Go, Read: Kiel Phegley at CBR Talks To Marvel’s Dan Buckley

Today's mainstream comics executive taking the major interview plunge is Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, who talks to Kiel Phegley in this first of a planned two-parter over at CBR. I think it's a much better showing from Buckley than similar pieces I can recall from 2009 and 2010. I've been joking elsewhere about that site's employment of the word "exclusive" with italics as a sales point in presenting the interview, but I think it's sort of worth noting in serious fashion, too. That the leading comics news site is using the occasion of this kind of interview to draw distinctions between itself and its competitors -- that it's splitting the interview into two parts even -- underlines the fact that such interviews aren't only important for their content and the exchange of ideas but as items through which Marvel and the people that score such interviews do business.

Phegley does a nice job of beating on Marvel with the DC stick; you could make a joke that the interviewer sounds like he's dating Marvel's competitor its recent successes come up so frequently. Buckley does his best work trying to convince that Marvel cutting its line and emphasizing top titles by doing more than 12 issues a year with certain comics is a strategic move designed to best serve the nature of today's market; this not only justifies those strategies but helps explain away recent perceived Marvel slippage as a failure by the company to enact such strategies as effectively as they should. Buckley also has a nice line about Marvel's output vs. DC's output, although I wasn't aware that anyone was really suggesting Marvel was out-publishing DC on an eight to five ratio. The publisher's display of patience with Marvel's strategy of simply telling the stories it wants to tell as best as it can tell them, in trusting the content to bear Marvel through whatever relatively tough times exist, will likely buttress the spirits of some and deflate hopes a few others may have had that Marvel has a strategic or infrastructure-related ace or two up its sleeve.

Buckley is much less persuasive when it comes to articulating some of the details and implications of general Marvel strategy. I imagine there's a fine line to walk between extolling the virtues of a company's willingness to try a variety of digital strategies and looking like a company is just flinging stuff at the wall to see what sticks; Buckley does not make it any easier to see that line. If character death isn't a specific plot/sales point with grim implications and a limited shelf life but just another storytelling-driven outcome among many, what are the other storytelling points that worked the same way as Marvel killing off two of its prominent characters in 2011? Because I don't remember that media coverage or those sales bumps. At what point is focusing on major titles and giving the market what it will bear smart strategy, and at what point is it an admission that Marvel no longer has the ability it once had to shape the market in a way that serves a broader range of publishing goals, long-term plans, and character development aims? Gabriel also doesn't have a convincing answer for the price-point issue beyond the usual "hey, those comics we do that with sell, man" take, which I suggest doesn't take into account all the ways pricing your material at a higher point can have long-term effects on the marketplace and a specific company's place within it.
 
posted 1:40 am PST | Permalink
 

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