POW! Entertainment Inc. (fka POWN)

[graspointe48236]

So is Virgin Comics dead or not? Their website's still up at last check, but reports of cutbacks are flying, and how much room for cutbacks could they have? I always found their business model suspect. As I've mentioned before they're not the first company predicated on titles created by "stars" with the grunt work performed by work-for-hire comics talent, with the goal of generating mass media franchises from the properties; that's how the runaway smash success story of the 1990s, the much-loved Tekno Comics, became the industry powerhouse they are today. I've written several times over the past couple of years of how comics, industry and fandom, now need to get over their deep-seated inferiority/superiority complex, because contrary to deeply held tenets the general public no long perceives us as something ridiculous, demented or retarded and now accepts comics as just one more entertainment option. The one place this doesn't seem to hold is when companies originating outside the comics industry make a play to "improve" comics by bringing in people who have little or no experience with comics in any form to "create" comics, especially when they have little to do with the creative act itself. Sometimes this is simply a marketing ploy - porn queen Jenna Jameson's name attached to a horror comic is bound to get some mainstream publicity just on notoriety - and sometimes the presumption is that a popular "outside talent" will create something bold and original that the ex-fanboy hacks mired in all the trash preconceptions of comics could never come up with in a million years.

You know, like Clive Barker's Razorline.

You're welcome to call it sour grapes, but it's been my general observation that "outsiders" (I'm tired and can't think of a better or less pejorative word, but take it as a neutral descriptive term if you can) a) tend to operate on either their last exposure to comics no matter how lost in the mists of time, or on what they heard about comics once, and usually have little exposure to current trends in comics, and have next to no exposure to the comics form, but neither they nor their publishers think that necessary; or b) they're huge comics fans and are dying to replicate all they ever loved in comics, whether that's Stan Lee or Al Feldstein or Alan Moore or Grant Morrison.

In either case (and it's funny how accomplished writers in other media will often hold their potentially most profitable ideas for those media and reserve their "comic book" ideas for comics, because most of them aren't stupid, although with the spreading notion of comic as movie or TV pilot that's changing some) the result usually only reinvents the wheel. And we've got enough wheels. Modern inventions would be better. (WATCHMEN, for instance, may be a new idea to people unfamiliar with comics and a popular one with people who love comics, but it is 20+ years old now. Same with DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Used to be that if you kept up with Hollywood you'd be well ahead of comics - remember when Marvel introduced MASTER OF KUNG FU about 20 minutes after the Bruce Lee-inspired initial kung fu craze here in American went belly up? - but with the current state of things if you keep up with Hollywood you'll be well behind comics. Even if you ultimately want to sell to movies, whatever medium the medium you want to sell to goes for ideas, that's the one you need to keep up with, not the one that's your eventual goal. Currently, if you want to do comics, you need to keep up with what's going on in comics. Because there's a lot going on, but most of it's going on in the margins.)

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=17875