The comic book community (which now includes the animation community and a certain amount of the live-action movie community) was jolted yesterday by the news that Dan DiDio was "out" as co-publisher of DC Comics.
The phrasing of the announcement suggested it was not a resignation without saying it was an involuntary departure. My own contacts with Dan were always pleasant and professional and I'm sure he will thrive and succeed wherever he lands. You have to be a smart person to have been at a company like that as long as he's been at that company like that.
I received a few calls and a number of e-mails asking me why he's out, what it means, what's going to change and so on. I will give you a firm, almost-certainly-correct answer: Nobody knows. And one of the things that makes me confident in that answer is that some of those questions to me came from people at DC who, if I cared more about this than I do, are the folks I would have called to ask them why he's out, what it means, what's going to change and so on.
My life and career occasionally touch some portion of the vast WarnerMedia LLC and like many big companies these days, if you work there at a desk in an office on the fifth floor, you breathe a tiny sigh of relief each workday morning to find that your desk is still there, your office is still there and that the building still has a fifth floor. And then you sit and work, wondering if all that will still be true when you return from lunch.
We live in a time when corporations get bought and acquired the way my friends and I traded baseball cards when I was ten. In fact, right now if you had a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax rookie card in mint, you could probably swap it for the entire Pier 1 Imports company.
And when the top jobs at such firms command huge salaries, those comes with huge expectations and demands for results. Back in 1983, the writer William Goldman wrote a non-fiction book about Hollywood called Adventures in the Screen Trade that is still actively read and quoted. Mostly, people quote a line he wrote that said — and I quote — "NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING."
That's said a lot since he said it. You'll notice I plagiarized the first two-thirds of it in my third paragraph above.
It was in reference to how unpredictable the business of making movies can be, and of course everyone applies it to programming television or producing Broadway shows or any corner of the entertainment industry. It certainly pertains to comic book companies that have bled into movie studios. The section of the book in which Goldman said that much-quoted line began like this…
Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: They wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they're going to get fired.
That is true and it would also have been true if Mr. Goldman had written "…sooner or later, the company is going to be purchased or acquired by some other company and everything will change."
When I was starting out in writing, which I did in 1969, a lot of folks I knew thought I was nuts to try and be a freelancer. They all wanted the security they thought would be theirs if they could just somehow hook up with a Big Company. If they did, they could spend the rest of their lives working for that Big Company. One told me he wanted a job at Hanna-Barbera because Hanna-Barbera would always be there. Hanna-Barbera, needless to say, is no longer there. Hanna is gone. Barbera is gone. And the hyphen was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb.
This kind of volatility exists everywhere in business these days. It's nerve-wracking for some people, probably most people, but it's not completely bad. When a screaming, incompetent maniac ascends to a position of power as screaming, incompetent morons often do, you can take some comfort in remembering what Goldman said about studio executives.
And hey, turnover can sometimes even be a good thing. About a dozen times in my career, someone at some outfit has told me, "You'll never work for this company again" and I usually think, though I do not say to this person, "You seem to be under the delusion that you'll be here forever." I have worked again for any number of those companies after the guy who told me that got canned.
But yeah, it isn't healthy to think of your permanent job as just less temporary than some others who are explicitly hired as temps. I'm still to this day a freelancer and I keep feeling like I have more and more in common with my friends and associates who report for work each Monday to their one job at one company. The ones at DC are now wondering what the departure of Dan DiDio will mean. It might mean very little to them. It might mean absolutely nothing. Or they might come in next week to find there's no more fifth floor in their building. That's how it works these days, people. Get used to it.