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Who said I didn't like the SWP? I hate it when people put words in my mouth, but for the good of the discussion I'm going to try to rise above it.
Ronan, you're in a place we have all been in. You're recently out of school. You're exploring your place in the world, and trying to work out through opposition how you relate to it. That's all good, but right now you need to calm down a little. It isn't easy being a middle-class kid from an unfashionable area - if anything proves that, it's Barbelith. We understand you. We accept you. We ask you to do the same.
As for putting off newbies - I ask people to treat newbies with consideration, as I did Flux just a moment ago.I hope that my status as administrator reflects a degree of trust in my judgement held by Barbelith in general, and hope likewise that should that trust be lost that the status would be lost also. I encourage newbies to post relevant and interesting content. As it happens, you're sort of struggling there. The "Andrew Avery" thing is pretty symptomatic; Barbelith extends across several continents and many different races, classes and personality types. It's not perfect by any means, but you're fighting battles in it that you need to be fighting with your friends. If you're having trouble with Andrew, then you need to talk to him. If you want support, start a thread in the conversation - we'll be here to help in whatever way we can, even if it's only to lend a friendly ear. But threadrot is threadrot, and the way you have posted so far is...well, it's not exactly rewriting the book of Barbelith. The two topics you started were badly begun, and I had hoped you were adult enough to understand how and why. I still hope that I am right about this.
It's great that you are proud of your blog writing; be a great author and recognise the important of medium. As for "Barbelith is crappy" - did you say that? Not very productive, but you're entitled to your opinion. Right now, you're not really showing me much to suggest you want to change that, but maybe you just need to settle in a bit. That's cool. Take your time. We're all here for you. But I'm afraid Barbelith is even less likely to change to oblige you than your friends.
Now, I don't think you and Flux have started off on the right foot. Flux has been dismissive, you have been rude. I hope that you will come to value and respect each other as much as I value and respect you both.
To get slightly back ontopic - presumably we agree economically that it takes an amount of money to produce a comic - payment of artists, writers, cost of paper, cost of staples, cost of advertsing and distribution, and so on. That money is recouped in various ways - sales, advertising within the magazine. If the balance sheet comes out ahead enough to indicate a decent profit, the comic or in broader terms the company is healthy.
Alan Moore at ABC gets to demand that the ads be put to the back, so they do not interrupt the flow of the story. Since, as has been mentioned, these do not sell very well, and the whole point of them is so DC can point to the ABC line and claim the cultural cachet of an Alan Moore imprint, the ads are duly sent to the back. Problem with this is that it means people might well just skip them completely, so I imagine that an advertiser will pay less for these positions. This financial hit is taken by DC in exchange for a happy Alan.
Now, the mainstream titles do not have this luxury. To get the bestmoney, and thus defray possible cancellations or cost rises, they have to offer advertisers pages where they will be most likely to be read. Hence the division of the Kordey DPS - an advertiser came in demanding that page across the titles, and the page order hd to be sacrificed.
Where this pattern gets fuzzy is in, for example, adverts for "the Hulk" or for "Trouble" (a Mark Millar relaunch of the largeyl execrable The Trouble with Girls). Is there an internal market within Marvel? I imagine probably so, in which case these adverts are basically the same as other adverts, except probably at a preferential rate because they could not find a more profitable advertiser, or they feel that they can recoup profits more successfully by pushing another comic or a toy line. That's microeconomics, and I certainly don't understand the intricacies of the relationship between, say, the publishing arm and the cut the business might get from Toy Biz on action figure sales.
Now, the adverts go in in the same place across an entire run's comics, and it seems that the writer of a Marvel property will have no real way to affect that - see the split of the Kordey DPS. Morrison would not want it, Kordey would not want it, but it goes ahead. In this sense, the idea of the writer as McDonald's franchiser is not a bad one. Ze has the freedom to do things hir way inside the content pages of the comic, to an extent (that extent presumably affected by how well the book is selling, how hot the writer is, and so on), but they get some things from head office that they have to use - a standard dimension of hamburger, a standard set of advertising pages.
The "Jake Danials" bottle is a more interesting one - in one sense, Bachalo is just doing something that Marvel comics have always done - have brands that clearly mimic "real-life" brands, but do not have the same name. So, in the New Mutants McD's was represented as "McBurgers", for example, or Bruce Springsteen might be replaced by a blue-collar rocker called Brick whatever, as he was in the Transformers. See also the TV show "Wendy the Werewolf Slayer" in DC continuity. This is a convention, and one Bachalo may be joking around with a bit. Also, the JD bottle is, to dip briefly into the Head Shop, an iconic brand presence, and says "ornery gulping liquor" pretty elegantly, without Logan having to exposit that he is the sort of rough, tough hombre who drinks ornery gulping liquor in the refined surroundings of the Hellfire Club while proferring a bottle of generic spirit.
Or it could be product placement. Seems unlikely though - it's more about describing the consumer through the object of consumption. |
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