Disney/ Marvel and non-American superhero work

[paw broon]

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/comics/news/a318802/disney-issues-marvel-content-restriction.html
This article is causing a bit of controvesy on comics UK forum and I might be about to put in my tuppence worth.:-
http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4172

[paw broon]

And here's somrthing by Tony Ingram on this very subject:-
http://www.brokenfrontier.com/blog/p/detail/british-marvel-is-not-american-enough-for-disney

[John C]

Three reasons come immediately to mind:

1.  Consistency and homogeneity:  They're a big company and risk isn't a big part of the corporate vocabulary.

2.  Structure:  Dropping Panini means fewer editors and no need to account for licensing revenue.

3.  Copyrights:  British law has funny things to say about Works for Hire, like that they might not really exist and author rights supersede a bunch of other stuff.  Captain Britain and his ilk may very well be an enormous lawsuit waiting to happen with nobody owning anything outright, making reprints or adaptations terrifying.

From a fan perspective, there may also be a continuity spin, in that everything goes through the same offices and a story doesn't "break" on one side of the pond and not the other.

If they're really smart, they'll hire the better UK creators outright and mainstream them.  The only real damage done is to Panini and the UK's national pride, if they do, and they're pretty lazy if they don't.

[Tony Ingram]

I don't think that national pride comes into it. The harm is being done to an already dwindling British comics industry which now has one less outlet for creators who are already short of work, and to the younger kids who bought and read those titles and for whom they acted as a gateway into the world of comics, whether it was the British reprint stuff, the comparatively small amount of British originated stuff like 2000AD or the US imports. A lot of those kids would have moved on from Panini's 'Marvel Heroes' to actual Marvel comics. Now, they won't-because whereas Panini's stuff was available on every high street, the US imports are tucked away in specialist shops these days and a lot of those kids will never even realize they exist. I fail to see how that benefits Marvel or Disney in any way. Unless they just don't care about any market outside the US, which seems to me to be no way to run a business in the 21st Century.

[philcom55]

As Paw has linked the two sites on this thread I thought I might as well share a couple of my own contributions to the discussion:

Having grown up on a diet of American and British comics I'd say there was a very definite contrast between the types of heroes that developed within the two traditions. To me America was a kind of 'Never-Never-Land' filled with skyscrapers, spaceships and cowboys, where larger-than-life characters such as Superman and Batman seemed completely at home. By contrast British heroes were always much more grounded in everyday life so that with a radio-controlled plane it was entirely possible to imagine myself as General Jumbo, or fighting bullies with my 'Q-Bike' and water pistol. Even grown-up characters such as the Steel Claw, Robin Hood and Tim Kelly were easy to copy with a painted glove, a bow and arrow or one of my Mum's cheap broaches. I loved both types of hero equally, but it soon became clear to me that there was something a bit inadequate about most British attempts to copy the American style, whereas few Americans had even encountered British comics at that point.

However this simultaneous exposure to two heroic traditions meant that during the 1960s a whole new generation were able to grow up in the UK equally at home with both styles. Thus, when they came of age, writers such as Alan Moore, Pat Mills, Mark Millar, Neil Gaiman, etc., were uniquely  qualified to apply a new, more realistic approach to US superheroes that had begun to seem increasingly dated - hence the famous 'British Invasion' which laid some vital groundwork for the genre's current success on the big screen (which is what attracted Disney to it in the first place!).

And:

It's worth remembering that the scarcity of American comics in postwar Britain resulted not, as many people assume, from the contemporary paranoia about US 'horror comics', but rather from a deliberate import ban with which the Government hoped to protect a home-grown publishing industry that had been crippled by wartime paper shortages. In effect it was about British jobs, and it's hard to imagine that companies such as TV Boardman, Westworld, Miller, WDL, Thorpe & Porter, Alan Class, etc. would have ever got off the ground without this kind of support - even if they did reprint a lot of American material at the same time as giving employment to the likes of Denis Gifford, Ron Embleton, Don Lawrence and Mick Anglo.

Given the current state of the world economy one can't help but wonder whether Disney is simply responding to the same sort of political pressures in favouring American workers wherever possible. 

 - In addition I'd have to say that I wouldn't be too keen on seeing American writers taking on traditional British characters such as Wilson, Billy the Cat or Roy Race - simply because they wouldn't have any understanding of the cultural background these grew out of. The end-result would probably be all-too much like Jonathan Frakes' unfortunate reworking of Thunderbirds! (Admittedly Jerry Siegel had some success with the Spider and Gadget Man & Gimmick Kid during the 1960s, but he was chosen to script these features precisely because they were intended to have an American feel in order to cash in on the worldwide success of Adam West's TV Batman)

Of course this doesn't really apply to American artists as people such as Alex Toth and John Severin proved long ago that they could draw British comics as well as anyone (and personally I'd love to see Sergio Aragones having a go at the Bash Street Kids...!).

 - Phil Rushton

[John C]

The point that's being missed, though, is that Disney is a business.  They either have a plan to expand into the market or they're not seeing money coming in from the license.  They don't care about British kids reading comic books or the (alleged) realism that British writers bring to the books except inasmuch as it affects their bottom line.

Keep in mind that the revenue from Marvel Comics isn't even one percent of what Disney makes (about $100M vs. 38B).  You're talking about a license that contributes to the smaller number, a fraction of that 0.3%.  Given that Panini (the Italian conglomerate) competes with Disney on a number of levels, the legal and accounting costs to maintain the license may very well just outweigh the revenue it brings in.

I'm not saying it's a good or bad decision, just that the rightness of the decision isn't going to be decided by the impact on British writers or fans any more than a bank decides on policy by listening to the people who keep pocket change in their savings accounts.  It's nice when they take everybody into consideration, but also unexpected.

There's actually huge opportunity, here, in going to Disney and/or Marvel and showing the difference to be made in relaunching the books with the force of Disney's marketing behind them.  Because you might need to meet a hobo in a back alley to pick up a copy of Avengers, but I doubt you can swing a dead cartoon mouse anywhere in the world without hitting a shop that sells Mickey Mouse crud.  If someone proves the point to the right people, you get the best of both worlds.

[Tony Ingram]

How do you prove that point, though? If I read you right, you're suggesting the way forward would be for Disney to relaunch Marvel UK, but when it was run from the States Marvel UK never made much of a profit. It took Stan Lee hiring Dez Skinn to run it as an actual British based business to start to turn it around-and something like that would seem to fly totally in the face of Disney's thinking.

[philcom55]

Though I have sympathy with any British Artists and writers who may lose work as a result of this decision I don't really disagree with your analysis John. In many ways the situation simply echoes events from the end of 1957 when Odhams' long-running and hugely successful Mickey Mouse Weekly had to be relaunched as ZIP when the Disney Corporation pulled all their characters in order to publish Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse themselves.

The problem in that case was that both ZIP and WDMM proved to be pale shadows of the original title and folded soon after.

 - Phil Rushton

[John C]

Just so you guys realize, I'm entirely sympathetic to the fans (and the artists, to a lesser extent, since they'll find work elsewhere).  But I want to emphasize that I see a lot of talk about it being a bad business move, when it's barely relevant (sadly) to Disney.

But yes, basically I'm suggesting (and it's probably worth every cent that free advice usually is, but feel free to pass it on to anybody who might be able to use it) is to look at the actual sales, the potential market, and the sales of similar Disney projects within the UK.  Those numbers (and really only those numbers) allow someone to walk into Michael Eisner's office (or Quesada's) to say that, not only are they ditching X pounds of revenue, they're leaving Y pounds on the table by not expanding the push.

More compelling would be a cost breakdown of what Panini puts in and an offer to take over the operation, the Dez Skinn analogy might not be right, here.  The Marvel Comics of the 1970s could barely afford to pay their own artists, let alone control a product thousands of miles away, whereas Disney has offices throughout Europe staffed by locals, if they wanted to do business right.  As I understand it, it took them a while, but they eventually learned the lesson of the Eurodisney debacle.

The obvious alternative, if the market is there and Disney is creepy, is to pitch a new line to Panini and let Marvel wither in the UK.

[paw broon]

As I started this on DCM, I suppose I should add my own views.  One thing that seems to have been missed is that surely doesn't only affect British artists and writers as Marvel use other non American creators.
Also, I don't really see that it has much to do with British pride - doesn't hurt mine.  Most modern American comic are pretty poor stuff, no matter what the nationality of the people on them. Only my opinion, of course, but I don't spend a lot of money on them and it doesn't matter to me that Marvel's U.K. output might disappear. I wonder if younger readers will continue to more adult Marvel  (or DC, etc. ) given the proliferation of, to them, electronic temptations.
Work for hire was a great way for comics to be produced.  If a writer or artist wanted to create comics or own his own work, I've always thought he/she should have sought backers and/or got the money together to do it themselves. So, it might not have worked for them but that's business.  After all, the comics companies took all the chances and, again, it's only my opinion, produced lots of wonderful entertainment.  See the material hosted on this and other sites.
Don't like Disney and with the exception of the classic Donald Duck strips, I'd rather they weren't there, annoying me and millions of others.
I realise I might be sounding like a right old curmudgeon but this has been an interesting discussion and places like DCM give me a chance to have a tilt at windmills.