MattBrady
01-28-2003, 04:15 PM
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<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 10</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/panic1.jpg" width="200" height="309" border="0" align="right">10. Smart but Unlucky
You wouldn’t know it from recent installments, but the “spine” that holds this column together is a chronological look at the history of comics. We’re up to the ‘50s -- a decade marked by the spectacular collapse of two vital, important companies. You may not know the second company, but everyone knows the first: EC Comics.
EC was the most acclaimed line of its time (the early ‘50s); it brought a new maturity to horror, crime, humor, and science fiction comics. The cultural influence of these comics was enormous -- the damn things were only published for about three years, but pastiches and revamps are still common today, fifty years (!) later. There has arguably never been a more influential publishing imprint in American comics.
And the EC story is dramatic, too: forced to abandon its core business by the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, which was formed in 1954 by EC’s competitors. The other comics companies’ goals were either (a) to establish self-regulation of comics’ content before the government could step in; or (b) to force their unpleasant, disturbingly successful rival to close up shop. That one’s still being debated.
EC’s ups and downs have been written about in exhaustive detail, and the social history of the ‘50s -- while often distorted -- is also well-traveled ground. The McCarthy hearings put the fear of God into all forms of entertainment; Hollywood blacklisted actors and directors, and comics blacklisted -- well, EC. A general cultural climate of fear clamped down on any entertainment that could open its producers or distributors to attack from decency groups. A nation still shell-shocked by war willingly followed a demagogue’s crusade -- for a while -- and EC found itself on the wrong end of that stick.
The lesson: Sometimes you can do everything “right” -- publish top quality stories and artwork, build a popular niche that you understand completely, expand in directions that make sense -- and a big foot still steps in and stomps you down hard.
That lesson applies, in a completely different way, to another crisis that hit comics, just two years later. This one was invisible to outsiders, but it hurt the field at least as badly -- probably worse.
<center>*****</center>
<blockquote>“The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine.”
--Noah Webster, 1788</blockquote>
Fawcett Comics, Charlton, Quality Comics, First Comics, Valiant, EC -- the history of comics is full of companies that did good business for a while, then disappeared. They left behind various legacies, some good, some bad. But none of them rocked the comics world like the death of American News Company, in 1956.
American who?
ANC was an enormously powerful company. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it could essentially make or break magazine and (later) paperback book publishers by refusing to distribute their product to newsstands. It was the vital circulatory system for the pulps and, for their first twenty years, for the comics.
In 1956, ANC was bought up in a stock raid. Frederik Pohl describes the chain of events in “The Publishing of Science Fiction,” a chapter in Reginald Bretnor’s Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow:
“Some canny investors had noticed that the cash value of the real estate and other properties ANC owned was a lot more than the aggregate value of the stock. So they bought up the stock and liquidated the company. They made a fortune in capital gains, but in the process they put ANC out of the business of distributing magazines.”
Notice something important here: The decision was made purely because of the value of the holdings -- it had nothing to do with the profitability of the distribution business. Actually, that’s not completely true. If the business had been unbelievably profitable, its proceeds would have outweighed the value of the holdings. But ANC was old and vast; it occupied huge buildings in major cities. Its property was just worth too much.
If you’ve followed recent comics history, this scenario may sound vaguely familiar. When Ronald Perelman owned Marvel Comics in the early ‘90s, he employed a series of short-term profit schemes and expanded the company too quickly, unwisely, while allowing its long-term bank debt to grow as he diverted profits outside Marvel’s operations. Marvel became the subject of a much-publicized struggle for ownership, and eventually entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where it stayed for a year and a half. The company is still, today, dealing with the debt load left behind by Perelman’s management team.
And none of it had anything to do with whether the comics themselves were profitable.
As with ANC, that’s not 100% true. The comics business took a downturn around 1994-95, which is when Marvel’s big troubles began. If sales had stayed as high, and the direct market as manipulable, as in the few years before that, it’s likely that both Marvel and Perelman would have been able to continue business as usual. But those years were an anomaly and the speculator frenzy of the early ‘90s -- deliberately fed by Marvel and others -- was bound to crash. The point is this: Even after the market slid, there was no point at which Marvel Comics sold poorly enough that the publishing division should have been unprofitable.
Just as, you can imagine, there were probably employees of American News Company suddenly looking around in shock when the liquidation went through in 1956. What happened? They’d been doing their jobs -- adequately, as far as they knew. There’d been no sudden dips in business, no complaints about their work. Just a new set of owners, who saw a quicker, easier way to make a huge pile of money.
Pohl describes the fallout:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/batalien.jpg" width="350" height="260" border="0" align="left"> “[ANC] had a unique position among national distributors. It was so large that it maintained its own entire network of local wholesalers around the country. All of the other national distributors combined (they were collectively called “the independents”) shared the same parallel network. When ANC folded, all of its local wholesalers folded with them, and every independent wholesaler in the country became an instant monopolist. Costs went up. Services went down. All magazines were hurt, and many of them folded.”
The Independent Distributor (ID) network was immensely corrupt and inefficient. As a young book editor, I heard stories of truck drivers arbitrarily deciding which paperbacks were delivered to a given store (the crucial factor: which boxes were closest to the back door of the truck); and entire print runs being held onto, then reported as 90%+ returned. You don’t want to know what it takes to get those digest-sized comics placed next to the cash register in a supermarket. It’s no wonder magazines, and comics in particular, suffered under this system.
The ID system basically collapsed in 1996 under pressure from Wal-Mart, which had the clout to declare that it would no longer deal with 154 regional distributors (the number dropped to three). But that hasn’t led to a new golden age for magazines -- if anything; it’s made the marketplace more demanding and difficult. More on that when we get to the ‘90s.
The head of a major comics company once summed up the year’s business to me by quoting the old saying, “It’s better to be lucky than smart.” Translation: You can run your business as rationally as possible, make carefully measured decisions on every small point and in the end, one big deal can make everything else you’ve worked for look unimportant on the balance sheet. From a business standpoint, that single deal can make you -- or ruin you.
In 1956, comics publishers faced a sudden crisis of lower sales and higher cost of doing business. It hit them out of the blue; they weren’t doing anything wrong. (Well, maybe those Batman-on-alien-planets stories were kind of a misstep. But nothing you’d shake up an industry over.)
Comics have to deal with the real world -- that’s the central theme of this column. But sometimes, the real world just steps in and squashes you with a boot much bigger than your own. It happened to EC in 1954; to Marvel in 1994; and it happened to the whole industry in 1956. As a publishing company or an entire industry, all you can do is pick yourself up, move forward as best you can, and hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.
After all, that’s what Batman would do. When he was stuck on that alien planet, I mean.
**
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel, THE MAGAZINE FROM COVER TO COVER (NTC, 1999)
• John Michlig, “This Is the Saga of EC Comics,” <a href="http://www.fullyarticulated.com/EC.html" target="_blank">http://www.fullyarticulated.com/EC.html</a>
• Frederik Pohl, “The Publishing of Science Fiction,” from SCIENCE FICTION: TODAY AND TOMORROW, edited by Reginald Bretnor (Harper & Row, 1974)
• Raviv, Dan, COMIC WARS: HOW TWO TYCOONS BATTLED OVER THE MARVEL COMICS EMPIRE -- AND BOTH LOST (Broadway Books, 2002)
**
Stuart Moore’s quick plugs: Pick up issue #6 of ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, the conclusion of my epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press; more info on the trade paperback of the first ZENDRA series can be found at <a href="http://www.pfpress.com" target="_blank">http://www.pfpress.com</a> .Then go to <a href="http://www.rocketcomics.com" target="_blank">http://www.rocketcomics.com</a> and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094</a> for a look at LONE, launching in summer 2003, with a special 10-page stand-alone preview story in ROCKET COMICS: IGNITE, Dark Horse’s contribution to Free Comic Book Day in May. Then visit my message boards at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com</a> to discuss this column, the color of the sky, or your favorite company due for an unexpected collapse. See you in 14…
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 10</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/panic1.jpg" width="200" height="309" border="0" align="right">10. Smart but Unlucky
You wouldn’t know it from recent installments, but the “spine” that holds this column together is a chronological look at the history of comics. We’re up to the ‘50s -- a decade marked by the spectacular collapse of two vital, important companies. You may not know the second company, but everyone knows the first: EC Comics.
EC was the most acclaimed line of its time (the early ‘50s); it brought a new maturity to horror, crime, humor, and science fiction comics. The cultural influence of these comics was enormous -- the damn things were only published for about three years, but pastiches and revamps are still common today, fifty years (!) later. There has arguably never been a more influential publishing imprint in American comics.
And the EC story is dramatic, too: forced to abandon its core business by the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, which was formed in 1954 by EC’s competitors. The other comics companies’ goals were either (a) to establish self-regulation of comics’ content before the government could step in; or (b) to force their unpleasant, disturbingly successful rival to close up shop. That one’s still being debated.
EC’s ups and downs have been written about in exhaustive detail, and the social history of the ‘50s -- while often distorted -- is also well-traveled ground. The McCarthy hearings put the fear of God into all forms of entertainment; Hollywood blacklisted actors and directors, and comics blacklisted -- well, EC. A general cultural climate of fear clamped down on any entertainment that could open its producers or distributors to attack from decency groups. A nation still shell-shocked by war willingly followed a demagogue’s crusade -- for a while -- and EC found itself on the wrong end of that stick.
The lesson: Sometimes you can do everything “right” -- publish top quality stories and artwork, build a popular niche that you understand completely, expand in directions that make sense -- and a big foot still steps in and stomps you down hard.
That lesson applies, in a completely different way, to another crisis that hit comics, just two years later. This one was invisible to outsiders, but it hurt the field at least as badly -- probably worse.
<center>*****</center>
<blockquote>“The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine.”
--Noah Webster, 1788</blockquote>
Fawcett Comics, Charlton, Quality Comics, First Comics, Valiant, EC -- the history of comics is full of companies that did good business for a while, then disappeared. They left behind various legacies, some good, some bad. But none of them rocked the comics world like the death of American News Company, in 1956.
American who?
ANC was an enormously powerful company. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it could essentially make or break magazine and (later) paperback book publishers by refusing to distribute their product to newsstands. It was the vital circulatory system for the pulps and, for their first twenty years, for the comics.
In 1956, ANC was bought up in a stock raid. Frederik Pohl describes the chain of events in “The Publishing of Science Fiction,” a chapter in Reginald Bretnor’s Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow:
“Some canny investors had noticed that the cash value of the real estate and other properties ANC owned was a lot more than the aggregate value of the stock. So they bought up the stock and liquidated the company. They made a fortune in capital gains, but in the process they put ANC out of the business of distributing magazines.”
Notice something important here: The decision was made purely because of the value of the holdings -- it had nothing to do with the profitability of the distribution business. Actually, that’s not completely true. If the business had been unbelievably profitable, its proceeds would have outweighed the value of the holdings. But ANC was old and vast; it occupied huge buildings in major cities. Its property was just worth too much.
If you’ve followed recent comics history, this scenario may sound vaguely familiar. When Ronald Perelman owned Marvel Comics in the early ‘90s, he employed a series of short-term profit schemes and expanded the company too quickly, unwisely, while allowing its long-term bank debt to grow as he diverted profits outside Marvel’s operations. Marvel became the subject of a much-publicized struggle for ownership, and eventually entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where it stayed for a year and a half. The company is still, today, dealing with the debt load left behind by Perelman’s management team.
And none of it had anything to do with whether the comics themselves were profitable.
As with ANC, that’s not 100% true. The comics business took a downturn around 1994-95, which is when Marvel’s big troubles began. If sales had stayed as high, and the direct market as manipulable, as in the few years before that, it’s likely that both Marvel and Perelman would have been able to continue business as usual. But those years were an anomaly and the speculator frenzy of the early ‘90s -- deliberately fed by Marvel and others -- was bound to crash. The point is this: Even after the market slid, there was no point at which Marvel Comics sold poorly enough that the publishing division should have been unprofitable.
Just as, you can imagine, there were probably employees of American News Company suddenly looking around in shock when the liquidation went through in 1956. What happened? They’d been doing their jobs -- adequately, as far as they knew. There’d been no sudden dips in business, no complaints about their work. Just a new set of owners, who saw a quicker, easier way to make a huge pile of money.
Pohl describes the fallout:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/batalien.jpg" width="350" height="260" border="0" align="left"> “[ANC] had a unique position among national distributors. It was so large that it maintained its own entire network of local wholesalers around the country. All of the other national distributors combined (they were collectively called “the independents”) shared the same parallel network. When ANC folded, all of its local wholesalers folded with them, and every independent wholesaler in the country became an instant monopolist. Costs went up. Services went down. All magazines were hurt, and many of them folded.”
The Independent Distributor (ID) network was immensely corrupt and inefficient. As a young book editor, I heard stories of truck drivers arbitrarily deciding which paperbacks were delivered to a given store (the crucial factor: which boxes were closest to the back door of the truck); and entire print runs being held onto, then reported as 90%+ returned. You don’t want to know what it takes to get those digest-sized comics placed next to the cash register in a supermarket. It’s no wonder magazines, and comics in particular, suffered under this system.
The ID system basically collapsed in 1996 under pressure from Wal-Mart, which had the clout to declare that it would no longer deal with 154 regional distributors (the number dropped to three). But that hasn’t led to a new golden age for magazines -- if anything; it’s made the marketplace more demanding and difficult. More on that when we get to the ‘90s.
The head of a major comics company once summed up the year’s business to me by quoting the old saying, “It’s better to be lucky than smart.” Translation: You can run your business as rationally as possible, make carefully measured decisions on every small point and in the end, one big deal can make everything else you’ve worked for look unimportant on the balance sheet. From a business standpoint, that single deal can make you -- or ruin you.
In 1956, comics publishers faced a sudden crisis of lower sales and higher cost of doing business. It hit them out of the blue; they weren’t doing anything wrong. (Well, maybe those Batman-on-alien-planets stories were kind of a misstep. But nothing you’d shake up an industry over.)
Comics have to deal with the real world -- that’s the central theme of this column. But sometimes, the real world just steps in and squashes you with a boot much bigger than your own. It happened to EC in 1954; to Marvel in 1994; and it happened to the whole industry in 1956. As a publishing company or an entire industry, all you can do is pick yourself up, move forward as best you can, and hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.
After all, that’s what Batman would do. When he was stuck on that alien planet, I mean.
**
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel, THE MAGAZINE FROM COVER TO COVER (NTC, 1999)
• John Michlig, “This Is the Saga of EC Comics,” <a href="http://www.fullyarticulated.com/EC.html" target="_blank">http://www.fullyarticulated.com/EC.html</a>
• Frederik Pohl, “The Publishing of Science Fiction,” from SCIENCE FICTION: TODAY AND TOMORROW, edited by Reginald Bretnor (Harper & Row, 1974)
• Raviv, Dan, COMIC WARS: HOW TWO TYCOONS BATTLED OVER THE MARVEL COMICS EMPIRE -- AND BOTH LOST (Broadway Books, 2002)
**
Stuart Moore’s quick plugs: Pick up issue #6 of ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, the conclusion of my epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press; more info on the trade paperback of the first ZENDRA series can be found at <a href="http://www.pfpress.com" target="_blank">http://www.pfpress.com</a> .Then go to <a href="http://www.rocketcomics.com" target="_blank">http://www.rocketcomics.com</a> and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094</a> for a look at LONE, launching in summer 2003, with a special 10-page stand-alone preview story in ROCKET COMICS: IGNITE, Dark Horse’s contribution to Free Comic Book Day in May. Then visit my message boards at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com</a> to discuss this column, the color of the sky, or your favorite company due for an unexpected collapse. See you in 14…