The Four Color Media Monitor

The New York Times reported on the new independent publisher Ghost Machine, working together with Image, whose management includes the overrated Geoff Johns. But he's not the only unwelcome presence at this new outfit:

Brad Meltzer has experience with ownership in publishing. “As a novelist, I own my characters. I always have,” he said.

Mr. Meltzer has written dozens of thrillers, including “The Escape Artist” and “The Book of Lies,” as well as books for children and comic books. He’s also no stranger to television: He was a creator of the series “Jack & Bobby” and the host of “Brad Meltzer’s Decoded,” which examined historical mysteries.

“The entertainment industry is an ecosystem, and it is ever changing,” Mr. Meltzer said.

Now he is trying to use his knowledge to help some like-minded writers and artists reshape the comic book industry. They have formed Ghost Machine, a media company that is being announced on Thursday, the first day of New York Comic Con, the pop culture convention. One of the principal tenets of the new company is creator ownership.

“When you tell the stories of comics themselves, the creator doesn’t always come first,” Mr. Meltzer said. The tension goes back to the earliest days of comics: In 1938, the creators of Superman sold their rights to the character for $130, with no inkling of how valuable the hero would become.

Look who's talking. Somebody who never truly respected the cast of the DCU, let alone Superman and his creators, when he scripted Identity Crisis back in 2004. Just what is the company's idea of associating with this disgraceful man who's never apologized for minimizing serious issues like sexual assault, as Elongated Man's wife Sue Dibny was seen subjected to by an out-of-character Dr. Light? The creators didn't come first because men like Meltzer never truly respected them, and even today, you don't usually see them reference writers of the Golden/Silver Ages like John Broome and Gardner Fox. The rest of Ghost Machine's staff includes:

The founding writers and artists of Ghost Machine will be exclusive to the company and will jointly own, operate and profit from it. In addition to Mr. Meltzer, they are Jason Fabok, Gary Frank, Bryan Hitch, Geoff Johns, Lamont Magee, Francis Manapul, Peter J. Tomasi and Maytal Zchut. Other creators will be named after they fulfill their commitments to other publishers.

“Everybody in the business wants to see comics thrive and continue to be an important part of pop culture,” said Mr. Johns, who is known for revitalizing many of DC Comics’ characters, including Flash, Green Lantern and the Teen Titans. “But the business model shifts so rapidly, we wanted to evolve with it.”

Mr. Johns is a proof of concept of Ghost Machine’s goals. He and Mr. Frank produced their first creator-owned work with “Geiger,” a comic book about a mysterious man living in a post-nuclear-war world. The six-issue series, published by Image Comics in 2021, was a critical and commercial success and is being developed by Paramount Television Studios.

Because “Geiger” is creator-owned, the team received the majority of the profits earned by the comic and had full control of media rights. Mr. Johns will write the pilot and be the showrunner. Both men will be executive producers.

And here, it sounds like Geiger was specially written up to serve as Hollywood fodder, and for all we know, could contain whitewashed views of Islam, as observed earlier. All this news makes clear is that Johns is no different from various other writers who're more into the business for the sake of producing comics with the intention of adapting to the silver screen, and make it worse when they add divisive politics to the mix.

Ghost Machine will publish its comics through Image Comics, which itself was established by top-selling artists who had grown frustrated with their lack of editorial control and the limited financial rewards from working on characters owned by media corporations.

Some of these writers, like Johns, were responsible for bringing down the quality of DC and Marvel, and then they have the gall to complain about not getting residuals they don't really deserve. It's also weird how all these years, nobody even asked whether the approach to how royalties are paid in comicdom was flawed, seeing how it may be based more on how often characters created by specific writers/artists are actually put to use than in how often the stories are reprinted in paperbacks. From what I can tell, that's actually led to situations where fictional characters are killed off, possibly so the companies won't have to pay any residuals at all, or worse, out of bizarre spite. Such a business model's only proven a disaster, morally, artistically or otherwise, and anybody who won't campaign to change it isn't doing an iota to improve comicdom.

As for Ghost Machine, let's hope the audience will see through this and not buy anything written under their imprints. The NYT didn't even provide clear sales figures for Johns' story, so it wouldn't be surprising if the claim of success was just an empty boast in any event.

Update: it may be worth noting that, according to the onetime writer/editor Valerie d'Orazio, who'd worked at DC, Meltzer wasn't the one who thought of writing the rape of Sue Dibny into Identity Crisis, and it was mainly an editorial mandate, which DiDio oversaw. Even so, that Meltzer would accept the mandate virtually unquestioned is still reprehensible as it's inexcusable, and if he thought up the scene where Deathstroke caused Zatanna to vomit with a martial arts technique, that was offensive too. Come to think of it, just about anybody who was involved at the time and voiced no serious objections has blame to shoulder. Thank goodness artist Alex Ross refused any participation in the project at the time. It's a terrible shame the late Michael Turner, by contrast, didn't, even if he only drew the covers. As I may have once stated before, it puts a huge stain on Turner's resume as a result.

Labels: conventions, dc comics, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence, women of dc