I was in a Border’s killing some time, and happened on the JLA reboot #5365, Brad Meltzer edition. I skimmed through it. Red Tornado and Amazo switch brains; Solomon Grundy is wearing a suit, Speedy is now Red Arrow, Hal Jordan is alive, Oliver Queen is alive, Barry Allen still isn’t alive. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman have for some reason collected playing cards with images of all the DC super-heroes on them. It seems kind of silly, but I guess it’s relatively harmless, as hobbies go.

But the main point of the comic seemed to be how much everyone just loves the Justice League. Oliver Queen talks about how he misses being in the League. Batman and Superman are awfully excited about starting up the new League. All these super-heroes are just eager to be in the League. And what a spiffy new headquarters the League has. And how great are it’s traditions. And on and on. Every damn page it seemed like someone was enthusing about the League.

Of course, the truth is JLA has almost always been a second string title, with no real reason for being. Those early Gardner Fox issues were dreadful even by the standards of 30s super-hero comics; Snapper Carr has to be one of the most embarrassing creations in comics. The time when the League really seemed to make the most sense was with Giffen/DeMatteis, when it was deliberately used as a joke, or with Grant Morrison, when it teetered on the verge fo self-parody (all the Morrison villains were always talking about how incredibly irritating the League was with its we-can-do-anything, we’re-so-great-and-good stance.) The League has certainly never had anything like the (relatively) coherent mythology of , say, the X-men or Fantastic Four. It’s been retconned so many times it’s a wonder that its amnesiac do-gooders can remember how to unzip their costumes to go to the bathroom, much less wax maudlin about their (indeterminate, over-edited) pasts.

Yet wax nostalgic they do. It’s almost as if they’re desperate to convince somebody — anybody — that this is the Best. Teambook. Ever. Really, the League’s a grand tradition! You should feel nostalgic for it! Remember Starro? Amazo? Somebody-else-that-ends-in-o? They were great villains! No, really — hey, come back here! Put down that issue of Nana! Don’t you know we’re the Justice Leaaaaaaaa….

Update: Tom Crippen also weighs in on buckets-of-super-heroes-in-one-book with a long discussion of Marvel’s Civil War series
Update 2: The JLA is from the 60s, of course, not the 30s. I could apologize for the error…but instead I blame the comics for being so mediocre they warp the space-time continuum.

So with the addition of Tom we got over 1000 hits this week, which is teeny, tiny wimpy beer by the standards of the great wide Internet, but is easily a record for this wee little blog. Thanks for all who stopped by and contributed to the everlasting, ever-expanding fame of Crippen! and Berlanskystein!

There’s been a fair bit of response around the blogosphere to my post about work for hire and the aesthetic limits thereof. I thought I’d try to respond to two of the more thoughtful ones.

Stuart Moore at Pensive Mischief thinks I’m missing the boat in linking work-for-hire to branding. He writes:

But that’s a side issue. The main thrust of this piece seems to be that creator ownership is desirable because it allows the creator to keep tight control of the “brand” and make sure the characters stay consistent and on-point. I’ll grant that there have been creators (Berke Breathed comes to mind) who’ve exercised very tight control over the licensing of their popular characters over the years. But traditionally, major entertainment companies have had an enormous interest in keeping characters “on-model” and consistent, to the point of having entire quality-control departments to ensure this. If it isn’t happening in one or two cases in the comics industry, that might be a glitch in the machinery, not an overall trend.

And I can certainly cite you independent comics that went off the rails — for a large part of their readership, anyway — as they went along. All respect to the creators’ right to do whatever they want with their creations — that’s the whole point here — but CEREBUS is probably the biggest example. FISH POLICE was a little rough toward the end, too. I’m sure there are others.

More to the point, though: Why do we care about branding anyway? Don’t we want creator-owned work because it leads to original, inspired comics, not because it means the Joker will look the same every time he appears?

Just to be a little clearer…I think the relationship between work-for-hire and quality is tricky to establish. There are a lot of great work-for-hire comics, and a lot of bad independent ones. The work-for-hire argument usually goes “if we get rid of work-for-hire, we’ll have more original, more creative comics.” That seems to be where Moore is headed with his argument. I deliberately didn’t make that argument because I think it’s hard to sustain. (I think there is a relationship between work for hire and low quality, but I think it’s a bit more circuitous than the one Moore seems to be advancing here.)

The point I’m making about branding, therefore, is kind of irrespective of quality. I’m not saying that comics would be better if the Joker always looked the same. I’m saying that comics as a medium would have broader appeal, and be able to retain a bigger audience if the Joker always looked (at least somewhat) the same.

Consistency is the soul of marketing. Comics long ago dispensed with even nominal efforts at consistency in large part because of the reliance on work for hire. In manga, for example, a series is inextricably tied to its creator (as the Brooke Valentine does or does not have to her music, from a marketing or branding perspective, the music is hers. A Brooke Valentine fan knows, more or less, what a Brooke Valentine song will be like. Whereas a fan of Batman in the comic book doesn’t know what the character will look like, or talk like, or who those stories will be aimed at.

In other words, I’m not talking about how creators are treated, but about how creations are treated. Not respecting creators is morally rotten and generally despicable, but it’s never been shown to hurt an entertainment conglomerate yet. Disrespecting creations, on the other hand, is morally neutral — but has unfortunate aesthetic and, ultimately, financial repercussions. In large part because of the work-for-hire standard, comics companies treat their properties like old, broken, whores, auctioned off with equal and cynical aplomb for a quicky, or a gang-bang, or some brutal, sadistic tryst. Consumers in general aren’t stupid; when the goods are presented as worthless, they figure they’re worthless, and don’t want to have anything to do with them. All, of course, except for a few, nostalgic fanboy johns, who knew the girl when she was young and pretty, and keep coming back for one more bitter, ugly fling….

UPDATE: Tom Spurgeon also weighs in, but much too briefly. Tom, if you’re reading, it sounds like you have some really interesting stuff to say about this. Longer post please?

UPDATE 2: And HU’s own Tom Crippen’s got a post about the aesthetic upside of work-for-hire.

UPDATE 3: I should note that pretty much everything I have to say about this was said first and better by Dirk Deppey in TCJ #269, his shojo manga issue of the Comics Journal:

Finally, and most importantly: The vast majority of manga being reprinted in the United States reflect the vision of a single creator or set of creators. This isn’t quite as inflexible a rule as that statement makes it sound — many manga studios more closely resemble the “communal assembly line” employed by Will Eisner than they do a single artist sitting at a drawing table — but even if the guiding force behind a given story (the manga-ka) is merely plotting and drawing the main characters’ faces, there’s still a single guiding force behind the story.

To emphasize the point, compare two media phenomena that attempted to drive sales towards graphic novels: Naruto and X-Men. The fact that Naruto has become popular in both print and animated forms should surprise no one; given that it’s the story of a young boy who’s secretly a nine-tailed demon, who spends his days going to ninja school and getting into constant trouble, you could safely call this series a
license to print money from the moment its creator wrote that concept down in his notebook. If the Naruto anime left you interested enough in the story to go to a bookstore and check out the manga, you’d find more of the same: The anime stays as close as possible to manga-ka Masashi Kishimoto’s original concepts, and Kishimoto is in turn the consistent driving force behind the creation of the comics version, regardless of who spotted the blacks or drew a particular forest background. So long
as you first bought the Naruto volume with the big “1” on the spine, liked it and followed it with the one labeled “2,” you’re pretty much guaranteed to be satisfied by the results.

If the X-Men films convinced you to pick up your first X-Men graphic novel, however, you’d be in for an entirely different experience. Your first exposure would depend upon which author’s version of the series you pulled out of the stack, be it Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar or Chuck Austen, and the artwork would likely change from one artist to another within the book’s pages. If you remained interested enough by what you read to buy a second one, that second volume would be as much of a crapshoot as the first, unless you very carefully observed which names were on the spine each time you invested your hard-earned dollars on a new book. The replaceable nature of the writers and artists, as dictated by the work-for-hire business practices upon which Marvel depends, actively discourages casual readers exactly to the extent that casual readers can never be sure what they get when they open an X-Men book.

Some news on other and sundry projects:

First off, Da Capo Press’ “Best Music Writing 2008” is out soon (I just got my copy.)It includes my essay on contemporary R&B from the Chicago Reader (reprinted in a slightly altered version here The book is edited by Nelson George. The rest of the table of contents is below:

* CARL WILSON * The Trouble With Indie Rock: It’s Not Just Race, It’s Class * Slate
* BILL WASIK * Annuals * Oxford American
* CLIVE THOMPSON * Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog * The New York Times
* JEFF WEISS * Soulja Boy: Cranking the Chain * LA Weekly
* DANYEL SMITH * Keyshia Cole: Hell’s Angel * Vibe
* NOAH BERLATSKY * Underrated Overground * Chicago Reader
* SOLVEJ SCHOU * First Person: Auditioning for this Season’s ‘American Idol’ * Associated Press
* BEN SISARIO * Wizards in the Studio, Anonymous on the Street * The New York Times
* BRANDON PERKINS * Wu-Tang: Widdling Down Infinity: Can a Bunch of old, dirty bastards save hip-hop for a third time or will the math just collapse upon itself? * URB
* JONATHAN CUNNINGHAM * Freaks Come Out at Night: Grandmaster Dee Cuts a Wide Swath on the Comeback Trail * Broward-Palm Beach New Times
* NADIA PFLAUM * Pay 2 Play: Hip-hop Hustlers are making Off with Kansas City Rappers’ Hard-Earned Cash * The Kansas City Pitch
* ANN POWERS * It’s Time to Kick this Addiction * Los Angeles Times
* NIKE D’ANDREA * Bad Habits: NunZilla’s Punk-rock Catechism Will Leave you Praying for More * Phoenix New Times
* J. BENNETT * Dimmu Borgir * Decibel Magazine
* ERIC PAPE * “We Sing Everything. We have Nothing Else” * Spin
* ANDY TENNILLE * Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings * Harp
* MARKE B * Gayest. Music. Ever.: The Death of Circuit, Energy 92.7, and the New Queer Dance Floor Diaspora * San Francisco Bay Guardian
* PHIL SUTCLIFFE * Pete Seeger * MOJO
* JEFF SHARLET * The People’s Singer: the Embattled Lee Hays * Oxford American
* LARRY BLUMENFELD * Band on the Run in New Orleans * Salon
* DAVID KAMP * Sly Stone’s Higher Power * Vanity Fair
* MATT ROGERS * Beast from the East: Mandrill’s Musical brew is Equal Parts Brooklyn and Motherland * Wax Poetics
* OLIVER WANG * Boogaloo Nights * The Nation
* SAM KASHNER * Fever Pitch: When Travolta Did Disco; the Making of Saturday Night Fever * Movies Rock
* SEAN NELSON * Dead Man Talking: “Kurt Cobain: About a Son” * The Stranger
* JODY ROSEN * A Pirate Looks at Sixty: Jimmy Buffett’s Mid-Life Crises * Slate
* ALAN LIGHT * The Notorious BIG * Blender
* ALEX ROSS * Apparition in the Woods * The New Yorker
* GARY GIDDINS * Back to Bossa: Rosa Passos and Fifty Years of Bossa Nova. * The New Yorker
* DAVID MARGOLICK * The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise * The New York Times
* CRAVEN ROCK * On Lynyrd Skynyrd and the White Trash Thing * Around the Bend * Ten Years * Eaves of Ass #6
* TOM EWING * The History Book on the Shelf: ABBA * Pitchfork Media

Second, Comixology (where I have a new column) is sponsoring the Harvey Awards at the Baltimore Comic Con this year. They’re giving away a pair of tickets to the Con and to the Awards (including cocktail hour and dinner). The winner will bring a friend with them to sit with the comiXology guys including Tucker Stone and the comixology iPhone developer at the Awards dinner. The giveaway page is Posted in Blog

In a link found through Dirk, Joe Quesada, Marvel editor, argues that work-for-hire is just part of life under capitalism, and that creators like Robert Kirkman should maybe whine about it a little less.

There’s certainly a point of some sort here. Ye olde movie actors and musicians often got screwed out of rights to their own work; early jazz musicians often got a flat fee for a performance and then never saw any money from it again, much as Siegel and Schuster were left out of the Superman bonanaza over the years.

The difference is that, in music and movies, this shit stopped a while ago. Yes, the music industry is still shady, as Tribe Called Quest reminds us, but artists now do by and large own their own work, and get royalties from it. In neither music nor movies is the field dominated by a business model based on the assumption that the creators are going to create stuff that is then going to live perpetually as a corporate property which anybody and their uncle can monkey with without the creator’s say-so.

Work-for-hire is obviously extraordinarily ethically dubious — and I’d cheerfully consign the executives at Tokyopop to hell, if that were my purview. But there’s an aesthetic objection as well as a moral one. Part of the problem that super-hero comics face today is a catastrophic lack of quality control. I don’t mean that comics are lousy . Many are lousy, of course, but lousiness in itself never stopped a cultural product from selling. Rather, the issue is that the comics are marketed based around characters which have no stylistic, aesthetic, or demographic unity. When you buy a comic with Batgirl in it, are you going to get a cute, cartoony story for kids? A sober adult story about a young woman getting randomly shot in the stomach? Or a sexy, violent, tale in which the heroine curses like a sailor? Will the art be good, bad, indifferent? Will the character even look vaguely like herself from one iteration to the next? There’s no way to tell, of course, because the character is owned by the company, not by the creative team. As a result she, and all the other properties, get farmed out, screwed up, screwed down, ret-conned and generally bashed into shape to suit the exigencies of whatever half-baked publishing directive happens to come down the pike.

There are certainly advantages to this. It makes it easy to move the characters from platform to platform, for example. TV shows, movies, cartoons — wherever they go, your iconic character has a built in audience, and you can tweek them to fit whatever demographic or narraive demands are called for. Grim and gritty? Check. Goofball camp? Works too. Fun adventure for kids? Sure.

But while this isn’t bad for the characters or for their corporate overlords, per se, I think it’s been really problematic for comics as a medium. Basically, it’s very hard to create recognizable creators/stars, or recognizable titles, when it’s difficult for a layperson to identify a recognizable style. People like Frank Miller and Grant Morrison are rock stars in the comics world — but they’re name-brand appeal beyond that has to be limited by the fact that in their most famous efforts they tend to be dwarfed by the star power of characters they didn’t create. Ai Yazawa is Nana, and that’s the case even when Nana becomes a film or an anime or whatever — it’s her creation, she’s associated with it. That’s good for Yazawa, but it’s also good for comics — it allows a transition back. People who see the Nana movie in Japan can go to the comics and know that they’re getting more of the same — they know the creator had a hand in the creation. That’s true for Miller and Sin City or 300 too. With super-hero comics, though, the opposite is true; it’s only the character that matters, and there’s no incentive to go back to the comic, because there’s no effort to suggest (and in fact, no truth to the suggestion) that the two have anything to do with each other.

Basically, work-for-hire dilutes the brand; the creator who should be looking out for it is shunted aside. And — ta-dah! — you get super-hero comics! An artistic backwater so despised that it can only justify its existence by leasing its best ideas to mediums which are less thoroughly distrusted.

Addendum:Thinking about this a little more…it’s true that, for example, Batman isn’t consistent from movie to television show to movie, either. And this is a problem (I was pretty irritated when my son wanted to see the Heath Ledger movie, which would have scared the bejeezus out of him.) But there is a largish effort to, for example, make sure that I know that my son shouldn’t go to see the Batman movie; there are marketing and other clear cues to separate the Heath Ledger Batman from Batman: The Animated Series. In contrast, there’s little effort to differentiate Frank Miller’s Batman from anybody else’s; indeed, individual titles aren’t even tied to one creative team necessarily. Comics is just much more cavalier about branding, which I think is the result of years and years of cavalierly separating creator and creation.

Addendum to the addendum:The Hooded Utilitarian’s new blogger, Tom Crippen, has just posted an extended discussion of his more-or-less-agonized relationship with Marvel comics. Check it out.

And…my new column on Comixology entitled “A Pundit In Every Panopticon” (swiped from this blog’s subhead) just debuted. The first one is about Piss Christ and editorial cartoons, among other things.

Throw Another Update on the Fire, Dept.: I’ve got a post responding to some of my critics (including Steven Grant) here

This short review first ran a while back in Bitch magazine.

Sixth through eight grade is a time of self-pity and self-loathing. Unsurprisingly, most of the comics in this anthology about middle-school indulge in the first (Eric Enright’s “Anxiety”); the second (Joe Matt, Dan Clowes) or else in a kind of cheerful aw-shucks-aren’t-we-all-glad-that’s-over cutesiness (Ariel Bordeaux, Jace Smith.) Not that there aren’t pleasures in all of these approaches — Robyn Chapman’s “Never Go Home, for example, contrasts a sparsely drawn style with heaping dollops of bitter and sweet to create a lovely melodramatic catharisis.. Still, the stories that really stand out take a different tack. Gabrielle Bell’s matter-of-fact“Hit Me” is drawn entirely without close-ups, creating a sense of emotional distance as the story goes from understated oppression to understated triumph to understated betrayal with a cold inevitability. Best of all are the two entiries by editor Ariel Schrag. In the autobiographical“Shit,” young Schrag is spending the night on a house-boat; as a result, she can’t poop without letting everyone around her know that she needs to do so. Trapped between internal and external taboos, she makes a series of disastrous choices as the narrative careens methodically towards a nightmarish, banal, icky and humiliating rite-of-passage. Which, I guess, is middle-school.