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The Comics Journal Message Board :: View topic - Baker & Taylor: Blindsiding Diamond?
I need time to go through the whole thing, but there's some interesting stuff going on in this dusty old thread at TCJ.com. I wonder if most of the pertinent content is still...pertinent, or if things have changed in the intervening 1.5 years?
There's gonna be a little (re)construction around here as I tidy some stuff up. Probably no real content today, but I want very badly to talk about Steve Gerber's run on THE DEFENDERS, which I'm near the end of right now. And some of my favorite giant monster movies.
But hammers and nails first.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Three members of my family have gotten it (my son just an hour ago.) I know I'm next.
No content until this passes.
And let the folks over at Hijinx comics know how you like to read your comics. I already stopped by and made the point by picking up some forty bucks worth of trades while I made my goodwill tour of the area in support of STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON. But your vote matters, too! Don't let your voice go unheard!
Just please don't vote for "bubble gum wrappers". I mean, unless you really mean it...
AKA GIGO, AKA "Garbage in, Garbage out." Computers only do what you tell them to, not what you want them to. In this particular case, I really *wanted* a 1/8" inch bleed area on all my pages, and what I got was 1/16" of an inch. Which means my files got kicked back for looking like a lamer put 'em together. That's okay, it gave me a chance to fix a couple little things that slipped through.
Something always slips through when you're not giving it 100%. Moral: give it 100%, slacker.
So here I sit hoping that the corrections I made end up in their FTP server before they've run the proof that they FedEx down to me. I know, it's their money to FedEx stuff, but I don't need to go out of my way to make things worse for them, now do I? My sudden victory of anal-retentivity over "get it done now"-ness shouldn't cost them another overnight package, right? Not to mention the fact that screwing around with proofs eats time, which makes the whole "show the book at Wonder-Con" thing a little less likely every time. Still think I'm gonna make it, but I'm making it into a race.
Speaking of which, I nailed down an Artist's Alley table (I didn't tell them that I'm just the writer. Ssh! it'll be our little secret.) I should really practice a quick cowboy profile or wolfprint that I can doodle into books. At least that's what Lieber and Parker have said. Now that the book is coming out, I oughta take that advice. Hmm, and I've got signage to get made up. This whole laser print onto foamcore thing isn't working out. It gets dented and wrecked if you look at it funny or call it names. Can't have that. There's no room for weakness in self-publishing. Eye of the Tiger, all that jive.
Which means no moping, either. My wife, bless her heart, pointed that out to me in the afterword that I'd written. Man, was she unhappy with it. I've got an entire blog to post to and gripe about how ain't it awful this grave I'm digging for myself; I oughta spare the paying customers that.
Files are uploaded. Let's see where this gets me.
Maybe I'll be able to get a little reading in. Currently plowing through ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS v. 2. Yeah, getting to the Gerber stuff. That first story arc (which I'm not really all the way through, because those maniacs in the 70s ran stories over months, MONTHS) is chock full of wonderful crazy. Ben Grimm blows a harmonica to save the universe. Top that!
29 days to record a 35 minute album? Way back when the Roswell Incident was an ongoing concern, we recorded albums in a day, or something like eight hours of sessions. But then we were young and crazy back then and didn't heed things like song structure or commercial accessability.
All that said, the admonition to "not wait for inspiration" is a good one, as is the one to exhort artists to daily Work. That friction is where you're going to get to the interesting stuff.
Says the guy who hasn't written a word of script in far too long. Beginning to bug me, really.
…minus ten percent
Declan MacManus, ladies and gentlemen. Give him a big hand.
And I thought I was loopy when I was posting earlier this week. I’m past loopy to sober and back to loopy again.
As I suspected, the discussion fired off by the ComicsPro position paper on convention-pre-sales is not over. Nor is it prompting any kind of a change in people’s minds, really. There’s a lot of talk, but it’s cross-talk. The pro and con sides have their minds made up (‘cept for those folks who seem to only be mildly for or against it, oh yeah, and everyone else who hasn’t said anything about it, which isn’t me, since I’m still babbling.) There’s a lot of passion and bluster, and thorough proof that the plural of anecdote is bitchfest.
For the record, since I apparently didn’t make it clear in my last missive (unsurprising, since my writing tends towards the opaque side of clarity), I will not be selling copies of STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON at Wonder-Con ahead of the Direct Market ship date of March 26th. Should I have copies, they will be given for promotion to reviewers and contributors (at least I think Steve is going to be there.) If local (or non-local) retailers want to buy copies at cost and I have a supply to meet their demand that is their business. I will be there to sign those books, should customers for them be found. I will have paid the cost to appear there, as will they. Perhaps both of us can benefit from that. As said before, Rory Root from Comic Relief in Berkeley has made such an offer, for which I am thankful.
Hell, in my position, I’m thankful for any customers.
But I won’t put myself in competition with pre-paid orders, particularly from local retailers. After the street date, I’ll happily sell copies at whatever price I choose (and continue to pass out preview copies should it make sense.)
It’s a conflict between a fast sale (or two, or ten) and whatever retailer goodwill I can generate as a result of playing by the ground rules. As I said last time, I’m not in a position to pick and choose friends and supporters. If my selling some copies of STRANGEWAYS over a three-day show is that much of a threat to my long-term presence in my book’s primary market, then I’d be short-sighted to do so. I’m not interested in selling a pamphlet comic with a low-duration shelf life. I was already convinced of that when I started this whole process back in 2003. The Speakeasy diversion and dalliance in the monthly form was me adapting to an opportunity that presented itself; an opportunity cost that was, well, high.
Again, the reality of STRANGEWAYS is that it will be ordered by a handful of stores. I don’t need to muddy up those waters with pre-sales. If a store is going to take a chance on my book, then I should give them a fair chance to sell it.
This does not make it my place to criticize or chide others who choose to pre-sell on convention floors. Eric Reynolds makes his case, and it’s a persuasive one. I am not going to tell him that he’s wrong in his choice. I bought a copy of I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS from a show before it was available in the DM. And then I gave that to a friend for his birthday and I replaced it with a DM-purchased copy.
But then I also believe that we’re not looking at a zero-sum system where a convention pre-sale means that a retailer is going to be left holding the bag on a pre-ordered book forever. For that to be true, then you’d have to prove that only people who go to conventions go to comic shops, and that is simply not true. If it is true, then we’re looking at a terrifyingly small comics market and have far bigger problems to figure out than convention pre-sales.
Long week, folks. I'm goin' to bed.
The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy: Design > Mutant Turtles 2001
I couldn't have made that up if I wanted to.
1) STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON is off to the printers. Done. Barring technical foul-ups on my end, which I'm awaiting actually.
2) Jeff Parker of Marvel Adventures: Everything and David Wellington of the MONSTER trilogy, and others, were kind enough to throw some complimentary quotes my way. Well, the book's way. I'm not so compliment worthy.
3) I'm glad I'm working with Imprimerie Lebonfon and not Quebecor at the moment. Tip of the hat to Uncle Lar for introducing me to them. And for all that other stuff.
4) I rewarded myself by finishing off my viewing of Nightbreed. What a strange movie. Plenty of art, but not as much artfulness as I'd hoped. And watching David Cronenberg tear it up as the psychotic psychiatrist was very very weird after my watching a bunch of middle-period Cronenberg films recently. Is it horror? Is it dark fantasy? Is it epic fantasy? Am I confused? A little.
5) I'm not small! That's just shrinkage! Did I really say that? I must be loopy.
6) Going to San Francisco this Saturday. Food recommendations? I'm partial to sushi if it doesn't cost both the arm and the leg.
7) Trying to figure out when I'll read comics again. Probably when I finish my Jim Thompson tear, which is just starting.
8) My office is almost done. This has only taken twenty times longer than I thought it would.
9) Stomach flu is a harsh mistress.
The morning that I was going to send out a press release about STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON is the morning that Comcast decides that I really didn't want to send any mail out after all. They do know what's best, right?
Hoping to get it out today. I'd post it here, but nobody comes here...
EDIT: Now I'm sure it's gone out twice. At least. Gah.
Okay, Heidi found me and kinda folded me into the current "pre-sale at conventions ahead of Direct Market or not?" meringue/harangue. Like so:
---
Leaving behind the steaming battleground for a moment, there’s this quiet little comment from Matt Maxwell:
I should have something to say about this, since I’m a new publisher in a position to debate a book at Wonder-Con before the official street date. I don’t have the time to devote to commenting at the moment however. Hopefully this will change over the course of the weekend.
And there’s the rub. What SHOULD Matt Maxwell do, ComicsPRO? Diamond isn’t going to help one little man with a book on any significant level. Comic shops aren’t going to order an almost unknown self published western by a creator best known as being an intelligent blogger in numbers that are going to impress anyone. Maxwell’s only business strategy is to raise awareness of his book by the means available to him — internet postings, selling directly to fans at shows, media outreach and, yes, talking to retailers.
The sad thing is that no set mechanism exists for the latter. New publishers arriving on CBIA are inevitably met with suspicion and the equivalent of a “Are you now or have you ever been a publisher who might have sold a comic outside the direct market?” threshhold that just isn’t logical in today’s day and age.
---
Okay, first thing that everyone needs to know about this is that the argument isn’t necessarily about what it’s about. In other words, yes, there is concern about the actual pre-sale of books at conventions on the part of retailers who have to order their books three months of time and on a non-returnable basis. This is a valid concern.
But it seems that some folks have made this into a proxy battleground between some retailers and some publishers/fans regarding how alternative books are sold, or the perception of how they’re being sold. On the independent publisher side, there’s concerns that the DM is a diminishing portion of their actual sales, and that they have the right to shore up their profits by making sales at conventions where they cut out the chunks taken by both Diamond and the retail seller. Notice that nobody from DC or Marvel or Image, so far as I can tell has any interest in this particular discussion. Even though Marvel debuts some big-ticket items in bookstores before the DM, but that’s not being addressed at this moment.
The retailers concern, as above, is that the books they order will languish on the shelves. These books were ordered with the assumption that the DM would get the first crack at their audience, not that they’d be published for free on the internet concurrent with their DM debut or that the DM retailers would be scooped by publishers selling at a show. Now, we can argue the effectiveness of advertising books with free publication of their entire contents online (for the record, I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but publishers should let retailers know what’s going to happen before they place their orders – let the self-fulfilling prophecies fall where they may.) And we can argue whether or not comics sales are in and of themselves a zero-sum universe where one book bought at a convention or at Amazon is the loss of that sale to a retailer. I’m not a marketing genius and I’m not sure the data exists to persuasively argue either position, so it comes down to anecdotes and emotion.
Nitro, meet glycerin.
I personally don’t believe in the zero-sum model. I suspect it’s close to true when you’re talking about items with a limited shelf-life (yes, monthly pamphlets, I’m looking at you.) But for an evergreen product, like a trade collection or >gasp< an original graphic novel, the sales window is expanded, not compressed. Anything with a spine can stay on a shelf for an extended period and still have a shot at selling, as opposed to a monthly comic whose audience is coming to the stores on a weekly or near-weekly basis. So for those books, I can see the retailer frustration rise as the sales window compresses. My feeling, though, is that retailers whose sales are split between monthly/evergreen products would rather be sitting on an extra ten dollars of trade inventory than ten dollars or even less of monthly inventory. In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be that much excess at all, but we don’t live in a perfect world. If it were, then everyone would get their orders filled perfectly and they’d know exactly how much to order of what book. I know. Keep dreaming.
So the DM retailers want to protect (and I mean that in the most benign way) not only their inventory/order dollars, but they want to protect their ability to serve their audience in the face of massive transformation all across the comics industry, from the move to a “Big Two Plus” marketplace, to the growth of the trade market, to places like Amazon and other bookstores poaching their bread and butter genres/publishers, to the rise of web-based publication. These forces aren’t nearly done, either. Since the 90s, there’s been constant motion in several directions at once. So retailing ain’t easy. I’ll note, by the way, that while I use the term “retailers”, they aren’t a “big hive mind-mass” (tip of the hat to Alex at Rocketship). They’re all real people with real personalities who are really doing the best job they can with what they have.
And on the indy publishers’ side (who are equally non-monolithic, to say the least), they’re also trying to do the best by their books and the artists whose books they publish, and oh yeah, trying to keep themselves afloat and maybe even grow their readership while they’re at it. And some of them feel that they’re red-headed stepchildren in the world of the direct market, and that their larger siblings are always going to enjoy a disproportionate chunk of the pie.
Both sides in this argument are driven by concern, and to some extent, fear for their bottom lines in this changing market. This makes some retailers wary of indy publishers (particularly brand-new indy publishers), which in turn feeds the perception that the indy guys (and gals) need to build their audience where and how ever they can. Can you say “cascade”? You know where this is going.
Now, as for what I’m going to do. Good question.
is due to hit the shelves on the 26th of March. I’m just finishing the last proofreads, etc now. If all goes well, it should be printed in time for the upcoming Wonder-Con (which is in San Francisco, a city served by a number of fine comics establishments, that number shooting up to “a ton” if you count the Bay Area and points south.) Theoretically, I could sell a few copies and that may or may not have a dire impact on the regional sales of the book. I really have no way of guessing.
But then, the book would have to be ordered by retailers for those potential sales to happen in the first place. Let’s be real. I’m a new publisher, with a first book and not a ton of advertising behind it in the DM. I am actually paying to have an insert put into all Diamond account invoices this week to advertise the book. Yes, you can do that. It’s pretty reasonably priced. My account rep at Diamond was able to secure a “Spotlight On” box for the PREVIEWS that S:MM solicited in (the current issue, check page 299). I’m getting the word out as best I can through my vast network of bloggers, etc. I’ve done some things to raise visibility, and I’ve passed on others (no PREVIEWS ad – it seemed like a lot of money for real estate in part of the magazine that a lot of retailers never get to).
I’ll be doing advertising outside the DM, in the horror magazine RUE MORGUE, most notably. But that won’t hit until the month the book ships. I didn’t see a lot of value in buying an ad for a book that’s not going to be out until months after the ad runs. Yes, I miss the pre-order window like that. But the reality is, I can’t get a lot of people motivated to pre-order a book. If they see it in front of them, I get a response. I’ve found that people want what they want when they want it. Pre-ordering doesn’t figure well into that. Of course, pre-ordering makes the DM world go around (or does it? I’m curious as to what percentage of books actually get pre-ordered in the DM.) Even so, I'm pointing people to local comics retailers in the ads, telling them about The Master List so they can find a local store (yes, that's an imperfect resource, but it's an imperfect world we live in.) If I was smart, I'd send them towards the list as well. Maybe I oughta do that, too.
But will that translate into interest at the DM level so that they can pre-order STRANGEWAYS and have it on the shelves for people to pick up? My crystal ball broke on the way back down the mountain, so your guess is as good as mine.
As to the question of convention pre-sales, the one that sparked all this off, I have to say the risk of alienating DM retailers is not something I can shrug off easily. I’m not interested in taking sales out of the region before the book can make its way in the DM. Would I sell enough to make it worthwhile? How much would it actually cost, aside from the table, etc? Would any of the local retailers be irritated enough to blackball me, a publisher of a book that they’re going to order in the low single digits? Would they ask if they could get the book at cost and have me sign a stack to go back to their shops (because I’d gladly do that – and Rory Root of Comics Relief has already extended a like offer).
Making the full cover price (or with the .99 rounded off) as opposed to what I see out of a Diamond sale, seems pretty tempting, I have to admit. Particularly in my case since it’s all been money out on Strangeways (even if the book had been published through Speakeasy years ago, it’d have been money out, my eyes were open on that.) Ultimately, though, I can’t see the small number of sales I’d make at a show like Wonder-Con being worth the animosity generated over such a move. Working directly with an area retailer to help get the books in people’s hands, now that sounds a lot better.
And as a publisher of a comic like STRANGEWAYS (perceived special-interest/genre, black and white, OGN not pamphlet) I’d rather be working with retailers than cross-purposes. If it works out for both of us that making them available at cost from me (no matter how many or few they pre-ordered from Diamond), then that’s fine by me. I’m not in a position to pick and choose friends. Of course, this whole brouhaha sort of puts the cart before the horse since I was going to visit SF-area retailers this weekend and get their takes on STRANGEWAYS and talk about convention sales. So much for my big surprise…
I’ll add, that orders from Diamond are still open, so any retailer reading this could adjust their orders up or down as they see fit. Not that one little blog post constitutes anything like advance notice on the Diamond contract that “This item may be available from other venues before it is available in the Direct Market.” It doesn’t.
As for the bigger questions swirling around this whole issue, don’t expect any revelations/resolutions in the short term. A good chunk of the friction here stems from the structure of the market itself (high discounts for non-returnable merchandise versus lower discounts and returnability, a market transitioning from serial pamphlets to more durable books and exacerbating the worst qualities of both models, large publishers in franchise maintenance-mode and not expanding readership, smaller publishers doing the heavy creative lifting and taking larger risks in developing talent, audience shift and malaise whilst a new audience bubbles up from below). The position paper that started all this off, while far from perfect, at least appears to have been a starting point for the conversation, even what we end up talking about isn’t what got us all fussed in the first place.
THE BEAT: Blog Archive--Retailer/Publisher/Customer tensions revealed
I open my mouth to say that I should open my mouth on one issue and I get quoted by Heidi. Even if my quote is malformed (as originally posted, no malforming on Heidi's part) to say that I could "debate a book at Wonder-Con" not *debut* a book at Wonder-Con" as it should have said.
I gotta fix that. Then I better hurry up and say something smart. But that's gonna have to wait until tonight, 'cause kids want to drive up and see snow...like now...
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Brendan McCarthy has a blog!
Aw, just go read it.
When you use Google.
I guess this happened early last year. At least I think I remember it happening. Maybe?
Tom Spurgeon commented on the recent ComicsPro position paper regarding publisher debut sales at conventions. Brian Hibbs of Comix Experience comments back, and you can read Tom's second-level response in the above.
I should have something to say about this, since I'm a new publisher in a position to debut a book at Wonder-Con before the official street date. I don't have the time to devote to commenting at the moment however. Hopefully this will change over the course of the weekend.
EDIT "debut" was quoted as "debate" in a recent link on The Beat. The error was mine in the original posting. That's what I get before trying to write before my second cup of coffee on a Saturday.
And no, I still don't have anything useful to say just yet. Check back tomorror morning.
EDIT TO THE EDIT - The book in question is called Strangeways: Murder Moon. A preview of Chapter One, as well as detailed pre-ordering instructions can be seen right at this very link.
If I could do it for you myself, I would, happily.
By popular demand: the collected Chapter One from Strangeways: Murder Moon. All the pages are there (sized up, and in a decent resolution, while trying to maintain a modest file size.) There's also a special bonus, which you'll have to read all the way through to get to. Everything is in one nice, tidy package, PDF-formatted for ease of reading (and sharing with all of your lycanthropic friends).
Pre-order information, of course, is included for your convenience.
And a movie that has a shot at delivering?
Diary of the Dead Trailer! | Horror Movie, DVD, & Book Reviews, News, Interviews at Dread Central
Look no further. Yes, LAND OF THE DEAD wasn't perfect, but it was entertaining. DIARY OF THE DEAD looks to be a far sight better. And meatier. My misgivings about Romero returning to "prequelize" NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD are all but forgotten.
As spotted on first.
CLOVERFIELD will probably do well enough to support its modest budget. The viral marketing campaign that is driving the movie will cost a quarter to a half of conventional advertising for an analogous movie. Granted, they're still buying newspaper ads (and I'm assuming targeted TV ads, but if they didn't, it wouldn't surprise me a bit -- those things are expensive.) Between the LOST audience and DVD sales subsequent to the short run in the theatre, it should end up in the black. Thirty million isn't a lot these days.
CLOVERFIELD, to all appearances, is a monster movie turned inside-out. It's the equivalent of reality-basing every Toho monster flick ever made (though my gut tells me the plot is more along the lines of GORGO: mother monster off to save baby monster stolen by evil moneygrubbing humans). And, in the parlance of comic criticism today, it's going to try to suck all the "fun" out of the genre. I don't know about you, but when I put in a monster movie, I want to see a monster trashing stuff, no matter how many thousands of onscreen deaths are implied. Oh, right, just like in the A-TEAM, all the bullets hit tires and all the monsters are ripping down abandoned buildings. See, monster movies aren't really horror movies, with but a few exceptions. They're monster movies. They have their own rules, and really the A-number One rule is that the monster is the hero.
Oh, and I want to see the goddamn monster being the goddamn hero of the piece. I *don't* *care* about the humans. The only time I ever did was when I saw the original GODZILLA, which is more about a force of nature being unleashed by Big Science on unsuspecting Tokyo. That's some scary stuff right there. But when it comes to nearly any other movie in the entire genre, the humans are the last thing on my mind. CLOVERFIELD is all about inverting that and making the humans the center of things. And not the scientists or generals out to stop it or their willful kids who are out to befriend this fifty-ton monstrosity, but rather, ordinary people. It's the TIME Person of the Year 2006 writ large. Me me me me me. A perfect monster movie for the blogging generation (of which I am a graying member).
CLOVERFIELD may succeed, storywise, but it's going to have to hook me with the characters right off the bat. And I don't mean some poor schlub who can't get the guts to ask the girl of his dreams out on the last night before he ships out on a big business meeting to Malaysia. The monster is going to have to make the story unfold. Not the plot. The story.
Shaky-cam is going to get old in the first few minutes. Yes, I had the same criticism of BLAIR WITCH back in the day. There's a line between "reality" and verisimilitude that is wobbly and nearly invisible. One step too far and people are going to lose patience real fast.
Oh, and no mistaking, the conceit is a great one. It hasn't really been done before, not in this manner. I have to give the writers and crew their props on that. Just like BLAIR WITCH was an awesome conceit (even if CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST did it first). But a conceit is not always enough, is it? It's what's done with the germ of that idea that really counts. Ideas are fine and all, but execution is what's going to get people to stick around.
The mystery will only go so far. "What's in the box" is a great way to start things off (or wrap them up), but it's a very very trick tightrope to walk. You can only tease for so long before people's wonder becomes irritation, and like Yoda says "Irritation leads to ridicule; ridicule leads to the Dark Side." Mysteries wrapped in paradoxes dipped in conundrums are tasty confections, but I want a meal, y'know? This is why all the classic monster flicks went out of their way to keep the Thing under wraps until the proper moment for the reveal, and then you got plenty of chances to see some human-crunching action. I suspect that the reveal won't happen until it's far too late to pull things off.
Powerlessness isn't cool, either. If there's a conflict, the appearance of lopsidedness is one thing, only to have a reversal come out and save things, that's fine. So long as the reversal isn't totally out of nowhere and doesn't just instantly negate the previous 90 minutes. When you bring it to the scale of a handful of rabble against the Gigantic Monster of Doom, that's kind of one-sided, yes? Now if you're talking about the Military Might of a Nation versus the Gigantic Monster of Doom, that's a playfield that's a lot more compelling. Hence my problems with "Oh by the way, we're all fucked" endings, in all but the most rewarding of presentations (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and MOUTH OF MADNESS come to mind here, go go John Carpenter!)
My fear (and yes, it's fear--I don't revel in this; I *want* my movies to thrill or move me) is that there will be no there there. The mystery box will get opened (as it will *have* to be) and there'll be emptiness inside. It may be an arresting portrait of Things Gone Wrong, but it will be a portrait and nothing more.
I am more than happy to be wrong in any or all of this.
BibliOdyssey: Wondertooneel der Nature
I have to admit, I've got a weakeness for pre 19th-Century scientific illustration. Like alchemy texts of old, everything is presented deliberately, as if revealing or reinforcing a hidden meaning.
Stop reading this and click on the above. Now.
About comic-book monsters? That is actually covering new stuff and not just the monster classics from Kirby/Ditko? Who'da thunk it.
But apparently, I don't. New Full Bleed is up.
And I'll add that the site that hosts this new incarnation of Full Bleed, one Comics Waiting Room, has been revamped and remade into a twice-monthly magazine. I may feel compelled to post something interesting in the off-weeks, but more likely, I'll take it as a chance to skip out writing and watch more David Cronenberg flicks. You know me.
The Horror Blog - Horror Roundtable: Week Eighty-One
My second weekly appearance on the Horror Roundtable. If anyone, I blame for getting me involved with this particular group of maniacs. I'm holding my breath until the moment that they realize I really don't know what the hell I'm talking about and simply making it all up as I go along.
As I’d mentioned in my recent essay on DAY OF THE DEAD, one of the reasons that it scared me so was the grounded reality of the piece. It was documentary horror. THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, for all intents and purposes was a documentary. Watch it today and you could call it a little slice of social history of the early Seventies in rural Arkansas. Authenticity dripped off of every frame like the everpresent Spanish Moss in the bottoms.
These were real people, not movie stars, not even actors. Not an ounce of slickness amongst the whole lot of them, from the bean farmer who puzzled over the strange tracks in his fallow fields to the self-assured sixteen-year-old who checked his traplines before heading off to school in the mornings. Semi-toothless elders dispense authority from around the stove in the general store while kids run around the swampland all on their own. Talk about alien. Look at that from where you stand in the late Naughties. You couldn’t pay people to be this dowdy and uncool, could you?
Like I said, authentic. I knew it even at the tender age of ten (which would be in 1977, y’all). These folks dressed like the people in my parent’s scrapbooks, with a few touches of bright polyester here and there, dabs of paint brightening the muted 16mm-bleached colors.
So if the people were real, well then, it only stood to reason that the Monster was real too, right? Okay, maybe not the smartest connection to make, but you have to understand, these were different times. Having survived the Age of Aquarius and America Under Siege (the SLA was indeed coming for your children, mister and missus America), people were hungry for some escape. And some of that came in a wholehearted crazy embrace of all kinds of borderline superstition and interest in paranormal phenomena. Books about Bigfoot and Nessie were easy to get from any library. And UFOs. Don’t get me started on my earnest and heartfelt desire to see a UFO. Or a flock of ‘em.
Now, today, I suppose we’d call that “Cryptozoology”, but back in the day, we didn’t have any fancy words for it. I ate up whatever I could get my hands on in the pages of ARGOSY or in the odd newspaper story that got carried across the AP Wire. Us paranormal geeks even got our own half-hour of television every week. That being IN SEARCH OF, narrated by no less of an authority than Mr. Spock himself. Spock can’t lie, right? No prevarications from this Vulcan. So even though the show (with it’s awesomely cheesy 70s synth theme) was clearly based on “theory and conjecture”, it was The Real Deal. And did I mention that every grocery store, every drugstore, every bookstore had shelves and shelves of shoddy paperbacks that threatened to blow the lid off of the secrets that our everyday world was steeped in? Oh yes. Did I eat that stuff up? Oh yes.
So in this milieu, surrounded by a shadowy half-realized world of monsters and unexplained phenomena, plaster casts that had no rational explanation for their prodigious size and scattered tektites on the desert floor, was me and my imagination. Now it’s one thing to read about a thing that may or may not be real. But it’s quite another to see it, and to see it in motion.
I could convince my rational brain that the monster that I saw in LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK was just a stuntman with a pituitary problem in a suit of matted hair. But something wouldn’t let me. Now whether it the mantle of authority granted by the previously-mentioned film grain (as mobile newscasts often used, not to mention shows like ADAM-12 and EMERGENCY) or the utterly convincing non-performances of the humans involved or that I wanted to believe that there was an eight-foot-tall wild man stalking the wilds of Arkansas, I won’t ever know. Not that I ever wanted to run into said wild man, mind you. He looked like he wouldn’t want to be anyone’s best friend. And who can blame him, after being shot at by hunters and overzealous high-school students.
Hell, I’d have shot him myself, if I’d been through even half of what any those poor folks went through. Plenty of opportunities for isolation terror. Remote houses/farmsteads, sometimes without electricity or other means of immediate communication; strange intruders who are both foul-smelling and noisome, growling at all hours; hairy hands reaching through windows and rattling at doorknobs. I swear to God that I just about had a heart attack at the climax of the film, when the Monster reached in and grabbed at a woman’s hair. No blood, no dismemberment, no nothing. Just a tangled mess of coarse black hair and pudgy fingers grabbing. I’m sure it was a rubber hand, now that I think about it. But back then, there’s no amount of convincing that you could have done to make me believe otherwise.
Does it offer the same horror punch that it did when I was ten? I can’t say that it does. However, LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK is a fascinating view of how you can mix the earthly and the hellish in an mundane way, yet still get some chills from it. Does it herald in a new age of horror? Not so sure about that, but it certainly gave some folks a few new tools (though really, subjective camera isn’t anything new, is it?) There’s no fancy camerawork, no special effects as such, just a determination to get the setting right, and then to wring some fear out of it. The more I think of it, it’s an anti-horror movie, none of the usual trappings of horror cinema at play.
LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK is a documentary. And that’s what makes it really, really scary.
I sure hope that link works. My current fave out of the latest batch of Zuda entries. Though I'm curious, wasn't this originally going to appear in an Image anthology of some kind? Maybe I'm just confused on the robot thing. I do confuse easy.
And "A Crooked Man" didn't win the last go-round? WTH?