Elsewhere: It's Nearly 2024 and I'm More Than Optimistic

I got pretty sick and finally wrote a thing.

Hey folks. It’s been a while. I’m gonna’ tell you a bit about what’s been happening in the ol’ personal life in a bit, but before we get to that, we have business to attend to.

A screen-cap of some full on nonsense.

This week, one of the bigger retailers in the business decided to make a few demands from Marvel and DC. In a larger sense, he probably wanted to point to the comic industry at large, but he definitely loses that focus from the jump, stating:

Marvel and DC, you blew it.  Or maybe you just succeeded in your plan to kill off an American art form of which you’ve been the able stewards of for 80 years. It’s baffling that something so prolific was ushered to the chopping block and executed. Strong accusation?  No, just the unvarnished truth as new comic sales find new lows.¹

The man is out there spitting “unvarnished truth” with no overall industry data to back his claims. So I decided to hit back with a bit of reality, and I wrote an article over at The Beat.

Within that article, I did my due diligence and linked to Phil’s original article, so you can get the full meal deal by clicking on that link.

There were a couple bits I cut and changed with editorial input that I still thought made pretty good points, and I’m going to share those with you here:

---

In regards to Phil’s fourth point:

4. The characters are iconic for a reason.  The movies never got traction until they leaned into what made the characters decades-long successes.  Change is good for story but inevitably, you need to touch base with what brought them.  Gender swaps, sexual orientation changes, and outright changes to who’s in the suit are short-term headline grabbers but without long-term sales with very few exceptions.

There comes a time in the lifespan of everyone and everything, where something needs to change. I don’t necessarily like this, as it requires some work, and I am very, very tired, but it is an unrelenting fact of life.

You see it in business and in life all the time. People change, tastes evolve, and there’s always a contingent standing off to the side, wondering where it all went wrong as things keep slipping away. 

The negative point about “gender swaps, sexual orientation changes, and outright changes to who’s in the suit” speaks volumes about a certain kind of mentality. It also - once again - mistakenly identifies “cause” and “effect”.

Capitalism is one hell of a drug, and a fairly unwavering one at that. This is proven by Phil’s stance in general - he’s seeing trouble on the horizon, and is looking to return to what brought him to the dance. Only the dancing partners have changed, and he doesn’t know why.

Much like Phil, the folks who run Marvel and DC are always looking at ways to find success in running their business. Much like Phil, there are very few businesses (I would say, probably none) who find success and think to themselves, how could I destroy this. Most businesses find a cause to react when they notice a decline. Seemingly unlike Phil, Marvel and DC saw a decline in sales in the past, and decided to build out into more underserved markets, to varying degrees of success.

Because let’s be clear here: if the old model was a success, Marvel and DC would just run the old playbook. They’re part of monster companies that take forever to change course in any given direction, and the easiest play is to always and forever maintain and bolster success where it is found.

Marvel and DC didn’t attempt to diversify their line because it was the easy or even the right thing to do. They did it because there was a marked decline in sales that needed to be remedied. The effect of seeing a dwindling audience was to finally - finally - write stories featuring underserved audiences to see who they could pick up. I won’t say the execution has been flawless - it has not.

The product and the market had been so homogenized that said audience had already built welcome corners, and are still wary of spaces finally offering them a hand after decades of passive and aggressive exclusion. By and large, they are attempting to retrofit a system that was decidedly insular in its outreach, and the movement is rightfully slow. But rest assured, these attempts would stop dead in their tracks if these companies haven’t been finding meaningful points of success. A lack of progress on an anecdotal front - even if you might be one of the largest purchasers in the direct market - is still a small data point.

---

And in regard’s to Phil’s fifth point:

5. Tell stories without proselytizing.  I’ve beat this drum for a decade and more but here we are, chasing away a large portion of our customer base with every new tale as they want entertainment, not a serialized sermon.

Ah, right. The grand tradition of the big two never proselytizing, dating back to, uh… never? Let’s say never.

I bet Marvel got letters when they had Captain America punch Hitler on the cover of a comic book. With the benefit of hindsight, we can forget about things like the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in the days before America finally joined WWII. That’s not a thing we’d do today, right? We wouldn’t actively choose our own comfort in front of taking a stance for the humanity of our fellow human beings? We wouldn’t use art to say something about hardships felt by those around us? We wouldn’t be asked to empathize with folks who don’t share our own experiences with the world?

There is nothing in this world more cravenly false than the idea of “art without purpose or intent”. The very act of creation is a statement of intent - a means to communicate complex ideas.

Personally, I have long been of the opinion that subtly has not done its job. Do we watch a Star War and hand-wring about it being Antifa? When you look at it, the messaging isn’t that subtle, but at the end of the day, the whole series from the jump is a rejection of fascist ideals. Anti-fascist. And yet, there’s this constant creep in society to bring us closer to those ideals, almost cyclically, without thought.

We get here through inaction. We see force in our art against this kind of garbage in times when it is needed most. There’s too much to be said about this in a far more nuanced way, but I’ll admit, I’m in no state to do that at the moment, so I’ll leave that sitting there for now.

---

Now, for the housekeeping.

I’ve been gone for a while. Somewhat darkly, the inciting reason is traditional at this point: I lost someone recently.

Late last year, I was at family Christmas. One of my cousins had been doing poorly for years. She was colouring with the younger members of our family, lamenting about the days to come.

“I’m not going to make it another year,” she said, filling a space in with purple. For some reason, I remember the colour clearly, “And I have a cat.”

She went on to explain that this cat was a sweetie. My cousin wanted to know if the time came, if Danica and I could be a home for her sweet girl. I told her we would do what we could. We already had four cats, and another would be difficult - but worst case, we’d be able to find an amazing home for her.

In July, I got the message. I was asked to pick up Kitty Kat and be at least a temporary home for her. I drove down to Central Alberta and met up with my Auntie and my cousin and had a bit of lunch. Kitty Kat was in the yard, attached to a leash and a grounding stake so she could roam a bit. She greeted my cautiously, not exactly knowing who I was.

Over a chunk of time, I talked with my cousin and my aunt about how they were doing. My cousin excused herself to go to sleep for a bit, and my Aunt and I continued to talk, until I decided I should probably pack some things up before nabbing the cat and driving her home.

Which is when I noticed the leash and collar, lying on the ground, without the cat. She had squeezed out of her harness, and absconded while no one was paying attention to her.

Obviously there was a bit of a panic. My aunt went to wake up my cousin and the three of us were on a search. After a quick look around the yard and a talk with a neighbour to keep an eye out, I took a look at the deck we had been sitting on during lunch, and realized there was a way you could crawl up and under the whole ass deck.

I went close to a potion of the siding, and spoke up into one of the gaps: “Kitty Kat?”

Pretty much instantly (and scaring the absolute heck out of me), Kitty Kat made herself known, with an appearance of her face and paws, and a hiss. She had managed to get herself stuck under the deck, and she was scared.

It took some time, but I ended up pulling a bit of the deck siding out, all the while Kitty Kat hissed and slashed in fear. She wasn’t quite sure what was happening. Eventually, we got a chunk open, but Kitty Kat had pushed herself deep under the deck.

The deck was a tight space. My cousin couldn’t fit under. I offered to go under, but my 65+ year old aunt wouldn’t hear of it.

“Besides,” she said, “She’s scared, and she knows who I am.”

She crawled underneath the thing, and when she got close, Kitty Kat calmed down. She carried her out, purring - a big adventure at an end. She was safe.

My cousin was distraught. A piece of it was the ordeal, but a lot of it was the fact that she was about to say goodbye. She held her cat for a bit before Kitty Kat was put in the cat carrier that would get her to her new home. There was no protesting on Kitty Kat’s part. Despite everything, she was calm.

The long ride home was quiet. When Kitty Kat got home, she made herself scarce. For the first few days, she reacted very much like she did under the deck. This place was strange. There were weird cats (that we introduced to her slowly, over time). This wasn’t home.

But… over time, she found comfort. She swiftly mixed with the cats and ended up on decent terms with all of them - which is a feat, because we keep pairs of them separate for fight reasons.² And boy, did she remind me of my cousin.

My cousin and I… didn’t always get along. She didn’t get along with a lot of folks, off and on. She felt to much, and sometimes, that was good. Sometimes, that was bad. Either way, she was extremely vocal about where she was in life.

After a fairly short period of time, as Kitty Kat’s real personality bloomed in the house, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to let her go - in part, because she reminded me of family… and I definitely wasn’t ready for one of my cousins to be gone.

---

My cousin ended up passing in late August. I sent her pictures of her cat settling in nearly every day, right up until just after my mom sent a message saying that things were coming to an end.

I sent her all the fresh pictures I could find. We were at an outdoor Prozac concert - “Strange Disease” providing the soundtrack to some frantic typing. I’m not actually sure she saw them. The message was marked as “read” but my family had access while all this was happening. I really hope she did.

Before her passing, we made it clear that Kitt was staying. We started calling her Kitt, because it was a take on the name my cousin gave her, and it fit with our house full of mono-syllabic cat names.³ We showed how Kitt was settling, hopefully giving my cousin another bit of calm while things progressed.

---

This year has been a lot.

I think once you become an adult, that just remains a status quo. It isn’t enough to just simply be. The world continually shifts and because you are progressively aging and supposedly getting wiser, you are expected to meet these moments of adversity with grace.

You can’t collapse. That isn’t adult. You can’t falter. What are you, a child? Things can be terrible, but you must be better than them. What would people think of you if you weren’t?

If dealing with idiot comic retailers has taught me anything, it’s that you can still be a stupid baby in context. If you present a solid front, and blame all your problems on external forces with a stiff face, people will assume that you’re an adult.

But you’re still a baby. We all are.

We all want the world to be simple. We all want the things to be easy.

Couldn’t it be like it used to? When the things were easy, and I didn’t have to make an effort? Of course that would be great. But the world doesn’t stay the same. It grows. Circumstances change. Your industry shifts from your level of comfort. You slowly say good-bye to people who helped carve you into the person you are. You end up with five cats.

None of this is easy, you see. But I don’t think being an adult means you pretend like it is all okay. I think being an adult means you look at circumstance with empathy. I think it means you approach situations in good faith. I think it means you can admit your faults and your triumphs, and ply them with reality.

I am a comic book retailer.

I do not expect to be rich, at any point in my life. Currently, I am comfortable. Tomorrow, I hope to be.

I extend my circumstance to the people around me. When I look at the decisions that publishers make, I assume they don’t want to destroy me. They just want to survive.

Everyone just wants to survive.

I will never see the malice that folks like Phil Boyle sees. I don’t think I have that kind of thing in me. Even when him and his ilk batter me when I state my piece in retailer spaces, I get frustrated, but I can say with a clear mind that I don’t hate them. They are lashing out, trying to find reason, and willing to strike at anything external that they can find.

I would like to believe I have a clear mind about the world. I’m not optimistic about it at this point, that’s why I have a hard time placating folks who want special boy treatment from corporations. I would bet my entire kingdom that the folks working in the comic trenches at Marvel and DC and every damn company out there want us all to live and eat and enjoy comics. The further you get to the top? And I mean “Disney/Warners” top? Maybe not so much.

But I’ll never spite a person for trying to live. I can disagree with them and wish for better, but to outright tell them they’re plotting to destroy their industry is folly. If anything, they’re trying to save it from the capitalism creep that comes for us all.

The truth of comics doesn’t make us rich, after all. It makes us happy. Or at least I’d like to think so.

Anyway, here’s some pictures of Kit.

I think she’s doing fine.

Thanks for sticking around.

Talk with you soon.

-B.

1. He’s also the kind of weirdo who pops a “double space” after a period. Have you ever read a book? I don’t understand why people think it is okay to live that way.

2. We love our babies, but they don’t all get along all the time. Also, for any “tut tut” folks out there, yes. We’re suckers for cats, and we can’t say “no” when a pal or family is in need and their cat needs a home. This is how you end up with so many cats, when you truly just want two.

3. Jim, Max, Joy and Squee, for anyone wondering.