From Kek’s newsletter:
Grant Morrison famously had a series of black notepads with ideas / pitches for virtually every major character IP from Sherlock Holmes onwards, just in case someone, you know, asked.
I didn’t know that! Mad fucker. That’s weirdly brilliant.
THE BRUTALIST, which was made for a hair under 10 million US dollars and is 215 minutes long, is getting a bunch of Oscar nominations. Meanwhile in Britain, the BBC has multiple series on-slate that it can’t fully fund. I suspect this is in part due to the perceived need for any mainstream drama series to look like a mid-level Netflix show. Hence the BBC co-producing with the likes of Netflix and Amazon to access those streamer coffers. The average spend on a “high end” British tv show in 2020 was something like £19 million. As of today, that’s $23.5 million. Two and a half BRUTALISTs, sure, and probably that equivalent in length (six to eight episodes). But the BBC has a massive amount of already extant resources that the BRUTALIST crew did not. BBC Wardrobe alone has 140 staff members and something over 20,000 pieces. In 2008 it sold over a million other pieces to Angels, around six miles of clothes, and can presumably rent back whatever it may need. And the BBC is already paid for by the people.
(Conversely, Ben Wheatley & Amy Jump’s A FIELD IN ENGLAND was made for three hundred grand and required maybe two dozen costume pieces.)
I was talking to a publisher friend last night about Patreon, on which he spends a lot of time looking at comics creators. I do not – I didn’t find out until last night that I still have an account on there, and I’m still not sure how that’s possible. Anyway. His thing was: he sees lots of work-in-progress and one page updates and stuff there, but how has it not become a primary delivery system for digital comics? Like, for your membership fee, or an extra dollar or whatever, here’s the first issue of my comic for you to read online or download, and the next one will be on this day next month, and so on. Maybe there’s a limited physical print edition that I’ll offer for sale a month later. And there’s no deal for collection, so maybe you’ll never see this again.
(It occurred to me this morning that any writer could do that with ebooks, too, and then whack them out to Amazon two months later.)
My thing was, does anyone really want to fracture common culture and a shared marketplace any more than it already is? And an hour later, I thought, common culture is a delusion of my age. Common platforms, perhaps, but platforms are contingent and temporary. We are all “creators” now.
Is there even a digital comics store and reading app that a majority of people use now?
(There is a supposed quote by Pericles I heard years ago but never sourced: “All things good should flow into the boulevard.”)
This note from my friend, which I summarise here to preserve it for myself, has gotten me thinking about that entire space. It’s less walled-off from the world than Kickstarter-style crowdfunding, perhaps? (I think Kickstarter and Backerkit et al are great: my concern over work crowdfunded in that style doesn’t transmit anything into the general culture. Again, probably a fixed idea from my age and background.) I’m always wondering how much great work I might be missing simply because I can’t find it browsing around real or virtual shelves.
I’m sure none of these thoughts are connected, but they’re what are on my mind while I puzzle out the back end of this consult document I’m working on finishing this week.