We recently talked to Michael Davis, who's launching a new comic line with Urban Ministries (see 'Urban Ministries' 'The Guardian Line''). In Part 2 of this two part interview, we discuss the religious content of the Guardian line, and the multi-media plans for the properties that are being created.
Would you say these books have an evangelical theme?
No. The word that Jeffrey Wright, the CEO, likes to use is 'biblical world order.' My goal is to tell good stories. Urban Ministries' goal is two-fold: it's to provide their audience with interesting and exciting content for their core audience and to create a series of characters which sort of run the gamut.
Are the stories about living a Christian life?
Here's the thing, the world we built with the City of New Hope, where all this takes place, the underlying structure in this universe is to make sure that you are doing something, and it may be what you said. But my thing is to tell good stories, Urban Ministries' goal is to reinforce and bring to you the teachings of God, but not by hitting you over the head with it. And also to create a place where you can go and see the difference between right and wrong, but we're not preaching. We want these books to look and feel like the Marvel books.
Your characterization is in there, but I wouldn't characterize the entire line that way.
What are your plans for book format packages?
Everything is a four-issue story arc.
First of all, I'm a huge comic book fan, but the only reason I do comics as a business is to create content that will fuel other revenue sources, other avenues--film and television.
Is that something Urban Ministries has done?
Urban Ministries has been producing films since the '80s. Urban Ministries has been distributing direct to DVD, well, when they started it was direct to tape. They were doing that before anyone else was doing it.
Carol Cartwright and I, our goal is to take the same standards of Urban Ministries and, for lack of better word, create a black Disney. The CEO is absolutely with what we're doing.
Here's the trick, when I was at Milestone or at Motown, we could do whatever we want. We could do the same thing here, except if you have some guidelines, you can think of better stories. How do you get them to do this that and the other?
I've given these people thousands of pages of the Bible, hundreds of pages of art, hundreds of characters; they came back with one change. That one change was because Joe in Joe and Max's origin story died and came back, and they were like 'Oh, only one guy ever did that.'
That's a pretty big deal. But we're doing funny stories, stories on interracial (issues), we're doing all these really great stories that could be at Lions Gate, could be at
This is the most important thing I've ever done in business. Not to toot my own horn, but I got Motown into the comic business, I got Simon and Schuster into the business -- they've got a whole division now. I got comics into the school. Marvel, DC, Lucas Learning and Disney have been trying to get into the school system for a combined 60 years, none of them were able to do it and I was.
This line is going to be a ridiculous success, or it will do okay. Either way, this stuff is going to be on TV. Either way, this stuff is going to be in movies. We're going to do chapter books. Urban Ministries is committed 100%, no matter what the numbers look like and the numbers look good.
But, even if it's a dismal failure, they're committed to keeping these things running.
