Marvel Comics Is Not A Serious Publishing Operation
It's time we started saying it more and louder, and maybe meaner, but I think I got pretty close on that one
Hi! Sorry about missing the past couple of weeks! I was going to blame comics themselves for my absence but as we’re about to see, comics have been pretty good over the past couple of weeks, so, I have to own up to the fact my ideas just weren’t good enough to send (You know what’s lamer than jokes about Watchmen? Jokes about jokes about Watchmen.) and I have to give myself the space to grow. I can’t just push out something mediocre week after week and force myself into burnout for little to no tangible benefit, right? Because that’s not what someone that takes things seriously would do.
And thus, obviously: let’s talk about Marvel Comics. I’m not the first or the last to make the claim that the House of Ideas has been in some manner of existential malaise over the past couple of years, but I’m the one that’s been making the claim that Marvel Comics is not a serious publishing operation, which bears explaining. I don’t think Marvel Comics are in the business of making and selling comic books. They are doing these things, obviously, and they’re doing them so much that they’re, at time of writing, the single largest publisher operating in the Direct Market, but they haven’t seemed to be good at it for a while now.
For instance: you would expect a serious publisher of comic books to maintain good relationships with the artists it works with, doubly so when they are some of the most talented craftspeople on the planet. You would expect a baseline level of respect in any dealings between Marvel and the many people that make the many characters they own living icons. If not for the principle of the thing on its own, at least you’d do it in order to keep publishing good comic books. Well, as we found out this week from the Instagram feed of one Dustin Nguyen, co-creator of Ascender, Descender, and famous in this household for a little comic we like to call Wildcats Version 3.0, as well as a number of comments left by a number of industry greats, Marvel Comics are not doing any of that.
Instead, we have an institutional system of undercutting wages to near-minimum level, stiffing creators on international sales, and generally treating people whose work is so essential to comics there wouldn’t even be comics without them as completely disposable. And then it gets worse! You start finding out, from no less reputable a source than Zoe Thorogood, that Marvel will also stiff you in incredibly petty ways, paying you a shockingly small fee for a character design study sketch and turning that into a much more expensive, and much more lucrative variant cover without even a word of warning!
And then it gets worse! You find out from Heather Antos, formerly of Marvel Comics, formerly of facing a deluge of shit from the worst people alive for paying tribute to the many women working in and around comics and only getting a tweet on the official Marvel Twitter account by way of institutional support, that assistant editors on what were some of the biggest comics at the time were making below minimum wage, and only got raises and overtime pay because the government had raised said minimum wage. It kept going from there, and while some of it was the kind of industry practice you’d also see the Distinguished Competition pull to scratch a profit where they can, the conclusion many of the illustrious illustrators in the thread were drawing was that Marvel was not worth drawing for. (I promise you, I’m not doing wordplay this egregious ever again)
The word to describe behavior like this is “contempt”. And the thing with that attitude is that it never really stops, does it? If Marvel Comics have this much contempt for the people they are directly working with, imagine how they see you, the comic-buying public. I promise you, for once, this isn’t about whatever disagreements you may have with whatever whichever editor you’re most mad at this week has said, probably in their awful newsletter. It’s about the other thing that pisses me off: advertising a comic with the promise of new work from one exciting artist, getting about a trade’s worth of issues from them, and then immediately switching to someone a little bit cheaper and, on occasion, a little bit worse. I am, of course, talking about Uncanny X-Men, but I might as well be talking about Ultimate Spider-Man, or was it any other comic that has disappointed me over the years? (Sound off in the comments with your own answer.)
They don’t even trust that you might be invested in whatever you may be reading! How else might you explain the fact that they keep advertising the big twists of their comics in covers and solicitations? It would have been exciting to find out that the second act of One World Under Doom was dealing with the return of the dread Dormammu, wouldn’t it? It would have been great to experience the surprise return of one Mister Sinister in the pages of the allegedly good Exceptional X-Men! But why bother being exciting? After all, the comics are already paid for.
As you can plainly see, I think the revelations of this week have angered me beyond my ability to be reasoned about these things. This is not what a good publisher does, and there are a dozen other things that Marvel are doing in a way that is plain and simple wrong. I didn’t even get into how they release and present collected material because it’s just not how I experience comics, but do trust that they’re also fucking that up. All of this comes back to this one conclusion: Marvel Comics is not a serious publishing operation, and we should stop treating them as such until significant changes happen.
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Secret Six #1 had every opportunity to be a crowd-pleasing book, cynically designed to delight out-of-context screenshot sharers. It is the revival of one of DC’s most celebrated books, a weirder and more queer take on the classic Suicide Squad carried by Gail Simone’s voice at her most uniquely herself. It is also the continuation of the adventures of one Jon Kent, a character that has been kept almost but not quite interesting through the overly cautious writing of well-meaning writers so afraid to get “the bisexual son of Superman” wrong they don’t even attempt to get it right.
The twist in the tale, however, is that it’s also a new comic from Nicole Maines, and it should appear clear by now that Nicole Maines is, as a point of fact, a messy bitch that lives for the drama. That gives the comic a wonderful contrarian streak. For instance, this is a comic where the domestic life and the gentle romance between Jon and his boyfriend Jay get constantly undercut by petty sniping and reminders that both he and his friend Dreamer were blackmailed or brainwashed into being pawns of Amanda Waller at her most despotic during the events of Absolute Power. It delights in being unsettling and uncomfortable, and that opens the door for moments of actual realness: when it shows a trans woman having a nightmare set in an operating room, yes, it’s foreshadowing, but you have to understand there’s something else at play.
But it’s not just about characters screaming their insecurities at one another. It’s also a really kickass action comic, drawn with all the energy that Stephen Segovia can give it (and that’s a lot, considering he worked on WILDC.A.T.S.). It switches effortlessly from tense showdown (metaphorical) to tense showdown (literal) and keeps things superbly stylish, including the new costumes that absolutely rule.
Ultimately, Secret Six succeeds because it is as unapologetically itself as any book with that title should be. Love it or don’t, it’s not like it’s going to care. I thought it was great, and that’s good enough for me.
I should love Assorted Crisis Events #1 because it’s objectively a great comic. Deniz Camp, of a little comic called The Ultimates, speaks to the unreality of our moment by pushing it further, setting it in a comic book universe where time itself has gone rogue, and then by pushing it even further, having its story set in a street where films about events that might have happened in the time crisis are being shot. And if that’s not unreal enough for you yet, the core of the story is about someone having to devise a backstory interesting enough to convince someone to repair a clock. And despite all the layers, it keeps that story at human scale, never for a moment leaving the human scale, despite how absurd it can get.
It’s all masterfully told in the pencils of Eric Zawadzki and the colors of Jordie Bellaire, who use every tool at their disposal to make it land just right. The stark white gutters attempting to put order in anarchy and panels extending in the margins and past the page imply a place where time is out of wack, while carefully chosen palettes let mood shine through without losing any of the wonderfully weird details of the world, which invite you to look and consider the many stories that could be happening.
The problem is that, for all the excellence on display, Assorted Crisis Events is a sci-fi thriller anthology. There’s a structure to it that is as predictable as it is inevitable. You may not be able to guess the twist at the end, but you can guess that there will be a twist, because that’s how it works. When I was done reading this comic, I couldn’t help but think about what it would have looked like as a 6-page Future Shocks story, of the kind they still print to this day in 2000 AD. It would have been denser and tighter, it might have cut on the world-building. I don’t think it would have been this radically different. Al Ewing made fun of this comic 20 years before it was released. I wish it would have done more; I don’t know how it could have, considering it’s doing a lot.
Obviously it’s a great comic. It’s just me that’s not feeling it. Wow! I just realized this is a huge fucking bummer! Sorry gang! Sometimes that happens when you’ve read too many comics! Ah well, that’s the madness, that’s the power, it’s that game we play when get into this! Let’s do it again sometime! Much love;
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS