The Self-Indulgent Show deplores the presence of Katie Couric on the evening news: “I think if your name is Katie, you should have to deliver the news from a swing set.”
Before anyone becomes horribly disturbed, this is not a yaoi title. I just gave in to a fit of sentimental whatsit. I’ve been doing that, lately. I also bought People magazine’s tribute to Farrah Fawcett. I loved “Charlie’s Angels” when I was little. I collected pictures of Farrah, and I recognized every one of the ’70s pictures in the magazine. Reading this magazine was a very emotional experience. Cathartic. I’m feeling a little verklempt, just thinking about it.
So, when I was at the comics rack at Borders the other day, desperately pawing through it to try and find something suitable for my young son, I paused dramatically at the Archie titles. Because I loved Archie comics when I was little, too. Even more than Farrah. So, overwhelmed with nostalgia, I picked up Archie’s Double Dip, evidently a Very Special Issue (the 200th, according to the excitable little yellow burst on the cover). I was curious about this, and alarmed. Because apparently, Archie Comics Online and Its Affiliated Companies have decided Archie needs a Dynamic New Look. The classic Dan Decarlo look, degraded as it has become, is apparently just too distinctive. Archie is being mainstreamed.
Woe!
It’s just the cover and the first story. It isn’t a no-going-back kind of thing; I imagine they’ll dump it as a failed experiment if people hate it. Or they’ll usher everything into the Borg collective, if people love it. Hard as that is to contemplate. Because, good grief, look at this. Here’s the second page.
The artist is Norm Breyfogle, and I’m thinking he should have maybe turned down this gig. I’m not intimately familiar with his work, but he’s done a lot of Batman, and let us just say he seems much more comfortable with the pointy ears and the swishy capes. That’s Betty’s dad in the middle panel, apparently having an epileptic seizure. It’s as if drawing the drama of dad stealing some cake is so ordinary we’re maybe overcompensating a little. I love this ad, too.
Betty: “Is this really goodbye forever?”
Archie: “Holy shit, is that a centipede on the ceiling? It’s enormous!”
And, here.
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What the hell happened to Archie’s chin? And Betty looks like a sex doll with the head put on askew. Is this what the kids are into, these days?
I realize it’s a desperate attempt to sell more comics, by any means necessary, and not a dark plot to indoctrinate girls into the ugly that is mainstream comics art. At least, I assume that’s the case. I guess if it is a dark plot, that’s actually kind of cool, although I sort of hope it doesn’t work.
Up at Metropulse I’ve got a review of a really fabulous dubstep album by Legion of Two.
I posted a bit ago about Wednesday Comics, and noted that it seemed kind of depressing to have a fairly ambitious venture in terms of form and distribution saddled to the same old content (DC super-hero properties, natch.) Then a couple days ago, I wrote about how much I enjoyed Adam Warren’s Empowered series.
And I was thinking about those two things together a little, and it occurred to me that Empowered would be kind of perfect as a feature in Wednesday Comics. It’s a super-hero story, so it wouldn’t upset anybody’s paradigm. It has excellent art, which wouldn’t look out of place among the heavy hitters DC has lined up. And, best of all, I’m pretty sure Warren could actually do what very few of the Wed comics writers seem to be able to do — i.e., he could write a serialized story, and pace it so that each page had a natural gag/end while still advancing the overall plot. It would be great for Warren, I think; my impression is that Empowered has done pretty well, but that he’s had trouble getting it out there as much as he’d like. And it’d be good for DC, it seems to me, insofar as Warren could, I believe, have an appeal to various demographics (manga readers, possibly female readers) that the company has spastically, intermittently, and ineffectually courted for some time. It’s true that Empowered is R-rated, but I’m sure Warren could tone it down for a short story if he was asked to.
But, of course, it can’t happen. And the reason it can’t happen is basically because comics just don’t work that way. DC and Marvel don’t pick up independent creators and creations who already have a following and put more marketing muscle behind them. Because that would require some sort of negotiated creators rights deal, and, though I know they’ve dabbled with it occasionally, the big two just don’t function on that business model as a matter of course.
I’m sure folks have said this before, but…I think it just can’t be overstated how much work-for-hire is responsible for the insularity and creative stagnation at Marvel and D.C. It’s not just that they’re wedded to their stable of characters — because, after all, they are willing to do do new series as well, like Y-The Last Man and so forth. But their default attitude towards creator rights (basically, there are none) makes it extremely difficult for them to co-opt other’s good ideas — and co-opting other’s good ideas is the way that hidebound behemoths manage to stay relevant (just ask Microsoft.)
I mentioned this a while back, but I think Minx is a pretty good example of this. There are actually comics for girls which have done OK in their niche; stuff like Courtney Crumrin for example. If you wanted to release a line of comics for young girls, why not go with the sure thing, drop some money on Ted Naifeh’s lap, and say, hey, keep doing the same thing you’re doing, just do it for us? You’d have a baseline audience, some automatic publicity, and you could maybe pull in curious readers to check out other products. But, of course, DC can’t do this sort of thing because it doesn’t do creator-ownership — and even if it decided to make an exception, I doubt it would be able to figure out what to do with it. (Does anyone know if the Minx line was creator-owned? The few references I’ve seen suggest it wasn’t.)
I don’t know; I guess DC and Marvel are happy enough churning out stories featuring the same few characters for the same few readers. And of course, quite possibly Adam Warren and/or Ted Naifeh are happier being indie, and wouldn’t want to work for DC anyway. But you know, there are various genre comics creators who I’m sure would sell out if someone were willing to pay them a reasonable price — said reasonable price not including all the rights to their work. And, needless to say, it might be good for comics as a whole if the biggest companies found a way to reach new audiences by working with some exciting young creators.
But it’s probably elitist to suggest that somebody somewhere might want to read about cynical young witches or bondage sitcoms or anything other than zombie Elongated Man. I mean…he’s Elongated. He’s dead. His stretchy, decaying sphincter and soul belong to his corporate overlords. That’s power for the people, that is.
Update: Minx creator Brian Wood says in comments that the line was creator owned. Good for DC, then.
I just read this story by Douglas Lain. Very modern, very socialist, but I liked it. For years I’ve wanted to write a story about a summer in Montreal when a big flying saucer parked itself overhead and stayed there. Now it may be too late, which goes to show.
Seeing Gaiman at Worldcon caused me to buy his big short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors. My favorite story so far is “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” which I happened to read years back while sitting in the book store. It’s kind of a sideways rendering of Gaiman’s first time out in Hollywood, when Good Omens had been optioned and he and Terry Pratchett were doing the script. I love Hollywood stuff, especially modern Hollywood and the nonacting side, the agents and studio people, so it’s no wonder I like the story. But it’s a good job, too. He captures odd little moments that bring out the disjunction and strangeness in the way these people approach life (or the way that one hears they approach life), and he manages the tricky job of creating a long series of quick but distinct glimpses of producers, execs, flunkies, etc., each person different enough from the others and yet cognitively deformed in the same way.