So I’m fly-on-the-walling (i.e., eavesdropping on) a conversation by what I assume to be a group of relatively young (i.e., under 30) publishing professionals (i.e., aspiring authors doing time as editors) at a local non-corporate coffee shop the other day. Professional No. 1, who I’ll from here on out refer to as ‘Billy’, on account of his stylish goatee, puts forth the argument that all of the great media franchises started out in print.

Skipping forward a couple of minutes into the discussion, Billy defined a ‘media franchise’ as a media property that has and has grossed more than a billion dollars, with a hundred million dollars each in two or more media (i.e., books, movies, TV shows, video games, websites, product sponsorships, periodicals, etc.), and is pervasive in our culture. For example, Harry Potter: book sales of 800+ million, movie receipts of  ~4.5 billion, plus video games, coloring books, backpacks and so on. A nerdishly foxy redhead, hereafter ‘Foxy Redhead’, suggested Spider-Man. No go, said Billy with a scoff: comic books count as print. The group took a few minutes to think. I was honestly having difficulty not jumping in before someone (non-descript dude with glasses, aka ‘Earl’) came up with the obvious answer — Star Wars — which inevitably led to the secondmost obvious answer, Star Trek. Which led Billy to reset his parameters: Other than Star Wars and Star Trek, I bet you can’t name an especially successful media property that didn’t start with print. And that was about the time I took my leave, though I was curious to see what the group came up with.

Now, then. I’ll begin my rant by acknowledging the strength of Billy’s basic premise: when you consider the likes of the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and any number of superhero franchises, there’s a strong link to source material with origins in print. And, as Billy did, you could probably make a case against occasional outliers: Transformers (suggested by Foxy Redhead), which began as toys, weren’t really that smashing of a success, and Godzilla (suggested by Some Other Guy) was really still just a film franchise and hadn’t experienced much success in other media. But all of the huge franchises had started in print: James Bond, Dune, The Godfather… he rattled off a number of them as I made my way to the door.

But this is an obvious example of inductive logic: beginning with a conclusion and working backward to find evidence. The bastard stepbrother to deductive logic, inductive logic is the preferred mode of reason of witch hunters, infomercial spokespeople and coffee shop subject matter experts. Deductive logic would start at the other end: What media franchises are (or have been), like, crazy successful in more than one medium? How’d they start out?

Once you get the notion of book-to-movie adaptations out of your mind, it only takes a couple of names to break the dam. First, any of a hundred celebrity brands. Oprah: television, magazines, publishing. Martha Stewart: television, publishing, consumer goods. Tony Hawk. Hanna Montana. Elvis.

But let’s assume Billy would have had a valid reason for excluding individuals as media properties. So, then, second: celebrity brands in which the brand itself is the celebrity: Legos: toys, video games.  Nickelodeon. The Beatles.

And third: the purveyors of media themselves. While many of Disney’s stories certainly began in print, the Disney brand is more valuable than any of its individual properties. And while I don’t know that people go to the movies thinking, “It’s being released by Fox, so you know it’ll be good,” they certainly have that mindset deciding where to get their news or what to put on the TV Friday evening.

So. Billy, while I appreciate your giving me something to think about, I’m sorry to say your logic is fundamentally flawed. Maybe if you rephrased your axiom slightly it would be easier to defend. Perhaps “almost all great narrative has it’s origins in printed source material.” Which is a total cheat, since pretty much anything anyone could ever say has been said in print at one point or another, but that’s a much more stronger starting point for someone defending the honor of the printed word.