Comic publishers shouldn't be turned into IP for other mediums, but that's what's already happening

Here's something sensible coming from the op-eds on Tech Crunch - a writer's pointing out how, over the years, major comic publishers and even small outfits like Mark Millar's have come to serve more as groundswells for movie adaptations and other such media, while the storytelling value of the pamphlets and graphic novels is cared for far less. Yet there is at least one part at the beginning that's not very accurate:

Over the past few decades, comic books have become Hollywood’s most reliable well for source material. It’s easy to see why — not only is comics one the most vibrant storytelling mediums in the world, but the books themselves offer built-in storyboarding, providing writers and directors a visual template on which to build a film.

This past week’s news that Netflix would purchase independent comics publisher Millarworld is hardly an outlier. It echoes larger moves made by Warner Brothers and Disney, when they purchased the two largest comics publishers, DC and Marvel, respectively, cementing their own cinematic comics universes. And while the specifics of those deals differ, both have kept their comics publishing wings most in tact.

Uhh, I'm not so sure I can agree with that. After all, the continuity and stand-alone storytelling collapsed more than a decade ago, rendering their products incoherent at worst, especially as company wide crossovers took over each and every year. No thanks to some of the worst editors and publishers who mandated tasteless storytelling effects, which had a bad impact in turn on the rest of their output. Leftist politics have unsurprisingly followed and flooded their output, and that too is another serious detractor.

And do the comics really provide built-in storyboarding? Maybe, but considering a significant amount of films and TV adaptations draw from the most recent stories of the 21st century, that's why the stories they're building on aren't the best places to look for inspiration. And I disagree that screenwriters have to base their ideas 100 percent on what's already been published - why can't they think of something themselves? Though it's probably nothing compared to how the publishers have been going out of their way to alter the structure of the original comics so it'll visually resemble what's seen in the movies, as was the case once with the X-Men films in the early 2000s, one of the earliest examples of the tail wagging the dog.. When they do stuff like that, it only ruins the zygote.

In the case of Netflix, however, the decision seems a bit more crass — or at least, it’s a decision that has very little to do with the comics themselves. There’s no doubt about the company’s motivations here. Seemingly spurred on by Disney’s plans to launch its own streaming media platform(s), Netflix went ahead and bought its own comic book universe.

Now they're getting somewhere. While Millar's products aren't worth much in terms of story merit, Netflix didn't buy Millar's company because they wanted to invest in comics publishing, if at all, as is further confirmed below. Rather, they bought it so they'd have a groundswell around for developing films and TV shows. Even if the source material as he envisioned it is already pretty tasteless, recalling some excerpts I once read from Kick-Ass involving gang rapists. John Romita Jr. was one of the artists for that sensationalized book, which decidedly doesn't reflect well on his portfolio.

Unlike the DC and Marvel acquisitions, Netflix appears to be making no bones about the fact that it didn’t purchase Millarworld to get into the comics publishing business. Yes, it says “Millarworld will also continue to create and publish new stories and character franchises.”

But also appears to be the key word here — as the press release spells out, the publisher’s main value to Netflix is in its IP: “The acquisition, the first ever by Netflix, is a natural progression in the company’s effort to work directly with prolific and skilled creators and to acquire intellectual property and ownership of stories featuring compelling characters and timeless, interwoven fictional worlds.”

Gee, what "skills" does Millar have for one? How compellingly developed are his characters? And what's so timeless about the "worlds" he conceived either? If anything, the man's made a career out of shock tactics, as seen in the Ultimates, right down to his remake of the Hank Pym-as-abusive storyline from 1981 in the Avengers, and even that was handled far better than what he put out in the early 2000s, where the Ultimate take on Janet Van Dyne may have been put in a situation where she allegedly "deserved" what he threw at her.

Deals like this risk undermining the source material. It’s in line with a growing fear in recent years that, the comics industry has becoming something of a farm league for Hollywood films. And indeed, it seems that many prospective screenwriters and directors have come to view the comics industry as a back door into Hollywood.

Eric Reynolds, Associate Publisher of alternative comics house Fantagraphics, bluntly sums up the opinion of many in the indie comics community.

“I have never read a Millarworld comic and as such have no clue and don’t really give a shit about this stuff, but of course it’s bad if media companies see comics as nothing more than IP factories,” he told TechCrunch. “I mean, if you actually care about the medium of comics, anyway, and believe that it has its own intrinsic value as an art form.”

This may all sound a bit alarmist, prompting the skeptical reader to quote crime novelist James M. Cain, who responded to concerns that Hollywood had ruined his novels by saying, “They haven’t done anything to my books. They’re still right there on the shelf. They’re fine.” Similarly, we might hope that no matter how many titles get pulled into the studios’ universe-building schemes, the comics themselves will be fine.

Except these larger corporate decisions are affecting the comics. Look no further than Marvel, where comics featuring the Fantastic Four and X-Men (characters whose movie rights were sold to Fox before the publisher started making its own films) have languished in recent years.

This makes sense too. In fact, I have a hunch Superman's red tights were omitted around 2011 partly because WB wanted to build on such a vision for the Man of Steel movie shoehorned into the comics first. And now look what's happened, it all led into Batman vs. Superman, which was even more mediocre; an excuse to see two legendary figures clashing.

There's a few other ways superhero comics were affected by sellouts to Hollywood, going back as far as the early 1990s, when video games and cartoons were coming out, and built on stuff I can't help wonder were created specially as IP or wellsprings for the different mediums to build their own products on. Gambit of the X-Men, for instance, is an early example of a character I wondered was created more as cartoon and video game fodder than as a storytelling vehicle for the comics themselves. I know Chris Claremont didn't do a great job fleshing out whatever background he gave Remy LeBeau after introducing him in 1990, and Scott Lobdell/Fabian Nicieza made everything worse with their expansions. Yet this very badly developed character began turning up in an X-Men cartoon and several video games over the next decade, even as he suffered terrible writing (and Rogue was victimized by poor writing to boot) back in the comics proper, right down the connections made to the Mutant Massacre and Mr. Sinister. I do think, however, that any writers in comicdom who didn't want to use Gambit for their stories at the time (he appeared in very few other Marvel books outside of X-Men during the 90s) weren't making their cases the right way, because their misgivings seemed to stem from a superficial dislike of a fictional character that let the writers responsible for bad characterization off the hook. What should've been their beef was the likelihood they wouldn't be allowed to make improvements in overall characterization, which is not impossible to do. The only obstacle would be the editors who'd impose harmful mandates.

And as for the video game influences, another early example could be Spider-Man's Maximum Carnage storyline, which ran through 4-5 different Spidey titles in 1993. It may not be considered the worst Spider-story in the backlog, but from what I know, most Spider-fans don't find it very good either. Yet this weak tale of a serial killer getting hold of an even more demonic take on the symbiote that originally created Venom several years prior wound up being adapted to a video game shortly after. And I can't help but wonder if the story's overall mediocrity stems from being written specially as the basis for creating a video game, where storytelling isn't the most important part by contrast. Even the Onslaught crossover from 1996 served to provide the subsequent Marvel vs. Capcom with a boss opponent, no matter how wretched the original comics crossover was to start with. I'm sure DC also had a few examples at the time, but Marvel's are most noticeable.

Over the past decade, Millarworld has become far better known for its IP than its actual books. While Millar’s early superhero work like The Ultimates and The Authority has its fans, you’d be hard-pressed to find Millarworld titles like The Secret Service, Kickass and Wanted on anyone’s list of their favorite comics. Instead, they were “successful” in the way that Millar probably intended: They were de facto pitches for blockbuster films.

And what does that suggest? That he's probably the kind of guy who's greedy for the chance to get into Tinseltown by conceiving his own line of comics that would appeal to film producers desperate for something comics connected they could craft their screenplays on. Let's not be surprised if Netflix could just as easily close down Millarworld as a publisher in the future, because they believe the story premises alone are enough.

For now, what matters most is how the Big Two have suffered from becoming more IP for movies than their own storytelling agencies, and just as awful are the crossovers they show no signs of wanting to abandon as the outdated concept they already are. That's why I believe in their case, it could do a lot of good if somebody who does recognize the power and potential of the art form try to buy out the publishing arms and just use them to tell stories as part of the medium they are, and if anybody wants to adapt a story from them, let them do it without writing it specially for movies or video games, and in fact, let the screenwriters conceive their own film adaptations as they see fit for the silver screen. This is far different from how Japan's manga and anime mediums have managed business, as here, by contrast, no distinctions or considerations are made as to what's best for either division. Being one specific medium is the only way to run a successful business.