NBC's Heroes the best thing for comics

According to Joe Quesada at Marvel Comics, Heroes was the best thing for comics in 2006. My response: umm...duh.

In an interview with Newsarama.com Quesada said:

Believe it or not, I think the best thing that happened to the industry was the TV show Heroes. While Civil War garnered a tremendous amount of mainstream press, Heroes was a complete and total validation of what it is that all of us in comics know and believe. Sure, you can watch Heroes and say, hey, it’s X-Men, or it’s Rising Stars, or wait a minute, that character is Rogue and he’s Kitty Pride, but none of that matters.

Hear me out for a second.

The reason that what we’re seeing on Heroes, though fantastically entertaining, isn’t unique to us, is because we’ve seen the Heroes model before. The maturing of the superhero concept happened over 15 years ago and it began with books like Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

Why is Heroes such a huge hit? Well, it’s easy. The mainstream audience is experiencing for the first time what we did when we read those great comics only they’re experiencing it for the first time. Much like myself who came back to comics after reading Watchmen and being floored by the possibility of the medium, John and Jane Q. Public are now looking at comics and comic characters in a whole new light, they’re 15 years behind us. But, that’s to be expected, we’re still a small medium and the exposure to the masses was tough for us. Now, I feel that Heroes may change everything if it continues with its great success. Couple this with Spider-Man 3 and you have a tinderbox of acceptance ready to explode!

Apparently Heroes has gone beyond saving the cheerleader and saving the world straight to saving the comic book industry. Good job guys!! You can tune into the next NEW episode of Heroes on January 22.

Hat tip to HeroeSite for the link to this interview.