Millarworld revisits the wreckage of Crossgen, and asks a good question: Whahoppen?
Cleaning out my apartment this weekend, I pulled a box of Forge/Edge tpbs out from under my bed and after flipping through one, totally abandoned cleaning and reread both series’ of books in one sitting. It struck me about halfway through – why did these guys fail? Did no-one buy these books or did they just spend the money on coke and hookers?
I mean, many of the biggest gripes I hear about the industry were addressed by these guys – you had quality talent (Mark Waid, Chuck Dixon, Steve Epting, Paul Pelletier, Steve McNiven, Dale Eaglesham, Scot Eaton, Al Rio, Paul Ryan, Ron Marz, Tony Bedard, Joseph Michael Linsner, Joshua Middleton, Jim Cheung, Greg Land, Bart Sears, Butch Guice, Aaron Lopresti, Karl Moline, Brandon Peterson, George Perez, Andrea Divito) working on books well outside the typical superhero genre, with regular trade publication, as well as the supercheap digest sized books Forge and Edge (6 to 11 issues for 7-10 bucks!!), and most importantly quality stories that really lived up to the hype of “you can read these individually and be completely satisfied, or you can look at these books as pieces of a larger story”. Look at Ruse for instance (far and away the best book Crossgen put out), where it’s the supporting character who has the Sigil powers, but she can’t use them, leaving Mark Waid free to write fantastic Victorian mystery stories.
I know these guys went into bankruptcy, but why isn’t someone trying something similar minus the coke and hookers?
Somewhere, some lawyer is wondering whether that coke and hookers line is libelous… Meanwhile, the rest of the world ponders the question:
“Their biggest problem from a commercial point of view was trying to create in one go what it took DC and Marvel decades to build, and at a time when the comic audience was barely beginning to recover from the boom-and-bust of the 90′s. If Alessi hadn’t had so much money to throw at it, if he’d actually needed to come up with a business model that made sense to investors, they might well have taken a longer-term approach that might have succeeded.”
“Where they failed is that the series they ended up with at the end with a variety of styles is when they started to get the coverage, but before then they had oversaturated the market with what looked from the outside as very similar books. They weren’t, but the joint universe put people off.”
“Crossgen had all the right pieces in place – their roster of artistic talent is basically Marvel’s roster of artistic talent these days. I loved some of their books too – particularly Sojourn (where Greg Land wasn’t wasted) and El Calzador. These were different concepts that American comics were unacustomed to. It has been said here but the company was too short-term. It needed to build slowly. All of a sudden there were too many books. You can’t be a Marvel, DC or Dark Horse over night. It takes time and Crossgen never had the patience for it.”
“The interesting thing about Dark Horse, of course, is that their one signal misstep was their failed attempt at a shared superhero universe. Once they got that out of their system, things improved considerably.”
“It was a flawed business model from the get-go. CG *had* to put out a lot of books in a hurry because it took on massive overhead – the famed complex down in Florida. First rule of starting a business is ‘minimize your overhead’, and CG did the exact opposite. It had to have a certain amount of revenue to cover the costs of the complex, creator ‘salaries’ and benefits, etc., so it dumped a wave of titles on the market with a bunch of generic-sounding names.”
Alternatively, I think it failed thanks to first warning signs of a Greg Land backlash.
November 13th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Ron Marz is the least imaginative writer in the business. FACT. I’ve read enough of his stuff, CrossGen, Silver Surfer, Green Lantern, etc. to be of the opinion that he is less a writer than a computer program spouting out cliches to form a story and get a check. I know there are people who are big fans of him, people whose opinions I respect, but I can’t stand him.
And he was their first creative hire. Do the math.
Nearly everything that came out of CG was tired, creaky reworkings of LOTR or Samurai movies or Conan or fantasy flicks. Written by low tier superhero writers.
Plus, it was debuting at the height of Warren Ellis’ influence, and he cockpunched the company (deservedly, given how they treated creative in the end) instead of encouraging his flock (like me) to try the non-cape genres For The Greater Good of The Republic.
But mainly the books failed because they sucked.
November 13th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
“But mainly the books failed because they sucked.”
Gotta take issue with this. Ruse, El Cazador, Way of the Rat, Negation – these books most decidedly did not suck. All were excellent representations of much under-exploited genres in the comics world, with great writing and art. I think they just came along at a time when the company was already on its downhill slide and people had already made up their mind about the shared universe thing.
Did you read any of these books? If not, which ones did you read?
November 13th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Oh, and Abadazad. I forgot about that. The best book they ever published. I’m still upset that I don’t get to read the rest of that story.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I read the first trades of Mystic, Sojourn, and The Path- Mystic and The Path in particular were so paint by numbers as to be embarassing. There was nothing about them that wasn’t already seen before, and told in the most obvious, rote way possible.
I read some of Ruse but was unimpressed as Waid didn’t really write a detective book but yet another title about how Men Keeping Secrets= Okay, Women Keeping Secrets= Disasater, a common ailment of his work that he only recently shook off.
Negation is one book I’d like to try a little more of- I thought the first few issues were pretty rank but the issue of CrossGen Chronicles Bedard did with Rudy Nebres about Obregon Kaine was excellent, probably the best CG comic I read. And good Tony Bedard comics are a rarity in this business.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
The books failed because they were unable to sell well in the direct market, and were unable to penetrate the book market. When they sent their “book dumps” (big cardboard displays filled with their trades) to major book stores, they weren’t even put out onto the sales floor because the large book publishers come first, and PAY for that floor space.
They didn’t appeal to comic shop fans because they had no super-heroes, and when they’d sign big talent (like George Perez) it took FOREVER for their books to come out, if at all.
It was a good experiment, and with better business people at the top, I think they could have succeeded.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Their books were almost always on time in the first year or two, if not actually always on time. It was later, when they started having cash flow problems that they started having a lot of late books.
November 14th, 2007 at 2:16 am
Failed for one reason and one reason only. 80% of comics fans read for superheroes. Admit it. And those that dont make up such a small number of our group. Take a look at the main page at newsarama. Countdown, World War Hulk, Captain Marvel, Captaint America, Sinestro Corps Wars. Sure you have zaducomics and a few other mentions, but mainly capes and tights.
The entire line had no capes, no tights. They should have started wiht some superhero yarns to draw in the crowd and get a niche in the market before going all Ruse and Branth and piratey on us.
Negation ROCKED. Make it a TV series on Sci-Fi!!!!
November 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
The Crossgen books didn’t so much suck as they were more kind of boringly competent, “merely okay” rather than “insanely great”. A good (if snarky) characteriztion of the CG titles was “The Volvo of Comics”. The CG titles weren’t stupefyingly awful, but I can’t recall a title that wasn’t any more than, at best, a marginally above-average book. They needed lighting-in-a-bottle to capture the imagination of fandom, but the level of craft wasn’t much beyond orange-juice, and so they never caught on.
(I think the “influnce” of the old Ellis Forum in CG’s downfall is overrated — a lot of the WEF hive-mind actually bought many CG titles, to poor pathetic Ellis’ chagrin)
Alessi would have had a greater impact in comics if he had concentrated on improving the woeful distribution system and the general lack of business competency in much of the comics “industry” at the time.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
It was all about timing IMO.
CrossGen books were entertaining enough BUT the biggest problem they faced was the fact that they came out during one of the most abyssmal times for sales the industry has ever seen.
In a market like we have now, I would bet that they would have done much better.