Robert Kirkman Mission Statement: Fix Comic Industry

Do you agree with Robert Kirkman?

  • Yes, I agree.

    Votes: 9 50.0%

  • No, I don't think he's right.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • I am Undecided.

    Votes: 3 16.7%

  • While I may agree, his method isn't something I'd go with.

    Votes: 6 33.3%
  • Total voters
    18
While I do think Kirkman is on the right path, I don't agree with his methods, and I find it ironic he's done such about face on Marvel/DC since his partnership with Image was announced

the guy comes off making MARVEL ZOMBIES for christ sake, and now he's flying the red flag of war.

I don't buy it.
 
Ice said:
This should be interesting:

Wordballoon: BMB on Robert Kirkman.
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Wow. If you're going to spend 30-45 minutes talking about what someone else has said, you may want to actually go ahead and LISTEN to what they said. They spend much of the interview with Siuntres trying to tell Bendis that Kirkman never said his career wasn't going anywhere, but that Bendis is never going to leave Marvel so no one can replace him for the foreseeable future and explaining that Kirkman is not advocating that every creator leave Marvel and DC just those who are "breathing rarefied air" as the top tier of comic book creators whose name alone can sell a book. But Bendis ignores him and blathers on into a prepared argument about how quickly Kirkman has forgotten the boost in sales and readership he got from his association with Marvel comics. Which would be a valid point if Kirkman hadn't specifically said that creators should go to Marvel and DC to make a name for themselves before leaving for the greener pastures of creator owned work. I find the fact that they conducted an entire interview without making sure Bendis had actually listened to what Kirkman said in the last interview to be incredibly "dopey".

In a related note, it astonishes me that no one in the industry can so much as whisper BMBs name without him responding to it on the internet in three hours time. The man writes 30 comics a month, where the hell does he find the time?
 
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I don't think Kirkman was necessarily demanding that ever single creator follow him to the promise land. That'd be dumb.

His creator owned work has been great but I'd love it if Grant Morrison kept writing mostly superhero books the rest of his career. He's good at it and it something he really enjoys.

But the funny thing is that Bendis is exactly the kind of writer who would probably benefit from getting away from all the damn Marvel books for a while and doing something else.
McCheese said:
In a related note, it astonishes me that no one in the industry can so much as whisper BMBs name without him responding to it on the internet in three hours time. The man writes 30 comics a month, where the hell does he find the time?
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Psshh.

Warren Ellis writes 9 comics, 3 film scripts, 14 blog posts, 37 Twitter updates, and a novel before breakfast.
 
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Skott Kurtz's response to Kirkman's call out.

In defense of Robert Kirkman
August 21st, 2008

Full disclosure: Robert Kirkman is my friend. I consider him to be a close friend. So anything I say in his defense will and should be taken in this context.

Last week Robert posted a video editorial; a call to arms if you will. He offered his thoughts on how to bring more life into the comic book industry and possibly save it from a even downward spinning market. His idea was twofold:

1) Top creators at Marvel and DC should think seriously about their future after the market no longer considers them popular. They should start investing their creative energies into creator owned properties now before Marvel, DC and the market decide their time in the spotlight has passed. Graduate from a successful freelance career at the big two into creator owned work WHILE you're hot.

2) Marvel and DC start making their comics more accessible with less continuity and event-oriented gimmicks in order to remain competitive with this new crop of creator-owned comics. New creators can step up and seize the opportunity to transform Spider-Man, Batman and Superman into books that are more viable for younger generations to get invested in.

This could lead to a reinvigorated comic book industry with new comics, new ideas, and more importantly…new readers. A lot of people are responding to this on comic book news sites and they're taking Robert to task. Brian Michael Bendis had this to say:

"I understand that I am one of the very few people that can do creator owned work and do mainstream work and find some success creatively in both fields…but having experienced what I have through comics, and being a little older than Robert, I can look back and can say at this level of play that I'm at and Robert is at, to ignore the fact that part of your audience came from Marvel is a mistake I hope he doesn't learn the bad way."

I see lines being drawn here between freelancers and independent creators and it really frustrates me because I personally don't see that as the issue at hand. The issue at hand is this: for the industry to survive, it's creators have to be able to survive. The heart of this industry is making it a viable career choice for the creative men and women who fuel it. And I'm not 100% sure that Marvel or DC are the best choices of a retirement plan.

When Mike Wieringo died, he was working for Marvel and he had no significant savings and no health insurance. When I visited him in 2005, he was sleeping on a chair at night because his back pain was so bad but he couldn't lie down in bed. I asked him to go see a doctor about it and he put that off for a week because of no health insurance. He had one creator owned project under his belt and wished to return to that world. But he didn't know how to make that transition without missing house and car payments. He felt trapped. That's not something I'm assuming. That's something we discussed at length.

For god's sake, we start charitable organizations to provide for creators, giants in our industry, who have been abandoned by the market. Think about how it ended for Dave Cockrum. Bringing Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler to life did not provide for him in the end. Once you as a creator, have used up all of your draw and panache with the market at large, once you stop being the hot thing, Marvel and DC will cut you loose and forget about you forever. They will move on to the next hot creator and they won't give two ****s about how you make your next house payment.

Right now, the only real retirement plan that creators have are their own properties. In 20 or 30 years let's compare how Mike Mignola and an equally popular company man without an established creator owned title are doing. I promise you the company man will be struggling and Mignola will be sitting pretty on Hellboy residuals.

Certainly, life as a freelancer for Marvel or DC can be a good and rewarding one. Obviously it's possible to freelance and pay for your own insurance and plan for the future with savings. But how can advising creators to establish their own creator-owned properties NOW while they're popular be consider bad or petty advice? How can anyone **** on that?

I think it's a pretty solid sentiment.
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boatty3.jpg

:lol:
 
Grant Morrison said:
I suppose I'm slightly amused by the reformer's zeal with which each new generation approaches the problem of 'saving' comics. It reminds me of humanity's charming, self-regarding notion that it's our job to 'save' a planet which has survived fine without us through several mass extinction events, climactic overhauls and planetary disasters.

I've been listening to people talk about 'saving' the 'industry' for over 20 years while comics have continued to be published and have, in fact, become better, to the point where the only conclusion I've come to is that comics are best 'saved' by sealing them in Mylar bags! Everything else is just messianic inflation. Just do good books and stop trying to be the savior of a whole medium that's been doing okay without you and will continue long after you're gone.

Yes, I think Kirkman's right, in that I'd like to see more of our creative community unleashing their wild imaginations onto the page and less of the obvious 'movie pitch on paper stuff' that's come about recently as a result of comic creators chasing the Hollywood dollar but I don't have a problem with writers and artists working on Marvel and DC properties if they enjoy it. I'd rather read a good Green Lantern story by someone who cares than work my way through a 'creator-owned' project that's been created solely to appeal to lowest-common-denominator movie executives.

Otherwise, he's possibly being slightly disingenuous by issuing this 'call to arms' at a time when, to be honest, I can't think of any significant comic book writer for Marvel or DC who doesn't have creator work on the go. Apart from Geoff Johns, who's told me he much prefers writing DC superhero books, everyone else - me, Warren Ellis, Mark Millar, JMS, Garth Ennis, Matt Fraction, Brian Bendis, Kurt Busiek, etc etc - seems to be hard at work creating new properties, so I'm not entirely sure where the problem lies.
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thought that was interesting....
 
except, as it has been said before, Kirkman isn't really talking about just writers... Writers can do that, they are lucky... they can do 5 or 6 (or 30 if your Bendis) books at a time... it's the artists I think he is looking at the most.
 
AnTwan said:
except, as it has been said before, Kirkman isn't really talking about just writers... Writers can do that, they are lucky... they can do 5 or 6 (or 30 if your Bendis) books at a time... it's the artists I think he is looking at the most.
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Um, well, for every writer that's working on an indie book, there has to be an artist too.
 
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