Comic Writing Virtuoso Anticipates Industry Wide Crash

Acclaimed writer Mark Millar, famous for his groundbreaking works The Authority, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates, recently wrote a piece detailing his interesting and eerily accurate prediction that the current comic book industry boom is headed for a cyclical bust.

I looked into the figures a little more, examining the market for the previous two generations and noticed that the peaks and troughs formed what was essentially a sine-graph going back to the dawn of the Golden Age in 1935. We had a peak in the 40s, a trough in the 50s, a peak in the 60s, a trough in the 70s and so on until we hit the worst trough of all in the mid-90s when the market suffered the nastiest collapse in our publishing history. The pattern seemed to be record highs (in terms of revenue and creator salaries) immediately followed by record lows where Chicken Littles everywhere predicted the death of the medium as a whole. And so, as the FINAL DEMANDS piled up on my desk and absolutely no work was to be found for long periods of time in the '90s, my friends and I consoled ourselves with the notion that we'd only have to tighten our belts for, er, a few years and things would be just peachy again when the pick-up of 2005 and beyond got into full swing.

Anyone "lucky" enough to have lived through the button-fly, Liefeld, gold lame'/foil sparkle covers of the nineties can flinchingly remember the most recent crash and perhaps even peer into their closet to find a dusty old box of shattered dreams splayed across five different covers all labeled #1. This time around we, again, have a number of incredibly talented people making some books that will hopefully be cherished decades from now and yet Millar believes a financial and creative crisis looms in the distance…

Like I've said many times, comics tend to move in twenty years cycles. Twenty years after Crisis and Secret War we have Infinite Crisis and Civil War at the top of the charts. Where were are right now, in market terms, is very close to 1986, right down to the numbers where the initial printings on Dark Knight and Watchmen are almost identical to our big books now and the frenzied re-order activity eerily accurate too. Like 1986, we also have a phenomenal number of talented people in the biz and I would say, especially among the writers, that we have MORE right now than we had back then. I don't think anyone's reached the giddy creative heights of a Dark Knight or a Watchmen recently, but some have come close and it's clear to see why the market (especially the big two) have made such significant gains in terms of growth year-on-year since the turn of the millennium. It's an exciting time to be in this business.

Everything may seem just fine and dandy now but Millar begins to pinpoint the impending Kryptonite-like killer of our present day comic loving orgy. He pinpoints both the rise and impending fall on the creatively ravenous vultures in Hollywood! Why are they always to blame?!

Good comics means good sales, right? But there's one factor I'd never taken into account. Something that just hit me a couple of days ago and that was that the very thing that helped us in recent years. The huge boost of money and interest injected into the comic-market is exactly what might prove our demise a little less than a decade from now.

And that, my friends, is Hollywood.

You will find no bigger cheerleader than me for the impact Hollywood has had on the industry. It's brought in a whole new wave of readers whose first experience of X-Men and Wolverine was Bryan Singer and Hugh Jackman. It's made it possible for comic pros to avoid mainstream superheroes if they desire and still make a good living with the number of indie books being snapped up and the symbiotic growth of their brands whether it's Hellboy, Sin City or Max Allen Collins Road to Perdition books. But the fact that Hollywood knows where we ARE now is both thrilling and terrifying: Because the poaching has begun and many of our favourite creators are going to be disappearing over the next few years.

Who can blame these creative bastards? Anyone with a wife, kids, and an addiction to bald eagle egg omelets would gladly take the once in a lifetime offers Hollywood is throwing at them. Instead of reaching thousands for tiny satchels of pennies, they’re able to inspire a handful of Hollywood types with storyboard sketches that will inevitably be altered to amuse the lowest common denominator of humanity!

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