Paying for Comics with Movies

Stephen W. Saffel suggested that Disney (which will own Marvel Comics) and Warner Bros. (which owns DC Comics) should "decide that it's time for comics to become ubiquitous once again".

Disney has announced their intention to purchase the Marvel corporation which would mean that the two main comic book companies would be owned by major media corporations which also make movies. Disney and Warner Bros. can use the stable of comic book characters they each own to produce films. They can also easily publish comic books about the characters from their movie productions.

A controversial idea would be to make comics "ubiquitous" by making them more affordable. Marvel already could have decreased the paper quality or even art quality if they had wanted to target children with limited budgets. I assume that Mr. Saffel intends Disney to subsidize comics with profits from the movies that would be made about the characters made popular by the comic book medium.

I agree that if it would work, Disney should definitely look at the overall picture of profit between movies and comic books that tie together. Corporations, especially larger ones, can have a difficult time setting up incentives to encourage this kind of cooperation and big picture thinking.

Effectively comic books would be what's called a "loss leader" for movies but it is hard to balance when a loss leader is just a waste and when it drives success elsewhere in the business. In this case the loss leader acts as an idea factory for movies and many of those new stories would fail to gain an audience.

Stephen W. Saffel is an Editor/Content Developer in the hobby/popular culture arena from the Forest Hills, New York. His comments can be found at http://www.icv2.com/articles/talk_back/15809.html

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