A guide to comics part 3 (company owned comics)

We're a couple of days behind on these because I've been watching the World Cup semi-finals but still on track to have the guide to comics series finished by mid-week next week at the latest. This is the 3rd part of 6 eventual parts. This time I'll be talking about the differences between company owned and creator owned stories. I know that sounds less than interesting but it's one of the big things that affect how comics are written and stories told and is much more interesting than it seems. It's a long topic too, so I'll split it into two posts.

Today I'll be talking about company owned comics.

Company owned comics are generally speaking the best known American (and British) comics. If you remember in part 1 I talked about the Big Two, Marvel & DC. Pretty much every one of  the comics Marvel & DC publish are company owned and those that aren't are published under a separate imprint that we'll get to in the next post.

Company owned comics, sometimes referred to as Corporation owned comics when talking about Marvel or DC, are pretty much exactly what they sound like. The company that publishes the comic owns the character and the story told in the comic. For example, DC own Superman. They hire creators to create Superman stories for DC. This is generally referred to a work-for-hire. There have been, and still are, legal actions to bring control of the characters back to the creators (or, especially recently, their heirs) but if I was betting I'd put my money on DC & Marvel continuing to own the characters they do.

Most of the really popular characters that DC & Marvel own are old characters. From DC's character stable Superman was first published in 1938. Batman in 1939. Robin in 1940. Green Lantern 1940, Wonder Woman 1941, Flash 1940. Lots of these characters have newer versions of them too, but they are still pretty old. For instance the first Flash, Jay Garrick, was created, as mentioned above in 1940. Barry Allen, the most famous Flash, was created in 1956. The third Flash, originally Kid Flash, was created in 1959 to be Barry Allen's sidekick before becoming the Flash after Barry Allen's death. Finally Bart Allen, Barry Allen's grandson was created in 1994 as another younger version of the Flash, this time called Impulse before eventually becoming the Flash. The point of this short diversion is DC still exists and creates comics and other media based off characters that are around 70 years old.

All-Star Superman by Frank Quitely 

That's not to say Marvel are much different. They're a younger company but most of their well known popular characters come from a concentrated time period. Just looking at characters that non-comic fans are likely to have heard of you have Iron Man, created in 1963. Nick Fury was created in 1963, (although the version based on Samuel L Jackson that is familiar from the movies where he's played by Samuel L Jackson was created in 2001), Falcon debuted in 1969. Black Widow in 1964. Hawkeye in 1964 as well. The Fantastic Four were created in 1961 to be followed in 1962 by Hulk, Spider-Man and Thor. Wolverine is a notable later example, being created in 1974 but the X-Men themselves were created in 1963. Captain America is one of the few Marvel characters from an earlier time, he was created in 1941 for Timely Comics, who later became Marvel.

Most of Marvel's big characters were created by a small group of people and that's part of why they all come from the same time. The other part is, very few new characters of note have been created since then. The creation of most of the characters happening between 1938 and 1965 is also why so many of them are white and male.

Superhero comic fans tend to like to buy things they are familiar with and things that fit into an established and inter-connected story. DC & Marvel can provide that. DC have been publishing a Superman comic every month since 1938, and for almost all of that time more than one comic a month. Currently they publish Action Comics, The Adventures of Superman, Batman & Superman, Superman, Superman & Wonder Woman and Superman Unchained. That's 6 comics you can pick up starring Superman this month. Plus there are various Justice League comics he appears in and a Supergirl and a Superboy comic if you want them. There's a Smallville comic too. Superman isn't even the most published example, the point is if you want to read Superman comics there are lots of them for you to read and more coming out all the time.

The shared universe is another big draw with company owned comics. As mentioned above Batman & Superman and Superman & Wonder Woman comics exist to show different characters interacting together. It's more than that though. To give an example from Marvel, every character in those comics lives in the same world. You may be a teenage English girl with magic boots that give you soccer related super-powers (I'm not making this up, and it is much better than it sounds) but if a scientist in NY creates a robot that gains sentience and an Oedipus complex and can self-replicate then you can very quickly end up hiding in the British Museum protected by a magic forcefield generated by the legendary sword Excalibur. (Avengers Assemble #15AU, a genuinely great comic).

Magic Boots Mel by Butch Guice (or maybe Tom Palmer. I thought it was Palmer but Google says otherwise)

Basically the upside is things don't change, you can always get the big characters in these inter-connected worlds.

The downside is, things never change. Sometimes new characters are added, but they're almost always new versions of older characters. Creators by & large don't create unique characters for DC or Marvel, because the company rather than the creator will end up owning them. Because things never change almost everyone heroic is a white guy. The world has changed but DC & Marvel comics haven't really. And they don't because the people who buy the comics don't want them too. So the number of people buying them trends downwards but any action to change this alienates a lot of the people still buying them. It's a tough position to be in. It is partly of DC & Marvel's own making but it'd be unfair to ignore that they have tried to fix the problem. The solutions offered just haven't worked yet. Maybe one or both of them will come up with a solution that works one day. For now they stick to the safety blanket of using decade old characters and earn money for their parent companies through merchandising and films.

One final downside is, because the stories never really change the comics are almost always about characters coming across a problem and resolving it through punching. Even when really talented creators work on these books, that gets tiresome after a while. I'm not saying that stories where problems are solved by punching are bad, I am saying when that, or some other violence related solution, is the way 100+ comics a month play out then I find it has a limited shelf life.

I want to end on a positive note here because I think this post comes across as too skewed to the negative. Lots of the books that are and have been put out by DC and Marvel are great reads. Marvel's Daredevil as currently written by Mark Waid with a changing cast of artists and DC's Superman Unchained written by Scott Snyder with Jim Lee on art are both books I really enjoy. Mainly though there's Miraclenan. Written in the early to mid 80's in Britain and finally getting a wider release by Marvel now (due to ownership complications and compromises far too complicated to go into here) it is one of the very best things I have ever read, comic or not, and I look forward to it every month.

Miracleman by Joe Quesada 

Next time I'll talk about creator owned comics and a little about licensed comics.