Random thought: With Chris Yost/Craig Kyle taking over Amazing X-Men from Jason Aaron and Chris Claremont coming back to the franchise with the new Nightcrawler series, it’s seeming like the new hires on the X-Books over at Marvel are… not-so-new hires. Is this speaking to a new conservatism over in that part of the Marvel Universe, a desire to connect to a core audience who might have disappeared in recent years, or just an odd coincidence?
So we started to experiment with what more we could do with the direct market. We started taking part in Free Comic Book Day, and found our orders growing in massive jumps each and every year as new readers took a chance on something fresh. We hooked up with IDW, one of the canniest publishers in the business, and have seen them do fantastic things with some our properties. Let me put it this way, every time they do something great with Dredd, our own books do even better. We made sure we got our books in as many places as possible when the Dredd movie came out and it’s the US direct market that has done the best with them.
With 2000AD and Rebellion releasing its first US-format, direct market comic book Brass Sun this summer, publishing manager Ben Smith explains why the company is making the move.
The problem isn’t the idea of aspiration itself, or of dedication and perseverance, or of inspirational quotes. The problem isn’t the belief that relentlessly pursuing one’s dreams can lead to success, though it should be approached with the recognition that it takes a lot of good fortune and the right opportunities, and the empathy to understand that those who never have those breaks should not be figures of contempt or object lessons in failure. The problem isn’t even the idea that people of unshakable will can change the world, though this should be tempered with the recognition of a moral context: the unshakable will of Gandhi to change the world had a very different endgame than the equally unshakable will of Hitler to change the world. The problem is that none of these are being presented honestly. They are, instead, being presented in the form of marketing, in the form of advertising. They are not personal messages of achievement and inspiration; they are commercials. They are meant only to sell you something, whether it’s trinkets for a particular charity, or treatment at a particular hospital, or the idea that you should give up on such quaint notions as job security and benefits in our bold new digital economy. Whatever they’re specifically selling, they are commercials, and commercials are never to be trusted, especially when the message delivered is one of contempt for the ordinary man, the average citizen, the person who could be you if you weren’t so unique and special.
Here is the more serious point: journalists are way under-rated as influencers. They are at the center of interesting discussion. And that will continue to be the case, even in a discussion environment which seems to challenge the traditional definition of the profession.
From Nick Denton’s Q&A attempt to sell people on the Kinja platform – something I’m still not convinced of the USP of, but I might just be dim. Before you get too excited about Denton apparently offering more value to journalists than they’re traditionally afforded, elsewhere in the same chat, he says this: “We intend to blur the line between journalist and reader.” And this: “To me, a writer is words on a page; and numbers on this screen. That may seem cold; but at least it’s fair.”
He also ducks the question about letting Gawker employees unionize: “Let’s save that particular question for another session.”
Hashtag “Complicated Feelings About Gawker Based on Personal Experience,” perhaps.
One of the things that I’ve been talking about, that I’m really passionate about is trying to figure out ways to introduce comic books to new readers and then redirect those readers into the direct market. Most of us figured out comic books, we got it at our 7/11 or our newsstand and eventually fell in love with the medium and we became direct market customers. And I think at IDW we’re very unique sin being able to expand the market in that way. We’ve been doing things like the Micro Fun Packs which are miniature comic books. We had really broad distribution of the Fun Packs so they were at every mass retailer—WalMart, Target, Toys R Us—and our sell-through was crazy. On the first Fun Packs our sell-through averaged about 60% at mass which is unheard of for any product. It’s an extraordinary sell-through. And that Fun Pack has marketing collateral to back, it drives people to the direct market. So if you’re a mom and you picked up these Fun Packs to put in your kids stocking for Christmas and the kid likes it, they’re not going to go back and get more fun packs, the only place really to get that content is through the direct market and our marketing collateral in there is very clear about that.
Ted Adams of IDW talks about different ways to grow the comic audience. In addition to the fun packs – which sell in the hundreds of thousands, he says later in the interview – there’re also the books that the publisher sells through Scholastic, which he says have had “virtually 100% sell through in significant six figure quantities.”
Changing Light’s reassuring compass is found in Mirah’s shimmering vocals and incisive descriptions. There is yearning (“Gold Rush” and “Fleetfoot Ghost”) and hot anger (“Goat Shepherd”), but no shortage of lyrical and musical playfulness. Whether it be the T. Rex-inspired rough edges of “Radiomind,” the rollicking lo-fi bang-and-pop of “Goat Shepherd,” or the lush pop balladry of “Turned the Heat Off,” the album corrals string sections and vintage synths with horns, a multitude of guitar tones and overdriven drums. With calm and clamor, Mirah brings us all closer together through her universal honesty and occasional use of the vocoder.
Thanks to an attempt to get a story going about the online pre-order effort for Changing Light, I’ve been lucky enough to hear the album in its entirety months ahead of release. I’ve been a Mirah fan for awhile, but this might be my favorite album of hers yet; her work as a lyricist remains startling to me, and there’re at least two songs on here that just took my breath away and made me re-listen again and again. In a perfect world, this’d be something that everyone listened to and adored, something that made Mirah embarrassingly well-loved.
In 2006, the breakout comic series, “Civil War” created a schism in the Marvel Universe pitting two of its greatest heroes, Iron Man and Captain America, against each other at the crossroads of identity, security and what it means to be a hero. Iron Man would ultimately prevail, but left in the dust of this great battle would be bigger questions of civil liberties, freedom and the responsibilities that go along with great power.
John Cerilli, VP, Content & Programming Digital Media tells Marvel, “When we started making this first Tales to Astonish, we were focused on telling a great story about the underlying themes regarding privacy in Marvel’s Civil War – the brilliant Marvel comic series that was published in 2006. In the middle of making this film, the NSA scandal broke and suddenly we realized just how prophetic Civil War was…and still is!”
Marvel’s love affair with Civil War continues to confound me, I admit.
(From the PR email about the company’s new documentary about the comic.)
