@’s by Top Cow’s Filip Sablik & Matt Hawkins!!!
Russ Sheath Top Cow is a comic company that is hard to pin down, categorize or label. Born of artist Marc Silvestri, one of the ‘Magnificent 7’ of artists who founded Image Comics almost 20 years ago, Top Cow was the home of some of Image’s most successful titles.
CYBER FORCE, WITCHBLADE and THE DARKNESS are all titles that helped put Top Cow on the map as well as a wealth of titles Top Cow that are also responsible for producing some of comics’ greatest new talents. Under the tutorship of Marc Silvestri new artists such as David Finch, Joe Benitez and, arguably its biggest artist next to Silvestri himself, Michael Turner, all began their careers at Top Cow and industry mega talents such as Mark Millar, Alex Ross, and J. Michael Straczynski have all found a home for their projects at ‘The Cow’.Where others have faltered Top Cow has endured and gone from strength to strength, with its titles being optioned for movies, including the Mark Millar penned WANTED and in its role as producer of the recent A-TEAM movie. Top Cow has also found success in other media as THE DARKNESS heads towards its second outing in its own video game and WITCHBLADE was translated into successful television and anime series.
One of Top Cow’s great and most unique initiatives in recent years is PILOT SEASON--a series of 8 separate titles, all of which fans can read and then vote for which title they would like to see become an ongoing series. It’s the only such event in the comics industry and one of the many ways in which Top Cow has become a fan favorite. As Top Cow heads towards its 20th year, I spoke to Publisher Filip Sablik and President Matt Hawkins about PILOT SEASON, movie announcements and Top Cow’s plans for its 20th Anniversary.
RUSS SHEATH (RS): Guys, how’s things going over at Top Cow?FILIP SABLIK (FS): We are getting ready to hit our 20th year in 2012 which is remarkable in any business, let alone comics. We are not ready to announce all the stuff we’ve got planned for the 20th anniversary yet, but trust us--we have a number of really cool projects planned to celebrate, as well as some big properties that we are going to be revitalizing.
RS: Tell us about the state of play at Top Cow for fans who maybe have never checked out a Top Cow book.
FS: Top Cow is divided into three primary imprints. The first one is the Top Cow Universe which is a shared universe that originated from the Marc Silvestri era in the 90s. Our flagship books are WITCHBLADE and THE DARKNESS. ARTIFACTS, MAGDALENA, CYBERFORCE, HUNTER-KILLER and ANGELUS all feed into that and it’s a unique, shared universe. I think outside of Marvel and DC, we have one of the few shared universes. It’s born out of science fiction and the supernatural and it’s accessible and right now, if you want to get everything in the Top Cow Universe, you are talking about buying four books a month. Our goal is to have one Top Cow universe title in stores every week and you can put down your three or four dollars and pick those up rather than spending three or four hundred dollars a month trying to keep up with books built on fifty years of history you don’t really understand.
One of the other two imprints is Top Cow Productions; these tend to be stand alone series like MYSTERIOUS or HEROES & VILLAINS. Entertainment co-productions like EPOCH or NETHERWORLD. The biggest thing we do under Top Cow productions is PILOT SEASON, which we do in the fall.THE DARKNESS’s 15th anniversary is in this year and we’re gearing you for THE DARKNESS II coming out in February. Phil Hester’s final stamp on THE DARKNESS starts with THE DARKNESS #98 in December and culminates with issue #100 in February as well. It’s an epic, cool storyline where Jackie decides that the one thing that stands in the way of true happiness is the Darkness itself. He decides that he is going to do what he does best and go up against and take out the Darkness itself.
With PILOT SEASON, we’ve got 8 titles coming out. Each is a stand alone series and at the end of it we give a teaser of how that title might be like, if it were ongoing. We let the fans vote online to decide which one of the titles continues. This year we’ve got 8 series so that the books come out in October and November on a weekly basis. The pilot season books we have coming up include:
THE TEST is a book that Matt actually created and it’s from the ECHOES team, and that’s a survivalist horror story.
THE BEAUTY is a police procedural with a science fiction edge to it.
FLESH DIGGER is a title that’s a very classic slasher/horror revenge story.
CITY OF REFUGE is a science fiction / post-apocalyptic dystopian future tale.THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a project that’s an action/science fiction story.
MISDIRECTION, which is a title that I created, that’s a fugitive/car chase story.
ANONYMOUS was co-created by Matt and it’s a man on the run, action adventure story.
SERIF is was created by Lance Briggs, who is a linebacker with the Chicago Bears, and he is co-writing that with Phil Hester--we’ve got a pretty impressive line up.
The other thing we do is Minotaur Press, which if we were a film studio this would be our indie film arm. They are more grounded in some ways, less big budget and projects we are passionate about but that aren't necessarily going to be blockbusters.
RS: Is Top Cow still a place where creators can come and find a home for their projects, in the way that, for example, Mark Millar did with WANTED?
MATT HAWKINS (MH): Yes, but in a much more limited capacity. We have PILOT SEASON coming up and we have five out of eight books are from creators outside of Top Cow. We are not going to be doing a lot of miniseries from outside people any more. A miniseries is very hard to make money on. We’d rather do a long run of something like ARTIFACTS, rather than do a miniseries of 6 issues. With our Top Cow Universe we are playing it pretty safe, but with our Minotaur Press and PILOT SEASON...look at ECHOES, what the fuck? It’s a great book, but that’s not exactly a conservative, contemporary book.
FS: With PILOT SEASON, you take a book like GENIUS, which is one of the PILOT SEASON winners from 2008 that we are going to be releasing end of this year, beginning of next year. It’s a book that is starring a young, female, African American lead in an urban setting, killing cops. If you look at it from just what is marketable and what is sellable, that book is crazy, but what’s great about PILOT SEASON is that it does afford us to play around with some concepts and try things with a lower risk.RS: Let’s talk about the big announcements from Top Cow this year, going back to Comic-Con. You announced THE DARKNESS in development as a movie.
MH: The Mandeville Pictures film team came onboard with us to develop THE DARKNESS. We’ve had a number of vicious stops and starts on it over the years, and ironically, THE SOPRANOS put a stop to it for a number of years as people saw it as a supernatural SOPRANOS. I didn’t see it that way, but stuff gets quantified pretty quickly. If you have a cash cow publishing property, like THE DARKNESS or WITCHBLADE, which are the long term, viable entities, if you put out some shitty movie, it doesn’t do anyone any good. The kind of money we would make out of the back end of a movie doesn’t make us enough to justify flushing the brand down the toilet.
THE DARKNESS video game has been very well received and we have worked hard to make sure those are good. There have been multiple WITCHBLADE movie scripts that have been written and none of them have been at the point where we would say “lets go for this”.
RS: Is it tough for you guys to get overly excited about movie deals and the like?MH: Here’s where I get excited. I get excited when someone actually turns the camera on and starts filming. 97% of TV shows that are sold to pilot don’t actually get past the first season and a large percentage don’t actually make it to pilot. When you make a lot of these deals, the PR teams and the studios want to announce that they’ve got your project, but if you keep announcing stuff that never happens, you kinda look stupid after a while. Mandeville are a credible production company; they are on the Disney lot and did the film THE FIGHTER, which was an Academy Award-winning film for them. They are good guys and I’ve worked with them on ALIBI and on CROSSHAIR. With THE DARKNESS game launch coming up, it’s a case of let’s see if we can get this going in a big and material way and give it our best shot. Does that mean that we have an actor, a director, a screen play and a studio that’s ready to put up a hundred million dollars to make the movie? No, we don’t have any of those things, but the reality is that you have to start somewhere. I’ve said this many times: you can’t win if you’re not playing the game!
FS: Part of what you have to bear in mind, and it’s part of the down side of the internet age, is that these announcements aren’t meant for fans. Variety is a trade publication that’s meant for the film industry but fans don't necessarily understand the process that goes into making a film. Fans see that Mandeville has gone into partnership to develop a THE DARKNESS film and think that means they’ll be able to go and see that next year.
MH: It used to be that people would license stuff to take it off the market, but that doesn't really happen any more. It used to be that you would option the rights to something that you had which was similar, but that doesn’t happen so much.RS: Speaking of licensing, you guys don’t do a lot of licensed comics these days?
MH: If you look at Top Cow the only licensed comic we ever did was TOMB RAIDER, and that was because of Eidos; they owned a piece of the company at the time. I have always maintained, and Silvestri agrees, that there’s no point in creating equity in someone else's property. They still technically own a stake and they are owned by Square Enix now, but we are in the process of acquiring that back from them. Eidos was all about TOMB RAIDER; I think the problem with Eidos was that the two guys who made that deal with us were gone within a year and then they had five management changes over seven or eight years, which is always fun. I can say that as long as I’m involved, we won’t be doing any licensing—it’s a waste of time. I’ve been involved in a number of what I’ll call custom comics projects, like CITY OF HEROES, which wasn’t a licensed thing, they were paying us to do it. We will do work for other companies. I read it when Richardson said, 20 years ago, that he was getting into licensing because he wanted to compete with Marvel and DC, but didn’t have the characters to do it.
Nick Barrucci came to me six or seven years ago, before Dynamite, and wanted me to do RED SONJA, and I think he’s quoted as saying I’m part of the reason why he started that company. If I wanted to do a red headed barbarian, I’ll make my own. I think that Nick and IDW do a great job and I read and enjoy them very much, but that flies in the face of Top Cow and our motto, “we create”. If I was going to launch a comic book company today I still don’t think I’d do licensing. This all goes back to when I was working with Rob Liefeld. Rob licensed a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA books back in 94-95. When it was time to renew the license I remember going back to Universal saying that we want to renew and Universal said that because of the revival we will have to charge you more. I was like, what? We are the ones who fucking revived it. No one had done anything with this property for, like, 10 years, and they wanted to charge us more after all this hard work we had done.FS: It’s in their best interest; at a certain point you build up the property for them and they will put it back out on the market--they aren’t concerned about you.
RS: the assumption on my part is that you have the Top Cow comic related properties--it didn’t occur to me that you would be developing non-comics properties.
MH: Romantic comedies don’t play well in comic books, at least not for us. Can you imagine a nice romantic comedy Top Cow book? People would kind of snicker, but we do much more grounded reality based stuff like that. I had a couple of ideas for reality TV shows and stuff like that.
Marc and I realized that we are story tellers. At our core competency we are good at telling stories. I like comics a lot because you can get a look and feel and get a lot of instant feedback from the trolls on the internet. I refer to comic books as self liquidating development; it might not make you much money, but it pays for itself to develop these properties. We optioned the A-TEAM idea originally and we are the ones who sold it to Fox.RS: Matt, How have things been for Top Cow, given the economic situation, globally?
MH: I would say from a top line it’s been tremendous and really fucking shitty, depending on how you look at it. There have been a number of things that have adversely affected us, but we have had some great strides forwards. I can’t bitch too much; we are alive and we are positioned well to move forward, but I think that anyone who tells you that the last four years in publishing has been good is lying through their teeth.
One of the things that make Top Cow unique and enduring is that if you look at a lot of the companies that came out, made a big splash and disappeared they are doing licensed books. They come out with a really hot licensed book that people are excited about, but the problem is they have a finite lifecycle. Either the nostalgia runs out, the owner wants more money or they want to take it back and do something different with it, so unless you are continually looking for the next license, you kinda have a ticking book.
The tagline that Top Cow debuted last year was “we create”! That speaks to what Top Cow does--we are introducing new concepts into the market every single year and it’s what keeps the company vibrant.You can follow Russ Sheath's blog Russwords here and on Twitter here.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
