Aw, C’mon!

Originally published May 14, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1330

Some assorted notions, thoughts and such:

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I’m instituting a new, very occasional feature in the column: The “Aw, C’mon!” Award. This is an award presented on no kind of set schedule, but just every time that something strikes me as deserving it.

This time around, the “Aw, C’mon!” Award goes to the Terry Brooks novelization of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It’s not for the book itself: I haven’t read it yet—and won’t until after I’ve seen the movie. (I’ve learned my lesson in that regard. I still remember, “No, Luke… I am your father,” in the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back, and being (a) stunned over the revelation, and (b) annoyed with myself upon realizing that the movie would now have less impact for me. So I swore not to do that again.) It’s for the packaging.

First off, it’s only available in hardcover. Almost 25 bucks. Remember the novelizations of the first three films? Paperback, kiddies. Standard issue, easily affordable paperbacks.

But the thing that really pushes it over into the “Aw, C’mon!” category is:

Six variant covers!! Six variant covers?!? Of a hardcover?!?

Aw, c’mon!!!

It’s bad enough that the characters are all going to be action figures on the shelves before the film even comes out. After all, the argument can be made that George Lucas was busy creating characters and concepts twenty years ago, and so little emphasis was given to toy spin-offs that 20th Century Fox, in one of the great bonehead moves of all times, gave the merchandising rights to Lucas. So it’s a bit unfair to accuse him of creating characters now for the pure purpose of stocking Toys-R-Us with more tsatskes. One has to give him enough leeway to assume that, like Mozart using as many notes as required to produce his music—no more and no less—Lucas is populating the films with the characters necessary to conveying his vision. Okay, fine. I can handle that.

But how much naked profiteering is evident in the publishing of six different covers of the hardcover novelization?

I know, I know: No one is putting a gun to the heads of the collectors. No one is forcing any of the Star Wars enthusiasts to pick up one of each. If someone feels pressured to be a completist and blow $150 to pick up the entire set because they just have to have it, that’s their individual choice and their own lookout. And we can look smugly down from on high and say, “Suckers!”

But, y’know, you just hate to see such pure greed. I mean, really now. No matter what excuses may be offered for the marketing decision, it comes across like a brazen attempt to take advantage of the collector mentality. And yes, yes, yes, I say again, if that’s what the collector wants to do, then it’s the collector’s problem. It’s not as if they’re drug addicts and the publisher is a pusher, taking advantage of people who are not in their right mind and they need their fix. Free will is clearly in force, and if the collector market wants to send a message that they’ve had enough, they can keep their money serenely in their pockets.

But it’s the attempt itself that seems so… so cheesy. So tacky. Once upon a time, a standard mass market paperback was all that was required. And now it’s six hardcovers with variant covers. Furthermore, if the same publishing deal is still in force that was around a year or so ago, Terry Brooks doesn’t even see royalties off it. All money generated by sales goes right into the pockets of the publishers and Lucasfilm.

Lucasfilm is playing a dangerous game here. If there’s one thing that Americans hate, it’s the feeling that someone is playing them for suckers or trying to take advantage of them, and this stunt definitely falls into that category.

When Obi-Wan recommending using the Force, he wasn’t referring to the marketing force. The tastes of the public are notoriously fickle, and people have a way of turning when they’re being yanked. Sometimes it takes a while for the dime to drop. Independence Day was an awful film, but it raked in $300 million. But the public took its ire out on Godzilla, the filmmaker’s next entry, complaining bitterly about the lousy story of Godzilla as if Independence Day’s plot was a newly found masterpiece from Dostoyefsky.

By all accounts, The Phantom Menace is quite good, but karma has a way of catching up, and the item that is must-have today becomes a dust collector on the shelves tomorrow. I mean, the question many people have is whether the film can overtake Titanic as a money maker. At this point, the new question seems to be whether the ancillary rights can generate so much money that it would have been a sufficiently heavy load to sink the original Titanic

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I looked over my column on the passing of Bob Kane and tried to determine where I said that Jerry Robinson had died. And I couldn’t find any such reference. All I did was mention his name in the same breath with others who had passed away. I sure didn’t mean to imply that he had, though, so I apologize for any confusion the reference may have caused.

I met Jerry Robinson at a Chicago Comicon some years back. Nice guy. Got a Joker drawing from him. Cool.

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I’d very much like to thank whoever it was that got Young Justice up for two Eisners. I always considered it to be the series I was writing for my son. I don’t have a son, but that’s who my audience is. Of course, with my luck, if I do ever have a son, he’ll probably take after Impulse.

The book I write for my daughters is Supergirl. Interestingly, that’s also been recognized and is up for an award, from a rather unexpected source: GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has annual awards for various achievements in positive portrayals of gays and lesbians. One of the categories is “Best Comic,” and Supergirl was nominated. According to Nick Adams, GLAAD’s national nominations co-chair, who was quoted in The Washington Blade, a prominent gay newspaper:

“Supergirl has its share of cheesy superhero posturing, but it shines when it dealing [sic] with relationships. The book contains the funniest, best-written Lesbian character in comics: supporting character and stand-up comedian Andy Jones. Andy can transform into the male superhero Comet, and in the issues nominated for the GLAAD Award, Supergirl develops a crush on Comet, while Andy pursues Supergirl’s alter ego, Linda Danvers.”

Adams calls the inclusion of a gender-swapping character “too trippy for words.”

Obviously, I’d dispute the “cheesy” part, but I’m still flattered. It also amuses the hëll out of me, because I constantly get letters from straight readers who, on behalf of gays everywhere, complain about Andy and how she’s allegedly a clichéd, flat and unrealistic portrayal of a lesbian. Go figure.

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A few columns back, I opined that “Green Arrow” was really a kind of out-of-nowhere name for a superhero. At the recent I-Con, Julie Schwartz sat me down and explained to me exactly from whence the name derived.

It turns out that when Mort Weisinger was developing the character, he apparently turned for inspiration to a movie serial entitled The Green Archer, about an emerald-clad hero (we’ll have to take their word for it; the serial was in black-and-white) who fought for justice.

From that starting point, Weisinger retooled the concept into the notion of a superhero bowman (with obvious Batman influences including arrows that functioned more or less as his utility belt). And he was named “Green Arrow” as a nod to his roots. In my best Johnny Carson voice, I must say I did not know that.

Thanks, Julie.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239 Bayport, NY 11705.)