What If?
by Frank Santoro
Sunday, March 7, 2010
What if Disney does away with the culture of freelance lifers at Marvel Comics and replaces pencillers and inkers with animators and storyboard artists?
WHAT IF? What if Disney takes control of the characters from the Marvel brass and assigns their own artists/animators to work on some properties like Iron Man or Spider-Man? Like what if they start developing a whole strategy around releasing a comic series that is intended be an animated series and also a live action movie? (And an iphone comic, etc, etc.) I just think that the parent company will eventually start orchestrating whole events around the launch of high profile projects and sort of blur the lines a little between what is a comic and what is an animated movie and who works on them. As it is now, it’s still the old system: there is a comic that fans love and then there is a movie version that many of the original fans despise because it is not true to the comic, the original text. I can imagine a comic that is developed at the same time as an animation or as a live action movie – which as Avatar has shown can be the same thing: animation and live action.
Or they could take the whole Silver Surfer* saga from the beginning, use all that written material and relaunch the comic using Disney animators who would streamline the storyboard process and skip over that awkward transition from comic book to animation, or from comic book to live action. Meaning replace pencillers with animators who are more suited to work with cgi effects because they understand how things move on the screen. Everyone working together planning for each stage of development.
I mentioned this all to Dan and he asked why I would think that Disney would want to do away with freelancers and pay health benefits to move full time animators over to the “comics department”. Then he said that Disney’s animation department is in production year round and that they wouldn’t have anyone to spare to make comics. He also said that that Marvel doesn’t have to make money now, that the new comics being published are just one big pile of development ideas. And beyond that Disney now has 50 years of material to plumb. They don’t need to do anything like what I am proposing. And I agree. A little bit. My pipedream, however, is that with specific projects they might just create a team of “comics people” and animators to work together to make a seamless launch. Sort of like the Kick-Ass comic/movie. Just add one more step. Instead of using someone like Romita,Jr. to pencil the book, it’s a storyboard-slash-comics artist like a Darywn Cooke and then that artist leads the team that creates the animated movie. I know, I know, New Frontier was sort of like that but I mean that it all comes out at once or is staggered in a way that keeps interest in the project. Silver Surfer comic, Silver Surfer animation and Silver Surfer live action staggered across a calendar year.
Forgive me, True Believers, if you are reading this and thinking “Yah, but that would never happen because…” Humor me. This is my own issue of What If?…
*UPDATE: A commenter below points out that the Surfer is tied up legally with Fox. So substitute in your favorite classic character who is not tied up legally with another studio and try and imagine what I’m speculating on here… thanks.
Labels: Disney, late-nite blogging, Marvel
Disney owned its own comics imprint close to 20 years ago. Mostly it continued Gladstone’s habit of re-publishing contemporary European-created comics as well as occasional Dell/Gold Key reprints while also commissioning new US-created work on its classic characters. It also produced comics tie-ins to its own then-new movie characters but didn’t really try to do what you’re suggesting. Of course that was then under much different leadership, so who knows what could happen now? (I think Heidi McDonald and Len Wein were among those involved) Personally I think the big mistake Disney always makes with its comics, no matter who is publishing them, is not selling them at the theme parks and Disney stores.
Hey Michael — this is off Frank’s topic, I know, but just wanted to let you know that Disney comics indeed ARE available in both the Parks and Disney Stores! Selections may vary depending on where you are, of course, just like any store, but Disney comics are available far and wide in the U.S.
Instead of comics people working on animation, will you settle for an animation guy working on live action? Favreau hired Genndy Tartakovsky to design the action scenes for Iron Man 2, sort of a humble admission that most of the action scenes in Iron Man 1 were not very good.
We probably have to wait a few years to see how much interest Disney actually has in Marvel’s print division. I always figured their first priority, if they ever have one, would be to design products to be sold among children’s/young adults’ books, rather than in Direct Market shops. Their first priority after that would be to use those books to promote the feature films they’re pumping $150+ million into.
Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Marvel theatrical features are going to be live action, not animated. Any animation is going to Disney XD. There’s a new Avengers cartoon premiering there in the Fall, specifically intended to promote the Avengers film coming in 2012.
Pixar will probably get to make a Marvel movie at some point, but it won’t be animated. John Carter of Mars is probably a prototype for a type of film they’ll make for Disney with increasing frequency: live action with heavy CG elements, especially CG characters. Maybe they’ll do Guardians of the Galaxy.
The film rights for Silver Surfer still belong to Fox, as part of the Fantastic Four package. LET THE DREAM DIE. Anyone still holding the rights to Marvel characters is going to cling to them as tightly as they can. The initial announcement of the Disney/Marvel deal conjured an instant vision of a Brad Bird Fantastic Four movie. 24 hours later, Fox announced they were throwing FF to Akiva “Batman and Robin” Goldsman for a “reboot.”
They will launch this New Marvel with great fanfare only to see it slowly lose an audience. Then after a couple of years of bad press they will launch Marvel Classic… to everyone’s cheers and positive press.
just like CocaCola!
For now, I’m sure they’ll leave Marvel the way it is, but I can see them coming in and telling the publishing arm that they need to have adaptations of their cartoons (like the new Avengers cartoon) so that they can sell them in the Disney stores and theme parks. If Steve Jobs, who is consulting on the Disney store redesign, comes in and says we don’t have nearly enough boy merchandise, they’re going to start taking a harder look at Marvel. That may only mean things like toys and clothes, but considering these characters originated in comics, I could see Disney wanting to put the comics in kids’ hands.
[…] lifers at Marvel Comics and replaces pencillers and inkers with animators and storyboard artists?" [Comics Comics] First Wave […]
IF ONLY. That surfer in the FF movie was super disappointing, and I don’t even want to talk about the CGI travesty that they called Galactus. If I could dream I’d hope for an animated version of Kirby’s 2001.
1) Once Disney undoes the Universal contract, then they can start promoting Marvel at the theme parks. (I’m thinking another “world” at Orlando, separate from the Magic Kingdom and Epcot.)
2) Comic books are hard to merchandise. Better to stock trades.
3) Disney has successfully done this sort of thing already: W.I.T.C.H. Their Italian studio developed this property, drew the comics, animated the cartoon. In Europe, the Disney machine is well-oiled.
Much of what gets produced by Disney comics europe is studio based. Not much different from Marvel US. The current stories from BOOM! are euro stories.
4) Personally, animators who self-publish tend to make great comics. The character designs are better, the page layout is easy to follow, the storytelling is well told.
However… industrial animation is a mixed bag. Much of what is on TV is pretty bad.
However, if John Lasseter is in charge, things could improve.
5) Here in the U.S., cartoons=kids. Why make a live-action movie which would tie-in with a cartoon on DisneyXD? An extreme example: Super Hero Squad. Would you watch a live-action movie of little people (or CGI avatars) as super heroes, using the same style of humor?
6) There’s a lot of stuff which hasn’t settled yet: CrossGen, Kingdom Comics, BOOM, Slave Labor… We’ll see what happens this Winter with Tron. That could be a good brand for boys.
7) Compare and contrast with DC Entertainment and Johnny DC.
Having worked for big conglomerates my whole life (Viacom, Time Warner, GE), I think your guess or “what if” about Disney/Marvel and Time Warner/DC seems like a totally natural fit.
I don’t know if the corporate buzz word “synergy” is being used ubiquitously as it has been in the past, but the idea that the branding of these characters should match on all media platforms, and be timed to specific launches in a finite time period makes perfect corporate sense to me.
The Spider-Man in the comics should match the Spider-Man in the animated series should match the Spider-Man in the theatrical releases should match the Spider-Man on the Disneyland Ride, etc and all should exist around the same timeframe for maximum brand exposure.
That said, if anyone corporate decides to look at the actual numbers and dollars of these comics, they’re going to realize that Spider-Man pencils make more money. I don’t know how much they’ll really care about the comic book product other than “match the brand” and “don’t fuck it up” so we can make a billion dollars off of a homogenous film product.
Kinda like that Garth Ennis/Nick Fury/George Clooney fuck-up fiasco, you know? That won’t happen again.
Which leads me to believe that even though Geoff Johns is part of the new DC Time-Warner Pentagon, I would find it hard to believe they’ll allow the continuation of all of the too-sexy, too-violent nature of those books for much longer. Maybe I’m wrong and that’s just my subjective taste speaking, but my guess is that DC will return to less titillating, middle of the road, standard superhero stories. You know, for the kids!
Natch for Marvel.
Excelsior!
Jonathan