Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 225
No Lessons Here.
HELLO THERE
Grateful for your eyeballs. Thank you for reading. Been a great week of family time. Bought a projector and watched Final Destination on the bedroom wall. My takeaway: 9-year-olds have a lotta questions about the mechanics of a premise.
Let’s get to it.
CREATING COMICS IS SATISFYING
ANTIOCH running into delays was painful for Marco and I. Being professional means taking lumps and keeping it moving, but we’re pretty neurotic about being timely so we carry some shame with us.
As we inch towards the trade hopefully some of those ghosts will be excised or exorcised. Marco has done some fantastic work and I am excited for readers to hold it.
KEEPING MY COMPOSURE
When you willfully take money out of a colleague's mouth -out of their family's mouths- it negates whatever moral 'lesson' you hoped to teach on Twitter.
I’m putting this up front this newsletter because I saw a comic ‘pro’ tryna whip up a mob around a ‘controversial’ creator. And while I think the moment in which no-talents could harm real artists is largely over, I just wanted to reiterate best practices for the adults out here:
If you want a capable person outta work, you are no friend of labor. In the language of that movement, you are a sellout and a collaborator. Tryna keep someone from a check makes you dirt.
There’s horrors that pierce our lives without notice and really lend perspective to idiot bullshit like “this guy is bad blah, I can’t believe blah blah.” The moment I went into my bedroom to complain about this backbiting nonsense I saw on Twitter, my girlfriend hit me with “did you see [redacted]’s baby has cancer?”
A colleague’s 1-year-old is going through something terrible at the moment. This is the stuff that is happening to real life people while idiots are scoring points off each other on social media.
Get a job working for the CEO in Robocop, you corporate-minded palace-intrigue scumbag.
MAYBE SOMETHING MAYBE NOTHING
Just wanted to talk on these tweets from Big Bang Comics for a moment.
I’m not in retailer groups. People tell me what’s said in some of them and, from the outside, they seem intense and contentious. If you talk to publishers they will tell you it’s impossible to take anything from these groups because retailers are individuals expressing individual concerns. Sometimes the loudest voices do not represent the consensus. If in fact there is one.
It seems like herding cats, and I wouldn’t know how to prioritize the voices, but I think there’s likely something to be pulled from these spaces for both publishers and creators. I just don’t know how to divine it.
At any rate, what I get I get from things that appear on my feed. And when that’s multiple retailers saying Marvel has priced itself out of 9/10 of potential sales, I think that’s something.
I’m, admittedly, a bit disconnected from Marvel at present but the vibe I’m getting is that no one knows what G.O.D.S. actually IS. Which means Marvel is treating Hickman like studios treat Christopher Nolan. “His name is the real title of the product.” I think that worked to a degree with X-Men, but only a very small degree. It was the combination of ‘X-Men’ and ‘Hickman’ that made that possible. I know(?) G.O.D.S. is tied to all the major titles at Marvel, but I’m not sure that has the same impact as “Hickman on X-MEN.”
I know there’s a narrative about how the post-Hickman creators ruined all the momentum HOUSE OF X had, but I think we should be honest- he period was a pump that couldn’t sustain. No disrespect to anyone, it’s just the nature of writing yourself into a corner. However good your intentions (or work), the chickens come home to roost at some point.
I think what will be a hard period will be a transformative and ultimately positive one. We’re headed to a crash and something new will come out of it. Like a… hm… what’s that thing that comes from the ashes?
REGARDING LAST WEEK’S TALK ABOUT REVIEWS
This article detailing how PR firms manipulate Rotten Tomato scores just hit. Surprising nobody, but worth bringing up here because it ultimately comes down to “find fringe players and incentivize them to give you good scores/hide bad ones, because they are weighted the same as major outlets.”
The payola aspect of this is very small, $50 is not meaningful to most people. But there’s a few aspects to what people call ‘access media’ and this capitalizes on the ‘you’re in the club’ element that less-professional critics live for.
There’s crossover (not the direct payment aspect, to be clear) with how comics are reviewed. Placing less credentialed voices on the same scale as known quantities (however that might apply) is not necessarily democratization of media. It can also serve the traditional powers. For example, the article above highlights how the push for diverse voices in the critics pool has seemingly served the major studios. That’s a troubling (troublesome?) reality that I don’t think we’ll see explored very much.
What’s the relationship between ‘good intentions’ and ‘corporate self-interest?’ Typically the latter subsumes the former.
IF IT WASN’T CLEAR ALREADY
This Game of Thrones-esque (content and length) article on Disney is the reason you should consider being your own boss. Unless you’re a sociopath who works well within the corporate skullduggery and/or bootlicking. In which case, carry on.
METOO ALSO
Last week I offered the idea of watching She Said as a companion piece to the excellent Tar. I made good on that and was mostly rewarded. She Said is nowhere near as good a film as Tar and has infinitely less to say. But it’s a completely capable ‘reporters doing the righteous thing’ film that I’d argue is every bit as good as Spotlight. Though, I guess that’s faint praise as Spotlight is inert on a few levels.
At any rate, I think it’s a worthy double-feature of #MeToo era sentiments that will NOT make you feel like you stepped into Twitter during the week of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. These are interesting reflections on a moment. I may try the exploitation version in Promising Young Woman sometime this week
LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT UPDATE
My read-through is your read-through. We’re at the ‘Faces’ arc from Matt Wagner. Which is very typical Wagner in most respects, and you just gotta decide if that’s a positive or a negative for you.
In my view, he’s one of the least-approachable creators in mainstream comics history. His work is exceptional but exceptionally idiosyncratic. It either appeals or it does not. And this tragic freakshow story takes that love-it-or-hate-it thing to the hilt for Batman. Still, even if you hate it, there’s some cool Wagner pages in here.
SIGNING OFF
Hope you all had a good week. Hope you all have a good week. I’m off to get some work done and eat banana bread. Stay healthy. Do for self.