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Bill Jemas

We’ve been hearing from a few folks that Bill Jemas – the once controversial publisher of Marvel and most recently at Double Take – was thinking about dipping his toe back into comics. And, according to my usually accurate Barcon sources, former Marvel e-i-c- Axel Alonso with him is also involved in some way.

ICv2 today confirms at least the first part , and adds the eye-popping stat that Jemas has raised $5 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners, an investor in Snapchat and DoubleClick in the past. Icv2 has more details:

The board of Artists, Writers & Artisans is made up of Jemas, Lightspeed partner Alexander Taussig, and Jon Miller, who’s currently rolling up digital media companies, including Fandom, with money from Texas Pacific Group.

Jemas contacted ICv2 directly, with no mention of Alonso’s participation, so I suppose that might still not be nailed down.

Double Take was a very idiosyncratic comics company, opting not to adapt Take Two’s popular video games, but rather spinning a universe out of the public domain Night of the Living Dead, and hiring spoken word storytellers to write the comics.  (Some say they were not allowed to adapt the video games.) Jemas rewrote the comics game during his time at Marvel, and in his ventures since then he hasn’t done anything by the book. I’m guessing AW&A will be quite different as well.

OH and they are hiring…a lawyer, anyway.

And as I predicted when Double Take Shut down:

And as for Jemas? I doubt we’ve heard the last of him.   He’s got comics in his blood.

So far from dying, more and more people seem to be flocking to the comics business. It’s high employment time all around. There are shakeouts to come, I’m sure, but comics aren’t going any where.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Venture funding for a comic book publisher? Wow, he better get that sweet Hollywood money FAST to keep the funders happy. This will obviously have to be a bigger deal than comics…. There’s no money there. I’d love to see his pitch deck on this. I’m sure it’s loaded with talk about IP and cross-media potential.

  2. Given what a sour taste in most retailer’s mouths Jemas left by the end of his Marvel tenure, and given the COLOSSAL screw up that was Take Two, I have an amazingly hard time imagining that retailers would give Jemas the time of day for anything less than truly exceptional creative material whose sole point was to be exceptional COMICS. I also don’t believe that Jemas would know what they even was. I’m fairly certain that any line in the 21st century as we know it whose PURPOSE is to be “transmedia” is 100% destined to fail as a COMICS PUBLISHER. I guess it is possible it might succeed in the greater media market (maybe? Do we have any positive examples?), but the comics audience is inwards enough now that they’re only looking for legit native content, and not as disguised movie pitches.

    Jemas is tainted goods in the Comics market for the majority of retailers, and I don’t think there is ANY consumer awareness of him whatsoever in 2018.

    Axel’s current rep isn’t a ton better, afaict, though I think he could refurbish it, if he comes in humble.

    -B

  3. Also, 360ep, which folks forget about because… well, seriously, what did they get up to. Jemas is a train crash – always bad, but I hate to say it… morbidly watchable, from a far, far distance.

  4. Dang, thiught Bleeding Cool was being sarcastic but yall really do wait until “official” publications give the green light before reporting now month plus old news. Do know that when given rumor, a reporters job is to go out and verify it as truth or false. Or i again jst wait until others do the work and just transcribing an emal or RSS link.

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