CrossGen Comics Part I

I'm about to turn 48 years old. I've been actively reading comics for 42 years, and as a life-long comics retailer, I have sold over $75 million in comic books since 1969. During that time, I've seen the medium of graphic storytelling evolve from the single format of 32-page and 64-page 7 1/2" X 10 1/4" standardized comics pamphlets, to a publishing medium that embraces a variety of pamphlet and magazine formats, as well as a large number of book and graphic novel mediums for conveying both art and story. The one constant that has remained, however, is that no matter which format has been utilized by publishers to produce comics, they have continued to be an essentially two-dimensional medium of artwork and story on a flat printed paper page.

For all intents and purposes, my long-established view of the world of comics was completely altered two days ago. It was during a visit to the offices of CrossGen Comics that I was exposed to a series of innovations in the delivery of graphic stories to consumers that so shocked my senses that I have been unable to write about them until now. The reason for my hesitance in committing my observations to paper is that I believe that what the technology wizards at CrossGen have already created is a view of the world of comics that I was expecting to evolve over the next five years. To see what I was dreaming about in nearly finished form, five years before I ever thought it could be done, completely blew me away.

To start, I have long been a Cassandra in the world of comics, preaching imminent doom. I firmly believe that for the past 15 years that the comics business has been in an accelerating downward spiral to oblivion. What I've observed is the almost complete elimination of new readers coming into the comics world as the newsstand distribution of new comics has dwindled to almost nothing, Simultaneously there has been a steady erosion of the existing base of hard core comics readers as inexorably declining print runs have forced publishers to continually raise cover prices. The net result is that we now have a business where the average price of a 32-page comic book is now approaching $3 a copy, while print runs of many "popular" titles have dropped below 30,000 copies being printed. Clearly, this continual erosion of the existing consumer base for comics, with a minimal number of new entrants, is the kiss of death. As an industry, we are currently watching the slow motion disintegration of the marketing of an art form that once upon a time used to be transferable into a viable mass market consumer product. Seeing this terrible decline during my lifetime has been one of the most discouraging and frustrating aspects of my entire professional career. The idea that the world of comics might become functionally non-viable while I was one of its ostensible "leaders" has been an incredibly galling and embarrassing reality. How can one truly be a "success" if the context in which you live dies while you personally enrich yourself?

For the past seven years, the one hope I saw for the redemption of the comics world has been the Internet. It has been my firm belief that the astounding capacity of the Internet to reach potential new comics readers in a highly cost-effective manner was the one clear possibility of salvation of our industry. As a result, I have made it my goal to preach that all publishers, creators, and retailers needed to find methods in which to utilize the Internet to reach new eyeballs. Aside from gradually building a company newsletter mailing list of 80,000 dedicated comics fans over the past six years, I have also personally absorbed the considerable expense of sponsoring such experiments as Scott McCloud's adaptation of ZOT! into an online comics series, and also acting as the #1 sponsor of online comics news organizations, such as Comic-Con.com's Pulse, Newsarama, and (soon) Comicbookresources.com. None of these online sponsorships have been particularly cost-effective in a true commercial sense, but I have viewed these expenditures as essential in working to build the future of the comics industry.

While I have been struggling to come up with the money to help implement these electronic initiatives, I've had a secret ally working in an office park in Tampa, Florida. Slightly over three years ago, a fervent comics fan by the name of Mark Alessi made the astoundingly ill-advised decision to slap the comics world tar baby. Despite the fact that he was well aware that the comics business was declining rapidly, Mark decided to take a significant portion of the personal fortune that he derived from his previous career in the world of high tech and dedicate it to building an all-new comics company.

Right from the beginning, Mark made CrossGen Comics different. For one thing, he eliminated the time-honored tradition of freelancers. All comics produced by CrossGen are created in a "bullpen," built right into the center of their office complex. In a point that can be lost on no one who visits the offices, the comics creators are the center of the CrossGen world. That having been said, Mark Alessi is a control freak. As a result, the vast majority of the creators working for CrossGen report to work each day at 8:30, and leave at 5 PM. Specifically because of these office hours, comics creators who want to be a part of the CrossGen team need to live in the Tampa area. This is an amazing development in the production of comics. As any comics fan or retailer can tell you, one of the most frustrating negative side effects of the evolution of creator "freedom" over the past 20 years of comics history has been the reality of poor work habits on the part of successful comics creators. This has led directly to a large number of very popular books being weeks, or even months, behind schedule. This simply doesn't happen at CrossGen. In three years of publishing, CrossGen has never had a book ship late.

While some comics creators would clearly suffer in such a controlled environment, the staff I met in the CrossGen bullpen were as enthusiastic a group of comics professionals as I've ever met. These guys were just as excited about comics as the old crew at Extreme Studios (which was also an incredibly dynamic working environment at its peak), but they dramatically differ from Rob Liefeld's old team in that they also get to work on time, and never miss a production schedule. Under the watchful gaze of comics veteran Bart Sears, they steadily turn out comics that are not only readable, but which are also the fastest growing titles in the entire Mile High Comics new comics selection. This goes a long way toward explaining how CrossGen has grown from being less than 2% of the comics business a year ago, to over 5% today. In fact, if their numbers keep growing at their current pace through this time next year, I predict that they will supercede Dark Horse and Image, and take over the #3 spot among all comics publishers in America.

While that is a great accomplishment, it really doesn't mean diddly squat. Being the best deck hand on the Titanic is still not a guarantee of a prosperous future. The comics business sucks right now, and it is getting worse. The optimists may point to increasing or steady sales in terms of dollars, but they wisely ignore revealing statistics of the number of total individual comics units sold. The fact is, the unit decline of new comics sales over the past decade has been horrific. We are the buggy whips of our age.

That having been said, what blew me away at CrossGen was that Mark Alessi never intended for the printed version of his comics to be the final stage of production. Right from the beginning, his goal was to transform static printed comics into electronic form, and then to utilize the magic of electronics to enhance his static stories into versions which would appeal not only to existing comics fans, but also to the millions of potential comics readers who exist around the world.

While that is a wonderful goal, I've learned in my decades of experience to be very skeptical of those who promise to save the world. Once I got to the CrossGen offices, however, I was completely dazzled by what I saw in the demonstration presented by the CrossGen computer wizards. They have taken the traditionally-produced CrossGen comics and enhanced them with professional voice-overs, music, and word balloons that expand to easy reading size in completely in sync with the voice-overs. Instead of slowly reading the comic book, you are actually captured by the creator's world, and transported into the comic book itself. The story moves along steadily, with the main characters actually "moving" against the original backgrounds. This is an astounding merger between comics and animation. I have simply never seen anything like it. Taking this innovation even further, each comic can be "read" in up to 10 different languages. This includes all of the major European languages, plus Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Despite my decades of experience in seeing comics innovations, this demonstration of the quantum leap forward that CrossGen had achieved in the creation of "comics" was absolutely mind-boggling.

Going even further, the CrossGen team has recognized that "reading" comics on a PC is very limiting. Within the current world of entertainment alternatives, most potential new comics readers are far happier utilizing other electronic devices for their primary entertainment source, rather than being stuck looking at a clunky PC monitor. As a result. the geniuses developing CrossGen's electronic enhancements have focused their efforts on patenting a methodology which allows their new electronic versions of comics to be "read" not only on PC's, but also any other personal consumer electronic device that currently exists. What this means is that a comics fan will be able to "read" CrossGen electronic comics on their X-Box, Sony Playstation, laptop computer, DVD player, CD player or any other device that will accept any electronic storage device currently available in the consumer electronics market. This includes all sizes of DVD's, CD's, FlashCards, and even the new Memory Sticks. They actually let me "read" one of their comics on a handheld "Notepad" device from Acer that transforms into a read-only screen about the size of an Etch-a-Sketch. The picture and sound quality was incredible! This Acer device weighed less than 3 lbs (1.4 KG), and was only about 1 inch (3 CM) thick. This was an electronic comic book you could carry with you anywhere, that not only had graphics and text, but also motion, voice, and sound in 10 languages.

What makes this so astounding to me is that Mark Alessi planned all this right from the beginning. He never intended to produce simple comics. His seemingly non-sensical pouring of his entire personal fortune into the black hole of building market share in a dying business suddenly makes sense to me. His focus, right from day one, was to build his comics with the thought that they would very soon be transformed from simple printed pamphlets into electronic form. As a result, CrossGen comics have had an entirely different, and far more stringent, set of production standards than those printed by Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, or Image. By waiting three years to finally reveal his grand plan, Mark has built a library of over 300 issues that are now ready to convert into electronic form. This gives him a huge competitive advantage in this dawning new age of the electronic distribution of comics. Frankly, I cannot believe how clever he has been in putting this all together.

To give credit where credit is due, Mark Alessi is not the only genius at CrossGen Comics. Like most truly brilliant business leaders, Mark has had the wisdom to surround himself with a team that mirrors his Mensa-level intelligence. Frankly, I haven't seen so many brilliant people working in a single environment since I was invited to meet the Amazon.com business development team in 1999. The three members of his technology team are particularly noteworthy. Jim Strikeleather is the team leader, and Chief Technology Officer. He joined CrossGen from MeadWestVeco, a technology company with over $8 billion in annual sales. Gabo Mendoza is one of the leading "Flash" animators in the world (his personal website still gets 3,000 unique visitors a day...), and Information Technology Director Courtland Whited is the man who visualizes and constructs the design and flow of CrossGen's online comics. As I see it right now, the combined talents of these three brilliant men are the key to developing the creative changes that will allow the comics industry to survive in this new millennium.

To see a limited sampling of CrossGen's new comics form, I encourage everyone to take a look at CrossGen's "Comics on the Web." Mark has put up some limited examples of his enhancements on that portion of his site for fans to view, free of charge. These do not contain voice-overs, motion, or music, but they do give you the flavor of what his electronic comics will look like. He then allows fans to sign up for future editions of "Comics on the Web" for a nominal charge. You can see the beginning of the future of the world of comics right now, but you'll have to wait a little while for the real CrossGen products to hit the market. Then I think all hell is going to break loose.

In closing this report, I want to make an incredibly bold statement. I have thought about this long and hard, ever since I left the CrossGen offices two days ago. I know that I will be branded as an optimistic idiot by many in the comics world for saying this, but I think that what I saw on Wednesday morning may change the world of comics as profoundly as the publication of ACTION COMICS #1. The comics world in 1938 existed, but was far from vibrant, or commercially viable. It was drifting in a malaise of mediocrity, existing primarily because depression-era printers had excess printing capacity, and access to cheap reprints of newspaper comics strips, or crude new stories of no particular popularity. From the moment that Siegel and Schuster stunned the world with their astounding new vision, the comics world exploded. Millions of new readers joined the field overnight, and an entire industry was born. While Superman was not the only character that helped create the comics Golden Age, his creation was certainly the beginning of a massive change in consumer perception of comics as graphic entertainment. I see direct parallels in the advent of ACTION COMICS #1 with what is happening right now at CrossGen Comics. We currently have no problem with comics content. There are literally hundreds of great new comics being published for fans to read. The problem today is with the paper delivery mechanism. Printed comics are dead, dead, dead. The corpse is still twitching, but the economics of paper and printing costs are clearly spelling trouble, probably very soon. What CrossGen has developed is a solution to that delivery problem that may not only save the world of comics, but also may grow it beyond any of our wildest dreams. I am excited beyond measure by the prospect of being able to turn on so many potential new fans on to comics. This is an incredible new electronic world that we are now suddenly entering. I am finding myself (with almost no warning...) having to readjust all my perceptions of the future of the comics industry, and suddenly go from doom and gloom, to seeing the necessity to prepare myself to be ready for a tomorrow that could be a far better reality for comics retailing than even the glory years of the early 1990's. Let's all hope that Mark Alessi can bring his dream for the future of comics to fruition. I believe that in the process of creating his own personal success that he will not only make himself a rich man, but also that he will also save the comics world that we all hold so dear in our hearts. I can think of no finer example of the positive effect of enlightened self-interest validating our entire capitalist economic system.

Chuck Rozanski,
President - Mile High Comics, Inc.

Please send your e-mails to chuck@milehighcomics.com, and your letters to:

Mile High Comics, Inc.
Attn: Chuck Rozanski
2151 W. 56th Ave.
Denver, CO 80221