Jemas waited a week before issuing his own statement about his departure, writing that a day after resigning from the company – something he clearly wanted to get on the record – he started a new venture, called Be Good Studios, which seems to be approaching the idea of comics as transmedia proof of concept from the opposite angle audiences expect.
“We do not do what other publishers do: commissioning comic book writers to create the original stories, then optioning those stories to Hollywood and hoping for others to re-write the stories, then fund, package, greenlight and produce TV programming and feature films,” he wrote. “Instead, we start with award-winning independent film makers and animators who co-create original stories with wonderfully talented webtoon and comic book artists. Then, we build [an] audience with promotional partners and raise funding for feature films and TV series with strategic Web3 investors.”
There’s a couple of interesting details here. Firstly, unless Jemas is using “comic book artists” in a broad sense (with him, always a possibility) it would appear that comic book writers are being cut out of the picture in favor of pairing creators from outside of comics to work directly with visual artists to create the work. And then, there’s the fact that he seems to explicitly be saying that he’ll be using Web3 money – “investors” is doing a lot of work there, and I’m not sure if he means it in the traditional venture capital investment sense, or the “people who bought our NFTs” sense – to fund movie and TV projects, which is potentially a smart move in terms of controlling projects and not giving all the power to studios – as long as there is Web3 money in the first place.
It’s a wild swing, and one that definitely has at least as much chance of failure as success. I wouldn’t count automatically Jemas out, however; he’s found success doing stranger things in the past, after all.
I made a joke on Twitter that, with Jemas and Quesada both free agents again, there’s the potential for both to work together again. I can’t
really see it happening any time soon for a multitude of reasons, but… I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t part of me that almost wants to see the former firebrands of Marvel circa 2001-2003 get the band back together just to see what happened afterwards. “
U Decide,” if you will.
* What are the odds that this “something [he’s] thrilled about for later this year” is whatever the Miracleman in the Marvel Universe project ends up being? I’m pretty sure that the last sequential artwork I’ve seen from Quesada was on the resurrected-from-the-trash-bin Grant Morrison spec script for Marvelman that eventually appeared in 2014’s All-New Miracleman Annual #1…
** Web3 is, for those who don’t know, code for blockchain, crypto and NFT projects.
*** Among the film and TV projects are adaptations of Bryan Edward Hill and Priscilla Petraites’ Chariot, to be directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, and the underrated Old Haunts, by Ollie Masters, Rob Williams, and Laurence Campbell.