Carol Kalish died on September 5 from heart failure at the tragically young age of 36. She was Vice President of New Product Development at Marvel Comics, spending the last 10 years of her life aggressively marketing Marvel Comics to comic-book specialty stores. Like JFK, the adoration heaped upon her has proved far more voluble after her death than during her life, and she is currently being mythologized in the pages of Comics Buyer's Guide. Professionals, from creators to retail store owners, have been eulogizing her in practically every issue from then to now; genuine private sorrow has turned sickeningly into public blubbering that, aided and abetted by CBG's editorial yahoos who have splashed letters ranging from the trivial and inarticulate to the ignorant and incoherent, has resulted in nothing less than sensationalizing her death, exploiting the crude sentimentality of its readership, and, sad to say, distorting and falsifying Kalish's contribution to the profession.

I knew Carol Kalish and Richard Howell -- who has been coyly referred to as her companion throughout the canonizing process, the term "boyfriend" apparently being too gender-specific for our enlightened age -- since at least 1977. They were guests in my home in 1978 when, if memory serves, they were editing Comics Feature for Irjax-New Media, the only company about which I can say that working for Marvel Comics was a moral step up. I saw Kalish occasionally over the next decade at conventions and trade shows, and we remained cordial if distant; I liked her personally, respected her intellect, and abominated the uses to which she put both. Shilling for Marvel wasn't, in my view, a responsible use to which personality and intellect should be put.

I have no doubt that Kalish did her job brilliantly. She collected knowledge like a sponge, transforming it into expertise; her mind was, quite simply, better, her instincts quicker, than anyone else's in an analogous position within the comics business. Listening to her give a sales presentation to an audience of retailers was a bit chilling. Her pitches were invariably pragmatic, cold-blooded, and "right" -- "right" in the sense that the pitches would almost surely result in moving units of product through the distributor food-chain and into the hands of consumers.

Of course, her job was to sell as much semi-literate junk to a gullible public as humanly possible. Her gift -- or genius -- was in exploiting markets, manipulating public taste, pandering to the lowest common denominator. She was, in an odd sort of way, forthright about the crassness of her employer's marketing methods. Once I witnessed a retailer timidly question Marvel's strategy of filling their comics with sex and violence; Kalish's reply, which was almost refreshingly free of the specious nod to morality to which less assured marketing tacticians would resort, was that little boys liked sex and violence and Marvel was in the business of selling comics to little boys. Hence and therefore.

This is what I meant by chilling; there was an irreducible logic to her arguments that were irrefutable (except on unprofitable and therefore irrelevant moral grounds).

Collectively, the letters in CBG praising Kalish offer a glimpse into the popular mind, its worship of managerial competence disconnected from moral direction, its need to inflate professional skill into private virtue, its unfortunate tendency to turn bonafide personal devastation into bathos, its compulsion to jump on a bandwagon regardless of relevance or appropriateness.

Most of the letters are embarrassingly insubstantial, the anecdotes trite, the praise hollow and generic: for her "business savvy and drive," her "enthusiasm, her generosity, and her good humor," her "wonderful balance of idealism and pragmatism," her "wit and grace," and so forth. Peter David, for example, devoted an entire column to her that read more like a trailer to a Neil Simon comedy than a heartfelt reminiscence. (Compare it to Bhob Stewart's magisterial and moving recollections of Wally Wood in Comics Journal #70). He was so stunned by the death of his friend that he was, he tells us solemnly, unable to write more than one page of X-Factor that week, which is a ludicrous way to convey one's grief, however accurate. It isn't the sincerity one questions, just the ability to convey it with eloquence or dignity.

The reader is overwhelmed by sheer quantity. Bob Matson of Comics Unlimited wrote, "She would listen to your idea, grasp its essentials, evaluate the potential, look for flaws, provide suggestions, absorb feedback, suggest improvements, absorb feedback, offer comments, etc." David Scroggy engages in grandiloquent gobbledygook when he refers to her as "one of the comic book marketplace's true pioneers" who "gained insights and dispensed information helping to define the parameters of this uncharted market that held the future of the comic book field in its tiny fingers." Jeff Gelb referred to her as "a comics visionary" based upon a half-hour conversation in which she proffered ideas such as "Sports comics, soap opera comics, Spanish comics, Biblical comics -- she was bubbling over with ideas, and all of them were good ideas!" (Aside for the fact that these are all old ideas, done by hack publishers in the '30s and '40s, one can just imagine their artistic execution under the Marvel imprint.)

Simple professional quid pro quo courtesies are transmogrified into universal decencies. Witness an anecdote from Mark Evanier: "I asked her if she had time, while she was in town, would she swing by the little comics shop and give the guy there a little encouragement and advice? She didn't have to do it: She was on her time, not Marvel's. But Carol not only loved comic books, she also loved people who loved comic books."

And: "Small wonder that the business never knew that she was a person of integrity who never said, 'This is a good comic book' unless she meant it." This is disingenuously put. Kalish would rarely refer to a comic as "good," but rather as "saleable," "good" having no meaning in the marketing lexicon. But I happen to know as a fact that Kalish would promote comics she hated. She was honest in a way; on an occasion or two when I would needle her about a particularly awful comic she was boosting, she'd usually admit its awfulness in what was meant to be a sotto voce, but ultimately justify it on the principle of supply-and-demand, the last refuge of the hustler.

A relevant anecdote is reated in an advertisement from Eastern News:

As our entry into the world of comics was somewhat tumultuous, Carol was always there, always available, putting things in perspective. After several puzzling conversations regarding what constitutes a distasteful comic book vs. a "clean" (whatever clean means) comic book, she gave us a tip which we repeat to ourselves time and time again, in order to maintain sanity. She said, "You will learn that certain things will never make sense."

Kalish, who I have no reason to believe was anything other than decent and personable in her personal relations, devoted her professional life to expanding the hegemonic power of a corporation that already owns all the distributors and most of the retailers, and whose shrewd marketing efforts no doubt contributed to the recent eight million-copy sale of a single X-Men comic. Nothing written about her belies this. We should consider CBG's memorialization of Kalish not only shallow and trivial, but a lie by omission on a grand scale.

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