Normally I'd Write More: Disney/Marvel Edition.

Disney bought Marvel today. The news came out of no where. The full (known) breakdown is here at CBR.

I'm curious to see how this will effect the industry (especially its impact on the indie market- if any).

I'm still working on getting King of Pain # 1 out into the world. We've had a few technical difficulties and scheduling setbacks. Bummer huh?

Expanding the Comic Market/Creating a New Market

From Stephen Grant's weekly column Permanent Damage:

"What can be done to create a comics market for the new era and why no one's going to do it."

What is needed

1) Material that appeals to a wide audience

2) A way to let the audience know the material exists

3) A means for said materials to be easily accessible to the audience

Seems like utilizing the internet is the common sense solution here. However, we are still stuck in cannibalistic system of men in their thirties hiding in little shops buying Marvel Comics almost exclusively.

I've been working in a comic shop in Salt Lake City that is located next door to a Game Stop. Kids under the age of eighteen show little interest in comic books. Often they accidentally walk into the shop with a confused look and then hurry back out.

In market competition Halo trumps The X-Men.

What can be done to save comic books from themselves?

From Mr. Grant's article:

"Someone asked recently about how to break the grip of the three pronged trap the comics industry spent the last forty years building around itself. The answer's both simple and complicated, but I should reiterate - again (because no matter how many times I bring up the truth, the legend continues to be spread) that comics did not abandon the newsstands, the newsstands abandoned comics! The direct market wasn't born and adopted by publishers because they were interested in making changes – publishers are almost never interested in making changes, preferring to bear those ills they know than flee to those they know not of – but because the comics business had nowhere else to go. That it worked out pretty well, until it didn't (and for a small section of the business, it's still working out fairly well), was one of those wish and a prayer things that demonstrated, against then-common industry wisdom, there was a sizable audience willing to go out of its way to buy comics.

Emphasize was.

The last decade-point-five was basically a matter of circling the wagons, and as a result we ended up with a system that no longer works especially well for the customer but is now designed to make the system a fairly smooth process for those running the system. Which is the eventual entropic fate of most systems.

To break out of the current bottleneck, we need three things: material that might appeals to a wider audience, a way to let them know that material exists, and a means to getting the material to places where they can easily find it.

Traditionally, comics companies have produced material that might appeal to a wider audience, then marketed it to their standard audience and put it solely where it must be tracked down: comics shops, whose existing audiences increasingly do not support new material. When sales figures come in, the experiment is then proclaimed a bust, and business as usual continues.

The problem with changing the existing system is that you can't just deal with any one prong of the three-pronged problem, and start work on the next prong once you have one prong solved, because you're never going to solve one prong without simultaneously dealing with the other two. You have to achieve all three objectives at once or you fail. It's that simple, and that difficult.

Money is obviously an issue in all this – even the most successful companies don't have much of a slush fund for the necessary risk – but the biggest problem of money isn't cost or risk but who controls the pursestrings. Especially these days, in whatever walk is under discussion, those who control pursestrings tend not to be a terribly visionary lot, and generally react to setbacks – and there are always setbacks to new ventures – by reverting to business as usual, even if business as usual no longer works. Because to moneymen what was once known to have worked is always preferable to what has never before been tried, unless results are startling and immediate.

But that's the challenge, and whoever's the first to pull it off will become the new Marvel that comics publishers have fantasized about becoming for the past fifty years..."

Blake Snyder: 1957-2009

According to The Hollywood Reporter screenwriter and author Blake Snyder passed away on August 4th, at the age of 51.

The article says:

"There was no one more gifted in the art of story structure than Blake Snyder," said longtime friend and screenwriter Tracey Jackson ("Confessions of a Shopaholic"). "He could tell you in two minutes why something didn't work and in another three how to fix it. And unlike many with a great gift, he was not miserly. He felt it was his calling to help others help themselves and took great pride when those he helped found success. He made all those he met feel special and encouraged them all in their dreams."

The stuff about Mr. Snyder encouraging people in their dreams is not just death-rhetoric. The guy was super-cool to amateur writers. I recently blogged about a series of email discussions with him. He helped me with story ideas I had been working on.

In our discussions he gave me tons of great advice and was always upbeat and positive. He never seemed annoyed and was always helpful. He continued to tell me to keep in touch. I wasn't paying him anything, nor was he soliciting me. Mr. Snyder was just being a nice guy.

So here's to a nice guy that we no longer have in this realm.

Thank you Blake Snyder.

Please Sign It Sir...

Printing and Proposing

King of Pain # 1 will be printing next week. It will be available in Salt Lake City, Utah as well as Glendale, California.

I will also be sending the issue and my proposal to about 38 different publishers. I can only assume that this means 9 rejection letters, 22 instances of no reply, 5 "try-again-next-times," and 2 letters of interest.

Wish me luck!

Glenn Beck: Us Versus Them

When I watch Glenn Beck I think, man this guy basically spews hate-speech. He dehumanizes what he sees as his enemies and creates an "us versus them" world. This in effect makes me think of him as less than human, or in my mind he becomes the "them."

How do I stop the cycle?

Love Glenn beck?

Oh man, I'm gonna burn in hell.

Glenn Beck: Proving that kitsch can be patriotic too.