T&T #25

The sad thing was that I was able to immediately pull three examples out of my hat:

 

Example one: There is a painting that was celebrated as one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces. It was worth several million dollars. A couple of years ago, someone discovered that the painting was actually done by one of Rembrandt’s students. The price dropped immediately to "only" something in the five figures. The painting itself didn’t change. Neither had the fact of who had painted it. The only difference was the name association. An unknown artist made the painting practically worthless.

 

Example two: There is another painting that just hung around somewhere, by an unknown artist. Pretty but ultimately worthless. Until an expert happened to see it and discovered that it’s really an unknown work by Vincent Van Gogh. The previously worthless piece of canvas was sold for several million dollars. Why? The painting didn’t improve overnight. It had still been made by the same artist. The several million dollar price increase wasn’t for the paintings; it’s Van Gogh’s name that’s worth several million dollars.

 

Example three: It’s been several years since I first heard the story, and I find it amusing how it changed a bit over time. I’m sticking with the first version I heard, though, because I believe it’s probably the closest to the truth. There is a famous writer (novels, not comics) who started to doubt himself. Did people buy his novels because they were good, or because he was famous? He decided to test the theory and wrote several novels under a penname. From what I heard originally, they sold okay but not all that well. Just well enough to encourage the publisher to publish more of the writer. A few books down the line, it became rumored that this unknown writer was really the penname of the famous one. Sales went up. When the famous writer admitted the connection, they became bestsellers. Lesson learned: it was the name, not the quality. (Amusingly, I found the penname-written books far more original, innovative and entertaining than the writer’s "official" work, which became increasingly formulaic over the years.) Again, success reflected the name, not the quality of the work.

 

I suppose you’re wondering now just what fine arts and novelists have to do with comics. Easy: it’s the same thing. Fine arts, novels, television, movies, comics… the success of any kind of creative/artistic endeavour depends not on how well you do your work, all that matters is how well known you are. Breaking into the big time depends on how well connected you are. If you want to break into television or movies, you won’t get anywhere without an agent. You won’t get an agent unless someone they know recommends you to one. So you need to know such people. It’s pretty much the same for prose writing: you need an agent to get a deal, but unless you have a deal pending no agent will even look at your work.

 

In comics, the advice I’ve heard the most isn’t to do the best work you can, the advice I’ve heard the most is to attend as many conventions as possible and get introduced to as many editors as possible so that they will recognize your name when you try to pitch them something. Notice anything? Correct: it’s the name recognition that will get your work looked at, not your abilities. (They say it’s different for artists, since the editors can more easily evaluate some art pages than a sample script. That sounds true. But I’m a writer, what do I care about how easy artists have it?) Of course, the accepted version is that once you’ve gotten to the point where editors will actually look at your work, it’s your abilities that will determine whether or not they will give you work. I’m not so sure if I believe that, because it certainly doesn’t explain Chuck Austen or Ron Zimmerman.

 

You might remember Ron Zimmerman: he was the Next Big Thing at Marvel, getting tons of work. Which was almost universally reviled. Strangely, he stopped getting work the moment his connection to Howard Stern ended. Tell me again how he got work because of his ability instead of his connections? I’ve also heard similar stories about Chuck Austen: reviled by many but well connected and therefore nearly untouchable. 

 

If we’re all in agreement that this is not a good thing, let’s move on to why it’s kind of funny. Because the quality of the name talent doesn’t really matter. Rob Liefeld was hot, big-name talent, when he was at the height of his game. It took years for people to wonder what they ever saw in him. But when he was at the top of his power, he was insanely popular. At the same time, it doesn’t really matter who you hire to write the comics. When DC let Grant Morrison write JLA, the title became insanely popular. True, it dropped readers after he left, but people have always wondered if the frenzy regarding JLA was due to Morrison or to the fact that it combined the most popular characters in the DCU. Morrison’s stint on X-Men actually suggests the latter. After an initial "Ooh, Morrison"-frenzy, sales on X-Men levelled out to roughly normal X-numbers. It has since turned out that Morrison reaches nowhere near to JLA or X-Men numbers with his creator-owned work, and there’s even speculation that his Seven Soldiers project might turn out to be a dud. This suggests that the truism of readers-buying-their-characters-nevermind-who’s-working-on-them is half right. Why half right? It’s been shown that while a popular and/or very good creator (that doesn’t need to be identical) might sell more copies in the short run, it won’t necessarily last; while a bad creator hurts sales on a book fairly quickly, and it might have difficulty recovering even after the creator leaves. At the same time, having a good and popular creative team on an innovative book doesn’t mean it will sell well. It might earn critical acclaim, but the readers will still ignore it. 

 

What this amounts to is that it’s a fact that the companies are after big names in the hopes of attracting audiences, to a point that makes it nearly impossible for unknown and unconnected new talent to break in, regardless of their abilities. It’s a fact that having a name helps you attract an audience in the short term, but it doesn’t guarantee you will be able to hold it. It’s also a fact that this goes twice for comics, where the readers keep on buying their favorite books every month regardless of the creative team. Being a name talent actually seems to mean less in comics than it does in any other medium. Except maybe television. Name three television scriptwriters. JMS and Joss Whedon don’t count, as they were smart enough to establish themselves as brand names beyond the recognition of the shows they created.

 

Television and comics have that much in common: the franchises matter far far more than the people who work on them. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, that it’s hardest to break into those two media where the individual creator matters the least.