Originally published at The Beat on June 4th, 2014. It is being reposted here with small adjustments for clarity, and archival purposes.
Note: because I refused and continue to refuse to link to garbage, I'll need to provide some context for this post that wasn't included in it originally. This column was built in an era when there was talk of Marvel editorial kneecapping the characters they didn't have the rights to. Small aspects of this rumour ended up being true, in that higher ups (than the folks working in publishing) were not interested in wasting assets on characters whose media was not fully controlled by Marvel. The regular Fantastic Four title did have another short run after this article was published. More context on all of that, at a later date.
I hate dealing with rumours in this industry, especially when I know my Wednesday will be nothing but addressing the half-truths and lies some over-glorified click bait magnate has put into the world. So this week, I thought I would channel the time I've spent talking to folks in the shop about bullshit into a column. There might as well be something helpful coming out from all of this.
There's no secret that Marvel and Disney would love nothing more than for the rights for Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man and any other character they sold media rights returned to them. If box office totals and (arguably) critical response are any indication, Marvel knows how to best shepherd their properties out in the wilds of Hollywood. They have a keen sense of what works, and have built a strong foundation for their company to take the universe building of comics, and ply it to a more lucrative medium. The fact that Guardians of the Galaxy has such a high Q rating among folks outside of the tried and true comic market – despite being based on a series that was, for all intents and purposes, critically acclaimed but monetarily challenged – speaks volumes for what has been built and what continues to go forward. It’s a structure that is so enticing, many others are trying to put up a similar structure without first pouring the foundation on which to build.
Warner Brothers is steam-rolling ahead with a homogeneously toned Superman sequel that looks like more of a universe expanding story than a Superman one. Batman v Superman gives him second billing in the "second instalment" of his franchise – something that shortchanges the character, and DC’s potential for him as a solo property in the long run.
Beyond that, you can see Sony struggling to build their own Marvel experience by pulling on strands from a pre-mature Spider-Man relaunch, and Fox trying to do something – anything – with the deep X-Men catalogue. As always, the problem comes down to a lack of care. Because Marvel made deals that allowed those companies to keep movie rights to the characters as long as they keep producing movies, each film seems to be produced out of necessity, and not care. Sony really should have let the Spider-Man franchise either build on it’s own accord, rather than packing the menagerie of villains into the final instalment of the original series, or let the series breathe after that particular misfire and relaunch at a later date. They did neither of these things, and the result was… well, not disastrous, but certainly not popular enough to immediate build spin-offs.
All that said, this past weekend, a rumour about the impending cancellation of the Fantastic Four and Ultimate FF titles began to swirl. In a vacuum, that isn't too scandous. It was when the cancellations were implied to have something to do with Marvel’s movie contracts – that was when the internet was set ablaze.
As is always the case with the juiciest of rumours, there is a hint of truth bubbling just below the surface. There is no question that Disney and Marvel would like all of their properties back under their umbrella, and have brokered quite a few deals to bring a lot of “lost” properties in house. In fact, each and every one of their first wave characters – Iron Man, Thor and Captain America – had to be purchased back by Marvel before they could move forward in-house. Continuing on the “hint of truth” idea, it’s no secret that Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter is notoriously short-sighted and stingy when it comes to “things that involve money”. Responsible for many company shattering cuts over the year, Perlmutter is said to be where the biggest push to pull back on product concerning the Fantastic Four is coming from as the team’s success would mean relatively little for the company’s larger bottom line.
To that effect there’s been an instruction sheet going around the internet that is purported to be for sketch artists working on Marvel’s 75th Anniversary trading card set, which lists the main four members of the Fantastic Four – as well as Doctor Doom, Galactus, Silver Surfer, The Watcher and Skrulls – as “off-limits” for rendering. Reasons for this could be innumerable, the easiest of which to think of is the fact that Marvel might well and truly have artists contracted on those characters specifically already. That said, the intent could match the rumour, and it could be nothing more than an executive discarding or trying to weaken the character and brands they don't fully "own".
Regardless of where the truth lies, I can tell you one thing for sure: if Marvel is going to take the Fantastic Four off the publishing schedule for a while, you can be sure it has nothing to do with the status of the team’s life in movies – or if it does, the team’s out-of-house status means Marvel actually has the luxury of putting the team’s book on hold. Stick with me here.
A quick look at Marvel’s numbers will show you that their current culture of relaunch followed by relaunch isn’t doing them favours. While I am usually in favour of the frequent relaunch of titles, I do so with a caveat: you need to take the book or characters off the board in some way for it to properly work. You have to create a hole in the publishing schedule, and insist that there’s nothing planned for the future – even if a new series is always the endgame. It’s something the company did to huge success with Peter Parker over the past year and a half. It’s something I assume they are about to do with Wolverine – making a big show of an end, giving the readership some time to salivate for the inevitable return, thereby goosing the sales of the relaunch.
Notice how all of the characters I mentioned are all part of properties Marvel currently doesn’t have the movie rights too? While it’s true that the larger company might not want to create as large a platform for characters they have less of a money making stake in, Marvel’s publishing MO as of late has turned that negative into a positive. It has allowed them to take larger risks with those characters and remove them from their budgeted publishing schedule without too much drama.
To put this in focus: for a span of 15 months, Marvel was not publishing an in-continuity title staring Peter Parker as Spider-Man. Any other company in this position would have their higher-ups asking questions. The upcoming Death of Wolverine story? Take a look at your recent comics. Has there been a time in the last… I don’t know, decade, where Wolverine has been appearing in so few titles? He’s been removed from the Avengers, isn’t a regular fixture of all the X-Men teams, and is no longer running X-Force. For all intents and purposes, the guy has Wolverine, Amazing X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men (barely) and Savage Wolverine. That might seem like a lot, but it’s down by almost half in terms of where he used to roam. If they’ve been given a mandate to remove focus, they are doing so in such a way that will benefit their publishing schedule in the long run, allowing some of their marquee characters to pull back and sometimes disappear, in order to clear whatever sense of exposure the character once had. This inevitably takes everything back to zero so that fans can wait with baited breath, and jump onto a new era of Spider-Man or Wolverine or Fantastic Four without the expected baggage of stories that – until that point – had gone uninterrupted.
That said, I might be looking at this whole thing far too optimistically. I could be wrong, and the rumours could be true, and this is all part of a larger corporate scheme. It would be a short-sighted move from a company that is currently known for long term plans for its movie and publishing line. The ideas just don’t mesh.
In the long run, whatever happens to the FF, I believe that the editors and creators working at Marvel have nothing but the best intentions for the characters, and if there’s a way they can make any hypothetical situation like this work, they will find it. You don’t stick around in a field like comics if you don’t have a passion for the medium and the product, and you certainly don’t stick around a place like Marvel if you can't handle some obstacles.
As with all things like this, we’ll just have to see what happens.
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