Morning Wire - Cultural Kryptonite: Rise of the Non-Woke Superhero | Saturday Extra

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

Independent comic book creator Eric July talks Hollywood, comics and his vision for a “non-woke” entertainment industry. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After decades of cultural dominance, the superhero is in sharp decline. Recent box office flops and cratering comic book sales have left some wondering if the genre is on its last legs. But while Marvel and D.C. are faltering, outside competitors are stronger than ever. Manga, comic books from Japan, are more popular than ever. And last year, an American comic book from an explicitly non-woke artist brought in almost $4 million with the first entry in his own superhero franchise, Isome One. Daily Wire researcher Michael Whitaker spoke with independent creator Eric July, author of Isome 1 and founder of The Ripperverse, to get a sense of what the future of pop culture might look like.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Saturday, July 1st, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. All right, so, Eric, it's an honor to have you in the studio. Thank you for coming to talk to us. Thank you so much for having me. I think the most natural place to start would be Isome No, 2. the release is coming up. I see the pre-orders have already opened and it is estimated that we'll start shipping at the end of July. Yes, that is correct. So it launched not too long ago. We are already

at 1.6-ish million floating around that area. We've already sold over 23,000 books, actually closer to 24,000, which is over a third of what we sold with Isam 1. So we will start fulfillment on the 31st of next month. And I'm excited for people to get a hold of the follow-up to Isom 1, one. All right. So one thing I noticed while looking over the promotional material was that the trailer for Isom number two was actually animated. So are you potentially exploring an animated adaptation of the whole series or is this more of a one-off? It was a filler. So we wanted to gauge our audience and what the response was going to be for it. So, you know, we launched that. We spent lots of money, lots of time to make that happen. And considering the reception,

for sure, we're going to do more of those. We actually had a benchmark, as we call it, That was at 750K. And if we had made that, we promised more animation in some capacity. And we blew right through that. So we're obviously obligated to it. But I'm taking this very, very serious because a lot of people are really intrigued by that. They loved seeing that. And I've always admired the relationship between, like, anime and manga and how they basically sell each other because they're almost one-to-one adaptations.

And I would love to do something like that with ICE and really all of our books in the Riververse. So speaking of which, because I think that would actually be a great segue. Recently, we've seen a massive dive in Western comic sales where a manga has actually started to come in and outsell them. I believe Demon Slayer, one popular manga, actually outsold the entire Western comic industry, which is simultaneously embarrassing for them and kind of hilarious. And there also seems to be this massive superhero fatigue at the box office. DCU is obviously sort of cratering right now. Marvel is struggling.

So do you think we're seeing a general trend? Do you think that ISO might be able to flip it around? And if we get more projects like it, five, ten years to know, could we have a revitalized American comic industry, a revitalized superhero genre, revitalized animation? That might have been too long of a question. I apologize, but... No, actually, you put that perfect, and you bring up two great points.

I think the fact that manga has grown so much in the West shows that there's not actually any fatigue in the concept of what a comic book is or even in the superhero stuff. I mean, oftentimes, manga definitely shows. The best-selling stuff, the best-selling stuff, really has a lot of the similar beat, right? It's told in their form of storytelling. But even when you look at like the one-punch man's of the world or even My Hero Academia, which is basically a nod to American comic book and superhero-related material,

is still destroying everything that's happening in the West. You mentioned Marvel and D.C. They have a huge content issue, whereas their demand is still there, but they're not able to really fill that with the content that they're creating. So I do believe that there was. will be a creative renaissance in the American sense. It's just not going to come from the big dogs. I think on the other side of this, when we do see a revitalized market, it's not going to look

the way that it did before. I think the day of like the mega corporation in the comic book entertainment aspect is gone. But I do believe there will be a lot of successes, multi-million dollars successes like the riververse, and we'll see a lot of pockets of that. And to me, that's a more decentralized sort of market, and I welcome that. All right. So you have an integrated supply chain, essentially. You have your own warehouse.

You print your own comic books. You ship them out. You're responsible for delivery for the entire process from top to bottom. So what made you decide that that was important compared to, say, partnering with a preexisting firm, like, say, Amazon, for example, which has print on demand or another one of the similar companies? Yeah, I understand what's at stake here. And because we're basically about to up in the entire industry, at least I knew we had the potential to do that. that meant that the bad actors were going to act bad. And I've seen them come for people's livelihoods.

I've seen them come for people's distributors and promoters and people that they team up with and partner with and try to paint you as a boogeyman to make sure that you really can't operate your business. So when I started the Riververse, I said, yes, it's going to be more work. And it may be initially more expensive to handle our own distribution. So in the event that someone has something negative to say about us, who are they going to go to? They can't go to the distributor. I mean, they can, but that would be us. So it allows us to be a lot more creative with what it is that we do.

And we, of course, know that at minimum, no matter who gets our material, especially our books, because a lot of this stuff is considered collectible, we know they're going to get it in good shape because we take care of it and it's coming directly from us. It doesn't have to go through us, then to someone else, then to a retailer. and then it gets to the actual customer. It doesn't have to do that. It's us to you and there's not that many hands in between. Do you foresee yourself potentially becoming a victim of your own success?

Because we saw, for example, you have $300 million movies, which are very, very difficult to make profitable. So studios interfere a lot with the production in order to essentially sanitize and perhaps smooth out creative rough edges in order to try and market it to as many people as possible. I mean, sometimes that takes very negative aspects. So as you get bigger and more successful, I know you have taken some steps to try and prevent this. Do you worry about the future of the ripover's?

Not necessarily because I'm the 100% sole owner, and I know there's people that, hey, you should do this, you should go public, you should do that. And I think with creative stuff, I think we're in the perfect spot that we want to be, and it will grow as much as I can basically have my hands on every single thing. I happen to be not only the lead creative, but I'm also a businessman.

So I can understand that aspect of it, which means less hands in the cookie jar. So, yeah, I have my team and I trust them, but we're relatively small, despite us being basically a multimillion-dollar publishing company, we still keep it all in-house. And I'm not so itching to be like, let's get there, right, quick as we possibly can, so I don't have to sell off assets and I won't sell off assets. I mean, the same thing can be said for, like, what happened on Marvel and DC as well, right?

It's like they couldn't possibly envision a world where these characters are now, part of the fabric of American culture. They've transcended comic books, right? You associate Superman with like Americanism, right? And thankfully with the technology, we get to see the mistakes that they had made along the way that forced it to really get out of control. And we can mitigate that through our own channels. And I think one of those ways, again, that we're doing that is not growing so fast and keeping everything in house. And we can still do big projects. Everybody saw the animation. That's something that we can do that's in our individual capacity that is competitive. You can line that animation up with anybody else in the industry and it's going to be

comparable. And with technology and everything being more decentralized, it allows us to still maintain control while also doing big, bold, and ambitious things. I'll certainly respect that a lot. On the integrated supply chain, you have made yourself effectively uncancellable. And obviously, we're seeing spasms from the left and the right to put pressure on companies to adhere to certain ideological agendas. Do you think that's what's going to be necessary for the American economy going forward? Do you think that we're going to see these larger trends of people

basically insulating themselves completely with parallel economies? That's what's going to have to happen, I think. I think really, to be completely honest, that's the only way out of this. I think that the days of expecting or anticipating that the established channels that have been around forever, that, again, may be part of the fabric of American culture, I think those are compromised.

And the only way to really, if we like what it is that they did, is to take from that what we have learned and don't make those same mistakes and be separate from them. And you know, you mentioned us being in control of everything. I think having more entities that embrace that level of control within their own companies is going to be very vital and very important. If we are going to have, especially in entertainment, something that isn't compromised, Something that isn't beating your audience over the head with whatever nonsense that, of course, we have rightful complaints about because really they're just used as vehicles now for the political or social preferences of whoever's doing that character these days. And it's often political leftism. I don't want to make that mistake.

And I don't think you have to make that mistake anymore. And why not separate from them, create, and see what happens. I mean, you're going to see a lot of successes. And not everybody's going to make it, but that's how markets work. Some people are going to be successful, others on Marvel, DC, Disney. They're pushed away their customers. So now you get to come up and you get to create an alternative. And other industries are having that same thing happen to them.

So it's an opportunity. So you have the technologies there. You can do it. It's far more affordable than any of it ever been, while also the demand being as high as is ever going to be. So this is a great opportunity for everybody. We have seen some steps perhaps in the right direction in some of these larger firms. We've obviously seen Anheiser Bush fire their med-level executive who pushed this decision.

We've also seen Disney Partways at their diversity officer. And we've seen so many flops and bombs that the industry is starting to get the message. Do you think that the superhero market and these mainstream entertainment firms could pivot back to the center? What do you think that they're going to run into the ground? I think they're going to run into the ground because they went so far that direction. You know, it's no turning around because really you've been infiltrated from the inside. So even if you did pivot, you'd be making so many folks angry. that are within it, or rather they wouldn't allow you to do it.

That's how deep this stuff run. So, yeah, they may start getting the message, but they won't do a full pivot, which is really what's necessary if you're going to try to save your industry. So I think what's going to be far more likely is that people that were once part of these mega corporations are going to, at some point, end up detaching themselves from it,

maybe coming up with their own production studios, their own companies, being successful in that. I don't want people to underestimate what's happening with Enhizer Bush right now economically, and especially with Disney. You got something like Elementals, they spent $200 million. I don't know how they spent $200 million on it, but they did. That's out of the way. And they just threw it away and ended up losing money.

So, you know, that same thing could be said for Marvel and Eternals and all these other movies that just really cost them a lot of money. You can't keep doing that and sustain that. But a lot of this stuff, even if they wanted to pivot, they really can't. Even if they try to reshoot certain things, they really can't. they plan this for, you know, 10, five years out. So it might actually get worse before it gets better. So it's an opportunity, though, for a lot of creatives.

And I used to be one of those guys, like, man, is I have an emotional, psychological, let's say, attachment to this stuff, Marvelling, D.C. Now I'm like, they can run themselves into the ground. I'll just take the customers. All right. So as far as the industry is concerned, some of the more talented creatives might make their way to the lifeboats,

but the ship has already hit the iceberg. It's gone. 100%. And we've seen that. a lot of our creators, for example, within the Ripperverse, from Cliff Richards to Gabe L. Taib, to Saskas to Chuck Dixon. These guys are former Marvelous, especially like Chuck Dixon. That's one of the most prolific Batman writers of our generation. And he's over here in the Ripperverse. And I've been, my email's been getting fired up by guys that are like, okay, yeah, this ship is going down.

And I see not only are you guys doing something that's great, but yeah, you guys pay on time as well. And that's a bargaining chip, certainly. So they're coming over here. And they're going to other independent creatives as well and that's what it's about all right well Eric thank you very much for your time appreciate you having me that was artist and creator of the ripaverse eric july and he was interviewed by daily wire researcher and long-time comic book fan michael whittaker and this has been an extra nerdy edition of morning wire