array of creative generosity. From a story perspective, perhaps the
boldest moment, and uhh, I guess spoiler alert(?), but it’s been out for
months, so it’s fair game, Brian Wood basically gave the lead character what
appears to be terminal cancer(!), but he did it in the backmatter(!!), and it
wasn’t even followed up on or revealed in the “regular” part of the book for
another two or three issues(!!!). It’s an aside, but this led fellow critic
Keith Silva and I to start screaming “The Backmatter Matters!” You may
have noticed, I keep saying “was.” It’s interesting to note that The Massive
backmatter lasted only six issues, basically the first arc, and was then
scrapped. There’s a related form of it that’s continued on Tumblr, heck,
there’s even a mostly dormant Callum Israel/Ninth Wave Twitter account, but
this online iteration is mostly process-driven reference pictures, sketches, penciled art, and maps
visually representing the story arcs (see above image), etc., and not the type
of in-story backmatter The Massive once excelled at. For the most part, the
print version appears to be dead for the time being. “Why?” is an important
question to ask, but we’ll get to that later.
Think Tank by Matt
Hawkins & Rahsan Ekedal (Image/Top Cow): Think Tank is a terrific
series that essentially takes advanced research and development, applies those
applied sciences to the real world, and then examines the mostly devastating
moral implications. Think Tank backmatter is a bit of an anomaly on this list,
because it leans toward being more traditional bonus content and not
story-driven backmatter, but a) I just really like the book and wanted to
include it, so deal, and b) there’s so much of it included in every issue, and it’s so
rich and dense that I think it’s worth discussing in tandem. Think Tank
backmatter runs a full spectrum, being articles and technologies that Hawkins
found from places like NASA, The RAND Corporation, DHS, CDC, DARPA, etc., an
inspirational knowledge base for the creation of the series, additional avenues
he discovered while doing that exploratory research and couldn’t fit into the
series, but also real world links that can then be followed up on by
curious readers to investigate on their own. It stands as a resource before and
after the reading process, for use by the creators, as well as the readers.
It’s unique in that regard. I had the chance to talk to Matt Hawkins for a few
minutes at SDCC this year. In addition to discovering he’s just genuinely a
nice guy, I brought up my appreciation for the backmatter specifically. He had
an interesting pragmatism about it. He essentially said that it’s a passion
component of the project for him, something he’s really interested in personally, and that
a third of the readers will probably ignore it completely, a third may read it
as part of the experience and take it at face value, while another third might
actually go do more research on their own. Matt Hawkins seemed to be at peace
with that.
Wasteland by Antony
Johnston, Christopher Mitten, Justin Greenwood, et al (Oni Press):
Wasteland represents yet another divergence in burgeoning backmatter
capability. While the journal entries of Ankya Ofsteen are set firmly in-world,
they’re also like 95% prose, with just some spot illustrations on the
beautifully designed letterhead. Like many of the stories I’m drawn to,
Wasteland is set in a long-running post-apocalyptic world where (we think) man-made
cumulative effects on the planet catalyzed an environmental event known as “The
Big Wet.” 100 years later, the result is a toxic arid landscape, with different tribes of people
banding together while language (d)evolves, scavengers run the ruins, and
familiar themes of sex, power, politics, religion, corruption, and betrayal
continue to plague the last vestiges of humanity. Wasteland backmatter
basically offers a “free” additional story track, with a mysterious additional
character, off on additional adventures, which may only tangentially ever brush
up against the main proceedings, for eagle-eyed readers anyway. It’s a
concurrent experience, as ruin runner Ankya Ofsteen documents her travels in
her journal (because she was taught her letters, don't you know) as she traverses the titular
wasteland. In many ways, Johnston has created the simplest, most elegant way to
world-build. He just literally writes you another story. It’s another entire
set of characters, places, and experiences, beyond what you’re ostensibly
getting in the main crux of the narrative. When I review the book, I always seem
to say that The Big Wet Universe extends well beyond the panel borders, and
it’s because this form of backmatter is one of the primary virtues of the
series. It might be important to also note that an online soundtrack continues
to develop for the series, and there’s additional character profiles and
duplicate journal entries being dispersed to the web, but I’m primarily
concerned with what’s being done in print, at least for this discussion.
Deathmatch by Paul
Jenkins & Carlos Magno (Boom! Studios): For those not familiar with
this engaging series, the entire premise of the book is predicated on a huge
group of heroes and villains being conscripted by their unknown captors to
unwittingly fight to the death in an NCAA-style bracketing system. It’s quickly
proven to be a deep and rich world that offers a delicious post-modern
deconstruction of the superhero paradigm and its most familiar archetypes. You
can find a female Batman, the corresponding Joker figure as villain, a version
of Rorschach, Captain America, Iron Man, and all manner of character templates,
both past and present, being manipulated for maximum enjoyment. The backmatter
in Deathmatch is critical to the experience. It contains full character profiles (complete with
their faux first appearances in fictitious Silver Age books), it tracks in real
time the winners and losers of each excruciating match-up, and then tops it off
with an aesthetic presentation of the actual brackets as it inevitably races
toward a bloody conclusion. It’s a fierce bit of world-building in a meta
fashion. It blurs the line between what could be in-world reporting of people
and events with what could just as easily be fourth-wall breaking discussions
between creators and readers. Most importantly, the backmatter visually embodies
the very mechanism the series operates on, like a down-and-dirty Cliff’s Notes
cheat sheet of what the series so gleefully expands upon in greater detail.
The True Lives of The
Fabulous Killjoys by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, Becky Cloonan (Dark Horse):
Well, if you’re not reading Fabulous Killjoys, you first need to go out and
correct that. It’ll certainly be listed as one of the best books of the year.
It continues to track with, in multimedia fashion, the world created by Way and
his former band-mates in My Chemical Romance, a post-apocalyptic Southern
California desert wasteland controlled by a domineering regime deadset on
homogenization as control. The Killjoys are our beloved freedom fighters
rallying demoralized individualists against corporate backed baddies roaming
the countryside. With only two issues out (as well as an FCBD prequel short),
we’re starting to get a sense of the type of backmatter that I hope continues
in this refreshing new series. To date, we’ve basically seen Better Life
Industries (BLI) info pamphlets, and a map of the decimated LA basin. The BLI
documents are an important set of artifacts because it’s quite necessary for
the creators to establish the type of humongous bureaucracy that Battery City
represents. That’s fundamentally “the thing” that the Killjoys are revolting
against, so firmly planting in the mind of the readers how oppressive the
regime is helps expedite our loyalty to the Killjoy crew. In the last issue,
there was also a map included, which offered a visual sense of the
post-apocalyptic world the story takes place in. If you followed MCR’s music
videos, you probably have been well-entrenched in visuals (starring Grant
Morrison as a wicked protagonist), but for strictly comic book readers, these in-story
additions to the backmatter give us a nice thematic push.
So, there are 7 examples of story-driven, in-continuity
backmatter being produced today. In terms of macro-analysis, I have a tendency
(blame the day job) to attempt to quantify things with metrics to see what that
particular numerical story can tell us that qualitative words may not. What I
can glean from these minimal numbers is that backmatter as a practice remains a
largely untapped segment of the medium. Out of all the approximately 30 books I
regularly support, there were only these 7 performing this type of backmatter,
putting on this type of show for the readers. That’s equates to about 23% of
what I read, which I guess is a substantial number of the little chunk of stuff
I pay attention to, though we really have nothing to compare it against as a
benchmark. It basically means close to 1 in 4 books I read has some type of
non-process driven backmatter. However, compare that to the roughly 60 new
books a week that my retailer receives, or 240 a month, and you suddenly drop
to only 3% of titles currently offering some type of story-driven backmatter. That seems low.
The good news is that this doesn’t appear to be the domain
of a single publisher, nor is it really endemic to Marvel and DC, but it seems
to be only tied to creator whim. On my little personal list, we have Dark Horse, Boom! Studios,
Oni Press, and Image Comics represented.
I guess my point here is that backmatter as a practice is still creatively wide
open for interpretation. You can do anything with it. I doubt we’ve yet to find
the optimal kind of content and “best” or most innovative delivery method.
While these are certainly some diverse examples from some diverse publishers, I
doubt we’ve explored all of the possibilities to try and tap reader engagement,
and give a single issue more punch at the $3 to $4 price point. I think the basic
logic is that if you offer something different and special, it will pique
reader curiosity, and somehow translate to a sustainable bump in the revenue
stream. It’s very difficult to correlate direct cause and effect though,
especially when there are so many different factors causing consumer X to
support book Y, and I don't think the inclusion or ommission of backmatter would even rank in the top 5 occupied by, say, one's predilection toward a particular company, character(s), story focus, art style, or creator loyalty.
On the down side, I don’t think backmatter is conceptually
understood or embraced by the audience at a level that’s reached any sort of
critical mass, which I guess I can partially back-up anecdotally with my
experiences talking to customers in the LCS, as well as the attention I’ve paid
to one title in particular. Full Disclosure: I had the chance to contribute to
the backmatter on a couple issues of The Massive. When I shared this news with
customers or even peers, the reactions ranged from “that’s great,
congratulations!” to “oh, I don’t even read that stuff” to “what’s that?” As I
paid more attention to this, I noted that here you have an A-list creator with
his hot new creator-owned book, maybe “the” creator-owned book of his career to date,
from an established and well-respected publisher, and the audience just wasn’t
responding in a holistic or meaningful way. I mean, even people who were Brian
Wood fans and were already buying the book admitted to glossing right over the
backmatter because they didn’t really know what to make of it. “Why do they do
that?” “Is it part of the comic?” “Do I have to read it?” Fucking stupefying,
man. On top of that, when I tracked down all of the reviews I could find of the
series, there were only a paltry three critics who even bothered to comment on
the backmatter, and that’s counting myself, along with my friend Keith Silva. As I
mentioned above, The Massive backmatter only lasted 6 issues. From the POV of
the publisher (hey, I’m a business person, I get it, I hate it, but I get it…),
if I have the choice between doing 2 to 3 pages of revenue generating ads, 2 to
3 pages of additional “regular” comic that’s easily recognizable and
digestible, or 2 to 3 pages of a labor intense (trust me from experience on
this) “writing experiment,” with effects you can’t correlate cleanly to see if
it moved the sales needle, and it’s something the audience doesn’t grok or isn’t
even ready to embrace, well, you see where I’m going. It’s a shame.
I wanted to discuss backmatter and now I don’t know how to
end this post. I love books with backmatter. I love feeling that I’m getting
something extra during my typical reading experience. I love the creative tinkering and curiosity behind it all. I want creators to
experiment with more backmatter. I want to see where it can go. I want
publishers to be willing to experiment, to temporarily value art over commerce
in the age old intersection of competing paradigms. I want to help develop
connoisseurship in the audience. I want the readership as a whole to be able to
understand and embrace backmatter, then actually develop a palpable appetite for it, instead of being resistant to change and “the
new.” Despite a few intrepid creators who’ve been paving the way, backmatter is
a largely untapped creative endeavor in the industry. The limits of this need
further exploration. Everyone seems hung up on the digital divide, a new model to
jump into, which is fine and necessary. But, for those of us who think that
print is an endemic part of the reading experience, being able to physically
hold the tangible object in our hands, we’d do well to consider further
altering and experimentation with print, to create material more appealing and
more innovative in terms of content and design. So, continue to support books
with backmatter if you’re already doing so. If you’re not, try a book that has
backmatter, whether it’s one that I mentioned or something else you find. The
creators are rewarding you with something different, so reward their
experimentation with support. Exploration often yields unexpected and satisfying
results, both for the creator and the consumer.
First, when I come in at 1:00 or 1:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, I expect everything to already be up on the shelves. Period. I’m sick of watching you do your retarded sea donkey dance, still unpacking half of the boxes, packaging material strewn about blocking the aisles, simultaneously trying to answer people’s questions, work the register, and answer the phone – all alone – while a handful of people stand around in bewildered frustration wondering if you will ever produce the books they came to buy. It really shouldn’t be this hard for you to take my money.
