The View from the Cheap Seats (20 page)

I
can still remember how excited everyone was, seventeen years ago, by the arrival of the
Batman
film. Frank Miller's story of an aging Batman coming out of retirement,
The Dark Knight Returns,
had, along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's
Watchmen
and Art Spiegelman's
Maus,
spearheaded the first, abortive, graphic novel explosion, and I believed that a good, serious Batman film was all that was needed to put it over the top, legitimize comics and change the world. Two decades later, we live in a world in which comics have spawned a generation of summer blockbusters. This summer it's a Marvel v. DC face-off, X-Men v. Superman, with Spider-Man waiting in the wings for 2007.

Comics and movies have always been a two-way street. Will Eisner's seminal
The Spirit,
back in the 1940s, took from Orson Welles and the films noirs as much as it borrowed from radio or Broadway, and there have been movies made from comics pretty much as long as either medium has existed. Last week an interviewer asked me whether I thought that the recent success of superhero movies meant that we might see a world in which comics that don't include the capes-and-tights brigade might also have a chance at making it onto the silver screen. “You mean comics like
Road to Perdition, Ghost World, Men in Black, A History of Violence, Sin City, From Hell, American Splendor
. . . ?”

I started to suspect that there might be a cultural sea change
occurring a few years ago, when
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
was released. It was not the first time that a bad film had been made from a good comic, not by a long shot, but it was the first time that the world at large seemed aware of this. Review after review pointed out that the film had none of the wit or brilliance, or even coherence, of the comic it was taken from.

Like many of my coworkers in the world of comics, I'm also involved in making films these days. This is seen, I realize from talking to acquaintances and journalists, as a step up, signaling that I've finally left the gutter. (Still, filmic legitimacy only goes so far. Opera seems to be the cultural front-runner, while books, with or without pictures, trail some way behind.) I like film. I am not very good at writing for film yet, which is what keeps me interested in it. Most of all I like the astonishing process—it's hard to get near a film set without remembering Orson Welles's description of a film studio as “the biggest electric train set any boy could ever have.” When I first went to Hollywood, the only people who read comics were the most junior assistants, the kind who weren't allowed to speak, who just went and fetched the bottled water. But that was a while ago. Now those people are running studios.

There was a time when those of us who made comics would try and explain what advantages comics had over film. “Comics have an infinite special-effects budget,” we'd say. But we missed the point, now that movies have, for all intents, an infinite special-effects budget. (I was writing a script for
Beowulf
last year, and, worried that a climactic airborne dragon battle was going a little over the top, I called the director, Robert Zemeckis, to warn him. “Don't worry,” he said. “There is nothing you could write that will cost me more than a million dollars a minute to film.”)

Still, the “unlimited special effects” nonsense hides a truth or two. Ink is cheaper than film. Film, especially big-budget
film, often needs to compromise in order to be liked by the biggest possible number of people around the world. A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating. The comic is, joyfully, a bastard medium that has borrowed its vocabulary and ideas from literature, science fiction, poetry, fine art, diaries, film and illustration. It would be nice to think that comics, and those of us who come from a comics background, bring something special to film. An insouciance, perhaps, or a willingness to do our learning and experimenting in public.

That was certainly how it was making
MirrorMask,
a film I wrote and which artist and director Dave McKean designed and directed recently for the Jim Henson Company. As long as we gave Sony something “in the tradition of
Labyrinth,
” Dave could make his film (it's my script, but in service of Dave's story and vision). It didn't have an unlimited special effects budget, or any kind of unlimited budget at all, but Dave still managed to put things on-screen that hadn't been seen before—huge stone giants floating in the sky, a librarian made of books and voiced by Stephen Fry, a horde of Monkeybirds all called Bob (except for one, called Malcolm). We made
MirrorMask
on location in Brighton, and in a blue screen studio in London, then Dave took fifteen animators to an office in North London and worked for eighteen months telling the story of Helena and her peculiar dream.

Whether you're making comics or film, much of what you're doing is done for dollars and for US-based multinational corporations who sell back what you've done to the UK and to the world.
MirrorMask
was a very English film, albeit made with money from Sony. Alan Moore, tired of bad films made from good comics he had written, and of the accompanying Hollywood-associated irritants (including a legal suit over
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
), recently removed his
name from the upcoming adaptation of his graphic novel
V for Vendetta,
disassociated himself from his previous films and, in the kind of definitive grand gesture that indicates that you really mean business, also declined his share of the money that came with them.

Even knowing that Alan's renounced it, I want to see
V for Vendetta
.
V
and I go back almost twenty-five years, to the first time I picked up a copy of
Warrior
magazine and saw those wonderful black-and-white David Lloyd–drawn people staring hopelessly back at me. (I find it hard enough to adjust to a world in which the
V
graphic novel is colored; a color
V for Vendetta
seems as pointless as colorizing
Citizen Kane
.) Moore's story of one lone anarchist up against a fascist British state—in a world poised halfway between Tony Blair's dream and Eric Blair's warning—meant something important to me and to a handful of other comics readers, when it was first published, and the film trailer, composed primarily of images taken from
Warrior
covers, hooks into that.

Alan Moore himself is resigned, amused and wryly bitter about the process of turning comics into film. “Comics are one step in the digestive process of Hollywood eating itself,” he told me. “Are there any films made from the comics that are better than the original comics? Hollywood needs material to make into films as part of an economic process. It could be a Broadway play or a book, or a French film, or a good TV series from the 1960s that people want to see on the big screen, or a bad TV series from the 1960s that nobody cares about but still has a name, or a computer game, or a theme park ride. I expect that the next subject of films will be breakfast-cereal mascots—a film that chronicles how Snap, Crackle and Pop met and explores their relationship. Or the Tony the Tiger movie.

“Films are no friend to comics,” he concluded. “I think they actually impoverish the comic landscape. Turning it into a sort of pumpkin patch for movie studios to come picking.”

At my most cynical I also wonder whether the world of comics might simply become a cheap R & D lab for Hollywood. The San Diego comics convention, once a summer gathering of a few thousand comics readers and creators, has in recent years become a Sundance-style event with over one hundred thousand people in attendance and where the year's major SF, fantasy and horror movies are announced and previewed. I confess that I am always relieved when another year passes without anybody making a bad film based on
Sandman,
the comic on which most of my reputation within the medium rests.

But I remain optimistic. While Frank Miller's film of
Sin City
isn't as powerful as his comics, it was still his vision up there on the screen in the film he made with Robert Rodriguez, uncompromised by the change from one medium to another.
MirrorMask
is Dave McKean's film from first frame to last, visually and musically. Nearly twenty years after the first Batman film, I realize that film doesn't confer legitimacy on comics. But it's still an awful lot of fun.

This was originally published in the March 3, 2006, issue of
The Guardian.

“This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it's the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.”

I gave this speech at the Diamond Comics tenth annual retail seminar. It was April 1993, and the world of comics was at the height of an unprecedented commercial boom.

I
want to talk about comics. I want to talk about good comics, and why you should do what you can to sell more of them.

But first I want to talk about tulips.

I'm often asked—via letters to the editor and at signings—to suggest interesting books to the world, or assemble a reading list.

Well, one of my favorite old books is a remarkable volume called
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,
written almost a hundred and fifty years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay.

In it he details many of the pursuits, wise and otherwise, to which people have devoted their lives: he devotes chapters to such diverse subjects as, for example, alchemists, haunted houses, the slow poisoners, the great Louisiana land swindle, and the popular street cries of Victorian London.

It's a book with a huge cast of characters within its pages that includes, for example, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, who wandered around England in the early 1640s, finding witches. He charged each village twenty shillings for the privilege of having him turn up and make
them all feel uncomfortable, and another twenty shillings a head for each witch discovered and disposed of, and was turning a merry profit, finding witches and sending them to meet their maker, until one day he went to find witches in a little village in Suffolk, the elders of which, who were nobody's fools, pointed out to him that no man could find as many witches as he had unless he was getting his infernally accurate information straight from Beelzebub, and before Hopkins could come up with an adequate response for this, he was put to the test, and was a former Witchfinder General.

The moral of which, I suppose, is that it can be unwise to start witch hunts, and also . . .

But I didn't come here to tell you about witches, who after all have little enough to do with the vitally important business in front of us, which is that of comics and the retailing thereof.

No. As I said, I want to talk to you about something far more germane to the world we all share of the four-color funnies.

Tulips.

Picture the scene: seventeenth-century Holland. Imagine the screen going all wavy at this point, and a hasty montage of wooden clogs, windmills, dykes with fingers in them, and red-wax-wrapped cheeses that taste more or less like yellow rubber.

However, one thing is missing: tulips.

The first tulips in Western Europe arrived from the east in the late sixteenth century, and became very popular in Holland.

           
In 1634 the rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to the lowest dregs, embarked on the tulip trade. As the mania increased, prices augmented, until, in the year 1635 . . . it became necessary to sell them by their weight in perits, a small weight less than a grain.

One tulip bulb sold for twelve acres of prime building land in Haarlem. Another sold for 4,600 florins—about $10,000 in modern money—plus a new carriage, two gray horses and a complete set of harnesses for the horses.

A wealthy merchant once received a sailor, who came with news, and was rewarded with a gift of a smoked herring for his breakfast.

The sailor, who knew nothing of tulips, also took with him something he thought to be an onion, which, when he returned to his ship, he sliced and ate.

He had eaten a 3,000-florin tulip bulb, and spent some time in prison.

By 1636 there were tulip exchanges in every major town in Holland. These functioned as stock exchanges.

You had . . . but I'll quote from Mackay's book:

           
The tulip-jobbers speculated in the rise and fall of the tulip stocks, and made large profits by buying when prices fell, and selling out when they rose. Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. The riches of Europe would be concentrated on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and poverty banished from the favoured clime of Holland. Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips. People of all grades converted their property into cash, and invested it in flowers. Houses and lands were offered for sale at ruinously low prices. . . . . .

You had an entire country here, obsessed with getting rich, and convinced that it was impossible that tulips could ever be less than the ultimate, perfect investment object.

After all, when the rest of the world caught up with the Dutch, they'd have all the tulips and would be even richer than they were already.

And instead the rest of the world stared blankly at the Dutch for fussing foolishly after something that was, after all, only a tulip.

The entire economy of the country of Holland was destroyed. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. There was a madness and a foolishness here that seems pretty apparent to an outside observer.

I am reminded of the time the South Sea Company infected all England with the joy of investing.

At the height of the craze, the so-called South Sea Bubble, share certificates traded hands down a London alley, going up in value as they went, until, one day . . . well, people were wiped out. Fortunes were lost, and a lot of people were made very miserable.

At least the Dutch could eat the tulip bulbs.

And if you think this has nothing to do with you, well, it does. Too many comic stores are trading in bubbles and tulips. I'm not here to play Cassandra. I don't have the figure or the legs. I merely point this out.

Personally I think any comic shop that sells multiple copies of the same comic to any child under, say, sixteen, because that child has somehow been given the impression that he or she has just been handed a license to print money, should, if nothing else, get the child to read a form explaining that comic values can go down as well as up, and require it to be signed by a parent or guardian.

I think any organization or store that pushes comics as investment items is at best shortsighted and foolish, and at worst, immoral and dumb.

You can sell lots of comics to the same person, especially if you tell them that they are investing money for high guaranteed returns.

But you're selling bubbles and tulips, and one day the bubble will burst, and the tulips will rot in the warehouses.

Which is why I want to talk about good comics.

I have a vested interest here: I write, or try to write, good comics. I don't write collectibles, nor do I write investment items. I write stories, the best I can: I write stories for people to read.

But before I wrote comics I was a journalist. Like writing comics, journalism is another profession that doesn't involve getting up in the morning. And I used to write, whenever people would let me, about comics.

A little digression, here: back in 1986 I was commissioned by the
Sunday Times
Magazine,
in England, to do a feature article on comics. I interviewed a number of people for it—Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Brian Bolland, and many others. I worked incredibly hard on it—this was going to be the first major national article promoting comics as a medium in England.

I sent the article in to the gentleman who had commissioned it, and heard . . . nothing. Not a sausage.

So, after a couple of weeks, I rang him up. He sounded oddly subdued. “How's the article?” I asked. He told me that he had a problem or two with it. I suggested that he tell me what the problem was. I could rewrite it, get it better.

“Well,” he said, “it lacks balance.”

“In what way?”

“These comics.” He paused, then spat it out. “You seem to think they're a
good
thing.”

He'd been hoping for something that Fredric Wertham would have been proud of, and that wasn't what he got.

Well, we agreed that I had no plans to rewrite it in order to give it the balance he felt it lacked, and he sent me a kill-fee for
the article that was twice what I got for getting articles printed anywhere else. And I would rather have had the article printed. Because I
do
believe comics are a good thing.

If I didn't, I'd still be a journalist, or I'd be writing unproduced screenplays for mind-boggling sums in Hollywood, or growing tulips.

We're living in what the Chinese curse described as interesting times, and I like that.

The landscape is changing, erupting, exploding. New lines and titles and universes appear and vanish, some comics are selling in numbers undreamed-of in 1986, stores spring up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.

It's hard to tell what things will be like in five years' time. But I'll tell you this: stores that sell and push good comics will still be around. Because people who read will still be with us, and they'll still want comics.

Another flashback: Philadelphia, 1990, and I'm attending a small American convention. It was followed by a meeting of the CBRI, Comic Book Retailers International, and I was asked to stay on and be on a panel discussion.

The panel discussion consisted of marketing reps from all the major publishers of the time, someone from Diamond, someone from Capital, and, right down at the end, more than a little bemused, was me.

So first of all everyone talked about bar codes on comics, and I learned more than any human being would ever wish to know about bar-coding comics. And then they talked about other things, racking, and pricing, and bar codes again—and I began to wonder just what I was doing there.

Steve Gursky, who was presiding over the whole shebang, might have thought the same thing. “We have a creator here, remember,” he told the assembled retailers. “Does anybody want to ask the creator anything?”

There was no sea of hands, no forest of waving arms. Just
some puzzled faces. Eventually someone took pity on me, and asked a question.

“As a creator,” he asked, “what's the difference between creating high-ticket items and low-ticket items?”

I suppose he wanted to be reassured that I was putting that extra three or four dollars' worth of verbs and adjectives into the high-ticket items. I don't know.

“There's no difference,” I said. “What I try to do is write good comics.” There was a silence and, made bold by this, I added, “And I wish that you people would do more to push good comics.”

Three hundred retailing eyes looked very puzzled indeed. Many of these are retailers who've since come up to me and told me proudly of the efforts they've made since then in that direction, and the success they've had.

Someone wisely asked me what I meant by the good stuff, and I told them, and someone else asked me what I meant by pushing it, and I told them as I will tell you.

What I mean by the good stuff is the comics you enjoy.

If you yourself have stopped reading comics, and sad to say, many retailers have—there's too much out there, or one day they found they no longer enjoyed
West Coast Avengers
and gave up on the whole field, disillusioned—then browse around. Ask friends, ask your staff, ask your customers.

But most of you have comics you like. And you should be pushing them.

How?

It doesn't involve much—for example, you can put a rack near the door of things you're proud of selling.

You can order just a few more copies of things you think are really good and try and sell them.

You could offer a money-back guarantee to anyone buying something you have faith in. It's not a hard thing to do.

Pick a comic of the week and push it.

Suggest to the customers who don't read what they buy that
maybe they should read these things instead of just bagging them.

Try to familiarize yourself with what's out there, and let your tastes influence your customers.

If your customers are mostly adolescent boys who go away when they tire of childish things, well, make sure they know that there's life after Spider-Man. Put a little effort in and you have a customer for life.

This is a good thing.

We are living in a remarkable time for comics: there is more exciting material available now than ever before. I mean it: there's more excellent material currently in print and available, going all the way back to
Little Nemo,
than at any time.

This is also a good thing.

Do I want any of you to make less money? Of course not.

I want you all to have Jacuzzis in your Cadillacs, more stores than you can shake a stick at—or indeed, more sticks than you can shake a store at, if that's your idea of fun.

While we're at it, I'd like you to be happy, healthy, and never again bothered by telephone salespeople. May your luggage always be first on the airport carousel, and may your pets never spontaneously combust. All these things I wish you.

But remember what it is that you're selling people.

When I go on tour I like to ask people how they started reading my stuff.

Mostly it's word of mouth. Friends tell friends. Friends force friends to sit and read it. And, in a lot of cases, store assistants tell customers they'd like it. Sometimes it's sexually transmitted.

In stores where the salespeople like
Sandman,
and push it hard, we equal or outsell whatever's “hot.” And the people who read
Sandman
buy a copy and lend it around. We get readers, and we get new readers.

And the new readers go back to the comic store and buy all the trade paperbacks, to catch up on the story so far, and then
they buy an extra copy to give to their friends . . .