Comic Talk and General Discussion *

Marketing department ruined Spider-man: Or why does it feel like "outsiders" don't know the business.
Furwerk studio at 3:33AM, May 22, 2025
(offline)
posts: 297
joined: 12-18-2019
Something that I think about a lot is how I ruined my art “career” by listening to my mom about business, ignoring my knowledge of constantly studying and learning from articles, interviews and editorials from all over the place, from Wizard magazine to Anti-gravity room to Modern Masters and actual experiences from selling my products (TRPGs and comics in person to my neighbors and online) because she went to Wharton for marketing and knew more than me.
My business plan is usually make a product (usually a completed comic issue), find a means of distribution that is reasonable, if I make enough to cover cost of creation and said distribution anything left over is profit for use in the future.
For my free work I try to get my work out there by posting it on twitter and Bluesky to get attention and put up a tip jar, slowly building up a reputation and experience for comics I can sell in the market place later on.
Her's was keeping track of hours in a spreadsheet of every job I did, that's artist, editor, letter, so on, and the salary of each job, add it up before even touching the tools to make a comic, often ignoring that it doesn't work like that in the industry as they use page rates and/or sales.
I was browbeat until I gave into her advice and almost ended my comic career because it was an utter disaster.

Along with this the inspiration for the topic was these arguments I get caught up with on Twitter with techbros over how movies are made. I took time to research how much it would be to realistically to make out a bottom of the barrel AI film, and found it would be over 3 million just for the equipment, the constant maintenance would be roughly 1 million constantly which sounds “cheap” until I started adding things like marketing and asking how are they distributing this movie, are they hosting a server or using a service? How are they generating Revenue?
I always wanted to make movies so picked up a lot of books on the subject of movie making beyond just directing or screenwriting but also Production too.

This long trauma dump brings me to the topic of the post, when people who have no idea how an industry operates but have general business education and thing they can come in and throw their weight around only to utterly mess things up very, very badly.
A comic book example would be the infamous Clone Saga of Spider-man during the 90's where the Marketing department took control of editorial and forced the creative staff to not only stretch out the story and bloated it to excess but forced some changes from the original idea of giving Peter a happy ending with Mary Jane and having Ben taking up the role of Spider-man.
There's also the basic knowledge of the American animation industry where producers often bring in live action sitcom writers in for “punch ups” not realizing that one can't just do a quick reshoot post production and just ADR things.

That's it for me, what is your opinions and examples of this topic?
plymayer at 3:15AM, June 2, 2025
(online)
posts: 289
joined: 11-5-2008
You hit the nail on the head with this one.

Often folks with degrees and “knowledge” have less real world experience or insight. That's why their products suffer.

bravo1102 at 12:23AM, June 3, 2025
(offline)
posts: 6,406
joined: 1-21-2008
It's been said that too many cooks spoil the broth. In Hollywood it is too many producers. When there are more producers than cast listed? Stay away. That means everyone cpuld have gotten some say in how things were put together.

It would be like setting up a patreon and every contributer you had could challenge and then change any creative decision you've made.

The same is true for writing credits. If there are a half dozen names listed? Whole lot of rewrites so whatever they started out with did not make it into the finished product. Sure there are union requirements but often it's just washing garbage.
last edited on June 3, 2025 12:25AM

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