George Harrison once said to Eric Idle, “If we’d known we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.”
That’s the phrase that comes to mind when I look back on that fall day when the pages first came into the darkroom at DC Comics. I’d been working there no more than a month or two.
Back in the day, pages of art that had bleeds were drawn on 12×18″ boards, which were too big to photocopy. To make copies for the colorist, every page had to be shot on a stat camera. Hundreds of pages a week. With photochemicals. It was a mind-numbing job, and I know one person who simply left one day for lunch and never came back.
And so one day, this book came in to be shot. Great, an oversized book, and it looked double-sized– 40 pages. There goes my break. I started to shoot the book.
Ooh, Sam Kieth art. I knew his pencilled stuff from an APA in the early 80’s, but I mainly knew him as the inker for Mage and later, penciller on Manhunter. Mike Dringenberg I knew from Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters (Don’t ask. Please.) And the writer– Neil Gaiman? That new guy, the one who wrote Black Orchid? Hmm…
This is a column for all you “I want to be a writer” writers out there.
The XXII Olympics officially opened on Friday, February 8th, 2014 in Sochi, Russia.
Thirty years ago the XIV Olympics took place in Sarajevo in what was Yugoslavia and is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, although the region is usually just called Bosnia. Thirty years later the Olympic village, the ice rink, the bobsled and luge tracks, the ski jump, the other sports facilities and hotels are gone, destroyed during the Bosnian war and the 44-months-long Siege of Sarajevo which killed nearly twelve thousand of the city’s residents.
I had the weirdest dream last night. Like all – or most dreams – it was a jumbled mix. And some of the details are getting lost as the day goes on. But I do remember that I was in the midst of writing three books for DC, one of which was specifically for Karen Berger, although I couldn’t really classify the stories as strictly Vertigo. They were more along the lines of Elseworlds, or Marvel’s Ultimate titles.
All the books were graphic novels and very adult, but the only one I remember clearly now is the one about Supergirl, the original Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, and it was getting the full DC PR treatment – in fact, I think it was Martha Thomases, my friend and fellow columnist here at ComixMix, who was handling the publicity. Karen was very excited about it, and I knew I was writing at the tope of my game. Alex Ross was doing the art, painting it ala Marvels or Kingdom Come. Or if it wasn’t Alex, it was someone equally talented.
But my Kara wasn’t the sweet, prepubescent young lady who was Superman’s secret weapon. This Kara was one tough broad, and street-smart. In my dream she had escaped Krypton’s destruction by running away from home, hitching a ride on a space-trucker’s semi, who subsequently tried to rape her in his cab. This happened while the semi was passing by Earth’s solar system, so it turns out that, because of the influence of Earth’s yellow sun, Kara is the wrong babe for the space-trucker to mess with.
The (super) struggle causes the semi to crash on Earth. Kara is the “last man standing” after the crash, which is investigated, not by Superman, but by Wonder Woman and two other superwomen. (But even while I’m dreaming I’m feeling pissed off because I can’t identify the two other women clearly, though both could fly and were very powerful and I think one of them was a lot like Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Captain Marvel – or maybe it was Carol Danvers, I don’t remember.)
Anyway, Wonder Woman wants to take Kara to Themiscrya, but Kara refuses to go, telling Wonder Woman “I ain’t no dyke, and I ain’t going to an island full of dykes.” (Don’t ask me how she speaks English and knows nasty, sexist slang – dreams don’t work like that.) The “sorta” Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers pulls a full nelson on Kara, but Kara breaks her grip and the two fight. While they are fighting Wonder Woman uses her “lariat of truth” to rope Kara to try and calm her and make her tell the truth, i.e., who she is, how she got there, but Kara uses heat vision (inadvertently, the girl is still discovering her powers) and burns the rope, breaking free and flying off.
So this is the first chapter of the graphic novel, and like I said, Karen is very excited and happy with my work; me, too, plus I’m making so much money that I can quit nursing and become a full-time writer. Which is good because working full-time as a nurse would certainly interfere with my ability to make deadlines if I’m writing three graphic novels at the same time. And Joseph Campbell said to “follow your bliss” if you truly want to be happy, and nursing isn’t my bliss (though I’m good at it) and writing comics on a full-time basis is and I’m very happy, very satisfied, with my life.
But then I read in the New York Times and The Comic Buyer’s Guide that there has been a huge upheaval at DC, and it has been sold off to some conglomerate that is even bigger than Time-Warner – or maybe it’s that Time-Warner decides to dump DC because the company’s movies, even with Man Of Steel making gazillions, pretty much suck – or it had something to do with the CBS vs. Time-Warner Cable war…
I’m dreaming, remember?
So all my books are on hold, including the Supergirl graphic novel. It’s not going to see print.
I’m suddenly not enjoying this dream, and I want to wake up.
But I can’t.
Then I get a call from “somebody” that there is a big meeting regarding the reorganizing at DC after the sale and I’m invited. Only it’s the same day as a wedding I have to go to – or not. I remember that in the dream I dress up to go this meeting, waaaaay over-dress in an incredibly beautiful art deco-y type of gown – think Jean Harlow in Dinner At Eight – in a satiny deep, deep purple, and this stunning cloche with a peacock feather curling down and around my chin, and in the dream I guess I’m trying to justify why I’m dressed so formally because I’m thinking that I will catch a cab and get to the wedding/affair after the meeting.
But you know dreams. Even though I’m sleeping I know that something isn’t right.
So I get to the meeting and there are people there whom I know but can’t recognize. But everyone is very glad to see me. We are in this very corporate, and yet very classy, glass-enclosed boardroom. The ceiling lights are recessed and there are candles burning on glass coffee tables and we are lounging in big, slate-blue love seats. Everyone looks absolutely terrific, though I am the only one in a gown, everyone else is wearing very expensive, designer suits by the likes of Hugo Boss and Chanel and Stella McCartney and Dolce and Gabanna.
The new owners of DC (a few men and women) hand out prospectuses and folios that contain the new organization chart for the company. According to the chart I am going to be an executive editor. The “new Karen.”
But I don’t want to be the “new Karen.”
I want to be a writer.
I ask about my Supergirl graphic novel. I say that the first chapter is done and I’m working on the next. I want to know if I can finish it. I want to know if it’s going to be published.
Nobody hears me, or chooses not to answer.
Now the new owners pass out envelopes. We all open them. Inside are contracts, or “letters of agreement.” My letter tells me who will be in my “stable,” including editors, assistant editors, writers, and artists. I want to know if I have to use these people if I don’t want to; again, nobody hears me.
Boy, do I want to wake up now.
I turn to the woman sitting next to me. She kind of looks like Shelly Bond, but I’ve only met Shelly once or twice, so I can’t be sure, and, anyway, it’s not her.
She says, “Wow, Mindy, they’re paying you $70,000 a year. That’s great!”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “Not for the responsibilities they want me to have. And anyway, I make more than that as a nurse.”
“But that’s a lot of money.”
“No, it’s not. They just want you to think it’s a lot of money.”
Then I hear my name mentioned, and the new owners are telling me that they are pulling my Supergirl book. It’s dead in the water.
Everyone else is busy signing his or her contracts.
They are signing their lives away.
They’re all just happy to have jobs in the comics industry.
Over at www.geekmom.com, Corinna Lawson’s June 21stCliffs of Insanity column once again wondered why Wonder Woman doesn’t get any respect; this was instigated by the news that DC is producing a new comic, Superman’s Girlfriend Wonder Woman – the title is mine – which will “focus on the relationship between the characters.” (Apparently a DC editor considers Lois Lane nothing but a “trophy wife.”) This is occurring, as Corinna rightly points out, “in an environment where women are still fighting for some basic rights, even to the point of having to listen to politicians talk about ‘legitimate rape.’” And, may I add, in which Texas, North Carolina, and ten other states, along with the House of Representatives, have ignored Roe vs. Wade and declared abortion illegal past 20 weeks and making the procedure not only incredibly difficult to obtain, but incredibly denigrating to the individual woman who seeks it.
On June 28th, Shoshana Kessock of www.Tor.com focused on “The Problem with Wonder Woman” in Hollywood, while noting that the Themiscrya Tigress “has recently been dubbed the 20th greatest comic book character by Empire Magazine, and ranked fifth in IGN’s 2011 Top 100 Comic Book Heroes of All Time…[standing] as one of the icons of the comic book world, and has been featured in dozens of comic titles since her debut in 1941. The character has also found success in other media, appearing in a popular live-action television series in the 70s, as well as several animated series (including Super Friends and Justice League).”
Why does Diana not getting her due bother me so much? I guess it’s because I have a personal history with her. Not only was Wonder Woman my first assignment as sole writer, but also I had no clue at the time that I was the first woman to be asked to write her – the only female cornerstone hero of the DC universe.
As I told Gail Simone when she interviewed me for her Five Questions webpage:
“I first worked on Wonder Woman in 1984 or thereabouts – back in the day, I was one of Karen Berger’s ‘fillies’ in her stable of writers in the New Talent Program. I honestly don’t know who suggested it – it sure wasn’t me. I think it was Karen, or perhaps it was Paul Levitz. Maybe it was Marv Wolfman or Len Wein. Anyway, it was about this time when plans were hatching for the [superb, imho] relaunch of Wonder Woman by the absolutely wonderful, nobody-can-touch-his-talent, charming and amazing George Pérez. So the then-current Wonder Woman series was running down – I think there were only about three or four issues le”ft – and I got a call from the editor, Alan Gold, asking me to come in and talk about finishing up the book.
Wonder Woman? Me? Frankly, I was amazed. Also very excited. And flattered.
I didn’t know it was going to turn into such a downer. You see, I didn’t really get a chance to write what I wanted to write. Alan told me – no, decided – what I was to write. He was big into Mayan civilization, theology and myths, and that’s the story he wanted to tell. I think he liked the idea of two great “pagan” civilizations clashing, as Wonder Woman represented the Hellenic Period. But I had no interest in Mayan culture at the time – or was it Aztec? (I still don’t have much of an interest in either of them, except that I know about the Mayan calendar, which ended in November 2012, so we’re all dead – or didn’t you know that?)
But this was my first chance at writing a regular series, plus I was a “nice Jewish girl” who hadn’t grown up yet, so I tried to go along with him – after all, he was the editor, right? But it was a disaster. I was trying, but my heart wasn’t in it, and when a writer’s heart isn’t in, then craft is supposed to take over. Only I was still learning my craft. And I couldn’t spell the goddamn name of the god who was the antagonist, and back then I wrote on a manual typewriter which meant a lot of erasing and White-Out and a lot of putting a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter when the original became too smudgy and too thick with the White-Out stuff.
It got to the point where I not only didn’t give a fuck about spelling the name of the god who was the antagonist of the story, but where I didn’t give a god damn about the whole story. I hated writing Steve Trevor because he lacked the right stuff: he was a nebbish, the perfect pisher, a humiliation in uniform, and a disgrace to the Air Force. I hated writing Etta Candy because she was a stupid fat girl who let men push her around and drowned her inner strength in chocolate.
According to many interpreters of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012 was to be the last day of the world. Were we going to go quietly, or in another Big Bang? No one knew. But some portents started happening as December matured.
A woman slept while a tornado ripped off her home’s roof.
More than 100 UFOs are seen along the India-China border.
A contestant on The Bachelor claims the producers brainwashed her.
Karen Berger resigns as Executive Editor of Vertigo.
And on December 9, 2012 (or thereabouts), Gail Simone is told her services as the writer of Batgirl are no longer required… via fucking e-mail!!!!!
Although I did once work at a hospital where the Director of Anesthesiology fired one of his staff via FedEx, and although Editor Mike Gold tells me that this is simply the snafu way that corporations use to rid themselves of the suddenly tainted, I personally think this is an unbelievably putrid, cowardly and totally unprofessional way to be axed, corporate or otherwise.
Gail Simone displays superb class; only tweeting I am very proud of what we accomplished with Batgirl and it was an honor to get to write Barbara Gordon again. Love that dame, as well as a longer post at her blog Ape In A Cape in which she thanks Scott Snyder, Bobbie Chase, Brian Smith, others at DC, and her fans for supporting her.
And the shit, in Newell’s unclassy words, hits the fan.
The comics world, not waiting for December 21st,explodes!
Twitter accounts overload. E-mail boxes are stuffed. Phones ring off the work. Websites, (ComicMix, BleedingCool, Wired, The League of Women Bloggers, The Beat) are “hot off the presses” with the news. Fan forums are abuzz.
Friday, December 21, 2012.
What happens in the Bat-offices will most likely remain between Gail and DC, although there will sure to be many rumors spread by many pundits. Fan outcry? Pushback from other pros? Some even speculate that it was a massive marketing ploy…
Friday, December 21, 2012.
According to some expert on the Mayans and their calendar, the date did not signify the end of the physical world, but simply the death of one cycle and the beginning of another.
Friday, December 21, 2012.
And for one extremely talented and deserving woman, it sure was!
Friday, December 21, 2012.
Gail Simone tweets: Here’s the thing. Gail Simone is the new Batgirl writer.
Hmm….
Maybe those Mayans were on to something. Congratulations, Gail!
But don’t breath easy yet, girlfriend. According to the Huffington Post, German scientist and Mayan calendar researcher Nikolai Grube says the 13th Baktun (or cycle) may not actually be over until December 24, 2012.
That’s today, boys and girls.
TUESDAY MORNING (assuming there is one): Emily S. Whitten
TUESDAY AFTERNOON (assuming there is one): Michael Davis
The responsible thing to do this week would be to write about The State of Women in Comics. With Gail Simone booted off Batgirl, coupled with Karen Berger’s departure from Vertigo, one can conjure all sorts of misogynist conspiracy theories, and one would have more than a 50% chance of being right.
But I don’t want to write about that. For one thing, I don’t have any inside knowledge, so I would only be speculating.
Here’s the thing. Comics is such a small world that I know both of these women. I worked with Karen for the better part of a decade, threw the launch party for Vertigo in my apartment when I couldn’t get DC to pay for it, and enjoyed her work a great deal. I don’t know Gail as well, but I’ve met her a few times, I love her writing, admire her work for the Hero Initiative, and think she’s a really classy person.
These are big names in the business. I am not. But comics is still low-profile enough that we are, more or less, peers. Or at least colleagues.
I was reminded of this last week, when I hosted our annual Hanukah party, the first one since my husband died. It was a bittersweet occasion, an event he loved very much. I thought it was an outrage that he wasn’t here for it, but I also thought it was important to continue the tradition. Life goes on, despite my best efforts.
My friends came out to support my son and myself, and that’s what friends do. The guest list isn’t just my friends from comics. It’s my friends from different aspects of my life, including my son and his friends. My apartment isn’t so large that the comics people can avoid the knitters, or the anti-war people can be in a room separate from my high school pals.
One of our guests is an aspiring comics creator whom I introduced to a few pros at New York Comic-Con last year. He happily told me about the other people in the business he’d met since then, and how great each of them had been to him.
That’s comics.
This is not to go all rose-colored-glasses on you. There are people in the business I don’t like. There are people in the business who don’t like me. There are people I don’t know, and more of them all the time. There isn’t any one of them I’d be intimidated to talk to.
And there isn’t anybody I wouldn’t defend against the attacks of the broader culture, the sneers of elitists who look down on the medium (fewer every day).
We’re in this together, and we have each other’s back. It reminds me of this lyric:
I met Karen Berger around 20 years ago when Vertigo first became a DC Comics imprint. I was 5… heh. At the time I was doing work for Piranha Press, another DC imprint, which started around the same time as Vertigo.
From her start at DC, Karen was a no nonsense yet kind editor. What that means is if she did not hire you she let you down with the knowledge that you could come back. Soon after Karen began her reign at Vertigo it became clear that you may have been welcomed back but if you sucked going back would just be a waste of everybody’s time especially Karen’s because if you sucked you would never ever work for Vertigo.
Now that did that mean just because you were a brilliant artist or writer your project would get a green light at Vertigo. Talent was just one of the factors Karen used to chose project. I pitched a project to Vertigo and Karen passed.
Hopefully it was because the project lacked something not because I sucked. Although when I saw Karen after the rejection she pretended to faint. The next time I saw her she pretended to have a heart attack and after that amnesia and so forth and on.
Karen, in my opinion is the last of the great comic book editors. That’s not to say there are not great comic book editors but Karen had a vision that was unique and her books wore that stamp.
Karen leaving Vertigo is one of the dumbest moves DC could allow. If she decided she wanted a change and I ran DC I would have told her to do whatever she wanted but just do it at DC. I like and respect Diane Nelson and I don’t know the particulars of why Karen is leaving so maybe dumb is the wrong word so I’ll say in my opinion it’s dumb to me.
Letting one of the most talented and original voices in the history of comics go is to me is just plain dumb. But for all I know Diane tried to talk Karen into staying but Karen faked a heart attack in the middle of the meeting.
Well, DC’s lost is someone else’s huge gain.
I can’t wait to see where she ends up. The moment I do I’m calling her using a fake name so she won’t have to fake amnesia. J
Thirty years is a long time. A lot can happen. And a funny thing happens as the years pass. You look back and you can see how you ended up where you are today. How the chalk drawings of your life have made a graphic novel starring you. It’s a story made up of page-turners and cliffhangers, of happy endings and endings that leave you nauseous with Vertigo.
Like so many others, I was, frankly, shocked when the news broke that Karen is leaving DC this March. (I believe my words were “Holy shit!”) Is this her decision? Is she being pushed out? I’ll leave that issue to others.
This column is, simply put, a love letter to Karen Berger.
Last week Mike Gold wrote, im-not-so-ho, a brilliant column about Karen and her lasting imprint on the comics field, in which he stated – I’m paraphrasing – that “Karen fostered and molded and taught her staff.” I can attest to that. Though I was never part of her staff per se, if it was not for Karen Berger and her nurturing of whatever talent I may possess as a writer…well, my life would have been very, very different, and I’m sure I would not be here at ComicMix now.
If you want to know the “ins-and-outs” of how Karen taught me the craft of writing comics and nurtured me and helped me expand my professional credits, look up my column dated August 8, 2011, How I Became A Comics Professional, Or, How The Fuck Did That Happen, Part Two. This is about how she helped me find myself.
In 1983 I was a single mom, and apart from the joy Alix gave me, I was a very, very unhappy and lost woman. I was lonely. I was, if not in darkness, in a fog as thick as pea soup. I could not put a finger on what was wrong, I only knew that something was lacking. There was an emptiness in my life. It was as if I was standing in the center of a compass, and I didn’t know in what direction I should walk.
Whatever possessed me to sit down that day and write a brief synopsis of what would become Jenesis, the story that got me into DC’s New Talent Showcase? Was it hope? Was it, as my therapist likes to say, a core of steel somewhere buried deep within me that enables me to always pick myself up no matter what, and to and continue to put one foot in front of the other? Was it the hand of God, or the Goddess, or Fate, or Karma, or whatever higher power is out there? Or was it pure chutzpah, born out of a need to do something to change my life? For me, and for Alix? (I tend to think that it was God giving me that hope and core of steel and the chutzpah, but that’s just me. You can decide for yourselves.)
But nobody, despite what they may boast, does it all alone.
The day I came home from my first meeting with Karen was the beginning of the end for me: the end of feeling chained down, the end of feeling mislaid and misplaced, the end of feeling alone. I had met a woman who saw something in me that I had lost the ability to see – my ability to dream. My ability to accomplish.
Karen was not only my editor. She became my friend. I was there as she and Richard fell in love, broke up, got back together, and got married in an absolutely beautiful wedding in brick townhouse in Greenwich Village. She was the first person that I ever told about my agoraphobia – we were sitting in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue.
“I’m having a panic attack,” I said.
“You are?”
“Yeah, I know it’s stupid, but I’m freaking out.”
“About what?”
“That something is going to happen to me and I’ll end up lying on the floor,” I answered.
“And what, do you think I would ignore you, that people would just walk over you getting to their tables?” she asked?
And we laughed.
And though the anxiety attacks continued – I still get them sometimes – I’ve never again let them hold me back.
Comics…and an editor and friend named Karen Berger helped me to learn to believe in myself again.
Did you hear? Did you hear? The sky is falling! That’s right! There’s no time to pack a bag. Just grab your cell phone and head towards my car. Now get in! Call your loved ones. Tell them to do the same. Where are we going? How the hell should I know? They just told me to grab you and leave, leave, leave!
Wait, hold on. I just got a text. Shut up, I know I shouldn’t text and drive. But I can’t help it, we’re in the middle of a crisis! I’m not sure which crisis. The sky is white, so it’s not Crisis on Infinite Earths. The sky isn’t red, so it’s not Final Crisis. The sky isn’t upside down, so it’s not Flashpoint.
Oh. Oh! OK, this makes sense. Yup. DC is going belly up. No, I’m not kidding. My credible source here says so. No I won’t stop the car. Hear me out.
My pal, who likes to remain a little anonymous – we’ll call him R. Johnston, wait no, that’s too easy. Rich J. texted me just now that there’s a storm a’ brewin’ in New York. No, it’s not Hurricane Sandy. Rich is great with these things, trust me. He’s like spy mixed with fly on the wall. For reals.
So, he got wind of a super secret set of individual meetings at DC HQ which he’s speculating (which totally makes this real, you know) means big things for our boy blue. Here’s the hot tip:
With Vertigo Honcho Karen Berger going on the lamb, there’s mutterings this is the beginning of a mass exodus to Burbank. Yup, with the last bastion of the Paul Levitz era seeking refuge in other parts of fiction (if at all), DC’s ties to it’s former home seem more sentimental than anything else. What with everything going digital these days, wouldn’t it behoove the couldn’t-be-for-profit publishing side to just nestle itself closer to the teat of Movies, TV, and Other Media by Papa Warner?
And since the rumor mill is chugging along, we also have word that maybe these meetings (which again we have no actual proof happened, or any notion of who was in them) could also entail the stepping down of one Diane Nelson as head of the company. Maybe these meetings hold the secret to the new head cheese … Speculation is abound!
And Richie also told me (via text – don’t worry, I can read really long texts while driving) that these meetings could mean a big upheaval of publishing policy! I don’t even know what that means, but I’m scared poopless. I mean, first Karen leaves … then Diane steps down … and then the whole company goes only digital, moves to California. What’s next? Superman stops wearing his red underwear. Oh. My. New Gods! OK, I’m pulling over. Get out, pal. Just run for the hills! It’s all coming down. We might as well get some fast food, and wait for the universe to reset.
Sigh. All joking aside, unlike some bloggers, let me make this even more clear: I write my articles several days ahead of time. As the writing of this column, this story over on Bleeding Coolwas a rank-and-file piece of absurdity. While Johnson makes all-too-clear he has no clue what’s going on, rather than get some sources and crank out a piece, he buried this little Chicken Little story in an attempt to what… get us commenting? Ranting and railing? I’m not entirely sure.
Be that as it may, unless anything concrete is published on this subject, here’s my two cents: most of what Rich conjures from the ether sounds pretty plausible. The New 52 sales seem to have leveled off, and the books, while low in number, are all very much akin to their brethren before the fall of Rome; predictable, great in parts, boring in most others, with plenty of worthless crossovers to go around. The fact is DC’s ties to New York are only superfluous at this point. Creative teams are assembled via the Internet. Books are compiled digitally and whisked off to Canada, or China or Apokolips to be printed and distributed.
We can also safely assume with Harry Potter done and over with, WB is putting heads on the chopping block if Justice League doesn’t pull off Avengers-like hype and profits. Diane Nelson may not want to be around when they inevitably miss the mark there (and I’m no less hopeful, just realistic). And to round it out … what “big publishing initiative” could they announce, aside from a hike in price for physical books? I’m yearning to be surprised.
At the end of the day, the sky ain’t gonna fall. Superman will be around for plenty of years to come. And there will always be too man-Bat books on the shelf. And we’ll always be here, to lap up the rumors like starving dogs, and fight one another over these oddly plucked bones of potential news. But, consider my inner Gold here to leave you on this thought:
Too many people in the comics racket get the tribute they deserve long after they leave the medium – if, indeed, at all. So I’m going to try to write one while the subject is still in her editorial seat; possibly before she even decides if she wants to actually leave the medium.
As you probably read – presumably right here at ComicMix – Karen Berger will be leaving her position as Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of DC Entertainment’s Vertigo line this coming spring. As Glenn noted in his news story, Karen will have been at the company for a third of a century (no, that photo on Glenn’s story is recent) and will have run Vertigo for 20 years. Vertigo, which she fostered, molded, and kept alive in the face of challenge and competition, all without adequate support from the guy who ran their marketing department at the time
Most certainly, Karen did not do this alone. She had a very talented staff, a staff she acquired and in many cases taught. She gathered an exceptionally gifted list of talent, and some of them would take a bullet for her. A couple people who otherwise spit on the ground every time DC Comics was mentioned would climb an active volcano for her.
In the process, Karen added greatly to the landscape of American comics and boldly took DC Comics into new directions. Unless you’ve been there, you cannot truly understand what a courageous and complicated undertaking that is. At the time DC was a corporation that was part of a larger corporation that was part of a Fortune 500 company. More recently DC has been part of a major motion picture studio that was part of a much larger Fortune 500 company. It’s the same company, only a lot bigger.
Like most astonishingly huge corporations, Time Warner’s omnipresent product is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation. Oh, sure, from time to time they’ll hire a few outside-the-box thinkers, particularly when they need a creative kick in the ass. But those of us who earn our livings outside of that box know all too well there’s a point when the corporation grows weary of being kicked in the ass. It flies in the face of their corporate culture. Or, as Mel Brooks famously said in Blazing Saddles, a Warner Bros movie, “Gentlemen! We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs here!”
Karen survived all that. Not just because she was great at her job, although that probably helped at times. She survived it because of her force of will, by doing what’s right by the talent she employed both creatively and in business to the best of her ability, and tilting at that windmill of bureaucracy with an energy that would drain Miguel de Cervantes.
Loyalty doesn’t come out of a box. You have to earn it.
In the process, Karen moved a huge chunk of DC Comics into areas the stodgy company had never considered. For decades there was a DC look that was impregnable. It worked, but like all creative endeavors eventually it showed its age. Karen planted the seeds of Vertigo years before the Vertigo imprint itself was established and now, in some of the more worthy New 52 titles, you can see the impact of her labors on the DC Universe. I don’t know if she realized her work was an act of subterfuge at the time, but some of us certainly did.
For this, Karen Berger deserves to go down in American comics history as one of the medium’s most innovative forces. Karen, as a co-worker you were amazing to be around. I can hardly wait to see what you do next.
