BOOMS AND BUSTS: MARK MILLAR EXPLAINS HIS THEORY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Mark Millar
Being stupid, I tried to crash into the US comics scene at the worst possible time. It was the mid-nineties and the number of comic stores had halved one year and halved again the next as everyone—and I mean everyone—seemed to be losing their jobs. Those actual, grown-up proper writers and artists who’d been in full employment for the last decade were crashing and burning and a huge number of people were very quickly chasing the very small number of jobs that were around. But I remained optimistic. Why? Because I’d found this little interview with Denny O’Neil some years earlier…
The interview had been conducted in a period roughly comparable to where we are now in 2006. That is, sustained growth in the market over a number of years and a rosy outlook for the foreseeable future. Denny said something that really struck me in that interview and that was how great is was for the biz to be on such a high after the low, low lows of the seventies when Marvel were sometimes reduced to sixteen pages of story, filling the rest of a book with ads just to keep the wolves from the door. After the horrible collapse of the 70s and the big wave of firings and smaller companies going under, it was great to be sitting there, he said, in a spanking new WB-paid office and looking at a market with healthy, sustainable sales.
Sound familiar?
It certainly cheered me up and made me realize that, like any other market, the comics industry goes through booms and busts and what we were experiencing in the 90s was just a downturn soon to be followed (I prayed) by an upturn. I looked into the figures a little more, examining the market for the previous two generations and noticed that the peaks and troughs formed what was essentially a sine-graph going back to the dawn of the Golden Age in 1935. We had a peak in the 40s, a trough in the 50s, a peak in the 60s, a trough in the 70s and so on until we hit the worst trough of all in the mid-90s when the market suffered the nastiest collapse in our publishing history. The pattern seemed to be record highs (in terms of revenue and creator salaries) immediately followed by record lows where Chicken Littles everywhere predicted the death of the medium as a whole. And so, as the FINAL DEMANDS piled up on my desk and absolutely no work was to be found for long periods of time in the ‘90s, my friends and I consoled ourselves with the notion that we’d only have to tighten our belts for, er, a few years and things would be just peachy again when the pick-up of 2005 and beyond got into full swing.
Like I’ve said many times, comics tend to move in twenty years cycles. Twenty years after Crisis and Secret War we have Infinite Crisis and Civil War at the top of the charts. Where were are right now, in market terms, is very close to 1986, right down to the numbers where the initial printings on Dark Knight and Watchmen are almost identical to our big books now and the frenzied re-order activity eerily accurate too. Like 1986, we also have a phenomenal number of talented people in the biz and I would say, especially among the writers, that we have MORE right now than we had back then. I don’t think anyone’s reached the giddy creative heights of a Dark Knight or a Watchmen recently, but some have come close and it’s clear to see why the market (especially the big two) have made such significant gains in terms of growth year-on-year since the turn of the millennium. It’s an exciting time to be in this business. Marvel and DC seem more enthused about their books than they have been in a long time and the independent scene is at least as thrilled by the influx of comic-book movies as their lycra-clad cousins. A self-contained three issue mini-series is now enough to get you a movie deal and, even if you aren’t writing the screenplay yourself, you can expect anything from 500,000 dollars to even a million for single picture rights, the same again for sequels and prequels and that’s not even counting DVDs, TV rights and merchandise. As I’ve maintained in interviews throughout all this time, the best is yet to come and the boom that ran from 1986-2003 is going to be nothing compared to the boom we’re experiencing now just two decades later. The Image guys became overnight millionaires in 1992, but imagine what could be accomplished now in the multimedia age as new characters are exploited in all these different formats. The boom of the ‘60s could never have anticipated the millionaire creators of the ‘80s. Is it possible that a comic-creator generates the next Harry Potter as a series of creator-owned books? Could we be looking at the first comics billionaire a few years down the line?
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=82502
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Mark Millar
Being stupid, I tried to crash into the US comics scene at the worst possible time. It was the mid-nineties and the number of comic stores had halved one year and halved again the next as everyone—and I mean everyone—seemed to be losing their jobs. Those actual, grown-up proper writers and artists who’d been in full employment for the last decade were crashing and burning and a huge number of people were very quickly chasing the very small number of jobs that were around. But I remained optimistic. Why? Because I’d found this little interview with Denny O’Neil some years earlier…
The interview had been conducted in a period roughly comparable to where we are now in 2006. That is, sustained growth in the market over a number of years and a rosy outlook for the foreseeable future. Denny said something that really struck me in that interview and that was how great is was for the biz to be on such a high after the low, low lows of the seventies when Marvel were sometimes reduced to sixteen pages of story, filling the rest of a book with ads just to keep the wolves from the door. After the horrible collapse of the 70s and the big wave of firings and smaller companies going under, it was great to be sitting there, he said, in a spanking new WB-paid office and looking at a market with healthy, sustainable sales.
Sound familiar?
It certainly cheered me up and made me realize that, like any other market, the comics industry goes through booms and busts and what we were experiencing in the 90s was just a downturn soon to be followed (I prayed) by an upturn. I looked into the figures a little more, examining the market for the previous two generations and noticed that the peaks and troughs formed what was essentially a sine-graph going back to the dawn of the Golden Age in 1935. We had a peak in the 40s, a trough in the 50s, a peak in the 60s, a trough in the 70s and so on until we hit the worst trough of all in the mid-90s when the market suffered the nastiest collapse in our publishing history. The pattern seemed to be record highs (in terms of revenue and creator salaries) immediately followed by record lows where Chicken Littles everywhere predicted the death of the medium as a whole. And so, as the FINAL DEMANDS piled up on my desk and absolutely no work was to be found for long periods of time in the ‘90s, my friends and I consoled ourselves with the notion that we’d only have to tighten our belts for, er, a few years and things would be just peachy again when the pick-up of 2005 and beyond got into full swing.
Like I’ve said many times, comics tend to move in twenty years cycles. Twenty years after Crisis and Secret War we have Infinite Crisis and Civil War at the top of the charts. Where were are right now, in market terms, is very close to 1986, right down to the numbers where the initial printings on Dark Knight and Watchmen are almost identical to our big books now and the frenzied re-order activity eerily accurate too. Like 1986, we also have a phenomenal number of talented people in the biz and I would say, especially among the writers, that we have MORE right now than we had back then. I don’t think anyone’s reached the giddy creative heights of a Dark Knight or a Watchmen recently, but some have come close and it’s clear to see why the market (especially the big two) have made such significant gains in terms of growth year-on-year since the turn of the millennium. It’s an exciting time to be in this business. Marvel and DC seem more enthused about their books than they have been in a long time and the independent scene is at least as thrilled by the influx of comic-book movies as their lycra-clad cousins. A self-contained three issue mini-series is now enough to get you a movie deal and, even if you aren’t writing the screenplay yourself, you can expect anything from 500,000 dollars to even a million for single picture rights, the same again for sequels and prequels and that’s not even counting DVDs, TV rights and merchandise. As I’ve maintained in interviews throughout all this time, the best is yet to come and the boom that ran from 1986-2003 is going to be nothing compared to the boom we’re experiencing now just two decades later. The Image guys became overnight millionaires in 1992, but imagine what could be accomplished now in the multimedia age as new characters are exploited in all these different formats. The boom of the ‘60s could never have anticipated the millionaire creators of the ‘80s. Is it possible that a comic-creator generates the next Harry Potter as a series of creator-owned books? Could we be looking at the first comics billionaire a few years down the line?
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=82502
