Comics’ Unlikely Hero

Two summers ago in a San Diego convention hall, Mark Alessi got his ticket punched for Hollywood.

After months of pursuit by mail and telephone, the former high-tech wunderkind finally corralled movie producer Michael Uslan in person. “He waited till I was toward a corner, and then he just backed me in,” Uslan recalled in an interview. “There was no way for at least the next four minutes that I wasn’t going to listen to him.”

Having served as executive producer of the “Batman” series, Uslan is accustomed to people pushing scripts at him. But in Alessi’s case, it was a fistful of comic books and a simple pitch: Read these and if you don’t love them, I’ll never bother you again.

Today, back at the San Diego Convention Center once again for Comic-Con International, the industry’s biggest annual gathering, Alessi and Uslan are on the same page.

Under a long-term development deal the two signed weeks after that first meeting at Comic-Con in 2001, Uslan is Hollywood ambassador for Alessi’s maverick publishing house, CrossGeneration Comics Inc.

Less than two years into the alliance, an eye blink by Hollywood’s clock, CrossGen has 11 movie and TV projects in the pipeline with some big names: studios such as DreamWorks SKG and Castle Rock Entertainment; filmmakers including Chuck Russell (“The Mask”) and Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump”); and writers like Bob Gale (“Back to the Future”) and Mike France (“Cliffhanger”).

And not one of the projects, as everybody connected with CrossGen repeats incessantly, involves a spandex-clad superhero.

The titles include:

* “Way of the Rat,” an action-adventure yarn set in ancient China and featuring a comical thief and his mentor, a talking monkey.

* “Route 666,” a horror tale with an early-’60s feel whose protagonist is a female college student who sees ghosts but can’t convince anyone else of their macabre conspiracy.

* “Brath,” a historical adventure based on the Roman Empire’s 1st century efforts to quell Scotland’s pugnacious Highland clans.

* “Meridian,” a fantasy and coming-of-age story about an orphaned young princess who has to save her world from the clutches of her ruthless uncle.

Hollywood used to believe that for a comic book to become a hit movie, it had to involve a household name -- Superman or Spider-Man, say. That theory was overthrown by the grand success of a string of movies based on little-known comic books: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Men in Black,” “The Mask” and “Road to Perdition.”

CrossGen isn’t just about feeding Hollywood. Actually, Alessi says, it’s the other way around. Putting his stories and characters on the screen as quickly as possible is how he hopes to win his comic books the mass market he thinks they deserve.

Alessi, 50, has plowed into 4-year-old CrossGen the bulk of a personal fortune he made in 1996, when he sold his software firm to H. Ross Perot’s Perot Systems Corp. The deal made millionaires of a dozen of Alessi’s co-workers, several of whom followed him to his new venture.

At 5 feet 7 and 195 pounds, and with a weightlifter’s upper body, Alessi still carries some of the attitude of the Connecticut youth who collected A’s in high school while getting suspended for fighting. Today, he is a widower with a 17-year-old daughter. Alessi says he’s driven to make GrossGen succeed to secure her future and those of the families of his 96 employees.

“I am the worst loser you will ever meet,” Alessi said during an interview this week in his cramped office at CrossGen. “You may beat me, and if you do, I hope I will be gracious. But we will play again.”

CrossGen, in a bland office park just north of Tampa, Fla., stands as a lifelong fan’s response to what he thinks is wrong with the comics industry.

Alessi says there’s plenty, starting with a retail network that in 50 years has shrunk from hundreds of thousands of newsstands and corner variety stores to 2,500 specialty shops, many of them “at the end of a seedy strip mall under a broken overhead light -- no place any parent would want his kid going on his bicycle.”

At $2.95 an issue, many of today’s monthly books offer more lavish art, color and printing than their 10-cent counterparts of the 1950s. But the price and the often adult-oriented content are barriers to new young readers. And so, Alessi says, the industry increasingly tightens its circle around a core market of young adult males and collectors.

Beyond that, he notes that burnout is rife among the mainly low-paid and isolated freelance artists and writers who create the books, making for high turnover and a weak sense of professionalism.

The CrossGen founder has said all this before in numerous industry forums, winning himself a reputation as a scold out of all proportion to his longevity in the business or his company’s 5% market share.

By contrast, giants Marvel Comics (“Spider-Man,” “The Incredible Hulk”) and DC Comics (“Superman,” “Batman”) claim about 35% and 30%, respectively, according to Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the dominant distributor. No other imprint has close to 10%. Depending on how you measure it, CrossGen is the fifth-, fourth- or third-largest publisher.

Still, Alessi has managed one of the industry’s most successful start-ups in years, and his ideas are getting respect and a bit of imitation.

Alessi’s response to poor deadline performance and fragile professionalism was to put everybody on salary, with health and dental benefits, and require the employees to move to Tampa and work under one roof. Salaries range from about $40,000 to the low six figures for a small number of creative people -- a range that Alessi describes as on the high side for the lower-paid employees but probably less than the top artists and writers could command on the freelance market.

At the office, there’s a jeans and Reeboks kind of dress code, and an industrial-size refrigerator stocked with free soft drinks. But the workload is heavy and the atmosphere can be intense. In four years, CrossGen has yet to miss a publishing deadline.

Writers, pencilers, inkers and colorists who used to communicate solely by FedEx, fax and e-mail are now organized around fabric-walled cubicles that let them exchange ideas directly and immediately. It’s an idea that hails from Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee’s famous “bullpen” at Marvel in the 1960s.

Alessi added a simple but powerful motivational tool: He asked the artists to post their completed pages on the cubicles’ outside walls.

Jay Leisten, inker on the popular fantasy title “Sojourn,” said his work had improved rapidly thanks to the creative give-and-take with his penciler, former DC star Greg Land, and other artists. But he acknowledged there is real peer pressure.

“Everybody puts their stuff on the walls, so we’re constantly challenging each other,” he said. “Nobody wants to have the worst-looking pages.”

Alessi has promised to share 25% of CrossGen’s profit with employees. He says the company appears on track to turn a profit in this year’s fourth quarter, though with sales expected to hit only about $13 million this year, any payoff won’t be lottery-like.

To reach younger readers with less spending money, Alessi is making all his titles available on the Internet for a $2 monthly subscription. CrossGen also is packaging collections of six monthly comics into paperback books that can reach readers at the big book chains and at the library. And teams of toy makers and tech wizards are preparing CDs, games, toys and other products that broaden the company’s offerings without requiring much creative work beyond the stories and art that are already in the comic books.

Movies and TV shows should create the brand recognition that would drive sales of these ancillary products. For that reason, CrossGen decided to keep options fees “ridiculously low,” as Uslan put it, so upfront costs wouldn’t be an impediment to getting a project off the ground.

Director Russell, who has signed on for “Way of the Rat,” said he was surprised by that and by the willingness of CrossGen artists and writers to work directly with him to develop the movie.

“I’m usually surrounded by lawyers and agents the instant I talk about a comics property,” he said. Russell said his pitch meeting with DreamWorks executive Michael De Luca was a “home run” thanks in part to poster-size original art supplied by two of the comic’s artists. Russell hopes the movie will be in theaters in 2004.