You Have To Learn To Take The Good With The Bad

Ladies and Gentlemen, here's a horrible caption:

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And now, a fantastic music video, with juggling:

Pissing In Your Wheaties Since 1926

I realize everyone's either trying to be polite or, or is honestly optimistic, but in all seriousness - this whole IDW thing? Bad news. I mean, sure, it looks nice on paper. But in the history of the comics industry - and this is going back a long way - every single time a company has put itself in a position to be sold like this, despite the best of intentions, it's ended up demolished within six months or a year. You can say the circumstances are different this time - OK. IDW is a good company. I know Chris Ryall, at least, a little bit, since way back in the days of Movie Poop Shoot. He's a good guy and he's done some really good things with the company since he's taken the helm. But history is not kind to this scenario... sure, both Marvel and DC survived being bought (Marvel more than once!), but there's just so many others that have fallen by the wayside. If history teaches us one thing, it's that once a company starts making major structural changes of any kind, no matter how seemingly healthy, things can go from good to horrible in a blink of an eye.

I'm just saying, I don't want to see IDW office furniture on eBay in 2009. I like IDW, they publish good books. But this is the comics industry we're talking about here, people.

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Speaking of the comics industry -

"Shouldn’t there be business opportunities in a growth period instead of wheezing, scale-downs and closures? What is it about the shape of that comics market where a boom period is felt more through articles claiming 'This is a boom period!' than it is in the wallets of creators and retailers?" - Tom Spurgeon

This quote from a fews days back got a bit of attention, and with justification. It's as cogent and canny an analysis of the current manic-depressive fortunes of this industry as I've seen. It got lodged in my head for a few days.

And then something occurred to me. Please, if this is just totally obvious conventional wisdom, somebody point it out to me - or if this is just totally unfounded and wrong-headed, I want to know. Because it may seem obvious but it really seemed like something no one else was saying . . .

1) You can't open a comic book store, any kind of comic book store in the entire country, without having Marvel and DC as the bedrock of your costumer base. A lot of stores sell a lot of stuff besides superhero books, but even stores like Comic Relief, the Beguiling, Comix Experience - they only get the luxury of specializing in such a wide and diverse array of products because they built their bread and butter on superheroes. For all the occasional talk about a manga-only model, manga stores are still few and far between (if not outright urban legends).

2) You can't sell superhero comics in the direct market without going through Diamond. Diamond is a big business and they do a very good job of getting comics where they need to be on a weekly basis, but all indicators point to the fact that their current distribution system is tapped to the max. And the current business model, while profitable, does not seem to be giving them a lot of incentive to expand their direct market logistics capacity.

3) Who does Diamond make more money off of, retailers or suppliers? That make seem like an idiotic question but bear with me: the only news you hear from Diamond anymore is when they sign a publisher to exclusive distribution through either the direct or bookstore markets. When was the last time you heard anything about initiatives for new retailers?

4) The last boom-and-bust cycle of the comics industry involved many, many undercapitalized, incompetent and just plain wrong-headed store launches, people who were enticed in by the boom and demolished by the bust. At the time, if memory serves me well, there were allegations of predatory practices on the part of both Diamond and Capital City, in terms of enticing fledging retailers to set up accounts with the promise of easy money.

5) As so many people have pointed out, we are living in a second Golden Age in terms of both the quantity and the quality of comics being made available in all genres - from manga and artcomics even through to plain vanilla superheroes. The books are selling everywhere but the direct market, where the pipeline is unaccountably clogged. Too few retailers in too few locations to really take advantage of any kind of "critical mass" - which may or may not be illusory, there's really no way to tell - and retailing is still too risky under the best of circumstances for most to ever take the plunge.

6) Is it in Diamond's best interest to promote a diverse market? Obviously not, that goes without saying. The market as it stands now could not be better situated to serve Diamond's needs - it's not sinister, it's not even shady, it's just capitalism. They were handed a plum opportunity and they took it.

So the question is - when do the Big Two's exclusive contracts with Diamond run out?

It may seem like a silly question. They may have already re-upped for some umpty-billion years and I may have missed it. But no contract exists in perpetuity. I'm not saying history is going to repeat itself - but it's been a long decade. Marvel and DC aren't the same companies they were back in the days when Capital City and Heroes World roamed the earth. It's something to think about.

Because . . .

If there were ever again a situation where more than one distributor held the keys to the bread-and-butter weekly superhero world, one of the happy side-effects might just be a more diverse industry. If it seems obvious, well, so be it, but I don't think I'd ever heard anyone connect the dots in quite that fashion before.

Maybe this is idiotic - but it's been rattling around in my head for a week. Kick it around and see if it holds water. If not, holler in the comments.

"reverse the polarity of the neutron flow"

Pop Quiz: What is the best title theme and sequence in the history of television?

There is only one answer.

No points for guessing.



In many ways the classic - from the years when William Hartnell defined the character - and still one of the best. You don't see the Doctor's face, just the intimation of mystery and strangeness. I can almost imagine what it must have been like to have been a British child in 1963, seeing this strange and spooky intro for the first time - probably inspired more than a few nightmares on its own, never mind the Daleks. There's also an extant version with a thunderclap at the beginning.



Here is the intro as we saw during Traughton's tenure. This is the first to feature the "floating face" motif that would be continued all the way up through Sylvester McCoy (but thankfully no further). Little change to the theme. The way the Doctor's face appears from the shimmering cosmic light is still kind of spooky.



And here's Jon Pertwee. The first Doctor to be filmed in color, he was also an extremely colorful character - definitely a change from the ascetic first Doctor and the "scarecrow" second Doctor. (Pertwee and Traughton actually appeared together onscreen twice, and the difference in their personalities was accentuated during these appearances.) Pertwee is not my favorite, but his tenure did see the advent of Sarah Jane - probably by universal agreement the best companion ever.



And here is, almost inarguably, the series' best opening sequence. As good as the previous seasons' opening sequences were, the Tom Baker years (the end of the Pertwee era had introduced a modified version of this 2001-influenced theme) were simply classic. For those of a certain age who grew up with the Doctor reruns on PBS, and undoubtedly for those who grew up with the program on first-run in the UK, there are no words to properly express the thrill of seeing the first few seconds of this opening, with the Tardis appearing in the far distance of the vast corridors of time. The best version of the theme music as well. And I always get a kick of the weirdly hangdog look on Baker's face when he appears.



And then there's . . . this . . . which, while certainly not horrible, was a definite step down. I guess the thought process was that since it was the 1980s, they might as well spruce things up, but there's an old saying about not fixing something if it isn't broke. Plus, the picture they picked of Baker makes him look as if he's had a few too many Jelly Babies.



And here's Peter Davison, with essentially the same opening sequence as the last year of Baker's run. Still not great, but better than what was to come. I quite like Davison in hindsight, even if he was the first Doctor stuck in progressively worse clown-costumes - I can't rightly blame the actor for the producer's bad decisions, now can I? He was the most humanistic Doctor, definitely a change after Baker's ultra-competent interpretation, which at times almost bordered blasé. It's an interesting take on the character and perhaps the most influential Doctor in terms of David Tennant's interpretation (with a lot of Traughton in there as well).



And here we have still more of the same. In my mind I like to call Colin Baker the "Asshole Doctor" - not a value judgment, but that was his take on the character. After Davison's downright modest version - and the unpleasant circumstances around his regeneration - Doctor #6 was unbalanced, not very personable, and even occasionally cruel. There was a lot of potential there, but it was undercut by the worst clown costume of any Doctor, ever. (At least he didn't have to wear the sprig of celery.) I haven't seen it in a while but I have very fond memories of the "Trial of a Time Lord" season.



And then there's this, the nadir. It's almost no wonder the show got cancelled with an opening sequence this ugly. And that blink . . . gah. I actually quite like Sylvester McCoy. I wish he'd had a longer tenure, because his take on the character was really interesting - quieter, but with a lot going on beneath the surface. Sometimes even slightly sinister in his machinations. The bohemian Fourth Doctor, for instance, suffered a crisis of conscience before deciding whether to destroy the Daleks at the moment of their conception, ultimately deciding against it. The Seventh Doctor, a few hundred years' older and wiser, later sent a super weapon to destroy the Daleks' home planet without shedding so much as a tear. This was definitely a large part of the bedrock for what would become Christopher Eccleston's interpretation. And Ace is probably my personal favorite companion ever, but that says as much about me as about the show itself.



And this is from the Fox TV movie. Less said about it the better.



. . . And, barring a few variations through the years, this brings us up to date. Both Eccleston and Tennant's Doctors have used the same intro sequence. It's certainly an improvement on the McCoy years, I'll say that, but the new title sequence just doesn't sit well with me - it might just be the orchestrated theme. I mean, it just doesn't sound right: the Doctor Who theme should be produced on vintage electronic instruments sitting around the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, not a full orchestra. There's always been something weird and creepy about the classic theme that sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill TV themes, and this bombastic orchestrated version falls entirely flat in my eyes - tarts up the Doctor's most timeless feature. As ugly as the 80s opening sequences were, even they never really screwed up the music.

Apparently I'm not the only one who agrees that the new music is the suck:



I am not a big fan of the CGI Tardis bouncing around, but it's still better than seeing Tennant's face (nothing against his face, but the Doctor's face motif hadn't looked right since 1980).

And for those completists out there, there's always this:



And then the same song, live at Glastonbury in 2004 (which would have been their farewell tour if memory serves me well). I love the Hartnell sample at the beginning, also used at the beginning of the Five Doctors movie - good salute to the man who started it all.



And here, to finish us off, is something maybe five people remember. Good luck finding this - the album on which this was originally released is so out of print it's negative in print. I'm glad I have my copy, is all I'm saying. (If you must own one KLF album, it should be The White Room. That one's not too hard to find, I still see it in used CD stores now and again. I've only ever seen one copy of the History of the Jams CD and it's the one I own. I don't imagine it will, ever be reprinted, and if you've ever heard it you'll know why. So if you do see it, grab it.)




And, just because, here's Ace:

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See that baseball bat? She used it. On Daleks.
That's why she's the bizzety bomb.

F*** You Guys, I'm Going Home



I've been talking for a few days now about the ways in which Marvel systematically destroyed the Punisher franchise back in the mid 90s, but looking over what I've wrote I realize that I may have been a bit scant with details as to just what these stories entailed. Aside from a few mentions of the Demon Bounty Hunter Punisher (and really, can you possibly have enough mentions of the Demon Bounty Hunter Punisher?) the details themselves have not been forthcoming.

The reason for this is that, well, I barely remember these stories. Those that I read, I have mercifully blocked from my memory. Those that I did not read, well, thank God. The books were pretty dire for a number of reasons. I did, however, do some work to refresh my memory - if you are ever in need of any Marvel trivia, no matter how maddeningly inconsequential or painfully obscure, this is a great source. It's also really depressing, but that's another conversation.

Anyway: in 1994 the Powers That Be decided it was time to shake up the Punisher's status quo. So, they concocted a ten-part crossover that would run through all three Punisher titles (Punisher, Punisher War Journal and Punisher War Zone), "Suicide Run". The plot of the series was fairly straight-forward: there's a meeting being held with all the bosses of all the big crime families. The Punisher takes it into his head to crash the meeting. The easiest way to do so apparently involves simply blowing up the building in which the meeting was set to occur. (A good seven years before 9/11, but it's worth noting that the original World Trade Center bombing was still fresh in peoples' minds. I believe, if memory serves me well, the Punisher also intended to use a truck bomb to collapse the building from the basement levels. So classy!) Anyway, he blows up the building and is declared dead. The media makes a big deal about this. So while everyone else thinks the Punisher's dead, a bunch of other people take up "the mantle" of the Punisher:







Can anyone say "Reign of the Punishers"?

Anyway, the Punisher obviously didn't die in the building explosion, but the fact that he had blown up a building I guess made him a bigger priority for law-enforcement than he had been in the past. So - you've got half-a-dozen people running around in Punisher costumes, a bunch of cops and SHIELD agents running after the Punisher, and God knows what else going on. At some point you've got a series called "Pariah" running in Punisher War Journal detailing, I guess, how the Punisher had become even more of a pariah to the rest of the Marvel Universe. Which doesn't make a lot of sense considering he was an anti-social mass-murderer to begin with, but there you go.

Most of the other Punishers didn't last long (most were dispatched in fairly short order) but they stuck with the Lynn Michaels character for a while - Punisher with breasts, basically. Her origin was the same as the origin of Samuel L. Jackson's Shaft in the 2000 sequel - a cop gets disgusted with the inefficiencies of the justice system and goes rogue. Only in her case it entailed skin-tight spandex and kevlar, with a strategically redesigned skull logo to accentuate her suspiciously spherical stripper tits.





However, I suspect that Lynn Michaels was much less popular than Marvel would have liked. Because not only was there no Lynn Michaels spin-off series to be seen - this being the disastrous mid 90s when seemingly any Marvel character, no matter how dubiously popular, received a spin-off under the logic of depriving competitors of that much more shelf space - but the big push for Michaels' character was made right before all three Punisher titles were cancelled in the early months of 1995. Whatever future the Punisher had, there was no room for female sidekicks / partners / analogues, even ones with big tits. In the space of twenty months - between the first issue of "Suicide Run", cover dated December 1993, and the final issues of all three Punisher titles, cover dated July of 1995 - the Punisher franchise imploded in as spectacular a fashion as conceivable. Not even statuesque blondes in skintight leather could save the day.

As previously discussed, the Punisher had always existed on a fragile foundation. There was a very delicate balance that needed to be upheld in order for the Punisher to remain a viable character. Despite his supposed status as a "gritty", street-level character, there's probably less you could do with the Punisher than a straight fantasy property like, say, the Silver Surfer. Thanos could kill half the universe in the pages of Infinity Gauntlet without raising an eyebrow, but for the Punisher to kill even one person under the Comics Code required some very careful juggling. The moment you start to pry into that status quo, you're asking questions that really can't be answered in the contest of a the Punisher's adventures: how does a mass murderer continually escape the clutches of not just thousands of crooks who want him dead but the cops, the feds, SHIELD, and every super-hero on the planet who see him as really no different from any other murderer? When they shook up the status quo they put these questions front and center, and the answers weren't flattering. If you insist on making the Punisher a global celebrity, an "inspiration" to dozens of wannabes and a target of not just street-level police organizations but super-spy groups like SHIELD and VIGIL, the character falls apart. From the standpoint of storytelling mechanics, it's easier to "believe" in overtly sci-fi or fantasy characters like the Silver Surfer, Thor or Dr. Strange than a world in which the law enforcement infrastructure is such a colossal failure that you can have dozens of well-armed vigilantes prancing over hither-and-yon with impunity and indulging in what are essentially large-scale gang-wars. The United States we see in these later Punisher stories has less to do with the "world outside our window" that still presumably makes up the backbone of the Marvel Universe than something you might expect from a former Soviet Republic, with corrupt warlords and freelance mercenaries carving out niches of "turf" on every corner.

The Punisher is simply not a character around whom you can accrue that kind of storytelling baggage. Once you start telling stories that mess with the basic principles of the Punisher's world - he's a loner, keeps a low profile, stays clear of law enforcement, not super powered but somehow manages never to get shot, no recurring antagonists - well, things just get kind of silly. Because then you've turned the Punisher into Batman, with Lady Punisher and Anti-Punishers and Arch-Nemeses and even a Punisher Dog. (Admittedly the Punisher Dog was around long before "Suicide Run". I liked the Punisher Dog, myself.) It doesn't fit, and it's not wha tthe fans even remotely wanted from the character.

But running into problems with suspension of disbelief was ultimately only a symptom of greater instability. The Punisher had reached a wall where the stories in the main titles were increasingly repetitive and were shedding readers in a context of greater industry instability. When "Suicide Run" began in fall of 1993, the industry was just beginning its tumble down the economic precipice of the 90s crash: Superman died in the fall of 1992, and the successful "Reign of the Superman" series ran through the spring and summer of 1993. But Turok: Dinosaur Hunter #1 also hit stores that summer, cover dated July 1993. Dark Horse's "Comics' Greatest World" hit. (They actually had a feasible idea, I thought at the time - sixteen issues introducing their new universe, each costing $1. Would that the interiors had been worth even that.) Malibu launched its Ultraverse. Valiant and Image crossed over with Deathmate (tying up hundreds of thousands of dollars in product that shipped many months late and stunk up shelves for months). Warriors of Plasm launched from Jim Shooter's Defiant. Marvel launched the fourteen-part "Maximum Carnage" crossover. Batman had "Knightfall". I could go on . . .

So, basically, the industry was tanking and the appearance of an ill-conceived multi-part Punisher crossover was just another squirt of lighter fluid to fan the flames. By July of 1995 Marvel had bought Heroes World - I still remember the cover of the very first Heroes World Marvel-exclusive catalog, it had a picture of the Punisher from the Double Edge Alpha special -



- a picture which is barely legible here because of the chromium cover on which is was printed. The "Double Edge" event was an attempt by the editorial office that oversaw the "unaffiliated" characters of the Marvel Universe - the Punisher, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, the Hulk - to replicate the success of the X-Men's "Age of Apocalypse" event. "Age of Apocalypse" had been a line-defining event that ran through the entire X-Men family of titles, beginning and ending with bookend "Alpha" and "Omega" one-shots. The difference between "Age of Apocalypse" and "Double Edge" was that the "Age of Apocalypse" was both extremely popular and actually pretty good. I read a lot of bad comics in the 90s that I wish I could take back, but I still have some pretty good memories of that story. Definitely the highlight of the post-Claremont era of X-Men stories (not that that is saying a lot, but still, bear with me).

"Double Edge", however, took off from the last issues of the Punisher's various defunct titles, which ended with the character in SHIELD custody and insane - I mean, more insane than usual. Then, because he's insane, he gets it into his head - somehow - that Nick Fury was responsible for the death of his family. Never mind that the Punisher had killed the people directly responsible for his family's death decades before. Anyway. He went on a rampage and encountered everyone involved - including heavy-hitters like the Hulk and Ghost Rider - none of whom were any help in stopping the Punisher from killing Nick Fury. Of course, it was eventually revealed that that Fury had been an LMD - of course! Bwahahahaha.

Somewhere in the middle of this the Punisher also popped in to Spider-Man's "Maximum Clonage" story, suddenly remembering how the Jackal - Professor Miles Warren - set him up against Spider-Man way back in the Punisher's first appearance. So not only was he involved in his own bad storyline, but he was also incriminated in the worst Spider-Man storyline of all time.



So. After killing Fury the Punisher is in federal custody, at which point he is sentenced to death by the electric chair. The first issue of the Punisher's next series, therefore, began with his death by electrocution. But of course he didn't really die, he was resurrected by the mob (??!!) or something in order to do something or other. This brings us up to cover date November 1995, right before the collapse of Marvel.



And this series would limp on for another year and a half before ending with issue 18, cover dated April 1997. This was Marvel's nadir: bankruptcy, near collapse, creative entropy. And this was the last we saw of the Punisher before he was resurrected in the pages of his first Marvel Knights series as (uggh) Demon Bounty Hunter Punisher. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What saved the Punisher? In the end, I think it boils down to one thing: the Comics Code, or rather, the corporate culture that enabled a character like the Punisher to exist ostensibly under the auspices of the Comics Code. As soon as Marval had changed enough to let a creator like Garth Ennis have his way with the character in the context of a "mature readers" title, the character immediately went from being a dead-end creative nightmare - how many stories can you possibly tell where the Punisher "just barely" escapes from Daredevil / Spider-Man / Nick Fury / Wolverine? - to one of boundless potential. At his best, the Punisher is the ultimate 80s action hero, Sylvester Stallone out of Cobra and Arnie from Commando wrapped up with a skull on it. Presenting his stories as PG-13 adventures where the untenable and unsavory aspects of the character are necessarily ignored castrates the character in a very literal fashion. Allow the creators room for some black comedy, some satire, even some dark ultra-violence, and you've given the writers a lot more room in which to play. Taking the Punisher seriously is a big mistake, because on the face of it the character is really abominable. But you're not supposed to sympathize with the Punisher - he's less a character than a fulcrum, a force of nature around whom things happen, and who can be used as a vehicle for any number of stories. Just don't try to actually tell stories about the Punisher. Effacing the blank slate of the Punisher's featureless wrath risks obscuring why anyone cares in the first place.

Regrettable Out-Of-Context Panel Theater
Or: How I Antagonized All The Women

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Speaking of which - does DC publish anything anymore that isn't simply depressing? I mean, seriously, skimming over a pile of new DC books I am just overcome by this frighteningly powerful malaise, like I'm looking into the eyes of some great hypnotic beast of the Apocalypse or something. It's not pleasant. I skim a lot of bad comics - it's a weakness, but at least I don't actually pay for them - reading modern DC actually makes me think that "free" is too high a price to pay. Shouldn't they cut the readers a check for slogging through this Amazons Attack junk? Talk about horrendous.