This is the first third of a transcription of the TAC Podcast I posted last night, which had serious audio quality problems. The content of the podcast was/is very important, so I’ve taken the time to transcribe it.

I hope to have the remaining two-thirds of the transcription posted later today.

JM = Joey Manley
SK = Scott Kurtz
SR = Scott Rosenberg

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JM: Hi, this is Joey Manley, and this is the Talk About Comics podcast, the first one in several months. Sorry about that guys. But this is a good one! On the line today are two Scotts. Scott Kurtz, who I think all of you know. How are you doing, Scott Kurtz?

SK: I’m doing good. Getting ready for San Diego, a little bit busy, but other than that, A-OK.

JM: Great. And also on the line, Scott Rosenberg, whom you may not know, and we’ll learn a little bit more about him as the show goes on. How are you doing today, Scott Rosenberg?

SR: Pretty good. Little bit hectic for San Diego with our Comic Book Challenge, but having fun.

JM: Well I am skipping San Diego this year, so after the show, I’m going to take a nap. So bleh.

SR: I have not missed a San Diego since I was thirteen.

JM: Oh yeah?

SR: Yeah.

JM: Well good for you. I find it depressing.

SR: I’m a geek, what can I tell you.

JM: It wears me out, man. It just wears me out.

SK: It’s a lot of work.

JM: I get dehydrated, you know, I keep bumping into the Klingon in the wheelchair … it wears me out.

SR: I live for it.

JM: So why don’t you tell us about yourself, Scott Rosenberg. Just give us sort of a quick origin story about who you are, and then we’ll move on into some of the more specific details about why you’re on the show today.

SR: Alright. Would you like for me to talk about where I am today, or about how I started into all of this when I was a little tyke, or what. Up to you.

JM: I would say start with Malibu.

SR: Alright. I started Malibu Comics right out of college and had no idea whatsoever how to publish, saw some interesting properties. I started getting involved with publishers because I made my way through college by selling comics, and for the most part, since I couldn’t bring my collection with me to Denver where school was I pretty much specc’d on comics. And ..

JM: So Malibu was … when you say you started Malibu right out of college, this was when? This was the nineties?

SR: This is ‘86. So in college a couple of years before that, this will kind of give you a lead-in to how I think, I was speculating on comics, with the goal really being having a service to comic retail stores of providing to them comics at a, for an increased price, of course, for what they were running out of. And at the time there weren’t really very many people doing it. And we used to go for really interesting things. We didn’t really go for — or I, I mean, it was just me in college and some kids, but I, I usually, instead of going for a number one, would go for something that was on the creative side. I would pick up the phone, call the creator of a comic, which I don’t know why anyone else wasn’t doing, and I’d say, hey, what are you doing interesting in the future, is there going to be an art team change, are you killing anyone, bringing anyone in, changing a costume … and from that, I was able to kind of figure out what stores weren’t going to pay attention to, and I kind of guessed what parts of the country it might do well in, and I bought those, and I just ended up selling them. I took ads out, and sold them to stores. So after college, I made a couple of bad deals with comics, and finding out that not everyone pays their bills. But we all go through one of those. And then started up and broke Malibu Comics. Essentially, I had a creative team approach me, saying, “Will you publish my comic?” My answer was, “I have no idea how to publish a comic, I have no money — no.” And they asked me a couple of more times. And I said, “Guys. How desperate are you if you go to someone who doesn’t publish comics, to publish? Is there anyone who has not turned you down? So they were like, “No, but just read it.” So I read the proposal. I went, alright, I like it. So I said, “Guys, I cannot lose money on this. Please hear me. Not that I don’t want to. Not that I shouldn’t. I can’t. My credit card limit is only so much, and we’re going to have to have about the highest-priced comic ever released, which was at the time, I forgot what it was, but it was double Marvel and higher than any independent. And it’s going to be in black and white. And I’ll market it the best I can, but I have about $200 for marketing. And we’ll see how it goes. Well, it turned out selling 130,000 copies with a break-even of about 8000, so it kind of turned into a wonderful thing.

SK: What comic was that?

SR: The Ex-Mutants.

SK: Oh! Great! Well, I used to read that!

SR: Yeah. And then we branded the solo Ex-Mutants, we spun it off into like four or five different titles. To me, I’m a sucker for spin-offs. I love them. I don’t care if they’re mine, or someone else’s, or a TV show. I love them. And we started building the company title by title. There were some successes, there were some failures. We’re always open to new talent and veteran talent. For instance, right now, we have lots of comics by Alan Moore, heck of a lot that are ideas of his that haven’t even come out yet, and we have some brand new creators that, you know, have never been published before. So through Malibu, started building it up, one day, we were publishing about twenty comics a month. Which, we had a very limited staff, but basically that’s what we had to do to keep the doors open, and …

SK: Now is this up to the Ultraverse titles at this point?

SR: No, this was still before that.

SK: OK.

SR: You know the first few years, they’re difficult.

SK: Right.

SR: Credit card bills come due, I was working weekends selling my collection at comic book conventions and through the mail. And during the week … you know, the kind of crap we all do. I was kind of you know building it up. So then I saw actually Men in Black. And it had been passed on by like seventy publishers, but I’m just — I don’t give a shit if somebody else has passed on something, it’s completely irrelevant to me. If anything, I want to look at it more to see if they’re being dumb. And my marketing guys said, “Hey, it’s not going to sell well. It’ll bring down our average. And I’m like, you know, I like it, I think it would be a really cool movie — by the way, I was not a producer at the time, I just bought a lot of popcorn. And …

SK: Laughs.

SR: No, it’s true. And so — why tell you I have a talent that I didn’t have? And so I developed it out, I started shopping it out to the studios. I was kicked out of each studio two to three times each. I mean, there’d never been an action/sci-fi comedy before, so there wasn’t really a point of reference except that some idiot’s pitching it. And then I got together with a writer who was becoming a producer, a guy named Walter Parks and his wife Laura McDonald. I liked the script that they were writing. I didn’t actually know that they were producers at the time. And they said, “We’d like to produce this with you.” And them being real, me not being real, and them getting it, I said, “Okay, let’s go give this a try.” And we went back to the studios who had previously said no. Sony said yes. Actually, two said yes, it was kind of a fun little thing. But we ended up going with Sony. Columbia at the time. Set it up. Spent a whole heck of a lot of years pushing it along. And not to take all the credit for it. Sony did a hell of a lot of pushing. Being worried about it all the way through, because it was from such a low-selling comic that they didn’t know what to expect. Well, what they didn’t count on was that comic fandom gets behind things. So do sci-fi and fantasy. If something comes from the comic world, people tend to get behind it, even if they’ve never heard of the comic and even if they have no intention of reading it. It’s just kind of cool that it comes from there. They ended up with more free publicity than they’d ever had with anything like this, to the extent that they were worried, a couple of days before the movie opened, that they couldn’t live up to expectations. So anyway, that happened, then a couple of years later we made a deal with all of the Image guys, they weren’t Image at the time, to defect from Marvel en masse. So it was Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee and the others. It was kind of phenomenal at the time, because these were Marvel’s top-selling creators and Marvel, nor DC, would give them what they wanted.

SK: Right.

SR: They wanted credit. They wanted their names on the covers, even if it wasn’t their creation, but you know they’re writing it or drawing it for that stint. And you know, who cares? Credit’s free. And they wanted that if they created a brand new series, a brand new character, they wanted to be able to participate in that. And Marvel and DC at the time said no. I mean, not to say anything bad about Marvel, I later sold my company to them. But we started that. And we broke literally every sales record for independents. It was, we had the first independent ever to hit number one on the sales charts, which was Youngblood, and we followed that up with them time and again. And during that same time we were producing the Ultraverse, but per our arrangement with Image, because we didn’t want to compete with ourselves, so to speak, we were holding it back until Image, until we knew Image was going to decide to go publish on their own, because we knew, it was all going to be a learning experience for them, we were all up front together and once they felt that they could handle all the reins themselves, we had an arrangement of how much notice and all that, and if you ever look at the press, the announcement of the birth of the Ultraverse, and of Image forming their own entity, was on the same day. So it was a nice coordinated effort. So we kept … we were one of the pioneers of using Photoshop in coloring comics, in fact Adobe to this day thanks us. At that time, everyone was using different kinds of colorings and specific to comics, and we liked Photoshop, because even though it was incredibly more difficult than any of the others to use, we always think about what other media we use it for. In this case, it was that we wanted to sell our comics internationally, makes us more money, makes the creators more money, just helps in a lot of things. And doing it in Photoshop helps. So we were kind of innovative about that, and it was a pain in the ass, but …

SK: Is it true that Marvel’s interest in buying Malibu was largely in part due to your whole coloring division?

SR: You know, that is actually really funny, because we’ve seen that a million times in print. And I don’t tend to correct anybody. As I said the other day, I’ve posted very few times in my life, in fact, this is my second podcast ever, so I’m almost a virgin. So I don’t know totally what to expect.

SK: Laughs.

SR: So, no, they liked our coloring, because we had the very best coloring in the industry. But frankly it was just a bunch of people with computers. So it mattered. In fact, when Ronald Perlman, who is the one who we made the with, came into our office, he said, “What’s the big deal? Why does everyone say your comics look better than our comics?” And I said, “Well, have you read ours?” And he said, “I don’t read comics.” So I said, “Alright. Here’s a stack of Marvel’s comics from last month. Here’s a stack of our comics from last month. Just open them up.” He said, “I don’t have to read them?” I said, “Just open them up and look at them.” And he opened them up, and you know, ours were vibrant colors and the whole bit, splashier pages, and theirs were kind of muddy. And he said, “Alright, I get it.” But the real thing is, we had a nice market share. We were one of the top independent publishers. They were trying to build their market share at the time. And they had a couple of particular interests in us. One of them was that we were able to launch brand new characters that no one had ever heard of, and have them successful, and distribute them the same ways as Marvel and DC. We were the only publisher to be on the newsstands, in the airports, in the bookstores with them. So we went to all the same points. Believe me, it was difficult financially to figure out how to do all that, but we made sure that our distribution was the same. We also were known for spending ten cents on the dollar for marketing that they spent. And being able to be out there as much as them. We did the first TV commercial ever for comics, the first bus bench and bus side advertising, some fun things like that.

SK: Hm.

SR: So we did all that so we start one day Warner and DC Comics called us wanting to acquire us, and we started conversations with them. And another day Terry Stewart called and said, “I heard you’re for sale,” and, you know, I said, “nnnyeah,” and he said, “Can we meet, tomorrow?” And I said, “Sure!” And basically made a deal with Perlman’s right hand, Bill Bevins, over breakfast, for the company, which, you know, at the time, I honestly was more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan. But we had investors who really wanted us to go with Marvel because of a pre-existing relationship. And, well, I didn’t really have much fun after selling the company. Now keep in mind, this is not a slam against current Marvel. There’s no one there who was there then. But it was unpleasant. And I just. I saw the writing on the wall.

SK: So you were still involved in the day-to-day operations after you sold it, for a while?

SR: Yeah, for a year. And that was about as much as I could take. And believe me, when you have your own characters, Scott, as you know. To leave them. To do that sitcom moment where you’re turning the light out in the office for the very last time.

SK: Right.

SR: It was incredibly painful, but they were hell on our staff. They were making us lay off people — which they were doing to their own staff — every couple of weeks, saying each time that this is the last time. And I’m not going to lie for someone. You know, the first time, maybe they were wrong. But the seventh time? I just … I told my staff what was happening, and that I couldn’t imagine it lasting. I sent memos to Marvel, saying, you know, if you guys do the things you’re saying. They were talking about shipping January books in December, which is silly, because then as soon as a store gets five Spider-man books instead of three, because of the way they order, then all the sales will go down. I said, if you do the things you say you’re going to do, then your sales will fall 18% in April, and I just gave the whole year out. And they’re like, “You’re full of shit.” But someone called me during the bankruptcy, from Marvel, and said, “We just found these memos. How could you know all these numbers?” So it turns out that that’s what they were!

SK: AH.

SR: But I didn’t know they were going to go bankrupt. Frankly, they were not in financial trouble at all. They just got themselves into odd circumstances. They went into bankruptcy because Perlman played a game, went to war with Carl Icahn …

SK: There’s a great book about all that called Comic Wars.

SR: Comic Book Wars. Yeah. I was actually, I formed the bankruptcy committee to protect the creators from their contracts being nullified and the creditors. The Court denied us being able to create a Creditor’s Committee, because it was supposed to go in and out of bankruptcy in thirty days. That was the original plan that Perlman had but you know, life isn’t that easy. So no one had formed the Board, and the Court said, “No, it’s too late now.” So we hired a bunch of attorneys, and went in, and were like, “Look, there’s going to be thousands of people screwed if we can’t form this committee. So as part of it, I wanted to make sure that all of the contracts for all of the creators were not — you know, in bankruptcy, you can toss out contracts. A lot of them have interests in the characters, and the whole bit. We got them to make a deal so that those were all just going to ride on through. And we got some of the people who were owed money some of their money back. But that’s very difficult in a bankruptcy. Basically, lawyers get half. So I mean that wasn’t the main goal. The main goal was just, let’s handle this the right way. Marvel of course wasn’t happy that I formed the committee, because it was at odds with them.

SK: So now who owns all those characters now? Who owns NightMan and Prime and the Ultraverse characters?

SR: I say this with great sadness. Marvel. I have an economic interest in them, but I have no control over them.

JM: And Marvel owns Men in Black as well?

SR: Yeah. Men in Black is an interesting case because we set that up, and developed it, you know, funded all the development and everything, before Marvel. Which is why you’ll never see Men in Black listed in any Marvel press. I mean, think about it. They talk about all their other movies. They never talk about Men in Black.

SK: Well, right before, we were. When I was doing research for the podcast, Joey was insisting to me that Marvel owned Men in Black, and I said, “No, that’s not right. They don’t own Men in Black.” And Joey said, “No, I’ve got the DVD. If you watch Men in Black 2, it’s got the Marvel logo at the beginning.

SR: Actually Men in Black 1 had the Marvel logo, and there are several of us that are participants in it, including Lowell Cunningham, who basically got Sony to change it in the second movie to Malibu Comics. Because it is not based on a Marvel Comic, it is based on a Malibu one. But yes, Marvel owns it, but the truth is there’s really a divvying up of participations. There’s Lowell. There’s me. The lawyer gets a couple of percent. The agent gets a couple of percent. And Marvel. Basically, they may own it in name, but it’s really, how money flows from Sony, and the number of checks they cut, and …

SK: So if somebody wanted to make a Men in Black comic, who would have the rights to do that?

SR: That was actually my next comment. Because I was talking to Lowell today trying to figure that same thing out. Because there are a couple of complications. If somebody wanted to do a comic that’s not at all based on the movie, then it’s Marvel, although Lowell’s checking to see if there’s a first negotiation so … we’d be happy to publish it again if it were with him. And if we wanted to use the Sony characters, we then need to go to Sony and make a deal with them, which is certainly do-able also. So we’re actually exploring that, because we all want to see Men in Black keep on, and we want to push hard for there to be a number three.

JM: I actually asked Bill Jemas why there was no Men in Black comic one time, when he was still –

SR: President? Uh-huh.

JM: President of Marvel, yeah, and he was kind of evasive, yeah.

SK: Dodged it?

SR: I’ll tell you why. Basically, all the Marvel stuff, I mean all the Malibu stuff, they simply decided to not care about. I mean, if you look on the web, about people’s comments, even recently, on the Ultraverse, there’s all these ten years later articles, there’s fan fiction, there’s lots of stuff. Everyone calls it “pre-Marvel Ultraverse” that they like. And post-Marvel that they don’t like.

SK: There wasn’t much post-Marvel Ultraverse was there? I mean, I know they tried to bring some of the Marvel characters over into it. Wasn’t Juggernaut involved in a … in one of the …

SR: Yeah, Juggernaut, and, I mean, here’s what happened. We sold the company in November of ‘94. Marvel made us change our prices starting in February, which was a little difficult, because the February solicitation had already gone out. They didn’t like our $1.95 so they just unilaterally said change everything to $2.50. We of course said, “Why don’t we start that with miniseries and with new number ones and give a couple of extra pages the first time,” and, you know. And they said, “Nah.” So with that, and they said, you know, “Start using these characters.” And it was really pretty early into ‘95, so it was all of ‘95, and all of ‘96, I was gone then. Some of them were still published a little bit into ‘97, there was one Men in Black special that came out that Lowell wrote for them. And then it kind of faded away. And then recently Marvel has said — it’s all over the web — “we’ve been told by management not to use any Malibu characters.” And then off the record, they said, “Or we’ll be fired.”

JM: Let me jump in here as the host. We’re at 29 minutes, these shows usually only last thirty, and we haven’t even gotten to the reason that we’re all talking here today.

SK: All right.

JM: This is really interesting stuff, though, and maybe we can have you on another time, Scott, to really go into that historical stuff, because, um …

SR: Sure.

JM: I know as a comic book fan myself — actually, to be honest, I quit reading comics shortly before you came onto the scene, and didn’t start reading them again until shortly after …

SR: Laughs.

JM: I kind of missed you. Um. But as a comic book fan, and especially as a fan of comic book history, that’s really interesting stuff. But let’s talk about what you’re doing now.

SR: Sure.

[[ To be Continued ]]

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