(Commentary) Damn, but it's getting early in the morning. Let's take a quick dip into the ¡Journalista! inbox before calling it a night.
My essay "The Trouble With Marvel" brought in several letter. Our first one begins with an unrelated correction:
"A few days back you mentioned the artist of Lone Wolf was teaching some where. Kazuo Koike is actually the writer, not the artist. Goseki Kojima was the artist and probably 85% or so of what made Lone Wolf great.
"Your stuff on Marvel is interesting and perceptive. The Journal should run it as a text piece. One point you haven't mentioned though is the role that pricing plays in bookstore sales. My perception is that the general public is very put off by current comics and graphic novel prices. TokyoPop and compact Viz books offer roughly 200 pages for $8 - $10 while Marvel and DC are MUCH higher. The current trend with the "Big Four" is to publish books that are even more expensive than the cost of the individual issues contained within. It frustrates the hell out of me cuz it has a real cooling effect on sales even in comics shop (plus I don't like feeling like a sleezeball). I'd love to see stats breaking sales down among price categories.
"Of course, confusing the issue are certain series or books that can easily sell at higher prices due to popularity (Sandman) or perceived value (large books like Jimmy Corrigan)."
I don't really have much in the way of an answer -- as you noted, there are several books that sell well despite the high price, and I simply wouldn't know enough about what I was talking about to address the issue. This brings us to our second letter:
"In the weblog's "The Trouble with Marvel," you wrote:
" '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.'
"This statement is a bit naïve, in my opinion. There are quite a few book publishers out there who still routinely screw their talent over using accounting methods that would easily put the creative accounting of Hollywood companies to shame. A close friend of mine is a talented writer of non-fiction historical material with about 10 books under his belt. After getting established, he was normally paid half of a flat fee when his book idea was approved, and the remainder upon acceptance. Then, if the book was a strong seller, he would allegedly get a percentage of 'the profits.' Well, apparently the books were never made any money -- even though they almost always sold out their print runs, because in all but one case, he never got any more payments (and even in that case, the supplemental payment was minimal). This was bad enough, but when my friend explained that from his flat fee he had to underwrite the cost of purchasing his photographic imagery and research material, I couldn't believe it. A book might take him 3-6 months to write, the photos and other materials might cost him close to $1,000, yet his total payment from the publisher might be $6,000 -- slave wages, in my opinion. You could damn near make more money working at McDonald's. The reason he put up with such abuse is the same reason an actor or a comic book artist does -- these folks are hoping to build up a resume and waiting for that big break where they can jump from the small time to the big time. With that in mind, I think it is misleading for you to paint the book industry in such rosey terms. It, like the comic book biz, film biz and some other popular culture industries, can be a predator-infested pool for young, unsuspecting talent. And, like in real life, only a tiny fraction of the hatchlings may ever make it to maturity."
You're right that I should have been a little more circumspect in my depiction of the book-publishing industry, but there are levels of corruption to all this: sure, there are sleazebags and incompetent businessmen in every profession. Nonetheless, work-for-hire is far less prevalent in the regular booktrade, and I think my basic point, while perhaps painted with too broad a brush, still stands.
The whole "Marvel ratings" controversy brought in several letters as well. Our first is rather critical of the brouhaha:
"The thing that irritates me about these midwestern retailers who are up in arms about the adult content in The Eternal is that they've suddenly retconned (to use a term that these fanboys might understand) the fact that the MAX imprint is inherently an adult imprint. Several of them have whined about get 'adult content' (ie: R-rated content) in what to them was solicited as a 'mature readers' (ie: PG-13-rated content) when Marvel has all along used the MAX imprint for the very type of content that they object to, whether it was solicited as 'mature readers' or not. U.S. War Machine, their kickoff title, featured nudity. War Machine, Grant Ennis's hilarious cold war spoof Fury and other titles have featured George Carlin-level language and other sexual situations. They use the huge label similar to the recording industry's warning label for the very reason that the imprint consists of work that is primarily 'adult' in nature. If these retailers are taken aback by the nudity in The Eternal, IMO, it's because they haven't done their homework and familiarized themselves with the fact that MAX has always been an 'adult content' imprint.
"Marvel does a lot of asinine things on an almost daily basis (and for that reason alone I hate to be defending them) -- however, not giving Bible-belt retailers sufficient warning of content is not one of them. The only reason that the MAX books aren't offered in Diamond's Adult Previews supplement is because Marvel is one of the five front-of-the-book publishers through which Diamond maintains its unethical monopoly of the direct market. And for that reason, it's not likely that MAX books (or their Vertigo and Eye of the Storm counterparts at DC) are going to be relegated to the Adult Supplement any time soon. Nor, really, should they be -- because they're generally 'R-rated,' not 'X-Rated.' These retailers are just going to have to suck it in and read (or at least skim) all of their books with any sort of a printed advisory so that they can be sure that they can censor their customer bases to their own hypocritically restrictive satisfaction.
"After all, it's not the publishers' job to satisfy the biggest whiners among their retailer base when those whiners are not representative of the views of the retailers nationwide. Most retailers in content-sensitive areas of the country that I've seen rack everything with any sort of an advisory together in a 'mature readers' area as a matter of course. The few that bother to carry pornography like Eros books (which I personally have no problem with other than the complete lack of artistry of pornographers not based in Europe) even cordon off porn into its own area separate from non-pornographic mature/adult titles. So again, I have no sympathy for these retailers' lazy, ignorant alarm over the MAX titles' adult content. It's not as if they weren't warned -- just that they weren't warned to their own satisfaction. And why should publishers cater to the prickly whims of the most irrational (and, not-so-coincidentally smallest) segment of their retailer base when those retailers can't be bothered to do the most basic homework -- namely, familiarizing themselves with the product that they sell?"
The only thing I should really respond to is the whole idea of Diamond's "unethical monopoly" -- while I think the notion of exclusivity as practiced by the company does look a bit thuggish given their status as the Direct Market's only distributor, I should nonetheless note that the present situation is not of Diamond's making. It was Marvel's disastrous attempt to circumvent the distributors with Heroes World, followed by Image's signing with Diamond rather than Capital City or any of the other players in the Distributors Wars of the 1990s, which led to the present state of affairs. The whole thing basically fell into Steve Geppi's lap by ridiculous chain of circumstance. I don't see how you can hold them accountable for that, however lamentable the situation may be.
Our final correspondent takes the opposite view on the suitability of Marvel's content, regardless of the label:
"Speaking of immature 'mature readers' content being sold to kids, I was quite stunned to come across a copy of X-Men: Phoenix in the comic shop recently. I haven't read Marvel in a long time but was slightly intrigued by an X-Men book that looked nothing like an X-Men book. Have you seen this thing? No idea what the plot is about, but the story is about two impossibly voluptuous teenage superhero-type girls, mostly fighting with each other. The most apparent superpower they have is the ability to pose in overtly sexual positions in each and every action scene, clad in the thongiest of thong-style 'uniforms', and in most panels the thong is cleverly tucked out of sight so that while you know the character is clothed in all the right places, the angle of view is such that she doesn't appear to be. This is as close to girl-on-girl porn I've ever scene in and I'm amazed that it's coming from Marvel and not one of the other less scrupulous publishers. One would expect that a company relying on the largess of the middle American movie-going public to keep it in business wouldn't risk it with a book that could cause a PR nightmare if middle American moms got a look at it."
And there you have it. Like the sidebar says, send email to weblog@tcj.com -- all email is considered anonymous unless you volunteer otherwise, and assumed printable unless you say otherwise.
