A Couple Of Notes On Marvel’s Firings From Last Week

Heidi MacDonald suggests via context and testimony that Marvel letting go staffers last week is part of an entrenched tradition of severe attention to costs in the post-1990s, post-bankruptcy era. This would explain not only last week's baffling-in-any-era-but-this-one moves but recent Marvel strategy regarding hires and even things like adamantly not settling with the Kirby family despite the massive windfall of cash for the company over the last dozen years and the benefits to Marvel that could come with such an overture. This is a terrible time to press any point, as a few nice folks out there face a new work week looking for employment, but it's always worth noting even when it makes us uncomfortable that there are differences in how different companies are run, and how creators and staff either share in or fail to share in increased profits to which they obviously contributed seems to me like it should be a primary standard concerning how we view such companies.

As a side note, I'm additionally glad whenever news of general comics parsimony comes to light because despite its culture of self-deprecating wisecracks the comics industry has a bit of a longstanding problem in terms of a realistic conversation about the rewards and benefits that may greet people that choose to work there. That's pretty much everywhere in comics, from the idea that any newspaper comic strip with a book collection is suddenly making Garfield money to the fact that people already employed elsewhere in an equivalent position will apply for a comics job only to flee in horror when salary gets discussed to the notion that a dominant image for cash rewards in comics comes from the Image bonanza of nearly twenty years ago. I think it's good to know that while there are areas in comics in which a very good living can be had, and even staff positions where employers are generous with perks and benefits and salaries, there are other areas where your idea of how things function may not match how they actually work.

MacDonald also wrote in to make fun of me for my calling Marvel's moves one of the first negative outcomes of the media-conglomerate-marriage age of these companies when so many at DC Comics lost their jobs in their split-the-offices restructuring several months ago. I hope she won't mind my saying that, because she's right. My automatic recall for events of the last few years kind of sucks these days, but MacDonald's 100 percent correct that in making that formulation I should have mentioned that massive, initial disruption at DC, no matter how it was papered over by NDAs and general press stonewalling.

I think the difference between the two, or why this one stings in a particular way that didn't automatically recall DC's moves, is that what Marvel did last week was readily described by those that pay closest attention to that part of the industry as a cost-cutting measure rather than as a needed restructuring of some sort. The nakedness of that description was unsettling to me, at least, and it's not something that I recall was done with DC's even now that my pea-sized brain is forced to recall that reduction of staff and elimination of at least one entire office. As CR's coverage of the newspaper industry's free fall might suggest, I actually have a bit of sympathy for restructuring moves in the new media era. It's hard to know in some cases where there are redundancies or entrenched, non-productive people that were protected by tradition and reliable profit margins, particularly as the landscape shifts underneath each industry's feet. It's hard to fully believe that a 1980s-style publishing staff is automatically the best set-up to meet whatever additional challenges are coming in the twenty-teens. That said, the Marvel moves last week seemed of a different kind entirely, openly concerned with meeting profit expectations and individually questionable in terms of long-term strategy in a way that maybe should make people shiver, if only a tiny bit, when thinking about these massive corporations' long-term commitments to high-cost/high-reward publishing.
 
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