There Will Never Be Another Marvel Comics

Bobby Derie

Spin-off of the DC comics thread, the discussion turned to something Stan Lee apparently once said to a bunch of comic creators: why are they still writing comics for these old characters? Why aren't they off creating all new characters in their own universe? Why hasn't there been a second Marvel comics, a new and more edgy and progressive comics company that pushes boundaries and carves out marketspace like Marvel did to DC?

We've seen a couple big indie companies - Dark Horse Comics, Image, and Valiant are the most memorable, with Dynamite, Boom!, and IDW fighting for position now as third tier publishers. Yet none of them has really challenged either of the Big Two, even during their heyday, and I don't think they ever will, because what it boils down t, more than iconic characters and nostalgia and leveraging the IP for movies and novels and merch...is who gets the money.

I don't think anybody really argues that early comic book companies were absolutely exploitative of their creators. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster fought DC for years to get a piece of the Superman action; King Kirby never saw a fraction of the revenue he generated for Marvel, because according to them they owned all his characters and artwork into perpetuity. And that means that Marvel and DC have some of the vastest archives of company-owned intellectual property in the world.

You look at companies like Dark Horse and Image, these guys attracted their creators because they chose not to be as exploitative, letting the creators keep the rights to their characters. And while it works and is fairly successful to a point, they never really got huge like Marvel or DC. Dark Horse has carved out a niche as the indie company's indie company, with a mix or original creator-owned properties and licensed properties. Image famously imploded over rights issues (Gaiman vs. MacFarlane: fight!), and the inability for a group of studios to keep to deadlines like the Marvel or DC factories, and now they're mostly a poor-man's image with a thin skein of a universe. Valiant made the most, pun not intended, valiant effort, trying from word go to put out a self-consistent universe of books superior in concept (if not always in inking or print quality) to anything the other companies were putting out, at least until Deathmate killed them.

I'm leaving aside the issue of rights for crossovers, because most companies seem to have a handle on that these days whether they're big or small, but I don't think we should neglect how much the shared universe and ease of intracompany crossovers in Marvel and DC helped distinguish them in the early days. Now? Eh, maybe not so much. They still do big crossover events regularly, whereas properties like Evil Dead just flit around in a seemingly never-ending series of crossover titles.

So, that's my theory. We won't ever see another Marvel comics, because to do what Marvel did requires conditions that few if any right-minded creators would ever agree to on these days. Even when you get a really prolific character like Hellboy, Conan, or Atomic Robo who is doing their own book and maybe a successful spinoff or two, they're still creator-driven (or owner-driven, in the case of Star Wars) enough that they just fail to really challenge the entrenched powers.

Fakefaux

I think assuming there will never be another Marvel is premature, for several reasons.

First of all, the old system is dying. It's a slow death, but death it is. There are not a lot of comic readers, and the numbers are not going up by much, even with all these comic book movies introducing new audiences to the characters. As we discussed in the previous thread, Bleedingcool reports that DC nearly got shuttered and turned into an IP farm by Time Warner, and that's still a very real possibility if their numbers continue to drop.

People aren't buying comics, and I think most of us know why. High prices, a limited number of outlets, the ever-present bane of Diamond Distributors, to name a few. Diamond in particular is also a horrible gateway demon that makes it much harder for indie comic artists to get their stuff out there, and it has a monopoly on the market because the market is so small and no other publishers care to expand into it.

Yet if the system is dying, what's going to replace it? In some cases, the answer may be nothing. Time Warner might just use their comic properties to make more movies and TV shows, and forget about the comics. But the big game changer here is the internet. Webcomics are A Thing. Lots of people read them. Granted, they're not super profitable outside of a few rare instances, but they do allow for unprecedented creator control.

This is not to say webcomics are the future, but I believe they are harbingers of the future. People still read comics. People still want to make comics. At some point the industry system with the Big Two is going to collapse, and something new will take its place, and the internet will play a major role in that. Who knows? Maybe in another fifty years the next Marvel will be born online. I'm not foolish enough to predict what it might look like, but I don't think there's just going to be a gaping void. Stagnation will eventually give way to change and innovation.

HadjiQuest

2 Things:

1. The extinction of the news stand market provides a major barrier to absorbing a notable share of the marketplace. Those who make the commute to their LCS do so with a particular set of characters or creators in mind, and while a portion of them are willing to try new books and characters, many of them are fairly set in what they know.

2. Very few creators have stepped up and been willing to work in a new shared universe. In recent years, we have the Mignolaverse, the new Valiant Universe, a couple small corners of Image (Kirkman's Invincible, Liefeld's book revivals, and some of the stuff tying into their original titles like Spawn and Savage Dragon). Besides Valiant, shared titles not written by the original universe/character creator tend to be minis or oneshots.

The best hope for this would be something like Monkey Brain. Do any of those titles share universes? They'd be slowed by the slow adoption of digital first indies, but I also think they'd end up pioneering the trail that comics will have to follow in the future, including shared universes.

Linespider5

Well, the first assumption needs to be tested.

Why do we NEED another Marvel? At this point in the comics game, the sorts of concepts Marvel really brought to bear-shared universes, legacy characters, epic space adventure, etc-are pretty understandable concepts, to the point that creators can easily tell the sort of story that simply would not have been possible without three decades or so of Marvel forming the collective bedrock that we can all readily accept as universal premises for books.

Consequently, we're more often seeing lots of self-contained stories that make references to a shared universe that is never seen or demonstrated. The creators kind of zero in with the story they're telling, and the reader is left to half-imagine what that other stuff could be, which, more often than not, is some analogue of the Fantastic Four or the JSA or something like that. This stuff is just so commonplace now, it's become kind of irrelevant. New characters turn inward, instead of becoming Johnny Appleseed-like progenitor stories.

It's sort of like reinventing Star Wars, when you get right down to it. It's such a dense, detail oriented thing with generations of fans and creators, with sooooo many characters, places, and things. Star Wars isn't going anywhere, probably, for at least another forty years. You can't go out and make another Star Wars, especially with the original right there, humming along, a billion dollar powerhouse, a veritable Galactus of the IP world, with a shadow bigger than God.

So what do you do? You do your own thing, and you do it at the level you can do it now. Anything more than that and you're setting yourself for a spruce goose that runs on your own bitters tears, if you can even get it built.

Fakefaux

Well, and that's the thing to keep in mind: Marvel and DC didn't really set out to create sprawling universes. That happened organically. Both of them just started doing comic books about superheroes, and hey, they sometimes did crossovers and team-ups because those sold better. Hell, the first issue of The Avengers was slapped together at the last minute to replace a concept that had fallen through. "What are our best sellers at the moment? All right, throw 'em all together, maybe that'll work."

Oniros25

Comics right now feel like a niche market on the verge of exploding back into the mainstream. Comixology and the proliferation of tablets together point toward a time where the barriers between the public and comic books will be greatly lessened if not pulled down completely. No more having to find and go to a LCS if that's not your thing. If I'm not mistaken, Comixology also supports digital-only comics that as far as I know get to thumb their noses at Dimond since they don't have to get distributed in a print form. A wider audience means you can sell each individual comic for significantly less (maybe even have an equivalent to Steam Sales where just before your company's big Summer Event, you could sell all the comics that lead up to that event at fire sale prices, thus allowing the maximum ammount of people to invest in such a thing.)

You still have the problem with rights. If a character is creator-owned and only ever written by the creator, they're temporary and that's just a fact. The Great Machine will never be on that level with Batman or Captain America because only Brian K. Vaughn is ever going to write about him and since his story is done, that's it for that character. No more Ex Machina. If you wanted to set out to become the next Marvel, you'd have to solve that problem. Here's my jab at a solution: offer a good deal to the people that get in on the ground floor that doesn't necessarily involve maintaining creative control over the characters they bring to the table. Instead, everyone gets a certain percentage of what everything in the universe makes as a whole. Whether your idea is doing gangbusters or just Ok, you're guaranteed a steady paycheck. Obviously, if you're doing terribly the company can fire you and you cease to get your cut, but as long as you're at least holding your own it's all for one and one for all. Try to play up the potential immortality of having a shot at creating the 21st century's Superman or Iron Man. I don't think a lot of old hands would be psyched to jump on board for that kind of experiment, but I could see new hungry tallent jumping all over that. Personally, I have a hero that I've been crafting in the quiet places of my mind that I think I could live with reliquishing creative control over for the chance to see her live forever.

There's still yet another problem though: finding an audience. What's the trick to getting people into comic books? Personally, I think a new company would, at least at first, move back toward more done-in-one stories. Individual, self-contained, exciting and cheap entertainment that benefits from the impulse-buy nature of being able to purchase more with a tap of the screen? That could be something you could market. It requires less investment of time and money from your potential audience, making it less of a gamble. You'd have to push hard on advertising in the right places too places where people that might have the best experience from your service are likely to be. I'm thinking Facebook, Spotify and other streaming music services and streaming video like Hulu, Youtube, ect. People need to see how cool this is and how cheap it is to get involved.

Even with all that, the whole enterprise could come down like a house of cards if your comics aren't compelling enough or your advertisments are persuasive enough, ect. If you want to be the "New Marvel", you need to leave the status quo in the dust to the point that everything else feels painfully antiquated. It needs to be progressive. It needs to be smart. It needs to be creative. It needs to grab the reader by the lapels and shout, "This is important! This means something!" There's never a gurantee you can accomplish that, but if you have the right people in the right place at the right time, it could still happen.

Probably won't though. :-)

Amigu

I think there is potential for a new popular shared universe. It might take on a different form though. I mean maybe it won't have Marvel's market shares. Maybe it won't even come out in print? But sticking to such narrow definitions of success just seems a bit antiquated.