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Last week’s column produced a pretty strong reaction from a lot of readers.  In fact, it was by far the strongest I’ve yet had to this column.  I was happy to get a good amount of positive feedback from readers of my own age group, but I confess that I was a little disappointed that I didn’t hear from some college-age readers defending their generation as something other than Republican neo-lemmings.  And then I got some additional feedback from a person or group I can only assume was from an Islamic fundamentalist organization.  These guys hacked my site (the PC LLC site) twice this week and put up some basically illiterate but nevertheless seemingly pro-Islam statements on our front page.  Like I said, this younger generation has produced an awful lot of lemmings, and they are apparently not only limited to the U.S. 

It’s important to understand that Islamic extremism is at its core nothing but a movement of followers who are too lazy or simply too dense to truly consider their own ideology.  Unfortunately, that ideology is the same recycled garbage that put the angrier and more gullible component of German youth into Nazi uniforms in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.  Ultimately the vaunted Nazi war machine was defeated and disgraced, taking with it the rest of its beloved Germany, but it’s doubtful that the old men of the movement really minded or cared.  Hitler reportedly said that Germany was getting what it deserved right before he committed suicide. 

What the old men of these movements care about is their own power.  The ideologies of hate are their paths to that power – even if embracing that ideology means that their nation and their people are destined to become little more than road kill on the highway of history.

We see it every day.  The leadership of the nation fails, and now that leadership must either cede power (fat chance!) or blame someone – preferably some large, amorphous foreign group – for their failures.  Thus comes the ideology of hate and the wild, unrealistic dreams of some future return to the old greater glory.  Greater Germany or the New Caliphate or whatever.  It’s the same old song and dance.  Us over Them under God.  Young men – prideful, defeated, and without education or hope – flock to this “new” ideology.  They embrace the “struggle” or the “cause” or the “jihad” or the “race war” as a way to prove themselves and their manhood and as a way to validate their own failures and faith.  Sadly, they never realize that it is this very same faith that provides the means of control for their new masters.

What you never see is this: you never see the leadership of the ideologies of hate engaged in real, honest labor.  Hitler praised the workers and the farmers of Germany, but the truth was that he couldn’t hold a job.  He was a failed artist!  He never worked an honest day in his whole life.  Meanwhile, Yassir Arafat survived in high style for decades on the backs and the blood of the poorest people on Earth.  How much did that guy steal from his own people, all the while claiming to have their best interests at heart?  Now look at him.  His image is disgraced.  His party is out of office.  His people are worse off than ever.  Bin Laden is just as bad.  He’s a trust fund baby from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia.  His hands are probably as soft as an infant’s bottom.  Certainly they don’t bear the calluses of hard work.  How could they?  He’s never worked.

The sad fact is that these people can’t let the struggle end because that would mean an admission of their own failures and, more importantly, an end of the power and importance.  Their glory requires violence.  Their rise to infamy is fueled by the blood of the faithful.  Their strength is the unquestioning gullibility of today’s angry youth.

You’ll notice that you never see the leaders of a jihad blowing themselves up.  That’s not a coincidence.  It would defeat the purpose.  Dead men can’t read about themselves in foreign newspapers.

So anyway, I stand by my statement.  What this world really needs is a younger generation with more curiosity.  Question.  Research.  Discover.  Learn for yourself.  Suicide is rarely the right answer.  At least with an education, you’ll know how to ask the right questions, and in the process, you’ll give yourself more opportunities for the future.  At the end of the day, I think that’s what we ALL want.

I get letters

I enjoyed Bronx Angel immensely and - you'll be pleased to hear - it made me think. Never having been in the armed forces I can only imagine how difficult it is reassimilating to civilian life, and the book really put that across. I felt that the ending was a little rushed, almost as if you ran out of pages to tell the story but all over, I really enjoyed it.  

I was interested by your take on licensing of Marvel characters. I think the FF movie showed that licensing doesn't always work. Personally I enjoyed the movie, and I know it did well enough to garner a sequel, but I didn't exactly see the FF toys flying off the shelves. These days more money comes from corporate tie-ins, as you pointed out, and who wants to license a guy who burns on a kids cup? I remember FF#285 well enough to know that is NOT a great idea!

 I think in the future, licensing revenue will drop off - but it should be replaced by increased income from the production and distribution of their own movies; the choice of Jon Favreau for Iron Man seems especially inspired, so I have some hope for them.

First off, thanks for the comments about BA: PBAM.  I almost didn’t run them here, but I wanted to acknowledge your point about the ending of the book being abrupt.  I couldn’t agree more. 

Originally, PBAM was supposed to be either a five-issue 135-page mini series/OGN.  However, when we got into production, I realized that the full production costs were going to eat PC LLC’s entire operating budget.  And as I said last week, I knew that the book wasn’t going to be an immediate indy-sales phenomenon.  So, bottom line, doing the OGN at that length would have killed the company.  As it turned out, that might have been the best thing for me personally, but at the time we had a bunch of other projects planned, and I wanted to be able to stay in business for a while and try to build a reputation slowly.  I didn’t want to bet it all on one throw.  Thus, I cut the book from 135-pages to sixty-eight plus fourteen for the mini, and we stayed in business for another year.

I like the book in its current form, and I think that having a higher page count – and therefore the higher price tag – would not have helped sales, so from that standpoint, cutting the book was the right decision.  And I’m happy that we did other good stuff like HORIZONS magazine, which in its way was a much better project than PBAM.  But there’s no doubt that PBAM suffered for the cuts, and that’s unfortunate.

As for your comments about licensing, I disagree with the caveat that licensing deals aren’t all cut from the same cloth.  However, in general I think Marvel has done a good job with their profitability from licensing largely because they’ve succeeded in maximizing their revenue while controlling their risks.  Licensors do not always get a back-end percentage of their licensee’s profits, and even if there is a back-end share, that share is usually capped after a certain point.  That makes sense.  As a license holder, you deserve to earn a profit on YOUR work.  For example, if I were to acquire the long-fabled license to the movie The Last Starfighter and make new LSF comics, I’d get a boost from the past success and notoriety of the property, and that’s the point.  But the books themselves would be wholly MY effort.  I’d be responsible for writing, editing, acquiring art services, marketing, etc.  The whole deal.  And as such, I’d have all (or nearly all) of the risk.  Bottom line: I’d be entitled to MOST of the profits.  In fact, I might argue that I’d be entitled to ALL of the profits minus a flat fee.  After all, the property is only worth what it’s worth before I get a hold of it.  AFTER I get it, I’ve changed the value of the property and am in for a share of that change. 

Look at Battlestar Galactica.  You could have gotten that license for beans before the new show aired.  But now things are different.  How much is that due to the original show/idea/property, and how much is due to the excellent execution of the new show?  That’s the critical issue.

With Marvel, they’ve maxed out their revenue on a lot of their recent movies, even the ones that haven’t been super successful.  The Hulk movie is a perfect example.  Marvel made a ton of money on The Hulk.  Supposedly, they came very close to their maximum revenue potential.  And the follow-on toy sales were excellent.  “Hulk Hands” were a big hit that Christmas.  However, I don’t think the studio did nearly as well.  I don’t know, but I would imagine that something similar is true of Fantastic Four as well.  Clearly the movie did well enough for Marvel because they’re well into planning for the sequel.  I’d imagine that the same studio will be involved as well, but from Marvel’s perspective, that’s hardly a necessity.

However, there are risks with licensing.  First, if your licensee puts out a bad product, they can damage the core brand’s value.  That happened to Marvel before its bankruptcy.  And it’s why toy companies usually retain editorial rights for their properties (examples: He-Man, GI Joe, etc).  The other risk from licensing is upside risk.  If the licensee does super-well, like happened with the first Spider Man movie, then the problem is that your back-end is capped.  You’re only going to make so much money, and then that’s it.  In the case of the Spider Man movies, Marvel’s profits have been much less than the property itself was arguably worth.

Marvel wants to make its own movies so that it no longer has upside risk.  That’s great for very well-known properties like Captain America.  A good Captain America movie should do GREAT at the box office.  But I have my doubts that Marvel really wants to own the full costs and back-end of movies like Elektra and The Hulk.  I’m sure that Marvel would argue that they have the BEST knowledge of these properties and so will make the better movies than the studios have made from their lesser known properties, and that may well prove to be true.  But movies cost a lot where licensing doesn’t, so making movies is a big new risk.  It’s up to investors to decide what the likely payoff from that risk will be.

And speaking of investors, Marvel’s stock got a great bump last week from a pretty favorable article in the Wall Street Journal.  The article[1] laid out the case for both optimism and pessimism.  Bulls pointed out that publishing sales are up and that toy sales look good for next year despite some logistics issues this year arising from the fact that the company is changing licensees, and the most bullish felt that the movie studio was a likely success story in the making.  Bears noted that most of Marvel’s best-known properties have already been exploited, and they therefore doubted that the company could do better than it has already done.  It seemed to me that about 25% of those asked were bullish and another 25% were bearish while the rest were sort of optimistically neutral.

Meanwhile, I was glad that I didn’t dump the stock last week. Between the article, the Fed’s pause in interest rate increases, new benign inflation data, and the potentially temporary end to the war in South Lebanon, the market rallied.  Marvel was up maybe 7% from last week as of Wednesday.

All of which made me a little more curious than I had been about the stock’s fundamentals.  It turns out that the stock is approximately 2.7 times more volatile than the larger market[2], and that there’s over 25% short interest right now (meaning that more than 25% of investors in the stock think the stock will fall and have made bets to profit on that fall).  Yikes!  That’s a lot of short interest.  And short investors can be pretty cut-throat.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to engineer some bad press about Marvel towards the end of the year if the stock is still riding high come the 4^th Quarter.  It’s just something to watch for.  You heard it here first.

Testament is a book I picked up with the debut issue.  It was an intriguing concept, and I read the first few issues hoping the concept would flesh out, would pan out, since, initially, it seemed it would.  But I became impatient with it because the story was only folding back in on itself rather than advancing forward.  Okay, I got the concept already, I found myself saying, so now what've you got to say with it?  What've you got to say is the natural conclusion to any intriguing concept, and it shouldn't be difficult to learn.  Yes, I get that history repeats itself, I get that these kids live in a bleak future.  It just seems that the book, for me, had nothing but these ideas to offer, through the couple of issues that I read.  I thought I'd found something greater than that.  So I stopped reading, and now all these months later, as I passed on the book each month, remembering what it had been for me and what it ended up being, I find Testament to be a Comic You Should Be Reading.  Your thoughts are not all that different from mine, but you've walked on the opposite side of the line, and I found that intriguing enough.

Another intriguing aspect of this week's column was your political speculation, from the implication of WWIII (which is not what anyone had thought at the time, but which is something someone is going to have to give a definitive account for at some point) and then of WW IV (at this point, including the letters and numbers together seems almost perverse, even if they still appear...unnatural apart) was a bit of a revelation.  I can't help but wonder if you should be writing more about this in coming weeks.

Thanks for the note.  I probably will keep writing a little more seriously from here on out.  Honestly, I was a little bit on the fence about it, but after getting so much positive feedback AND having my site get hacked twice in one week… well, I can’t help but think I’m onto something.  I want to at least explore it a little.

And yeah, I dug Testament a lot too.  Obviously.

Meltdown

MELTDOWN is a two-issue 96-page prestige-format mini series coming soon from Image Comics.  I first learned about it from artist Sean Wang, whose title RUNNERS is perhaps the best OGN I’ve read all year.  Sean is also the artist on Meltdown, and after reading my review of Runners, he made sure that I got an advanced copy of Meltdown too.

Am I glad he did!  This is another truly great book! 

Meltdown is the story of Caliente, a young man with fire-based superpowers that are quickly growing out of his control.  The book follows Cal as he lives out the last days of his life; his body is literally melting down from the heat of his powers.  This is made all the more poignant because Cal has little desire for either powers or the superhero’s life.  He’s a hero only because he needs a job, and heroing is pretty much the only thing he’s actually qualified to do.  His natural body heat makes him unsuited to most other professional tasks.  And that’s a real shame because prior to his powers manifesting in public, Cal had been living the dream as a standout pro baseball player fast rising through the minor leagues.

This story is about the death of a superhero, and so comparisons to The Death of Captain Marvel are inevitable.  But this is a different book.  Where Death was the story of a fulfilled life cut short by the tragedy of cancer, Meltdown is very much a young man’s story.  At its core, it’s about wasted opportunities.  One gathers that our hero COULD put it together and eventually find himself if his condition wasn’t terminal.  As it is, he doesn’t have the maturity to accept his fate, and so the arc of the story flows from the breakdown of his mental state as his end approaches.  We’re watching his nervous breakdown and its consequences for those around him.

In Meltdown, writer David Scwartz presents us with a well-constructed non-linear tale of the overwhelming failures of youth.  It’s frustrating to see how close Cal is to getting his life together and getting through that second coming-of-age that we all experience in our mid- to late-twenties.  In that way, the book has the same vibe as the TV show Friends (though certainly not the same tone).  It’s very much a “What’s my life really about?”-type story.  I grooved on it, remembering well my own struggles with these same issues.  We all go through that stage and feel like we’ve failed with our lives.  The real frustration and tragedy here is in knowing that our hero isn’t going to have the chance to eventually put it together and get his life straightened out.  We’ve seen him fail.  We’re not going to get to see him succeed.

As I said in the intro, I’ve been a fan of Sean Wang’s for some time now, and his art here is again excellent.  But more impressive is the fact that it’s also different than what we’ve seen before from him.  Here the work is cartoony and expressive and personal when it needs to be, but then it switches seamlessly to a more traditional, over-the-top heroic style when that’s needed.  It’s a subtle and impressive shift, trust me.  Sean Wang is a rising superstar, and this book doesn’t just prove it.  It locks it in cement.  If folks haven’t taken notice of him yet, they will soon.  This book is likely to be his coming out party.  After Meltdown, you’re gonna see Sean Wang’s name everywhere.

Bottom line: Read Meltdown!  Superhero comics do NOT get better than this.  The storytelling here is no less than excellent all the way through, and the subtlety of the art is worth the price of admission by itself. 

Read it.  Enjoy it.  Share it with your friends.  Meltdown is a Comic You Should Be Reading.

Stray Voltage

Check out this cool-ass retro Batgirl from my friend Pat Carlucci. 

This Batgirl is the one from the new Batman animated series.  If you’re interested, I’m sure you can find some information on the DC Comics website.  Plus, they’re putting out a Batgirl comic these days that I liked a lot prior to all of the Crises of the last year.  I confess that I quit reading ALL DC comics after the crises made them too confusing.

Anyway, you can see more of Pat’s work on his website.  And he’s got a pretty good forum too.

The crew over at Awesome Storm Justice 41 published webisode 13 this week.  This one – the so-called Suessisode – is one of my favorites.  Go check it out.

Also perhaps worth mentioning is that I resigned my responsibilities at ASJ-41 this week.  On the good side, things have been going pretty well for me both at work and at home, but on the bad side, that has lead to a dramatic decline in the amount of time I have for comics.  At this point, this column is the only comic-related thing with which I’m still involved, and to be honest with you, I find that I don’t really miss it as much as you might think.  I don’t know if that means that I’m finally moving past whatever internal issues made me want to write comics in the first place or what, but I’ve been tilting back towards non-fiction and more serious writing and analysis.  I have no idea where that will lead, if it even leads anywhere.

No Hiro Arturian, Samurai this week.  I have this week’s chapter ready, but I’ve already run longer than I intended, so I think it makes sense to maintain the bi-weekly production schedule that I accidentally implemented when Richard Nelson guest-wrote this column two weeks ago.

And finally, I’m running low on books to review and recommend.  If you’ve got something you want me to recommend, email me and let me know.  I’ll try to review PDF read-aheads, but I don’t always get to them, and I certainly don’t make them a priority.  If past experience is any indicator, you’ll do much better to send me a hard copy.  I DEFINITELY read those.

Thanks.  I’ll see you next week.  Until then, stay safe.

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About the Columnist:

Dan Head is a utilities analyst, occasional freelance writer, and all-around good guy.  He humbly asks the forces of Evil to stop hacking into his website.