(Note: when I wrote the following, er, tirade, 'The Goon' comic creator Eric Powell had a very funny and very articulate video editorial bemoaning the lack of variety in the domestic comic market. Namely, that it's mostly super-hero comics. Powell's comic, The Goon, is a relatively successful non-superhero adventure comic. I'd provide a link to the video on YouTube in question, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore. Maybe the scene of a mainstream publisher comically sodomizing a hapless artist as a metaphor for the industry might've had something to do with it? Anyways, sorry. You'll have to take my word for it...)
Eric Powell's editorial on the lack of variety in the comics field bothered me, and not the content itself, which I'm in agreement with. Rather, it's a matter of perspective, and I'd like to present the following ham-fisted, clumsy, and probably unfair metaphor to illustrate.
Powell is a village blacksmith, who makes riding tackle and shoes for a specific type of mount. You would think, upon entering his shop, that he makes tackle and shoes for horses, being a
blacksmith and all. You would be wrong. Powell makes tackle and shoes for elephants. He is saying that he works in a field that is traditionally serving horse-riders, has always served
horse-riders, and when you think of blacksmiths, you always think of horse-riders. Well, Powell points out, there's room in the field for not just horses, but gazelles, elephants, ostriches, elk,
reindeer, wildebeests, and even chihuahuas pulling sleds. If the traditional horse-rider likes horses, might he or she not also like different types of mounts as well?
Well. The problem is not twenty feet from Powell's livery, there's a massive six-lane superhighway full of fast cars and very fast bikes. These methods of transportation are faster, more fun to drive, and get you from point a to point b better than mounts. Occasionally, a canny bike or car maker might brand their vehicle with the name of a particular horse for marketing reasons. The people who equip those horses usually don't benefit materially from the branding. People who buy a car named after a horse don't usually go out and buy the horse as well, you see. So a lot of people who would like to make a living as blacksmiths usually wind up getting jobs working in auto and motorbike plants. The pay's better, the risks are less, and the prestige is
greater. At the very least, you're going through the same grief as in the smithy business, but you get a living wage, usually.
Now here's where my metaphor gets wonky. In the past decade, a new form of conveyance has appeared. Sky bikes and Spinner cars. (Like in Blade Runner.) They go faster, and in three
dimensions, and they're even more fun to drive than the cars and bikes on the highways. The problem with them, from a builder's point of view, is that most people who fly in these things
have figured out how to get them for free. Worse still, the sky riders' vehicles can emulate the qualities of not just cars and bikes, but horses as well. That is, while a car builder might throw the blacksmith a few bucks, more out of largess than out of honor or obligation, the person flying around in the rocket car that can look like a horse or a car is not only not going to pay the blacksmith and the car builder any money for their efforts, he's (well, it's always a he, isn't it?) going to get quite indignant at the suggestion.
Pay for this wonderful thing I have? Are you mad? Why, for the love of God, should I even do such a crazy thing? These sky bikes (Digital media) are just lying around, not being used? Have you seen the price of a movie ticket recently? I just downloaded the entire run of Neil Gaiman's Sandman collection for free! I don't have the space for all those comics and movies and books and DVD collections of T.V. shows in my apartment! Besides, if I don't ride that sky car, someone else will! (In a bitter display of irony, the type of person who gets free movies, video games, T.V. shows, and, yes, even comic books off the Internet usually has a bottle of brand-name water somewhere on their desk that they paid a couple of bucks for. Oh, sigh...)
I've seen this complaint about the lack of variety in the domestic comic book market for the last twenty years, and while some things are getting better, a lot of things are getting worse.
While artists and writers might start getting royalties from reprints of their work, that doesn't mean jack if their publisher goes under for lack of income. Powell's concern about the lack of
variety in the market at this point in the twenty-first century is like a Japanese businessman complaining about the train being late while a tsunami wave is rushing towards him. (Sorry, Japan. Sorry, Eric Powell.)
Here's a hypothetical: You're a comic artist, and you want to put up the first issue of your first comic for sale. Well, firstly, you have to spend money at a printer. A LOT of money at a printer. Then, you would have to take copies of your comic around to all the comic shops in your area and see if they want to sell them for you. This is going to take a long fucking time. So there's this distributor called Diamond who acts as the middle man and does all that running around for you, so you send a copy off to them to see if they will distribute your comic for you all over North America. If they agree, and the chance that they will is better then showing up at your local minor-league hockey team's tryouts to start on the path to being a professional hockey player, you're in business. If you want to do this comic thing for a living, and not just a hobby that worst case scenario, pays for itself, you have to devote a major part of your working day to not just making the actual comic. Remember, you've also to got to promote your work at conventions, schmooze with industry people, deal with shippers and the printer, and sweet jesus the costs! Not just to your wallet, but the waking hours of your day! And what if your comic just doesn't cut it? Not that it's bad, or you're a terrible administrator, but you do everything you can with the time and resources that you have, and your comic just doesn't sell enough copies to earn you a living. That 's a hell of a risk, but people do that every day.
Sometimes they forge ahead even knowing the pitfalls.
So web distribution seems like an easier solution, doesn't it? Make up your comic, upload it to Apple's Itunes site, or Amazon's e-book page, someone pays two bucks to download it on their Ipad3 or ColorKindle or whatever, you keep 70% of that two bucks, with enough paying readers, you're making money. Better still, you've got the time to do other things. Hell, maybe even another comic series.
Hang on. Remember those guys above I mentioned? The ones with the flying cars? Remember when I said that they figured out how to get their hands on those flying cars for free? "Flying
cars" was my own lame metaphor for "Digital Media". And those guys aren't being spiteful, or mean, or cheap, or greedy. (They're not taking movies and T.V. shows (or bikes and cars) off
the 'net and selling them. Well, unless they're Chinese. Or Russian.) That's just the way they've been doing things for over a decade now. Try explaining to them that what they're doing is
literally starving you to death, and it's like trying to explain Calculus to a chimp. To these guys, the whole of the Internet is a cornucopia of free stuff that's just lying around. Nothing's being
destroyed. No paper or plastic went into making an Mp3 or a Divx video. Every time a photo or comic or book or magazine is converted to a jpeg or a .cbr file, God doesn't kill a kitten. What, for the love of God does this all mean for the aspiring writer or artist or musician in this century? Are they going to have to go back to the Patronage system of the Renaissance? Will they be the 21st century version of the street busker?
Okay. Remember when I pointed out the irony of some kid downloading t.v. shows and movies and video games onto his computer? Hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of media onto
his hard drive for the relative cost of Internet bandwidth. And on his desk is a bottle of water. Fucking tap water. That he paid for from a store. Water, that is free, that falls from the sky into
a bucket that, if you think of it, you can run through a filter and will likely be safe to drink. (Unless you currently live in Sendai, Japan. Again, sorry, Japan.) Somebody convinced that kid
that shelling out two bucks for that water was a good idea. I don't know how comic artists can currently convince people to drink their brand of tap water, but like it or not. THAT'S the
future of not just the comic industry, but the entire media industry. It's an unknown future, but as always, it's the only one we've got.
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