Trading In The Chevy For A Cadillac-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack (IT'S FROM "MOVIN' OUT" BY BILLY JOEL)
So, you know that thing, when a company with a near-monopolistic grip on all direct market distribution of comic book periodicals loses its exclusive partnership with the single biggest publisher in the industry? That thing? Yeah, it happened. Starting in October of this year, Marvel is gonna use Penguin Random House as its sole Direct Market distributor, for everything from graphic novels and trade collections to your humble floppy single issue comic. The move has raised several questions, including a few I'm actually qualified to answer.
Why did this happen? Probably for the same reason it happened when DC dropped Diamond this time last year: Diamond has had trouble paying publishers during the shutdown, and they unilaterally stopped the comic book industry from working for several months, which very noticeably forced Marvel to reshape and re-scope several of their big-ticket comic book events, including X of Swords, Empyre, and The King In Black. Obviously it was the right thing to do, considering the killer plague out there, but the combination of this and the aforementioned money troubles will not make you popular with the C-Suite executives that are running roughshod all over entertainment nowadays.
More than anything, more than the myriad horror stories retailers have told about their Diamond shippings, more than the almost adversarial relationship Diamond had with smaller publishers, more than the dozen things about the way Diamond have run their business that have stunted the growth of comic books in these past two decades of single-distributor exclusivity, this ultimately is what did them in: they stood between entertainment giants and their money. Again: this is what happened with DC Comics. We know from these negotiations that Penguin Random House was looking to get involved in direct market comics. Marvel following suit is shocking, but it is not surprising.
What does this mean for the immediate future of the industry? It's been less than a week. Anyone trying to make predictions will run into one or several questions they cannot answer. Can Diamond get a low enough rate as a wholesaler to be competitive with the discounts Penguin Random House will be offering? Following from that, how much is Diamond gonna keep, and is that gonna be enough to stay afloat? What of the smaller publishers, chief amongst them Image? What of the comic shops Diamond has kept afloat by not collecting on the debts they owe? There's so many questions, and we will not even begin to get an idea of the contours of the whole picture until May 26 at the very earliest (when early solicits for October will begin dropping), and more likely in July when the first catalogues for distribution through PRHPS drop.
I will however make you this fairly safe prediction: this is not doom for the comic book industry. You don't invest in the way Penguin Random House is investing if the industry you're investing in is dying. If this is to be the end of an era, as many around the industry have predicted, it's gonna be the end of the "chummy small business owner" era of the comic book industry. Consider the changes at DC Comics as part of this, and you can probably see it: big corporations are staking their claims over how things are run, and Penguin Random House is just the latest big dog to enter the yard. But the words of the day are corporate synergy, business-to-business solutions, and leveraging intellectual property for vertical integration. And that's just not a world in which a small business owner who can be found after hour in Mia Khalifa's mentions can compete.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: BUT WHAT WOULD WE KNOW ABOUT CHANGING DISTRIBUTION PARTNERS ANYWAY RIGHT?
We've been talking Tom King a fair amount in these newsletters (new subscribers might wanna check out issues #3, #6, and #10 for the full story!) so if you've been paying attention, what I'm about to say is gonna sound completely obvious: there's rules to a Tom King comic. Even at his most playful, there will be a structure, and that structure is going to inform the story in some way. We have seen this before, and I am bringing it up here because it is necessary context to understand Strange Adventures #9, where it all begins to fall apart.
More than in any previous issue, Mitch Gerads and Evan Shaner break away from the three single-panel strips setup they had used for most of the series. There's more spillover, fused panels, breaks in layout and panel sub-divisions, all happening right as Adam Strange is facing the Pykkt invasions past and present. But these aren't just here to illustrate decisive action in moments of crisis. There is something far darker at play; these are the last few cracks needed to fully break a facade. Adam Strange, the planet-hopping science hero of two worlds, is not who you think he is. He has killed innocent people. He led an army as they massacred civilians. He is, by any definition, a war criminal.
This is where content meets form: Adam Strange breaks the rules of warfare, and so the comic breaks with him. This is the story of Strange Adventures in a nutshell: it's a man inexorably becoming more and more cruel as he gets told by the powers that be that he's the only thing standing before the total collapse of society. It's one lie, supported by many other lies. And for Mr. Terrific, the other protagonist of the series, it's getting to be one lie too many. We're getting to the proverbial endgame, and all similarities with an existing empire's recent history are not fortuitous. (IT'S AMERICA, I AM SAYING AMERICA IS BAD)
There's a comic I really wanted to talk about in this week's newsletter, because it challenges the notions of what an ongoing contemporary superhero action comic book should read like in really cool and interesting ways. It is published by a company that is still currently working with a known bigot, who's put antisemitic imagery in the background of one of their comics FOR THE SECOND TIME IN THAT COMPANY'S HISTORY, BOTH EVENTS HAPPENING IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS. Luckily, there's a book that's kinda like it, but even better, from the same writer, that also came out this week. So let's talk about Decorum #7; it rules.
I appreciate that this is not gonna be enough, so, allow me to elaborate: Decorum absolutely and completely fucking rules. On paper, it's another one of Jonathan Hickman's attempts at transforming the value proposition of a comic through ambitious world-building, data visualization with an incredibly strong sense of design (and here we will take a moment to appreciate Sasha E. Head pulling some work mapping out both the timeline of a collective of post-Singularity lifeforms AND a bowl of tonkotsu ramen from a local dive), and deceptively strong character work. But where works like the Black Monday Murders and comics of its ilk deal mostly in dark forebodings, this is an action comedy about strange space assassins, set in a world of many moving parts.
And, of course, there's Mike Goddamn Huddleston, turning this strong sense of design into an actual living and breathing world, through ingenious combinations of almost every possible style of comic on the planet. He can work in the evocative painterly imagery of euro comics, turn on a dime and sketch out the emotive action of manga, work in the iconic grandeur of american comics, and occasionally stun with dips into hardcore psychedelia, stunning pencilled classicism, or intensely alien computer-enhanced vistas. Sometimes even in a single page. Where other sci-fi comics might play at being cosmopolitan, this is the real deal.
Sure, some comics released this week might be better at making their data pages integral parts of the story they're telling in a strong and affecting way. But they don't look as stunning, and they're published by companies I have chosen not to advertise in this newsletter because of the aforementioned failures in editing. It's my newsletter and I can do whatever the hell I like.
I know I have a reputation to uphold as "the guy who finds joy in the misery of Wally West's contemporary fandom", but sorry, haters, I did have a grand old time reading The Flash #768 and there is nothing you can do about it. Sure, I gritted my teeth through Jeremy Adams lowering the final body count of Heroes in Crisis by a couple, but I can still enjoy a turbo-charged Quantum Leap space-time caper with the best of 'em. First, we're talking about the issue, meaning it still is, AND FOREVER SHALL BE, canon, which I'm counting as a win.
Second, well, it's executed as textbook iconic as it gets by Brandon Peterson and Marco Santucci, with a two page assist from David Lafuente which I'm not even gonna go into because you deserve to see it unspoiled. It's the big figures, in the big bold lines, the way you see them when you close your eyes, timeless and iconic, a thin halo of color making the larger than life characters exist in their own space. Third: it's funny as all hell. There's a joke in there that's the best thing I've read all week, and sometimes that's all it takes! There's ludicrous nonsense super science! There's dinosaurs! Do you really think I'm too good for it? Because I'M NOT!
I don't really have much to say about The Bat and the Cat #4. It's the best dang comic released this week. Tom King can tell you a lot about a character in three sentences, and Clay Mann can make them as hot as goddamn lava. There's action, there's tension, It's beautiful and it's heart-wrenching and, if you're cool, you're reading it already. Anyway this is getting long enough, you don't need any more of my yapping, let's skip to the italics.
Because that's that for this week! Welcome to Buttondown everyone! If you're reading this, I assume you have checked your spam folder, in which case, thanks! Please tell everyone else! And then please tell them to subscribe! That's right: there's no liking OR commenting here! There's also no overrated transphobes! It's a great deal! Everything feels new, and everything feels great! Enjoy it! And then, bow your head down and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!