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Yeah - the Nocenti series, untimely cancelled at around issue 18 and as such very easy to collect, was for my money (all 50p an issue) really good stuff - didactic and at times utterly incomprehensible, but mad good fun. The Morrisonn Kid Eternity I only read issues 1 and 2 of - nice artwork, but I think it felt a bit.;.. Arkham Asylum at the time, if you see what I mean. Possibly a bit unfair - I was much younger when I read it. If you have so far liked everything GM has written, I'm sure it's worth reading.
On brands, and specifically:
Is there past precedent for this in the comic industry? I can only think of novelists being given comparable treatment (King and Clancy come to mind).
The habit of putting the creator's name on the top of books in a big font was reasonably common with celebrity authors who created properties which were then taken over by less expensive writers - Neil Gaiman's Pneu-Matic man, that sort of thing. The superstar comic book author, I think, is usually dated to the period when Image comics was formed, and when an effort was made to market its creators not only as aspirational figures because they wrote comic books but also because they were cool guys whom chicks dug. The tendency to associate and market personalities, however, is older than that - think back to the Marvel bullpen editorials, for example - if not generally as concerted. Or, of course, the creation of Stan Lee as a kind of "brand champion" for Marvel comics.
The big-author/small-title thing makes pretty reasonable sense in genre fiction, I suspect - the idea being to capitalise precisely on the audience Matt represents. If somebody will buy any book (or comic book) written by author x, then the important thing to do to sell that book to them is to make it clear that it is written by that author. In a sense, it's what I use Barbelith for - it tells me when new Grant Morrison stuff is coming out, so I can buy it. At that point author-as-brand is interesting, because there are elements of an author's branding which really don't have that much to do with the scripts he is delivering. Vertigo provides a very good example of this, I think - after Moore there were a number of attempts to communicate, through cover design and intellectual property, that other books were close enough to the Moore-branded merchandise to be worth buying by the person who buys everything produced by Moore - a form of cross-selling. Some thing with Vertigo after Sandman - Mike Carey's work, in particular, has a definite "If you liked Sandman, why not try" feel about it in its presentation, as did The Dreaming. The novel equivalent might be the outbreak of Josh Kirby-resemblin' covers slapped on sci-fi/fantasy comedies in the wake of Pratchett's breakthrough success. Speaking of Gaiman, perhaps one of the most literal applications of this principle was the belly band around American Gods promising that the reader could get his or her money back if it was not, in their opinion, as good as Stephen King - that is, they were putting Stephen King's name, in big letters, on a book not written by King or associated with him in any way in order to sell it to people who bought Stephen King novels.
There's some stuf that sort of rambles around similar issues here and here. |
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