September 20, 2002

I have this friend named Pat O'Neill.  We get along fine in person and on the phone.  Nice guy.  On various discussion forums on the Internet, however, I rarely agree with him and often strenuously disagree to the extent where people write me and say, "Boy, you must hate Pat O'Neill."  I don't.  I don't think I "hate" anyone in this world...but if I did, it would have to be for something a lot more offensive than posting things I utterly disagree with in newsgroups.

I mention this because I'm about to disagree with Pat again.  The other morning, over in the rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe newsgroup, he posted the following...

Most commonly on these groups any decision a publisher makes that cancels a "critically acclaimed" title whose sales are in the toilet is derided.  In general, these groups act as if publishers were in business to publish the GROUPS' favorite comics, as opposed to publishing the comics most likely to be profitable.

Pat is right and wrong about this...and I should add that I was, as well, since I used to say almost the exact same thing in fanzines when someone would start weeping that their favorite funnybook had been axed.  But I think I was at least partly incorrect for two reasons, one large and one small...

One is that, first of all, a fan has every right to complain when something he likes is taken from him.  Such passions ought to be balanced with a little pragmatism and awareness of how things have to work in the Real World, true.  But I think it's unfair and probably unwise to demean or attempt to change that passion.  You can't expect someone whose only relationship to a work is as Enthusiastic Audience to suddenly snap to the mindset of one of the bean-counters in the accounting department...nor should they.  What a cold, unenjoyable media it would be if we all had to hook our sympathies up to the financial end of things and to accept every decision as a calculated profit/loss reality.  If I love something, I shouldn't have that love trampled by the business department expecting me to view it through their eyes.

That's the small reason.  The larger is this: When a publisher cancels a "fan favorite" comic book due to poor sales, there's a very good chance that publisher is wrong...often in the long term and sometimes even in the short term.

An amazing number of times — too often to dismiss as flukes, I believe — a publisher has cancelled The Invincible Flurp and all the Flurp fans get up in arms and protest, and the publisher says, "Don't you [idiot] fans realize that this is a business?  That Flurp sales are in the crapper and we're losing money and that we're not in business to lose money?"  And in the long run, with hindsight, there is ample evidence that the publisher simply gave up too quickly on a comic that might have built a new and profitable audience had the company stayed with it longer or done a better job of marketing.  (It has also been the case, though some have denied it, that someone in the office simply misread the numbers and terminated a profitable title, or killed one deliberately because of personal issues with its makers.  I don't think anyone will ever admit that in print, at least about themselves, but almost anyone who's been in the business for any length of time will tell you it's happened.)

Throughout comic book history, publishers have often been way too short-sighted and timid and terrified of losing even a very modest amount of money on new product.  At times, the financial risk in publishing the established sellers becomes so non-existent that they cannot bear to assume even a microscopic risk to publish something new.  They can become adept at marketing a very specific kind of material to a very narrow audience and when something different comes along, they don't know how to sell it and are afraid to try.  The super-hero books are selling decently and, in a moment of uncommon wisdom, someone says, "We need to expand the audience and reach folks who don't like super-hero comics," so they launch some non super-hero comics, often with great confidence and a determination to build and nurture another marketplace.

That's until the first sales figures come in on the non super-hero comics and they don't immediately yield the guaranteed profits of the super-hero books.  Then someone has a panic attack and, without waiting for the folks who don't like super-hero comics to have time to find the new, non super-hero books, the publisher says, "Wait a minute!  Why am I publishing these when I could sell more comics per month by replacing them with super-hero titles?"  That has happened way too many times, despite the fact that the potential loss, even if the new books never catch on, is not all that great.  It also happens despite the facts that...

A. There are dozens of cases where a new comic was declared a flop and then, for reasons other than the publisher believing in it, it was brought back or continued a little longer...and it became not just a hit but a huge hit.  Marvel Comics' two biggest properties — Spider-Man and the Hulk — were both initially and prematurely declared failures and were cancelled.  And had we been around then and protested those cancellations, someone at the company could have said precisely what Pat O'Neill said above.  Later on, the publisher declared the then-new Conan the Barbarian comic an utter failure and actually did say what Pat said when fans protested its probable cancellation.  But as with Spidey and Greenskin, the Barbarian stuck around long enough to develop and show a following.

B. Sometimes, the sales of the comic book itself are only part of the story.  All the major companies have published comics that were, going strictly by this month's sales, unprofitable...but because the property was licensed for a movie or toy deal, loads of cash rolled in.  There were many years where Wonder Woman was technically losing all kinds of money on the newsstand but that comic served as a very effective loss-leader for very lucrative merchandise.

C. There are also dozens of cases where, years later, a cancelled comic still has a loyal following.  No one can ever prove that Bat Lash (to pick one example of dozens) would or would not have found an audience had it run another year or so but, given the extent to which people still recall it fondly, you have to wonder.  More to the point, some abruptly-cancelled comics are probably analogous to a movie that is declared a flop at the time of its debut but which, in re-release, proves to be enormously popular and profitable.  DC, for instance, has made an awful lot of money reprinting the old Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams issues of Green Lantern-Green Arrow which, back in 1971, was declared a money-loser that had to go.  Some don't think it was unprofitable then but, even if it was, the foreign sales and reprints have since made it one of the more lucrative things DC published that year.  Had they kept it going, it would have been a very good investment.

This is not unique to comics.  TV networks are often too quick to cancel a show if its initial ratings do not soar.  Seinfeld, which may turn out to be the most profitable TV show of all time, was — like Spider-Man or Hulk — an "immediate flop" that the business-types wanted to junk, and might have.  The TV version of M*A*S*H, which may be the current holder of the "most profitable of all time" medallion, was definitely in that category, as well.  (I once worked for a producer who kept on his wall, a framed memo from a high executive at Paramount.  Going by early ratings, the exec was declaring Cheers a bomb and asking if the studio's lawyers could extricate them from having to produce any more episodes.  Next to it was framed a then-recent statement of the show's grosses, which of course made the first memo look even stupider.)

Fact is — and I'll bet it's the same in almost any field — business decisions are not always firm, intractable judgments.  A creative field like comic books is probably especially subjective.  The folks who have to decide what to publish and what to cancel might like to pretend that they have no choice...that they're only going by the numbers and you can't argue with them.  But you can.  Like William Goldman says of the movie business, "Nobody knows anything."

If you love a comic book and the publisher kills it, don't let anyone tell you you're naïve to protest or lament its passing.  Worrying about the profit or loss of the company is the company's job, not yours.  And besides, there's a very good chance that even as a dollars-and-cents decision, they're wrong and you're right.