Comics, Seriously

This was originally written in 2007 for Moli.com, a hybrid business-social site, now defunct, that published a substantial amount of original content. I was business editor. This was the first part of an abortive series on comics creators, never completed due to the site's demise.

The makers of comic books are all powerful. With a flick of their wrists, they create and destroy universes, cheat death, shatter the time barrier, and imbue mere mortals with powers far beyond those of mortal men. But despite their heroic demeanor and soaring imaginations, many of these omnipotent, omniscient Masters of Reality have been broke, exploited, and demoralized victims of corporate oppression. Occasionally, some rise up to fight this injustice and subjugation.

Our story begins many years ago ...

As content, comics are now a primary source of material for blockbuster movies. But the business of comics is just that: a business, albeit a rapidly changing one. Once upon a time, there were many companies producing comics. But for the last 40 years or so, the best-known characters like Spider-Man, Superman, the Fantastic Four, Batman, the Hulk, and others, have come from two companies: Marvel and DC. Sales of traditional pamphlet-sized, individual "comic books" have dropped sharply over the last decade, while the sales — and mainstream cultural acceptance — of hard- and soft-cover compilations, as well as original "graphic novels," are ascendant.

If you grew up reading comics in the '60s or '70s, you were regaled with tales of the Merry Marvel Bullpen, a wondrous place where all the artists drew their comics while laughing and kibitzing with writer/editor Smilin' Stan Lee. They had a grand time.

Turns out the bullpen was essentially a myth. Few, if any, artists hung around the office, except to pick up a check and a new assignment. They toiled from home, or from their own rented studios. That's the way it's still done. Most of the creative work in comics is performed by freelance writers and artists on a work-for-hire basis, with the companies retaining ownership of the story, the characters (old and new), and any derivative works, like movies, TV shows, cartoons, lunch boxes, ring-tones — whatever. Creators are sometimes offered a slender sliver of the pie, but paying actual royalties to actual creators is a relatively recent innovation.

Years after signing away his rights to the iconic character, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel couldn't even get a writing assignment from DC or any publisher. His partner, Joe Shuster, was legally blind and couldn't draw, so he toiled as a messenger in Manhattan and lived in semi-poverty. Marvel comics artist Jack "King" Kirby, at minimum responsible for the original design (if not the actual creation) of the Fantastic Four and nearly every other Marvel character, was forced into pleading, threatening, and finally shaming Marvel into returning a fraction of his original drawings — those that hadn't already been lost, stolen, or destroyed.

"All I know is that I own my drawings, but they've got them, and they know that I own them," he told The Comics Journal back in 1986. "They know, and they're holding them arbitrarily. They'll grab a copyright, they'll grab a drawing, they'll grab a script. They're grabbers — that's their policy. They can be as dignified as they like. They can talk in lofty language, although they don't usually ... not to me [laughter]. They can act like businessmen. But to me, they're acting like thugs."

And this was Kirby, the King of the Comics! Mere mortals, and just plain journeyman artists and writers, have been treated far worse.

While it's legal and practical for publishers to exploit (in the positive sense of the word) their intellectual property, until quite recently these companies have also exploited their freelance writers and artists, paying on a per-page basis with none of the benefits typically accorded salaried employees, such as health insurance, paid vacations, holidays, etc. When a group of veteran writers organized in the mid-1960s and asked for basic health insurance, DC's reaction was to abruptly cut off their work — in effect, firing them. That was the end of that little uprising.

Modest improvements were made over time, including the advent of creator-owned properties and shared trademarks, royalties, and payment for reprints. Most of the advances were incremental and isolated until 1992.

Before that important year, the hegemony of Marvel and DC had been challenged by a handful of smaller publishers: Dark Horse, First, Pacific, Eclipse, Malibu, Comico, Valiant, and others (all of which are now out of business except Dark Horse, whose close ties with film properties like The Mask, Time Cop, and other Hollywood productions augment and support their print ventures). Some of the indies produced books with production values equal to or better than the majors, though the quality of the stories and art varied greatly. Distribution was inconsistent, at best. They were less a threat to the Big Two and more of a farm system for new talent.

But in 1992, seven of Marvel's hottest artists (Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Mark Silvestri, and Jim Valentino) met with the company's management and announced the formation of their own publishing entity, Image.

Jim Lee told author George Khoury in Image Comics: The Road to Independence, "There was a wide, wide rift between how we perceived ourselves and our value to the company as creators, and [how] they valued us as creators, and I think they felt that they would survive without us. And they did, ultimately. They took a hit for ... several years because I think they underestimated what Image would become."

Image began to publish books written and drawn by the rebel alliance. At first Malibu distributed the comics. After learning they were paying Malibu for services that they could handle themselves, like dealing with printers and other vendors, Image distributed the books themselves.

But Image wasn't even a publisher in the traditional sense. It didn't own the copyrights, trademarks, or characters. It was (and is) more of a collective, with each of the then-six (Portacio dropped out) shareholders owning their own creative properties and calling the shots. The effect of Image's entry into the marketplace was immediate; initial sales of their books were quite high, even surpassing DC's volume, albeit briefly. Comics featuring their creations — Spawn, The Savage Dragon, Wildcats, and others — sold in the millions (!), and the Image founders became quite wealthy, especially for comic artists.

It's worth pointing out that these Image founders were all artists, and not writers; none wrote their own tales, though some had already begun either scripting or "plotting" the stories they drew at Marvel in collaboration with an editor or a "scripter," who penned dialogue to match the action depicted in the drawings.

In the wake of Image's success, several groups of writers and writer-artists also tried forming similar publishing collectives, but none gained traction and all were abandoned.

Image itself didn't stay together. Jim Lee's Wildstorm imprint was wholly acquired by DC in 1998. Lee is still ostensibly in charge of the creative side, but DC manages the business, which frequently involves creative decisions, too.

Marc Silvestri's Top Cow Productions left Image in 1996 but returned shortly after Image founder Rob Liefeld was voted out by the other partners over a variety of complaints and conflicts. Top Cow regularly works with Marvel. Lee and Liefeld have also drawn books for their old company, though since the DC acquisition, Lee's work has mostly appeared under that company's banner.

The comics industry is subject to the same competitive forces faced by most businesses, including consolidation. Image, though originally formed as a means to empower and enrich its creators, found that they still had bills to pay, payrolls to make, and profits to turn. Business is business; it's revealing that nearly all of Image's current books are written and drawn by non-partners.

But creators still seek to create businesses to serve their needs — and not the other way around.

The latest, artist Steve Rude, is a journeyman "artist's artist." In an upcoming post, we'll explore the secret origins of his new company, Rude Dude Productions, which one skeptical veteran editor termed "a suicide mission." We'll see.

© 2007, 2008 The Pachter Family Trust. Originally appeared on www.Moli.com.

Comic Wars

Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over The Marvel Comics Empire — And Both Lost. Dan Raviv. Broadway Books. 320 pages.

By Richard Pachter

The business of comic books is a fascinating one, in many ways a microcosm of American industry. It all began in the early part of the last century as a means of using otherwise idle color presses. Its original "content" was compilations of previously published newspaper cartoons. But when these compilations sold well, a new industry quickly formed, and original material was required.

With the success of its first genuine star, Superman (whose strip was a cut-and-paste job originally intended for newspaper syndication), the need for new strips exploded. Scores of new publishers seemed to appear overnight. Assembly-line principles produced thousands of pages of comics by editors, writers, pencil artists, ink embellishers and colorists in "bullpens" based mainly in New York City, the center of the American publishing industry.

Fast forward. By the late '40s and early '50s, this once-thriving business hit on hard times. The number of publishers were down to a handful, decimated by wartime paper shortages, then a politically motivated attempt to tie comics to a rising youth crime rate — as if "juvenile delinquents" were avid readers! The growing popularity of television didn't help sales either. By the 1960s, most of the survivors sold out to larger corporations. And as consolidation continued, one of the largest remaining comics companies, Marvel, was a ripe target.

The scene is then set as Dan Raviv's book, due out next week (on the eve of the release of the Spider-Man movie), opens:

"Ronald O. Perelman — America's richest short, bald, forty-six-year-old chain-cigar-chomper — seemed to have a delicious deal when he bought Marvel Entertainment Group in January 1989. This was not a hostile takeover. It was simply a matter of negotiating a fair price for a property that seemed to have untapped potential.

The owner dumping Marvel was New World Entertainment, a Hollywood production company that garnered very limited payoffs from made-for-television movies featuring the Incredible Hulk and other Marvel comics superheroes. New World had gone flat and wanted to pump itself up with new genres of TV and movies. So Marvel was on the auction block, and when Perelman saw that half a dozen companies were making bids he hardly needed to check his credit line. He simply outbid the others at $82.5 million. The delicious part was what Wall Street calls leverage: He had to put up only a small percentage of the money. All the rest was somebody else's."

It's an interesting account — up to a point. The problem is, the book is about deals. Raviv relishes the subject, but most of the, well, color of the comics business is essentially missing. The various wheelers and dealers (Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad) are a bunch of rich guys playing with bonds, zero coupons and leverage: boring stuff irrespective of the specifics of the business.

Raviv, a distinguished journalist whose distinctive — and breathless — reports for CBS Radio are always sharp, unfortunately fails to elicit much interest from the reader as he describes interminable exchanges of faxes, attorneys' letters, impromptu meetings and the like. Also absent is any real knowledge of comics on the part of the author. For example, not even journeyman artist Sal Buscema's mother would call him "one of the great Marvel artists" as Raviv apparently does.

Similar errors appear throughout, but that's not the big problem with Comic Wars. Although a current Marvel exec recently confided that he's having a lot of fun with the book, the rest of us will have to look elsewhere for tales to astonish. 

Originally published in The Miami Herald