The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood 9781844579426, 9781844579419, 9781839023156, 9781839023149

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International Screen Industries Series Editors: Michael Curtin, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. and Paul McDonald, King’s College London, UK. The International Screen Industries series offers original and probing analysis of media industries around the world, examining their working practices and the social contexts in which they operate. Each volume provides a concise guide to the key players and trends that are shaping today’s film, television and digital media.

Published titles: The American Television Industry Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc Arab Television Industries Marwan M. Kraidy and Joe F. Khalil The Chinese Television Industry Michael Keane East Asian Screen Industries Darrell Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh European Film Industries Anne Jäckel European Television Industries Petros Iosifidis, Jeanette Steemers and Mark Wheeler Global Television Marketplace Timothy Havens Hollywood in the New Millennium Tino Balio Latin American Film Industries Tamara L. Falicov Latin American Television Industries John Sinclair and Joseph D. Straubhaar Localising Hollywood Courtney Brannon Donoghue Nollywood Central Jade L. Miller The Video Game Business Randy Nichols Video and DVD Industries Paul McDonald

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The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood

Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer, 2021 Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover illustration by Cully Hamner All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:    HB: 978-1-8445-7942-6     PB: 978-1-8445-7941-9    ePDF: 978-1-8390-2314-9 eBook: 978-1-8445-7943-3 Series: International Screen Industries Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: The More Things Change … : The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century 1 Comics Pros Go to Hollywood: The Historical Evolution of the Comics–Hollywood Relationship 2 Comic Books and the Economics of Intellectual Property Production 3 Drawing Lines: The Place of Comic Book Artists and Writers in Hollywood 4 Synergy in Theory and in Practice: Comic Books and the Contemporary Media Conglomerate 5 Organizational (Dis-)Integration: Publisher–Hollywood Relationships in the Twenty-First Century 6 From Dental Floss to Dental Tape: The Strange Case of Digital Comics Distribution Afterword: Days of Future Present: The View from 2020 Notes Bibliography Index

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1 11 47 75 109 131 167 201 207 213 236

List of Illustrations FIGURES 2.1 Sales volume across DC Comics’s entire line in April, May and June 2016 2.2 Title churn: Number of titles sold by Marvel Comics, June 2015–July 2016 2.3 Title churn: Number of titles sold by DC Comics, June 2015–July 2016 2.4 Creators’ and publishers’ shares in publishing ventures 5.1 DC Extended Universe film release schedule, projected vs. actual 6.1 Total comics sales in millions, 2009–2018 6.2 Year-on-year comics sales growth, 2011–2018

53 57 57 70 150 169 169

TABLE 6.1 iPad comic book apps available in April 2011

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Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the support of the many executives and creative professionals who agreed to be interviewed for it. Although our interviewees remain unnamed throughout the book so as to protect their identities, we are immensely grateful to each of them for giving us their time and sharing with us their considerable expertise and insight. We also owe a special thanks to series editors Paul McDonald and Michael Curtin, who championed this project when it was little more than a vague idea and who shepherded it through the multiple stages of the publishing process. We cannot thank them enough for their guidance and their patience. We are grateful too to Rebecca Barden, Veidehi Hans, Louise Dugdale, Sophie Gillespie and Rebecca Willford at Bloomsbury for so readily adopting this project and for going above and beyond to ensure that the book ended up matching our vision for it. We appreciate the time and care that Amanda Conner, Ian Gordon, Derek Johnson and Greg Rucka took to write such thoughtful endorsements. Finally, thank you to Cully Hamner for his wisdom, generosity and sense of humour – and for the gorgeous cover he created for us. In addition to the above acknowledgements, which come equally from the both of us, each of us has his or her own individual acknowledgements to make, which we happily offer below.

ALISA PERREN This project was made possible in no small part due to the encouragement provided by my colleagues in the Radio-Television-Film (RTF) Department and the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Receipt of a Faculty Research Award in spring 2019 provided me with a much-valued semester’s leave to dedicate to writing. Special thanks go to Dean Jay Bernhardt, former Associate Dean Karin Wilkins and RTF Chair Noah Isenberg, along with former RTF Chair Paul Stekler, for your advocacy both for this award and for my work more generally. Thank you as well to Selena Dickey, Laura Felschow and Lesley Willard for the high-quality work you provided as research assistants over the years. I have been fortunate to benefit from a larger support network in RTF as well; Wenhong Chen, Richard Lewis, Elana Wakeman and Rachel Walker deserve

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Acknowledgements

a special shout out for serving as reliable confidantes both about this book and on so many other topics. I am so grateful to have been able to fuse cocktails and kvetching with my informal RTF writing group: Mary Beltrán, Kathy FullerSeeley, Cindy McCreery and Suzanne Scott. In addition, I once again have been able to turn to Tom Schatz for input on my writing. Your insights always make my work better. Thanks as well to the many RTF graduate students who have shared ideas, articles and feedback with me, whether in graduate seminars or during casual conversations in the hallways. During the earliest stages of this project, Greg Smith proved to be an invaluable resource, pointing me to useful scholarship in comics studies. Miranda Banks, Derek Kompare and Avi Santo all provided me with both publishing and conference opportunities (as well as useful conversations!) to test out early ideas for my work on creative labour and professional identities. I also want to thank Jay Faerber, Tom Feister, Keven Gardner, Ford Gilmore, Paul Jenkins, Van Jensen, Horace Newcomb, Ross Richie, Zack Rosenberg, Tony Shasteen and Brian Stelfreeze for helping me map the field early on and build out my network of contacts. Nedda Ahmed, Amelia Arsenault, Sunny Early, Karen Gustafson, Jen Holt and Anh Nguyen all have been terrific as travel buddies, conference roommates and supporters of this project (and many others). Caroline Frick: our long neighbourhood walks have kept me sane throughout this process. Thank you for always being willing to let me brainstorm with you. Thanks, as always, to Steve and Diane Perren, for your unwavering support as well. Finally, this project would not exist without Cully Hamner. Ten years ago, I would not have believed that I would be writing a book about the comic book industry. I am so grateful to be able to write about this world that you introduced me to – and more importantly, for the life I have been able to share with you since 2007 (!). Having you available as a sounding board – and willing to assist me at every stage of this process even as you scrambled to meet your own deadlines – has meant so much. Last but not least, to Bernie: having you sleep (well, more like loudly snore) at my feet during my many late-night writing sessions made the process just a little bit easier.

GREGORY STEIRER I would like to thank the Dickinson College English Department for encouraging this project from its earliest beginning. I am also grateful to Dickinson’s Research and Development Committee for funding portions of the book’s research and to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for funding other areas of my research. Although the fellowship awarded to

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me by the NEH was for a different project, research for that project informed a number of the chapters here. To Kevin Sanson, Matthew Goldmark and Jeehyun Lim, thank you for reading early drafts of these chapters and for always having time to help me work out ideas and arguments. Thanks also to my research assistants, Harris Risell, Samuel Portelance and Benjamin Doern: this book would never have got finished (or even started!) without you! To Jen Holt, I can’t thank you enough for your mentorship and for never letting me lose sight of what fun this job can be. To Ronni Rosenstein, thank you for your inexhaustible support and for always providing me a peaceful space to write (and store comic books). Thank you, Robin and Robert Ring, for your encouragement and unflagging enthusiasm, and for filling my life with books. Matt Colville, I’m grateful to you for all the conversations we’ve had about comic books and superhero films and for the many trips to the Danbury comic book store we’ve taken together. This book would not have been anywhere near as fun to write without you. Thank you, Keith Witham, for listening to me babble on about copyright and synergy for the past six years, for resignedly living amongst towering piles of my comic books and graphic novels, and for your endless and sometimes undeserved support and patience. And, finally, many, many thanks to Lyra, June and Azazel, who will never read this but who played at my feet, purred on my lap and slept on my books while I wrote it.

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Introduction: The More Things Change … : The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century ‘Convergence is here! Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an April Fool’s Day prank!’ —DC All Access, June 2015 Beginning in the 1980s, DC Comics and Marvel Comics semi-regularly devoted large chunks of their publishing schedule to big, storyworld-altering ‘events’. Consisting of one or more limited series where the main storyline played out, as well as tie-ins and crossovers throughout most of the publisher’s line, the events were more often than not critical and commercial successes. They were also responsible for some of the most well-loved storylines in comic book history, including DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–6) and Identity Crisis (2004) and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet (1991) and Civil War (2006–7). When first announced in the fall of 2014, however, DC Comics’s 2015 event promised to be something different. Described by Co-Publisher Jim Lee as ‘the  most meta epic event we’ve done’ (qtd. in Hudson, 2014), Convergence (as the event came to be called) was born out of a real-world industrial exigency: the shuttering of DC Comics’s seventy-year-old home in New York City and the opening of a new office in Burbank, California that would situate the comic book publisher, spatially at least, as part of Hollywood. The move, explained Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, was about ‘pulling aspects of DC Entertainment together. It [DC Entertainment] was bifurcated between two coasts. This brings us closer together, it brings us closer to (parent company) Warner Brothers [sic]’ (qtd. in Yarbrough, 2015). In the short term, however, pulling the companies together posed a serious problem, as it would render temporarily impossible the kind of internal coordination DC Comics required to publish its weekly and monthly series. To solve this problem, DC crafted Convergence, a new take on the traditional comic-book event. Originally dubbed The Band-Aid by DC employees (according, at least, to the magazine and website Bleeding Cool), Convergence saw the publisher’s regular line suspended for the two months of the move, with forty monthly mini-series

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and one weekly mini-series published in its place ( Johnston, 2014b). The forty monthly mini-series involved versions of characters that were no longer in DC Comics continuity, written and drawn by freelance workers who did not work on DC’s regular line of books – thus enabling the publisher to assemble the comics with minimal oversight months in advance of the actual move. To write the weekly series, DC brought in Jeff King, a television writer and producer (best known for his work on US cable series White Collar, produced for the USA Network), who had no comic book experience – nor a previous working relationship with Warner Bros. The art assignment was divvied up among an atypically large number of pencillers and inkers. Described by DiDio as ‘about celebration, but really transitioning to the next phase’ (qtd. in Phillips, 2015), Convergence’s storyline revolves around a figure named Telos, who – confused as to his purpose in the absence of his ‘boss’, Brainiac – pits various assemblages of characters from older DC comics against each other, with the ultimate winner promised continued existence in the current DC comics continuity. Unfortunately, fans and critics saw little to celebrate in the event, which to many seemed rushed, poorly written and uncharacteristically dark (a ‘Hunger Games for superheroes’, one reviewer observed) (Cheang, 2015). Sales of all forty-one series paled in comparison to those associated with past DC events, and sell-through was consistently poor, with retailers reporting numerous unsold copies of the monthly tie-in books (Gearino, 2017: 66). For many, the best part of Convergence was in fact the opposite of what the title promised: not the integration of DC Comics’s various characters and worlds into a single fictional continuity, but the fracturing of that continuity at the series’ end into a conceivably unlimited number of discrete storyworlds. ‘Reality is resetting, stabilizing. Each world has evolved, but they all still exist’, proclaims Brainiac in the story’s final splash pages (King, et al. 2015), each depicting versions of characters from across DC Comics’s seventy-plus-year publishing history – but, somewhat surprisingly, none from Warner Bros.’s films or television shows. A critical and a sales disappointment, DC’s most ‘meta’ event ever also appears to be a surprisingly poor example of the industrial/cultural concept for which it was ostensibly named. Although there has been considerable disagreement among communication and media studies scholars as to what exactly (if anything) the term media convergence means,1 most would today define it as involving some combination of technological integration, narrative integration (i.e. transmedia storytelling) and industrial/organizational integration (see Jenkins, 2001; Dwyer, 2010; Balbi, 2017). And judged by these three criteria, convergence seems to be in little evidence with DC Comics’s Convergence. The comic book event made no novel uses of technology, either for marketing,

Introduction

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storytelling, printing or distribution. Indeed, the way most consumers accessed the story was technologically old-fashioned: by reading printed books they purchased from physical retailers, who received them in weekly United Parcel Service shipments from wholesaler warehouses. Convergence’s story was also resolutely singular in medium, relying exclusively upon characters and storylines from older comic books and making not even a meta-level nod to the characters’ film and television versions. As for industrial/organizational integration, setting aside the logistics of the physical move, Convergence demonstrates no interaction or coordination between DC Comics and any of Warner Bros.’s other divisions: the event was designed and executed entirely in-house by the comic book division. Even considered as a preliminary to future coordination, the event must be judged something of a failure. Similarly, DC Comics’s post-move relaunch, branded ‘DC You’, made little use of Warner Bros.’s film, television or home entertainment resources (and was subsequently abandoned less than a year later), while Warner Bros. continued to develop and produce DC-branded film and television shows much as it had before Convergence – that is, with limited coordination or collaboration with DC Comics except when developing or producing animation. Despite its failure to evince much that we as scholars would recognize as media convergence, however, we should not dismiss Convergence too quickly as one more instance of (non-convergent) ‘business as usual’. For unusual things did happen. One of the two largest comic book publishers in America effectively suspended its entire line of books for two months. Characters from previous decades were revived, with writers and artists from outside the regular workforce hired to work on them. A television producer/writer with no prior affiliation with the comics industry was given a high-profile comic-book writing assignment – and although this proved to be his only comic-book gig, he went on to serve as an executive producer for what became a hit comic-book-based Netflix series (Dark Horse Entertainment’s Umbrella Academy [2019–]). And most unusual of all, DC Comics moved from New York City, the heart of print publishing, to southern California, the heart of Hollywood, shedding roughly half its staff in the process ( Johnston, 2015a). Considered more broadly, DC’s Convergence is but one of a myriad of endeavours that have occurred this century with the aim (to borrow Dan DiDio’s language) of ‘bringing closer together’ Hollywood and the American comic book industry. Film studios and tech companies have purchased comic book companies. Media conglomerates have reorganized so as to foster comicsindustry collaboration. Comic book writers have taken jobs as Hollywood writers and producers – and vice versa. And a plethora of comic-book derived films and

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television shows have debuted, many to critical acclaim and most to box-office or ratings success. Like DC’s Convergence, these events have changed the lives of creators, management, retailers and consumers in tangible and sometimes quite significant ways – though not necessarily in the ways that theories of convergence might lead us to expect. This book offers a careful examination of these industrial changes, paying as much attention to the ways convergence has underwhelmed, misfired or simply failed to take place between Hollywood and the comic book industry as it does the ways convergence has reshaped organizations, careers and creative practices in these industries. Indeed, we open our book with the example of DC’s Convergence so as to make clear from the start the kind of study the book provides: not an argument on behalf of technological integration, transmedia storytelling, corporate synergy or any other pre-determined feature of media convergence broadly conceived, but instead a painstaking empirical examination of the complex relationship between Hollywood and the American comic book industry between 2000 and the end of 2019. Accordingly, the chapters that follow attend first to the facts of this relationship – as synthesized from interviews, fieldwork, archival research, trade analysis and personal experience (for many years, one of us owned a comic book store) – and only secondarily to pre-existing theories purporting to explain what industrial convergence is and how and why it takes place. Such theories may have value (indeed, they functioned for some of our interviewees as sense-making tools), but we did not find, in our research, that they adequately accounted for either the complexity or ambiguity of industrial integration in actual practice. As the example of Convergence helpfully demonstrates, such integration can be, paradoxically, both radical and conservative at once, a shake-up to the existing order that simultaneously reaffirms that order. In this book, we have tried to capture this paradox, offering up a richly textured picture of how Hollywood and the American comic book industry have interacted during the first two decades of the twentieth century that also conveys the ways in which these industries have remained distinct and separate. In composing this picture, we have oriented our analyses from the perspective of the American comic book industry more so than that of the film or television industries (which we occasionally gloss, for reasons of rhetorical economy, as Hollywood). We have done so not because the former is more important than either of the latter—by any metric, it is in fact much smaller (Steirer, 2021) – but because the comics industry has been significantly understudied by scholars in virtually all fields, including media studies, communication and comics studies. The American film and television industries, by contrast, have been the subject

Introduction

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of numerous scholarly monographs, edited collections, dissertations and journal articles. Taking for granted that the basic workings of these two industries and their general histories are familiar to our readers, we have thus devoted only minimal space to describing them in our book. Readers seeking more detailed accounts of how these industries operate can profitably consult other books in the British Film Institute’s International Screen Industries series, as well a plethora of works published elsewhere. When it comes to scholarship, the comic book industry, on the other hand, is a virtual terra incognita. The occasional journal article and book chapter notwithstanding, scholars have almost completely bypassed the US comic book industry as a research object in its own right.2 The reasons for this are complicated and have more to do with the ways in which different academic disciplines and fields have constituted themselves than anything intrinsic to the comic medium itself. Media industry studies, for example, grew primarily out of film and broadcast studies, and has thus focused primarily upon the film and television industries – and increasingly the technology industry as well (Holt and Perren, 2009; Arsenault and Perren, 2016). Study of the print industries (under which comic books would normally fall) has been left largely to a subfield of literature scholarship called history of the book, which, having developed out of the fields of medieval and early modern studies, has devoted most of its attention to historical periods predating the twentieth century (Darnton, 2007; Howsam, 2006). Comics studies – which one of us has elsewhere described as a ‘protodisciplinary arrangement’ (Steirer, 2011/12: 278) – has, for its part, pursued a primarily text-based or ‘cultural’ approach to the medium, supplemented in recent years by more sociologically-oriented research paradigms such as fan studies (Steirer, 2021). Not surprisingly then, no book-length monograph has been published from any of these fields that takes as its primary object the US comic book industry.3 We have tried to rectify that gap here by offering in this book an account of comics-industry–Hollywood interaction that can also serve as an introduction to the comic book industry as it functions in the twenty-first century. In addition to providing in-depth examinations of specific aspects of the relationship between the comic book industry and the film and television industries, including labour mobility, organizational dynamics and intellectual property deployment, the chapters that follow thus also provide basic accounts of the comic book industry qua industry: how comic books are produced and distributed, for example, and how comic book workers make a living (which, as we show, often means working outside the comics industry). We have incorporated these accounts so as to ensure that our readers—who may know little of how the American comic book

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industry functions – have the information they need to engage fully with our analyses of transindustrial relations. We hope also, however, that by providing this information, we will empower other scholars – in media industry studies, comics studies and even history of the book – to undertake research on comic books from an industrial perspective.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW Chapter One provides an overview of the comics industry’s relationship with Hollywood from the twentieth century through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis placed on the conditions within which comics professionals participated in the film, television and comics industries – and vice versa – at different historical moments. As the chapter demonstrates, opportunities for creative professionals to move between these industries developed slowly over the last century and were shaped not only by changing technological, economic and sociocultural forces, but also by changes in the perceived cultural value of comics (and, to some extent, animation) as a medium. In tracing this history, the chapter provides a basic, historical introduction to the comics industry, covering such aspects as production, distribution, market participation and consumption. It also indicates the key forces responsible for the heightened attention comics have received from Hollywood this century. Chapter Two examines the economic arrangements for intellectual property (IP) production within the twenty-first-century comics industry. Offering a detailed analysis of the industry’s three publishing models – work for hire, creator ownership and co-ownership – the chapter describes the complex trade-offs each involve for both creative workers and publishers and how these trade-offs impact the development of original IP. In doing so, the chapter also demonstrates the interdependencies of the three publishing models, which constitute together what we characterize as a business ecosystem. Chapter Three looks closely at how twenty-first century comics professionals conceptualize their professional working identities and how these conceptualizations are shaped by the opportunities (or lack thereof ) offered to them by Hollywood. Attending to the differing experiences of comic book writers and artists, and zooming in closely upon a community of comic book professionals in Atlanta, Georgia, the chapter demonstrates the importance that work roles play in determining not only who is visible to Hollywood, but also who wants to be visible to Hollywood. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the roles that intermediaries – specifically managers, agents and lawyers – play in helping comics professionals (primarily writers) achieve this visibility.

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In Chapter Four, we turn to the organizational aspects of the comics– Hollywood relationship, interrogating the role synergy plays in coordinating production within a modern media corporation as well the concept’s analytical utility. Beginning and ending with the example of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired Marvel Entertainment in 2009, the chapter offers a macrolevel introduction to the economic and organizational dynamics that shape how corporations operate. Drawing from economics and organizational scholarship, the chapter demonstrates why the pursuit of synergy has typically had less impact on relations between the comics industry and Hollywood than is usually assumed by consumers, journalists, and media and comics scholars. Building on the conceptual groundwork laid in Chapter Four, Chapter Five examines the organizational arrangements through which different kinds of comics publishers have, during the twenty-first century, worked to develop the properties they own for film and television. Organized around case studies of three publishers – DC Comics, BOOM! Studios and IDW – the chapter provides a comparison of the comics industry’s three main development models: that of the conglomerate subsidiary, the studio-publisher and the financierpublisher. In providing this, the chapter also illustrates what is distinctive about comics as sites of IP exploitation. Chapter Six offers a history of digital distribution as it has developed in the comics industry. Unlike the film and television industries, which have been radically reshaped this century by new distribution technologies associated with the internet, the comics industry has been so far relatively unaffected by these same technologies. Although equivalents of ‘streaming’ and electronic sell-through exist for comic books, and although they are offered by the same technology companies that are active in Hollywood, the digital comic book remains a very small portion of publishers’ revenue portfolios. This chapter traces some of the reasons for the differing experience of the comics industry and in doing so points to some of the limits of comics–Hollywood convergence. The curse of academic research – and book publishing more broadly – is that books must inevitably trail behind current events; after the manuscript is finished and turned in to the publisher, time keeps moving and change keeps occurring. For us and for this book, the changes that have occurred as we were preparing our final edits for publication were extraordinary: the pandemic of COVID-19, which saw Hollywood productions frozen and the comics industry paralysed, and the subsequent economic crisis that gripped both the United States specifically and the world more generally. Although, as we go to press, it is too soon to say what the future will look like for Hollywood or the comics industry, it is clear that both industries have been affected dramatically by the virus and that the

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way they operate – both separately and together – will change in some regards moving forward. Although we think it irresponsible in this case to prognosticate on the future of these industries, after Chapter Six we have added a formal Afterword, which briefly addresses the dramatic industrial changes that have taken place as of June 2020 and, in doing so, also indicates why 2019 is a logical stopping point for our book. This discussion, in turn, enables us to address the larger interventions of our study, suggest productive areas for future research and speak to the analytical value of thinking transindustrially.

A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY Readers will note that we devote very little attention here to narrative studies of either individual comic-book or film texts or to ‘transmedia’ universes. This is for two reasons. First, there already exist a large number of scholarly works offering some form of narratological, aesthetic or cultural analyses of comicbook-based films and television shows.4 Many of these are quite strong, offering insightful readings of these texts and the manner in which fans engage with them. Readers looking for this kind of research can thus easily find it elsewhere. Second, and more importantly, we have found in our research that narrativebased approaches to comics and comics-based texts often produce a slightly misleading picture of the industrial processes that determine how these texts are actually made. This finding is perhaps not surprising, as media industry studies as a field has, in recent decades, distanced itself from narrative-based approaches for just this reason. This is not to say that narratological analysis is intrinsically extra-industrial; early studies of media industries married the two methods quite effectively (e.g. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1985; Schatz, 1988), and, indeed, we look forward to a methodological rapprochement between the two in future scholarship. We, however, have not undertaken such a project in this book and have instead limited ourselves to providing the kind of research upon which we believe an industrially oriented study of comic-book textual aesthetics might later be built. Readers will also note that our book ignores the medium of the comic strip – in distinction from that of the comic book – almost altogether. In doing so we replicate the discursive framework of comics studies, which has – at least during the twenty-first century – tended to position the strip and book as distinct media, each with its own scholars and scholarship (Duncan, Smith and Levitz, 2015: 3–7). Although we believe that comics studies (and media studies more broadly) would benefit from blurring this distinction, except for the discussion of digital comics in Chapter 6, we have not attempted to do so here. Our reasons are twofold. First, the US comic strip industry is and has long been organized

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quite differently from that of the comic book industry, with different working conditions, distribution models, monetization strategies and consumer bases. As an industry, the comic strip has, in fact, much more in common with that of the newspaper industry; indeed, the former’s fortunes have been so heavily wedded to that of the latter (and, in some historical periods, vice versa) that the comic strip and the newspaper might rightly be considered two parts of the same industry (George, 1999). The comic strip industry’s interactions with Hollywood have thus taken place according to a logic that is quite distinct from that of the comic book. Although this logic might be well worth exploring, a second consideration has led us to reject doing so here: namely, the marginality of the comic strip in the twenty-first century. As we write this, comic strips continue to be published in print editions of regional newspapers (as well as The Washington Post), but their cultural import and financial value have fallen considerably since the twentieth century (Berlin, 2008; Tornoe, 2011). As a result, the medium figures into Hollywood’s affairs only rarely today, and almost never factors into the business of comic book publishers or creators outside of the publication of reprint collections (what journalist Luke Epplin [2015] has called the ‘museumification of the medium’). Indeed, excepting such collections, only a single Hollywood or comic book professional we interviewed for this book mentioned the comic strip at all. Focused as we are for this book upon the twenty-first century, we have thus elected to leave for future scholars, especially those whose research focuses on the twentieth century, the work of studying Hollywood and the American comic strip industry. To conclude, we wish to offer a few brief words regarding our own mode of production. This book is a co-authored work and, as such, reflects the research interests and theoretical proclivities of both its authors. Although, to be sure, these are in close alignment, each of us have brought to this project our own particular research specialties and disciplinary training. Our method of writing the chapters was to split them up according to interest and expertise, with each of us assuming primary writing and research responsibility for the three chapters with which we felt the most affinity. Once drafts had been completed, the chapters were then exchanged, with both of us adding to, subtracting from, and otherwise revising each other’s work; at which time, they were exchanged again, subjected to further revision, and then exchanged once more. In this manner, we have strived to produce a work that is unified in structure, style and method, while still preserving the distinctive contributions each of us has brought to it. Methodologically, we have utilized what some social scientists would call a ‘mixed methods’ approach, relying upon trade analysis, archival research, market analysis, legal analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, quantitative data analysis – and,

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most importantly, fifty-four interviews we conducted with Hollywood and comic book professionals. These interviews were conducted over a period of four years, usually by phone, and typically lasted from thirty to ninety minutes. We connected with potential interviewees by drawing upon personal networks, by ‘cold calling’ and by receiving referrals from those we had previously interviewed. Although careers in these industries involve so much mobility that it is not particularly meaningful to categorize our interviewees by way of the job title they held (or even the industry they worked in) during the time we interviewed them, the following list provides a rough indication of the diversity of our interviewees: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

18 had worked as comic book writers 9 had worked as comic book artists 15 had worked as comic book executives 7 had worked as Hollywood executives 4 had worked as tech executives5 13 had worked on a television show or as staff for a television company6 8 had worked on a film7 8 had worked as talent representatives.8

Some of the interviews were recorded and transcribed; some of them – at the request of the interviewees – were not. In most cases, our interviewees wished to remain anonymous in the published work. For this reason – and because much of the information they provided was ‘informational’ (i.e. providing factual information about their organizations and industries) and repeated by multiple interviewees – we have chosen not to cite individual interviews throughout the work via footnotes; instead, we have incorporated into our prose reference to interviews where it is relevant. In the few cases where interviewees have been open to going ‘on record’, we have followed the same method of citation, naming them in the prose rather than in a footnote. We wish to note here, however, that despite the absence of most of our interviewees’ names from this book, each of our interviewees was invaluable in helping us produce it, and we are grateful for the considerable time and insight that they gave us.

1 Comics Pros Go to Hollywood: The Historical Evolution of the Comics–Hollywood Relationship Prior to the 2000s, with only a small number of exceptions, the relationship between comics professionals and Hollywood was largely unidirectional: artists and writers of comics might move into certain types of positions in Hollywood, but only in extremely rare instances did Hollywood professionals aspire to work in comics. As one writer with experience spanning film, television and comics since the 1980s explained to us, before the release of X-Men (2000) and SpiderMan (2002), a stigma was associated with comics that limited the kinds of positions one could attain in film and television. When pursuing employment in Hollywood, this writer was actively encouraged to conceal his comics work – work for which he was widely acclaimed and well-known within the comics fandom of the time. Before the new millennium, success in comics typically did not open doors in Hollywood for creatives – in fact, quite the opposite. This writer felt that his work needed to be kept ‘very much in the closet’ if he hoped to procure employment on anything besides children’s animation: My agent would say to me ‘When you go out on a job [for film or television], don’t tell them that you write comics. It confuses them. They still see comics as childish literature’. There was Batman. But that was its own thing. If you worked on Batman [movies], everybody understood it. But nobody else [in terms of Hollywood executives] could make the things work.

This is not to say that comics professionals did not seek careers in Hollywood before this time. Far from it. But the organizational imperatives, storytelling conventions and cultural status of comics were misaligned with those of Hollywood throughout most of the twentieth century. This meant that comic book artists and writers often had only limited avenues through which to attain careers in Hollywood. Within most circumstances, comics professionals’ understanding of and appreciation for the medium meant little to Hollywood executives. As such, the opportunities available to them remained relatively circumscribed.

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By the 2010s, much had changed. Comics professionals would be aggressively pursued to manage motion picture franchises, visualize storyworlds and run writers’ rooms. These professionals were sought after by agents, managers, creative executives and marketers in order to lend legitimacy and authenticity to film and TV adaptations of comics. They were often treated like rock stars at comics conventions, store signings and on fan sites. Meanwhile, creatives who had launched careers in film and television increasingly sought to write comics ‘on the side’ – whether as a means of launching new IP via an independent publisher such as Image or Dark Horse or just to ‘play with’ the characters they grew up with and loved. It wasn’t just comics that were cool – so, too, were a new generation of professionals. As a number of scholarly and popular writers have illustrated, a range of forces contributed to the growing interrelationship between Hollywood and the comic book industry during the last few decades.1 Although comics consistently had been mined as source material for radio, films, comic strips, television and more since the 1940s, a variety of factors contributed to the proliferation of these properties across various screens since the 2000s. Focusing in particular on motion picture adaptations of comics, Shawna Kidman (2019: 185) summarizes many of the reasons given by fan websites, industry trade publications and scholars for why comics proved to be particularly exploitable in recent years. These include: ‘1) the influence of prominent industry insiders who happen to be comic book fans, 2) an intensification of interest in pre-sold films, 3) the rise of CGI technology, 4) the increasing importance of international markets and 5) a social-cultural psychic need’. As rich as this growing body of work on the comics–Hollywood relationship is, thus far it has focused mainly on the role of key companies (DC, Marvel) and the exploitation of specific superhero properties (Batman, Superman), especially in theatrically released motion pictures. Such scholarship has effectively illustrated how Hollywood’s turn to comics sheds light on larger structural shifts in the media industries. It also has skilfully highlighted how executives and creatives have employed particular discursive moves to appeal to avid comic book fans. But more than just companies and properties have ‘gone Hollywood’ in recent years. So, too, have comics professionals. Indeed, a different perspective on the intersections of Hollywood and the comic book industry emerges by tracing the means by which many comics professionals – both artists and writers – have pursued (or tried to pursue) careers in Hollywood over the decades. This chapter provides a survey of the evolving relationship between comics and Hollywood, placing a particular emphasis on the conditions within which comics professionals participated in the film, television and comics industries at

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different historical moments. As shown below, before the 1980s, the low cultural status of comics, combined with the distinctive narrative, generic and stylistic traits of film and television during this time frame, limited the movement of talent between comics and Hollywood. Changes in the production, distribution and marketing of comics from the 1980s onward began to alter the cultural status of comics in American culture, and within some quarters of Hollywood as well. Concurrently, a generation of primarily white, male Gen-Xers ascended to power within Hollywood – and became increasingly valued by both the comics industry and Hollywood as fans-cum-consumers (Scott, 2013). Nonetheless, into the 2000s, Hollywood’s interest in comics continued to reside mainly in exploiting the properties rather than the professionals involved with them. It was only within the last couple of decades that larger technological, economic, cultural and organizational shifts contributed to both comics properties and professionals being more fully embraced and exploited by Hollywood. We have designed this chapter to serve two main objectives: First, here we provide a general overview of the history of the American comic book industry. While the other chapters of this book are primarily contemporary in scope, this historical context offers a useful foundation for readers largely unfamiliar with this topic. By identifying the emergence, diffusion and/or decline of specific production, distribution and retailing activities within the American comic book industry at certain times, we hope to enable a better understanding of the concepts and practices addressed in subsequent chapters. Second, even as we highlight key moments in the history of the American comic book industry – moments that have been well covered in greater detail by others (e.g. Lopes, 2009; Gabilliet, 2010)—we also aim to supplement these earlier histories in new ways. We do so in part by focusing this historical survey on the movement of industry professionals between the American comic book industry and Hollywood from the 1930s to the 2010s. Such an approach simultaneously points to how the relationships between these industries changed and the instances when comics professionals, in particular, were able to take advantage of such changes. Our approach specifically involves identifying the degree and types of labour mobility within and across these industries from one generation to the next. In so doing, we are able to address many of the reasons why certain types of industry professionals were able (or chose) to move from one industry sector to another while others were unable to do so. Even though media studies and comic studies scholars have addressed the historical interrelationships between Hollywood and the comic book industry in terms of topics such as transmedia storytelling and intellectual property exploitation, thus far there has been little consideration of how, why and when

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media workers have traversed different industry sectors. As we will illustrate, this mobility was enabled or constrained by a variety of cultural, geographical and institutional forces over the years. As the following pages underscore, while it is crucial to understand the macro-level economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces that have structured the comics–Hollywood industrial relationship over time, we can gain an even richer understanding of this relationship by identifying how different types of industry professionals occupying various work roles (e.g. artists, writers) navigated the ongoing changes within both the American comic book industry and Hollywood. We hope that the emphasis that we place here on trans-industrial labour mobility might be further taken up by media industry scholars looking at other types of media workers moving forward; we see such an approach as providing a fresh means of thinking through historiographic practices and modes of periodization as well as shifting industrial dynamics and evolving production cultures.

1940S TO 1980S: FROM BOOM TO BUST TO BABY BOOMERS To an extent, many of the earliest comics professionals had much in common with early professionals working in the motion picture industry: The comics industry, as it took shape in the 1930s and 1940s, disproportionately comprised Jewish, lower or working-class men residing in the New York area (Gabilliet, 2010: 161–162). Both in terms of gender and geographic diversity, the comics industry was even more homogenous than the early film industry of the 1900s and 1910s (Robbins and Yronwode, 1985: 47–66). Many of those launching careers in early comics did so because they could break into this line of work much more easily than they could gain employment on comic strips, illustration or advertising. Occasionally, early comics professionals, such as Otto Binder and Julius Schwartz, came from or worked concurrently for pulp magazines, and proceeded to move into other more respected and better paying lines of work if and when the opportunities arose. For most early entrants, comics were just a job, providing an opportunity for a (relatively) steady income during the first boom period of the medium, which began during the Great Depression and spanned into the mid-1950s. Early professionals such as Jack Kirby, Bob Kane and Joe Kubert often undertook their work in assembly-line fashion in small studios, functioning as part of a ‘shop system’ that contracted with different publishers (Gabilliet, 2010: 112–115, 121–133). Within this system, professionals handled distinct phases of the production process including writing, inking, pencilling and lettering. They frequently all worked together in small office spaces called ‘bullpens’. These shops consisted of a blend of regular, paid staff members and freelancers compensated by the page or project (Lopes, 2009: 10; Gabilliet, 2010: 115).2

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From their inception, comics were seen as a disposable, ephemeral medium. As discussed at length by sociologist Paul Lopes, with the exception of a brief ‘age of relevance’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, American culture afforded the medium ‘no respect’ until the mid-to-late 1980s. The brief ‘moment’ for comics in the late 1960s and early 1970s occurred primarily due to the embrace of the medium by a generation of college-age baby boomers, attracted either by the appearance of more ‘irreverent’ and ‘engaging’ characters via Marvel in the 1960s or by the appearance of more socially engaged storytelling from both the mainstream and underground comix in the early 1970s (Lopes, 2009: 65). Nonetheless, for much of the twentieth century, comics were perceived to be at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy.3 The low cultural standing of comics was a function of a variety of factors, including the marginal genres in which they traded (e.g. superheroes, funny animals, romances, etc.), the books’ primary appeal to children and young adults, their association with children’s animated fare and the means by which they were produced (cheaply, on pulp).4 That most early comics publishers and distributors were involved in the business primarily to make a quick buck – and often traded in girlie mags and maintained affiliations to organized crime – further contributed to the industry’s disreputable status ( Jones, 2005). The low cultural positioning of comics led many early professionals to adopt pseudonyms – aspiring novelist Stan Lieber’s assumption of the name Stan Lee represents one of the most famous examples of this (Batchelor, 2017: 25). By the mid-1950s, the shops that contracted with different publishers gave way to a system through which publishers contracted directly with freelancers (Gabilliet, 2010: 116–117). This arrangement enabled publishers to exercise more direct control over the freelancers and their work product. The publisher– freelancer relationship has remained the dominant one into the present day. From the outset, most comics were produced on a work-for-hire basis, with writers and artists compensated per page (see Chapter Two for more on details on the work-for-hire arrangement). This mode of compensation would lead to no shortage of conflicts between creatives and publishers in the ensuing years, especially as certain characters such as Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel proliferated in film, radio, television, comic strips, merchandise and more. Select characters may have transitioned smoothly into Hollywood, but their creators were much less likely to do so. Whereas most professions in Hollywood were able to establish guilds and unions that helped ensure workers certain protections and benefits, comics professionals were never able to do the same. As Jean-Paul Gabilliet (2010: 175– 176) observes, ‘one telling aspect of the socially and economically subordinate position of comic book creators was their chronic inability to organize some

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form of collective professional organization’. Off and on from the 1940s into the 1970s, professionals made periodic efforts to lobby for better treatment in the form of improved financial compensation, medical and retirement benefits, and royalties. But due to several different factors, including the small size of the profession, the anonymous status of most workers, internal dissension in terms of workers’ goals (between artists and writers, in particular) and effective push-back on the part of editors and publishers, little came of these organizing efforts. The comics profession, along with being perceived as ‘socially contemptible’, also was defined by its ‘economic precariousness’ (Gabilliet, 2010: 76). This cultural positioning certainly did not make moving from comics into Hollywood easy to do. Nonetheless, throughout the twentieth century, a number of comics professionals did procure employment in film and television. Determining precisely when and how select comics writers and artists took on work in Hollywood from the 1930s through the 1980s proves challenging due to the anonymous, often uncredited nature of the types of work they did both in comics and Hollywood.5 Few of our interviewees could point to many examples of comics professionals who held careers in Hollywood prior to the 1990s. A common refrain was that there weren’t any – or at least, not many people who successfully moved back and forth between these industries. But this is not entirely the case. In fact, more comics professionals pursued careers in Hollywood than many of our interviewees suspected. Nonetheless, for roughly fifty years, the paths that comics professionals took into Hollywood were limited both in terms of the kinds of positions they could assume on film and TV projects as well as the types of projects on which they might gain employment. The constraints they faced were the product of a variety of factors, including the perpetually low status of comics as a profession, the relatively siloed organizational structures and storytelling practices within the film, television and comic book industries, and the geographic distance between comics professionals, residing mainly in the New York area, and film and TV professionals, working mainly in the Los Angeles area. One of the earliest – and most consistently pursued – avenues taken by comics professionals into Hollywood, both writers and artists, was in animated children’s television. This path makes sense, given the historically close proximity between these crafts and industry sectors. A few examples here demonstrate the types of opportunities available. As far as artists, one prominent example is Alex Toth, who began his comics career in the late 1940s working on DC characters such as Green Lantern, the Flash and the Atom. In the 1960s, Toth moved into animation with a position as art director for the animated science fiction show Space Angel (1962–1964). He subsequently worked as a storyboard artist and

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art designer for Hanna-Barbera cartoons throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s. Sergio Aragonés and Jack Kirby represent two other notable examples of comic book artists who moved into animation work later in their careers. Aragonés’ early work for Mad magazine in the 1960s was followed by projects including Bat Lash for DC Comics and the early creator-owned comic Groo the Wanderer. His animated work ranged from producing segments for Super Bloopers and Practical Jokes (1984–1986) to providing cartoons for the 1997 George of the Jungle feature film. Kirby, meanwhile, moved into animated TV late in his career, following a particularly frustrating period working for Marvel. He, as well, undertook considerable design work for production houses HannaBarbera and Ruby-Spears from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, working on children’s animated programmes including Turbo Teen (1984), Super-Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show (1984–1985) and Mister T (1983–1985). Indeed, Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were consistent employers of comics professionals during much of the classic network era of television. Some comic book writers also moved between comics and Hollywood; one example is Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula co-creator Marv Wolfman (the comic where the character Blade first appeared). Wolfman began his multi-decade career in TV animation writing for shows such as G.I. Joe (1983–1986) and The Transformers (1984–1987). Another name of note is Mark Evanier, co-creator of Groo the Wanderer with Aragonés and writer for animated programmes including Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo (1979–1983) and Garfield and Friends (1988–1994). Prior to working on animated programmes, Evanier wrote for various sitcoms, including The McLean Stevenson Show (1976–1977) and Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979).Though the number of women involved in either mainstream comics or Hollywood animation was relatively limited during this time, some managed careers in both media. Christy Marx, for example, had a brief but impactful career in comics, where she launched a creator-owned book for Marvel’s Epic imprint with artist Mike Vosburg titled The Sisterhood of Steel, before moving into television, where she wrote for animated series such as Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981–1986) and Conan: The Adventurer (1992–1993) and created the cult hit Jem (1985–1988), which would decades later be remade as a live-action film released by Universal (2015). In the 2010s, Marx moved back to comics, writing for DC’s Birds of Prey and Swords of Sorcery. As these examples indicate, while comics professionals often were staffed on shows based on comic book characters and properties, they also worked on other types of content on occasion. That said, the path from comics to animated fare proved to be an easier one not only because professionals’ skills could be relatively smoothly translated from one form to the other, but also because of

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the relatively marginal status of each within American culture from the 1950s through the 1980s. Both comics and cartoons were not widely respected – or, rather, hearkening back to the point made above, they were both perceived as childish forms. Individuals who were often ‘stars’ within comics fandom – people like Toth, Wolfman and Kirby – assumed positions of considerably less industrial and cultural status when they went to Hollywood. The same was the case for those comic book writers (and it was almost exclusively writers) who pursued careers in live-action film and television. One example is Alan Brennert, who balanced work for publishers including DC and Marvel with writing positions on programmes like Wonder Woman (1975–1979), Fantasy Island (1977–1984), China Beach (1988–1991) and L.A. Law (1986–1994). Marvel writer and editor Gerry Conway, meanwhile, gained notoriety for (among other things) co-creating The Punisher and killing Spider-Man character Gwen Stacy in 1973. During the 1980s, Conway’s focus shifted to screenwriting, where he co-wrote the story that served as the basis for Conan the Destroyer (along with comics writer/editor Roy Thomas, 1984). Conway proceeded to write on TV series ranging from My Little Pony ‘n Friends (1986–1987) to Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–1991) to Diagnosis: Murder (1993–2001). Thomas, meanwhile, briefly wrote primarily for animated programmes such as The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show (1979–1981) and Thundarr the Barbarian (1980–1981) before returning to focus once again on work in comics. Many of the individuals discussed above, including Marv Wolfman, Alan Brennert, Mark Evanier and Gerry Conway, were members of the baby boom generation (b. 1946–1964). This generation grew up in the 1950s, as comics’ cultural power was diminished by television’s rise as America’s mass medium. Concurrently, the industry’s reputation was further tarnished due to ongoing attacks from both cultural and governmental forces (Hadju, 2008). Despite the declining circulation and reputation of comics, many of these boomers started to enter the profession in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They launched their careers even as Marvel was ascending and a nascent, niche-oriented comics fandom was beginning to take shape. Like many of the comics professionals that were part of the baby boom generation, artist/writer Howard Chaykin (artist on the first licensed Star Wars comic and creator of the cult classic American Flagg!) stayed firmly focused on working in that medium from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. When he decided to move to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s to pursue a writing career, Chaykin felt he was unusual in doing so. Chaykin’s motivations for attempting a career in Hollywood were similar to the motivations that led so many other professionals

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to pivot from a career in comics to a career in filmed entertainment, especially beginning in the 1990s: a desire for better pay, greater job stability and health insurance coverage via WGA membership. The precarity of the freelance life of a comics professional grew more and more exhausting as many pros reached middle age. Writing positions on programmes including The Flash (CBS; 1991–1992), Viper (NBC/syndication; 1994–1999) and Mutant X (syndication; 2001–2004) provided Chaykin with a degree more stability, at least for roughly a decade. Beginning with The Flash, Chaykin explained to us, he came to occupy the position of ‘comic book person’ on staff – the individual who could be relied on to draw from their knowledge of comics, thereby ensuring some fidelity to the source material’s tone and style. Though an exceptional role for a comics professional to occupy in Hollywood at the time, this would become a position that an ever-expanding number of comics professionals (especially writers) would occupy in the new millennium. It is just as well that few other writers made the move to Hollywood when Chaykin did, as at the time there was limited demand on the part of executives for individuals with either the skills or knowledge base he possessed. Nor was there much opportunity available for this type of work beyond children’s animation (in particular, Saturday morning cartoons) and live-action hour-long genre television (most prominently, first-run syndicated fare). According to Chaykin, most of the executives with decision-making authority in television during the 1980s and 1990s knew little about comic books nor did they understand their potential economic and creative value. They weren’t themselves fans, nor was comics fandom (and, more generally, geek culture) yet seen as possessing enough cultural or economic value to motivate them to pursue such projects. As such, most executives had little motivation to seek out comics professionals as employees. Agents and managers similarly did not see the benefit of signing or soliciting work for this type of talent. From Chaykin’s perspective, film and TV executives neither respected nor understood what comic book writers and artists did. One notable exception, he observed, was former NBC programming wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff, who presciently noted the potential value contained within comic books but was unable to capitalize on them himself before his death in 1997 at the age of forty-eight. Much as most comics professionals hired to work in Hollywood felt like undesirable outliers at this time, so too did those executives who advocated for producing film or TV properties based off of comics. As a former television executive with whom we spoke observed, during the 1990s, his colleagues labelled him ‘the comic book guy’ due to his advocacy for licensing comics properties for production as original television series. At that time, his tastes were seen by his

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colleagues as largely out of sync with the programming strategies, demographic targets and business models of the channels for which he worked. In short, up into the late 1990s, most Hollywood executives in positions to develop, finance, greenlight and distribute projects by and large simply didn’t ‘get’ comics. And they certainly didn’t understand how these professionals could be worth hiring to work on the limited number of comic book properties they adapted into film and TV series. A revealing, relatively early example is Superman: The Movie, released by Warner Bros. in the US in 1978. At the time the film was produced, DC Comics was a subsidiary of Warner Communications, and the publisher had a say in its script, casting and costumes. Nonetheless, DC’s conglomerate parent did not feel sufficiently confident in Superman: The Movie’s financial viability to directly produce it (Tucker, 2017: 128). When Ilya and Alexander Salkind made inquiries about purchasing the film and television rights in 1973, Dick Shepherd, head of production at Warner Bros., readily signed off on the sale. ‘Ah, sell it’, he told the licensing office in New York (according to Ilya Salkind). ‘It’s not worth it. It’s not a good property for a film’ (Rossen, 2008: 60). DC Comics, however, pushed back, insisting on having approval over numerous aspects of the film, including costumes, plot and casting. After six weeks of negotiations, Warner Publishing overruled DC, approving a twenty-five year license to the Salkinds for a mere $4 million – with virtually no oversight from DC. Even better for the Salkinds, the first film was contracted as a negative pickup, which meant that Warner Bros. simply paid for the delivery of the completed film (Rossen, 2008: 60). As an indication of just how little appreciation the producers had for the source material, they entertained casting Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken and even Muhammed Ali and Neil Diamond as the Man of Steel (Rossen, 2008: 74–77). Hired shortly before production started, director Richard Donner (pursued based on his recent success with The Omen [1976]) evidenced a strong desire to adhere to the spirit and tone of the source material. Pushing against what he perceived to be the campy approach that dominated live-action properties up to that time (e.g. Batman [1966–1968]) – and that was evident in the initial draft of Superman written by The Godfather (1972) screenwriter Mario Puzo – Donner aimed for a more grounded, realistic take (Rossen, 2008: 68–73). Although a tumultuous production, Donner’s approach to the material proved largely successful both with critics and at the box office. Superman: The Movie was the second highest-grossing film of the year in the US, behind only Grease. As financially successful as Superman proved to be in the short-term, the lessons taken from it by Hollywood executives – at least in relation to the potential

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economic viability of comic book properties – were the wrong ones. Battles with the producers led Donner to be fired before completing the second Superman film. The series proceeded to grow campier – and more critically reviled – as the 1980s continued. Following the disastrous response to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), the hero was retired from features until being rebooted in Superman Returns (2006). An effort to capitalize on Superman’s appeal in the form of the feature Supergirl (1984) was equally unsuccessful, with that film becoming a critical and box office failure. According to Paul Levitz, an editor at DC Comics during this time frame, ‘Superman wasn’t perceived as replicable … No one else thought there was room for another superhero to make a lot of money’ (Tucker, 2017: 130). Far from leading to a mad rush to produce other superhero movies, Superman’s success – in tandem with the earlier success of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) – contributed to the production of a wave of science fiction and fantasy properties across film and television, including Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979), Tron (1982), Starman (1984) and V (1984– 1985). Concurrently, characters drawn from comic strips, pulp fiction and radio serials of the 1930s and 1940s, including Annie, Popeye, the Lone Ranger, Doc Savage and Flash Gordon, among others, appeared in motion pictures during this time. Almost all were huge box office failures. One of the few success stories involved Conan the Barbarian, a character that originated in pulp magazines in the 1930s and had helped touch off a fantasy paperback boom at the end of the 1960s (Sammon, 2013: 42–57). The movie version, released in 1982, was part of a wave of sword and sorcery films that also included Fire and Ice (1982), co-written by comic book writers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. Fire and Ice, notably, is one of the few movie projects of the time that directly involved comics professionals. Of course, it was an animated film. As a point of contrast, and far more indicative of the status of comics professionals in Hollywood then, co-creators of the original Superman character, Siegel and Shuster, had no involvement with the feature iteration. In fact, only a few years prior had Warner Communications settled with the duo after years of legal and public relations battles over compensation (Ricca, 2013: 271–284). Notably, the campaign for greater compensation and respect was led by comic book artist Neal Adams, who previously had spent years (unsuccessfully) leading the charge to organize comics professionals, first in the form of the Academy of Comic Book Arts in the 1960s and subsequently in the form of the Comic Book Creators Guild in the late 1970s (Asselin, 2015). Adams’ efforts to generate more respect for Siegel and Shuster on (individualized) moral grounds – i.e. public shaming – were more effective (Ricca, 2013: 280–282).

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While the efforts to launch the Comic Book Creators Guild proved unsuccessful, creators made a modicum of headway in terms of compensation in the late 1970s. Due to a combination of ongoing pressure from prominent creatives, a heightened sense of responsibility on the part of select executives and a wave of negative media coverage (including the widely reported Siegel and Shuster compensation campaign), Marvel and DC instituted their first royalty (DC) and incentive (Marvel) programmes. Since then, select creatives have had the opportunity to receive additional compensation if their work reached certain sales thresholds or if their characters, stories and/or designs appeared in other media forms (see Chapter Two for a more detailed discussion of these programmes). Unfortunately, these moves only benefited a certain contingent of creatives, and thus did little to quell widespread dissatisfaction amongst many professionals. The lack of a guild or union for artists and/or writers, in turn, made Hollywood – and its guilds, including The Animation Guild and the Writers Guild of America – that much more attractive to many professionals. The challenge was finding opportunities to make that transition. Superman: The Movie may have been a financial and economic success, but that success neither opened doors to comics professionals nor provided a direct boost to the comics industry. The Superman movies were effective in increasing character licensing, benefiting the DC-affiliated division and Warners subsidiary, Licensing Corporation of America. But much to the befuddlement of DC Comics staff, and in contrast to the Batman TV series a decade prior, the Superman films had no noticeable effect on sales of comic books (Miller, n.d.a; Miller, n.d.b). Journalist Reed Tucker (2017: 131–132) interprets the negligible impact of the Superman films on comic book sales as evidence of the compartmentalization of superhero characters at the time. As the discussion above illustrates, it was not just the characters and properties that were compartmentalized at this time, though. So, too, were the professionals involved with comics. Hollywood may have been engaged with both comic book properties and professionals in fairly circumscribed ways through the 1980s. But conditions would shift soon. Changes in IP ownership, along with adjustments in corporate structures and business practices, the growth of the global marketplace and the impact of new technologies on production, distribution and reception all would figure into the growing embrace of comics properties – and of more comics professionals – by Hollywood in the ensuing years. But even before these forces were fully in effect, there were the dramatic shifts taking place within the comic book industry and in comics culture. Those coming to comics from the mid1980s to the late-1990s – as readers, fans and professionals – engaged with it

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differently as a medium, a culture and an industry. This new generation would be welcomed into both the executive and creative ranks far more enthusiastically – and on a much wider range of projects – than were many of their baby boomer predecessors.

1980S AND 1990S: FROM GEN-X TO X-MEN Members of Generation X (b. 1965–1980 [Dimock, 2019]) were products of a specific comics, film and television culture – a culture that would shape their understanding of the medium, their creative choices and their engagement with the comic book industry, Hollywood and fan communities for decades to come. The Gen-Xers who pursued careers in comics from the mid-1980s on not only remained a relatively homogenous group demographically – mainly white, male and middle-class – but also were exposed to the medium in remarkably similar ways. To fully understand how artists’ and writers’ professional identities evolved in subsequent decades – and to better expose the fault lines that appeared within this professional community during the 2000s – it is helpful first to briefly trace the specific industrial and cultural conditions under which this generation came of age. While Gen-Xers were growing up, comics still could be purchased at newsstands (e.g. drugstores, grocery stores). However, during the 1980s, comic book readers increasingly accessed their favourite stories and characters via the growing number of comic book stores appearing across the country. The rise of the direct-market model of distribution of comics, and the concurrent decline of mainstream distribution at newsstands during the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the emergence of an increasingly insular comic book culture. Many of those that participated in this evolving comics culture strengthened their commitment to the medium, key publishers, certain creatives and each other through participation in the growing number of conventions, fanzines, store events and (as of the mid1990s) message boards/internet culture (Schelly, 1995; Pustz, 1999). As it took shape, the direct-market distribution system and the comic book retail system further diminished the position of comics as a mainstream form that had the potential of being accessed by a demographically varied readership. Importantly, with the earlier newsstand model which dominated into the 1970s, there was no guarantee that a given title would appear each month at the same retail outlet. The mass-market model of newsstands thus contributed to what Umberto Eco (1972) has called an ‘iterative’ mode of storytelling. To maximize sales, individual issues could not be too highly serialized; readers had to be able to follow the narrative even if they missed particular issues. (An analogous example is how linear broadcast network television content relied on a largely episodic

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structure during the classic network era because programmers could not assume viewers would catch every episode when it aired.) The shift to the direct market model of distribution, where single issues of comics were primarily sold at a few thousand dedicated retail outlets across the US, shifted comics to an even more niche market.6 With the direct market model, readers could be more confident that every issue of a series would appear at their local comic book store. This dedicated niche of readers-cum-fans, along with publishers’ desire to maximize sales, facilitated a greater commitment to serialization. Superhero publishers – particularly DC and Marvel – also sought to boost sales by altering their storytelling and marketing strategies in other key ways. This included a growing investment in ‘event series’ (as discussed in the Introduction) among superhero publishers, a heightened reliance on complex worldbuilding, an expansion in the number of titles featuring the same characters and an increase in the number of stories in which characters crossed over from one series to another. These changes in publishing practices intensified both the financial and affective investment of the core white, male fanbase even as they risked alienating potential new readers, especially women and people of colour (Lopes, 2009: 135). At the same time, the direct market model of distribution also gave rise to a range of new independent or ‘alternative’ publishers, most of which focused on non-superhero books featuring material aimed at alternative niche demographics (such as women, gay men and lesbians, African Americans and literary-minded adult readers), which rendered the books uneconomical for traditional newsstand distribution (Hatfield, 2005). Meanwhile, at the better-paying and much more visible superhero publishers, those writers and artists able to effectively move into comics as a profession largely came from the constituency of avid white, male fans, thereby contributing to the homogeneity that characterized much of the comics industry well into the 2000s. Notably, the creative commitment that many aspiring professionals had in the form deepened with the introduction of the new methods of storytelling introduced at this time. These textual attributes would later be incorporated into many film and TV superhero adaptations of the 2000s (e.g. the Marvel Universe in film, the DC Universe on The CW broadcast network). These changes in storytelling, distribution and retailing fuelled a second boom period in the comics industry. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the comic book industry (and in particular, Marvel and DC) began printing multiple editions of the same books, often with die-cut, holographic or foil-stamped covers in order to encourage a growing speculative market in the medium. One version of Superman #75 (the ‘death of Superman’ issue), for example, was printed

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with silver foil-stamp and packaged in a black polybag along with a trading card, poster, stamp sheet, ‘Daily Planet Obituary’ and ‘mourning’ armband. Similar to what was taking place concurrently with baseball cards and stamps, investors purchased large volumes of such comic books with an eye towards selling them to collectors at a profit in the future (Duncan and Smith, 2009: 75–76). This boom period proved beneficial to those wishing to break into the comic book industry. As multiple comics professionals we spoke with noted, with so much content being produced and so much money flowing into the business – both to Marvel and DC as well as to new independent publishers including Malibu Comics, Comico Comics and Dark Horse – individuals possessing limited writing experience or modest portfolios often could land their first jobs without much difficulty. Meanwhile, the low cultural status of comics, along with their niche readership, limited the number of people pursuing careers in the industry, thereby further increasing publisher demand (and compensation) for available talent. These conditions led to many young professionals being paid quite well during this time. As one artist explained to us, the page rates she received in the early 1990s were roughly equivalent to the rates she was being paid by the same publishers in the late 2010s. At the same time that more and more artists and writers were able to enter the comics industry and earn steady incomes with relative ease, a more robust star system took shape. A select number of artists and writers gained such large followings that their compensation – after royalties – grew to over a million dollars annually (Tucker, 2017: 170–171). Many of these individuals, including Gen X-ers Todd McFarlane (Spawn), Rob Liefeld (Youngblood), Jim Lee (Wild C.A.T.s) and Erik Larsen (Savage Dragon), grew increasingly dissatisfied with their treatment by Marvel. As such, they departed to launch Image Comics in 1992 with the goal of having greater creative control over their work (‘Image Press’, 1992; Khoury, 2007a). With Image, they continued to focus on creating comics largely characterized by ‘hypermasculine heroes and impossibly proportioned heroines’ along with an emphasis on ‘visual spectacle over story structure and dialogue’ (Duncan and Smith, 2009: 75). The time that many of these co-founders spent with Image proved to be a bumpy one; many of them broke off from the company within a few years. Nonetheless, as discussed in more detail in Chapter Two, the publisher survived their departure, advancing a creator-owned model as a viable alternative for some artists and writers. In the 2000s, this model would become increasingly attractive to many comics professionals who had become frustrated by their compensation by Marvel and DC and perceived a greater opportunity for riches as Hollywood licensed more comics IP.

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Even as a small contingent of artists became superstars, a different group of creatives – all baby boomers – achieved acclaim while helping to further improve the cultural status of comics for subsequent generations. As Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (2009: 71) note, ‘three works that engendered the most hope for the future of the comic book all graced the shelves in what might be the medium’s greatest year: 1986’. The books in question were Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, from artist-writer Art Spiegelman, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, from artist-writer Frank Miller and Watchmen, from writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. Maus was distinctive for becoming the first comic to earn a Pulitzer Prize (via a special award in 1992). Despite being notable for the significant attention it received within mainstream American culture, including a rave review in The New York Times, Maus did not substantively influence the content of most mainstream comic books. Spiegelman was firmly situated in alternative comics, with roots in the underground comix of the 1970s. Far more important for both comics professionals and publishers, as well as for many comic fans, were The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. Both of these limited series – published by DC Comics – offered much darker takes on superheroes than had been present in prior commercial comics. The financial and critical success of these books not only helped further improve the status of comics within American culture, they also fuelled the growth of more adult-oriented, upscale books that provided darker takes on the superhero genre and its characters. All three publications initially were released as individual issues on a monthly basis and sold via the direct market. However, the titles were subsequently packaged as trade paperbacks or graphic novels, which dramatically increased their reach.7 In trade paperback form, these books were stocked by both direct market stores and, importantly, traditional bookstores, thereby contributing to the dissemination of comics beyond the clientele who frequented comic retailers. In part because of the success of these titles, publishers began semi-regularly collecting ‘mature’ comics series in trade paperback form. These comics, which were the focus of imprints launched by both DC (via Vertigo) and Marvel (via Max), spanned diverse genres including crime (100 Bullets), spy (Human Target), supernatural action adventure (Preacher) and horror (iZombie). Independent publishers including Image (Walking Dead), IDW (Wynonna Earp) and Dark Horse (300) followed suit. Taking advantage of the acclaim that he gained for his work on comics including Ronin, Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Miller subsequently took on roles as a screenwriter and director in Hollywood. His credits included screenplays for Robocop 2 (1990) and Robocop 3 (1993) and co-director credits for Sin City (2005, based on Miller’s graphic novel, and in

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partnership with co-director Robert Rodriguez) and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). Crucially, Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One (1987), along with Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1998), provided inspiration for many of the later Hollywood takes on both the Batman character and on Gotham City, including Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski’s Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995), Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and Zack Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Burton identified Moore’s The Killing Joke, in particular, as shaping his vision of Batman. In a revealing statement, Burton (2006: 71) observed that ‘It’s the first comic I’ve ever loved. And the success of those graphic novels made our ideas more acceptable’. Burton’s Batman (1989), of course, often has been identified as laying a foundation for superhero cinema in conglomerate-era Hollywood (Meehan, 1991; McAllister, 2001; Grainge, 2008). Yet this status was by no means assured. During both the development and production stages, Burton – along with the film’s producers and Warner Bros. – struggled to gain acceptance from comics fans for their take on the character. The casting of Michael Keaton, at the time best known for playing comedic roles in films such as Mr. Mom (1983) and Gung Ho (1986), led to concern amongst many in the fan community that the film would provide yet another campy take on the character. As such, producer Jon Peters hurried a trailer to theatres in December 1988 (Owczarski, 2008: 111). The trailer was designed to convey the movie’s mood and look, and thereby quell anxieties among a community of comics fans increasingly connected via stores, fanzines and conventions. The production also hired the artist who created Batman, Bob Kane and marketing materials in turn promoted the fact that he provided input on the script and served as a creative consultant on the film (Kane also appeared in a cameo in the movie) (Owczarski, 2016: 306–307). While public relations efforts such as these reflected the growing importance of comics fandom, they also indicated a modest shift in how comics professionals were being valued by Hollywood. With Superman, Warner Bros. mainly wanted to ensure that their legal battles with Siegel and Shuster were settled before releasing the film. For Batman, Warner Bros. sought to signal that comics professionals actually sanctioned the film and viewed it as appropriately faithful to the source material. The producers even hired comic book writer Steve Englehart to draw from his prior experience with Batman to develop a treatment of the film in the mid-1980s (Englehart, n.d.). Englehart did not, however, receive screen credit for his contributions; Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren were credited as the movie’s screenwriters. Following his work on the film, Hamm also wrote briefly for one of DC’s Batman titles, Detective Comics.

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During the time of Batman’s release, Hollywood may have sought input from comics professionals within particular contexts, and productions may even have hired them on staff as storyboard artists, art directors, character designers and screenwriters. But professionals’ involvement on film and TV projects remained sporadic, and the respect accorded to them in Hollywood remained limited. The structural, technological, cultural and creative conditions facilitating the steady movement of – and demand for – talent across these industries were not yet in place. That said, a range of forces during the 1990s enabled the rise of more niche-oriented film and TV content. This niche-oriented content consisted in part of an increasing number of comic book characters, stories and properties. New broadcast networks like Fox and The WB, cable channels like Cartoon Network and USA Network, and niche-oriented distributors like New Line and Dimension Films all became outlets where comic book properties appeared. Both mid-career baby boomers and young Gen-X artists and writers often landed jobs working on such movies and TV series. Many also found employment on other types of genre content that were burgeoning due to the appearance of a growing number of distribution outlets. As discussed by media studies scholar Shawna Kidman, a steady stream of comic book adaptations were made into movies during the 1990s. Many of these projects were released by genre-oriented niche distributors and marketed primarily to a youthful male audience (e.g. Miramax’s The Crow [Caliber Comics, 1994], Gramercy’s Barb Wire [Dark Horse, 1996]). Although these projects rarely were widely promoted on the basis of their source material or due to the involvement of comic book professionals, many did employ artists and writers in some capacity (Kidman, 2019: 210). For instance, co-writers Mike Richardson and Mark Verheiden based the motion picture Timecop (1996) on their Dark Horse comic book of the same name. Genre-oriented company New Line Pictures proved to be one of the strongest supporters of comic book properties during the 1990s. This was the case partly due to the interest of head of production Michael De Luca, who was one of the few executives during this time to declare his comics fandom and to seek out comics as source material for liveaction feature films (Weinraub, 1995). De Luca was also one of the earliest Gen X-ers to rise to a position of authority at a major media corporation. Though New Line already had produced a highly successful comic book adaptation with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (Mirage Studios, 1990, 1991, 1993) prior to De Luca’s arrival at the company in 1993, The Mask (Dark Horse, 1994), Spawn (Image, 1997) and Blade (Marvel, 1998) all were released by New Line during his tenure. Importantly, most of these films did little to legitimize comics to the wider public; indeed, these 1990s-era releases largely only reinforced general

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impressions of comic books as trashy, lowbrow schlock (also see Tank Girl [Deadline/Dark Horse, 1995], Judge Dredd [2000 AD/Eagle Comics,1995]). Arguably more influential than many of these frequently on-the-cheap liveaction feature adaptations were two animated series that appeared on Fox in the early 1990s. These two programmes, Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) and X-Men: The Animated Series (1992–1997), might also be seen as especially indicative of the evolving Hollywood-comics relationship. Produced by Warner Bros. Animation in the wake of the success of Burton’s Batman movie, Batman: The Animated Series was co-created by Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski. After failing to break into the comic book industry as an artist, Timm pursued a career as a character and model designer, storyboard artist and writer for children’s animated series in the 1980s (e.g. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe [1983– 1985], The Real Ghostbusters [1986–1991]). Timm, in turn, brought others on staff who previously had sought or sustained careers in comics, including writers Paul Dini, Marty Pasko and Len Wein as well as artists Kevin Nowlan and Glen Murakami. Timm and Radomski’s vision for the programme involved incorporating elements of Burton’s Batman along with the aesthetic of the Fleischer Studios cartoons of the 1940s (Kendall, 2019). Though Batman: The Animated Series would air weekdays on Fox’s children’s programming block, Fox Kids, it was important to Timm and Radomski that they did something ‘quite a bit more adult than, say, shows like G.I. Joe or Transformers or He-Man’ (Riesman, n.d.). The programme was a huge success, helping to launch Fox Kids’ daytime schedule and jump-start a shared universe of DC Animated series (sometimes labelled the ‘Timmverse’ or ‘Diniverse’). This DC Animated Universe received acclaim for featuring a greater level of storytelling and character complexity than had been on display in previous animated series (Parkin, 2016). Subsequent DC animated programmes included The WB’s Superman: The Animated Series (1996– 2000) and Cartoon Network’s Justice League Unlimited (2004–2006). Dini and Timm also participated in the creation of direct-to-video films (e.g., Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker [2000]) and a theatrical feature (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm [1993]). These film and TV projects didn’t just satisfy both adult Gen-X and youthful millennial viewers; they also inspired many comics professionals as well. Significantly, both Timm and Dini capitalized on the notoriety gained through their work on these animated series to shift into working in comics – an unusual move at the time. Warner Bros. maintained tight control over the DC Animated Universe, and increasingly prioritized placing these animated programmes on its own broadcast and cable channels. In contrast, Marvel had only limited involvement with many of the properties featuring its characters during the 1990s and early 2000s. Until

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the mid-2000s, Marvel was struggling to stay afloat due to a combination of overextension of its product line in efforts to exploit the speculative market, unwise acquisitions including a distribution arm (Heroes World) and general financial mismanagement (Howe, 2012: 301–376). Collectively, these moves placed Marvel under tremendous financial strain and compelled it to license most of its characters on the cheap to anyone and everyone willing to pay for the rights. Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, Marvel prioritized licensing characters and properties primarily in the interest of boosting merchandise sales (in particular, toy sales). Marvel made little effort at quality control. Within this context, Saban Entertainment licensed the rights to produce X-Men as an animated series and proceeded to produce it as inexpensively as possible (in part by outsourcing voiceover and animation work to Canada and South Korea) ( Johnson, 2009). The tight budgets contributed to inconsistencies in terms of the execution of stories and the quality of animation. But the programme made it on the air, in no small part due to the advocacy of Fox executive Margaret Loesch, who previously had served as president of production and chief executive officer at Marvel Productions in the 1980s. It was broadcast on Fox Kids on Saturday mornings.8 Despite ongoing production difficulties, X-Men was notable for being among the first children’s animated series to be serialized (Couch and Burton, 2017). It also was yet another animated programme to employ comic book writers and artists (e.g. artist Will Meugniot as supervising producer, writer Len Wein). Although the majority of comics professionals were employed on children’s animated television prior to the 2000s, there were occasional instances when writers, in particular, worked on live-action programmes. In most cases, comics professionals worked on hour-long superhero dramas. Bill Finger (Batman, 1966–1968), Mike Carlin (Superboy, 1988–1992) and Len Wein (Human Target, 1992), along with the aforementioned Alan Brennert (Wonder Woman, 1975–1979) and Howard Chaykin (The Flash, 1990–1991), for example, were all staffed on series based on comic book properties. Opportunities to work in other television genres, however, remained slim. As the 2000s approached, comics professionals had begun to secure positions on a growing number of film and television projects. Though few of these professionals felt like many of their peers were working in Hollywood at the time, in fact, many more were doing so – primarily by procuring employment on the animated series, first-run syndicated programmes and feature-length genre films (whether theatrically released or direct-to-video) that were proliferating in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. With cable outlets old and new increasingly pursuing original programming to grow their viewership,

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new broadcast ‘netlets’ Fox, The WB and UPN, focused on pursuing younger viewers, a booming videocassette (and, as of 1997, DVD) market further fuelling investment in new content, major corporations seeking new ways of exploiting their laterally and vertically integrated structures, and a white, male-dominated geek culture emerging as a particularly viable (and internet-connected) market segment, the prospects for comics properties – and professionals – were improving exponentially. As discussed earlier, prior to the 2000s, comics professionals who aspired to break into film and television often concealed their prior work experiences. Comics’ lowbrow and juvenile associations remained too strong, and there were not yet enough people in positions of power in Hollywood that viewed the medium favourably. But things were starting to change. Suddenly members of a generation that had grown up buying comics in stores, watching comics adaptations on TV and talking about comics online were in their twenties and thirties – and they were starting to gain status and power in both comics and Hollywood. For example, after growing up as comics fans (and, in the case of Lana, writing comics), the Wachowski siblings translated much of what they appreciated about the medium into The Matrix (1999) and its expanding transmedia universe. They even hired comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce to develop concept art and create storyboards for the trilogy ( Jenkins, 2006: 93–130). Passionate comic book fans including Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1996–2003), Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, 1997) and Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996), meanwhile, fused their appreciation of comics properties with their love of genre cinema. Whedon, in fact, later spoke of how he based the character of Buffy in her TV iteration on X-Men character Kitty Pryde, noting ‘Kitty was like the mother of Buffy, as much as anybody’ (Rogers, 2012). Whedon and Smith followed in the footsteps of Timm and Dini by transitioning from working on TV to writing comics.9 Several of our interviewees singled out these men’s embrace of comics – in homages paid via their films and TV series, through expressions of their love for the medium in interviews with the press and by writing issues of comics – as helping to further increase an awareness and appreciation of the medium beyond traditional comic book fans. Remarkably, at the same time that both Whedon and Smith were publishing their first comic books in the late 1990s, two ardent comic book fans in their late twenties – Kevin Feige and Geoff Johns – gained employment with Richard Donner ( Johns) and his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner (Feige) (Arvedon, 2017; Erao, 2017). Their timing was auspicious, as the Donners were beginning the development process for a live-action X-Men (2000), to be released by Fox.10

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This film, followed shortly thereafter by Sony’s Spider-Man (2002) kicked off the contemporary age of big-budget superhero cinema. Feige and Johns subsequently would be intimately involved with the ascent of superheroes on screen – Feige in his role as president of Marvel Studios (2007–) and Johns through his position as chief creative officer of DC Entertainment (2010–2018). A variety of technological, economic, cultural and creative forces would enable the movement of many more Gen-X comics professionals-cum-fans into Hollywood’s creative and executive ranks during the first two decades of the new millennium.

COMICS–FILM INTERACTIONS IN THE 2000S: SPIDER-MAN AND BEYOND The success of the first X-Men and Spider-Man films further encouraged investment in more superhero stories by a number of studios. Marvel’s forceful efforts to monetize its characters via licensing helped lead to several different studios releasing superhero movies in a short time span. These included Daredevil (Fox, 2003), Hulk (Universal, 2003), Punisher (Artisan, 2004), Elektra (Fox, 2005) and Fantastic Four (Fox, 2005). At the same time, Warner Bros. rebooted both its Batman and Superman franchises under the direction of Christopher Nolan and Bryan Singer, respectively (see Chapter Five). While Batman Begins (2005) was a hit, neither Superman Returns (2006) nor Catwoman (2004), featuring Halle Berry, proved successful. Despite uneven results with many of these early-to-mid-2000s films, the genre remained an attractive investment for several studios. What ultimately cemented the place of comic book superheroes in Hollywood was not one film, but an entire ‘universe’ of films: Marvel Studios’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). In effect, Marvel Studios undertook a more than decade-long process of building out its characters across a series of twentytwo films (or ‘episodes’) that comprised its first three phases (or first ‘season’). Phase 1 of the MCU launched with the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man (2008); Phase 3 concluded with his death in Avengers: Endgame (2019). Under the management of Kevin Feige, the stories, characters and designs that had appeared in Marvel comics over several decades were recombined for their onscreen iterations. One of the key ways that select comics professionals were involved with the MCU films early on was through their participation on the Marvel Creative Committee, a group that – until it was dissolved in 2015 – included comics writer Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate X-Men, Alias) and Marvel Chief Creative Officer (as well as artist and writer) Joe Quesada (Chitwood, 2018).

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Even as superhero adaptations increasingly dominated multiplexes during the 2000s, a number of other comic book projects drawn from a wide range of genres made their way to theatres. These included adaptations of comics published by Archie Comics (Josie and the Pussycats, 2001), Top Shelf (From Hell, 2001; Surrogates, 2009), Dark Horse (Hellboy, 2004; 300, 2007), IDW (30 Days of Night, 2007), Vertigo/DC Comics (Constantine, 2005; V for Vendetta, 2005; Red, 2010), Top Cow (Wanted, 2008); Oni Press (Whiteout, 2009); and BOOM! Studios (2 Guns, 2013). Importantly, comics at this time were not just the domain of the bigbudget arms of the studios. Several indie operations turned to the medium for source material as well. This included teen dramedy Ghost World (United Artists, 2001), based on the comic book of the same name created by Daniel Clowes and published by Fantagraphics; the hybrid fact/fiction take on underground comic book artist Harvey Pekar’s initially self-published American Splendor (Fine Line, 2003); and action thriller A History of Violence (New Line, 2005), based on the Paradox Press/Vertigo book by John Wagner and Vince Locke. In some of these cases, comics professionals were involved during the development and production stages (e.g. Ghost World, 30 Days of Night). In other cases, screenwriters for comic book movies later pivoted to writing comic books (e.g. Catwoman’s John Rogers, Batman Begins’ David Goyer). Depending on the project, comics professionals might be called upon to assist in a film’s promotion, thereby helping to reassure comics fans that the source material and its characters were treated respectfully. Yet even if comics professionals were only minimally involved with the development, production and/or promotion of many of the 2000s-era comic-book film adaptations, they nonetheless benefited from the growing media coverage these projects generated. As the comic medium’s profile increased and its cultural status improved, more such professionals identified fresh means of generating income. Such income might come from initiating their own creator-owned projects or by looking for work on movies, TV series or videogames. For example, comics writer Warren Ellis (best known during the first decade of the twenty-first century for Transmetropolitan with DC/Vertigo, Planetary with Wildstorm and the creator-owned Fell with Image) worked as a writer for several videogames in the early 2000s. These include Electronic Arts’s hit sci-fi horror title Dead Space (2008) – to which comics writers Rick Remender and Antony Johnston also contributed. He also wrote episodes for a number of animated television shows, including Justice League Unlimited (2004–2006) and web-series Revisioned: Tomb Raider (2007), before serving as executive producer for the first four Marvel Anime series (which debuted in Japan between 2010 and 2011) and creator of the Netflix original animated series Castlevania (2017– present).

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While new routes for comics professionals into Hollywood continued to emerge, the comics profession itself was changing in ways that made Hollywood increasingly attractive. When the business of comics imploded in the mid-to-late1990s due to overproduction, speculation and mismanagement, opportunities for many comics professionals declined. With several publishers either going out of business or scaling back, and Marvel and DC trimming the number of books they published each month, prospects for work diminished and page rates stagnated. Periodically new publishers launched, spending large sums of money recruiting top talent. More often than not, such ventures were short lived. Further, while Image provided a creator-owned model as an alternative to the work-for-hire model at Marvel and DC (see Chapter Two) – and digital technologies enabled fresh means of diffusing stories via emergent forms like webcomics (see Chapter Six) – few creatives were able to sustain themselves with the income generated solely from these alternative distribution outlets. At the same time that compensation within the medium languished, comics professionals grew increasingly dissatisfied with the growing creative constraints that they were facing, especially in relation to the superhero comics from Marvel and DC. For a variety of reasons, both DC and Marvel began exercising greater control over their properties and characters during the late 1990s and early 2000s. One reason was that many executives remained frustrated by the star system that had emerged – a system that had cost them a lot of money and grief (e.g. when professionals departed with no notice, as was the case with the aforementioned Image artists in 1992). Executives thus sought to contain the amount of power asserted by creatives, especially artists, who had been the biggest source of headaches. Second, as publishers became ever-more invested in crossover stories and maintaining continuity, they felt compelled to exert more control over how and when characters appeared in books. According to one artist, who first entered the comics industry in the 1980s: Back in the day, a creator could say ‘I want to do a story with [Batman villain] Ra’s al Ghul’. Now you say ‘I want to do a story with Ra’s al Ghul’ and literally what happens is [DC Comics] says ‘we will have to check Ra’s al Ghul’s schedule. We have to see if he is involved in any other story’. And if he’s involved in another story, that means he’s busy right now.

As a means of spurring sales, Marvel and DC became even more focused on rebooting stories and launching new special events; such efforts required greater coordination and supervision on the part of editorial divisions. Much to the dismay of many comics professionals, conditions changed even more in the mid-to-late 2000s. Key forces driving this change were Marvel Studios’s move into independent production in 2005 in the wake of a $525 million cash

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infusion, followed shortly thereafter by Disney’s 2009 purchase of Marvel and Time Warner’s creation of DC Entertainment, also in 2009, to manage film and television adaptations of DC Comics characters (see Chapter Five). The effect of these developments on Marvel’s and DC’s comic book divisions is complicated and, we believe, sometimes exaggerated (see Chapter Four), but – at least from the point of view of many creatives we interviewed – after 2009, working conditions for some writers and artists at these companies changed for the worse. Although numerous factors are to blame (including poor management, a problem that has plagued both companies to varying degrees off and on throughout their existences), seasoned comics professionals sometimes cited the new corporate structures as the primary cause. Another Gen-X writer who had entered the comics business in the 1980s explained to us the change in work conditions as follows: If you work at Marvel or DC now, you get a fair amount of editorial input. Because you are playing with their characters and they’re part of multimedia franchises that have grown into other media. And you don’t have that freedom that you once had to work on this stuff because everybody wants some sort of synergistic effect between the way the stories in comics are versus the way the stories are seen on TV or movies or videogames.

Overall, however, the degree of autonomy experienced by workers in the comics industry has varied a great deal this century. For a star creator – such as Frank Miller, Jonathan Hickman, Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka or Ta-Nehisi Coates – working at Marvel and DC today can provide unprecedented autonomy. For others, a host of alternative publishers offer reliable – if not especially remunerative – work on licensed books, co-owned and creator-owned titles that often involves considerable creative freedom. Creative freedom notwithstanding, most comics professionals have benefitted little financially from Hollywood’s growing interest in comic book IP. As discussed in the following chapter, in some cases, the professionals involved with the adaptations of their work to other media forms have received compensation for the characters or stories that they originated. In other instances, they have been brought in to consult during a film’s development process (for example, Geoff Johns on Green Lantern [Warner Bros., 2011] and Mark Millar on Fox’s Marvel-based films). Such moves were often widely publicized by the companies in the interest of ensuring that comics fans would remain strong advocates and promoters of the projects. Though the readership of comics remained small, the strong presence of comics fans across various fan-oriented websites and social media platforms was seen by many producers and studios as vital to the success or failure of their film and TV projects. This led to a paradoxical situation where

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even as comics professionals were gaining more cachet within Hollywood and American culture, they were growing increasingly dissatisfied with working on corporate (superhero) comics. Many of these professionals were encouraged by peers, publishers, managers and agents to build and sustain their fanbase in ways that mainly contributed to the success of comic adaptations in other media forms. Often the proliferation of comics properties across film and television did not translate to a spike in comic book sales (Hionis and Ki, 2018). At most, upon the release of a particularly successful superhero film, sales might briefly increase enough for comics professionals to receive a modest bump in their royalties.

COMICS–TELEVISION INTERACTIONS IN THE 2000S: FROM SMALLVILLE TO THE WALKING DEAD As detailed in the previous section, during the twenty-first century, the organizational imperatives, storytelling conventions and cultural status of comics and motion pictures aligned so as to yield tremendous financial results. But the film industry was not alone in benefitting from a closer relationship with the comics industry. During the 2000s, a similar alignment took place between the comics and television industries in terms of both narrative strategies and creative practices. As it did, comic book professionals found new opportunities for work in television. Given the relatively low cultural status of television as a medium into the 1990s, it might seem that comics professionals would not have faced too much difficulty procuring work on writing staffs. But television then was a much more closed system, especially compared to what it is now. It was unusual for ‘outsiders’ (e.g. playwrights, novelists, etc.) to break in, even if they wished to. And comics professionals were at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy in terms of their industry status. A hierarchical, apprentice-based system, supported by WGA rules, further reinforced an orderly process through which writers moved up the ranks (Banks, 2015). The TV system was also much smaller, with far fewer employers: the three broadcast networks were the only consistent buyers of product for the first four decades of the medium. This larger industrial context helps explain why comics professionals secured only limited work in television for decades. A couple of other factors also worked against comics professionals gaining employment on live-action television programmes from the 1940s into the 1990s. First, the types of programmes on which they would most likely work – superhero programmes – remained relatively limited in number. Prior to a brief boom period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when shows like Wonder

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Woman (1975–1979), The Amazing Spider-Man (1977–1979), The Incredible Hulk (1978–1982) and the Doctor Strange TV movie (1978) aired, superheroes made only a modest number of appearances on the small screen beyond animation. Second, most of the programmes during this lengthy time frame relied on a fairly formulaic episodic structure designed to draw in the largest number of casual viewers of all ages from across the United States. This mass orientation meant that only the most elemental attributes of comics properties and characters made their way into programming. In other words, neither comics professionals’ deep knowledge of characters and storyworlds, nor their engagement with and understanding of niche-oriented fan communities, carried much value to studio and network executives. Comics professionals’ value on staff was limited until the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was only then that narrower demographic groups (especially younger ones) began to be more actively pursued through newly launched broadcast netlets like Fox, The WB and UPN, through syndicated programming like Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), which aired in off hours on broadcast affiliates and independent stations, and through low-budget original cable programming like USA Network’s Swamp Thing (1990–1993). This context underscores why it was so exceptional for comics professionals to attain work on writing staffs for live-action series before the 1990s. Much as Superman: The Movie represented an early turning point in terms of the comic book film, the character’s appearance on The WB broadcast network in Smallville (2001–2011) signalled a watershed moment for comic-book-based television series. Building on The WB’s success with ‘unofficial’ superhero Buffy, Smallville represented the network’s (and, as of 2006, its successor, The CW’s) first of many efforts to exploit DC Comics IP. Smallville provided a fresh take on Superman’s origins, tailored primarily to the teen viewership that The WB most actively pursued in the 2000s. Notably, series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s pitch for the show was ‘no flights, no tights’. This approach helped ensure that the effects budget stayed low and that the story remained more grounded (Shimpach, 2010: 94–124). Although initially oriented towards a ‘villain of the week’ format that aligned with most earlier takes of superheroes on television, the programme evolved over time to include more mini-arcs of four to six episodes and then even season-long arcs. In their efforts to balance episodic and serialized stories, the producers sought to simultaneously maintain the show’s appeal with teen viewers, whom they believed preferred the villain-of-the-week tales, and with comic book fans, whom they perceived to be more in favour of the longer-running stories. This effort to straddle the line between episodic and serialized stories had been employed for some time in genre television, including, most famously, with The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2001; 2016–2018). These narrative

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strategies functioned in part as a means of responding to evolving modes of consumption of the medium—modes that were changing radically even during the course of the show’s run (e.g. via TV-on-DVD, TiVo and other personal video recorders, newly launched streaming services like Hulu and Netflix, etc.). Smallville not only represented a shift in how superhero stories were told on TV and engaged with by audiences, but also in terms of staffing practices. During the course of its run, Smallville employed several staff writers who had prior experience writing for comics, including Mark Verheiden, Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. Others on staff, including Steven S. DeKnight, Michael Green, Bryan Q. Miller and Drew Z. Greenberg, would move into writing comics after joining the Smallville staff. Importantly, many of Smallville’s writers would be instrumental in shaping how comics properties – and, more generally, genreoriented content – appeared on TV, in theatres and in print for years to come. For instance, in addition to writing comics featuring Batman, Superman and Green Lantern, Michael Green became an executive producer on the Starz series American Gods (2017–) and received screenplay credit for the Green Lantern (2011) and Logan (2017) feature films. Bryan Q. Miller’s work on Smallville comics was complemented by writing on programmes including The CW’s Arrow (2012–2020) and The Flash (2014–) along with Freeform’s Shadowhunters (2016–2019). Drew Z. Greenberg worked on both the Arrow comic and TV series, along with Syfy’s Caprica (2009–2010) and ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–2020). Whereas Howard Chaykin had felt exceptional in his status as the lone ‘comic book guy’ on writing staffs during the 1990s, within a decade, it became more and more common to have multiple comic book writers on staff, especially for fantasy and science fiction series. Even if a TV series didn’t employ a staff writer with prior experience writing comics, it was more likely than not that many writers had grown up reading comic books in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus were familiar with the form’s tendencies towards hyper-serialization and worldbuilding. Such knowledge was in turn being put to increasingly good use on the growing number of genre series appearing across broadcast and cable television during the 2000s. The capacity for genre programming to draw in hard-to-attract young viewers (especially young men) at a time when the number of media choices was proliferating made programmes such as Supernatural (The WB/The CW, 2005–2020) and Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) especially appealing to network executives. That these properties could fuel repeated consumption, along with an intense affective and economic investment in their transmedia universes, made them that much more compelling to the companies financing and distributing them. An increased corporate emphasis on licensing further

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facilitated the monetization of these properties via comic books, novelizations, merchandise, videogames, web series and more. For reasons discussed in Chapter Five, with the exception of Smallville, as well as Warner Bros.’s short-lived Birds of Prey (The WB, 2002–2003), New Line Television’s even shorter-lived Blade (Spike, 2006) and Fireworks’ syndicated Mutant X (2001–2004), live-action superhero versions of comic book characters were almost entirely absent from broadcast and cable television during the first decade of the millennium. Also largely absent on TV at this time were adaptations of non-superhero comics, though there was no shortage of these being released theatrically. Rare TV exceptions included Painkiller Jane (Syfy, 2007) and The Middleman (ABC Family, 2008). Superheroes did, however, make an appearance on air in a striking fashion in Heroes (NBC, 2006–2010). A pop culture phenomenon upon its premiere, Heroes’ writing staff consisted of a large number of individuals who either previously had written comics or would soon do so: Smallville veterans Michael Green, Jeph Loeb and Mark Verheiden were joined on staff by other comics fans and soon-to-be comic book writers, including Chuck Kim, Aron Eli Coleite and Joe Pokaski, among others.11 In addition, comic book illustrators Tim Sale and Alex Maleev contributed artwork to the series. It is true that Heroes’ buzz diminished significantly after its blockbuster first season. Nonetheless, that programme, along with Lost – which also employed Loeb, as well as comics writers Brian K. Vaughan and Javier Grillo-Marxuach – were important in further reinforcing the growing financial viability and cultural power of geek culture (Graves, 2011; Clarke, 2012: 137–164). The ease with which more comic book writers were moving into television during the mid-to-late 2000s served as inspiration and motivation for others. Comic book writer Jay Faerber, for example, had long wanted to work in television, but doubted whether he could make the leap. As Faerber recounted to us, after seeing Vaughan’s success with Lost, in particular, he decided to move from Seattle to Los Angeles and try to find work in TV. A stint in the Warner Bros. Television Writers’ Workshop was followed by staff positions on Ringer (The CW, 2011– 2012), Zoo (CBS, 2015–2017) and Supergirl (CBS/The CW, 2015–). As this example indicates, Faerber benefited from the groundwork that had been laid for comics professionals – and, in particular, writers – with shows like Smallville, Heroes and Lost. Demand for the skillsets that comics professionals had, the taste sensibilities they possessed and the content that they produced grew as industrial conditions evolved. Significantly, a network of comics professionals continued to expand as more employment opportunities emerged in Hollywood. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, larger economic, technological and cultural shifts would further fuel the exploitation of comics in television.

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Both Marvel/Disney and DC/Warners were especially well positioned to take advantage of the shifting industrial conditions: With more and more media options available, marketing costs continued to rise. Standalone content (i.e. not part of a franchise) struggled to distinguish itself in this environment. Conversations on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter could quickly make or break a movie or a television show; properties for which there wasn’t substantial pre-awareness faced even greater challenges breaking out in this context. All these factors contributed to media conglomerates’ doubling down on their investments in franchises and ostensibly committing more fully to universe building. By the 2010s, television universes began to emerge concurrent with the growth of cinematic universes. Again, comics properties and professionals were central to this process. Appointed as executive vice president of Marvel Television in 2010, Smallville and Heroes writer Jeph Loeb guided the company’s aggressive move into live-action television programming. This included an expansive deal with Netflix for original series. Through Netflix, Marvel methodically built its streaming TV universe of ‘street-level’ heroes from 2015 to 2019. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist each had their own multi-season series (as did antihero The Punisher) in addition to joining together as a team for limited series, The Defenders (2017). On top of its partnership with Netflix, Marvel also produced series for a variety of Disney-owned outlets, including ABC (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter [2015–2016]), Freeform (Cloak & Dagger [2018–2019]) and co-owned Hulu (Runaways [2017–2019]). At the same time, DC focused on launching its own small-screen universe via The CW. Shepherded by writer-producer Greg Berlanti, in collaboration with experienced comic book writer (and screenwriter) Marc Guggenheim, Arrow represented the first series to appear in the so-called ‘Berlanti-verse’, ‘DC TV-Verse’ or ‘Arrowverse’. Although Disney and Warner Bros. frequently sold shows based on their comic-book properties to their own television and cable networks, these shows were just as often sold elsewhere. In part, this was due to rights issues. Until Disney’s purchase of Fox in 2019, Fox owned the film and television rights to Marvel’s X-Men universe. Thus The Gifted (Fox, 2017–19) and Legion (FX, 2017–19), both based on this universe, debuted on channels owned by Fox. But as Disney’s Netflix deal demonstrates, where shows ended up was also influenced by other factors: the amount being offered to license them, the publicity that different channels might bring to the properties and the overall ‘fit’ between a property and a channel’s brand. Constantine (2014–15) and Preacher (2016–19), both based on DC characters, thus aired on NBC and AMC respectively. Lucifer

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(2016–), one of DC’s most successful television adaptations not produced by Berlanti, ran for three seasons on Fox, before moving to Netflix. More recently, Netflix made news by ordering an eleven-episode series of DC’s critically acclaimed 1990s series, The Sandman, from Warner Bros. Television (Ramos, 2019). Netflix’s investment in both Marvel and DC programmes represented part of its larger commitment to establishing itself as the global leader of internet television. As broadband diffusion increased during the late 2000s, and more consumers were able to access video content online, Netflix moved away from its initial DVD-by-mail model. Beginning in 2007, the company became the industry leader in streaming film and television series licensed from other studios. To further differentiate itself – and in anticipation of a day in which studios would reclaim their content rights – Netflix began licensing original series in 2012 with Lilyhammer (2012–2014), House of Cards (2013–2018) and Orange is the New Black (2013–2019). Netflix’s deal with Marvel, struck in 2013, represented one of its most notable early moves into original series programming (Lieberman and Andreeva, 2013). The billions of dollars that Netflix spent on licensing original series during the 2010s helped set off an arms race amongst television distributors for content. New TV series continued to proliferate during what became labelled the ‘peak TV’ era by FX CEO John Landgraf in 2015 (Rose and Guthrie, 2015). By the end of 2018, the number of scripted shows available on broadcast, cable and streaming services totalled nearly 500 ( James, 2018). Studios and networks actively pursued IP ranging from podcasts to young adult fiction to magazine features to serve as source material for new programmes. Comic book properties proved to be especially desirable to broadcast, cable and streaming services alike. Crucially, superhero stories were not the only comics properties that proved attractive to television producers. Indeed, perhaps no single programme was more important in altering the comics–TV relationship – and the financial prospects for comics professionals – than AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–). Whereas Marvel and DC television series provided many comic book writers with an opportunity to write for television, The Walking Dead represented the potential windfall available to those professionals who developed creator-owned content. Based on a horror comic created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore in 2003 and published through Image, The Walking Dead evolved from being a solid hit for AMC in its first season to becoming a blockbuster franchise by its fifth season. In fact, the fifth season premiere in 2014 totalled 17.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched non-sports programme in cable television history (St. John, 2014). AMC, faced with the prospect of its other big hits, Mad Men (2007–2015) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013), going off the air, focused on

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building out the Walking Dead Universe with a series of webisodes, an aftershow hosted by media personality Chris Hardwick (Talking Dead [2011–]), a spin-off (Fear the Walking Dead [2015–]) and more. The company even appointed a Chief Creative Officer, Walking Dead showrunner Scott M. Gimple, to manage further ‘brand extensions on a variety of platforms’ for The Walking Dead universe (Otterson, 2018). With its dedicated niche fanbase, well-realized storyworld and serialized format, The Walking Dead illustrated the compatibility of comics with post-network era television and motivated other creatives and companies to replicate its success. While AMC grew increasingly dependent on Walking Dead-related content, co-creator Kirkman exploited the success of the programme to become a brand name and a multimedia mogul. It’s worth noting that even before appearing on the air, Walking Dead already had been a popular comics title: Due to its success in print (along with other books Kirkman had co-created, including Invincible), he joined Image Comics as a partner in 2008, becoming the only non-founding partner of the company (Gustines, 2008). In 2010, he subsequently launched his own studio (with Image serving as its publisher), Skybound, designed in part to cultivate the next generation of comics professionals (Karlin, 2012). This imprint was connected to Kirkman’s larger multiplatform entertainment company, called Skybound Entertainment (‘About Skybound’, n.d.). The business model for Skybound Entertainment involved providing advances to professionals in exchange for an ownership stake in their properties and playing a role in transforming them into franchises. Following the success of The Walking Dead TV series, Kirkman’s company quickly moved into producing additional television series, movies, interactive games and other forms of digital content via its own in-house studio. Although much of Skybound’s most high-profile content derived from Kirkman’s comic properties, its output also came from other creatives (e.g., motion picture Air [2015]; Scare PewDiePie on YouTube Premium [2016]) (Kit, 2014). Kirkman, meanwhile, not only was involved as a writer and producer on the flagship Walking Dead TV series but also contributed to various other iterations of the franchise, with, for example, Skybound taking over the completion of Telltale Games’ acclaimed The Walking Dead videogame after the developer shut down (Crecente, 2018). In addition, he augmented his public profile through his role as producer of AMC’s mini-series Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics (2017). The astronomical success of The Walking Dead – and of Robert Kirkman – underscored the immense economic and creative potential available to both comic book properties and professionals in television during the 2010s. This success was enabled in part by Kirkman’s business partner and manager, David

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Alpert, who also served as co-producer on Skybound’s projects as well as partner at the management company, Circle of Confusion ( Jade, 2018). Benefiting from its affiliation to Kirkman as well as the Wachowskis, Circle of Confusion rapidly expanded its profile as a management and production company in the genre space, representing a growing number of creatives with experience writing across comics and television (e.g. Luke Cage writer Matt Owens, Supergirl’s Jay Faerber, Powers’ creator Brian Michael Bendis [2015–2016], etc.). Unfortunately, not all creatives benefited equally from Hollywood’s interest in comics properties and professionals. As more comic book adaptations were developed to become movies and TV series, more conflicts arose between companies and creatives, as well as amongst creatives themselves. Though oftentimes writers and artists would be co-contributors in shaping comics properties, as discussed further in Chapter Three, the creative contribution of artists often was not legible to Hollywood managers, agents and executives. The disproportionate power that writers had come to hold in Hollywood relative to artists increasingly contributed to the former benefiting much more than the latter in terms of both compensation and credit. Such was the case, for example, with The Walking Dead. Upon becoming a hit, co-creator and artist Tony Moore sued Robert Kirkman to receive a greater share of the franchise’s proceeds (Gardner, 2012). The duo ultimately settled out of court. As seductive as the Image model of ownership may have been to many creatives, it often contributed to increasingly unrealistic expectations on their part regarding the financial upside of projects. What’s more, this model at times fuelled resentments between members of a comic’s creative team, as artists saw writers benefit disproportionately from their co-creations. Of course, the Image model of ownership was by this time only one of multiple models available to creators – all of which, as detailed in the next chapter, had their share of benefits and drawbacks. Unfortunately – and also to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter – most of the successful comics-based Hollywood franchises were derived from properties created long before these alternative models were available. The fact that Hollywood conglomerates were now reaping billions of dollars from exploiting comic books’ characters, stories and designs, however, led many to anticipate larger payoffs, regardless of prior contractual arrangements and historical practices. Large paycheques, unfortunately, were often not forthcoming. Thus, by the 2010s, a situation had arisen where comics professionals may have been aggressively pursued by Hollywood for their skills. And they may have gained greater cultural legitimation for their work. But an improved cultural status and increased professional opportunities did not necessarily translate to greater financial security.

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CONCLUSION: INTO THE 2020S As this chapter has illustrated, by the mid-2010s, Hollywood was turning not only to comics properties, but also to comics professionals, with growing frequency. Prior studies have addressed both the structural factors leading to the growing exploitation of comics by Hollywood and the cultural forces driving the expansion of comics culture. While the survey provided here has built on such approaches, we also have sought to provide a distinctive approach to the historical relationship of comics and Hollywood by focusing on the movement of professionals across different industry sectors over the course of several decades. Certainly a range of technological, economic, sociocultural and creative forces shaped the opportunities available to comics professionals within Hollywood at different historical moments. But as we have shown throughout, also crucial were distinct cultural forces. More specifically, how comics were culturally valued at different historical moments – both as a medium and as a profession – shaped the ways that professionals were (or were not) able to participate within different Hollywood production cultures (e.g. children’s animated television vs. live-action feature films). It took roughly a generation – starting in the 1980s and continuing into the early 2000s – for comics professionals to be welcomed into the decisionmaking ranks of Hollywood’s development and production processes. Several developments took place before professionals attained this status, including a shift in the cultural status of the medium; an expansion in the economic and cultural power of comics fandom; the heightened economic viability of certain niche markets; and the creative alignment of comics’ narrative strategies with Hollywood’s economic imperatives. Presiding over these changes were a select number of baby boomers and a large number of Gen-Xers. By the 2010s, this generation of professionals – and comics readers –were in their thirties and forties. These individuals comprised a distinctive (and distinctively homogenous) taste culture – largely white, male and well-read in the output from Marvel and DC publishers. Importantly, even as Hollywood increasingly looked to comics properties and professionals, the comic book industry remained a niche business. On occasion – as with Kirkman and The Walking Dead – sales of a particular title might jump by virtue of its success in Hollywood. But more broadly, the comics industry did not realize a substantive boost in sales relative to the heightened interest by Hollywood. Indeed, the comics industry faced an even larger challenge: its readership was too narrow, demographically. As many publishing executives with whom we spoke stated, if the industry hoped to remain economically viable, it needed to diversify, both in terms of the types of stories it told and the types of

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talent it cultivated. Yet it could not afford to alienate its superhero fanbase, which still most heavily frequented comics stores and sometimes dominated comics culture. Hollywood, concurrently, was simultaneously facing growing social pressure (and financial incentives) to include more stories of women, people of colour and LGBTQ viewers. As the 2020s approached, both the comics industry and Hollywood would increasingly look to a new generation – the millennial generation (b. 1981– 1996) for fresh perspectives. Many members of this generation had interests that extended beyond those of the largely white, male superhero fanbase that long had dominated comics culture and the comics industry, and were, arguably, Hollywood’s primary target audience for most special-effects-driven action fare. Notably, a number of these younger comics readers – and aspiring professionals – were women, attracted to the medium in part through their exposure to manga in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Brienza, 2016). In addition to having more varied tastes, this new generation, (e.g. Noelle Stevenson, G. Willow Wilson, Fiona Staples) often held different ideas about what it meant to be a professional and how one might cultivate a career in comics, Hollywood and beyond. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, what having a ‘career in Hollywood’ entailed was perceived differently not only due to generational variations, but also as a result of divergent work roles and geographical positioning.

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2 Comic Books and the Economics of Intellectual Property Production In 2009, the children of comics artist Jack Kirby served Marvel Comics with notices of copyright termination for the characters Kirby had created or co-created while working as an independent contractor for Marvel fifty years earlier (Marvel v Kirby, 2013). Executed in accordance with the termination provisions provided under section 304(c) of the 1976 Copyright Act, these notices purported to statutorily cancel or ‘terminate’ parts of Marvel’s copyrights in Thor, the Hulk, Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, the original X-Men and other characters, transferring them ‘back’ to the creator’s heirs beginning in 2014. Such a collection of transfers, if effected, would wreak havoc on Marvel’s finances and business structure. The Kirby heirs, once they became legal co-owners of these popular characters, would be entitled to a large share of much of Marvel’s profit while also possessing the legal authority to develop and license products and develop media adaptations featuring the characters without securing Marvel’s permission. The right of termination, though having the potential to be extraordinarily disruptive to established business arrangements, was created by Congress as a means of offsetting the tremendous advantages publishers usually have over creators in the media industries. Under the United States government’s first modernized copyright regime (as represented by the Copyright Act of 1909: §§ 23–34]), creative works were eligible for two sequential but separate periods of copyright protection, with the second period expressly granted to the original creator or, if deceased, his or her family – even if the copyright for the first period had been acquired by another entity, such as a publisher. This reversion of copyright back to the creator had been intended to enable creators, who typically have little initial bargaining power, to capture some of the long-term value of their creations. Though the Copyright Act of 1976 ended the dual copyright periods, replacing them with a single, longer period of protection, the law’s drafters sought to honour the original spirit of the Act of 1909 by providing creators who had sold their copyrights under the 1909 regime with the opportunity to capture most of the additional value generated by the longer period of protection.

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Congress thus provided a new, inalienable termination right, which such creators could employ to reclaim ownership of a work fifty-six years (the total length of copyright protection before the Act of 1976) after the work’s first publication (17 U.S.C. § 304(c)). The only requirement is that the creator has produced the work independently; works created by an employee acting under the scope of his or her employment – what the law designates ‘works made for hire’ – cannot revert to the creator, since they never technically belonged to the creator in the first place. Seizing upon the work-for-hire exception, Marvel fought back, filing suit in the Southern District of New York for declaratory judgment invalidating the Kirby heirs’ termination notices (Marvel v Kirby, 2011). Kirby, Marvel argued, had produced the characters in question as an employee and thus had no legal right to claim ownership of them. In its ruling, the court agreed with Marvel, noting that the fact that Kirby would not have been legally considered an employee at the time he had created the work was irrelevant; because Marvel had solicited the work from Kirby and had exercised some limited oversight of it, Kirby should be considered an employee and the work ‘work-for-hire’ (Marvel v Kirby, 2011). A court of appeals affirmed, despite holding undisputed that Kirby was an independent contractor who had worked at his own expense, had not been guaranteed payment for his work and had been required to formally assign copyrights in his work to Marvel (Marvel v Kirby, 2013). With potentially billions of dollars at stake, the Kirby heirs submitted a petition for writ of certiorari (i.e. legal review) to the Supreme Court, requesting that the Court take up the question of ‘work for hire’ and pointing to a long history of confusion among the lower courts as to how the principle should be applied (Kirby et al., 2014). On 14 May 2014, the Court took the significant step of ordering Marvel to file a response to the petition. As the vast majority of petitions are rejected out of hand, the Court’s order suggested that the appeal had passed the Court’s first cut and that the justices were considering hearing the case. A bevy of former government officials, comics historians and professional groups subsequently submitted amici curiae in support of the Kirby heirs, arguing for the importance of the issue and urging the Supreme Court to grant the petition. The implications of the case were enormous – not only for Marvel and its parent company, Disney, but also for rival DC Entertainment/Warner Bros. and a myriad of other entertainment companies. The ‘instance and expense test’ routinely employed by US courts to determine the employment status of creators producing work that is paid for by others had created what Judge Thomas Gee had described in 1987 as ‘an almost irrebuttable presumption that any person

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who had paid another to create a copyrightable work was the statutory “author” under the “work for hire” doctrine’ (Easter Seal Society v Playboy, 1987: 327). Entertainment companies – and especially those that owned properties created prior to 1978 – had thus come to depend upon this presumption in developing their businesses. Were the Supreme Court to hear the case and then find the instance and expense text invalid, the legal basis for these companies’ long-term business models would be wiped away. A vast array of properties (including characters, books, films and even music) would be at risk of reverting to the independent contractors who had originally created them. Though how the Court might rule was uncertain, in a case decades earlier the Court had criticized the kind of legal reasoning typically associated with the instance and expense test as ‘inconsistent with the language, structure and legislative history of the work for hire provisions’ (Community for Creative Non-Violence v Reid: 750). Fearing a lawsuit that might not only invalidate their copyrights on Kirby’s characters, but also upend the industrial structure on which the entertainment company (and indeed, much of the entertainment industry) depended, Marvel settled with Kirby’s children on 26 September 2014 (Barnes, 2014). The legal questions raised by the dispute nevertheless still remain live. And though these questions apply only to comic book work created before 1978, they reflect one of the most long-running and important issues in the comics industry: the ownership of intellectual property. Who owns the characters and stories created by comic book writers and artists? Who is in charge of creative decisions regarding these characters and stories? And who gets to profit financially from these characters’ and stories’ translations into film, television and ancillary products such as toys and clothing? As the Kirby case suggests, these questions have become more important in the twenty-first century, as the comics industry has become increasingly integrated into Hollywood. The financial and creative stakes have grown since the previous century, and so too has the entertainment industry’s demand for narrative-based intellectual property that can be exploited across media. As a result, the answers to these questions in the current century have become both more various and more complicated than they were in the previous century. Unlike the 1960s, when the answer to all three questions was almost without exception ‘the publisher’, the comic book industry now offers multiple ownership models, each with their own accordant risks and benefits for both the creator and the publisher. This chapter examines each of these models in turn while also discussing the way their emergence has reshaped the creative ecosystem of the comics industry and altered the economics of intellectual property production.

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PART 1: TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY Like talent working in the book and magazine industries, the vast majority of comic industry writers and artists labour as independent contractors. This means that they are not official employees of the publisher, but rather work independently: on their own time, in their own space, using their own supplies and with little to no direct supervision by the publisher (or, in some cases, the rightsholder to a specific property) who has hired them. Technically, it is not their labour that is being purchased but rather the copyrights to the products of that labour: specifically plots, scripts and art. Talent is typically hired on a project-by-project basis, although – unlike with film or television projects – it is not uncommon (especially at Marvel and DC) for the scope of the project to be uncertain, flexible or subject to regular renegotiation. As independent contractors operating without a union, comic book artists and writers also labour under conditions that in many cases exhibit an extreme form of what scholars and activists call ‘precarity’ (Curtin and Sanson, 2016): lack of predictability; lack of strong workplace protections against discrimination, capricious dismissal and excessive working hours; and lack of a comprehensive safety net (no health insurance, sick days, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance or institutional retirement plans). As with other media industries, compensation packages for talent vary greatly in the comics industry, not only from publisher to publisher, but also from individual to individual and from project to project. Nearly all of them, however, revolve around three central concepts: (1) a page rate, (2) a participation threshold and (3) copyright assignment. The page rate designates a specific dollar amount that is paid to the contractor for each page of the completed book that he or she has written, drawn, inked or coloured. Though likely derived from the word rate used to compensate prose writers in the early pulp and magazine industries, the comic book page rate differs in that the number of pages within a comic book is typically standardized across a publisher’s entire line, whereas the number of words in a prose story or essay is not. Partly for this reason – and partly because comic book publishers commonly assign single writers and artists to entire books – talent and publishers sometimes speak in terms of an issue rate: the total compensation to an individual for working on all of the pages that make up a single issue.1 The page rate, like the word rate in pulp and magazine publishing, tends to incentivize quantity over quality. The more work a writer or artist does, the more he or she will be paid. For everyone other than celebrity talent, rates have also typically been low enough to necessitate that writers and artists take on multiple projects a month. A recent edition of the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook (2013: 267) lists page rates for pencilled comic book art at $100–$400, plotting/

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scripting at $75–$120 and colouring at $50–$150.2 Though these rates do not take into account potential reprint income or income generated by artists’ sales of their original art (a practice that became possible once publishers started returning original art to artists in the mid-1970s), they are nevertheless set low enough that working on a single book a month is economically unfeasible for all but the highest-paid celebrity artists. A writer paid the rate of $75 a page would need to write two twenty-two-page books a month in order to ensure a yearly gross income of $39,600 – a figure that does not reflect the costs of state and federal incomes taxes, self-employment tax (approximately 15.3% in 2013), health insurance (currently mandated under US law) and the cost of supplies. Given these relatively low wages – and the lack of paid vacation or sick days – many comic book writers and artists must, as the guild handbook warns, ‘work ten hours a day, six days a week, to make a living wage’ (Graphic Artists, 2013: 266). Although explicit criticism of this high rate of production is surprisingly uncommon today, during the 1970s and ‘80s a number of comic book workers and commentators (speaking primarily through The Comics Journal) argued that the rapid rate hurt artistic quality by depriving artists of opportunities to experiment, undertake difficult projects and develop their own styles and voices (opportunities which novelists, screenwriters and fine artists were assumed to enjoy) (e.g. Groth et al., 1980). The participation threshold refers to an alternative model for figuring compensation – similar in general principle if not in actual details to the much more complicated profit participation models employed for above-the-line talent in the film and television industries (see Ulin, 2014: 558–566). In this model, which seems to have been designed to mimic the book publishing industry’s approach to royalties, a talent’s payout is partly or wholly dependent upon sales of the book on which he or she worked. Although its specific details vary depending upon the kind of publishing deal in effect, at the core of this model is the designation of a sales threshold that must be met before compensation is paid out to talent. The threshold may be set at a specific number of units sold or at a specific amount of revenue generated. A publisher might, for example, employ a sales threshold of 60,000 units, with talent receiving 5% of net revenue for sales above this threshold.3 When coupled with a page rate – as it is in many workfor-hire deals – the participation threshold is sometimes referred to as a royalty threshold. We use the broader term here, however, since – as we demonstrate in detail below – the compensation provided in this way is not technically a royalty under creator-owned and co-owned publishing deals. In contrast to the page rate, the participation threshold would seem to incentivize quality over quantity, and indeed its introduction at both DC (in

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1981) and Marvel (in 1983) was part of long-running efforts by both companies to improve the quality of their books (‘DC Creates’, 1981). The link between quality (a subjective criterion to begin with) and sales, however, is not always correlational. A book may sell well because its characters are popular, the art is attention-grabbing/spectacular or because the book has been the subject of intense marketing efforts. Indeed, in the last quarter of the twentieth century and still today, the books that receive the most critical acclaim and industry awards are rarely the bestsellers. Dark Horse’s Concrete (originally published in Dark Horse Presents [1986–2000]), Dark Horse’s Goon (2003–2015), Image Comics’s Southern Bastards (2014-present) and BOOM!’s Giant Days (2013-present), for instance, have all won Eisner Awards (the comic industry’s version of Academy Awards or Emmy Awards) for best continuing series but sold considerably fewer copies at the time of their release than higher-profile superhero titles released by Marvel, DC and Image. As in the film industry, pay earned through profit participation is thus often less a measure of the quality of the work the talent has done than of the assignment they have been given and the marketing it has received (De Vany and Walls, 1999). Whereas the page rate and participation threshold provide monetary compensation to comic book writers and artists, copyright assignment grants creative workers property rights that must be further exploited in order to produce financial payouts. In some cases, the entire bundle of copyrights adhering in the work under US law is granted solely to the writer and/or artist; in others, these workers receive only some of these rights or only a share of ownership in the larger bundle. As the Kirby lawsuit demonstrates, these rights can sometimes be of tremendous value; however, as the Kirby suit also demonstrates, this value is not intrinsic to the work itself. Properties such as The Avengers and X-Men tend to become valuable through long-term development, which often requires both substantial financial investment and strategic deal-making with adjacent industries, such as that of film, television and apparel. Compensation via property rights, as we will demonstrate below, is by itself thus less straightforwardly beneficial to talent than it may at first appear, at least in the short term.

The Three Basic Publishing Deals During the twenty-first century, there have existed three basic types of publishing deals: work for hire, creator ownership and co-ownership. Each is distinguished from the others by how it approaches the page rate, participation threshold and copyright assignment. The oldest and most common of the three is what comic professionals usually call the work-for-hire model. It is the primary contractual arrangement at the two largest publishers, Marvel and DC, as well as a host

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of other publishers, including Valiant, Zenoscope, IDW and Dynamite. Under this arrangement, the publisher acquires all copyrights, usually in perpetuity, for the work produced. In exchange, artists and writers receive a set page rate that is usually higher than that provided under either of the other publishing deals. In most cases, talent also begin receiving a small payment or royalty after a participation threshold has been reached on individual books. A separate threshold is usually also set for trade paperback sales. These thresholds change over time to reflect the state of the market, but they are typically difficult to meet via initial, first-run sales. Since mid-2014, for instance, DC’s participation threshold has been 60,000 copies (counting both print and digital) for single issues (ICv2, 2014).4 Figure 2.1 depicts print sales volume (excluding re-orders and reprints) across DC’s entire line of new comic books in May, June and July of 2016; the x-axis consists of distinct sales brackets while the y-axis measures the number of titles sold within each sales bracket. As the figure demonstrates, print sales for the vast majority of DC’s new books fall below the participation threshold (represented by the dotted line).5 What is more, the most common sales bracket (10,000–20,000 copies) was significantly below that threshold. Although over time, digital sales may push the few titles that are close to the threshold above it, triggering royalty payments, digital sales (as we discuss in Chapter Six) remain a tiny fraction of print sales; most of DC’s creative workers will thus likely never receive compensation under this aspect of the work-forhire publishing deal. In contrast to the work-for-hire model, under a pure creator-ownership model the creators retain all but first-publication rights for the material they reproduce. These rights come at a cost to creators, however: the creators usually forgo a page rate.6 They also forgo editorial assistance, robust international sales support,

Figure 2.1  Sales volume across DC Comics’s entire line in April, May and June 2016.

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and all but rudimentary marketing support. In this model, creators are thus responsible for putting together their own teams and establishing how revenue will be shared, for providing (or getting a separate intermediary to provide) the initial funding needed to produce the work and for attracting and then maintaining an audience. The publisher provides only printing, distribution and basic administrative services. Once it has recouped the initial publication costs and taken a small flat fee for overhead, all of the revenue goes to the creators. Popularized by Image Comics, many refer to this as ‘The Image Model’. The third and final kind of publishing deal is what we call co-ownership, and which is primarily characterized by the sharing of rights between the publisher and the creators. Journalists (and occasionally publishers themselves) sometimes call this model ‘creator-ownership’ (e.g. Smith, 2014; Dark Horse Comics, n.d.). but we prefer to reserve that label for the kind of publishing deal described above, under which creators are designated the sole rightsholders. Indeed, the term ‘co-ownership’ was suggested to us by a publishing executive as a way of distinguishing the publishing model his company employs from the ‘creatorowned’ deals employed by Image Comics. Publishers offering co-ownership deals include Aftershock, Avatar, BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse Comics, Dynamite and IDW. In contrast to creator-owned arrangements, under co-owned deals the publisher is frequently instrumental in putting together the creative team and developing the project. A lone creator, for instance, may have only a script and need the publisher to assemble an art team. In other cases, the initial story idea or pitch comes from the publisher itself. Because of the publisher’s greater role, the publisher is generally assigned broader publishing rights, and may also require the right of first refusal for adaptations in other media and derivative/ancillary products. Once a sales threshold (typically set at the break-even point for the publisher) has been met, the publisher and creators share the profits generated by the book according to an agreed-upon split. Creators are also usually paid a page rate that is slightly lower than under the work-for-hire model; this payment is sometimes treated as an advance on profit-sharing, sometimes as separate, independent compensation. Money made through sales to other media firms, such as a film production company or a videogame developer, is usually shared between creator and publisher. In some cases, the publisher will also assist in selling or licensing media rights. Before discussing the benefits and drawbacks of the three different publishing deals, we should briefly mention another kind of publishing arrangement, which – though technically not a publishing deal – still plays an important role in the comic book industry’s ecosystem. In self-publishing, a creator or group of creators handles not just the production of a comic book but also the book’s printing, marketing and distribution (either to retailers directly or to a wholesale

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distributor such as Diamond Comics).7 Though creators retain all rights to the work published in this fashion, the retention of rights is usually not the motivating factor; rather, like much self-publishing in other industries, comic book selfpublishing is typically pursued as a hobby, an entrepreneurial experiment or a means of developing one’s craft (Baverstock and Steinitz, 2013; Gauntlet, 2011; Schleser, 2014). Except in unusual cases, self-publishing has also historically failed to provide sustainable financial returns for creators. It has, however, sometimes served as a stepping-stone for creators toward an eventual deal with a publishing company. Indeed, for some established writers and artists – including writer Robert Kirkman (of Walking Dead fame) and artist Erik Larsen (creator of The Savage Dragon and Publisher at Image Comics from 2004–2008) – selfpublishing at the beginning of their careers proved instrumental for ‘breaking in’ to the formalized industry.

PART 2:  THE IP ECOSYSTEM If a publisher or comic book creator from the 1930s, 1950s or even 1970s were to find himself transported to the present day, he would almost certainly be amazed that there exists more than one kind of publishing deal.8 What would prompt publishers to offer anything besides the work-for-hire deal, he would likely wonder, given their control of the major distribution channels? And once creator-owned deals were on the table, why would a creator ever accept anything else? Though these questions would be particularly important to our time traveller (for whom the work-for-hire deal was – with very few exceptions  – the only deal available), they are no less relevant to us in the present day, as they point to a peculiarity about the balance of power in the twenty-first-century comics book industry: How is it that all three deals co-exist, with none being perceived as categorically superior by industry stakeholders? In the remainder of this chapter we offer an answer to this question by analysing the comparative costs and benefits of the three publishing deals for both creative workers and publishers. We demonstrate not only why no publishing deal is categorically better for either party than another, but also how the three different deals are functionally dependent upon each other. The three deals, in other words, together constitute what we call, drawing from the work of business scholars and economists, a market ecosystem.

Work-for-Hire At first glance, the work-for-hire deal may seem the least beneficial to writers and artists. As lawsuits like that of Kirby v. Marvel have made well known to comics fans and the wider public, creators working under this form of deal have

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extremely limited opportunities to share in the long-term value their work produces. Because talent has no ownership rights over the material they create, they are guaranteed no compensation – nor, in most cases, even formal credit – when their work is adapted into other media. Joss Whedon’s script for Marvel’s The Avengers film (2012), for example, is widely seen as having borrowed heavily from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates comic book series from 2002. Neither Millar nor Hitch, however, were compensated or credited for their contribution. ‘Whenever a movie comes out’, Millar explained in an interview for The Telegraph in 2015, ‘ … we won’t see a penny of anything and the impact on sales of books [upon which publishing royalties are based] will be relatively modest’ (Brown, 2015). Warner Bros.’s Man of Steel (2013) offers us another high-profile example: Though drawing upon Mark Waid and Lenil Lu’s 2003– 2004 Superman: Birthright comic book series, neither Waid nor Lu received compensation or credit for the use of their ideas (Waid, 2013). Although the lack of compensation to comic book creators for media adaptations of their work is frequently framed as the work-for-hire model’s major drawback for creative workers, it is not the only drawback. Equally problematic is the lack of predictability work-for-hire deals involve, which manifests in two interrelated phenomena: the shuffling of creative assignments and the ostensible capriciousness of editorial edict. The shuffling of creative assignments by workfor-hire publishers occurs for a variety of reasons, including efforts to raise sales or shift audiences on specific titles, the need to fill vacancies created by ‘retirements’ or ‘layoffs’ and the regular cancellation of old titles and launch of new ones—what we call ‘title churn’.9 Figures 2.2 and 2.3 demonstrate the phenomenon of title churn by providing monthly figures for both the number of continuing titles and the number of newly launched titles published by Marvel and DC respectively from July 2015 to July 2016.10 As the charts demonstrate, total output at both publishers varies from month to month, as does the portion of this output that represents continuing series. Title churn in particular results in unpredictable swings in the demand for labour, thereby contributing to the financial instability experienced by many creative workers. The continual reassignment of writers and artists to different titles, however, also produces a lack of stability at the creative level, with creative teams having limited opportunities to fine-tune working relationships, develop original approaches to characters and titles, and craft long-form stories. The shift by Marvel and DC in the early 2010s to twicemonthly publishing for key titles has further aggravated this problem, as the faster publication rate has resulted in multiple artists working on a single title simultaneously (often alternating issues), thus depriving them, as critic David Harper (2014) has argued, of ‘the ability to develop a consistent artistic presence’ and develop a distinct ‘visual identity’.

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Figure 2.2  Title Churn: Number of titles sold by Marvel Comics, June 2015–July 2016.

Figure 2.3  Title Churn: Number of titles sold by DC Comics, June 2015–July 2016.

The second form of unpredictability, the capriciousness of editorial edict, characterizes the work-for-hire model only at DC and Marvel, where a bevy of often siloed corporate stakeholders (including editors, marketing executives and managers located outside of the conglomerates’ comics divisions) regularly dictate creative instructions to writers and artists. Though such instructions may sometimes result in higher quality books, seasoned creators often chafe against them, perceiving them as creatively ill-informed and inconsistent or irrational. Celebrated writer and artist George Pérez, for example, complained

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in a widely reported 2012 Q&A session that his short stint writing Superman for DC Comics in 2011–2012 was subject to continual editorial meddling and indecision: ‘I didn’t mind the changes in Superman, I just wish it was the same decision in Issue 1 or Issue 2 … I had to keep rewriting things because another person changed their mind, and that was a lot tougher’ (Melrose, 2012). J. H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman (2013) cited similar reasons for ending their critically acclaimed run on Batwoman in 2013. ‘We have always understood that, as much as we love the character, Batwoman ultimately belongs to DC’, Williams explained on his blog. ‘However, the eleventh-hour nature of these changes left us frustrated and angry—because they prevent us from telling the best stories we can’. Though in recent years, specific public complaints such as those just cited have been primarily directed at DC, this seems more to reflect the higher degree of transparency that characterizes labour relations at DC than it does any substantial difference in working conditions at DC and Marvel. Indeed, in a 2013 open letter to the industry, writer Paul Jenkins excoriated management at both companies for ‘pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork’. Though the increasing importance of the companies’ film and television divisions are often blamed for such changes, editorial edicts have been a source of conflict at Marvel and DC since long before the integration of Hollywood – with much of Marvel’s pre-2000 history involving extremely rancorous relationships among talent, editorial and publishing (Howe, 2012). Besides making the actual execution of work difficult for creators, the shuffling of creative assignments and the capriciousness of editorial edict also serve to undercut creators’ self-identities as artists and storytellers. To be sure – and as the complaints cited above suggest – talent does not expect unlimited creative freedom when working with corporately owned characters; nevertheless, as creators, they typically desire to be ceded some level of creative authority over the work they produce. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1996) has argued, writers and artists differ from other kinds of workers in the greater importance the former place on notions of aesthetic autonomy and craft, valuing them sometimes even above financial remuneration. The unpredictability of work-for-hire publishing, however, often undermines such autonomy, positioning talent more as lowlevel managers of corporate trademarks than as actual creators. Aggravating the tension is the growing cultural divide between management and creators. Whereas in earlier decades, editorial and management positions were regularly filled by former artists and writers, this is more rarely the case today. As creator Frank Quitely explained in a 2009 discussion with Dave Gibbons, ‘[T]here have been very, very few editors that I have worked for who really had much more of an idea about how to go about telling a story, visually, than your average artist

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who’s only been working for a few years’ (Quitely and Gibbons, 2009: 69). Like all of the complaints we have cited here, Quitely’s observation does not reject editorial involvement out of hand (in fact, both Quitely and Gibbons go on to note the value of good editing), but rather opposes editing that is not rooted in the same experience and values of artistic storytelling held by the creators themselves. There is yet one additional drawback of the work-for-hire deal for creators worth mentioning: publishers typically have no contractual responsibility to publish purchased work from contractors. What is more, if a publisher chooses not to publish the purchased work within a reasonable time period, it need not pay a kill fee, return the artwork to the artists, nor, in cases where the work does not involve trademarked characters, sell the copyrights back to the creators. This has sometimes resulted in finished projects being stuck in publication limbo, such as The Big Book of Women from DC’s Paradox Press (‘Newswatch’, 2006). A few of our interviewees also cited examples of finished writing and artwork remaining unpublished because of abrupt changes in publishers’ publication priorities. Such instances appear to have become relatively rare during this century, but the right not to publish – which creator and former publisher Steve Bissette has called ‘reprehensible’ – is nevertheless one of the clearer signs of the asymmetrical structure of the work-for-hire relationship, with contractors having no equivalent ‘right of denial’ with respect to publishing (Nickerson, 2005). The publisher, by contrast, might seem to benefit immensely from the workfor-hire model. Not only does this model secure for the publisher both final say over all creative decisions and full ownership of the work produced, including the entirety of revenue generated from derivative products; it also enables the publisher to maintain over the long-term what business and labour scholars call a flexible organizational structure (Skorstad and Ramsdal, 2009). The flipside of labour precarity, flexibility allows firms to better manage risk, experiment with new products and pursue potential markets by treating creative labour as a variable cost, comprising only short-term financial commitments to workers. The flexible firm can quickly contract additional workers to respond to a new opportunity and just as quickly terminate these contracts if the opportunity does not prove sufficiently remunerative. For comic book publishers, the combination of flexibility and creative control provided by work-for-hire deals appears necessary for the creation and management of ‘shared comic universes’, such as that of the Marvel or DC Universes; with very few exceptions, such universes have not germinated under creator-owned or co-owned publishing models. Despite these very real advantages publishers have over talent under workfor-hire deals, in practice the costs and benefits of the work-for-hire model are

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more evenly distributed than they first appear. Writers and artists, in fact, often prefer work-for-hire deals to either of the other deals. Though the specifics of work-for-hire assignments are often unpredictable, creators can usually depend upon some form of assignment being available, given the heavy demand for content by companies such as Marvel, DC and IDW in recent years. Income is thus usually predictable and, potential royalties notwithstanding, guaranteed regardless of the book’s success on the stands. In contrast to creator-owned work (as we will see below), payment is also made to workers in advance of the book’s publication. Work-for-hire deals are thus, for most creators, an essential part of assembling a dependable income stream as an independent contractor. As one writer explained to us, they ensure that he can pay his monthly bills and eat. Artists and writers who work for Marvel and DC under work-for-hire deals can also count on much higher visibility than they would have at other publishers, as the two companies not only have very large market share, but also employ relatively extensive and sophisticated marketing strategies. These include direct market promotional material (such as free books, posters, standees and neon signs), co-op funds for retailers, podcasts and video series, contests, cross-platform advertising and digital data collection initiatives – not to mention the spillover and halo effects derived from Marvel and DC’s film and television enterprises. For artists, original artwork featuring well-known characters owned by Marvel and DC is also easier to sell to fans and collectors, who are usually willing to pay higher prices for it than art featuring lesser-known characters owned by other publishers or the artist herself. Working for Marvel and DC can thus be, as one creator told us, ‘star-making’ – and, indeed, the creators who have had the most success with co-owned or creator-owned books have invariably spent substantial portions of their careers working on high-profile books at Marvel or DC. Writer Mark Millar, for example, after garnering acclaim working on The Authority, The Ultimates, Civil War and other DC and Marvel properties, started his own creator-owned imprint at Image, Millarworld, where he wrote – and earned a fortune from – hits such as Kick-Ass and Kingsman, both of which have been made into multiple films. (Millar sold Millarworld to Netflix in 2017, making him one of the few comic book writers in the United States that is currently compensated as a salaried employee). For many creators, the visibility that comes with working on a well-known IP is only part of the pleasure of working on pre-existing characters and storyworlds. Also of considerable value – at least, at first – is the thrill of getting to work on properties of which the contractor is (or was) a fan. Though caring about the medium in which one wants to work is typical of most creative workers, the comic industry has long been unusual for its dependence upon semi-professional

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fandom as a pipeline for workers. Since the 1960s, many professional writers, artists (and, in some cases, editors) began their careers as fans.11 Critics have long complained that ‘fannish’ enthusiasm has enabled work-for-hire publishers such as Marvel and DC to underpay for creative labour. Whether or not such claims are accurate is impossible to establish, but what the criticism unwittingly highlights is that many contractors are deriving substantial non-financial/ affective compensation from work-for-hire work. This is perhaps most evident when creative talent from outside the industry – such as Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, Brad Meltzer and Ta-Nehisi Coates – discuss their reasons for taking on comic book assignments at Marvel and DC. Coates, for example, in an interview with the New York Times about his Black Panther series for Marvel, described himself as a ‘Marvel Comics superfan’ for whom writing for the publisher was ‘a childhood dream come true’ (Gustines, 2015). The affective pleasure creators take in working on corporately owned characters, however, is usually not sustainable in the long-term, and thus comes to function as something of a double-edged sword for publishers. As creators become more seasoned and successful, the desire for greater financial compensation or artistic autonomy usually takes precedence over the pleasure of working on SpiderMan or Batman in creators’ professional decision-making. To keep such creators working for them (especially those creators with large followings), work-for-hire publishers must thus either substantially increase their page rates or alter the basic work-for-hire compact to give such creators greater control over their labour. In some cases, this increased control has meant freedom from editorial oversight; in others it has meant granting creators editorial control of entire imprints or lines.12 For Marvel and DC, keeping star talent on board in a work-for-hire capacity has also necessitated providing them with creator-owned publishing opportunities. Marvel’s Icon imprint, for instance, has published work under an ‘Image model’ arrangement from Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Mark Millar and other big-name talent associated with Marvel. The Vertigo imprint often served a similar function for DC, although the publishing arrangement was more of a creator-owned/co-owned hybrid, with DC retaining long-term publishing rights and usually securing a first-look option and right of first refusal for media adaptations.13 Beyond trouble retaining star talent, publishers operating under the work-forhire model face another, equally serious problem: the traditional work-for-hire contract provides virtually no incentive for talent to generate new IP. Indeed, because any new worlds or characters generated under this model become solely and perpetually owned by the corporate employer, talent has often felt actively dis-incentivized from producing such things. As former Marvel Editor-in-

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Chief Roy Thomas (1981: 84) explained, ‘I supported such a such a system for years, and got other benefits out of it, but I still never felt that made it right. So, except for what I felt I owed Marvel as its editor, I relentlessly avoided after 1970 or so creating new characters when I could avoid it’. Comics historian Sean Howe (2012: 99) has even suggested that the extremely complicated and inter-connected storyworld that constitutes the Marvel Universe (and which was substantially developed under Thomas’s tenure) is in part an unintentional product of such dis-incentivization: instead of generating new creations for Marvel or DC, creators like Thomas simply recycled old ones. Regular lawsuits between talent and publishers over valuable properties – which have rarely ended with victory for talent – have further dis-incentivized new IP production by serving as cautionary warnings for creators. Partly to counteract the ill will such lawsuits have brought and partly to try and incentivize new IP generation, Marvel, DC and some other work-for-hire publishers have instituted policies offering creators a limited form of participation equity in new creations. Except in special cases, such equity is limited to new characters (stories themselves, ‘worlds’ and plot points are excluded) and consists of a small royalty paid whenever the character is used in a medium other than comics. Though the royalty is typically tiny, in unusual cases it can generate a not insignificant pot of money for the creator. Chuck Dixon, for example, creator of comic super-villain Bane (who features as the primary antagonist in Warner Bros.’s 2012 The Dark Knight Rises film), told Comic Book Resources in 2012 that he had always been ‘taken care of ’ by DC for its exploitation of the character in merchandise and screen media (Phegley, 2012). Rob Liefeld, co-creator of Marvel’s Deadpool, has reported being similarly well-compensated for the publisher’s use of his creation (Khal, 2016). Though work-for-hire profit participation for new characters has certainly benefited some creators the policy’s effectiveness in incentivizing IP generation appears mixed. As creator Gerry Conway (2015) complained in a highly circulated Tumblr post from 2015, the royalty is unpredictable, the qualifications for it somewhat arcane and the burden of claiming it not insignificant. Its current implementation at Marvel and DC also fits oddly into the collaborative nature of comics production in those company’s shared universes. Why privilege the creator of a character, for instance, when numerous other creators, usually working over many years, are typically involved with developing that character – often (as with Superman) in directions substantially different from that of the initial creator’s conception? Perhaps for these reasons, the creators we spoke to – though all aware, at least in the abstract, of the participation policy – seemed little interested in or motivated by it. Indeed, one creator we interviewed,

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though having co-created a fairly popular character who has for years appeared in cartoons, toys and games, had never submitted a claim for equity in the character. Perhaps, given the complexities involved in claiming the royalty, this creator feared doing so might endanger her strong working relationship with the publisher. In any case, the macro-effect of the equity on IP generation has appeared to be minimal. Over the last fifteen years, very few significant IP assets have been generated at Marvel and DC. Virtually all twenty-first-century movie and film deals involving these companies’ publisher-owned IP have focused on characters that were not only created during the last century, but were also, in most cases, produced forty or fifty years ago when work-for-hire deals were the only available option for writers and artists. As one creator told us, ‘If you wanted to launch a new superhero, you wouldn’t do it at Marvel or DC anymore’.

‘The Image Model’ In contrast to the work-for-hire model, the pure creator-owned or ‘Image model’ has regularly been cast by critics and scholars as the best deal for creators and, by extension, that of the medium itself. Their concern has usually been that of aesthetic autonomy rather than income or copyright control, and it is unequivocally true that, of the various publishing deals, creator ownership provides the highest degree of aesthetic autonomy outside of self-publishing. Artists and writers working under the Image model are subject to little direct editorial interference and generally retain full creative decision-making power over their titles. So long as a title is recouping its costs for the publisher, creators have virtually free rein over it. They are also, comparatively speaking, free to take their time working on it. Though Image Comics (best known for Spawn [1997– present], The Walking Dead [2003–2019] and Saga [2012–present]) has policies in place to try to minimize publishing delays (which plagued it during its first years of operation), creators working with the company are free to pause series between story arcs or to release issues on bi-monthly or quarterly schedules. Whether or not control over one’s rate of output makes for higher-quality work is ultimately indeterminable, but such control better corresponds with the traditional values of fine arts and literary production than does the often rushed and unpredictable assignments that characterize work for hire. Judging by interviews given by the founders of Image during the early 1990s, writers and artists’ creative control over their work – though in itself valuable – was not the primary goal of the company’s publishing model: of much greater importance was talent’s financial control (‘Image Press’, 1992; Khoury, 2007b). When a creator-owned title does well, the vast majority of the revenue it generates goes to the creators and not the publisher. As a result, relatively low

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sales will typically generate greater pay offs for creators than will much higher sales under a work-for-hire contract at Marvel or DC. As writer Kieron Gillen (2015) explained in a blog post disputing claims that his Image series The Wicked + The Divine was in trouble due to ‘low’ sales of twenty-two thousand copies, ‘If you’re selling over … 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two [Marvel and DC] would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names. If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends’. Because creators under the Image model retain ownership of all copyrights, including (after the first publication) comic and trade paperback publishing rights, they are also the primary beneficiary of all future exploitations of the property, whether via book publishing, toy licensing or media adaptation. Financial control may even trump creative control, as successful creators at Image sometimes step back from the tasks of writing or drawing their books so as to take a purely managerial or editorial role with respect to the properties they’ve created. This, for example, has been Todd McFarlane’s approach to Spawn since at least the late 1990s. The importance of financial control also explains the growth of independently owned and managed ‘partner studios’ that have published under the Image imprint, such as Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios, Robert Kirkman’s Skybound, Mark Millar’s Millarworld, Marc Silvestri’s Top Cow Productions and Jim Lee’s WildStorm. Although individual arrangements vary, these partner studios typically employ a work-for-hire or co-owned model while utilizing Image Comics as their publisher. Because the Image model provides such a high degree of financial control to creators, it ultimately leaves little profit potential for the publisher. As a result, Image Comics in many respects resembles more of a business-to-business service than it does a traditional comics (or book) publisher. Accordingly, some of our interviewees described Image as engaging in ‘pure publishing’: just printing and distributing content to wholesalers. Though, like other publishers, Image retains decision-making power over what it chooses to publish, it is unlike other publishers in that it owns no IP, has no long-term content library and has no rights to any share of future revenue generated from licensing or adaptation of the titles it publishes. From a traditional capitalist business perspective, the Image model thus offers a particularly bad deal to publishers, as most of the profit it helps produce is captured by creative labour. The limited financial returns to the publisher, however, are largely beside the point, as the Image model’s primary purpose for the publisher lies elsewhere. In the case of Image Comics, the company was initially founded in 1992 as an attempt to reshape the power dynamics of the industry, which the founders saw as unfairly privileging publishers over creators. In interviews, they decried

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the work-for-hire deals that typified Marvel and DC as exploitative and they explicitly cast Image Comics as a more ethical and equitable alternative (‘Image Press’, 1992). Though technically a for-profit company, Image Comics was thus from the start more mission-driven than profit-driven. The publisher thus to some extent resembles a non-profit company in that its business design prevents it from generating for itself much profit; most of the value it generates is instead captured by other stakeholders (primarily creators). Marvel’s Icon imprint – which also employs the Image publishing model – might also fairly be characterized as ‘mission-driven’, in that its goal is not to generate profit internally but to strengthen working relationships between creators and its parent company, Marvel Comics. Mission aside, however, publishers employing the Image model also benefit from radically simplified business operations. Since independent creators are responsible for most of the production process (and all of post-publishing development) the publisher only requires a comparatively small number of salaried employees to execute essential, base-level publishing functions such as printing, in-house brand management and sales/distribution to wholesalers. At Image Comics, for example, promotion is primarily limited to the publisher’s own brand (not the titles it publishes) and is extremely minimal compared to that of other publishers. Image+ Magazine and the annual one-day Image Expo in Seattle, Washington provide some limited promotion for books and creators, but they are small in scale and, because of the publisher’s limited revenue, must pass their own costs directly on to the consumer through direct charges for the magazine and expo tickets. This hands-off approach to publishing is a logical consequence of the ‘creatorowned’ publisher’s profit model. Because the publisher takes only a set fee, calculated close to that of the actual publishing costs (plus a small percentage of profits from graphic novel and digital sales)14 the publisher has comparatively little financial incentive to see any given book succeed. The publisher also, however, faces little to no financial repercussion when a title fails. If a title is not selling enough to cover its costs, Image will simply cancel it. As Erik Larsen, co-founder and former publisher of Image Comics, explained in a 2007 interview with George Khoury (2007a), ‘We won’t publish if it’s going to lose money … You don’t go to press when the orders come in and it’s like, 75 copies’. The lack of potential for profit or loss means, as one managerial professional explained to us in an interview, that publishers like Image have relatively little ‘skin in the game’. This does not mean that publishers employing ‘the Image model’ will contract to publish anything – all are in fact highly selective regarding what they will publish – but the fact that they do not typically have significant financial stakes

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in the products that they publish means that they enjoy much simpler business operations than publishers that employ work-for-hire or co-owned deals. Though fans and critics regularly celebrate the Image model for removing the publisher from the financial equation, the publisher’s lack of a stake produces a serious problem for creators, who now find themselves – in place of the publisher – having to bear the up-front costs and short-term risks associated with publishing. Since most creators receive neither a page rate nor an advance on earnings from Image, for example, their labour on creator-owned books must be self-funded. Comic book marketing and fandom has almost universally framed such self-funded labour via the values of aesthetic autonomy so as to suggest that working on creator-owned comics is its own reward; in practice, however, writers and artists have limited working hours within a month, and unpaid work on one’s own book comes at the expense of time that could have been devoted to paid work on something else. As artist Chris Samnee (2013) explained in an interview with ComicBookMovie.com, ‘As a long term investment, involvement in a creator-owned book is a wonderful thing, but as the sole provider for my (soon to be) family of four I have to make decisions that pay our bills first’. At Image, the opportunity costs of working on a creator-owned book can often be quite high, as the publisher currently requires creators to have completed three issues of a new title before Image will solicit the first issue through wholesalers ( Johnston, 2015b). Since solicitations occur two months prior to actual publication – and because the publisher must earn its fee from a book before making payments to creators – this means that creators will typically receive no earnings from an initial project until many months after they have completed the work for it. What is more, if a book does poorly, the creators themselves suffer the biggest loss, since whatever revenue the book generates goes first to the publisher. Under the Image model, creators are thus in effect cast as self-financing entrepreneurs: they must invest their own financial capital in their own IP in the hope that the IP will eventually earn them a return that justifies the initial investment. The need to self-finance is, for many creators, the most significant drawback of publishing under the Image model, but it is not the only drawback: the entrepreneurial aspects of creator-owned publishing extend beyond initial book costs to encompass all aspects of the property’s management. Creators must manage workflow for their creative teams, ensure that deadlines are met, develop branding for their properties, produce editorial copy and – when employing additional talent – negotiate terms and manage payments. The creator must, in effect, serve as manager, a role that is often seen as being at odds with the values and self-identity of artists and writers, and which also imposes its own demands on the creator’s time. Though some creators quickly take to the role of

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manager, for many the kind of work it entails can prove difficult or distracting. As creator Brian Michael Bendis (2014: 175) observes, ‘For most creative people, it’s fun to create, but it’s really hard to run a company. It’s doubly hard to run a company when the company’s main export is the writer’s imagination’. For this reason, creators will sometimes hire someone else to carry out basic managerial functions – a solution that further adds to the costs of book production. Beyond the base-level needs involved in the actual production of their books, creators working under the Image model must also assume responsibility for marketing, product licensing, international sales and the sale of media rights. Managing these aspects of their properties can prove extremely difficult for creators, who typically have little to no training in these areas and often possess few professional connections to other industries. Even when creators do possess the know-how and connections, however, such work imposes on them a heavy time burden, thus further limiting the time they have available for work on the narrative or aesthetic dimensions of the property. Creators can (and sometimes do) contract out some of these tasks to intermediaries such as managers, agents and lawyers, typically at the cost of a percentage of any deals made (see Chapter Three for detailed discussion of these intermediaries’ roles); but doing so does not always come naturally to comic book creators, many of whom will not have had regular dealings with such intermediaries prior to launching a creator-owned property. One professional we spoke with noted, for example, that many creators fail to sell translation rights – or fail to sell them at a high enough rate – because they lack experience in this area and/or have contracted the responsibility out to someone who does not typically handle international licensing for comic books. To be sure, some creators publishing under the Image model have expertly handled the higher-level managerial tasks it imposes – and made a fortune in the process; but for every Mark Millar or Robert Kirkman, there are a score of creators who have either found these tasks a challenge or have failed to take some of them up at all.

Co-Ownership As the above sections demonstrate, both work-for-hire and creator-owned deals involve a series of distinct trade-offs for creators and publishers. Taken together, these trade-offs suggest that neither of these deals can be judged categorically better for either party. In the work-for-hire model, publishers secure creative control and a high claim on profits by taking on the costs of management, production and development and by assuming the risks of financial loss or bankruptcy. In the creator-owned deal, the creator maintains creative control and a high claim on profits, but also takes on the costs and risks of the project.

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The co-owned model, by contrast, offers an alternative to such all or nothing arrangements by attempting to split the distribution of costs and benefits associated with publishing more evenly between the two parties. Structurally, it tries to position creators and publishers more as partners than adversaries, with each side focusing on what it does best and with both sharing more or less equally in the profits. Unlike the work-for-hire and creator-owned deals, under which creators and publishers have unequal stakes in their books, the co-owned model is designed to ensure that each side has ‘skin in the game’ and is thus similarly incentivized to see books succeed. Though there are a large number of publishers offering co-ownership deals, BOOM! Studios represents one of the leading publishers in this area, and thus offers us a clear example of how publishers structure such deals. At BOOM! (whose co-owned books have included Lumberjanes [2014–present], John Flood [2015–2016] and The Spire [2015–2016]), co-creators are paid up-front for the work they do, just as they would be under work-for-hire arrangements at Marvel or DC. The amount BOOM! pays co-creators varies, but our interviews suggest that they are on par with the low end of average work-for-hire page rates. Unlike the payments made under work-for-hire deals, however, the up-front payment BOOM! provides is treated not as a flat ‘wage’, but as an advance on profit. When the book is published, BOOM! takes from the revenue it generates an amount equal to the advance paid to the creators. After the publisher has earned back this amount (which is meant to cover the publisher’s costs), all remaining revenue is split fifty-fifty between BOOM! and the creators. In cases where BOOM! does not earn back its advance payments, creators nevertheless keep their advances. Ownership of the underlying property rights is also shared equally, with profit generated by the sale of derivative rights, such as film or television options, split fifty-fifty as well. In contrast to the very limited services publishers provide creators working on creator-owned books, BOOM! provides its co-creators editorial support, marketing, a dedicated in-house foreign sales person, a dedicated bookstore distributor (Simon & Schuster) and assistance with property development and media sales. BOOM!’s success in this last area has been especially impressive, with one title so far (at least at the time we are writing this) adapted into a feature film (Universal Pictures’ 2013 2 Guns) and – thanks in part to a series of first-look deals with film and television studios, including 20th Century Fox TV in 2014 and Netflix in 2020 – a range of others optioned for film and television. Despite the energy it devotes to pursuing film and television deals, however, BOOM! appears to leave primary creative authority in the hands of the creators. Indeed, many of the publisher’s co-owned titles, such as The Spire and Cognetic (2013), seem ill-suited for adaptation into film or television.

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Other publishers employing the co-ownership model maintain the same basic conceptual approach as BOOM! but differ in the specific details of the co-ownership deals they offer. Some take a greater or lesser share of profits or differ in how they determine the participation threshold after which profits are shared. The suite of services the publisher provides may also be different – or, in many cases, smaller – than those offered by BOOM! Many, for example, have less extensive ties with the film and television industry and contract out international sales. In addition, some publishers offering co-ownership deals, such as Avatar Press (best known for Crossed [2008–2010], God Is Dead [2013– 2016] and Providence [2015–2017]), distinguish themselves by offering creators opportunities to target particular markets or to publish work that other publishers would not accept because of explicit content. Each publisher also typically has its own roster of go-to talent to provide creative support/services under work-forhire contracts, which sometimes results in distinct ‘house styles’. Variations to the approach notwithstanding, in most cases the distribution of costs and benefits between creators and publisher under the co-ownership model is in fact not as equal as it may first appear. Though, to be sure, both sides have skin in the game, the model’s pay structure means that the publisher typically has more skin in the game than does the creator. Though BOOM! explained to us that most of the co-owned books they publish eventually cross the threshold where they are generating a profit, it often takes time for them to do so. Initial issue sales are by themselves typically not enough; trade paperback, translation rights and media options are the key to profitability. Whereas the publisher must thus actively manage and market each book over relatively long periods of time in order to recoup the book’s production and development costs, the creator is paid his or her advance up-front (and, as noted above, keeps it even if the book never recoups its costs). Most of the up-front costs and managerial responsibility (both short-term and long-term) under the co-ownership publishing model – and virtually all of the risk – is therefore borne by the publisher. If the publisher does not take primary responsibility for selling the co-owned books, the co-owned books will likely generate losses on the publisher’s balance sheets. Figure 2.4 offers a visual representation of the creator and the publisher’s respective shares in five key aspects of the publishing venture under all three publishing models. For simplicity’s sake, we characterize two of these aspects – creative control and claim to profits – as ‘benefits’ and three of them – managerial responsibility, development and production costs, and risk – as ‘costs’. Note that though informed by data, the chart is intended as a heuristic device; the lines indicate the general proportions of cost and benefit under each model and not the actual proportions under empirically existent contracts, which vary from publisher to publisher and property to property.

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Figure 2.4  Creators’ and publishers’ shares in publishing ventures.

As the chart illustrates, under the creator-owned or Image model, virtually all of the costs and all of the benefits fall on the creator; under the work-for-hire model, all of them fall on the publisher. The co-owned model, however, does not evenly split the difference, as one might at first expect. Though the claim to profit may be split fifty-fifty (as it is at BOOM!), the creator will generally retain more creative control over the property than the publisher while bearing much less of the cost involved in publishing and exploiting it. Indeed, as the chart demonstrates, from a cost perspective, the co-owned model much more closely resembles that of the work-for-hire model than it does the creator-owned. One creator we interviewed explained that he, in fact, considers co-owned and workfor-hire deals financially identical – at least in the short term – since unlike creator-owned deals, they require from him minimal up-front capital while providing a steady, guaranteed rate of pay. The potential for profit-sharing, though not unimportant, is in practice often of little value, he suggested. Since so few co-owned titles substantially exceed the participation threshold, the financial payoff to creators is usually not much higher, over the long term, than the initial advance. Because, for publishers, the co-ownership model is comparatively risky and often slow to generate a profit, most of those that employ it have developed strategies to hedge their risk and cushion the costs associated with it. The most common means of doing so is to license popular properties associated with other media, such as videogames, film, television, toys or even books and newspaper comic strips. Publishers then produce these licensed titles under traditional

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work-for-hire contracts, which ensure that they – and not the creators – will keep most of the profits these books generate. What is more, the licensed books usually generate higher up-front sales than new, creator-owned properties while also requiring – because they are ‘pre-branded’ – much less marketing from the publisher. At BOOM!, for example, Adventure Time (2012–2018) and its spin-off books – all based on Cartoon Network’s hit show – have consistently been some of the publisher’s highest selling titles. Saban Entertainment’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, to give another example, has also been an extremely lucrative license for BOOM!. In March 2016, the series’ first issue not only outsold all of BOOM!’s other titles by a wide margin; it also outsold almost everyone else’s, making it the second-highest selling title that month (with nearly 120,000 units sold) for the entire industry (ICv2, 2016). Other publishers, such as Avatar, hedge their risk by employing what Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian (1998) have called versioning: the sale of a single product in multiple (superficially different) versions at a range of price points. In 2016, for example, Avatar released Prometheus #11 (by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows) in 21 different single-issue versions, with retail prices ranging from $4.99 to $39.99, as well as a limited-edition collector’s set priced at $285.

THE IP ECOSYSTEM As the previous section of this chapter has demonstrated, each of the three publishing deals entails its own complex bundle of distinct costs and benefits for both the publisher and the creator. These bundles can be modelled, as we have shown via Figure 2.4, as a series of trade-offs between the parties. This conceptual model is not perfect, as it does not capture the full collection of costs and benefits at play (for example, publicity, page rate, organizational flexibility, etc.), but it does provide a relatively accurate picture of the value propositions for each party under each deal. As useful as this model may be, however, it is ultimately misleading in its employment of logical disjunction to represent the three deals as exclusive, independent choices. For most publishers and creators, the choice is not in fact work-for-hire or co-ownership, for example, but both, with each party taking a portfolio approach across their broader body of work in order to balance the costs and benefits of one kind of deal with those of another. No publisher, in other words, sticks only to one kind of deal over the long term. Marvel and DC offer creator-owned and co-owned deals in addition to work-for-hire. BOOM! offers work-for-hire in addition to co-owned deals. Even Image Comics, though technically only offering creator-owned deals, in practice depends heavily upon work-for-hire arrangements, since creators of successful Image books (such as

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Robert Kirkman and Mark Millar) regularly contract other writers and artists to work on their properties. The same diversity of approaches characterizes the working portfolios of most creators. No creator with whom we spoke has stuck purely to work-for-hire deals, and many who had not yet worked under a creatorowned deal expressed plans to do so in the future. The widespread dependence upon a portfolio approach to deal-making strongly suggests that the market for intellectual property in the comic book industry is structured in the form of what some business and organizational scholars have called a business ecosystem. Though there is wide variability in the specific ways scholars employ the term, their varied approaches share a fundamental perspective toward markets, agents and the role of competition that sees industry participants as interdependent actors whose economic success depends in part upon the collective health of their competitors. As organizational scholar James Moore (2006: 33) succinctly explains, ‘The term “business ecosystem” and its plural, “business ecosystems”, refer to intentional communities of economic actors whose individual business activities share in some large measure the fate of the whole community’. In such communities, competition does not proceed as a zero-sum game, but rather produces added value for the ostensible competitors – a phenomenon that business scholars Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff (1996) label ‘co-opetition’. In the comic book IP market, the three deals outlined in this chapter function together in ‘co-opetition’ to produce a network of mutual dependencies from which the entire industry benefits. The creator-owned deal, for instance, depends upon the existence of the other deals. Not only do creators need the publicity – and, to some extent, training – provided by the work-for-hire deal; they also require upfront capital and a predictable income, which the creator-owned deal does not usually provide. Similarly, the co-owned deal depends upon the existence of the work-for-hire deal, since (as we noted above) the former is typically by itself insufficiently profitable to support fully the publishers who offer it. For its part, the work-for-hire deal functions somewhat differently, as it appears to serve as the base or ‘keystone’ (see Iansiti and Levien, 2004: 82–83) of the IP ecosystem, in that it supports the other two deals without necessarily depending upon their existence to maintain its own. The work-for-hire deal nevertheless benefits from the existence of the others, for though it could survive (and for most of the twentieth century did in fact survive) without them, the total value at play in the market would likely be lower were it the only deal available, as top talent would be prone to what economist Tony Carnevale, et al. (2011) call ‘diversion’: the departure by qualified professionals from an industry with lower pay and benefits to an adjacent industry with higher pay and benefits. The

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highest-profile creators, for example, might be led to seek greater profit-sharing, pay and/or creative freedom by leaving the comic book industry and moving into that of film, television, advertising or prose publishing. Such diversion was, in fact, not uncommon in the 1970s, when the work-for-hire deal was virtually all that existed. Despite Hollywood offering few employment opportunities for comics professionals during that decade (see Chapter One), some of the comics industry’s highest-profile creators – such as Neal Adams and Frank Frazetta – were nevertheless able to find positions in other creative industries that afforded them higher pay and more creative control (for Adams, this was advertising; for Frazetta, commercial illustration). Of course, like all individual ecosystems, the comics industry is dependent upon and may even be seen as constituting a member of any number of larger or broader ecosystems. Indeed, as this book suggests, growing integration between the comics industry and Hollywood has substantially altered the economics of both of these industries to such an extent that the two might sometimes be better seen as constituting a single industrial ecosystem. This is not how most of the comics publishers or creators we spoke with saw things, however; and, indeed, despite substantially increased interaction between Hollywood and the comics industry, both remain defined (as demonstrated throughout this book) by distinct values, practices and organizational structures. In any case, from an ecological perspective, this increased interaction has so far done little to alter the underlying comics IP ecosystem. Although, for example, greater access to Hollywood ‘money’ in the form of rights sales and licenses has increased the potential payouts of newly created comic book IP, these payouts equally incentivize participants in all three publishing models (and indeed explain much of the pay differential for creators working under each model). When such payouts come, they also almost always necessitate that the original owners eventually turn to work-for-hire labour from other comics creators in order to produce new comic books featuring the IP – even when the IP was originally produced under a co-owned or creatorowned deal. Such has been the case, for example, with Image Comics’s Spawn, Walking Dead, WildC.A.T.S. and Witchblade (all of which have been adapted for film or television) and virtually every long-running ‘creator-owned’ Image comics series. In this fashion, greater integration with Hollywood has subtly reinforced the ‘keystone’ position of the work-for-hire deal. Although the growth of employment opportunities in Hollywood for comics professionals this century (described in more detail in the following chapter) has no doubt increased the potential and actual degree of labour diversion from the comics industry, these opportunities have also seemed to affect all three publishing models equally. Certainly for artists, transindustrial labour mobility

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has not depended upon experience working in any one comics publishing model over another. One might assume that writers, by contrast, have greater access to Hollywood (and are thus at greater risk of labour diversion) when employed under the work-for-hire model at Marvel and DC – by virtue of both the increased visibility that comes from working on popular, well-known properties and the intra-corporate connections afforded by working within a media conglomerate. In reality, however, the relationship between comic publishing models and diversion is simply too complex to support such assumptions, as most comics writers (and indeed many comics artists) will have worked under multiple publishing models by the time they are presented with employment opportunities in Hollywood or (as described in the next chapter) have developed such opportunities through a talent representative; they will also frequently move back and forth between the comics industry and Hollywood or work simultaneously for both of them, rendering the entire concept of diversion unhelpful. Of course, like biological ecosystems, business ecosystems are delicately balanced structures: the interdependencies that make them up provide resilience but also put the system at risk of structural collapse. The ecosystem for comic book IP described in this chapter currently seems highly stable – indeed, from our perspective, the comics industry as a whole seems not only more secure, but also more open to new participants and more diverse than at any other time in its history. Of course, whether this will persist through subsequent decades remains an open question. At the moment, however, the structure of the IP market appears, overall, to provide added value for both publishers and creators.

3 Drawing Lines:  The Place of Comic Book Artists and Writers in Hollywood Gabriel Hardman began his career as a comic book artist during the boom period of the 1990s, working on projects such as Marvel’s Ultraforce Spider-Man and DC’s The Batman Chronicles. When the comics industry collapsed at mid-decade, the young artist suddenly found himself, along with many of his peers, struggling to find work. He decided to make the move from comics to Hollywood, with the goal of becoming a storyboard artist for motion pictures. After only a few months working on commercials, he landed a position as the sole storyboard artist on what, at the time he was hired, seemed a modest project: Austin Powers (1997). During the course of the production, the film shifted from non-union to union status, enabling Hardman to be grandfathered into the Animation Guild. This provided him with faster access into higher-status and better-paying jobs than he otherwise might have attained. During the next ten years, Hardman focused solely on working as a storyboard artist for movies, building an impressive list of credits including Jurassic Park III (2001), Men in Black II (2002), Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and Superman Returns (2006). In the late 2000s, Hardman decided to return to working in comics once more, taking on projects between movie gigs. This time around, his comics work was more expansive and eclectic than it previously had been. While he continued to serve as a penciller and/or inker on some books, he wrote others, often in collaboration with his wife, Corinna Bechko. In addition to working on projects for Marvel and DC (e.g. Avengers vs. Atlas; Green Lantern) as well as on comics using licensed properties (e.g. Planet of the Apes for BOOM!; Star Wars: Legacy for Dark Horse), from the late 2000s on, Hardman began creating comics for Image (e.g., Invisible Republic; Kinski). All the while, he continued to serve as a storyboard artist on some of Hollywood’s biggest features, including SpiderMan 3 (2007), Inception (2010), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and Logan (2017). From Hardman’s point of view, the skills that he developed as a visual storyteller during his early years working in comics translated effectively into his Hollywood work. Yet while this facility as a storyteller served him well

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in working across media forms, his professional status and work roles in film differed significantly from the status and roles he held in comics. When working as a storyboard artist, he was well aware that he was a ‘gun for hire’ who was ‘working on somebody else’s story, somebody else’s project’. As he explained, ‘movies are my day job’. As one of the first employees on many film productions – often hired to produce storyboards that would help producers and directors pitch projects to executives – Hardman held a degree of creative authority. But this authority was only that which was permitted by the director, and sometimes also the production designer and editor. Hardman typically was hired early on in a film’s development in order to assist the director and producer in realizing the desired tone, mood and vision. During the production process, his storyboards served clearly defined goals, and were viewed by only a limited number of intraindustrial stakeholders. From his perspective, there was little rigor involved in being a storyboard artist: ‘You’re just trying to get an idea across to the crew or the studio or whomever’, he observed, adding that ‘there’s a lower threshold quality-wise’. As a mechanism designed mainly to communicate to the crew, storyboarding, from his standpoint, was ‘not the art, in and of itself ’ but rather ‘just a step along the way’. Although working on large-scale Hollywood projects provided him with financial stability and a degree of creative fulfilment, Hardman found that comics work offered him a much greater sense of agency and artistic control. When choosing which comics projects to work on, he largely opted to avoid the types of continuity and crossover-heavy books of DC and Marvel that came with substantial editorial input and rigid creative parameters. When developing creator-owned properties, meanwhile, he expressed little interest in having his projects optioned to become films or TV series. Indeed, he described himself as ‘allergic to having my projects adapted by other people’. He maintained that Money is nice but the gap between how much you get for something versus it becoming successful and you making a lot of money—it’s a pretty big gap. It’s just not as much money as it can seem like. And I’m an artist, in a broader sense. The work is really important to me. I want it to have integrity. I’m sure at some point, I will give in and sell something. But for the most part, I mostly want the work to be its own thing.

As such comments indicate, Hardman had come to view his professional identity working in comics as largely driven by his artistic goals, whereas his professional identity working in Hollywood was shaped more by economic objectives. His career trajectory is distinctive, and the ways that he reconciled the tension between art and commerce are highly personalized. Nonetheless, from this brief profile we can identify a number of issues that comics professionals

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more generally have wrestled with as Hollywood has expressed growing interest in acquiring their properties and exploiting their labour. These issues, which are the focus of this chapter, include: First, the matter of professional identity and self definition. This involves the extent to which those working in comics conceive of themselves as ‘comics professionals’ first and foremost, as opposed to illustrators, writers or visual storytellers whose work transcends specific media forms. Such self-conceptions, in turn, impact the kinds of work that different comics professionals pursue. Second, there is the matter of opportunity. This pertains to who, within the comics profession, has been most able to make the transition into Hollywood, and the means by which they have been able to gain such access. The matter of opportunity is linked to the types of structural and sociocultural forces that have enabled or constrained professionals as they have pursued different types of careers in Hollywood. Third, there is the matter of work roles and creative authority. This is tied to the types of positions that comics professionals have been able to assume within Hollywood, and how the power and agency that they have in such positions differ from the power and agency that they are able to hold in the comics industry. In this chapter, we explore these issues, addressing key ways that Hollywood’s heightened interest in comics in recent years has contributed to changes in the professional identities, career trajectories, creative opportunities and work roles of both comic book artists and writers. We have organized this chapter into four sections, each drawing from interviews with a wide range of comic book artists and writers, as well as the agents, managers and attorneys that represent them, to provide a portrait of the diverse workworlds and worldviews of contemporary comics professionals. Section one examines the institutional identity of the comics industry qua industry from the perspective of comics professionals, providing at the same time a general description of comics-industry labour conditions. Section two examines the writer-artist hierarchy, tracing how Hollywood’s growing interest in comics has differently impacted the working lives of comics writers and comics artists. In section three, we zoom in closer to the ground, offering a case study of comic book workers in Atlanta, Georgia, and their experiences working in the so-called ‘Hollywood of the South’. Finally, in section four, we turn to the subject of talent representatives, analysing the role they play in facilitating interactions between Hollywood and the comics industry. This microlevel, bottom-up approach to the cultural production of comics complements the more top-down, macro-level approach provided in the previous two chapters. It also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on creative labour and media work produced by media industry scholars. Like this scholarship, which tends to focus on particular industry sectors and/or occupations, our chapter illustrates the ways that comics work is distinctive from other types of media work while

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also demonstrating how the larger issues faced by these workers are in line with those faced by other contemporary media workers. In Chapter One, we described the changing social and industrial conditions that enabled a growing number of comics professionals to pursue careers in Hollywood. Fundamental to that discussion was how the improved cultural status of comics helped professionals working in that industry gain greater entry into the executive and creative ranks of Hollywood in the 2000s. In this chapter, we refine that discussion still more, revealing that not all comics professionals have experienced similar gains from the growing intersections between the two industries. In fact, a variety of factors have led to comic book writers disproportionately benefiting from the shifting industrial and cultural status of comics. Artists, meanwhile, often have struggled to benefit creatively and financially or move as fluidly between industries. Along with intra- and inter-industrial forces that have largely disadvantaged comic book artists, these workers are further disadvantaged – through no fault of their own – by their work conditions and the formal demands of art production. For a variety of reasons to be discussed below, a hierarchy has formed that favors writers over artists both within the comics industry and in Hollywood. To be sure, this hierarchy is as much a function of specific work practices and professional roles as it is a function of divergent self-conceptions and affective investments held by different types of comics professionals. That said, this hierarchy has been further reinforced through the perceptions and actions of key Hollywood stakeholders, including development executives, agents, managers and lawyers. Many of these intermediaries have focused on representing and cultivating writers while failing to fully recognize the creative contributions of artists. This professional hierarchy has led to variations in access – access not only enabled or constrained due to the greater investment by such prominent intermediaries in writers over artists, but also facilitated by spatial dynamics, as comics writers-cum-Hollywood writers have been more readily welcomed into locales ranging from writers’ rooms to pitch meetings, convention stages to press junkets. In circumstances within which artists have gained access to Hollywood – as is the case with Hardman, in his work with filmmakers such as Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan and others – the positions they hold are usually perceived industrially to be subordinate ones, with the artists functioning largely as anonymous, below-the-line labourers.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMICS PROFESSION In contrast to other types of creative labourers, few scholars have examined the role of comics professionals as media workers. In the introduction to their 2016

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edited collection, Cultures of Comics Work – which represents the most extensive examination of the cultures of production of comics to date – editors Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston ascribe the paucity of such scholarship to the largely textually based, humanistic orientation of comics studies as a field. Located primarily in literature, art history and film studies programmes, comics studies scholars have tended to approach creative figures through an auteurist lens, with (usually singular) individuals analysed largely via romantic discourses (Brienza and Johnston, 2016: 2). Sociologists like Brienza and Johnson, as well as Benjamin Woo and Paul Lopes (both drawing heavily upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu), have only recently begun to counter such perspectives, looking at comics work in ways similar to how other types of creative work within the cultural industries has been examined for decades (Woo, 2016; Lopes, 2009). Such scholarship has been crucial to forwarding fresh theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of comics labourers and to showing the varied circumstances within which comics are produced in diverse contexts around the world. Yet comics studies researchers have been less interested, at least thus far, in probing the intersections between comics and Hollywood – and between workers moving between these two industry sectors. Much as there has been only limited analysis of the mobility of professionals between comics and Hollywood, there have been only rare instances in which scholars have differentiated between the professional identities and work roles of comic book writers and artists. Part of the reason for this gap might be that we are still only in the early stages of mapping the complexity of the larger ‘comics world’ in the first place – a world that Woo (2015) describes as a complex ecology of creators, publishers, critics and readers. Such mapping, as Woo notes, is a daunting task due in part to difficulties in defining who exactly is a comics professional. The absence of a guild or union explicitly advocating for comics professionals means that there is no formal, external entity tracking the number of writers and artists engaging in such work. Some artists, like Hardman, might be members of the Animation Guild or the Graphic Artists Guild, while writers might be members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) – but such memberships are based upon work done in other fields, not comics. Many individuals, including Hardman, not only draw but also write comics, making the process of accounting for different types of labourers still more difficult. It is worth underscoring the difficulty in assessing the size of the field of comics workers, without even attempting to account for those professionals who move between comics and Hollywood. Executives that we spoke with at different publishers could only provide limited assistance in assessing the size of the labour pool. One executive at a major publisher suggested extrapolating the number from the DC and Marvel talent rosters, each of which, he explained, included roughly

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600 artists and writers in 2018. This information, however, does not get one very far. Comics talent typically does not work solely for one publisher, nor does all talent work just for Marvel and DC Comics. Most professionals move back and forth from company to company and from project to project based on their personal goals, abilities, reputations and relationships, as well as the particular opportunities that arise. Others self-publish, often through online venues and with support from crowdfunding and membership platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon. Further, comics professionals – especially writers – frequently work on more than one book at a time. As noted in the last chapter, often these professionals balance work-for-hire employment on books from mainstream or independent publishers with their own creator-owned or co-created properties. Even more importantly, many individuals identify less in terms of their identity as ‘comic book writer’ or ‘comic book artist’ than on the basis of the type of work that they do. This type of work – work that includes illustration and writing – increasingly spans a wide range of media forms and industry sectors including advertising, gaming, film and television. It encompasses work not only for Hollywood, but also for Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley and beyond. Walking through an artists’ alley at a convention might provide some insight into the breadth of work being undertaken in comics, but it would do little to shed light on the size and scope of the labour pool. This is the case not only because different types of talent attend different types of conventions, but also because many of those in attendance at conventions generate little, if any, income from the work on display. Thus, identifying a comics professional mainly by one’s ability to ‘make a living’ from such work is also a fraught endeavour. Beyond those professionals who balance work in comics with work in other media sectors, many generate supplemental income from other professional activities. Some of these endeavours are more closely tied to comics (e.g. teaching at a university, graphic design) while others are more removed (e.g. retail, bartending). A number of professionals are only able to sustain their own careers due to financial support and health insurance benefits that come from a partner or from family money. Periodically, critics and reporters have sought to gather information regarding the scope of the comics field as well as its compensation rates (e.g. MacDonald, 2018), but results have been wildly uneven here as well, due in part to the reticence of many professionals to share such information. Despite the difficulties involved in quantifying the number of artists and/or writers working in the American comic book industry, there are certain general attributes that characterize the life of the contemporary comics professional. Before elaborating on the substantial points of difference between artists and writers, it is worth first highlighting their more general shared identities

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and affiliations. The independent contractor status of these workers, and the associated precarity that comes with their freelance status, have been addressed in earlier chapters. We also have discussed the means by which such workers have been disadvantaged due to their inability to collectively organize. Indeed, the comics industry, like other media industries, exploits the passion that many of its workers express for the medium as a means of undercompensating them. Technological advances have helped this reserve army expand. Before the 1980s, most professionals found it important to be located close to the publishers’ offices in New York City in order to connect directly with publishers and drop off their work in a timely manner. Since then, however, new modes of communication have enabled creatives to work further away. The diffusion of the internet has helped expand the pool from which talent can be discovered. Artists in particular, are increasingly recruited from around the world. As one interviewee observed, ‘For a publisher to hire some guy in Ohio versus some guy in Italy, there’s no difference whatsoever’. Often foreign workers can be hired for cheaper rates than their American counterparts. Brazil, Spain and Italy are among the countries from which an especially large number of artists originate, according to several interviewees. Another interviewee informed us that writers in the American comic book industry more frequently hail from Englishspeaking countries, including Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. As with many other creative industry sectors, workers are often attracted to the profession by the promise of being able to ‘do what they love’. Thrilled at the opportunity to work on characters that they grew up with, some young comic book artists and writers are willing to rationalize the low pay and subpar working conditions that characterize the industry. In so doing, leisure and labour are collapsed, and little distinction is made between ‘work’ and ‘play’. Such conditions lead many professionals to quickly burn out. These challenging circumstances may also account for why those who do reach what they perceive to be ‘professional’ status often are especially eager to demarcate the boundaries between themselves and the amateurs and fans that they come into contact with. Private groups on Facebook, creator-only dinners at conventions and professionals-only socials in different comics communities all become means by which distinctions are drawn between professionals and ‘outsiders’. Professionals may seek to establish or reinforce boundaries between themselves and those they perceive as outsiders as a means of forging closer social ties and asserting their own worth. Despite such boundary marking, in recent decades, the profession gradually has become more inclusive in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography. There are several reasons for the relatively recent transformation of the composition of comics professionals.

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As noted earlier, a growing number of women became interested in working in comics following their exposure to anime and manga in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Publishers also have much more aggressively pursued a diverse workforce in the last couple of decades. Especially since the 2010s, the major publishers have scouted for new talent at conventions, online and through word of mouth. To an extent, these more active recruitment efforts are a defensive strategy on the part of publishers, undertaken because they have come under attack for the longstanding homogeneity of their creators and characters (cf. Weldon, 2017). But as several executives told us, publishers also increasingly have recognized that their core, aging white male audience is insufficient to sustain them moving forward. To grow their readership and revenues beyond this audience, publishers recognize that they must employ artists and writers with different backgrounds and experiences. Newer talent increasingly is directed toward producing graphic novels aimed at children and young adults, sales of which have grown exponentially in recent years (Reid, 2018). These projects (e.g. Smile by Raina Telgemeier, Nimona by Noelle Stevenson) typically are targeted toward bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, rather than the direct market of specialty comic book stores. Meanwhile, faced with fresh opportunities for revenue from both Hollywood and from publishers like Image, many established artists and writers have dedicated less time working for Marvel and DC.

THE WRITER-ARTIST HIERARCHY ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m just a writer. Whether I’m writing through TV or comics, it’s pretty much all the same, and I have love for all of it. I don’t think that comics writers should just be writing comics. I don’t think animation writers should just be writing animation. I think if you’ve got stories to tell, find a medium that lives to tell it, and indulge.’ —television and comic book writer Adam Beechen ‘Every other form of illustration is an aspect of comics. As a comic book artist, I’m a storyboard artist. I’m also an illustrator. I’m also a production artist. And a character artist. A little bit of everything. Whereas most artists make their career about being one of those.’ —comic book artist Brian Stelfreeze

The two statements above – one by a writer, another by an artist – are revealing in terms of how each conceives of their roles. For Beechen, who has balanced writing for comics such as Justice League Unlimited and Batman Beyond with staff positions on animated TV series such as The Adventures of Chuck & Friends (2010–2012) and Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2014–2017), writing

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skills transcend medium. Skilled writers, as he notes, can translate their abilities to any form. The key is understanding what medium is most appropriate for telling the story, and then effectively exploiting the storytelling conventions for that medium. In contrast, despite occasional design work for videogames and movies, Stelfreeze has spent most of his career working in comics. Though periodically taking on writing roles, he has focused on serving as an artist on such books as Matador, Daymen and Black Panther. As with Beechen, Stelfreeze perceives his role to be a storyteller. But he draws a distinction that is a crucial one for many comic book artists: in serving as a storyteller, he is simultaneously functioning in a variety of other roles as well – roles that can be seen as analogous to several different work roles in moving image media. For Stelfreeze, these include storyboard artist, illustrator, production artist and character artist. Other artists we interviewed turned to the language of Hollywood to articulate their duties, identifying their roles as akin to directors, cinematographers, production designers, actors or concept artists. In highlighting the diverse roles that an artist takes on in the process of creating a comic book, we can begin to see why tensions arise between artists and other key industry stakeholders. The fundamental tension here is between explicitly seeing oneself as a comic book professional – creating specifically for comics – and seeing oneself as a storyteller in a more general sense. These identifications do not always break down along the lines of artist and writer – indeed, some writers perceive themselves as primarily focused on the comics medium (e.g. Brian Azzarello), while some artists see themselves as illustrators working across media forms (e.g. Dan Panosian). Self-perceptions, of course, are shaped not only by work roles, but also by a variety of other forces, including generation and geography. But the artist-writer schism is one of the most notable, and it has become more profound in the last two decades due to changes both within the comics profession and within Hollywood. As discussed in Chapter One, comics artists have long held positions in Hollywood such as character designer, storyboard artist, art director, concept designer, production designer and costume designer. Before the 2000s, far fewer writers made the transition to Hollywood, and most who did so wrote for animated films and television series. In the last couple of decades, however, artists initiating careers in Hollywood have faced markedly different attitudes and opportunities than have writers. This is partly an issue of legibility: Executives understand what writers do; they speak similar languages. Artists, meanwhile, have been less likely to be seen as co-equal to writers and more likely to be viewed as ‘artifacts added on to the writing’, as one artist that we interviewed phrased it. Of his experiences trying to pitch a TV series based off a comic he created, another artist with whom we spoke observed that ‘In Hollywood, the

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mindset seems to be that the artist isn’t valued the same as the writer. They don’t seem to get that the artist’s contribution to telling the story is just as vital as what the writer is putting down’. Similarly, as one entertainment lawyer observed, with regard to artists, there remains an ‘inherent disrespect’ across Hollywood: There’s a complete disconnect about comic book artists. When you ask a network or studio, you say ‘Oh, the artist and the writer own this together’. They completely understand the writer and they get it. But with artists, they are like, ‘What would they do?’ Like ‘What do you mean what would they do?’ They’re the creator of this property. It wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for their part. I feel like half my time is spent educating networks and studios as to the absolute value of artists.

The role that many artists have played as co-creators, sharing in the visual storytelling process as described by Stelfreeze, simply does not resonate with most of those in power positions in Hollywood. This is in spite of the fact that there have come to be more executives in the decision-making ranks who identify as comic book fans and understand the profit potential of comics properties. Thus, Hollywood’s greater openness to comic book talent really has meant it has a greater openness to comic book writers; it’s primarily these individuals who have had the capacity to gain more status and authority in film and television, even as artists have continued to work in diverse below-the-line roles in the industry. In addition, by virtue of the nature of their work, writers have been better positioned to move into higher-level executive and creative roles in Hollywood: a comic book writer might produce one twenty-two-page issue of a book each week, whereas a comic book artist might take six-to-eight weeks to complete a single twenty-two-page issue, especially if they have assumed multiple roles on the book (e.g. penciller, inker and/or colourist). Indeed, it is because comic book art requires significantly longer time to produce than comic book writing that the page rate of the former is higher than that of the latter. Lower page rate notwithstanding, the relative speed with which writers can produce means that writers can have much more of their work appear in the marketplace on a regular basis. This, in turn, has enabled writers to gain more exposure for their work via the press and social media. Of course, with more product available for consumption, writers also have had additional opportunities to strike movie and TV deals. It has not just been Hollywood that has become more favourable to writers of late. In the past couple of decades, the balance of power in the comic book industry has also shifted so as to disproportionately favour writers over artists. This shift began in the late-1990s and was in part a response by Marvel and DC to what they perceived to be the oversized authority gained for a time by

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a number of high-profile individuals, including Marvel-turned-Image artists Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane. The boom period of the late 1980s and early 1990s is often considered a time when artists dominated the comics industry; along with these Image co-founders, other high-profile artists such as Bryan Hitch, Joe Madureira and Humberto Ramos made a fortune as companies fought to retain talent whose work sold hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of copies of books per month. As DC and Marvel regrouped following the mid-1990s crash, they sought to limit artists’ agency in a variety of ways. This included exercising more editorial control over the content of the books that they supervised as well as privileging select writers over artists in the creative process. One of the ways that this shift happened was through the gradual deemphasis of the ‘Marvel method’. Developed by Stan Lee in the early 1960s, the Marvel method of scripting comics involved writing loose plot points for a story; these scripts might run only one or two pages (Gabilliet, 2010: 126–131). Such an approach allowed artists a great deal of creative latitude in terms of storytelling: they typically had the freedom to visualize individual panels as they saw fit. The writer would then come back in once the artwork was completed and provide dialogue and captions as needed. In the 2000s, the Marvel method lost favour to the full script (or ‘DC style’) format. With this format, writers would include panel-by-panel details, dialogue and even camera angles (for examples of both formats, see Bendis, 2014: 21–72). With a full script, according to one artist-interviewee, editors also could provide more detailed feedback early on and writers could ‘art direct’ pencillers to a greater degree. In tandem with these changes in editorial and creative practices were other changes at Marvel and DC that further disadvantaged creatives more generally and artists in particular. These included the heightened attention by the companies to when, where and how characters were presented in different books as well as the hiring of newer, younger, often less expensive editorial staff. As Howard Chaykin joked, he was now older than the parents of many of his editors at Marvel and DC. Less experienced and less knowledgeable editors were acceptable because these companies were increasingly focused on brand management. Editors now were largely responsible for ensuring that the comics aligned with the larger institutional visions and corporate objectives of Disney and Time Warner. This included seeing that artists conformed to style guides that ensured design consistency across books. Oftentimes such guides were shaped by the design aesthetic and depictions of characters in recent movies and TV series. As writer Ron Marz observed of the shift in the 2000s, ‘There’s a certain aspect of, well, “It’s just lines on paper, let’s just get somebody to do it” mentality that I think is more prevalent than before … The art is [now] less thought of by publishers and

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fans both. Comics canon invariably becomes co-opted by Hollywood as readymade storyboards to go pitch a movie project’. Marz’s observation that comics increasingly were viewed as ‘ready-made storyboards’ is itself a revealing statement, indicating the extent to which the language of Hollywood permeated comics discourse. Many comics professionals, especially the artists we spoke with, bristled at such allusions to comics serving as nothing but storyboards, as they saw such comments as indicating that the speaker had but a limited appreciation of the medium. Through this lens, comics are perceived solely in terms of their economic value, as a means of facilitating business transactions. In fact, as producers, writers and financiers have found it more challenging to sell original properties in Hollywood, some comic books have been produced solely or primarily as a means of helping to make a deal, with some never even being made available for purchase by consumers. In some cases, this form of ‘reverse engineering’ has proven successful – the Harrison Ford film Cowboys & Aliens (2011) as well as the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion (2013) are two examples of this approach working (MacDonald, 2013). This practice was looked down upon by many of the comics professionals we interviewed not only because they felt it diminished the artistic contribution of comics as a storytelling medium, but also because the artists involved often ended up further devalued in the process. Paradoxically then, even as the art became vital to getting a film or TV series greenlit, the artist became further marginalized. One interviewee noted with frustration that the new dynamics of greenlighting have helped to further relegate artists to the status of writers’ employees. The fact that some writers hired artists on a work-for-hire (page rate) basis to contribute to creator-owned books – thereby diminishing the potential for artists to serve as co-equal participants in movie and TV deals – only exacerbated the evolving writer-artist hierarchy. Many artists perceive the incursion of the language of Hollywood into comics practice – language that, for example, analogized comics to storyboards – as yet another sign of disrespect on the part of Hollywood writers and executives. As more and more film and television screenwriters began to write comics, they brought film-speak along with them: terms like ‘cold open’, ‘cut to’, ‘pan’ and ‘zoom’ increasingly peppered the pages of comics scripts. The use of such terminology frequently read as both affected and inaccurate to artists. For example, one artist we interviewed spoke of how ‘cut to’ – a term used in moving image media to refer to a scene transition—was deployed by a Hollywood-writer-turned-comicswriter to direct the artist to draw a transition from one panel to the next. This linguistic misusage, from our interviewee’s perspective, showed that the writer did not understand a crucial distinction between comics and moving image media taught in basic introductions to comics form. As every textbook on comics notes,

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moving-image media are constrained by time, whereas comics are constrained by space (e.g. McCloud, 1994: 7–8). An inability for ‘tourist’ writers to think through how much might feasibly be able to be presented on a given panel or page without it appearing cluttered often leads to an additional burden being placed on artists. This is the case because artists became responsible for having to streamline overstuffed stories – a process that made meeting editorial deadlines even more difficult for artists. While certainly this practice of overstuffing scripts was not confined only to writers parachuting in from Hollywood, editors often let these individuals cut more corners due to the elevated status they brought with them from Hollywood. Film terminology not only permeated comics scripts to a greater degree from the 2000s on, it also increasingly diffused popular and industrial discourses. As Anthony Smith notes, phrases such as ‘widescreen comics’, ‘cinematic storytelling’ and ‘cinematic style’ – all introduced by comic book writers in speaking about the medium – began to be used with growing frequency by journalists, creatives and executives as well (Smith, 2018: 166–167). Television terminology also was employed with greater frequency in comics discourse during this time. For example, the seven-season run of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was followed by several additional ‘seasons’ of the comic book, all supervised by Buffy writer-producer Joss Whedon. Similarly, when he was appointed to supervise a team of writers for a weekly Batman series for DC Comics, comics writer Scott Snyder positioned himself as the series’ ‘showrunner’ (ICv2, 2013). Of course, these discourses and practices have not been unidirectional: The language of ‘shared universes’, which grew out of Marvel and DC books in the 1960s before being employed by Marvel Studios in the late 2000s, started to seep into film and television franchising practices during the 2010s. And just as they have been in the comics industry, it is writers – and not artists – who have been central to the development of such universes in Hollywood. Although artists typically have not wielded the same creative power and authority as writers either within Hollywood or in comics, there have been some notable exceptions. In most cases, artists’ ability to ascend the ranks of either industry sector has been the result of them demonstrating skills in other areas, such as management (e.g. Jim Lee as DC Entertainment chief creative officer and co-publisher, Joe Quesada as Marvel chief creative officer) or writing (e.g. Mike Mignola, Jeff Lemire). In cases such as these, artists have attained a status equivalent to that held by the most successful writers. Economic status and creative authority often have been situational, shifting based on the specific work role(s) that the individual assumed, as was the case in the discussion of Gabriel Hardman in the introduction to this chapter. Further, the particular routes that artists might pursue within both the comics industry

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and Hollywood might be based on quality of life decisions or on a combination of luck, ability and opportunity. In terms of opportunity, as the preponderance of names cited here underscore, women and people of colour often have faced more challenges in terms of breaking in and in rising through the ranks. As has been the case with the media industries more generally, there are structural, institutional and cultural reasons why the mainstream industry has been dominated by white men (Warner, 2015; Saha, 2018). Oftentimes the ‘solutions’ posed by industry stakeholders to the white maleness of comics have been highly individualized, sporadically implemented and of limited effectiveness. Importantly, the ‘Hollywood’ referred to throughout this section can be seen as both abstract and material. To an extent, Hollywood functions as a discursive construct – a certain way of thinking about one’s professional identity and work roles. For some of our interviewees, to work in comics meant one did not work in Hollywood. This might mean claiming a more artisanal identity, wherein one worked differently (often in isolation) and participated in a distinct production culture (of comics professionals). It might also mean perceiving oneself as free from Hollywood’s corporate imperatives and creative constraints. But Hollywood, as discussed above, also has material dimensions. In this context, Hollywood is a particular industrial formation with specific economic structures, corporate stakeholders, production methods and formal-aesthetic practices (Bordwell et al., 1985; Balio, 2013). Hollywood is also place-bound; as John Caldwell notes in paraphrasing geographer Allen Scott, it is a ‘unique geographic agglomeration of local suppliers, producers and facilities’ composed of a distinct production culture (Caldwell, 2008). In the contemporary postFordist era, of course, Hollywood production no longer is bound solely to a specific region in Southern California. Now Hollywood is global, with its operations and offices dispersed to sites elsewhere in the world – sites where tax incentives often are greater, regulations are fewer and labour is cheaper (Elmer and Gasher, 2005; Tinic, 2005). In terms of North America, a combination of regulatory, economic and cultural forces led the state of Georgia to welcome a growing number of Hollywood productions (Cunneff, 2016). Beginning in 2002, and expanded upon in 2008, the state implemented an incentive programme designed to lure more production to the region. This programme proved to be a massive success. By the mid-2010s, Georgia became the third largest production hub in the United States, behind only Los Angeles and New York (Stevens, 2015). Although designed to serve the entire state, the city of Atlanta especially benefited from this expanded incentive programme. Long before Hollywood prioritized Atlanta as a production centre, the city had emerged as a regional media hub as well as a prominent site in which

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comics professionals chose to locate. Indeed, beginning in the mid-1980s, a sizable comics community had begun to live and work in Atlanta. By examining Atlanta’s transformation from regional media capital to Hollywood production hub – and exploring when and how comic book professionals took advantage of this shifting status from the 1980s through the 2010s – we can see key ways that macro-level political-economic forces were experienced on the ground by a distinct professional community. Through a case study of Atlanta, the ‘Hollywood of the South’, we also can see the extent to which the structural and creative convergence of the comic book industry and Hollywood manifested in a specific place and space. As illustrated below, writers may have benefited more from the growing industrial convergence and cultural cachet of comics in Hollywood. In the city of Atlanta, however, we see a somewhat different story. In this case, artists were the primary beneficiaries of the city’s evolving relationship with Hollywood. However, as we will see, these professionals often didn’t necessarily conceive of themselves as engaging with ‘Hollywood’ even when they did so. Such was the power of their professional identity as artists, their sense of marginality in relation to the media industries and the particular meanings that Hollywood had come to carry for them as a community.

ATLANTA AS COMICS CAPITAL, ATLANTA AS REGIONAL MEDIA CAPITAL In 2003, scholars Glen Norcliffe and Oliver Rendace published an article in Economic Geography in which they used a case study of the comic book industry as a means of complicating studies claiming that cultural producers were increasingly motivated to cluster within select metropolitan centres. Responding most directly to The Rise of The Creative Class by urban studies scholar Richard Florida (Florida, 2002), geographers Norcliffe and Rendace agreed that regulatory, economic and sociocultural forces could contribute to the agglomeration of creative workers in select ‘creative cities’. But, they argued, the decentralized and flexible organizational structure of the comic book industry as it had taken shape since the 1980s did not entirely conform to these more general locational tendencies (Norcliffe and Rendace, 2003: 242). They maintained that comics professionals were far more widely dispersed than many other types of creative workers, with some residing in cities, some in suburbs and some in more rural locales. While they acknowledged that a disproportionate number of comics professionals did choose to live in New York City and Los Angeles as a means of pursuing ‘crossover work in animation, advertising, television and film’, they identified more than a dozen other states in the US within which such talent located in sizable numbers (Norcliffe and Rendace, 2003: 255–

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258). Norcliffe and Rendace held that the ‘neoartisanal form of production’ dominant within the contemporary comics industry contributed to ‘new spatial arrangements that are based on personal lifestyle preferences, made possible by adopting new technologies and different time geographies, with producers alternating between decentralized phases and centralized social phases located in temporary agglomerations’ (Norcliffe and Rendace, 2003: 260–261). When necessary, comics professionals would gather for business and personal reasons, whether virtually through the use of technology or in person at conventions and social events. Otherwise, they located wherever they found most optimal for their needs. Today, more than fifteen years after Norcliffe and Rendace published their article, comics professionals have remained widely dispersed geographically. In this sense, their article provides an enduring portrait of a specific professional community’s locational choices. Their approach also remains valuable as a counter to claims by Florida as well as the many creative industries scholars who have built on his work. Often, policymakers as well as scholars have turned to Florida’s research on creative cities as a means of encouraging key governmental and industrial stakeholders to invest in cultural production and the arts within distinct locales (Miller, 2009). How effective such economic development and cultural policymaking efforts have been in serving different communities remains a point of contention. While it is true that comics professionals now can live almost anywhere, it remains the case that a large number have chosen to cluster in certain areas since the 1980s. Among the favoured areas in North America outside of Los Angeles and New York are Portland, Chicago, Toronto, Orlando, San Diego and Atlanta. Yet with the exception of a case study of the Portland comics community by Shaun Huston (2014), there has been little scholarly attention given to how space and place figure into comics professionals’ identities, work practices and career trajectories. What’s more, when comics studies scholars speak of geography, they tend to focus either on what Jason Dittmer (2014) labels as ‘place in media’ (i.e. representation and narrative in comics) or ‘space in media’ (i.e. the role of space within comics and the different relations between space and time in graphic narrative). Although there are select instances when comics scholars have addressed the specific contexts within which media have been consumed (what Dittmer calls ‘media in place’) as well as how the comics industry has reconfigured discrete spaces (i.e. ‘media in space’), the emphasis mainly has been on the distribution and retailing of comics, rather than on comics production.1 In contrast, both media studies scholars and cultural geographers have given substantial consideration to how and why particular locales have grown as favoured sites of cultural production (e.g. Punathambekar, 2013; Curtin and

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Sanson, 2016). One influential lens used to address the forces enabling the fusion of ‘capital, creativity, culture and policy’ is media capital (Curtin, 2009: 117). As put forward by Michael Curtin (2003: 204–205), media capitals such as Bombay, Cairo and Hong Kong have come to function as ‘a nexus or switching point’ as well as ‘locations where complex forces and [local, regional and/or global] flows interact’. During the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Atlanta became a particularly notable regional media capital in the southeastern United States. This was due in part to the city’s concentration of Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola, Home Depot and Delta, which employed marketing and advertising creatives both in-house and through local support agencies. It was also due to the ongoing growth of major media corporations in town, along with various satellite operations that came to service them. Among the most notable of these to emerge during this time were Cox Enterprises, Turner Broadcasting System (including TBS, TNT and CNN) and The Weather Channel. An initial wave of comics professionals arrived in Atlanta as these major companies – in particular, Turner – expanded. What is striking, though, is that none of the comics professionals that we spoke with came to Atlanta explicitly to work for these companies, even if several later ended up doing so. In this section, we draw from our interviews with more than a dozen artists and writers who lived in Atlanta during at least some period of time between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. In doing so, we have three main goals: First, we illustrate how Atlanta evolved as a regional comics capital during this time frame. This involves surveying the particular institutions and activities that helped support the growth of a robust comics community. This micro-level exploration of the evolving network of comics professionals complements Norcliffe and Rendace’s more macro-level survey. Second, we address the ways that the work of these comics professionals variably intersected with Atlanta media more generally and Hollywood production more specifically. As will be shown, over the years, Atlanta’s status as a regional media capital evolved. Increasingly, the city came to function less as a corporate media hub and more as a site for physical production and postproduction activities. This changing status precluded some types of work opportunities for comics professionals while opening up other possibilities. Finally, we address the limits of Atlanta’s status as a regional media capital. Ultimately, the types of work available to comics professionals remained constrained in certain ways. Comics writers, in particular, faced ongoing pressure to physically move to Hollywood if they wished to fully cultivate their careers as screenwriters. There was no single inciting incident that led to an influx of comics professionals moving to the Atlanta area during the 1980s. Rather, a variety of forces figured into making the city an increasingly desirable site for comics

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professionals to reside. As noted above, prior to the mid-1980s, most professionals working for the main publishers located in the northeastern United States. Many sought to be close to DC and Marvel, in particular, so that they could regularly drop off their latest pages, network with editors and more generally socialize at the publishers’ offices. The more casual nature of the comics business at that time meant coming and going from publishers’ offices could be done with relative ease. Once FedEx became available and affordable, it no longer became as imperative for comics professionals to be located near a publisher’s headquarters. The diffusion of the internet, and the capacity to send one’s work via fax or email, further expanded the geographic options for many professionals. Meanwhile, the convention circuit continued to grow, providing professionals with ample opportunities to participate in what Norcliffe and Rendace describe as the ‘periodic social economy’ (Norcliffe and Rendace, 2003: 242). Early comics conventions such as the New York Comic Art Convention (launched in 1968), San Diego Comic-Con (1970) and Chicago Comicon (1972) were followed by others such as Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC (1982) and WonderCon in Anaheim, CA (1987). Downtown Atlanta became the site of two notable events relatively early on: the Atlanta Comics & Fantasy Fair and Dragon Con. Both were geared not solely to comics fans but rather to fans of the nascent geek culture more broadly. Nonetheless, each convention provided a chance for comics professionals to display their work, participate in book signings and take commissions for original artwork. Atlanta Comics & Fantasy Fair, which launched in 1975 and took place annually up to 1995, attracted several thousand attendees during one weekend each summer (Merrill, 2015–2020). Dragon Con, launched in 1987, gradually came to eclipse Atlanta Fantasy Fair in size and scope. By the late 2010s, Dragon Con attendance was estimated to exceed 70,000 each Labor Day weekend (Carroll, n.d.). Conventions such as these provided one means by which artists and writers from outside the region initially became introduced to Atlanta. Another way that many came to know the city was through exposure to the variety of higher educational institutions based there.These institutions both provided employment to comics professionals as instructors and offered training to those wishing to pursue careers as artists. One of our interviewees attended the art programme at Georgia State, while several others attended the Art Institute of Atlanta and the now-defunct Atlanta College of Art. In addition, a growing number attended the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), first in the city of Savannah and subsequently in the city of Atlanta, where it set up its second location in 2005. Starting in the 1990s, SCAD began offering a degree in sequential art, with courses taught by artists Tom Lyle (Starman, Robin), June Brigman (Power Pack, Supergirl) and Pat Quinn (G.I. Joe, Captain Marvel), among others.

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While educational institutions and select cultural events may have attracted some professionals to Atlanta, others were drawn for different reasons. As one interviewee noted of Atlanta’s appeal: Atlanta is a growth epicenter. I’m from New England, where Boston easily dwarfs Atlanta in size but within the region is three to five hours from other large cities. But in the south, south of Virginia, large urban cities are far less and farther in between. Atlanta is kind of nicely in the middle of that and connected as an airplane hub. That’s a big reason why Atlanta as a city has developed that way, and why I think a fair amount of southern artists settled here. Then once they had created a community, they could pull other artists here.

Atlanta’s status as a progressive city – ‘a blue oasis in the middle of a red region’, as one interviewee put it – proved appealing to creatives across the southeastern United States in particular, and along the eastern United States more generally. Among those that we spoke with, a handful grew up in the Atlanta area. Many more had moved to the area from nearby states including Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. Others came from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and even the United Kingdom and Italy. Atlanta’s relatively mild climate (summers excluded) as well as its diverse population, liberal politics and affordable cost of living all drew professionals to the city. Once there, as the remark above shows, these professionals began to network and build a community. It is important to underscore that the Atlanta comics community must be perceived as relatively fluid and organic, subject to variable interpretations based on professionals’ diverse subject positions. It is perhaps more appropriate to say that there have been several different groups of comics professionals that have collectively comprised a larger, loosely organized and ever-evolving Atlanta comics community. Subcommunities congregate for a variety of reasons. They might be drawn to each other on the basis of similar educational backgrounds (e.g. attending SCAD together), due to their involvement with related types of comics work (e.g. alternative comics, superhero comics), as a result of generational affinities (e.g. members of Gen-X) or as a function of geographical proximity (e.g. located in or near midtown Atlanta vs. in the northern suburbs of Norcross, Chamblee, etc.). As Hollywood-based production expanded in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more comics professionals began to interact with different types of media professionals as well, including other below-the-line workers that they met on set. According to a number of interviewees, the Atlanta comics community was especially vibrant during the 1990s and early 2000s, when many of the early transplants were in their twenties and thirties. It was during this time that a couple of prominent comics art studios formed, Gaijin Studios and Jolly Roger. The studios provided spaces where locals could gather and out-of-town visitors

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could stop by. Gaijin rented office space in the north Atlanta suburbs while Jolly Roger located in Macon, Georgia. Gaijin was especially notable, as more than a dozen artists (and a few writers) were part of the studio from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. Among the members of Gaijin over the years were Cully Hamner (RED), Tony Harris (Ex Machina), Adam Hughes (Wonder Woman), Georges Jeanty (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Dave Johnson (100 Bullets), Laura Martin (Thor), Jason Pearson (Body Bags), Brian Stelfreeze (Black Panther) and Karl Story (Ocean). More than a dozen interns passed through over the years as well, several of whom went on to careers as artists or editors. Along with the various studios based in the Atlanta area, a handful of publishers set up shop in the region over the years, including Desperado Publishing, Top Cow and most recently, AfterShock. While several artists were associated with Gaijin, Jolly Roger and Studio Revolver studios (the latter of which launched in the mid-2000s), many more professionals worked independently of these studios. As was the case with estimating the size of the comics profession more generally, determining the size of this loosely organized Atlanta comics community at any given moment is not feasible. One of our interviewees tried to estimate the community’s size based on the email list that he had used to invite people to periodic drink-ups. That list totalled roughly forty individuals. However, several caveats need to be provided in terms of this modest estimate. As our interviewee noted, the only individuals invited were those that he considered professionals – no ‘wannabes’ were allowed. (He explicitly culled his invite list after aspiring artists started to come with portfolios and ask the more seasoned professionals there to review them.) Professional, in this context, also involved those who worked primarily on commercially oriented genre titles. The list was further delimited generationally: this particular group of individuals socialized mainly with those from their own generation (Generation X). In terms of employment, some opportunities have remained consistently available to comics professionals over time. For example, there have always been graphic design positions at non-media-oriented companies. Individuals pursuing positions such as these often have been motivated to do so in order to support their families or pay off sizable student loans. Other comics professionals procured employment at some of the local media companies. Turner and its suppliers originally represented the most significant source of employment for local comics professionals. In fact, Turner’s corporate evolution had a tangible impact on the career trajectories taken by many of these professionals. The founding of Turner’s Cartoon Network cable channel in 1992 opened up a range of fresh opportunities for artists and writers alike. One of our interviewees,

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for example, worked on staff at Cartoon Network during the 2000s, where he wrote and edited on-air promos following his graduation from SCAD. Another served as a staff illustrator at Cartoon Network during that time. Her tasks included producing style guides to ensure licensees remained consistent in their presentation of characters, as well as drawing characters to serve a variety of in-house merchandising needs. Still other artists that we spoke with worked for local animation houses and design studios that supplied programming to Cartoon Network and its Adult Swim programming block. These companies included Wild Hare (Squidbillies, 2005–2017), Primal Screen (The Brak Show, 2000–2007) and Radical Axis (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, 2000–2015). Following Turner’s sale to Time Warner in 1996 and Time Warner’s subsequent merger with AOL in 2001, the employment opportunities for comics professionals at the company evolved. Periodic efforts at corporate reorganization led to the elimination of a number of Atlanta-based positions. The jobs that were cut included some held by comics artists and writers. One interviewee discussed how she lost her job at the company in the mid-2000s as the result of a ‘power play’ made by the West Coast office. Her position, along with many others, was reconfigured and shifted to Los Angeles. Such actions were read by this interviewee and others we spoke with as indicative of how Time Warner executives (de)valued their Atlanta-based workers. The Atlanta roots of Turner, and its employees’ ties to the region, meant little to their new corporate owners. As the 2000s continued, economic incentives may have made Atlanta (and, more generally, Georgia) an ever-more desirable place to locate productions and to hire below-the-line workers. But both higher-level executive positions as well as permanent staff roles increasingly were shifted to LA or New York. While Turner’s downsizing of its Atlanta workforce may have adversely impacted some comics professionals, the growing state incentive programme opened up different opportunities for work. Hollywood-based animation company Bento Box, for example, set up an Atlanta animation studio through which it produced the Hulu series The Awesomes (2013–2015). One of our interviewees worked as a character designer on the programme. British-based Pinewood Studios, meanwhile, established its first outpost in the United States with Pinewood Atlanta Studios. Marvel became a primary tenant of the new facility, shooting films including Ant Man (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Black Panther (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) there. Among those employed on these Marvel productions were individuals affiliated with the Atlanta comics community. Two people that we spoke with secured positions working in Marvel’s makeup and costume departments. Still other comics professionals found work as storyboard artists on the growing number of

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genre-oriented television series that shot in the area (e.g., Vampire Diaries [2009–2017], The Walking Dead [2010–]). The proliferation of production opportunities in Atlanta benefited artists far more than writers. As one professional who sought to build his career as a film and TV writer in Atlanta grimly observed: Where the skillset of comics really sets you up for film work is pre-production. [But] those aren’t the jobs that are available in Atlanta. Atlanta is just a production hub. It’s starting to become a post-production hub. The thing that I always say is we are not the Hollywood of the Southeast. We are the China of the film industry.

Such remarks, of course, point to both spatial and professional hierarchies. This particular writer had met with a modicum of success both in comics and with Hollywood: he had secured consistent work with DC Comics, taken on a prominent New York-based literary agent and LA-based manager, and sold a few options for film and television projects. But in choosing to stay in Atlanta, rather than move to Los Angeles, he struggled to further grow his profile as a screenwriter. As he was the first to acknowledge, the majority of writing opportunities were in television. And the majority of television writers’ rooms were in Los Angeles. Others that we spoke with recognized they had reached the limits of what Atlanta had to offer for writers and moved West. This included the aforementioned promo writer at Cartoon Network. After being laid off during one round of corporate restructuring, he moved to LA. He proceeded to find consistent work writing for animated television series. As these examples indicate, the artist-writer hierarchy could cut both ways. In the space and place of Hollywood, writers had greater creative authority and a higher cultural status. They were generally accorded more respect and provided better access to executives and talent representatives. In Atlanta, however, artists stood to benefit far more than writers in terms of opportunity and community. Cultural and educational institutions enabled a far more robust social network of comic book artists to take shape, while state-driven incentive programmes provided them with a wider array of job possibilities. Nonetheless, the extent to which the influx of Hollywood productions led comics professionals to envision themselves as working ‘for Hollywood’ varied. For many, their professional identities had been shaped by their earlier education and training as sequential artists. They had spent years working primarily as comic book artists before shifting to work on film and television projects, and as such, they continued to see themselves primarily in those terms. They often worked on ‘Hollywood projects’ because these projects provided better pay and more stability – what one artist termed a ‘real middle-class lifestyle’ – not because such projects helped them feel creatively fulfilled.

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This survey of the evolution of the Atlanta-based community of comics professionals is instructive for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the specific ways that large-scale economic, political and sociocultural forces at times have enabled, and at other times constrained, the development of particular, small-scale creative communities. The Atlanta comics community emerged in the 1980s for reasons that had little to do with the city’s status as a regional media centre. But members of that community – especially the artists that we interviewed – both contributed to and benefited from the city’s transition from Turner headquarters to a Hollywood production site in tangible ways. Some claimed new positions such as storyboard artist, costumer and character designer that they might not have been able to without the state’s support for growing local production. Through their involvement with this specific community, these professionals frequently forged new relationships and cultivated fresh professional identities that extended beyond their prior identities as comics professionals. As was the case with most of the artists working outside of Hollywood, what these Atlantabased comics artists gained in job security they often sacrificed in creative authority. This case study is also instructive for what it illustrates about the different meanings ‘Hollywood’ takes on for creative workers – and the different opportunities it offers these workers – when Hollywood operates outside of Southern California. In terms of the community of comics professionals discussed here, particular historical conditions forged it, and different conditions continue to shape it; its relationship to Hollywood is likewise contingent and unfixed. That this community is in flux is for much the same reasons that most professional communities today are in flux: political, economic and social change. In Atlanta, industrial mergers alter the kind of work available, while the incentive programmes that help attract film and television production remain subject to the whims of elected governors and legislators, and can be reduced or eliminated at any time. Communities as small as the Atlanta comics community are also to some degree inherently unstable. Many of the people that we interviewed when we first initiated this project no longer remain in regular contact with other members of the community. This is in part a function of the passage of time, as many of these individuals got married, had children and became busier with everyday responsibilities. Others opted to move away (or at least move out of the metro region and into the exurbs) due to the rising cost of living in Atlanta, or to take advantage of professional opportunities arising elsewhere (including in Hollywood). And still others lost contact as they became busier with work on Hollywood projects, cultivated new social connections and established different professional networks. As several interviewees told us, they are increasingly as likely to see members of the

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Atlanta comics community at conventions in places like New York, Charlotte and San Diego as they were to see them in their home town.

(INTER)MEDIATING COMICS–HOLLYWOOD RELATIONS: THE ROLE OF TALENT REPRESENTATIVES Previously, we surveyed the varied economic, sociocultural and technological forces that contributed to the growing appeal of comic book properties in Hollywood and addressed the diverse ways that comics professionals navigated these evolving industrial conditions. Importantly, in many instances, comic book properties were not simply ‘discovered’ by Hollywood studio and network executives. Nor did comics professionals simply ‘find’ jobs in Hollywood. Rather, a variety of talent representatives, including literary agents and managers, as well as entertainment lawyers, played crucial roles in locating, evaluating, brokering, contracting and monetizing the comic book industry’s products and people.2 Importantly, as comics have become more widely valued both culturally and financially during the last two decades, a small group of talent representatives have developed reputations specifically for servicing comic book publishers, projects and creatives. Through their efforts, these representatives have fulfilled a central role of cultural intermediaries as identified by sociologists Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews (2014: 11): they have impacted ‘upon the notion of what, and thereby who, is legitimate, desirable and worthy – and thus, by definition, what and who is not’. Maguire and Matthews note that these industrial actors are defined by their expert orientation; they draw from their understandings of market conditions as well as their existing relationships to shape how both people and products are perceived and engaged with by other key stakeholders. In the context of Hollywood, these other stakeholders include financiers, networks, studios and entertainment journalists, among others. The concept of the cultural intermediary from which Maguire and Matthews draw originally was advanced by Pierre Bourdieu (1996) in reference to a contingent of literary professionals working in 1960s-era France (see also Hesmondhalgh, 2006). Since then, a range of media and cultural studies scholars have studied the figure of the cultural intermediary and expanded upon the types of professions that might be seen as functioning in such a capacity. As Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare and Avi Santo (2014: 7) note, Bourdieu’s initial approach is especially helpful in offering ‘a flexible and historically grounded model for how occupational identity and norms are formed within cultural industrial settings’. Such identities and norms have formed both for comics professionals and the intermediaries that have come to represent them in their engagements

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with Hollywood. Among the professions that scholars have identified as fitting under the mantle of cultural intermediary are talent scout, accountant, brand manager, publicist and journalist. Although scholars have consistently identified talent representatives as important intermediaries, these workers have rarely been formally examined in this capacity. In fact, as sociologist Violaine Roussel (2017) has noted, agents and other types of talent representatives such as managers and lawyers rarely have been studied by scholars at all.3 This is striking given the extent to which these professionals have the ‘power to affect which artists we get to know and admire, and which entertainment products get offered to audiences or never see the light of day’ (Roussel, 2017: 26). As Roussel argues: Through their inclusion into a particular evaluation community, not only do agents affect what and who is made in Hollywood insofar as movies, television shows, and the associated artists and stars are concerned, but they also play a significant role in the emergence of new categories of ‘talent’ and new formats of projects which discreetly reinvent what ‘creative content’ means. (Roussel, 2017: 194)

We can see such processes of identifying new categories of talent (comic book professionals) and new formats for projects (comic books) as central to the activities of the eight talent representatives that we interviewed for this section. The offices at which these literary agents, managers and entertainment attorneys worked ranged in size and scope from one of the largest global multinational talent agencies in the world to a mid-size entertainment law firm to a twoperson boutique management company. Collectively, the individuals with whom we spoke for this section have facilitated stronger structural and spatial ties between the comic book industry and Hollywood. They have done so by attaching and packaging Hollywood talent (e.g. directors, writers, actors) to comic book properties for sale to Hollywood companies as well as by pursuing career opportunities in Hollywood for comics professionals.4 They have helped comic book publishers establish offices for their Hollywood production arms directly on studio lots. They have assisted in procuring financing for individual comic book adaptations and in negotiating sales of specific comics properties to Hollywood producers and distributors. And they have brokered larger-scale deals between companies and publishers. For example, talent agency CAA represented BOOM! Studios in negotiating its first-look film production deal with 20th Century Fox’s feature division (Kit, 2013), while talent agency UTA represented BOOM! in striking its first-look television production deal with 20th Century Fox Television (Andreeva, 2014). These deals provided the respective arms of Fox with right of first refusal for any project that BOOM! wished to make into a film or television series. In such

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deals, agencies are responsible both for procuring any producer fees as well as any underlying rights fees. In all of these ways, we can see how talent representatives have directly contributed to the ongoing structural convergence of the comic book industry and Hollywood. Talent representatives can either enable or impede comics professionals’ ties to Hollywood companies, people and spaces. They might enable such ties, for instance, by helping a comic book writer land a job in a TV writers’ room or by negotiating a profit participation fee for an artist on a creator-owned property. While in the case of the former, representatives help to reshape the writer’s professional identity as a Hollywood labourer, in the latter, they are establishing or improving the artist’s economic value and cultural status. Through the sum total of their actions, talent representatives exercise significant control over comic professionals’ mobility within the industry. That said, there are notable variations both in terms of the scope of work that each type of representative engages in as well as how each is compensated by their clients. Not only do the incentive structures vary for different types of intermediaries, so too do the types of relationships that they cultivate with comics professionals. Importantly, just as there are tiers of power within both Hollywood and the comic book industry, there are tiers of power in the agency and management businesses as well. In terms of talent agencies, there are the major agencies (WME, CAA, ICM and UTA) and then there are a wide range of mid-size to smaller-scale boutique agencies (e.g. The Gersh Agency, Verve, Rothman Brecher Ehrich Livingston). Often, the smaller agencies specialize in a particular type of talent (e.g. comedians, screenwriters, etc.). Since the mid2000s, the larger agencies have come to function less as talent agencies than as global multimedia corporations; the majority of their revenue comes from other activities than representing talent. WME, for instance, owns the Miss Universe Pageant, eSports organization ELEAGUE (in partnership with Turner) and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It also is vertically integrated, owning film and television production companies and a nascent streaming service. In terms of representing creative professionals, talent agencies are in the volume business. They are focused on the short-term and oriented toward the mechanics of brokering deals and assembling packages. For their role in negotiations, they typically take 10 per cent of what they negotiate for a client.5 Although a literary agent might be the main point person for comics professionals (including publishers, artists and writers), the representatives based at one of the larger agencies typically coordinate their efforts with other divisions of the company (including film and television talent, financing, digital and licensing) as needed.

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It is not uncommon for comics professionals and publishers to switch agencies over time. One small publisher with whom we spoke had been represented by William Morris (before it merged with Endeavor in 2009 to become WME), ICM and CAA at different points over the course of fifteen years. All had provided the publisher with access to potential financiers, producing partners and talent as a matter of course. The agencies also had helped arrange both general and pitch meetings between the publisher and different production companies, networks and studios. In most cases, talent agencies will have one (or at most two) individuals on staff who are known for their relationships with comics professionals and who possess explicit knowledge of the comic book industry. Comics professionals, however, make up only a portion of these representatives’ client lists. In contrast to the shorter-term orientation of talent agencies, managers generally are focused on longer-term career planning for the clients that they represent. As with talent agencies, management companies vary in size and scope, though none are as massive as WME, CAA, UTA or ICM. Among the largest management companies are Anonymous Content, 3 Arts Entertainment, Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Artists First. For the work they put in, managers take a fee of up to 15 per cent – slightly larger than the 10 per cent of talent agents. Given the greater amount of time and attention that managers are expected to dedicate to their clients, they tend to retain smaller clients lists than talent agents. Importantly, talent agencies are licensed (in the United States, usually either by the state of California or New York) and are held to more stringent standards than managers as a result. Managers are not licensed, but also are not legally allowed to negotiate deal points for talent. In other words, should creatives be represented by a manager, they would also need either an attorney or agent to assist them in executing contracts. Frequently, representatives begin their career as agents and then shift to being managers and/or producers. While beginning a career as a talent agent might provide individuals with an expansive understanding of Hollywood structures, practices and relationships, the management route was seen by many with whom we spoke as providing more flexibility and autonomy, as well as greater potential for creative input. If they also assumed the role of producers, managers had the greatest opportunities to provide creative input. In this capacity, they could offer their clients more detailed notes on their work as well as interface more regularly with executives at networks and studios. Increasingly, the larger management companies have developed sizable film and television production divisions, with managers explicitly – often entirely – functioning as producers. As might be

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expected, the managers with whom we spoke were careful to underscore that a firewall existed between the management arms and the production arms of their respective companies. From the perspective of other stakeholders, however, the fact that a single company represents talent while also producing content generated by the talent can sometimes appear to constitute a conflict of interest. Managers are far less well-known publicly than talent agencies; their contributions also are far less widely discussed by the press. However, both managers’ income and industrial authority continue to grow. The strongest evidence of this is mini-major Lionsgate’s recent acquisition of a majority stake in management company 3 Arts, which represents Kevin Hart, Chris Evans, Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey, among many others (Vlessing, 2018). This move – of integrating talent, production and distribution within one corporation – hearkens back to the vertically integrated days of studio-era Hollywood, and suggests a means by which legacy media companies may further seek to consolidate power in the future. While at first glance, these details may seem somewhat removed from a discussion of the comic book industry, managers have in fact been instrumental in helping expand the relationship between that industry and Hollywood. Especially noteworthy here is the management company Circle of Confusion. Launched in 1990 in New York as a literary agency, Circle of Confusion first established itself due to its role in representing the Wachowskis (The Matrix [1999]) and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (X-Men: The Last Stand [2006]; Fantastic Four [2015]). This management/production company further built its profile in the genre space during the early-to-mid 2000s. By 2004, Circle of Confusion had launched an office in Los Angeles and was representing ‘about two dozen comic book creators’ – all writers – including Brian Michael Bendis (AKA Alias) and Robert Kirkman (Walking Dead). Even by the mid-2000s, Circle of Confusion was quite explicit about its desire to monetize independently published (i.e. non-Marvel or DC) comics through Hollywood sales (LaPorte, 2004). Circle of Confusion’s decision to move in this direction was rewarded most strikingly due to its partnership with Kirkman. Circle of Confusion partner David Alpert was both Kirkman’s manager and producing partner. In addition, Circle of Confusion served as a producing partner on the Walking Dead television series. As noted in Chapter One, Alpert subsequently joined with Kirkman to launch ‘sister company’ and Image partner studio Skybound. As one Circle of Confusion manager told us, Kirkman had reached such a stature in Hollywood by the time of our 2018 interview that he could ‘probably sell something he wrote on a napkin’. The early success that Circle of Confusion had with comic book creators in general, and Kirkman in particular, helped it further burnish its profile in the

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comic book space in subsequent years. The company represented independent publisher IDW for a time, and Image partner studio Top Cow more recently.6 It did not represent Image itself, however, because (as discussed in Chapter Two) that publisher maintains no control over the rights to the properties that it publishes. Circle of Confusion did, however, represent a number of writers who had published with Image. We regularly heard Circle of Confusion cited by other interviewees as the main site for comics-related management, along with (to a lesser degree) a handful of other boutique management companies such as Heroes and Villains, Illuminati Entertainment and the Cheng Caplan Company. The managers that we interviewed at Circle of Confusion, however, told us that they were increasingly diversifying beyond genre-oriented or comics-related talent. One of our interviewees at the management company noted that she was hired there because of her relationships to other types of Hollywood talent. Even so, she represented some comic book writers, though she played no part in negotiating their relationships with publishers (writers would either handle this on their own or – albeit rarely – through their attorneys). Her focus was solely on assisting comics writers – and again, it was only writers – in finding film and television-related work. When asked why they only represented comic book writers, as opposed to comic book artists, one literary manager stated bluntly that ‘We do not sign people who draw or ink or colour. It’s just not a business that would make sense financially’. The commission that an artist could make, they said, would be too negligible; artists simply didn’t produce enough on a volume basis to satisfy the voracious financial needs of a large company such as Circle of Confusion. Here we see quite explicitly how the aforementioned artist-writer hierarchy is reinforced through economic conceptions of value. Yet while simple financial calculations may have been the most explicit reason why many literary agents and managers have opted not to represent artists, cultural assessments of value also figure in, albeit in subtler ways. During the course of our interviews with several agents and managers, we regularly heard talk of how writers were the primary, if not sole, forces shaping creator-owned properties. Here we again can see how writers’ greater legibility to Hollywood can impact their creative authority, credits and compensation relative to artists. Representatives’ perception that writers have greater creative authority than artists can lead to differential contractual terms between these two types of professionals. For example, it is not uncommon for the writer (and, by extension, their representatives) to be ceded exclusive rights to shop creator-owned projects around while their (co-creator) artist partners are stipulated to be passive participants. Writers also were frequently better positioned than artists to negotiate ‘side deals’, such as the right to adapt the screenplay on which their project is based.

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Another way in which representatives contribute to emerging distinctions between writers and artists is through the advice they provide about living in Los Angeles. Most of the representatives with whom we spoke told us that, if their comic book writing clients are serious about pursuing film and television opportunities, they recommend that they move to Hollywood. Only if (or once) a writer had realized success in Hollywood might they be able to live elsewhere, and commute as needed. When starting out, one interviewee stated, it was important to ‘be there’—to be able to connect not only in professional contexts but also to casually converse at Starbucks or the gym. As shown in the discussion of Atlanta above, incentive programmes might have fuelled the rise of certain types of production work both nationally and internationally. But writers’ rooms – and other higher-status positions such as agents, managers and lawyers – remain firmly based in Hollywood. Of course, Hollywood also remains the central locus not only for the most prominent above-the-line workers and cultural intermediaries but also for a more expansive network of producers, creative executives and distributors. As Roussel observes, Hollywood is an ‘occupational space holding together various types of participants whose activities collectively make entertainment products’. It serves as the ‘dominant pole of the interdependence system’ that diverse media capitals such as London, Paris, Dubai, Beijing and Vancouver form, ‘even though local cultural production has more autonomy than the model of cultural hegemony suggests’ (Roussel, 2017: 15). While there are literary agents and managers based in New York City, these individuals primarily service the publishing industry (including graphic novel publishers such as First Second, Simon & Schuster and Scholastic). For Hollywood-related tasks such as licensing the media rights to graphic novels or procuring work on films and TV series for professionals, New York-based literary managers typically contract with subagents situated in Los Angeles. Despite the cultural biases held by Hollywood representatives toward writers, artists have gained representation within particular contexts. For example, some agents and managers specialize in procuring work for certain types of belowthe-line workers. Others – usually those at boutique agencies – are more open to signing artists as clients. When operating at a smaller scale, and with fewer overhead expenses, representatives can better stand to benefit from servicing artists with co-creator status on comic book properties. Such a move, of course, also functions as one means of differentiating oneself in the marketplace. One such manager we spoke with distinguished themselves not only due to their greater openness to representing artists, but also in how they branded their company. Though they serve a large number of comics professionals, this

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representative underscored that they represent ‘storytellers and worldbuilders’ in a broader sense. They encourage their clients to position themselves in a similar fashion. And in fact, their clients have worked not only on comics, but also film, television, videogames, theatre and beyond. What is more, most creatives that they represented resided outside of the Los Angeles area, commuting into town only on an as-needed basis. Such examples show that, even though intermediaries shared certain ‘discourses, dispositions, and tactics’, institutional, economic, cultural and even personal factors contributed to notable variations in perspective amongst them ( Johnson, Kompare and Santo, 2014, 1). Of the types of intermediaries most likely to service both writers and artists, entertainment lawyers stood out. These representatives also were notable for the extent to which they – unlike agents and managers – negotiated deals for their clients in both Hollywood and the comic book industry. One entertainment lawyer outlined to us the different types of deals that she brokered as including: (1) exclusive contracts between talent and publishers (usually DC and Marvel); (2) creator-owned deals with Image or other comic book publishers; (3) various types of rights deals across media, including merchandising and foreign rights; (4) overall and first-look deals with Hollywood production companies. Entertainment lawyers might also help arrange for comics professionals to be based in a particular geographic locale as they work on a project there. Despite the distinctive nature of some of the deals that they negotiate, these intermediaries nonetheless largely do what lawyers do: they execute contracts. While some might charge on an hourly basis, as one attorney noted, their rate of $750 an hour proved untenable given the low compensation levels received by some professionals. This individual thus preferred a percentage-based compensation model – 5 per cent for those with an agent, 10 per cent for those without. The amount returned to the attorney might be miniscule in the short term, but one sizable creator-owned deal could make it worthwhile. Based on what they had seen in terms of the high demand for comics properties during the last decade, this attorney believed their approach would pay off on a longerterm basis. As with agents and managers, only a handful of attorneys focus primarily on representing comics professionals. Once again, some of these individuals work for large firms, others run one or two-person practices. Much as was true with respect to the other types of talent representatives discussed earlier, we found it striking how consistently comics professionals identified only a select number of attorneys as experts in the comics-Hollywood space. That this was the case underscores the small world within which this community circulates as well as the degree to which specialized knowledge of the routines, practices and

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cultures of both industries is appreciated and seen as beneficial. The rise of this particular subset of specialists – during less than two decades – shows the extent to which the Hollywood-comic book relationship remains in transition. As this relationship further evolves, agents, managers and attorneys continue to refine how they see themselves, their work roles and their relationships with each other. At the same time, they also play an ever-more crucial role in shaping how both comics professionals and publishers are valued both culturally and economically by Hollywood.

CONCLUSION: MAKING WORKERS VISIBLE In this chapter, we have explored how the evolution of the comics–Hollywood relationship during the past two decades has contributed to changes in the professional identities of both comic book artists and writers. The conceptions that these professionals hold of themselves has shifted at the same time that their employment prospects have expanded. However, not all comics professionals have been afforded the same types of job opportunities or creative authority. Comic book writers have benefited far more from the growing cultural and industrial cachet of Hollywood. The artists who have been accorded the same level of power and status that the more successful comic book writers have attained usually have done so either because they have assumed other types of roles (e.g. writer, executive) or because they have managed to secure especially effective representation. Of course, it is important to note that a large number of comic book writers and artists have pursued careers in Hollywood – or tried to sell creator-owned properties to Hollywood – with limited or no success. Hollywood remains as much a lottery for comics professionals as it does for other outsiders seeking entry – though comics may be perceived by some as a potential short cut into the industry. Meanwhile, many other comics professionals have continued to express limited interest in engaging with Hollywood at all. Importantly, Hollywood’s interest in comics still shapes the self-perceptions and career possibilities of those taking an oppositional stance. Their identities then are defined in part by their choice not to sell a creator-owned book to Hollywood or not to take on a position as a character designer on an animated show. Similarly, Hollywood structures the opportunities available to those continuing to work only for mainstream comics. This is the case, for instance, when an artist works on a comic based on a licensed property, and has to receive approval from Hollywood talent about the depiction of their likenesses. It is also the case when artists are encouraged by editors to design characters that more closely resemble recent film or TV iterations.

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The Hollywood in question in this last paragraph is an industrial formation with particular structures, practices and cultures. But as we discussed earlier, it is also a place where specific types of media workers cluster. Certain types of workers – such as comic book writers – have gained better access to both the occupational space and the industrial formation that is Hollywood. Comic book artists, meanwhile, have benefited from the expansion of Hollywood production to locations such as Atlanta. Meanwhile, a variety of agents, lawyers and managers have helped some comics professionals navigate Hollywood as industry, culture and place even as they have hindered others from doing so. In discussing both comics professionals as well as some of the intermediaries that represent them, we have sought to make visible media workers who thus far have been accorded limited scholarly attention. Throughout this chapter, we also have illustrated the complex ways that industrial convergence is experienced on the ground. Media workers such as comic book artists and writers usually don’t just glide smoothly into new careers in film and television; indeed, they often struggle with their own self conceptualizations, work goals and professional identities in making such career transitions. Further, they turn to a range of intermediaries to help advise them on how to engage with new industrial contexts. These intermediaries, in turn, exercise immense cultural and economic power as they define who and what has value. In the case of comics professionals, as we have seen, these intermediaries can help alter industrial relations, affirm (or challenge) cultural hierarchies and shape professional identities both within and across different industry sectors.

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4 Synergy in Theory and in Practice: Comic Books and the Contemporary Media Conglomerate In late 2014, Marvel Comics surprised the comics industry by announcing at New York Comic Con that the February 2015 issue of Fantastic Four (issue number 645) would mark the end of the fifty-three-year-old comic book series. Comic book cancellations at Marvel are rarely permanent, with revamped versions of series sometimes launching within weeks of their previous iterations’ cancellations, but to many fans and journalists the timing of Marvel’s FantasticFour announcement suggested that the series’ cancellation represented the semipermanent abandonment of the property by Marvel and its owner, the Walt Disney Co. In support of this theory, commentators pointed to the conclusion of writer-auteur Jonathan Hickman’s line-wide comic-book ‘event’, Secret Wars, which saw key members of the Fantastic Four literally removed from the Marvel Comics Universe. Although Fantastic Four had long been one of Marvel’s weakest books in terms of sales, trade journalists and comic book critics saw a different – and more nefarious – reasoning behind the book’s cancellation: synergy. Central to this perspective was the observation that Fox – and not Disney/Marvel – owned the film rights to the Fantastic Four. With the rights split in this fashion, Fox, which planned to release a new Fantastic Four film in 2015, stood to benefit from whatever publicity Marvel generated from its own work with the property. Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston (2014d) thus argued that Marvel had chosen to ‘cancel the Fantastic Four comic rather than provide any promotion, however small it might be, towards the Fox Studios film. Merchandise and licenses were scrapped and even Fantastic Four posters in the offices were pulled down’. Pieces in Deadline, Forbes and CinemaBlend echoed Johnston’s argument (Busch, 2014; Gonzales, 2015; O’Connell, 2016), while Brett White (2014), in a piece for Comic Book Resources titled ‘Marvel and the Danger of Synergy’, argued that similar decision-making was at work across most of Marvel’s line. Framing synergy as a kind of anti-creative conspiracy, the conversation had a highly critical – even at times funereal – tone, exemplified most succinctly by Tim Carmody’s observation in The Verge that ‘One way or another, synergy had killed the Fantastic Four’ (Carmody, 2016).

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Although the conversation surrounding the Fantastic Four cancellation was unusual for its explicit invocation and critique of synergy, its employment of the concept would have been familiar to comics and media studies scholars. Indeed, the idea that the corporate strategies of Disney, Time Warner, Marvel and DC are governed by the pursuit of synergy has been a mainstay of comics and media studies scholarship since the 1990s. Work in that decade by scholars identified with the political economy of communication introduced the concept of synergy as an important analytical tool for understanding media production and marketing in an era of industrial conglomeration (e.g. McChesney, 1996; Meehan, 1991; Turow, 1992). In this and subsequent scholarly work, Warner Bros.’s 1989 Batman film, with its myriad of licensed products (including a Batman-branded album by Warner Bros. recording artist Prince) was frequently put forth as the archetypal example of synergy in action. Work by Henry Jenkins (2006) in the mid-2000s broadened the perceived utility of the concept (while also dampening the political stakes that had originally accompanied it) by reframing synergy as a central component of digital-era fan studies, worldbuilding scholarship and transmedia storytelling. Since then, the concept has shaped most analyses of Disney-era Marvel (as well as Disney itself ) and has figured heavily in work on the comics industry and the superhero genre. One recent edited collection, Superhero Synergies, even takes the concept as its modus operandi (Gilmore and Stork, 2014). Curiously, synergy’s three-decade rise in fortune within media studies scholarship has coincided with the concept’s spectacular fall in fortune in economics, business and managerial discourse. Indeed, by the late 1990s the idea of synergy was increasingly seen as something of an embarrassment by industry leaders and investment managers. Even Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, who in 1995 helped oversee the acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC (which provided Disney with its own television broadcast channel), began scaling back his use of the term: ‘I hate to use the “s” word’, he explained, mere months after the acquisition, to Business Week’s Phillip Zweig (1995) for a story examining the poor results of recent mergers. By the mid-2000s, the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, which had been sold on the synergies it was supposed to achieve, had effectively put the concept to rest among business strategists and investors (e.g. Pastsuris, 2001). Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes summed up the prevailing sentiment in an oft-quoted statement to The Wall Street Journal in 2006: ‘[synergy:] it’s bull-shit’ (Karnitschnig, 2006). In this chapter, we argue that an understanding of Hollywood and the American comic book industry requires that we take Bewkes’s contention seriously. Which is to say that synergy, if it works at all, may not work the way we have assumed

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it does. Our empirical interactions with creative workers and executives, both via interviews and, for one of us, via fieldwork in corporate settings, provided the initial impetus for this chapter’s argument. Not only did these interactions offer up little evidence of synergy serving as an institutionalized corporate imperative, they frequently offered evidence of the contrary: attempts to engineer or develop synergy failing to be pursued, supported or even accepted as possible. Even the apparent ‘synergy’ between individual comic books within an ostensibly singular publishing division, we were repeatedly told, was more of an accident or, as one former editor at Marvel put it, ‘luck’ than a result of deliberate organizational linkages. Marvel/Disney’s bemused public responses to the claims that synergy had killed the Fantastic Four were thus in keeping with what we saw and heard as researchers. ‘Fully independent decision, by the way’, explained Disney CEO Alan Horn when asked about the series’ cancellation at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable. ‘I didn’t even know about it. I mean, honestly, we don’t even [he shrugs shoulders]’ (McClintock and Masters, 2014). Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort expressed similar bewilderment, noting on Tumblr that ‘[f ]olks have a very strange ideas [sic] as to the way a business is run’ (Brevoort, 2014). Rather than seek to demonstrate the non-existence of synergy empirically, we thus instead provide here a critical interrogation of the concept so as to demonstrate how we might better study and understand the mergers and industrial consolidation that have characterized Hollywood’s relationship with the American comic book industry in this century. In fact, we argue that treating synergy as a causal principle, as Johnston, Carmody and other trade journalists have done, risks not only misapprehending the manner in which comic book publishers have been integrated into Hollywood but also misapprehending integration itself as an industrial phenomenon. The problem, we argue, stems in part from a failure to pin down what exactly synergy means; the lack of a stable definition results in regular slippage between cause and effect, so that perceived product synergies are offered up as evidence of integrated production processes while, at the same time, integrated production processes are used to account for perceived product synergies. To quote economist Ronald Coase (whose work on the nature of the firm inspired much of this chapter’s argument), ‘[W]e are not surprised to see the man produce the rabbit out of the hat if we’ve just watched him put it in’ (Coase, 1988: 43). This chapter seeks to offer a corrective to such improvisatory and often circular approaches to integration by bringing economics and management paradigms to bear on the concept of synergy as it applies to the entertainment industry. Accordingly, we devote the first part of the chapter to a review of

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synergy’s brief and ultimately rather limited take-up by economists and strategy scholars. Indeed, we demonstrate that the concept was ultimately sidelined by those disciplines in favour of more precise and analytically productive methods for understanding issues relating to business diversification and firm structure. In the chapter’s second section, we offer six observations of Disney and Marvel so as to demonstrate how we as media scholars might alternatively approach the issue of conglomeration without drawing upon synergy as our operating paradigm. Before we proceed, however, two caveats plus a brief note on terminology are in order. First, this chapter is not a work of economics. Which is to say that our goal is not to provide a contribution to work by economics and strategy scholars, nor to provide an exhaustive review of how issues such as firm integration, transactions costs and management costs have been handled by such scholars. Indeed, there has been serious and continuous debate within the discipline of economics on nearly every issue we discuss in this chapter. Our goal is thus not to provide authoritative pronouncements on how diversified firms work and do not work, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which media studies as a discipline may need to rethink what synergy means and how (or if ) it functions, if the discipline is to engage constructively with questions of firm structure and integration in the twenty-first-century entertainment industry. Second, although this chapter offers up specific examples of Marvel and Disney’s business and organizational practices, its approach is primarily conceptual and analytical – not descriptive. This reflects our chapter’s main goal: that of re-orienting our understanding of firm economics so as to enable more nuanced studies of industrial integration than the concept of synergy has traditionally allowed. We might thus also characterize this chapter as a sort of critical house cleaning. By subjecting the concept of synergy to careful analysis, we seek to clear the ground for a new kind of empirical approach to industrial integration – one that treats synergy as a problem, an ideal and/or a discursive construct instead of a causal force. Readers who are not interested in such a ground clearing might thus skip ahead to Chapter Five, which employs this new approach to provide empirical analyses of three forms of existing publisherstudio relationships. Finally, a few words about terminology. We employ economic and legal language in this chapter even though it occasionally differs from the language traditionally used by communication and media studies scholarship. Economists, lawyers and US regulators, for example, use the term lateral integration to describe mergers between two companies who are not in competition with each other but whose products or services appear to have some similarities, whereas communication and media studies scholars typically describe such a merger using the term horizontal integration. We follow economists in their usage, reserving

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the term horizontal integration for instances of mergers between two competitors in the same industry. Both economists and media scholars, by contrast, share the same definition of vertical integration, which describes mergers taking place between two firms that operate at different stages of the supply chain for the same goods or services. Both vertical and horizontal mergers are fairly easy to identify and have long been the object of anti-trust regulation. Lateral mergers, by contrast, are much more difficult to identify, as the criteria for them can be subjective; they have also historically been subject to almost no regulatory oversight, as they do not – according to traditional anti-trust approaches – result in decreased competition or harm to consumers (Kwoka and White, 2018). Although popular and scholarly discussions of synergy are sometimes so imprecise as to encompass all three kinds of mergers, for the most part, when people talk about synergy, they are talking specifically about lateral mergers and the benefits they alone produce. One additional terminological distinction may be helpful. The words firm and company, as we employ them in this chapter, describe any kind of business organization, whereas the word corporation describes a specific kind of firm or company: one that is legally incorporated and thus subject to special taxation and regulation; a corporation is also typically (but not necessarily) overseen by a board of directors and has stock that is listed on an exchange. Although we tend to think of corporations as big, bureaucratic and impersonal, a corporation can consist of as little as one person; likewise, an unincorporated company can be very large, with multiple divisions and hundreds of thousands of employees. A conglomerate is a company that owns a controlling stake in a number of other companies, which typically (but again not necessarily) operate in separate but related industries. Conversations about synergy are thus typically conversations about a certain kind of conglomerate: one that is presumed to derive a special form of benefit from having pursued a strategy of lateral integration.

SYNERGY AS A BUSINESS CONCEPT Although the word synergy was likely employed by Anglophone economists and business journalists as early as the late 1950s, the concept had little discursive currency until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when some of the first strategic management scholars such as Igor Ansoff (1965) and Richard Rumelt (1974) incorporated the concept as a key element of post-war management science. Thanks in part to these scholars, by the 1970s and 1980s the term had become a buzzword in management and investment circles, where it was used to explain, justify and at times critique the unprecedentedly high level of transindustrial merger and acquisition activity occurring in the United States and

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Britain. Ansoff (1965: 19, 79–82) originally defined synergy as ‘joint effects … resulting from [the] addition of new product-markets to the firm’, and offered an early typology of such effects, distinguishing between what he called ‘sales synergy’, ‘operating synergy’, ‘investment synergy’ and ‘management synergy’. Subsequent scholars devised their own typologies, with Sayan Chatterjee (1986), for example, identifying ‘financial synergy’, ‘operational synergy’ and ‘collusive’ (i.e. price-related) synergy, and Michael Lubatkin (1983) proposing ‘pecuniary economies’, ‘diversification economies’ and ‘technical economies’, with this last category divided into six subcategories. As the proliferation of typologies suggests, scholars struggled to conceptualize how exactly synergy functioned and how it might be formally modelled. Some of the typologies seemed even to suggest that synergy was simply a different name for economies of scale, a canonical business concept that refers to the efficiency advantages corporations acquire as they grow larger, irrespective of how that growth is achieved. In general business discourse, however, the term synergy was employed to express the simple – and extremely simplistic – idea that the sum of two companies is more valuable than its individual parts, a point often expressed ‘mathematically’ as 2+2=5. Although synergy continued to have its champions throughout the 1990s, by the start of that decade the concept was subject to increasing critique by a wide range of commentators, and by the early 2000s the word had largely disappeared from professional business discourse. There were three reasons for the concept’s abandonment. First, and of considerable importance, was the terrible financial performance of most ‘synergized’ conglomerates during the postwar period. A series of widely disseminated studies of conglomerate performance, such as Michael Porter’s ‘From Competitive Advantage to Corporate Strategy’ (published in Harvard Business Review) and Business Week’s ‘The Case Against Mergers’ (produced in collaboration with Mercer Management Inc.), revealed sub-par performance on the part of conglomerates in virtually every industry (Porter, 1987; Zweig, 1995). The Synergy Trap, an oft-cited book-length analysis by mergers-and-acquisitions expert Mark Sirower (1997), offered additional empirical support to these studies by demonstrating the existence of an ‘acquisition premium’ which rendered target firms exceptionally expensive to their acquirers (which usually funded acquisitions via debt) and thereby tended to cancel out whatever economies might presumably be gained by synergy. Scholars also found evidence that conglomerate share prices were subject to what they called a ‘diversification discount’: amazingly, the market appeared to value conglomerates less than the sum of their parts (Lang and Stulz, 1994). Such research findings were (and continue to be) disputed, but commentators increasingly accepted the generalized conclusion. As Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell (1998)

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explained in a Harvard Business Review article, ‘Simply put, many synergy values end up destroying value rather than creating it’. The second reason for the business community’s abandonment of synergy as a concept is in part a consequence of the first. Discovering that mergers seemed, in many cases, not to create value, scholars from a variety of fields subjected the concept to increased analytical pressure and identified serious logical problems with how it had been operationalized. Porter’s 1987 piece on corporate strategy set the terms for much of the subsequent criticism by observing that managers had substituted a vague notion of ‘fit’ for detailed, rigorous analysis of industry structure and post-merger organizational needs (see also Ensign, 1998). As Thomas Gruca et al. (1997: 605–606) summarized in a piece for Management Decision, ‘The role of the parts in creating the whole and their relationship to realizing the benefits of synergy is often a post-hoc rationalization of the decision if they are considered at all’. By the end of the 1990s, even CEOs of large-scale conglomerates, such as Eisner and Bewkes, began echoing these critiques, with Harold Geneen (1997: xiii) of International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. (ITT) devoting the opening of his memoir to a full-scale attack on the concept’s lack of logic: What is synergy? It is alleged to be some sort of alchemy whereby the whole becomes greater than its parts. You combine A and B and C and get the magic potion D. But simply mixing elements together rarely does much good and sometimes is a pretty bad idea. If you toss a nickel, a quarter, and a dime into a box, you get forty cents. No magic there. If you mix beef broth, lemon juice, and flour, you don’t get magic, you get a mess … If a car has three wheels and you add a fourth—now that is synergy. But if you add two more, all you get is an extra expense.

The final strike against the concept of synergy was delivered, albeit perhaps unintentionally, from new work in organizational economics that focused on what is often called the ‘theory of the firm’. Though rarely interested in synergy explicitly, such work nevertheless revealed substantial problems with the premises underlying the concept and was thus increasingly taken up by strategic management literature from the late 1980s onwards. Because we think the theory of the firm is of particular importance for an understanding of the problems with synergy as a concept, we devote the rest of this section to an extended discussion of it. Indeed, as we hope will become apparent, one of the major benefits of approaching integration via a theory of the firm is that the latter can work as a corrective to the somewhat breezier strategy literature by shifting the analysis away from description and prescription to questions of a more fundamental conceptual and even ontological kind. Such questions include, as we will demonstrate, ‘What is a firm?’ and ‘Why do firms exist at all?’

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Work on the theory of the firm originated with Ronald Coase’s 1937 essay, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, a groundbreaking and slightly unorthodox interrogation of conventional economic reasoning, which – though initially ignored by other economists – in time came to set the research parameters for subsequent work in the field. Before discussing Coase’s essay, however, let us, as a heuristic device, introduce a basic and widely accepted economic principle, first put forth by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (2003): as a market expands in size, specialization should reduce the cost of production. This principle would lead us to expect, as George Stigler (1951) notes in another early essay on the firm, that as industries grow, they will disintegrate into specialized firms, each handling a different part of the production process and utilizing market contracts to coordinate production; likewise, as industries shrink, they will integrate, with individual firms taking over the production processes previously handled by others and internal decision-making replacing market contracts as the means by which production is coordinated. Unfortunately, empirical observation reveals problems with the principle: Though disintegration and integration can indeed sometimes be observed under the conditions stipulated, in practice industries exhibit a wide variety of behaviour, with companies integrating in growing industries, as well as disintegrating in shrinking industries. What explains this variation? Coase’s deceptively simple answer is that there are costs involved in using the market to coordinate production, and that these ‘transaction costs’ can, in some cases, be considerable enough to offset the general efficiencies of the market as a means of economic organization. Firms, in this theory, come into being as a means of avoiding such costs. ‘Within a firm these market transactions are eliminated’, Coase (1937: 388) observed, ‘and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-coordinator, who directs production’. Indeed, as Coase (1988: 34) argued, the reduction of transaction costs is the raison d’être of the firm: ‘if they are not included in the analysis, the firm has no purpose’. Which is to say that if contracting with free agents on the market were costless, then large companies would never have formed; the production and circulation of goods that characterizes twentieth-century capitalism would have been achieved instead by millions of highly specialized producers entering into contracts with each other in a competitive, open market. Coase’s conception of transaction costs proved to be immensely influential, eventually giving rise to an entire field of economics devoted to their study. Early work in this area, such as that of Oliver Williamson (1985), sought to formalize Coase’s theory, in part so that it could be better employed in mathematical models. Doing so required identifying in much greater detail both the specific sources of

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transaction costs, as well as the cases in which they would prove extensive enough to render the market unsuitable for coordinating production. For the purpose of this chapter, however, a more generalized conclusion is sufficient: transaction costs are, essentially, the costs of long-term contracting. A comic book publisher, for example, can either print and distribute its books itself or it can contract on the market with a printer and a distributor to provide these services. In the latter case, the publisher will face costs associated with drafting the contracts, negotiating the contracts and enforcing the contracts. In many cases, these transaction costs will be less than the cost of providing and/or developing the services internally. Such is the case, for example, for all comic book publishers today, none of which print or distribute their comics themselves. Sometimes, however, transactions costs may be so high as to make contracting on the market uneconomical. This can happen in cases of information asymmetry (where one party to a contract possesses relevant information that the other party does not, thus allowing the former to take advantage of the latter), holdup potential (where contracting risks giving one party increased bargaining power in subsequent contracts) or environmental uncertainty (due to, for example, changes in technology, swings in commodity prices or unpredictable demand). Indeed, the integrated firm offers an especially attractive solution to environmental uncertainty, as a manager can make radical changes to internal production on the spot (by, for example, firing workers or shuttering a product line), whereas a market contract with a supplier would require extensive and expensive re-negotiation. If one accepts the preceding analysis as valid, one may wonder why markets exist at all. Why, as Coase (1937: 394) himself asked, would production not be most efficiently organized by assigning all of it to ‘one big firm’ – as in the most extreme vision of a communist state? That way, the costs and danger of contracting would vanish and the process of coordinating production would become simpler and cheaper – or would it? The answer, as both economic theory and twentieth-century history have convincingly demonstrated, is that it would not, for internal, managerial coordination has its own costs. Following Harold Demsetz (1998), we call these costs ‘management costs’. Early transaction-cost scholarship often paid little attention to them, and, as economist John Roberts (2004: 93) notes, the exact nature of these costs remains controversial. All economists today, however, agree that such costs exist and can be substantial. For simplicity’s sake, we will limit our discussion here to brief articulations of the three kinds of management costs we believe are most relevant for a critique of synergy. The first of these costs is associated with the need to monitor (that is, reward and punish) performance in the team environment of a large firm. In such an environment, firm output (usually measured in terms

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of revenue and profit) serves as a poor measure of the performance of any one individual employee because it is impossible to tell who contributed what to that output. Firms thus must employ ‘monitors’ (i.e., managers) so as to incentivize performance, measure performance and punish free riding.1 Monitoring entails numerous expenses—not only must a firm divert labour towards monitoring, but it also must devote time and money to develop, maintain and keep relevant performance measures that appropriately incentivize action. Monitoring also indirectly contributes to a second kind of management cost: influence costs. Influence costs (sometimes also called lobbying costs) represent the loss in value of productive labour when such labour is devoted to influencing managerial decisions. Paul Milgrom and John Roberts (1988: S155) explain: Sometimes, this activity is aimed at realizing well-specified, immediate results: individuals campaign for pay increases, choice job assignments, and promotions, and groups push for larger budgets, acceptance of their policy proposals, adoption and continuation of their programs and projects, and rejection or abandonment of those that are harmful to their interests. In other cases, these efforts seem to be intended to create a general good impression with decision makers, which may lead them to favor the individual or group in as-yet-unforeseen decisions.

Such costs presumably do not exist in market transactions – or, at least, exist to a much lesser extent. This is because contracts, once ratified, set out clear expectations that cannot be adjusted by a hierarchically situated decision-maker.2 Our final form of management cost is what we call coordination costs. Coordination costs arise particularly in the case of conglomerates, which must devote resources to the creation and management of interrelationships among their multiple businesses. Such costs can be both extensive and wide-ranging, consisting, as Yue Maggie Zhou (2011: 626) explains, of ‘joint designing, joint scheduling and mutual adjustments, as well as setting transfer prices and designing incentive schemes for [inter-business-unit] cooperation’. In the cases of acquisitions, conglomerates must also work to integrate the organizational structures and cultures of acquired firms, which not only may differ from that of the acquiring company, but which also may have become so institutionalized over time as to be very costly to change (what Evan Rawley [2010: 873] refers to as ‘organizational rigidity costs’). Even if conglomerates get this right, the requirement that the parent company’s managers consider the needs of increasingly diverse but interrelated businesses subjects these managers to increased challenges in strategy formulation and decision-making, including not only higher information processing costs but an increased likelihood of error (Hill and Hoskisson, 1987: 336–338; Sutherland, 1980). In terms of coordination costs specifically, market transactions between firms – and especially firms with goods that are difficult to value (such as films and

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television shows) – can often offer more value in the form of flexibility and efficiency than internal, managerial coordination. If a firm that is providing service via a market contract proves to be a poor performer, the dissatisfied party can substitute that firm for another when the contract expires – or, in extreme cases, pursue the firm for breach of contract in a court of law. A manager attempting to reform an underperforming division, by contrast, has comparatively limited options. She cannot replace the division with another, nor collaboratively adjust the terms of the relationship (which is usually dictated by broader corporate policy), nor can she even sue to recover losses due to poor performance. This is perhaps why media conglomerates have historically found it so difficult to ‘fix’ problem areas (as illustrated in the next chapter by the example of Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment). The concepts of transaction costs and management costs, and the alternate theories of the firm from which they stem, are relevant to a critique of synergy for two reasons. First, the existence of these costs demonstrates why the generation of synergy through diversification is not intrinsically worthwhile. Savings achieved through the reduction of transaction costs may end up dwarfed by the increased costs of management. The theory-of-the-firm scholarship thus provides a theoretical explanation for the empirical results noted at the beginning of this section: most mergers and acquisitions appear not to produce value. Second, and perhaps of greater importance, the theory explains why, in practice, diversified firms frequently ignore the pursuit of synergy altogether by allowing business units to function independently from – and even, at times, in competition with – each other. This ‘portfolio’ approach to conglomerate organization seeks to reduce management costs by recreating market-like relationships within the firm. Indeed, in the effort to derive the most value from their holdings, conglomerate CEOs may even employ coordination inconsistently across their business units, letting some of them operate independently, linking others loosely (by, for example, establishing transfer pricing), and attempting to build strong interdependencies among still others. What is more, conglomerates may find themselves, by necessity, shifting away from the pure pursuit of ‘synergistic benefits’ as the diversity of their holdings increase; as Zhou (2011: 626) explains, ‘because a firm’s overall coordination capacity is limited, its scope choices may be substitutive’. In other words, a relationship between three of a firm’s business units poses much higher coordination costs than a relationship between two. There is yet one other claim made on behalf of both lateral and vertical integration, and although it is rarely heard in business or economic discourse, it has become such an implicit assumption of popular understandings of industrial integration that we think it deserves some brief discussion here. In short, it is the claim that companies will always earn greater returns from transacting internally

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to produce or distribute a good than they will by transacting externally via the market to produce or distribute that same good. The claim may seem at first to be common sense: exploiting one’s own property by oneself must naturally be cheaper than involving someone else in the process. It is nonetheless wrong. To understand why, imagine that you are in charge of the division of a media conglomerate responsible for the development of the conglomerate’s comics properties for film and television. An external company, possessing an extremely popular streaming platform, emerges as an interested licensee of the television rights to one of your properties. This company offers to pay a very large amount for these rights; let us say, $250 million. A separate division of the conglomerate you work for, however, will soon be launching its own streaming platform, and it is in need of content for it. The question is thus: Should you keep the property in-house? You could, but from an accounting perspective, doing so would provide you no greater return than selling it to the external platform would. Here is why: if you grant the rights to your in-house streaming service, and charge them a transfer price of less than $250 million, you will have provided that division of the conglomerate a benefit that is exactly equal to the loss you have inflicted on your own. The same happens, but in reverse, if you charge that division more than $250 million. Economists sometimes call this phenomenon a ‘zero-sum transfer’. Assuming that all buyers have sufficient information to assess the value of something, and assuming all buyers have equal access to capital to make a purchase, the ‘value’ of that something will be set by the highest amount that a buyer – internal or external – is willing to spend on it.3 If you sell the license for less than the external licensee valued it, you hurt yourself; if you try to sell the license for more than that, the external licensee will refuse to buy it. If you sell it internally for more or less than that amount, you hurt a division in your own conglomerate (and risk damaging the reliability of internal transfer prices). Additional factors that might influence your decision, such as the degree of exposure a property will receive with a specific buyer or the possible benefit (or harm) of having it associated with a buyer’s brand, can also cut both ways. A property will sometimes receive, for example, a bigger boost to its brand in the hands of a competitor than when kept in-house. All of which explains why those who are actually in charge of IP development sometimes ignore the lure of synergy and, in fact, contract externally. Such was the case with Warner Bros.’s 2019 sale of the television rights for DC Comics property, The Sandman, to Netflix (with Warner Bros. Television producing) for an undisclosed but supposedly quite large sum – despite parent company AT&T’s need for highprofile content for its upcoming streaming service, HBO Max (Otterson, 2019a).

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To sum up, the problem with synergy from a business and economics perspective is that the concept has tended to substitute vague and often incorrect generalizations about corporate economics for close analysis of how different divisions actually operate and interact. As Gruca et al. (1997: 605) succinctly explain, ‘Synergy is a micro-level phenomenon which has been confused by a focus on the corporation as the unit of analysis’. Firms are complex organizational structures made up of multiple actors engaged in multiple processes, which frequently exhibit a low degree of interdependence regardless of CEOs’ exhortations to the contrary (cf. March and Olsen, 1976; Kaplan and Henderson, 2005). In contrast with markets, they also require diverse forms of actively managed, hierarchical coordination. By itself, the mere merger of two businesses that seem to have strong ‘fit’ can thus not produce value; managerial intervention is necessary. What kind of intervention is worthwhile – and what kind is not – depends upon the individual circumstances of each business unit at a given time. The principle that 2+2=5 has proven thus, at best, unhelpful, and, at worst, a gross and even financially dangerous misrepresentation of the much more complex logic underlying the process of corporate value creation. A careful (or sceptical) reader might be wondering at this point why, given all the concept’s problems, synergy continues to be employed as a causal principle by journalists, consumers, media scholars and even some business professionals (who should presumably know better) at all. One reason, which has been widely recognized by management scholars, is that integration is highly beneficial for CEOs and Wall Street businesses, regardless of its effects on the integrating companies themselves and their shareholders. As Dennis Mueller (1969: 644) influentially observed, ‘Management salaries, bonuses, stock options and promotions all tend to be more closely related to the change in the size of the firm than to its profits’. Building off this observation – and often citing Warren Buffett’s likening of ‘acquisition-hungry’ management to children who, overexposed to fairy tales, believe their kiss can magically transform toads into princes (Buffett, 1981)—scholars have also noted the considerable power and prestige, both inside and outside the company, that managers receive by pursuing mergers. In the management literature on merger incentives, integration is thus sometimes explained as the result of managerial empire-building (e.g. Rhoades, 1983) or even hubris (e.g. Hayward and Hambrick, 1997). Although there has been considerably less research done on the benefits derived by Wall Street businesses that help to facilitate mergers, they clearly derive substantial financial rewards from supporting integration, as well as increased access to high-power and high-worth social networks. As economics and finance scholars Richard Du Boff and Edward Herman (1989: 109) have argued, ‘promoters, bankers and

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strategically placed insiders do extremely well in periods of merger movements; on average, the stockholders of the acquiring firms either lose, or derive no benefits, from mergers’. Given the significant role that these stakeholders have in shaping public perceptions and journalistic discourse about business, the fact that small shareholders and other non-insiders end up echoing the vague economic justifications for synergy put forth by the former group is disheartening but should not surprise. This is not to say that workers, consumers, journalists and media scholars who employ the concept of synergy are on the side of Wall Street – indeed, members of these groups often attack synergy as a process or phenomenon that inflicts harm via increased inequality, decreased competition, compromised artistic integrity or even (as we saw in this chapter’s opening) the ‘murder’ of fictional characters. But such attacks typically take for granted that synergy works in the way that Wall Street claims it does, thus paradoxically reifying the concept while mobilizing against it. Perhaps a more important reason, however, for the continued employment of synergy as a concept is the vital role it has played as an accessible sense-making tool for workers, fans and scholars. Although vaguely defined and incapable of accounting for how integration works in practice, it is an efficient, easily teachable and (for most everyday conversations at least) ‘good enough’ framework for explaining what seem to be new features of twenty-first-century media: an increase in high-profile mergers, increased licensing across media industries, the emergence of transmedia storytelling and decreased aesthetic autonomy for creative workers. Most of the creative workers we spoke with thus employed synergy not as a rigorously developed theory of economics or organizational science, but as a means of making sense of perceived changes in their own worklives, such as increases in editorial oversight, changes in their employer’s location, the growth of cross-industrial employment and advancement opportunities, and corporate mismanagement. For fans and media scholars, the concept has likewise served as a quick and easy means of accounting for perceived connections (usually of a narrative kind) between ostensibly separate media texts, thus enabling both new kinds of transmedia interpretive strategies and a corresponding desire among new or soon-to-be creative workers to tell transmedia stories (a desire expressed by three of our younger interviewees). This explains why the concept of synergy, though originating for media studies in the field of critical political economy, has been most enthusiastically and productively employed this century by the fields of fan studies and transmedia storytelling – not production studies. For if one’s primary perspective is that of a textual consumer, the organizational and economic underpinnings of production processes are largely irrelevant; one can efficiently gesture to them via the conceptual shorthand of synergy. Along

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these lines, we might conclude by recognizing here that the incorporation of synergy into media studies parlance was hard won, and the term’s incorporation was instrumental in helping expand what were accepted as viable research areas within the discipline. Indeed, from this standpoint, we might understand the concept’s vagueness and divorce from business and economics scholarship as a strength, as these features enabled it to be taken up in the 1990s and early 2000s by multiple kinds of media scholars, including those committed to humanistic research frameworks and methods. Although we have argued in this chapter that the concept is no longer serving the discipline, we recognize that scholars, like all human beings, are naturally disinclined to discard a tool that has proven so useful in the past. As institutional theorists Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (1991: 11) have pithily observed, ‘some of the most important sunk costs are cognitive’.

THE COMPLEX MEDIA FIRM: DISNEY/MARVEL Notwithstanding the benefits synergy as a concept has provided the discipline of media studies in the past, we believe that it is ill-suited to continue serving as an operative concept today. Indeed, we think it fails one of the cardinal tests of such concepts by muddying instead of clarifying our understanding of media industries, media production processes and media organizations (both in terms of structure and behaviour). For this reason, we advocate abandoning the concept  – or, better still, treating it as a discursive and/or sense-making tool instead of an empirical phenomenon or casual force. What is more – and as we hope to have demonstrated above via our review of the theory of the firm – replacing synergy with a more economically inflected approach to integration would offer us as media scholars a more sensitive, more complex and often more empirically accurate account of how media firms – small and large, singular and diversified – work. In our next chapter, we offer a full-length example of what such an account might look like. Before that, however, we will conclude this chapter with six observations about the media conglomerate that earlier scholarship has most often presented as a case study of synergy in action: Disney/Marvel. Observation 1: Marvel Comics cannot, even at the level of the business unit, be called an integrated company. As we have described in Chapter Two, nearly all of the company’s creative labour is organized via short-term and often spot market contracts with independent contractors. Much of the distribution is contracted out as well, with printing, shipping, wholesale distribution and retail all provided by external companies. From this perspective, Marvel Comics looks less like an example of an integrated firm than it does what Roberts (2004: 191), citing fashion firms Nike and Benetton as examples, has called a ‘vertical

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architect’ or ‘value chain organizer’: ‘This role involves the lead firm’s organizing and managing a value chain … but actually owning few of the assets involved and carrying out few of the activities that are needed to create value’. Marvel Comics is not exceptional in this regard, for disintegrated supply chains – especially those for which creative labour is an important input – are the rule rather than the exception in virtually all media industries today, including the tech industry (see Caves, 2000).4 For Marvel Comics in particular, however, the combination of a highly disintegrated creative labour supply with an integrated managerial staff that is situated at or near the bottom of Disney’s conglomerate structure is a likely cause of the high level of dysfunction Marvel Comics seems to have suffered in the 2010s. Last-minute title cancellations, abrupt shifts in strategy and changes in publishing plans, clashes between creators and editors, an unprecedented series of line-wise reboots (each bringing diminishing sales), inconsistent and/ or ineffective public and retail relations management, and a continual failure to sync its comics, aesthetically, with the products of other conglomerate divisions such as Marvel Studios: all of these missteps can be partly blamed on the increased management costs that have accompanied Marvel Comics’s integration into Disney. Indeed, the organizational difficulties Marvel Comics has faced – and the failure of Disney’s purchase to provide it with much (if any) performance bump – point to the very real challenges associated with acquisitions and mergers. It is a truism of business and economics scholarship that the mere purchase of a company cannot produce meaningful changes in organizational culture, managerial practice or performance at that company; such changes require careful adjustments to the managerial structures of both the acquiring firm and the acquired firm. Without such changes – or without a portfolio approach to management by the acquiring firm (see Observation 6) – the acquired firm will typically find it even harder to function profitably than it did before the acquisition. Observation 2: Disney regularly organizes the production of ‘tie-in’ or ‘cross-promoting’ merchandise via market transactions with external firms. In many cases this is because Disney does not own and apparently does not find it worthwhile to acquire production capabilities for key products such as videogames, toys, food and clothing. This should not in itself be surprising; Johnson (2013), Clarke (2012) and other media scholars have, in recent years, detailed how regularly licensing is used by media firms to organize production across product categories. What may be more surprising are cases when Disney possesses an internal firm capable of providing the production but nevertheless employs market contracts to outsource production. Such is the case, for instance,

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with Disney-brand comic books and graphic novels, which are produced and marketed not by Marvel Comics but by IDW, Joe Books Inc., Tokyopop and Fantagraphic Books. Disney has also contracted with IDW and Joe Books for production of Star Wars comics aimed at ‘all-age’ and non-comics-store audiences – despite Marvel Comics’s considerable experience publishing Star Wars comics and graphic novels, which it has done from 1977 to 1986 and from 2015 to the present. A conglomerate might rely upon external suppliers rather than one of its own subsidiaries for a number of reasons. The external suppliers might possess production capacities and product expertise that the subsidiary neither currently possesses nor has the interest or resources necessary to develop for the future. The external supplier might also be substantially more efficient – and thus able to generate a bigger profit – than the subsidiary. The conglomerate may be interested in maintaining or developing relations with external suppliers so as to benefit from their brand, know-how, technology or intellectual property. Or the conglomerate may just be in need of the immediate revenue that an external contract can supply. In the case of Disney’s deals with other comic book companies, the first two of these reasons (and possibly the third) are likely in play, but so too – with the specific case of Disney brand comic books – is likely some degree of organizational inertia: before the merger, Disney was used to contracting with comic book companies other than Marvel; changing that practice would likely have required significantly more effort (on both Disney and Marvel’s side) than simply maintaining it. Observation 3: We can extend Observation 2 by noting that not only does Disney employ market contracting for basic merchandising and comic book publishing, it also regularly employs it for core production and distribution ventures. In most of these cases, the contracts are not with small, specialized firms such as Tokyopop or Fantagraphic Books, but are rather with major media firms that directly compete with Disney’s own business units. Marvel Television’s multi-series deal with Netflix, which saw a Disney owned-company producing multiple television series for the popular streaming platform is one obvious example. The Lego-brand Marvel videogame series, published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a division of competitor Time Warner (itself acquired in 2018 by AT&T), is another. In what is perhaps an even more telling example, Marvel Studios and competitor Sony Pictures (which owns the film rights to Spider-Man) devised a market contract in which production of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and then Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) were effectively outsourced by Sony to Marvel Studios. As The Wall Street Journal reported in an article titled ‘Rivals

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Join to Spin Gold’, Sony covered the cost of production while Marvel Studios managed the production process. Though Marvel Studios received no share of the film’s profits, its ownership of the character’s merchandising rights (which it licenses out to numerous non-Disney firms) meant the company would directly benefit from the film’s success (Fritz, 2017). As part of the deal, Marvel Studios was also granted the right to use the Spider-Man character (played by actor Tom Holland) in its own self-produced films, which it did – to popular acclaim and financial success – in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: End Game (2019). Like the Netflix and Warner Bros. deals, the Sony deal demonstrates the capability of market contracts to facilitate coordinated production processes, even when dealing with rivals. The deals also suggest that Disney regularly finds it worthwhile to disregard the strictures of vertical integration when pursuing high-value projects. Of course, coordinating production with rivals has significant risks and can, if practiced at great enough scale, run afoul of anti-trust law. Indeed, the state of Marvel’s deal with Sony at the time we are writing this illustrates one of the dangers in these arrangements. In August of 2019 the deal between the two studios effectively dissolved, as the two failed to agree on revisions to key contractual provisions (with Marvel supposedly demanding 50 per cent of future film profits) (Fleming Jr., 2019). From a business economics perspective, the problem was not that the partnership was not effective. Indeed, both sides benefitted substantially from the collaboration and stood to do so in the future. The problem was that Marvel’s strategy of integrating Spider-Man as a key character within the Marvel Cinematic Universe granted Sony increased bargaining power, so that when contract renegotiations took place, Marvel had much more to lose than Sony by a scuttled deal. Given the altered balance of power, Marvel’s request for a better deal than it had previously accepted was an economic non-starter. Why Marvel nevertheless held out for a better deal is unknown – perhaps the opportunity cost of producing a rival’s film made doing so no longer worthwhile. Whatever the case, the example of Marvel’s contract with Sony demonstrates both the benefits and the risks of contracting with a competitor; but also, and perhaps more importantly given this chapter’s focus on synergy, it demonstrates that Disney and its subsidiaries sometimes find it worthwhile to engage in such contracts – even when the risks are substantial. Observation 4: Tellingly, given the success Disney has had working with external companies, its subsidiaries have sometimes struggled to replicate this success when working with each other. Examples of what appear to be clear inter-firm coordination between business units have produced mixed results. Marvel Television/ABC Studios’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–present), for

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instance, has suffered low ratings for multiple seasons despite the involvement of high-profile figures like Joss Whedon (who wrote Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron) and Samuel L. Jackson (who starred as Nick Fury in most of the Marvel Studios films) (Kline, 2014; Porter, 2017). The show’s difficulties in part stem from its poor narrative and stylistic integration with the Marvel Studios films. Billed as a transmedia extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its connections to the films – despite being produced within the same conglomerate and sharing key talent – have been mostly superficial and have diminished in substance and significance with each season. Marvel Television/ABC Studios’s Marvel’s Agent Carter (2015–2016), which was similarly pitched as a transmedia extension/spin-off, also involved minimal connections to the films, and was cancelled after two seasons of low ratings. Narrative and stylistic linkages between the comics division and the television and studios division has been similarly unimpressive, with the stories, design and basic character traits of key film and television characters sometimes differing radically from those of the films and television shows. Although managing a transmedia franchise is no easy task, Disney’s organizational structure has not made things easier. A clear hierarchy exists among Marvel Studios (managed, at least through the time we are writing in late 2019, by Kevin Feige), Marvel Television (managed by Isaac ‘Ike’ Perlmutter and Jeph Loeb) and Marvel Comics (managed by John Nee), with Marvel Studios at the top, Marvel Television below and Marvel Comics so far below the others that they seem rarely to take it into account at all. Lacking organizational incentives to work together, the film and television division are sometimes even positioned as quasi-competitors. We have been told, for example, that Marvel Studios has veto rights over character usage, which has – in practice – left Marvel Television with some of the least developed and least well-known characters (such as the Inhumans, Deathlok and Quake) in Marvel Entertainment’s IP library. What is more, as the television landscape has changed and streaming has become more important, Marvel Television has begun to find itself stripped of the responsibility for developing Marvel-based television shows. During the run-up to the launch of Disney’s streaming service Disney+ in November 2019, trade journalists found themselves surprised that all of the heavily promoted Marvel series for the service were Marvel Studios productions. Indeed, as late as August 2019, not a single Marvel Television series had been announced for the service – despite Loeb’s assurances that the division was producing them (Patten, 2019). Although Marvel Studios’s higher position in the conglomerate hierarchy – and its phenomenal track record as a business entity – may explain Disney’s decision to give that division greater responsibility for Disney+ content than Marvel

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Television, only time will tell whether the decision was a wise one (conventional theory of the firm would suggest that Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige will have to contend with substantially increased information processing and coordination costs as a result). For our goal in this chapter, the more important point is that, as the above examples demonstrate, Disney’s subsidiary structure – at least as far as Marvel is concerned – does not appear to have been organized around the goal of synergy. Nor, for that matter, does having Marvel’s content producers all answer to the same Disney executives, board of trustees and shareholders mean that transmedia storytelling has gotten easier or more economically viable. Observation 5: As the business and trade press has repeatedly noted, many of the highest-performing entertainment business units within Disney over the last fifteen years have been acquisitions; what is more, these companies were already high performing when Disney acquired them (Govindarajan, 2016; Rainey, 2016). To what degree is their continued high performance a result of Disney management? The question is impossible to answer, but if, as the business press has regularly reported, Pixar and Marvel (and to a slightly lesser extent Lucasfilm) operate with little interference by Walt Disney Company management (e.g. Barnes, 2008; ‘Disney’s Recent Acquisitions’, 2012), then we would have reason to suspect that Disney’s overall impact has been minimal and that the conglomerate has taken a portfolio approach to managing its blue-chip acquisitions. Indeed, that a strong level of interfirm coordination by Disney management may, in fact, be value-destroying might be suggested by the comparatively weak performance in recent years of a number of big entertainment properties overseen by Disney itself. Such properties include the box-office flops Mars Needs Moms (2011), John Carter (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013) and Tomorrowland (2019); the critically lambasted Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017); and the Disney Infinity videogame, which despite critical acclaim suffered such substantial supply-chain mismanagement that both the game and the in-house studio that produced it were shut down (Gilbert, 2016). Observation 6: Finally, we think it worth observing that Disney’s impressive financial performance over the last decade has not stemmed (as is frequently suggested) from the success of its transmedia franchises nor its theme parks; it has derived largely from its cable television businesses, particularly ESPN – of which Disney acquired an 80 per cent stake as part of its purchase of Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 (Fabrikant, 1995). By 2010, analysts such as Soleil-Gould Research Corp.’s Alan Gould regularly observed that more than half of Disney’s entire value derived from its cable businesses (qtd. in Ellis, 2010). Even the rise of cord-cutting and the growth of global film markets during the past decade has so far done little to change this, with cable businesses accounting for 57 per

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cent of Disney’s profits in fiscal year 2016, with 74 per cent of that, according to estimates by The Wall Street Journal, generated by ESPN (Flint and Fritz, 2017). We have encountered no journalism nor scholarship (from either media studies or business studies) suggesting that ESPN’s success is the result of synergies with other Disney business units. In fact, ESPN – with its emphasis on sports, its reliance on live media, its adult male demographic and its limited merchandising options – would appear to fail the vague ‘fit’ test with respect to many of Disney’s other businesses. This is not to rule out the possibility that Disney has in fact developed specific inter-firm links between ESPN and its other cable businesses nor the likelihood that the conglomerate derives economies of scale from its ownership of multiple television businesses (e.g. Gottfried, 2017); rather, we cite ESPN here to suggest how poorly the concept of synergy seems to apply to what has been, for much of this century, Disney’s primary means of profit-generation. Not only should the importance of ESPN to Disney’s overall performance make us think twice about ascribing a strategy of inter-firm coordination to Disney writ large, it should also make us think twice about evaluating over-all conglomerate strategy without a careful parsing of the conglomerate’s financial data. As we hope the above observations demonstrate, the argument that Disney and its Marvel subsidiaries are organized by ‘synergy’ appears to ignore important empirical features of Disney and Marvel Entertainment’s firm structures, production organizations and financial performances. When we dispense with or at least displace the concept of synergy so as to attend to these features, Disney and Marvel become more complex – and ultimately, we believe, more interesting – objects of analysis than they have often previously appeared in trade discussions and scholarship. Moreover, without ‘synergy’ as the predetermined answer to questions about Disney and Marvel’s organizational structures or competitive strategies, we as media scholars can begin to ask new kinds of questions about how Disney and Marvel work, how their competitors work and how the markets in which they are situated are organized. To be sure, the answer to some of these questions may turn out to involve a strategy in which certain forms of production are coordinated among specific interfirm business units so as to reduce transaction costs (at the expense of increased management costs); but this will be part of the answer only some of the time; and in the process of demonstrating, through detailed empirical accounts, when it does and does not pertain, we will end up with a richer, more dynamic and more accurate understanding of how Hollywood and the American comic book industry function.

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5 Organizational (Dis-)Integration: Publisher– Hollywood Relationships in the Twenty-First Century Upon their arrival at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, regular attendees found themselves in for a big surprise: The standalone DC Comics booth, which for decades had been situated in the centre of the comic publishers’ section of the exhibit hall, was no more. As part of the larger organizational changes that AT&T initiated in assuming ownership over Time Warner and its assets in June 2018, DC Comics relinquished its featured spot on the convention floor (MacDonald, 2019b). In accordance with AT&T’s larger goals of foregrounding a small number of priority brands and eliminating longstanding siloes between various Time Warner divisions (Littleton and Lang, 2019), all of the DC and Warner Bros. characters, talent, props, artwork and executives now appeared together in ‘one big amazing megabooth’ (Beedle, 2019). In addition to getting autographs from DC-affiliated creatives such as Greg Capullo, Tom King, Frank Miller, Jim Lee and Scott Snyder, visitors to the new Warners/DC exhibit could also greet the cast and creative teams for other newly re-branded WarnerMedia properties including New Line’s It: Chapter Two (2019), The CW’s The 100 (2014–2020), Rooster Teeth’s RWBY (2012–) and HBO’s Westworld (2016-). What’s more, fans could look for the re-creation of Riverdale’s (2017–) Pop’s Diner booth and take pictures next to the Central Perk couch from Friends (1994–2004). The merged WB/DC booth provided a visual and spatial manifestation of shifting conglomerate imperatives. In addition, it foreshadowed how AT&T imagined its various brands realigning under its soon-to-launch HBO Max direct-toconsumer streaming service. The DC Comics website attempted to put a positive spin on this dramatic change, adapting Lord-of-the-Rings-speak to declare that there would be ‘one booth to rule them all!’ However, this new AT&T superteam of Warner Bros.HBO-New Line-Rooster Teeth-DC Comics corporate holdings received at best a mixed response from journalists. The Beat reporter Heidi MacDonald (2019c) declared the change ‘vivid and traumatic’ and lamented that ‘DC’s massive booth [had been] the nexus for the comics area … in some ways, it was the anchor of the whole con … a place where everyone stopped by at one point or another, as

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DC’s headset-bedecked crew ran things with the energy of a Marine battalion’ (MacDonald, 2019b). Indeed, in previous years, the DC exhibit had towered over other publishers’ booths. Dark Horse, IDW, BOOM!, Oni Press – and even Marvel – remained in the same space they long had been, even as the Warner Bros./DC booth moved from the centre to the far-left reaches of the expansive convention hall. Writing for Forbes, Rob Salkowitz (2019) noted that ‘The subtext of this move could not have been clearer … America’s oldest and second-largest comic book publisher had retreated to the far back corner of the hall, where it was incorporated into the multi-level WarnerMedia exhibit, in the shadow of banks of giant monitors previewing upcoming shows and cast appearances’. Meanwhile, DC’s former spot had been claimed by several other companies, including graphic novel publishers Scholastic and Humanoids, as well as digital distribution platform and Amazon subsidiary ComiXology. In what may have been one of the strongest signs of the shifting status of comics publishers, Image Comics now rented much of the premium space that DC previously had occupied (MacDonald 2019b). In assuming DC’s privileged location, Image asserted its status to fans and creators alike. Such a move by Image was especially important at this particular historical moment, as Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman just had surprised both retailers and consumers with news that the early July 2019 issue of his horror comic would be the series’ last. As discussed in Chapter Two, Image’s creator-owned model meant that it held no ownership stake in its properties. As such, the company’s revenues derived almost entirely from distribution fees. Sales of The Walking Dead in both single issue and trade paperback format constituted a disproportionate amount of Image’s total revenue, helping it to maintain its status as the third largest direct-market publisher for roughly a decade, behind only Marvel and DC (Griepp, 2019b). With that series abruptly ending and its other big seller, Saga, on hiatus, Image needed to not only aggressively reassert its brand identity to fans but also underscore its stability to high-profile creatives who might be debating whether to work with the company in the future. While Image’s creator-owned model meant that it played no direct role in financing, developing or producing its properties, its movements were nonetheless regularly monitored by a variety of Hollywood stakeholders. As noted in Chapter Three, talent representatives received advanced notice of Image’s forthcoming books, enabling them to reach out quickly to any creatives whose properties were perceived to have viability as films or television series. Many creators of Image books, meanwhile, had their own representatives shopping their comics to Hollywood production companies, financiers, studios and networks. Image’s status as a ‘pure play’ publisher differentiated it from most of its largest competitors.

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As comic books became especially appealing sources of IP for films and TV series from the 2010s on, publishers increasingly had become involved in the development, financing, production and distribution processes of their properties. Rather than simply passively licensing their books for media exploitation or providing modest input during the development phase of a film or TV project, several publishers – including Dark Horse, BOOM! Studios, IDW, Archie and Skybound – hired dedicated staff members to expand their relationships with Hollywood. Several publishers even launched in-house production arms focused explicitly on developing films, television series, videogames and more. Concurrently, both DC and Marvel further prioritized mining their deep wells of library content and thousands of characters for exploitation across media. Both of these companies also publicly emphasized their growing efforts to coordinate their activities with other divisions of their respective parent companies, Time Warner (so labelled through summer 2018) and Disney. In Chapter Two, we mapped the comic book IP ecosystem, identifying the different ownership models provided to creators by publishers. In this chapter, we provide a somewhat different view of intellectual property as we chart the emerging Hollywood-comics IP ecosystem. The focus here is explicitly on the varied ways that comic book publishers have taken an increasingly active role both in exploiting their library content and in developing fresh material for film and television. What can be seen from this study is that the comics-Hollywood IP relationship exists along a continuum, with Image residing on one side due to its lack of ownership and control over its properties, and corporate comics publishers DC and Marvel residing on the other side, as modestly sized subsidiaries within massive global media conglomerates. In between can be found publishers that also function as production companies (e.g. Dark Horse, BOOM!) as well as publishers that function as financiers (e.g. IDW, Legendary). The following pages provide case studies of three different publishers – DC Comics, BOOM! Studios and IDW – to illustrate how the conglomerate subsidiary, production company-publisher and financier-publisher models each work. These different cases detail how larger industrial forces and production contexts have impacted publishers’ involvement with Hollywood content. They also point to what is distinctive about comics as sites of IP exploitation, especially in comparison to other pre-sold properties such as plays, podcasts and popular fiction. Before beginning this survey, it is important to provide a couple of caveats. First, this remains an ecosystem with a limited number of players involved. Within this small system, each publisher has a different corporate structure, business model and institutional culture. Other publishers, beyond those discussed here, operate somewhat differently. What is more, the strategies employed by the publishers explored below continue to evolve as market conditions shift, institutional

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mandates change and their content meets with financial and popular success (or failure). Second, although a few of these publishers – most notably DC, Marvel and Dark Horse – have engaged with film, television and other media forms in a variety of ways for decades, most of the companies discussed below only ramped up their Hollywood financing, development and/or production efforts in the 2000s and 2010s. The greater ability for these new players to operate in this space stems in part from the growing demand for content with the rise of new distribution services (e.g. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.) and in part from the reduced costs now associated with producing the special effects demanded of many comics properties. Comics publishers are also advantaged because they tend to produce high-concept (and highly sellable) genre-oriented content and because they can tap into dedicated fan bases that act as emissaries on their behalf via social media. Furthermore, comics have come to be valued by many Hollywood stakeholders because they come with fully visualized storyworlds, thereby offering a shortcut for both creatives and executives into the adaptation process. Yet despite these potential advantages, as we will see, these publishers are nonetheless functioning in a volatile industrial landscape. While this volatility within both the comics industry and Hollywood compelled many of these publishers to move beyond their prior role as passive licensors, their new roles have led several of them to face fresh challenges in their pursuit of greater autonomy and control over the Hollywood production process.

THE ‘INTEGRATED’ MEDIA CONGLOMERATE: THE CASE OF DC COMICS/TIME WARNER Marvel’s growing involvement in producing film and television series has been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly examination in recent years (e.g. Yockey, 2017; Flanagan et al., 2016; Kidman, 2019: 180–229). To an extent, this is unsurprising: Marvel’s 2000s-era tale – which involved its transformation from struggling independent film studio to stunningly successful Disney subsidiary – is a compelling one. Its ability to successfully build the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) provided a model for other companies’ subsequent franchising and worldbuilding efforts (e.g. Transformers, Lego, The Fast and the Furious, Walking Dead, etc.). At once hearkening back to old Hollywood studio models and at the same time forwarding new practices in multimedia exploitation, Marvel’s cinematic story pointed to both continuity and change. In addition, as Derek Johnson (2012) has discussed, the story of Marvel is appealing as the story of a company realizing its ‘destiny’ – a destiny, as the press frequently reported, attained largely due to the singular guiding force of Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige (in consultation with the Marvel Creative Committee through 2015).

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Marvel Studios’s financial and popular success no doubt derived in part from its ability to realize on screen the superhero teams and spectacular effects that many comics fans had desired for decades. At key moments, Marvel Studios also has appeared to depend upon creative professionals being granted the freedom to pursue their own individual visions within the structure of a massive global media conglomerate. At the same time – as illustrated in the previous chapter – Disney’s distinct conglomerate structure ensured that cooperation between different divisions was minimal, with Marvel Studios enjoying significantly more power than that of the comics or television division. Much less journalistic or scholarly attention has been afforded to DC Comics and its involvement in producing film and television content during this century. While there have been several studies that have focused on DC’s historical activities, especially in relation to its management of the Batman and Superman franchises (e.g. Yockey, 2014; Freeman, 2014a), in-depth discussions of DC Comics’s ventures into film and television during the new millennium are limited at best. To an extent, the lack of attention to DC Comics and its role in crafting Hollywood filmed entertainment makes sense. DC’s story lacks the simple, ‘destiny’-like through line that characterizes Marvel’s. Instead, we can see some moments of stunning success (mostly involving Christopher Nolan and Batman) along with regular periods of disappointment (see Catwoman [2004], Green Lantern [2011] and Justice League [2017] as but a few examples). Efforts at worldbuilding and teambuilding have been fraught – at least on the big screen, where more scholars’ and journalists’ attention has been directed – and the company has reversed course on a number of occasions due to critical attacks, fan backlash, managerial changes and box office disappointments. Further, the relationship between DC and Time Warner has been far more opaque and far less publicized than has the Marvel–Disney relationship. Marvel’s story can be presented as a fairy tale of sorts: after countless stumbles in Hollywood for years, it initially sought financial stability in the 1990s and early 2000s by freely licensing off some of its largest properties to others (X-Men and Fantastic Four to Fox, Spider-Man to Sony, Incredible Hulk to Universal, etc.). It subsequently found its footing in the mid-2000s due to a high-risk, high-reward strategy that involved reclaiming its lost rights whenever possible and using private equity to produce big-budget event films (e.g. Iron Man [2008] and Incredible Hulk [2008]) that other companies distributed (Paramount and Universal, respectively). Building on these initial successes and the accompanying buzz, Marvel became attractive enough to become a target for Disney, which paid $4 billion to acquire it in August 2009 (Barnes and Cieply, 2009). Disney’s money and infrastructure further enabled Marvel to continue to expand its ambitious universe. As noted earlier, the Marvel Studios unit which Feige headed was also

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reportedly permitted a high degree of creative independence and organizational autonomy by Disney. The DC–Warners story is far less sexy. A subsidiary of Warner Bros. since 1969, the DC Comics division functioned relatively autonomously as a publishing entity for decades.1 For a long time, DC’s parent company expressed little interest in exploiting its properties for film or television, even with its most high-profile characters such as Batman and Superman. As discussed in Chapter One, the Salkinds acquired the rights to produce Superman (1978), with Warners only assuming the role of distributor via negative pick-up once the project was well into development. Throughout the 1980s, Superman-related properties, including Supergirl (1984) and the first-run syndicated TV series Superboy (1989) were controlled by the Salkinds. Similarly, producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan struggled to make a Batman film for roughly a decade; only after producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters came onboard did the project gain traction. Although, as noted in the previous chapter, the exploitation of the Burton-directed Batman (1989) in the hands of a newly merged Time Warner has been featured as a tale of successful corporate synergy on numerous occasions, nothing subsequent to that DC franchise has similarly captured the imagination of media studies scholars in quite the same way. Lacking in a singular Kevin Feige-type guiding figure or a clear narrative of dramatic success or remarkable failure, the DC–Warners relationship has continued to be largely neglected as a site of extended analysis. It is true that DC Comics is messy. It is messy to analyse as a division within a massive, complex organization that has regularly changed owners (from the 2001 marriage to AOL to the embarrassing 2009 divorce, from the 2014 spin-off of the Time publishing division to the 2018 sale of Time Warner to AT&T). It is messy to analyse as a division that has been subject to the frequently shifting dictates of both top leadership and divisional managers (especially motion picture division executives). And it is messy to analyse as a brand that has been refreshed on numerous occasions – indeed, whenever business strategies, organizational imperatives and industrial conditions have changed for DC, specific Time Warner divisions or its parent company writ large. When asked to describe the structural relationship between DC and Time Warner, a former high-ranking DC Comics executive told us that such a task would be impossible to do. ‘Warners is not a unitary thing’, he stated. ‘When you try and look at the operating procedures of the armies that are involved, you are going to get lost in five minutes flat’. Yet rather than being deterred by this messiness, here we embrace it for what it can tell us about the complex, evolving relationship between a conglomerate

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parent, a publisher and the various independent production units involved in the hands-on creation of much of its content. The story of DC’s role in managing its IP, in fact, is the story of the limitations of synergy as a conceptual model and the challenges that particular human agents face when operating within and in relation to complex media organizations. In this sense, we see this particular case study as providing additional empirical examples to illustrate some of the theoretical and conceptual points made in the previous chapter. Particular forms of political economic analysis might call attention to exceptional examples – moments when companies fully exploited their vertically and horizontally integrated structures to maximum economic and cultural effect (or dominance). Certainly there are notable instances of such behaviours to point to here; even a conglomerate as notoriously siloed as Time Warner has been able to marshal its resources and coordinate its efforts across its various divisions to produce and promote especially high-priority content such as the Superman and Batman franchises. From our perspective, what is more interesting than the astounding successes or shocking failures are the more mundane instances in which moves towards coordination were not fully realized and when efforts at integration were constrained, whether due to structural forces, institutional cultures or the acts of particular individuals. In the remainder of this section, we provide a brief overview of what we identify as four notable phases in the DC Comics relationship from the 1980s through the late 2010s. Our focus here is specifically on the ways that DC properties were exploited for film and television at different historical moments, and the key individual or divisional agents publicly identified as being creatively involved with these processes of exploitation. What is important to note upfront is that across this timeframe, DC Comics (that is, the comic book publisher) was always constrained in its ability to get comics made into movies or TV series. As one interviewee told us, the most that those working within the comics division could do in the majority of instances was try to get other parties – whether affiliated with Time Warner or located outside of the corporation – interested in licensing the rights and exploiting the properties. Once a project was licensed, depending on the desires and relative power of the other parties involved, individuals at DC Comics might have more or less creative input on a project. The input provided by DC might involve how characters were depicted, the structure of the script, the casting of actors, the production design and so on. Importantly, throughout its history, DC staff were far more actively involved in the development and production of animated content. This was largely due to the closer proximity of animation to comics, a point discussed in Chapter One. In the interest of keeping our scope somewhat narrower, and also because DC’s input on animation has

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been and continues to be far more extensive from conception to marketing, we are confining our discussion below to DC’s involvement with live-action film and television content. In relation to scope, it is also worth noting that, in undertaking this analysis, we have been limited both by space constraints and access. In terms of access, as is the case with most major media corporations, Time Warner (which the company was named at the time that we undertook most of our research and interviews) limited who was authorized to speak. The conglomerate also required approvals from their PR division prior to initiating most of our interviews and again upon their completion (to review what remarks would be used for publication). Nonetheless, we were able to procure background information, primarily from past employees. Their perspectives provide much of the context for this section. Additional information was procured from a survey of a wide range of trade and journalistic publications including Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. It is worth underscoring that these publications tend to focus on the contributions of a handful of top individual executives and creatives within major media corporations. Although we also focus on those featured individuals in our discussion below, our doing so should not imply that these were the only significant people involved in corporate strategy or creative processes, nor that the divisions mentioned were the only ones with significant input on the development or production process. Indeed, beyond the comics, film and television divisions that we highlight below, workers across a range of other divisions and in diverse roles (e.g., executing contracts, licensing merchandise, approving advertising copy, etc.) were involved in the processes of developing, producing, marketing and distributing DC-related filmed entertainment. That said, we hope that what we describe in the following pages might serve as a foundation for future analyses that examine the DC Comics–Time Warner relationship.

Phase One: 1969–2002 The first phase of the DC–Warners relationship consists of the period prior to the early 2000s. This is the time frame during which Time Warner (as it was called after the merger of those companies in 1989) expressed limited interest in exploiting DC properties beyond Batman and Superman as liveaction entertainment. During this period, executives at DC Comics attempted to license their library holdings both within Time Warner and with other companies. Time Warner mostly passed on developing projects from DC, but the corporate parent let the publisher shop its projects elsewhere. As one interviewee told us, DC Comics President and Editor-in-Chief Jenette Kahn

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played a leading role in pushing for adaptations of the publisher’s projects. Among the projects for which she was a driving force was the ABC-distributed, Warner Television-produced series, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997). She was able to move Lois & Clark forward because Time Warner had regained the character rights from the Salkinds. Time Warner was willing to sign off on this latest TV iteration of Superman in part because the company perceived the character’s cinematic appeal to be significantly diminished following the release of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Although various DC Comics staff members provided creative input on the Lois & Clark series throughout its run, the series was a significant generic departure from past Superman comic books, with most episodes following the structure of a romantic comedy. Notably, the series’ climax revolved around Lois and Clark’s wedding – a story point which, in an unusual case of cross-division coordination, was mirrored in the Superman comics books that DC published while the series was airing. The lack of interest in exploiting comics for film and TV before the 2000s is indicative of the extent to which comics were perceived as having limited viability as live-action film and TV properties during this time. A wide range of properties were optioned, but few made it onscreen. For example, DC sold screen rights to the comic Watchmen to Fox in the mid-1980s even before all issues of the miniseries had been published (Finke, 2008). For more than two decades, a number of different individuals, including Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass, were hired to direct the project. Several different scripts were commissioned, yet no film resulted until the 2009 Zack Snyder version (by which time Warner Bros. had reclaimed the rights). Numerous other DC Comics projects (or projects from its imprints, including Vertigo) were optioned and developed for film or television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. With the exception of the various Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher-directed Batman movies and assorted animated projects, little made it either to theatres or TV screens. Marvel was no more successful in getting its projects produced during this time, despite its willingness to license any and all characters as a means of selling toys and staying afloat financially (Howe, 2012: 301–376). Strikingly, long before Time Warner’s New Line Cinema division produced a DC Comics property as a movie – which it finally did in 2005, with A History of Violence (published by DC’s Paradox Press imprint in 1997) – it released a movie featuring a Marvel character dating back to the early 1970s: Blade (1998). The box office success of Blade led to two sequels (2002 and 2004) and a TV series (2006), and, along with such films as Sony’s Men in Black (1997, based on a comic from Malibu) and New Line’s Spawn (1998, based on a comic from Image), helped further fuel the growing interest in comic books by Hollywood

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executives. And yet, few other comics-related films or TV series from either New Line or Time Warner made it onto screens, at least in the short term.

Phase Two: 2003–2008 A key turning point for the DC-Time Warner relationship came in the early 2000s, thereby spurring what we identify as a second phase, which ran through 2008. In terms of motion pictures, Marvel’s tremendous successes in licensing X-Men (to Fox, first film released in 2000) and Spider-Man (to Sony, first film released in 2002) compelled Time Warner to reassess its relationship with DC Comics. In mid-2003, the trades began reporting on this moment of reassessment, with Claude Brodesser (2003a) noting for Variety that DC had been identified by an investment bank as a ‘hidden asset’ that is ‘buried’ within Warner Bros. and ripe for further exploitation. Then-DC Comics President Paul Levitz was reported to be working with the executive vice president for business development and strategy of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Kevin Tsujihara, on getting ‘its films in gear quickly, lest the comic book cycle begin to wane’. A top priority for Warners, the article added, was hiring an individual akin to Marvel’s Avi Arad – a ‘Svengali’ who could manage creative relationships. Such an intermediary figure was hired by DC later in the year: Gregory Noveck transitioned from his role as a TV creative executive at Warners-based producer Joel Silver’s company to serve as senior vice president of creative affairs for DC Comics (Brodesser, 2003b). Noveck was charged with building relationships with the Hollywood creative community as well as identifying characters and properties that could be exploited for film and television series. Even before his arrival, Time Warner had placed several DC Comics projects into active development with different producers on the lot. These included Batman (later named Batman Begins [2005]) with Christopher Nolan attached and Charles Roven producing; Catwoman (2004) with Halle Berry attached and Denise Di Novi producing; Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves attached; Superman (which became Superman Returns [2006]) with Jon Peters producing; Shazam at New Line, with a script from William Goldman; and Wonder Woman, with Joel Silver producing. Joss Whedon became attached to Wonder Woman for a time, but his version never came to fruition and the leaked screenplay later became an embarrassment for Whedon for its sexism (Desta, 2018). In what proved to be an overly optimistic statement, Brodesser (2003a) noted that while ‘the bureaucracy of AOL Time Warner has been problematic in getting Warners-controlled DC characters set up as New Line films … [there are] signs of [the bureaucracy] ebbing a bit’. In fact, the bureaucracy did not ebb, and New Line did not make a Shazam movie – or any other DC superhero film – until

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the 2019 Shazam. Indeed, the Time Warner bureaucracy was regularly identified both by our interviewees and the trade press (e.g. Littleton, 2013; Masters, 2013) as a key force that has for decades impeded the successful exploitation of DC properties in other media. Especially pertinent here is that Time Warner relied on a structure designed to try to reproduce internally the efficiency of traditional external market transactions, wherein individual units of the company were competitively assessed against each other. One content division’s profit and loss statement was measured against another’s in a way that often incentivized these individual units to strike deals outside rather than within the company in order to make the most money (Littleton, 2013). Although such a structure arguably ensured that deals were made with the highest bidders (thus maximizing shortterm profit), it dramatically dis-incentivized collaboration between divisions. An additional institutional dynamic further constrained the exploitation of DC Comics properties for television throughout the 2000s. According to one interviewee, even as late as the 2010s, Warner Bros.’s film division maintained ‘blackout rights’ over all DC properties. What this meant is that the TV division had to receive explicit approval from the film division to move forward with any DC comics-related series. Such approval for anything beyond animated content was rarely forthcoming, as the film division wanted to reserve the right to develop any DC properties as theatrical features at any time. Although Warner Bros. Television had been able to proceed with both Smallville (2001–2011) and the short-lived Birds of Prey (2002–2003) on its sister broadcast channel of the time, The WB, it was not until 2012 that the next DC superhero made it on the air in a live-action television programme, with Arrow (2012–2020).2 This institutional relationship existed in spite of the fact that Smallville was one of The WB’s (and, as of 2006, its successor, The CW, co-owned with CBS) most successful shows in its initial broadcast, in syndication (on ABC Family in the United States) and through its global distribution (Kissell, 2006). It was also the case even though the television landscape (both broadcast and cable) was growing increasingly hospitable to nicheoriented genre television in general, and comic book properties more specifically (e.g. NBC’s Heroes [2006–2010], ABC Family’s The Middleman [2008], ABC’s No Ordinary Family [2011–2012]). Notably, the majority of superhero properties developed for television during the time were derived from original ideas (i.e. not based on existing IP such as DC Comics’s books). The tug-of-war between the film and TV divisions over DC properties garnered heightened attention from the trades again in 2008, when Warner Bros. Pictures Group head Jeff Robinov pulled the Warner Bros. Television-produced series The Graysons (about pre-Caped Crusader-era Robin) out of development at The CW. While Robinov reportedly had ‘originally given his blessing’ to

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the project, he changed his mind because he believed that the Warner Bros. film division needed to ‘rethink its DC Comics strategy’. The studio expressed concern that featuring its characters on television would diminish audience’s willingness to pay to see them in theatres (Schneider, 2008). This continued to be a perception held by both Marvel and DC in subsequent years, impacting which characters appeared in feature films versus on television. Not long before the film division halted development of The Graysons, reports began to circulate that Time Warner was (again) reassessing how DC functioned in relation to the larger organization. Warners and DC held a ‘superhero summit’ in July 2008, days before the release of the much-buzzed about Dark Knight. In a case of ‘déjà vu’, conversation at the summit purportedly focused on ‘complaints that the studio has been slow to exploit a potential treasure trove of franchises’ (Cohen, 2008). DC Comics artist Jim Lee was among those that met with Warners executives to find a way to move the company past what was perceived to be a ‘hodgepodge development process’ (Cohen, 2008; Kit, 2008). In addition, DC-based writers Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison and Marv Wolfman were said to have been hired to consult with the various producers adapting different DC properties into feature films (Kit, 2009). As was standard by this time, DC’s activities were compared by reporters to Marvel’s activities. Marvel, of course, had just begun to ‘strategically’ link its characters (and thereby build the MCU) with the release of its first Phase One films, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Throughout this second phase, Time Warner’s organizational structure continued to limit how different institutional stakeholders engaged with each other and exploited DC content. Building a DC shared universe – as Marvel was starting to do onscreen – was stymied in part because of how the studio continued to work with producers on its films. The studio, placing enormous value on its relationships with star producers and directors, employed a traditional film-oriented studio-production company model, wherein producers with deals with Warner Bros. competed for the right to shepherd productions. This was in contrast to the distinctive model then taking shape at Marvel, whereby in lieu of individual production companies feeding the studio pipeline, all production activities were managed by Feige’s team at Marvel Studios. Disney’s involvement included consulting on production activities and supporting the division’s licensing, merchandising, promotion and distribution efforts. Over the years, individual producers with deals on the Warners lot (e.g. Joel Silver, Charles Roven, Akiva Goldsman, Donald De Line) had gained control over the rights to develop different DC characters onscreen. Each of these producers, in turn, had hired their own screenwriters, directors and so forth – and had little incentive to collaborate with each other. Further, select filmmakers – including Christopher Nolan as well as rising star Zack Snyder, who was a

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hot property in the wake of the surprising performance of his film adaptation for Warner Bros. of Dark Horse Comics’s 300 – had been granted significant authority over the creative process, further limiting systematic corporate efforts at coordination in terms of style, storytelling or characterization. The result was that ‘while the projects ostensibly were being developed under one roof, many were spread out over a host of producers, each with different visions for how to approach each adaptation’ (Kit, 2009). Meanwhile, Gregory Noveck – the DC creative executive hired to oversee the advancement of the publisher’s IP for film and television adaptations – had met with only limited success. Warner Bros. executives ultimately held all the power for green lighting a DC-based project – and few were interested in doing so. Despite Noveck’s efforts, Daily Variety thus reported that ‘Warner Bros. has been unable to point to anyone at the studio with responsibility for overseeing the DC characters’. Though Warner Bros. President and COO Alan Horn and Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov were identified at the time as the ultimate decisionmakers for Warners, ‘they’re the decisionmakers for pretty much everything at the studio, and neither is in a position to dive into active development in the DC universe’ (Cohen, 2008).

Phase Three: 2009–2013 Roughly a year after the DC–Warners summit took place – and only a week after Disney announced its acquisition of Marvel – Time Warner made its most aggressive moves yet to rectify these ongoing structural, institutional and cultural problems: With the rebranding of DC Comics as DC Entertainment (DCE) in September 2009, the conglomerate parent made public its interest in more closely integrating and coordinating DC within the larger organization. This particular moment marks what we identify as the start of the third phase of DC– Time Warner relations, which spans from 2009 to 2013. This was an especially bumpy period, filled with lots of stops and starts, and with far more financial and popular disappointments than successes. Despite ongoing assurances that it was moving quickly to exploit DC’s rich library of characters, Warner Bros. continued to proceed haltingly. During this time frame, there seemed to be one DC-related embarrassment after another: films such as The Losers (2010), Jonah Hex (2010) and Green Lantern (2011) all bombed at the box office, while a David E. Kelley-produced TV adaptation of Wonder Woman failed to make it onto NBC in 2011 (though it did generate a great deal of embarrassing press coverage).3 Meanwhile, Warner Bros.’s prized Batman franchise came to a conclusion with The Dark Knight Rises, and director Nolan expressed little interest in continuing to adapt other DC properties (Lesnick, 2014). Even as Warners struggled to find

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a workable formula for its DC properties moving forward, Marvel launched a television division (in 2010, under Jeph Loeb) and released its first full team-up movie, The Avengers, to the largest domestic box office results of all time (‘The Avengers Smashes’, 2012). With this corporate restructuring, the previous point person for Time Warner on behalf of DC Comics, Paul Levitz, departed the company. Diane Nelson, the head of Time Warner’s direct-to-DVD-division, Warner Premiere, assumed the newly created position of president of DC Entertainment. Shortly after her appointment, Nelson declared her sizable ambitions for the newly named division: DC, she said, would now serve as the ‘creative engine that is proactively driving how we interpret these characters across the Warner Bros. business and figure out which characters and stories we want to bring to the customer vs. just being a reactive rights holder’ (Littleton, 2010). Nelson, however, directly reported to film executive Jeff Robinov – a fact signalling where the conglomerate’s priorities continued to reside as far as DC was concerned. Especially noteworthy in terms of Nelson’s appointment was her prior experience with brand management and marketing, as well as her earlier role in overseeing the Harry Potter franchise for Time Warner. With the Harry Potter film series soon to wind down (the last instalment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, would be released in 2012), Warner Bros. was desperate to launch other big film franchises. Many executives believed that DC Comics properties – as overseen by Nelson – could do the trick (Kilday, 2009; Graser, 2009). Supporting Nelson were several other individuals, including writer Geoff Johns, who was appointed chief creative officer of DC Entertainment. While Nelson managed much of the coordination between DC and Warners on the business and corporate strategy side, Johns was charged with coordinating the creative process across film, TV, games and comics. He was assisted in part by newly appointed DC Comics Co-Publishers, Dan DiDio and Jim Lee (Littleton, 2010). Noveck departed shortly after the creation of DCE. In contrast to prior top DC executives, Johns not only served a managerial function but also continued on in a hands-on creative role for various Time Warner divisions. This included writing episodes of both live-action and animated TV series (e.g. Smallville, Robot Chicken, The Flash), contributing to the DC Universe Online Game (the development of which was supervised by Jim Lee) and continuing to write for DC Comics (e.g. Aquaman, Justice League). He also claimed producer credits for several DC films, beginning with Green Lantern and continuing through Shazam (2019). Select individuals such as DCE-based Johns may have had more of an involvement in shaping DC-related properties than had been the case before, but, at least as far as the feature film division was concerned, Johns’s authority remained constrained due to the power exerted by

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numerous other prominent individuals, including Warner Bros. development and production executives, studio-based producers involved with particular projects (e.g. De Line, Silver), and directors such as Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder. As one interviewee observed for us of Johns’s relationship with those in Warner Bros.’s film division: Geoff was in a tough position, because [of ] his association with DC … in those scenarios you have a producer, you have a director, and then you have these screenwriters, and they all have their creative vision of what they want to do, and you’re making Geoff the hall monitor, you know? … He becomes a cop, [resorting to saying], ‘Well here’s what the continuity from the comics are … Can we change this villain to make this villain more like the villain from the comics? Aquaman wouldn’t do this, Wonder Woman wouldn’t do that.’ And so, it creates a creative antagonism where Geoff is constantly in a position of trying to say what they will do, as opposed to Feige [who has complete control] …

Thus, despite film studio head Robinov’s assurances in 2010 that Warners and DC together now were ‘creating a seamless, cohesive unit’ (McNary and Graser, 2010), such objectives were far from realized during his tenure at the company (or long after). Protestations to the contrary, the ‘fiefdoms’ across Time Warner and its filmed entertainment divisions remained in place. The existence of such fiefdoms – and the ongoing desire to eliminate them – were cited by several journalists (e.g. Littleton, 2013; Masters, 2013) as a key reason why Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes made the surprising choice of appointing then-president of Warner Bros. home entertainment division, Kevin Tsujihara, to be CEO of Warner Bros. instead of then-film division head, Jeff Robinov. The January 2013 appointment of Tsujihara as the replacement for Warner Bros. Chair and CEO Barry Meyer was part of a more substantive restructuring of Warner Bros. In relation to DC specifically, Diane Nelson initially shifted to reporting both to Tsujihara and Robinov, until the latter left the company a few months later, at which point she reported only to Tsujihara (Masters, 2013). This change in management represented what we see as leading to the fourth phase of the evolving DC–Warner Bros. relationship.

Phase Four: 2013–2018 This 2013–2018 period was the most dynamic and dramatic one yet in terms of the DC–Warners relationship. On a symbolic level, the greater integration of DC into Time Warner was most evident with the 2013 decision (discussed previously in this book’s introduction) to move the publishing division from New York to Time Warner’s Burbank location in 2015. Although roughly 250 employees from various DC divisions, including feature films, digital media, videogames and consumer products, already had moved from New York to LA

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in 2010, the decision to relocate the last 100 or so staff members to the West Coast resonated across both the comic book and filmed entertainment industries. Marvel’s publishing arm, notably, remained based in New York City. This decision to move the remaining DC staff to Los Angeles was presented as part of a larger series of actions taken by Warner Bros. to finally realize ‘the studio’s long-term plan to mine more material from the DC vault’ (Littleton, 2016b). Tsujihara long had expressed his belief that DC was an underexploited asset – note, for example, his aforementioned 2003 statement that the film division needed to move quickly to better take advantage of the publisher’s IP. And although Warner Bros. did not in fact move quickly to exploit DC assets in 2003 – far from it – the company at long last did so when Tsujihara became secondin-command at the conglomerate a decade later. Indeed, it perhaps moved too quickly at this time, especially in relation to its film ventures. Among the most important changes that Tsujihara made to the DC–Warners relationship was that he eliminated the longstanding blackout that the film division had imposed on Warner Bros. Television Group. No longer could the motion picture arm of the company prevent the television arm from exploiting DC characters for live-action series. As Daily Variety reported, ‘to the delight of many on the lot, the film division no longer calls the shots on the management of character-rich DC Entertainment vault’ (Rainey and Littleton, 2015). Even before Tsujihara had been named to his new position, initial moves had been made to finally exploit more DC characters on television. The first step in this direction came with the premiere of the Greg Berlanti-produced Arrow on The CW in the fall of 2012. Arrow represented the first of eight DC superherooriented series that Berlanti would produce through his Warner Bros.-based production company during the next eight years. Beyond these programmes – which would appear on either The CW or on the DC Universe streaming service when it launched in 2018 – Berlanti also was involved in producing three Archie-comics adaptations (The CW’s Riverdale [2017–], Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina [2018–2020] and The CW’s Katy Keene [2019–]) in conjunction with that publisher’s chief creative officer and series showrunner, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Berlanti began the 2019 TV season with a stunning eighteen series in production for six different outlets. His output included not only comics-related properties but also half-hour sitcoms (e.g. God Friended Me [2018–2020] on CBS) and crime dramas (e.g. Prodigal Son [2019–] on Fox) (Littleton, 2019). By the late 2010s, Berlanti had become one of Warner Bros.’s – and DC’s – most important assets. Even as early as 2015, one reporter observed that ‘Berlanti has become DC’s go-to producer for its comic book archive’ (Birnbaum, 2015). Indeed, Berlanti became so important to Warner Bros. Television that in

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2018, the company signed him to a (television-only) six-year production deal estimated to be worth more than $300 million.4 Even as Marvel continued to build out its cinematic universe – and DC struggled to do the same – Berlanti rapidly established his own television universe on The CW (which Washington Post’s Michael Cavna [2016] jokingly said should be called ‘The GB’). What was particularly striking about Berlanti’s ascent into this role was that he previously had been cast off of a DC feature film property. Hired in the mid-2000s to write and direct Green Lantern, Berlanti later was removed from the project, replaced by director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale [2006]). Though he remained one of four credited writers on the film (along with Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim), Berlanti had little input on its final form. It was due to this experience that, upon starting Arrow, his only request was that Warners ‘let us do it our way because I was so heartbroken’ by what happened with Green Lantern (Rose, 2016). Ironically, whereas the Ryan Reynolds-starring Green Lantern had been intended to jump-start DC’s efforts to emulate Marvel’s Iron Man in building a connected universe centred around second-tier characters, the Warner Bros. release proved to be such a massive failure that it set back the film division’s efforts for years. Meanwhile, with Arrow, Berlanti initiated a similar universebuilding process in a much less high-profile fashion. Of the experience, he observed: ‘I actually think that some of the stuff we get to do on the TV side is richer, deeper and more like the true comic books in the sense that you’re always able to explore a new thing the next week and the stories grow wider and wider’ (Rose, 2016). With this shared televisual universe, Berlanti sought to provide a more optimistic worldview than what was concurrently taking shape with DC’s evolving cinematic universe. Berlanti made no secret of his desire to maintain a more lighthearted tone on the TV series under his supervision; in one interview, for example, he noted that his creative team for The Flash (2014–) was guided by the following motto, which appeared on the wall of the writers’ room: ‘Heart, humor, spectacle’ (Rose, 2016). As one reporter noted, with The CW, Berlanti had become ‘not unlike a small-screen version of Marvel Studios mastermind Kevin Feige—an engaged overseer and creative guide of an entire interconnected universe … The CW is doing on TV what Disney has so brilliantly unfurled at the massive cinematic level’ (Cavna, 2016). While analogies to Feige might seem apt, the distinctions between Feige’s role and Berlanti’s are worth noting. Feige was an employee of Marvel (and thus, Disney) – a studio executive ultimately beholden to the directives of his corporate overseers. In contrast, Berlanti ran a production company that was contracted as a supplier to Warner Bros. Television. He could access DC (and Warners Bros. IP) and indeed was increasingly entrusted with it

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as an ‘uber-exec producer’ based on the lot (Littleton, 2016a). But Berlanti had the ability to produce other content elsewhere, especially since he remained a free agent for his film activities (e.g. Love, Simon for Fox [2018]). Berlanti, along with super-producers such as Chuck Lorre (The Big Bang Theory [CBS, 2007–2019]) and J.J. Abrams (Castle Rock [Hulu, 2018–2019]), were among the most important content providers for Warner Bros. Television at this time. This Time Warner division, in turn, thrived under the supervision of Warner Bros. Television Group CEO and Chief Content Officer Peter Roth, even as the film division – under the management of a series of different executives during the 2010s – consistently struggled. Importantly, along with another major media conglomerate Sony, Warner Bros. Television had a distinct industrial status that benefited both Berlanti and DC properties. Although Time Warner had shared ownership in broadcast network The CW with CBS since 2006, Warner Bros. Television was widely considered within the industry to be an ‘independent studio’ lacking a ‘sibling’ broadcast distributor (e.g. Barnes 2009). This was because of the network’s relatively modest advertising revenue with The CW as well as its reduced programming slate compared to the other vertically integrated broadcast networks. As a result of this industrial positioning, Warner Bros. TV (and its affiliated producers) increasingly supplied content to networks, channels, and platforms across the broadcast, cable and streaming ecosystem. This meant that Warner Bros. properties were less bound to conform to the demographic targeting and brand identities of broadcast networks held by other vertically integrated operations such as CBS, NBC, ABC and (until Disney’s 2019 acquisition) Fox. Due to its status as an independent studio, Warner Bros. TV was also especially well positioned to benefit from the ‘peak TV’ era of the 2010s. Seeking to establish brand identities (especially in the case of cable) and to grow their subscription base rapidly (in the case of streaming services like Netflix), such companies often turned to experienced, reliable content suppliers. Warner Bros. was more than willing to respond to the hunger of these new outlets for highproduction-value content. By 2019, Warner Bros. TV Group supplied roughly 60 original scripted series to various platforms (Goldberg, 2019a). Established IP, such as DC properties, was ever-more desired by distribution and aggregation services, as their pre-sold status and built-in brand awareness distinguished them from generic medical, detective, supernatural and legal series. This same logic drove Netflix’s decision in 2013 to contract with Marvel Television to produce a number of series focused on the ‘street-level’ exploits of second-tier characters (e.g. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.). During the latter half of the 2010s, in particular, Warner Bros. TV financed an ever-expanding number of DC-linked properties. These included not only

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the Berlanti-produced series but also The CW-based iZombie (2015–2019), Gotham on Fox (2014–2019), Preacher on AMC (2016–2019), Lucifer first on Fox, then  Netflix (2016–), Krypton on Syfy (2018–2019) and Pennyworth on Epix (2019–). Each of these DC-based shows was customized by their respective writer-producers to suit the desired audiences, brand identities and programming imperatives of the outlets on which they appeared. The DC-based CW shows, meanwhile, generated substantial sums for Warner Bros. TV through secondary licensing deals with services like Netflix and Hulu (Littleton, 2016b). Even as Warner Bros.’s exploitation of DC properties on TV met with an unanticipated level of popular and financial success, the company’s carefully planned film activities led to far more uneven results. In the post-Nolan era, Warners initially entrusted Zack Snyder with directing the movie versions of its biggest DC-related properties. Given the success that the studio had experienced with the dark, violent worldview provided by Nolan with his Batman trilogy, executives sought to sustain that tone moving forward. Man of Steel (2013), the first film released under Tsujihara’s leadership (though overseen by Robinov), thus retained the grittiness and cynicism – but not the intricate, Modernist narrative structures – of its most successful recent cinematic predecessors. The latest reboot of the Superman franchise proved to be a box office, if not critical, hit, grossing more than $650 million worldwide, according to tracking site Box Office Mojo. While Man of Steel’s performance proved insufficient for Robinov to retain his position (he departed shortly after its release), Zack Snyder benefited in the short-term, as he became entrusted with being a primary guiding force behind what came to be called the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). Whereas Warner Bros. had been criticized for years for its ‘painfully slow’ process of building out a slate of films tied to DC Comics characters, it now sought to hastily match Marvel in output. In 2014, the studio announced that, following the March 2016 release of the Snyder-directed Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, it would release nine additional untitled films between August 2016 and June 2020 (see Figure 5.1). Although the company was vague at this time on exactly which characters would appear – and when they would do so – this announcement was at first mostly received favourably by fans excited to finally see the Justice League onscreen. Initial enthusiasm started to wane, however, during the three-year gap between the release of Man of Steel and the next DC instalment, Batman vs. Superman. In the interim, reports continued to emerge of script troubles, creative conflicts and production difficulties on multiple projects: for instance, Suicide Squad (2016) underwent extensive reshoots, while director Michelle MacLaren was replaced by Patty Jenkins on Wonder Woman (2018) (Masters, 2015; McMillan, 2016). All the while, executives came and went, further contributing to instability in the creative process. Robinov was

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Figure 5.1  DC Extended Universe film release schedule, projected vs. actual. Source: Graser, 2014; Littleton, 2015

replaced by a team of executives comprised of Greg Silverman, Toby Emmerich and Sue Kroll in 2013; Silverman was subsequently pushed out and Emmerich elevated to head of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group in 2017 (McNary, 2013). Shortly after his promotion, Emmerich indicated the challenge he would face in managing DC as part of his portfolio, declaring in one interview that ‘I don’t speak comic’ (Lang, 2017). During the mid-2010s, Warner Bros. publicly continued to put its faith in Snyder, claiming he was the central visionary who would lead them to box office gold. As Silverman, then-president of Creative Development and Worldwide Production, tried to pitch it in 2016, ‘We have a great strategy for the DC films, which is to take these beloved characters and put them in the hands of master filmmakers and make sure they all coordinate with each other’ (Kit, 2016a). This position was intended to serve as a contrast to Marvel, where directors were clearly subordinated to Feige’s vision. Unfortunately, the press angle didn’t work. The historic struggles between executives and various producers played out across the films, with directors Snyder and Suicide Squad’s David Ayer, Warner Bros. executive Jon Berg, DC executives Nelson and Johns, and producer Roven all cited during this time as key voices weighing in on the DCEU’s creative process (Kilday and Kit, 2014). As reporter Kim Masters (2015) observed, ‘Exactly who is in charge of the DC Universe remains blurry’. A degree of clarity seemed to come after the first team film, Justice League (2017), underperformed only months after the standalone Wonder Woman

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emerged as the ‘first certified hit’ of the DCEU (Betancourt, 2017). Within weeks of the release of the critically reviled Justice League, Warner Bros. (yet again) announced changes to its executive ranks. Jon Berg, who most recently had been the direct liaison for DC films on behalf of Warner Bros., was out. In his place would be Walter Hamada, now occupying the newly created role of President of DC-based Film Production (Lang, 2018). Among Hamada’s tasks would be to ‘implement more quality control’ for DC’s onscreen efforts. This entailed continuing the shift already underway in presenting a lighter tone in many of the DC-affiliated films – a strategy that recently had met with favourable results with Wonder Woman (Fritz, 2016b). It also meant prioritizing films featuring individual heroes, such as Aquaman (2018) and Shazam (2019), over the teambuilding strategy employed by Marvel (e.g. Avengers: Infinity War [2018] and Avengers: Endgame [2019]). Such a reorientation was thought to better suit the traditional studio-production company model that Warner Bros. employed.

Phase 5?: 2019–Present Within six months, in what was described in Variety as a house cleaning at the executive level, Nelson had departed the company. Johns had shifted to becoming an independent producer (Rubin, 2018). Snyder was not slated to direct future DC projects. And fifteen years after Kevin Tsujihara and Paul Levitz had first publicly declared their hope of creating a position on the Warner Bros. side specifically supervising (only) the production of DC movies, someone (Hamada) finally occupied that role. The larger corporate tumult, however, was not over. Concurrent with these managerial changes with the Warners film division and DC, AT&T assumed control over Time Warner. With the arrival of this new ownership, DC Entertainment was returned to its pre-2009 name of DC Comics. As a sign of what DC might represent to its new corporate owners, the division was placed under the supervision of Pam Lifford, president of global brands and experiences (Doran, 2019). As this survey of the evolving relationship between DC and Warners has indicated, it is impossible to anticipate what may be next for the publisher, its properties or the hundreds of people in its employment. We might look, however, to Rob Salkowitz’s prediction, upon viewing the merged Warner Bros./ DC booth at Comic-Con in 2019, for one perspective on what’s next: ‘To the extent that DC matters at all in the company’s future, it’s as a source of owned IP for other media channels and as a lifestyle brand to serve as an ambassador to geek culture’ (Salkowitz, 2019). Indeed, a variety of actions taken both by AT&T and its newly renamed DC Comics subsidiary support this prediction. For instance, after several years during which its fate was in flux, DC’s ‘much admired and industry changing

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mature-themed imprint’, Vertigo Comics, finally was shut down in June 2019 (MacDonald, 2019a). Founded in 1993, Vertigo had become known for boosting the careers of a number of comics creatives (e.g. Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison) and for publishing a wide range of critically acclaimed and award-winning books (e.g. The Sandman, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, iZombie, Constantine). In the 2010s, however, Vertigo increasingly came to be perceived by DC Comics as too niche. Upon departing Time Warner in 2013, Vertigo’s founder and its executive editor for thirty years, Karen Berger, observed of the publisher that ‘I’ve found that they’re really more focused on the company-owned characters’. Both Marvel and DC, she added, now ‘are superhero companies owned by movie studios’ (Itzkoff, 2013). Although numerous Vertigo books, including those listed above, recently had been (or were in the process of being) transformed into television series with great success, DC – and, by extension, AT&T/WarnerMedia – was no longer interested either in launching new creator-owned books or in pursuing niche readerships with the type of original content that the imprint long had specialized in. In a summer 2019 interview with Milton Griepp (2019c), Co-Publisher Dan DiDio further reinforced this point, stating: The marketplace is very crowded and very noisy, to be very honest, and to fractionalize sales and separate ourselves, we lose the strength of our characters and our name recognition. We can spend a lot of time and energy creating new brands and identities, or we can spend all of our energy strengthening one overall marketing idea, which is DC, which is the most recognizable one of all. And from there, we’d be able to feed out into all these areas. I think we have a much stronger message if we go out and say that DC Comics or DC provides product and stories for everyone of all types, all cuts, and all slices.

Such a statement echoed remarks made by then-newly installed WarnerMedia CEO (and former AT&T Chief Strategy Officer) John Stankey, who led the charge in reorganizing the HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. divisions in the wake of the telecommunications company assuming control of the media conglomerate. In an environment in which all filmed entertainment content – including new DC-related series such as soon-to-premiere Batwoman (2019–) and the Berlanti-produced DC Universe streaming series Doom Patrol (2019–) – would be featured under the banner of the soon-to-launch HBO Max streaming service, sub-brands like Vertigo or targeted services like DC Universe seemed like less worthwhile investments (Hayes, 2019; Otterson, 2019b). Importantly, other publishers took advantage of the gap left in the market due to DC’s (and Marvel’s) ongoing shift to functioning primarily as superhero IP farms and lifestyle brands. This was perhaps most evident with Berger’s move to Dark Horse, where she launched the Berger Books imprint in 2018

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(Phegley, 2019). It wasn’t long after she made this move that an early Berger Books publication drew the interest of Hollywood: in summer 2019, basic cable channel AMC announced that it had optioned the rights to writer Christopher Cantwell (Halt and Catch Fire [2014–2017]) and artist Martin Morazzo’s graphic novel, She Could Fly, to be developed as a TV series (‘AMC Picks Up’, 2019). This was far from the only instance of original comics IP drawing Hollywood’s interest in the 2010s. In fact, over the course of the decade, a growing number of publishers, including not only Dark Horse but also IDW and BOOM! Studios, prioritized developing their comics IP as films and television series. In doing so, they played an increasingly active role in the development, financing, production and distribution processes involved in transforming their comics properties into filmed entertainment.

BEYOND MARVEL AND DC: HOLLYWOOD–COMICS PUBLISHER RELATIONSHIPS During the course of the 2000s, the heightened emphasis by both Marvel and DC on publishing comic books drawn from their evergreen library content (e.g. Preacher, Sandman) or linked to their long-established superhero characters (e.g. Stargirl, Harley Quinn) provided an opening for other, smaller comic book publishers to launch different types of comics-related IP. While DC and Marvel books continued to overshadow those of other publishers in terms of book sales in comic shops – the market share for these two publishers alone totalled close to 70 per cent in 2018 (Griepp, 2019b), for example – the landscape can be seen as somewhat more complex when other sales channels, including bookstores and book fairs, are accounted for. For example, according to sales data from BookScan, the so-called ‘book channel’, which is thought to be better geared towards selling graphic novels, was dominated in 2018 not by DC or Marvel – which together totalled roughly only 19 per cent of the market share – but rather by traditional book publishers such as Scholastic, Penguin Random House and Macmillan (Hibbs, 2019). Scholastic alone represented a whopping 33 per cent market share in this channel, due in large part to the immense appeal of children’s and young adult books created by such individuals as Dav Pilkey (Dog Man series), Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) and Ann M. Martin (The Baby-Sitters Club series). In addition to publishers specializing in superhero (DC, Marvel) and youthoriented (Scholastic, Penguin Random House) comics, there exists a subset of other publishers, including Image, BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse, IDW, Oni Press, Legendary and Dynamite. Each of these publishers has engaged with Hollywood in somewhat different ways. Their specific modes of interaction with

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Hollywood have varied depending on their corporate structures, individual goals and market positions, as well as the types of opportunities that each perceived to be available at particular moments in time. Yet while each of these publishers operates somewhat differently, it is possible to identify three primary ways that independent publishers have interacted with Hollywood in recent decades: as passive licensors, as active producers and as financier-studios.5 Each of these categories can be differentiated on the basis of creative agency and financial authority. First, passive licensors are publishers (e.g. Dynamite Entertainment) that have an ownership stake in underlying comics IP but exert no creative control over the process of adapting their content for film or television. In the process of agreeing to license rights to a Hollywood producer and/or financier, passive licensors might request a producing credit as well as some form of compensation. While Hollywood companies may appreciate the ability to retain complete creative control over the process of adapting the property, they might be disincentivized to strike a deal with a passive licensor if the price to license rights adds too much to the production budget. Second, active producers (e.g. Dark Horse, BOOM!, Skybound) are publishers with divisions that function as production companies. Many of the roles taken on by these companies – approving outlines and scripts, pitching projects to studios and networks, attaching talent, managing the general production process in terms of budgeting and scheduling, etc. – resemble those employed by most production companies, including the Warner Bros.-based production companies run by Joel Silver, Charles Roven and Donald De Line discussed above. For our purposes here, the key distinction in terms of production companies run by Silver, Roven and De Line and those run by publishers such as Dark Horse pertains to their relationship to the IP they develop. First, the Warners-based production companies typically license content from a variety of different IP holders whereas comics publishers draw mainly from the comics IP over which they have an ownership stake. Importantly, whether discussing Warner-Bros.-based production companies or the production companies run by comics publishers, the ability to move projects forward is constrained by network and studio executives. Active producers cannot proceed with the pre-production and production stages of a project until they receive the green light (and thus additional financial support) from motion picture studios, broadcast networks, cable channels, streaming services or other types of outside financiers. Yet they may strike various types of deals (e.g. first look, overall) with studios that offer them money to cover development expenses, overhead costs and so on (‘Production Pods’, 2003).

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As is illustrated below, comics publishers who operate as active producers face the same challenges advancing projects into production as do all other types of producers. Countless film and TV projects – including numerous comics-based projects developed by publishers – have been stuck in so-called ‘development hell’ for years, if not decades. BOOM!’s Mouse Guard and IDW’s Locke & Key are provided as examples below in order to show the ongoing challenges faced by independent publishers in adapting comics-based properties. Ultimately, until an outside financier – typically a studio (e.g., 20th Century Fox Television, Warner Bros.) and/or network-distributor (e.g. Fox Broadcasting, Hulu) – signals its approval via green light – and in turn releases the necessary funding – a project remains in limbo. Upon receiving a green light, these publishers are then beholden to the same creative input and financial supervision that any production company receives from a studio and/or network. In most instances, these production companies will receive producer fees (and possibly a share of the backend) in exchange for surrendering ownership rights to the adapted film or television property to the financier. The publishers, of course, also stand to benefit in terms of the bump in sales they receive to the books that they publish in the wake of the release of the film or television series. As one example of these first two models, the Portland-based publisher Oni Press (best known for Scott Pilgrim and Stumptown) had, for a period in the late 2000s and early 2010s, developed an LA-based production company called Closed on Mondays (Debruge, 2008). In so doing, it assumed the role of an active producer, employing staff that were explicitly involved in film and television development and production processes. Closed on Mondays even struck a first-look development deal with CBS TV Studios in 2010, though the arrangement did not ultimately lead to any projects being produced (Hibbard, 2010). Oni subsequently retrenched, shutting down Closed on Mondays and reverting primarily to the status of passive licensor, at least for a time. While Oni’s Hollywood activities might serve as a cautionary tale for publishers considering pursuing an active-producer strategy, Portland-based publisher Dark Horse’s longstanding successes dating back to the early 1990s via its film and TV production arm, Dark Horse Entertainment, demonstrates the strategy’s considerable potential (Gustines, 2006; Goldstein, 2011). Among the Hollywood projects with which Dark Horse Entertainment has been involved included The Mask (1994), Timecop (1994), the Hellboy movie franchise (2004, 2008, rebooted version in 2019) and The Umbrella Academy Netflix series (2019-). The third and final model, the financier-studio model, is relatively new to the comics industry. Indeed, calling it a model at this time may be an overstatement, as at present, it only has been practiced by publisher IDW. What is more, the

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degree to which it will be a viable model in the future remains in question, as the case study that follows reveals. However, this emergent model is worth discussing as it indicates the heightened ambition being demonstrated by comics publishers due to shifting industrial conditions. An interview we conducted with an executive at Legendary suggests that this company intends to move in a similar direction, and, as discussed in this chapter’s conclusion, other publishers appear poised to pursue a similar model as well. It is important to underscore that the contours of this model remain in flux. In addition, many of the specific details of IDW’s financing and licensing arrangements are impossible to discern, as that information is not publicly available. Nonetheless, we can point to the fundamental distinction between the financing-studio model and the active producer model: namely, the former model enables IDW to proceed with production without waiting for a green light from an outside studio (or other funding sources). Instead, by tapping into its conglomerate parent’s (and outside investors’) resources, taking advantage of tax incentives, pre-selling select rights (e.g. to certain international territories) and exploiting relatively new licensing and distribution possibilities, the financier-studio – mainly IDW, at least for now – has the ability to initiate production on its own. Unfortunately, the increased creative authority afforded by this model has been accompanied by a heightened degree of financial precarity. In the following section, we rely heavily on interviews with executives at BOOM! Studios and IDW in order to more precisely illustrate the mechanics of the independent comic book publisher–Hollywood relationship. Drawing upon conversations with individuals at these companies, we demonstrate how these publishers have differentiated themselves from DC and Marvel both in terms of business strategies and content published. This process of differentiation has been vital to these publishers’ survival in the comic book business as well as to their successful ventures in Hollywood. At the same time, these publishers have benefited from the ongoing media hype and industry enthusiasm attached to DC and Marvel’s filmed entertainment activities. Both BOOM! and IDW have been involved in a delicate dance, balancing their publishing objectives – which have remained the companies’ primary business – with their Hollywood ambitions. The trajectories taken by these two companies is remarkably different (and indeed, every independent publisher’s forays with Hollywood are distinctive and worthy of greater study). Yet together, these examples provide a better means both of understanding why comic books have come to be perceived as particularly valuable IP by Hollywood and what the limits of exploiting such IP might be. The examples provided below demonstrate the different ways that comics IP is being developed beyond the primarily

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superhero-oriented Marvel and DC. A survey of both BOOM! and IDW’s publishing and production endeavours also further sheds light on the dynamic relationship between Hollywood and the comic book industry in the 2010s.

The Active Producer: The Case of BOOM! Studios In contrast to the massive global multimedia conglomerates of which DC and Marvel are a part, BOOM! is a relatively small-scale operation. Launched in 2005 in Los Angeles, BOOM! was founded by an executive, Ross Richie, who had prior experience working in Hollywood as well as in the comic book industry. Under Richie’s tenure as CEO, the company grew during the next 15 years to include a few dozen employees. Over time, BOOM! developed several imprints, including its main BOOM! line, the KaBOOM! label geared for all-ages readers, BOOM! Max and Archaia, which it acquired in 2013. BOOM!, like most other prominent independent publishers, releases both licensed comics and original content. As discussed in Chapter Two, BOOM! employs a co-creator publishing model, which allows it to control the Hollywood development process of its original properties. Since its inception, BOOM! consistently has optioned the rights for its comics projects to film and television companies (e.g. Lumberjanes, Last Sons of America). Its first comic to be produced was the Universal-released action-crime film 2 Guns, which starred Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg (2013). Concurrent with the release of 2 Guns, CAA negotiated the aforementioned first-look film production deal for BOOM! Studios with Fox Film. UTA negotiated a first-look production deal for the publisher with 20th Century Fox Television the following year. Then, in 2017, Fox acquired a minority stake in BOOM! Studios (McNary, 2017). With this investment, Fox retained rights of first refusal for projects. However, BOOM! could take its projects elsewhere if Fox passed on developing them into films or TV series. As its Hollywood prospects grew, BOOM! hired several Hollywood creative executives to run its production division, all of whom were based on the Fox lot rather than at the company’s publishing office a few miles away. BOOM!’s production executives worked with its publishing executives to determine which projects to develop and pitch as film and TV projects, and at what time to do so (i.e. before a book came out, after a certain number of issues had been released, etc.). Although its arrangement with Fox initially seemed promising, the ongoing consolidation taking place in the media industries during the late 2010s led BOOM! – along with many other Hollywood production companies – to face challenging circumstances. For example, prior to its acquisition by Disney in March 2019, Fox executives had provided the financial and managerial support

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for BOOM! to move forward with the development of several of its comicsbased projects, including Lumberjanes and Mouse Guard. However, following the finalization of its acquisition, Disney closely scrutinized the slate of Fox projects currently in development. Among the first projects that Disney shut down was Mouse Guard, which Fox already had greenlit and was only two weeks away from beginning production as a $170-million-budgeted, CGI-heavy feature (Kit and Kilkenny, 2019). No doubt Disney’s own strength with its well-established family friendly IP (and its own mouse-themed entertainment brand) disincentivized it from moving forward with this project. Disney’s announcement that it was shelving Lumberjanes came later in the year, in tandem with CEO Robert Iger’s quarterly earnings call in August 2019 (Donnelly and Lang, 2019). During this call, Iger noted the poor box office performance of most of the Fox releases that it had inherited with the acquisition, including X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Stuber and The Art of Racing in the Rain. Having already closed its Fox 2000 division, which traded in mid-range films such as Hidden Figures (2016), Love, Simon (2018) and The Hate U Give (2018), Disney proceeded to halt most of the comic book, family and animated content that Fox had placed in active development. This included not only Lumberjanes but also the Fantastic-Four-affiliated Dr. Doom. Although Fox’s ownership stake in BOOM! was transferred to Disney as part of the larger Disney–Fox deal, the publisher retained the ability to shop its projects elsewhere – and proceeded to do so with both Mouse Guard and Lumberjanes, as well as other titles that Disney had passed on. In fact, BOOM’s larger development process – both in terms of comics and with the adaptation of these comics as filmed entertainment – did not substantively change following Disney’s acquisition of Fox. BOOM!’s method of developing new original content is worth detailing briefly here, as it further highlights what is distinctive about the independent publisher-Hollywood relationship, particularly in terms of the active producer model. For independent publishers such as BOOM!, publishing activities remain central to their businesses. While these days independent publishers almost always keep in mind the prospect of an original comic book being developed into a film or television series, according to those that we interviewed, the initial development process must be oriented towards making the story first work for the comics medium. We often heard from publishing executives how fans will know when a comic is only being made to be sold to Hollywood, and the book is likely to fail as a result. As these executives told us, the appeal of comics for film and TV has derived largely from the ability for comics to effectively create original storyworlds in a visual format. Comics’ tendency to rely on many conventions

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favoured by Hollywood – including goal-oriented protagonists and mythic frameworks – made them especially easy for adapting into filmed entertainment if and when the time came. More than one interviewee emphasized that, even though comics had built-in Hollywood appeal due to their visual attributes, treating them as pre-published storyboards for film or television was a fool’s errand. This was the case because the formal story-telling conventions for film and television were typically quite different from that of comics. Treating them as storyboards was also unnecessary, they told us, because Hollywood creative talent could draw what was useful from the comics IP and alter the rest as needed. Far more important to independent publishers than imagining a specific comics property’s potential for Hollywood at the outset was ensuring that it adhered to a particular publishing format. Most independent publishers have come to favour the trade paperback model, which consists of between four and six issues of twenty-two pages each. As one publisher told us, with this model, they focus on publishing ‘a complete story that is open ended’. Should a book prove successful—which for most graphic novels, means that it sells between 10,000 and 20,000 copies – then a second instalment can be commissioned. Given these relatively low sales numbers, profit margins obviously are slim. Publishers must constantly be mindful of how much creators cost (including writers, pencillers, inkers, letterers and colourists), what their overhead costs are and how many issues they can sell at a given price point (usually between $12.99 and $19.99 for graphic novels). Although many of these books might be released as single issues to comic book stores first, in most cases, the bulk of the publisher’s revenue comes from the graphic novel sales. As noted earlier, most independent publishers steer clear of superhero stories both because DC and Marvel dominate this market with books, but also because Hollywood already is overwhelmed with such properties. That said, different companies will focus more heavily on targeting particular demographic groups or publishing certain genres. For instance, IDW has more heavily targeted younger audiences with its books. Legendary Comics increasingly has geared its content towards LGBTQ and youthful readers with an eye towards exploiting this IP for film and TV in the future. And Avatar Press, looking towards the horror film market, has focused on adult, heterosexual male audiences interested in explicit and violent material. Although most publishers told us that the book market is foremost in their minds, their publishing model proves equally effective for pitching projects to Hollywood. A four-to-six issue graphic novel can easily be presented to development executives and talent representatives as a complete, tangible and fully visualized story. According to BOOM! CEO Ross Richie, when a story is

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‘execution dependent’ – meaning its marketability is premised on the quality of its visual storytelling – as 2 Guns was, having a complete graphic novel available to circulate helps to better pique executives’ interest. This is in contrast to more ‘high concept’ stories, which can be easily imagined as marketable movies or TV series based on a succinct pitch. An example here is Mech Cadet Yu, which Richie framed as ‘Harry Potter with robots’. With a project like that, BOOM! executives might begin pitching the project as soon as – and even sometimes before – the first issue was released. In general, a limited number of individuals from the publishing division of a company will work with the executives in their production arm to develop a Hollywood strategy for a particular book. In the case of BOOM!, Richie personally green lights each comic book and then, working with his editorial team, sees it through to publication. Typically at some point between the publication of the first issue and the graphic novel version, the publishing arm shares the comic with the members of their production company and discusses whether the project is viable as a film or television series. If they see potential for the project in Hollywood, they will then figure out the appropriate time and form in which to present it. From this point on, much of the process resembles the Hollywood development and IP adaptation process more generally: potential producing partners will be secured, talent agencies and management companies will help them attach writers (and later, other talent), and projects will be pitched to network and studio executives in pursuit of development and production financing. Indicative of the appeal of comics IP to Hollywood, most publisher-cum-active producers have struck first-look deals. As noted in Chapter 2, BOOM! has its ties to Fox and Netflix. Skybound has a first-look deal with Universal for features and Amazon for television (Low, 2019), while Dark Horse has a first-look deal with Netflix for both film and television (Salkowitz, 2019a). Though initially functioning as an active producer as well, since 2013, IDW has taken a somewhat distinctive – and much more aggressive – approach to transforming its comics properties into filmed entertainment.

From Active Producer to Financier-Studio: The Case of IDW Entertainment Both as a comic book publisher and in terms of its relationship to Hollywood, IDW’s trajectory has been distinct from BOOM!’s. The publisher was co-founded in 1999 by Ted Adams, Alex Garner, Kris Oprisko and Robbie Robbins (Cronin, 2018). Although none of these individuals worked for IDW by the late 2010s, a key source of continuity during much of this time has been Chris Ryall, who began as editor-in-chief before moving into the position of

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president, publisher and chief creative officer. The company got its start when it assumed control over WildStorm Comics’s creative services division (WildStorm was forced to sell that division when it was acquired by DC Comics).6 With the stable base of income provided by this division, IDW soon began to diversify, moving into publishing both original and licensed comics. As with BOOM!, IDW maintained a co-creator model. It, too, also sought to license its comics IP to Hollywood within its first few years of operation. IDW’s first major success was the feature 30 Days of Night (2007), which Columbia Pictures adapted from the horror comic of the same name. Notably, Dark Horse Entertainment served as a partner on the film’s production. During much of the 2000s, talent agency CAA as well as management company Circle of Confusion represented IDW in its Hollywood dealings. Although like BOOM!, IDW initially functioned as an active producer, developing its own film and television shows with the goal of procuring outside financing from a studio or network, it had only limited success with these early efforts. According to Ryall, IDW executives grew especially discouraged due to their experiences attempting to launch a TV version of their popular horror comic, Locke & Key – written and co-owned by acclaimed horror fiction writer (and son of Stephen King), Joe Hill. The book was among the company’s best-sellers, and IDW had high hopes for it as a series. Pilots were produced first for the Fox broadcast network in the early 2010s and then for Hulu a few years later. Neither was picked up to become a series. These frustrations, compounded by the general feeling that IDW’s production arm was subject to the changing whims of studio and network executives, led to a shift in strategy by the publisher. In 2013, in an effort to overcome what Ryall described as ‘an endless cycle of options and renewing options and things falling out of option’, IDW Entertainment launched. As noted above, the financing model that the publisher developed was markedly different from that employed by other comic book publishers, and was designed to help it move forward with production without relying on a studio or network partner. Now IDW was able to take much more direct control over its own fate, functioning in effect as a financier-studio. As it touted on its website, IDW Entertainment (IDWE) was designed to focus on ‘developing, financing, producing and distributing entertainment content ranging from series and features to interactive experiences and digital content from sister company IDW Publishing’s extensive IP catalogue of comic books and graphic novels, as well as from third party content’ (‘About IDWE’, n.d.) IDW’s Hollywood-oriented division, like BOOM!’s, was comprised of a much smaller staff than its publishing division. By the late 2010s, more than seventy individuals worked for IDW’s publishing arm, which remained based

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in San Diego. IDW Entertainment, meanwhile, employed roughly a dozen individuals at an office in Los Angeles. (The number of Hollywood-based staff members at BOOM!’s production arm totalled about a half-dozen.) In addition to the head of the entertainment division, Lydia Antonini, staff included a handful of development executives charged with mining library content as filmed entertainment projects, as well as talent relations executives seeking to attach the right creatives to work on these adaptations. A limited number of executives on the publishing side, including Ryall as well as select marketing executives, consulted regularly with the entertainment division. More so than BOOM!, IDW emphasized its desire to aggressively exploit the library of more than 200 titles over which it held at least partial ownership. By moving into self-financing, IDW was able to assert more direct control over the development, production and distribution of its content. Subsequently the publisher also shifted from working with CAA and Circle of Confusion as representatives to signing with Endeavor Content, the financing and production division of talent agency-cum-media conglomerate, WME (Littleton, 2018b). IDW’s ability to move into financing was facilitated by specific changes that had taken place in terms of its corporate structure during the late 2000s. In 2007, IDW was acquired by publicly held multinational telecommunications company, IDT, as part of that conglomerate’s efforts to procure content for distribution on the internet and mobile devices (‘IDT Internet’, 2007). In 2009, IDT spun off IDW as part of CTM Media Holdings; CTM represented a major distributor of tourist information in North America (‘IDT Corporation’, 2009). By 2015, IDW and its various divisions, which came to include IDW Games and the San Diego Comic Art Gallery, took precedence over the tourism-oriented ventures, and its parent company changed the name to reflect this shift (‘CTM Media Holdings’, 2015). As a publicly held division within a larger integrated media company, IDW had the capacity to finance filmed entertainment projects on its own – and it proceeded to do so. Whereas BOOM! drew on financial support from its deals with Fox and later Netflix to support its development costs, IDW absorbed many of these costs on its own. In addition, IDW provided funding to support the establishment and maintenance of writers’ rooms, and to cover the cost of shooting a pilot if necessary. Other producing partners might be brought in by IDW depending on interest and need. Importantly, IDW’s business model was made possible by larger changes taking place in the television industry specifically and the media industries more generally. It moved into self-financing at the precise moment when cable channels and streaming services were pursuing more original content. Initially, IDW pursued cable distribution for the first run of its programmes in the United States, such as science fiction detective series Dirk

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Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (BBC American, 2016–2017) and supernatural Western Wynonna Earp (Syfy, 2016–). However, as IDW soon learned, more platforms – and more potential buyers – might mean that the publisher could get more projects made than those companies opting for the active producer model. But the ambitious new model did not translate into greater stability. Indeed, the financing model that IDW began to employ in 2013 proved equally precarious, albeit in different ways, than the active producer model that BOOM! continued to favour with limited success. The case of Wynonna Earp is especially instructive, both in terms of its implications for evolving TV financing models and in terms of IDW’s status as a hybrid studio-publisher. With Wynonna Earp, IDW employed a traditional deficit financing model, whereby the licensor (in this case, Syfy in the United States) covered roughly two-thirds of IDW’s production costs. Although this deficit financing model meant that IDW would take a loss on the initial run of the series, the potential upside was high, since it also meant that the company would capture much of the profits from licensing to linear outlets (broadcast and cable) in other territories as well as from licensing for secondary distribution windows (in particular, streaming.) Initially, the arrangement with Syfy seemed promising due to a deal that IDW struck with Netflix for second-window distribution rights in select territories. IDW further benefited both in terms of infrastructure and budgeting through its partnership with Canadian production company, Seven24 Films. This partner company handled the physical production process and benefited from tax incentives available by shooting and hiring staff located in Canada. Such an arrangement helped IDW maintain its small staff and reduce its budget via production subsidies. The allure of robust incentive programmes along with the proliferation of distribution outlets eager for fresh content may have led new financier-studios such as IDW to anticipate a financial windfall was forthcoming. Wynonna Earp’s actual production history, however, both highlights the risks inherent in the self-financing model employed by IDW and suggests why other publishers have not moved in a similar direction. The company’s ability to fund the show’s production was dependent on it receiving both the first-run licensing fee from licensor Syfy as well as the Netflix money for its second window of distribution. Unfortunately, although Syfy had renewed the programme for a fourth and fifth season, Netflix opted to stop licensing the show after its third season. This contributed to larger challenges faced by IDW’s entertainment division, and to a long delay in moving forward with production on the fourth season. Because Wynonna Earp had developed a dedicated fan following (sometimes referred to as ‘Earpers’), the company’s financial challenges received a particularly high level of public scrutiny on social media, at comics conventions and in the trade press

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(e.g. ‘IDW Media Holdings’, 2018). Critic Maureen Ryan (2019a), for example, reported in Vulture that the show was ‘in limbo’ and that, ‘according to a public filing posted in late December, the company has had to take out some hefty loans, and the filing cites a “need for a cash infusion”’. Ultimately, IDW was able to revive Wynonna Earp when both US distributor Syfy and Canadian distributor Space agreed to provide additional financial support. In addition, international sales agency Cineflix partnered with IDW as a co-producer on the programme and assumed control over licensing the rights for different territories moving forward (Ryan, 2019b; Goldberg, 2019b). IDW tried to put a positive spin on its challenging circumstances by noting that it anticipated more upside for the property in the future due in part to growing demand for Earp-related merchandise. Nonetheless, the experience with Wynonna Earp proved chastening. IDW’s larger managerial and financial struggles became public concurrent with the Earp drama; reports circulated of high levels of debt, executive turnover and even a prominent investor calling for the company to be sold (Ryan, 2019b). Although a cash infusion of $23 million through a private stock offering provided some relief, IDW acknowledged that its financing model would be altered, with it pivoting ‘to production models that require less capital and minimize downside risk’ (‘IDW Media Reports’, 2019). More specifically, in lieu of the deficit financing model that IDW had employed with its cable productions and that long had been standard with linear television distribution, the company moved towards licensing arrangements that offered more financial stability at the outset. For example, IDW took advantage of the cost-plus financing model preferred by Netflix (Lotz, 2014: 95–130). With this model, the streaming service usually covered production costs and provided a 30 per cent premium on top. In exchange for this premium, Netflix retained licensing rights – meaning that a financier-studio, such as IDW, could not generate additional revenue by licensing the programme elsewhere (Castillo, 2018). Such a deal proved preferable to the publisher in the wake of the Wynonna Earp drama. In fact, the next three IDW comic book adaptations, V-Wars (2019), October Faction (2020) and Locke & Key (2020–), were produced for Netflix. With these series moving forward at the time of our interview in 2019, IDW’s Ryall perceived the company to be on its way to reaching the targeted four-tosix series they had the infrastructure and staff available to support at that time. While IDW might have sacrificed potential backend monies, it gained greater financial security. With the Netflix arrangement, IDW finally could proceed with production on projects that long had stalled in development. While not a financier-studio in the way it initially imagined it would be, IDW retained

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significant creative control over the series, and stood to increase the sales of its books and associated merchandise upon the release of the shows. In taking on the greater risk involved with financing its own projects, IDW soon found itself in a situation all too common in the history of Hollywood studios. The voracious demand for content from a range of old and new outlets had led IDW to believe – due in part to the types of IP it held – that its circumstances would be different from those companies that preceded it. Although IDW may have had deeper pockets than most of its independent publisher competitors – one journalist estimated the conglomerate’s full value at between $239 and $599 million as of early 2019 (ADW, 2019) – it nonetheless lacked the scale of an AT&T/WarnerMedia or a Disney. The advantages that the company possessed in terms of its deep library of comics IP were offset by its lack of infrastructure, limited revenue streams and comparatively small operational scale. IDW’s struggles highlight the challenges faced in the contemporary media landscape not only by comics publishers, but by mid-sized content companies more generally.

CONCLUSION: NEW MODELS, NEW PUBLISHERS? As comics IP has become increasingly appealing – at least, in theory – to Hollywood production companies, studios and networks, a growing number of such properties have dominated screens both large and small. This has not meant, however, that the road from comics to film and TV is an easy one for any of the creatives, executives or companies involved. This is the case regardless of whether we are talking about a corporate comics publisher that is part of an integrated media conglomerate (DC Comics) or an active producer (BOOM! Studios) or a financier-studio (IDW). Comic book properties may have several factors working in their favour in Hollywood, including functioning as readymade visualizations of characters and storyworlds; possessing ties to marketable genres such as science fiction, fantasy, action and horror; arriving with built-in fanbases and audience awareness as pre-sold properties; and delivering useful preliminary sales data through Nielsen’s BookScan and Diamond Comic Distributors. But even with these advantages, comics IP must still face nervous executives, a volatile marketplace and layers of bureaucracy at major media conglomerates. Certainly the development process works differently for each of these types of companies: DC properties and characters, as desirable as they have come to be for their parent company – indeed, because they have become so desirable to their parent company – are subject to perpetual creative struggles between comics-affiliated executives, producers, studio and network executives, creatives,

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licensing and branding executives and more. With the financial stakes so high, and so much of WarnerMedia’s revenue reliant on the success of comics-related IP, the threshold for risk-taking often is low, especially with motion pictures. There is a tremendous (and growing) investment not only in protecting how the characters are presented onscreen, but also in ensuring that their appearances in comics adhere to the conglomerate’s larger brand vision. BOOM!, in its role as an active producer, has experienced contemporary Hollywood’s low threshold for risk-taking in a different way. Despite the agency the company has to develop different types of stories and characters in print, gaining buy-in in the form of a green light to move into production from Hollywood studio and network financiers has proven to be more challenging. Meanwhile, in its evolution from active producer to financier, IDW has discovered that increased creative autonomy has come with greater financial precarity. While to an extent it has benefited from the rise of peak TV and the accompanying heightened demand for original series, IDW also has learned the hard way what happens when a licensor-distributor that you have counted on to make your numbers work (e.g. Netflix) no longer wants your content. Despite the challenges that each of the publishers has faced – and that each of their models poses – there continues to be growing interest in developing comics properties for exploitation by Hollywood. This is the case not only with the publishers mentioned here, but also with a new wave of publishers that launched in the mid-to-late 2010s. For example, in 2015, Marvel editor Mike Marts joined with editor, writer and publisher Joe Pruitt to launch AfterShock Comics in collaboration with an eBay and Facebook executive (Michael Richter), a reality TV producer ( Jon Kramer) and a story editor from Endeavor (Lee Kramer) (Busch, 2015). In 2018, tech industry executive Salvatore Simeone and film and television writer, producer and director, Tze Chun, launched TKO Studios with the promise of experimenting with new formats and fresh modes of distribution (e.g. binge releasing; selling directly to readers through their website) (Gustines 2018). And in 2019, former Marvel COO and Publisher Bill Jemas and former Marvel Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso launched Artists, Writers & Artisans (AWA) with more than $12 million in initial funding, including a $5 million investment from James Murdoch (Gustines, 2019; Mullin, 2019). Each of these new publishers has highlighted their affiliations to top names in comics as well as their desire to be more than just a comic book publisher. As Hollywood Reporter’s Graeme McMillan (2019) observed, each ‘conveyed in code’ their ambition to be ‘the next Marvel’. How exactly they might accomplish such an objective – and whether the comics sector or Hollywood would be able to accommodate even more entrants of their type – remains to be seen.

6 From Dental Floss to Dental Tape: The Strange Case of Digital Comics Distribution At the 2011 annual meeting of ComicsPRO, a trade organization for comic book retailers, DC Comics Co-Publisher Jim Lee introduced DC’s approach to digital distribution by way of an analogy. ‘This is the digital market’, Lee pronounced, holding up in one hand a piece of dental floss. ‘And this’, he added, producing in the other a standard letter-size sheet of paper, ‘is the print market’ (Hibbs, 2011). Lee’s striking analogy – which juxtaposed the raw material of comic book production with a disposable hygiene product – accurately conveyed the comparatively tiny share of digital comic sales at the time: less than 1.25 per cent in the most recent calendar year.1 The analogy’s primary purpose, however, was not descriptive but persuasive. Given that digital comics represent no more than a sliver of the market, Lee’s analogy implied, brick-and-mortar retailers had no reason to view them as a threat. After all, who in their right mind would be afraid of dental floss? Whether Lee had created the analogy himself or merely been its messenger, his dental floss analogy made a strong impression on retailers and reporters and effectively shifted trade conversation about digital comic book distribution away from the zero-sum logic that had previously dominated it.2 Despite its success as a piece of public relations showmanship, however, the analogy seemed to some commentators misguided – or, worse, disingenuous; for as DC well knew, market data suggested that digital comics would not remain dental floss for long. Between 2009 and 2010, digital had grown by triple-digit percentage points (700 per cent in 2010 based on $8 million in sales), a trend that showed every sign of continuing at the start of 2011 (which ultimately finished with 212.5 per cent growth based on $25 million in sales). Over the same two years, the print market had actually contracted, with sales in 2010 showing a 6.6 per cent decrease from 2009. Though as a share of the total comic book market, digital appeared likely to remain relatively tiny in 2011, its growth rate was nevertheless remarkable considering that this growth had been achieved with extremely minimal investment by publishers. Despite digital’s limited market penetration in early 2011 – and contra Jim Lee – the rise of digital comics thus seemed at the time inevitable; what

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remained unknown was how this rise would affect the comics industry as a whole. DC, riffing on its original analogy, argued that the future heralded growth in both physical and digital: the physical would grow from a lettersized sheet of paper to a legal-sized sheet while the digital expanded from dental floss to dental tape (Rogers, 2011; MacDonald, 2011). Many direct market retailers, however, were worried. ‘Once one of my customers buys a comic online’, explained retailer Paul Howley to a reporter for The Boston Globe, ‘then DC Comics has them forever. They don’t need me … This is, in the long run, cutting our own throat’ (Dyer, 2011). Such concerns were often supported by pointing at the damage digital distribution had inflicted on other media industries. As a commenter on Brian Hibbs’s popular industry blog Savage Critic observed, ‘Jim Lee holing [sic] up that piece of floss feels an awful lot like the music executives in 2000 grinning about how this digital thing will never be a real business’ (Ryan H., 2011). Some stakeholders, however, welcomed the disruption digital would bring to the industry. Comic book creator and digital evangelist Mark Waid hailed digital comics as the future of the industry, proclaiming in a divisive speech at the 2010 ICv2 conference that digital ‘cannot be held hostage by two thousand retailers’ (Hudson, 2010). By early 2012, Waid (2012) was even prophesying that digital comics, through the incorporation of animation and new forms of panel and caption sequencing, would change the very form of the comics medium itself. Many other creators agreed with him, with some – such as DC Comics writers Scott Beatty and Don Kramer – predicting that digital would become comics’ dominant delivery system by 2021 (Rogers, 2010). To the surprise of almost everyone, however, by mid-2019 digital distribution had only had a relatively minimal impact on the comics industry as a whole. Though digital comics sales increased by 300 per cent between 2011 and 2018, this increase did not come at the expense of print, which grew 55.5 per cent over the same period (and approximately 265 per cent since 2001). In fact, after seven years of committed engagement by publishers, digital amounted to only 9.1 per cent of total industry sales in 2018 (a mere 5 per cent increase from 2011). Such data might at first appear to support the claims of DC’s former executive VP of sales, marketing and business development, John Rood, who began arguing in 2011 that digital comics were a complement rather than a substitute for print (‘DC Execs’, 2011; Hibbs, 2012). A more granular look at the growth rates, however, suggests a more complex relationship. As Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show, digital comics’ yearly growth rate began a precipitous decline in 2013 and in 2015 actually became negative (meaning sales had shrunk). In the three years since then, digital comics sales have remained relatively static, both in terms of growth and as their share of the total comic book market. Stranger still, this

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Figure 6.1  Total comics sales in millions, 2009–2018.

Figure 6.2  Year-on-year comics sales growth, 2011–2018.

lacklustre performance occurred in the context of the strongest print sales the industry had seen in at least two decades. This is not the performance one would expect of a complementary product. Indeed, the relationship between print and digital comics over the past five years seems to defy standard models of how digital-era distribution is supposed to work. Were digital comics bringing in new customers for the industry but quickly converting them to print? Or was print by some strange reversal actually cannibalizing digital? Whatever the relationship is (and perhaps it is better to

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speak of multiple relationships during the period in question), the comic book industry’s experience with digital has so far been nothing like that of Hollywood, which has seen physical product sales massively eroded by piracy, electronic sellthrough, and new kinds of rental and subscription services. Unlike Hollywood, which had – in response to digital – undergone radical changes over the last decade in the way it develops and sells products (and to whom), the comics industry’s basic industrial practices remained much the same at the end of 2019 as they had been before the introduction of digital comics distribution options. In what follows, we provide a detailed history of the comic book industry’s engagement with digital distribution during the first two decades of the twentyfirst century so as to demonstrate how the industry has managed to uniquely minimize the more radically disruptive or transformative effects of what Curtin, Holt and Sanson (2014) have called ‘the distribution revolution’. Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, the path digital distribution has taken in the comics industry differs substantially from that of digital distribution in Hollywood. The chapter is split into two parts, with the first offering a history of digital comics distribution and the second highlighting two key issues that have shaped the evolution of the digital comics market. In assembling this history we have relied upon trade articles, business journalism, hands-on interaction with software applications and – as noted in our book’s introduction – extensive interviews with comic book creators, publishers, retailers and business entrepreneurs. Although our primary goals with this chapter are to provide (1) a detailed analysis of the history of digital distribution in the comic book industry and (2) an explanation for why digital distribution in that industry differs so greatly from digital distribution in the film and television industries, we also see this chapter as having much to offer scholars studying digital distribution in other media industries – not only film and television, but also music, print publishing and videogames – or as a transindustrial practice. We have thus woven comparisons between the comics industry and other media industries throughout the chapter. As in our opening analysis of stakeholder responses to DC’s ‘dental floss’ analogy, for the most part these comparisons are not our own, but were relayed by industrial actors themselves. Beyond their scholarly use value, the comparisons help to explain why different actors within the comics industry responded as they did to the distribution possibilities of the internet – and how they construed these possibilities in the first place. We have also treated the findings of this chapter – specifically the divergent routes digital distribution has taken in the comics industry and Hollywood – as an opportunity to offer some reflections on the importance form can play in industrial practice, and how media industries scholarship might profitably attend to it in the future. So as not to bore readers uninterested in meta-level

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discussions of scholarly practice, however, we have confined these reflections to the chapter’s conclusion.

PART 1: A HISTORY OF DIGITAL COMICS DISTRIBUTION Like the concept of physical distribution, which groups together a variety of business practices that sometimes have little in common, digital distribution – even when confined to a single industry such as the comic book industry – can only with some simplification be assigned a single, unified history. In the context of the comics industry, for example, digital distribution has encompassed multiple distribution pathways, such as the web page, the mobile phone, the e-reader and the tablet, each of which has given rise to new kinds of industrial actors and distinct industrial practices. In bringing these multiple pathways together into a single history, as we do below, our intention is not to discount these differences, but rather to explain how – over a period of less than two decades – this diversity of practices gave way to an industrial structure dominated by only a single distributor and distribution practice. Likewise, the evolutionary framework we employ to structure our history – which ascribes to the digital market distinct phases within a singular ‘lifecycle’ – has been chosen, in spite of the sometimes overly neat histories it can produce, for the clarity it provides in demonstrating how the current market structure came to be and why it looks so different from that of digital markets in other media industries.

Pre-2007: The Experimental or Pre-Market Phase Though digital comics began appearing on the internet shortly after the launch of the first graphical web browser in 1993, a functional digital comics market did not exist until at least 2008. During these early years, digital comics lacked a consumer base, a reliable revenue model and a stable product identity. They also attracted very little investment capital, from either pre-existing comics industry players or venture capitalists. For these reasons, we call this phase of the market the experimental or pre-market phase. As those terms suggest, comics companies, creators and entrepreneurs during this period approached digital comics in a largely exploratory manner, testing the format’s technological possibilities while also experimenting with a variety of monetization models – or, as most of the leading print publishers did, staying out of digital comics entirely and observing the experiments of others. The earliest form of digital comics – the webcomic – was derived not from the medium of the comic book, but rather from that of the syndicated newspaper comic strip or cartoon. Like these newspaper forms, the webcomic’s key feature was its brevity. Consisting of as a little as only one panel and at most one or

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two horizontal strips of block-shaped panels, the webcomic was constructed to occupy a single webpage and be consumed quickly, with new instalments in a series posted daily or weekly. This brevity positioned the webcomic as an ideal medium for the early web, which – because of bandwidth limitations and the rudimentariness of early web-based programming languages – could only employ images sparingly. Some of the very earliest webcomics – which T. Campbell (2006) dates to 1993 – originated on student-run websites affiliated with college newspapers and humour magazines, though many also appeared on personal websites belonging to the comics’ creators. At this early stage, there existed no revenue model, nor did there seem to be any real urgency in producing one. Webcomics were instead primarily seen as a means of expression and exposure for their creators, or as a way of attracting audiences to amateur or student-run (and thus usually non-monetized) websites. As the web’s user base expanded, access speeds increased and programming languages became more capable, however, the webcomic began to attract entrepreneurs and newspaper strip syndicates, who saw in the format a new and as yet untapped source of revenue. Though a few individual webcomics, such as Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik’s Penny Arcade (begun in 1998) relied solely on advertising placement to generate revenue, most of the first wave of webcomic publishers employed a variety of monetization schemes, including subscription fees, microtransactions (often labelled ‘donations’), premium access offers and online merchandise sales (Boxer, 2005; Marshall, 2010). Joey Manley’s Modern Tales, for example, which launched in 2002 with webcomics by multiple creators (eventually including award-winning cartoonists Gene Yang and James Kochalka), offered recent strips for free, but charged $2.95 per month and $29.95 per year for access to the site’s entire archive (MacDonald, 2005). King Features Syndicate – distributors of Popeye, Blondie and Family Circus to newspapers – relied similarly upon subscription fees to generate revenue from its webcomics site, DailyINK.com (launched in late 2004), which provided access to the most recent six months of all its newspaper strips for an annual fee of $15 (Walker, 2005). Keenspot Entertainment – to provide one more example – employed a mixed model for its two sites, Keenspot.com (which was carefully curated by the company) and Keenspace.com (which was open to all creators): the company’s revenue – half of which was allocated to artists based on page views – came from a combination of advertising, merchandise sales and subscriptions to an ad-free version of the site. Despite the variety of monetization experiments, webcomics struggled to generate substantial revenue for the majority of publishers, syndicates and creators. In 2002 – two years after its launch – Modern Tales, for example, was

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generating a miniscule $5900 gross revenue per month from its two thousand monthly subscribers (Walker, 2005). Though Keenspot did slightly better – grossing a total of $285,000 in 2004 – after revenue sharing with the creators and other costs, the remaining take, as co-CEO Chris Crosby explained to a Washington Post columnist, was insufficient to generate a ‘livable wage’ for the company’s four owner-managers (Walker, 2005). The occasional self-published hit notwithstanding, most creator-run webcomics sites faced similar challenges. As arts and culture critic Sarah Boxer (2005) noted sardonically in an excoriating 2005 New York Times survey of the medium, ‘[O]ther artists just don’t make any money at all. They’re always begging for funds through PayPal’. By the end of the decade, many webcomics sites had accordingly shut down. Of those that remained, nearly all had abandoned efforts to directly monetize their content. Many continued to generate some revenue through advertising sales (often via Google AdWords), but most reconceived of the medium as primarily a marketing tool rather than a revenue generator. As Lisa Wilson, senior VP of syndication for United Media (distributor of Nancy, Marmaduke and Tarzan to newspapers), explained in a 2008 interview with The New York Times, the syndicate would henceforth approach its webcomics site Comics.com (which had previously been subscription-based) as a means to ‘build a fanbase’ and promote licensed merchandise rather than a source of revenue (Berlin, 2008). Because this book focuses on the comic book industry as distinguished from the comic strip industry, the development of the webcomic may at first appear tangential to the history of digital comic book distribution. As Heidi MacDonald (2005) once observed in Publisher’s Weekly, the webcomic has been regularly seen as ‘esoteric to the mainstream comics world, let alone to the book publishing world’. Though such a view is valid, we believe the webcomic not only served as an important precursor to the digital comic book, but that it also directly influenced future approaches to digital distribution by comic book publishers and creators. It did so – as we will demonstrate in what follows – by adumbrating two questions that subsequent digital comic book publishers would wrestle with. First, what is the proper form for digital comics, given the limitations and affordances of computer software and hardware? And second, how should digital comics be monetized? In contrast to the flurry of experiments conducted by comic strip artists, internet startups and newspaper syndicates, most comic book publishers stayed out of digital comics entirely during the first two decades of the World Wide Web. Neither DC Comics, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, nor a host of smaller independent companies attempted to develop a digital comic book. Though there are many reasons for their lack of participation – not least of

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which is the fact that their attention was absorbed by a convulsing print market – one cause worth highlighting here is the relative lack of importance of digital piracy at this time. Like ripped MP3s, which by the late 1990s could be illegally downloaded through newsgroups, internet Relay Chat and peer-to-peer sites such as Napster, illegal scans of comic books were readily available from similar online sources by at least the early 2000s. Unlike the record labels, however, which saw digital piracy as the cause of rapidly falling album sales, comic book companies remained relatively unconcerned over pirated books and – especially in these early years – took virtually no action (neither lawsuits nor the kind of ‘consumer awareness’ advertising campaigns eventually employed by the Motion Picture Association of America [see McDonald, 2016]) to squelch their production and circulation (Simmons, 2010b: 280–283; Hauman, 2007). We will explore the reasons for this difference in the next section of this chapter, but for now we raise it merely to suggest an important reason for publishers’ slow entry into the digital market. Whereas record labels, television networks and film studios had felt pressured to move quickly into digital distribution in order to provide legal alternatives to file sharing, comic book publishers felt no such pressure (Knopper, 2009: 170–177; Kompare, 2010; Cunningham et al., 2010). Not all print comic book publishers stayed out of digital distribution, however. Two companies, in particular, rejected the industry’s prevailing indifference to digital comics and made experimental forays into web-based distribution during this time. First among them – in terms of both date of entry and market share – was Marvel Comics, which began producing and distributing digital comics in 1996. Christened ‘CyberComics’, Marvel’s first digital books borrowed heavily from the form and release schedule of webcomics. Published weekly, initially via America Online and then through Marvel’s Marvelzone website, these short comics deployed the restricted horizontal or single-panel layouts of webcomics within a ‘multi-page’ model reminiscent of print books. Read via a browser or AOL window running Shockwave (an early competitor to Flash Player) they also included rudimentary animation, sound effects and music. Seemingly more an experiment than part of a coherent digital strategy, CyberComics appear to have lacked both a revenue model and, as comics scholar Sean Kleefeld (2011) has suggested, a clear marketing function. By 2001, Marvel had replaced the labour-intensive CyberComics with a new, simpler format – sans music and sound effects, but maintaining limited animations – that the publisher called (in a cringe-worthy play on words) ‘DotComics’. Though still employing the panel layouts of webcomics, Dot-Comics were not original creations for the web but were rather reformatted adaptations of popular print comic series such as Ultimate Spider-Man, X-Men and Blade. Part of a revamped digital strategy that included a wholesale redesign of the

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publisher’s website, Marvel’s second attempt at digital comics was more carefully synced with the company’s other business ventures, both in print and in film and product licensing, and was designed to build brand awareness and produce new print customers. As Bill Rosemann, Marvel’s marketing communications manager, told comics journalist Todd Allen in 2002, ‘As with any industry, if you believe you have a quality product, the best way to bring in consumers is to give them a taste for free’. Though Marvel would eventually retire the label ‘DotComics’ in 2005, the publisher continued to rely upon the free, browser-based digital comic format the label had once named until 2007. The other comic book publisher to experiment with digital distribution during this early market phase was CrossGen, an unusual late-90s startup initially funded via founder Mark Alessi’s large holding of stock in former US presidential candidate Ross Perot’s energy company, Perot Systems (Kit, 2016b). Unreservedly embracing the web as a key component of its publishing strategy, CrossGen launched its Comics on the Web website in March 2002. Like Marvel’s Dot-Comics, CrossGen’s Comics on the Web utilized Flash Player to provide ‘enhanced’ browser-based reading; unlike Marvel, however, the enhancements did not add motion or sound to the comics but rather provided DVD-like extras, such as multiple languages, pre-colour versions and removable word balloons (so as to better highlight the original art) (‘CrossGen Schedules’, 2002). Though requiring readers to buy a subscription for access to most of the site’s digital catalogue, the fee was set so low – at $1 a month – that the site was clearly not intended as a revenue generator; instead, CrossGen sought to use the site to build awareness for its properties (many of which were being courted by film and television producers), develop an online fan community and market its print books. Whether or not the strategy succeeded is difficult to determine, largely because CrossGen itself had such a short life: in mid-2004, after the Perot Systems stock with which Alessi had been funding the company tanked, the comic book start-up went bankrupt and quickly shut down. Though the expensive digital venture no doubt contributed to the company’s poor balance sheet, had external market conditions not wiped out Alessi’s investment funds, Comics on the Web may eventually have helped transform CrossGen into a profitable transmedia brand.

2008–2011: The Market-Making Phase Despite more than ten years of experimentation and development, the digital comic book had little to recommend itself to publishers or entrepreneurs at the close of 2007. Some saw it as an experimental or niche medium that could, at best, serve as a loss leader or promotional tool. Most, however, simply ignored

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it altogether, focusing instead on print books and the growing graphic novel market. That this perspective abruptly changed in 2008 is due almost entirely to a pair of radical innovations occurring within the personal computing industry: specifically, the release of Apple’s iPhone in mid-2007 and the subsequent launch of Apple’s App Store in mid-2008. Though the iPhone’s hardware – which included one of the first fully responsive colour touch screens – opened up new possibilities for software design, the more important innovation was the new form of business platform the phone employed (Amit and Zott, 2012: 37–39; Montgomerie and Roscoe, 2013). Coupling a now near-ubiquitous servicemodel approach to the phone’s operating system (which involved free updates and universal compatibility across Apple’s mobile devices) with an OS-integrated App Store open to third-party developers but relying on a single payment method, the iPhone seemed to herald the beginning of a new mass market for software and digital media. Accordingly, despite its small screen – which rendered it illsuited for reading comics – the iPhone prompted entrepreneurs and, eventually, publishers themselves to reconsider the viability of digital comics as a medium and to undertake a myriad of new digital ventures (both for the phone and for the PC) in the years immediately following the smart phone’s release.3 Because of the lead role taken by start-ups or ‘third-parties’ (as one publisher we spoke with referred to them), the vast majority of these ventures focused heavily – if not exclusively – on directly monetizing digital comics instead of attempting to employ them for marketing purposes. In almost all cases, the mode of direct monetization employed was that of electronic sell-through (EST), the sales model most closely resembling that of physical retail. In EST, digital comics are assigned individual retail prices and consumers granted ‘ownership’ of the books they choose to purchase. Sometimes ownership involves transfer of the digital file directly to the consumer; other times, ownership constitutes unlimited access rights to the comic through the retailer’s website and/or app. The near universal preference for EST over subscription pricing, bundling or other methods of monetization was in part a result of the piecemeal approach to catalogue development that early startups were forced to take as they worked out separate – and often contractually distinct – deals with different publishers over time.4 EST’s ubiquity, however, also appears to have been a product of mimetic isomorphism, as start-ups attempted to replicate the interface design and business models of iTunes and the App Store itself. Despite the importance of the iPhone as a distribution and sales platform, many of the digital comics services that launched in the years immediately following its release remained heavily dependent upon PC- and browser-based architecture. Class Comics, the first comic book publisher to sell digital comics directly to consumers, did so in late 2008, for example, in the form of portable

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document files (PDFs) protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology that could be downloaded upon purchase from the publisher’s own website. Similarly, Longbox, which began development in 2008 and frequently billed itself as the ‘iTunes of comic books’, launched in 2010 as a PC-only app – with mobile versions promised for the future (Manning, 2009). Apple’s content restrictions, such as the banning of nudity, were partly to blame for this reliance upon PCs and websites, as was the 30 per cent cut Apple took from all in-app mobile sales, which put substantial pressure on retailers’ margins. Of equal importance, however, were the limitations of the early iPhone as a comic book reading device, as well as the challenges its small screen and virtual keyboard posed for browsing digital comic book catalogues and managing one’s purchases. The PC, in other words, was at this time a better platform for reading comics than the iPhone, even though it was a substantially worse platform for selling them. For these reasons, even companies aiming primarily for the iPhone market devoted significant resources to PC- and browser-based applications. When Graphic.ly, for instance, debuted in April 2010, it not only offered iOS applications, but also a PC application – with the latter providing consumers more robust and sophisticated modes of interacting with both other consumers and the comics content itself. Likewise, ComiXology debuted its EST service in mid-2009 as both an iPhone app and a linked web-based store and viewer. Though most publishers and retailers thus tried to keep one foot in smartphones and one in PCs, DC Comics, for its initial venture into digital comics in late 2007, rejected the idea of the smartphone market entirely. DC’s Zuda, the only major non-monetized digital comics service during what we call the market-making phase, was a flash-based website that harkened back to early webcomic sites such as Keenspace. DC accepted short, original submissions for the site, which were published in instalments and voted upon by readers each month, with the winning title (and sometimes other popular titles chosen by Zuda’s editors) awarded year-long contracts and occasionally print publishing deals (with DC taking half-ownership of the properties). Like earlier webcomics, comics on the Zuda site were limited to a few small panels – what DC described in a press release as ‘a series of 4:3 aspect ratio screens’ – so that the panels would fit fully upon a PC monitor or laptop screen (DC Comics, 2007). An interesting experiment in web-based publishing that seems to have been highly valued by creators who participated in it, Zuda’s dependence on browser-based viewing and Flash Player made it remarkably ill-suited for the app-based environments of mobile devices. Zuda was also surprisingly unrepresentative of DC’s traditional brand of superhero comics, which remained conspicuously absent from digital devices until Zuda was shut down in mid-2010.

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Though DC’s early aversion to the iPhone can hardly be seen as representative of the broader comic book industry’s approach to the platform, publishers and third parties did tend to move slowly in launching digital comic apps and bringing catalogues online. At the launch of the App Store in July 2008 only one comics app was available: Clickwheel’s Comic Reader, which – besides Clickwheel’s own original, self-published webcomics – offered titles from only one print publisher, 2000AD (Kean, 2008). Two more companies released apps in 2008: Uclick and iVerse Media, with each comic they offered produced as an individual app (so that, for example, Bone issue 1 had its own self-titled app from Uclick) (Sorrel, 2008; Wert, 2009). Both companies’ catalogues were extremely limited at launch, with iVerse, for example, offering only a total of ten titles, all from independent publishers such as Ardden Entertainment and Bluewater Productions (‘iVerse Comics’, 2008). Two more apps debuted in 2009: Opsis Distribution’s Panelfly and ComiXology’s Comics by ComiXology. Both had slick, attractive interfaces (with Panelfly’s frequently singled out by reviewers for its pleasing design) and provided special panel-navigation technology to help viewers read their comics on the iPhone’s small screen. Both apps’ catalogues were, at first, limited to fare by independent publishers (though ComiXology’s featured content from some of the better-known indies, such as Image and Zenescope). In October 2009, however, Marvel licensed selected titles from its back catalogue for sale on both apps, as well as on iVerse Comics (Parkin, 2009). As for publisher-branded apps, only perennially unhip Archie Comics had its own app (developed by iVerse) before 2010 (‘Archie Comics’, 2009). That comic book publishers and entrepreneurs moved slowly onto the iPhone platform was largely the result of publisher scepticism that the iPhone could actually support an EST comics market. Though the iPhone offered a reliable distribution pathway and a simple, safe payment system, it was – as noted earlier – poorly suited to actually displaying comics. The low pricing structure third-party retailers preferred (.99 to $1.99 per comic) – modelled after that of iTunes so as to encourage impulse purchases but also in part as compensation to consumers for the poor viewing experience – also risked devaluing publishers’ content. Wary of undercutting print, publishers were thus especially cautious in their content licensing, offering up a highly limited and sometimes randomseeming selection of older issues that had already exhausted their profit potential in the print market. As a result, digital comics on the iPhone seemed to appeal to consumers primarily as novelty goods; though offering early smart phone adopters a new way of experimenting with their phones, digital comics proved too limited in their availability and too poor a reading experience to prompt and sustain much demand. As product reviewer Charlie Sorrel (2008) succinctly put

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it in the title to a 2008 review for Wired magazine of the first iPhone comic apps, ‘Comic Books on the iPhone? No Thanks’. What finally changed publishers and consumers’ minds about digital comics was another technological innovation occurring in the computer industry: the unveiling in January 2010 – three months before its official consumer release – of Apple’s mobile tablet, the iPad. Not only did the iPad’s larger screen (5.82x7.75 inches) ensure that all content displayed upon it would be more easily readable than content on a smartphone, the screen’s dimensions also made the tablet closer in aspect ratio to an actual printed comic book (6.75x10.25 inches) than was either the iPhone or the contemporary laptop monitor (‘iPad’, 2016). Tech and publishing journalists, as well as many comic creators and publishers, hailed the device as a comics reader, with Jason Snell (2010) in Macworld suggesting the iPad would be ‘[p]erfect for digital comics’ and Nicole Lee (2010) for CNET casting it as the potential ‘savior of digital comics’. With one of the major hindrances to a viable digital comics market apparently solved, retailers and publishers piled onto the iPad soon after it had launched. Within a year of the device’s release, eighteen digital comics apps were available for the iPad (many – though not all – with corresponding iPhone apps as well). Four of these were run by third-party startups and offered a diverse assortment of back catalogue comics from multiple publishers. Each of these also employed its own form of panel-reading technology, such as ComiXology’s ‘Guided View’, which enabled readers to zoom in on panels and progress through them in sequence. Most of the other apps were publisher-branded, meaning their catalogue was limited to titles belonging to a specific publisher. In some cases, such as Dark Horse Digital and the Yen Press App, these publisher-branded apps were built from the ground up and run directly by the publisher; most, however, relied upon one of the third-party retailers for the technological backend. In a few cases, a single publisher operated multiple apps, with some devoted to specific properties (such as IDW’s Transformers app and Image Comics’s Walking Dead app). See Table 6.1 for a full list of these apps. For the most part, publishers tried to make their content as widely available as possible. Marvel Comics’s titles, for example, could be purchased on all four third-party retailer apps as well as its own (which was built by ComiXology). The one major exception was DC Comics, whose titles could only be purchased on ComiXology or its own app (also built by ComiXology). Though this plethora of apps was testament to companies’ enthusiasm for the iPad and the increased viability they believed the platform afforded digital comics, from a consumer perspective the growth in apps resulted in a market that was excessively confusing and difficult to navigate. The unpredictability

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Table 6.1  iPad comic book apps available in April 2011. App Name

Release Date

Industrial Position Back-end Provider

Archie Comics

April 2010

Publisher

Comics+ by iVerse

April 2010

Third-party retailer n/a

Comics by ComiXology

April 2010

Third-party retailer n/a

GI Joe Comics

April 2010

Publisher (IDW)

Graphic.Ly

April 2010

Third-party retailer n/a

IDW Comics

April 2010

Publisher

iVerse

Marvel Comics

April 2010

Publisher

ComiXology

Panelfly

April 2010

Third-party retailer n/a

Star Trek Comics

April 2010

Publisher (IDW)

iVerse

Transformers Comics

April 2010

Publisher (IDW)

iVerse

BOOM! Comics

June 2010

Publisher

ComiXology

DC Comics

June 2010

Publisher

ComiXology

Image Comics

August 2010

Publisher

ComiXology

Walking Dead Comics

October 2010

Publisher (Image)

ComiXology

Viz Manga

November 2010

Publisher

Proprietary

Templesmith Comics

January 2011

Publisher (IDW)

iVerse

Yen Press

January 2011

Publisher

Proprietary

Dark Horse Comics

April 2011

Publisher

Proprietary

iVerse

iVerse

of offerings and the dependence upon low-demand back catalogue did little to attract committed comic fans, while the proliferation of retailer-specific licensing deals and publisher- and property-branded apps made search and discovery difficult for new or casual comics readers. The large number of apps also created problems with interoperability, as titles purchased through one app would (usually) not be accessible on other apps that carried them. When building a library via EST, customers were thus forced to consider not just the

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content they wished to purchase, but also the differences between apps, as well as the likelihood that the apps they preferred would still be operating in the near future. For publishers, the benefit of their titles being widely available was offset by the inefficiencies involved with managing multiple retail platforms, which simultaneously multiplied and fragmented marketing venues and sometimes led to seemingly incoherent distribution strategies. Marvel was often singled out for criticism in this regard, for not only did the publisher sell its titles on a slew of incompatible iOS apps, it also promoted other digital comics initiatives such as Marvel Comics for the PlayStation Portable (via the Sony Digital Comics store), Marvel Comics on Chrome and the web-based Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited. As comics journalist David Brothers (2011) observed in an early2011 piece for Comics Alliance, ‘Marvel’s digital comics strategy is fractured, to put it nicely’. The solution to at least one of these problems – the limited catalogue offerings – had been recognized by the industry since the launch of the iPhone: the adoption of what media industries call a ‘day-and-date’ release schedule. Under a ‘day-anddate’ schedule, new digital comics would be made available for purchase on the same day as their print counterparts – traditionally Wednesday of each week. The strategy posed no technological hurdles and, indeed, DC, Marvel and Image all experimented with it for a handful of titles in 2010. Publishers remained hesitant to embrace day-and-date fully, however, for fear of upsetting print retailers and hurting the direct market, which accounted for the vast majority of publishers’ sales. These fears were not unfounded, as the vast majority of direct market retailers were small businesses operating on slim margins. Were day-and-date to lead to significant cannibalization of new comic book or graphic novel sales, the direct market – at least as it was currently structured – might collapse. DC’s announcement at the end of May 2011 that they would adopt dayand-date publishing for all their titles beginning in September thus represented a substantial shake-up of the digital comics market (Hyde, 2011).5 It also represented something of a volte-face for DC, which had hitherto been much slower and more conservative in its approach to digital distribution than its major competitor, Marvel. To forestall objections by retailers, DC employed a two-part strategy. The first part of it, begun months earlier with Lee’s ‘dental floss’ analogy, involved underplaying the potential size and value of the digital market. The second involved spotlighting digital tools that would support print retailers and create infrastructural links between the digital and direct markets. Some of these tools actually pre-existed day-and-date, such as ComiXology’s Digital Storefront Affiliate Program (joined by DC in March 2011), which allowed print retailers to sell select comics via ComiXology through the retailers’ own websites in exchange for a small percentage of the sale (‘Comixology to

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Launch’, 2011). For print stores offering a dedicated DC Entertainment Digital Storefront (carrying only DC products), the retailer’s take was a much higher 30 per cent (DC Comics, 2017). DC also reaffirmed their promise to include in their digital comics advertisements for print products, with the aim – as Executive VP Rood had explained in 2010 – of ‘get[ting] people into stores, which will always be the thrust of our digital strategy, closing the loop’ (Phegley, 2010). Despite DC’s assurances – as already described in this chapter’s introduction – many retailers remained worried; nevertheless, with DC’s turn to day-and-date publishing the floodgate had opened and other publishers quickly followed suit. By the following May, virtually every publisher had embraced day-and-date publishing – nearly all via ComiXology – with Marvel one of the last to make the switch in May 2012. Though many publishers subsequently took part in ComiXology’s Digital Storefront Affiliate Program, only Marvel would take additional efforts to link digital to print and the direct market. The Marvel AR initiative, launched in April 2012, provided DVD-like extras to consumers of print comics while the publisher’s ‘free digital copy’ promotion, begun in June 2012 and still in effect at the time this chapter was written (despite a brief cessation in early 2017), rewarded print consumers of the company’s higherpriced titles with free digital versions.

2012–2014: The Consolidation Phase After day-and-date publishing had been universalized, the digital comics market began to take off, growing from approximately $8 million in sales in 2010 to $70 million in 2012 (‘Digital Comics’, 2013). With new, often heavily marketed releases appearing at predictable weekly intervals, digital comics apps began to facilitate regular (rather than impulse) consumption and attract – even perhaps help produce – comic book fans. At the same time, the market began to consolidate – for which reason we label the years 2012–2014 the consolidation phase. Longbox ceased operating in 2011, Graphic.ly stopped retailing comics in 2012 and Panelfly tried shifting its focus to transmedia, eventually calling it quits in 2014. Although all three of these companies were ultimately done in by different forces – Longbox, for instance, had difficulty raising investment funds after the US stock market collapse in 2009, while Panelfly found that many of the corporations that owned intellectual property were not yet ready to move into serious transmedia product development – the difficulties they faced were aggravated by the increasing dominance of ComiXology in the digital retailer space.6 By 2012, ComiXology had not only become the iPad’s most successful digital comics app; it had also become one of the most successful apps of any kind available on Apple’s device. Starting in September 2011 – after the adoption

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of day-and-date release schedules by DC – ComiXology began to appear repeatedly in the lead position on Apple’s lists of top-grossing apps (Price, 2011). This success continued in 2012, as ComiXology finished the year as the iPad’s third highest-grossing app (Langshaw, 2012). Digital comics retailers and publishers rarely released sales data, but industry analyst ICv2 (2012) estimated in mid-2012 that an astronomical 75 per cent of the previous year’s digital comic market (in terms of sales revenue) had belonged to ComiXology. ComiXology’s success was in part a result of its well-designed app, responsive customer service and early integration into print markets via its Pull List software, which helped retailers and consumers simplify the often cumbersome process of print ordering. Of much greater importance, however, was its special relationships with the leading comics publishers, Marvel and DC. ComiXology’s exclusive distribution deal with DC provided the digital retailer with an extraordinary early advantage over rivals – so much so that journalist David Brothers (2010), reviewing the deal for Comics Alliance, concluded that ‘with the addition of DC Comics, ComiXology wins almost by default’. Although Marvel had originally chosen to make its titles more widely available than DC, Marvel had depended upon ComiXology for back-end app support for its own app when it launched in 2010. With the transition to day-and-date publishing and free digital comics, however, the increased costs and complex logistical demands involved with supporting multiple digital retailers led Marvel to go exclusive with ComiXology as well. With exclusive distribution deals with the two market leaders – who, in the print market, together accounted for over 74 per cent of unit sales and 66 per cent of dollars in 2012 – ComiXology had thus effectively achieved what journalist Tom Cheredar (2012) called ‘digital comics dominance’. That ComiXology had emerged by 2012 as the dominant digital comics retailer guaranteed nothing about its future prospects, however, for 2012 also saw a new class of competitor enter the market: the highly capitalized, public retail/tech firm, as represented by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.7 Not only did these companies – each with their own eBook platform – bring with them a potentially much larger market for digital comics, they also seemed to herald a more competitive market, as comic book publishers now found it much more difficult to play favourites through the kind of exclusivity deals they had forced upon the much smaller and less powerful app companies. When, for example, Amazon, as part of the promotional buildup to the release of its new colour Kindle, the Kindle Fire, announced an exclusive deal with DC Comics to sell digital versions of DC’s graphic novels through its Kindle bookstore, print retailer Barnes & Noble (which sold its own colour eReader, the Nook) retaliated by pulling print copies of DC’s books off its physical retail stores’ shelves (DC Comics, 2011; Rosenblatt, 2011). Print retailer Books-A-Million quickly

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followed suit, despite not having a tablet or app of its own, stating that the company ‘will not promote titles in our stores’ showrooms if publishers choose to pursue these exclusive arrangements that create an uneven playing field in the marketplace’ (Reid, 2011). DC, eager to avoid losing position in the much more valuable print market, eventually relented and by the end of 2012 graphic novels from DC – along with those from Marvel and a handful of smaller publishers – were available on all three major eBook platforms: Kindle, Nook and iBooks. Because digital comics apps depended at this time primarily upon single-issue sales released on a day-and-date schedule, the eBook platforms, which focused on graphic novels, constituted – at least at first – only indirect competitors in the digital comics market.8 The presence of these platforms, however, signalled to would-be entrepreneurs that the market had matured; undercapitalized startups would henceforth have to compete with retail/tech giants in addition to other startups. The number of new startups accordingly fell after 2011. The two most noteworthy, Thrillbent and Madefire, attempted to distinguish themselves by re-engaging with the question of format: how, formally speaking, should a digital comic book function? Although Thrillbent and Madefire, both of which debuted in mid-2012, frequently marketed themselves as the future of comics (so successfully, it would seem, that one of the entrepreneurs we interviewed characterized Thrillbent’s founder Mark Waid as a ‘futurist’), both companies’ approaches to digital comics were in essence returns to earlier, browser-based experiments with the medium. At launch, Thrillbent offered an assortment of original comic book series, released sporadically in the form of twenty-‘page’ ‘chapters’, which consumers could access for free via a web browser. Each page consisted of a single panel (or sometimes even just a text box), so that visually Thrillbent’s comics resembled a cross between early webcomic sites and Marvel’s abandoned Dot-Comics, with ‘page-turns’ producing fades, panel superimpositions and other effects that lent added structure to the temporality of comics reading. Though this panel-bypanel approach was seemingly custom-made for the World Wide Web – which Waid sometimes suggested was a singularly ‘democratic’ space for digital comics – Thrillbent maintained it when the company eventually launched its iPad app in early 2014 (Hudson, 2010). Madefire, though forgoing the web as a distribution platform, relied similarly upon an earlier web-based comic format: Marvel’s CyberComics. Like those early, Shockwave-based multimedia webcomics, the original comic books Madefire offered via its iOS apps incorporated music, sound effects, ‘camera’ movements and limited animation so as – according to Madefire’s website – ‘to transform a once static medium into an interactive experience that unfolds dynamically on mobile devices’ (Madefire, n.d.).

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Whether or not the ‘dynamic’ digital comic has potential as a consumer product is, of course, still an open question, but the fact that publishers and developers almost universally rejected an earlier version of such a product suggests that the dynamic digital comic suffers serious limitations as a business venture. Like Marvel’s CyberComics, which were expensive and complicated to produce, dynamic digital comics entail increased costs, longer production times and more complex logistics than the simple scans of print comics that constitute traditional, ‘static’ digital comics. Worse still, the very qualities that make dynamic digital comics aesthetically interesting also restrict their market: whereas a static comic book can be sold in print and in digital – through physical retailers and online – dynamic digital comics can only be sold digitally, thus seriously limiting the revenue they are capable of generating. To be fair, relatively minimal implementation of formal dynamism might obviate some of these problems, but as the degree of dynamism decreases so too likely would the justification for implementing it at all. Regardless of the degree of dynamism involved, however, the contemporary dynamic digital comic ultimately raises the same question regarding monetization with which earlier webcomic sites struggled: How do you monetize such comics so as to generate a sufficient profit to justify producing them in the first place? Thrillbent’s struggles to find a workable monetization model are telling in this regard. After licensing its comics for sale on ComiXology and iVerse, then selling DRM-free PDF copies via its own webpage, Thrillbent moved to a subscription model ($3.99/month) which it then scrapped two years later; since then, the service has barely been updated and new title announcements have ceased.

Mid-2014–Present: The Monopoly Phase ComiXology had without question occupied a dominant position in the digital comics market during the few years that comprised the consolidation phase, but the company’s position during those years was tenuous enough that it did not yet constitute an actual monopoly. The market itself, as noted above, was still changing, with graphic novels appearing as a new, major product category and massively capitalized tech/retail companies entering as new competitors. Despite its exclusivity deals with Marvel and DC, ComiXology was also a relatively small company, with limited resources to devote to expansion, product development and price competition, and no way of ensuring that the exclusivity deals upon which it depended would remain in place long-term. All this changed abruptly, however, in April 2014, when Amazon surprised the comics industry by purchasing ComiXology for an undisclosed amount, thus marking the beginning of what we call the monopoly phase of the market.

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As part of Amazon, ComiXology acquired the financial backing and industrial leverage needed to secure a monopoly position within the digital comics market. Much of the increased leverage stemmed from Amazon’s position as a monopoly in contiguous retail markets, such as the US ebook market and the online market for new print books, as well as the company’s leading retail positions in the physical toy market, the videogame market and the DVD market. Marvel and DC’s dependence upon all of these markets meant that future negotiations with ComiXology would see the publishers bargaining from much weaker positions. Indeed, the combination of Amazon’s leading positions in these markets with ComiXology’s dominant position in digital comics retailing meant that ComiXology would henceforth have immense leverage when negotiating with any comics publisher over future rates, prices and exclusivity deals. Such leverage need not even be directly invoked, as the mere threat of it would likely predispose publishers to be as accommodating to Amazon as possible. The widely reported account of Amazon’s retaliations against book publishers who would not agree to its terms – what Joe Nocera (2014), writing for The New York Times in 2014 called ‘bullying tactics’ – would serve as a cautionary example. The first target of this new, more powerful ComiXology, however, was not comic book publishers at all, but rather the tech/retail company that Amazon viewed as the conglomerate’s primary competitor in the digital entertainment space: Apple. Less than a month after its acquisition by Amazon, ComiXology removed the purchase buttons from its iOS app, forcing would-be consumers to make purchases through ComiXology’s website and depriving Apple of the 30 per cent take it had been earning from in-app digital comic sales. Although theoretically benefitting ComiXology’s bottom line by increasing the company’s own take from sales, the decision was widely seen by journalists as having little to do with ComiXology at all. ‘With ComiXology’s acquisition by Amazon’, wrote Heidi MacDonald (2014a) in a piece for comics news blog The Beat, ‘the number 1 digital comics app is now but a pawn in the larger Kaiju battle of Amazon, Apple, Google and so on’. Amazon’s real goal, blogger Marco Arment (2014) suggested in a well-circulated post, ‘is to lock up and control as much distribution as possible’, while Augie De Blieck Jr. (2014) argued on Comic Book Resources that Amazon’s move was ultimately aimed at strengthening the consumer appeal of its Fire operating system, which ran Amazon’s colour Kindle, and – starting in mid-2014 – would run the retailer’s ‘Fire Phone’. Whatever Amazon’s reasoning for disabling the purchase buttons (and it is possible that its reasoning evolved as the company’s digital strategy changed), in December of 2015 Amazon further strengthened the links between ComiXology and its Kindle devices by enabling and encouraging users to ‘merge

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accounts’ on the two platforms. In practice, this merger meant the replacement of ComiXology’s own account and payment systems with that of Amazon’s larger retail platform, but it also granted consumers the ability to access Kindle comic purchases using ComiXology’s apps and website.9 Notably, however, Amazon did not enable the reverse: users could not view ComiXology purchases on the Kindle. Whether a subtle attempt to push ComiXology customers to buy their digital comics on Amazon’s all-purpose retail website or merely the first step in what will eventually be a complete integration between the two sites, the account merger suggests that Amazon saw (and continues to see) ComiXology as an important means of strengthening its overall brand, competing with other big consumer tech firms and further developing its user analytic tools. From a business economics perspective, these are not the traditional goals of a monopolist, but rather that of a participant in an extremely competitive market (i.e. the tablet market or the digital entertainment market) and indeed, one would be hardpressed to frame Amazon’s disabling of Apple’s 30 per cent take of in-app comic sales as a monopolist abusing its market share to crush the little guy. As for Amazon/ComiXology’s treatment of comic book publishers, as of the time of this writing, ComiXology has not appeared to have abused its position as a monopoly in its dealings with publishers. In fact, in many respects, publishers appear to have benefitted from ComiXology’s acquisition. Though commentators, for example, had initially worried that the new ComiXology, as part of a public company answerable to shareholders, would scale back its commitments to independent publishers and creators on account of the far fewer sales they generate and the greater marketing efforts they require (e.g. Freeman, 2014b), in practice ComiXology has not only kept up its commitment to these stakeholders (via, for example its self-publishing platform, ComiXology Submit), ComiXology has increased it. ComiXology’s subscription service, ComiXology Unlimited (which we discuss in greater detail below), for example, was geared exclusively towards independents when it launched in 2016, and although Marvel began licensing content to the service in mid-2017 and DC in early 2019, the service still seems primarily designed to provide broader exposure for independent publishers’ intellectual property. The one area in which ComiXology has unambiguously scaled back support for publishers is in its role as a back-end or ‘white label’ app supplier. Beginning after Amazon’s purchase, ComiXology began to wind down its white label deals with all but the top three comic publishers: Marvel, DC and Image (Salkowitz, 2015). Even this move, however, is difficult to frame as a monopolist abusing its power, for in practice ComiXology’s decision to offer white label services to only high-end publishers has considerably strengthened start-up company Madefire’s position in the mobile market. Smaller publishers

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such as IDW, Archie and BOOM! Studios, after losing their back-end deals with ComiXology, simply transitioned their apps to Madefire. Although Amazon’s approach to ComiXology continues to evolve, the most significant impact of the acquisition – at least in the short term – may be Amazon’s efforts to refashion digital comic consumption as a subscription service rather than a traditional (online) retail experience. Foremost in these efforts is ComiXology Unlimited, which debuted – taking many journalists and creators by surprise – in May of 2016. Modelled directly upon Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, ComiXology Unlimited offers subscribers unlimited access to select titles for a monthly fee of $5.99. Though the service’s catalogue currently lacks recently published titles and, until very recently lacked anything published by DC Comics, it contains material from a vast array of independent publishers, including issues from best-selling series such as Image Comics’s Saga and The Walking Dead. Like Amazon Prime Video, the subscription service has been forcefully integrated into the ComiXology retail interface in order to help drive subscriptions. When browsing or searching in the online store, for example, the service indicates titles available through Unlimited even when the consumer doing the browsing or searching does not have an Unlimited subscription. In October 2016, ComiXology also unveiled its new ComiXology Originals programme, which promised to bring new, original content from popular independent publishers such as Valiant and BOOM! to ComiXology (Arrant, 2016). Although the titles released as part of the programme are available for purchase via EST, they are also accessible for free to Unlimited subscribers. Indeed, the similarity between the programme’s name and that of Amazon Prime’s original television initiative, Amazon Originals, suggests that the programme might eventually be more firmly integrated into the Unlimited service, with some original content only available for subscribers. Only time will tell whether Amazon’s acquisition of ComiXology helps or harms comic book publishers. In the meantime, one thing is certain: since Amazon’s acquisition, ComiXology’s competitors in the EST market have been gradually disappearing. In March 2016, Barnes & Noble began winding down its struggling Nook platform (Lauchlan, 2016). In December of that same year, San Francisco start-up Scribd scuttled the comic book part of its ‘reading subscription’ service after less than two years of development (Reid, 2017). Dark Horse, the one major independent publisher who had refused to release its books on ComiXology, gave up the fight in mid-2015 and licensed all of its titles to the big eRetailer, effectively undercutting its own proprietary app – which had hitherto been the only place to buy digital copies of such titles as Aliens, Conan the Barbarian and Mass Effect. iVerse’s Comics Plus, though still in operation, had by the end of 2016 lost most of its backend deals and seen its

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catalogue substantially reduced; at the time of this writing its Facebook page has also gone without update for years. This leaves Google (which debuted a comicfriendly redesign to its Google Play Books store in late 2015), Apple (whose iBooks store offers few single issues and employs an interface that makes reading and browsing comic books difficult), Madefire and new start-up ComicBlitz, which launched in late 2015 with its own all-you-can-read subscription service. Although a variety of publishers still maintain their own apps or sell DRMfree PDFs through their websites, the vast majority of the digital comics retail market now belongs to Amazon.

KEY ISSUES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIGITAL COMICS MARKET Substitutability Since the first experiments with digital comic books in the 1990s, one of the major questions confronting publishers and retailers has been whether the digital comic book constitutes a substitute good or a complementary good with respect to the print comic book. From a conventional microeconomics perspective, the digital comic book would constitute a substitute if it competed for the same share of consumer spending as the print, so that, ceteris paribus, if the price of the print increased, demand for the digital would rise. If the digital comic book were, by contrast, a complementary good, then demand would observe the inverse relationship: when the price of the print increased, demand for the digital would decrease. From a slightly broader perspective, we could also define substitutes as goods that are in direct competition with each other and complements as goods that support each other or exhibit some form of functional dependence.10 As this broader definition suggests, the retail price charged consumers is not the only factor that affects demand; just as important is the overall value proposition of the goods in question, with this value proposition also depending for consumers on such things as the quality of the user experience, uncertainties regarding future product support, potential switching costs, etc. (see Steirer, 2015). That stakeholders have had such a difficult time determining the nature of the demand relationship between print and digital comic books is in part an effect of the comparatively low value proposition of the latter. As the history we provided in the previous section demonstrated, digital comics have suffered from their beginning from formatting issues that do not affect print comics. As a result, the experience of reading digital comics is substantially different from – and usually considered worse than – that of reading print. This is in contrast to consumers’ experiences with many other media, such as music, film and television, in which the ‘digital experience’ of listening or viewing is in many ways identical to the

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‘non-digital experience’. Unlike ebooks, which have come to offer a variety of features that print books do not (such as variable fonts, comment functions, search tools and hyperlinks), the vast majority of digital comics also offer nothing that print comics do not already provide. What digital comics do share with the EST products of other digital media is a comparatively weak ownership proposition: purchasing a digital product provides consumers in most cases with only the ability to access the product (what Steirer [2014b] has called ‘use in the narrow sense’); this is in contrast with the panoply of use-functions or ‘rights’ accompanying physical ownership (such as the right to sell, trade, display, get autographed, etc.). Because comic book culture has long institutionalized many of the features associated with physical ownership, thereby linking the consumption of comics with the collecting of comics, digital comics’ weak ownership proposition also contributes to their comparatively low overall value proposition (Steirer, 2014a). As the history we provided above recounts, publishers and third-party retailers have continuously tried to address the formatting dimension of the value proposition by incorporating dynamic features into the digital comic book; as the history also recounts, however, such efforts have faced significant problems – from technical issues to increased production costs – and have had little impact on the digital comics market as a whole. Although the comparatively low value proposition of digital comics has severely limited the growth of the digital comics market, this lower value proposition has also benefitted comic publishers by helping dampen the threat of digital piracy. To be sure, digital comics piracy exists – and Marvel and DC have occasionally taken light efforts to combat it (Enigmax, 2009) – but unlike the film and music industries, which have tirelessly campaigned against piracy, comic book publishers have largely ignored it. Because comic book culture privileges institutionalized collecting – what Charles Hatfield (2005: 24) described as ‘getting and keeping’ – and because pirated digital comics, like legitimately sold digital comics, have a much lower value proposition than the print originals, publishers seem not to view illegal scans as substitute products of the sort that pirated films and television shows represent for Hollywood and illegal MP3s once represented for the music industry. In economics language, the value consumers have been assumed to derive from free pirated comics (taking into account search costs and other costs, such as the risk of viruses) is less than (or qualitatively different from) the value derived from regularly priced print comics (taking into account their retail costs). Sales data supports this assessment, for whereas pirated music seems to have been largely responsible for the massive decline in CD sales between 2000 and 2003, the print comic book market has grown throughout the twenty-first century (Knopper, 2009: 185).

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The lack of competition from pirates, though without doubt a benefit in itself, also meant that the comics industry could take its time developing digital products and digital strategies. Whereas publishers and distributors in other media industries were forced to develop new, high-value digital products in order to compete with free, comics publishers faced no such pressure and were thus inclined to forgo the costs involved in increasing the value proposition of digital comics. Comics publishers could, in other words, develop and market the lowervalue digital comics as complementary goods rather than substitutes – and this is, especially during what we labelled the market-making phase, exactly what they did. Although publishers eventually came to hedge their bet by adopting day-and-date publishing and thereby strengthening (albeit minimally) the value proposition of newly released digital comics, publishers, in general, committed very few resources to establishing digital comics as a viable substitute for print or to converting print customers to digital. Indeed, many of the new publisher initiatives during the 2000s – including free comic book day, wide-scale deployment of variant covers, increased convention participation and deluxe graphic novel releases – were aimed explicitly at supporting and strengthening print retail. Even Marvel’s multi-year ‘free digital comic’ initiative, which might at first seem a way of converting print consumers to digital, in fact further decreased the value proposition of individual digital comics in comparison with that of print while also rhetorically framing ‘digital’ as a kind of extra or bonus item. As the above analysis suggests, the question of whether digital comics are a substitute or complement to print comics has thus never been a question about the ontology or essential nature of either product, but has rather been a question about which paradigm comic book publishers most benefit from adopting at a given time and in light of a variety of relevant conditions. The threat of piracy is one such condition, the cost of improving the value proposition of digital comics is another. A third condition – and the last we will mention here – is the differing economics of digital and print retail. In print retail, direct market retailers purchase new comic books from their distributor on a non-returnable basis; publishers thus derive revenue from all copies that are shipped to retailers, regardless of whether or not consumers actually buy them. The revenue the publishers earn is also independent of the price retailers charge; when retailers discount the cover price (which is a very common practice), the publishers’ revenue is unaffected. With digital retail, by contrast, publishers only derive revenue from purchases actually made by consumers; the reduced margins from discounted prices likewise usually falls upon the publishers. In these respects, digital thus represents a much higher-stakes business model for publishers, as the responsibility for sales to

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customers falls primarily on the publishers themselves instead of being shared with (or, as direct market retailers might frame it, offloaded onto) retailers. As with the other conditions described above, the differing economics of digital retail has thus helped ensure that publishers approach digital comics as complement rather than a substitute good with respect to print.

Monetization The second key issue faced by publishers and retailers of digital comics has been how to best monetize them. As the history we provided in the previous section indicates, the industry has since its beginning experimented with a number of monetization strategies. These strategies can be broadly divided into types: what we call direct and indirect. In direct monetization, a company earns revenue by charging end users directly for access to a good or service. In the case of digital comics, retailers have so far employed three different methods of charging for such access: a per-issue charge granting perpetual access (the EST model), a multi-issue or lot charge granting perpetual access (bundling) and a monthly or yearly charge granting temporary access (the subscription model). By contrast, in what we are calling indirect monetization, a company forgoes potential revenue from end users by strategically distributing content to users for free (or at a rate well below cost); the eventual revenue gains come indirectly through increased sales of related, directly monetized products. With internet companies, the most common form of indirect monetization involves providing end users with a free service so as to produce large user bases that can then be monetized through the sale of ad space to advertisers. With comics companies, however, this approach to indirect monetization has been relatively rare. Though a few comics publishers (such as Class Comics and early webcomic creators) have charged advertisers for the opportunity to place ads in or alongside digital comics, indirect monetization has been more commonly employed by publishers so as to generate increased demand for related products featuring the publishers’ intellectual property (such as films, games, clothing, etc.). Of these two types of monetization – direct and indirect – the type most employed by publishers and retailers has been direct, and more specifically EST. As we noted earlier in the history section of this chapter, the preference for EST grew largely out of the lead role taken by third parties in the early iOS space. Lending itself to piecemeal development and drawing upon very familiar and easily negotiable relationships between stakeholders, EST was well-suited to the early digital comics market, characterized as it was by under-capitalized startups and weak (or uncertain) consumer demand. The consumption model EST supports had the further benefit of being extremely familiar to print comics

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consumers, as it essentially mirrored – and indeed still mirrors today – that of the print market. The increasing marginalization of EST in other media industries, however, points to problems with it as a monetization model. In the film and television industries, compatibility problems, high pricing (secured in part through the inability of digital retailers to set their own prices in the way that retailers of physical goods can) and a comparatively low ownership value with respect to digital content have made EST a hard sell to consumers and have helped drive demand for subscription services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime (Steirer, 2015). In the music industry, on the other hand, where retailers such as Apple had a much larger say in determining pricing, digital content was initially priced for consumers at considerably below the cost of physical versions, thus giving rise to a very different problem: the devaluing of content (Knopper, 2009: 177–180). Though record companies were in some ways forced to adopt such pricing in order to compete with pirated MP3s, the low prices – combined with the eventual removal of DRM restrictions from digital tracks—have been seen by many commentators and industry stakeholders as contributing to the destruction of the consumer market for recorded music by signalling to consumers that such music has little monetary value (e.g. Adams, 2013; Marshall, 2014). As these examples of other industries’ experiences with EST demonstrate, EST is not only extremely difficult to price correctly, but getting it wrong can inflict serious damage upon broader content markets. Comic publishers’ preference for a highprice, comparatively low-value EST model thus seems in large part a reflection of their caution: they do not want to risk wrecking the larger print market. Such caution notwithstanding, since 2014 the subscription model of direct monetization has begun to appear as a potential addition or alternative to EST. As discussed above, there presently exist four noteworthy subscription services: ComiXology Unlimited, ComicBlitz, Marvel’s Marvel Unlimited and DC Comics’s comparatively recent DC Universe (which launched in late 2018). Of the four, Marvel’s subscription service is by far the oldest, technically dating back to 2007 when it debuted under a slightly longer title as a monetized, browserbased replacement for Marvel’s Dot-Comics. Not until 2014, however, did Marvel launch a proper iOS app for the service and devote to it significant marketing and development resources (Scheeden, 2014). All four services currently offer subscribers a fairly wide selection of content – though almost none of it less than six months old – at relatively low prices: $5.99 a month for ComiXology Unlimited, $7.99 a month for ComicBlitz, $9.99 a month (or $69 a year) for Marvel Unlimited and $7.99 a month (or $74.99 a year) for DC Universe. By comparison, a single comic that is at least six months old is typically priced between $1.99 and $2.99 via EST.

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As with EST, however, comic publishers have overall remained extremely cautious with respect to subscription services, in part – again – because of the examples provided by other media industries. Though digital subscription services for film, television and music have proved immensely popular with consumers, for whom they appear to provide exceptional value at a relatively low cost, this low-cost, high-value combination runs the same risk with respect to devaluing content as does low-cost EST. Digital subscription services – especially those with persistent catalogues containing high-demand content – also risk cannibalizing sell-through sales, both physical and digital. Even when publishers get the pricing and windowing periods right so as to avoid or compensate for these problems, successful digital subscription services pose yet another potential hazard: popular service providers that aggregate content from multiple publishers can end up deriving incredible competitive advantage from their large subscription bases. As the film and television industries have discovered, such service providers can use this advantage to launch their own production or first-run distribution wings, thus becoming competitors to their original licensors (as has happened with both Netflix and Amazon). One last concern is also worth mentioning: In the music industry, digital subscription services such as Spotify and Apple Music have been widely criticized by songwriters and recording artists for so dramatically reducing the creators’ share of profits that songwriting and recording increasingly appear financially unviable as professions (e.g. Arthur, 2013; McIntyre, 2015). These artists’ struggles have not been lost on comic book creators, who expressed worry – and in some cases anger – when ComiXology Unlimited debuted in 2015 ( Johnston, 2016). Indeed, drawing a direct connection to the miniscule revenue musicians earn from streaming services, one of the comics professionals we spoke to described ComiXology Unlimited as the ‘Spotify of Comics’. Perhaps to assuage these fears, ComiXology has been exceptionally careful to position its subscription service as a discovery tool, not as a binge-reading service. As ComiXology CEO David Steinberger has repeatedly noted in interviews, ComiXology Unlimited is not intended to replace sell-through. ‘We are fully aligned with publishers both to make money on this service and on a la carte’, he explained to trade site ICv2. ‘Everyone’s going to make more money when more people are reading’ (Griepp, 2016). ComicBlitz, by contrast, has positioned itself explicitly as a binge-reading service, and can thus, for the titles it carries, more meaningfully obviate the need for sell-through purchases. Perhaps for this reason, major independent publishers such as Image Comics, BOOM! and Dark Horse have not signed on with the service. Although the app is well-designed, the company also faces the same problems as many internet startups: high customer acquisition costs and a lack of capital to devote to product enhancement and marketing.

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DC Universe and Marvel Unlimited, as ‘publisher-run’ subscription services, represent a different kind of business altogether. DC Universe, pitching itself as a service for fans of DC Entertainment’s intellectual property, offers unlimited access to DC-branded films and television shows, as well as comics. At the time we are writing this chapter, however, the service’s catalogue is extremely limited with respect to film and television. Aside from Titans and Doom Patrol, (both original live-action television series), and DC’s animated films (which are also available on DVD and EST), the service offers very little video content that originated this century (none of the live-action films, for example, and none of The CW television series) – and compared to Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime, very little video content at all. The comic book catalogue, by contrast, is extensive and well-organized. Indeed, despite the presence of video content, DC Universe’s approach to both digital comics and intellectual-property marketing seem to have been modelled quite explicitly on Marvel’s older and more established subscription service, Marvel Unlimited. Since the relaunch of Marvel’s service in 2014, Marvel Unlimited’s catalogue (which consists only of comics) is extraordinarily large, with over twenty-five thousand comics available at the time of this writing (all of which are also available for purchase via ComiXology). Both old and relatively recent content are continually added (and no content removed), and there are strong editorial features designed to aid search and discovery and to highlight distinct characters and properties. Although DC Universe is still too new for us to assess its impact on the comic book market, the high quality of Marvel’s service combined with its relatively low cost have earned it consistent praise from fans, bloggers and journalists, and in recent years it has become a major player in the digital comic book ecosystem. Marvel’s apparent success with Marvel Unlimited brings with it new problems for the publisher, however, as publisher-run subscription services (when they are successful, at least) pose significant risks of cannibalizing sell-through sales – in Marvel’s case, of both single issues and graphic novels. The threat of cannibalization explains why successful publisher-run subscription services are rare in any industry dependent on sell-through: the employment of such a service essentially pits the publisher in competition with itself. Marvel’s service thus raises the question: Why would Marvel Comics undercut itself ? Given the way the service has been implemented, we suspect that, despite the subscription cost, Marvel Unlimited is seen by its parent company as a means of indirect monetization. It thus functions much like CrossGen’s original subscription service, Comics on the Web; there, the subscription fee was set well below the cost of running the service so that the service might function for the publisher as a brand development and marketing tool. Like CrossGen, Marvel has used its subscription service to build awareness of its various intellectual properties and to

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strengthen the value of its overall brand. Unlike CrossGen, which went bankrupt before its properties had moved to other media, Marvel has also employed Marvel Unlimited to promote properties being developed for or debuting in other media, such as film, television and videogames. Beyond its specific value for IP promotion, Marvel has additionally treated the service (much like it treated the ‘free digital copy’ promotion in its physical books) as a clever means of signing up customers with Marvel.com, a highly integrated website that provides Marvel with customer lists, additional marketing opportunities and enriched data analytics. For all these reasons, Marvel Unlimited might be best understood, despite the seeming paradox of the formulation, as consumer-subsidized indirect monetization. Indeed, this might be the best way to understand all four existing subscription services – at least from the standpoint of the publishers: the services’ function is not the generation of revenue, but rather the promotion of intellectual property possessing profit potential outside that of the market for comic books themselves. If this is correct, the relatively recent appearance of subscription services may mean that publishers as a whole have begun to reconsider the indirect monetization model introduced by earlier ‘free’ webcomic sites, whose primary sources of revenue were ancillary products and advertising.

CONCLUSION In many respects, the advent of digital distribution technology has had relatively little effect so far on how the comic book industry functions and how it is comprised. A time traveller from the late twentieth century would find the most significant change in comic book distribution to be the expanded place of bookstores in the retail market – a change that has nothing to do with the internet, but rather stems from the growth of the graphic novel as a product category. On the whole, comic book creators today tend to work for the same comic book companies that existed before the internet, making the same kinds of products, which get distributed by the same wholesaler (at the time we are writing, Diamond Comics) to the same kind of comic book shops and bookstores. To be sure, digital distribution has given rise to a smattering of new industry participants, but only one – ComiXology – has had much of an effect on the industry – and that effect has so far been small. For the industry as a whole, digital comics remain an extremely marginal product category and source of revenue, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon – the growth of subscription services notwithstanding. That the internet has had such little impact on the comic book industry should be surprising given how much change it has wrought on other media industries and on Hollywood itself. New companies – among them Spotify, Alphabet,

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Amazon, Apple and Netflix – have come to be major players in these industries, bringing with them radical transformations in how music, television, film and videogames are created, distributed and consumed. Indeed, our time traveller would barely recognize the film, television and music industries today – to say nothing of the decimated newspaper and magazine industries. All of which prompts the question: if the internet caused such change in these industries, why has it caused such little change in the comic book industry? One answer may be that the change is yet to come, and that the internet is for some reason – perhaps the comparatively small ‘value’ of the comic book industry – simply working its disruption more slowly in the case of comic books. Alternatively, one might credit (or perhaps blame) comic book industry stakeholders themselves for the lack of change. As the history we have provided above indicates, comic book publishers, facing organized resistance from direct market retailers and well aware of how digital distribution had played out in other industries, proceeded conservatively, working to protect physical-media markets and preserve existing price-points for the content they sold. Of course, stakeholders in other industries attempted similar courses of action (witness, for example, the film industry’s attempt via UltraViolet to preserve sell-through models for at-home film consumption [see Steirer, 2015]), but typically to no avail. So, again: what makes the comic book industry’s experience different? Ultimately, we believe that digital distribution has had relatively little effect on the comic book industry owing to fundamental differences between the form of the comic book and that of other media such as film and television. We recognize that discussion of form – let alone the attribution of industrial agency to form – is not particularly fashionable in media industries scholarship today. In an era of remediation, transmedia storytelling and transindustrial entertainment conglomerates, the suggestion that a medium might have a proper, stable form may even appear absurd. Be that as it may, in the historical research we undertook for this chapter, comic book form continually asserted itself as an industrial actor in its own right, with digitally-minded entrepreneurs – and some comic book publishers and creators – struggling to translate it to the digital spaces of laptops, browsers, phones, portable gaming consoles and tablets. In the language of sociologist Bruno Latour (2005: 39), comic book form revealed itself, with regard to digital distribution, to be a mediator and not an intermediary. Which is to say, that comic book form mattered: form itself was part of what comprised ‘distribution’ as a technology and business process. And from this perspective, the digital comic book is not merely a physical comic book rendered digitally but some other kind of ‘comic art’ altogether. Although we would not deny that digital distribution has altered the forms of professionally produced music, film and television as well, these alterations

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have been primarily to modes of distribution, search and discovery (or ‘curation’), and what we call (admitting the digital bias of the term) ‘user interaction’ – all aspects of the platforms or ecosystems through which content is accessed – and only minimally to the underlying textual forms themselves. An MP3 played via Airplay through a stereo system, for example, sounds more-or-less indistinguishable from a track on a CD played through that same stereo system, even if the means of selecting and relating to that MP3 is considerably different. Similarly, a film streamed via Netflix on one’s iPhone is indistinguishable in most regards other than image size from the same film delivered to a television over a high-definition broadcast signal, a cable line or via a DVD. Certainly the way that consumers select this content has changed, and, to be sure, some digital platforms have encouraged alterations in textual form as well (in television, for example, via longer episodes, a revival of cliffhangers and a de-emphasis on episodic closure), but the textual forms of digitally distributed music, film and television were originally similar enough to that of music, film and television distributed via ‘traditional’ methods that consumers were able to switch to digital without having to adopt radically different textual consumption practices. The same cannot be said, however, for the relationship between physical comics and digital comics. As we have recounted in the history above, for as long as the digital comic has existed, its textual form has differed – sometimes quite significantly – from that of the physical comic. Publishers struggled to find ways to bridge the divide, so as to translate the physical comic for the digital space in a way that was both attractive to consumers of the former and not prohibitively expensive. But the physical comic’s form largely resisted these efforts, with the result that today the experience of reading a digital comic (as opposed to searching for it or otherwise interacting with the platform through which it is accessed) is quite different from that of reading a physical comic, so much so that consumers have not treated the two, in that the way they have digital music, film and television, as substitutable goods. In this regard, comic books have much in common with books themselves, the form of which has also presented problems to digital entrepreneurs (who have had to invent new screen and annotation technologies and charge lower prices to compensate for them).11 Indeed, the comic book industry’s experience of digital distribution much more resembles that of the book industry – where ebooks now account for less than a fifth of trade unit sales in the United States and digital subscription services remain marginal (Milliot, 2018) – than it does the film or television industries, and this despite the importance of comic book publishers’ intellectual property to the latter. Certainly, form is not the only thing affecting how a media industry develops or changes (we are not arguing here for some kind of formal determinism), but our research demonstrates that form can

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matter, and that with respect to the history of digital comics that it did matter. The fact that digital comics distribution has thus remained, metaphorically speaking, the ‘dental tape’ to physical comics distribution’s legal-sized piece of paper, has, in the end, as much to do, we propose, with comic book form as it does market structure, technology and consumer culture. When form is made a serious part of industrial analysis – as we have made it in this chapter – the results may suggest as well that there is a limit to how much integration is possible between different media industries. Despite the significant interdependencies that we have traced in previous chapters between the comic book industry and the film and television industries, the three nevertheless remain organized at a fundamental level around the production of very different media. While certain aspects of each medium may overlap with each other or be capable of being translated between media (characters and settings, for example, or certain kinds of creative workers), other aspects may remain fundamentally incompatible, creating points of disjunction among the different media and their respective industries. Beyond the specific analysis of digital distribution we have provided here – which we hope to be of value to both comics scholars and film and television scholars – the broader take-away of this chapter is thus that difference matters, and that when studying convergence, we should be careful to attend not only to the growing connections between industries but also to the gaps and divergences that continue to separate them.

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Afterword: Days of Future Present: The View from 2020 When we initially conceptualized this book in the mid-2010s, we imagined it focusing primarily on the first two decades of the new millennium. As we completed the first draft of the manuscript in the fall of 2019, the logic of this periodization seemed even more clear not only due to the states of the American comic book industry and Hollywood individually, but also given the status of these industries in relationship to each other. A robust growth period that had begun in the early 2000s in film with X-Men and Spider-Man and in TV with Smallville was now reaching a new chapter due to the conclusion of Phase Three of the MCU (with Avengers: Endgame [2019]), the end of the first wave of the DC Extended Universe films (with Birds of Prey [2020]) and the series finale of the first of the Greg Berlanti-produced CW series, Arrow [2012–2020]). The concurrent cancellation of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–2020) represented the end of Marvel Television’s existence as a standalone unit as well. In late 2019, Marvel TV executive Jeph Loeb departed the company and his unit closed; subsequent control over television shifted to Kevin Feige, who was promoted from his position as president of Marvel Studios to chief creative officer of Marvel. In this new role, Feige was charged with overseeing the film, TV, animation – and publishing – activities across the company. Now responsible for ‘the overall creative direction of Marvel’s storytelling across mediums’ (Otterson, 2019c), this managerial shift represented just the latest in a wave of efforts at greater cross-divisional coordination to take place over the course of this century. Creative executives who had launched their careers in the early 2000s with work on comic book-based IP had come to play central roles in shaping the Marvel and DC cinematic and televisual universes. Whereas in the early 2000s, writer-producers such as Joss Whedon and Jeph Loeb might have felt like outliers as they shifted from working in Hollywood to writing comics (in the case of Whedon) – or from writing for comics to producing live-action TV (in the case of Loeb) – by the late 2010s, it had become commonplace for creatives (and, in particular, writers) to move fluidly across film, TV and comics. The rather ad hoc basis of managing and licensing comics IP that dominated into the late

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1990s had evolved into a much more dynamic ecosystem, replete with diverse publishing models. Even as comics industry market leaders DC and Marvel continued to publish a sizable number of superhero titles on a monthly basis, a range of smaller publishers (e.g. BOOM!, IDW) followed in the footsteps of pioneer Dark Horse in mining comics IP for development as films and TV series across a range of genres. Building in particular off of the financial success of Image Comics’s The Walking Dead series, a vibrant infrastructure of intermediaries (e.g. agents, managers, lawyers) had emerged. These intermediaries, and the diverse companies for which they worked, both facilitated the licensing of comics IP to Hollywood and were crucial in brokering employment for comics creatives on a range of film and TV projects. As we write this Afterword in June 2020, larger economic and sociocultural developments have occurred in tandem with the ongoing industrial developments already in process to reinforce the value of our selection of 2019 as the end point for this study. The most notable development in 2020, of course, has been the global pandemic and subsequent financial crisis spurred by COVID-19. As has been the case with the spread of the coronavirus more generally, both individual companies as well as industry-wide business practices have faced significant disruption. In terms of the comics industry, the direct market’s reliance upon a single distributor (Diamond Comic Distributors) – which retailers had long blamed for problems with inventory management – proved to be especially problematic following the onset of the virus. When Diamond was forced by state regulations to shut down its warehouses for roughly two months beginning in late March, many comic book retailers (some of which had also been forced by their states to close) faced severe financial hardship. Eager to keep their businesses running and ensure consumers had access to comics, both DC and Marvel made some adjustments to their distribution activities. DC contracted to work with two new (physical) distributors before severing ties with Diamond altogether (MacDonald, 2020; McMillan, 2020), while Marvel shifted twelve of its less popular monthly periodical titles to digital-only distribution (Griepp, 2020). Despite these efforts, the closures effectively shut down the direct market for the months of April and May: excepting the titles published by DC and the small number of graphic novels published by book publishers, publication and distribution of print comic books and trade paperbacks simply ceased. Whether the direct market will survive COVID-19 and what it will look like if it does remain uncertain as we write this (though it is worth noting that prognosticators have been announcing the imminent collapse of the direct market for decades). The changes that DC Comics, in particular, has made to print distribution holds the potential to shake up the industry by reintroducing

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competition into a distribution system that has lacked both competition and innovation since the 1990s (notwithstanding the growth of digital). Direct market retailers, consumers and the industry as a whole are likely to benefit if additional publishers follow DC’s lead. At the same time, and despite our conclusion in Chapter Six that digital comics are not a natural supplement for print, the virus might shift periodical comics sales to digital, as consumers abandon in-person or online physical shopping for the safety of at-home digital consumption. Such a shift would help strengthen the near-monopoly position of Amazon/ComiXology in digital distribution. Sales data is, for the most part, currently non-existent, but at the time we are writing this there does not appear to have been a significant spike in digital sales. That said, fans, creative workers and publishers have helped sustain physical comic book stores in the short term via fundraising platforms and social media campaigns; additional financial assistance has come to many retailers in the US via new Payment Protection Program loans offered through the 2020 CARES Act. The most that can be said for certain as we go to press is that the relationship between – and status of – comic book publishers, distributors and retailers is in a state of flux. It is worth underscoring that even though Hollywood’s distribution activities also are being affected by COVID-19, the ways that its practices are being impacted differ from how the American comics industry’s distribution activities are being impacted. This is the case because, as we have illustrated throughout this book, Hollywood’s structure, practices, formal attributes and key stakeholders differ from that of the American comic book industry. Clearly, parts of the American comic book industry heavily rely on the revenue derived from licensing IP to Hollywood. A growing number of comics professionals also benefit directly or indirectly from employment in Hollywood. Yet despite such points of intersection, the American comic book industry simultaneously functions as a relatively self-contained business characterized by its own organizational structures, business models, managerial discourses, production cultures and professional identities. As further illustration of the status of the American comic book industry as ‘both/and’ – both a part of Hollywood, heavily reliant on its financial support and employment opportunities, and distinct from Hollywood, in terms of strategies, stakeholders and professional identities – we might briefly look to the Disney/ Marvel relationship following the arrival of COVID-19. Although the global pandemic and resulting economic crisis have severely disrupted business practices within the comic book industry, the nature of these disruptions is different from those affecting other media industries. In terms of the legacy media companies, Disney was among the hardest hit right away ( Jarvey, 2020). This is striking

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because, prior to the onset of the virus, Disney had been among the most dominant of the legacy media companies. Disney’s stable leadership, emphasis on family friendly global brands and prioritization of experiential entertainment seemed to have positioned it well to take on technology companies such as Netflix and Amazon. Yet the fact that Disney derived so much of its revenue from theme parks, cruise ships, sports (via ESPN), live theatrical performances and theatrical distribution of feature films led it to be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. In terms of its comics-related IP, Disney was forced to delay the theatrical release of the highly anticipated Black Widow (2021) – the first of Marvel’s Phase Four releases. Production on several Marvel television series designed to serve as tentpoles for the new Disney+ streaming service (e.g. The Falcon and Winter Soldier, Wandavision) were also delayed, diminishing the new platform’s value proposition at the precise moment it was trying to build its subscriber base. Perhaps even more significant, Disney became one of the first major media conglomerates to furlough a large number of its employees (Boorstin, 2020). The ways that this played out specifically within the publishing arm of Marvel – as opposed to within other divisions of Disney – speaks to the particular issues being faced by the comics industry. With physical distribution halted and retail stores closed, Marvel trimmed its publication output. This in turn, not only diminished the number of Marvel staff members required to keep operations running, but also led to a reduction in the number of employment opportunities for the artists and writers working – primarily as independent contractors – on the books. Strikingly, DC Comics did not similarly reduce the number of freelancers it employed nor trim its staff size during the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis. The different short-term corporate responses of Disney/Marvel and WarnerMedia/DC highlight both the complexity of the Hollywood–comics industry dynamic and the difficulty of making generalizations about organizational behaviour in the abstract. By delineating in this Afterword the manner in which the virus manifested across the Disney corporation versus within the publishing arm of Marvel (and across AT&T/WarnerMedia versus within the publishing arm of DC Comics), we have tried to underscore the value of understanding the operations, practices and cultures of Hollywood and the US comic book industry – and the individual corporations and divisions that comprise these industries – both independently and relationally. Throughout this book, we have sought to foreground the American comic book industry, highlighting how it is distinctive in terms of its historical development, organizational structures, economics, managerial practices, distribution strategies, production cultures and labour practices. Drawing from a survey of wide range of trade and journalistic

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publications, extensive interviews, participant observation and other field research, we have aimed to ground our mapping of the operations of the comic book industry with specific examples drawn from original research. Even as the comic book industry has remained central to our study, we have been mindful of continuing to ‘think transindustrially’. In some cases, such as our discussion of IP licensing (Chapters Two, Four and Five) and creative worker mobility (Chapters One and Three), this has meant looking at how Hollywood’s financial and creative possibilities have supported and sustained the American comic book industry. In other cases, such as our analysis of how digital distribution has functioned with the comic book industry (Chapter Six), this has meant using Hollywood’s business practices as a productive point of contrast. In still other instances, such as our dissection of terms such as ‘convergence’ and ‘synergy’ (Introduction and Chapter Four), the Hollywood/comics relationship has enabled us to interrogate industry terminology and dominant scholarly discourses. And finally, in our exploration of how comics professionals imagine their work roles and develop their career trajectories (Chapter Three), Hollywood has been shown to function variably as a specific place, a mode of production and a professional identity, to which artists and writers position themselves in relation. Ultimately, we hope that this book provides a road map for those aiming to understand the comics–Hollywood relationship in more detail while also offering new models for conducting trans- and interindustrial analysis. We have, of course, no illusions that our book has exhausted the research possibilities of examining the American comics industry and Hollywood together; we hope, in fact, that it prompts new questions and new research in this area, and new collaborations between scholars of different fields and backgrounds or with different sets of expertise. The evolving role of cultural intermediaries, for examples, strikes us as an area deserving greater research. Additional study of the contributions made by agents, managers and lawyers might be complemented by the examination of other key figures such as art dealers, convention organizers, publicists and technology platforms such as Patreon and Kickstarter. More could also be done to understand how and why comics professionals have located in particular geographic locales such as Orlando, Chicago and Seattle (not to mention places outside of the United States) – and how the specific features of these places (e.g. infrastructures, social networks, educational institutions, etc.) shape both creators’ work experiences and the form and content of the work they produce. More consideration might also be given to both affinities and aversions between different groups of comics professionals – defined on the basis of gender, sexuality, generation, education, race, nationality or other categories. Such work

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might involve examining how different groups of professionals launched their careers and forged ties to Hollywood and other industries – or, in some cases, resisted forging them. Speaking more broadly, a full accounting of how the American comic book industry and Hollywood have operated – and continue to operate – requires that we as scholars also consider the connections that link these industries to other media industries. We can imagine, for instance, a study similar to ours that explores the relationship between the comics industry (or, for that matter, Hollywood) and the book/magazine publishing industry in the twenty-first century.1 Work is needed as well on the relationship between the videogame industry and both the comics industry and Hollywood. We see such work, with its inter-institutional scope, as following in the footsteps of foundational media-industry-studies scholarship, such as Michele Hilmes’s Hollywood and Broadcasting (1990) and William Boddy’s Fifties Television (1993). Moreover, if we take seriously the prospect of empirically grounded transindustrial analysis, why limit the scope of our research to just two industries? Although difficult to produce, the time seems ripe for research projects, preferably employing some form of human-subject research, that examine the intersecting relationships between multiple media and technology industries at once. Besides increasing our knowledge of what an industry itself is and how it functions in the world, such research might also serve to make us more attentive to the connections that link us as scholars together across our various institutions, fields and disciplines. The promise of rich, empirically attentive transindustrial research is, we think, after all, also the promise of a reinvigorated – and reinvigorating – transdisciplinarity.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

August Grant has called the term ‘nebulous’ (Grant, 2003: 15) and Espen Ytreberg ‘essentially confused’ (Ytreberg, 2011: 507). Exceptions include McAllister, 2001; Clarke, 2013; Steirer, 2014a; Palmer, 2016; Perren, 2016; Perren and Felschow, 2018; Smith, 2018; Woo, 2018. Although adopting, like our book, a transindustrial approach to the comic book industry, Kidman, 2019 also devotes significant attention to the workings of the comics industry. There are a few book-length histories of comic books as a medium that touch upon industrial topics, typically from a macro-historical perspective. See Lopes, 2009; Gabilliet, 2010; Duncan, Smith and Levitz, 2015. These include Gordon, Jancovich and McAllister, 2007; Gilmore and Stork, 2014; Burke, 2015; and Flanagan, McKenny and Livingstone, 2016. We include in this category executives working for distribution platforms, ­e-commerce sites and streaming services. We include in this category producers, showrunners, writers and creative ­consultants. We include in this category producers, writers, creative consultants and art ­directors. We include in this category both New York-based literary agents and Hollywoodbased talent agents, managers and attorneys.

CHAPTER 1 1 2

3 4

Popular examples include Fritz, 2018; Howe, 2012; Tucker, 2017. Scholarly examples include Schatz, 2010; Johnson, 2013; Owczarski, 2016. On occasion, starting in the mid-1940s, employees at animation studios in the Los Angeles area would supplement their income with work in comics; examples include Harvey Eisenberg (who worked for MGM) and Don Christensen (who worked at Disney and then Warner Bros). Sometimes these supplementary gigs led to longer-term moves between industries. Artist Del Connell, for example, ­eventually left Disney to work as a writer/editor at Dell Comics (Weldon, 2011; Baxter, 2017a; Baxter, 2017b). As with early science-fiction, however, well-organized fans (many of them young adults) applied a different set of cultural values to comic books. See Schelly, 1995; Pustz, 1999: 26–65. During World War II, servicemen were also frequent readers of comics (Benton, 1991: 53).

208

Notes

  5 Except where indicated otherwise, information in this section regarding s­ pecific individuals’ career paths was derived from interviews, the Internet Movie D ­ atabase (IMDb) and responses we received from queries made to professional ­communities via both Facebook and Twitter.   6 For a detailed history of the direct market, see Gearino, 2017.   7  Although the terms ‘trade paperback’ and ‘graphic novel’ have different c­ onnotations, both refer to the same industrial object and are often used i­nterchangeably by ­industry professionals (Steirer, 2011/12).   8 Additional Marvel animated series, produced by parent company of the time, New World, followed X-Men on Fox. These included Spider-Man (1994–1998) and Iron Man (1994–1996).   9 Whedon’s comic books include spin-offs to most of his TV series, as well as a well-received run on The Astonishing X-Men. Smith has written on multiple series for Marvel, DC and Dynamite, including Batman: Cacophony, Daredevil (1998), Spider-Man/Black-Cat, Green Hornet and Green Arrow. 10 Feige was associate producer on the film; Johns had moved on when production started but was working with Donner while it was being developed (Barnes, 2011; ‘Geoff Johns Conquers’, 2009). 11 A tie-in webcomic was also produced, which several of these writers contributed to, including Kim, Pokaski and Coleite (Clarke, 2012: 27–62).

CHAPTER 2   1 Pencillers doing work for hire are sometimes given piecemeal assignments of small numbers of pages across multiple books – thus making the issue rate an irrelevant proxy. This is, however, much more rarely the case for writers, who (except in the case of anthology issues such as some comic book annuals) tend only to be ­contracted for entire issues.   2 One of our interviewees noted that the higher end of the pencilling rate was ­sometimes paid for pencils and inks (which are sometimes, but not always, done by the same individual) together.   3 These figures reflect DC’s estimated royalty in mid-2014 after the company ­revised its compensation system ( Johnston, 2014c).   4 We found that most of our interviewees were uncertain as to the exact thresholds associated with publisher contracts. This uncertainty – which is also reflected in blog posts by creators – may be an effect of regular changes in contract terms or working simultaneously under the conditions of contracts with multiple p ­ ublishers. It may also, however, reflect either a lack of interest or a lack of time for the ­‘business side’ of creative work (e.g. Bendis, 2014: 175–176).   5 Sales figures were compiled using Comichron data for the three months ­(Comichron, n.d.).   6 In special cases, a publisher might offer the creators of a creator-owned book an advance on future profits (in simulation of a page rate). This is usually done when the creators or title is sufficiently high profile to ‘guarantee’ that the publisher will be able to recoup the cost of the advance. We have heard professionals refer to this practice, when employed by Image Comics, as the ‘Nu-Image deal’.   7 Because there are typically no direct labour costs involved in self-publishing, the primary up-front expense faced by creators is printing fees. Though these vary greatly based upon the print run, they typically involve a minimum investment

Notes

  8   9 10

11

12 13 14

209

of around $1000 for a standard size, twenty-four-page colour book. Though ­self-publishing online can eliminate many of these costs, a general survey of selfpublished titles available via ComiXology, Kindle and Kickstarter suggests that – except in the case of web comics – many creators who self-publish online also rely upon printed copies. We use the male pronoun to reflect the fact that the overwhelming majority of comic book creators and publishers in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s were men. Such shuffling has long been so common at work-for-hire publishers that The Comics Journal used to regularly report reassignments at Marvel and DC under the heading of merry-go-round (e.g. ‘DC Merry-Go-Round’, 1980). Data sourced from Comichron (n.d.). Newly launched titles were identified as books numbered 0, 1 or.1. Titles that reprinted older books were excluded from the figures, even when these reprints were repackaged under new titles. Data from Comichron does not provide title information for Marvel and DC publications with extremely low circulation; for consistency’s sake, we counted such titles (of which there are typically five or fewer each month) as ‘continuing titles’. The majority of Marvel’s ‘bullpen’ in the 1970s and 1980s (some of whom are still in the business), for example, began as fans – including Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter (Howe, 2012: 173–177). Other notable comic book professionals who started their careers as fans include Paul Levitz, Len Wein, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane and Gail Simone. Marvel’s former ‘writer-editor’ position offers an early example of this solution (see Shooter, 1978). For a more recent example, see Flinn, 2016. Some Vertigo titles, such as Sandman, Hellblazer and Animal Man, were produced under a basic work-for-hire arrangement. DC discontinued the Vertigo imprint in 2019. According to interviewees, Image Comics’s take in these categories is 20 per cent.

CHAPTER 3 1 2 3 4

5 6

Brienza and Johnston (2016) are an exception. These verbs are adapted from Johnson, Kompare and Santo, 2014. Among the few examples of scholarly works written about agents, see Kemper, 2009; Bielby and Bielby, 1999; and Zafirau, 2008. When representing a publisher, the involved agency is incentivized to attach ­writers, directors and stars from its own stable of talent. By doing so – what is called assembling a package in Hollywood – the agency earns a fee (a p ­ ercentage taken out of the production budget and the back-end) for clients involved in the package. This is, at least, how the process has traditionally worked – as we are writing this, the WGA has challenged agencies over these packaging practices (see Writers Guild of America West, 2019). Agencies often opt for packaging fees in lieu of the 10 per cent commission. Image itself does not have an agency or management company representing it due to its creator-owned model (see Chapter Two). However, Image partner studios such as Skybound and Top Cow have co-creator models whereby rights are split between the publisher and the creatives involved. This model enables management companies and talent agencies to represent them.

210

Notes

CHAPTER 4 1

2 3

4

Some scholars, such as Alchian and Demsetz (1972), have even suggested that the firm, as an organizational technology, developed in part so as to solve the incentive problems associated with team production. Absent the existence of the firm, such production would likely not occur even when it was in the collective interest of the potential team members. There has, however, been some attempt within business economics to expand the theory of influence costs so that it applies to inter-firm dealings as well. See ­Powell, 2015. Of course, a buyer can mis-value something; however, when it comes to media, external bidders are usually no worse and, in fact, often better assessors of value than the owner of the good being sold. This is because divisions within a media conglomerate may feel pressured – due to managerial intervention, formalized inter-division relationships, influence activities or even simple proscriptions against selling externally – to over-value the products produced in-house. Indeed, mandates requiring that products be kept in house are, from a pricing perspective, especially risky, for they deprive a conglomerate of one of the market’s main functions: to determine, through competitive bidding, the value of whatever is offered for sale. Scholarship within the field of critical political economy of media regularly observes the same dynamic, although it tends to describe market contracting for labour as peripheralization, precarization or contingent hiring.

CHAPTER 5 1 2

3 4

5 6

DC was purchased by Kinney National in 1967. Warner Bros. became its sister company in 1969, when Kinney acquired it as well. The only other DC-related property to appear on television during that decade was the short-lived action drama, Human Target (Fox, 2010–2011). Smallville producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar attempted to bring an Aquaman series to television in the mid-2000s, but the programme never made it on the air (Adalian, 2005). Although these projects were in development prior to the 2009 launch of DCE, their release in this third phase helped to further stall efforts to exploit DC ­properties as motion pictures. Berlanti’s production company previously had been based at Warners from 2002– 2006 and then again since 2011, when he was lured back to the studio after being based at ABC since 2006. With the 2018 arrangement, Warner Bros. acquired an ownership stake in Berlanti’s production company and also bought out Berlanti’s profit participation in his existing shows (Littleton, 2018a). Thanks to Ross Richie for providing this typology, which we have expanded upon here. Creative services divisions of comic book publishers typically employ their ­freelance and/or in-house artists to develop advertising content for other ­companies. This often involves using a publisher’s characters for product design, branding and marketing purposes (e.g. incorporating Superman onto a box of cereal or Captain America onto kids’ meals for a fast food chain).

CHAPTER 6 1

Except when otherwise noted, the sales data provided in this chapter – i­ncluding those in Figures 6.1 and 6.2—have been calculated using data from annual

Notes

  2   3

  4   5

  6

  7

  8

  9

10

211

i­ndustry reports by ICv2 and/or ICv2 in collaboration with Comichron (‘Digital Comics’, 2013; Griepp, 2019b). Data excludes revenue from digital ­subscription services, which is not reported and has usually been considered to comprise a ­negligibly small portion of total market revenue. For 2009–2012, Comichron produced reports separately from ICv2, resulting in slightly different yearly sales figures for those years; the overall trends, however, are identical to those indicated by ICv2’s data (see ‘Comic Book Sales’, n.d.). By the time of the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con, the analogy had even become a key part of DC’s official position on digital comics, showing up in a FAQ that DC Comics (2017) released for retailers titled, ‘The New 52 and You’. We have chosen to forgo discussion of Android and other mobile ­operating systems in this chapter. We have done so in part for simplicity’s sake, but also because Google’s Android operating system was in almost every case a ­secondary consideration for entrepreneurs and publishers. Which is to say that ­companies developed apps for the iPhone (and later iPad) first and only ­subsequently – often with at least a year delay – for Android devices. That Apple was first to market partly explains their preference. Equally important, however, was Google’s open-source approach to Android, which caused device ­compatibility problems and created vulnerabilities in publishers’ digital rights management systems. These issues have helped Apple’s iOS maintain its initial importance for developers and publishers, despite Android’s greater device ­penetration in the United States. The one major exception is Marvel’s Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a webbased subscription service that the publisher launched in mid-2007, and which we discuss in greater detail at the end of the chapter. Though the first publisher to go day-and-date was Archie Comics in January 2011, few took notice, as Archie had miniscule market share, and depended ­heavily on newsstand sales and children consumers (viewed as more prone to impulse purchases than scheduled weekly comic store purchases). After shutting down its retail service, Graphic.ly continued operating as a ‘digital distribution platform’ for publishers, for whom it provided formatting and e­ bookstore distribution services. Then in 2014, Graphic.ly – whom comics journalists noted had been struggling financially for years – sold some of its assets to Blurb, a company specializing in self-publishing and print-on demand and then shut down (MacDonald, 2014b; Johnston, 2014a). Just as comics publishers and retailers entered Android’s app market much later than they did Apple’s, so too did they focus their initial investment in eBook platforms on companies other than Google. Comics did not become available on Google Play Books until late 2013. DC brought new single issues to the three primary eBook platforms in N ­ ovember 2012 (and Google Play Books in 2014) – but few other publishers followed suit until 2015, when Kindle and ComiXology’s technological back-ends were quasi-merged. Though still optional at the time during which this chapter was written, ­ComiXology’s own FAQ warns that ‘[m]any future features will depend on using your Amazon account’ and that ‘[a]t some point in the future, the only way to sign in to ComiXology will be with your Amazon account’ (ComiXology, 2015). This sense of complementarity – which is sometimes used in market analyses – better accounts for what Michael Katz and Carl Shapiro (1999: 47) gloss as ‘products that work together’ (such as hardware and software) and that thus may

212

Notes

not necessarily exhibit the kind of clear negative cross-price elasticity described by traditional microeconomics definitions. 11 For an attempt to conceptualize comic books as part of the print (i.e. book and magazine) industry, see Steirer and Perren, forthcoming.

AFTERWORD 1

For an example of what a comic book/publishing industry study might look like, see Steirer and Perren, forthcoming.

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Index Note: Titles of comics are given with the publisher in brackets to distinguish them from film and TV titles.

f = figure; n = endnote; t = table. 2 Guns (2013)  33, 157, 159–60 3 Arts (management company)  102 30 Days of Night (2007) 33, 161 100 Bullets (DC)  26, 94 The 100 (TV 2014–20) 131 300 (Dark Horse)  26, 143 300 (2007)  33, 143 Abrams, J.J.  148 Academy of Comic Book Arts  21 active producers  154–5, 157–60, 165, 166 Adams, Neal  21, 73 Adams, Ted  160 Adult Swim channel  95 advance on profits  208n6 Adventure Time (BOOM!)  71 The Adventures of Chuck & Friends (TV 2010–12)  82 advertising  192, 210n6 AfterShock Comics  166 Agent Carter (TV 2015–16)  40 agents/agencies  161, 209n4 commission  100 licensing  101

role in film-comics relationship  99–100 size of talent roster  100 switch to management 101 switching between 101 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV 2013–20) 38, 40, 126–7, 201 Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto  146 Air (2015) 42 Alchian, Armen  210n1 Alessi, Mark  175 Ali, Muhammad  20 Alias (Marvel)  32 Aliens (Dark Horse, web)  188 Allen, Todd  175 Alonso, Axel  166 Alpert, David  42–3, 102 Alphabet  196–7 The Amazing Spider-Man (TV 1977–9)  36–7 Amazon 183, 196–7 acquisition/operation of ComiXology 185–9 disabling of purchase button  186–7 monopoly of EST market  188–9, 203 Prime  193

American Flagg! (First Comics)  18 American Gods (TV 2017-)   38 American Splendor (2003)  33 Android  211n3, 211n7 Animal Man (DC/ Vertigo)  209n13 animation comics writers’ work in  16–18 perceived as childish form  18 TV adaptations of comics stories/ characters  29–30 Animation Guild  22, 79 Annie (character)  21 Ansoff, Igor  113–14 Ant Man (2014)  95 anti-trust law  126 Antonini, Lydia  161–2 AOL-Time Warner merger  110, 136 Apple  176, 186–7, 194, 196–7 conditions/restrictions 177 iBooks  183, 189 see also iPad; iPhone Aqua Teen Hunger Force (TV 2000–15)  95 Aquaman (DC)  144, 210n2 Aquaman (2018)  151

Index

Arad, Avi  140 Aragonés, Sergio  17 Archie Comics  178, 211n5 Arment, Marco  186 Arrow (DC)  38 Arrow (TV 2012–20) 38, 40, 141, 146, 147, 201 The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019)  158 artists attitudes to work  82–3 employment opportunities in Atlanta  96 lack of respect for contribution  83–7 moves into other roles  87, 106 (objections to) cinema-influenced terminology  86–7 payment schedules 50–1, 208nn1–2 professional representation 104–5 timescale of production 84 types (penciller/inker/ colourist)  84, 208nn1–2 unacceptability to management companies  103 Artists, Writers & Artisans (AWA)  166 Atlanta, Georgia  77, 91–8, 107 comics art studios  93–4 comics conventions 92 as comics production hub  88, 93–8 comics professionals’ community  93–7

237

distance from other major population centres  93 employment opportunities in comics industry 94–6 higher educational institutions  92–3 political leanings  93 as regional media hub  88–9, 91 Atlanta College of Art  92 AT&T  151–3 acquisition of Time Warner  151 reforms at DC 131–2, 151–2 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)  75 The Authority (DC)  60 Avatar Press  69, 71, 159 The Avengers (2012)  56, 127, 144 Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)  127 Avengers: Endgame (2019)  32, 95, 126, 151, 201 Avengers: Infinity War (2018)  126, 151 Avengers v Atlas (Marvel) 75 The Awesomes (TV 2013–15)  95 Ayer, David  150 Azzarello, Brian  83 Bane (character)  62 Barb Wire (Dark Horse/1996)  28 Barnes & Noble  183, 188 Bat Lash (character)  17 Batman (character)  15, 137 film reinterpretations 27

Batman (TV 1966–8) 30 Batman (1989)  27–8, 29, 110, 136, 139 casting  27 comics professionals’ input  27–8 Batman: The Animated Series (TV 1992–5)  29 Batman Begins (2005)  32, 33, 140 Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000)  29 Batman Beyond (DC)  82 The Batman Chronicles (DC)  75 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (DC)  26–7 Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)  29 Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)  149 Batman: Year One (DC)  26–7 Battlestar Galactica (TV 1978–9)  21 Batwoman (DC)  58 Batwoman (TV 2019-) 152 Beatty, Scott  168 Bechko, Corinna  75 Beechen, Adam  82–3 Bendis, Brian Michael 32, 35, 43, 61, 67, 102 Bento Box  95 Berg, Jon  150, 151 Berger, Karen  152–3 Berlanti, Greg  40, 146–8, 201, 210n4 Berry, Halle  32, 140 Bewkes, Jeff  110, 115, 145

238

The Big Bang Theory (TV 2007–19)  148 The Big Book of Women (DC/Paradox Press)  59 Binder, Otto  14 Birds of Prey (DC)  17 Birds of Prey (2020)  201 Birds of Prey (TV 2002–3) 39, 141 Bissette, Steve  59 Black Panther (Marvel) 61, 83, 94 Black Panther (2018)  95 Black Widow (2021)  204 Blackman, W. Haden  58 ‘blackout rights’  141 Blade (character)  17, 139 Blade (1997)  139 Blade II (2002)  139 Blade: Trinity (2004)  139 Blade (TV 2006)  39 Blade (webcomic)  174 Blondie (King Features) 172 Boddy, William, Fifties Television  206 Body Bags (Dark Horse)  94 Bone (webcomic)  178 Books-A-Million  183–4 BookScan  153, 165 boom periods late 60s/early 70s  15 late 80s/early 90s  24–5 BOOM! Studios  7, 132, 154, 156–60, 165, 166, 202 co-ownership model 68–9, 70, 71 licensing agreements 71 pitching of projects 159–60 use of talent agencies 99–100 Bourdieu, Pierre  58, 79, 98

Index

Boxer, Sarah  173 The Brak Show (TV 2000–07)  95 Brandenburger, Adam  72 Breaking Bad (TV 2008–13)  41 Brennert, Alan  18, 30 Brevoort, Tom  111 Brienza, Casey  79 Brigman, June  92 Brodesser, Claude  140 Brothers, David  181 Brubaker, Ed  61 Buffett, Warren  121 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dark Horse)  94 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV 1996–2003) 31, 87 Burrows, Jacen  71 Burton, Tim  27, 29, 139 cable TV  30–1, 128–9, 162–3 Caldwell, John  88 Campbell, Andrew  114–15 Campbell, Martin  147 Campbell, T.  172 Cantwell, Christopher 153 Caprica (TV 2009–10) 38 Captain America: Civil War (2016)  95, 126 Captain Marvel (Marvel) 15, 92 Capullo, Greg  131 CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act 2020 (US)  203 Carlin, Mike  30 Carmody, Tim  109, 111 Carnevale, Tony  72 Cartoon Network  94–5 Casino Royale (2006)  147

Castle Rock (TV 2018–19) 148 Catwoman (2004)  32, 33, 140 Cavna, Michael  147 Chasing Amy (1997)  31 Chatterjee, Sayan  114 Chaykin, Howard  18–19, 30, 38, 85 children, targeting as audience  82, 159 children’s television comic books adapted for  29–30 comics professionals’ moves to  16–18 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018–20)  146 China Beach (TV 1988–91)  18 Christensen, Don  207n2 Chun, Tze  166 Circle of Confusion (management company)  102–3, 161 Civil War (Marvel)  1, 60 Clarke, M.J.  124 Class Comics  176–7, 192 Clickwheel  178 Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018–19)  40 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 21 Closed on Mondays  155 Clowes, Daniel  33 Coase, Ronald  111, 116, 117 Coates, Ta-Nehisi  35, 61 Cognetic (BOOM!)  68 Coleite, Aron Eli  39, 208n11 Comic Book Creators Guild  21–2 comic book professionals 78–82, 205 career uncertainties 106

Index

concealment of background  11 disenchantments/ frustrations  25, 34–6, 57–8 enthusiasm for subject 60–1, 81 freelancing  80 gender/demographic 14, 44, 81–2, 88 increased diversity 81–2 (lack of ) professional associations  15–16, 21–2, 81 moves into other industries  72–3 moves/returns from Hollywood  11–12, 75–6, 201 moves to Hollywood 11, 16–17, 31, 35–6, 73–4 numbers  79–80 payment methods/ rates  50–2 places of residence 89–90, 205 pseudonyms  15 raised profiles  60, 74 range of work  80 recruitment from fanbase  60–1 recruitment from outside US  81 sought by Hollywood 43, 44 terms of employment 50–5 working conditions 14, 35 writer/artist hierarchy 82–9, 96, 103, 106 see also artists; writers comic book stores  23 comic books ‘age of relevance’ (late 60s/early 70s)  15 alternative niches  24, 45

239

changing attitudes to 11–12 collapse of market (90s)  34 conventions  92, 131–2 fanbase  24, 44–5, 82, 159 influence of cinema on style/mentality 85–7 niche markets  23–4, 159 (perceived) low cultural status  11, 13, 15, 18, 28–9 publication/distribution 15, 23–4 publishing formats 159 sales figures/growth 169f (shortage of ) studies 5, 12 comic strips, distinguished from comic books 8–9 ComicBlitz  189, 193 Comico Comics  25 ComiXology  177, 178, 179, 181–3, 185, 211n9 acquisition by Amazon 185–6 activity under Amazon 186–9 handling of monopoly position  187–8, 203 Originals  188 subscription service 193, 194 Unlimited  187, 188, 193, 194 communications technology, advances in  81 Community for Creative Non-Violence v Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1987)  49

Conan: The Adventurer (TV 1992–3)  17 Conan the Barbarian (1982)  21 Conan the Barbarian (Dark Horse, web) 188 Conan the Destroyer (1984)  18 Concrete (Dark Horse)  52 Connell, Del  207n2 Constantine (DC/Vertigo) 152 Constantine (2005)  33, 40, 140 conventions  92, 131–2 convergence  4, 205 (problems of ) definition 2, 207n1 Convergence (DC)  1–4 critical/commercial response  2–3 Conway, Gerry  18, 21, 62 coordination costs 118–19 co-ownership  54, 55, 67–71 cost-benefit divisions 69–70, 70f licensing agreements 70–1 objectives  68 publishers offering 68 risk-reduction strategies 70–1 specifics of deals  68–9 copyright acquired by publisher see work for hire assignment  52 changes to law of  47–8 creator-owned see creator-ownership shared see co-ownership uncredited adaptations 56

240

‘work for hire’ exception  47–8 Copyright Act 1909 (US) 47 Copyright Act 1976 (US) 47–8 corporate stakeholders, dictating of creative policy  57–8 COVID-19 pandemic 7, 202–4 Cowboys & Aliens (2011) 86 creator-ownership (‘Image model’)  53–4, 55, 63–7 advance on profits 208n6 burdens placed on creator  66–7 ethical objectives  64–5 simplification of publishing operations  65–6 Crisis on Infinite Earths (DC)  1 Crosby, Chris  173 Crossed (Avatar)  69 CrossGen  175, 195–6 The Crow (Caliber Comics/1994)  28 Cruise, Tom  86 cultural intermediaries, role of  98–9, 205 Curtin, Michael  91, 170 CyberComics (Marvel) 174, 184–5 Daredevil (DC)  26 Daredevil (2003)  32 Daredevil (TV 2015–18) 32, 148 Dark Horse Entertainment 12, 25, 26, 132, 152–3, 154, 155, 161, 202 digital app  179 licensing of Amazon 188 The Dark Knight (2008) 142

Index

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)  62 Darrow, Geoff  31 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)  75 day-and-date publishing (online)  181–2 Day Men (BOOM!)  83 DC Comics  7, 165 approach to scripting comics  85 changes to distribution system  202–3 contractual/payment arrangements  51–3 digital distribution 177–8, 181–2, 190, 211n8; subscription service 193, 195, 196 discouragement of originality  62–3 ‘event’ stories 1, 24 involvement of non-creative stakeholders  57–8 loss of stall at San Diego Comic-Con 131–2 move to LA  1, 145–6 negotiations over Superman franchise 20 output  56, 57f payment methods 51–2 relationship with Time Warner  136–53, 165–6 (see also Time Warner) royalty programme 22 sales figures  53f structural integration with Time Warner 136–7, 142 talent roster  79–80 ‘universe,’ development of  29, 142, 147, 149

De Blieck, Augie, Jr.  186 De Line, Donald  142, 145, 154 Dead Space (2008)  33 Deadpool (character)  62 The Defenders (TV 2017) 40 DeKnight, Steven S.  38 De Luca, Michael  28 Demsetz, Harold  117, 210n1 Detective Comics (DC)  27 Di Novi, Denise  140 Diagnosis: Murder (TV 1993–2001)  18 Diamond, Neil  20 Diamond Comic Distributors  54–5, 165, 202 DiDio, Dan  1, 2, 3, 144, 152 digital distribution 167–99 advertising  192 compared with music industry  193, 194 consolidation phase (2012–14)  182–5 day-and-date publishing  181–2 ‘dental floss’ analogy 167–8, 170, 181 diversity of pathways 171 economics of retail market  191–2 experimental/ pre-market phase (to 2007)  171–5 history  171–89 key issues in evolution 189–96 (limited) impact on industry/sales 168–70, 169f, 196–9 market-making phase (2008–11)  175–82 monetization  176, 192–6;

Index

direct vs. indirect 192 monopoly phase (2014-)  185–9 PC-based architecture 176–8 piracy  174, 190 pricing  193 publishers’ lack of interest in  173–4 subscription services 193–6 substitutability 189–92, 198–9 digital distribution  7 DiMaggio, Paul  123 Dini, Paul  29, 31 direct distribution model, move towards  23–4 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016–17) 162–3 Disney  123–9, 203–4 acquisitions  128, 157–8 cable revenues  128–9 organizational structure 127–8, 129 outsourcing of merchandising/ publication  124–5 outsourcing of production/ distribution  125–6 purchase of Marvel 7, 35, 109, 124, 143 subsidiaries’ difficulties 126–7 Disney Infinity (videogame) 128 Dittmer, Jason  90 ‘diversion’  72–3 Dixon, Chuck  62 Doc Savage (character)  21 Doctor Strange (TV 1978) 36–7 Donner, Lauren Shuler  31 Donner, Richard 20–1, 31

241

Doom Patrol (TV 2019-) 152 ‘Dot-Comics’ (Marvel) 174–5 Downey, Robert, Jr.  32 Dr Doom (unfinished project)  158 Dragon Con  92 Du Boff, Richard  121–2 Duncan, Randy  26 Dynamite Entertainment 154 Easter Seal Society v Playboy, 815 F.2d 323 (5th Cir. 1987)  48–9 eBooks  183–5 Eco, Umberto  23 Eisenberg, Harvey 207n2 Eisner, Michael  110, 115 Eisner Awards  52 electronic sell-through (EST)  176, 178, 188 benefits  192–3 drawbacks/marginalisation  193 Elektra (2005)  32 Ellis, Warren  33 Emmerich, Toby  150 Englehart, Steve  27 Ennis, Garth  152 entertainment lawyers 105–6 Epplin, Luke  9 Evanier, Mark  17, 18 Evans, Chris  102 Ex Machina (DC)  94 Faerber, Jay  39, 43 The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV, projected)  204 Family Circus (King Features)  172 fans demography  24, 44–5

progression to creative role  60–1 Fantastic Four (Marvel), termination of series  109–10, 111 Fantastic Four (2005)  32, 102 Fantasy Island (TV 1977–84)  18 The Father Dowling Mysteries (TV 1989–91)  18 Fear the Walking Dead (TV 2015-)  42 Feige, Kevin  31–2, 127, 134, 135–6, 142, 147, 150, 201, 208n10 Fell (Image)  33 Fey, Tina  102 financier-studio model 160–5 financial model  155–6, 162–3 risks/benefits  163–5, 166 Finger, Bill  30 Fire and Ice (1982)  21 firm, theories of  115–19 Flash Gordon (character) 21 The Flash (TV 1990–1) 19, 30 The Flash (TV 2014-) 38, 144, 147 Fleischer Studios  29 Florida, Richard, The Rise of The Creative Class 89, 90 Ford, Harrison  86 form, importance in industrial practice 170–1, 197–9 Fox TV acquisition by Disney 157–8 children’s programming 29 deals with comics publishers  99–100

242

Frazetta, Frank  73 Friends (TV 1994–2004) 131 From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)  31 From Hell (2001)  33 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul  15–16 Gaijin Studios, Atlanta 93–4 Gaiman, Neil  152 Garfield and Friends (TV 1988–94)  17 Garner, Alex  160 Gee, Thomas, Judge  48–9 Geneen, Harold  115 ‘generation X,’ role in comic book industry  13, 23–4, 28, 44, 94 George of the Jungle (1997) 17 Georgia State University 92 Ghost World (2001)  33 GI Joe (Marvel)  15 GI Joe (TV 1983–6)  17, 29 Giant Days (BOOM!)  52 Gibbons, Dave  26, 58–9 The Gifted (TV 2017–19) 40 Gillen, Kieron  64 Gilliam, Terry  139 Gimple, Scott M.  42 God Friended Me (TV 2018–20)  146 God Is Dead (Avatar)  69 The Godfather (1972)  20 Goldman, William  140 Goldsman, Akiva  142 Google  189, 211n3, 211n7 Goold, Michael  114–15 Goon (Dark Horse)  52 Gotham (TV 2014–19) 149 Gough, Alfred  37, 210n2

Index

Gould, Alan  128 Goyer, David  33 Grant, August  207n1 Graphic Artists Guild 79 graphic novel, publishers’ market shares  153 Graphic.ly  177, 182, 211n6 The Graysons (TV, unproduced) 141–2 Grease (1978)  20 Green, Michael  38, 39 Green Lantern (DC)  75 Green Lantern (2011)  35, 38, 143, 144, 147 Greenberg, Drew Z.  38 Greengrass, Paul  139 Griepp, Milton  152 Grillo-Marxuach, Javier 39 Groo the Wanderer (Aragonés)  17 Gruca, Thomas  115, 121 Guber, Peter  136 Guggenheim, Marc  40, 147 Gung Ho (1986)  27 Halt and Catch Fire (TV 2014–17)  153 Hamada, Walter  151 Hamm, Sam  27 Hamner, Cully  94 Hanna-Barbera  16–17 Hardman, Gabriel  75–7, 78, 79, 87 comments on work/ creativity  76 Hardwick, Chris  42 Harper, David  56 Harris, Tony  94 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2012)  144 Hart, Kevin  102 The Hate U Give (2018) 158 Hatfield, Charles  190

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (TV 1983–5)  29 Hellblazer (DC/Vertigo) 209n13 Hellboy (2004)  33, 155 Herman, Edward  121–2 Heroes (TV 2006–10) 39, 40, 141 Heroes (webcomic) 208n11 Hibbs, Brian  168 Hickman, Jonathan  35, 109 Hidden Figures (2016)  158 Hill, Joe 161 Hilmes, Michele, Hollywood and Broadcasting  206 A History of Violence (2005)  33, 139 Hitch, Bryan  56, 85 Holkins, Jerry  172 Holland, Tom  126 Hollywood, interaction with comic-book industry  3–4, 5–6, 204–6 2000s developments 24, 32–43 areas for future study 205–6 changing attitudes 11–12, 77 continuum of  133 global reach  88, 97–8, 104 history, 1940s-80s 14–23 history, 1980s-90s 23–32, 44 influence of cinema on comics  85–7 publishers’ varying approaches  133–4, 153–4 writers working in both concurrently 75–7 Holt, Jennifer  170

Index

Horn, Alan  111, 143 House of Cards (TV 2013–18)  41 Howe, Sean  62 Howley, Paul  168 Hughes, Adam  94 Hulk (2003)  32 Hulu  38, 193 Human Target (DC)  26 Human Target (TV 1992) 30 Human Target (TV 2010–11)  210n2 Huston, Shaun  90 Identity Crisis (DC)  1 IDW Publishing  7, 26, 103, 124, 132, 155–7, 160–5, 166, 202 financial fluctuations 163–5, 166 financial model  162–3 foundation/personnel 160–1 mission statement  161 staff numbers  161–2 target audience  159 work with agents/ managers  161, 162 Iger, Robert  158 Image Comics  12, 26, 43, 63, 208n6 commission  209n14 costs to authors  66 creator-owner model 34, 53–4, 55, 63–7, 132 (see also creator-ownership) foundation  25, 64 partner studios  64 promotion  65 publishing ethos  64–5 relations with management companies 103, 209n6 at San Diego Comic-Con 132

243

work-for-hire agreements  71–2, 73 Inception (2010)  75 The Incredible Hulk (2008) 142 The Incredible Hulk (TV 1978–82)  36–7 Infinity Gauntlet (Marvel)  1 influence costs  118, 210n2 integration, lateral/vertical 112–13, 119–20 intellectual property (IP) 6, 47–74 changes in ownership 22 ‘ecosystem’  55–6, 72–4, 133, 201–2 place in larger ecosystems  73 range of publishing deals  55–71 see also copyright interviewees, background of  10, 138 Invincible (Image)  42 Invisible Republic (Image) 75 iPad 179 pitfalls for customers 179–81, 180t iPhone  176–9 App Store launch  178 comics designed for 177, 178 unpopularity with publishers  177–9 Iron Man (2008)  32, 142 Iron Man (TV 1994–6) 208n8 It: Chapter Two (2019) 131 iVerse Media  178, 185, 188–9 iZombie (DC/Vertigo) 26, 152

iZombie (TV 2015–19) 149 Jackson, Samuel L.  127 Jeanty, Georges  94 Jem (TV 1985–8)  17 Jemas, Bill  166 Jenkins, Henry  110 Jenkins, Patty  149 Jenkins, Paul  58 Jessica Jones (TV 2017–19) 40, 148 Joe Books Inc  124 John Carter (2012)  128 John Flood (BOOM!)  68 Johns, Geoff  31–2, 35, 38, 142, 144–5, 150, 151, 208n10 Johnson, Dave  94 Johnson, Derek  98, 124, 134 Johnston, Anthony  33 Johnston, Paddy  79 Johnston, Rich  109, 111 Jolly Roger Studios  93–4 Jonah Hex (2010)  143 Josie and the Pussycats (2001)  33 Judge Dredd (Eagle/1995) 29 Jurassic Park III (2001)  75 Justice League (DC)  144 Justice League (2017) 150–1 Justice League Unlimited (DC)  82 Justice League Unlimited (TV 2004–6)  29, 33 Kahn, Jenette  138–9 Kaling, Mindy  102 Kane, Bob  14, 27 Katy Keene (TV 2019-) 146 Katz, Michael  211–12n10 Keaton, Michael  27 Keenspot Entertainment 172–3

244

Khoury, George  65 Kick-Ass (Millarworld)  60 Kidman, Shawna  12, 207n2 The Killing Joke (DC)  27 Kim, Chuck  39, 208n11 Kinberg, Simon  102 Kindle  183–4, 186–7 King, Jeff  2 King, Stephen  161 King, Tom  131 King Features Syndicate 172 Kingsman (Millarworld) 60 Kinney, Jeff  153 Kinney National  210n1 Kinski (Image)  75 Kirby, Jack  14, 17, 18 heirs’ lawsuit against Marvel  47–9, 52, 55–6 Kirby v Marvel see Marvel v Kirby Kirkman, Robert  41–3, 44, 55, 64, 67, 71–2, 102–3, 132 Kochalka, James  172 Kompare, Derek  98 Krahulik, Mike  172 Kramer, Jon  166 Kramer, Lee  166 Kroll, Sue  150 Krypton (TV 2018–19)  149 Kubert, Joe  14 LA Law (TV 1986–94)  18 Landgraf, John  41 Larsen, Erik  25, 55, 65, 209n11 Last Sons of America (BOOM!)  157 Latour, Bruno  197 lawyers see entertainment lawyers Lee, Jim  1, 25, 64, 85, 87, 131, 142, 144 ‘dental floss’ analogy 167–8, 181

Index

Lee, Nicole  179 Lee, Stan  15, 85 Legendary Comics  159 Legion (TV 2017–19)  40 Lemire, Jeff  87 Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)  75 Levitz, Paul  21, 140, 144, 151, 209n11 licensing  22, 38–9, 70–1 of agencies  101 Lieber, Stan see Lee, Stan Liefeld, Rob  25, 62, 64, 85 Lifford, Pam  151 Lilyhammer (TV 2012–14) 41 Locke, Vince  33 Locke & Key (IDW)  155 Loeb, Jeph 38, 39, 40, 127, 144, 201 Logan (2017)  38, 75 Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (TV 1993–97)  139 The Lone Ranger (character)  21 The Lone Ranger (2013)  128 Longbox  177, 182 Lopes, Paul  15, 79 Lorre, Chuck  148 The Losers (2010)  143 Lost (TV 2004–10)  38, 39 Love, Simon (2018)  148, 158 Lu, Lenil  56 Lubatkin, Michael  114 Lucifer (TV 2016–)  40– 1, 149 Luke Cage (TV 2016–18) 40, 43 Lumberjanes (BOOM!)  68, 157–8 Lyle, Tom  92 MacDonald, Heidi 131–2, 173, 186 MacLaren, Michelle  149 Mad magazine  17

Mad Men (TV 2007–15)  41 Madefire  184, 187–8, 189 Madureira, Joe  85 Maguire, Jennifer Smith  98 Maleev, Alex  39 Malibu Comics  25 Man of Steel (2013)  56, 149 management costs  117–19 managers/management companies  161 commission  101 compared/contrasted with agencies  101 diversification  103 focus on writers  103 increase in influence 102–3 production divisions 101–2 role in film-comics relationship  102–3 Manley, Joe  172 Mars Needs Moms (2011) 128 Martin, Ann M.  153 Martin, Laura  94 Marts, Mike  166 Marvel Comics approach to scripting comics  85 Atlanta operation  95 Cinematic Universe (MCU)  32, 62, 126, 127, 134, 142, 147 co-production agreement with Sony  125–6 contractual/payment arrangements 51–3 Creative Committee 32 digital distribution 174–5, 178, 179, 182, 184–5, 190, 191, 202, 211n4; incoherence of strategy  181; subscription service 193, 195–6

Index

discouragement of originality  62–3 dysfunctional operation 124 ‘event’ stories  1, 24 financial misjudgements 29–30, 126 frustration/departure of employees  25, 34 Icon imprint  65 incentive programme  22 lawsuit  47–9, 52, 55–6 move into film/TV production  34–5, 134–6, 143–4 non-integrated structure 123–4 output  56, 57f place in Disney hierarchy 127–8 purchase by Disney see under Disney relationship with Disney 123–9, 203–4 role of non-creative stakeholders  57–8 success in licensing film rights  140 talent roster  79–80 Marvel Entertainment  7 Marvel v Kirby, 726 F.3d 119 (2d Cir. 2013) 47–9, 52, 55–6 Marvel’s Agent Carter (TV 2015–16)  127 Marx, Christy  17 Marz, Ron  85–6 The Mask (1994)  155 The Mask (Dark Horse/1994)  28, 155 Mass Effect (Dark Horse, web)  188 Masters, Kim  150 Matador (Image)  83 The Matrix (1999)  31, 102 Matthews, Julian  98 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman)  26

245

McFarlane, Todd  25, 64, 85, 209n11 The McLean Stevenson Show (TV 1976–7)  17 McMillan, Graeme  166 Mech Cadet Yu (BOOM!) 160 media capital(s)  90–1, 104 media studies  5, 13–14 Melniker, Benjamin  136 Meltzer, Brad  61 Men in Black (Malibu)  139 Men in Black (1997)  139 Men in Black II (2002)  75 mergers see integration Meugniot, Will  30 Meyer, Barry  145 The Middleman (TV 2008) 39, 141 Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (Saban)  71 Mignola, Mike  87 Milgrom, Paul  118 Millar, Mark  35, 56, 60, 61, 64, 67, 71–2 Millar, Miles  37, 210n2 Millarworld  60 millennial generation  45 Miller, Bryan Q.  38 Miller, Frank  26–7, 35 Mister T (TV 1983–5)  17 misvaluation  210n2 Modern Tales  172–3 monitoring  118 Moore, Alan  26, 27, 71 Moore, James  72 Moore, Tony  41, 43 Morazzo, Martin  153 Morrison, Grant  142, 152 Motion Picture Association of America  174 Mouse Guard (BOOM!) 155, 158 Mueller, Dennis  121 Murakami, Glen  29 Murdoch, James  166 Mutant X (TV 2001–4)  39 My Little Pony ’n Friends (TV 1986–7) 17

Nalebuff, Barry  72 narrative-based approaches 8 Nee, John  127 Nelson, Diane  144, 145, 150, 151 Netflix  38, 41, 120, 163, 164–5, 193, 196–7 The New Adventures of Superman see Lois & Clark new characters, incentives to create  62 New Line  28, 139–41 newspaper industry  9 newsstand distribution model, move away from  23–4 Nimona (webcomic)  82 No Ordinary Family (TV 2011–12)  141 Nocera, Joe  186 Nolan, Christopher  32, 78, 140, 142, 145 Norcliffe, Glen  89–90, 91, 92 Noveck, Gregory  140, 143, 144 Nowlan, Kevin  29 Oblivion (2013)  86 Ocean (WildStorm)  94 October Faction (TV 2020) 164 The Omen (1976)  20 Oni Press  132, 155 Oprisko, Kris  160 Orange Is the New Black (TV 2013–19)  41 Owens, Matt  43 page rate, payment by  50–1 advance against  208n6 Painkiller Jane (TV 2007)  39 Panelfly  178, 182 Panosian, Dan  83 participation equity  62 participation threshold 51–2

246

sales falling below  53 uncertainty over  208n4 Pasko, Marty  29 passive licensors  154 payment methods/rates 50–2 advance on profits 208n6 copyright assignment 52 page rate  50–1 participation threshold 51–2 Pearson, Jason  94 Pekar, Harvey  33 Penny Arcade (webcomic) 172 Pennyworth (TV 2019-) 149 Pérez, George  57–8 Perlmutter, Isaac ‘Ike’   127 Perot, Ross  175 Peters, Jon  27, 136, 140 Phillips, Sean  61 Pilkey, Dav  153 piracy, online  174, 190, 193 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)  128 plagiarism, allegations of  56 Planet of the Apes (BOOM!)  75 Planetary (WildStorm) 33 The Plastic Man Comedy/ Adventure Show (TV 1979–81)  18 Pokaski, Joe  39, 208n11 Popeye (King Features) 21, 172 Porter, Michael  114, 115 Powell, Walter  123 Power Pack (DC)  92 Powers (TV 2015–16) 43 Preacher (DC/Vertigo) 26, 152, 153

Index

Preacher (TV 2016–19) 40, 149 Prince  110 print industry, studies of  5 Prodigal Son (TV 2019-) 146 Prometheus (Avatar)  71 proof corrections 17 (McClean), 19 (TV 1991–2), 144 (Hollows), 149 (2018) Providence (Avatar)  69 Pruitt, Joe  166 publishers dedicated filmdevelopment staff  133 digital distribution, lack of interest in 173–4, 175–6 expansion into production/distribution  133 mainstream, graphic novels by  153 publishing formats 159 range of operational models  133–4, 153–4, 165 (see also active producers; financier-studio model; passive licensors) range/overlap of agreements with creators 52–5, 71–2 (see also co-ownership; creator-ownership; work-for-hire agreements) The Punisher (2004) 32 The Punisher (TV 2017–19)  40 Puzo, Mario  20 Quesada, Joe  32, 87 Quinn, Pat  92 Quitely, Frank  58–9

Radomski, Eric  29 Raimi, Sam  78 Ramos, Humberto  85 Rawley, Evan  118 The Real Ghostbusters (TV 1986–91)  29 Red (WildStorm)  94 Red (2010)  33 Reeves, Keanu  140 Remender, Rick  33 Rendace, Oliver  89–90, 91, 92 Revisioned: Tomb Raider (online, 2007)  33 Reynolds, Ryan  147 Richardson, Mike  28 Richie, Ross  157, 159–60, 210n5 Richter, Michael  166 Ringer (TV 2011–12) 39 Riverdale (TV 2017-) 131, 146 Robbins, Robbie  160 Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics (TV 2017)  42 Roberts, John  117, 118, 123–4 Robin (DC)  92 Robinov, Jeff  141–2, 143, 144, 145, 149–50 Robocop 2 (1990)  26 Robocop 3 (1993)  26 Robot Chicken (TV 2005-) 144 Rodriguez, Robert  26–7, 31 Rogers, John  33 Ronin (DC)  26 Rood, John  168, 182 Roseman, Bill  175 Roth, Peter  148 Roussel, Violaine  99 Roven, Charles  140, 142, 150, 154 royalty/incentive programmes  22 see also participation threshold

Index

Ruby-Spears  17 Rucka, Greg  35 Rumelt, Richard  113 Runaways (TV 2017–19) 40 RWBY (TV 2012-)  131 Ryall, Chris  160–1 Ryan, Maureen  164 Saban Entertainment 30, 71 Saga (Image)  63, 132 Salkind, Alexander/Ilya 20, 136 Salkowitz, Rob  132, 151 Samnee, Chris 66 San Diego Comic-Con 92, 131–2, 211n2 The Sandman (DC/ Vertigo)  41, 120, 152, 153, 209n13 Sanson, Kevin  170 Santo, Avi  98 The Savage Dragon (Marvel)  25, 55 Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)  92, 93 Scare PewDiePie (web TV 2015)  42 Scholastic  153 Schumacher, Joel  139 Schwartz, Julius  14 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 20 Scooby-Doo and ScrappyDoo (TV 1979–83) 17 Scott, Allen  88 Scott Pilgrim (Oni Press) 155 Scribd  188 self-publishing  54–5, 80, 208–9n7 Shadowhunters (TV 2016–19)  38 Shapiro, Carl  71, 211–12n10 Shazam (2019)  140–1, 144, 151 She Could Fly (Dark Horse)  153

247

Shepherd, Dick  20 Shooter, Jim  209n11 Shuster, Joe  21–2, 27 Siegel, Jerry  21–2, 27 Silver, Joel  140, 142, 145, 154 Silverman, Greg  150 Silvestri, Marc  64 Simone, Gail  209n11 Sin City (2005)  26–7 Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)  26–7 Singer, Bryan  32 Sirower, Mark  114 The Sisterhood of Steel (Marvel)  17 Skaaren, Warren  27 Skroce, Steve  31 Skybound Entertainment 42, 154, 209n6 Smallville (TV 2001–11) 37–8, 39, 40, 141, 144 Smile (webcomic)  82 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations  116 Smith, Anthony  87 Smith, Kevin  31, 61, 208n9 Smith, Matthew J.  26 Snell, Jason  179 Snyder, Scott  87, 131 Snyder, Zack  139, 142–3, 145, 149, 150, 151 Sony, deal with Marvel 125–6 Sorrel, Charlie  178–9 Southern Bastards (Image) 52 Space Angel (TV 1962–4) 16 Spawn (Image)  25, 63, 64, 73, 139 Spawn (1998)  139 Spider-Man (2002)  11, 32, 140, 201 Spider-Man 3 (2007)  75 Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (TV 1981–6)  17 Spider-Man: Far

from Home (2019)  125–6 Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)  125–6 Spider-Man (TV 1994–8) 208n8 Spiegelman, Art  26 The Spire (BOOM!)  68 Spotify  194, 196–7 Squidbillies (TV 2005–17) 95 Stallone, Sylvester  20 Stankey, John  152 Staples, Fiona  45 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV 1987–94)  37 Star Wars (Marvel)  18, 124 Star Wars (1977)  21 Star Wars: Legacy (Dark Horse)  75 Starman (DC)  92 Starman (1984)  21 Steinberger, David  194 Stelfreeze, Brian  82–3, 84, 94 Stevenson, Noelle  45 Nimona  82 Stigler, George  116 Story, Karl  94 Stuber (2019)  158 Stumptown (Oni Press) 155 subscription services, online  193–6 drawbacks  194 pricing  193 Suicide Squad (2016)  149 Super Bloopers and Practical Jokes (TV 1984–6)  17 Super-Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show (TV 1984–5)  17 Superboy (TV 1988–92) 30, 136 Supergirl (DC)  92 Supergirl (1984)  20, 136

248

Supergirl (TV 2015-) 39, 43 Superhero Synergies (collection)  110 Superman (character) 15, 20, 62, 137 Superman (DC)  57–8 #75 24–5 Superman (1978)  20–1, 22, 27, 136 Superman: The Animated Series (TV 1996–2000)  29 Superman: Birthright (DC)  56 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1984)  20, 139 Superman Returns (2006) 20, 32, 75, 140 Supernatural (TV 2005–20)  38 Surrogates (2009)  33 Swamp Thing (TV 1990–3)  37 Swords of Sorcery (DC)  17 Syfy  163–4 synergy  109–29, 205 accessibility of concept 122–3 coinage/usage of term 113–14 continuing use/ applicability of term  121–3 critiques/limitations 110–11, 114–15, 119, 121, 129, 137 terminology  112–13 talent representatives  74, 77, 98–106, 107, 132, 202, 205 advice on Hollywood life  104 client base  104–5 role in film-comics relationship 99–100, 161

Index

tiers of power  100 see also agents/agencies; managers/ management companies Talking Dead (TV 2011-) 42 Tank Girl (Dark Horse/1995)  29 Tartikoff, Brandon  19 television  36–45 live action  30 moves to comics from 31–2, 201 (perceived) negative impact on cinema audiences  141–2 see also animation; children’s television Telgemeier, Raina, Smile 82 Thomas, Roy  21, 61–2 Thor (Marvel)  94 Thrillbent  184, 185 Thundarr the Barbarian (TV 1980–1)  18 Time Warner  95, 136–53 acquisition by AT&T 125, 131 ‘blackout rights’ on DC properties 141 box-office failures 143–4 corporate restructurings/personnel changes  143–5, 149–50, 151 dynamic development of DC material 146–51 exploitation of DC material  137–8, 140–1 internal differences 142–3, 150, 165–6 lack of interest in DC material (up to 2002)  138–40

merger/dissolution with AOL  110, 136 movie releases via New Line  139–40 organizational structure  136–7 release schedule (projected vs. actual)  150t relocation of publishing arm to LA  1, 145–6 Timecop (Dark Horse/1994)  28, 155 Timm, Bruce  29, 31 ‘title churn’  56, 57f TKO Studios  166 Tomb of Dracula (Marvel) 17 Tomorrowland (2019)  128 Top Cow  209n6 Toth, Alex  16–17, 18 transaction costs  116–17, 118–19 internal vs. external 119–20 Transformers (TV 1984–7) 17 Transformers: Robots in Disguise (TV 2014–17)  82 Transmetropolitan (DC/ Vertigo)  33 Tron (1982)  21 Tsujihara, Kevin  140, 145, 146, 149, 151 Tucker, Reed  22 Turbo Teen (TV 1984)  17 Turner Broadcasting System  91, 94–5 Uclick  178 Ultimate X-Men (Marvel) 32 The Ultimates (Marvel) 56, 60

Index

Ultraforce Spider-Man (Marvel)  75 digital version  174 Umbrella Academy (TV 2019-)  3, 155 United Media  173 ‘universes,’ comic/ cinematic  24, 40, 41–2, 62, 87 see also DC; Marvel Uslan, Michael E.  136 V (TV 1984–5)  21 V for Vendetta (2005)  33 V-Wars (TV 2019)  164 The Vampire Diaries (TV 2009–17)  96 Varian, Hal  71 Vaughan, Brian K.  39 Verheiden, Mark  28, 38, 39 Vertigo Comics  71, 139, 151–2, 209n13 Viper (TV 1994–9)  19 Vosburg, Mike  17 Wachowski, Lana/Lilly 31, 43, 102 Wagner, John  33 Wahlberg, Mark  157 Waid, Mark  56, 168, 184 Walken, Christopher  20 The Walking Dead (Image) 26, 41, 63, 73, 132, 202 digital app  179 The Walking Dead (TV 2010–21)  41–3, 44, 55, 96, 132 The Walking Dead (video game)  42 Walt Disney Company see Disney Wandavision (TV, projected)  204 Wanted (2008)  33 Warner Bros., management of DC properties  20, 27, 138–40

249

see also Time Warner Warner Bros. Television conflicts with film division  141–2, 146 expansion  148–9 Washington, Denzel 157 The Washington Post  9 Watchmen (DC)  26 sale of screen rights 139 webcomics  171–2, 174–5, 176–8 (limited) profitability 172–3, 189–90 substitutability 189–92 Wein, Len  29, 30, 209n11 Welcome Back, Kotter (TV 1975–9)  17 Westworld (TV 2016-) 131 Whedon, Joss  31, 38, 56, 61, 87, 127, 140, 208n9 White, Brett  109 White Collar (TV 2009–14)  2 Whiteout (2009)  33 The Wicked + The Divine (Image)  64 WildC.A.T.S. (Image/ WildStorm)  25, 73 WildStorm Comics 161 Williams III, J.H.  58 Williamson, Oliver  116 Wilson, G. Willow  45 Wilson, Lisa  173 Witchblade (Image)  73 Wolfman, Marv  17, 18, 142 Wonder Woman (DC)  94, 140 Wonder Woman (2017) 149, 150–1 Wonder Woman (TV 1975–9)  18, 36–7

Wonder Woman (TV 2011, unaired)  143 Woo, Benjamin  79 work-for-hire agreements 52–3, 55–63, 71–2 benefits (for publisher) 59 copyright implications 47–8 drawbacks (for creator) 55–9 drawbacks (for publisher)  61–2 incorporated into co-/ creator-ownership model  70–1, 73 lack of incentives to creativity  61–2 mitigating factors (for creator)  59–61 non-publication of contracted work  59 place in IP ecosystem 72–3 role of non-creative personnel  57–8 writers’ improved visibility  60, 74 writers acceptability to management companies 103 attitudes to work  82–3 employment opportunities  96, 106 valued more highly than artists  83–5, 83–7 Writers Guild of America (WGA)  36, 79 Wynonna Earp (IDW)  26, 162–3 Wynonna Earp (TV 2016-)  162–4 The X-Files (TV 1993– 2001, 2016–18)  37 X-Men (Marvel) influence on later series  31

250

licensing to filmmakers  140 series set in world of  40–1 web version  174 X-Men (2000)  11, 31–2, 140, 201, 208n10 X-Men: The Animated Series (TV 1992–7)  29, 30

Index

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)  158 X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)  102 Y: The Last Man (DC/ Vertigo)  152 Yang, Gene  172 young adults, targeting as audience  82

Youngblood (Marvel)  25 Ytreberg, Espen  207n1 Zhou, Yue Maggie  118, 119 Zoo (TV 2015–17)  39 Zuda (DC)  177 Zweig, Philip  110

251

252

253

254