More on the Marvel rumor front: President Bill Jemas is rumored to have been taken out to the woodshed by Marvel head honcho Ike Perlmutter recently. According to this thread at Comicon.com (courtesy of Franklin Harris), an angry letter from retailer Matt Hawes was the reason for this.
I’m not necessarily nuts about everything Jemas has done with the company–lately he seems to have convinced himself that his formula for writing comics, as spelled out in the Epic submission guidelines and a special issue of his vanity comic Marville, is pure storytelling gold; I’m sorry, but anyone who wants to base the structure of every single comic they publish on the ghastly, overrated, good-idea-but-gutbustingly-stupid-execution Wolverine story Origin is just plain goofy–but he at least had the balls to stand up to the wretched contingent of die-hard fanboys (and their creepy uncles, the fanboy retailers) that would enjoy any shit served to them so long as no one changed Captain Mar-Vell’s haircut. Of course it’s up for debate how many of these long-overdue and 90% successful changes in content and creators were due to Jemas and how many were due to editors like Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso, and Stuart Moore (my money’s on the latter three), but Jemas had the mouth and the muscle to see that they could do their job, and for that we should be grateful.
Unfortunately, since many of the policy and publishing decisions made under Jemas’s watch have been unsuccessful either creatively (overhyped, often pretentious series like The Rawhide Kid, Namor, Captain America, 411, The Call of Duty, not to mention countless godawful ugly T&A covers, and the recent increase in top-down micromanagement-style editing), financially (woefully underrated series like The Truth, Soldier X, and even X-Statix to an extent), or retailer-relations wise (the constant “fuck yous” in Jemas’s press releases, the no-overprint, no-reprint policy), people who have some valid complaints but otherwise have no goddamn business dictating what makes for good comics are going to be listened to now that Jemas’s golden-boy image seems to have been tarnished with his superiors. This retailer, for example, seems to think that Axel Alonso, the best editor at the entire company (X-Statix, Hulk, Amazing Spider-Man) has no business working with superheroes. In other words, this retailer is on fucking crack. This is the same type of person who really, really wants to see the X-Men back in spandex uniforms, who wants the Hulk to yell “Hulk SMASH!” and fight the Bi-Beast in every issue, who thinks the Ultimate line is merely a pointless rehash of great superhero stories gone by (“give me something forward-thinking–like Earth X!”), who doesn’t want “The Homosexual Agenda” “promoted” or even talked about in the pages of, well, anything. It’s a shame that Jemas’s occasional screw-ups have left all the good that he and his team have done open to revision or destruction by nitwits like this.
Basically, Dirk Deppey is right, as usual. In a semi-rant (scroll down) the point of which is mainly that retailers are insane if they don’t start stocking manga in a big way and advertising that fact in an even bigger one, Dirk points out the following:
QUOTE: “..where the Direct Market is concerned, the customer is in fact fatally wrong. I have long maintained that the biggest problem facing the comic-book industry is its idiotic status as a network of one-genre shops, as retailers chase after the hardcore superhero readers to the contemptuous exclusion of everyone else.”
Marvel has not been perfect in this regard–witness their recent scuttling of creator-owned books in their new Epic line and their insistence that what books remain be, at most, superhero books in genre drag, just for instance–but Jemas, Quesada, Alonso et al have at least tried to move superhero comics beyond what they’d been for God knows how fucking long, using them in a far more creative fashion than normal (i.e they’re doing a little more than answering questions like “If Storm was, like, really mad, could she out-lightning Thor? And, uh, do you think, um, that her top might come off if she did?”). Or as Jemas put it in one of the sharper moments in his Marville storytelling guidelines (I’m paraphrasing here:”‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Dr. Octopus’s tentacles were made of adamantium? Wouldn’t it be cool if the Hulk turned small and smart and gray?’ No, that wouldn’t be cool–that would be stupid. That’s a comic about other comics. If you’re going to use superpowers, use them to say something about the character, about life, not about other comic books.”
Unfortunately, rather than reigning in Jemas’s excesses, the current “Lynch Bill” movement aims at least as much, if not more so, to curtail the good things he’s done, from employing Axel Alonso to putting the X-Men in clothing reasonable people might actually wear. A huge chunk of the anti-Bill contingent wants their comic books about comic books back, and they don’t care if in getting them they shoot the industry in the face.
I think one of the reasons that, sadly, this incredibly stupid Team Stupid Fanboy Comics initiative might work is the current Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee story arc on Batman. Loeb and Lee are both good-but-not-great fan-favorite creators, and they’ve teamed up to produce a storyline that’s basically the comics equivalent of a big old Vanilla Coke–flavorful, sure, but it’s all calories and no nutrition. No new ground is being broken, no interesting exploration of the characters’ lives and psyches is being undertaken. It’s basically Batman running around encountering every single villain and supporting character he’s ever known, while visions of twelve billion rendering lines per page dance in his head. In other words, it’s a continuity-wonk splash-page-junkie fanboy’s wet dream come true. And this dopily entertaining thing is the number one comic book month after month after month. It’s exactly what the fanboys want–the appearance of a shakeup (“They got Loeb! They got Lee! Those are big-name creators! It’s got to be good!”) with none of the unpleasant aftertaste (i.e. no reality, no satire, no politics, no change in tone, no symbolism, no depth, no real character work, no advancement of the characters’ lives–no shakeup at all, in other words).
For the last few years, Grant Morrison’s complex, subversive pop masterpiece New X-Men has been the model for success. Now it’s Batman, a Jerry Bruckheimer movie in comics form.
There couldn’t be a worse time for Bill Jemas’s feet to turn to clay.