Welcome to the 902nd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our second legend is about whether Void Indigo was canceled in part because copies were seized at the USA/Canada border over the content.
Earlier this month, I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik's controversial comic book project called Void Indigo. As I noted at the time, Steve Gerber had been one of Marvel's most prominent writers in the 1970s, but the relationship deteriorated over Gerber's hit creation, Howard the Duck. As the character became more and more popular (and Marvel clearly was looking to try to adapt the character into film and/or television), Gerber sued Marvel in 1980 for copyright infringement. Obviously, then, Gerber wasn't going to be working for Marvel during that period, so after doing some animation work, he began to find work at DC (who he had done freelance work for in the 1970s, as well), and the new independent comic book companies that were starting to proliferate in the 1980s due to the expansion of the direct market system (which allowed companies to now make a profit on relatively small print runs, leading to an explosion of independent comic book companies), the ones that were willing to do creator-owned work. Gerber did a number of projects for Eclipse Comics during this period.
After Gerber settled with Marvel, he brought his new concept, Void Indigo, to Marvel's creator-owned line of comics, Epic, about an alien merged with the soul of an ancient barbarian who returns to Earth and ends up in Los Angeles, where he sets out to get his revenge. It seemed like a strange move, seeing as how he had just been SUING them, but Gerber explained his thought process inThe Comics Journal #99...
All of the independents passed: Eclipse felt it too violent; Pacific couldn’t visualize how the prose treatment and Val Mayerik’s presentation drawings would translate into a comic book; First claimed it had a similar project in the works. DC was lukewarm toward Val’s artwork and declined to negotiate on ownership of the copyright and division of ancillary income; that left us with nothing to discuss. We chose Epic for three reasons: In a market dominated by mutant ninja teenagers, we felt this book needed every ounce and, yes, every dollar of promotional support it could get. Marvel, we knew, was capable of providing that support; we were less certain about the smaller publishers. Secondly, both Val and I like working with Archie Goodwin, who, by anyone’s standards, is one of the most competent and creative editors in the industry. Thirdly, following the out-of-court settlement of the Howard the Duck case, it struck me that it would make an interesting statement to return to Marvel with a property copyrighted in my name (and Val’s, of course).
The end result was a Marvel Graphic Novel that led into a six-issue Void Indigo miniseries (with the possibility of more in the future)...
However, the series was canceled after just two issues. There was a lot of disinformation about what, exactly, went wrong with the comic book, including some people who claimed that the comic was considered so offensive that it was seized at the US/Canada border when coming into the States (as Marvel's comics were printed in Canada at the time). That wasn't the case, but the truth was still pretty bad for the comic.
Did the series run into trouble on the US/Canada border?
At the time, The Comics Journal reported in issue #95 that:
Epic Comic’s controversial new Void Indigo series is being cancelled with its second issue, making it the first ongoing Epic series to be cancelled. Only two months earlier, a copy of the graphic novel had been seized by Canadian customs officials who thought it might have violated pornography statutes.
First off, as noted, it was the GRAPHIC NOVEL that had an issue, not the comic book itself.
Also, as Gerber later noted, in a follow-up in the Journal, "Essentially, what happened was, a box of books broke open at customs, Someone looked at the book, was disturbed by the contents, and sent one copy on to Ottawa for review by Canada’s censorship board. The other 199 copies in the box went on to whatever dealer ordered them. Nothing more ever came of it."
Okay, so what WAS the problem with Void Indigo?
What was people's problems with Void Indigo?
Simply put, the comic book didn't sell. Gerber was busy with animation work, and the comic kept getting delayed, and the issues that DID come out were selling really poorly. This was at a period where the content of comics was getting a lot of attention, with violence and sexual content being really scrutinized, and Void Indigo was a fairly violent comic book with a lot of nudity.
Other comics were fairly violent with a lot of nudity, too, though, so for whatever reason, Void Indigo got a lot of negative attention. Dealers saying they wouldn't order it, and even some distributors saying they wouldn't distribute it (back at a time when there were multiple distributors across the country). And, well, a number of people just thought it wasn't that good of a comic. So it was selling VERY poorly. Under 50,000 copies for the first two issues.
As Gerber noted to the Journal, " I think a lot of people took out a lot of frustrations on it. Also, I think some people just genuinely didn’t like it. Maybe most people didn’t. Anyway, to wrap this up, the dealers didn’t want to order the book, the distributors didn’t want to carry it, and, under those circumstances, Marvel didn’t want to publish it, because it wasn’t going to make any money. My feeling was, rather than change the book and bring it more in line with the mainstream, let it die a quick and painless death. Archie Goodwin and Val Mayerik agreed with me completely. We never fought the cancellation."
So yeah, it just was a perfect storm of a bad market for a book like this, delays, and the book just not finding an audience. The seizure just didn't have anything to do with its cancelation.
Here is a synopsis of what the remaining issues in the series would have entailed.
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