How to Get Friends Into Comics

Some advice from the pros!

Listen. We’ve all been there. You just read a fantastic comic and you want to share that joy with your friends. You want to indoctrinate all your loved ones into the realm of comic books. There’s just one problem- they don’t even know they still made comic books, let alone read them. Check out this minisode of RYAN AND DONNY’S HALF-ASSED SUBSTACK PODCAST for some helpful tips on how to change that!…or not?

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Ryan Stegman: Alright, how do you get your friends into comics? The answer is, you most likely don't. It's nearly impossible. For me, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but you were saying how comics are kind of a solitary experience.

Donny Cates: Right.

Ryan: I love to share the things that I love with people. But there was something special about that, to me- that it was just my thing. I used to go to conventions by myself when I was 15 years old. Once I could drive, you know, I'd drive myself to a convention. I had one friend who was into comics, but he wasn't into the same type of comics as me. He just liked Spider-Man and that was it. I was into the whole industry and what was going down in it. I don't think I've ever converted anybody to being a comic book fan. So I don't have a good answer as to how to do it and I think it might be a lost cause. But what do you think?

Donny: I don't know if that's entirely true. I do think that there is... there's a new comic fan born every day. If that wasn't true, then we wouldn't be here.

Ryan: No, no, I agree with that.

Donny: I think that, to your point, it is a journey that you kind of have [to go on yourself]. You get bitten by the bug or you don't. I've had buddies of mine who I briefly got into some shit. Like I was reading a cool Abnett and Lanning Guardians thing, and I was like, "dude, you gotta check this out." And then my buddy would like, read through that, but it would never jump over to him and get him starting his own pull list or whatever. I do think it is something that like, if it imprints on you at an early age, you know, it's easier. I wonder if the generation under us and under that, how much of that is being replaced by being bit by the movie bug? Right? Because in 2022, I think we're getting like six or seven different Marvel projects that are either TV shows or films. So I wonder if that's just fulfilling that rather than [comics].

Ryan: Well, I think that's fulfilling a part of it. But I think there's definitely something about the the art of comics that makes it special.

Donny: Yeah.

Ryan: What you're saying, though, is if that doesn't grab you right out of the gate, if you're not like, "wow, this is really awesome to look at, and I love this aspect of it," then it's gonna be difficult. I did a Disney cruise and there was a lot of Marvel stuff there. They had me go and do a talk at it. There was maybe one person on the entire ship out of like thousands of people who knew who I was. And the rest were just interested in it because of the movies.

Donny: Right.

Ryan: But they consider themselves massive Marvel fans, enough to go pay this exorbitant amount of money to be on this cruise.

Donny: I run into that all the time. And it's one of the benefits of, or one I kinda like the beautiful things about what we do right now. When I'm at a dinner party with non-industry people, just like a neighborhood party, and people ask me what I do. Being able to say I work at Marvel always gets people's attention, but then it's always, you know as well as I do Ryan- the amount of filters they have to do with their head. "So like the movies? Wow, that's crazy." I'm like, "No, I wrote the comics." They're like, "they still make comics?"

Ryan: "Do you also draw them?"

Donny: It's always that sort of thing. My neighbor across the street, they have a little boy who is awesome. Like, he's just all into Marvel stuff. And when we moved into this house, like two years ago, he was only interested in Marvel, like, really little kids shows.But I've watched him, over the last two and a half years or so, start to evolve into like, 90s X-Men stuff, 90s Spider-Man stuff, and now he's starting to get like The Golden Book versions of comic books, and now he's like evolving into comic books. So, I think that it's just more exposure and more avenues. Maybe we're not seeing as much as the same path as we had, which was only comics, it was the only path that we had into it because, we didn't have any of that shit when we were kids.

Ryan: I think also that if you can find a person and turn them into a nerdy shy teenager, and then you give them comic books. At any age, you just havw to make them feel like they're a shy teenager, and then they'll get into it.

Donny: It's very surprising, the only demographics that you and I can really point to are the demographics of people who are in our line at shows.

Ryan: Oh, yeah.

Donny: There's a lot of teenagers, there's a lot of smaller kids and kids that are so young that I'm like, shocked that they're reading our Venom run, which can be so brutal, you know? So, people are finding it somehow. It is consistently weird to me that we seem to be the only entertainment avenue, as far as like media goes, that constantly predicts our own downfall. And constantly talks about how we're failing, even though we've been around for 100 years. But yeah, apparently it's going pretty well, I would think so. Yeah. More of that.

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