CrossGen announced last week that they were opening up their long-locked doors to indie publishers and creator-owned content. The new program recasts CrossGen as three lines of content -- company-owned continuity (Ruse, Scion, etc.), creator-owned books (Red Star signed up as the first candidate) who can enjoy the company's largesse and administrative structure, and co-owned properties through a Code 6 imprint (Code 6 means "escaped prisoner" to Florida law enforcement) where creators can sell controlling interest of their ideas (I don't have data on what the percentage is yet) in exchange for a page rate and CrossGen to take the ball and run. All books must conform to CrossGen standards, meaning no, say, graphic sex or violence or ... well, anything you'd find in a MAX book (they quote a 12-year-old and up demographic).

Erik Larsen had a definite right to sneer at the announcement -- in and of itself, CrossGen is doing nothing new. DC has a similar co-ownership thing running, and Image has had the creator-owned market locked down for a considerable amount of time, standing strong as a bastion of independance. Big whoop, right?

What makes this story so fascinating, so riveting is less the actual details than the implications for change. Alessi said, "I did this because I really love comics, and IÕm not na•ve enough to think that we're the only people that make great comics, but I think we have the best vehicle for delivering them across the board in many venues." Many readers took this to mean that the hegemony of talent can be broken and smaller, lesser known (or even unknown) creators can have a shot at the big time, cross-marketing, action figure deals, and so on.

This columnist is one of them.

Admittedly, CGE's first signee, The Red Star, is nobody's hungry indie. Their creative director designed Darth Maul's lightsaber, for the love of Julie Schwartz, so they aren't exactly destitute. Why did this story capture so much attention? I'll tell you, but I warn it will be a horrible oversimplication with wildly inaccurate guesses at numbers (because yours truly is awful at math), but it will have the general feel of the truth, which is considerably faster than the real thing.

Let's say there's about fifty guys who pretty much make mainstream comics. Busiek. Cassaday. Dixon. Ross. Waid. Sprouse. Moore. Morrison. Azzarello. Ellis. Oeming. Zimmerman. Bendis. Lee (there's a bunch, pick one). Quietly. Casey. Kelly. Loeb. Blah blah blah, you know the names. Ben Raab. Frank Tieri. Ed McGuinness. So on and so forth. A few wild cards here and there, but for the most part, the "names" list changes very rarely. A lot of these guys are white guys. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact. A lot of them have been in the game for a considerable amount of time. The grand majority of them are very, very good at what they do. Still, no problem with any of that.

But you look around and see, well, Christopher Priest, a likewise seasoned vet ... one book a month. Sporadic offerings from Lea Hernandez, J. Calafiore, Dwayne McDuffie, G.D. Phillips, John Paul Leon, and so on. Drop a tier down, you have people like Jiba Molei Anderson (The Horsemen), you have groups like Comics Conspiracy (the Ochlocrat, Operator 99, The Exec), or what have you, people making good stuff on shoestring budgets, struggling to escape the cloying grasp of anonymity. Drop down even further and you have, well, people like me -- trained and experienced writers with new ideas and new perspectives, people who can lay out scripts and understand story structure and would love to get off "the bench" (as one pro told me of my status).

To people like this, the CrossGen deal can be a call to arms. A chance to stand on a more level playing field and make some freakin' money doing what we love for a whole different group of people than the usual suspects.

(Two notes: I have not spoken to any of these "tier down" people -- they may think the whole CrossGen thing sucks, I used them as examples. Second, yes, I am preparing a slate of content to pitch CrossGen, so I'm not even gonna pretend like I don't want some of that money myself nor that I would turn down the work. Full disclosure, that's how we do it here)

Of course CrossGen would love to throw its doors open and have the top writers and artists drop everything they're doing and join up. CrossGen's early attempts to go with unknowns, according to industry pros who paid attention (I didn't, I was busy) didn't go well. Monetarily a rush of names would make their scheme a complete win-win.

The thing is, how many established creators are still hungry enough to want to sell controlling interest in their ideas, or wouldn't just make deals with existing houses? CGE will surely be crowded with the best and the brightest names you probably already know, but Code 6 has room to be more of a developmental league, a CBA for the industry to develop talent that's ready for prime time, but perhaps not well known. As talented as I believe I am (and I do believe I am pretty freakin' talented), had I not worked at NPO and gotten to know some really wonderful people, the owners of this site included, I would be considerably more obscure than I currently am (and, despite coming in 4th for a Squiddie, something I discovered two years later, I'm still a virtual nobody). Comics, movies, TV, whatever -- your talent and abilities are a secondary consideration. Relationships, who you know, matters more than anything else, as that gets you into money-making relationships.

If CrossGen has the nerve to break the rules, to make its own game, it can throw the whole system on its ear. If CrossGen consciously makes an outreach to different centers of creativity -- writing classes on Navajo reservations, writing workshops in inner cities, and so on -- we can get some new ideas, new blood, new people, new stories. Just like they started doing down on a campus in Tampa, once upon a time.

Will they do it? I dunno. Will me calling them out in a column sour my own chances of signing a deal? Damned if I know. I do know that this idea, the promise of something new, something different is wildly exciting to a lot of wide-eyed dreamers and mad scribblers, as well as the possibility for opening up whole new markets of fans (number of kids in my "ghetto" neighborhood who like comics, if asked, or have an interest? All of 'em. Number of comics targeted to them? Zero). Maybe Alessi will call up more Entertainment Weekly writers, draft scribes from Vanity Fair or pillage the talents from the Simpsons.

Or maybe, just maybe, he'll think, "No, how about we go this way?"

I can't wait to see, myself.