MORE Vanity Fair Necrophilia

Like an unwatched pot, my beat has bubbled over. So much so that it overflowed my last post’s ability to comment upon all of the topics currently now topical. (And trying to weave them in would have ruined the flow of my last rant-o-thon.) We have two follow up issues, regarding our old pals Newsweek and Vanity Fair, a new magazine to cover, a trend in neo-pulps and magazines to watch and an entirely new magazine form to make note of. Zounds! For a dead form, magazines are really jumping. But first my all original new joke:

I went to the store to pick up a book on origami.

Unfortunately, I left my glasses at home

 and wound up buying a book on karma sutra instead.

I don’t know who is more disappointed

Me or the little strips of paper

If you hear that at a comedy club, you know where they got it. I don’t actually take donations, but a little attribution would be nice. (The name is A-J-A-X T-E-L-E-G-R-A-P-H.*) Now that we have the yucks out of the way, let’s go to press...

NEWSWEEK SOLD (YET AGAIN)!

Out of respect for the dead, we are leading with Newsweek. For those of you who haven’t seen a copy of Newsweek for the past year, it’s because it ceased publishing, joining US News & World Report in that limbo realm where such things go. Prior to its death, while still in the hands of sinister for profit school con-artist Kaplan (formerly known as the Washington Post), Newsweek became a True Crime Pulp and thus strayed into our territory. Then it was sold, Beanie and Cecil style, for one bright and shiny US Dollar to the founder of the Harman-Kardon speaker empire. Sadly, the 90ish newly minted press baron did what 90ish men do best (passed away) as the transaction was still in its final stages. His trust fund receiving spawn then blanched at the concept of actually doing anything other than cashing pappy’s checks and dumped the whole thing onto Barry Diller. Diller, who saw Newsweek primarily as print avenue for his Daily Beast website, then cancelled the publication portion of the publication, choosing the more net-worthy model of appending the former Newsweek print trademark onto his Daily Beast web page.

In the middle of this, Tina Brown transformed Newsweek into the best news magazine at that time being published. But it was not for long. Shortly after this, Kaplan decided to disgorge itself of its last legitimate business, the Washington Post, to concentrate on stapling people who don’t belong in college into $60,000.00 non-dischargeable loans for worthless degrees. **

Now it seems that Mr. Diller has decided that the Newsweek trademark is not so value added after all. (Or that it has no added value to his current holding the Daily Beast.) Since he has no need of two news reporting websites, Diller has sold the one that least fits his product mix of Match.com, ShoeBuy.com and OKCupid.com. Hence it has been slave sold off to a web biz with even more obscure offerings.

The new owner, essentially web business site International Business Times, has vowed to reincarnate Newsweek as at least a website with its own dedicated domain. Thus Newsweek joins Cracked and the National Lampoon as web only entities operated by persons who had nothing to do with the original print entity. Sigh. This too is a building trend.

VANITY FAIR NECROPHILIA (CONTINUES)

The evil Graydon Carter has deployed flacks to deodorize his predilection for the previously living by having this startling copy planted in the Yahoo news-scroll:

Take a wild guess why we're seeing an influx of long-dead famous people covering magazines like Vanity Fair lately? Give up? It's because they sell mags better than most living celebrities! 

According to WWD, Vanity Fair's bestseller so far this year was the issue that featured a photo of a young Audrey Hepburn, which sold 308,000 copies, which was nearly 100,000 more than the worst-seller, Taylor Swift in April, who sold a little more than 211,000 copies. 

Graydon, please. I’m on to you and you know it. I don’t know what Ms. Swift did to you (or didn’t do), but cut it out. If one really reads between the lines, it means that no one under 50 bothers with your magazine. Not something I would tout, really. It goes on, genuflecting double jointed in Graydon’s august direction with:

The highbrow culture glossy has made something of a habit in recent years putting glamorous, intriguing dead celebrities on its covers, including Hepburn, Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and, as WWD pointed out, the Kennedys "who practically deserve posthumous contributing editor credits for the number of appearances they've notched over the years." 

I always wondered what Graydon’s shoe polish tastes like. I am quite sure that the typist of “highbrow culture glossy” knows the taste, texture and color of the soles that have now been so lovingly slobbered off in livid detail. I would have gone with “National Enquirer without the Elvis sightings”, only because I am not inspired to lie.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Vanity Fair. I even sort of get what it is trying to be. Then again, I AM A MAGAZINE HISTORIAN. It’s sort of my gig. My brother-in-law, by contrast, thinks it’s a fashion magazine. So he avoids it and wonders why I subscribe to it. My sister, who loves fashion magazines, generally avoids it because it doesn’t have enough of a fashion focus. And that is Vanity Fair’s problem in a nut shell. Its reputation as a general interest magazine is somewhat muted by the fact that most people are unaware that such exist. Vanity Fair’s future, if it has one, is in raising the profile of the general interest magazine or shifting focus to a lifestyle orientation. Simply planting stories on Yahoo or flashes of the logo in ads for other things makes the “highbrow culture glossy” seem about as relevant as grandma’s front room good furniture.  

Artistically, Graydon’s career is as dead as his cover models. It stuns me that this was the same person who came up with SPY magazine. Where did the talent go?

Putting dead women on the cover is creepy and weird. Period.

DISNEY COMICS RETURN (TOTAL FAIL)

The woes of one media group have not prevented another media group from getting back into print. Powerhouse Disney (also known as What Capital Cities Became--currently ESPN, Star Wars, Marvel Comics, ABC and so much less) has pitched a new entry into the comic book business:

Disney, as Disney, is the beneficiary of an absolutely spectacular and internationally sourced treasure trove of comic strip and comic book art. Some of the best written and drawn works in the comics medium have featured Disney characters. Many of Disney’s currently most popular entities, such as Duck Tales and the Uncle Scrooge feature, originated first in comic strip or comic book form. If Disney did nothing else than republish the top 1% of this time tested material, they could run ten years of a magazine.

So that’s exactly what they didn’t do. To be charitable, half of this magazine is a children’s activity book. As such, they are crowding a market in which they are already the biggest dog on the block. One imagines that it is the comics in Comics Zone that are meant to distinguish this offering from the other princess or automotive themed children’s magazines. Unfortunately it is here, the comics, that Comics Zone, falls weirdly short. For a company that not only owns the best back catalog of material in the world as well as an actual comic book company, this effort is inexplicable. The comics were not merely insipid and uninspired, but also confusing and vulgar.

Making Mickey French is just peculiar. Motion jokes in a comic strip generally do not work, unless they are done Family Circle style. Jokes about which Disney characters wear pants are suitable for the reject pile of an Underground Comix, not the flagship of a mainline publisher. Much of this could have been avoided if the people who put the magazine together were familiar with the characters  or the medium. And they obviously aren’t. Tell whoever oversaw this mess to go back to whatever it is they do.  (Focus group report reading, probably.)

It’s a comic book. If you don’t know how to make one, ask the people at Marvel. Or perhaps you might want to hire the braintrust from Gladstone? I hope Walt chews your ass next time he’s thawed out. How dare you push this tripe at children!

OUR ROBOT MASTERS (NEO-PULP TREND)

First, we let the machines build things for us. Then we entrusted them to do our killing for us. When the space aliens landed, all they found were little helicopters swooping about, on a constant search for missing and unseen prey. We invested, as a society, in the development of tools that would ease our drudgery. And when we had no drudgery left, the people who claimed to own the tools declared themselves rich and the rest of us poor. Then, when the poor complained, the rich made more tools to keep themselves in power. Finally, after the rich had killed all of the poor with the tools we all gave them, the rich became too lazy to procreate. But before then, we wrote magazines about them...

If you’re looking for something even that illuminating, don’t look here. We’re still obsessing about how neat the machines are. I suppose it’s all fun until the first mayor deploys  one against a street gang. Or a home brewed version goes on its first senseless mayhem spree. Or one flown by someone other than a member of our military kills one of our officials on our soil. Or until the other nations in this world outlaw them, just as poison gas and zepplins were outlawed.

But don’t look for even those questions to be raised. We are too obsessed on their potential impact upon pizza delivery.

(I have been neglecting the field of Neo Pulps for the past few months for various reasons. I do intend to resume coverage of the field sometime in the future, circumstances permitting.)

I suppose drones are analogous to the spate of UFO Magazines from the 1950s, but they somehow seem more mundane. Perhaps they are mundane because they are really nothing more than remote control thingies, like slot cars. Perhaps they are mundane because of what they generally do, like clean our floors, manufacture our cars, and KILL PEOPLE.

Oh, yeah. UFOs were from outer space. Much more mysterious than things we have ourselves made which are taking our own jobs and OUR LIVES.

EXPERIENCE BOXES (NEW PUBLICATION TYPE COINED)

As a person who comments on my writings here has noted, I have a tendency to coin  names for different types of publications. As ‘useless and insipid’ as this practice may seem, I have need to resort to it when detailing certain unique items.

Experience Boxes, as I am calling them, are fairly new. Like Neo-Pulps, they have begun taking up magazine rack space. Most of these items contain a Neo-Pulp in them. (A Neo-Pulp is a perfect bound publication with a slick cardboard cover, generally the size of a magazine. They are dedicated to a single fantastic subject.) Many also contain posters, post cards, pins, CDs and collectible whatnot. All of this is packed into a slick full color printed cardboard envelope.

From what I can tell, much of it is an attempt to repackage English magazines for the American market. One big superhero magazine makes it a point to just stick last month’s returns in a box and ship them stateside.

It also seems to be popular with nostalgia music marketers. I will confess to being prone to buying anything Blondie. Debbie Harry can yodel into a box and I will buy it. Sadly, the album/CD that came with this is something someone should have talked the group out of.

Given that the whole music industry has done a swan song, taking up impulse buy space vacated by magazines seems the coming trend. And these Experience Boxes seem to be the way to go. One wonders how long it will take the purveyors of other forms to glom onto the idea. Eventually the magazine racks will disappear altogether, so the length of this trend may not be long.

*Which reminds me that I have to do a posting on my unattributed work, various acts of non-attributing deserving a little retribution. If you can’t extract cash from the little slugs, at least make them internet infamous

**Also remind me to cover online colleges as a consumer fraud. Kaplan is an ugly contributor to the trend, but they are not alone nor are they the largest crook in the field.