My Monthly Curse (Part Fifty-Seven)

Comics Lesson 25:

With the waters already muddying up, let’s throw the final bucket of shit into the mire. Fandom: we’re entering true nerd territory here. Fandom is rather neatly summed up by this quote from US retailer Steve Fischler of Metropolis Comics, “If you go to a convention, you’ll see a lot of strange people. I’ve always wondered: Are these normal people turned strange by comic books? Or were they strange already and comic books just attracted them?” Coming from a man who runs a comics store this seems a bit rich, but that’s just my opinion. What he says is both funny and very accurate. Even though the weirdoes only represent a small percentage of comics fandom, they are by far and away the most recognisable and therefore the entire comics industry has this stigma attached to it as a haven for miscreants, undesirables and perverts. Comics the place to be if you’re a social outcast!

Fandom isn’t unique to comics, but if ever there was a concept that applied to this industry ‘fandom’ was it. I’ll stick my neck out and say Stan Lee probably created organised comics fandom during the early years of Marvel’s superhero renaissance. Not only did he turn his comics into ongoing soap operas, he welcomed the fans, their comments and their ideas with open arms – the fans were the people who put the money in his pocket, they had to be shown some respect. He even started a fan club that made fans feel as though they were part of the entire process. That is what fandom is and by default, I have been slagging off the people who make fandom; the nerds and geeks who have the time to devote to making fandom a real place.

Fandom is an odd word and Wikipedia has this as the definition: Fandom (from the noun fan and the affix -dom, as in kingdom, freedom, etc.) is a term used to refer to a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of sympathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the object(s) of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices (a fandom); this is what differentiates "fannish" (fandom-affiliated) fans from those with only a casual interest.

Reading that, I'm wondering why I bothered writing this.

Fandom, or at least this definition, does not include comics fans in a list of notable fandoms; yet even the word fandom sounds like a word only a comics fan could create. But the point is comics and fandom work well together and it is a good thing, even if you think of it as a place for all the freaks to go and not bother the rest of us.

Every genre and medium has its own fandom, abounding with fanzines and fan movements. Punk’s fandom was huge and it was during that time that the black and white appreciation pamphlets produced in the cheapest way possible became really popular (and will probably never see the light again because of the Internet).

Comics fandom generally applies to the collective noun attributed to all comics fans; they read comics therefore they belong to comics fandom. That's not true; for starters probably about 70% of all comics readers either are unaware of its existence or couldn't care less. Fandom isn't about Mr Average Batman reader, it's about people who want to live their hobby; the people who have a desire to discuss, dissect and immerse themselves fully in every aspect of comics they find floats their collective boats. Subsequently, this is why a large percentage of fans will attend conventions dressed as Spider-Man or Tank Girl, Wolverine or Vampirella. In a way, I call these people nerds, but they display not only a passion for their subject, but also a hell of a lot of balls, especially fat spotty girls who insist they look just like She Hulk with all that green dye spread over their sweaty carcasses.

However, while Fandoms exist, then there is hope for the future. The state of fandom tends to reflect the state of the industry, or has done for the last 50 years or so. A healthy fandom normally relates to a vibrant industry; it is derided, but it also a good yardstick; it breeds new generations of creators and it can be a way to encourage people to read, especially if a normal person befriends a comics geek and gets addicted by a mixture of osmosis and brow-beating.

In the UK, the staple comicbooks are still there, they might not be going as strong as they once were but 2000AD has grown in readership over the last couple of years, and The Beano, Dandy and Viz, the three biggest selling comics in the UK do not look like their futures are in any doubt at the moment. However there’s bugger all else, unless I’m mistaken. Yes, there are some small press stuff, some independents, but even a lot of that has migrated to the internet. The sad truth is that outside of nursery titles, nothing much makes the shelves much nowadays.

When I wrote the majority of this, I had just spent the day in London with Martin Shipp and the publisher of Egmont Poland, Tomek Kolodziecjzak – repaying him for some of his hospitality when we were guests in Lodz. We spent an enjoyable day visiting some of central London’s comics emporiums, drinking in pubs and basically trying to work out why the UK comics industry is quite probably smaller than the Polish one. I continued to bang on about the perception of comicbooks in the eyes of the general public – the underlying theme of this book. He told me, in his almost faultless English that he lives on the outskirts of Warsaw and has to travel into work every day on Warsaw’s only underground train. As publisher and editor of many of Egmont Poland’s comics lines he normally has a new comic to look at every day, even if it one produced by the competition. Even there, some people give him that look, the look that says ‘what’s a man of your age [36] doing reading a children’s thing?’ But he made a very important distinction, one that I myself had started to notice since I began to work on this book – the people giving him that look were the people in the same age range as Tomek. People in their 30s and 40s, the same ages as I am [was] and many of the other people I know in the comics industry. Comics fans are actually derided by their peers – older generations look at comics with fondness and nostalgia - they remember before the derision; and the young… well, let me tell you about young people.

When I started working with homeless teenagers, one of the jobs I had to do was try and implement a literacy scheme to get some of the young people we worked with up to scratch and able to handle things such as forms, applications and basic reading. If you work with a bunch of hyperactive teens with histories you’d rather not know about, trying to get an ex-car thief or a drug taker, who maybe can’t read very well, to sit down with a book is like trying to convince the Pope that outlawing paedophile priests is essential. But you give them a comic with Superman, Spider-Man, Spawn, Batman, The X-Men, Transformers or anything else, the colours, the design, the entire package is more appealing than 300+ pages of text. Heck, it's more appealing than 1 page of text, for them.

So that’s what I did. I was producing Borderline and we’d recently run an interview with yet another Northamptonshire comics writer, Jamie Delano, and the two of us talked about the boxes and boxes of complimentary copies of DC comics he received month in and month out and what he could do with them. I said he could give them to the organisation I worked for and he thought it was a splendid idea. So armed with ten boxes containing about 500 comics and books, I gradually introduced the people I worked with to comics. To my amazement many of them already knew comics, some had even collected them or had siblings who had. Now we’re talking about young people from very disadvantaged backgrounds, who have had horrible lives but are still driven by the modern consumerist visions – they have to have mobile phones, CDs by Eminem, tongue or eyebrow piercing is almost a pre-requisite, and if they don’t have the right kind of training shoes or the right label on their underwear they are derided by their peers. Yet many of these ‘little shits’ who would steal your car, sell your DVD player or possibly even sexually molest your children are all walking around with comics and there isn’t a dissenting voice in the room. Remember when I mentioned Mark and Darren from my shop and the fact they were two 20-something guys with modern lifestyles and girlfriends who dripped attractiveness and success? Well they should have alerted me to the change that was beginning by their actions alone and the fact they brought others into the shop who bought stuff – many only bought Freak Brothers comics or something like Dark Knight Returns, but they did so because of recommendations from their mates and they didn’t feel as though they were walking into a sex shop and purchasing the latest issue of Teen Sluts in Bondage.

Young people don’t think comics are stupid; they’re just something else in the magical tapestry of life. I’ll even go as far to say that the price isn’t even really an issue – we’re talking about new generations who think spending £10 on a pair of boxer shorts is ‘normal’. A couple of quid for a comic isn’t going to kill them, is it?

Marvel Comics appears to be exploiting the new generation a little better than DC. But the two giants hold their place in the industry. One has again found the need to be innovative; the other is relying on its good name and history.

Marvel does seem to be changing its publishing priorities, DC is staying very similar to what it’s always been like, but there is no real evidence that either company has actually done any research or thrown any money into researching how to get more people reading comics.

Marvel now has a policy that involves doing away with the old concept of the ongoing comic and is replacing it with the 6-issue story arcs we talked about earlier. These package well as trade paperbacks and work equally well in the European formats. They appear to have forsaken the idea of continuity – which isn’t as bad as it sounds – and are attempting to produce as many comics series that will turn the comics fan on as they can. But of course this is costing them an awful lot of money and the break-even point gets higher and higher. Expectations become higher and before you know it there’s an awful lot of pressure on a book to succeed, especially if there’s been outlay on the comic and it hasn’t sold enough to cover costs.

And what of the poor comics retailer in all of this? He has to now stock as many trade paperbacks and graphic novels as he can to appease demand (or lack of it) and these beasts cost considerably more than a standard comicbook and just how many do you order? Do you re-order if you sell out? Is so, how many? Once upon a time it was a pre-requisite for a comics shop to have a huge array of back issues – now it’s more important for the shop to have a huge selection of trade collections and that is an enormous amount of outlay for a new shop opening in today’s climate – especially as Diamond Distribution now look to the store owner to pay up front for his orders for at least the first 9 months! See, there is nothing to encourage people to open a comic shop; it’s almost like a fucking endless computer game – if you can get past all the levels, you’ve succeeded in being allowed to continue... to dodge more rocket-fuelled retail shit in the future!

Marvel is spreading itself out thinner than it has ever done before and it isn’t a bad thing – comics publishers should be elastic, but they only tend to flex at the wrong times. Marvel’s arrogance overlooked, the company is showing signs of experimenting in areas that have always been alien to them before, and ironically areas that DC could have exploited had it the chutzpah that Marvel showed at times. You see the hyperbole does have some positive effect, Marvel believes everything it does will succeed and amazingly when it doesn’t the company shows a resilience that would make Richard Johnston proud. Failures are water off a duck’s back for Marvel, a company that has often adhered to the ‘throw enough shit and some of it is bound to stick’ ethos.

DC, because of its rather staid nature has actually tried more things than people care to remember, the problem is they don’t have the impact that Marvel has, don’t have the self-belief, which is why so many things the company releases look really half-hearted, almost apologetic.

DC is a real enigma and it obviously says a lot about TimeWarner’s view of comics. DC is still in that short-term mentality they finally adapted in the mid 1990s and years after everyone else has moved on they’re finally getting with the 21st century programme. They have a streamlined look about their new monthly titles, but the icons stand out – Superman and Batman are still graced with some of the finest artists DC can afford, led by Jim Lee, now more than just an illustrator. But essentially they still pander to the collector who wants periodic adventures and only collect, what appear to be randomly, selected titles in trade paperback format, and many of these collections from its mature readers imprint Vertigo.

Why DC doesn’t invest something into the future of comics is probably down to the fact that that comics sales have dropped so rapidly over the last 30 years that there are probably very few people in the executive offices who believe there is nothing left other than the death rattles. The money is in the characters and not the comics – with even more Batman and Superman films in the offing, plus a raft of other characters waiting in the wings, DC’s future isn’t in comics, but if the comics can co-exist with the films, TV series, video games, and any other merchandising opportunity, then fine, TimeWarner are happy – just don’t ask for anything!

Marvel’s new execs probably see that investment into the future is needed, but this was a company that existed on an almost hand to mouth basis and for every guy in the Marvel offices that thinks so-and-so should be done, there’ll be a team of accountants screaming ‘bottom lines’ at them and reminding them what a pay cheque looks like. The success of their film line hasn’t been transferred to the comics – Disney’s acquisition of Marvel hasn’t seen the company benefit from films like Iron Man, Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four; far from it. It’s like a songwriter who writes great songs, but is a talentless arse in person; use the songs, not the songwriter!

Just because Marvel seems to be heading towards the right direction – new lines of comics, prose imprints and recruiting of familiar ‘real life’ people to make comics far more accessible to ‘real people’, doesn’t mean it is doing it right, and comics, which were created as a cheap disposable form of entertainment to be read over and over, look as though they are about to become the property of only those with disposable incomes, only in countries like ours and the USA. Collectible comics was an oxymoron in the 1940s and early 1950s; it has now become the raison d’être of the industry and it no longer really applies.

And that’s the conclusion I’m afraid – comics, as long as the young keep them alive, are actually in reasonably safe hands – there are new readers coming in, there could be more, but the companies really need to look at this new breed of comics readers (as well as try to think of fair ways of helping the poor retailers who sell their wares), who are going to be a damned sight more ephemeral than previous incarnations, and the major companies need to wonder what they have to do to make sure this kid and his mates all want to read comics, like their fathers and their grandfathers did and for more generations to come. Comics are most likely going to become even more of a cottage industry than they have ever been. I expect Marvel and DC will remain huge in a contracting market, but I also expect the Internet to change the way people read and for future generations having something tangible in their hands will be as alien to them as reading a comicbook on a computer screen is to people of my age. Comics will always be produced and they will adapt to their surroundings accordingly. Some will get rich, most will not. Some things change, some things stay the same.

I talk about comics to the disadvantaged kids I’ve worked with over the last 10 years and I’m not derided. Many of them might not be interested in comics, but they don’t view them as sad. The youth of today are eclectic generally; they might like shit rap music, but they also like rock and pop and soul and classical – whatever their mothers, fathers, sisters, aunts, uncles and brothers listen to. In 2009, I was working with a right little Herbert; he had been done for all manner of heinous things. He was in my car, ignoring me, with his iPod headphones on, listening to something. It sounded vaguely familiar from what I could make out. He was listening to the original soundtrack from Grease and he was a big fan. I was slightly gobsmacked, yet not really surprised. His generation got a remix of a Yes song into the top 10 the same year. His generation have made talent shows big again, while also becoming huge fans of ballroom dancing. The youth of today are the future and they’re being influenced by the past – no change there, except this young generation don’t have the same prejudices we once did.

That makes me happy.

Next: Yard sweepings

My Monthly Curse (Part Fifty-Six)

Have I talked about hype much? Hyperbole was reinvented for comics – with a genre such as superheroes you get hyperbole to match the fantastic premises. Someone, somewhere must have twigged that fans cum in their pants a lot at the prospect of anything that tickles their fancies, so all press releases have been written by someone who sounds like he’s cum in his pants just writing about it. The hype would be a joke if Americans didn’t write it, so therefore it takes on a sort of Walter Kronkite meets David Letterman meets the man with the growly voice who premieres blockbuster movies with lines like, “Just when you thought it was safe to open the fridge,” or “From the people who brought you rabid typhoid rats comes a new blockbuster that will make your hair spontaneously combust and your girlfriend’s nipples fall off...”

I have talked about the hype, of course I have... Without the hype there might still be a blooming retail industry, with comics shops adorning high streets in small towns and everyone skipping along, holding hands and cats and dogs harmoniously living in trees each reading Batman comics.

Unlike other places where the rats will desert the sinking ship – in comics everyone clings to whatever flotsam and jetsam they can grab hold of. Working in comics is like being paid for your hobby and what person in their right mind wouldn’t cling on to that? And that might be the root of why comics professionals choose to work in this industry. At that party I attended in Tarzana, hosted by comics writer Marv Wolfman and containing so many comics writers from my youth, the one thing that really struck me more than anything else was here were a bunch of middle aged men all talking with great love and affection for comicbooks – they all had the youthful exuberance of fans, despite many of them having seen their best days long gone. Working in comics is easy, even when it isn’t, it is.

For some becoming a star is more important than anything else. When Image Comics started, purely because the 7 artists felt they could make more money on their own than being work-for-hire at Marvel or DC, the industry was going through such a revelation in sales that if Image had failed then some serious questions would have been asked. Marvel built up these people and suffered the consequences when they left. The fact that most of the people involved in the Image split have ended up working back at the companies they left, for more money, effectively caused by their leaving in the first place, which in turn has made comics personalities hold the future of the industry in their hands, is quite ironic.

But let’s get back to the point; comics publishers aren’t just frightened about change that could dramatically alter the shape of comics publishing in the future, they’re scared for their very existences, because the choices are vague and are not guaranteed to succeed they are having to build for a future with one foot still rooted firmly in a medium they aren’t sure they need to remain in. Or, in other words, if Marvel and DC go the route of mainly trade paperbacks and originated graphic novel material, they will continue to produce comics, but only the ones that they are guaranteed to make money from. Prices will continue to rise as the customer base continues to dwindle. The most obvious thing, to me, about the decline of comics in the last 30 years has been price. Fabian Nicieza can talk about relativity; Craig Johnson can talk about amortising sales; but if there is no interest from the youth to buy something that isn't classed as value on their X-Box scale of cost over entertainment, then what future has it got?

Despite being told by everybody in the known comics world that I’m barking up the wrong tree, the most basic ‘entry point’ for new readers should be the price, but that isn’t likely to be changed unless many other things change and we’ve got to think that the industry isn’t going to change because I suggest it does. Publishers can argue and prove that comics need to be as expensive as they are, yet go to ‘poorer’ countries and look at their comics industry and tell me if having cheap comics has ruined their industries? The price issue is about greed; it’s about bumping up the profile of their creators to the point where they earn far too much money. The US industry has got itself in this mess by idiots with no forward thinking and a short term profit mindset. The 1990s have a lot to answer for. That era for comics heralded a time when creators were paid too much money. Had they not been given the earth by publishers, then the punter wouldn't have been expected to pay for it - comics are not gas and electric, you can live without them.

To use a well-worn cliché, at the end of the day (apart from getting dark) comics, or rather comics publishers, distributors, retailers and fans are not going to change comics. They aren’t going to make anything more appealing to the person who just might consider looking at a comic. Nothing any of them say or do will expand the horizons of the industry in any other way other than possibly artistically. The only real way a viable entry point is going to come from persuading people that comics are actually worth the human investment - the time, the effort and the expense.

Believe it or not, that is happening, but it isn’t happening because of the publishers, the retailers or the creators.

Comics Lesson 24:

Let’s lay our cards on the table. I like comics; I like the medium and regardless of what many people inside the industry are now feeling about it the format of the comicbook is never going to disappear. It might become ghettoised, and it might end up being a very specialised market, it might get taken over by many of the very small publishers, or it might encourage someone else, a self-made millionaire comics fan maybe, who decides he doesn’t like the industry as it is, so he creates his own company or buys up the majors.

The only life left in superhero and fantasy comics appears to be the ones that are still with us after 50 years. Image is the only real success story and it seems that even they are now always on the verge of closure – even Spawn which boasted sales of 100,000+ is a marginal indie at best now. If you take out the innovative independent comics producers, a group we’ve not really touched on because of its vastness, and leave the rest, we’re still left with most of the industry’s turnover and money. I don’t know how much reading tastes has changed in the last 12 years, but in 1999 superhero comics (or comics produced by companies that specialise in spandex) accounted for 90% of total sales – that really shouldn’t be ignored, nor should it be believed the market split has changed much since then – comics sales are roughly the same now (2011) as they were in 2006; there has been a shift in product loyalty, but it appears that the massive tail off in readership hasn’t materialised, yet.

“Most superhero comics are formulaic rubbish”, I heard this statement uttered at Caption 2002. Caption is the small press convention held in the plush surroundings of Oxford’s colleges. This is an expression you expect to hear from people entrenched in the small press. The truth is that statement is 100% accurate. Most superhero comics are formulaic rubbish, even today with the rising expectations of the reader for sophistication and forward movement in stories, comics companies have perfected the art of ‘illusion of change’. The need for something major to happen in the general status quo of a hero’s life or those lives around him has become a common plot used in most superhero comics, it adds some realism to the unrealism. But even these changes are formulaic, it doesn’t matter that a writer might be able to introduce a groovy new idea, most are planned months in advance and rarely now does anything exciting happen in a comic because the rest of the world, thanks to the Internet, knows every little detail about to happen.

I was a huge fan of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was a latecomer and had to play catch up using a mate’s video collection, by the time I’d caught up with the series around the middle of Season 3 I was hooked, as were lots of my comics reading mates. Buffy was like comics on screen and we loved it. One of the things that completely hooked me on Buffy was the fact that I deliberately avoided websites that offered plot spoilers, I deliberately avoided any conversations with mates who had seen all the episodes and knew what was happening in the USA, because they were 10 episodes ahead of Sky TV (when I was watching it). Therefore when major events or plot twists happened in that series I was blown away. They were, for me, genuine revelations and increased the drama ten-fold.

It is possible to do the same with comics, but the Internet and the cult of personality has made it very difficult for the comics enthusiast and net nerd to be able to avoid finding out the future. Take the death of Superman for instance – that even made national and international news programs (yet in real terms it was about the 15^th time DC had killed the Man of Steel off, except this time he was dying in the technologically advanced late 20^th century and it was a slow news week…) - everyone knew he was going to die before it happened and it lessened the effect dramatically. They handled the return of Superman much better, but to be honest by the time they milked all the spin-off concepts, no one really cared how he came back only that he had and DC could return to producing standard comics on a monthly basis. By the way, DC Thomson did a similar stunt first with Dennis the Menace and his hairstyle going punk, which turned out to be a very practical April Fool’s joke that had every major newspaper in the UK giving massive exposure to one of Britain’s oldest and cheekiest comics characters and it of course boosted sales of The Beano.

The problem with a lot of comics fans is they need to know what is happening next episode and this is something that comics publishers have always been able to exploit. Even back in the Seventies, a lot of editors and employees at Marvel and DC would spend hours on the phones talking to fanzine editors or amateur journalists who were trying to get hints and tips of what was going to happen in the future and when these conversations were turned into news in the front of newszines, these were the first places the fans looked at. Actually this wasn’t true, the first place many comics fans looked at was the ‘Next Issue’ caption on the last page of the comic or said comic's letters page – where the little teaser for next month often appeared. It was because fans loved to know hints that the newszines prospered and why Internet news sites have become the new comics magazines (with one almighty difference, CBR, Newsarama, Comicon, Silver Bullets all gave their promotional tools free of charge. It’s like a fan of Robbie Williams starting up a website to do nothing but promote Robbie Williams’ record company and music publishers!).

Marvel and DC have always given the potential buyer a synopsis of the upcoming issue. Once in next issue boxes and eventually through retailers catalogues and eventually the Internet, rarely do they give you more, but they might warn you that some revelation is going to happen – this immediately sparks interest in websites and news magazines and people are soon trying to find out what is going to happen. Someone always knows someone else who knows someone in that particular editorial office and before you know it you have a story, you can reveal to the fans what the revelation is going to be. It’s like the tabloids and Eastenders isn’t it? Yep, it sure is! Speculative news journalism has always been the secret link for success in this industry and the people who run the industry know that there are enough people out there who will do all their donkeywork for them, without payment – what better PR department than the fans themselves? They cover far more bases than a paid-for PR executive, cost nothing and you can shout at them if they get it wrong and don’t have to worry about employment legislature.

There are a number of people who believe this might be the problem, who feel that the Internet has too much power over comics and that the companies pander too much to the Internet and not enough anywhere else. It could be said that the major web sites are now powerful creatures indeed and have been allowed to become powerful because Marvel and DC let them.

I have to be honest, with hindsight neither Marvel nor DC ever appeared to really have fingers on the pulse of comics, they have relied too heavily on others for their success and the failures they have had. Essentially for two massive publishing houses they’ve freeloaded and exploited just about everyone they could and not even a twang of guilt has ever shown itself. Here’s some irony for you, comics publishers’ representatives despise comics fans – they wish for the day when the only comics fan left are sweet smelling yuppies with huge disposable incomes and the retailers are just huge conglomerations that order in the gazillion and never hassle them. That’s possibly one of the reasons why comics are up shit creek at times.

The Internet has become even more massive than it was when I launched Borderline and in many ways it has uncovered many more comics fans – either those returning or those swept up by some film’s hype – probably more than I suggested earlier in this tome. It gives the impression that comics and the Internet are synonymous and can now only co-exist together or not at all.

But let’s forget about the ‘net, it actually is a bit too self-important. In 2005, as soon as people in the comics industry found out I was writing a book about it I had all number of people email me, telling me that I need to include this, that and the other in my book or I couldn’t call it a ‘complete’ look at comics. I never said it was going to be that, but people, especially dedicated fans, believe that unless I cover the small part of the industry they are either experts in or have interests in, then I won’t be doing comicbooks justice. Guess what? I don’t think I set out to do comicbooks justice, it is a medium I have absolutely loved – it is one I’ve grown up with and I will probably end up leaving my wife… to decide what happens to the rest of my comics when I die! Just a small box with some personal favourites...

But I no longer feel that this book has to end up being a defence of a criminally inadequate industry that only survives on the blind faith of its dedicated and dwindling fan base. Comics need defending, but not to the people who are already reading them and comics is the biggest entertainment group that only preaches to the converted...

Next: who is the future of comics and the ever-lovin' end... Blummin' eck!

My Monthly Curse (Part Fifty-Five)

Comics Lesson 23:

Have I talked about gimmicks? When comics became void of new ideas and the fans grew tired of the old gimmicks, a whole bunch of new ones were invented. We’ve talked about the various different versions of the X and Spider-Man books, this was soon followed by metallic ‘fifth’ ink covers, it wasn’t long before hologram covers made an appearance, plus lenticular (don’t ask, I don’t know) covers, wraparound covers, fold-out covers, 3D triptych, glow-in-the-dark, sparkle-in-the-rain covers! When fans got fed up with forking out an extra dollar or two for some enhanced cardboard, the companies moved on to other things… They went back to the future.

Back in the 1970s something unheard of happened – Superman met Spider-Man. The story was very contrived and just enough was included into it for Marvel and DC fans to think the difference between the two companies’ universes wasn’t that far apart. There followed a second meeting, then a meeting between Batman and the Hulk and before you knew it… they’d stopped. They didn’t really work and to be honest DC has never liked working with Marvel because the two companies have differing work ethics and, well, DC has ethics in general, Marvel would have to look the word up in a dictionary and then get someone to explain the definition. But by the mid 1990s the idea of comics companies working together to milk even more money out of the fans was rife. There was at one point about three company crossovers a month and most of them featured moderately successful comics characters teamed up with someone from Marvel or DC that would benefit no one really. The stories were often quite simply shit, the art was often rushed or done by a team of artists and the crossover became like a production line. New and more sophisticated gimmicks were needed.

In recent years these have included recruiting writers from popular TV. Joe Michael Straczynski, the creator of the award-winning SF series Babylon 5, Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hollywood scriptwriter Bob Gale, and probably most prominently independent film director Kevin Smith have all been attracted to writing comics and have obviously attracted interest or have drawn people with them, interested in seeing what they are doing next. I have no doubt that even more famous people have written comics in the last 6 years; but I don’t give a shit and neither should you!

Once upon a time comics didn’t need gimmicks to sell them, and in some cases the gimmicks weren’t gimmicks at all – Stan Lee used to make it seem as though special permission had been granted for one Marvel character to appear in another’s comic! But that was Stan Lee and his fantastic use of hyperbole and his understanding of PR.

What happens is quite simple, the wonder disappears. In 1965, saying on the cover that the Angel had special permission from the X-Men to appear in a Human Torch story was cutting edge; in 2005 [or 2011] the reader expects to be dazzled. He expects to believe he's impressed with the latest gimmick. Therefore, existentially there is no such thing as a gimmick comic, it's just evolutionary economic robbery.

With the exception of a few, I firmly believe that most comics writers aren’t. Writers, that is. I think a lot of them are failed writers in another field; some might have a go at a novel or some literature, but basically they were just in the right place at the right time to write comics.

But then real writers with genuine love for comics came along and the audience witnessed quality.

Comicbooks shouldn’t be derided, for all the faults in all the areas of comics, the medium is alive, kicking and in many cases rolling in dosh, in other countries. I don’t want this to sound like a conclusion because we have a little more to go through, but essentially it isn’t the people who read comics that have given the medium such a bad image in the US and UK. The behind-closed- doors stuff I’ve talked about, the rough ride the retailers get, the in-fighting and backbiting are not publicly known and even Rich Johnston avoids a lot of it, because, generally, no one cares. The fans don’t want politics outside of their comics. The commonest event nowadays if people start throwing hissy fits on most Internet forums is to just ignore the person, whether they have a valid point or not. Most comics fans are normal inoffensive people and have had a bad press for far too long. I recently was in London visiting relatives and we were driving near to Hammersmith Odeon and there was a rock band playing, I don’t know who, but the general assortment of weird looking people frankly made the saddest and most grotesque of comics fans look relatively normal. Yet no one ever looks at devoted followers of rock fashions in the same way as comics fans. We looked at punks in the 1970s, but they weren’t really derided and even if they were, it didn’t ingrain itself into the consciences of the public. Comics are derided by the public because of what they perceive the comics reader to be like, and most people when they’ve moved on in life think of comics as something from their childhoods and not something grown men or young adults should be devoting so much time and energy to.

Another major factor, apart from the cost and the soon-to-be-disproved fake stigma attached is the limited choice. This isn’t going to be changed. We no longer can afford to try and change the minds of people. Superhero comics will stay superhero comics, they are the bread and butter of the US industry and the smaller outfits will continue to flog their wares to these existing comics fans, attempting to persuade people that spandex isn’t the only option – even if that’s what most of these people want. When I launched Borderline, the CI forum, which by this time had become the ‘Comics Unintentional’ list – I decided to change the name because I didn't want to be associated with CI – didn’t really appreciate what we were doing. Most of the then 350 members downloaded it and probably read it, but the feeling from most of them was ‘there isn’t enough about the things we’re interested in, in it!” They still had their powers of observation, which was a relief.

But while superheroes are dominant in this little pocket universe we've been talking about, they aren’t everything. In 10 years I’ve seen non-superhero comics and trade paperbacks go from having just 4% of the market to nearly 10%. There is a reason for this and it kind of contradicts a lot of what I’ve said. But that’s for part of my conclusion; we have other fish to fry before we get to that, but it won’t be long – just a few more pages...

However you feel about them, comics have been part of our history since the beginning of the last century and part of our consciousness since Superman and Batman appeared in the States and the Beano and the Dandy appeared in the UK. Despite the perceived low opinion people have of comics they still have contributed a phenomenal amount to modern popular culture.

We have seen the creation of a new breed of comics characters, and we saw that take over the entire landscape of US comics. You can find funny comics, the other staple for many years, but they are as marginalized now in comics collectors’ eyes as anything that doesn’t fit into their own particular mindset. Plus funny comics are still available in Wal-Mart and the local newsagents – Direct Market comics aren’t.

Comics haven’t really changed as a format. We saw giant-sized comics from almost the first one, as many comics were actually 64-pages or more every month and they were all anthology titles, something that no longer has any place in the US industry apart from in the small press (they also cost just 10 cents). The USA had their annuals like the British had their hardcover Christmas stocking fillers. Comics were reduced in size to the point where extra pages were treated like a bonus rather than a right. We’ve seen 80-page giants, and we’ve seen coffee table styled Treasury Editions. We saw the creation of the trade paperback collection and the graphic novel and we’ve been introduced to the phonebook styled monster trades that originated from Japanese manga comics and were made popular in the USA by Dave Sim. But essentially for all the technological advances that have been made comics are still just pages of paper with artwork and words on them, that hasn’t changed. There have been bolt-ons to the concept, but the principal has remained the same.

But now, twelve years into the 21^st century there is a school of thought that thinks that the comic as the most common form of the medium might be displaced by the trade paperback or the original graphic novel (35 years since the forecast was originally made, it’s made again!) and may become focused only on the characters that guarantee profit. This means that many, many characters that have become comics institutions and have existed for longer than most of us have been alive may disappear completely, with them only standing a chance of life again if a film producer finds the concept worth expanding on. I don’t think this is a particularly forward thinking solution and while there is no guarantee it will happen, people in this industry have a nose for forecasting the future. I’m not the only person who could and can be precognitive in this business.

I don’t think it will be the end of comics as we know it really, because if Marvel and DC go the trade paperback route exclusively then there’ll still be lots of other companies floating around producing comicbooks and probably grabbing a disproportionate amount of the market, but without Marvel and DC Comics most comics shops that specialise in comicbooks will either have to completely rethink their retail approach or face extinction. Change or die? You might think it’s a good thing, but instead of improving the image of comics and making them accessible to the masses they would ghettoise them even more – even Britain’s largest comic shop, Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue, London, has its masses of comics hidden away downstairs and if they had a back issue department it was pretty small and select. It might even be that it’s now retailers and people who run comics that view them the way I’ve been portraying them.

If comics change that way there will be less people emerging as new talents, fewer people trying to break into comics, barely any innovation, lots of traffic managers and the law of diminishing returns would suddenly become a law of downwardly spiralling returns. Marvel and DC might still produce a couple of dozen comics titles between them, but if you don’t like the X-Men, Batman, Superman or Spider-Man you’re buggered. It is possible that Marvel and DC might decide to sell off properties they don’t feel are viable enough for them, but the likelihood of this, although it has often been discussed, is pretty small. Marvel holds onto its characters like Gollum hold his Precious; while DC probably own more characters than you could shake the proverbial stick at, so it might not be such a stupid idea for them, but they still won’t do it. Even publishers display an unhealthy anal retentiveness that we normally associate with comics fans. It might make them money in 40 years time!

If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle...

But for original graphic novels and the proliferation of these in the future, comics fan and former co-owner of the website The Comics Village, Craig Johnson summed it up quite nicely when he said to me, “The loss-leading function performed by comicbooks (singles to LPs if you like) is the most important part of comics companies trade programs. It allows them to amortize the cost of the trade over a period of months, whilst earning income (even if it doesn't cover the immediate costs) over a slightly deferred time period – then the trade can come out, and after printing and distribution costs, is almost all profit. If the trade is a relative flop, then it doesn’t actually have to make much money to cover manufacturing cost, so the chances of making a loss on a trade collection are slim.

“However, should the monthly not be there, then they would be faced with paying a writer and artist for six months without having any product to sell – then it’d enter the printing/distribution process, and you’d end up with books not actually seeing a return on investment for a much longer period. In this instance, a trade would have to sell far more to break even, and increase the number of flops and decrease the overall profit for the companies. It’s worth bearing in mind that most Manga trades saw print in instalments in magazines first – there are very few manga books that are specifically produced as books first and foremost.” And I think he’s right, comics companies can’t take the risk of not producing new comics and the ones who won’t produce new material are the ones who are picking up and repackaging old and archived stuff. What I think will happen over the next few years will be a gradual retraction of Marvel and DC’s comic series output. There will be even more 4 and 6 issue stories and mini-series. Failing characters will see even less exposure (unless a hot shot comes along with a great idea or an even better artist) and they might get replaced with the opportunity to make money again in another market in the form of short stories. The days of the single story comic are almost over now, only the independents seem to practice the art with any heart and over the coming years the idea of any story that isn’t of epic proportions will be greeted with rejection by the big two.

Marvel’s problem is simple – there is a genuine fear that selling a character or concept that is a complete and utter pile of wank might just make someone else some money, so they won’t sell anything. Remember The X-Men; they are the yardsticks by which every Marvel character is measured. It was a failure and yet it rose from the ashes and became the greatest thing since eggy bread, so how could they possible think of getting rid of any of their copyrighted characters? The future is never clear, but it’s always better to think positive!

DC went around buying up just about every failed comics character from Charlton to Fawcett and reinventing them (or not). DC has destroyed an entire history’s worth of its own history, but even though we will never revisit the past, they won’t part with it… Just in case. [And this might be born out with the news as I was editing this tome that the entire DC Universe is being revamped, or kick-started as some commentators like to call it. DC is trying to appeal to a new audience by making icons such as Batman and Superman more appealing. The cynic in me says that this will do what it says on the tin until it's failed or succeeded, when, either way, the icons will revert back to their recognisable selves.]

So for characters with half a century or more of history and the people who have followed them, the future could hold nothing. Marvel and DC will believe that if they cancel someone’s favourite title he or she’ll move onto one of their other comics, because they are comics fans – this isn’t like The Sandman, the real fans will not bail out. But why do you think the industry has seen a drop in sales of over 80% in the last 30 years? Because people are leaving and are not coming back – for these key reasons: they were driven away from them by cancellations, poor quality or high prices. And yet people in comics were telling me that all the major companies are doing what they can to attract new readers. Where? What is the evidence, especially when I can’t get a straight answer from either of the two majors about the amount of future investment they are placing on comics finding a larger audience, or even a new one?

Who do you think is the best person to convince others to read comics? Someone who reads them rather than works in them, for starters – the Internet doesn’t attract new readers for comics, really, it doesn’t. It just attracts the same people to them. It might just snare a curious ex-fan who’s having a look for old time’s sake, but for every one of him there are thousands who don’t even think of looking at a website or a sales catalogue or a comics magazine and to be honest the only way comics have of surviving the next ten years is by trying to attract back as many old, and not so old, readers and get them to stay and spread the word – maybe introduce comics to their kids. But how do they attract those who have left back? Nostalgia, basically. Touch the child in them. Hey, do you remember this? As far as new readers are concerned, well, we’ll get to that because every cloud has a silver lining, amazingly.

People in the comics industry will tell you that every way conceivable had been tried to increase the fan base, and they will cite other’s failures as reasons why they won’t try a similar thing themselves. It’s copout logistics, because publishers are scared of spending what little profit they make. The law of diminishing returns is the only law they understand or are prepared to adhere to.

We are missing a massive point and that is a company called DC Comics, the longest lasting publisher of comicbooks in the USA and, of course, the owners of Batman and Superman (and Wonder Woman, if you want some feminine interest). DC Comics is owned by the massive entertainments conglomerate called TimeWarner, which has money falling out of its corporate arse. Why hasn’t Warner Brothers Entertainment (under the TimeWarner umbrella) invested in comics the way it has in other forms of entertainment? Or have they invested the amount they see fit for an industry that the chief executives of the higher power might not see a future in? These are valid questions, but the sad answer is that DC has been so good at promoting shit for the last 30 years that the comics company regularly loses money anyhow. It is a sort of loss leader for TimeWarner; for every comic that makes them money, they throw more shit at the wall to see if anything else will stick. DC was pretty much rust proof in my humble opinion. The problem with them was they couldn’t see something good if it bit them on the collected arses.

Next up: the penultimate section; hyperbole and stuff

My Monthly Curse (Part Fifty-Four)

[This chapter includes a deliberate typo.]

The Internet is arguably another reason why comics have lost popularity. Being flippant for a moment, if you saw the amount of traffic that takes place on some of the live comics forums in the USA you’d wonder how these people ever have the time to actually read comics, eat, sleep, shit and go out to work to pay for their habit.

There are some very professional and long-standing comics websites; ironically, when I first wrote this tome nearly 6 years ago, the majority of those I listed were the most prominent; now all but one of them no longer exists. Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources or CBR, is the only one of the list that survives. There are others and areas of the ‘net which I’m sure many of you are aware of, things such as forums, newsgroups, blogs and homepages, which are dedicated to all manner of things and not just comics, many of them are popular and regularly frequented – these sites survive by the number of hits they get – the number of times a different Internet users goes to that page and this can equate to money if you are successful enough. Either that or they buy their space and write off the expense as fun. Of course, since this was originally written something called Facebook arrived and there are literally hundreds of dedicated Facebook pages aligned with comics; it should also be noted that nearly a million people ‘like’ comics; so perhaps the figures I bandied about in the first quarter of this book aren’t as accurate as I’d like to think; but saying that, I could click ‘like’ to having my balls shaved by a big hairy gay biker with a penchant for shit eating; it doesn’t mean I actually do like it.

However, the Internet created cults of personality, as more and more people went on-line. The entire Internet has changed since this was written in 2005 and yet back in the late 1990s it was so new that its content was covered in print magazines, to allow those without Internet access to see what they were missing! It rankled Dez that Richard Johnston and I came up with the revolutionary idea of creating a column that focussed specifically on the comings and goings on the, still relatively immature, World Wide Web. He still ran ‘Networks’ in CI right up until it ended and it was one of the most popular columns, with the brief of cherry-picking the best bits from the entire web.

What comics fandom was really about back in the 1970s, was the community and fun side, getting one’s name in print, whether it was a fanzine or a real comicbook, it was an accolade that many wanted. It still is, even though you can buy your own website and have potentially an entire planet viewing you and your thoughts. In comics there seems to be a rule of thumb and that is ‘you ain’t anybody until people talk about you’. There have been a few people who have really been able to capitalise on this ethos. The Internet reinvented comics fandom into something bigger, more international and far more confrontational than it had ever been – more even than the days of full-scale abusive letters hurled back and forth in the now anachronistic letter columns of fanzines.

Comics and the Internet had their first real marriage with the creation of the Usenet message board system and as that became more widely used, comics took advantage of it. Email meant that for a lot of people they suddenly had contact with others they could only write letters or possibly phone and then the added extra of being able to send files meant that writers could work from home more – it was faster and mostly more reliable than FedEx or UPS and it was considerably cheaper.

Usenet grew exponentially and as its numbers went into the global thousands they started to attract all the wrong kinds of people. From advertisers to arseholes who just want to wind people up – as the web developed so did the number of other forums and websites devoted exclusively to comics. Of course we all know about the dotcom phenomena; well comics weren’t exempt from this. People saw the amount of traffic these kind of sites were getting and started to offer money for advertising rights on the pages, suddenly the smallest fanboy with the lowest IQ could earn money from having a site dedicated to superheroines who get their tits out for the lads! (And trust me there were hundreds of these kind of things – there probably still is!)

Of course when everything came crashing down around the ears of the dotcom millionaires, comics, because it has resilience, just kept plodding along and taking advantage of the technology left behind. Marvel, DC and all the other major publishers invested heavily in websites (only to lay many people off as it became obvious that most webpages can be maintained by a minimum of staff). But what is a corporate website if it isn’t just a big advert? Well, nothing really, but Marvel and DC tried to offer something more than just press releases and previews of future cover art. Stuff like web comics and membership to clubs that allowed them to get free or discounted goodies. It has had a limited success, but arguably it makes some money because it still exists today, in 2012.

I discovered the hard way that there are very few people who like to pay for anything like this on the Internet, especially when there’s so much stuff available for nothing. Marvel and DC both disliked the fact there were a multitude of comics sites dedicated to their characters, generating interest from the fans and potentially stealing future revenue, so both went on the legal rampage and tried to have websites shut down. DC succeeded and lost a lot of respect from the comics community, Marvel decided to do a U turn and offered partnerships with websites they regarded as non-harmful to the company’s reputation. Obviously, this has all changed over the last 6 years and websites are far more interactive and progressive – technology has advanced to a level that makes the internet a valuable resource for all parties. I’d like to think that Borderline had something to do with the way peoples’ ideas changed.

So, who were the real stars of this early Internet revolution?

The most obvious was Warren Ellis. After manipulating the press to get him in a prominent position, Ellis, who I can’t deny is something of an innovator, decided he was going to use the Internet as his own personal totem. So he set up his own forum using the Delphi notice boards and the WEF as it became known grew and grew. People were attracted by Ellis’ forthright opinions and ideas and the fact that he and other pros often discussed the insides of the industry, but they were lured back more often than not by Ellis’ uncensored attacks on anyone who dared to have an opinion he didn’t share. WEF became a huge haven for sycophants and abusers – as long as you had an eloquent enough tongue and half a brain about you (and knew whose arse to lick) you could become someone on the WEF. The new breed of professionals either came up through the WEF or followed colleagues along to see what was going on and stayed, adding more credibility to it. The list grew into vast subsections that covered the whole of the comics industry, in reality it became a form of interactive online magazine of its own. Ellis, at one point, had over 25,000 people dancing to his tune – it was a revelation for comics and if you weren’t on the WEF you weren’t into comics. I obviously wasn’t into comics then? I found the place mainly offensive and incredibly snobbish – but you couldn’t ignore it, nor could you fault the way it was run – a dictatorship, policed by piranhas. It did read at times like a bunch of freaks taking the piss out of another bunch of freaks that didn’t read the same things as they did, but it was as innovative as Borderline in its own way and pre-dated Facebook by a few years.

The comics taste war was smouldering, rearing its head in different places, not just the WEF, and with different amounts of vitriol. Do the fans of SF films have pitched battles with the fans of Horror fans? Oh, yeah they probably do, they belong to the same area of fan as comics and most of them probably have dipped their toes into comics murky waters at some time in their lives. How about ‘film noir’ and surrealist film fans then? Do they hate each other and go out of their way to denigrate everything the other says or does? No, I don’t think they do. Are there heated battles between John Grisham and Stephen King fans? Probably not. Do Catherine Cookson aficionados hurl cream buns at Mauve Binchy’s fans? I’m being silly, but that is how petty comics can be if you just happen to be slightly out of step with everybody else.

The thing is Warren Ellis and his forum never lost a shred of credibility. He could be as offensive as he wanted, be as obtuse as he cared to be and unhelpful, and yet the only people who disliked him were the ones who felt the wrath of his acerbic wit (and some of them came back for more and more – comics fans are also masochists. Haven’t I personally proved this?). The Internet built up his reputation and it helped him secure good paid work, and it gave him a career. Ellis left the major spotlight before it began to wane and others have filled his place on the Delphi forums. There are going to be new false idols replacing every previous one – it’s the nature of the beast. If you are in a position of importance, and being a writer or artist on a regular good selling monthly title immediately gives you an audience of sycophants, it really shouldn’t be difficult to achieve a massive following, using the net – Hell, Borderline attracted 150,000 people; so it’s not unusual to see comics creators with 100,000 fans on Facebook. And what about that new load of bollocks, Twitter. I'm betting top creators have more followers than a man has sperms in an ejaculation.

The real success stories for comics on the net are either the ones where people have made it via use of the web to promote their work, or the person who manages to turn being the most hated man in comics into an art form. I’ve mentioned him before, but audience, please bow to the unrivalled and completely undivided hatred that was once shown towards Richard Johnston – my protégé.

Back at Comics International, but this time in the years when the speculator market was booming and comics were having a ‘halcyon days’ moment, the most popular column in comics was Movers & Shakers. I’ve said it before and I think it’s worth saying again – it was the first of its kind, it had stuff you just wouldn’t normally dream of seeing in print, it was irreverent and had a pretty high success rate at getting it right. Every magazine wanted its own equivalent of Movers. Every comics magazine had their own version of it, but it just wasn’t the same. I think the Brits do that kind of column so much better because they understand irony and subtle sarcasm and that was one of reasons it was so popular - the Brits also had Nigel Dempster.

Movers also covered scurrilous gossip and highlighted the absurdities of the industry – typical of most British tabloids it was quick to build up and quicker to knock down. It was, on the whole, one of the most fun assignments I ever had to do and rarely did I ever approach its construction with anything but excitement. It got tougher to write, but that was mainly Rich Johnston’s fault and I needed to be both creative and sneaky to be able to keep one step ahead of him at times.

You see about two years after Movers first appeared, Usenet saw the debut of Rich’s first gossip and rumour column. The majority of it was made up from stuff he’d seen in CI and either copied verbatim or did his own investigating and came up with either more or less. The snobs on Usenet weren’t happy with Rich, but he’d been a regular contributor there for a few years already and was well liked by a lot of the people on that group – so the snobs tolerated him. I’d like to think they didn’t like what Rich was doing because they saw it as a gradual erosion of the tight knit bastion they had created, but they couldn’t deny that it was attracting new people and generating a lot of reply posts. Rich knew he was onto something and used his ingenuity to string out an issue’s worth of Movers stories throughout a month on Usenet, obviously with some stories of his own – because creative people know a good thing when they see it and some had already started to talk to him about ‘maybe dropping a hint or a plug somewhere’ for whatever they were working on at the time. But it was the gossip that made Rich his name. It didn’t take him long before he was getting juicier stuff than I was and that was the reason was he was quickly becoming known throughout the comics community. The problem was that Rich was also getting a bad name for himself and I can put the record straight on that right here.

There’s an expression, ‘You don’t shoot the messenger’ and it’s one that has to be thrown at the baying masses every so often, because they blame the person who tells them and not the people it went through before it got to the person who tells you. For Richard Johnston, the comics community began to really despise him and it actually wasn’t his fault. It was mine. When you’ve been in the comics industry long enough and studied it the way I have, you become sort of precognitive. I remember having a discussion with Dez once about the nature of news and speculative news – no story is a lie unless it’s a blatant lie. You can’t say, “Stan Lee is dead” because apart from the libel implications it isn’t true (or at least you don’t know it for sure), but you can say, “Stan Lee is going to die”, and you can because it is true. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t dead; you are just stating a fact – one day he will die. It’s all to do with real world libel laws, so the true beauty of a great gossip column is to be able to make stuff up that you either know for certain is going to happen, or be as ambiguous as possible as to not set off alarms and then say, we foresaw it. CI sometimes ran stuff we heard third-hand and really shouldn’t have run, or we just made it up!

The first instant of this happening basically tarred CI with a brush it found difficult to shake, many years after it happened. I’d only been working there full time for about a year and we didn’t have a cover story, we had half a cover story, but part of that was informed speculation from an industry professional. Essentially the new Image Comics company was a year old and there was going to be some shake ups on the books it published, not least the market leader Spawn. Todd McFarlane, it was reported, had been happy with a three-month experiment where he employed some of the top writers in the industry to write his book. It was ingenious because it gave McFarlane more time to do his artwork and it got huge coverage from the press because he’d attracted not only Frank Miller, but Alan Moore and Dave Sim (a creator responsible for a multi-award winning independent comics called Cerebus the Aardvark), this brought readers of these creators along and gave Spawn some much needed credibility amongst generic comics fans.

So we knew that there were some big anniversary plans scheduled, some new books and something happening with Spawn. It was really nothing more than a bit of idle speculation for the Movers column, but we didn’t have anything for the cover story that really reached out and grabbed the reader by the balls. So we made a story up; we put our collective heads together and came up with a couple of scenarios and then we needed some people to pad out the scenarios. If Image was recruiting who would they be looking at? If McFarlane was going to take a break from writing Spawn who was the logical replacement?

The first part was easy; we just looked at the top artists in the industry and played pick a name. We got three of the four we guessed and the artist who didn’t join Image admitted to being wooed by Image. The second part was more difficult. Dez speculated that whomever McFarlane would get to write Spawn for a few months would have to either be on the same level as the previous guest writers or someone who was really wowing the comicbook world at that time. He drew a blank. I drew a blank. Then I looked at the last 2 years’ big releases and saw the likely candidate. Not only had he written Batman recently, he had been responsible for a couple of the most off-the-wall comics series of recent years and he was currently being coaxed and coerced by both of the big companies. Dez, who claims he discovered this person, jumped at it, and so we ran the sub-header that ‘Grant Morrison was going to be the new writer on Spawn’. There was no truth in it at all.

Two weeks later, we’re sitting in the back garden of Dez’s place in Finchley, smoking and drinking tea and catching some rays when the phone rang. A couple of seconds into the call, “Say that again? [pause] You are joking? Tell me this is a wind-up? [longer pause] Hang on. [turning to me] Grant Morrison has been announced as the new writer on Spawn!” We were ecstatic – not because we’d guessed the news right but because we hadn’t made fools of ourselves. An even more amazing bit of irony was to follow, but first we had to deal with the unexpected.

Over on Usenet, where most of the stuff that Rich had posted was very well received or taken with mild disbelief, there was all of a sudden a huge backlash and Rich had to invoke the don’t shoot the messenger rule when he received yards of abuse from people claiming this was preposterous, that McFarlane wouldn’t employ such a loose cannon like Morrison and besides he wasn’t exactly the best writer in comics was he? Of course they were all proved wrong, yet for some unfathomable reason they seemed to blame us even more, even though they didn’t know the true story. It was almost like they hated the fact that a British comics magazine had got the scoop over the Americans (most of Usenet was populated by Americans) and when we explained that we are, like British and, like, Grant Morrison is like, British… it just seemed to incense them even more. A Scotsman should not be writing Spawn!

Rich then became linked with CI whether he liked it or not, and knowing Rich, he liked it. It was clear from the offset that Johnston was an attention seeker and didn’t care what kind of attention it was as long as it’s focused on him.

Shortly after Morrison’s short run on Spawn came out, to great commercial and critical acclaim, he admitted in a magazine interview that he had wandered into his local comic shop in Glasgow and seen the headline of CI and decided that if we had said so it must be true, so he rang Todd McFarlane up and said ‘what’s this about me writing Spawn?’ and McFarlane said, ‘You writing Spawn? Hey, what a great idea’ and he got the gig. He thanked Dez for helping him make $50,000 he wasn’t expecting.

Of course, when this news came out, the whole of Usenet seemed to declare war on the rumourmongers of CI. We could literally post something on there that was a repeat of month old news and people who be speculating that we had made it up. Seriously, they can be that childish and often still are, because for all the advances on the Internet, Usenet still exists and still has numerous 'people' using it.

The other irony was that, on average, there was at least one made up story in Movers every month and had been since the very first time I wrote it. I never told Dez, in fact I’ve never admitted it to anyone, but every month I used to make up a story and incredibly a huge percentage of them were either completely right or so close it could be excused. And of course Rich used Movers as one of his main sources, so he started to get a reputation for either making stuff up, perpetuating lies or just being part of the whole sham. The thing was by about 1994 he was generating most of the stuff he was writing himself, or getting his own ‘stringers’ to do a lot of the donkeywork.

The first company to start getting seriously pissed off by Rich was DC Comics. The publisher had put a tight lid on all news releases and had an almost Nazi attitude towards giving the press anything before they were ready and yet Rich was constantly coming up with details of stuff the company was working on. I was impressed, for about two years Movers was almost devoid of DC stories and even the odd made up one about them, despite being inconsequential at best, was always followed by a letter from Bob Wayne or Patty Jerez in the marketing department either asking for clarification, some form of retraction, or something in the next issue to say the news was not true. Because DC had never given CI a penny in advertising, Dez told them where to put their demands on most occasions. DC could technically have tied CI up in litigation forever if it wanted, it certainly had the money, but it would have been counterproductive because we were doing their job for them so on most occasions they just let things pass. They should have felt the same way about Rich Johnston, but I’d guess that Bob Wayne, a very dry, acerbic Texan, probably had great difficulty in even understanding Rich, or keeping track of his scattershot approach to conversation.

I remember Bob leading the standing ovation I received at the National Comics Awards for firing Rich from the Borderline team, and I think it would be safe to say that Bob’s life would have been a lot easier if it wasn’t for Rich. The two were always at loggerheads, Bob with that expression of exasperation and Rich with his devilish grin and revolving eyes. The bottom line was, for as much harm as DC felt Johnston was doing, he was also an invaluable aid; the battle lines were drawn up and while Rich skirted them frequently he hasn’t gone over, yet. When I asked Rich to sum up his relationship with Wayne he said, “Eeyore incarnate to my Rabbit. The immovable object. Frankenstein’s Teddy.” I have to say that this is a typical Johnston response, in that it is amusing and nonsensical. I asked Bob for a comment about Rich, but surprisingly as more and more information leaked to the comics reading public that I was writing a book about comics, the less enthusiastic responses I got from major league industry backroom staff. I do know that while Bob found Rich exasperating, he didn't dislike him.

As more and more people arrived onto the ‘net, more found their way to Rich’s various columns, which by now were housed by various websites. Rich took his column through a number of homes and names, increasing the profile before moving on for a better deal with the next biggest. The more people who visited meant the more professionals saw Rich as the person to go to when they had something controversial to talk about, or had heard some juicy titbit that the world needed to know. He was also the person to go to if you wanted to plug your comic, especially if you didn’t think the marketing department of the company you worked for was pulling their weight (which often happened). Love him or loathe him Rich Johnston had established himself as one of the most important people in comics and if you suggested that to anybody who is anybody in comics they would laugh in your face (while secretly agreeing with you, begrudgingly). Rich is also probably the only recognisable person who isn’t a comics employee or freelance creator, and not only is he recognisable, he is better known than half of the people he talks about. But isn’t that one of the trials you have to face when you become the equivalent of the Nigel Dempster of the comics industry?

One of the criticisms levelled at Rich is that he lacks in ethics and has no conscious, but this isn’t the case. I know from personal experience that he plays the game fairly and if you went to him and said ‘please don’t run this’ he won’t, however excellent or controversial it is. And that might be why so many still go to him, associate with him, and use him, because they know that he is at least an honourable gossipmonger (I taught him well). I asked him if he thought he was ethical, “I seem to be bound by my own ethics. If I err, I try to rectify it. I don’t repeat what I’ve been told in confidence unless there are legal aspects. And I do try to avoid causing people problems, and do try to clean up my mess as I go along. I recognise, however, as part of what I do, I am going to make messes...”

Rich has run interviews with everyone from disgruntled ex-employees to the industry’s top people; he’s run accusations of homosexual favouritism, stories of bribery and corruption; he’s crossed the line a number of times in many people’s opinions, but he stands by his record and when I asked him if there was anything he wouldn’t stoop to, he replied, “Plenty. If someone asks me not to write a story and can give me reason why, I generally don't. Also, I tend to steer away from personal lives – unless there's a relevant reason. If someone's been totally open with other people about a personal story I'd be more inclined to use it, but generally I don't.” And I think that’s a fair reflection and far better than the ‘tabloid journalist’ he’s been labelled with. Rich treats the industry in a way it should be treated and that is why the establishment hate him so, yet he’s a massive supporter of the medium and would never do anything to damage the reputation of comics further, even if he publicly isn’t its best advert.

In the real world Rich is a moderately successful advertising copywriter and has been for years; I’m not sure if he still does it now or if he actually makes a living from comics – he’s done some stuff for The Guardian newspaper, in 2011. A former winner of the National Union of Students Cartoonist of the Year competition, in 1994, and holder of a degree in politics, he has always dreamed of being in comics. He’s married to a pretty young South African and he didn’t pay for her and she didn’t need a British passport. I remember him saying to me once, it was late and he was a little drunk and I’d just asked him if it was true he married his wife for a lot of money, “I love my wife and I know she loves me. We got married because we loved each other. It hurts to think people think I’m that sad.” If that’s true then I’m happy for him.

Rich’s main problem was his appearance. I remember him appearing in that comics TV programme I mentioned so long ago in this story and thinking ‘you could be talking the most sense that a mortal has ever spoken and people will look at you and think ‘get your hair cut, get your teeth fixed and get a life!’

He was also something of an innovator in his day and actually had a go at the shameless self-promotion lark before it was fashionable. Rich produced his own comic called Dirt Bag, it wasn’t particularly good, but he managed to sell more than the average small press effort because he convinced people it was worth buying. He also managed to get laid in San Diego in 1995 by telling all the female fans he was going to be the next writer for Excalibur, the comic based in England and mainly written by Brits (or it was once, before it got cancelled). He denies this, but many of us know differently…

I have never particularly been that fond of the guy, we used to talk and we socialised but I find him too effervescent and he has the attention span of a goldfish. But he’s also very clever, he has managed to exploit a human condition – he knew that deep down most creative people like to talk and they love to gossip and if they didn’t, he knew people close by them who did. Rich also realised that the bigger he got the more people wanted to talk to him, because if they got a name check it was better than a plug in a monthly magazine. Fame, even if it’s generated by Rich’s columns, is something they all want, eventually.

Johnston is a rare thing in comics he’s a one-man cult of personality, the single most famous non-comics person in comics. I asked him about it, “Some people really don’t like me, have a real distaste for what I do, they way I do it (or more importantly the received wisdom they have over what I do) some seem like John the Baptist teaching my ways to others, it’s peculiar.” Yet people should not dislike him; he’s honest and he campaigns for the medium extremely diligently. He works hard in the background and would probably make sacrifices for the sake of comics. His approach may be seen by many to be destructive to the industry, but the industry is quite capable of destroying itself and I think, they think, Richard Johnston is a good person to focus the attention away from the wrongs inside the US and UK comics industry. Oddly enough the only death threat Rich ever received was from one Mark Waid!

So, I was indirectly responsible for Johnston’s career as a gossip columnist, I was probably responsible for his reputation getting tarnished from the very beginning, and I think he deserves me saying that he has probably helped comics far more than he has hindered them. His columns, while dripping in bad grammar and lazy writing, have always conveyed the kind of irreverence this industry needs to display. It’s comics not nuclear physics. The people who work in comics are not gods, they take a shit as regularly as you and I and while I doubt Rich has that in mind when he writes his columns, I do when I read them. He is the ultimate sycophant and his devotion to specific things and people is actually more creepy than admirable, but you can’t dispute he’s a true fan and he’s made a lasting impression. Right, that’s quite enough ego massaging, this had nothing to do with the little shit running this on his website and then stopping it because he chickened out...

Next: we enter into the final parts of this long journey...

My Monthly Curse (Part Fifty-Three)

My little excursion back into comics for that Polish weekend, prompted a return to proper comics journalism for me and it came from an unexpected source – but like always we need to do a few of things first, it has to be said that for all the altruism I've extolled about Borderline and the wronged man schtick I'm pretty easy at falling into, at times as editor/creator of Borderline, I was as much of a prick as a previous employer of mine was capable of displaying. It was my magazine and where some people have been known to vociferously defend their property, I was very, very defensive of my magazine and subsequently this, on occasion, turned me into an obstinate bastard, especially with people we were promoting. I was fed up with the comics press fawning over the publishers, so I opted to be a belligerent snob and like with Mark Waid or Warren Ellis or even other more pointless confrontations, it was a little more like marking my territory rather than having a piss.

Then I need to mention/explain about something that didn’t so much happen as evolved, in an odd way: about a year after I started my real life job, the one that allowed us to continue to produce Borderline, I had a breakdown. It was a pretty covert breakdown because when my wife finally found out about it four months had passed and she was unaware there had even been a problem.

I had been working with homeless people for a year, had gotten into it as an economic necessity. Working with the homeless is a really stressful thing and before long I was struggling to cope with life. I was taking more drugs and getting incredibly emotional about the injustices of the world, for the two to kind of collide and manifest into an 'I can't take this shit any more' kind of way. My boss decided that I needed to take an unpaid break, but I couldn't afford to, so I was offered the chance to be seconded to another organisation, where I would help develop a national project – which would eventually be called Connexions (which replaced the careers service and has now itself started to fall apart). I accepted this and things got a little better; there was a lot of reflection, a lot of reconciling my old self with this new caring version. I just chilled for a while.

However, after the death of my father and near collapse of the project I was on, because of dilly-dallying from the government, I found myself staring into an even wider abyss. I was sitting in my office one night going through years of accumulated junk, throwing away bags and sacks of old press releases, catalogues, general rubbish that I thought might have some future – like a man who hordes nails and screws because you never know when that specific screw might come in handy. I found stacks of Comics Internationals, destined for the loft, and I sat and looked through a handful. It was a nostalgic trip and made me realise that it was now all over. This made reconciliation with my old self and the new improved and nicer to be around one a bit more convoluted; but above that, I'd come to a really 'final' decision: I was going to say goodbye to comics for the final time. I would get back from Poland and disappear into the obscurity that had enveloped me for most of my comics career. So I did something sentimental and rather stupid, if those of you reading have been paying any attention. I wrote to Dez Skinn.

I know. I know what you’re thinking and you don’t have to say it, but the bottom line is I’m not a bad person and I’m also a very forgiving person. I didn’t want my life to be littered with ruined friendships. Thomas Wolfe said ‘you can never go home again’ – how many times has that been proved to be a load of bollocks?

I really didn’t expect to hear back from Dez and was even more surprised when he offered me a job. Not a permanent one, just a short gig to talk about the rise and fall of Borderline. I knew why he was offering me this – I’m not stupid. CI’s sales had continued to drop after I left, I don’t know this for certain, but I do know that sales had been on a steady 15% decline per year and without me I couldn’t see Dez stemming the flow that much. His acrimonious feud with me had probably taken its toll on the magazine and if he were seen working with me again, acting as though there was nothing different, then he would score some brownie points. I declined payment, which must have thrown him slightly and I produced about 1500 words on the decline of Borderline and sent it to Dez. It appeared the following month; the way I was mentioned in the contents page was like the return of the prodigal son. He approached me again 6 weeks later and asked if I wanted to do a report on Lodz. I did, I really can’t tell you if it saw print or not.

Comics Lesson 22:

The term ‘comics journalist’ is a bit of an oxymoron. I mean, it isn’t, but if you’ve been in it long enough you realise that it isn’t a term that actually means much. When I started out as a comics journalist there was probably only really one in the country and that was Dez Skinn and he isn’t really a journalist, he is an editor and publisher – he didn’t really have any journalistic training and picked up most of his knowledge from Sarah Bolesworth. So I became the second of two comics journalists in the UK. And I was one of two for a long time until Steve Holland came along, then I was one of four when Mike Conroy took the leap from amateur to professional. But essentially that’s it and none of us have had any journalistic training and I’ll bet none of us could get an NUJ card.

But in the States it’s a title that is used very often and you don’t actually have to get paid to coin the term. I suppose it is the Land of Freedom so if you want to call yourself a journalist or a pig fucker you can – no one is going to argue. Unlike the UK, there are a number of trained journalists who have made the transition into comics magazines (one must ask if they were ever successful in mainstream journalism because there isn’t really any money to be made from comics journalism?) and have become well-respected historians and elder statesmen. The Internet spawned more comics journalists than we’ve all had hot dinners, you only had to be interviewing Fred Bloggs for your mate’s e-zine and you were a comics journo! Most people think it makes them look cool and earn more respect from creators. Most comics journalists I know have never called themselves comics journalists – we don’t really have titles, we just work in comics, but we’re not involved in the creation process of a comic.

Next time: Richard Johnston...