The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood PDF
Preview The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood
International Screen Industries Series Editors: Michael Curtin, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. and Paul McDonald, King’s College London, UK. The International Screen Industries series offers original and probing analysis of media industries around the world, examining their working practices and the social contexts in which they operate. Each volume provides a concise guide to the key players and trends that are shaping today’s film, television and digital media. Published titles: The American Television Industry Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc Arab Television Industries Marwan M. Kraidy and Joe F. Khalil The Chinese Television Industry Michael Keane East Asian Screen Industries Darrell Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh European Film Industries Anne Jäckel European Television Industries Petros Iosifidis, Jeanette Steemers and Mark Wheeler Global Television Marketplace Timothy Havens Hollywood in the New Millennium Tino Balio Latin American Film Industries Tamara L. Falicov Latin American Television Industries John Sinclair and Joseph D. Straubhaar Localising Hollywood Courtney Brannon Donoghue Nollywood Central Jade L. Miller The Video Game Business Randy Nichols Video and DVD Industries Paul McDonald ii The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer, 2021 Alisa Perren and Gregory Steirer have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover illustration by Cully Hamner All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8445-7942-6 PB: 978-1-8445-7941-9 ePDF: 978-1-8390-2314-9 eBook: 978-1-8445-7943-3 Series: International Screen Industries Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction: The More Things Change … : The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century 1 1 Comics Pros Go to Hollywood: The Historical Evolution of the Comics–Hollywood Relationship 11 2 Comic Books and the Economics of Intellectual Property Production 47 3 Drawing Lines: The Place of Comic Book Artists and Writers in Hollywood 75 4 Synergy in Theory and in Practice: Comic Books and the Contemporary Media Conglomerate 109 5 Organizational (Dis-)Integration: Publisher–Hollywood Relationships in the Twenty-First Century 131 6 From Dental Floss to Dental Tape: The Strange Case of Digital Comics Distribution 167 Afterword: Days of Future Present: The View from 2020 201 Notes 207 Bibliography 213 Index 236 List of Illustrations FIGURES 2.1 Sales volume across DC Comics’s entire line in April, May and June 2016 53 2.2 Title churn: Number of titles sold by Marvel Comics, June 2015–July 2016 57 2.3 Title churn: Number of titles sold by DC Comics, June 2015–July 2016 57 2.4 Creators’ and publishers’ shares in publishing ventures 70 5.1 DC Extended Universe film release schedule, projected vs. actual 150 6.1 Total comics sales in millions, 2009–2018 169 6.2 Year-on-year comics sales growth, 2011–2018 169 TABLE 6.1 iPad comic book apps available in April 2011 180 Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the support of the many executives and creative professionals who agreed to be interviewed for it. Although our interviewees remain unnamed throughout the book so as to protect their identities, we are immensely grateful to each of them for giving us their time and sharing with us their considerable expertise and insight. We also owe a special thanks to series editors Paul McDonald and Michael Curtin, who championed this project when it was little more than a vague idea and who shepherded it through the multiple stages of the publishing process. We cannot thank them enough for their guidance and their patience. We are grateful too to Rebecca Barden, Veidehi Hans, Louise Dugdale, Sophie Gillespie and Rebecca Willford at Bloomsbury for so readily adopting this project and for going above and beyond to ensure that the book ended up matching our vision for it. We appreciate the time and care that Amanda Conner, Ian Gordon, Derek Johnson and Greg Rucka took to write such thoughtful endorsements. Finally, thank you to Cully Hamner for his wisdom, generosity and sense of humour – and for the gorgeous cover he created for us. In addition to the above acknowledgements, which come equally from the both of us, each of us has his or her own individual acknowledgements to make, which we happily offer below. ALISA PERREN This project was made possible in no small part due to the encouragement provided by my colleagues in the Radio-Television-Film (RTF) Department and the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Receipt of a Faculty Research Award in spring 2019 provided me with a much-valued semester’s leave to dedicate to writing. Special thanks go to Dean Jay Bernhardt, former Associate Dean Karin Wilkins and RTF Chair Noah Isenberg, along with former RTF Chair Paul Stekler, for your advocacy both for this award and for my work more generally. Thank you as well to Selena Dickey, Laura Felschow and Lesley Willard for the high-quality work you provided as research assistants over the years. I have been fortunate to benefit from a larger support network in RTF as well; Wenhong Chen, Richard Lewis, Elana Wakeman and Rachel Walker deserve viii ACknowLEdgEmEntS a special shout out for serving as reliable confidantes both about this book and on so many other topics. I am so grateful to have been able to fuse cocktails and kvetching with my informal RTF writing group: Mary Beltrán, Kathy Fuller- Seeley, Cindy McCreery and Suzanne Scott. In addition, I once again have been able to turn to Tom Schatz for input on my writing. Your insights always make my work better. Thanks as well to the many RTF graduate students who have shared ideas, articles and feedback with me, whether in graduate seminars or during casual conversations in the hallways. During the earliest stages of this project, Greg Smith proved to be an invaluable resource, pointing me to useful scholarship in comics studies. Miranda Banks, Derek Kompare and Avi Santo all provided me with both publishing and conference opportunities (as well as useful conversations!) to test out early ideas for my work on creative labour and professional identities. I also want to thank Jay Faerber, Tom Feister, Keven Gardner, Ford Gilmore, Paul Jenkins, Van Jensen, Horace Newcomb, Ross Richie, Zack Rosenberg, Tony Shasteen and Brian Stelfreeze for helping me map the field early on and build out my network of contacts. Nedda Ahmed, Amelia Arsenault, Sunny Early, Karen Gustafson, Jen Holt and Anh Nguyen all have been terrific as travel buddies, conference roommates and supporters of this project (and many others). Caroline Frick: our long neighbourhood walks have kept me sane throughout this process. Thank you for always being willing to let me brainstorm with you. Thanks, as always, to Steve and Diane Perren, for your unwavering support as well. Finally, this project would not exist without Cully Hamner. Ten years ago, I would not have believed that I would be writing a book about the comic book industry. I am so grateful to be able to write about this world that you introduced me to – and more importantly, for the life I have been able to share with you since 2007 (!). Having you available as a sounding board – and willing to assist me at every stage of this process even as you scrambled to meet your own deadlines – has meant so much. Last but not least, to Bernie: having you sleep (well, more like loudly snore) at my feet during my many late-night writing sessions made the process just a little bit easier. GREGORY STEIRER I would like to thank the Dickinson College English Department for encouraging this project from its earliest beginning. I am also grateful to Dickinson’s Research and Development Committee for funding portions of the book’s research and to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for funding other areas of my research. Although the fellowship awarded to ACknowLEdgEmEntS ix me by the NEH was for a different project, research for that project informed a number of the chapters here. To Kevin Sanson, Matthew Goldmark and Jeehyun Lim, thank you for reading early drafts of these chapters and for always having time to help me work out ideas and arguments. Thanks also to my research assistants, Harris Risell, Samuel Portelance and Benjamin Doern: this book would never have got finished (or even started!) without you! To Jen Holt, I can’t thank you enough for your mentorship and for never letting me lose sight of what fun this job can be. To Ronni Rosenstein, thank you for your inexhaustible support and for always providing me a peaceful space to write (and store comic books). Thank you, Robin and Robert Ring, for your encouragement and unflagging enthusiasm, and for filling my life with books. Matt Colville, I’m grateful to you for all the conversations we’ve had about comic books and superhero films and for the many trips to the Danbury comic book store we’ve taken together. This book would not have been anywhere near as fun to write without you. Thank you, Keith Witham, for listening to me babble on about copyright and synergy for the past six years, for resignedly living amongst towering piles of my comic books and graphic novels, and for your endless and sometimes undeserved support and patience. And, finally, many, many thanks to Lyra, June and Azazel, who will never read this but who played at my feet, purred on my lap and slept on my books while I wrote it.
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