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davidmariottecomics · 2 years

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Brandifying the "Geek", or How Funko Became the Band-Aid

Hello again!

Last week, I was talking about comics job (in)security, particularly in light of the majority of Comixology staff being let go, and also touched on the continued migration of comic creators to Substack, despite some public problems that platform's had.

Discussing both of those things had me thinking about the safety of a default, which is going to be a lot of what we're talking about today, and we're going to be talking about that through the highs and lows of association with a brand. I'm not here to specifically call out or bash anyone's interests or even any big companies, so much as using this as a chance to talk about trends in the larger sphere of "nerd culture" that effect audience expectations and, often, the thought processes of creatives and creative companies--the parts that actually matter to people trying to make and tell stories.

Why Brands Like Being Brands Starting at the most basic level, let's talk about what makes a brand and why they're important to this conversation.

Take a look at your stuff. Chances are there's a lot within pretty easy reach that you call by a brand name, rather than a generic name. Band-Aid (bandages), Tupperware (plastic containers), Kleenex (tissues), whatever.

Or maybe you don't always refer to it by the brand name, but you make assumptions about it related to the brand: tablets are iPads, cell phones are iPhones, simple and cheap furniture's from IKEA, plastic building blocks are LEGOs, sodas are Coke, and sports drinks are Gatorade. That sort of thing.

Brands like being brands because when their name is commonly associated with a product, it's good for business. More name recognizability, easier market penetration. The more a brand exists in the cultural consciousness, the more self-sustaining it is, allowing for longer lifespans and more money. If a business is lucky, at some point they corner the market and either really or artificially box out their competition and become a default. We'll get more into this later on how creators engage with each other and their audience, but keep that in mind. The other key to having a "default" is it sets a sort of standard that people can judge against, but it may or may not actually speak to quality or reliability.

Ready Player One

If you've been reading through my blog for a while, you'll know I've been slowly making my way through the Blank Check Podcast back catalog. I'm finishing up Spielberg right now and was just listening to the Ready Player One episode. And part of their discussion, which at this point is 5 years old anyway, is the change in the pop cultural landscape between the release of Ready Player One the book and RPO the movie. The book released in 2011. I really enjoyed it on my first read as a young man who liked older pop culture and was looking forward to this crazy idea that there could be a good Avengers movie on the way because outside of X-Men, team superhero movies were practically not a thing and even something so mainstream to me as a comic reader felt like a major crossing-over event in the wider public consciousness. But by the time RPO the movie came out, the Avengers were about to have an Infinity War with characters from a dozen other movies. The language of Cinematic Universes was well established. Star Wars was back and doing a new trilogy! And Hot Topics around the world had walls of little toy statues making every property imaginable a uniform little big-headed guy.

There's a lot I could talk about in terms of how nostalgia plays into all of that or Warner Bros. multiple attempts at creating a "multiversal WB brand" between RPO, Space Jam 2, MultiVersus, Etc. But why I'm actually bringing it up is in the past little over a decade--and particularly over the past few years as the state of the world has necessitated changes to both shopping and media consumption habits--the brandification of "nerd culture" or "geek culture" or "collector culture" or whatever you want to call it has exploded as businesses have really tried to expand their brands to become pillars of the pop culture landscape. And I think that has started to influence not just the audience, but creators too.

The Brands of Geekdom

If I go into my local Target, chances are I'll stop by the "Collector's Spot" or whatever they call it. It's a little section by the books, video games, and whatever remains of their movies & music, usually within eyesight of, but not part of, the toy aisles. It makes sense. According to a recent report, "kidults" or--checks the description--anyone 12 or older who enjoys toys (rolls eyes), make up roughly 1/4th of overall toy sales. At my local Targets, at least, it always seems like an odd selection. There are usually some of Super7's ReAction Figures, but specifically ones where there isn't a space in the toy aisles for the rest of the line. Star Trek & TMNT & horror movie figures end up here while G.I. Joe and Transformers sit with their kind a few aisles away. Also there are Sanrio crossover plushies, NECA figures for TMNT and Gargoyles and horror characters, sometimes the Godzilla toys, and of course the wall of Funko Pops (which is different from, but very similar to, the Hot Topic wall of Pops mentioned above). If you have ever liked a property and wanted to see it made into a physical commodity, there's a Funko Pop for that (okay, looks like ALF only had a Wacky Wobbler from Funko, but still...).

The reason I focus on Pops is A. They're all over the place. They have an amazing amount of market penetration and there are still stores that exist primarily as Pop retailers. B. Because they work with so many other licenses, they're a good gauge of what's actually catching on--when a Pop is a shelf-warmer, it is a SHELF-WARMER. If people didn't want Ready Player One Pops, you knew. C. Points A and B have made Pops, whether you like them or not, a cornerstone of the general perception of "things nerds like." And it's one that overlaps with the others more than almost anything else--I'd contend that the GoodSmile Company has a pretty robust catalog too, but with a key difference.

Pops reflect a general audience--sure nerds/geeks/collectors/etc may like them, but they're also something a grandma might buy for you because it's cheap, it's of a thing you like, and your grandma's heard of a Pop before. But something like GoodSmile, be it Nendoroids or Figmas or other lines of figures/statues, are not as uniform and not as accessible, even if they have a lot of variety. They tend to be sought out by people who have that interest, rather than distributed to be easily findable for anyone and everyone.

The other cornerstones that I think are often looked at in modern "nerd culture" understandings include the Disney Trifecta (Disney/Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars--less the latter, but how many of us have heard someone refer to an animated movie as a Disney movie, or a superhero movie as a Marvel movie, when the Disney Company had no involvement whatsoever), Pokemon, Studio Ghibli, Stranger Things, Dungeons & Dragons, and in some cases where people find themselves incapable of separating their interests from the damage done by the brands' creators, Rick & Morty and Harry Potter. While I may not cater to those last two and don't personally really like Stranger Things, I certainly enjoy stuff from the rest. I even own a few Funko Pops. So, again, I'm not trying to say these things are inherently bad or markers of a false "nerd" or whatever. I'm saying that they're common and because of that, they are getting to be viewed in that default status, which can set a very strange standard which changes how we interact with stories because of the brandification of pop culture.

A Ranger, a Warrior, and a Bard Walk Into a Bar...

The other part of why this is on my mind is that there's been a lot of conversation about Dungeons & Dragons recently. Most recently, they've reversed their position on becoming more restrictive of their open game license, and have committed to having D&D be under a form of creative commons license. And while I think that's the right decision, and am happy to have worked on a couple of D&D things in the past, I also found the conversation really interesting because I think in some ways, D&D has become an interchangeable term for some people with both tabletop role-playing and Fantasy in general.

It makes sense, right? D&D's 5th edition is pretty popular as a game. It's got comics from IDW. There's an upcoming D&D movie. Plus, it's central to the premise of Stranger Things and is the game that like half of all podcasts play. This sort of brand rehabilitation--from the Satanic Panic era--has really built D&D into a powerhouse. Regardless of how many other tabletop RPGS there are, the controversy around the open game license inherently revolved around how many businesses and resources have been created specifically based off of and in interaction with D&D.

And that's one of the kind of downsides to this, right? There is so much wrapped up in the understanding of what D&D is and what is and isn't allowed within it's framework. Beyond this one issue, Wizards of the Coast has been dealing with the ways in which the tropes of D&D have been harmful and how they can minimize some of that harm going forward. But because it has built into a "default" brand, it also means there's a lot of shorthand that comes to talking about setting up fantasy worlds that still uses some of the worse D&D tropes. Or, on the flip side, there are people pitching every property in the world as having a Fantasy version, but are specifically trying to get it tied to D&D for the name-recognition, regardless of whether or not what they actually would want to do with it works within that D&D framework.

Again, this is not me saying that I haven't had fun playing and working on D&D in my time. I have. It's more to say that sometimes I see conversations speculating how much fun it would be to put whatever franchise in a D&D world (often through the characters playing the game) that spends so much time figuring out the ways in which to incorporate those characters and their attributes into D&D, it kinda ignores that it isn't a story being pitched, or that it doesn't further the understandings of the characters at all. Which is fine in casual conversation, but I'm sure myself and other people in my type of roles have also had to have these types of conversations about the other "default" brands and the things that are made within their terms. The more the Marvel movie method becomes understood as superhero storytelling, the more complicated conversations about the nature of comics storytelling, particularly with first time and non-regular comics readers becomes, right?

When the Default is Unsafe

That all gets us back to what I was talking about last week and my larger point about keeping an eye on these trends. Comixology became the default for digital comics retailer and now is going through being killed by their parent company and that's leaving an uncertain gap in the market, uncertainty in how digital comics will continue to be fostered and grow and become more accessible, and a lot of people out of jobs. Substack brings new people in for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is enough reputable people have taken to it that it's getting name recognition.

Or, to look at it another way, I'm sure many of us unfortunately still use Twitter. Even with all the problems and the criminal owner, by virtue of being the default social media for years, it is where the majority of creators remain and their fans remain and our conversations as a community remain. And when we tried to diversify, it split too much. Not only did audiences not follow, it was hard to just find your friends and peers again. And that is unfortunate, but one of the considerations we make to keep in touch and the never-more-unified community together, even if we're all kinda still certain it'll all fall apart any day now.

All of which is to say, I guess, be wary of what we look to as the default--in the larger pop culture landscape and the ways in which criticism of Marvel movies gets projected onto different types of storytelling or popularity is defined by Funkos or whatever to the styles you see other artists using and getting work with and the platforms we use to promote our work and engage with each other. Because while the default might be familiar, that doesn't mean it's the best representation of what could be.

Next week: I dunno yet. We'll talk about something else.

What I enjoyed this week: Blank Check (Podcast), Honkai Impact (Video game), House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (Book), 17-21 by Tatsuki Fujimoto (Manga), Nope (Movie), Black Adam (Movie--No doubt, it was kind of a mess, but I'm a sucker for the JSA, so it was nice seeing my friends, I guess), Persona 4 Golden (Video game), Poker Face (TV show), The Savior's Book Cafe Story in Another World (Manga), Gundam: The Witch from Mercury (Anime), working on some wedding planning/registry stuff, bought a new mattress that should be here tomorrow (please buy stuff from Becca and me because we just spent a lot of money buying a new mattress).

And for the sake of something fun, here's a roundup of the webcomics/comics I read digitally most weeks and when I read them: Nancy (daily), Gil Thorp (daily except Sundays), Lore Olympus (Sundays), Zatanna & the Ripper (Sundays), Batman: Wayne Family Adventures (Sundays), Vixen: NYC (Sundays), Skullgirls (Sundays), Aeonian Red (Sundays), Alfie (Wednesdays & Fridays--ADULTS ONLY), The Rock Cocks (Mondays & Fridays--ADULTS ONLY), Blissverse (Mondays--ADULTS ONLY), 1.1.23 (As I catch updates), and then my Shonen Jump block: Chainsaw Man (Tuesdays), Jujutsu Kaisen (Sundays), My Hero Academia (Sundays), Witch Watch (Sundays), Fabricant 100 (Sundays), Spy x Famiy (Sundays), and One-Punch Man (Sundays), with other stuff that updates less frequently sort of thrown in whenever I remember.

New Releases this week (1/25/2022): Godzilla Rivals: Round One TPB (Didn't work on this, but plugging Zilla)

New releases next week (2/1/2022): Off week for my books!

Final Order Cutoff (1/30/2023): Godzilla Rivals: Mothra vs. Titanosaurus (Editor)

Announcements: Arizona Comic Book Arts Festival - 2/25! Less than a month away! It's a one day comic-focused event in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets are only $10. Attending artists include me, Becca (who once again is dropping some new stuff on their Patreon, see below), Mitch Gerads, Steve Rude, John Layman, Henry Barajas, Jay Fotos, Jeff Mariotte, Marcy Rockwell, John Yurcaba, Andrew MacLean, Alexis Zirrit, Meredith McClaren, James Owen, Ryan Cody, and many more! Come and see us! Becca'll have some very cool new merch, too!

Becca contributed to Aradia Beat, a Magical Girl Anthology Magazine! It's now on Kickstarter! It's both a tribute to 90s magical girl stories and part of a larger project about the overall preservation and mutual support of magical girl stories!

Pic of the Week: Caught the cats looking really goofy!

#godzilla idw #funko #pops #nerd culture #brandification #arizona comic book arts festival #comics #comics editorial #ready player one

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