I pondered a while whether I'd post on this thread or not, since I've been involved with the comics business for awhile and I always post under my real name. I've decided I should post, so here goes. I won't cite names of people I know or have talked to.
I've been involved in comics publishing since pretty much late 98. In this period, and especially from 2001 to 2005 I've met and talked to most of the big names in comics, including managers, writers, artists etc... so I can reasonably claim that I know the people and companies. This doesn't mean I'd necessarily see or detect the big conspiracy, but still....
Basically, there are a few big trends that help explain editorial decisions over the last few years. These trends can be pretty much summed up as "I'm waiting for the trade" and "We make a lot more money selling rights to the movie industry". Over the last decade or more, comics sales have been falling catastrophically. The fact that the last 5 years have been more stable and have produced a few best-selling titles (apparently) shouldn't obscure the fact that back in the early 90's a best-selling title would sell >500.000 and could reach more than a million copies, whereas now the Marvel leading titles are probably at 90-120.000 copies.
Times have changed, and there are many reasons for this, I won't go into them. But one fact is undeniable: the number of readers willing to shell out 3$ for about 22 pgs of story and then wait for a month before getting the next installment is falling. A lot of readers now prefer to wait for the trade, the book that will compile 5-10 comics into an easy to read 15$ package. This is a vicious circle, since the fact that the trade is coming out in less than a year creates a motivation for more readers to drop out of the monthly title. If you're a Marvel reader you're going to still pretty much be able to buy a trade a month if you want to, what with all the series.... There are a number of industry and production reasons that make it so that comics publishers still need the monthly comic and cannot afford to drop it. This is especially true of the Big Two (Marvel and DC).
The second factor has to do with the fact that the comics industry is becoming the darling of the movie industry, kind of its "idea incubator" and a lot of comics artists know this, and know that they can get a lot more money out of the movie rights, even if the movie never gets made, than from the actual comic. What does this mean? That a lot of creators would rather commit to working on projects where they retain the rights rather than on projects where they work for hire (like typically is the case with Marvel and DC, although there are exceptions). So the Big Two end up having to shell out more money for the big talent to work for them and having to fight for that talent with exclusive contracts and all the works. A friend, a US well-known artist/writer, likes to go looking for less well known artists for projects, publish them with a deal with a smaller publisher, and then sell the option rights to the movie version. This means that some studio pays a lot of money (from a comics artist point of view, peanuts for the studio or movie agent) to retain the exclusive right to buy the rights themselves in the future (typically 2-5 years); if he doesn't buy the rights, the artist gets them back and can then sell them again. My friend has sold the options to the same comic book story three times, each time for c.15.000$, more than he ever made on the actual writing of it. The movie was never made, but a bunch of executive in movie productions paid him about 45.000$ over a period of about 6 years to insure no one else would buy the rights, if they ever wanted them!
This is the reality at the Big Two: they're in a war for talent and for the dwindling readership of monthly comics. Whereas the market for trades and graphic novels has been growing steadily over the years as these books break into normal, general readership bookstores. DC is doing quite well for a long time in this, and Marvel couldn't get its act together for years and years, despising first the trades, then doing them badly and only now doing the right. Lots of small publishers have done well out of this, and the readership of comics, the initial pool of clients in the direct specialized market, has fragmented over the years, at the same time as seemingly fewer kids get into comics. So people who were reading Spidey 15 years ago have moved on to other comic books, probably published only as books.
What does all this mean?
It means the fight for a regular stream of bestselling titles that can keep the entire apparatus of the big two moving on and justifiable to the shareholders is getting meaner and meaner. This means bigger and bolder storylines for readers who are a lot more adult and jaded than they used to be. It means also Marvel needs more of this since they're trailing in graphic novels (although doing very well in movies), and to break into territory that is dominated by DC, Dark Horse and even smaller, minor publishers (Fantagraphics, Top Shelf et. al.) they need.... Captain America killed, zombie super-heroes, death and mayhem and shock value. Everybody does this, but Marvel does it bigger and bolder. And in the end, what do they care about the readers? Marvel is NO LONGER A PUBLISHER, it is a media company, producing and financing their own movies, and they look upon comics just as the laboratory where they incubate their stuff - and where they're fighting the first line of their battle with DC.
So, in the end I would say a lot of this is driven primarily by the business dynamics of this industry, which is pretty much an industry that knows, in the medium term, they're dead. Especially for the big ones. Comics will continue to fall in sales. The Big Two won't really be able to transition to a point where they can afford to publish the trades without having done the comics. An entire generation already knows exactly who Spider-Man, Superman or Batman are, and THEY HAVE NEVER READ A COMIC, they just watched the movies or played the games. Pretty soon, the Big Two will see that whether they publish comics or not is irrelevant to the franchise. They will license the comics to some other, smaller publisher, and get into a lot of other problems, but that's another story.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the "memes" being published and used by the Big Two aren't significant, but I'd be wary of attributing too much "intentionality" to them. The movies would be a way better way of doing it, than a medium that seems condemned in the near to average term, at least for the Big Two. Also, it's true that the vast majority of comic book artists outside of the Big Two tend to be left wing or liberal.
Watchmen was in a way Alan Moore's way of telling readers why the superhero comic story is actually impossible. The entire idea behind it can be found at the end in the quote: Quid Custodiet ipsos custodes? Who Watches the Watchmen?
I'm surprised no one mentioned my favorite zombie comic book: The Walking Dead.
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October top selling comics: (source
www.Icv2.com)
1 NEW AVENGERS #35 111,481
2 FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #24 110,405
3 JUSTICE LEAGUE O/AMERICA 101,763
4 MIGHTY AVENGERS #5 99,544
5 JUSTICE SOCIETY O/AMERICA #10* 99,424
6 X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX ONE SHOT MC 98,958
7 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #7 94,144
8 MARVEL ZOMBIES 2 #1 (Of 5) 92,587
9 UNCANNY X-MEN #491 85,638
10 WOLVERINE #58* 83,810
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Also:
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/11576.html
Marvel's Strong Q3 Sends Stock Soaring
Net Income Nearly Triples
November 05, 2007
Driven largely by licensing revenues created by the release of Spider-Man 3, Marvel reported a net income of $36.3 million for the third quarter compared with just $13.2 million in Q3 2006. Marvel's strong Q3 performance beat Wall St. estimates and sent the price of Marvel's stock soaring by 17%.
Though licensing was the prime mover, Marvel's other segments also flourished in the third quarter. Publishing, where sales increased from $30.9 million in Q3 2006 to $34.9, managed to maintain its momentum thanks to strong performances from World War Hulk and Stephen King's Dark Tower;
while in the toy category sales declined but profits nearly doubled as Marvel continued its transition from toy producer to licensor.
Marvel's joint venture licensing program with Sony for Spider-Man 3 contributed over $24 million during the quarter (versus .8 million in Q3 2006) and the settlement of various audit claims added $16.8 million. Overages (licensing fees paid in addition to the up front licensing advances for sales over and above agreed upon goals) totaled a whopping $24.1 million for the quarter -- a good indication that the Spider-Man property is alive and well.
In a conference call to industry analysts Marvel Vice Chairman Peter Cuneo noted that
Marvel's core businesses such as publishing, which are largely unaffected by movie releases
, continued to show substantial steady growth. Marvel raised its estimates for earnings on individual shares for 2007 to $1.60-$1.65, and forecast 2008 earnings of between $1.30 and $1.50 per share, though Marvel's 2008 estimate does not include any revenue from the company's two self-produced movies, Iron Man & Hulk 2, both of which will debut next year.
Marvel disclosed that it had spent $186 million so far in 2007 (from its "risk-free" line of credit -- see "Marvel Gets Financing") on the production of movies. Principal photography on Iron Man is over, and filming on the Hulk 2 will wrap up in two weeks.
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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?art ... mic_boooks
America's superheroes take on preemptive war, torture, warrantless spying, and George W. himself.
Julian Sanchez | November 9, 2007
A superhero killed the president this summer. Moments later, a shocked White House press corps watched as John Horus, his gleaming white-and-gold costume still soaked in blood, explained why. Because "the war in Iraq is illegal and predicated on lies," because "our people and theirs are dying for corporate gain," because of the "use of torture by our elected authorities," and because the president "stole the last two elections," the most powerful member of the Seven Guns could no longer "stand by while this administration commits crimes." In response, a terrified government imposed martial law, launching a nationwide manhunt for Horus' estranged teammates, whose reactions to the act ranged from horror to sympathy.
That bit of propaganda-by-the-deed launched acclaimed British scribe Warren Ellis' Black Summer, an eight-issue comic book miniseries from Avatar Press. And though heroes at industry giants DC Comics and Marvel have shown more restraint -- even after Superman's Lex Luthor won the Oval Office in 2000 -- the post–September 11 era has seen an explosion of politically themed storylines in mainstream as well as independent comics. While real-world presidential candidates invoke supercop Jack Bauer, of the TV series 24, as a guide to national security policy, a more nuanced debate about preemptive war, warrantless surveillance, and the responsibility that comes with great power is taking place in an illustrated universe.
In one sense, this is nothing new. The very first issue of Captain America (1941) showed the star-spangled super-soldier punching out Adolf Hitler, prompting criticism from both Nazi sympathizers and those who considered der Führer Europe's problem. Superman and Batman hawked war bonds while facing down monstrous racist caricatures of buck-toothed Japs. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen -- works that transformed comics in 1986 by proving that illustrated tales of men in tights could be serious, adult art -- were both steeped in their Cold War milieu. (Moore took his title from the Roman poet Juvenal's famous query about political power: "Who watches the watchmen?")
Nevertheless, the politically inspired stories of the "War on Terror" era have been remarkable not only for their ubiquity and sophistication, but also in the way they have exposed -- and sometimes exploded -- the political ideas embedded in the superhero genre itself. A famous 2002 cover of the German news magazine Der Spiegel depicted members of the Bush cabinet dressed as Rambo, Batman, Conan the Barbarian, and the "warrior princess" Xena, suggesting that neoconservatism is just comic-book logic applied to international affairs. But the efforts of comics writers to grapple with current events raise a corollary question: Is the superhero a natural neocon?
Probably the most widely read of the recent crop of political comics has been Marvel's "Civil War," a massive 2006–2007 crossover story line spanning the company's main superhero titles. The story begins when the members of a young team of C-list heroes get a bit too big for their spandex and challenge a group of powerful supervillains living incognito in Stamford, Connecticut. The ensuing battle leaves more than 600 civilians dead, and public outcry prompts the hasty passage of the Superhuman Registration Act, which requires costumed heroes to be trained and licensed -- and to disclose their secret identities to the government. The "powered community," heroic and villainous alike, is riven by the act: Iron Man and the Fantastic Four's stretchable supergenius Reed Richards rally support for registration, while Captain America goes rogue and begins building a dissident underground. The stand-in for the conflicted reader in this debate is Spider-Man, who is initially so convinced of the wisdom of registration that he unmasks on national television. When he sees the extradimensional Guantanamo being built to house resisters, however, he defects with a dramatic speech about the folly of trading liberty for security.
As the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in the news pages in 2004, the DC Comics universe found itself in the throes of Identity Crisis, in which it is revealed that a cabal of heroes affiliated with the Justice League superteam had been tampering with the memories of captured baddies to protect their own identities. An outraged Batman, who discovers that his own memory has been altered to cover up these acts, begins tracking superhumans via a vast satellite surveillance network -- which, naturally, falls into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, the Arab antihero Black Adam overthrows the tyrannical leader of "Khandaq," then kills the entire population of Bialya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on his country.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about these stories is why they fail. For as much as they seek to tease out the complexity and moral ambiguity of their themes, the authors of most of these tales clearly mean to convey a liberal or civil libertarian message. So much so that in 2003, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies released a screed titled "The Betrayal of Captain America," by right-wing pundit Michael Medved, decrying leftist infiltration of comics; that same year, professional bluenose Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center condemned Superman as a Ba'athist sympathizer. Yet when these stories go beyond leftish imitations of a previous generation's simplistic propaganda comics, the allegories tend to collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. There are, of course, openly conservative comics -- ranging from the ludicrous Liberality for All (starring a cyborg Sean Hannity!) to Bill Willingham's brilliantly layered Fables. But there is often a strong (if unintended) neoconservative subtext even in stories by left-leaning authors.
The "Civil War" storyline may provide the clearest illustration of this. The Superhero Registration Act is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief. But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The "liberty" the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes, many wielding incredible destructive power, to operate unaccountably, outside the law -- a right no sane society recognizes. In one uneasy scene, an anti-registration hero points out that the law would subject heroes to lawsuits filed by those they apprehend. In another, registered hero Wonder Man is forced to wait several whole minutes for approval before barging into a warehouse full of armed spies from Atlantis. Protests about the law's threat to privacy ring a bit hollow coming from heroes accustomed to breaking into buildings, reading minds, or peering through walls without bothering to obtain search warrants. Captain America bristles at the thought of "Washington … telling us who the supervillains are," but his insistence that heroes must be "above" politics amounts to the claim that messy democratic deliberation can only hamper the good guys' efforts to protect America. The putative dissident suddenly sounds suspiciously like Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell defending warrantless spying.
The problem of modern terrorism -- how to deal with small groups of individuals who can wreak the kind of destruction that once required an army -- is familiar territory for comics, as is the idea that heroes often inadvertently create their own worst enemies. Yet attempts to directly address the problem of blowback from military action exhibit the same sort of ambiguity. In the second volume of Marvel's Ultimates (2004–2007) -- a reimagined version of the classic Avengers superteam -- the heroes are being used to carry out covert military missions abroad. Their foreign interventions prompt governments hostile to the U.S. to send their own superteam ("persons of mass destruction" wryly dubbed "The Liberators") to invade Washington. After the inevitable victory, The Ultimates decide they must operate independently of the U.S. government, but the lesson remains that "the world needs looking after," presumably by the same mostly American heroes.
These mixed messages shouldn't be blamed (solely) on the comics' creators, though. As John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett argue in their book The Myth of the American Superhero, the premises of the genre itself demand that "total power must be pictured as totally benign, transmuting lawless vigilantism into a perfect embodiment of law enforcement." The hero, possessed of moral clarity, solves problems by force, yet (usually) without killing. Evil is depicted as personal rather than institutional: The problem is not that power is wielded by a small elite, but that the wrong people -- supervillains -- sometimes get powers. And when the only tool you have is Thor's hammer, every problem looks like a supervillain. Super-heroes don't form PACs; they have slugfests, because the narrative of the superheroic redeemer demands that more prosaic means of conflict resolution -- diplomacy, say -- prove ineffectual.
The simplest way for writers to escape the embedded politics of superheroism, of course, is by ditching the tights entirely. Brian K. Vaughan makes this rejection explicit by having Mitchell Hundred, the protagonist of Ex Machina, abandon his costumed identity as the hapless Great Machine to serve his fellow New Yorkers as mayor. And there are many spandex-free depictions of war in comics. Vaughan's simple but moving Pride of Baghdad follows a group of lions freed from an Iraqi zoo during an American bombing. (The liberated animals are eventually shot by frightened Coalition forces.) Rick Veitch lampoons the romanticization of war in Army @ Love, in which a Huxleyan Department of Motivation and Morale entices soldiers to fight in "Afbaghistan" by making conflict sexy and fun. Others, such as Brian Wood in DMZ and Anthony Lappé in Shooting War, illustrate the old adage that "when war is declared, truth is the first casualty" by following journalists into spin-riddled battle zones.
Yet however much some writers may lament the popular identification of comics with superhero tales, it is no accident: Iconic characters demand a medium that deals in icons, and their privileged place in the American Zeitgeist has given them a mythic narrative power that storytellers are loath to forsake, even as they seek to tame the genre's fascist undertones. Some film adaptations of comic book tales -- notably Superman Returns, V for Vendetta, and the first two Spider-Man films -- have attempted to democratize their protagonist by creating populist moments in which ordinary citizens must band together to save the hero. But rather than conveying a message of democratic empowerment, these scenes typically have more than a whiff of übermench-as-embodiment-of-the-volk about them.
Mainstream titles increasingly feature stories in which the traditional Manichaeism of the genre is countered by pitting heroes against each other rather than villains, emphasizing how evil can arise from well-intentioned efforts to use coercive power for good ends: "Civil War" falls into this camp, as does DC's Infinite Crisis (2005–2006), in which a group of erstwhile heroes discover that their scheme to remake the universe into a utopia has transformed them into monsters. Other titles, following in the tradition of Watchmen, create doubly allegorical worlds populated by close analogues of the classic DC stable of heroes, then use them to explode or detourn the tropes of conventional superhero comics.
The failures and successes alike show that if comics are to succeed as modern political allegory, comics writers cannot simply transplant real controversies into their fictional worlds. They also face the daunting task of inventing a grammar and a vocabulary for a new sort of superhero narrative -- one capable of telling us that, sometimes, great power comes with the responsibility to not use it.
Julian Sanchez is a writer based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for Reason magazine.
