Culture Shock 10.16.14: Cosplay isn't a sign of stagnation

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I've never been one for cosplay. Putting together a good costume takes a lot of time and money, to say nothing of sewing skills I'm sadly lacking, as my high school home economics teacher would attest.

The most dressed up I ever get for comic book or sci-fi conventions is a T-shirt emblazoned with some obscure pop-culture reference. But I've always envied people who have the time, patience and know-how to pull off a really great costume. Little did I suspect they were an indicator of economic stagnation and poor job prospects. Who'd a thunk it? So, imagine my surprise when I read an article at The Week headlined "Why the rise of cosplay is a bad sign for the U.S. economy."

The author, James Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, makes a bold and, it seems to me, wrongheaded claim. It goes like this: More and more Americans, especially millennials, are into cosplay, short for "costume play." And this is because dressing up as fantasy characters is an escape from dead-end jobs and economic malaise.

But maybe I should let Pethokoukis speak for himself: "When you're disillusioned with the reality of your early adult life, dressing up like Doctor Who starts looking better and better."

Pethokoukis argues by way of analogy, noting that Japan has lots of young cosplayers, lots of underemployed young people and an economy that's been no better than anemic for the past 20 years. This, I gather, adds up to something, but I have no idea what.

Despite the nagging feeling there must be something more to what Pethokoukis is saying, if there is I can't find it. Taken as is, Pethokoukis' argument is so wrong I barely know where to begin, but I'll start with dollars and cents.

Cosplaying isn't for the poor of spirit or bank account. It costs a lot of money to make a good costume. Some cosplayers spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on their wardrobes. Some wear multiple costumes during the course of a weekend convention. Some even call upon the services of professional makeup artists. And none of that accounts for travel and hotel costs. Attending a sci-fi or comic convention isn't cheap, whether you're in costume or not.

Pethokoukis knows this and even refers to the "big bucks" cosplayers invest in their costumes.

Now maybe he assumes they all live with and sponge off their parents to supplement whatever money they make from their menial jobs. Regardless, it takes a wealthy society to be able to afford such pastimes. Cosplay isn't a sign of economic trouble, but a reminder of how rich we are, even after the Great Recession. But the problems with his argument don't end there.

It's hard to calculate how many cosplayers there are in the U.S., but we can at least get an idea of attendance at the conventions cosplayers frequent. Attendance at one of the largest, San Diego's Comic-Con International, has been growing for years, since well before the Great Recession. The fastest growth was from 2001 to 2005, when attendance doubled and reached 100,000 for the first time. Since the recession, attendance has hovered between 125,000 and just over 130,000.

That doesn't look like a post-recession flight from reality to me. It looks more like a trend line flatting out. But enough foreplay. Time to get to the crux of Pethokoukis' article, such as it is.

Though unstated, Pethokoukis makes a common but unwarranted assumption: that there is something special about cosplay. But the fact is, people escape mundane reality in lots of ways, and dressing up like fantasy characters is just one of them, albeit the one that's most easily ridiculed.

What if we applied the same illogic to jock pastimes that Pethokoukis applies to geek pastimes? Maybe we should be looking at the increasing popularity of fantasy football and baseball? Maybe the real indicators of a lousy economy are guys who turn their dens into shrines to their favorite college or pro football teams? Yes, these are expensive hobbies, too, but why let that stop us?

If Pethokoukis' argument describes reality, then cosplaying millennials aren't the only ones trying to escape it. Fortunately, they aren't the ones I think have taken a flight from reality.

Culture Shock 08.08.13: TV and movies experience reversal of fortunes

Two new books, taken together, perfectly illustrate the divergent fortunes of television and the movies.

The first is "Difficult Men" by GQ correspondent Brett Martin. In this case, the (overly long) subtitle — "Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad' " — says it all. Television is no longer mostly just sitcoms and episodic police procedurals, although both are still around and doing fine. Now there are complex shows with ongoing stories that attract some of the best actors in the business, the sort of actors who used to do only movies and looked down on TV work.

Driven by writer-creators rather than by directors, television has become the go-to platform for long-form, narrative storytelling.

At the other, seedier end of the street is Lynda Obst's "Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business." Obst is a producer who has a hard time producing movies nowadays, even though her credits include hits like "Adventures in Babysitting" and "Sleepless in Seattle."

The reason is Hollywood doesn't make the kind of modestly budgeted films she makes anymore, unless they're horror films or star-driven comedies. Everything is either low-budget indie films, on the one hand, or grotesquely budgeted effects-driven extravaganzas based on brands with built-in audience appeal. That's why everything Hollywood produces seems to be a remake, a sequel or based on a book, comic book or old TV show.

They're not all bad, but for every "Iron Man" there are a dozen "Man of Steels," crowding out other types of movies. Once, these big-budget would-be blockbusters were tentpoles around which studios built their release schedules. Now, Obst complains, just about every studio movie is a tentpole.

Even a big-name director like Steven Spielberg has to scrape together funding when he wants to make a non-tentpole like his Oscar-bait biopic "Lincoln."

That prompted Spielberg and George Lucas, jointly credited/blamed with creating the "summer blockbuster," to warn that Hollywood's big tent is on the verge of collapsing.

The common denominator behind both TV's and films' fortunes is DVD sales.

The rise of DVDs (and video on demand) in the past 15 or so years made movies more available, a development that was one thing driving pay-TV channels like HBO into original programming as a way to differentiate themselves. The subsequent decline in DVD sales, however, broke all of the Hollywood studios' financial models, leading to the tentpole-dominated model that prevails now.

The decline of DVDs is in part the work of Netflix, which is also credited with helping change TV for the better by encouraging "binge viewing" and producing its own shows like the Emmy-nominated "House of Cards," a fourth season of "Arrested Development" and the latest critical darling, "Orange is the New Black." It's not too much of an exaggeration to say Netflix changed everything.

So, is everything roses for TV and curtains for the movies? Not necessarily.

Television still falls prey to formula. For all the talk of a "creative revolution," how many of these daring new shows can be summed up as "family man (or woman) with a secret criminal life"?

And Hollywood has been here before, when big-budget disasters like 1963's "Cleopatra" nearly sank studios and cleared the way for a new generation of filmmakers who made smaller, more personal films. After a decade of bloated epics, we got the generation of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and, yes, George Lucas.

Lest we forget, the original "Star Wars" was also a modestly budgeted film, by today's standards.

Culture Shock 02.21.13: A penny ain't worth what it used to be

Killing Lincoln.

The film "Pennies from Heaven" starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Jessica Harper opened in 1981.

Since then, the titular penny has lost more than one-third of its value, according to the inflation calculator at www.usinflationcalculator.com. Yet the movie is set in the 1930s. So, take the TARDIS farther back, to the dark days of the Great Depression, and a penny from today suddenly has the purchasing power of 14 cents.

It's like when baby Kal-El journeys from Krypton to Earth, gets super powers and becomes Superman. In the past, the penny becomes the Superpenny, able to buy the stuff of 14 ordinary pennies.

But here in 2013, the penny is just the lowly penny. People drop them on the sidewalk and can't be bothered even to bend over and pick them up. A penny just isn't worth that much time and effort, and besides, my back hurts. From a monetary point of view, the penny is now a bigger wimp than Clark Kent ever was.

That's why there is a movement afoot, once again, to do in the penny once and for all.

Some groups like Citizens to Retire the Penny have campaigned to eliminate the penny from circulation for years, and President Barack Obama recently added his voice to those calling for change in our change. But so far they have been no match against the feared zinc lobby, or, as I like to call it, Big Zinc.

Yogi Berra once quipped, "A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore." That isn't just a truism; it's economics. About 100 years ago, a penny was worth roughly a quarter, adjusted for inflation. But after a century of Federal Reserve-backed monetary expansion, a penny ain't worth a quarter anymore. It ain't even worth a penny.

Other governments have already killed their pennies. Canada ended production of its 1-cent coin earlier this month. As governments inflate their currencies, lower-denomination coins cease to be worth minting, or even face value. It costs the U.S. government 2.41 cents for every penny it mints.

By that standard, the penny is worth more dead than alive. You're better off melting them down and selling the zinc back to the U.S. government to make more pennies. If "Seinfeld" were still on the air, this would be a great get-rich-quick scheme for Kramer and Newman.

The only economic case to be made for the penny is without it businesses would round up their prices and we'd all end up paying more. But that argument is probably overstated, and as the penny continues to lose value, less and less persuasive. You might as well complain that businesses have to round up to the nearest cent because there are no half-cent coins. (Yes, there used to be half-cent coins in the U.S., from 1793 to 1857.)

Add to all that the hidden cost of keeping up with pennies, counting them out, storing them, sorting them, driving them to the nearest Coinstar machine to get rid of them and the time spent wrapping them to take them to the bank, and pennies are surprisingly expensive for something so worthless.

The penny's only remaining value is cultural.

We name daughters Penny. We don't name them Nickel or Dime. It's "a penny for your thoughts," not a quarter because, face it, no one cares that much about what's on anyone's mind. And if you're really poor, you "don't have two pennies to rub together" because not even really poor people will bend over to pick them up.

The only known form of communism to work are the "take a penny, leave a penny" trays you find in convenience stores and restaurants. When they are gone, it'll be the worst day for communism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It gives new meaning to "red cent."

Culture Shock 03.04.10: Is there gold in Golden Age comic books?

Superman isn't letting a little thing like a recession keep him from going up, up and away. But can the rest of us take advantage?

A copy of Action Comics No. 1 set a record last week when it sold for $1 million, the highest price any comic book has ever commanded, and a sizable sum even for the book that introduced Superman. But that record didn't stand long. Three days later, Batman proved he has what it takes to take down the Man of Steel. A copy of Detective Comics No. 27, the Caped Crusader's debut issue, sold at auction for $1,075,500.

Both comics are in excellent condition, each rating an 8.0 out of 10 according to the Certified Guarantee Company. But the sale prices were staggering nonetheless. Before this year, no comic book had come close to the $1 million threshold. The top sale price I could find was $350,000 for a copy of Marvel Comics No. 1 purchased in 2001.

So, is this the start of a bull market for old comic books? And, if so, does it reflect real value, or is it a bubble waiting to pop?

The last time comics entered a boom period was the late 1980s and early '90s. And that boom continued even through the recession of 1990-91.

That boom, however, turned out to be the perfect set-up for a disastrous crash. The official history of the period tells of speculators — mostly people who had never seriously read or collected comic books before — entering the market and driving up the prices of newly published books. That fueled the growth of upstart publishers looking to cash in on the increased demand.

My own pet theory is that many of those speculators thought comic books were a safe haven in an otherwise sluggish economy. But whatever their motives, the speculators thought wrong.

In 1993, while the rest of the economy was recovering, the comics bubble burst. During the next four years, many of the publishers that had helped fuel the boom — Broadway Comics, Tekno Comics, Eclipse and Valiant — went under. Retailers and many of their customers were left holding boxes filled with near worthless books, some of which had fetched hundreds of dollars during the boom's peak.

But if history is repeating itself, it's not following the same script. The '90s comics bubble was limited to newly published comics with large print runs. When demand dropped, there were simply too many comics in circulation for prices not to fall to near nothing. This time around, we're looking at two books published in the late 1930s, the beginning of comics' "Golden Age." Publishers can't flood the market with 70-year-old comics.

Another difference this time is comics have not run counter to the rest of the economy.

According to Nostomania.com, virtually all of the top 100 most valuable comics have lost value during the past year. Two of the few exceptions, Showcase No. 22 (first appearance of the second Green Lantern) and Tales of Suspense No. 39 (debut of Iron Man), can be explained by Hollywood hype. A Green Lantern movie is in the works, and the Iron Man sequel hits theaters this spring.

Ultimately, the record sale prices of Action Comics No. 1 and Detective Comics No. 27 could be meaningless anomalies. Or they could drive speculation that might extend to other vintage comics and end up crashing down in a few years. Or, just maybe, all of this is a real reflection of the enduring value of old comic books.

But for now, I wouldn't bet a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15 on any of those possibilities if I were you.

Culture Shock 04.02.09: 'Atlas' shrugs up sales charts as economy falls

More than 50 years after its publication, Ayn Rand's bestseller "Atlas Shrugged" is again moving up the sales charts.

According to The Economist, "Atlas Shrugged" has reached as high as No. 33 on
Amazon.com's best-seller list, briefly topping President Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope."

Renewed interest in the novel began with the economic downturn, starting with the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts last year. Sales spikes then coincided with the mortgage and bank bailouts, and the passage of the president's economic stimulus package.

Every time the economy takes a hit or the federal government grows larger, new readers flock to Rand's novel. But why, after all this time, is Atlas still shrugging?

Although set in the 1950s and somewhat dated by its focus on the railroad industry, "Atlas Shrugged" still reads like dystopian science fiction, describing a near-future world on the brink of economic collapse as governments restrict, regulate and expropriate private businesses in a failed attempt to keep the system going. To a lot of people, apparently, that near future seems a lot like now.

In the novel, the few businessmen, artists, thinkers and other producers who have not compromised their principles or been co-opted by the government go on a "strike of the mind." Tired of being taxed and regulated, they abandon their companies and other projects. They deprive the world of their creative talents. And, eventually, they join the book's mysterious hero, John Galt, in a secret hideaway. There, they watch as the world crumbles and plan their return, when they will rebuild along lines that respect the individual, creativity and, by implication, laissez-faire capitalism.

Over the years, Rand has taken a beating both for her literary talents and her philosophy of rational self-interest, which she called Objectivism. A small number of academic philosophers treat Rand's ideas seriously, and I was a student of one of them at Auburn University in the early 1990s. But the official Objectivist movement, led by the Ayn Rand Institute, hasn't served Objectivism well, instead treating Rand's novels and essays as holy writ.

Yet, as a literary figure, Rand endures, to the consternation of the literary establishment. She was born in Russia, and her novels, especially "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," combine the scope of Russian epics with a distinctly American pulp style. They are an odd mix of both highbrow and lowbrow sensibilities that continue to enthrall and inspire readers. Rand even weaves science fiction into her works, especially "Atlas" and her novella "Anthem," which was reprinted in a 1953 pulp sci-fi magazine.

Rand's sometimes unlikely admirers include Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Jolie is among the contenders to star in a movie version of "Atlas Shrugged," which is in development at Lionsgate for a tentative 2011 release. Perhaps the novel's newfound popularity will finally get the long-delayed project in front of the camera.

Meanwhile, conservative pundits, particularly Michelle Malkin, are citing anecdotal cases of people "going Galt" — voluntarily reducing their income to avoid paying higher taxes. Of course, one wonders where these would-be John Galts were when President George W. Bush was increasing federal discretionary spending by nearly 50 percent.

There is a bitter irony to Rand's resurgence. Most if not all of the blame for the U.S. economy's woes lies with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a former acolyte of Rand's. Many of Rand's other followers — and economists sympathetic to Rand's pro-capitalist politics — have denounced Greenspan as a sellout, some warning beforehand that his policies would lead to trouble. Certainly, the Greenspan who wrote in favor of the gold standard and against the Fed in the 1960s, when he was part of Rand's inner circle, is hard to square with Greenspan the Fed chairman.

It makes you wonder if Greenspan ever imagined himself as one of Rand's villains, because he makes for a pretty convincing one.