|
PIPELINE COMMENTARY AND REVIEW #65
30 August 1998
by Augie De Blieck Jr.
http://www.nic.com/~augie/pipeline
ORGANIZING YOUR COMICS
I'm happy to say I've had a lot of reaction to last week's column. A
lot of you have very interesting ways to store your collection. I hope
to get to a lot of them in a future column, or at least sprinkle some of
the stories in a number of future columns. I think you'd be surprised.
DC/WILDSTORM
This week, Michael Doran's NEWSARAMA, via Mania ( http://www.mania.com )
is reporting on a rumor that DC is set to buy WildStorm. If you haven't
read the story, go there now and read it. Then come back here.
The thing is, I don't doubt the story. Jim Lee's become more and more a
business man. Just like Marc Silvestri (who's taking another 12 month
hiatus -- this time to devote energy to media crap) and Rob Liefeld
(who's set to write and direct movie crap), he's taken time away from
his own creative endeavours to grow a business. There are tie-ins with
video games and collectible card games. He's produced an animated movie
(Gen13) and then sold it to Disney for distribution (coming in May
supposedly, now). Then he stretches out to Cliffhanger and Homage, the
latter of which is alive only for ASTRO CITY anymore, with the news that
LEAVE IT TO CHANCE is dead in the water now.
So he tries to get back to his creative roots and comes up with DIVINE
RIGHT. He sees it as a small project, lasting maybe twenty monthly
issues. It doesn't take too long to realize he can't keep up the pace.
Why not? I'd imagine more business considerations. He's president of a
company, at this point.
So if he wants to get back to the drawing board, there's one easy way to do that:
Get rid of the business headaches. Sell the now overly large and
burdensome company to a larger company that has organization, the
financial backing of a huge conglomerate, and would be willing to bring
him in under friendly and enthusiastic terms. Plus, it would be
something new for him. I don't think Jim Lee has ever worked for DC.
So this might be a very good move. It's more than just a need for
editors. It's a need for organization.
This also is not the death-nell of Image. This isn't proof, should it turn out to be
true, that Image is dead, or never was. Image was designed as a way for a group
of artists to publish what they want as they want it. A central office was set up to
do the distribution and much of the paperwork for them. Unfortunately, certain
artists had delusions of grandeur: Todd M., Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, and Jim
Lee. Instead of being happy producing comics that kids will love, they wanted to
be the next Marvel. Despite their protestations to the contrary and their much-
ballyhooed devotion got creator's rights, it was usually not to be. Ask Marc
Silvestri, who had to cancel one title due to creator's rights issues.
This isn't to say Image is no better than Marvel or DC. No, at least in Image, the
creators are more richly compensated, with says in the spin-offs and power quite
often in the storylines and directions and media tie-ins. If a baseball cap sports art
from a given artist's work, that artist will get paid for it. Unlike at Marvel, where
Todd McFarlane doesn't get so much as a free sample and is not even
consulted when they used his stuff on caps and tee's.
Image is not about these specific 7 guys. Image is a greator concept which has
allowed Erik Larsen and Jim Valentino to do their books, at this point. And only
Erik has done so reliably. If not for Image, Erik could not afford to
do Dragon. If not for Erik, Image would be a joke. I do seriously
believe that.
Maybe at this point, it's a sea-change in the industry and the times more than a
change in Image or its composition. We're in a different world now than when
Image first formed 6 or 7 years ago. Comics don't sell enough to make
that much money. The money is to be had in video games, movies, TV
shows, and animated series. 9 times out of ten, they're utter crap.
Usually, this is due in part to the creator's not giving a damn about
them. (Erik Larsen sold the rights for a Dragon cartoon so he could
have the money to draw more comics. He consulted here and there, and
drew title cards in the second season, but that's about it. He had no
delusions towards being a screenplay writer.) Many times, it's due to
the fact that comic books are just too far out there to be seriously
represented on the TV or movie screen. As bombastic a movie as SPAWN
was, with special effects galore from the big boys at ILM, it still
looks silly as compared to the comic. Malibu's (not Marvel's) THE
NIGHTMAN looks silly on the TV screen. It's embarassing. But it got
renewed, so go fig. The Fantastic Four movie and the JLA TV pilot are
atrocious, from the brief samples I've seen at cons. Alas, not enough
people look natural in that much spandex. (This is a shame on many
levels, but I'll leave my hormones out of this. . .)
So Image functions as a way to allow creators to pursue those options. J. Scott
Campbell would not have been able to control DANGER GIRL's destiny at Marvel
the way he's been able to at Cliffhanger. He controls the horizontal; he controls
the vertical, too. A SPAWN movie would never have been made through Marvel.
And if it had been, it would have been the death of the franchise. (Could you
imagine a Spawn cartoon on Sunday mornings sandwiched between the Iron Man
and Fantastic Four series?)
It's a loose association of creators (at one point, friends) who banded together to
form a company to allow them to pursue their comic goals without anyone else to
dictate anything to them.
And they've changed the industry. Marvel now puts creator credits on the covers of
their books. Malibu tried to recreate Image with Bravura. There've been rumors of
Marvel trying to jump-start Epic up. DC tried a great concept with SOVEREIGN
SEVEN, and is rumored to be ready to make a similar deal with Devin Grayson for
another series in a similar situation. Creators are better credited and better
rewarded now than they were a few years ago.
And now DC stands ready, if the rumor is true, to bring on WildStorm and to
maintain it as a separate division. To allow the creators to remain in control, in
exchange for Jim Lee working exclusively for them. I see this not as a defeat, but
as a victory. It's Jim Lee's company. He has control over it. He can bring it to DC
if he likes. And that DC is ready, willing, and able to accept it, is a sure sign that
Image is a success, to me. It's fostered an $8 million takeover bid
from DC for one portion of it, if the rumor holds. This is not a
sell-out. WildCATs won't magically appear in the Superman titles next
month as if they've always been there.
That having been said, there's one part of this deal that makes me uneasy, if true:
What will Alan Moore do? Will he go back to working (albeit tangentially) for DC?
If not, it will be a shame. To bounce from Awesome to Wildstorm, only to be
bounced back to DC, only to take it all back. But this, too, is the glory of Image:
he's free to take his toys and play elsewhere. He can shop the titles around to
Dark Horse or someone else. This will be interesting. (In the
meantime, I would suggest to all other comic company executives that
they not hire Alan Moore for anything. He's getting to be as bad as
GROO for killing companies in his wake. ;-)
-Augie
|
