Random Dumb Thought

The standard line on the business success of the wonderfully gory EC horror comic books from the fifties was that a lot of G.I.s enjoyed comic books as cheap, disposable, and entertaining junk reading in the trenches and later retained the habit when they were demobilized and returned to civilian life.

My renewed interest in science fiction is much more prosaic than that of a G.I. who just wanted something quick to read in between dodging sniper fire and grenades, but disposable, cheap, and entertaining is an accurate description of some of the science fiction short stories and novellas that publishers TOR and 40k have made available on the Kindle.

I wonder what impact the sales from these eBook titles have on their bottom line, and how successful they have been at winning back older readers who have gafiated from the genre since their youth?

From the "There Is Nobody More Sexist Than a Self-Proclaimed Progressive, Enlightened, Liberal, White Male" Department:

Reading former National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra's, Going Too Far, a history of humor during during the sixties and seventies, I was struck by the following sentence:

The piece was written by Kelly, Choquette, and the Lampoon's first (and only) major female contributor, Annie Beatts.

I guess it sucks to be Mara McAfee and Shary Flenniken, huh?

Obamanomics Explained

President Obama has decided to put a federal pay freeze on the negotiating table to help lower the federal deficit. The deficit is currently about 1 trillion and change a year, and the pay freeze, according to this article, would save about 2 billion a year, which would help reduce the deficit by a whopping 0.2 percent.

It's like a family of four with a household budget in the red to the tune of $100,000 a year thinking that they can dig themselves out of the hole by not purchasing a Wii for Christmas this year.

It's a good thing for our Commander-in-Chief that there isn't a Math section on the LSAT.

Watssit Worth?

Last weekend I bought a new smart phone – the Motorola Droid X. One of the more interesting apps that I’ve downloaded is an Inflation Calculator. Playing around with it, I plugged in the sales price of comic books from the 1950s, ten cents, and learned that a dime then is worth about 0.91 cents now.

Comic books in 2010 sell for as much as $3.99 (DC recently lowered their prices to $2.99) which in 1950, was worth about 0.44 cents – or for the price of one comic book today, you could have purchased the equivalent of four comic books in 1950.

However, all things considered, would I really want to read those comic books from 1950? As historical curiosities, they are interesting, but I wouldn’t want to buy or read any of them on a month to month basis, despite the fact that comic books (in terms of page length) were more like “books” and a lot less like the pamphlets that I pick up once a month at the comic book store.

A fairer comparison, in terms of format – and quality – would be with 1986, the year I started to buy and read comic books on a regular basis. $3.99 was worth about $2 in 1986, which would have let me buy two comic books (pricing varied between 0.75 cents and $1) with as much as two quarters left over to spend at the arcade, or a Big Gulp at 7-11, but not both.

The comic books were printed on newsprint, but otherwise, there were no significant differences in the artistic or written quality of the comic books that I enjoyed then and now.

The bad ones still suck for pretty much the same reasons now as they did then: artwork that looks like a photocopy of a photocopy of a rejected John Byrne page for The Uncanny X-men, and, well, the less said about the writing, the better.

And as for good comic books, they are every bit as good now as they were back then. However, nobody has really brought any radically new narrative, visual, or thematic treatments to the table since Frank Miller, Alan Moore (working with artists Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al), and Dave Sim were doing their ground-breaking work on titles like Batman: Year One, Swamp Thing, and Cerebus.

So it really does beg the question: is the fancier paper really worth the extra buck or two?

Don't You Wish You'd Gone to Med School?

High school math was sheer, absolute, misery. Torture, really. I spent many hours agonizing over problems, late into the evening. Around ten every evening, I'd still be plugging away at it, and "Easy Street", a CBC radio program that featured classic jazz. I don't remember much about how to plot a sine, tangents, or functions, but I did acquire a taste for John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ella Fitzgerald.

The torture was heightened by the fact that if I wanted to escape Winnipeg, and enjoy that sort of high-brow, artsy lifestyle associated with the likes of Messrs Davis and Coltrane, I'd need cash to do it. A lot of cash. The kind of cash that only math skills can bring. Unfortunately, in grade twelve, I had to bite the bullet and take what I thought was the more practically oriented (and easier) math course to meet my high school graduation requirements.

Balancing checkbooks, and figuring out the difference between my gross income and net income was the best I'd ever be able to do. I took my "B+" or "A-", and was just happy that I wouldn't have to go to summer school to get my diploma. A sense of failure still gnawed at me, and the future, which had always looked as bleak as a Manitoba sky on a cold winter's day, looked even harsher in the light of that compromise.

The perks that I'd come to associate with being a professional like Mr. Rockwell - the only CPA in a small town our family had briefly lived in - vanished from my sight: the big house, the go to hell utility vehicles, cable television, trips to Disneyland, and a little disposable income for the memorabilia associated with the little distractions we all love. In Mr. Rockwell's case, it was the Montreal Expos, for me, it was, and still is...comic books, strips, animation. Any kind of commercial illustration really.

I wanted to be in business like my father and Mr. Rockwell, but Dad had drilled it into my head that retail was not the best way to do it. It's a good game when you are young, and have a lot of energy, but it progressively gets harder as you get older. I made feeble attempts to break into journalism, but in all honesty, it was like aspiring to be a rock star, and well, I certainly would be enjoying a much more...frugal lifestyle if I'd actually succeeded.

That failure to finish out the higher level math course gnawed at me over the years, but had almost disappeared entirely by the time I'd written my LSAT. For the first time in my life I had a real metric for my intelligence. I could point to a quantifiable, measurable score, and not just drop the names of a bunch of dead writers nobody had ever heard of into a conversation as a means of asserting my intellectual bona fides.

I wasn't able to get into law school, but eventually, I was able to break out of the education track and into business, and enjoy some of the perks that Mr. Rockwell enjoyed. I want to hold on to those perks however, and get more of them, and to do that I need a bigger salary and bigger bonuses. I signed up to take one of the prerequisites for an accounting certificate.

To my surprise, it uses the kind of math that I became familiar with from what I thought was the "Easy A" high school course. After three weeks in the accounting course, I've come to realize that the math being used in that high school course wasn't so easy after all. It's a lot of hard work, but I've done fairly well on the assignments so far.

I might just be a little bit brighter than I thought I was.

Splatterstick Box Office #Fail

The Evil Dead II scared the shit out of me before I even saw the film. I was mesmerized and repulsed by the video box cover when I was a kid, so much so that while I'd stare at it intently, I couldn't bring myself to look at the back cover. I finally got around to watching it while I was teaching in Japan. I'd seen everything I pretty much wanted to see at the video store by that point, and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about...

And it was freakin' awesome. Scary, because I didn't know what to expect when that freaky deaky Raimi-cam rush started, but also a lot of fun, equal parts Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Three Stooges. I watched The Evil Dead trilogy in reverse order, and went on to enjoy some other horror films from the eighties that mined a similar splatterstick vein - Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, and Return of the Living Dead.

I'd always thought that the production of horror films was cyclical, thematically speaking. The eighties were a period of relative prosperity, hence the infusion of comedy, while the seventies, and to a lesser degree the oughts were a little bleaker, and as a result, the movies themselves had a darker worldview.

However, after looking at the numbers, I realize that hypothesis is probably...bunk. The box office receipts show that people prefer their torture, murder, mayhem, and misery on the silver screen without a soupçon of black comdey to help lighten things up.

Let's take a look at the numbers for two of the splatterstick films that I like, Evil Dead and Re-Animator.





The results aren't bad, given that both films managed to make money, and the fact that they were written, directed, produced, and performed by a group of relatively unknown people. But when you compare the financial results of The Evil Dead and Re-Animator with similar efforts from the seventies like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the results are much less impressive.





The financial performance of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is especially noteworthy in light of its relatively low production costs when compared with a similar freshman effort, The Evil Dead and the overall box office gross for both productions.

Given the healthy box-office performance of grimmer fare from the seventies, and the continued success of that bleak cinematic outlook in the oughts, I doubt we'll ever see a "mainstream" splatterstick revival even if the economy improves during the teens of the 21st century: bleak is just better business sense.





I did find a couple of interesting anomalies in amongst the box office receipts of aging celluloid horrors. Films that had no gore, no nudity, and were for all intents amateur productions shot on a digital camera, out-performed all the other horror films that I looked at by wide margins.





So who knows? As computer animation gets cheaper, and amateurs get more proficient at using digital cameras, maybe I will live to see an "indy" splatterstick revival.

Nota Bene: All film grosses reflect performance at the box-office, and not the revenue from rentals or sales of cassettes or DVDs. The adjusted productions budgets for The Evil Dead and Paranormal Activity were calculated using numbers for 1981 and 2007, however, the adjusted box-office grosses were calculated according to the years that they were released, which was 1983 and 2009. Numbers for the box office gross and production budgets were found on IMDB, while the adjusted ticket prices were based on the figures from Box Office Mojo. Production budgets were adjusted using the CPI Inflation Calculator.

Man v. Superman

Superman and Batman are the two basic superhero archetypes. Superman is gifted with abilities that mere mortals do not possess: flight, strength, x-ray vision, heat vision, invulnerability, and super-human senses. Batman, on the other hand, is made, not born. Circumstances and training have made him the crusader for law and order that he is. In theory, anybody with time, patience, training, and cash could be the Batman, but most people missed out on the chance to become Superman when Krypton exploded.

So which type of superhero do readers actually prefer? This has provided endless fodder for debate in comic book shops across this land for ages. However, as far as I know, nobody has ever actually crunched the numbers to see how people vote on this particular question with their wallets.



I looked at the sales figures for eight (8) different superheroes over the course of sixteen (16) months, and learned that readers prefer the Superman archetype, but with some caveats. These are the total number of copies each title sold over the course of 14 months:



Even when two most popular examples of each archetype (Spiderman and Batman, respectively) are removed from the equation, the superman archetype still dominates:



The grand-daddy of the archetype is the least popular title amongst his super-powered peers. In fact, Superman lags behind Spiderman, Hulk, and Green Lantern in terms of sales, and has seen a steady drop in sales over the last fourteen (14) months.

I think the easiest explanation is that readers want some limits placed on their heroes. Spiderman, the Hulk, and Green Lantern are all very powerful, however, they aren’t omnipotent in quite the same fashion that Superman is.



Two interesting things became apparent while I was looking at the sales data. The first was that nice guys don’t finish last – they trounce the competition. Batman, a character known for not carrying a gun or killing bad guys, outsells the Punisher by a factor of two. Daredevil has an ethic not all that dissimilar from Batman and has a somewhat erratic publishing schedule - Marvel publishes fewer issues per year of Daredevil than Punisher. Daredevil still managed to out sell the gun-toting, homicidal badass by roughly 35,000 copies over a fourteen month period.



The second was the sharp decline in sales experienced by both Superman and Punisher during 2009, and which show no signs of reversal in 2010.



This isn’t the first time that the Punisher has experienced an overall decline in his fortunes, but I’m surprised heads haven’t rolled for the marked decline in sales for Superman – the character is almost synonymous with its publisher, DC comics.



In the contest of man versus superman, superman might be the clear winner, but Superman alone won’t win the battle. For that, he is going to need a little help from his ring wearing and web spinning friends.

Nota Bene As with previous posts, all sales figures can be found here. Please keep in mind that all the sales figures pulled from this website represent estimates from independent comic book shops, and do not take into account sales figures from online retailers like Amazon, independent bookstores, news stands, or big box retailers like Borders.