Courting the geek: as bloggers gain influence, product placement in comic books

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through messageboards, websites and blogs - are helping change the national conversation, say researchers.

Though it’s hard to find concrete numbers regarding age and Net usage, all the many studies I eyeballed online plainly state that the two biggest factors determining Internet access are income (it’s harder for poor people to get online) and age: those who fall in the Xer range -- currently those between 25 and 45 -- are waaay more likely to be online than those over 50, with those under 20 a near second... though I think it’s safe to assume that all the kids goofing around on MySpace aren’t having quite the impact of those of us who have been active on the Web -- building Web sites, hosting forums, pontificating on blogs -- for the last ten years.

So: Generation Xers have gained for ourselves a very prominent voice in Western society, and one that elder generations did not have. By contrast, the Xer-type Lost Generation -- Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Rockwell, Mae West, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, and others -- was our age in 1928, before many of them had really even begun to have a real impact on the culture. Imagine if the Algonquin Roundtable had been online, or if Irving Berlin had been able to let music fans download his songs, or if Alfred Kinsey had run a sex blog...

Second, from The Wall Street Journal:

Superheroes like Superman and Spider-Man can save mankind from natural disasters, space aliens and evil mutants. But there's one thing they are powerless to stop: Advertisers shilling products within the pages of the comic books they call home.

In July, Time Warner Inc.'s DC Comics, home to characters such as Batman and Aquaman, is launching "Rush City," a six-part miniseries that boasts visible promotional support from General Motors Corp.'s Pontiac. As part of the series, a new hero known as "The Rush" will be prominently featured driving a Pontiac Solstice in the comic book. "The car will be as essential to the character as the Aston Martin was to James Bond," says David McKillips, vice president of advertising and custom publishing for DC Comics.

Over the past few months, Marvel Entertainment Inc. has begun putting the "swoosh" logo from Nike Inc. in the scenes of some of its titles, such as "New X-Men." So far, the emblem has appeared on a car door and on a character's T-shirt. "We are always looking for new and interesting ways of connecting with our consumers," says Nate Tobecksen, a Nike spokesman. "This is certainly one of them."

It’s easy to decry this kind of thing -- from the Journal: “Laverne Mann, a Ewing, N.J., librarian who has read comics for years, hopes the books won't look ‘like the comic is being bought by the product,’ with a logo or drawing of a soda can obscuring the art” -- but product tie-ins with comic books are hardly a new development:

DC says in the 1960s it produced comic-book series based on toys such as Captain Action or Hot Wheels, in response to advertiser relationships.

No, what’s noteworthy now is what products are being tied in, and whom those products are aimed at:

Comic books have long carried some print ads, and they typically had a youthful bent, with ads for toy soldiers, x-ray glasses and mail-order Sea Monkeys. More recent ads hawked acne medications, videogames and chewing gum.

Lately, readers of comic books have gotten older. On Madison Avenue, "there is a large misunderstanding of who is reading these titles and what they are paying attention to," says Pontiac's Mr. Bernacchi. The genre suffered a slump beginning in the early 1990s that lasted until the first Spider-Man movie was released in 2002, says Gordon Hodge, who follows the business for Thomas Weisel Partners. In that time, fans who kept buying the books have grown older, now reaching into their 20s and 30s. A recent wave of hit films featuring comic-book heroes has gotten consumers, including older ones, interested in comic books again.

That last bit has it backwards: it’s not that movies have gotten interested readers seriously interested in a universe of comic books that has not changed over the last 50 or 70 years, it’s that the Xer/geek demo has invited comic books to grow up along with us, like a lot of other pop culture, from Doctor Who to videogames, that was once aimed at children and has gotten reinvigorated by a geeky adult perspective:

Comic books for the older set contain grittier storylines about superheroes with distinct character flaws. Batman these days exhibits paranoid tendencies, even going so far as to construct a satellite to keep tabs on his caped associates. Green Arrow, an archer in an emerald costume who once shot trick arrows with boxing gloves instead of sharp tips, recently used a real arrow to stab a villain in the eye. (To be fair, the criminal was already blind in that socket.)

And we’re not buying mail-order sea monkeys anymore... but I bet whoever is the first to come up with some smart, snarky reinvention of sea monkeys would make a fortune.