TV news, comics, and trials

Originally published March 10, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1112

Some random, assorted thoughts:

* * *

You know what I really hate? Teasers for TV news shows. I don’t mean the kind where they say something like, “Mayor convicted in three-way money-laundering scandal,” which is the equivalent of headlines running around the side of the New York Times building.

I don’t even mean those cheesy ads for stories that exist only during sweeps months, such as—I dunno—“Sexual harassment in the workplace! Tune in tonight, as we explore the cases of policewomen posing for nude photo layouts and how that affected their working relationships!” (This, of course, features illustrations of nude policewomen with teeny, tiny strips of tape covering their naughty bits. Thus does TV news become the 11 o’clock equivalent of Playboy: “I only watch the TV news for the interviews.”

But that’s not what bugs me when I say “annoying teases.” No, I’m speaking of those items when they deliberately withhold information in order to try to force you to stay tuned.

Death is a particular favorite. “Beloved actor dies. Details at 11.” What really stinks is if you’re in the middle of watching a one-hour drama and you hear this at the 10:30 break. Then you get to sit there wondering, “Oh, God, who died? Jimmy Stewart? Kate Hepburn? Who?”

And then you get to the news—and they put it off. Effectively turning it into their lead story, then they bury it three-quarters of the way into the newscast for the specific purpose of getting you to stick around.

If you have cable, you can try switching to CNN out of spite, although these days all you’ll see if stuff about O.J. Simpson anyway, so what’s the point?

Worst of all, when they finally tell you who it is—it’s a no-win situation. Either it’s someone you really did like and you feel depressed, or it’s someone you never heard of—or didn’t care about or didn’t even like—and then you get to feel like a ghoul.

And then there’s those items when TV news is concerned with Competitive Ignorance. What is CI, you might ask? That’s when newscasters break in with updates or live reports (their favorite time being in the middle of superhero programs) in order to tell you about an ongoing news story. Now, silly me—I’d tend to think that, if a show I was planning to watch was being interrupted, it would be because something’s happened. But, no. These lamebrains pop in to tell you that nothing’s gone on since the last time you heard from them. You know, stuff like:

“This is Jack Blank in the newsroom, with an update on the president’s constipation. The situation remains unchanged at this time. He’s still constipated. For an on-site report, let’s go to Frank Doe in Washington.” Cut to Frank Doe, standing in front of the White House, looking cold but determined, and he’ll say, “White House officials have said that nothing has changed. The president is still constipated. No new legislation is expected to pass until the president does. Sources remain uncertain and clueless. Back to you.”

Then they go back to the newsroom, where we’re informed of two things: that there will be details at 11. (Details? Details? How can you possibly have details of nothing?) and that they’re going to return you to your program already in progress. I know I’ve always wanted to find out precisely where it was progressing. Is there someplace in the great country of ours where Lois & Clark or The Flash was blissfully uninterrupted? Maybe Canada was spared.

* * *

It was not all that long ago that one editor at Marvel was walking the halls, grumbling because the first issues of a new Punisher comic book had only sold half a million copies. Only half a million. Yet it seems ages ago.

I’m wondering—now that the comic marketplace has experienced the long-predicted crash—now that the go-go days which seemed to begin with Spider-Man #1 have ended, and we witness sales plummeting, stores vanishing, readership eroding—now that all this has come to pass—

Does anyone actually feel good about being able to say, “I told you so?”

It makes me think back to when Marvel was planning to launch the New Universe. Carol Kalish, for whom I was working as assistant direct sales manager, was sitting in her office staring at papers and looking frustrated. I stuck my head in and asked what the problem was.

Carol was being asked to make predictions for the coming publishing year. Estimates on what certain titles would sell, to help the company get budgets and priorities. And what she was fuming over were the slots next to the New Universe titles. Actually, “titles” might be too strong a word. There were no titles. No information. No specifics at all. It simply read, “New Universe title #1—#2—#3” and so on. That was it. Beginning and end of information.

“How am I supposed to make predictions based on this?” she said. She looked up at me, shoved the paper at me, and said, “Here, you do it. Your guess is as good as mine.”

I looked at it for a moment, shrugged, and wrote 125,000 next to the first issues of each. Carol looked at me and asked, “Where’d you get that number from?”

I shrugged. “Avengers numbers,” I said.

She stared at it for a moment, then shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

As it turned out, that’s pretty much what the numbers for the first issues were. Unfortunately, they slipped precipitously after that. Which was a shame, particularly since—after the “relaunch”—the titles were pretty good. Lee Weeks and I were on Justice. Tyro writer Fabian Nicieza (who seemed to take demented glee in creating characters with names even more unpronounceable than his own) was on Psi-Force. Mark Gruenwald did some of his best work ever on DP 7.

Does anyone even remember that John Byrne worked on Starbrand after Jim Shooter left the title that featured some of Shooter’s cleverest superhero riffs?

Pity.

I still think that if we’d gone with my suggested promotional line (“The New Universe! It Doesn’t Suck Any More!”), the series would have lasted.

The great thing was that, since sales were in the toilet and we knew we probably didn’t have a prayer, we could do whatever the hëll we wanted.

Maybe the one positive element in the current lousy sales positions of most companies is that they will undergo that same feeling of liberation.

“The hëll with it. Let’s go nuts. We’ve got nothing to lose. Sales? We’re losing those, anyway.”

Either they’ll do that or they’ll recycle that which has worked in the past—and, of course, eventually it will stop working again and sales will spiral even lower.

We’ll see.

* * *

Something companies might want to consider: When launching a new series, they might seriously want to think about taking returns on some sort of limited basis for, say, issues #2-6.

The problem, as it stands now, is that retailers have to place orders for the first four issues or so without any clue as to how the thing’s going to sell. So they place a strong-to-moderate order for #1. For issue #2, they cut the orders in half. Issue #3, they whittle it down by another 20% or so.

That means that by issue #5, the publisher is already so far down the hill that it takes the efforts of Sisyphus to get back up again.

In the old days of newsstand distribution, series would be canceled by the third or fourth issue, even though sales numbers wouldn’t be in for another six to nine months. You might have had a sell-through success on your hands, but you didn’t know at the time of the cancellations.

Now we’ve got the reverse. Lousy sales doom a title, and it’s not even on the stands yet.

Offering comics at, say, 50% returnable would be a way for publishers to send a dual message to retailers and distributors. The first message would be, “We understand your problems and are trying to work with you.” And the second message would be, “We have such confidence in this series that we know it’s going to be a hit and will take whatever steps necessary to make sure you have enough copies.”

After all, no publisher wants returns. So the implication is that they don’t expect returns, because the comic books are so gosh-darned fabulous. And if the publisher doesn’t have that sort of confidence in its products, well, then—maybe some thought should be given to holding or delaying it until such time as the publisher does have confidence.

A good example of how removing the “guesswork” factor can be of tremendous benefit is the nearly five-month gap between the first and second issues of Sachs & Violens. It wasn’t intentional by any means, but it did provide an interesting lesson. By the time issue #2 was resolicited, retailers had already had a chance to see the first issue; to see how the public responded to it and whether they were comfortable with the material. Consequently, although the original solicitation on issue #2 had given us well below 2/3 of the first issue, the resolicitation resulted in orders substantially higher—indeed, close to the orders on issue #1.

Granted: The notion of built-in returns on issues of new series means more work for distributors, who would have to handle the actual processing of returns from thousands of retailers. But it was certainly manageable back in the days when Carol first started overshipping on key Marvel titles. If there were certain issues that she and I felt had been lowballed, Marvel would overship the copies, with the overshipment being returnable. That way the comic books were in the warehouse and available. Having them in the warehouse, though, may no longer be enough. There are too many titles, and interest is too mercurial. You’ve got to get them into the stores.

Besides, nowadays, any extra effort that helps improve a retailer’s cash flow or avoids more and more piles of unsold copies is something worth exploring. With any luck, retailers would be encouraged to order more than they would have, if being stuck with unsalable copies was a consideration.

The all-returns newsstand world of comics served to so diminish the industry that it almost brought an end to it. The all-non-returnable distribution system arguably saved the entire industry—but now retailers are choking, and new series run the risk of coming into the world stillborn. From one extreme to another, it might now be that the ideal situation is somewhere in the middle.

Just a thought.

* * *

I’m tired of hearing the O.J. Simpson trial referred to as the trial of the century.

It’s not. It’s a murder trial, that’s all. In my opinion, the chances are slim-to-none that it will have any long-term impact on jurisprudence or even society. How can you compare it to, say, the Scopes Monkey Trial? Or the trial of the Rosenbergs that helped usher in the age of atomic paranoia? The trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, executed for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which remains one of the great debated mysteries (nicely examined in Max Allan Collins’ novel Stolen Away).

No one can downplay the tragedy involved, but—in the harsh reality of history—tragedies are transitory. Look at it another way: Right now, everyone is up to their armpits in O.J. O.J. O.J.

Everywhere you go, every news show, every magazine, every newspaper. It’s consuming people’s lives. One almost speculates that Dan Quayle declared he wasn’t running for the presidency simply because now is not the time to announce; everything is overshadowed by O.J. (My theory is that it was because Quayle was discouraged when the best that his people could do for a campaign slogan in a Quayle presidency run was, “Dan Quayle: No, really. We’re serious.”)

However—

Go out and ask people at random if the following names ring any bells with them:

Leopold and Loeb.

Fatty Arbuckle.

I think the chances are spectacularly slim that either of them will be familiar to anyone under the age of 30. Maybe even 40.

So take heart, America. Forty years from now, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to look at us with blank expressions, if this “trial of the century” is mentioned, and say six words that, at the present, seem inconceivable: “O.J. Simpson? Never heard of him.”

Unless, of course, the trial’s still going on.

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