DC Comics are no longer being distributed in British newsagents

Titan Comics are no longer publishing their licensed reprints of DC Comics in the UK meaning there won’t be DC titles in newsagents which means a lot of readers will be disappointed.

Comics in newsagents is important because for many people it’ll be their first encounter with them, and indeed people like Warren Ellis has spoken of stumbling across comics in newsagents when he was young. So that spark led into careers in the industry for a lot of people but for the last 20 years or so DC have royally fucked up ensuring readers get their favourite stories, or even pick up new ones. Licences have been passed around but we shouldn’t have a situation where on the verge of 2019 the license is dangling there waiting for someone else to pick it up.

But as said, it never used to be like that. DC used to have their comics well distributed from the 1950’s when 5/6% of the average titles print run was sent to the UK to be shipped to newsagents. By the 80s and early 90’s large chunks of certain titles print runs (Hellblazer for example)  were escaping cancellation as much of the print run was being sold in the UK, and not just the direct market. You could pick up titles in not just the big chains like W.H Smith’s but your corner shop with your loaf and pint of milk. All of that stopped in the late 90s.

Next time out I’ll be going into this more as I start a series of stories of unsung heroes of British comics.

DC Comics , Suicide, and Misogyny

The latest bit of organised insanity from DC Comics is this competition where drawing a picture of the character Harley Quinn in several situations may get you published. Here’s the description of the last of four panels DC would like people to draw.

Harley sitting naked in a bathtub with toasters, blow dryers, blenders, appliances all dangling above the bathtub and she has a cord that will release them all. We are watching the moment before the inevitable death. Her expression is one of “oh well, guess that’s it for me” and she has resigned herself to the moment that is going to happen.

This has caused a wee bit of a kerfuffle as well, it’s such a fucking awful idea. DC have effectively tried to sexualise the actual act of suicide in a way to get what is a bit of cheap publicity which yes, involves people like me pointing out the problem with doing this. It’s a perfect bit of marketing if one has not got ethics or a soul to worry about.

Taken in isolation it doesn’t seem too bad, but when you consider that DC changed the character from this…

To this..

There’s nothing essentially wrong with sexualised superheroes if used in the right context  as I’ve explained before, but this is different. This is cheap and pandering to a certain large part of the customer base who see female characters as gratification only, which in this context is dubious and wrapped round a sexualised image of suicide is morally dubious at best, or pandering to the worst of people.

Coming around the same time as their decision to refuse a lesbian marriage in their Batwoman title, and just before Suicide Prevention Week, you have to think that DC is run by people who have no idea of the world beyond their own cynical worldview. You’d probably be right. These joyless decisions to ensure that DC closes out a larger readership confirms what the likes of Karen Berger have said about the company that it’s given up on dealing with anyone that isn’t in their current core readership, even if that means alienating people and generally making themselves looking like enormous arseholes.

Even the Guinness Book of Records Hates the New Superman Outfit

This weekend at Kendal Calling there was a new world record for people dressed as Superman…

A bit of research shows there’s a lot of competition over this and it is indeed, a big thing in it’s own wee way. There’s one thing though from this link here…..

PLEASE NOTE:  The costume requirements for participating in this event are as follows: 

Any costume must have the blue body suit, the red and yellow “S” shield on the chest, the yellow belt, the red cape, red boots, and the red trunks.  Guinness has given us no indication that other costume variations set forth in the comics, films, or books other than the Classic Superman version or the “Superman Returns” version are considered acceptable, so- to be safe- we are limiting it to these two costume styles only.  The Rubies-brand Classic Superman and Superman Returns costumes are considered acceptable as they are officially licensed. Fan-made costumes are acceptable as long as they meet the criteria listed above.

So there we have it. Even the Guinness Book of Records thinks this is horrible…

 

We are however nowhere near this yet…

Superman Kills!

That’s a panel from Justice League #22 written by Geoff Johns, the man who seems to be single handedly making DC’s superhero comics grim, dark, depressing things that you wouldn’t wipe your arse on.

Yes, I know that Superman is possessed and it’s not really him, but if there’s an image that defines superhero comics now it’s probably going to be this which is designed to make as many people pissed off as possible and create chatter online for DC’s range of titles.

It’s only designed to to this. That’s it. It’s a fuck you to people who might be more than a bit fed up by this constant  pandering to those who think ‘adult’ is just more and more empty violence or thought Man of Steel was kewl and hey, people are going to die right?

It’s clearly an attempt to reconcile Man of Steel with the comic version of Superman and I’ve made my thoughts clear on that film, but this is yet another example of bad writing from bad writers in order to pander to people with a video game’s sense of morality.

It’s dull, it’s boring and it’s frankly offensive to see DC do this. Will they change anything? No, of course not as it’s a cynical attempt to cash in while removing another little piece of joy from the world as if you make everything dark, grim and depressing then what’s the point? Where’s the optimism? You can’t sustain drama when the tone is that of someone standing over a sink with a razor over their wrists thinking whether or not to slash them open? You can’t make things grimmer and grimmer because you don’t have anything in this world that anyone wants to fight for?

And that’s the problem. Why should we the readers bother anymore?

Mass Murderer of Steel

I made a blog about Superman and the new film, Man of Steel last month which focused on how DC Comics and Warner Bros. had royally shafted Superman’s creators over the years, and how this film was meant mainly to be made to keep the film rights of the Superman character.

Well, I’ve seen the film now so from here on in it’s spoilers so you’ve been warned.

Right, firstly I’ll make it clear that the film is fucking shite just in case anyone might be confused as I go on.This isn’t to say there’s not good things about it; the score is good, some scenes are very well imagined (the Krypton scenes especially are very well imagined) and the last five minutes aren’t bad at all. Everything else is grim, unrelenting shite wrapped in one of the worst scripts you’ll hear being spoken by actors horribly miscast in roles they barely manage to breathe two dimensions into.

So let’s briefly recap Superman’s origins. He’s sent to earth by the brilliant Kryptonian scientist Jor El as his planet is doomed, where he’s found by Jonathan and Martha Kent who bring him up to be a guardian of everything good and to fight for truth and justice when he grows up to be Clark Kent, reporter for the Daily Planet, and to be an example for the world. As you can see there’s plenty of religious allegory here as that’s what Siegel and Shuster intended when they created Superman as they drew upon the Jewish myths of their upbringing, and at the time creating a powerful foe against the evils of Nazi Germany, not to mention the daily plight of immigrants to the US who suffered at the hands of slum landlords, corrupt businessmen and gangsters. In fact early Superman stories were full of him taking on these sort of villains as Superman was a moral guardian for the weak and the poor. He made things better for people and that’s been the character’s core for the 75 years he’s been around.

Then we get to Man of Steel which starts with a long sequence on Krypton which shows the planet in a middle of a civil war which means the director can show lots of THINGS EXPLODING, and the brilliant scientist Jor El (played with the range of a Findus Crispy Pancake by Russell Crowe) gets to walk around looking brooding and moody with a big gun. We know Jor El is broody and moody because Crowe frowns a lot and does his important sounding voice from Gladiator while shooting people as brilliant scientists tend to do.

Jor El then faces off against General Zod (played by Michael Shannon who SHOUTS A LOT to show how angry and earnest he is)  before being killed by Zod as he sends his son to Earth after some bollocks about Jor El placing the MacGuffin in the ship taking his son from Krypton. It doesn’t really matter because you don’t really care as there’s no character building as that would get in the way of the SHOUTING and THINGS EXPLODING.

Zod gets his arse kicked, the civil war ends, Jor El sends his son to Earth, Zod and his gang get sent to the Phantom Zone. And this is in around five minutes of screentime topped off by Krypton EXPLODING!

Then we flash forward to an adult Clark Kent being a moody wanderer in a fishing boat trying to rescue people from an oil rig fire in an actually well done scene, but this is the last good scene until the last five minutes. What follows in between these scenes is the sort of stuff you normally see in bad fanfiction or in a lot of superhero comics today as we get lots of brooding shots of Henry Cavill, lots of brooding shots of Shannon’s Zod, lots of brooding shots of Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent, and on and on.

While I’m talking about Costner let me talk about his death scene. It’s so badly written and set in a scenario so ridiculous that if you’ve not been taken out of the film by the endlessly pompous tone of the film you will be as Costner dies in a tornado to save a dog because ‘humans aren’t ready for what his son is’.

Like I said, bad fanfiction.

Anyhow, Zod’s soldiers get out the Phantom Zone, find their way to Earth to get the MacGuffin, which results in a huge fight between Superman and the Kryptonians in Smallville which results in THINGS EXPLODING and probably the loss of thousands of lives, but lets skim over that as there was lots of kewl fights and guns and helicopters and soldiers and stuff plus lots of THINGS EXPLODING.

The film muddles along until it gets to the last 40 minutes which is more fight scenes, more THINGS EXPLODING and lots of 911 imagery used in a dubious moral way to drive home the point that this is a Superman for a post-911 world and things are much darker now. This of course ignores the fact the character was created when Jews in Europe were being rounded up and murdered by the Nazis, but today’s audience only seems to care of the here and now not to mention did I say there was THINGS EXPLODING on screen?

Eventually Superman defeats all the Kryptonians by sending them back into the Phantom Zone (I think, by now my brain was like putty) apart from Zod so they can have yet another huge fight scene with no emotional content but it looks kewl and there’s THINGS EXPLODING, and oh, Superman breaks the neck of Zod because that’s dark isn’t it? That’s what the kids want? A Superman who breaks the neck of a bad guy because kids love dark moody characters so let’s have Superman break the neck of Zod because the filmmakers can’t think of anything else. Did I say it was dark as well?

The fight scenes are clearly influenced by what Alan Moore and John Totleben did on Miracleman #15 back in the 80’s, but the difference is that Moore and Totleben detailed the horror of such a fight in graphic and gory detail.

The human cost is clear, but in Man of Steel, the human cost is at best an afterthought, but most of the time it’s ignored as that gets in the way of people punching each other and THINGS EXPLODING!

It’s a soulless, empty film made by accountants and marketing managers to try to hit the demographic who think ‘adult comics’ means people endlessly hitting each other, scientists carrying guns and maybe the odd THING EXPLODING.

But it’s the uncaring loss of life that shows up exactly how little the people who made this film care about Superman, or even follow the script they’ve filmed. In Costner’s death scene we have it made clear that Superman has to put people first and protect them, and we see that in the oil rig scene but as soon as the director/writer get to the big fight scenes we don’t see that until the moment when Zod’s neck is broken but by this time millions of people are dead or maimed but we’re not shown the human cost at all. It’s war but with no human cost so in that respect it’s very modern but ultimately Man of Steel is just violence for violence’s sake. It’s fanfiction writ large.There’s no joy in it. No fun. Just nihilistic violence and brooding, boring introspection. As said, it’s exactly the sort of thing creating by marketing managers and accountants.

Alan Moore recently outlined more of the history of Superman which detailed how the character was exploited, and Man of Steel is just another notch in the exploitation of the character but done in such a nasty, cynical way that any joy you can take from it is wiped out by another 15 minute fight scene with THINGS EXPLODING everywhere.

Then there’s the figure being sold at San Diego featuring Superman standing on skulls because nothing screams ‘hope’ more than Superman standing on skulls.

Ultimately though the best review of the film is the fantastic Kyle Baker’s game Mass Murderer of Steel, as it just sums the bloody mess up perfectly. Endless scenes of men hitting each other over and over and over and over in increasingly empty scenes of violence…..

Man of Steel-What You Might Like to Know About Superman

The new Superman film, Man of Steel is out in the UK this week amid a huge amount of publicity and fuss. It looks like it might even be a bit above the usual American summer blockbuster. It might even be a very good film and it’s got good people in front and behind the camera. It is however an an enormous fuck you to the creators of Superman and their family who have been fighting for as long as Superman has existing to get a fair share of the billions upon billions their creation has made for it’s corporate owners for over seven decades.

 

Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and first published in 1938. You can see the pair discuss their creation of Superman here. The media are falling over themselves to provide studies of the myth and meaning of Superman over the last 75 years, but few if any will mention how Siegel and Shuster were shafted  over the creative rights of Superman.

I didn’t know anything of this as a kid reading comics, not until I read in a fanzine about Neal Adams fighting for Siegal and Shuster to get due credit for Superman in the 1970’s and the story of the messy history between DC (and the companies before it became DC Comics) is in this excellent article here. Siegel struggled to make a living in comics for years, and there’s a mention ins Sean Howe’s excellent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story about how Stan Lee felt sorry for Siegel in the 1960’s when he was struggling for work, so gave him whatever job he could at Marvel but because his writing style didn’t fit into the Marvel style of the time this meant menial office jobs. The man who was partly responsible for the boom in superheroes and for creating employment for people at Marvel and DC was reduced to struggling for work and favours from friends like Lee. Siegel even worked for IPC’s line of boy’s adventure comics and created The Spider which appeared in Lion, which was a strip I adored as a kid.

 

 

 

 

In 1975 DC agreed to pay Siegel and Shuster $20,000 for the rest of their lives. At that point, they’d made billions from Superman, and even then this amount was only agreed after the work of people like Neal Adams. This was not something DC out of the goodness of their heart.

By the time of their deaths the dispute still hadn’t been settled, and carried on to their heirs,  who continued to fight for what was a fair share of their creation as the sons and daughters of shareholders made money from Superman but the family of the men who created him didn’t. However due to US copyright law, the rights would revert to Siegel and Shuster’s families, and that would include the film rights as well. Early last year, DC’s parent company Warner Brothers won, which saw Man of Steel go quickly into production to ensure the film rights stayed with Warner’s .

So when you settle down to watch Man of Steel in your comfy chair in the cinema have a wee thought about the creators and their families and wonder why the media is talking about the heroic myth of Superman, but don’t feel it’s important to mention what happened to Siegel and Shuster? I’d imagine because it probably shows the myth up to be just that, a myth.

Siegel and Shuster deserved better. Their heirs deserve better. It would be nice if one journalist, or one person connected with the film mentioned this rather than repeat the same story which marginalises the creators and their plight into a footnote of a larger story rather than being something that taints the myth.

 

 

 

Hey Kids! COMICS!

The New York Times has a really quite fascinating article on Karen Berger that’s pretty much essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in comics, and no, not just superheroes but comics as a medium and where the major companies are heading.

There’s a couple of sections which stand out for me. The first is this one:

Ms. Berger said she noted changes in DC’s priorities in recent years. “I’ve found that they’re really more focused on the company-owned characters,” she said. DC and its Disney-owned rival, Marvel, “are superhero companies owned by movie studios.”

This is probably the first time I’ve seen a high level employee (or ex-exmployee) point out what’s been increasingly obvious over the last decade that DC and Marvel have focused on pumping out titles featuring their superheroes at the detriment of anything else. Of course there are people who will point out the odd one or two titles which aren’t just superheroes, but on the whole DC and Marvel publish superhero comics to a decreasing marketplace.

Which brings me to the second part which stands out…

Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics, said there was “some truth” to these feelings of a shifting landscape, which he said were industrywide. For comics published by Vertigo and by DC, he said: “There’s not a challenge to be more profitable out of the gate. But there is a challenge to be more accepted out of the gate.”

Mr. DiDio said it would be “myopic” to believe “that servicing a very small slice of our audience is the way to go ahead.”

“That’s not what we’re in the business for,” he added. “We have to shoot for the stars with whatever we’re doing. Because what we’re trying to do is reach the biggest audience and be as successful as possible.”

Again, this is the first time I think Didio has admitted publically that creativity, innovation and experimentation is a thing of the past, and that ‘servicing a small part of our audience’ really means ‘fuck you’ to a large a loyal audience of readers who would enjoy the experimentation of the Vertigo years. It is however about servicing a not much larger section of the audience with superheroes, or at least, how people think superheroes should be portrayed to a shrinking marketplace.

So when your audience is teenage boys and middle aged men you end up with Batman fucking Catwoman on panel, or any of the dozens of other examples of DC fuckwittery which means they appeal to a smaller and smaller market. It’s all calculated to sell as many copies to as limited an audience as possible while ensuring they exploit as much intellectual property as possible, and if it’s sexist or moronic then great because a lot of the audience want that.

Never mind there’s a larger group of people who might want to read stories about Catwoman where she’s not just an arse and a pair of tits, or seeing Sue Dibny raped in a story which set the tone for the last decades worth of DC stories.

There’s no joy in this. There’s just people trying to be ‘mature’ by being as sexist as possible while the buying audience decreases because superheroes aren’t fun and as children’s characters they should be fun. However this is basically DC telling us that it’s over for anything fun or different or experimental.

It’s all grim, misogynist rape and violence for here on in. I’m no prude, but when you make children’s characters deliberately inaccessible to children and most women then you’re really not reaching for the stars and trying to expand your readership because frankly, everyone is too scared to lose their job and take the leap that Berger has.

So I wish Berger well. She’s helped provide me with vast amounts of entertainment over the years, and I apologise for trying to chat her up at a UKCAC in the 90’s. My only excuse was I was exceptionally drunk…

The Slow Painful Death of the Art of Criticism & How It Hurts Doctor Who

As mentioned last time this week’s final episode of this series of Doctor Who sparked a few things off in my head. This was mainly in the reaction to it online and the fact that the Emperor has no clothes but if you distract people from this you can create a success out of anything as long as people ignore the obvious. From now on there’s spoilers so be warned if you’ve not watched it yet.

Now I’m not talking about enjoying something. I still enjoy Doctor Who most of the time and thought the Neil Gaiman episode last week was excellent, and Mark Gatiss did a great one the week before that which played on the campness of Who while mixing in influences including a large League of Gentlemen one which is always going to get my approval. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy something and notice the huge gaping problems with what you’re watching. I’m talking about that most horrible of things in modern genre fandom, the Squee Factor. Which isn’t to say that people are wrong, but if you’re just sitting there thinking that something is good because it’s ”cool” and it’s what you as a fan want, then all  that’s on the screen is a version of fanwank which is building and building things up but forgets to create drama or characters in order to get what the writer, and a large chunk of the fans want but it doesn’t mean the story or the programme actually needs it.

This creates the defence of ‘but if I love it then it can’t be bad’, or ‘ur a hater!!!’ because when the writer of the programme itself is a fan then the temptation to write professional fanwank is huge and this is the huge gaping hole that Stephen Moffat has written himself into. In creating a programme aimed more and more at the fans as opposed to the populist days of Russell T. Davies (which did end up being tied in knots because of pandering to fans) that’s ended up fetishising the character of the Doctor in a way only a fan of the programme could.

So that’s why The Name of the Doctor isn’t anything more than fanfic writ large on HD screens and funded by license payers rather than banged out online, or in the old days, hammered out on a typewriter then photocopied and distributed as fanzines. I’m not knocking fanfic per say, but when you have an episode made up essentially of actors spouting large unweildy chunks of exposition at each out while the writer hammers home the point that Clara is ‘important’ and the Doctor is the huge mythological figure akin to God, or Allah, or Jebus rather that this weirdo alien bloke going around having adventures. It can’t be as simple as that as producers and writers (many of which were fans growing up) see the character as a HUGE INFLUENCE on EVERYTHING which is really some sort of meta-commentary on how Doctor Who influenced them as children and children tend to make influential figures in their lives bigger than they actually are so that’s why we end up with the Doctor being this massive figure in all of creation which makes people think it’s all grown up and dark and stuff.

In reality it takes away from the core of the character in that he was one of many of his people who escaped the cloying nature of his people to do good because he wanted to escape. He was a drop out created just before the idea of a drop out became part of the sixties culture on both sides of the Atlantic, so the Doctor was this rebellious figure saying ‘fuck you’ to the establishment  even though he was sometimes part of that same establishment. In fact the entire first year of the Jon Pertwee era rams this point home as he’s constantly trying to run away like a child would if they were unhappy with their family and I found that amazingly powerful when I started watching the Pertwee era when I was a kid because things weren’t all bread and roses when I was growing up, so what I’m saying is that I’m as much as a screaming fanboy as anyone. I am able however to spot steaming shite when it’s served up to me.

This is where we have a little diversion and I have to recommend going off and reading the TV criticism of Clive James. In particular I remember reading The Crystal Bucket around the age of 15 or so thanks to an English teacher who tried to spark some ember of writing skill I must have shown in school but never properly did anything about. It’s a fantastic book and James is the best critic of television I’ve read apart from Harlan Ellison. His essays collected in The Glass Teat are spectacular and comparing both James and Ellison’s criticism compared to say, Sam Wollaston’s barely literate ramblings in The Guardian shows you just how lost the skill of criticism has become in the media.

Go read this stuff. It’s important and it shows you how to do it rather than recapping the synopsis, adding a funny line, adopting a popular stance, then moving on.

When you have a programme written by fans, for fans and criticised by fans (normally along the lines of ‘this was awesome’ or ‘squeeeeeee’) in the newspapers, online and on fansites, genuine criticism becomes swallowed up in the fight to get heard. Part of this is people who genuinely did enjoy it, and I’ve no real problem with them. Part are people bandwagon jumping trying to get in on what’s ‘cool’ or just parroting what they’ve heard elsewhere and a large part are people desperately trying to be heard so they can get a paid job in the media and this last one causes problems because this is generally where all critical facilities tend to go out the window.

See, it’s very hard to seriously criticise what might be a future employer, or something you want to work on should be lucky enough to do so. This leads to the horrible situation of the sort of soft criticism you see especially on comic sites like a Bleeding Cool or CBR because you don’t want to lose those exclusive interviews, the review copies, the access to professionals and all the other stuff that you really want to get involved with rather than actually write criticism. You want your cake and eat it, or indeed, gorge on it. If you’re really lucky you might get a job with Marvel or DC Comics, and that might lead to working for a TV production company, or a TV channel or a film studio and then you’re quids in. It’s a means to an end rather than a goal in itself so it suppresses real criticism so rather than reading about how Moffat doesn’t seem to understand anymore how to form a drama in it’s own right, you just read thousands of versions of ‘squeeeeeee’.

Which brings us to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who and a storyline which has been building for years, or at least the consensus is it’s been building for years rather than being thrown together and made up on the hoof as some of it clearly looks like it has because everyone is so intent to make things HUGE and EPIC like a fan would that they’ve forgotten that the best drama is made up of what people can relate to and simply put, you can’t relate to a God. You can relate to someone breaking free of a cloying establishment and doing good things to help people, but a God who is so important we can’t even know his name or something bad will happen somewhere to everyone isn’t a relatable hook, so it all becomes fanfic. It all becomes about rushing from one scene to the next so someone can spout another huge bit of exposition and the Doctor acts like a cretin because that’s how some people growing up saw the character, and it plays well in the US.

Creating good, populist drama is hard. Creating good criticism is hard. It involves hard work, research and an education and by that I don’t mean a degree, but a knowledge of television, how it works, writing, dramatic structure and of the world generally rather than just recycling what you know. It also takes a will to demand quality be it Doctor Who, or Eastenders or anything because why should the audience accept rubbish because it throws some bones to the fans who will watch it regardless of quality. Spouting exposition at each other isn’t drama. Telling us in huge unsubtle strokes that a character is Very Important isn’t creating a human drama, it’s just demoting female characters on the programme to plot points rather than people as it’s only the female characters who act as these important plot points. It’s odd, and there’s a weird feel about seeing female characters who only exist as a puzzle for the Doctor to solve rather than being people in their own right which says something about what’s rattling inside Moffat’s head.

Really though the point of this rambling nonsense isn’t to have a pop at a popular programme, or fanboys or anything that ”haters are going to hate” but to demand quality and honesty rather than shouting ‘squeee’ at the screen every five minutes because the script has spat out another piece of fan service.

And it’s not just Who that suffers from it. It’s virtually everything genre related out there because production companies and film studios do their market research online which means they encounter the hardcore fan, and when something new or different is proposed to try to widen the appeal/audience you get fans tied up in knots complaining how it’s not ”their” version of the character, or just plain outright misogyny or racism.

I want Doctor Who to thrill, excite and challenge me like it did when I was watching all those great Robert Holmes stories, or even a return to the quality Moffat is clearly capable of.  As said, it’s still fun to watch most of the time but it’s fell into a hole of it’s own making by building up everything to a huge and massive scale that the drama is lost in the twists and turns of the plot. All the likes of Moffat is doing is just eating the history of the programme and spewing it out but bigger and more epic and this is the final point. Fans want their programmes or genre fiction to be more epic and big and huge and massive and enormous, but there’s a point where you can’t go anywhere else and this isn’t helped by the feed of uncritical, or basically crap criticism.

Saying something is ‘shit’ or ‘sucks’ isn’t criticism. It’s just an opinion. Saying something is ‘cool’ or ‘fun’ isn’t criticism. It’s just an opinion. Far too often that’s what we get as criticism and frankly it’s shite…………

Next time, something else……

Bitter Sweet Symphony part five/ The Great British Comic Distribution Wars.

Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four.

We’ve covered a wide series of events in this series of blogs so far, but the defining part of the late 80’s/early 90’s is the battle between Titan and Neptune for the comic book distribution king of the country. The effects of this are felt today.

Before I get stuck in, I really strongly recommend reading the first four parts of this series. They’re pretty essential to getting the bits of backstory and I hate repeating myself. This isn’t going to be a history of Neptune Comic Distribution as I’m saving that for another series of blogs, but just the battle between Titan and Neptune and the longer lasting effects of that battle.

So, let’s start with a recap of how Neptune registered on Titan’s radar after getting DC’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel into shops before them. They really started to get Titan’s notice when they started gaining lots, and lots of their custom through 1986 and into 1987, which meant that Titan lost part of big shops like AKA, Gosh!, Comic Showcase, Sheffield Space Centre and virtually all of the Virgin Megastore business in all of Virgin’s branches as well as medium sized shops like Negative Zone in Newport, or Talisman in Belfast.

Titan still had the majority of the distribution business in the UK, but it’d went from having 100% in 1986 to probably 70-80% by the start of 1988 with Neptune making more and more inroads into Titan’s market.

By the time I moved to Leicester and started working for Neptune in January 1988 the plan was to aggressively take more business. I would run the proposed Manchester warehouse, head office with still be in Leicester and Martin (one of the three partners) would run the London warehouse. We also had Tod Borleske, a former employee of Diamond Comic Distributors we’d nicked working in our New York warehouse based in Brooklyn. Essentially the idea was to have total coverage of the UK and with Tod in New York making valuable connections with Marvel Comics and DC Comics we’d be peachy.

Except it didn’t turn out like that. The Manchester warehouse had fallen through which utterly gutted me as it was just down the road from the famous Hacienda nightclub, and seeing as I was slowly drifting into that scene I was overjoyed at this.

The warehouse was on the right hand side of the picture about 300 yards from where the Hacienda (now a block of yuppie flats) is, and just past the lights.

This put a halt to Neptune’s northern expansion, but it didn’t stop us acting quickly when Forbidden Planet opened in Glasgow. What I deliberately neglected to mention in my earlier blog was the fact that Geoff, Tod (who was visiting from the US) and myself drove from Leicester to Glasgow and back in a day to firm up a deal where AKA would give us 80% of their business.

We made this deal with John McShane and Pete Root over shark steak and beer in the Blackfriars pub which was a frequent haunt of the AKA Crowd and somewhere we knew the FP lot wouldn’t come to as things were frosty at this point to say the least. Word of this meeting got out (like I’ve said, comic shop owners love to gossip)  and this set people’s noses twitching but we pulled similar meeting with Paul Hudson at Comic Showcase in London and Josh Palmano of Gosh!. We’d also managed to get 100% of the Virgin Megastore business thanks to the chronic mismanagement of Paul Coppin who ran not just the Virgin shops, but Fantastic Store on London’s Portobello Road which was at that time an amazing place, and not the santised middle class playground of today.

I have to take a diversion for a second to tell a wee story about Paul. He was generally quite rubbish with business, and on more than one occasion I was there to help pick up thousands of pounds in cash so he could get his bills up to date. You know the measure of a man as he’s counting out silver in order to keep his businesses going for another week. Anyhow, I’d completely forgotten about Paul til one day in 2001 I saw an item on the news about planespotters from the UK being nicked in Greece and who should pop up but Paul. It was his company which organised that trip and it came as no surprise to me that he’d royally cocked it up. When he was being interviewed on TV he had that same sad, bathetic look he had when we were boxing up all the money he could get to pay his bills.

But I digress….

Neptune was the feisty young thing kicking the heels of Titan and here’s the thing; I’m 90% positive (I had three different people with close connections to Titan, Mike Lake and Nick Landau tell me this) the aggressive expansion of the FP chain was to help Titan claw back some of it’s lost market which led me to mention to Geoff one day as we were driving back from a shipment in London that Titan and FP being so interlinked was a massive conflict of interest. This set Geoff’s brain ticking.

By this time Neptune had bought Fantasy Advertiser, the UK’s leading comics magazine, but what Geoff really wanted was it’s then editor Martin Skidmore had in contacts withing the creative comics community, and of course his reputation for honesty as the plan to launch a line of small press comics under the banner of Trident Comics were well underway by the time I joined and they were quite successful.

That’s the first issue of our anthology title we did. Isn’t that a lovely cover by John Ridgeway? I will include a history of Trident when I do a history of Neptune, but again I digress…

The point is that we had Fantasy Advertiser (FA), which was the only thing Titan bought from us as their shops wanted it. So this meant that Geoff decided to stick a huge editorial on the inside of one issue titled ”conflict of interest?” using exactly the same font and design of the Lloyds Bank ads of the same time.It was something Martin didn’t want to run but he didn’t have a choice. If anyone reading this has a scan of it I’d love to add it to this blog, so please drop me a line if you do.

It ran and that issue of FA went in FP Glasgow, London and every Titan customer in the UK. We got phone calls from Mike Lake, Jim Hamilton and several other dealers who called Geoff and everyone at Neptune all the fucking cunts under the sky.Fine. The lines had been drawn and I was quite happy standing on the Neptune side.

Throughout 1988 we pulled stunts as pointed out in Part Three of this series to help AKA in it’s fight with FP, but we did similar stunts with other shops like Comic Showcase and Gosh! to get them their comics before Titan dropped off their copies.

This is where it gets dirty because there used to be two vans wizzing round London dropping off comics; one from Neptune and one from Titan. I did the London drop many a time normally with Martin, but occasionally with Geoff and it’d see us pull some truly amazing and illegal stuff such as screaming round Soho Square to cut off the Titan van, or tailgating behind an ambulance up Tottenham Court Road to get from the West End of London to Camden in the quickest time ever to drop off at Mega City Comics.

It was dangerous, risky, stupid and daft. We’d picked a fight with a much larger company who was connected and had the power of a growing retail chain behind it. But we were eating away at Titan and more importantly, most of the time it was enormous fun to prick the rather pompous nature of Titan and many of those connected with it. I actually remember being in tears laughing as we burned up the Titan van on Friday afternoon, and in fact I still had tears running down my face when I got to Kilburn to meet mates at the Bull and Gate for a gig later that night.

The whole thing was bloody huge fun from the summer of 1988 through to the summer of 1990, but the best, and possibly most lasting strike against Titan was one of the most massive fuck ups by any company I’ve seen.

In summer 1989 Tim Burton’s Batman film was the biggest thing ever in the history of everything.

This meant that for comics the exposure was huge, and in fact probably the biggest the medium had ever had in decades. Now I’ve heard from younger comic fans on message boards and in person that this film ‘wasn’t a big deal’. or ‘it wasn’t as big as The Avengers‘. This is of course, utter steaming heaps of hairy bollocks. Batman was a huge cultural event that seeped into virtually everyone’s consciousnesses to such a degree you couldn’t avoid seeing the Bat Symbol everywhere and this was in the UK, In the US everyone seemed to have the Batman logo on them.

Because of this DC Comics decided to capitalise by releasing a Batman comic, or a comic with Batman in it, every single week and most weeks you’d have two or three titles with Batman related stuff in it. Things were huge! If you had any comic related business in that summer it was a license to print money. You. Could. Not. Fuck. Up.

Titan did.

Batman opened in the UK on a humid Friday in August 1989. There wasn’t any particularly big Batman comic that week from what I remember, but I do remember there being a load of titles from Marvel and DC, as well as a load of independents. I’d also asked to stay in London instead of going back to Leicester that night so I could hang around Leicester Square and I’d arranged to go out clubbing with my girlfriend of sorts in London that night before going back to Leicester the next day as we’d planned a Neptune outing to the local cinema in Leicester to see Batman.

Everything that day was pretty normal, we started our van drop in London around 2ish and dropped off at Comic Showcase first where we were told that Titan wasn’t delivering that day because they’d given everyone the day off to go and see the Batman film. Martin and myself couldn’t quite believe it so we called Geoff in Leicester on the carphone and asked if he’d heard anything and he hadn’t. By the time we dropped off at Gosh! the word was that nobody in London, or in fact, anywhere in the UK the next day were going to get their Friday comics. In one massively insane move Titan handed us a huge amount of business as on the Monday we had shop after shop contacting us to increase their orders with us, and also we won several bits of new business all because Titan were just bloody daft.

The following month was UKCAC, the UK’s main comic convention (I’m going to do a rundown of all the UKCAC’s and GLASCAC’s I attended) which saw Geoff and Mike Lake being cold to each other, while I ran around the con like a total lunatic having the sheer time of my life and in fact if there’s one weekend I would love to relive it’s that weekend. I got a few sly digs at the FP Glasgow lot, took the piss out of Mike Lake and was pretty damn spectacular all weekend. Going home on the Sunday saw me laughing all the way back in Geoff’s car with him as we told each other of how much petty fuckwittery we’d pulled to piss off Titan.

At the first GLASCAC the following April, it was a similar story. I remember vividly standing in George Square in the glorious spring sun smelling the flowers and thinking ‘this is fucking brilliant!’ as I spoke with Andy Sweeney, one of the new generation of the AKA Crowd.

Then after that things went wrong. Geoff pushed forward with Toxic! too early as he was now intent to take on Titan Books, which left me effectively running the Leicester warehouse, while Tod was trying to keep Diamond on our side in the US and we were really starting to notice that Geoff was shagging the female members of staff which was causing a fair amount of tension in the office.

I left in autumn 1990, went to work for Comic Showcase in London, and royally fucked things up before moving back to Leicester just before Christmas and completely fucked things up but I was still observing what was happening with Neptune.

Geoff was losing control. Without being too big headed he lost a lot of good people in a six month period and didn’t replace them with better people while he was bleeding the distribution part of the business to pay for the publishing side which was going down the tubes thanks to Geoff not listening to people like Pat Mills (I will tell the story about Pat turning up at Neptune demanding payment another time) and John Wagner.

Neptune struggled on for a year or so before dying in 1992 when Geoff sold it to Diamond.

Titan was also bought by Diamond.

So the winner of the Great British Comic Distribution War wasn’t Titan or Neptune, it was Diamond. They got themselves a nice monopoly of the UK market and that’s ended up with the depressing reality that they control what’s being sold. You don’t have Trident Comics, or companies taking risks. It’s all safe. It’s all about money and you don’t have anyone willing to take Diamond on as they have the market, not to mention DC and Marvel and you as a shop aren’t going to have a business if you don’t sell their comics.

What could have been so much better, and for a time if was glorious. I’ll tell you the full tale of the Rise and Fall of Neptune another time, but this is the point; we died not because of Titan but because of ourselves.

But dear bloody god, how that time especially between 1989 and 1990 shone like the sun on the first day of your school holidays during summer. I would do anything, really, anything, to get that time back. there’s times in my life I want back, and this is one of them. Again though, I will go into detail soon enough as to the full details but fuck me, I long for them.

Moving on, we get near the end of Bitter Sweet Symphony. Only two more parts to go.

Next up: The Great Bristol Comic Shop Wars……..

Bitter Sweet Symphony part two/ Battle of the Planets

Last time I outlined a brief history of comic shops in Glasgow which is really a small part of a larger story about the rise of the direct market in the UK as more and more specialist comic and SF/fantasy shops grew across the country. Now there’s better people than me who have outlined the death of the newsstand market in the US and the history of the direct market as a whole in the US.

The UK direct market was slightly different in that American comics were still available in newsagents til the late 90’s thanks to Comag and Moore Harness, who finally kicked the bucket four years ago. The direct market was different in that you finally got the non distributed comics that were so hard to get in the UK, and you got them relatively cheaply so this is where there was a gap in the market and with Titan Distributors you had the first organised distribution system across the UK as opposed to the patchy methods of getting comics in directly to the UK in previous decades that was at the whim of the major companies like Marvel or DC.

There was also the problem that there was a lot of crooks in the distribution game so it was a front to launder money for gangsters or to distribute porn, which was the case in the US as well as here in the UK, but the point we pick things up here is the early 80’s when Titan Distributors are the main supplier to comic shops across the UK. That wasn’t to say we’re talking the million pound industry we have today. There was probably only two or three dozen shops across the UK by the middle of the 80’s, not counting the Virgin Megastore comic shops which sold comics and magazines like Fangoria to the record buying public.

Titan had a nice monopoly in that in those days in that you had to buy from them even though there were more than a few dealers voicing concerns that there could well be a conflict of interest as Mike Lake and Nick Landau who owned Titan, also owned Forbidden Planet in London and should they want, they could easily open FP’s across the country selling comics at less than any other shop.

But they didn’t. Lake and Landau both made it clear often that they wouldn’t open a shop where they had an existing Titan customer, so that ruled out Glasgow, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and basically every major British city.

The only problem as I mentioned in passing in the first part that Titan deliveries would turn up a week or so after being released in the US, which wasn’t a huge problem in those pre-internet days but deliveries would often turn up with comics that the SF Bookshop in Edinburgh would get but AKA in Glasgow wouldn’t and vice-versa. Then there was the fact Titan could charge what they wanted within reason seeing as they had a monopoly and this meant American distributors looked at the UK with envious eyes, and slowly and surely they made their plans against Titan.

Mile High Comics made some attempts to distribute directly to shops in the UK, but the problem was they didn’t have a warehouse in the UK, so you ordered directly from their warehouse in the US and they packaged and shipped to the UK. This was basically what some dealers had been doing with them prior to Titan anyhow, but they opened the door before Bud Plant Comics made some attempts to piece the UK market and based on the West Coast of the US, they had a little bit more success but again, without a UK warehouse they were fighting a lost cause. Titan just made sure they didn’t fuck up, or put their prices up too high in case it alienated customers.

This changed when Neptune Distribution came on the scene in 1986. Neptune was set up by three students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) who lived at 67 Barclay Street (more on this address another time) by the name of Geoff Fry, Sarah Hunter and Martin, who’s last name completely and utterly escapes me. It was Geoff though who was the comics geek, while Sarah and Martin were not readers. Sarah and Geoff were also seeing each other which is not important at the minute.

Geoff was the mastermind behind the operation and considering it was run out of their small living room in Barclay Street, they had a base of operations not to mention Geoff was smart enough to make contact with Bud Plant in the same way that Lake and Landau had made a connection with Phil Seuling’s Seagate Distributing at the start of Titan’s operation in the UK. This meant that Neptune could shift comics quickly and store some stock in what became the stock room, or normally, one of the bedrooms upstairs as Sarah and Geoff now shared a room.

The main problem for Neptune wasn’t to capitalise on Titan’s flaws, but to convince shops they weren’t a a risk or unreliable like the few other  distributors who tried to break Titan’s monopoly. The break was John Byrne’s Man of Steel, which was DC’s big Superman relaunch in 1986.

 

Neptune managed to get this title to the few shops it had as customers three days before Titan. It sounds like no big deal at all, but it helped from stopping people go to the competition in either Glasgow or Edinburgh in AKA’s case. It was a nice way of getting one up that one of the biggest comics of the year was on sale before anyone else had it.

Neptune used that success to grow the business and they gained shops in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leicester, Sheffield, and across the UK fairly quickly over a period of 8-12 months as the direct market erupted after a huge amount of mainstream publicity over creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and work like Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and Maus. Shops were springing up everywhere and there was a battle starting to brew between Neptune (the bright young challenger) and Titan (the undisputed champion) mainly to gain business but Geoff had it in his head to take on Mike Lake due to the fact he’d went away after a meeting with him utterly hating him. Plus this was the 80’s and the height of Thatcherism so Geoff wanted to crush Mike Lake because he was more successful than him.

By the end of 1987 Neptune had grown and was continuing to grow as they moved from the house on Barclay Street to a warehouse in Enderby, just on the outskirts of Leicester and near the M1. This was Neptune’s big advantage over Titan in that they could reach the shops in the Midlands and North of England quicker than Titan who only did van deliveries to London shops while Neptune did van deliveries not only to London shops, but across the Midlands.

When I moved to Leicester and started work for Neptune the intention was not for me to stay there, but go to run a Manchester warehouse which would supply the North of England and Scotland, while Leicester would supply the Midlands, and the London warehouse in Staines  would supply London and the South East. There was also a vague plan to expand Neptune’s US operation which was at that time, sharing a Bud Plant warehouse in Brooklyn in New York.

The situation at the start of 1988 is Neptune eating away at Titan’s market, with Titan trying to get as much of it back as possible while Mike Lake and Nick Landau still saying that FP will not expand outside of London to any city or town where there’s an existing Titan customer.

So we’re up to the point in 1988 where Geoff comes into the office shouting  at me saying ‘what the fuck do you know about Forbidden Planet opening in Glasgow?’…..

Next time, the Glasgow Comic Shop Wars….