Yes, this is the final installment of this series of articles. In case you're just jumping in now, go back and read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11.
It's not so bad these days but during my first two or three decades in the comic book business, I often witnessed an unfortunate tendency in the comic book field to wholly blame the talent if a book doesn't sell well. If it does great…well, the writer and artist obviously had something to do with that but so did the publisher's overall success and the brand loyalty of those who buy their other books and the skill of their marketing and promotional people and whatever editorial or creative input came from the folks in the office. But if they decided (rightly or wrongly) to cancel your comic, the reason was simple: You didn't do your job well.
I encountered that policy a lot in the TV business. It always seemed to be either "Our show is a hit" or "Your show bombed."
In the eighties, I was briefly an investor in a restaurant in Hollywood and I learned a little about that business. Sales were good for a year or two, then they started a downward spiral and it soon became a better financial option to close the eatery and sell the land to a company that wanted to build a mini-mall in its place. Which is how I got out of the restaurant business, probably forever.
One of the other partners had way more experience in this field than I did. I asked him what he thought had gone wrong and he said, "When a restaurant closes, you always blame the chef."
I didn't quite grasp what he was telling me so I asked, "But the chef didn't change…and how come some branches of Olive Garden or Denny's succeed and others don't? The food is exactly the same at all of them."
He said, approximately: "In reality, restaurants succeed or fail for a million different reasons — location, what kind of competition is nearby, how much advertising they do, how effective that advertising is, not keeping up with changing tastes and trends, letting the restaurant itself get run down or uncomfortable, ease of parking, the courtesy and efficiency of your wait staff, the quality of the meat and produce your suppliers deliver to you…" He listed about fifteen more and then he summarized: "Bad food is definitely a big reason but when a restaurant goes under, everyone who was in charge of those other things just blames the chef!"
And I thought, "Gee, that's a lot like every other business I've ever been in."
I do not have a high opinion of the management at DC Comics between, say, 1968 and 1976, in part because of this attitude and it certainly applies to certain periods at Marvel, as well. I also thought the folks running DC then were way too quick to cancel books before they had a chance to catch on, and I'm not just talking about Jack Kirby's.
When I was named editor of Blackhawk, I reported mainly to Dick Giordano, who now held the titles of Vice-President and Executive Editor. But I didn't report much to him and when I complained (always nicely) about something, he usually fixed things. When he didn't, he had this amazing way of telling me — this was the gist of it, not the precise words he used — "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change" and then he'd take the time to explain why. I still liked and respected him. Sometimes, honesty trumps the little song-and-dance when they promise you things will change, knowing full well they won't.
Dick and I did not talk much. As I've said, DC left me surprisingly alone on this comic. But he'd occasionally call and tell me he loved something we'd done. I liked to think it was earnestly meant and maybe it was but it was always followed by "I'm sorry I have to tell you that sales are down another notch." On the plus side, when we stopped doing Blackhawk, he did offer other books to Dan and to me, and he personally hired Dan to ghost-pencil a few comics that were officially drawn by Dick Giordano.
I called Dick once to complain that DC's Production Department was insisting I replace the colorist that Dan and I wanted. Dick's response was basically "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." I called him a couple of times to complain about the overt lack of promotion I felt the comic was getting. Dick's response was another variation of "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." But again, he explained why it was the way it was, which had to do with the over-all health of the company. I understood. There was some justification for channeling promotional efforts towards certain books and not others.
The problem with the colorist was solved via a compromise. The problem with the promotion was not solved. One aspect of it was that each month, I'd send in a description of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk that dealers would be ordering. It did not seem to be the fault of anyone in particular but somehow, the description would not get to the proper folks at the proper time and when the solicitations went out, it would just say of the next issue of Blackhawk, "No information available at press time." I don't know how much that hurt us but it sure didn't help.
I had this friend named Bill Liebowitz, who owned and operated the Golden Apple bookstore here in Los Angeles. It was then the place to go if you collected comics and a lot of folks would have told you Bill was the wisest retailer, if not in the country than certainly in our half of the state. I asked Bill over and over what I could do…and I wasn't asking how to make it a top seller. I just thought if we could get sales up a skosh, Dan and I could get to do the comic a little longer.
Bill was a pretty straightforward guy about this kind of thing. He said, "There's really nothing you can do. DC is not behind this book." He told me that when he mentioned to some DC rep that he might have Dan Spiegle and me in the store for a signing, the rep told him not to waste the energy. He quoted the guy as saying, "I can see if we can get Marv Wolfman and George Perez to come by and sign Teen Titans. Now, that's a hot book these days."
"But don't take my word for it," Bill also said. He invited me to a meeting of a little group he convened now and then — maybe a dozen guys who operated comic book shops in Southern California. I drove with him down to the meeting, which was held in the back room of one of their stores and I answered their questions about the business for half an hour. Then Bill said, "Okay, now let's flip the script. Does anyone have any advice for Mark on how to boost the sales of Blackhawk?"
There were no suggestions.
They all told me stories not unlike Bill's about DC reps urging the promotion of other DC books. And by the way, when I say there were no suggestions, I'm not counting the guy who said it might help if the book was instead written or drawn by someone "hotter" than Dan or me. He emphasized that he was not saying "better." Just "hotter." He mentioned an artist whose work, he said, was very popular with his customers but "personally, I think his comics suck."
I was not angry at anyone, not even the DC reps. In their position, I might have advised the same thing. I think it's important to be realistic about these things; to realize that the buyers are going to buy what the buyers want to buy. You can nudge them and call things to their attention and dress the product up to look more attractive and some of that may work. But if they don't want to see a movie, all the powers of Hollywood and the zillions they can spend on promotion cannot stampede ticket buyers to the Cineplex. Usually.
A few days after that meeting with the local dealers, Dick called. DC had raised their cover price from 60 cents to 75 and they were now looking at sales figures impacted by that change. As might be expected, everything was down a little bit. That little bit didn't matter much to a top-selling book but it mattered to one like ours.
Then soon after, someone else in the office called to tell me that the company that bought the rights to republish DC comics in Germany had decided to stop taking the ones set in World War II. I wasn't surprised by that. I was actually surprised that they'd ever been interested in publishing comics that were basically all about killing Germans. But they had been and weren't anymore so DC war titles became less lucrative…for DC.
Dan Spiegle lived near Santa Barbara. I lived (and still live) in Los Angeles. It's a distance of about 85 miles and we'd decided that Thousand Oaks was about the midway point. Every so often, we'd meet there for lunch at a delicatessen to which I also sometimes took Jack and Roz Kirby, who lived nearby. The day I heard about Germany canceling, I called Dan and asked him to meet me for lunch the next day.
Over burgers in Thousand Oaks, I told him, "Blackhawk as we know it is not long for this world. They'll probably cut us to bi-monthly any day now. That's the best case scenario. They may just cancel it or decide to see if some other writer and artist can turn it around. But I have an idea of something else we could do."
I was concurrently doing The DNAgents for Eclipse with Will Meugniot and there was an obvious, crying-out-to-be-done spin-off called Crossfire there. Dan had drawn some sequences of the character in DNAgents and was the perfect artist for an ongoing series if we wanted to ongo. Before I could lay out several possible scenarios for us, he said that whenever Blackhawk went away, he'd be delighted to do a Crossfire book with me for Eclipse. When I got home, I called Dean Mullaney, who was running Eclipse, and he said, "Great. Whenever you want to start." I started writing the first issue that evening.
Not long after that, Mr. Giordano called and said they were going to have to cut Blackhawk to bi-monthly. I said, "In that case, Dan and I would like to leave at whatever time will not cause you any problems." Dick replied — and these were his exact words — "I'm not surprised and I don't blame you. You two gave us a much better book than we expected and we didn't treat it very well."
I have been in and around the comic book business since 1969. I cannot tell you how rare it is for someone in Dick's position to say something like that and he even phoned Dan and repeated it. Others then running the company said similar things to me. DC was a very creative-friendly company in those years under the management of Jenette Kahn, Paul Levitz and Dick.
We soon decided to end with Blackhawk #273, which I think came out around the same time as Crossfire #6. Somehow, descriptions of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk were still not getting into the dealer solicitations and instead, it often said "No information available at press time"…so I decided to entitle our last story, "No Information Available at Press Time." One or two people at DC were miffed or didn't see the humor but most told me it was a funny idea.
To my surprise, DC decided they would try to keep the Blackhawk comic going after we left. The book was assigned to a different writer-artist team and they began doing their first issues while Dan and I were still doing our last ones. The writer worked at Marvel's animation studio in North Hollywood and one day when I was out there for meetings on a project, I ran into him in the men's room. He told me that my Blackhawk work was a "nice try"…
…but he was doing it so right that DC was going to put it back to monthly and promote the hell out of it. Not only that but Steven Spielberg was hiring him to write the screenplay for that big Blackhawk movie. I have the vague feeling that neither DC Comics nor Mr. Spielberg ever knew any of this. I do know DC didn't even publish the issues he did. Once someone in upper management saw what they were doing, it was decided to terminate the Blackhawk comic with the last issue by Dan and me.
Not all that long after though, someone with a lot more talent than that writer-artist team produced a three-issue Blackhawk mini-series. That was Howard Chaykin, who took things, probably wisely, in a different direction. That led to a couple of other revivals, including a series in Action Comics, a new Blackhawk comic that got a #1 (I'm jealous) and a special. Some aspects of the property have popped up in other DC Comics as well but I haven't followed any of this closely enough to write about it here. It does look like the franchise has generally been in good hands.
Dan Spiegle and I did Crossfire in various forms for a few years and we were both very happy. I miss doing a monthly comic book and I miss Dan. And whenever I think about either book, as I did a lot while writing this overlong article, I miss him even more. I don't like to re-read old comics I wrote but often at a convention, when someone brings me a copy of anything I did with Dan to sign, I flip through the pages and think just how fortunate I was to know and work with that man.