Annotated Chapter 27 Cover
This Starbucks cover is the reason that this website currently has its disclaimer at the very bottom. To some degree, I agree with Phil’s joke on the matter: I, too, wish product placement were a thing in webcomics, or at least mid-level story webcomics like ours (I wouldn’t be surprised if Penny Arcade did a deal or seven). I’ve participated in occasional experiments: my Fans series did a couple of customized comics to promote the movie Fanboys, and we sold PDFs on an early platform that was sponsored by Verizon. But for the most part, this gig is too small-scale to be worth brands’ time.
That said, I’m the contrarian type, so if Starbucks had paid us anything to feature it in this story, I probably would’ve had Shanna go on a rant about its overpriced coffee, underpaid workers, mix of good work and hypocrisy, creepy logo, and weird, gross juices.
The actual reason Starbucks is here is, it was a more useful setting than some generic locale. And we live in a world of brands, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. American kids know corporate logos before they learn to write.
Crossword historians remember “the Oreo war,” a battle about what kind of clue to write for the answer OREO. Old-fashioned purists thought the crossword should only include what information was in their really big dictionaries (where “oreo-” used to mean “prefix for mountain,” though modern dictionaries have mostly dropped that entry). New-schoolers were like, “It’s a goddamn cookie. You know it, I know it, and more importantly, anyone who wants to solve a puzzle without a fucking PhD knows it.” That’s one ideological battle that was so thoroughly won that almost no trace of the other side remains: you’ll never see a puzzle published today with the clue “Mountain (comb.).” I hope one day we can say the same thing about lawsuit-shy, toothless comics set in a “Farbucks.”
(or calling The X-Files The XYZ-Files for no good reason (cough))
Man can you imagine if some comic writer wanted to make comics about Star Trek fans but instead of calling it Star Trek they came up with some weird off-brand version? How lame would that be? I would never read that comic and would never read anything else with those characters ever again.
StarTec was an odd fusion, looking back. It was 98% Star Trek, to the point of having its own version of NextGen and DS9 and Enterprise, but we focused most of our attention on this one little difference, a character (and actress) who fused together several figures from the show (and its production). We introduced all that in the series’ very first page, so we were committed to it ever after. I didn’t realize how much work it would be to establish even one alternate-reality sci-fi property, or I wouldn’t have set doing so as the precedent.
Anyway, the key phrase there is “no good reason.” When you’re going to investigate a property thoroughly and maybe deconstruct it a bit, that’s when it’s useful to create a near-duplicate. You’re investing your own creative energies into building a new entity even if your inspirations are obvious (see discussion about Hurricane below). For this story, though, the setting was important to the ambiance but always and only a background to the main action. Trying to create something new for it would’ve wasted time, and using Starbucks but calling it some obvious almost-the-same name would come off as obnoxiously coy.
It was important for us to have the freedom to explore Clara Strudenberry as a character, which we couldn’t do if we’d just made her Majel Barrett Roddenberry or James Doohan or Grace Lee Whitney. But it was not important for us to make X-Files not X-Files, and it was actually a little confusing, because we were contrasting two real-life agents with the TV show. Were they Miller and Sully vs. Mullder and Sculy? Which ones were the real-life ones again?
These days, I’d only do the “Farbucks” thing if I was very consciously echoing Mad Magazine and its approach to satire. Harvey Kurtzman’s achievements are not to be denied, but I think pastiches of his work dominated funny and half-serious comics for a lot longer than they should have, and they don’t really work if you’re trying to tell a story outside the snarky, everything’s-a-joke reality they create. Fans may have occupied that reality in its very early days, but I always had ambitions to move beyond it, so at a certain point the joke-names got embarrassing. I probably can’t put it much clearer than that.
“we sold PDFs on an early platform that was sponsored by Verizon”
Are you talking about Wowio? I bought a few dozen comics from them back in the day.
Yeah. I was primarily doing Penny and Aggie with them, but we tried a couple others.
If you think the current Starbucks logo is creepy, don’t Google the original.
But the original is so much better!
Agreed. Melisune that tempts one to drink evil tree juice or we riot. Now it’s just some weird smiling lady, when it was a mythological fish creature I knew where I stood.
Even after your explanation, it still seems weird that you’d rename Blizzard Hurricane but couldn’t call the coffee shop something else, lol.
No, it’s the other way around. Sepia-world brands are preferably real brands, to make that world as close to our own reality as possible, in order to generate a maximal effect when the boundaries of that reality get severely compromised. So ideally Hurricane would indeed be Blizzard, if not for the fact that Hurricane’s role in the story is far too, shall we say, morally ambiguous. That would not be fair to Blizzard, would it?
Thomas has it, pretty much. We used Blizzard as a template for Hurricane to make some pointed commentary on real game companies and what we expect from them, and because we were obviously using Warcraft as a model for Arkerra. But we had to make it a different company (and Arkerra its own world), or else doing the creative things we wanted to do would just be confusing. We’re not actually accusing the CEO of Blizzard, whose name I honestly don’t even know, of taking any HR-like actions.
It’s about what serves the story. Hurricane Software is central to our plot, so it’s going to get enough attention to develop as its own thing. The coffee shop where this chapter is set needs to be a lot more ready-made.