Go, Read: On Marvel Ending Any UK New Comics Production

Here's a story that seems to have bloomed in the blind spots of my on-line comics reading: Marvel has apparently decreed they will no longer allow new work to be produced for the Marvel magazines distributed in the UK. As one of the few places for off-brand Marvel comics work, the Marvel UK material has been a valuable resource in terms of generating quirky comics material for the audience picking up those magazine featuring Marvel material, including work in the magazine kind of orphaned by Marvel proper in a sense during the 1990s upheaval. It's one of those decisions where you kind of get it -- Marvel's in the brand management business now, and there are elements at those companies closer to the core business that might not care for a counter-voice, no matter how modest -- while at the same time you might appreciate that there was this kind of Marvel side door out there.

A couple of the pieces e-mailed to me -- here and here -- seem to be framing this general cease and desist as a specific loss for comics aimed at kids. I'm not certain I follow the reasoning here, as I'm not sure how those kinds of comics were specifically the result of a semi-independent creative outlet like those generated in the "Marvel UK" books. Heck, I can't even ascertain how many comics we're talking about that fulfill this kid-friendly role. I'm also not certain why moving forward this kind of structure is necessary for Marvel to value and generate comics for kids if they wanted to. If they wanted to. It seems to me more like a peripheral issue from which you can derive some righteous heat. Furthermore, while I think it's a peripheral issue with significant weight and import, I think both writers ascribe a motivation to drive fans to publishing that probably doesn't exist anymore. In other words, new Marvel-related kids cartoons for Disney networks don't seem to me uniquely designed to drive kids to the comic books later on in any way, and to judge them as unlikely to do so seems really old-fashioned and presumes the companies share this concern. My guess is that Marvel would be perfectly happy if the kids watching the cartoons remained fans of Marvel cartoons and movies and toys and licensing and never, ever picked up a comic book, in the same way that the makers of James Bond movies don't seem particularly concerned with driving traffic to the Ian Fleming prose works.

That disagreement beside, I join those critics in being generally sad when creative avenues become limited rather than expanded upon, even as much as I understand why this is done. You can definitely argue that this is an overall creative loss, and that it even might run counter to where things are going in the future. In fact, I think there's a lot of room for companies like these to open up certain corners of their universes to outright open interpretation and untethered creative contributions in addition to secondary creative and editorial cultures like the one they're snuffing out here.
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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