Ugly American Report Column 9: The Natural Order

I’ve been thinking about the state of comics as we close out 2012, as I am wont to do. It’s sort of an odd thing to do, really. As an example, I eat pizza. Lots of pizza. Like it quite a bit. I spend exactly 0 minutes a year thinking about the pizza industry, how healthy it is, and what I can do as a consumer to make sure the best pizza possible is coming my way. I wouldn’t want to meet anybody who did spend time fretting over pizza. I would probably slash that person’s tires on the sly just for being such a damn dork about it. If Pizza can’t figure itself out, screw em’. I’ll just go get a burrito and not worry about it.

And yet here I am, typing away, wondering about the future of comics and what I can do to help. I often wonder if the Powers That Be ever take a moment and think about what a good thing they have going in that there are people like me so bent on their product that they will embarrass themselves on a blog proselytizing for and sweating over these things. I suspect they don’t think about me as much as I think about them. Sigh. Unrequited lovers of the damned – story of my life!

Comics are in a very weird, precarious position at the moment. There is room for optimism. I’ve been reading these things for quite some time, and I can tell you that some of the finest comics I’ve ever experienced are being published right now. The most recent sales data is as strong as it’s been since they’ve been counting in the Diamond era, at least by dollars. That sounds like a good thing.

And then there’s the digital revolution everyone and their aunt was shrieking about, coming with great thunder to put us printosauruses into extinction. It’s here, folks, and the digital “revolution” has hit with all the authority of a gnat. I’ll admit, I was worried about it for a bit. No more. Digital runs pretty much in lock step with print, except at 5-15% of the volume. And don’t let any idiots come to you with their data about 35 billion percent growth for digital, either. You know what 35 billion percent of a gnat is? It’s a dung beetle. You can still step on it quite easily.

Print comics seem to be all right at a casual glance, but if you peer deeper you can see cracks in the firmament. The New 52 sort of reset the clock at DC, but it isn’t growing. Those titles are still shrinking every month. Comp sales look pretty good despite that…but that’s because of Before Watchmen. I don’t think they’ll be able to keep pace with a Before V for Vendetta this year, I think its just going to start plummeting again.

Especially over at DC, the stories aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. I’m reading Batman, Action, and Green Lantern, and I’m kinda on the fence about Green Lantern again. I pick up Earth 2 because I love Nicola Scott. And Action is going without Grant Morrison soon, which means it will be going without me soon. There isn’t much new happening over at the “New 52”, it’s mostly now a 1990s Reclamation Society, and the books are predictably dull.

And even when they do try and infuse some fresh blood over there, I don’t think it’s going well because the editorial gauntlet is pretty heavy. Go read Team 7 by Justin Jordan and tell me that’s the same guy writing Luther Strode. The Luther Strode version of Jordan pops on every page – the dialogue is crisp, the action is played sharp and brutal for max effect. Team 7 just lays limp. It’s pasteurized, bland, and ready for mass production. There’s no Justin Jordan in there at all, that I can tell. I don’t think that’s his idea, I think that’s the omnipresent and oppressive editorial gauntlet.

Marvel’s no better. Their contribution to the robust sales figures are not driven by increasing readership or innovative storytelling. Marvel titles go down every month. Those spikes are easily shown to be a direct result of double shipping, endless re-launching, and variant covers. That’s not sustainable. That’s the kind of nonsense that bought us The Great Flushing of 1993, and I think we’re all still nursing the rectal scarring from that one.

So it’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times, but where have we gone wrong and how do we fix it? The answers are myriad, but I think it comes down to two things, and both are absolutely correctable, should the publishers of comics ever find some wisdom and some balls.

Problem # 1: The Game Is Rigged Against The New
For whatever reason, the comics audience has an incredible amount of inertia leaning toward Marvel and DC. For my purposes here, it doesn’t even matter why or if it’s a good thing – it’s a fact. Marvel and DC are running their business less like a publishing firm and more like an IP factory, because that’s where the money is. You make more money on the action figures and t-shirts than you do with comics. Sad but true. You make a HELL of a lot more money making hit movies than you do printing comics.

The Big Two are not focused on The Next Big Thing, they’re focused on squeezing whatever juice is left in the Old Big Things, because people know them, they have brand awareness. Marvel and DC have no motive to produce new characters and boundary-pushing comics. The data shows those likely to fail.

Meanwhile, on the creative end…why in the world would create new IP or hand over your best ideas to a machine that won’t pay you for them? They saw what happened to Gary Friedrich when he was just trying to make rent. There is no incentive for a talented writer or artist to drive anything forward just to watch somebody else cash the gigantic checks for your sweat and inspiration.

So if the company doesn’t want to produce anything new or different, and the employees have no incentive to produce anything new or different, the only thing left is to continue to hit the defibrillator on a bunch of concepts that might be better served to ride off into the sunset.

Listen, I enjoy Batman and Spider-Man a great deal, and I’m glad on some level that they are both still around. But it’s kind of absurd at this point. Just look at DC trying to re-write things fresh with the 17 Robins they have in the archives and tell me that it feels viable and natural to you. Spider-Man is 50 years old, and there are 700 issues extant of just the Amazing title. How many Spidey comics total? 5,000? 10,000??? Has anybody on planet earth even read them all? If they did, could they still be sane?

It’s not natural. TV and movies don’t work that way. Bonanza was a great show by most accounts, but it had its day and then it went out gracefully. You don’t see network television continuing to ram out adventures on the Ponderosa for eternity, they just move on to the next thing. Movie characters like James Bond have endured an unnaturally long time, but he’s allowed to re-invent himself. Nobody really knows or cares whether Daniel Craig actually fought Jaws in Moonraker, do they? I don’t. That was Roger Moore. Different guy, different stories, and I don’t care whether it’s in “continuity” or not. James Bond is the ultimate man’s man of a spy who gets laid a lot more than I do. That’s it, and it’s more than enough. But we don’t seem capable of accepting that in comics. Batman kinda needs to be Bruce Wayne for us, and if he fought Jaws in 1981, well dammit, that better have happened or we’re burning down the internet.

So what’s the answer? I suppose part of the equation would simply be us “growing up” and allowing for change, but the problem with that is we’re tottering on into our 40s now…if we were going to grow up it would have already happened.

I believe the answer is for Marvel and DC to instil a reasonable piece of ownership in new creations, and it should be a percentage (5% maybe?) of future profits on licensing and such. It’s never going to happen, for several reasons. Most notably the fact that Marvel and DC would have to share money with the help. But there are other problems, like who is keeping track of the books? How do you determine what’s profit, and how many ways can Disney and Warner Bros wriggle their way into declaring losses where there is actually gold? What do you do with the public backlash when some newspaper finds a destitute Bill Mantlo desperately hoping that another Hero fundraiser can pay his medical bills while some newcomer starts cashing big checks?

There are lots of wrinkles to work out, but if we want a future, I think that Marvel and DC need to start thinking Big Picture and turn their creative people loose. Incentivize the new, or die squeezing blood out of you last turnips.

Problem # 2: The Natural Order Is Gone
Comic books are commercial art, a hybrid of the fiscal and the creative. It’s a bit of a quagmire when you think about it; commerce and art are not natural allies. In correct balance, a harmony between the two can be quite magical. The commercial element can squeeze the most out of the freewheeling artist with deadlines and structure. The artist can show to the commercial element that what people really want are pure expressions of the human condition. And what people really want, they will buy.

Comics have never really had a perfect symbiosis of the two faces, but back in the day there was an understanding. If something sold, you generally let the creative forces have their way and produce copycat products and the golden goose is dead. If something wasn’t selling, editorial got involved and made changes and dictated more of the content. But if something REALLY wasn’t selling, that policy spun back around and went pro-creator again. If something was in the toilet, there was nothing left to lose and they let creators try crazy things to kick-start interest. This is how we got Frank Miller’s Daredevil, as an example. Marvel used to carry books like Marvel Premiere and Marvel Spotlight specifically devoted to throwing weird crap at the wall to see what stuck. Sometimes you got Wood God. (really disappointing, unless you’re Jeff Parker) But sometimes you got a Ghost Rider that you could milk for years.

In 2012, there is no reversion back to the creative in order to spur sales. Marketing does all the heavy lifting these days. When things go south, you don’t rely on your artists to bring you something inspired, you slap an “Uncanny” at the beginning of the title and put a new # 1 on it. Nothing ever really dies, it’s always artificially propped up by the marketing department.

You know, as a general rule people don’t like forest fires. The problem is, the most healthy thing in the world for a forest to do is burn down to the ground every couple hundred years. It puts nutrients back in the soil, and the tree population is stronger for it.

The old comics guard intuitively understood this. When things go south…it’s OK to do something flashy and let it burn. Something good will come out of the fresh soil, and it will be a hell of a show in the interim. Now, marketing staples ugly aluminum supports to the tired old diseased trees and then they clap at each other about how clever they are.

You’re not clever. The marketing end of things can surely put band aids on things, but they don’t ever produce meaningful hits. Artists do. An artist will decide that what Amazing Adult Fantasy needs is a high school kid with a spider motif and lots of problems. Never mind that spiders test horribly with all focus groups, that prevailing trends say that kids are sidekicks and not leads, and that heroes have to be better than us, not one of us. Marketing wouldn’t know what to do with that concept, but there was a time when experimentation was allowed inside of floundering properties. We wouldn’t get a Spider-Man today, because the suits can’t see what Stan Lee and Steve Ditko could.

How about this one? If you were trying to create a mega-hit in the modern era, would you try and create a comic in the least profitable genre of horror, put two complete unknowns on the book, the writer picks the artist because he went to high school with him, and then publish it sporadically in black and white as an indie title? Well… that’s the Walking Dead. There is no way that book could ever work – except that it works really, really well.

The suits don’t know about Spider-Man, or The Walking Dead, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I’m not advocating that comics simply let the artists go wild without restraint, because that road leads to Non Player, and don’t hold your breath waiting for that to come out, please. Believe it or not, comics are better for the commercial element. But right now, we’ve lost the natural order when the creative was turned loose against impending doom to the benefit of everyone. We need to get back to that.