Killing the Grizzly #5: Comics Companies
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Comics History Is Written By The Wikipedia: Comics Companies, Extinction Agendas
You know what I miss?
Comico.
Never heard of it? They’re in my mind primarily as the publishers of Matt Wagner’s MAGE.
Let’s see… Wikipedia tells me that they also did Robotech. And Star Blazers. Wonder what impact that had on the history of manga in the United States… Oh, right, and also Matt Wagner’s GRENDEL… oh, right, and, of course, Bill Willingham’s ELEMENTALS.
Here’s what else Wikipedia has to say:
>While Comico had proven to be a serious contender as a
>third major comic company, a decision in mid-1986 spelled
>the end of the comic company: it began to publish to the
>newsstand market. This significantly raised the number of
>prints for each issue, but also increased the number of
>issues being sent back that did not sell. Refunds for those
>returned issues ate into the publisher’s budget very quickly.
>In response to this, Comico began to push out a number of
>new titles, aimed at spreading out the number of returned
>comics between various titles. They also partnered with
>DC Comics to distribute their comics into a wider market.
>With the end of the Mage, Grendel and Robotech series,
>much of the reliable revenue for the company dried up. . . .
>by 1989, Comico was deep into bankruptcy. The company
>stopped printing in 1990, with E-Man #3.>In 1991, the owners of the company sold Comico to
>Andrew Rev, who released the rest of the original staff,
>and began working on relaunching the company.>Most significantly hit were Matt Wagner’s creations Mage
>and Grendel. Mage II: The Hero Defined, expected out in
>1989, was not published until the late 1990s. Both Comico
>and Wagner had jointly copyrighted Mage and Grendel,
>and with Comico in bankruptcy, that half of the copyright
>was claimed as a company asset. Matt Wagner regained
>sole copyright of Grendel in 1993 and, much later, Mage,
>publishing the series through Dark Horse Comics and Image
>Comics respectively. . . . Comico’s line ended in 1997 with the
>Elementals Sex Special vol. 2, #2, illustrated by Frank Quitely.
I’m seeing something happening these days that reminds me a lot of the end of Comico, and I’m not just talking about any one company.
Although certain companies certainly come to mind as soon as I get on this topic, such as Speakeasy.
Speakeasy was going to be the first to publish Wicker Man Studios’ HALF DEAD, although they were going to do it as single issues. Thankfully, the whole thing fell apart right _before_ they would have started printing issue 1.
I know why I think Speakeasy fell apart, but let’s see what Wiki has to say:
>In August 2004, Speakeasy Comics (based in Toronto) was
>founded by Adam Fortier. Previously, Fortier had worked for
>comics publishers Dreamwave Productions (where he revived
>the Transformers license in comics), Devil’s Due Publishing,
>UDON, and IDW Publishing.>In November 2005, it was announced that Speakeasy had
>concluded a financing deal with Los Angeles-based Ardustry
>Entertainment, for a stated two-way purpose: Speakeasy
>would now also develop comics based on licenses brought
>by Ardustry, while Ardustry would represent Speakeasy’s
>comics properties in the entertainment industry (movies,
>videogames, etc.)>However, it was learned later (according to Ardustry’s
>Wayne Williams, who handles Business Affairs for the
>company) that the deal was only an option to buy
>Speakeasy, which expired without materialization. Cash
>flow problems led to Speakeasy’s demise before they could
>materialize various lucrative licensing deals, such as with
>HBO (The Sopranos or Deadwood).>At 3:30pm EST February 27, 2006 . . . announced by email
>the immediate closure of Speakeasy, with all March-solicited
>books still shipping, April and May’s being tentative, and
>June’s being cancelled. The company, however, didn’t file
>for bankruptcy, officially in order to try and pay people owed
>money.
Hmm. That goes right along with what I thought, except they left out one thing I would have added: They got too big too fast, and I’m not using Big as a synonym for Successful, as people sometimes do. They grabbed too many books at once– more than they could handle, and they didn’t sell lucratively enough, although (A) I don’t know what would have been enough, and (B) some of their most successful titles left them for bigger companies relatively quickly.
Go back and read that last paragraph again– I’ll be working with it throughout this piece.
Okay, now that you’re back, let’s proceed. All the creators who were with Speakeasy (were there many? Yes there were. Not only did they get too many projects faster than they could remain successful, they also had no house properties of their own– it was all creator-owned stuff. “Hooray!” you may say. Yes, but that meant that they had nothing of their own, either — not even a solid brand image.
Some of the comics started just self-publishing. What does THAT say about a publisher, that someone leaves a practically brand-new publisher and decides to just become their own company instead?
Some went to Image, went to Markosia… one went, after a long time, to Boom. One ended up at Ape. One ended up at Villard– who no longer want genre work, but stuff more like Persopolis.
And, of course, HALF DEAD went to the Dabel Brothers, who were going to use it to start their own creator-owned line of horror, and then they made the deal with Marvel.
Contrast this with what happened with Malibu, and its Ultraverse shared superhero universe, which started making up a lot of Malibu’s efforts—I again quote Wikipedia:
>The Ultraverse line was launched during the “boom” of
>the early 1990s, roughly concurrent with the debut of
>publishers such as Image and Valiant, and new
>superhero lines from DC and Dark Horse (Milestone
>and Comics Greatest World, respectively).
It’s true that the Ultraverse was something noticable… my friend Nathan and I, seeing that the art often was just what you’d expect, but that the writing was a cut above what one might expect, nicknamed the new line Content Comics, as opposed to Image Comics.
>They boasted improved production values over traditional
>comics (especially digital coloring and higher-quality paper),
>and a roster of respected and/or talented new writers and
>artists.>As sales declined industry-wide in the mid-1990s, Malibu
>cancelled lower-selling series. The company was purchased
>by Marvel Comics in 1994. Reportedly Marvel made the
>purchase to acquire Malibu’s then-groundbreaking in-house
>coloring studio, and/or its catalog of movie-licensable
>properties. Marvel cancelled the entire Ultraverse line, but
>re-launched a handful of the more popular titles as well as a
>number of crossovers with Marvel characters. The “volume
>2″ series each started with “#? (infinity)” issues and were
>cancelled a short time later.>In June 2005, when asked by Newsarama whether Marvel
>had any plans to revive the Ultraverse, Marvel editor-in-chief
>Joe Quesada replied that:>“Let’s just say that I wanted to bring these characters back
>in a very big way, but the way that the deal was initially
>structured, it’s next to impossible to go back and publish
>these books. There are rumors out there that it has to do
>with a certain percentage of sales that has to be doled out
>to the creative teams. While this is a logistical nightmare
>because of the way the initial deal was structured, it’s not
>the reason why we have chosen not to go near these
>characters, there is a bigger one, but I really don’t feel like
>it’s my place to make that dirty laundry public.”
So, basically, a whole company did… well enough… had a certain amount of rough sailing in the mid-1990s (when everyone else did, too), then got bought, then got dropped for unknown reasons. I believe Quesada when he says that the specific financial reason he raises isn’t the actual reason, but I don’t have any evidence pointing to what the actual reason might be.
More often, though, the problem can be neatly summed up by this sentence from the entry about First Comics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Comics
>“Its titles met with variable success and the company
>eventually closed its doors in 1991.”
Variable success.
Contrast this with Future Comics, which truly makes for interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Comics
>Financial mismanagement necessitated a “sizable layoff”
>of “employees in non-critical positions” in January, 2003
>(not long after the Diamond deal). The following month,
>on February 17, “Future Comics’ office was vandalized”
>and the computer network disabled by a virus which
>severely compromised Future’s e-commerce ventures.
>In addition, “PDF files of our latest crop of books were
>corrupted” by the virus, delaying the newly-solicited-
>through-Diamond issues of Metallix and Freemind, giving
>Future “almost two months without any income from
>sales,” even as debts accumulated.>Future Comics announced that it would be concentrating
>not on the declining direct (comics) market, but on the
>mass (books) market, and following publishers such as
>CrossGen in focusing its efforts on trade paperbacks and
>graphic novel-releases…
And soon enough, it was all over, after two and a half years. There was apparently some Hollywood interest in the properties… of which I have never heard about anything more developing.
Then there’s Epic, the imprint of Marvel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_comics
>Epic’s cachet dimmed somewhat in the late 1980s and
>early ’90s, partly as a consequence of the new breed
>of “grim and gritty” stories Epic had helped to pioneer
>but which had now become a staple of mainstream comics.
Then they tried to bring Epic back—I won’t say much about that, except to voice my theory that casting the submissions process as open to anyone may have been a huge part of what helped to kill it—specifically, I don’t think they had enough raw administrative personnel to deal with the huge flood, and finally just gave up…
Marvel itself has now also ceased regarding submissions from those without prior permission to submit.
I truly loved DC’s Milestone imprint, particularly Xombi, Blood Syndicate, and Static, arguably in that order, although I certainly respected Icon and Hardware as well. However…
>The comics market was experiencing a glut of “new
>universes” as several other publishers launched
>superhero lines around the same time . . . the books
>received limited exposure beyond existing comics-shop
>customers, the coloring process added slightly to the
>cover price of their books, and overall comics sales had
>peaked around the time of Milestone’s launch and
>declined dramatically in the years that followed. It also
>should be noted that even though they received press
>coverage from non-comics related magazines and
>television, they were virtually ignored by the comic book
>press such as Wizard Magazine.
Wiki’s words, not mine, remember…
>Milestone cancelled several of its lower-selling series in
>1995 and 1996, and aborted plans for several
>mini-series. Heroes, a new team book featuring Static
>and several of its more popular second-tier characters,
>was launched, but failed to sell well enough to justify an
>ongoing series. Milestone shut down its comic book
>division in 1997, with some of the remaining ongoing
>series discontinued in mid-story. Today, it is primarily
>a licensing company, focusing on its television property
>Static Shock.>At the 2008 Comic-Con DC Comics executive editor
>Dan DiDio announced that the Milestone Universe and
>characters would be revived and merged into the DC
>Universe proper. Examples of the integration include
>Static joining the Teen Titans and the Shadow Cabinet
>appearing in Justice League of America.
I can’t help but wonder if the fans who remember them won’t say, right off the bat, “But we liked them being separate!” But it’s probably better than the properties being gone forever… depending on how it’s all handled, anyway.
Finally, just a little on Virgin, though there’s not much information on wiki about its end, but here it is anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Comics
>On August 26, 2008, it was reported that Virgin
>Comics had shut down its New York office. A
>statement released confirmed closure of the New
>York office, but indicated that the company would be
>restructuring and relocating to Los Angeles. On
>September 24, 2008, it was announced that Virgin
>Comics changed its name to Liquid Comics after a
>management buyout.
So, basically, looking at their current site, they now appear to do digital comics.
I could go on. I could talk about Tundra. I could talk about Kitchen Sink. I could talk about Valiant/Acclaim. Or Kandora. Or Broccoli books. Or Grafika. But I think you get the idea.
It’s a hard industry to try to stand out in, and it’s a harder industry in which to try to blend in (and none of them were _trying_ to blend in, although more than one actually did, to their chagrin, in one way or another).
If you don’t have good financial backing, and an extremely good marketing plan, and a well-organized management system (and doing everything yourself, as a one-man show, is worse than a bad idea), any attempt to stand out _or_ blend in while doing paper-and-ink comics issues will probably fail. Among all the other reasons for this, I would like to mention that the people whom everyone _most_ expects to buy such fare are not only somewhat hard to impress, but they have a cashflow that’s more limited than ever, and they have a lot of brand loyalty already established.
You wouldn’t think that that last paragraph was going to be the point of this article, but it is, because I’m tired of seeing newcomers jump into this business with good ideas or good properties or both, and running off the cliff at the first hairpin turn. It’s sad for the readers, and it’s REALLY sad from the perspective of creators such as myself who wouldn’t mind one bit if one or more cool new companies to pitch projects to could hang on long enough to publish them.
It’s hard. You have to plan.
I’m talking to _you_, guys and gals considering your shiny new start-up.
Please be sure you’re ready.
Photo by Flickr user What What
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