The Last Zulu strikes: CGE bankrupt

The Pulse’s Jennifer M. Contino recaps the history of CrossGen’s financial troubles up to and including the recent filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. All of the staff have been laid off. As Bruce detailed, the company owes $3 million in debts. Mark Alessi is trying to get new investors and relaunch the company.

You might be wondering what the big idea is in trying to even salvage the company at this point. I am going to give my own opinion as to why I think they should.

The main reason is that CrossGen has from all appearances crashed from a sudden cash crunch that was unrecoverable, regardless of current sales and/or quality of books. A financial stumble was made all the worse when a major investor pulled out, resulting in unpaid freelancers, missed publishing deadlines (to CGE’s credit, it was for the first time ever), no funds to publish and a resulting spate of bad press which made finding new investors all the harder.

At the time of the implosion, CrossGen was growing in positive directions. It had big-name media imprints (He-Man, Space Ace, Dragon’s Lair) and non-universe titles like The Crossovers, both of which ended only due to the financial problems. They had just debuted their innovative Digital Comic Books only to not have the money to promote them. And all of their new books were breaking away from the Sigilverse concept and many were allowed to take place on Earth instead of other planets.

I’ve believed for a long time that the CrossGen of 2002-2004 was a much better company than it was initially, and had more funding appeared when Alessi was trying to save the company it would have been quite a contender in the coming years. That’s reason enough to bring the company back on its feet and try again.

Getting more creators to give CrossGen a try will initially be a problem, but the company can start off by focusing on producing trade paperbacks of its already existing works. Due to the financial problems, the TPB line had suffered greatly and many good stories are raring to go. This is especially true of many of the better, more recent titles such as El Cazador and Brath (and the later years of ongoing good titles like Ruse, Sojourn and Way of the Rat) that didn’t even get into TPB format because of the cash crunch.

After that, I hope CGE will relaunch it’s most winning titles (relatively speaking, as none sold in the Batman-X-men range) such as El Cazador, Brath, Route 666, Way of the Rat and Sojourn while concentrating on new, non-Sigil books. The implosion generated a good cabinet-cleaning that CGE needed, but I do think they should finish off a few of the best epics (Ruse and Sojourn) to make their TPBs more marketable. Many of CrossGen’s fans have lamented that they don’t want to get into epics if they will not reach a proper conclusion, and now that those books have had their unceremonious ends I can empathize. It’s hard to recommend picking up the excellent Sojourn TPBs if all it will do is get your friend interested in a book series that ends in the middle.

Writer Chuck Dixon (who wrote many of the better books, especially once able to break away from the Sigil-verse) has said that he will stay with CrossGen until the last Zulu. Some CGE creators may come back to their books if it can be done freelance, without relocating to Tampa. Others will not trust CrossGen to deliver on the paycheck, and Alessi may have trouble luring away big names like he did before. But will he have trouble finding creators? Not in this comic book job market.

Certainly I’m up for it.

NOW, my own analysis of what went wrong:

While the CGE implosion was brought on by bad decisions, most decisions were only bad in a Monday morning quarterbacking way.

Marc Alessi obviously operated on the belief that you have to spend money to make money, funding expensive experiments such as the CrossGen Compendiums and the Digital Comic Books. If they succeed, he’s a pioneer; if they fail, he’s a foolish wastrel.

I don’t think such experiments were bad ideas. The problem was the titles themselves. The first wave of CrossGen books were middling. All of them had great art and I’d imagine they were all well-written (I’ve not read Scion at all), but the character names were often hard to remember, the titles were all one-word and vague, and few of them were truly winners.

What was needed was survival of the fittest. If a book did not find an audience, cancel it and put those creators to work on something else right away until something clicked with the readers. Instead, Alessi made a claim that they would never cancel their books, thus backing all horses even when they were lame.

Added to the problems was the Sigil-verse concept. An overarching story in the CrossGen Universe was that main characters in every title possessed a sigil, a mark of power. In some books, this seemed a mere afterthought, a macguffin to explain why one character had superpowers. Indeed, the best of the first wave of CrossGen titles were the ones that barely mentioned it (for example Sojourn, Ruse, Brath). The later titles where it was apparently absent (Route 666, Way of the Rat, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, El Cazador) were better for it…although I should mention that they were also just better books, sigil or no.

Had Alessi waited until he could look back on a couple years’ worth of publishing to see what books were worthy before launching all of the major endeavors, CrossGen would most likely be a powerhouse. There’s nothing wrong with aggressive multimedia licensing for your titles, but they have to be titles people want to see turned into movies and tv shows. There was nothing wrong with the monthly compendiums reprinting all of CGE’s products in a handy digest, but they have to be collections of titles people want to read. The Digital Comic Books are a great idea, but I’d much rather have seen Brath, Ruse and especially El Cazador.

Thus, in conclusion, I think CrossGen still has potential. If they can find enough investors to first pay off the $3 million in debts, repay any other artists awaiting payment, then restart a few of their best titles and keep printing their best trade lines, CrossGen could be salvaged and might be a better company than before, having learned from some hard mistakes.

I should note that this is all speculation on my part, as an outsider, and there could be many internal CGE workings I don’t know about that could make everything I said here completely wrong. But I think I’m right about a few of the more blatantly obvious problems.

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