(Graphic Novels) Having spent the better part of 2002 attempting to browbeat the comic-book industry into doing what it wants, Marvel seems to be taking a different tack this year. ICv2 features a report that The House That Jack Built¹ has turned a tentative about-face on its misguided policy of encouraging overorders in comic-book shops by refusing to reprint unexpectedly popular comic books, a policy that has had retailers furious for some time now. The company has announced that it will consider reprinting the first issue in its new romance comic, Trouble. In addition, the company is working diligently to ensure that at least some copies of its new, Spider-Man-derived prose novel for teenage girls, Mary Jane, makes its way into Direct Market retailers' hands before the book appears in bookstores on July 2nd.
Marvel's engaged in something of a balancing act, here. On the one hand, the company clearly wants to break into the bookstore market, where a wider array of potential readers lies in wait. On the other hand, the company has met with resistance so far; the current king of graphic novels in bookstores, manga publisher TokyoPop, has given Marvel the kind of vicious thrashing the company hasn't seen since it first went head-to-head against DC in the early 1960s. Furthermore, Marvel still depends on the Direct Market for its bread-and-butter sales, and cannot afford to get retailers too angry.
To see this balancing act in action, we turn now to Comic Book Resources, which extensively covered last Friday's Trouble press-conference. Mark Millar had some interesting things to say:
" 'Within comics themselves, within the established market of 330,000 readers, whatever exists out there, there may not be a gigantic market for something exclusively romantic,' commented Millar. 'But, if you can combine it with other successful elements and can do something that appeals to a wide, mainstream audience, then that's what excited me about the possibilities here. For people who like Spider-Man, they get something out of it. This is the first comic I've ever written that my wife read from page 1 to page 22, understood it and quite enjoyed it.'
"Mark was asked if he researched the current state of romance books before beginning on this project. Included in this discussion was reaction to the cover to Trouble #1, which was a 'live cover' depicting two teenage girls in bathing suits, which some fans claimed was pornographic.
" 'I actually did have a good look at this market and when I first saw the covers [to Trouble] I wasn't sure what to make of them until I walked into a book store and actually saw that's what these covers look like [on teen novels today]. It was interesting to see the comic book reaction... It's not pornography. It's exactly what twelve-year-old girls read and it's what their eyes fixate on when they walk into a bookshop. What excited me was that this book could be stacked next to those things, but also stacked along side Origin, Kingdom Come and Marvels. Even those books, as good as they are, not everyone is interested in them or can pick them up. So this is quite a unique thing and a catalyst between the two genre's.' "
This statement is interesting for two reasons:
- Millar placed Marvel's current readership at 330,000 before qualifying the figure as a guess. I'd buy it as such were it not for that extra "3" in the ten-thousands column -- sure sounds like something more than a vague, uninformed guess, doesn't it? The industry quite famously guards its sales figures on both the publisher and distrubutor levels, and this rare slip, if true, provides as eloquent a reason for coveting the bookstore market as anything you're likely to hear. As much as devotees of the superhero set like to refer to their favorite genre as the comics "mainstream", the fact remains that 330,000 readers in a nation of 270 million people is nothing to brag about. It's like referring to the unicycle as the mainstream in one-wheeled vehicles -- comforting to the faithful, but ultimately a ridiculous statement.
This may sound like empty snarking, but it's actually central to the subject under discussion. The Direct Market, the distribution network which services comics shops all over North America, is in pretty dire straits right now; while ten years ago sales of comic books through this network often approached the upper six figures, the decline in readership for superhero comics has led to a situation where the number of comics selling more than 70,000 copies per month can now be counted on the fingers of two hands. While comics-shop retailers often talk of "recovery", evidence for this is difficult to come by -- it's hard to see such talk as anything but denial in action.
- At the outset of the press conference from which the above quote was taken, the participants made a point of noting that Trouble's teenage main characters were originally meant to be Spider-Man's mother and Aunt May, and that the series was meant to depict the circumstances by which Peter Parker's parents conceived him. This is the context in which Millar claims the completed book could be simultaneously stacked alongside teen romance novels as well as "Origin, Kingdom Come and Marvels." It has to be; the impression I get from the press surrounding this book is that it doesn't actually feature superheroes at all, and if it's set before Parker was ever born, there's hardly going to be a way to make the Spider-Man connection explicit within the framework of the story, now is there?
Think about it for a moment. The whole reason that the oh-so-controversial cover was considered "pornographic" when first released was that those making the charge were used to thinking about comics from a Direct-Market point of view; there, the primary purpose of women on comic-book covers is to sexually arouse male readers enough to convince them to buy the comic. In this context, a cover featuring two barely-pubescent girls in bikini tops with sly expressions isn't "pornographic", but rather pedophilic.
In a bookstore market, it's another matter. As Millar notes, the cover is entirely unexceptional if your target audience is twelve-year-old girls. Of course, such girls by and large don't shop in comic-book shops to begin with, which is I suspect why the whole "Peter Parker" meme was raised at the press conference -- to distract retailers from Trouble's purpose. Early on, Marvel CEO Bill Jemas stated that he didn't expect retailers to order this book in huge quantities. I suspect he has entirely different hopes for the bookstore market. Likewise for the new Mary Jane book.
See what I mean by balancing act? Marvel needs better sales for its comics if it's to continue being a profitable company once the superhero movie fad fades. As the Direct Market continues to dwindle, its ability to keep the company profitable dwindles too. Last January I wrote that those making their living selling to the comics shops have two choices: either retailers have to somehow be lured into providing a greater variety of material in order to attract a wider customer base, or a way has to be found to get the material into another market before the present market collapses. With Trouble, Marvel takes a small but significant step in both directions.
Each path has its own set of seemingly intractable problems for the company. Take the Direct Market first. The comics shops have built-in structural and ideological weaknesses which tend to retard any and all efforts to build up their customer base. It's almost like the old joke from the Blues Brothers movie: "We got both kinds of music here, country and western!" The monomania towards superhero comics may please the market's diehard customers, but such cliquishness tends to put off almost anyone who doesn't share its adherants' obsession. Don't believe me? Listen to the opinion of someone deep enough in the profession to know -- Marvel's own editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada. In a recent email exchange reproduced in Rich Johnston's "Waiting For Tommy" column, Quesada notes:
"Bill J[emas] is absolutely right, it's not about a fear of success meaning a fear of impending bust, there's a bit of that but what it really is is a fear of people invading the nice little sanctity of the comic book club. Retailers don't keep dirty stores because they don't know how to clean, they all most likely have nice neat homes, they keep the dirt there as a barrier to keep the invaders out. This is revenge of the nerds to the highest level and it's not even being done on a conscious level. These are the geeks that joined the AV squad to be with other geeks, they don't want the football players or the cheerleaders joining their little deserted island, their safe haven on this planet."
Let's step around the fact that Jemas himself has fueled such fears by encouraging retailers towards another goddamn speculator bubble; Quesada has a point, here. A plurality -- not all, but probably a majority -- of comics-shop owners got into the business in the first place in order to convert an obsession with superhero comics into a livelihood. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but the result is oftentimes an almost hostile attitude towards anything which diverges from said obsession coming through the front door. I'm not even talking about indy comics or manga, here; the occasional contempt I've seen retailers display over the years towards such borderline products as Neil Gaiman's Sandman (and its Goth-leaning fanbase) has left me befuddled time and again. There's almost a whiff of heresy about the whole affair, as though the slightest deviation in funnybook orthodoxy would render the enterprise pointless from top to bottom. I've lost track of the number of times I've advocated a greater variety of material in the shops while surfing through comics-related message boards, only to find myself facing accusations that I "hated superheroes". How does one get from Point A to Point B in that little logic-loop? I'm still puzzling that one out.
To be fair, it seems pretty obvious that the higher-ups at Marvel understand the consequences of this attitude. Responding to a offhand remark I made recently, journalist and weblogger Franklin Harris offered a dead-on summary of the recent trends displayed by The House That Jack Built:
"Actually, I think it's becoming clear that most of Marvel's characters function best as hybrids, mixing superheroics with other genres. We see that with Daredevil (police procedural), Hulk (Hulk meets The X-Files) and New X-Men (soap opera/sci-fi). I believe this strategy works because, from the outset, the Marvel characters were a 'real world' alternative to DC's characters. As Stan Lee likes to say, if you live in New York, you half expect to see Spider-Man swing past when you look out your window."
I think Harris tends to overemphasize the innate "realism" of the Marvel universe; Stan Lee's big innovation has always struck me as introducing two-dimensionality into a previously one-dimensional genre. It's a relative thing, I suppose. That said, his basic point is correct; Marvel has in fact been trying to expand the superhero mythos in such a way as to sneak in other genres under the retailer/reader radar. The results vary wildly -- New X-Men succeeds aesthetically by ditching the accumulated clichés of the superhero schema (goofy costumes, black-and-white motivations, and many of the underlying assumptions of the genre), while still keeping most of the basic mechanisms of the form, and as a result is able to graft science fiction and a pop-culture sensibility seamlessly to the book's basic chassis. Bendis' Daredevil, by contrast, is too smart for its own good; while frequently quite readable, the intelligence on display in the writing is undercut by the continued reliance on the genre's goofier tropes, and while the results may appeal to fans, it can be offputting to readers who come to the work with no emotional investment in superheroes. Frank Miller, who revitalized the book over a decade ago, got around this by skipping the cleverness and submerging the series in an almost primal film noir. The technique worked because Miller never asked you to take the work as anything other than an action-adventure joyride, which in turn merged the Mickey Spillane trappings and the Ditko-esque underpinnings without sacrificing either. Bendis brings too much self-conscious sophistication to the project to succeed with the same gambit.
The problem with Marvel's approach is that it plays more to the established reader than the curious onlooker; while a police procedural/superhero hybrid might be acceptable to the faithful, new readers are still going to have to get past their preconceptions to get the meat, and as the sluggishness of superhero graphic-novel sales in bookstores suggests, this is simply asking too much for most readers. A reader looking for a crime story isn't likely to settle for a sorta-crime story when there are alternatives available -- and in today's booksellers market, there are always alternatives available just a couple of shelves over.
The Direct Market puzzle doesn't look any easier to solve when you examine it closely, does it? This conundrum more than anything else is what's driving the vast majority of Marvel's current initiatives, from Tsunami to Epic... which in turn brings us to the bookstore market.
Graphic novels have something of a spotty history in bookstores. While such visionaries as Will Eisner and NBM's Terry Nantier have been pushing the format and trying to place it beyond the Direct Market since the 1970s, it wasn't until the late 1980s and early '90s that booksellers took any real notice. Then, it was a two-pronged push by a handful of art-comics (Maus, Love and Rockets) and a handful of genre comics (Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns) that attracted the attention of the wider world at large. Bookstores took tentative steps towards giving the new format a try, and for a brief moment, it seemed like the rest of the reading public had hepped itself to the quiet revolution that had been brewing in comic-book shops across America.
It didn't last, of course. Faced with a sudden potential for increased sales, publishers from across the spectrum began shovelling anything they could find into a squarebound format, calling it a "graphic novel" and offering it for sale. What genuinely good works as did exist were drowned in a sea of mediocre crap, and the emerging boom became a decisive bust.
It would take another decade before the momentum was regained. Neil Gaiman's Sandman proved to be something of a cult hit in bookstores, and the occasional ground-level artist like Jeff Smith would find limited room on the shelves. On the indy side, a slow trickle of works by the likes of Ben Katchor, Peter Bagge, Adrian Tomine and Seth kept the dim spark alive. Towards the turn of the century, things began to pick up again; Joe Sacco and Chris Ware began collecting awards and positive reviews for their works, Warren Ellis and Derrick Robertson's Transmetropolitan developed a small but devoted cult following, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell finally saw print in collected form, and the longterm diligence of such manga publishers as Tokyopop and Viz began to develop solid audiences in bookstores.
It was really this last trend that wound up pushing things over the top. In the last few years, Japanese comics became the economic engine which made the viability of the graphic novel look less like the result of a few isolated works and more like a steady stream of saleable product. Driven by the popularity of televised Japanese anime among both children and young adults alike, manga volumes have gone on to sell in respectable numbers even after the floodgates were opened and the new releases began piling up. It's hard to overestimate the success of these books -- at the end of last year, manga volumes comprised 23 of the top 25 bestselling titles on BookScan's graphic novels sales charts; last April, the fifth volume of the popular series Chobits became the first manga book to appear on BookScan's Adult Trade Fiction list. Bouyed by this success, manga publishers have all but abandoned the "pamphlet" format preferred by an inexplicably hostile Direct Market -- Dark Horse recently announced that its latest comics would appear directly in paperback, while Viz has stopped publishing traditional comic books altogether.
For "indy" comics publishers, the mainstream booktrade has likewise been a boon. While largely snubbed in the Direct Market, books published by Drawn and Quarterly, Fantagraphics, Slave Labor, Top Shelf and other such publishers have found new homes on bookstore shelves, and produced some rather astonishing successes -- Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan (Pantheon) sold over 80,000 copies despite being a $30 hardcover, while Daniel Clowes' Ghost World and Joe Sacco's non-fiction works Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde became breakout hits for Fantagraphics Books, a company particularly hard-hit by low sales in comic-book shops (Ghost World has sold over 100,000 copies to date, of which roughly a tenth went to Direct Market retailers). Many indy and art-comics publishers now depend on the bookstore trade for half or more of their total sales, while such publishers as Simon & Schuster and Reed Press have expressed a newfound interest in getting into the game themselves.
This time around, the inroads graphic novels have made into the bookstore trade look considerably more permanent than the previous attempt in the late 1980s. The New York Daily News quotes BookScan representatives as stating that the format now accounts for 2.5% of the overall adult fiction market. If that sounds like small-potatoes, consider this -- according to ICv2, $100 million in graphic novels were sold last year, a 33% increase over sales for 2001. Furthermore, it estimates that 2002 sales were evenly divided between the Direct Market and the bookstore trade. While ICv2 is predicting 2003 sales to increase by 20% this year, it is also predicting that the majority of that increase will occur in bookstores rather than comics shops; this despite a current sluggishness in much of the book market.
Which brings us to Marvel Comics. Like virtually every other major comics publisher, Marvel has seen sales in the bookstore market rise. According to the company's 10-K report for 2002, mass market sales reached $7.0 million in 2002, a considerable jump from just $1.1 million in 2001. With this figure in hand, a little creative deduction can explain away the company's desire to make further inroads into the bookstore market. As just noted, the GN market was worth $100 million last year, with half of it in bookstore sales. Of that $50 million, Marvel was therefore able to capture just 14% of the market in 2002. For a company used to dominating the sales arena to the extent Marvel has -- it's generally agreed that Marvel held 41% of the Direct Market last year -- that 14% must look like one piss-poor market share. It's even more difficult to acquire sales-figures for most other comics companies, which are by-and-large privately held and therefore excempt from having to file the sorts of documents that Marvel must, but assuming for the sake of argument that DC does an equivalent business in bookstores and indy/non-genre publishers take up a collective 20% of the playing field, that still leaves a full 50% of the market to publishers of... oh, what is the word? I had it just a moment ago. It starts with an "M"...
However you cut the figures, it's pretty obvious that manga publishers are beating the living crap out of Marvel in the booksellers' arena. The last BookScan figures I was able to get my hands on only covered sales for 2001/2002 and were limited to just a few representative titles, but they seemed to indicate that Tokyopop has been outselling Marvel by an average of three-or-four to one on a book-by-book basis. The fact that manga publishers are capable of such sales -- especially to the lucrative young-adult market, which Marvel had seemingly written off long ago -- has to have whet Bill Jemas' appetite for similar success. Clearly, however, Marvel's current output isn't capable of creating a similar draw amongst the non-DM reading public.
Faced with a market where they were stuck playing second fiddle, Marvel has no choice but to give innovation a shot, however hesitantly. To this end, the company recently announced two competing initiatives, each clearly intended to make the company more competitive on bookstore shelves.
The first was Tsunami, a line of comics meant to appeal directly to manga fans. Eleven titles have been announced to date, each taking a different tack in attempting to attract a non-Marvel readership. The "first wave" involves an exotic romance comic (Namor), a horror comic (Venom), a giant robot comic (Sentinel), a spy thriller (Mystique) and two teen-adventure comics (Human Torch, Runaways). This was followed by a "second wave" featuring a post-apocalyptic thriller (Wolverine: Snikt!), a Kirby-esque sci-fi comic (Inhumans), an "urban" superhero comic (The Crew) and another attempt to re-boot the X-Men continuity without all the extraneous back-story (New Mutants). Most recently announced is the "third wave", of which only the teenage Indiana Jones-style comic Quest has been revealed to date.
The manga influence varies wildly from title to title, but with a few exceptions each attempts to downplay the traditional-superhero aspects of existing characters, while still remaining within Marvel's stable of pre-existing trademarks. Some of the titles are drawn by authentic manga illustrators, some by American artists in the manga style, while still others bear no trace of Eastern comics influence whatsoever. The underlying idea here is to see just how much of the manga influence is required to sell softcovers to the Tokyopop crowd.
The other initiative is a relaunch of Epic Comics, the line first pioneered for Marvel by the late Archie Goodwin in the 1980s. A mix of creator-owned and company-owned comics, the original Epic offered considerably greater autonomy to its artists and resulted in such fondly-remembered titles as Moonshadow and Elektra: Assassin. This second incarnation seems to be a bit less friendly to the concept of creator ownership, but hasn't quite dismissed it altogether; while the first two attempts at articulating Epic's publishing principles met with what could most charitably be described as a mixed reaction, Marvel CEO Bill Jemas has been fairly consistent in his message, if somewhat vague in exactly what that message ultimately means. So near as anyone can tell, Epic will be where creators are given free reign in producing the sort of material the company doesn't usually touch -- though the use of existing Marvel superheroes is encouraged. As for creator ownership, this is as close to a clear statement as the company's issued to date, from Jemas' Marville #7:
"Look at Diamond Distributors' monthly list of the top 300 comics: one or two creator-owned books may find their way into the top 100 for a month or two, but the bulk of these titles dwell at the bottom of the list, selling a few thousand copies, and losing a few thousand dollars, per issue.
"Moreover, from Marvel's point of view, these books don't have much value, because most of the long-term upside opportunity for ancilliary revenues belongs to you, not us."
Jemas goes on to note that this doesn't necessarily mean that Marvel is against the concept of creator ownership, but with qualifiers like these they certainly aren't entirely behind it, either. It's a mixed message, and more than a little suspicious: the first paragraph is as weaselly a statement as you could hope to find, while the second surprises with its brutal honesty.
Take the first paragraph. The principal reason for the preponderance of company-owned titles in the top 100 Diamond bestsellers, of course, is that that's what Marvel and DC have traditionally been in the business of selling; because the overwhelming majority of the Direct Market's customer base is composed of Marvel and DC fans, those two companies have free reign to set the terms of employment for the writers and artists they employ.
This leads us to the second paragraph. Marvel currently has good reason to want those ancilliary revenues. The company is $151 million in debt, due to the gross mismanagement of previous owners whose efforts had left Marvel in bankruptcy court; the majority of those notes come due by the end of the decade. Marvel currently uses licensing monies from various sources (toys, film and television, mostly) to pay this debt down. The publishing division currently comprises just one-fifth of the company's income, and is thus ill-equipped to handle the financial burden independently. Without licensing, the company would likely find itself again seeking bankruptcy protection -- Marvel needs that money, and only an expanding base of intellectual capital can keep it coming.
What's surprising therefore isn't that Marvel seems reluctant to publish creator-owned properties, but that it's willing to consider the concept at all. While the company has only recently begun accepting submissions, a few accounts of attempts by creators to negotiate with it have already surfaced. Take this one by writer Micah Wright, from Rich Johnston's comics-gossip column Lying in the Gutters:
"They also went On and On about the need to turn everything around for TV and Features, which, again depressed me because (a) what makes a good comic and what makes a good movie/tv show are not necessarily the same thing, and (b) they nimbly dodged all of my questions about 'so what if I create a new character for you that you turn into a Spider-Man sized film deal, what kind of money do I see for that?' I consider that to be highly shiver-inducing, especially after my exciting adventures in getting ripped off as an Animation writer."
By all accounts I've heard so far, Marvel intends to use Epic's creator-ownership possibilities primarily as a reward for its own creators, specifically those who've diligently provided the company with new characters and concepts on the work-for-hire plan. Creator-ownership could also be useful in luring popular writers and artists who'd otherwise take their more heartfelt work elsewhere. Used judiciously, Epic could conceivably prove competitive in cutting into other companies' base of creators. Whether they will, however, is another matter.
In the end, the thinking behind Tsunami and Epic may come at a price for the company's publishing division. Work-for-hire is all well and good for conducting business in the Direct Market, but bookstore distribution works by an entirely different set of standards. There, the conditions under which Marvel is used to doing business simply don't exist, and the company's "own-it-all, grab-it-all" philosophy may prove to be more of a liability than an advantage.
A short history lesson is in order here. Up until the 1960s, the financial investment required to produce and distribute comics meant that comic-book publishers wound up setting the terms of debate when dealing with the talent. Work-for-hire -- the practice of demanding that creators sign away all rights to their work, essentially making the company the creator -- was the order of the day, and the few attempts to unionize writers and artists in a concerted effort to demand copyright-ownership and better contracts invariably went nowhere.
Galvanized by the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and '70s, the underground-comix movement produced the first real market where cartoonists were able to maintain ownership of the comics they produced. When the headshops which by and large sold their works began to fade, so did underground comix -- but the seeds of "creators rights" for cartoonists had been planted. With the creation of the Direct Market, the subject came to the forefront, as independent publishers like Pacific, Eclipse and underground-holdover Kitchen Sink used the lure of creator ownership and editorial independence to attract talent that might otherwise have gone to the major companies. During the heydays of the 1980s and early '90s, Marvel and DC began implementing more favorable contracts for its top creators in an effort to stem the tide, and for a brief moment it seemed like comic books were finally about to shake off their sweatshop past.
Things didn't work out that way. The movement suffered a setback during the second speculators' bust and subsequent Distributor Wars of the 1990s, which allowed Marvel to safely shut down its Epic division without worrying about how it was going to attract major talent. As the market contracted, only the top four or five companies could really promise their writers and artists a living wage, thus winnowing the effective competition and putting all the chips back into the hands of the likes of Marvel and DC. Back in a position to demand that its creators bite the bullet and take what they could get, Marvel in particular proceeded to do just that.
It's against this backdrop that Bill Jemas could dismiss creator-ownership and make such cavalier statements as "This is really about creator freedom and compensation much more than creator rights, the deal is right in line if not more favorable than what the other companies offer for 'creator owned properties.' " And why not? He's a man at the top of the Direct Market, speaking to journalists covering the Direct Market in order to reach readers and potential contributors whose only real world of commerce is the Direct Market. Never mind that he's offering a pittance in exchange for a lion's share; he's speaking to the faithful, secure in the knowledge that they'll be happy to serve. Why shouldn't he act like he's holding all the cards?
Answer: because he's attempting to enter the bookstore market, where his cards are far less valuable.
The booksellers market is not the Direct Market. It's a sprawling, decentralized network of competing publishers, distributors and retailers, none of whom hold more than a fraction of marketshare, and all of whom compete with one another to bring the next bestseller to the top of the charts -- and more importantly, to maintain a backlist of perrenial sellers which will attract new readers year after year, the bread-and-butter of any successful publishing house. While nobody's going to give the best contracts to an unknown first-timer, neither are they likely to offer them the kind of highway-robbery deals in which Marvel trades; you never know which of those first-timers is going to go on to steady sales and reliable name recognition, now do you? Authors who strike gold are likely to remember whether or not their publisher tried to screw them the next time their contracts come up for renewal. The writer, not the work, is the intellectual capital everyone's trying to acquire, and one doesn't want to alienate the moneymakers. In the booksellers market, work-for-hire carries an air of sleaze wisely relegated to disposable romance novels and fly-by-night publishers -- and well it should.
This is not to say that the magic of capitalism turned the book trade into some airy "best of all possible worlds" with a pass of Adam Smith's hand, of course. Authors have been agitating for more advantageous working conditions since the first copyright laws were issued in England centuries ago. American author Mark Twain was one of the notables who appeared in Congress in the later half of the 1800s to call for proper copyright protections, and eventually founded his own publishing house to protect his work. The Authors Guild formed in 1919 to provide a voice for writers in legislative bodies and contract negotiations. Organizations like The American Society of Journalists and Authors routinely share information to ensure that their members don't get screwed on the deal. Even in literary genres which sprung from the sleaziest of pulp magazines, there are unions, guilds and associations which have worked tirelessly to uplift their memberships, from science fiction to mystery to cowboy stories. The kinds of battles cartoonists could never quite bring themselves to fight were won decades ago in the book trade. It's a long way from the Direct Market.
Talent, not brand-name, is king in bookstores. Nobody buys "Doubleday novels" or "Penguin novels" the way comics fans used to buy their wares by publisher. Nobody gives a shit who's publishing Tom Clancy or Toni Morrison; should a popular author decide that their contract is insufficient, the trouble taken in walking to a rival publisher when the time comes to renegotiate isn't going to provide much in the way of disincentive. To a certain extent, this principle already exists in the Direct Market; Garth Ennis may write Punisher comics for Marvel, but his next literary collaboration with Preacher artist Steve Dillon is going to be published by DC, where both men know that the end result will have a "© Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon" planted safely in the indicia. Grant Morrison may draw a steady paycheck for New X-Men, but The Filth belongs to him -- and Marvel ain't touching it. Neil Gaiman is writing a work-for-hire series from Marvel in order to finance his efforts to re-secure the rights to Miracleman; that doesn't mean he suddenly finds Marvel's contracts attractive enough to bring them his next American Gods. This principle only gets more dramatic in the book trade.
Marvel isn't even in a particularly advantageous position within the graphic-novel section of the bookstore hierarchy. Right now that place is reserved for Tokyopop by a wide margin, and their most worrisome competitor is Viz, not Marvel or DC. In any case, they've got their own plans to attract talent.
Marvel's approach to bookstore success -- using pre-owned characters to make one's mark, thus ensuring total ownership of any and all profits and ancilliary benefits -- is dictated by the mountain of debt it inherited from Ron Perelman, more than anything else. As stated previously, Marvel is less a publishing house than an intellectual-property farm these days, and its ultimate benefactor is not Barnes & Noble but rather the movie theater and Toys R Us. Because the company has to keep the licensing money flowing or die, it cannot afford too many publishing successes which involve giving half the proceeds to the creators. This motivation drives all else, and if it means publishing takes a back-seat then so be it. How else could you possibly explain Marvel's half-assed presence at the recent BookExpo America? The Pulse's Heidi MacDonald attended this year's BEA, and for the most part returned with nothing but praise for the graphic-novel publishing contingent -- all but one company:
"Finally, Marvel's presence was definitely a let down, consisting of a single table manned by someone who had been working there for approximately 10 days. 'It was befuddling,' said one observer. 'It looked like their booth at San Diego last year,' said another."
I suspect that if it were a gathering of filmmakers and licensing agents, Marvel might've spent more than thirty bucks on the booth.
None of this is to say that Marvel is necessarily destined to fail in the bookstore market. With the right title, and the necessary buzz backing it, anything is possible. That said, the company's ability to work the market to its own advantage seems limited by outside concerns and a need to expend as much of its extra cash in paying down debts rather than taking chances. Marvel's not looking for good books so much as saleable properties, which is why so many of its new initiatives reek so much of High Concept.
All of this brings us, in roundabout fashion, back to Trouble. It's a perfect metaphor for the company's position, when you think about it: an attempt to break into another, possibly more profitable market, it nonetheless retains just enough trace elements of the Marvel Universe to ensure that Mark Millar remains legally replaceable. It mimics the latest advances in modern teen novels (sex, booze and an attempt to deal with "modern issues"), but still feels like it was written by committee; I've had a chance to read the first issue, and frankly I couldn't shake the impression that I was about to watch Archie and Veronica fuck. Series like Love Hina and Chobits work because there's an underlying personality behind the storytelling; their authors have an owner's stake in the property and know that they're in it for the long haul; Millar's work reads like its job is to produce a hit comic which leads to bigger paychecks on better projects. This isn't a formula likely to produce longterm success, but it's the one to which Marvel seems irrevocably wedded. Trouble indeed.
¹ (footnote from first paragraph): I'm referring, of course, to Jack Kirby, who co-founded the Marvel Universe back in the early 1960s. (Back to top)
