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Post by crazyoldhermit on Oct 3, 2020 11:05:30 GMT -5
One thing I'd like to add that may not have been discussed before... today kids/teens.. up to people age 30 or so, cannot conceive of reading an ocassion issue of a series. I'm 45.. when I was a kid, you watched the TV that was on... shows were one-in-done, and had little, if any, ongoing plot.. you could watch in any order and miss stuff and it was no big deal. Today, that's not an option.. starting with DVD sets and now with streaming, there's no situation where one would just pop in and watch an episode of a show to see if it's good.. you start at the beginning with the intent to watch it through to the end, and if you don't you likely never go back to it. This effects comics too... my kids like superheroes and will read comics.. if they can read 'the whole thing'. That rules out Marvel and DC. When I suggest a great story, they say 'but that's not the beginning' and simply refuse it. Even stand alone stuff like DKR, it's still 'Batman', and if they can't read the whole thing of 'Batman' forget it. I think not only to they need to do a complete reboot and write it trades, but they need new characters too. They can be VERY similar, use the tropes, but they have to be new, or kids won't read them. I think this is a huge factor in the failure of the comics market to grab young audiences, especially in comparison to manga. There is a binge culture and comics run directly contrary to it.
Most superheroes are five or more decades old, and have been published continuously since inception. That makes for a very long slog. But because they go so far back, the earliest comics are incredibly different stylistically and go through countless writers and artists. And because comic book adaptations distill 5+ decades of stories and ideas into a two hour movie, many of the elements people expect to be present often roll out very slowly, while many elements that didn't make it into the movies or cartoons (usually because they're very dated) can be quite common.
They just do not play well with the binge culture. There's not enough consistency.
I've always felt it was both cowardly and counter-intuitive on DC's part to never truly commit to their reboots. Their reboots are always soft, continuing existing stories while changing the backstories. Totally dumb, it makes things way more confusing. Of course in 1986 the market was a different place, it was pre-TPB boom and it wasn't expected to go back and read earlier stories. But in 2011 they had no excuse. One of the biggest missed opportunities in DC history is Batman Year Two. Whats the first Batman book recommended to new readers? Year One. It's Season One, Episode One of Batman. And what did DC follow it up with? Drivel. In the mainline comics, Year One was followed up by the Jason Todd origin story. When a "sequel" to Year One was released it had absolutely nothing to do with Year One. Eventually they released The Long Halloween as a proper follow-up, but even then it skipped over the introduction of most of Batman's rogues gallery. It wasn't a true Season Two, or Season One Episode Two. And that's what DC needs.
Marvel had a lot of early success with their Ultimate Universe because it was small, compact, written for trades and bingeable. The problem they ran into was being different for difference's sake. It did more than modernize, it dramatically reinterpreted characters and events specifically to play off of reader expectations. As a result, it could never truly replace the Marvel Universe.
In my opinion, Marvel and DC should both start from scratch. Square one. Retell the old stories, distilling all of those years of concept development. Create a true, definitive lineage from Season One, Episode One. It will alienate many existing fans, but having evergreen "complete" tales of these pop culture icons, easily consumable and bingeable by new readers, will pay off for decades.
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Post by Icctrombone on Oct 4, 2020 9:45:52 GMT -5
This jumped out at me. The Image guys and a few editors started to fight the system back in the day by refusing to stay on the plantation and creating their own books with sole ownership. Maybe those moves have helped lead to the downfall of the big two. I don't know of anything that has been created by DC and Marvel over the last 20 years that wasn't a derivative of their existing characters . Not that the big 2 care, they just keep passing the company from corporation to corporation. For themselves, yes; but, not necessarily within their own studio system. One of the criticisms leveled against some of them was acting like traditional publishers in certain studios, after talk about co-ownership. The idea is for you to create a property that you get all the financial rewards from. The system will always include protecting the properties from copywriter infringement. They never claimed to be Lincoln, they just wanted to keep the money instead of a Ceo that had zero to do with the creation of candy bar man. That being said, I thought it was crazy for Grant Morrison to be awarded custody of Medevial Spawn because of a story he wrote for Mcfarlane. It was an iteration of the Spawn Character. On the other hand, it was totally right that Gaiman retained ownership of Angela from the same series when he wrote the book. |
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Post by chaykinstevens on Oct 4, 2020 17:01:49 GMT -5
That being said, I thought it was crazy for Grant Morrison to be awarded custody of Medevial Spawn because of a story he wrote for Mcfarlane. It was an iteration of the Spawn Character. On the other hand, it was totally right that Gaiman retained ownership of Angela from the same series when he wrote the book. I thought it was Gaiman who introduced Medieval Spawn. |
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Post by Dizzy D on Oct 5, 2020 4:08:06 GMT -5
That being said, I thought it was crazy for Grant Morrison to be awarded custody of Medevial Spawn because of a story he wrote for Mcfarlane. It was an iteration of the Spawn Character. On the other hand, it was totally right that Gaiman retained ownership of Angela from the same series when he wrote the book. I thought it was Gaiman who introduced Medieval Spawn. It was. Gaiman wrote an issue that introduced Angela, Cogliostro and Medieval Spawn. McFarlane then gave him a percentage on merchandise of those characters and then stopped paying for new merchandise/comics starring these characters.
and later:
McFarlane and Gaiman later have an agreement (1997), where McFarlane allows Gaiman to use Medieval Spawn and Angela in his own comic to make up for some crossovers he did using those characters with other Image studios without giving Gaiman any compensation for those:
There is then a bit where McFarlane and Gaiman negotiate over the rights to Miracleman (which Todd (thought he had*) partly acquired after Eclipse went down (both Moore and Gaiman owned their own parts of Miracleman)) in exchange for Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro. Any attempts to do any of the crossover series mentioned above ran into problems, where DC/Marvel needed McFarlane's approval for any such crossover, but he didn't return any calls.
Cue lawsuit a couple of years later. Basically the jury decided in the end to award Gaiman the rights to those two characters, because they felt that McFarlane had not held up to his end of the deal. McFarlane and Gaiman then settled out of court, the details of that are unknown, but probably Gaiman got full ownership of Angela and released ownership of Medieval Spawn, because as a derivative character he couldn't actually use him for anything.
*=This one is getting off-topic and Miracleman is its own legal quagmire, but basically Todd bought rights to Miracleman from Eclipse, but those rights weren't Eclipse to sell.
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