Continuity: Licensing, Product Placement and the Comic Book Industry

By: Steven Shapiro

I did a double take the last time I walked into a supermarket. Prominently displayed for sale in the beach toys was a boogie board with a giant image of Smiley: The Psychotic Button screened on it. Yes, the blood-thirsty, imaginary friend-given-life of Chaos! Comics’ Evil Ernie… on a boogie board.

I mean damn.

For the uninitiated, Evil Ernie was one of the most metal comics produced in the 90s. Chronicling the undead adventures of an emotionally disturbed, yet psychic (!), teenager, who cut a swath of terror across the American heartland in order to bring his one true love, Lady Death, back to Earth, Evil Ernie was like a zombie movie dipped in a Dethklok concert and baked at like a million degrees. Unfortunately, Chaos! went belly up back in 2002 and sold off all of its kickass intellectual property. And though Lady Death’s skull-studded bikini has found a home on wince-inducing D2V cartoons and a series of sword & sorcery books that feel more like Dungeons and Dragons than Demons and Wizards, Pulido and Hughes’ brutal heavy metal icons have not reached anywhere near their former epic glory.

This in mind, coming across Smiley: The Psychotic Button seven years later as a brand license deal for a boogie board was disconcerting. Stephen Hughes is a pretty remarkable artist and his imagery clearly has value beyond the page. So much so, that some kid who has never heard of Ernest Fairchild might want to identify with that toothy grin and skull & cross-bone icon. But is the goal here to suck every last shred of brand equity out of these properties? Marc Gobé, the fantastic author of Emotional Branding and Brandjam, would have us believe that if we have learned anything from the Apples or Googles of the world; it’s that brands should not be about commoditization, but individualized resonance. There is a subsidiary of Omnicom out of Chicago called RiverWest, which is part brand licensing agency and part venture capital house. At RiverWest, they take ‘dead’ brands and reanimate them into ‘zombie’ brands. By this, I mean that RiverWest takes defunct companies that pretty much exist only as intellectual property (trademarks and maybe a trade secret or two) and infuses a management team and capital into it to make the brand live again.

Appropriate, hm?

Making a zombie brand of Evil Ernie and friends would create a certain poetic justice that the ‘90s nostalgia hounds as well as a group of metalheads, who would never dream of entering a comic shop, would dig. Chaos! Comics largely zombie and horror-related properties slated to come back from beyond the retail grave? Epic. Yet diluting the brand through window-dressing fast cash hits, not only fails to achieve this resonance, but can place the goal of capitalizing on the long term equity in the emotional reaction to the Chaos! properties that much harder to accomplish. No one likes a sell-out. Especially when the brand is on its sunset or, in the case of the Chaos! properties, past it.

Consumers are savvy. Whether they have the language to articulate their opinions on marketing campaigns or not, they know what they like and they know what works. As Gobé would remind us, what ‘works’ isn’t necessarily logical either. But these consumers, who have been inundated in marketing noise since they were infants watching Sesame Street, are kinda cynical. If a brand licensing campaign causes them to be jarred out of the ‘magic’ of the retail experience, its failed.

Related to this, and though it KILLS me to call attention to it, is the product placement buzz that’s been plaguing one of my favorite comic titles, The Amazing Spider-Man. Marvel has apparently entered into a deal with mattress retailer, Sleepy’s, to incorporate Sleepy’s logos and ads into the billboards depicted in Marvel’s flagship title. Of course, cash is king, and if Sleepy’s is willing to pay for the 2-D real estate of Puny Parker’s Friendly Neighborhood, I can’t really fault Marvel for assenting. But where’s the cross-promo synergy? Spider-Man moonlights as a superhero- he’s not even in bed that often, right? Is this a Ford Mustang Pony Girl thing, where we’re trying to get consumers’ loyalty BEFORE they have the need or ability to buy? When a fanboy moves OUT of his parents’ basement, he’s going to need a bed of his own-- and he’ll turn to the Mattress Professionals for it.

I would argue that there has to be other prominent brands with deep pockets that actually resonate with a comic book fan (and more importantly, potential NEW comic book fans!), avoid that jarring electro-shock of inappropriate pairings, and give back to both brands. In the case of Spider-Man, the tried & true everyman from New York, how about the New York Mets? Unlike most comic book fans who debated whether The Mighty Thor could beat up the Incredible Hulk in a fight, my friends and I discussed whether Peter Parker was a Yankees or a Mets fan. Not that I’m biased, but CLEARLY, the kid from a working class family in Queens, would identify with the blue collar underdog vibe of the Mets brand. And Mephisto’s Brand New Day aside, did he get married in the Bronx or did he get hitched at Shea Stadium?! ‘Nuff said. Spider-Man plus the Mets could sell books, tickets and contribute to the promotion of the mythology of both New York icons.

So the moral of the story is continuity isn’t just about whether Spider-Man was in the Savage Land with the New Avengers at the same time that he was battling the new mandibled Vulture in Amazing. Or whether it’s cheaper to just dust off the cool old psychotic button, rather than make something new and cool for that boogie board company. Brand licensing and product placement tools are also aspects of a long game. They are about fidelity across product lines and industries towards the goal of promoting the narrative of all brands in play.

Steven Shapiro is an attorney and Vice-President at Exemplar Law Partners, LLC. He specializes in brand licensing in the comic book and apparel industries.