In The Deal Business For Deals, And Business
Folks, it’s deal season, and when it rains deals, it pours deals. People are making so many deals and taking so many deals that it’s a hell of deal if you can be the real deal trying to get the full deal on all of those dang deals. It’s deals coming and going fast and furious all up and down the deal superhighway and trying to keep up with all of it has been tough. I’ve basically spent all week face first in figures and data, looking at the ECONOMICS of it all, and I’ve mutated into a monster I dare not recognize. I’m wearing dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up, ugly ties, and khakis. My brow is constantly drenched in sweat even when I do nothing. My voice is locked in a permanent shout, and my thoughts are filled with commerce. I have become that most loathsome of horrors; I have become a BUSINESS JOCK. Everything is markets and every market is a game. And though I wish it had never been so, it is my grim responsibility to bring you THE WINNERS AND THE LOSERS OF THE WEEK IN COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY DEALS.
WINNER: DC COMICS
We talked last week about how critical it was for any enterprise looking to make money in comics to meet the people where they are, and it don’t get more “meeting the people where they are” than DC Entertainment getting in bed with the mobile webcomics behemoth Webtoon and its 72 million monthly worldwide users, for all-new stories featuring DC’s many characters. It’s 72 million people. Turning one percent of that audience into paying customers on one comic would mean you outsold every direct market comic released in the past ten years not named Star Wars #1. Doing even half of that on a single comic puts you in a club of less than 20. As big as I think it is, it’s probably bigger. If they’re serious about this, if they can turn Webtoon’s audience into DC Comics fans, there’s a chance they might be set for life.
LOSER: MARVEL COMICS
Meanwhile, Marvel comics is continuing its partnership with mobile NFT clearinghouse VeVe, and this week, they’ve announced they’re putting digital comics on sale on the platform. For the low low price of as many $6.99 blind boxes as your gullible little brain may desire, you, yes you, may earn yourself an entirely made-up series of numbers and letters based on virtual copies of Marvel Comics, Journey Into Mystery #85, or Fantastic Four #1, all given an arbitrary level of scarcity that is supposed to lay the foundation for a speculative bubble! We’ve already covered why NFTs are for losers, and this is no exception! The NFT market has collapsed! VeVe and Marvel will skim 8.5% off the top of every transaction! This is a two-bit get rich quick scheme that you will NEVER win! That sort of thing is AS LOSER AS LOSER GETS!
WINNER: BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Say what you will about the guy’s work (I found that I like it a lot better than most people) but the guy sure can run a hustle! And the big winner in this year’s Jinxworld sweepstakes is Dark Horse, which is probably the option that made the most sense. At Dark Horse, Bendis will run one imprint amont many others, in between whatever the hell Karen Berger is doing and the six thousand Black Hammer spinoffs Jeff Lemire is signing off on every hour. Most important to the whole deal, of course, is the fact that, unlike some, Bendis has chosen to make that paper (cash money) via making that paper (releasing comics in stores where people can buy them). The data keeps telling you that this is where people are at! Why would you do anything else?
LOSER: DONNY CATES
You didn’t listen! I said “don’t do a Substack, it’s bad news!” But you did, didn’t you? You went and did a Substack for your Youngblood ripoff! Why do I even bother? WHY DO I EVEN BOTHER?
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IS IT REALLY A MONTY HALL PROBLEM IF YOU’RE WITH THE G.O.A.T.?
So far, in the eight months I have been running this newsletter, there have been two Leah Williamses: one wrote X-Factor #7, an achingly sincere and beautiful comic about escaping the grasp of abuse and also fighting a scary ghost. The other lent her name to X-Factor #10, an event tie-in so bloated it collapsed under the weight of the plots it had to serve, and so self-centered it could not even consider for a moment that it wasn’t doing right by the people whose stories it tried to tell. The circumstances of how that comic got made are worth examining in detail, especially in what they tell us about who is and isn’t given the space to figure things out and what stories get a chance to be told, but what you need to know for now is that X-Factor got cancelled, and in its place we got X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #1. We lost the one book in the X-Men line that loudly and proudly displayed its queerness, and instead we got one of those big dumb oversized Event Miniseries that promise to change everything FOREVER. At the time, I felt pretty short-changed, and I don’t think I was the only one. It’s an easy story to tell, because it’s a familiar one. Following comics is having to one day experience having something you love taken away from you, and replaced by something unequivocally worse.
There is, however, a very slight problem: X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #1 is an exceptional comic. It is, with no doubt in my mind, the finest comic Leah Williams has written across the whole of her tenure at Marvel Comics. It is the massive injection of character and drama that the line needed at this exact point in time. It is spectacular and it is beautiful in equal measure. As lead X-Men creative Johnathan Hickman prepares to bow out of the line, it is also proof positive that there is absolutely no shortage of ambitious people ready to carry the Krakoa era forward.
Leah Williams’ X-Factor could, at times, feel unfocused and a little too satisfied with itself. This is the exact opposite. It’s an oversized issue, but it is packed to the brim, and it asks every uncomfortable question about the state of mutants that’s been on the back of people’s minds since the finale of House of X. “Isn’t it fucked up how X-Force are basically running an authoritarian surveillance state?”, uh yeah, kind of. “Isn’t Krakoa’s Council built on tons and tons of unresolved grievances just waiting for an opportune moment to resurface?”, boy howdy is it ever. “And what about the fact that Magneto has, historically, always been horrible and borderline abusive to the people in his immediate orbit?”, wow, that’s a really pointed question; but yeah, that’s the big one, this being “The Trial of Magneto” and all. When you consider everything that he has done, and all the people that it involved, there is a veritable Stockx’s worth of other shoes right there for the dropping, and, amazingly, Williams uses Wanda’s death as a catalyst to drop them all at once.
What this means is that, all of a sudden, melodrama is back in the X-Men line with a vengeance. Big, loud, and all-encompassing, it has all the crying, the screaming, and the high-stakes life or death fighting of the greatest comics the line has ever seen, in the service of a full accounting of our relationship to Wanda Maximoff, and really our relationship to power, and emotion, as it relates to women characters in comics. Why do we forgive Magneto, and treat Wanda as a monster? What does that say? There’s nothing quite like a big comic summoning up big emotions in order to ask big questions, and X-Men comics are the best at that exact purpose.
If I have to have a problem with this comic, and I do, because I’m ill in the head, it’s in the art. It’s an interesting comic, doing many interesting things (the first scene, crossing over two parts of the investigations, breaks out into a pretty cool Watchmen-style 9-panel grid full of cool juxtapositions), but the execution on it all feels a little too uneven. There is some great imagery in there, but some of the layouts get in the way of readability in a way that doesn’t quite work for the elements aiming to be a straightforward mystery story. It’s very good, but it could have been better. Then again, it could always be better. When the rest of the comic brings it this hard, it feels a distraction to even consider it. It’s a great comic, and I hope it delivers all the way.
And that’s the week! Yeah there’s not much, but I had nothing to say about the other books. Sometimes that’s how it shakes out! Follow me on Twitter for the rest of the takes! Subscribe to the newsletter if you want more of this in your inbox! Tell your friends if you want it to get bigger! Engage, discuss, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!