On playing at being DC’s editor-in-chief
The Occasional Superheroine herself, Valerie D’Orazio, has an interesting thought experiment going on at her blog:
Play "Fantasy DC EIC" and Redo The DCU!
This is like Fantasy Baseball, but instead of pretending to play a professional sport, you pretend to be the new Editor-In-Chief of the DC Universe.
You come in to the job, and are given carte blanche to totally rearrange the DCU as you see fit. Among your powers:
1. Killing characters and/or bringing them back from the dead.
2. Canceling titles.
3. Starting new titles.
4. Creating events.
5. Hiring talent and editorial.
6. Offering exclusives.
7. Steering the "direction" of characters and books.
8. Creating special projects (movie tie-ins, new initiatives, etc).
My immediate response:
The biggest problems that face DC right now aren’t in Editorial. The structural problems are elsewhere.
Do I get to make changes to other parts of the company as well?
Valerie replied:
If this was real? Probably not. So you have to factor that in.
In a real scenario, any big changes you make to major characters or books or directions have to be signed off on by The Powers That Be.
But isn’t working together fun?
It makes me think that somehow Valerie hasn’t heard the joke:
Q: How many DC Vice-Presidents does it take to change a lightbulb?
Although having worked at DC, she can probably guess the punchline:
A: I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Paul.
Whatever problems there are with the DC line– and there are some problems, and Valerie’s readers come up with some very interesting solutions– the problem with the company is so ingrained in the company’s DNA at this point that it may not be able to easily change. Love Dan DiDio or hate him, many of DC’s problems are beyond his ability to affect.
Think of DC as the comic book equivalent of Microsoft. It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s got a bankroll, and it’s run by a boy genius and has been for 25 years. And even with all that going for it, it’s vulnerable to change from the outside, because the majority of cutting edge stuff, where all the action is nowadays, are areas that they’ve ceded to others, areas in their growing blind spots– and it’s gotten so bad that creators find it much easier to go elsewhere, to start up their own companies, in the hopes of getting anything done.
Want an example in practice? Mad magazine. Here’s a property with a pedigree stretching back over 50 years. The original bastion of irreverence in America. TV shows, movies, bobblehead dolls based on Alfred E. Neuman. And it’s been handled so poorly that Cracked magazine is kicking its ass. While Mad is being reduced to a quarterly magazine, Cracked is out there conquering the Internet and making solid revenue. Cracked has officially started Feeling Sorry for Mad Magazine. And at that, Cracked is still a far second place to an even more recent upstart, The Onion.
Do you go to DC for innovation? Not really. Ask the folks at Minx. When I want innovation in the field– I’m not even talking innovative comics themselves, although form does seem to follow function here– I look at guys like BOOM! who put their comics online and on Google Android phones. I look at IDW, making pushes into lots of different areas and grabbing footholds. I look at the webcomics guys, who keep trying the form out like mad scientists with a whole new lab.
The old slogan, about 25 years old at this point, was "DC: Where Legends Live". Forever, it seems.
Glenn Hauman is getting cranky in his old age. Don’t mention his upcoming birthday.
"Cracked" and "Mad", who cares! I'm still upset that DC canceled "Plop!" When will they collect those issues in a TPB!
I think she was looking for suggestions like "get Frank Miller to do a series called All-Star Alfred and Aunt Harriet" — not actual DCU/comic industry solutions. Great column, though!
I wish hard every night I'll be called up to the majors (DC). They have done SOME things very "right" lately… and I don't think it's DC's place to be "cutting edge" as much as they need to entice reader by identifying what they've done right. Examples? Tiny Titans. Green Lantern. Where are things not going so well? Grant Morrison… Trinity in general? I don't know. As a would-be-creator… I think it comes down to the quality of the books, and the ability to market them to the proper audience, which DC needs a swift kick in the patoot. ZUDA was a good idea that wasn't pushed in the right areas smartly.DC Direct pre-releases everything so early when it's time to debut, you're sick of it.and I could go on. But then again, I'm just a nobody.
Going after the example, not the argument:Comparing properties like MAD and Cracked.com is specious. They're different animals. For starters, MAD actually commissions artwork, something Cracked.com doesn't do. It's also a print magazine, which has been pounded like everyone else. (Playboy is cutting its issue total in 2009; and the previously economically impregnable New Yorker has lost over a quarter of its ad pages in a year.) When Cracked revived its print magazine 2+ years ago, it flamed out in 3 issues. Also, Cracked v.2 was a Maxim-type production that no resemblance whatsoever to the longtime MAD imitation. And today, they're maintaining a website that has nothing to do with either of Cracked's two dead incarnations. We can't even usefully compare Cracked.com with Cracked, let alone MAD. These minor distinctions apparently weren't lost on most of the commenters on that "Cracked Feels Sorry" thread you linked. The one-way MAD-Cracked "competition" wasn't even heated when it actually existed, 35 years ago. It's imaginary now.
Q: How many DC Vice-Presidents does it take to change a lightbulb?Although having worked at DC, she can probably guess the punchline:A: I don't know, you'll have to ask Paul.Narf!
Looking at the Mad question for a moment, I don't really have a suggestion so much as an observation.My first exposure to Mad was via the paperback collections they used to have, around 1972. The material in those paperbacks was from the late 1950s and early 1960s ("He knows the names of all the players. He doesn't know who Kennedy is."). I was reading this stuff at the age of eight or nine and laughing at it. I asked for, and received, a subscription for Christmas. It started with issue #157 in 1973, and I read Mad every issue for the next twelve years. The material worked for me, consistently, as I grew up. Looking back now at age 45, that material still works. That was the magic of Mad for a long, long time: It was satire that could be appreciated by a ten-year-old and by a 45-year-old.I bought Mad for about a year in the mid-'90s after a revamp and it still worked for me at 30-whatever-I-was. It had material and references that I'm sure worked for 10-year-olds in the '90s, too, but it worked for a reader in his 30s at the same time.Today, however, I'll occasionally pick up a new issue and page through it. The real ads were jarring the first time I saw them, but I can accept them as a necessary part of magazine publishing. What I find off-putting is that the overall tone of the magazine seems much more juvenile than it did before. Before, it did a good job of targeting both adults and a younger audience, but now it seems more precisely-targeted to 12- to 18-year-olds. It's snarky and flashy and, frankly, the publication design is sometimes chaotic–but it's not as smart as it once was.You could take the position that my sense of humor has changed over the last 36 years, and it has–but the older material that drew me to the magazine at age nine is still funny to me at age 45. Conversely, the material in today's Mad would probably appeal to me if I were 15 today, but it's got very little to draw me in at 45 ("Monroe?" Really? Every issue?).I'll bet I'm not the only one who feels this way, and that just might be a part of why a magazine that once sold a million copies per issue with no advertising and no internal color now has to be cut back to a quarterly with lots of ads and color pages.
While that may be true for Paul1963's particular case, that's not the dynamic at work here. Playboy has also lost a ton of circulation, and the Hefner family has publicly discussed selling. Are adults no longer interested in naked ladies? TV Guide has plunged. Are adults no longer interested in television? Entertainment Weekly is down the tubes. Are adults no longer interested in show business? U.S. News and World Report divebombed, and is now a monthly instead of a weekly. Are adults no longer interested in politics? Sales for Men's Vogue are down 40%. Are adults no longer interested in fashion? Cosmopolitan, down. US Weekly, down. Newsweek, down. O (Oprah), down. and so on, and so on.
Are adults are less interested in reading?
I know a good number of people I meet day-to-day and socially are not reading much. I do have my reader friends – and in contrast to the others – they are usually very intense about their reading. But my impression is that most adults are not reading. When they do read it is usually connected to their work. I've also noticed that they don't go to movies. But they do tend to watch TV. But they do not pick up on new shows. They tend to stick to sports, reality and long-running shows that they formed attachments to many years ago. This reminds me of just about everyone I know (except for a very few) and their music listening tastes – what they listened to in high school and college is all they ever listen to now. The really adventurous ones will keep up with a band's new releases, might follow a band member to a new band.I think one of the charms of news, sports and reality programs is – the viewer doesn't need to know anything special going in – there is no continuity to confuse.I'm not sure our culture currently can support an entertainment institution for longer than a decade or two. At least not without a "reboot" that essentially transforms it into a new institution aimed at a new generation.Anyway – I'm aiming for readers who are Readers with a capital R. But they might be casual readers of comics and graphic novels – so far.And I have to believe the Harry Potter Generation represents a wave of consumers who are readers, with a capital R.
They aren't less interested in reading, but they do read in much shorter and staccato bursts. Twitter, blog posts, etc. Pacing has had to change a lot, and not all authors are able to adapt to it. Some authors, on the other hand, have found the new form to more suited to their style and have prospered, much as what happened to some actors when the switch from film to TV happened.