A Conversation with Dave Olbrich, Founding Administrator of the Eisner Awards

Dave Olbrich, founding administrator of the Eisner Awards and publisher of Malibu Comics, was kind enough to share some history with our own Richard Caldwell.

Dave, your illustrious career in funny books- spanning two and a half decades now- has left you as an unsung megalith of the industry. You started early with Fantagraphics during an interesting time with that company. As a lifelong comics fan, do you remember how it felt to be hired for that very first gig?

Dave- I had decided on a career in comic books around the age of 15. At the first Chicago Comic Con, I even solicited the advice of Marv Wolfman about the college classes I should take that I would benefit from the most. A college friend told me that Fantagraphics was advertising for a managing editor. He and I both applied. We drove together to Chicago Con 1983 to interview with Gary Groth and Kim Thompson. The way I remember it, we were both offered positions. The salary was terribly low. It took me three or four days to decide whether I was going to give up my life in Wisconsin and move to Connecticut. I asked everyone that I respected. Ultimately I decided that I was young (at the time) and would always regret it if I didn’t chase my dream. So my fiancé and I packed up the car and arrived sometime in September 1983, both of us less than a year after our college graduations.

It was incredibly exciting. I really only had the vaguest idea what I was doing and I had a lot to learn. At that point, Fantagraphics only had six full-time employees, including me. The business was run out of a large house deep in the rich suburbs of Stamford, Connecticut. The house served as both home and office for three of the five existing employees. In addition to the meager salary, I was also given room and board in the home/office. My future wife and I moved into a third floor bedroom (with its own bathroom). There were plenty of days I would throw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and go downstairs to work, never leaving for days at a time.

How did I feel? I was exhilarated. Gary, Kim and Mike Catron (the partners at the time) had given me a chance to live the dream I had for more than seven years. I met and worked closely with Tom Mason, who was my partner at Malibu Comics and remains a close friend to this day. We would take daytrips to New York City, visiting the Marvel and DC Comics offices to get stories and information for Amazing Heroes. I visited the office of Art Spiegelman. Gil Kane would stop by the Fantagraphics offices about once a week. We took a road trip to Poughkeepsie to meet Richard and Wendy Pini when Elfquest was just beginning to take off. I met Walter Simonson. I read my first Love and Rockets story. Every day I got paid to think seriously about comics, to write about comics, to edit other people writing about comics. It was fantastic.

You have to understand where I came from. Before leaving for college, I lived in a farmhouse five miles from a town of less than 600 people in rural Minnesota. I lived in a house with a wood burning furnace and woke up once with a snow drift in my bedroom. My high school graduating class had 25 students. Clark Kent grew up in a bigger town than I did. I wanted a career in comics, but even in college I only had the vaguest idea what that really meant. It was very intimidating and I was a little over my head, but I muddled through.

You muddled through enough to learn and network and so become the founding publisher of the lamented Malibu Comics Group. You were there from rise to fall in fact, working all across the board- from signing creators and opening up some Hollywood doors for comics to even writing some funny books yourself. Share with our readers something about the formation of Image- were you the first one approached by the seven?
I believe that any collective media SHOULD be more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes the individuals win more of the limelight for the whole. The sensationalism of the Image houses, past on to today and for good or ill, has brought many a new reader to the medium. And so you share some of the blame for that.

Dave- Blame or credit for anything related to Image, rests solely with Image. That is the way the “seven” would want it, especially back in the day when Image was launched. If there are any non-Image ways in which I can be blamed for bringing new readers to comics, I’ll gladly plead guilty.

A ton of wordage, probably more, has been expended (and much of it wasted) on the subject of the launch and goals of Image Comics. I’ve told the story of my involvement, through Malibu Comics, a number of times. To answer your question, Malibu was the only company “approached” by the Image founders when it happened.

Interestingly, there wasn’t seven at the time that the deal was made. Jim Lee’s name wasn’t even in the initial press release. Rob Liefeld had approached Malibu about doing YOUNGBLOOD more than four years earlier, in 1987. We wanted to do it, but it never came together as Rob got assignments at DC and Marvel. We maintained a good relationship and Rob did a number of guest covers for us over the years.

In 1991 we started talking to Rob about ways to work together including a book called Executioners (which Marvel’s legal department killed) and Extreme: The Art of Rob Liefeld. While he was talking to us, he was also talking a lot to Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane about his desires to strike out on his own and own his characters. I had even taken a short meeting with Larsen, Liefeld and Valentino at a convention expressing Malibu’s interest in working with them. Before the Image deal happened, we actually had a separate deal with Rob to publish YOUNGBLOOD under an imprint he was already calling Image.

During our discussions, he had mentioned several times that something “bigger was going on.” Then in December 1991 I got a call in which Rob basically said, “It you want to be part of this deal, you need to fly to New York.” So Tom Mason, Chris Ulm and I (three of the four Malibu partners) hopped on a plane and flew to New York.

We met with Liefeld and Todd McFarlane in the morning. They told us that they were going to meet with DC Comics and Marvel Comics to discuss their situation and that they would meet with us for dinner after those meeting were complete. It was VERY late before we met them for dinner. When we met with them, they said, “If Malibu wants to do this deal, here are the terms.”

Malibu’s choice was simple. Do the deal under their terms or they would make the deal with someone else and we would be forced to compete with them. At the time, Malibu was a top five comic book publisher, but we had aspiration for growth. Malbu also had a sterling reputation for honesty, paying our creators on time and being extraordinarily efficient at promoting our titles through the direct market. Needless to say, we made a deal with the soon-to-be Image guys.

It was an incredibly exciting and chaotic time. YOUNGBLOOD was originally scheduled for February, but in order to coordinate with the launch of the other Image books, it got pushed back to April. Each week it was late, as the magnitude of the Image deal permeated the business, orders on YOUNGBLOOD increased.

I’ve personally been a supporter of creator’s rights for my entire career. What the Image deal proved first and foremost is that creators can easily get all the rights that they are willing to pay for. What rights you get when someone else is paying the bill, that is a negotiation. If you are paying your own way, you get to decide every aspect of what happens to your rights.

One of the most interesting things that I ever saw was two or three years after the Image launch. Todd McFarlane had been invited to give a presentation (it may have been a key note address) at an event called Pro-Con. This event was designed to be a convention where creators and publishers could get together and talk about issues of interest that might benefit the whole industry. Pro-Con only lasted two or three years as an event just prior to Wonder Con in Oakland.

During his talk, Todd McFarlane talked about the trials and tribulations that he had experienced as a publisher and contrasted it to assumptions that he had to change since his days as a creator and Image founder. It was amazing to watch him show understanding for the difficulties that publishers face in dealing with creative people and balancing the allegiance between creators, the publishing company (and its employees), the retailers and the fans.

To their credit, the Image guys took the risks and put their careers and finances at risk to secure the rights to their creations. If you’re familiar with the financial deal Image offers creators, they have also kept their promise to the creative community to provide similar opportunities to others.

Admittedly, the notoriety from the arrangement with Image did help pave the way for the Ultraverse launch, which was during an exciting era for comics, as new universes were popping up almost daily. Though your Malibu crew were able to bring in a wide range of talents to create and develop the Ultraverse line, it was kinda sad to see the other imprints from Malibu gradually fade away. Personally, I liked alot of those books, from Eternity’s Captain Harlock series to your friend Tom Mason’s Dinosaurs for Hire book. And after Marvel’s procurement of the Ultraverse books, Malibu itself road off into the sunset.
You, however, have stayed a busy man while remaining generally behind the scenes. Any regrets? Any expectations for the future?

Dave- You couldn’t be more right. The competition following the Image launch from all publishers was intense. At least at the point, the size of the orders coming from retailers made a wide range of comic books very profitable. It was a vastly different comic book industry landscape then than it is now. Chief among the major differences, there were more than eight competing comic book distributors. Collectors, retailers, distributors, publishers and to a lesser degree creators had created a “house of cards” that was heading for a crash, but when Malibu launched the Ultraverse, things were still on the way up … albeit not for long.

The comic industry has a long history of business people, writers, artists and other pundits that spend a lot of time bitching about the short-comings and faults of comic books. The unfortunate truth of most of these complaints is that they generally come from (1) people with a limited perspective and (2) people with a self-serving agenda. When you boil it all down, nine times out of ten, the basis of their argument is “why isn’t the comic book business the way I want it to be.”

There are a lot of people and companies producing comics and nearly all of them would be very pleased to adjust the nature of the content of the books they produce if it were profitable. Within its own narrow confines, the comic book market works pretty efficiently. A variety of material is produced, retailers as representatives of their customers order the books that they think they can sell to pay the rent and put groceries on the table. When one kind of comic book sells well, other publishers and creators quickly jump in with similar products to try to serve the needs of the customers who have voted with their dollars.

Comic book readers and collectors, as a group (not as individuals) get exactly the kinds of comics that they show that they want based on sales figures that are dynamically produced every month. Sure, there are problems and inefficiencies that need to be fixed, but it can be a great system and has proven to be in the past.

I’m really glad that you liked a number of the Malibu Comics that were not associated with the Ultraverse. I liked a number of them as well. We would have been delighted to keep producing them if the sales figures had justified their continuation. Comic books only disappear for a couple of reasons, but by far the most significant is low sales. A creator’s visions for a book, especially non-Marvel and non-DC books, are usually tied directly to the success of a series. Sometimes when sales fall, even if the publisher would like to continue, the money the creator is going to receive for his work drives the creator to do more lucrative work elsewhere… and so the title dies.

The hardest thing for a company (or a person for that matter) to do is to go backwards. You spend your life’s hours, and those of your co-workers, building up a publishing company and when the market turns downward, very hard decisions must be made. Downsizing a company, retrenching business activity, re-organizing and laying off employees are all extremely difficult and unpalatable realities to face. Sometimes you’ll go to great lengths to avoid them. Malibu chose to be acquired by Marvel Comics in the hopes of surviving and continuing to grow and keep paying our valuable employees and creators.

Do I have any regrets? Absolutely. Do I dwell on them? I try not to. Do I want to detail them here in some kind of laundry list of screw-ups? Not at all. Like my Dad used to tell me, some mistakes are like ordering the wrong pizza and other mistakes are like stepping out of an airplane without a parachute. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference until it is too late. You try to do the right thing, weigh your options, test your conscience and learn to live with (or counter-balance) your human weaknesses. I regret that I wasn’t smart enough to save Malibu Comics in a way that would have allowed it to survive. I wanted to work there the rest of my life.

My expectations for the future mostly involve nurturing my current comic related activities. I work with Lee Nordling, Brian Augustyn, Barbara Kesel and Gordon Kent on a comic packaging company called The Pack (http://www.the-pack.biz/home.htm). While the direct market is suffering and the book market isn’t much better, the demand for good stories told in comic book format continues to be viable (and may actually be growing). The Pack’s goals include working with businesses and publishers who want to communicate through comic storytelling, but don’t have the experience or expertise. The Pack offers editorial services as an out-sourced activity for those businesses.

The Pack is also developing its own editorial packages for books, which we will then shop to publishers who have access to large portions of the mass market. My responsibility in this area is developing “graphic novels” with non-fiction content. Non-fiction books with comic content are popping up more and more and we believe that mass market publishers have only scratched the surface of this market sector’s future viability.

I also spend a lot of time working on a weblog called Funny Book Fanatic. My “blog” is only about a month old, but I enjoy it. The goal of the blog is different than most of the comic book blogs that I have seen. What I want to do is tell the stories of the people in comics, not the fictional characters. The blog should give visitors a variety of experiences, but primarily to give them a “peak” behind the curtain of the industry. Fanatic tends to mine my 25-year career and fan interests quite heavily, but I’m working with a number of creators that I’ve known and met encouraging them to contribute and tell their stories.

The blog includes many regular features like Miscellaneous Monday, Ask The DWO, Blog of the Week, Fanatic Quiz Question of the Week and 2nd String Character Hall of Fame voting.

Stories that have already been featured on the blog cover subjects like what Jack Kirby told the press when Image launched, what happened when Walter Simonson refused an interview, the day Alan Davis announced his retirement (in 1993), background on the Comics Code Authority, the birth and death of the Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards, which Marvel Comic title saw the debut of Klaus Janson cover inks and comics career advice from Marv Wolfman from 1976.

There are also tributes to artists Mike Ploog and Norm Breyfogle as well as the usual trivia and such one would expect from a blog called Funny Book Fanatic (http://funnybookfanatic.wordpress.com). The weblog is part of a larger strategy for a new internet business that I can’t talk about yet, but when we launch in 2009, you’ll be among the first to know.

Thanks for letting me spout off, Rich, I appreciate it.

Thank you for the stories, Dave.

space cowboy

Richard Caldwell

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