More Industry Speculation - Will Marvel Lose its Fire?

This is an addendum to the piece I wrote yesterday about Marvel. I was just thinking about it today and realized that there are a whole bunch of points I forgot to talk about in that already overly long article.

So here we go. More fun with industry speculation that will most likely be wrong anyways.

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The most obvious analogy I can give for the way Marvel is operating today, in terms of creative output, the working creators, and the working business model, is the way DC operated in the 80's.

Think about it. Back in the 80's DC had all the coolest creators: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, John Byrne, Peter Milligan...

...who am I forgetting? There might be a few others. I can't remember all of them.

They were all revamping books left and right. Gaiman's SANDMAN, Moore's SWAMP THING, Miller's work on Batman, etc. etc. There were even newer original works by creators, like Miller's RONIN, and the most obvious, Moore's WATCHMEN. All were highly successful, highly critically acclaimed. Hell, even artsy fartsy guys like Scott McCloud hold Moore and Gaiman's work at DC to be some of the best work produced in the medium.

Slowly, however, the creators (with the exception of Grant Morrison) all left. Some goodbyes were like messy breakups and had a lot of mean words exchanged, while some just seemed to get better offers elsewhere and didn't look back. But if there was any one single unified grievance, it was this:

Creator rights.

No matter how much fun a writer is having with editorial leeway and the revamping of a character, no matter how much a creator is being paid to do corporate work - in the end, they never feel all that great about losing ownership of the characters and icons they create for the corporate books.

Fast forward 20 years to the present and we're in the same situation. Marvel has all the Eisner winning creators, they're doing revamps left and right, sales are good, smiles all around...

...but is it just me, or is there a ghost about to rear its ugly head? Somewhere along the line this issue of creator rights has to pop up. When I was talking to Daniel Way, he mentioned that editors keep pushing the writers to create new characters and none of the writers want to do it, because not only do the creations belong to the company, but even the content in the pitches belongs to Marvel.

Come to think of it, this would probably explain why Terry Moore is doing work for Marvel and not creating something new. I've said in the past it would be pretty awesome if he wrote something just like STRANGERS IN PARADISE but taking place in the Marvel U, but why the hell would he bother creating a book for Marvel when he could create a book for another company and retain full ownership?

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So here is my theory for all of this:

Some of the big name writers are out. I mentioned Kirkman, but I forgot to mention Brian K. Vaughan. He's done great work for the company, but now he's a huge name, has a lot of critical acclaim - he doesn't need the Marvel paycheck or the name boost. I am willing to bet he'll never be doing any work for Marvel again.

Then there's Warren Ellis. He seems pretty entrenched, doing a whole bunch of books for them. But do you think he'll honestly stick around if any of his Avatar books break the 30 or 40k mark in sales? Hell no.

It's only a matter of time before many other of these creators start to make decent sales on their creator owned books and take off. Think about it - the pay is better and most of the writers claim they have more fun doing it. It's a no brainer, huh?

My take on all of this is that in the coming few years, it's going to be hit then split for creators at Marvel. Once their creator owned books become hits, that's it - they're gone.

Again - I could be completely wrong about this.

(In fact, that's most likely the case)