INDUSTRY DOGMA: A Strange New Day.

It's a new day in comics. A massive corporation has purchased another comics company, or their parent company. American Online just bought Time Warner (and in effect, DC Comics and it's various imprints) at the time of this writing. It's only a matter of time before Marvel Comics gets sold again or changes majority ownership. Sooner or later some of the smaller companies will change hands as well. And things could just continue along the way they have. All the same business practices, all the same routines; another month, another year. But like I said, it's a new day in comics. The wind that blows the industry around has shifted, and there's a change coming.

The new bosses have decided that they're going to push comics into the mainstream media like never before. You think some movies have had over-the-top promotional campaigns? You haven't seen anything yet. The things that comics creators and fans have been saying should happen for so long are finally here. Billboards. Advertisements in major magazines. Fast food promotional tie-ins. Great comic movie adaptations being made that push the actual comics as well. Clever advertising on a par in ingenuity with those of the major sneaker companies and the video game industry. Massive marketing blitzes so intense that they could drive comics to all new and unprecedented levels of popularity in the United States.

This would be a great thing for the comics industry, obviously. Opportunity, money, and new comic book titles would explode all over the place like a field of dandelions getting trampled on by a group of children. But there would still be one flaw, one problem to the whole picture, and it's one that currently exists. It's at times big, at times almost unnoticed, but it's there nonetheless. The problem is where the ultimate creative power lies in the industry.

Comic creators don't always have the final say over the very things they create.

The reason I'm stuck on this is two-fold. The acquisition of Time Warner by AOL initially just sort of rolled over my head, almost unheeded. "They did what? Oh, alright." But then I was reminded by someone of AOL's well-known policies towards content, and their control over it. You can call it protecting the majority of their users and members, or you can call it censorship. I'll leave that to you. The other thing that got me thinking about this was the new Kevin Smith movie, DOGMA.

"The problem is where the ultimate creative power lies in the industry."

I read in a magazine article recently how the film company Miramax had initially embraced Smith's film. The film company's head, Harvey Weinstein, was standing firmly behind the film despite the controversy that was inevitable considering it's subject matter. Of course, once Disney (the parent corporation of Miramax) heard about what was going to be coming from the direction of the Catholic League, Miramax was made to drop Dogma. You can start now to draw the inevitable comparisons between Disney and America Online.

Even worse, this is already a familiar scenario for comics. There are many stories about how comics projects were either cancelled or altered significantly because of concerns over content. Kyle Baker had a DC ELSEWORLDS story that drove DC to pulp the entire print run of that book. Warren Ellis had a HELLBLAZER story pulled because of content. Rick Veitch had his long-ago SWAMP THING issue stopped where Swamp Thing was to of gone back in time to meet Jesus Christ. Marvel, on the other hand, is known for the editorial departments having a tremendous influence on the directions of their titles. There have been numerous stories of Marvel writers and artists jumping ship due to pressures and restrictions laid down by the editors. In the situations of both DC and Marvel, the ability of the creators to use their full artistic ability was pulled away by others.

Just as what started to happen to Kevin Smith and his film.

But this is where things got interesting, however. Harvey Weinstein did an end run around Disney, essentially buying the movie back from them, and led a hunt to find the film a distributor. After some time, it ended up at Lion's Gate instead of Miramax, and was released to a fair degree of success. The most important thing about the whole episode was that someone in charge had faith in Dogma, and was willing to put it out for the public to either embrace or reject.

But how often does something like this happen with comics? Comics right now, at this very moment, and since pretty much Day One have been a small industry. Where a even a smaller independent film like Dogma could cost millions of dollars to produce and market successfully, the cost to produce a comic with a comparable level of success is just a fraction of that. There's so much less at stake financially at this point in time that comics publishers could certainly afford to be more frisky, to let riskier things happen creatively. But the powers-that-be won't do this. With the film industry, Disney was worried about the public relations damage that a very vocal group of 300,000 Catholics could do. In the comics industry, what group is going to bring any such level of pressure to bear on a publisher?

It would be a truly bold and courageous experiment if the publishers and editors gave creators more freedom to do what they do. It's as simple as letting them loose to tell the best possible stories, with the best art, the best lettering, and the best coloring. Looking past any sort of genre conventions, looking past superheroes, fantasy, horror, science fiction and drama, all that matters is creating the best comics possible.

"Why isn't it the same for comics?"

Our industry should work under the same sort of methods as any other entertainment industry. In the final equation, all that comics are is another storytelling medium, the same as film, prose, poetry, or music. No one tells the Counting Crows not to make bluesy, heartache-laden songs because they do it so well. Johnny Depp plays wildly odd film roles because he can do it better than almost anyone else, and no one forces him to play typical leading man roles. Tom Clancy writes action-filled political novels, so his publishers don't tell him to curtail his creative juices and tell a different tale.

Why isn't it the same for comics? If you have the talent who are supposed to be the pinnacle of their creative field, why are the people in charge not always letting them do what they do best? In such a small industry as comics, they have everything to gain: increased sales, increased quality, less alienated and happier creators, and increased mainstream attention. Look at all the good publicity that comics got when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons made WATCHMEN. And what was involved...? Moore and Gibbons were set loose to do what they do best. Compared to other media, the potential losses would be minimal compared to the potential gain.

A mega-merger on the scale of AOL Time Warner could be either a blessing or a nightmare for the industry, and more specifically DC Comics. But if new precedents become set by DC because of this, you can bet your bottom dollar that Marvel, Image, and all the other publishers will get onto a similar track. It could push comics into the forefront of the American mainstream like never before, and this could in short order be the dawn of a new golden era for the industry. But the most important thing is that you don't need a monstrous infusion of money to push the industry to new highs.

All that has to happen is for the editors and publishers to get out of the way of the people who really know how to make a good comic. They need to have some faith in the professionals, and to forget about all the old practices, the old dogma they've stuck to for so long, because they aren't helping the industry today.

Joe Szilagyi, January 12th 2000

Joe Szilagyi is a regular contributor to PopImage.

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