tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211606252024-03-06T21:03:35.126-08:00Comic Book HoedownWherein the author waxes poetic about tales of spandex-clad beings pummeling each other into the groundAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-11221009243793152392017-12-14T08:41:00.000-08:002017-12-14T08:46:37.775-08:00Why the Disney/Fox Merger May Be Bad for the X-Men<span data-offset-key="p5dq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">So, Disney is buying 20th Century Fox! A lot of folks are really excited about the possibilities of having the X-Men in the MCU, Wolverine and the Thing in the Avengers, AvX, Galactus, and all of the other possible crossover potential. But I find myself apprehensive.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0lL0Avg8KllC9ocz72UyePxJwQe2J00Iq8YrbyWseq7A3tEvY0wCK-cWnV3OVWvXrko_OxUKXRwGp3cvuqRh13Ju7cozvtb9GTnsMRXiL3PStnFjmkaOsiuGl_BQPfsmFoAnN/s1600/632886-new_avengers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="I mean, yes, this would be really sweet" border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1054" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0lL0Avg8KllC9ocz72UyePxJwQe2J00Iq8YrbyWseq7A3tEvY0wCK-cWnV3OVWvXrko_OxUKXRwGp3cvuqRh13Ju7cozvtb9GTnsMRXiL3PStnFjmkaOsiuGl_BQPfsmFoAnN/s200/632886-new_avengers.jpg" title="I mean, yes, this would be sweet." width="130" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I mean, yes, this <br />
would be sweet.</td></tr>
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<span data-offset-key="30dt1-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-offset-key="30dt1-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">I mean, to start with, there's the whole "One media corporation has bought another one, effectively reducing the number of actual voices out there" which is always something to be concerned about. Just from that standpoint, this is worrisome. But even if you push all that aside, I'm not sure this is an unvarnished good, just staying within the realm of the X-Men joining the MCU.</span>
<span data-offset-key="cdgvj-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">The Disney Marvel movies have been by and large good. Not great (with a couple of exceptions like Winter Soldier) or terrible (again, Thor 2). </span></span><br />
<br />
<span data-offset-key="cdgvj-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span data-offset-key="cdgvj-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">But they have mostly been pretty same-y. They're good. They're a pleasant time. Their stories are enjoyable, if fluffy, with lots of light drama, some comedy, and really solid action. </span>
<span data-offset-key="7pedp-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">But they largely have the same tone, the same type of stakes, and, importantly for the X-Men in particular, they're rarely actually about anything larger than the story they're telling. The good guys win, the bad guy loses, no one in the audience really learns anything or thinks about anything other than the spectacle. There have been exceptions (Winter Soldier and its parallels to the war on terror, etc.), but even those have little ambiguity. It's hard to be against government overreach in the security state when it turns out to have been HYDRA all along, after all.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizkKo3RUZGSKbtX90RPy-9ge_UvKKHfbe1laTTpWEO5gWea00Fz6IjAoR2sFFQEgHHgcAVVVNhNki5EGML1gmg4LjCXD-n0oxuF02labn0XRakGhtGQqHr8znxPQWsebtXrzQr/s1600/11ce14f73fd00fef940e48049451b9e3130d6879_hq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Guest starring Mike Pence" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizkKo3RUZGSKbtX90RPy-9ge_UvKKHfbe1laTTpWEO5gWea00Fz6IjAoR2sFFQEgHHgcAVVVNhNki5EGML1gmg4LjCXD-n0oxuF02labn0XRakGhtGQqHr8znxPQWsebtXrzQr/s200/11ce14f73fd00fef940e48049451b9e3130d6879_hq.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Guest starring Mike Pence</td></tr>
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<span data-offset-key="1145q-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">The X-Men aren't just superheroes. They're walking, talking metaphors for civil rights, gay rights, representation, minority issues, immigration,and a whole lot of other complicated stuff. Even in the arguably worst X-Men movie, Last Stand, there's a whole major subplot about whether mutants should be "cured," even if the technology is available to do it, and even the mutants argue amongst themselves about whether they want the cure or not. That's a hell of a discussion to be having in the middle of your movie about blue furry people punching each other, and it's something the House of Mouse is probably not going to stand for. Any kind of message that a director wants to put in there is going to have to make it not past just Disney's censors, but also Kevin Feige's steadying hand. Which to be clear, has been great for the other parts of the franchise, but the X-Men need to not be restricted in that same way, or they become just another group of folks in spandex punching getting in fights.</span><br />
<span data-offset-key="6r1qo-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;"><br data-text="true" /></span>
<span data-offset-key="8svc2-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">But even ignoring all of that, I don't think Disney is likely to take new chances from the other standpoint that Fox has. The Fox X-Men franchise has been incredibly uneven, but that's partially because it's tried to tell a bunch of different stories. If the X-Men were part of the MCU, I honestly don't believe we would have seen anything like the broad spread of stories that we've seen. Deadpool probably would have been PG-13 if it were at Disney, if it got made at all. Logan probably wouldn't have gotten made, or if it did, it would have had Logan saving the family on the farm and ended with Logan riding into the sunset with X-23; I can't imagine that kind of heavy of a tone making it into a Marvel movie, at least not until an actor's contract runs out. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCFTx-YcAX7gsRLoP-es52AW7f-alLVVI9ZVlieGIW7RV7XybbJmrEAUN4NNZ2iXHjerbRpCDGsZcmPmy8SaaRZlfzV496hE5gRktbREfRsTs6bcl0Jinxc1IG60qJPTNUwxDv/s1600/the-new-mutants-movie-poster-1063557.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="I mean, it's a story about a girl raised by demons, a werewolf, and a girl who can project nightmares whose parents were eaten by a demon bear and... oh, yeah, I can see that now" border="0" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="900" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCFTx-YcAX7gsRLoP-es52AW7f-alLVVI9ZVlieGIW7RV7XybbJmrEAUN4NNZ2iXHjerbRpCDGsZcmPmy8SaaRZlfzV496hE5gRktbREfRsTs6bcl0Jinxc1IG60qJPTNUwxDv/s200/the-new-mutants-movie-poster-1063557.jpg" title="" width="135" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Black Friday sale at<br />
Westchester Best Buy</td></tr>
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<span data-offset-key="6l00e-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Looking forward, you've got the New Mutants coming up, which has the pretty brilliant idea of making a horror movie out of a bunch of characters that have pretty horrific powers and backgrounds. In hindsight, that's an obvious choice, but I can't see Marvel having come to that conclusion; we likely would have gotten a Harry Potter for mutants story instead. And maybe that would have been great! But I guarantee you, it would have had the same tone as the Avengers or Spider-Man: light drama, light comedy, clear good guys and bad guys, and maybe a very tepid message that 90% of the audience could agree on, if they thought about it at all.</span><br />
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<span data-offset-key="6l00e-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">There are, of course, bright spots. Having the FF in the MCU will probably be great, along with Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Alpha Flight, and all of the other stuff that people are really excited about. Okay, admittedly, I'm the only person excited about Alpha Flight. And I would really, really love to be proven wrong and find out that the first X-Men movie has Iceman having a brief discussion with Storm that talks about the parallels and differences between the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and the way mutants are treated in the MCU. But if you really think that will happen, I have a Bifrost to sell you.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-8617356835777310112017-05-19T08:10:00.002-07:002017-05-23T11:56:58.921-07:00In Defense of Both the HydraCap Storyline and Its Detractors<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The HydraCap story is one of the most divisive storylines in comics that I've ever seen, even spilling out into the regular press. After a long conversation with a friend who is a more casual Captain America fan, I'm getting a better view of where the divisions are happening and why. I do think it's partially on Spencer, but it's also because comics fans these days tend to be more fans of what they think characters are (which often includes cinematic versions, cartoon versions, and just wider pop culture symbolism versions) than fans of the past stories about characters. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'm a big fan of the HydraCap storyline. I think, if he can stick the landing, it will have turned out to be potentially the best Cap story since the 80s. Yes, better than any of Brubaker's; Brubaker told a lot of good stories, but they were good Brubaker stories with Cap in them, not good Captain America stories, if that makes sense. In the same way that Warren Ellis writes good stories, but they're Ellis stories with X in them, instead of them being X stories.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sharp dressed reference</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first problem is that Spencer is doing deep cuts and callbacks that are decades years old, remixed for modern sensibilities. The Sam Wilson Captain America story is like someone took Gruenwald's "The Captain" and then changed out the who (Sam) and the why (racial tensions in the US instead of government corruption) while maintaining a lot of the other story components, down to bringing back Demolition Man, a small team of support personnel, and something that is basically the Captain America Hotline updated for 2017. Next month's cover has Sam in a red, white and black version of his Captain America costume, another callback, and I fully expect by the end of this we'll have Sam back in the Cap costume.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Where he is subverting story elements from the past, it is also intentional and thoughtful. When Steve Rogers came back, a lot of old-school Cap fans railed against Cap's shield having a laser sword in it, because that explicitly went against what Kirby wanted of the character when he created him; that he should carry a shield because he was a soldier that purely defended and didn't kill. It took me months after the unveil to say, "... Oh, you clever bastard. Not only is it a sword because this Cap kills, but it's hidden because his evil exists in secret for now."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Second, there are two things that I think Spencer is trying to push people to examine about Steve Rogers Cap with this story, but they are both ones that younger/more recent fans kind of take "as-written" instead of being weird changes over the past ten years. One is that Cap has become increasingly trusted for murkier and murkier reasons, and that should be examined. It was a common refrain during Civil War that the anti-reg side was right, because Cap was on that side. In AvX, the Avengers were right because Cap was on that side. At the beginning of the Avengers World series, Cap is all jingoism and "This is an Avengers World," and some of us older fans were like, "that doesn't sound like Cap, it sounds like American foreign policy writ large." </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is NOT okay</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dovetailing into this is the fact that Cap has gotten increasingly militaristic since September 11, and it's been sold as "realistic." Especially after he came back as Director of SHIELD, he's been used more and more as a military (or more accurately paramilitary) character, and less of a traditional superhero, and that's frankly been a little uncomfortable. The breaking point for me was when Ellis had him tacitly approve torture, but that could be written off as Ellis being Ellis if later stories like Dimension X hadn't implied him being somewhat comfortable with killing and Hickman's run hadn't basically turned him into a semi-fascist in pursuit of the Illuminati (not to defend that group, as they were an entirely different brand of wrong I kind of hated).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But the big problem here is that this is all coming from the point of view of a person who has been reading the character for literally twice as long as many current day fans have been alive. I have the background in this, I get what he's going for and why, I've watched Cap become increasingly less like Cap, I know that Marvel has spent a lot of time telling stories that say "Hydra's not inherently Nazis, it depends on who's running it," and all of the other stuff that they are legitimately saying in defense and then being mystified that people aren't accepting of it. Because the people writing these books are longtime uber-fans, and they think the readers are too, and they haven't managed to bridge that gap to the vast majority of people that just like Cap as a character or a symbol.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because that is the majority of what the folks that Marvel is reaching out to are. They like Cap. Maybe they've only read comics for 2 or 5 or 10 years or maybe they've only seen the movies or maybe they've only watched Earth's Mightiest Heroes. They don't have the grounding in the character's history to either understand or appreciate what is being done with the story, and Spencer and Marvel haven't done enough fill-in to tell them "this is why<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The proper response to actual fascism</td></tr>
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we're doing what we're doing." And while normally that would be okay, if disappointing, their mistake has come at a time in history where corrupting a symbol of America into the thing that many people hate isn't going to fly. And that's even more troubling when, for example, hate groups grab onto that and start unironically using the new, fascist version of the character as a symbol.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For the record, if you look back at the letters pages in the Nomad era of Cap, or the Gruenwald Captain one, you would see similar types of anger, similar attacks on the writers saying they don't know what they're doing, that they're corrupting the character, etc. I understand why people are angry, and I sympathize. But I think Marvel's biggest mistake here was not Hydra Cap but making this a tentpole event, not that they're telling the story. There was no really good way to both tell this story and tie it back into the past of the character, both distant (the callbacks to the 70s and 80s) and the recent (the problems with the increasing militarism and "Cap is always right!") while also telling a compelling story, or at least not one that Marvel and Spencer were able to put together or even understood that they needed to do. And that's the kind of thing you have to be able to do if you want folks onboard.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-66582214924803024082016-05-26T08:25:00.002-07:002016-05-26T09:12:24.685-07:00Captain America, Character, and Fresh Takes<span style="font-family: inherit;">This post contains spoilers for a recent comic book which you have probably heard about if you have looked at the internet in the last day or two. Still, the rest of the article is after the cut for those of you returning from desert islands.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZG2ChzGkxjm0ytfJnDVTuiG1oF7ayRtHyGi7c_VFo5PEv9BIQWQlROBv6mNpCimfIRqYP01pH-hpiEFBbkqzTwDRN8b8sbalFhF3gJ5RUF97aLOb70svxc6bqc7PbmwmSHVp/s1600/capwolf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZG2ChzGkxjm0ytfJnDVTuiG1oF7ayRtHyGi7c_VFo5PEv9BIQWQlROBv6mNpCimfIRqYP01pH-hpiEFBbkqzTwDRN8b8sbalFhF3gJ5RUF97aLOb70svxc6bqc7PbmwmSHVp/s320/capwolf.jpg" width="205" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Be honest, this should be the status quo</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Captain America isn't a Hydra agent, and hasn't been for the last 75 years. Let's just get that out of the way first. The idea that this is anything that's even vaguely going to stick, that Marvel is going to take one of their top 5 most popular characters and turn him into a Nazi, is patently ludicrous. Just like there was no way Superman was going to actually stay dead or AzBats was going to take over the lead after Knightfall, there's no way HydraCap sticks. Any halfway-observant reader of Captain America: Steve Rogers #1 can see all of the places where this is being set up as a temporary status quo that will be undone through some combination of brainwashing, cosmic cubes, time manipulation, or some other comic book nonsense. But given that you're reading a comic book blog, you probably already suspected that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, given that this is not going to be the new status quo for more than a few months, there are a couple of questions to ask: why are Marvel and the writer on the book, Nick Spencer, doing this, and why are people freaking out so hard about the idea? </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The second question actually helps to answer the first (Marvel is doing this because people freaking out about it has put the book as a trending topic on all forms of social media, as well as generated write-ups on both respected journalism sites and, uh, nerdy comic book blogs), but there's more to it than that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Beyond the "we'd like to sell books" answer, there's also the question of what a good Captain America story does, or, for that matter, what a good story about any character does. For Cap, the answer is generally to discuss some combination of the nature of patriotism and ideology, America's place in the world, the intersection of ideals and pragmatism, or what it means to be Captain America as a symbol. As with any character, some of these storylines have been duds, but many of them are classics, like the Brubaker BuckyCap era and Gruenwald's "The Captain" storyline. It's worth noting that both of these were also lambasted before their publication because they upset some strongly held notions of comic fans.</span><br />
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As to the public reaction, that's certainly intended by Marvel, as I said before. They want to sell the book and stirring up rage is certainly one way to do it. There are two types of people that seem to be especially riled up, however: big Captain America fans and people who only know of the character as a symbol or from the movies. The big Cap fans seem to be incensed for the same reason that some Spider-Man fans hated Superior Spider-Man, that it's doing unpleasant things to a character that they love. Which I get, of course, but that takes a really short view.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx2-ORgrkvQ67g-PfKWyBZ_sGSwaSG3eRRSZw70SU_N-BUY3XC0B41sFNf9TA4S95sY3djlKLornOUupmp2gk8GQ70sy5s_o6Cn_txEREwymuG7dxA_04HIR3OoQP_2XQt_Ea4/s1600/SuperiorList3-9c59e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx2-ORgrkvQ67g-PfKWyBZ_sGSwaSG3eRRSZw70SU_N-BUY3XC0B41sFNf9TA4S95sY3djlKLornOUupmp2gk8GQ70sy5s_o6Cn_txEREwymuG7dxA_04HIR3OoQP_2XQt_Ea4/s320/SuperiorList3-9c59e.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Best Spider-Man? Best Spider-Man.</td></tr>
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Even if you didn't like Dr. Spiderpuss, which I admittedly did, the post-Superior status quo gave us a much more adult version of the Peter Parker Spider-Man than the one that we went into it with, a character that understood responsibility like an adult (trying to make payroll for employees, using his talents and company for good, taking care of his loved ones' emotional needs as well as preventing supervillain attacks against them) instead of like a child (dropping the ball on his work responsibilities, never finishing college, squandering his mental gifts in favor of his physical ones). Similarly, I wasn't a big fan of the death of Captain America, but without it, we wouldn't have gotten a lot of really great stories with BuckyCap and new, fresh takes on the Steve Rogers version that came after. All in all, it was a positive, even though the death and return itself was pretty goofy.<br />
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The other type of person that seems to be losing their minds over this is the very casual Cap fan, the one that likes the idea of the character or the symbol without knowing much about the character outside of the movies. I saw a conservative on Facebook yesterday saying it's a betrayal of a character that always stood for traditional American values, to which I could only laugh. He's been pro-civil rights, pro-gay rights, anti-nationalist, anti-death penalty, and any number of other positions that a defender of "traditional" (read conservative) American values would clutch their pearls over. It's easy to forget now, but the first appearance of Captain America, the one with the cover where he's punching Hitler in the jaw, was a very unpopular political statement being made. We hadn't entered the war, and a majority of the American public didn't want to, but this character was a call to action by two Jewish creators saying "we gotta do something about this guy."<br />
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This is going to be another take on the character that has no chance to last, that isn't even intended to, but which can shed some light on both the character and his core themes. While Cap as a Hydra agent isn't good in the moral sense of the term, the idea of it has the potential to be good in the storytelling sense. So just sit back and enjoy the ride.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbS-uUWNKJd6RFRWAOGZ8WWBYTE8Uj6-0qTnnml_N4gH_5fBn3ASGs6nBcMJCI9xpklm1wbI-e8cicUKSNotcK00BV-VK_2vOBigjDeDXbYixJWv8zfMrPY_4-lUfuQ7zEnCjp/s1600/13239909_10153425318266612_5351427071497279459_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbS-uUWNKJd6RFRWAOGZ8WWBYTE8Uj6-0qTnnml_N4gH_5fBn3ASGs6nBcMJCI9xpklm1wbI-e8cicUKSNotcK00BV-VK_2vOBigjDeDXbYixJWv8zfMrPY_4-lUfuQ7zEnCjp/s400/13239909_10153425318266612_5351427071497279459_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hail Hydra</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-56848312363508763252015-01-14T08:12:00.003-08:002015-01-14T08:13:16.439-08:00A Short History of the Comic Book IndustryA couple of years back, the company I work for was kicking around some ideas, and one of the things that came up was an idea that would eventually end up being <a href="https://heroanalytics.com/" target="_blank">Hero Analytics</a>. Not everyone in the company was as familiar with comic books and the industry as I am, so I made up a little document to act as a primer on the history of the industry and its current state. This is that document, with a few edits. Please keep in mind that this was made in early 2013. I've updated it a little bit, but there are a few dated references in here. If you need to give someone a relatively short document that explains the history of the industry and why things are how they are, well, here you go.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Terminology</b><br />
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This document assumes only a passing familiarity with comic books, so I'll begin with some terms:<br />
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<b>Marvel</b> - One of the “big two” of comics publishing, these are the guys we'll be trying to reach first. They've had a string of successful movies leveraging a number of their properties: Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Avengers have all been produced in house, while Sony and Fox have made successful franchises out of their Spider-Man and X-Men comics. Agents of SHIELD, their first live-action TV show since the late 70s is in the middle of its second season, and a companion show called Agent Carter is currently running as well.<br />
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<b>DC</b> - The other of the big two. Marvel and DC spend long periods being first and second in the industry, in terms of monthly market share; currently, Marvel is slightly more dominant. They are beginning to see continual success in their live-action TV and movie franchises with the Arrow and Flash TV shows, as well as their new cinematic universe that was kicked off with Man of Steel.<br />
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<b>Image, Dark Horse, IDW, Valiant</b> - the independent publishers, roughly in order of their size. There are some others, but these are the biggest indies. <br />
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<b>Diamond Comic Distributors</b> - the distribution company that more or less has a monopoly on the distribution of print comics. They buy the comics from the publishers, then distribute them to the shops. Independents below the size of Dark Horse or Image end up getting about 40% of the cover price of their comics from Diamond; Marvel and DC don't publish their numbers (from what I can find), but it's estimated Diamond pays them between 50% and 60% of cover price. Diamond's monopoly has had a number of bad effects on the comics industry that I'll go into later.<br />
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<b>Singles / Floppies</b> - These two terms are used fairly interchangeably to refer to single issues of a comic book; for example, Captain America #1 would be a single issue.<br />
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<b>Trade Paperback (TPB)</b> - Collections of single issues; for example, Captain America #1 - #6. Usually published by Marvel within a couple of months of the final issue in a TPB, e.g., the TPB for Cap 1-6 usually comes out somewhere between the time that Cap 7, 8, or 9 comes out. Particularly successful comics will see a hardcover TPB come out first, then about 6 months later, a softcover that's ~$5 cheaper.<br />
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<b>Local Comics Shop (LCS) </b>- This is pretty much where all single-issue comics sales are made. They also sell TPBs, but they aren't the only place; both publishers in the last 15 years have made very good in-roads in getting their TPBs in stores like Barnes & Noble. Amazon and other online distributors also sell singles and TPBs, often with deep discounts compared to brick and mortar stores.<br />
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<b>Marvel Unlimited</b> - Marvel's subscription service, it currently gives generally good but kind of spotty access to Marvel's massive back catalog, but no access to anything more recent than 6 months ago. In some cases, titles can lag up to a year behind. It was launched in 2007, but it's only in the last couple of years that they even have an Android or iOS version of the application. DC does not have a competing service, but they do have an even larger back catalog than Marvel that they could bring to bear.<br />
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<b>Comixology</b> - All of the major and most minor publishers make their digital comics available through Comixology, but unlike the Marvel Unlimited service, digital comics are bought much like single issues at an LCS. It's often referred to as "iTunes for comics." Self-publishers and small indies split sales 50/50 with Comixology. Marvel and the others don't make public the amount that they pay, but Comixology probably takes 30-40% of their sales.<br />
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<b>Comics Ages</b> - There's a lot more to the ages than just their publication dates, but they're not terribly important to most of our discussion; a broad understanding of their start and end points are sufficient for now, but I'll be touching on each of the ages as I go on. Interestingly, while the differentiation between the ages usually focuses largely on their content, each of them also has a pretty strong correlation with changes in the industry that occur near their starting and ending points, which I'll be discussing somewhat in section detailing the problems facing the industry as a whole. The years and stories listed are generally correct, but there is some overlap, most notably in the end of the bronze age and beginning of the dark and the end of the dark and the beginning of the modern ages.<br />
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<b>Golden Age</b> - The period roughly from the first appearance of Superman in 1938 until the mid-1950s.<br />
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<b>Silver Age</b> - The period roughly from the second Flash's appearance in 1956 until the early 1970s.<br />
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<b>Bronze Age</b> - The period roughly from the death of Spider-Man's first love interest, Gwen Stacy, in 1973 until the mid-late 1980s.<br />
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<b>Dark Age</b> - The period roughly from the publications of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 until the early 2000s. Also called the Iron Age.<br />
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<b>Modern Age</b> - The period from the publication of JLA #1 and Kingdom Come in the late 1990s until the current day. Sometimes called the Platinum Age or (sarcastically) the Diamond Age.<br />
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<b>Digital Age</b> - Some people posit that we're entering this one. <br />
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<b>History of the Industry and Its Current Strengths and Weaknesses</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
So that's a lot of terms, but they should give you some basic grounding in how the industry operates. Back in the Golden Age and up into the Silver Age, comics were almost entirely distributed through newsstands and corner stores; there were some LCS, but they were basically just part of the same distribution system as the newsstands. The general tone of stories in the Golden Age was whimsical, but also pretty violent; Batman carried a gun, Superman would sometimes kill criminals, etc. Near the middle of the silver age, Superman comics were selling a million copies a month by themselves, and had a successful imitator in Captain Marvel, who sold around that much. Batman wasn't very far behind.<br />
<br />
Around the beginning of the Silver Age, a book called <u>The Seduction of the Innocent</u> came out that decried a lot of the comics at the time as being too violent or of corrupting minors; beyond its attacks on horror and true crime comics were its claims that Batman and Robin were homosexuals and a lot of other nonsense. A congressional hearing happened in the mid-50s, largely on the back of the panic that Seduction of the Innocent caused. The industry, hoping to avoid a McCarthy-esque witchhunt, and following in the footsteps of the MPAA, created the Comics Code Authority (CCA), a self-regulatory group that would make sure that comics were wholesome enough for children to read, with long laundry lists of criteria. <br />
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In the mid-Silver Age, Marvel Comics started making its own superhero comics again, starting with the Fantastic Four, Thor, Hulk, and Spider-Man, shortly followed by the Avengers, Captain America, and a number of other titles. The new characters from Marvel were generally more approachable and human than the characters at DC: Spider-Man was an unpopular teenager, the Fantastic Four was a family that often argued, Hulk had his uncontrollable anger and so on. Comics started being picked up by college students, and as older readers embraced the books, the stories became more complex, which leads us to the Bronze Age.<br />
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Bronze Age stories tended to be a touch heavier than Silver Age stories, which were usually pretty light. They began to tackle issues like race and gender discrimination, poverty, drug addiction, cancer, and similar fare. The main characters in them regularly had failures that they didn't recover from. For example, the story that is considered to have opened the Bronze Age concerned Spider-Man's failure to prevent the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a supervillain, while the Green Arrow's sidekick developed a crippling addiction to heroin. It's worth noting that this was the first time that comics started to intentionally choose to not have the CCA stamp of approval, albeit for a few issues at a time. Also noteworthy is that stories began to get split from single issues into longer two and three issue story arcs, and even issues that were "done-in-ones" tended to have a narrative thread running through them. For example, an 18 issue run on Captain America in the late 80s had him forced to set aside his Captain America identity and become just "the Captain," rather than take orders from a corrupt group inside the government. As stories became longer, newsstands began to get pushed out in favor of the direct market and LCS; after all, if you can only get the middle issue of a three part story, that's not very helpful, is it?<br />
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The Dark Age is named that for several reasons. The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns showed that mature themes could be freely and skillfully addressed by comics, but, unfortunately, less talented groups than those working on the aforementioned titles tended to translate that into "we can put swears and blood in our comics now!" Violent anti-heroes like the murderous Punisher, bloodthirsty Wolverine and demonic Ghost Rider became extremely popular. To be fair, a number of truly great titles came about in this era, too, and it was also the first time since the CCA that non-superhero comics did well, primarily with a more mature market, with DC's Vertigo publishing imprint. By the end of the Dark Age, the CCA stamp of approval was gone across the board at the two major publishers.<br />
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This era was also the final nail in the coffin of the newsstand as a major distribution point, as a multi-company grudge match between the publishers and the three major distributors ended in the closing of two of those distributors and all of the publishers' distribution going through Diamond. An anti-trust suit was brought, but it was ultimately determined that, while they had a monopoly in the comics industry, they didn't have it in the larger periodical or book distribution markets, and Diamond was left intact.<br />
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The other "dark" part of this age was the spectacular rise and fall of the speculator market. When old comics started being auctioned off for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the late 80s and early 90s, people began to buy new ones in the deluded hope that, by socking the right comics away, they could later sell them for enough money to pay for their retirement or college. Marvel and DC encouraged this rampant speculation by adding new, flashy features to drive speculators to buy multiple copies of a single comic: multiple covers for an issue, for example, or holograms, metallic ink, rare "chase" covers, and the like. Around the mid-1990s, the speculator market collapsed and almost took Marvel and DC with it. Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996; DC did better, as it had been purchased by Time Inc. in 1989, giving them a larger corporate structure to fall back on. At the height of the speculator craze, a few comics had single-issue circulations in the millions, most notably the Death of Superman at ~2 million and X-Men #1 at ~1.5 million; however, issues other than these "event" issues, without gimmicks had much lower numbers, and after the speculator craze, circulations across the lines cratered.<br />
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The Modern Age reined in a number of the excesses of the Dark Age, both in terms of storytelling and in terms of business practices. The best stories tend to mix the wonder and playfulness of the Silver Age stories with a more mature sense of pacing, art, and storytelling. However, with the crash and burn of the speculator market, and the ascendance of Diamond in the mid-90s, the business has shifted wholly to the direct market. This has ended up being a self-reinforcing cycle, to an extent: because the companies know that they're mostly selling to fans, they end up doing things like 6 issue story arcs and massive, companywide crossover events that involve every book the company publishes, which allows them to capitalize on their fanbase, but also makes it much harder to bring in new readers. They try to mitigate this by releasing trade paperbacks in bookstores, but that results in them writing specifically for trade paperbacks, with "decompressed" storytelling that means that very little tends to happen in a single issue; while a book published in the 1980s might have roughly the equivalent of a single episode of a TV show's worth of story, a 6 issue arc in 2013 has 1-2 episodes’ worth. <br />
<br />
Six issues of a comic in 1983 would have cost somewhere between $4.50 and $6 and given 6 TV episodes' worth of stories; 6 issues in 2013 costs $24 and gives 1-2 TV episodes' worth. Between the 1950s and now, the real price of a single, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled, while the amount of story has more than halved. Diamond takes an increasingly large chunk of the pie, but the materials used to print are better quality now as well, increasing the costs. Digital distribution is making some inroads into this problem, but neither house has their own single-issue digital distribution system, meaning that they both have to pay Comixology a cut, albeit a smaller one than they pay to Diamond, for every digital issue that they sell.<br />
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One other thing is worth noting: as each age passed, more and more of the writers, artists, and editors were fans themselves. While in the Golden Age, comics were seen as something that you worked on while you were waiting for something better to come along, by the Bronze Age the staff was transitioning to people who were comics fans and intended to do all or almost all of their work in the industry. At this point, almost everyone in the creative side of the industry is someone who has been a comics fan all their lives and has their own collection at home, with their favorite characters, etc. This is often true of the business side as well. This isn’t inherently bad, but it leads to an echo chamber effect, where there are story and business decisions made that, albeit mostly unintentionally, tend to discourage new readers. The pricing of comics and reliance on the direct market is one example, but another would be an overreliance on continuity of the universe as a storytelling hook. What that means is that they generally expect a Captain America fan, for example, to recognize the Red Skull, and know some of the major stories that he’s been in, and his relationships, and to know that Cap is a member of the Avengers, and what his supporting cast is and has been, all without explaining a lot to the new readers. New readers are expected to go hunt down old issues or browse through the Marvel comics wiki to learn more about the characters, instead of having their hands held.<br />
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It’s not all bleak, of course. Marvel is doing gangbusters with Marvel Studios and has recently been bought by Disney, meaning that they have deep pockets. While DC continues to struggle with getting good live action movies other than the recent Batman trilogy made (edit for the folks in 2015: add Man of Steel to the list of goo... well, successful movies), it makes excellent animated direct-to-video ones, and it’s been having some luck with the Smallville and Arrow TV series. Unfortunately, this success in other media hasn’t been helping that much with circulation; a marginally successful book is one which ships 22K copies a month, and the very best book of February 2013 (which is the most recent sales data I have at this point) only sold ~300k copies, and was also a #1 issue of Justice League of America, a popular franchise that was being rebooted; the next most popular was a Marvel book, Uncanny X-Men #1, at 177K copies. By the time you get to the bottom of the top 20 across all publishers, including the independents, circulations are down to 62K; at the top 100, it’s 22K. However, Marvel and DC both make a lot of their money on merchandising, with everything from lunchboxes and backpacks to costumes to collectible statues of characters. <br />
<br />
So that's where the industry is now: it's an industry by fans, for fans, that’s having trouble attracting new readers despite its literally billion dollar successes in other media. It’s doing well enough to stay afloat, but if you compare the number of readers decade by decade, it’s not coming even close to staying with the population growth of the United States. They are stuck under the thumb of a single print distributor and are about to place themselves in a very similar position in the digital realm.<br />
<br />
Some additional notes from 2015: Comixology is still the dominant digital provider, and they've since been bought by Amazon. Marvel is pushing Marvel Unlimited hard these days and filling in the gaps in its back catalog rapidly. There has been a small but noticeable uptick in readership, and Marvel is starting to rein in some of its excesses in their crossovers, restricting them to 3 months instead of taking up half a year or more. Overall, though, the future is still cloudy for the comics industry, even if other forms of media are very successfully using ideas, stories, and characters from comics to fuel new franchises.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-76996926492735303402014-11-11T10:29:00.000-08:002014-11-11T10:29:21.097-08:00Hollywood's Problem With Comic Book Movies<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.moviepilot-cdn.com/doom-no-female-doctor-doom-cast-rumors-leaked.jpeg?width=1600&height=1200" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://images.moviepilot-cdn.com/doom-no-female-doctor-doom-cast-rumors-leaked.jpeg?width=1600&height=1200" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Doom is not pleased.</td></tr>
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Welcome back to the internet's most sporadic comic book blog! I know I haven't written much on here this year, and I'll be honest that that's probably not going to change, but every once in a while I see something so phenomenally great or something so phenomenally dumb that it gets my brain whirring and I have to write something or blood's going to come shooting out of my nose. Today's post is brought to you by the announcement that in the new Fantastic Four film, <a href="http://comicbook.com/2014/11/11/doctor-doom-gets-a-new-origin-and-last-name-in-fantastic-four-re/" target="_blank">Dr. Doom will not be named Dr. Doom</a>, nor will he be a Latverian monarch nor even a businessman. He's a computer hacker that goes by the handle DOOM. Take a guess as to whether I regard this as phenomenally great or phenomenally dumb. Go ahead. Guess.<br />
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Here's the thing, I can understand how this came about. I can even sympathize with why it did. I mean, I can see the thought process of this change. I used to blame the suits at studios for things like this, but I'm rapidly beginning to understand that a lot of this kind of dumb can be laid at the feet of the creative types, and I think I've finally figured out why.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>While it's true that executive types hold the purse strings for a film, they will generally give the <br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy6vMg6CxPEQPQr00nm0cFTq3v-fdsu8Dp5AavxLEhc766w62C332k0JisEW0PfURRn4QafYjeq7YEos9mcLHBgiXjCrDal9Nj6dEZyvjWDhEXoa7yvIbyp3LVcbUEvR-b84BR6w/s400/scan0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy6vMg6CxPEQPQr00nm0cFTq3v-fdsu8Dp5AavxLEhc766w62C332k0JisEW0PfURRn4QafYjeq7YEos9mcLHBgiXjCrDal9Nj6dEZyvjWDhEXoa7yvIbyp3LVcbUEvR-b84BR6w/s400/scan0001.jpg" height="246" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUwkqeI7XWk#t=837" target="_blank">Except that Brainiac MUST wrestle a polar bear</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
director a fair amount of latitude. After all, they picked the director for a reason, and there are a lot of repercussions, both financially for the studio and for the careers of the executives, in reining in a director on something that the executives may not personally like, or worse yet, pulling the director if they think he's going in the wrong direction. It's often better to have a bad film make its way out and then put the blame on the director for the decisions they made after the fact, from the executive's point of view. It's vitally important to match the director to the movie, and not just go, "This guy has directed another successful genre movie," and let them at it. Which, frankly, seems to be what's happened with Fantastic Four.<br />
<br />
Let's say that you have a new, young director. They're a film nerd, in the same way that Bendis or Busiek are comics nerds. They want to make movies like the kind that inspired them when they were younger, just like Bendis and Busiek love to work with older characters or styles of stories from their youth. In some cases, that means that the director wants nothing to do with genre movies, and instead want to make "serious" movies about real world situations. Even in the case that they do want to make genre movies, they want to work on something that fires their imagination. But they're also a young director, and someone has given them a superhero movie to direct, and, well, they want to make their mark, but more importantly for our purposes, they're probably not comic book fans. If they are, it's almost certainly because of the visuals, not the story.<br />
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Even in the case that the director has written other genre movies, even if they were comic book movies, even if they were superhero movies, for that matter, that's not a great indicator. Snyder did a great job with 300 and a serviceable job with Watchmen. Goyer wrote the hell out of Blade and the Nolan Batman movies. These were both experienced, successful creative types, and they ended up being responsible for arguably the worst Superman movie ever made. Nether of them got Superman as a character, to the point where Nolan was arguing with them til near the end about whether Superman should kill. (Hint: he should not.)<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/gFMq1lj.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/gFMq1lj.png" height="149" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pretty sure you shouldn't do that in a <br />high oxygen environment, Johnny</td></tr>
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A similar problem seems to be happening with FF. Josh Trank directed Chronicle, which is a pretty gritty examination of what would happen if a few people got superpowers in the real world and what the repercussions would be. That seems, if you know nothing about the Fantastic Four, to be a good fit. Unfortunately, the arc of the characters is wildly different, as are their interactions, their relationships, and the expected tone of the story. Fantastic Four stories tend to be centered around the family of adventures exploring the cosmos together, arguing at times, but always with a sense of wonder. It has next to nothing in common with Chronicle, which is fairly grounded, even grim. Josh Trank has proved himself a capable director, in the same way that Snyder has, and Goyer has as a writer. But the FF movie is on a similar path, and it's too late now to prevent a <a href="http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2014/10/06/fantastic-four-wear-containment-suits-in-gritty-reboot-michael-b-jordan-says/" target="_blank">gritty movie where the Fantastic Four are wearing containment suits in order to deal with their disabilities.</a> He has tried to make a movie that imagines "what would happen if the Fantastic Four existed in the real world" instead of asking "what are the elements that make the Fantastic Four great, and how can I make them work in a world that can seem realistic?" It's a subtle but important distinction, and one which almost every bad superhero movie has gotten tripped up on.<br />
<br />
When Edgar Wright was picked as the director for Ant-Man, fans rejoiced. He had done so many great genre movies, infusing them with fun and humor that it seemed like a natural fit for a character like Ant-Man. But then he was let go from the picture earlier this year, because he and Marvel couldn't see eye to eye on how to proceed. It was, frankly, a pretty brave move for the studio, but they understood that they had picked the wrong director for their film, and they needed to do something about it. As much as I have complained in the past about comics being by fans for fans, having folks that are comics people first and movie people second running their productions has been incredibly important in preventing a Daredevil, Man of Steel or X-Men: The Last Stand from making it out of the studio and damaging their brand. The other studios need to be willing to do the same.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_super/1/15659/1684859-moviedeadpool_doesnot_deadpool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_super/1/15659/1684859-moviedeadpool_doesnot_deadpool.jpg" height="191" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We don't deserve this, Hollywood.</td></tr>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-70397668639740882014-02-13T08:15:00.000-08:002014-02-13T08:17:39.962-08:00Why a Wonder Woman Movie is Trickier Than You Might ThinkAnd we're back! Between work and the holidays, I haven't been able to blog, but now Marvel has confirmed development of a <a href="http://screencrush.com/black-widow-solo-movie/" target="_blank">solo Black Widow movie</a>. And, of course, everyone's response, including mine, is, "So what's the hold up on the Wonder Woman movie, DC?" DC has one of the most iconic female characters in any medium available to it, yet the property continues to sit in development hell: a TV pilot that went nowhere, a movie that had Joss Whedon attached and died in development, and plenty of other attempts that haven't even made it as far as getting a name attached to them. But the truth is, developing a Wonder Woman movie or TV series is a lot trickier than people want to admit.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
On the face of it, the lack of a Wonder Woman movie or TV series in an era where Ant-Man, Rocket Raccoon and Batroc the Leaper are going to be on the big screen looks like typical Hollywood sexism. There's almost certainly an element of sexism to it, of course; Hollywood execs are famous for believing that action movies starring women in lead roles don't sell, regardless of the significant number of counter-examples. However, that's not the whole story.<br />
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Most of the other heroes that have been featured in successful films have either a relatively simple hook: an update Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, a benevolent alien raised by human parents, a rich guy in a suit of flying armor, and so on and so on. But then you have Wonder Woman: an Amazon warrior princess sent to the world of man in order to spread peace by punching people in the face. The comics have been grappling with this for 70 years and they're just now finding something that reliably works.<br />
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Wonder Woman has been all over the map as a character, and a lot of her elements don't line up as well as
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 70s were a weird time for Diana</td></tr>
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they should, and it goes all the way back to the character's creation. Wonder Woman's creator, William Marston, is famous for being a devotee of bondage and believing that submission should be a healthy part of the female psyche, particularly for powerful women. A lot of the early elements of Wonder Woman make a lot more sense when you know this, like her Lasso of Truth and the fact that she originally lost her powers when her wrists were bound by a man. Wonder Woman was also created during WWII, and was in the same vein as the patriotic characters of the time, which is why she has red, white, blue, and gold as the primary colors of her costume. Later takes on the character would remove her weaknesses, change her costume, depower her and repower her. The current run on Wonder Woman is probably the strongest they've had in years, with a character that sells being both a warrior and an ambassador for peace, with great action and a hefty dose of Greek mythology. But that leads us into the next issue.<br />
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Wonder Woman in the comics is a character with strong ties to Greek mythology. In the current run, she's the illegitimate daughter of Zeus, and she is regularly locked in conflict, both martial and political, with her siblings and extended family. It makes for great reading, and it would probably make for a fine standalone movie, but DC isn't going for standalone movies anymore. They're finally going the Marvel route, with an interconnected universe, and that's great, but it means that they're also under pressure to follow Marvel's example in the creation of their universe as well. You know what's missing from the Marvel movieverse? Magic.<br />
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Thor and Loki are aliens that were worshiped as gods, and their magic is technology we don't understand yet. Doctor Strange may show up later, but I'm sure there's a lot of internal debate as to whether he's actually going to be a sorcerer, or whether his magic will just be science by another name, like the Norse <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This doesn't even include the most recent movies</td></tr>
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magic. Beyond that, wherever they could, Marvel has tied together disparate elements in their movies. Tony Stark's dad was Captain America's pilot and weapons creator, and Bruce Banner was working on recreating the super soldier serum when he got turned into the Hulk, and they all end up fighting against Loki because of a piece of tech that the Norse gods left behind on earth. There is a lot of pressure to make the universe as simple and interconnected as possible at the beginning to draw viewers in before hitting them with the crazier stuff, like talking raccoons and tree men. As an example, I think it's entirely possible that once we get to the Black Widow solo movie, we'll have found out that she really was a Soviet-era superspy, but it will have taken us four movies featuring her to get us there. Given that there are already rumors that Wonder Woman is going to be Kryptonian in origin, I can't imagine the kind of political fighting happening at DC and WB right now over the nature and origin of her character.<br />
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And that's worth noting as well. Marvel Studios is a subsidiary of Marvel Comics. Marvel Comics has, therefore, an enormous amount of control over exactly how to handle the characters in their movies. DC and WB are both subsidiaries of Time Warner, and WB makes Time Warner far more money and therefore has much more pull in determining how it wants to run with the characters in the movies. Of course, having creator input isn't a cure-all, as we saw with Green Lantern, but generally it's very helpful in maintaining the spirit of the characters. However, WB is almost certainly going to want to go with the kind of simplification that makes a character more accessible to new viewers, and Wonder Woman is a complex, possibly overly complex character to begin with. Simplifying her in a way that doesn't destroy the character, while still making her fit into the burgeoning DC movieverse is not an easy task, and it's not going to be made any easier by political infighting between two separate parts of the Time Warner conglomerate.<br />
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All of this doesn't even get into the fact that there's not really a definitive Wonder Woman story to draw from, nor that she has arguably the worst cast of villains of any major hero. Say what you will about the Superman franchise's tendency to go with Lex or Zod, at least they're not stuck with Egg Fu and the Angle Man. The best Wonder Woman villains are the mythological ones, which brings us back to the aforementioned magic issue. And there's the problem of her supporting cast. Do you include Steve Trevor, and do you include him as a love interest? What about Themiscyra, the Amazon island? How do you fit that into a modern world with satellite imaging and Google Maps? Magic again, or Kryptonain supertech?<br />
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Yes, there should be a Wonder Woman movie, and yes, it should have happened long before now. But there are so many issues that have to be hashed out, and that have to be rehashed every time a shift happens in the superhero movie and TV market, I'm not particularly surprised. I am, however, a bit disappointed.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wonder Woman is also disappointed in you, WB</td></tr>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-39553914098616080842013-11-07T07:39:00.000-08:002013-11-07T07:39:00.822-08:00Why Agents of SHIELD Isn't WorkingWe'll get back to our positivity-fest shortly, but I wanted to talk a little bit about Agents of SHIELD, and why it's not working. I know it has fans out there, but its viewership has steadily dropped since its admittedly wildly successful debut episode. I, personally, had expected to like the show a lot more than I have. However, it's not really working for me nearly as well as a TV show about SHIELD should be, and that is, I think, the whole reason it's not working: it's not a show about SHIELD, it's mostly just a generic genre show.<br />
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Now, to be clear, there are some structural problems with the show, but those are problems that most shows face: the cast and writers need some time to find out what does and doesn't work in character interactions and cast chemistry, there are stories that are purely (and often boringly) establishing stories, it takes a while for a narrative thread to emerge beyond freak of the week stories, and all of the other sort of stuff that genre television in particular has to deal with. There is a long laundry list of fan favorite shows that had rocky first half-seasons or even full seasons. But one, in particular, provides a nice contrast for Agents of SHIELD, and a comparison may help to illuminate why I and many other folks I've talked to have had a hard time waiting for Agents of SHIELD to get good: Arrow.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Admittedly, it could be worse.</td></tr>
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Arrow is the latest in a long line of DC properties turned into live action movies or shows by Warner Brothers. In the first half-season, it had an attitude toward its source material that is pretty common from DC/WB live action productions: mild embarrassment. Deadshot shows up, but he's just a really good sniper, not a guy in a costume. China White shows up, but she's just a random triad hitter. The main character is called The Hood, presumably because Green Arrow sounds too silly. Same thing with the Huntress. By the latter half of the season and especially in the second season, when they realized viewers weren't going to run screaming and they could get away with some of the crazier stuff from the comics, they started to use larger chunks of the comic book lore to create the show.<br />
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However, in the beginning, they hid as much of it as they could behind oblique references. They had a slow pan as one of the first shots of the show that went over Deathstroke's mask on a stake on the island. They named Ollie's partner after Andy Diggle and the streets of Starling City (Star City in the comics) were named after other Green Arrow creators. Slade Wilson shows up early on, and comic book fans know that he will eventually become Deathstroke, so it sets the hook for them. There are dozens of these kind of slight nods throughout the early episodes of the show, largely because DC/WB was so afraid they would drive viewers off by being too comic book that they only felt comfortable giving a wink and nod to fans.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Also, some strategic deals with Maybelline instead of a mask</td></tr>
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Agents of SHIELD has the exact opposite problem. Marvel is coming off a string of massive movie hits; they are understandably proud of their success in the live action arena, and they also understandably expect viewers to want to come along with the Agents. However, this pride has left them in an uncomfortable place: they want to wring as much money and exposure as they can out of their existing comic book properties, but they only know for sure that the movies work on that angle. Agents of SHIELD is a gamble for them, because Marvel hasn't been involved in a live action TV show since the early 80s.<br />
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More importantly, it's a gamble because continuity from the show is supposed to be shared with the movies. If they introduce something on the show that contradicts what's being planned for a movie, or, more likely, what happens when a last minute script rewrite is needed, that's a problem. If they use a MacGuffin from an earlier movie that a later movie depends on, but do so in a way that requires script contortions, that's bad. Even little references used in the wrong way can end up as problems later on; while it would be cute to have a Col. Danvers show up as a SHIELD agent instead of USAF, that might present a problem later on for Avengers 3 or a Captain Marvel movie.<br />
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Because of this, they have been incredibly reference light. The pilot had a few nods, but for the most part, there were as many oblique references to DC comics in the first episode of Arrow as there have been to Marvel comics in the entire run of Agents of SHIELD. Instead, they have new organizations like "The Rising Tide" and "The Centipede Group." Remember how, before the first episode, everyone was trying to figure which of the half dozen or so recognizable super strong black characters from the comics J. August Richards was going to play in the pilot? And then it turned out to be... just some guy? Same thing with "Scorch," almost certainly because someone writing a later movie had all of the existing fire-based characters reserved in case they needed one.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hooray, a generic angry black man is the first villain</td></tr>
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With the exception of the scientist who later becomes Graviton in the comics, there have been almost no recognizable organizations or characters from the comics that didn't already exist in the movies; when Victoria Hand comes on board in a few episodes, it will be the first even semi-major character introduced through the TV series. Instead, it's a series of freaks of the week created for the show as the characters go off on globe trotting adventures, and you know what? I already have that show, and it's called Warehouse 13.<br />
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Imagine your friend inviting you to a concert. It's a cover band, but they're supposed to be good, and it's free, and you like the band they cover, so you agree to go. You get there and sit down, and they play one or two songs by the original band. Turns out they're pretty good. Then they say, "Hey, now we're going to spend the rest of the show playing our original material." And it's... okay? It kind of sounds like the stuff you wanted to hear in the first place. Maybe it'll get better, and you're already here, so you might as well see. But you'd really like it if they'd at least mix in some competent covers of stuff you already like.<br />
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That's what Agents of SHIELD feels like right now. Maybe, by the end of the season, it will turn out that Centipede is a HYDRA splinter cell and The Rising Tide is the recruitment arm for AIM. Maybe we'll see them start using characters from the comics. But right now, there's not really any of that, and they're not baiting the hook for longtime fans like Arrow did. And that's a shame, because I have no doubt they can make this a show that's great; there have been glimmers of that here and there already.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-53177043998962275622013-11-05T06:53:00.004-08:002013-11-05T06:54:11.522-08:00What DC Does RightAbout a week back, I talked about <a href="http://www.comicbookhoedown.com/2013/10/what-marvel-does-right.html" target="_blank">what Marvel does right</a>, and now it's time to talk about the other of the Big Two. DC gets a lot of flak, some of it deserved, some of it not so much. Viewed over the length of their publishing history, I think it would be difficult to argue that they haven't had an enormous net positive impact on comic books, and that continues to be the case today. Beyond that, they continue to make smart business decisions, and to do so in a generally pretty agile manner. So what does DC do right?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two points with one image!</td></tr>
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<b>They have the most recognizable comic properties in the world. </b>I dithered about including this in the list, both because it can be argued that this is something that the current management has inherited and because Marvel is really nipping at their heels these days in this regard. However, it's too big of an advantage to not include. If you go anywhere in the world and show someone a picture of Batman or Superman, there's about a 99.9% chance they'll be identified correctly. The rest of the Justice League isn't far behind. </div>
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<b>They consistently make great animated movies and series. </b>The list of great DC animated properties is much, much longer than the list of bad ones. From the beginning of Batman: The Animated Series in the early 90s to today's animated straight to video movies, DC has been a juggernaut when it comes to animation.</div>
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<b>They're consolidating their studios. </b>For now, they're just moving them closer together geographically, bringing the traditional print comic studio out to California. This is smart because it will help them keep business costs down; running a business in NYC is not cheap, and they should be able to eliminate some support staff as well. However, it's also smart because their digital studios have been putting out some DC's best content and getting the print and digital staff back together will hopefully allow some of that to rub off. Beyond that, moving the main comics arm closer to the larger Warner Brothers part of the business, geographically, will hopefully mean greater and better influence on DC's live action movie and TV properties.</div>
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<b>They're getting their act together with their movies and live action TV.</b> <a href="http://www.comicbookhoedown.com/2013/06/man-of-steel-great-superhero-movie-bad.html" target="_blank">I've made no secret that I was not a fan of Man of Steel</a> from an artistic standpoint, but I recognize that it was a financial success, and that's an overall good thing for the genre of superhero movies. The fact that DC is willing to go all-in, making a Batman/Superman movie, hopefully spinning off the Flash from their Arrow TV franchise, talking seriously about Justice League and Wonder Woman movies, and generally acting like they're developing an overall strategy is great. It's a far cry from the time when WB allowed a creator to make a "no tights, no flight" rule on their TV show about young Superman.</div>
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<b>They keep trying to make non-superhero content. </b>This might seem like damning with faint praise, but even when they fail to attract a lot of readers, they keep trying. Even if some of it is just thinly-masked superheroes in other genres (I'm looking at you, Jonah Hex fighting Batman villains), they're still trying. Smaller studios are doing a better job at this, of course, but they aren't part of publicly traded companies with investors breathing down their necks. Any attempt at either of the major two to make something different available to readers should be lauded, especially when it's placed under their main publishing imprint.. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-56969115310852852602013-11-04T11:25:00.003-08:002013-11-04T11:25:49.069-08:00New DomainHey folks! While the site is still on blogger.com, I've gone ahead and snagged comicbookhoedown.com, so you should be able to go to www.comicbookhoedown.com instead of having to type out the longer address. The old address will still work, but it'll redirect you to the new domain. One unfortunate side effect of this is that the older comments have been lost, but everything else seems to be in working order. I'll be getting back to posting with "What DC Does Right" later this week, but for now, welcome!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-68058386690108943682013-10-23T07:14:00.001-07:002013-11-05T06:54:28.903-08:00What Marvel Does RightI spend a lot of time talking about what's gone wrong in the industry because, well, that's what I do in my day job. Analysis, whether it's system analysis or business analysis, most often looks at what's wrong in a system in order to address its problems. However, it's also worth looking at what's right in a system, both to prevent trampling that good while fixing the bad and, to be quite honest, to blatantly copy what works in other systems. So for the next few articles, I'm going to focus on the positive, and talk about what some of the major and minor players in the industry do right. Some of this will be about the artistic side and some of it will be about business, and we all know that those are often at cross purposes with each other. However, just like it's important to recognize the context of bad systems, it's important to look at the context of why good decisions are made. Today, we'll start with Marvel Comics. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Should I have a parachute or something?</td></tr>
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<b>Live action movies </b>- I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that, of all the comic book companies, Marvel is the most prolific and arguably the most profitable producer of comic book movies. That doesn't necessarily mean the most artful, but they don't all need to be high art. Sometimes I want to watch a well executed crime drama with a guy in a bat suit dropped into the middle of it, and sometimes I want to watch a giant green monster tear an alien invasion up. Both have their place, and Marvel does the latter better and more often than anyone else out there.<br />
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<b>Getting and retaining talent</b> - This matters a lot. The best runs at both Marvel and DC, not just on single books but company-wide, have been when the editorial and writing staffs (and, to a lesser but still important extent, the art staff) have remained fairly constant. Marvel has one of the longest average employment / contracted worker time of any comics company, and it shows in the consistency of their work. Bendis, Quesada, Fraction, and a number of others provide a stable framework of continuity for other, newer writers to play around in, enabling them to take artistic chances.<br />
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<b>Stable continuity</b> - This sort of ties in with the above point. Having the same person write the Avengers for 10 years means that, for the most part, Avengers continuity is pretty well handled. I've never been a big fan of strong continuity, the kind of continuity where the creators feel like they're in a straightjacket when trying to write a character with a troublesome past, but I'm also not a big fan of company-wide reboots to fix the problem; as someone who works in software, I understand the allure of breaking everything down to re-do it "better," but usually that means leaving a bunch of things that users have come to depend on out of the first few revisions. Marvel has very few reboots, and they mostly use their retcons to prune things that they feel don't work in their universe, and this tends to be a better way to handle long-running stories. It's not always the best way, of course; the crazy tangle of retcons following Morrison's X-Men run shows that. But as a general rule, revision is better than re-creation when trying to retain a fanbase.<br />
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<b>Public relations</b> - Marvel is only very rarely at odds in a major way with the fandom. There are always certain things that are angering the fans, most of them oddly centered around Spider-Man, but that's always going to be the case. However, there is very rarely the kind of PR nightmare that you sometimes see at other studios where something meant one way is taken another, then it takes two weeks to sort it out, and everyone is left with a bad taste in their mouth. You don't generally see creators leave Marvel in a huff, either. Now, as to whether that means they're happier there or not is a question, but either way, you and I don't hear about it. And that's good business for Marvel.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I am gonna miss this guy when he's gone</td></tr>
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<b>Diversity of characters</b> - I've written on this a number of times before, and it's nearly time to make another Diversity In Comics spreadsheet and analysis, but Marvel gets better and better at this every year. They have, comparatively, a hugely diverse cast of characters. They're not quite at the US census number levels in some areas, but they're not far off in most of them, either. Of particular note at a company that creates primarily superhero content, they even have wide age diversity as well as heroes and villains that have disabilities that they overcome to do their jobs, and they deserve a hat tip for that.<br />
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So that's some of the stuff that Marvel does right. There are other things I could talk about here, like Marvel Unlimited, but you get the general idea. Marvel is the House of Ideas, and that extends not just to their stories, but how they run their business. Next up, I'll be talking about DC, and what other companies can learn from them.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-26713315342829682712013-10-07T07:14:00.000-07:002013-10-07T07:17:17.832-07:00The Anti-Discrimination Message Of The X-Men Comics Doesn't Work In The X-Men MoviesPretty much everyone knows that the main theme of the X-Men comics is that prejudice is wrong. Mutants in the comics have been a stand-in for everything from the civil rights movement of the 60s on up to the struggle for gay rights today. It's a metaphor that works very well, as it allows the issue to be discussed in a way that the largely male, white, straight readership of comics can understand: preaching to smart, largely unathletic kids that can empathize with "these people are hounded because of their unappreciated special talents" is pretty low hanging fruit, after all. The stories have run the gamut from the heartbreaking to the ham-handed, but at their core, they've always been about accepting those who are different.<br />
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It's a shame the movies dropped the ball so badly.<br />
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In the comics, discrimination against mutants is shown to be foolish on a lot of levels. The first, of course, is that there are a ton of non-mutants running around that are just as much, if not more dangerous than any of the mutants: the Hulk, Thor, or the Sentry could give any of them a run for their money before even looking at the more villainous options. The second is that there are a lot of mutants in the comics whose mutations are little more than cosmetic in nature; before Genosha was destroyed, the mutants numbered in the millions, and only a handful had even marginally dangerous abilities. Third, the mutants are out there every day saving the world. The X-Men stand shoulder to shoulder with the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Defenders, and various solo heroes, and mutants have served on all of those teams at one time or another. The fear of mutants above other superpowered types is clearly irrational in the comics.<br />
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The movies don't really have any of this. There are no other superhumans,or at least none that are ever mentioned. This also means there aren't ever really any non-mutant superpowered threats, so humanity sees mutants fighting either government agencies or other mutants. And, especially in the first and second movies, the ratio of "terrifying forces of nature" to "normal folks with feathers and fur" is just a weensy bit lopsided. In the first movie, the good guys consist of: two people that can read and control minds, one of whom can also move objects with her minds, a woman that can summon lightning and tornadoes, a girl that can drain memories and life force from the people she touches, a guy who uncontrollably shoots lasers out of his eyes, and an unstoppable killing machine. There are some younger students at the school, but even those are shown doing things like conjuring ice and walking through walls. The second movie opens with a teleporting mutant that almost succeeds in killing the president. By the third movie, there are dozens of incredibly powerful mutants fighting on both sides of the conflict.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/BMc11R2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://i.imgur.com/BMc11R2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Xavier's School for Gifted Death Machines</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
What the movies try to sell as "anti-mutant hysteria" is actually a fairly sensible fear of a group of beings with immense power and no accountability. Some of them choose to coexist with humanity, while others claim an inherent right to rule. Two groups seek out young mutants and try to train them to use their powers, both toward violent ends; to the humans caught in the middle, it looks like a turf war as much as anything. Oh yeah, and a group of them almost made the Cuban missile crisis go nuclear, so there's that. Even the kindest and best of the mutants have powers that are terrifying in their implications, and we see many of them mind controlled throughout the films by their fellows, so their inherent goodness is no guarantee of their good behavior.<br />
<br />
The fear of mutants in the movie is perfectly understandable and even reasonable. If you turned on the news
tomorrow and started seeing stories about people that could bench press a tank or blow a hole in a vault by staring at it, you'd... well, probably, given that you're reading this blog, you'd say "Awesome!" But most people would react with fear, and it's actually a pretty sensible reaction. Even if every single mutant was a super nice person, that doesn't preclude the bizarre kinds of accidents that you normally only see around industrial machinery, and that's before you even bring in the concept of them getting drunk or having a bad breakup.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZV5ERqh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZV5ERqh.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twenty minutes later, he wrecks the place <br />
they went on their first date</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the movies, the only source of these bizarre and dangerous powers that threaten lives is the X-gene, and as far as we see in the movies, if someone has the X-gene, their abilities are almost always somewhere between dangerous and deadly. The X-Men movies only work as a parable about prejudice because we, the audience, know that they should. But if you changed the name of the movie and swapped out the power source for magic or nanotechnology or alien experimentation, it would all fall apart.<br />
<br />
It's unfortunate, because a few minor tweaks to the movies would make all of these issues disappear. An offhanded mention of how few mutants have dangerous abilities, for example, and a brief note on a news show about non-mutant supers that Fox has access to, like Alpha Flight, could make the parallels much more clear. However,without these and without the greater framework of the Marvel universe, humanity's fear of mutants in the movies actually makes a lot of sense, and this undermines what should be one of the strongest themes in the film.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/YYOEvA7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="http://i.imgur.com/YYOEvA7.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just not this Alpha Flight, please.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-62537171663946963162013-10-04T06:54:00.003-07:002013-10-04T06:54:50.364-07:00I'll See You at NY Comic Con!Super excited about this one, folks. I'm headed to NYCC for the first time, and I'm hoping to be able to blog about it while I'm there, time permitting. I'll be wandering the floor all weekend, and I'd love to meet any of the folks reading the Hoedown that might be attending as well. If you'll be there, give me a shout in the comments.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/1QkfR7h.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://i.imgur.com/1QkfR7h.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm sure we'll bump into each other.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
P.S.: I haven't forgotten about that villain post I promised, but it's morphing into something else; hopefully it'll make it up next week.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-58804821308176700112013-10-03T06:34:00.002-07:002013-10-03T06:43:43.688-07:00Someone Explain DC's Business Model To MeBefore we begin, I'm not talking about their writing or their art or their editorial choices. While I may not agree with all of those when talking about individual books or even across their entire line, I at least see why they think their choices make sense. I may not like what happened with the Batwoman team, but I understand why DC did what they did there, for example. What I don't get is how they run the publishing end of their business. I'm not saying there isn't a method to their madness, but I'd really appreciate it if someone could tell me what it is.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Marvel and Image both make sense to me: they release singles in print and same-day digital, then when they get 5 or 6 issues collected, they turn it into a trade. If they think it'll do well enough, they make a hardcover first; regardless, that first trade comes out no more than 2-3 months after the last single in the collection comes out. Then, if it's a hardcover, they'll wait six months or so and release it as a softcover. Marvel also has their Unlimited service for very cheap but very late access to their books. This all makes sense to me.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/kP50bN1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://i.imgur.com/kP50bN1.jpg" width="208" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Really, really good</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Then I look at DC's release schedule. Print singles and same day digital, just like Marvel and Image. They even drop the price on their digital by a dollar after a couple of months, which makes some good sense. But DC waits <a href="http://www.readingorders.com/Collections/TheNew52" target="_blank">four or more months</a> and sometimes as long as eight months before releasing the hardcover version of their trades. A month or two difference might not seem like much, but it can have a significant impact on buyer habits.<br />
<br />
I grabbed the third trade for All-New X-Men last week, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm on the fence about adding it to my small group of singles that I grab on release; if I do decide to do that, I'm going to have to buy two singles at $4 each to catch up. My local shop, and most shops of a decent size, keep 2-3 recent issues of popular books on the racks, so it's easy for me to do that without going digital and, more importantly for Marvel, to take the plunge in an impulse-buy manner if I happen to be at the shop next Wednesday and find that none of my normal comics are in that week.<br />
<br />
Now, let's look at a DC book that was released last week, Justice League Volume 3. The last issue collected in that trade is #17, compared with All-New X-Men's 15. Justice League's most recent issue, ignoring all the Villain Week stories, is number 23, compared with ANX's 17. As I said before, it will take $8 and two singles for me to catch up in All New X-Men. For Justice League, using the cheapest method that doesn't involve back issue bin diving, it will take $19 and 6 issues. If I want to wait for the trades, Justice League Volume 4 will be out in April of next year, 8 months after the final single issue it collects comes out.<br />
<br />
I'm not saying there isn't a reason for all of this, but for the life of me, I can't see it. Someone want to enlighten me?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-26310988191340137042013-10-02T06:25:00.004-07:002013-10-02T06:28:25.876-07:00Go Fund City of TitansI was a huge fan of City of Heroes. There were problems with it, as there are with all games, but it was pretty much my comfort food MMO. It was the game I'd always go back to when I wanted to take a break from more "serious" fare, kick back, and set a purse snatcher on fire. I was even one of the moderators on the COH Livejournal community, back when Livejournal was still a thing people regularly went to. Then NCSoft cancelled City of Heroes after an eight year run, despite the fact that it was still turning a profit.<br />
<br />
Hey, it happens, right? MMOs get shut down, companies want more profit, servers get turned off. It's unfortunate, but what are you going to do. Well, some members of the larger City of Heroes community decided to make their own game. They started <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans" target="_blank">their Kickstarter drive</a> this morning, and they're already at $67,000 of their $320,000 goal. Go on over, take a look, and throw some cash at them if this kind of thing interests you.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-83194496660120608262013-10-01T07:13:00.002-07:002013-10-01T07:16:34.738-07:00Avengers: Endless Wartime ReviewWhen I heard Marvel was restarting its Original Graphic Novel line, I was actually really excited. The original Marvel Graphic Novel line had some of the best stories of the Bronze Age, including: The Death of Captain Marvel; X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills; and The New Mutants. For the first book in the new OGN line, they announced they'd have Warren Ellis on the writing duties, which is a pretty good choice, given that his Extremis storyline had just provided the framework for the third Iron Man movie. And, hey, the first book is an Avengers book; I'm kind of Avengers SuperFan #1, so if anyone should be on board, it's me.<br />
<br />
In reality, eh. Not so much. The word that keeps coming to mind is "awkward." Some spoilers below the cut.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>One of the clear driving forces behind the relaunch of the line is to bring new viewers that are fans of the films into the comic book reading fold. That's a great idea; new readers often tend to buy (or have their friends loan them) trades instead of getting singles. A brand new book in the movie continuity would be a great way to capitalize on the movies' popularity, while also introducing some new characters (Wolverine, Captain Marvel) and concepts to new fans of the Avengers. But then the book tries to have its cake and eat it, too.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/OVBbNXM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="172" src="http://i.imgur.com/OVBbNXM.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That really spangles my stars</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
See, the book is set in the normal 616 continuity. For those of you that don't recognize that number, it's shorthand for "this happens in the normal Marvel comics universe." That changes, or should change, a lot of the dynamics between the characters from their movie counterparts, but the book tries to have it both ways. Captain America is the old man in a young body who can't figure out the future, like in the movies, but he's also the solid team leader and guiding force of the Avengers that's been around 10+ years in-continuity. Thor is the arrogant outsider while also being the longtime friend of Cap. Wolverine is the best there is at what he does and what he does is zzzzzzz. Stuff crops up, over and over, that is old hat to established fans, but then gets shoehorned back in for the people coming in from the movies, and the result is a book that never really seems to know what it wants to be. I'm pretty sure there was an editorial meeting that went like this:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We need to write something that's accessible to new readers. We need to use the movie versions of the characters."<br />
"I kinda get where you're coming from, but we can't be sure this will sell to new readers. It's kind of an expensive proposition at $25 for a brand new reader."<br />
"Right, right, we need buy-in from the fanbase. Why don't we set it in the regular comics universe?"<br />
"That's... not really a solution, but alright, we can go with that. What should the story be about? Warren?"<br />
"Let's make it about drone attacks! With space alien Norse god monsters! And evil government conspiracies designed to make the reader distrust their government!"<br />
"Uh. Okay. That... I'm sure that's the kind of things that people who went to see a PG-13 action movie will want to read about."</blockquote>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/VmDbDKd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="195" src="http://i.imgur.com/VmDbDKd.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, we needed all those panels<br />
to show how Carol's helmet works</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's not all bad, of course. Warren Ellis still writes some of the most entertaining dialog in the business, and he's in good form for that here. The art is serviceable, and there's an absolutely brilliant sequence early on involving Captain America boarding a plane from another plane that really needs to make it into a movie somewhere. It's good that Captain Marvel is given such prominence throughout the book. But I'm honestly having trouble coming up with much more to say about it that's good. It would probably be okay as an intro to new readers? But there's a stack of better books for that, and it's hard to make an argument that Endless Wartime gets even in the top 20 of "good Avengers stories for new readers."<br />
<br />
When I got done reading Avengers: Endless Wartime, I went to put it on my shelf, but I found that they had printed it in a different format than the trades. It's a little taller and a little wider, and it just doesn't fit on the shelves with my other trades. It also doesn't really fit, physically, with my novels, and while it's about the same size as my reference and game books, the content doesn't belong there. This, as much as anything, is about the best metaphor I can find for the book: it doesn't really fit anywhere.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/wCNgdpC.jpg?2" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://i.imgur.com/wCNgdpC.jpg?2" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Also, it scratched my table. Just saying.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-84312926165178530802013-09-30T07:51:00.002-07:002013-09-30T07:52:34.616-07:00Ten Million Readers Redux: A PostscriptBefore we get started, I really wanted to thank everyone who chimed in on the <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-get-ten-million-new-comics.html" target="_blank">series of posts</a> I did a couple of weeks ago about the comics industry. I thought there were so many good points brought up from both sides of the argument that I needed to address them. However, I promise this will be the last "serious" post for a bit. If you want to skip this, I will totally understand; there'll be a post on my favorite villains hopefully a little later this week.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
For those of you sticking around, I'd like to throw a particular shout out to the folks on reddit's <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks" target="_blank">/r/comicbooks</a> subreddit who had a lot of interesting stuff to say. Let's start with some of those:<br />
<br />
<b>I'm just not sure there are really 10 million people out there who would be comic fans if only they had a service like this. </b>I don't think there are, either. However, I think there could be if we start now. In the first year, I'd be amazed if there were more than few hundred thousand new readers. It's not a plan for "how to get 10 million new readers in a year." I expect there will be a slow rise to the curve over the first few years, then an explosion after a tipping point has been reached.<br />
<br />
<b>Storage is cheap, but bandwidth is expensive. </b>True, but this is sort of related to the last comment. If the service had to handle 10 million customers in the first year, it probably couldn't; but over 10 years, bandwidth will get chepaer and cheaper. Netflix serves 20 million users in 2013. They couldn't have bought enough bandwidth for love or money to do that back in 2003. Imagine what will be available in 2023.<br />
<br />
<b>TV isn't free; you have to pay for cable.</b> The older of you in the audience are probably chuckling at this. While few people do so these days, when I was a kid, you could hook up the rabbit ears to your TV and get limited service. In most places, you can even hook up to an inactive cable outlet and get your local broadcast channels. So, yes, TV can be free, but what's even more interesting is that paying for cable service has become so ubiquitous that most people don't even think of not doing so anymore.<br />
<br />
<b>Is this the only way you can see comics thriving?</b> No, not at all. It's just a solution that I think will work most effectively. There's always the possibility that Marvel Unlimited's "Netflix for comics" idea will work on its own. While Comixology's setup really seems to simply be a recreation of the direct market in a digital format, that's still more convenient than going to an LCS. DC's 99 cent digital content proves that cheap content can be made available, and it's also some of the most charming and new-reader-friendly content that DC is putting out. Possibly the most promising idea is the ComicPlus Library Edition which makes content available to libraries very cheaply, and which seems free to library patrons. It answers a lot of the same problems I mentioned in my earlier posts with a different, but still potentially effective solution.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/HZR7czH.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="148" src="http://i.imgur.com/HZR7czH.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Seriously, y'all. Batman '66 is a hoot.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>DC and Marvel are too risk-averse to try this. </b>Possibly, yes. However, both companies have been trying new things in the digital arena over the last few years, so this isn't necessarily true. Failure to act can be as dangerous to a career or a company as acting incorrectly. Beyond that, it's not like all of this content isn't already out there free through torrents to begin with; it's just free in a way that doesn't help the companies.<br />
<br />
That covers most of the highlights. Thanks again for listening to me nattering on about the subject, and I'll see you a bit later this week to talk about the charms of villains with a code. Have a good week!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-28455843986456097432013-09-20T07:22:00.000-07:002013-09-20T07:34:54.343-07:00How To Get Ten Million New Comics Readers In Ten YearsOver the past few days, I've talked about the problems that have both created and been created by the niche that the American comic book industry has worked itself into over the last twenty years. From <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/getting-comics-out-of-their-niche.html" target="_blank">expensive comics</a> to <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/comic-books-arent-just-for-kids-anymore.html" target="_blank">an aging reader demographic</a> to <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/its-not-all-superheroes-so-why-do-most.html" target="_blank">the inability to get the word out about non-superhero comics</a>, there are broad, interrelated problems that all come back to the niche that comics have been forced into due to its overreliance on the direct market distribution system over the past 20+ years. That's going to have to change if we want comic books to survive and thrive. Today, I'll be presenting a roadmap for a distribution system that could help bring in millions of new readers, while still protecting and even helping the local comic book shops that have served the industry and its fans so well over the years.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/I54nRqG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://i.imgur.com/I54nRqG.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Artist's rendition of my chances for getting paid</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Before I begin, some disclosure: I am a project manager at a company that has developed an analysis tool for e-reader software called <a href="http://www.heroanalytics.com/" target="_blank">Hero Analytics</a>. However, our software is not necessary for this roadmap to work; it would merely enhance an idea that can be successfully implemented with what the publishers already have available to them. While we could potentially be asked to work on a project like the one I'm about to describe, it's kind of a longshot. I just want to be upfront that, while the idea I'm presenting is something intended to help a hobby I love, there is a chance I could see some money out of it. I believe transparency is important.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
This post is going to be a long one, so I'll apologize in advance. There is a lot here to talk about, and it needs to be fully explored to make the case that this is the correct path. I understand you may be pressed for time, but it really is worth reading and, I hope, sharing with anyone you know that loves comics. Particularly if they work in the industry.<br />
<br />
The root problem, the thing that got the industry into the niche in the first place, is the way that comic distribution is set up in the United States. As I mentioned on Monday, Diamond maintains a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Comic_Distributors#Antitrust_litigation" target="_blank">legal monopoly on comic distribution</a> in the United States that has led to an increase in comic prices that tracks at about <a href="http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=0.65&year1=1986&year2=2013" target="_blank">three times</a> the national inflation rate. So the first thing this plan has to do is to maintain or increase the amount of money comic book companies are getting for their material, while simultaneously lowering the price for the consumer. But that's not enough by itself. To really do what we want to do, a very large number of comics need to be not just cheap, but free.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm sure a lot of you are saying, "Wait, what?" But I mean what I said there. Free. All of the other
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/4E4zPtw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/4E4zPtw.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Like this, but every day.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
major entertainment choices offer places to go that are free or functionally free for those who want to indulge but are unable to spend money. TV, of course, only requires the ownership of a TV that most people already own, as do movies; you may not see exactly the shows or movies you want, but you've got something to watch at almost every hour of the day. Videogames have free to play games on both smartphones and PC. Music has the radio, as well as software like Pandora and Spotify. Comics don't have anything like this, except perhaps at the library, but the libraries often have very spotty comic book and trade collections. It's also important to note that these free options are both approved by the content providers and easily accessible by just about anyone. One can technically, and with somewhat dubious morality, get comics off of a torrent, but that does nothing for the companies that are paying to produce the content, and it requires the user to spend a fair amount of time searching for exactly what they want. We want the experience to be as easy as turning on your TV and browsing the guide to find something you want to watch.<br />
<br />
Of course, it can't all be free. The companies need to make their money in order to make the content, and we want them making new content that is friendlier to young readers, as well as diverse content that will eventually become available to potential readers that are interested in genres besides superheroes. To this end, what I'm proposing is a different way of making comics available to readers.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZPFC0bz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="195" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZPFC0bz.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just more, you know, unlimited.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
To those of you who have used <a href="http://marvel.com/comics/unlimited" target="_blank">Marvel Unlimited</a>, their basic design is very close to what I'm advocating here. It's a service available on iPad, Android, or through a browser that lets the subscriber read most of Marvel's content that's six months old or older for $10 a month or $70 a year. They've described it before as "Netflix for comics" and that's pretty apt. However, while it's basically a good idea, it needs to go further. Imagine a service like Marvel Unlimited, but with a multi-tiered subscription model. The lowest tier would make all of Marvel's content that is twelve months old or older available for free to anyone that will register for an account with them. A second tier at $14.99 a month would give same day as print access to all of Marvel's catalog.<br />
<br />
If you'll remember from the post on the <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/getting-comics-out-of-their-niche.html" target="_blank">high price of comics</a>, Marvel is probably getting about $1.50 from each print comic they sell. With this new structure, people who have never looked at a comic book before or ones who simply can't afford to pay right now will still have access to a lot of free, well-curated content, encouraging them to steer clear of torrents, while those who want to read more and newer content will have access to a bargain for both them and Marvel: for about the price of 4 print copies, they get access to the whole Marvel catalog, while simultaneously giving Marvel revenues roughly equal to buying 10 comics from a local store.<br />
<br />
Now, I've said "free" several times, but there are some caveats. First, the lower tier will see ads in their reader every few pages; in this way, even their oldest content can still generate revenue for Marvel. The second is that, for both tiers, the company will be gathering information about what their users are reading and how they're reading it, anonymized for their privacy, that allows them to see certain trends. For example, if they wanted to find out what the most readers were reading just before they switched to a paid subscription, they could get a list of the top 10 titles fitting this criteria. In this way, it lets them see not just what their most popular titles are, but also which ones get people to spend money with the company. There's a ton of data that can be picked up regarding user habits in order to make a better user experience, more compelling content, and ultimately more money for the company.<br />
<br />
I've talked about Marvel Unlimited a lot here, but there's nothing here that couldn't be done by DC or Image. All of them are already digitizing their content in-house, and we did some analysis at my company and estimated that a small team could have a full system, including readers for browsers, iPad and Android, content servers, registration, etc. ready for a limited rollout in six months to a year, with a full rollout a few months later. It mostly requires someone willing to say "we should do this" and selling it internally to their company. If it's successful, I imagine the other major companies would fall in line within a few years, offering their own spins on the concept, maybe with more or less content, or a higher or lower price point. Basically anywhere that I say "Marvel" in here, you can swap it out for DC, Image, or a number of others.<br />
<br />
For now, imagine that Marvel got on this next week, reworking their systems and tweaking their billing. Around the time of Thor: The Dark World's release, they make an announcement of the shift in the service, offering beta sign-ups with priority given to those who have previously been Marvel Unlimited subscribers. Around February of 2014, they do a soft launch of the service to shake out the bugs, and then a week or <br />
two before the Winter Soldier release, they go live. At the Winter Soldier screenings, they've bought ad time to say "Hey, kids, want to read more about Captain America? We have hundreds of Captain America comics and thousands more with the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Wolverine, and all your other favorites at Marvel Unlimited! Download the free app..." and so on. You get the idea. They do a hard marketing push from Winter Soldier, through Amazing Spider-Man 2, Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, and into the Age of Ultron. Maybe Joe Quesada goes onto Colbert Report to announce Peter Parker's return and pitch Marvel Unlimited at the same time. Make a reference to "The Unlimited database" in Agents of SHIELD. You get the idea.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/E5cHPRO.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="171" src="http://i.imgur.com/E5cHPRO.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A touch more subtle than this, but not much.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
About 100 million people saw the first Avengers movie in the theater in North America, before you figure in all the people that saw it on cable, DVD, Netflix, etc. Assuming that the second Avengers movie does as well, imagine 10% of those people signing up for the free version and reading comic books, carefully curated to recommend things relevant to what was on at the theater at the time. That's 10 million people at least looking at the app, maybe reading a few books, maybe reading a lot more. Maybe 10% of those people will ever be willing to pay for a subscription. That's still a million paying subscribers at $15 a pop, or $15 million a month for Marvel, and it's all their money. No splitting it with Diamond or Apple or Comixology. Now it could take as long as 2020, or maybe even a little bit longer, to see those kind of numbers, but still. That's $180 million a year in revenue. For a compare and contrast, the total singles sales for 2012 across all publishers was somewhere in the neighborhood of $280 million and Diamond got half of that.<br />
<br />
If any of this sounds familiar, it's a common strategy in the MMO gaming genre. Lords of the Ring Online launched as a pay-only service, then implemented a free to play model a few years later. It had a free tier that gave access to most content and a pay tier that allowed the users to access the more recent and high end content. Within a month of doing so <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/08/lotro-revenue-doubles-f2p/" target="_blank">their revenues doubled, and they had a 400% increase in subscribers</a>. This is a model that can, does, and has worked in the past for other media.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
And this ignores all of the ways that a free service enables Marvel to reach out in ways it previously couldn't.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/SXBpoYA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="253" src="http://i.imgur.com/SXBpoYA.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marvel's offices, circa 2024</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
They've always been good about supporting the troops and making some free comic books available to them, for example. Now imagine if they could provide as many comics as they want to a group of young men and women aged 18-25 that are often stuck in boring places and tired from the duties of the day. What about literacy programs? Or art programs? Sure, some of the places that need those kind of programs are also lacking in computers and the like, but not all of them; even teachers in relatively wealthy schools love free, ready made materials. And of course, the nature of popular culture means that popularity breeds popularity. Assuming it can reach critical mass, there comes a point where people read comics because everyone they know reads comics; it becomes the norm. The possibilities are almost endless, and as Marvel makes more money and can supply content for more demographics, they stretch out to the horizon.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm sure there are some criticisms that are likely to crop up, so I'd like to address some of them ahead of time:<br />
<br />
<b>Isn't this a bad deal for Marvel if it converts readers that buy more than 10 issues a month? </b>Theoretically, yes. However, there are a few caveats to that. First, the type of person that buys more than 10 Marvel issues a month is very likely to be a collector and will want to continue to get his physical issues. Some of those may subscribe anyways, simply to be able to read more comics each month. As the reworking of Marvel Unlimited would primarily target new readers, who would never have bought any Marvel comics, they can make it up in volume.<br />
<br />
<b>Won't this hurt local comic book shops? </b>This is very much a "rising tide lifts all boats" scenario. If you've ever watched a movie on Netflix and thought "I have to own that," you already know the answer here. There may be rough patches here and there, but local shops are still the place to be for people who become collectors, and I expect some of the new readers would. I also wouldn't be surprised to see people choose to only register for the free version of Marvel Unlimited, then find the two or three titles they want to follow at their LCS instead. In addition, if this is successful enough, Marvel can begin to supply more trade paperbacks that are akin to collector's edition DVDs, which can help as well, and it's likely that an LCS would see increased traffic for action figures and other collectibles. There could be a whole market re-opened as the new young reader demographic starts wanting less expensive action figures, etc. But that's the type of thing that's likely to take ten years or more to come to fruition. In the interim, the local comic store is going to be fine.<br />
<br />
<b>What if the comic book shops boycott anyways? </b>To be fair, there's a chance they could. Marvel saying "you can have access to all of our comics for the equivalent cost of four of them at retail" could frighten retailers. There are a few ways to approach this. First is to basically ignore any kind of boycott; realistically, around 35% of comic sales are Marvel comics, so the retailers can't really afford that kind of a hit to their revenues for very long. Second, they could keep a couple of comics as print-first to show solidarity. These would most likely be books that are fun but not necessarily tied in to larger stories; perhaps resurrecting Marvel Two-In-One or What If? Third, an outreach program by Marvel's marketing department to retailers explaining their reasoning could help to reassure them. Ultimately, it's a smaller concern than I think a lot of the publishers believe it is.<br />
<br />
<b>How is Comixology affected?</b> There's still a niche there for it. There are going to be some people that don't want to read even four Marvel comics a month, and Comixology is there for them. In addition, even if both of the Big 2 and all of the Middle 3 manage to make similar services, there are still smaller publishers for which this isn't a viable model, and Comixology continues to work for them. And, of course, a lot of what was true for the local comic shops is true for Comixology - as those young readers grow up and want to branch out into more mature titles, Comixology can provide.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/8WU2k5g.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="123" src="http://i.imgur.com/8WU2k5g.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just for you, Diamond</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>What about Diamond? </b>I can play a very small violin for them. More seriously, they're still going to be the physical distributor for the industry, so a lot of what was said about the local comic shops applies to them as well. Diamond for good or ill is going to be a large part of the industry for years to come. This is a plan that's intended to minimize the damage their monopoly does, not put them out of business.<br />
<br />
<b>But what about ownership of content? </b>It's true that people won't own the content they get access to through this service. If it ever goes away, they will cease to have access to things they had previously read. That's, frankly, okay. As I said, they're getting a bargain price to view a lot of content, and if they really want assured permanent access to the content, there's trade paperbacks, digital purchase through Comixology, back issues at their LCS, and so on. You don't pay for Netflix to get permanent access to their content; you pay to get access this month. This is a similar concept.<br />
<br />
<b>What if it doesn't work?</b> Well, then, in a few years, they shut down the program. And, frankly, if this doesn't work, I have no idea what will.<br />
<br />
<b>How are you going to get the industry to go along with this?</b> I'm hoping that it's a persuasive plan, and I'm hoping I can persuade all of you that are reading this to forward, share, tweet, and do whatever you can to get it into the hands of someone who can help make it happen.<br />
<br />
In my job, I wear a lot of hats, and one of those is analyst. Sometimes that means system analyst, meaning that I try to figure out how to make computer systems more efficient, and sometimes it means business analyst, meaning that I try to figure out how to make businesses more efficient and profitable. Back in January, my wife and I had our first child, and a few months later, in May, I was sitting around and thinking about what it had been like to be a comic fan as I was growing up. By the time I was in high school, I knew maybe a dozen or so folks my age that I could talk about comics with. When she's in high school, I want her to have hundreds; I want discussing comics to be like talking about movies or TV or music, something that almost everyone in the school does. So that night, as a personal project, I sat down and started to analyze the comics business and look at what could be done to get to that point. I had some co-workers go through it with me, and, while they are not as familiar with the comics industry as I am, they agree that this is a sound, workable strategy. I believe that this plan that can be relatively easily, quickly and inexpensively implemented, primarily using resources the publishers already have, with the potential for a huge upswing in revenues and a broadening and deepening of the comic readerbase. It can be done, and it should be done.<br />
<br />
I know this has been long, and I thank you for your time, both in reading this post as well as the others I've written this week. I've enjoyed reading your comments and criticism, and hope this posting sparks a discussion that changes our hobby for the better.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-18680791576159655142013-09-19T07:00:00.002-07:002013-09-19T07:00:58.670-07:00It's Not All Superheroes, So Why Do Most People Think That?This is post is the third in a four part series discussing how to get the medium of comic books out of the niche that they're stuck in. Previously I took a look at how the niche is both the cause and the result of <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/getting-comics-out-of-their-niche.html" target="_blank">the high price of comics</a> as well as <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/comic-books-arent-just-for-kids-anymore.html" target="_blank">the aging comic reader demographic</a>. Tomorrow, I'll be detailing a potential solution for getting comics out into the mainstream.<br />
<br />
For today, however, I'd like to discuss the perceived lack of diversity in comics. Now, I'm not talking about racial or gender diversity; those are worth exploring, and I <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/07/hoedown-breakdown-diversity-in-marvel.html" target="_blank">have talked about them</a> in the past on this blog. What I'm talking about is this: if you ask the average non-comic book reader to name a comic book, 95 out of 100 of them will pick a superhero title, and the last five will probably say "The Walking Dead" or, rarely, "Sandman." That's kind of a big problem.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><b>Problem 3: Most people only know about superhero comics because comics are a niche, and comics are a niche because most people only know about superhero comics</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Now, I'm sure most of the folks reading this could name a dozen great non-superhero comics off the top of their head: Preacher, Sandman, Jinx, Strangers in Paradise, Walking Dead, Fables, Saga, East of West, and many more. While comic books are, in fact, extremely superhero heavy, there are a lot of other options out there for a person that's willing to look for them. But that's the problem: they have to go looking for something they don't even know they should be looking for. Yes, the person that wants to read a mystery can go to their local comic store and ask the salesperson, but how would they even know to? Instead, they go to Barnes and Noble and hit the mystery section and find a novel.<br />
<br />
Most people wouldn't even know to go to the comic store in the first place to look for a mystery story, because most people think "superhero" when you say "comic book." The genre and the medium are more closely tied together than in perhaps any other genre/medium pairing in the United States. If people don't know that they can get a mystery, fantasy, or science fiction comic book in the first place, why would they go to a comic shop and look for one? In the last 20 years, great new non-superhero comic books have been coming out, just as the ascendance of the direct market has ensured that most non-comics fans will never hear about 99% of them. Outside of the local comics shop, the only place a person is going to see Fables or Y: The Last Man is sandwiched into the graphic novel section at their Barnes & Noble, often not even broken out from the Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman trades.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/SEg3ZNZ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://i.imgur.com/SEg3ZNZ.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"I didn't even know they <br />
made a comic out of the show!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There's a lot of historical context for why superheroes are tied so firmly to the public's perception of comic books, but it's not really necessary to get into it here. What matters, for our purposes, is that there are very few chances to change that perception. There's the occasional runaway success like the Walking Dead TV series that tells people, "Hey, we've got other stuff, too!" but those are very rare, so rare that I'm having trouble thinking of another example. Maybe Sin City? 300? Probably not even those.<br />
<br />
It doesn't help that the big two put out almost entirely superhero content. There's a very small group of books in the Marvel and DC output that aren't superhero books, especially in the Vertigo imprint, but that's it. They clearly want to break out of this and expand their readerbase, but that's harder than it looks. They keep putting out a book here and there that is from a different genre on their main product line, but even then, it's often still a thinly veiled superhero book, like All-Star Western, which has Jonah Hex fighting the same conspiracies that Batman will fight a hundred years later, alongside masked heroes in cowboy hats.<br />
<br />
Their reasons are entirely understandable when you look at <a href="http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2013/2013-08.html" target="_blank">the sales figures</a> for printed singles. The Walking Dead is in the top twenty, and Saga is at number 22, but then you have to go all the way down to East of West at number 51 with 36,345 purchases before you get to a non-superhero, non-licensed book again. The next non-superhero book is Trillium at number 70, and it's only ~7,000 above the 20,000 cancellation mark that DC seems to have been using lately. Marvel and DC are giving the fans what they want, but that puts them in a position that prevents them from getting new fans. Even within the superhero genre, there's immense pressure to use existing properties, because they sell. Look at how many Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Avengers and X-Men-related books there are on the market these days if you have any doubt of that, or how often Wolverine, Batman, Spider-Man, or Superman shows up in a new book to boost sales.<br />
<br />
The indies are in a slightly different position. They can afford to run with a somewhat lower circulation rate, but that doesn't help to increase the visibility of their often excellent non-superhero comics. They can get along well enough to get trades printed and put in Barnes & Noble and other mass market stores, but then they're just another book on the graphic novel shelf; they're not being stocked in the fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, or horror shelves, which means that the average shopper will give them a pass entirely, because they'll be lost in among the superhero trades.<br />
<br />
Right or wrong, most people only know about superhero comics because comics are a niche, and comics are a niche because most people only know about superhero comics. Because most sales go through the direct market, the average non-comics fan will never know how much good non-superhero content is available. On the other hand, because superheroes are precisely why most people come to the medium in the first place, it's an uphill battle to sell non-superhero content to many of the established fans of the medium.<br />
<br />
It's a vicious cycle that can only be addressed by changing the way that comics are distributed. By making comics widely available to people who have traditionally not been comic book readers, comics can break out of the niche that have made them more expensive, that has seen a readerbase that has only grown older over the years, and that has made the public wrongly assume that the medium is only good for superheroes.<br />
<br />
And I'll be talking about how that new way of distributing comics can be implemented tomorrow. See you then!<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-33429520900543367062013-09-18T05:31:00.001-07:002013-09-18T05:31:12.872-07:00Comic Books Aren't Just For Kids Anymore! That's Not Entirely a Good Thing.This post is part of a larger series I'm writing this week talking about how the niche that the comic book industry has worked itself into is both the cause and the result of several other closely linked problems. If we want to see comics standing toe to toe with larger entertainment fields like TV, movies, videogames, novels, and music, we're going to have to face some unpleasant truths, and the companies are going to have to change how they do business. However, I fully believe this is something that can be done, and in a way that could see a population of millions of comic book readers by the end of the decade, if we get started soon.<br />
<br />
On Friday, I'll be presenting a possible solution, one which I think the major companies could implement relatively rapidly and inexpensively. However, I wanted to talk about some of the major problems first. Tuesday's post laid out the first problem: <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/09/getting-comics-out-of-their-niche.html" target="_blank">comics are expensive because they are niche, and comics are niche because they are expensive.</a> For today's post, I'd like you to indulge me for a moment and cast your mind back to the 80s. I apologize to those of you old enough to remember them firsthand, as I know what I ask is painful. It will be worth it.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Looking back, you can see an industry that was trying to find its way. It wanted to tell more adult stories, with intricate plots and visuals to back them up. A few creators began to leverage the new opportunities available to them and told stories that were less childish and more mature, while still retaining the sense of wonder that their audience was used to. As the decades wore on, some went off the rails a bit and began to tell stories that were "adult" only in the sense that you wouldn't want a child to read them, but many more created new and wonderful experiences for the audience that had grown up with their medium. Not content to preach only to the faithful, they also told many stories in that same medium for the children of their original audience.<br />
<br />
In case that last sentence hasn't already tipped you off, I'm not talking about comic books. I'm talking about videogames.<br />
<br />
The two industries share a similar path, in a lot of ways. At the beginning of the 80s, comics and videogames were both largely seen as children's fare. They both had simplistic stories and crude visuals. Then came the personal computing boom of the 80s. Adults began to play more games and demanded more mature entertainment. Some truly amazing games came out of this period, like Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, and the Ultima series, all of which told larger, more intricate stories. Similarly, in the rise of the direct market, we saw Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and the beginning of what would turn into the Vertigo line at DC and the Epic imprint books over at Marvel. Today, there are more people playing videogames than ever before, across all ages. The videogame industry is <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103064-Videogame-Industry-Worth-Over-100-Billion-Worldwide" target="_blank">worth over 100 billion dollars</a>. Comic books... not so much. Why?<br />
<br />
<b>Problem 2: Comic readers are getting older because comics are niche, and comics are niche because comic readers are getting older</b><br />
<br />
In <a href="http://firestormfan.com/2013/04/29/firestorm-outsells/" target="_blank">November 1985</a>, DC had 37 titles on the stands. Marvel had 43. Of those titles, almost all of them would have been appropriate to give to an 8 or 10 year old. And when I say "appropriate," I'm not talking just about the content of their stories, but also the way the stories were told. Comics before the 90s tended to explain a lot more and used simpler art and layouts to help convey the story to the reader. Let's compare two comics (you can expand both for a better look):<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/rTT3T0G.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://i.imgur.com/rTT3T0G.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Batwoman #1 two page splash - 2011</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The Batwoman comic is absolutely gorgeous. It has a wavy, undulating layout that makes the reader a little uneasy, as is appropriate, given the story it's telling. However, for a novice comics reader, particularly a younger one, it might be a little unclear the order the panels are supposed to go in. Should it be read across or straight down? There are visual clues to long-time comic readers, like the way the speech bubbles overlay panels and lead the eye to the next one, that make it clearer for them. The dialog explains very little of what's happening in the panel, instead offering context for it; the name of a victim, for example, or the name of a villain not shown. It's a very rewarding experience on every level for an experienced comic book reader, and even for a new reader that really dedicates some effort to trying to learn the visual language of the medium. It is worth noting, though, that the art on Batwoman is some of the best in the industry, and there are many others that try to create a similar flow for the reader to follow and fail miserably.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/q1BwFpt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://i.imgur.com/q1BwFpt.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Iron Man #202 - 1986</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The Iron Man art, while fairly dynamic inside the panels, stays inside the panels. It's very clear to the reader which panel they should go to next and what the flow of the story is. It's a single page, so there's no question the reader should stay on this page, make their way through all of its panels, and move on to the next one. Speech bubbles and artwork stays within their own little boxes. The text explains what's happening if the art leaves any kind of doubt, and sometimes even if it should be clear to the reader. For an experienced comic fan, it's, well, a little boring. I'm still fond of it because I have a great deal of nostalgia of this era of comics, but trying to go back and read a lot of that material is not something I often do, because it does hold the reader's hand so much.<br />
<br />
You know what else bores me? Children's videogames. That's because they're not for me. They are designed to get kids used to playing videogames. I mean, they're there for the game creator to make money, of course, but they're designed to be simpler experiences that ease children into the concepts they'll need to play other videogames as they grow up. Compare, for example, Lego Batman to Batman: Arkham City. They're both games where you control Batman and take him around sections of Gotham City to fight the Joker and other villains while solving equipment-based puzzles to get further into the game.<br />
<br />
However, the gameplay in Lego Batman is far simpler, requiring little of the player. There are no counterattacks in the combat system, navigation is far more forgiving, there's no real stealth gameplay, and equipment usage is limited to one or two abilities at a time that change depending on the outfit the character is wearing. Hints are almost always on the screen, even if it's only to tell the user how they can use their current suit's ability. The story presented is a simple morality play that doesn't try to explore in-depth character motivations: the heroes are on one side and the villains are on the other. There's more comedy, and it's broader comedy. And it doesn't hurt that the Lego games are a bit less expensive than the Arkham games, so parents will be more likely to buy them. It makes for a better game for children that are just starting to learn the ins and outs of the media of videogames.<br />
<br />
And this brings us back around to comic books. The kid that plays Lego Batman is probably going to be the kid that grows up to play whatever the equivalent to Arkham City is 10 years from now. He's going to be a videogame player. His experience with the simpler gameplay and story of Lego Batman has trained him to enjoy the more complex Arkham game. He may even be a Batman fan. And yet, there's still a really good chance he'll never regularly read a Batman comic.<br />
<br />
Comic books used to teach kids how to read comic books. As the kids of the 70s, 80s and 90s grew up and wanted more and more sophisticated comics for their more sophisticated tastes, they began to shove comics that were kid-friendly, both in content and design, out of the marketplace. In the late 80s, there were a handful of PG-13+ comics available and dozens of PG or G rated comics, with design that largely matched the content's sophistication. Now that number has reversed. According to their website, <a href="http://marvel.com/comics/calendar/month/2013-09-01?byZone=marvel_site_zone&offset=0&byType=date&dateStart=2013-09-01&dateEnd=2013-09-30&type=&orderBy=release_date+desc&formatType=issue&limit=300&count=25&tab=comic&isDigital=0" target="_blank">Marvel is putting out 73 comics this month</a>, including their Icon imprint. Of those, three are all ages books, and the rest are T+ or above, which is roughly equivalent to PG-13. To put that into perspective, imagine if Hollywood's output was 96% PG-13 and above. If you look at the other publishers, most of them put out even less all ages material.<br />
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To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't have the mature material. It's great stuff, and it makes for wonderful reading. But in trying to get to the point where comics were respected as an artform, mistakes were made. Children were pushed out of the market with increases in price. The industry, afraid of being forced back into only making stories for children, reacted by making almost no stories for them. And, honestly, readers had a bit of a chip on their shoulders for the way that comic books had been looked down on for decades. We cut off our nose to spite our face, and now we don't have enough new, young readers coming in to do more than maintain and perhaps very, very slowly grow readership.<br />
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The videogame industry manages to bring new gamers into the fold every year by continuing to make games not just for the dedicated adult gamer, but also for children. Unfortunately, because of the niche the comic book industry has worked itself into where it's so dependent on the direct market, there's not a lot of room on the shelf for inexpensive kid-friendly books that can train up a new generation of readers in the skills they'll need to enjoy the more mature books that make up the bulk of the market. Even for someone like me, a parent that wants to introduce their children to comic books, the opportunities to do so are scarce. And given that comics are really only available through the direct market, there are no opportunities for a young child to point at a Marvel Adventures or Tiny Titans book at the grocery store or gas station and ask their parents if they can buy it. Comic readers are getting older because comics are niche, and comics are niche because comic readers are getting older.<br />
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That's two problems dissected, and one more to go. On Thursday, I'll be discussing the perceived lack of content diversity in comics, and then on Friday, I'll lay out a potential solution for much of what ails the industry. See you tomorrow!<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-59971893694991984512013-09-17T05:40:00.000-07:002013-09-17T07:14:21.643-07:00Getting Comics Out of Their NicheComics are a niche entertainment choice. I don't know how anyone can reasonably argue with this statement. I'm not saying that there aren't choices that are more niche, but for the amount of impact comic books have had on pop culture as a whole, the number of people who actually read comics is tiny. A book at one of the major publishers is usually considered successful enough to stay in circulation if it can maintain <a href="http://comicsbeat.com/whats-the-new-52-cancellation-threshold-heres-what-the-numbers-say/" target="_blank">~20,000 readers</a>; it's a wild success if it can sustain 150,000 readers for more than a few months. There are only a few hundred thousand regular comic book readers in North America. If we include digital and trade readers, we could generously say that there may be as many as one million semi-regular readers. For comparison, there were <a href="http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-contents/america2019s-opera-boom" target="_blank">20,000,000 opera tickets</a> sold in 2007 in the United States.<br />
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Let that sink in for just a moment: unless the average opera-goer went to 20 performances a year, that means comic books are more of a niche entertainment choice than opera.<br />
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How did the industry get to this point? How can we fix it? I think I have the answer to that last bit, but understanding the road that's taken us here is vital if the solution is to make any sense. Let's start by saying, first, that the niche the industry is stuck in is both the source of its problems and the result of them. Over the next few days, I'll be examining three of the main problems with the industry, and all of them share a similar pattern: the problem exists because of the niche nature of comic books, and the niche nature of comic books causes the problem. On Friday, I'll be presenting a model that can be technically implemented with perhaps six months' to a year's worth of work, but which could see the addition of millions of new and returning readers by the end of the decade.<br />
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<b>Problem 1: Comics are expensive because they are niche, and comics are niche because they are expensive.</b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tony has a lot of yellow books.</td></tr>
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Anyone who has bought a comic in the last five years knows how out of hand the price of comics is getting. We're up to $3.99 an issue on a lot of titles even in digital, and there's no sign of the prices going back down. When I bought my first comic for myself, Iron Man #202 in 1986, it cost 65 cents. It had about as many pages as a modern single issue, albeit with a somewhat simpler storyline, less detailed art, and cheaper ink and paper. Still, it told a whole story in 22 pages, unlike the usual multi-story arcs of the current day comics. Adjusted for inflation, today it would cost a massive... $1.39.<br />
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How did that happen?<br />
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Well, as previously mentioned, comics are printed with better materials now, so there's that. There's also the fact that, in terms of real dollars, inflation in New York or Los Angeles is going to mean a higher real dollar increase in cost of living, cost of business, etc. than in Dallas or Des Moines, and the publishers (and therefore their staffs) are mostly based out of New York or LA. Of course, they have to pay for the salaries of the writers, artists, editors, letterers, and all of the other folks that actually create the books. But the largest cost, by far, can be laid at the feet of Diamond, the distributor that has a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Comic_Distributors#Antitrust_litigation" target="_blank">legal monopoly</a> on comic distribution in North America.<br />
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Diamond pays a percentage of the cover price for each copy of a single issue that they buy; for indie publishers, that number can be <a href="http://comicbooks.about.com/od/publishers/a/submitdiamond.htm" target="_blank">as low as 30-40%</a> of the cover price. For Marvel and DC, it's probably closer to 50%, but they don't publish the details of their contracts anywhere I can find. There are other factors that can muddy the waters here as well, such as Marvel or DC offering a store owner a discount that affects how much Diamond pays, and a bunch of other stuff. It's pretty crazy and <a href="http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2009/05/05/is-diamond-comics-the-devil/" target="_blank">well worth reading about</a>. As an added expense, the publisher also has to pay for shipping from the printer to Diamond, although it's not certain if this applies to the major publishers. Smart money says yes, though. What's the point of having a monopoly if you're not going to squeeze people?<br />
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The net of the whole thing is that, for a $4 book that doesn't get discounted to the retailer (and most of them will), Diamond will take $2 per issue off the top. Printing and shipping can be pretty variable, so we'll roll it up into an estimated cost of 50 cents. That means that, out of a single issue of a $4 book, one of the big publishers is only seeing about $1.50, and that's before paying for staff, facilities, etc. Mind you, this doesn't include any discounts the publisher gives as incentives to the retailers to get them to order more copies, which they regularly do. That $1.50 estimate is pretty close to the best case scenario for the publisher. These are all ballpark numbers, of course, but it's easy to see how the cost of a single issue has gone up so much. Trades work out a little better, but not so much better that the publishers could shift entirely over from a single-centric to trade-centric publishing scheme and have that fix the problems with the current print distribution model.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Npvc3Cp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://i.imgur.com/Npvc3Cp.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Artist's depiction of Diamond's CEO</td></tr>
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Well, what about digital? The story is better there, but still not wonderful. The cut that Comixology takes varies from publisher to publisher, but it's generally a little better than the Diamond deal. However, if a user buys through the app on an iPhone or iPad, Apple first takes 30% off the top, then Comixology and the publisher split the take. Marvel doesn't discount their digital issues, and DC only does after two months, so the cost is still the same to the reader, as well.<br />
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Regardless of how the publisher gets their money, they still have to pay the bills and keep their shareholders happy with the ~$1.50 they get from each book. The more books they sell, of course, the more of those little $1.50 cash infusions they get, but that brings us back to our original problem: only comics fans are going to spend $4 in the first place to buy a 22 page pamphlet that tells a third of a story. The books that were put out until the early 90s were more likely to be done-in-ones, because they were sold as often at a 7-11 or a newsstand as they were at a comic book shop. The publishers are forced to cater to the market that they do have left, because it's too expensive or not logistically feasible to try to venture out of the direct market.<br />
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So there you have it. Because comics only get sold through the direct market, fans can ask for more intricate
stories. In turn, because the stories are more intricate, even if the publishers were able to go back to newsstands, new fans wouldn't come onboard there because they would be getting a third or a fifth of a story for four dollars. Heck, the most recent Captain America story arc was ten issues long, plus an epilogue. Nearly fifty dollars for a story that only takes a couple of hours to read at the outside is kind of hard to swallow for a new reader.<br />
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I'll see you back here tomorrow for the next installment, where I'll be looking at how an aging core demographic has made it hard to bring in new readers. See you then!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-19518676332995602572013-09-15T16:25:00.000-07:002013-09-16T06:03:07.231-07:00Review: Mighty Avengers #1Hey folks! I've spent the last couple of weeks either traveling or preparing to travel, and it's good to be back. I was out in New York for the first time, which was a lot of fun, and I got to swing by Midtown Comics. Their Times Square shop is great, and I recommend it if you ever get a chance to visit. I got a big stack of trades there that I'm slowly making my way through. And on the flight home, the TSA was kind enough to put "Notice of Baggage Inspection" flyers in all of them when they rifled through my checked luggage, so I have plenty of bookmarks, too! On a less Orwellian note, I also picked up a copy of Mighty Avengers #1, and the series seems to be off to a pretty good start. There will be a few very minor spoilers in here, but most of them are about things that have already been unveiled in the previews for the book.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">LAAAAAND!</td></tr>
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Let's get this out of the way first: yes, it's got Greg Land on art for the first few issues. I know a lot of people don't like his stuff, but I'm pretty indifferent to it. I've always been more of a story guy than an art guy, so your mileage may vary. However, his style didn't detract from the book for me, other than maybe his change to Monica Rambeau's (Captain Marvel / Photon) hairstyle. The dreads are gone, replace with a short hairstyle which makes her look like a typical Land girl. Not a great change, but at least there's a story explanation, which I'll get into shortly.<br />
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Storywise, it's a fairly typical introduction / "assemble the team" book, introducing about half of the lineup the book will have by the end of the first arc. First up are Luke Cage, Power Man (Victor Alvarez, who has taken Cage's old name) and White Tiger fighting a D-list villain while working as Heroes for Hire. They also run into the Superior Spider-Man, and almost immediately one of the best things about the book is on display: Al Ewing, the writer, has a wonderful grasp of character motivation and voice. Each character sounds different from the next, and they all seem genuine. Luke Cage is written like a dedicated father and husband and Victor Alvarez is written as a teenager with a chip on his shoulder, which is a good start. However, what makes it really great is that Cage talks like a guy who has been that kid before, and understands where he's coming from, with an almost wistful attitude about his youth; amazingly, Land actually sells this in his art, which surprised the heck out of me.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/an8G2fv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/an8G2fv.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That has got to be a nightmare to clean</td></tr>
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The rest of the characters are similarly well written, with personalities that match histories, including one that might end up being a bit of a surprise to some fans, and might even anger a few of those: Monica Rambeau. Most comics fans know her from the excellent Nextwave: Agents of HATE, where she was a pretty angry character: angry about the kind of crap team she was stuck with and angry about the way she had been shuffled off to the side from the Avengers. Her most recent appearance previous to this in Captain Marvel showed her even being somewhat angry at her friend, Carol Danvers, taking on the Captain Marvel mantle without running it past her first. In this book, she's trying to move past that anger and adopts a new name, costume, and hairstyle to help shed the past. I think it might be one of the more interesting choices, since it returns to the character's roots in a lot of ways; in her time as an Avenger, she was one of the consistently nicest people on the team, acting as a point of view character for the readers a lot of the time. It should be interesting to see how this evolution of the character's personality ends up.<br />
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The last of the heroes introduced is a mystery character that presumably will eventually be adopting the Ronin identity, but has to borrow a costume from Spectrum's tailor for the battle against the enemy that brings the team together for the first time. He's still a mystery character, but he knows Spectrum, is a martial artist, and has hideous taste in costumes. I present to you:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Hx2b2cv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://i.imgur.com/Hx2b2cv.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The new character find of the decade!</td></tr>
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All in all, it has the makings of a good book, and that ignores the elephant in the room: it's got a great cast of minority characters. With the exception of Dr. Spiderpuss, She-Hulk (who will be joining in a later issue) and possibly Ronin, all of the characters are black or Hispanic. Marvel is taking a gamble, and I implore you: even if you normally wait for trades, as I do, don't do that with this book. They're trying to do something really great here, and even if their primary motivation for it might be profit, they should be rewarded. Even if it didn't have the makings of a really good book, which it does, it deserves to have a shot.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-39895867450030851702013-08-30T07:57:00.001-07:002013-08-30T08:12:24.005-07:00Triumph Division, National Superheroes, and Cultural IdentityA few years back, in Invincible Iron Man #2, Matt Fraction introduced a superteam called Triumph Division, based out of the Phillipines. Because they were a plot device masquerading as a team, they were blown up within something like three pages. This didn't go over so well with folks, given that they were the first and only Filipino team from either major publisher, but their legacy counterparts showed up later and still occasionally appear in a Marvel book here and there. That "disposable team of heroes" plot device isn't the thing I wanted to talk about today, though. It was the reaction to the characters themselves; namely the complaints that the characters weren't Filipino enough.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/JsfdnJd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/JsfdnJd.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not pictured: Pacman</td></tr>
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<br />
<a name='more'></a>Over on scans_daily, there was (surprise!) a <a href="http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2694808.html" target="_blank">pretty spirited discussion</a> about it, with a lot of folks chiming in that, outside of Anitun and maybe one or two of the others, there's not a lot of Filipino cultural influence on the team. Warrior One's costume looks to be a modified version of the traditional dress of the Aeta and Mighty Mother is probably a cute reference to how much power the mother wields in the traditional Filipino family, but the rest are heroes that basically look like you could drop them in as new Avengers and they'd be okay. It really surprised me that people were asking for characters that were more deeply tied to the culture, instead of pleased that the characters weren't reduced to one-note references to mythology or history, as usually happens with non-American heroes.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/N3I6sk9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="294" src="http://i.imgur.com/N3I6sk9.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yee. Haw.</td></tr>
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There's a long tradition in comics of having American heroes be a pretty diverse lot of characters, at least in terms of their heroic identities, then having non-American characters be something that are usually just this side of stereotypes. There's a long list of them: Banshee, Shamrock, Black Knight, Batroc (a savate master), Man-of-Bats, Knight and Squire, Gaucho, Ursa Major, Red Guardian, Mandarin, and pretty close to everyone from the Great Ten. Even some American characters get this treatment. Just take a look at the Marvel team that's based out of the American Southwest, the Rangers: you've got Texas Twister, a cowboy that can turn himself into a tornado; Shooting Star, a cowgirl quickdraw artist; Phantom Rider, a ghost cowboy; Armadillo, a guy that looks like an armadillo; and Red Wolf, a really stereotypical Native American. They've recently added 51, an alien teleptah with a name that clearly references Area 51. I was really pleasantly surprised when they had Scarlet Spider move down to Houston and didn't have him tripping over Texas-themed heroes every two seconds, other than the occasional run-in with the Rangers.<br />
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There's been a lot of backlash against this, of course; it feels just a touch racist to boil a culture down to its mythology and to the cultural signifiers that are most visible to outsiders. Think about what an American superteam that consisted only of American cultural and mythological figures would look like: Captain America! The Screaming Eagle! Paul Bunyan! Manifest Destiny! The Cowboy! Burger-Man! NFL Pro! Uncle Sam! And their kid mascot, Apple Pie!<br />
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Huh. I kinda want to read that book now. <br />
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Anyways, getting back to the point, I thought at the time that Triumph Division was actually a fine balance between using cultural elements to design a team, but not letting them dominate the design. There were one or two characters very strongly tied to Filipino culture, another couple with more tenuous ones, and then several that were pretty sort of standard characters: a magic guy, a martial artist, a power armor guy, and a Superman type. All in all, it seemed like a good way to honor the culture.<br />
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However, a lot of the folks that were unhappy with the loose ties on scans_daily and elsewhere were actually <br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/noqoKwJ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="http://i.imgur.com/noqoKwJ.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Regardless of the answer, though, Batroc stays.</td></tr>
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Filipino and Filipino American readers who wanted a stronger cultural link to the Phillipines. These were, after all, the only Filipino characters in a major American publisher's comics, even if they did get blown up in three pages. If the representation is going to be so brief, is it better for them to be distinctive in their cultural identity, even if that borders on stereotype? Is it better to have these most visible characteristics be very strongly tied to culture, then establish the characters as individuals? I don't have any real answers here, but I think it's worth discussing, especially with Marvel and DC both trying to create more diverse characters.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-59406730301858812872013-08-29T06:38:00.000-07:002013-08-29T06:38:07.929-07:00A Personal RequestHey, folks. This isn't going to be a particularly interesting post for most of y'all, so I apologize in advance. <div>
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I need a favor.<div>
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If any of you know someone who works at Marvel, or if you know someone who knows someone, I'd really appreciate it if you could help me get in contact with them. While this is business-related, it's not about me pitching a book to them, or trying to get in as a writer/artist/editor/etc. It's far more on the dull, dry, business end of things, but I think it could be something that ends up being very profitable for Marvel and ends up helping the industry as a whole. I can't go into a lot more detail than that, I'm afraid. Anyways, if y'all can help out, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-2185528548528184922013-08-21T08:53:00.002-07:002013-08-21T08:58:40.221-07:00When Heroes Were Heroes Again... For A WhileThere was a great post by John Seavey over at <a href="http://mightygodking.com/" target="_blank">Mighty God King</a> on Monday about <a href="http://mightygodking.com/2013/08/19/in-defense-of-onslaught/" target="_blank">Marvel's 'Onslaught' event</a> and how it was, in a lot of ways, the beginning of the end for the extreeeme era of comics. In it, Seavey mentions the great Marvel comics that came after Onslaught and Heroes Reborn, and it got me to thinking, once again, about how close we were to having comics that were really about heroes again. It's a shame it didn't take.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>After Heroes Reborn fizzled out, Kurt Busiek did one of the best runs the Avengers ever had. Mark Waid was over on Captain America. Thunderbolts came out and told stories about villains that tried to turn towards good, stumbling somewhat, but most of them unambiguously picking heroism over villainy. Over at DC, there was Morrison on JLA, telling stories that were mostly about heroes doing good, and not in the sheepish, "ho ho ho, it sure is hokey" way that unalloyed heroism was treated when it showed up in the years since Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Even in Hitman, one of the most Dark Ages concepts you could ask for, Garth Ennis told one of the best Superman stories ever told in Hitman #34, albeit a couple years after the rest of these books.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Old Superman is disappointed in you, comics.</td></tr>
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One of the most striking places one can see this shift is in Kingdom Come, by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. Kingdom Come is a book that is almost the anti-TDKR in its message and tone. I don't want to spoil it for those of you that have not read it, and you really, really should if you haven't, since it's one of the classics of modern comic books. However, the story is one in which sacrifice and restraint are what ultimately allow the world to be set right, and it is quite intentionally contrasted in the book with the brutality and moral murkiness that had come to infect comics in the previous decade.<br />
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There was a brief period there where it looked like we were going to have a wonderful synthesis of the good aspects of the Bronze and Dark Ages of comics (and there were some, to be sure) with the more heroic and, honestly, joyful stories of the Silver and Golden Ages. It seemed like the creators had figured out how to balance telling a whimsical, classically heroic story with the need for more mature storytelling and character motivation. And then September 11, 2001 happened.<br />
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After 9/11, the industry seemed to lose hope again. To be fair, that happened across all media, as anti-heroes, hard men and women that would get things done and come out just barely on the side of the angels had a resurgence. Just look at 24, with it's anti-hero protagonist Jack Bauer torturing people to prevent terrorist attacks, for probably the clearest example. Pop culture has to shift to fit the mood of the times, and one can't really fault the creative teams on the comics for trying to do so.<br />
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Unfortunately, this meant a return to a lot of the grimmer aspects of the Dark Age, without any of the goofiness of the extreeeeme stuff to lighten it. This is how comics readers got things like Bucky, Captain America's teen sidekick, being Cap's wetwork operative. It's how we got Identity Crisis tainting one of the last carefree Justice League rosters retroactively. The list goes on and on, with the Illuminati retconned into manipulating every aspect of the Marvel universe, Superboy-Prime killing Superman-2 and a bunch of other folks, Civil War ending with the heroes of 9/11 tackling Captain America, Dark Reign's entire story arc, and Wonder Woman snapping Max Lord's neck as some of the highlights.<br />
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None of these are inherently bad stories; there's good aspects to almost all of them. But it's missing that <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It's weird, but at least he's a hero.</td></tr>
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sense of hope that was on display for a scant few years, and its absence is sorely felt when one looks at the stories as a whole. That's not to say there weren't dark stories in the brief heroic resurgence, and there weren't heroic stories after it; just look at Incredible Hercules and Blue Beetle for great examples of those. But there's been an undercurrent until very recently that still seemed to be ashamed of heroism and justice as anything except unobtainable ideals.<br />
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It's not all bad news, of course. With Marvel NOW! and DC's New 52, there have been some of these stories poking around the edges again: Captain America spending a decade of his life raising and protecting the son of one of his enemies, Superman in Action Comics being, well, Superman, All New X-Men showing the younger X-Men trying to come to grips with how their older selves ended up in an attempt to avoid that fate, and a number of other examples. Hopefully the new heroism will take root this time.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21160625.post-80125740925092069032013-08-16T06:46:00.000-07:002013-08-16T06:51:46.762-07:00How To Make A Black Panther MovieBlack Panther is one of those characters that should be a slam dunk for a movie. To borrow from <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-big-picture/7344-Secrets-of-S-H-I-E-L-D" target="_blank">MovieBob</a>, BP is most easily described as "You ever seen Coming to America? Black Panther is that guy, if he was also Batman." It's a great, easy to understand concept that lends itself to a ton of different stories. Unfortunately, it's also a concept that's incredibly easy to screw up and piss off one or more large groups of potential viewers.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Unlike Batman, I <br />
know to armor my face."</td></tr>
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Black Panther is actually named T'Challa and he's the king of an African country named Wakanda. Wakanda is a lot like Atlantis or Themiscyra, in that it's technologically advanced and refuses to deal with the outside world more than it absolutely has to. The Black Panther is not just the political leader of the country, but also its spiritual leader, with pseudo-shamanistic ties to a sort of panther god. There are a number of other tribes in Wakanda with their own totems, and they vie for control of the nation through methods ranging from back-alley politicking up through ritual combat. Wakanda also sits on the only large deposit of vibranium, the material that Captain America's shield is made out of, adding that political factor to the mix. T'Challa is also a genius on the level of Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Hank Pym. BP's really a neat character, and I recommend almost any run with the character except Reggie Hudlin's.<br />
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However, that character also presents a number of problems for a studio. First off, the character is black. As I mentioned in my <a href="http://comicbookhoedown.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-deep-are-marvel-and-dc-movie-benches.html#more" target="_blank">post on available properties at Marvel and DC</a>, Hollywood shies away from action movies starring black actors that aren't named Will Smith, Denzel Washington, or Wesley Snipes. The fact that that generation is aging and they haven't really replaced it with a new group is troubling, both in general and for our hypothetical BP movie. There's a fear that, without one of those names that has reliably brought in the wider (also, whiter) movie-going audience, the studio will make a movie that will, at best, break even, and the break-even point for a Marvel movie these days is often at or near the billion-dollar range, after marketing expenses, etc. are figured in.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Man. Ape. *facepalm*</td></tr>
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Tying into this, you've got the fear of touching on racial issues in America, and the character's name is the <b>Black Panther</b>. For those of you that are reading this somewhere besides the good old US of A, the Black Panthers were a revolutionary black power movement that used violence and threats of violence to try to enact social change. The comic book character had nothing to do with the movement and actually predated the movement by several years, but the name still has negative connotations in the US. Then there's the fact that a bunch of BP's enemies are unintentionally racist characters like Man-Ape, and that another chunk of them are things like great white hunters (Kraven) or white men trying to steal Wakandan resources (Klaw), and you've got a whole racial minefield built into possible stories for the character.<br />
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Wakanda is another problem. People sometimes say, "Well, they can do a movie in space, or Atlantis, and they can't do one in Africa?" But Wakanda presents an uncanny valley problem, writ large. It's supposed to be a peaceful, wealthy, technologically advanced, egalitarian society... sitting in the middle of Africa, the most war-torn, impoverished, least technologically advanced continent in the world, where ethnic clashes still happen. There are literally still genocides going on there. Back when Coming to America came out, I remember reviewers basically saying, "Hey, if that's an African nation and they're living like that, what is happening with their subjects? How much of that opulence is on the back of the poor in their country?" And then you expand it further. If Wakanda is more technologically advanced than America or Europe, and as wealthy, and they're just sitting there and not doing anything to help the continent around them, that's bad. I mean, on a moral level, that's really bad, and then it creates a cognitive dissonance that's bad for the movie.<br />
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So, how do you make a good BP movie that avoids all of these problems? I'll be honest, it's a tough nut to crack. Here's what I would do:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We'll get you in a movie yet, guys.</td></tr>
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During Avengers 2, there's a brief flash of the great nations of the Marvel universe, each with their own set of heroes fighting off their own section of Ultron's robots: The UK (MI-13), China (People's Defense Force), Wakanda, Canada (hi, Alpha Flight!), Latveria, etc. Some of these might not be available due to rights issues, etc., but we could sub in ones we need to.<br />
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The post-credits sequence is Nick Fury in the Wakandan throne room with T'Chaka, T'Challa's father. If possible, I'd get Denzel for T'Chaka, in the same way the studio got Anthony Hopkins to play Odin for Thor. Fury is asking T'Chaka to enter into a defensive pact with SHIELD, saying something like, "You can see that the threats to our world transcend national boundaries. In times of great need, can we count on the support of Wakanda and the Black Panther?" T'Chaka pauses and says, "No. Wakanda will take care of Wakanda, as we always have. We are not your puppets. You go and take care of your people." A stunned and angry Nick Fury walks out, as T'Challa sneaks into the hallway and he and Nick exchange a few words, ending with, "I love my father, but he is a stubborn man. Let me talk to him." End movie.<br />
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Wakanda, in the Marvel movieverse, has closed itself off from other nations, with limited diplomatic contact for over 100 years for... whatever reason. Go back as far as they need to to find a reason for isolationism; the British Empire's expansions into Africa should work. The Black Panther movie itself is a coming of age (sort of; T'Challa's already a 20- or 30-something man at this point) story for T'Challa, where he sees his father die to court intrigue and ultimately assumes the mantle of the Black Panther. Figure that somewhere in there is Ulysses Klaw, former SHIELD agent turned weapons dealer, and Man-Ape or someone similar (preferably with less racially-charged iconography), with T'Challa retaking the throne and beginning to lead his people in tentative steps back into contact with America and the rest of the world, including a call to Nick Fury with lines about "Wakanda will never be a puppet, but we will stand with you when it is in our interests" or something similar. The post-credits scene is the recruitment of Klaw by ... someone, maybe Baron Zemo, if he ends up in the Winter Soldier movie, into a group of individuals that have a bone to pick with the Avengers, with some namedropping of folks that will let the fans know this is the formation of the Masters of Evil.<br />
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Obviously, there's a lot of ways they could go with the Black Panther movie. But they need to do something with it, and they need to start moving on it soon.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437362285081996455noreply@blogger.com1