Comic relief?

Mark Alessi hopes his new creation, Oldsmar-based CrossGeneration Comics, and its old "bullpen'' approach can breathe new life into an industry that has sagged in recent years.

By SCOTT BARANCIK

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 14, 2000

OLDSMAR -- A local millionaire has summoned 15 top minds from around the world to a laboratory here. Behind its thick walls, the group discusses plasma-casting weapons and the geopolitical ramifications of the war against the Saurian monarchy.

Mark Alessi and his minions are creating an imaginary universe, along with the comic book characters that will inhabit it.

"Our current universe is boring," Alessi said.

Three years after selling his Tampa software company to Perot Systems Corp. of Dallas for millions in stock and cash, the 46-year-old Odessa resident is plowing some of the spoils into his new creation, CrossGeneration Comics.

Unlike many entrepreneurs rushing to create dot-coms, Alessi is indulging a passion from his youth. He also is spending his own hard-earned cash, not some venture capitalist's.

His goal: to create from scratch a comics publishing empire with global readership and an old-fashioned focus on story and artwork. All four CrossGen titles -- Scion, Sigil, Meridian and the flagship series, Mystic -- take place in a common universe dreamed up by Alessi, each with its own cast members and plots.

Next month, readers will get their first peek at such CrossGen characters as Sephie, a teenage heroine endowed with magical powers; Giselle, a socialite endowed with ridiculously outsized breasts (after all, the typical readers of today's comics are male, many of them teenagers); and Skitter the Squit, a cuddly fur ball seemingly destined to become a Happy Meal toy at McDonald's. Another cast member, the brave warrior Ashleigh, is named after the founder's 14-year-old daughter.

Unfortunately, Alessi's timing couldn't be worse.

Stung by competition from video games, cartoons and the Internet, comic book sales have plummeted in recent years. Even industry titans such as Marvel Entertainment, home to Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men, are faltering. On Wednesday, Marvel said its first-quarter revenues fell 43 percent from a year earlier. The firm emerged from bankruptcy in late 1998 after being bought by a toy company.

But Alessi rejects the idea that comics are financial Kryptonite, citing the huge number of fans in Japan as an example. Comics aren't selling in the United States, he said, because many publishers have put lucrative licensing deals and product tie-ins ahead of quality.

"Marvel makes me want to puke," Alessi said. "It's basically, as far as I'm concerned, run by bankers."

Before making any big moves, Alessi spent more than a year polling readers, retailers, publishers and artists about the best and worst parts of the business. For example, he invited his friend, Sean Eirish, owner of the Tampa store Hooked on Comics, to bring his 10 best customers to CrossGen's 13,000-square-foot facility. After a tour, the group chatted with the artists, sampled the comics and provided feedback.

Alessi said he emerged from his incubation period with a clearer idea of how to build a successful comic company.

One key decision he made was to spurn the current industry practice of using freelance artists. He resurrected the "bullpen" pioneered decades ago by Marvel. Doing so meant recruiting artists from around the world to move to the Tampa Bay area, paying them a salary and benefits, and housing them at a single facility.

The bullpen assures Alessi that his artists are working exclusively on CrossGen projects, not juggling assignments from several publishers. It enables team members to share ideas and drafts as a group. And it speeds production because the artists don't have to send their work on to the next player via overnight mail.

Still, Alessi estimates it costs $50,000 to $60,000 to produce a single issue of one of the four comics, with the total expenditures so far in the millions. He declined to be more specific.

The arrangement also works for the artists. In addition to the company of peers and a guaranteed paycheck -- the pay ranges from $40,000 to the low six figures -- Alessi has promised them 25 percent of the profits, including any earned if the company should be sold or go public.

"We're applying sound business principles in an industry that patently avoids them," said Alessi, whose software company, the Technical Resources Connection, was ranked the 36th fastest-growing private firm in America by Inc. magazine before Ross Perot bought it.

Comic book artists who saw CrossGen's job advertisements were awestruck. (Imagine making the same offer to, say, freelance poets.) More than 6,000 applied, Alessi said, and from them CrossGen drew a talented creative team of 14 men and one woman, including several from other countries.

Jim Cheung said he was making more money as a freelance comics artist in London but was tired of working alone in his studio. "Now I can see the way things are progressing on a day-to-day basis," he said, "and the writer can give me a smack on the head whenever he needs to."

Along with material benefits, CrossGen provides on-the-job perks such as foosball and video games, a bunkhouse for napping, and showers and lockers for all 30 employees. Priceless comic book sketches from Alessi's personal collection -- he owns nearly 10,000 comics -- adorn the walls.

Each CrossGen title is produced by a team that includes a writer, who develops the story line and dialogue; a penciler, who sketches the scenes on an 11- by 17-inch piece of white paper; an inker, who uses black ink to go over the pencil lines and create shadows; a colorist, who scans the inked drawings into a computer and then adds color; and a letterer, who uses the computer to layer dialogue boxes and sound effects -- THWACK! KERPLUNK! -- onto the document.

Afterward, the finished computer file is burned onto a CD-ROM and mailed to CrossGen's printer in Toronto.

It's hard work. Each artist is expected to complete six comic pages a week. For colorist Caesar Rodriguez, who moved here from Los Angeles with his wife and two children, that typically means arriving at 8 a.m. and staying until 10 p.m., and sometimes 1 a.m., six days a week. To guarantee that the monthly comics come out on schedule, the staff has worked ahead. Several completed editions of each title are ready to be released.

Alessi and his artists have gone to great pains to create what they think is an interesting universe with quality plotting, character development and artwork. What's not clear yet is whether the comic-reading public will bite. And there is skepticism among some comics fans.

"Out of Tampa, Fla., comes the first big ground-up comics publisher in a decade," scoffs an article on ifuse.com, a youth culture Web site. "So why won't they suck, too?"

But CrossGen's marketing staff has been every bit as busy as its art department. Alessi predicts the firm will sell more than 1-million of its comics by year-end. "We're shooting for 14 years old to dead," he said of his target audience. "As long as you've got $2.95 and you're alive, we're interested in you."

CrossGen is paying the sales force of the industry's dominant distributor, Diamond Comic Distributors, to hawk its titles to comic-store owners. It hired a telemarketing firm to repeat the message to retailers and placed ads in industry trade mags. "You have to be financially well-off to do that," said William Neuhaus, Diamond's sales director.

CrossGen also created a spiffy press kit that Alessi said has drawn interest from a wide range of publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Seventeen and Cosmo.

Last year, the firm purchased MegaCon, an annual convention that draws thousands of comic book, sci-fi and gaming fans and pros to a 100,000-square-foot exhibit hall in Orlando. The event provides Alessi with an invaluable mailing list and a soap box from which to broadcast CrossGen propaganda.

This month, CrossGen is sending free copies of a special-edition comic to more than 4,000 stores in the United States, England and Canada. The comic will help introduce retailers and customers to the CrossGen universe.

But Alessi, who lives with his wife and daughter on a 5.5-acre estate, remains the heart of the franchise, as well as its mouth.

A born talker with a sand-and-gravel voice and a ready supply of SweeTARTS for visitors, he has repeated his lines so often that the same ones keep showing up in articles written about the company.

"I'm a very clever peddler," he said, in an oft-repeated refrain.

In fact, it's hard to find a retailer, distributor or artist Alessi hasn't brain-picked, flattered or enriched in some way. Even Eirish, the local comic-store owner, received a small loan from Alessi several years ago to help make the leap from flea market to retail store.

"Having a comic book store is like a fountain of youth," Eirish said gratefully. "Ponce de Leon came here too early."

Despite criticizing Marvel and others for placing too much emphasis on movies and other lucrative crossover projects, Alessi has every intention of exploiting any CrossGen characters that capture the public imagination.

Gareb Shamus, publisher of Wizard: The Comics Magazine, said it's much cheaper to test the broad appeal of a character or story line first via a comic book, rather than investing speculative millions in a movie, television series or toy.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Men in Black, Blade and the Mask all began as comic books, he said.

"Making comics and characters is a lot like creating your own money," Alessi said.

So what will separate Alessi the purist from the money-grubbing competitors he despises? He will never, he said, rush an ill-formed concept into print just to provide a launching pad for a leap into the movies.

Yet he is confident that success will soon follow.

"Why would a fool like me, at the beginning of the dark ages of comics, start a comic book company?" he said. "Because I see great possibilities. I think this industry is ready for a revival."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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