The Corner Box S1E15 - Licensing Your Childhood Part 1

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.

[00:30] John Barber: Hey, welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, John Barber, and with me as always,

[00:37] David Hedgecock: David Hitchcock.

[00:38] John: Hope you enjoyed our two-part interview with Dave Baker. I thought that was great.

[00:43] David: Yeah, the thing about Dave, John, is that he's one of those guys that, after talking to him, I was like, “Oh, he's a really massive fan of pop culture. Not just comic books,” but he is all over the place with his knowledge of pop culture in general. Love to talk to guys like that, because it's always humbling, really, to be honest. In my mind, it's that thing. People that make comic books, I mean, you just have to love it, and you have to love it so much that you're willing to be a student of it, and Dave is obviously one of those.

[01:18] John: Yeah, that's true. It'd be interesting to have him to get more of his take on some of the history of stuff, too. Yeah, that was an excellent talk.

[01:25] David: But he's not here, John.

[01:27] John: Once again, no, he's not. You're just stuck with us.

[01:29] David: We've got a great topic today. I'm super excited about it, but there's a couple things that I want to share with you. First of all, I've been really geeked about this new character, Spider Boy, at Marvel. I don't know why I've only read one issue that he appeared in, and it didn't really tell him much about it, but that Humberto Ramos costume design is just so good. I just love it so much, and just the idea of a younger Spider Man sounds like fun, and so I'm very interested in it. So, most of the time, I'm reading my comics digitally, but I was like “okay, I'm going to go hit the store and pick up Spider Boy number one, and I did, and I read it, and I really liked it, and there are many huge Dan Slott guy, but I thought he just did a fantastic job of capturing the fun and the imagination of what new Spider Boy character could be and it was a refreshing spin that had its roots in something deeper, the Spider Man mythos, but was not slavish to it in any way, shape, or form, and then the artist, Paco Medina, is no joke. That guy does not get enough play. He is really, really rock solid. You're smiling.

[02:41] John: Oh, yeah, no, I love. Super nice guy, too.

[02:46] David: Yeah, his art is really good. He’s just not getting enough play. So, I really liked it. I thought, it's an oversized issue, there’s two stories in it, which I was like, “hey, Speedball,” but he introduces all these cool new villains. There's Gutterball and Helifino, and Madame Monstrosity, and the Balloon Man, so they're fun, quirky characters that just fit. That's what you want a rogue's gallery to be, especially for somebody named Spider Boy, I think. Serious threats, but also goofy. The thing that Slott did that I really loved, when he finishes the first issue, Spider Boy’s battling this big, monstrous character called Helifino. He's a cross between an elephant and a rhino, and they call him Helifino. Yeah, it's good. It's funny, and Spider Boy’s with this girl who's an adopted sister, and her name is Christina, and Christina, at the end of the story, Helifino’s running away, the battle is over, and Helifino’s escaping, basically, and Spider Boy’s surrogate sister, or whatever she is, Christina, says “you're going to be all right. I have faith in you. In fact, I bet the next time you run into that guy, you'll beat him,” and Spider Boy says “nah, Christina. The next time I see him, I'm going to save him,” and I loved that ending. I thought that was what we've talked about before about heroes being heroes, and in this kid's mind, it's not about beating. It's about helping, and I just thought that was a perfect little ending to the story and really set Spider Boy up for me as a character that I think I'm going to enjoy. So, super onboard with Spider Boy. It was better than I thought it was actually going to be, and a bigger Dan Slott fan today than I was yesterday. So, I wanted to share that with you. If by now everyone's already read, it's probably issue seven by now, and it's probably horrible and everything's falling off and there's a new artist on it.

[04:54] John: It's on its third number seven by the time we get it. Yeah, I loved Dan Slott. I think Dan is one of the all-time greats, in terms of Spider Man writers, that was I was going to put a number on it, and then I was like, “Oh, what about this guy? What about Bendez? What about Conway?” But I thoroughly enjoyed it. So, I haven't read Spider Boy yet. So, I'm a little behind on Spider Man, but I do want to get caught up and read it.

[05:22] David: It's just charming. It's fun, and I really enjoyed that.

[05:26] John: I feel like sometimes that thing that you talk about can come off as really saccharin, but I feel like Dan really believes in that kind of thing. He really believes in that idea of the hero as the hero. Whenever he puts Peter or Doc Ock through the paces on that stuff, it's always in the service of getting us back to that point where they turn around and do the heroic thing or realize the value of doing the right thing, and I think that comes from a real place with Dan, I think that comes through in his writing, at least for me.

[05:56] David: Yeah, certainly did in this piece. Couldn't couldn't agree more. I'm excited for that start. I was checking out some reviews just to see what other things people think. It's the typical mixed bag. There's some people that are like me who love it. Some people are “nah, it’s not,” but I thought it was great. I'm definitely in, for the near term, at the very least, and then the last thing I want to talk to you about, hopefully, I'm not taking over the show. I got on Whatnot again. So, Rob Liefeld was on Whatnot again this past Wednesday, and I am very entertained. I mean, he's signing stuff and selling it, but while he's doing this, he's also standing up and dancing and smacking his butt in front of the camera. I don't know what is going on. He's singing and, I mean, I am wildly entertained. I just sit there watching it going, “what is happening?” He's got a zero-tolerance policy for anybody in the chat. If somebody even just says something slightly innocuous that he's not really sure what it means, he just boots them, he just kicks them out, bans them forever. In between the dancing and butts smacking, he just booting people out left and right. It serves to be the best time ever. I'm just completely entertained. I don't even know what to say other than if you haven't seen Rob Leifeld’s Whatnot, you have to get on there and watch this thing because it's amazing.

Also, I might have bought a couple of Blood Splatter Chisel signed copies of Snake Eyes, because it was the one. I didn't even know, we did a Snake Eyes Dead Game connecting cover where he did Snake Eyes on one cover and Storm Shadow on the other cover, and they're connected. I didn't think I had those. So, I was like “okay, I actually have to get those.” So, yeah, I got some Blood Spattered Chisel Signature Snake Eyes Dead Game comics. Best money I've ever spent.

[08:13] John: Yeah, it's another one to even put together. That was Megan and I editing that one. I remember Megan was doing all these covers, and I was on the editorial side. I mean, Rob was putting the comic together himself.

[08:26] David: Yeah. So, John, you’ve got to get on there. Man, you’ve got to see this. There other thing about Whatnot is that you can take a snapshot of your screen on your phone on Whatnot. If you do it, it says, “do you want to clip of last 30 seconds,” and then you hit a button and it clips the last 30 seconds. So, I've probably got three minutes of Rob Leifeld singing and dancing on my phone. He's amazing. I have never been a bigger fan of Rob Leifeld, John. As you know, I was a huge fan before, but I'm an even bigger fan now. Guy’s fantastic. Well, shall we get into it?

[09:15] John: Sure. Yeah, so speaking of Dead game, speaking of Snake Eyes, speaking of working on it, one of the things we’ve both done a lot of is work on some licensed comics, and I feel like in the last couple of months, there's been a number of sea changes in certain parts of licensing. A couple of new publishers have come in and picked up licenses, a couple of big ones have moved places, and I think it's been interesting to see what all that means. I don't know. I thought it’d be an interesting takedown of it. Thought it'd be interesting to take a deep dive into making license comics and what makes a good one, how it works, and all that sort of thing, which is a real wider-anging topic. Yeah. I'm excited to talk about it.

[09:56] David: Yeah, I was talking about this the other day, and you and I working for IDW, and everybody who has been an editor or is an editor at IDW has a unique position in the industry in that we are working a lot with licensors and on licensed comic books, which is not something that editors at Marvel/DC really have to deal with. I guess, Marvel’s got Aliens now and did some Conan, and occasionally they have that sort of thing going on, I'm sure, but not in as meaningful ways, I think we've dealt with.

[10:31] John: Way back when, when I was at Marvel, Marvel was very focused on its own IP. That had been a decision that was made because, at certain points historically, Marvel definitely did. Marvel was the place where Transformers and GI Joe started as comics. I think that was the first of any of those things that actually hit the streets, was the Marvel Comics of those, and then going back before that, you had ROM and Micronauts, but going back even before that, you had the stuff that really is widely considered to have saved the company with Conan and Star Wars. All those things were the fabric of that company. Conan, it's amazing when you think of John Buscema being such an important Marvel artist, and most of the stuff he drew, I think was probably Conan, or at least a huge chunk of it. I mean, he obviously had great runs of Avengers and everything, but I mean, there's a guy that literally wrote How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, or drew How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, spending a lot of the time on what was a licensed book. By the time I was there, that had gone away with the exception that came back in, was when we started working on Dark Tower, the Stephen King book, and retrospectively, in my head now, it's weird the way that book worked, because we really ran it like a Marvel comic. Stephen King saw everything, but I think he only ever gave notes on one line of dialogue in issue one. I don't mean that out of “he wasn't engaged.” When we started it, he sat down and was like, “Okay, well, here's what the story should be,” and then laid out 30 issues of plot. I mean, he was really, yeah, I guess that's a story all in itself.

[12:08] David: That's a lot.

[12:09] John: You want to hear that story? You want to go into that?

[12:11] David: Yeah, I do want to know that story.

[12:15] John: Joe Quesada was, I think, really excited about the prospect of getting a Stephen King license, doing Stephen King books. He’s a big King fan, a big fan, particularly of The Dark Tower. So, mock it up, I think he wrote a three-page sequence, they turned into a four-page sequence, based on the opening line of the first Stark Tower book, which I'm going to get wrong, because I don't remember it. I think actually, it's in my garage. I was going to say. I've got a bunch of other Dark Tower books in arm's reach. It was Roland ran through the desert, and the man in black followed, so that was the opening, and then he got the idea was to have Jae Lee draw the sequence and Jae was going to be the the artist, and the original idea was that Jae was going to do pencils on it, and then Richard Isanove was going to do paints over Jae’s pencils. Richard Isanove was Joe's main colorist, I think still is, I think he still colors all Joe’s stuff, but while Richard was coloring or painting them digitally, Jae was going to ink the pages, and then June Chung, Jae’s wife, his usual colorist, is going to color them, and we were going to have two versions to show, but the first Richard Isanove page came in and everybody was like “nope, that's it. That's amazing.”

Funny aside there, I actually just told Jay this past ComiCon, I don't think he knew that, and June wasn't there, so I didn't tell her the following thing was, so then you had June who has always been coloring Jae’s work, but she was down a job. So, we're like, “oh, she's great. We should get June to color something, and right around, that time Mark Miller and Greg Land introduce the Marvel Zombies and Ultimate Fantastic Four. I go, “we should do a Marvel Zombies series. I don't know who should get to do it, but you know who'd be a great colorist on it? Would be June Chung.” So, she was actually the first person to get hired, and I don't think she knew that. I mean, I don't know that we ever brought it up, but we built that book around June, weirdly enough.

Anyway, Jae and Richard finish up these these four pages. They get printed out in this 11 by 17 book put on poster board, and then we have an actual meeting with Stephen King, and as agent, they're coming into the Marvel offices. They come in, Robin Firth, who wound up plotting the Dark Tower stuff, she wrote a book called The Dark Tower Concordance, which was an Encyclopedia of The Dark Tower, explaining the chronology and all that stuff. She's American, but she was living in England at the time, so she was on the phone while we were doing this, and Stephen King comes in and, I mean, I'm a Stephen King fan, but you never know what it's going to be like when you meet somebody like that, but he and the people he surround himself with are absolutely as cool as you'd hoped they would be. He's just super engaged, just doing stuff because he's interested. He's the guy that writes the stuff he does, and does the stuff he does, because he likes doing it, and he absolutely does not need to. He's fine, but he keeps working at a rate that's incredible, and then I mean, again, as an aside there, that's something I think we should bring up, is there anybody in the history of writing that has the longevity that Stephen King has, with the level of importance that Stephen King has, in the sense that a new Stephen King book is a major book? I went into Barnes and Noble, and I was looking at some horror books, and I was like, “there sure are a lot of Stephen King books here in the horror section.” Then I realized, no, wait, that's not how the alphabet works. I'm in the Stephen King section that's adjacent to the horrors. I mean, Charles Dickens didn't have a career that lasted this long. I mean, I don't think anybody has, going from the seventies.

[16:10] David: Edgar Rice Burroughs, somebody like that was doing pulpy.

[16:15] John: That's interesting. Yeah, you're probably right.

[16:18] David: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, maybe, but I don't know how their books were landing. Yeah, the guy’s prolific, to your point.

[16:26] John: You could fit all the Sherlock Holmes book in a thing that you could hold in one hand. You can't do that with Stephen King’s oeuvre. Okay, so Stephen King.

[16:35] David: This whole show’s about digressing, I opened the show digressing. So, we'll make a new title for this show by the time we get to the end.

[16:43] John: He comes into the conference room, we're in there, and it's Joe, think Dan Buckley was there, Tom Marvelli, who was the creative services director and designed some of the stuff, would go on to design the books and everything. We were all there. Ralph Macchio was going to be the editor on it because he, apparently at one point in the 70s, Walter Simonson did an adaptation of The Lawnmower Man, the story, not the movie, for one of the black and white magazines that Ralph was editing. The story Ralph told me was that they sent the art over to Stephen King just for approval to see if it was okay, and then it came back a week later, or whatever, scripted by Stephen King. He just wrote the dialogue for it. I don't know if that matched up with anybody else's memories.

[17:34] David: That was so cool. Didn't we do a Lawnmower Man artists edition or something like that?

[17:39] John: Yeah, IDW did a portfolio of it. Scott Dunbier put that together. I'm sure you’ll find that on eBay or something.

[17:46] David: It sounds really cool.

[17:48] John: It's a cool adaptation. Anyway, so Ralph had already talked to Stephen before, was the main guy, and I was Ralph's main assistance, so I was there for this stuff. We present the pages to Stephen King, and he's just like, “Oh, these are these are really good,” and Joe says something like, “these aren't the real pages. These are just to show you what we want to do, how we want it to look,” and King says, “No, this is how the story starts. You go to here and then you open it up,” and it's this two-page spread, and then the next spread, you cut back to the past, and then you do this,” and just run through, “here's 30 issues of how you're going to do it. Oh, yeah, we can do it.” Not demanding it, but just like “oh, then you could do this and you can do this.“

[18:26] David: Right there in the initial meeting? You haven't signed the license?

[18:30] John: There's no license. This is trying to get the license, and Stephen King was like, “here's how we're going to do it.

[18:39] David: “The page four-five spread is going to be on issue one is this.” Wow. That's awesome.

[18:45] John: Yeah, no, and Robin’s on the phone every once in a while correcting, fact-checking Stephen King, where Roland doesn't have his guns yet at this point. He's like, “Oh, okay. So then this happens.” Making these adjustments. Is somebody recording all this? Robin was taking all the notes of everything. She wound up plotting it out and wrote down the first arc, and then the first issue. Peter David came in and scripted it, and I think that the one note we got, I love Peter David, he had a very Peter David kind of line. Completely don't remember what it was, but it was a pun or something like that about something, and King scratched it off and was like, “those people are as big a liar as a balloon going in a forest,” or whatever. I don't know what it was. King just scratched it out, and it was, “those people are full of crap or whatever.” That was the one edit we got the entire time.

[19:41] David That's the best licensor ever right there. He says, “here's what I want you to do,” and then gets out of the way and lets you guys do it.

[19:50] John: Yeah, and I mean, he was in communication. I was there. This is around when the Sopranos was just ending, the TV show, and after the last episode of Sopranos, Ralph was like, “I wonder what Stephen King thought of that,” and calls him up, and I'm sitting there listening to the other side of the conversation, as Ralph and Stephen King are talking about the last episode of The Sopranos. Yeah, we were really freewheeling at a certain point. I mean, even we were getting that book out by the skin of our teeth every week that it had to go out. I think we managed to hit most of the ship dates, but it was by minutes.

[20:32] David: Jae Lee on the art is probably going to do that to you.

[20:36] John: Well, yeah. Maybe this is just going to be a Dark Tower one. 

[20:44] David: I guess so.

[20:44] John: One, was that Jay did the layouts for the whole issue, and one of my favorite things that I've ever had in comics is because we knew this is going to be a lot of people's first comic or a lot of people's first comic in a long time. Joe really wanted all the storytelling to be really bulletproof, but we didn't feel it needed to look like a regular comic, because people were going to come in from other mediums wanting to see Stephen King, and we all agreed it was okay that it looked weird, that it looked unusual and didn't look like everything else out there. You had this idea, and I was sitting there while Jae was going through each of his layouts with John Romita Jr, and they were just going through page by page talking about all the storytelling choices, and I was just sitting there watching it, and John would be like, “Oh, that's really good. I could never do that. Yeah, that's an interesting way to do it.” These two guys are really good at what they do, two of my favorite artists talking shop. That was really fascinating. Jae would pencil everything, turn it in for the deadline, not be happy with what he did, and redraw the entire issue every time, and it was out of trying to make it better. You know what I mean? I love Jae. He's great. He was like, “I don't think I did a good enough job on this. I need to change this page,” and by the time we'd get the color-in from Richard, it would be “The layouts are different.”

[22:12] David: Was Richard just frustrated?

[22:15] John: He was into it, too.

[22:19] David: It sounds like a charmed project. The sales on that thing were pretty fantastic too, though. You guys did a really good business with that thing.

[22:27] John: Yeah, I only worked on the first story arc. I think maybe set up part of the second one, but I think I was gone. I believe Nicole Boose took over the main reins of it, but by then with Ralph still overseeing, but definitely expanded into a bunch of Stephen King books over there. They did The Stand with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa writing it, and then they did an adaptation of N with Alex Maleev and Marc Guggenheim, I think.

[22:56] David: Wow, I didn't realize it went on that long or had that depth to it. I think that's pretty great that you set up the meeting to try to win the license, and Joe Quesada must have just been so happy with the way that conversation went. If the guy is plotting out 30 issues in front of you, you're like, “Oh, we're going to get this license. This is just a matter of money.”

[23:21] John: Yeah. That isn't typical of the way license stuff works. I don't even mean in terms of qualitatively, I just mean, usually you send all this stuff in for approvals, and somebody has to approve something and tell you it's okay before you move forward, and there was a level of instant trust, I guess.

[23:43] David: On the other side of the coin is when I was running Ape Entertainment, back in the day, we went out and got the DreamWorks Animation license, and it was a similar setup, where you put together a bunch of art and some ideas, some rough concept ideas about what you want to do, in terms of story-wise, or where you think a couple directions might go, and then just the pages and pages of financial documents basically, about how you're going to pay for everything, but it really is, you go in with some art and hope that they like it. So, did something similar. Basically, when I went to DreamWave, they had a similar reaction to our stuff. They really loved the concepts and ideas that we're doing. They absolutely adored the artwork that we had put together for it. So, I was like, “oh, man, we're off to the races,” and then almost immediately, they didn't understand the concept of alternate covers.

We weren't allowed, as a company, to do alternate covers on the DreamWorks Animation projects, which at that time, cost probably hundreds of 1000s of dollars. The amount of money lost by not being able to produce a couple of extra covers on every book was probably a difference between, quite a sum of money, and that was just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of working with a licensing partner who had a lot of requirements, and none of them were good business decision requirements, and there was a lot of back and forth about every single page, about every single thing that we did, like, “hey, that person's hand should be closer to their head.” Nothing to do with storytelling, nothing to do with anything other than “that just looked a little like the hand should be somewhere else,” and this is not going to go well. They were great people, actually. I adored everybody that I was working with over there, but they did have these very odd restrictions and rules that really did handcuff everything we did, and ultimately, it really did affect the business side of things, because if you can't produce quick and you can't produce the things that you know you need to produce to juice the numbers, what are you left with? You're left with literally just the name and the likeness of the property, and nothing else to try to do a good business with.

That's the other side of the coin, is when you get into these situations where you're working with licensors, they have ultimate control over every single thing you do, and if they don't like something, you have to change it. There's no choice, and it doesn't matter if you lose 10 days' worth of production time while you're making that change. Doesn't matter. They don't care. That's on you. That's your problem. If you're going to be late, that's your fault, even though we're the ones that are throwing up all the obstacles in front of you, it's your job to hurdle them, but ultimately, when you get into relationships like that, those relationships don't last very long, because they're not happy, because they're not getting what they want, they're having to put a lot of energy into something that they're not getting back out of what they want, and the licensee is getting in the same boat, you're throwing massive amounts of energy trying to get something out the door, and you keep getting stumbling blocks and roadblocks in between, and you just can't do business like that. When I hear you talk about the Stephen King thing, it's like, “okay, that makes sense, that tracks,” and that's one of the reasons, certainly there's multiple reasons. Jae Lee and Stephen King being two of those big reasons, and how do you say his last name, Richard?

[27:32] John: Isanove.

[27:33] David: Isanove. That guy’s fantastic. Peter David, was a great team around that thing, but the fact that you were able to keep to a schedule and get that thing out on time, and everybody cared about the quality, and the licensor was not nitpicking every little thing and getting in the way of production, that certainly has a lot to do with the success of that thing, too, for sure, I'm sure, and that's probably why that thing went on as long as it did, and why you guys were able to do other projects with Stephen King, because it's like, “this relationship works. So, we can really turn it on and really keep it going.”

[28:10] John: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things, I think, from the outside, when you ask about licensed comics. What's it like? It's a wide spectrum that varies, completely depending on the licensor. There are comics that can be like making a regular comic book at a publisher, and then there are ones where, like you said, it just grinds you down, because you're making all these weird, minute changes. I mean, there are sometimes where licensor feedback is not always unwelcome. There's definitely times, protecting the integrity of the story that they're doing, and there's stuff that definitely makes sense. We can't do that with Star Trek, that's not a Star Trek thing, and hopefully, you get to the point where everybody involved in it knows that stuff, but a lot of times, when you're starting off with licenses, you don't know all the rules.

[29:05] David: 100%, and it's to be expected to have a lot of feedback in the early stages of a project. Yeah, absolutely, but once your team on the licensee side is trained up, you've got a good team, the idea is that the licensee will take care of making sure that they're protecting the brand properly, and the licensor’s job is really just to monitor and then make sure everything's staying on track, and if you can't find a way to get to that situation, that's when things go a little south.

[29:41] John: What do you think makes a good license? What attracted you to DreamWorks, at the time, or what did you look for when you were EIC at IDW or associate publisher at IDW?

[29:54] David: That’s a great question. I mean, obviously, you have to have something that you think has mass appeal, or you have to have a property that maybe is comic book adjacent in a way. So, as an example, with the DreamWorks Animation stuff, I was leaning heavy into all-ages material. I really thought that it was important for us to get new readers into the comic book space, and at the time, it was DreamWorks Animation properties where they were firing on all cylinders. They had Shrek and Madagascar, and they had all kinds of properties, and those movies are doing really good business, and there wasn't a kid around that didn't know who Kung Fu Panda was, so, okay, we've got a mass appeal, and they're fun characters, they've got plenty of story that we can mine in between movies or before movies, so there's plenty of directions that we can go, so all of that fed into a what I thought would be a good fit for comic books. So, that's one direction, is you've got something with such broad appeal, that even though comics are a pretty narrow slice, you can probably bring in enough of those broad appeal fans into that comic book space to really do a good business.

The other version of that is to find something that's comic-centric, in a way, and I think something like Conan or Red Sonja at this point is probably one of those. It's got a history where it skews very close to the comic book industry. So, comic book fans themselves, the ones that are already reading comic books, a large portion of them would be interested in it. So, even though it might not have broad appeal across a wide audience, it's got a broad appeal across the comic book audience.

So, hopefully, I'm articulating that, where it's two different types of properties, but they both have equal value, potentially. So, that's what I do to try to identify what direction to go, and then it's also dependent on the publisher themselves. If I'm publishing primarily all-ages material, I'm not going to go out and get Hellraiser. It's not going to fit, even though that might have broad comic book appeal. It's just not going to work for me as a publisher. It's outside of what I'm trying to accomplish. So, that would be the other piece that I'd probably be looking at. How about you?

[32:27] John: The thing I used to think about this stuff. Now, I don't actually know how true it is, because I think the landscape has shifted over these years that we've been working on this stuff. I used to call it nerd properties, and you had jock properties. The jock ones were the ones that might be very popular, but people don't care about the mythos and they don't care about the stuff behind it. They just want to see an action movie or something. 

[32:55] David: I have a perfect example of one that I feel like started out as a jock property and turned into a nerd property.

[33:01] John: I have a guess. Does it have cars in it?

[33:05] David: That's actually a good example, too. Go ahead. That’s not the one I was thinking of.

[33:11] John: I was thinking Fast and Furious.

[33:14] David: Fast and Furious. That's a good one. I was thinking John Wick.

[33:17] John: Oh, interesting. Yeah, John Wick definitely goes into the stuff where it has all the mythology and become so important to the story, and that's why people like John Wick.

[33:23] David: It's not important, seven in the first two movies, really, of John Wick. I'm just there to watch John Wick beat the crud out of people. It's just slaughter and it's super fun and fast, but by the time you get to four, there's all kinds of stuff, like the continental and all these rules, and there's all these side characters and stuff going on everywhere. It's like “man, I want to know all about this thing,” but that's not where you start, and you're right, Fast and Furious is exactly the same way.

[33:50] John: The first few movies, there's not much to them, and then around four, and then especially five, when it's just “we need a crew. Oh, I know a guy,” and then they bring everybody together and then from then on, those movies are just about the continuity or just about that mythos and about family. Don't get me wrong. John Wick, at least in the very beginning, had hints of there being a larger mythology. I think you're totally right. It had hints of that in a way that, I don't know, Eraser probably didn't, or whatever, Arnold Schwarzenegger movie did. Wasn't going to drag people back there.

[34:35] David: But I don't think anybody cared about that. I think you're right, but I don't think anybody cared. This dude's dog got killed and now he’s killing.

[34:43] John: There are definitely licensed properties, Conan's a great example, of the stuff that is comics related. Conan is just inexorably linked to comics, that so much of the visuals of Conan really were driven by the comics. Obviously, the Frazetta covers and everything, too, but what Barry Windsor Smith did and what John Buscema did, and Gil Kane, and that's so important to it. I think GI Joe and Transformers, out of the way that stuff came about, those have as long a history in comics as they have of existing. I mean, with GI Joe, at least existing in the 1980s and later sense of GI Joe. The other really big one that I thought was a really very comic-centric one is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which of course was a comic. That is the first thing it was. It absolutely grew from comics, but it is a licensed property that exists so far outside of that realm of comic books, but it still has that deep comic book roots.

[35:41] David: I would go so far as to say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the perfect comic book license. 100%. There's nothing better, today at least. Maybe in 1983/84, GI Joe was more perfect, but in this day and age, there's nothing more perfect for a comic book license property than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I'm telling you right now, if I was starting a new comic book company, I would do everything in my power to try to somehow get that license. I know IDW's got it wrapped up, but man, I’d try to figure that out.

[36:12] John: The other quality that Ninja Turtles has is that it is not a retro property. It's not something that is, like you and I maybe remember the stuff from the 80s, but my son sure doesn’t, and he assured into Ninja Turtles, he saw the movie and he's got a little Raphael set that he runs around, and he wants to be Leonardo for Halloween.

[36:37] David: You occasionally see this, but in particular, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been handled as a property about as good as you can handle the property, in terms of it continuing to grow and evolve as a property beyond its creators’ original managing of it. I don't know if that's actually totally true, though, because I know Kevin Eastman still has a pretty strong hand and say in a lot of what happens with Turtles, but Nickelodeon as a custodian of Turtles seems to know what they're doing, most of the time.

[37:09] John: Yeah, I agree, but I do think that ability for them, or that interest they have in maintaining that link to the past on certain things, like Kevin's continued involvement in the comics and Last Ronin being a thing that he and Peter Laird originally worked. I mean, in the comics world, Tom waltz, shout out to Tom for writing more Ninja Turtles than anybody ever has.

[37:36] David: And better than just about anybody ever has, too.

[37:40] John: Yeah, and they've seen that and when he writes in Turtles video game, that's the thing they'll talk about, is Tom Waltz, Ninja Turtles writer, wrote this video game. That's awesome that they build so much from the comic stuff. I mean, there's other ones. I mean, Star Wars, Star Trek, both of those have a real long history in comics, but to me, there's a slight difference with those that, even when you're making really great comics in there, and I love a lot of Star Wars comics, Star Trek. I mean, very rarely to the Eisner awards ever look at licensed comics, and Star Trek was nominated for an Eisner Award last year. That's cool. From Colin Kelly and Jackson Lanza, who I believe you helped usher into the Star Trek world.

[38:27] David: You have no idea what hoops I had to jump through to get those guys on that book. Well, you probably do.

[38:31] John: Well, yeah, but they're great. There is a quality that the real Star Wars, the real Star Trek, always is the thing on screen. I mean, I don't think there's that many people that look at it and be like, “No, the real thing is a comic book.” Where there totally is with Turtles, with Transformers, with GI Joe, with Conan. I'm sure some other stuff we're not thinking of, and that's an interesting one, that those are ones that maybe have less of a center to them. I mean, sorry, with Conan, and there is very much the center of the original Robert E. Howard stories. So, that is something you can point out, but I think the rest of the stuff is. Even Turtles, maybe the originally Eastman/Laird comics are the same thing, but that's grown off in so many different ways that there's an authenticity to the comics that I think you maybe don't get in something where you're applying the style of the thing to the comic, largely, which is true. Kung Fu Panda has to look like Kung Fu Panda, or you're doing a weird special Kung Fu Panda comic that looks like somebody else. Whereas, Ninja Turtles looks like the artist that’s drawing it, the same way Spider Man does, or the same way Batman does, or something.

[39:50] David: The artist’s style comes through, is what you're saying. Whereas, you don't want that with something like Kung Fu Panda, where it's like “we have to make this thing look like.”

[40:00] John: Yeah, a little bit of it'll come through, but it's still got to look. So, it's the difference between doing a Batman comic and doing a Batman Adventures comic. That has to look like Batman, The Animated Series or it doesn't feel right. It isn't quite the right thing, I think. So usually when you get to the point where you have a licensing deal.

[40:25] John: So, when you're setting up a deal to do a dual licensed comic, you're obviously dealing with a licensor, but usually, you'll set it up, the deal will be for a certain number of years, or a certain amount of time. Usually, it's in years. A year, two years, three years, something like that. They'll usually be a sell-off period baked into that at the end, so that if the license isn't renewed at the end, you still have time to sell the copies of the book that you've printed, or the copies of the books that you've printed for three months, or six months, or some length of time. The big piece to the financials are that you have what's called a minimum guarantee, which is the minimum amount of money that the licensor will get from the licensee. Sometimes that can be a really low amount, sometimes that can be extraordinarily high, and that's at the end of that three years.

[41:15] David: Or whatever the term is, but three years is pretty typical.

[41:20] John: Well, okay, sorry, to backup real quick. The other thing is that you have a certain percentage of profit that goes to the licensor. The rest stays with the publisher or the licensee, what's called the royalty. So, at the end of the term, if the royalties don't add up to the minimum guarantee, you as the licensee owe the licensor the balance of what's leftover.

[41:43] David: Yeah, and if you haven't hit that minimum, you're in big trouble.

[41:46] John: So, if you have something that was huge, and you had a million-dollar minimum guarantee, and they made $200,000, and all of a sudden you owe 800 grand to them, and there are some things that command millions of dollars, and there's a lot more that command 1000s of dollars. A lot of times the numbers are actually fairly low on the minimum guarantee, partially out of not scaring off licensees, partially out of “we're all in this together trying to make stuff.” There are a few licensors that are predatory, and really want to go after the minimum guarantee. That’s what I'm not going to name names on, but there are some of them out there.

[42:31] David: They’re definitely out there.

[42:33] John: I don't know. Does that all sound accurate?

[42:36] David: Yeah. So, like you said, that term’s the amount of time, if we're just going over some of the logistics of it, a term’s an amount of time, and as a licensee, you always ask for five, and the licensor always gives you three. There's the minimum guarantee, there's the royalties, and there's different royalty percentages based on what you're selling. So, your comic book might have one royalty, but the digital sales might be a different royalty entirely, but usually, the guarantee is all just one lump sum. It's all going into whatever the pot is that you're trying to fill. The other thing about licensors is, I see online, a lot of people wondering, “why haven’t they made a comic book out of that yet?” And the answer is, somebody's probably tried, and the reason why there's not that comic book is because it's just not set up for that, the property itself. So, you might have what could be a really big property, some multi-million-dollar property that's making tons of money, but for them to take time out of their day to review and approve comic book story and comic book art.

Comics books are a very intensive process. It requires a lot of different steps of worth of approval, and if the company is not set up to be able to ingest that amount of information and review it and approve it, or they are set up for that, but the money in comic books just isn't enough for them, they're just not going to do it. If I can do bedsheets and I have one approval, and they're using style guide art that I supply them, and I can make just as much money as I would off of 12 issues worth of a comic book, that's going to be really labor intensive on their side, and on the comic book publisher’s side. Why would you bother? You're just not going to. So, that's the reason why you get situations where you're like, “man, that would be a perfect comic book property.” Probably would be but they're either making so much money that it doesn't make any sense for them to do that, or they'd like to but they're just not set up for that, and they can't be set up for that or the amount of money that would require for them to get set up for that just isn't something that no one can hit that minimum guaranteed to make it work. It usually comes down to money.

[44:44] John: Yeah, well, that's actually a really good point of how labor-intensive comic book creation is for a licensor. I have a long association with Hasbro, and I've gone to a lot of Hasbro events and licensing conventions, and award ceremonies and stuff like that, and everybody there is in the business of making beach towels and cake toppers and stuff, where their version of licenses, the licensor sends them a style guide that shows a bunch of images, they pick some of those images, and they put them on a beach towel, and they send the beach towel over and they approve the image that has already been created. Where comic books, you're making new story, making something in the range of 100 to 150 drawings of these characters every four weeks, in a single comic book. That's for one comic. When we were doing Transformers, at the height, I mean, we had a Transformers comic every week. The layers of approval that you get on a beach towel is “here's what it looks like when it's on the towel, and then I'm going to send you a towel when we've made them.” With a comic book, it's like, “here's the story arc we want to do for these 600 issues or whatever. Here's the script for one issue. Here's the pencils for one issue. Here's the inks for one issue. Here's the colors for one issue. Here's the letters for one issue. Here's all of those things put together into a PDF for one issue, then I'll send you the printed copy after it comes out. We also have the digital version, and then all that's going to get collected into a book.

Licensors that deal with publishers in general, there's prose licensing and stuff, too, or it's just a regular novel, that's intensive, in the sense that you're creating new fiction with it, but it's less intensive in the sense that you have an outline of manuscript and then revisions on that manuscript. There's just fewer steps, even though it takes longer to read a novel than it takes to read a 20-page comic book, and then video games are the other big one. When I was at some of the Hasbro ones, the people that were creating new fiction were us in the comic books and the video game people. Movies and TV tend to be totally different animals on that stuff. Although, it technically falls into some of the same categories. Those tend to work extremely differently than anything, but video games tend to be more analogous to the way comic books run, but let me throw this out there, if you also might do licensed video game comic books, or you might do licensed movie comic books.

One of the other big things is that when you produce a movie, you write a screenplay, you shoot a bunch of stuff, you edit it together, you go back and reshoot a bunch of stuff, and edit that into the movie, and the movie can be completely different. I mean, I've been in rooms where you would not believe stuff that has been changed in movies at the last minute. Whole sections of things that were not filmed these days, that wound up being in a movie, because they could EG stuff in there and change the story completely after it's done, and video games are all about iteration. Weirdly, with video games, especially, the last thing you need to put on is, “here's how the character looks, here's the costume, here's the face,” because all of that is tweakable to the last minute, where when you're going through the play testing, you're building the stuff out and you're playing it and you're seeing “is this fun? Okay, well, we have to go back and revise this because it isn't working,” or all this stuff. There's all these layers of revision to this stuff that happened, and that can create a train wreck with comics, when you have people that come in from these other mediums to get to the end of it. Comics, traditionally, have always been a very margin-driven business. It's all about just how much are you making for a monthly comic inking out a little bit, so they have to be done fairly efficiently. So, you write an outline, and the outline is going to change a little bit when you write the comic, and the art is going to change a little bit from the script, but you're basically locking in that, “here's the thing that's going to be in there,” and you don't get to the end of it like, “well, what if instead of a dog, they found a cat?” and then you go back and change everything. Where in a video game, sure, swap out the dog for the cat. We have to do movements, but we can build that out. I don't mean to say boom, that's easy. I'm sure that's super hard, but comics are all about the finishing version one, one level of it, and moving on to the next level of it, and hopefully not going back.

[49:21] David: It's always fix it on the next one. It's always fix it on the next page, fix it in the next issue. That's how comic books work. That's one of the things I love about complex comics are rock and roll, man. You just go, you just riff, you play, you just do the thing, you throw it down there on that page, you get it out, and then you see what works, see what doesn't work, you ingest that, and the next time you do it, you do it different, you do it better, and you just keep doing it better, and you're never going to be perfect, but that's why comics are so great, because who wants perfect? What the heck is perfect anyway?

The other thing, just to put a finer point on what you're saying, John, which I totally agree with what you're saying, is that if you were working in a video game, you're probably pulling a salary. You're not a freelance artist who's making a set amount of money for creating a set thing. Whereas, in comic books, it’s very different. If you're a writer, you're making x amount of dollars per page of script that you turn in. So, let's say you make 150 bucks a comic book page. So, once you've turned in that script, and it's been approved, and you've been paid, if you have to then go back and work on that script again, the amount of money that you made on that script is now less per hour, so if you're having to go in and constantly revise and make changes to something that you've done, your hourly rate, whatever, your page rate, doesn't change. So, the amount of work that you've done, the amount of hours you put into that thing, keeps going up, and at a certain point, it becomes untenable, because you can't make that work if you're constantly going in and making tons of versions.

I use the writer as an example but the artist, obviously, is much more affected by that, because if I go in and say, “Hey, I've got 10 panels across 20 pages that have to change.” Man, that's a lot of work, and then if we don't get that requested change until the colors or the letters are already on, well, now, not only does the pencil inker artist have to go in and make change, but now the color artist has to make change, and then the letterer has to make a change. The entire process gets set back to zero, and everybody that's touched it is now making less money, because those aren't salaried positions. Whereas, if it was a salaried position situation, there probably would be a little bit more room for flexibility and changes, and things like that, but that's not how the industry works, and if you get a licensor who doesn't understand that, if he doesn't really fully grok that, then again, it's going to be a struggle, for sure.

[51:55] John: Yeah, no, totally makes sense. Maybe we stop right there and come back, reconvene same time, same place next week, and explore a little bit more about the specifics of some licensing stuff that's gone on fairly recently, and then also just thoughts where some of this stuff is going.

[52:11] David: I would like to talk a little bit about some of the companies that are doing interesting license stuff right now, or some of the interesting announcements that’ve come out over the last couple months. We’ll talk about those, and then I want to hear your thoughts and opinions on what direction you would go, John, which licenses you would pick up, and how you would start a publishing venture if you were to do it today. Want to hear that from you.

[52:33] John: Sounds good.

[52:34] David: All right, man. All right.

[52:34] John: Thanks for joining us, and we will see you here next week. Thanks for joining us. It's been The Corner Box.

[52:43] David: Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.