It has been a while since Hollywood discovered comics. The film industry learned long ago that a great deal of money could be made producing big-budget action films inspired by cheaply printed little books about men in tights and capes. But it's only recently that the comics world really learned what it could get out of Hollywood. Or at least that Scott Mitchell Rosenberg learned an interesting lesson: actual ink, paper and staple comics might just be the least important part of the comic-book industry.
This may seem odd for someone so passionate about comics that he had been selling them since he was 13. But not long before he sold Malibu Comics, his small publishing house, to Marvel, Rosenberg shepherded a little-known, underselling series to Hollywood. ''Men in Black'' went on to gross more than half a billion dollars and spawn a sequel that would earn nearly as much. So within a week of founding Platinum Studios in 1997, Rosenberg was pitching an idea to producers. It would be based on a comic called ''Cowboys & Aliens,'' and it didn't matter that the comic hadn't been written yet. From the start, he says, he ''had no intention of just doing a stand-alone comic novel.'' He came up with a few characters and a basic plot line that was as straightforward as the title. The idea was inspired by the children's game of cowboys and Indians, but without the stain of political incorrectness (or genocide). ''You're not going to shoot Indians now -- but cowboys and aliens, that would be fun to play,'' Rosenberg explained to me.
Rosenberg's business model at Platinum, which he calls ''full-circle commercialization,'' complicates the very idea of adaptation. In the middle of the circle is the intellectual property -- the bare Platonic form of an idea -- which is orbited by its potential marketing manifestations: films, television series, print comics, Web comics, electronic comics that can be downloaded to cellphones, video games, toys, clothing, all manner of branded trinkets and trifles from playing cards to coasters.
Within months of pitching it, Rosenberg made a deal with DreamWorks and Universal to produce ''Cowboys & Aliens.'' ''As is often the case with Hollywood,'' he said, ''it took its twists and turns.'' The project sat dormant for years and landed for a while with Sony before finding its way back to DreamWorks and Universal in a deal signed this summer (it is scheduled for release in 2009). ''I just really liked the title,'' said Roberto Orci, who helped write ''Transformers'' and recently signed on as a producer.
For most of the intervening years, ''Cowboys & Aliens'' did not exist as a published comic. Platinum didn't bother printing any of its comics, in fact, until late last year, when ''Cowboys & Aliens'' became its first property to exist in tangible, paper-and-ink form. Fred Van Lente, one of its two credited writers, was hired to work on the comic as early as 2001. His own final draft, he said, underwent additional rewrites. ''For comics,'' Van Lente told me, ''it was a very Hollywood process.''
If Rosenberg's production model owes a lot to the movies, his promotional techniques also borrow freely. ''We used outside-the-comic-book-market marketing strategies,'' Rosenberg says. Those strategies involved making deals with retailers not unlike the ones ''that a beverage maker would make with a supermarket.'' This meant, among other things, offering ''Cowboys & Aliens'' at a highly discounted price, and giving some comics shops promotional budgets, with which they could discount the books further, or give them away. In its first week on the stands in October, ''Cowboys & Aliens'' flew to the top of Entertainment Weekly's comic and graphic novel best-seller list.
Comics bloggers cried foul at what they saw as artificially manufactured hype. ''Rosenberg,'' wrote A. David Lewis, a comics commentator, ''has pulled a fast one.'' Entertainment Weekly issued a ''clarification,'' and the controversy soon died down. In the comics world, at least, so did the hype. Dirk Deppey, a blogger for The Comics Journal, wrote in an e-mail message that, ''aside from the headlines generated by its marketing,'' ''Cowboys & Aliens'' was ''by and large ignored.''
But the whole affair highlighted what comics cognoscenti say is the problem with Platinum's plans for ''full-circle commercialization'': that the circle is too often empty. Chris Butcher, a Toronto comics-shop manager and blogger, says, ''I have yet to come across a Platinum project that didn't feel like a pitch.'' In describing ''Cowboys & Aliens,'' the kindest thing that Gary Groth -- whose Fantagraphics Books publishes high-end graphic novels by writers like Joe Sacco and Gilbert Hernandez -- could manage was to call it ''undistinguished pap.''
For his part, Rosenberg can afford to be unconcerned. ''There's actually no correlation between success in print as a comic book and how the comic does at the box office,'' he says. The average gross of each film based on a comic, according to a Variety study, is about $215 million -- just over a third the size of the entire North American print-comics market. The bloggers can holler all they want. ''As far as we're concerned,'' Rosenberg says, ''it's more buzz.''
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY PLATINUM STUDIOS)