Intended Audience & Genres

Intended Audience

My project will be aimed mainly at the people that enjoy older comic books as well as people that like to watch Anime or read Manga. I find that such people tend to mainly be the following:

• Students (and lecturers) in media courses, though not uncommon to be enjoyed by students outside of media courses
• People that work with and/or spend a lot of their own time on computers
• Gamers and people involved in the production of games
• People that work within the media industry
• Young adults that are towards the end of finishing secondary school
• People that enjoy the Goth/Alternative scene
• People that grew up watching cartoons

I want to create a more mature feel than the majority of comic books currently deliver such as the Marvel comics as they are generally aimed at young teens although they do have exceptions to this. II want my own project to have a darker and possibly more serious feel to it, being aimed at people from the age of 18+ with the choices on offer ending in some questionable outcomes depending on how they choose the story to progress.

Genres

I have been looking into different genres in order to help decide what I would like to create for my comic, where as it is not immediately that I need to decide on a genre I do feel that considering the different options will give me a better idea of what I could do.

Vampires

Although a very popular concept I do believe they have been a bit overdone as of recently, following the success of Buffy and Angel we now have such movies and shows as True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Being Human, Underworld, Blade and of course the massively successful Twilight. As for books there are a whole host of popular novels currently available, again we have Twilight as well as the popular JR Ward and Sherilyn Kenyon books to name a few. Manga and comic books suffer from the same popularity with plenty of different series to choose from, like Hellsing, Vampire Hunter D, Vampire Knight, Castlevania and Trinity Blood to name the more popular ones. This is great if you love vampires as you have loads of choice and there is always something new to read/watch but this also puts me off creating yet another vampire comic when so many already exist.

Wizards and Witches

I don't think this genre is overdone and there is a lot that could be done with it, the only downfall that I can see is that anything created in the future that does fall under this category will inevitably be compared to Harry Potter. Although I do like the idea of something similar but with a much darker twist that would include such things as killings, murders and rituals etc, I am not quite certain on how effective it would be. The older generation that did not grow up with Harry Potter, and mainly the ones that don't like it will most likely consider anything of the same genre to suffer from the same teen driven, school child drama. 

I confess that myself and some of my friends do not enjoy Harry Potter as we just consider it to be aimed at a much younger audience and find very little that would be considered cool, largely because it is aimed at younger people. Its noticeable that anything of a similar genre has copied Harry Potter by also aiming itself towards the younger audience such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and Disney's The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I personally disliked all of these movies and I do believe the genre now has a stigma attached to it as to the audience which does put me off.

Zombies

Zombies have been around for a long time as they used to be one of the big horror monsters of popular culture. Recently there has been a resurgence as many old zombie movies have been remade, albeit many of them have discarded the once telltale sign other than the decomposing flesh commonly associated with them, this being the staggering and shuffling as they slowly advance towards their prey. The modern day movies have a tendency to replace this with having them run after people in a state of frenzied bloodlust. I imagine the reasoning behind this is that a monster isn't a very frightening concept when it becomes apparent that you can easily outrun it, even at a brisk walk.

As well as the remakes there has also been plenty of tongue in cheek movies and games made in fun of the shambling horde that have been pretty successful. Shaun of The Dead and Zombieland were pretty fun movies (even though the second one did have the zombies running) and such games as Dead Rising 1&2 encourage the player to kill the zombies in a variety of hilariously different ways, dress them in hats, take photos or mow them down with a sit on lawnmower.

I do like the concept of zombies but I believe there is only so much that can be done with them in the form of  comic book, maybe if they were to take a background role, not being the main feature of the comic but a problem within a certain direction of the storyline that could be encountered.

Heaven & Hell

If I were to follow this theme I would make sure that I avoided religion, which may pose a few problems. People do tend to take religion quite seriously and the last thing I would want to do is to question, make fun of or upset people that follow a specific religion.

However I do think that it is an interesting concept, what immediately comes to mind when thinking of this subject are the Spawn comics and books created by Todd McFarlane. Which have agents from Heaven and Hell that use the world we live in as a sort of battle ground where they try to claim the souls of the people living there. This is generally the background story to the comics as a lot more does go on involving the main character who died but then made a deal with the devil and has returned as a spawn, a demon with some impressive powers, although the more his energy to use them the shorter his time back on earth becomes.

I like the idea of angels and demons doing battle with one another or followers of cults, possibly even have a main character that hunts them down.

Super Powers

Possibly the most popular comic books available, the majority coming from either Marvel of DC comics. As much as I do enjoy the genre and many other people do I think that the sheer amount of comics about superheroes many of us have never heard of is quite off putting. Mainly as it has become quite a hard feat to come up with an original superhero.

Gamers

Quite a popular genre, mainly for internet comics and videos although it is features are mainly in good humour including jokes, funny situations, slagging off new game/movie releases, using game references and being very tongue in cheek. It would be very hard to create a serious comic for this genre and the popular ones that attempted to tackle serious storylines were met with many complaints by fans and just weren't interesting to the readers. For this reason I have decided that this genre will not be considered for the comic.

Gangsters

Although not a common genre for comics I do really enjoy it and think that it could possibly work as gangster movies and shows tend to be pretty popular and generally very well written. I myself enjoy a lot of gangster movies with films such as Scarface, The Untouchables, The Godfather, GoodFellas, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Layercake, Lucky Number Sleven, as well as Oceans 11-13. I really like the backstabbing involved, the hits or robberies that are planned and how everyone is always trying to get one up on each other and think it’s an interesting concept. I also enjoy when there is a bit of mystery involved, it's not immediately apparent how something has been pulled off but when the plan is revealed later on it makes the viewer go "Ahh that’s pretty clever".

I think this is a definite consideration as the concept for the comic as it does allow a lot that can be done with it and many different characters can easily be introduced, as well as killed off.

Fantasy

Elves, Dwarves, Goblins and Orcs are the mainstay of most fantasy movies/books/comics. I think the genre should definitely be considered as a possibility as it is pretty wide in what you can do with it, certain creatures are not required and you can create a world that follows some specific rules that separates factions from one another. Over the years there have been many fantasy movies/books to act as a reference tool, the most prominent of all being the Lord of The Rings trilogy and the truly epic scale of the storyline, struggle and the battles it involved. the books effectively told each of the 9 members of the fellowship's story, the struggles they encountered and the challenges they faced. 

I like the idea of a fantasy setting as there are no set rules that have to be followed and it is very easy to create your own and create your own world with its own kingdoms, history, beliefs and perils.

Sci Fi

I am a big fan of Sci Fi and believe that to that end I may be a little biased towards it as a genre. My own favourite show would have to be Firefly, this featured a crew of outlaws trying to make a living scraping by on whatever jobs they could get hold of while always trying to avoid the authorities. I really liked the concept of them always being on the run and having different adventures while managing just to get by and how a job gone wrong could spell some serious consequences. I am also a big fan of the Warhammer 40k novels, I enjoy these mainly because they are very dark and pretty grim offering a large amount of conflict with some very vividly detailed bloodshed as well as some really well done storytelling, plot twists and discoveries that the reader does not often expect.

Sci fi tends to be a pretty popular concept as many of the target audience also tend to enjoy such movies/shows and books such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Serenity, Starship Troopers, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Dr Who and Red Dwarf to name a few. The Sci fi genre is especially popular with computer games with many popular titles like Half Life, Deus Ex, Starcraft, Quake, Final Fantasy and Halo.

As with Fantasy there is a lot that can be done with Sci Fi, the scope is left wide open for the person(s) creating their universe to fill with anything they deem appropriate, this allows a lot of flexibility as there isn't much that cannot be done.

Conclusion

The most appropriate genres that could be considered and offer the best opportunity to create something new and a little different appear to be Fantasy, Sci Fi, Gangsters and Heaven & Hell. The inclusion of Zombies, possible even Vampires and Wizards/Witches could always be taken into account and could make a pretty interesting sub plot to the comic but they would not feature as the main genre for the project.