Why you don’t read comics.
One of the cool things about helping run your own magazine is you get to decide what it is the magazine will cover. (Means of production and all that.) And from the start at Anodyne I insisted that I wanted us to cover comics on a regular basis. Luckily, I didn’t have to insist all that hard. We were a scrappy, underdog arts magazine with a yen for the hip yet unsung, and comics were a scrappy, underdog art, unsung, yet with the faintest whiff of hip about them. (Comics have always been scrappy, unsung, on the verge of hip, finally growing up, not just for kids anymore. Read the entertainment press going back 10, 15 years and you’ll see the same damn headline over and over again: “Biff! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” —This is how comics are defined for most people. This is part of the problem.)
So we covered comics. Along with The Stranger, we were the only general arts periodical on the West Coast to feature regular comics reviews and news. Then The Stranger stopped writing about comics so they could have room for a gossip column.
I wrote about Eddie Campbell and bad girls and Strangehaven and Jon Lewis. I wrote about the San Diego Comic-Con and Pickle and I did my muckraking bit to help save Reading Frenzy from Taco del Mar. I got to run strips by Barry Deutsch and Kevin Moore and Amy Sacks and Shannon Wheeler and Keith Knight, and I got to run pieces by Barry on Bruno and Ariel Schrag and sociological studies of daily strips, and by Kevin on Peanuts and David Collier, and by Jenn on Dean Hsieh and Inu-Yasha. We ran interviews with David Chelsea and Scott McCloud and Alison Bechdel and Mike Allred, and all of it appeared each and every month along with CD reviews and book reviews and band profiles and fashion shoots and Burning Man write-ups and cigarette ads and the other sorts of things that scrappy, underdog hipsters find interesting. (And I discovered an important secret of the reviewing game: if you tell publishers that you run reviews, they send you free stuff. Cool.)
In 1998, I pulled out all the stops I could find, and ran a 5,000 word jeremiad on the decline and fall of the comics industry, as it were. “Why You Don’t Read Comics,” I called it. I did the most legwork I’ve ever done for a piece: among other research (and numerous interviews), I sat down with the phone book and called every comics shop listed in the Portland area and asked them a set of market research questions: what did they sell besides comics, how much of their business was comics, what percentage of their comics sales were from subscription boxes, that sort of thing. There were 25 listed; I think I managed to get hold of 17 or 18 of them by press-time.
I just checked the yellow pages: there are 12 shops listed today. That’s counting Things From Another World’s three branches as individual shops. I’m pretty sure they had seven or eight branches, in 1998.
Anodyne folded in 1999, and I stopped getting free comics. So I fell out of covering the scene qua scene. We went back to picking up only what we were interested in, which wasn’t much at all. We lost our coveted low box number at Excalibur because one day we realized it had been six months since we’d been in to pick up new comics.
So while I knew things were bad in the trenches, I had no real idea how bad.
In the meanwhile, strange and weird things have been happening online. In 1998, it was but one of three possible ways out of the woods (along with returnability—still a no-hoper—and breaking into the book trade, which is actually humming along), but back then I was thinking of it mostly as a way of selling physical comics. And sure, great strides have been made along those lines (which helps, perhaps, explain some of the drop in the number of brick-and-mortar retail shops in Portland). Yes, I knew the web would also be used to actually publish comics—I’d seen Argon Zark (in a paperbound collection, but I’d seen it). I just never imagined webcomics would have all that much of an impact. Not until broadband was more widespread, and bigger, better, cheaper monitors, and above all, some sort of cheap, convenient, secure system of payment…
—Silly me. Anyone who knew from zines and minicomics should never underestimate what determined artists will give away for free, when the market can’t bend itself to accommodate them.
Sure, no one’s making a living. Few are making any money at all. And Sturgeon’s Law applies as much here as it does to pop music, movies, and presidential candidates. But the explosion of talent is nonetheless dizzying. Scott McCloud likes to joke that there are more good cartoonists named Jason now than there were good cartoonists at all in 1986. —Hyperbole aside, he is not without his point. There are more people doing comics now, and of more varied backgrounds, than ever before, and if you know anything about comics as they have been, you can’t help but thrill at the sheer scope and variety of it all, even as you get lost in a thicket of links. The most inbred art is cross-pollinating for the first time in decades, and the results are spreading and growing and changing, thick and fast. We are on the cusp of a new Age of comics—the Fibroin Age, maybe? (Much as I dislike Age-ing comics. It’s a tool of canonization, a backwards-looking tool, striking each subsequent Age from baser and baser metals as we march onward away from some dim and misty Golden Age. And wrong, to boot—have you ever tried to read a Golden Age comic? —I came of age (comics-wise) in that fabled Annus Mirabilis, 1986; I walked into a comics shop for the first time and saw Dark Knight and Watchmen and Elektra: Assassin and Cerebus and American Flagg and Maus. [Actually, I had to go to a bookstore to find Maus.] Heady days. We didn’t need Ages, dammit! Comics were growing up, stepping back from the kiddie table, going to The Show! Bang! Zowie!)
But for all the enthusiasm and excitement and inchoate boosterism over the vast potential we haven’t had time to fuck up and fuck over, we still haven’t gotten around to that question I set out to answer five years ago—
Why don’t you read comics?
Oh, chances are better now than ever before that you do. On the web, if not on paper. But if you do, you’re still in the stunted audience of a tiny, neglected corner of the entertainment industry; Buffy fandom on a bad day outweighs comics fandom by a whole order of magnitude.
Still. Things are better for comics as a medium now than I ever dreamed possible in 1998. (As an industry, it’s a different story, but it always has been.) —So. Motivated in part by the recent surge in what the invaluable Dirk Deppey calls “the comics blogosphere,” I dredged up this five-year-old piece. My own take on where comics were then, how we got there, and where we might have been headed. If you like, return with me to those thrilling days of yesteryear—and when we get back, maybe go to Scott McCloud’s links page as a start and just, you know. Surf the comics. See what there is to see.
Deal?
From Stan Lee’s “Soapbox,” November, 1968:
So, that sinks it! From now on, whenever we have something to get off our collective chest, we’ll assume we have a magniloquent mandate to sock it to ya, and let the chips fall where they may.
Excelsior!
Smiley
From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Excelsior,” 1841:
A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
The comics industry is dying, and it’s all Stan Lee’s fault. Or maybe Todd McFarlane’s.
Actually, Fredric Wertham is to blame. And the Comics Code Authority—butchering comics, hounding EC out of business. We’d have made it if not for them.
Oh, and the fanboys. Those pasty-faced mouth-breathing zombies, demanding ream after ream of poorly drawn tits and spandex. And the speculators—Christ! Don’t talk to me about speculators. Just thank God they’ve moved on to Beanie Babies.
And the retailers. Think of how many comics we’d move if they’d just clean up their stores, get off their fat asses, and sell some fucking product! Of course, that might be easier if the publishers were putting ads someplace other than the freakin’ distributor’s catalog. Or if Marvel Comics hadn’t tried so hard to drive retailers out of business, with their stupid vertical integration plan. At least they went bankrupt—ha!
Why can’t it be like Japan? Everybody loves comics in Japan. And France.
It’s Image’s fault. It’s the artists who can’t draw and the writers who can’t write. It’s the superheroes; it’s the bad girls. It’s all Superman’s fault, and Batman’s. And Shi, and Lady Death, and Spawn. But it’s Harvey Pekar’s fault, and R. Crumb’s, too.
It’s way too easy to blame Diamond.
It’s your fault. Chances are you don’t read the damn things. Do you?
Hell, it’s my fault, too.
“It was Hiroshima.”
Summer of 1991; I’m working for a comics shop in Boston. This guy walks in and starts scanning the wall books, looking for a hot prospect. Some copies of the recently released Spider-man #1 are already selling for $250, and he wants a taste of that action.
We hung the expensive back issues on the wall, from hooks, in stiff mylar sleeves, out of reach of grubby fanboy fingers. Right up in the front of the store he finds what he’s looking for: the issue of Superman where Clark proposed to Lois. We’d known it was going to be hot, and we’d sold out of our inflated orders in a couple of days. So the last seven are hanging from a hook and he wants me to pull one down so he can check it out. I do. It’s priced to move at $10. (He could have gotten it for a buck fifty the previous week, if he’d been quick enough.)
And he’s holding it up to the light, looking at it edge-on, making sure there’s no creases or microscopic tears, that I’m not trying to foist off a mere near-mint at that price, when he sees the copy of the self-same issue that had been hanging behind the one he’s got; it’s priced at $11.
“Can you get that one down, too?” he asks. I shrug. I do.
Now, this is basic economics, right? As long as demand stays constant, and the supply dwindles with every purchase, well, the price will go up. And we’d marked the issues accordingly, each one going up a dollar a pop. Supply and demand.
Anyway, he’s comparing those two issues, holding them up to the light, trying to discern God knows what difference between the two, when he sees the third issue of Superman on that hook. Priced at $12.
You see where this is going, don’t you.
The last one on the hook, the one that was priced at $16—what we’d figured it would sell for after all the others had sold—that was the one he bought. It was the most expensive. Therefore, it must have been the most valuable.
And I let him.
“It was Hiroshima,” says Bob Schreck, publisher at Oni Press. “The way everybody was going ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ and raping any idiot who wanted to buy a crate of Spawn #1 or Spider-man #1.”
If you want an immediate explanation for why comics are in such a sorry state, the speculator frenzy of the early ’90s isn’t a bad place to start. When Todd McFarlane’s Spider-man #1 was released, the back-issue market moved into an insanely fast turn-around. Comics were going to make everybody rich; rumored “hot” issues would sell out the day they arrived and then go up on the wall, at 1000% or 2000% mark-ups. To start. Demand was high, but artificially so; everybody had to have multiple copies—selling one at a high price was a coup, but selling a bunch was even better. We had people buying stacks of ten or twenty at a time. We let them.
Spider-man #1 sold three million copies to an estimated 500,000 people. You do the math. And that was just the beginning.
“The whole speculator thing was codependent, it was enabled by retailers, publishers, creators, everybody all the way down,” says Schreck. “Those speculators came in, got raped, and left. And a lot of fans who got burned left, too.”
And we let them.
Why you don’t read comics.
Which starts to explain why roughly half to two-thirds of American comics shops went under in the last five years; why direct market sales of comics dropped ten to twenty-five percent last year alone; why Alternative Comics and Black Eye, two of the premier comics publishers, are respectively cutting way back and contemplating shutting down; why it’s harder and harder these days for cartoonists to make a living. Not to mention editors, or publishers, or retailers (or critics).
But it doesn’t explain why you don’t read comics. (Of course you read comics. It’s the first section of the paper you turn to, right? Peanuts, Doonesbury, Rose is Rose, Mutts. And you know what comics books are all about: Batman, Superman, Spider-man, yadda yadda. You probably even know that Crumb guy, the one they made the movie about. Keep on truckin’! So sure, you read comics—like somebody who watches only Letterman’s monologues three or four times a week watches TV.)
So why don’t you read comics?
Because comics are crap. They always have been. We all know it; it’s an open secret.
“If I wanted to make money, it would be easy,” says Jeff Mason, publisher at Alternative Press. “I’d do T and A. I’d do what comics are designed to do these days. It’s not hard to draw two gigantic breasts. If there’s some blood, it’s even better.”
“Comics have always been aiming at themselves for so long,” says Zander Cannon, who writes and draws Replacement God. “It’s all boys who wanted to be cartoonists writing for themselves the way they were ten years ago.”
“They’re holding this coarse mirror up to people and saying, ‘This is your life,’” says Tom Hart, who’s written and drawn Hutch Owen’s Working Hard, among other things. “And they say, ‘Yeah!’ and buy it.”
Tom Spurgeon, executive editor of The Comics Journal, used to review any comic sent his way on the Journal’s website. “You Send It, We’ll Read It,” it was called. He gave up after six months. “I’d rather eat glass than read so many awful comics again,” he posted by way of explanation.
This, from people who genuinely love comics, who spend their days neck-deep in comics. If this is their reaction, what’s there for you to get excited about?
Marvelism is fast becoming a philosophical movement. A prime example of this can be found in the Silver Surfer, one of the most moralistic characters ever created. Marvel Comics are the voice of a new breed of intellectual.
—Achille D. DiBacco, in a letter to Marvel, 1968
And trapped upon this world of madness... stand I! How much longer am I destined to endure a fate I cannot even comprehend!
—The Silver Surfer, as written by Stan (the Man) Lee, 1968
Sequential art.
So. Comics are crap; comics are juvenile; comics are coarse superhero bullshit; comics are tits and ass. Comics are for 12-year-old boys and alienated navel-gazers. Comics are those things you cut out of the paper and stick on the fridge.
All of which is untrue. Or rather, all of which is true, but it’s not the whole truth.
Comics are nothing more than one picture set next to another.
That’s it; that’s the essence of comics. Any time you put one picture next to another, and you make the jump, the connection between them—you’ve just encountered the one thing that defines comics; the only limit they have.
Which helps to explain some of the confusion they cause. When Madison Clell shows non-comics fans issues of Cuckoo, her autobiographical comic about dealing with dissociative identity disorder, they usually say something like, “That’s not a comic. It’s a—it’s a, a graphic story.” When Art Spiegelman’s Maus was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the first sentence proclaimed, “Maus is not a comic book.”
If it’s good, it can’t be a comic, because—well, because we already know what comics are: crap. QED.
Maybe it’s the name. Lord knows it’s the only medium that has to share a moniker with practitioners of stand-up comedy (by coincidence, the one thing less popular with Anodyne readers than comics—I suppose I should be glad we weren’t dead last). But attempts to erase the stigma of comics by changing the name haven’t taken hold. Spiegelman still persists in “comix,” dragging it with him to his new job as comix editor at Details. (From the co-mixing of words and pictures—get it?) Will Eisner, one of the few undisputed masters of the medium, prefers “sequential art,” but that’s too dry. Good for academic discussions, though. Donna Barr has high hopes for “drawn books,” and while I’d never bet against her, I’m not holding my breath. Marketers came up with “graphic novel” for those trade paperbacks they tried to sell to bookstores, then promptly killed the term by using it for everything from 48-page “premium” X-Men books to Dave Sim’s 500-page Cerebus tomes. Besides, “graphic novel” makes people think of Jackie Collins. “Manga” is appropriate—it means “pictures drawn in spite of oneself”—but we need it to differentiate Japanese comics from everybody else.
“Funnies,” anyone?
We’re pretty much stuck with “comics”; it’s one more hurdle we’ll have to overcome. Everybody recognizes what it means, for good or ill. “People ask what you do,” says Anina Bennett, who’s worked as an editor for First Comics, and Dark Horse, and now writes her own comic, called Heartbreakers. “And maybe you look away and you say ‘publishing.’ And they say, ‘What kind?’ And you admit it: ‘Comics.’ And they say, ‘Hey, comics! Cool!’ There’s a lot of people out there fascinated by talk of the medium.”
So let’s accept for the moment that comics have almost no limit to what they can do or say, like any other medium; let’s accept that good comics have been made, and read, and loved, by intelligent adults; let’s even take it as read there’s an interest out there in comics. (There are two different images we can put on an Anodyne cover, to guarantee it’ll fly off the shelves: a woman, or a cartoon.)
What happened? Why is the industry in such dire straits? Why are cartoonists reluctantly quitting the medium to find viable jobs elsewhere?
Why don’t you read comics?
The front lines.
There are roughly twenty to twenty-five comics shops in the Portland metro area, which makes us one of the healthiest comics retail markets in the country. Visitors from the East Coast are surprised, especially when they walk into a shop like Excalibur, on SE Hawthorne; it’s so big. The relative health can probably be attributed to the fact that Portland, in general, is a reading city; we have the largest number of bookstores per capita (with, I understand, the possible exception of Washington, DC) and comics piggy-back on that.
But of those shops, maybe two count comics as more than half of their sales. The rest have branched out, and comics make up 50%, 40%, even as low as 20% of what they move. And while diversity is good—eggs in one basket, and all that—take a closer look at what they’re selling: role-playing games and war games, trading cards and collectible card games (Magic: the Gathering and its ilk), action figures and other collectible toys, even Beanie Babies. Far from learning from the speculator crash and burn, retailers seem determined to repeat it again, dangling bright new baubles that will someday, some way, make you rich. They haven’t—with the exception of the Beanie Babies—even tried to reach outside their habitual customer base, the 14-to-24–year–old males.
There are exceptions to this mix: Ancient Wonders, on SW Boones Ferry Road, sells comics, used CDs, and used video games; Blood Moon, on SE 39th, offers coffee and comics, a mix tried by Coyote Comics in Seattle; they’re further focusing their efforts on the goth community, slipping them Chaos! comics and the Crow while they’re browsing for lipsticks and sipping au laits. But the overall pattern seems discouragingly entrenched.
And even if you wanted to go into a comics shop and buy a comic, you might have a hard time finding one you wanted. Portland’s retailers, like comics retailers all over the country, maintain subscription boxes, or reserve boxes, for their regular customers. It works like this: the regular customer guarantees to buy certain titles each month, or every time they appear. In return, he gets a 10% or a 20% discount, and the retailer sets the copies aside, so they can’t be sold before the customer can come in and get them. It’s not a bad perk for your regulars, but shops in Portland sell 50%, 75%, as high as 90% of their comics through the boxes—not off the shelves, where walk-in customers could find them, where impulse purchases could be made. The lowest percentage reported was about a third of total sales, which is about the highest you’d expect a healthy retail store to have.
The comics industry is, rather notoriously, an industry staffed by fans. This is especially true of the retail end of things; nobody opens a comics store to make money. But while there’s a lot of horror stories floating around out there, there’s really no more stupidity or bloody-mindedness in comics retailers than there is in any other group of small retailers. The problem isn’t the way the retailers run their businesses; the problem is the business itself.
The Franklin Mint.
The direct sales market—which is how most comics are sold these days, and which is what every comics shop in America is part of—was a complete accident.
Comics in the early ’70s were, like today, facing a slow but steady slump in sales. Comics were sold then from newsstands, on a returnable basis, like the magazine and book trades—the retailer paid only for the copies actually sold; the rest were shipped back to the publisher or destroyed. And newsstands hated comics. They made less money off them than anything else but TV Guide, which sold more than enough copies to justify its cheap price. So the newsstands were giving prime placement to TIME and Life and other magazines that actually made them money, and comics publishers were watching up to half or two-thirds of their print runs go unsold.
So, when Phil Sueling made his offer to DC Comics in 1973, DC jumped at it. Seuling had organized one of the first comics conventions, a place where fans could meet to talk about favorite comics and trade back issues, dickering over the valuable ones. And there was a lot of money for one person to make in those back issues, even then; enough to support a couple of hundred specialty shops.
Seuling’s idea was that DC should sell directly to him, at a better discount than the newsstand distributors got. In exchange, Sueling wouldn’t return the unsold books. He was gambling he could sell all he bought, and any left over he could use as trading stock for conventions.
That deal became the basis for the direct market. Publishers loved the increased cash flow, and loved transferring the risk to the retailers; the big discounts encouraged other fans to open their own stores, which spread like wildfire; the break-even point on comics got lower, and black-and-white comics were viable for the first time ever, putting comics publishing within the reach of anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. New publishers flourished; once the direct market got organized, they could base their print runs directly on orders from comics shops, and be assured of a sell-out. New ideas were appearing in comics, new voices were being heard. That deal made possible just about every good comic that’s been done since.
It also sealed comics away, hermetically, into shops only the cognoscenti knew about. It reinforced the milk-the-fanboy strategy pioneered by Marvel Comics: if fanboys are all you’re reaching, you’d better squeeze them as hard as you can. The variant cover gimmicks, the glow-in-the-dark specials and the platinum inks, the trading cards, the movie tie-ins, the massive cross-over special editions, the fixation on spandex and tits, the $16 Superman you could probably buy for $4 today, if that—it was a speculator’s market from the very start, and like any house of cards, the crash was inevitable.
The funny thing is, Wertham saw it coming.
Dr. Fredric Wertham is a favorite demon of comics fans; his infamous 1945 book, Seduction of the Innocent, and his testimony before the US Senate scared comics publishers enough to create and enforce the dreaded Comics Code Authority—a draconian list of prohibitions, hypocritical morals, and imposed happy endings. It scuppered comics’ chances of ever reaching beyond its perceived audience: kids.
But Wertham never hated comics per se; just the violent ones he saw as the prime factor behind juvenile delinquency. (And comics in the ’50s were pretty raw and violent; shock sells, no matter what the time or place. Or medium.) In 1969, when Wertham was contacted by Dwight Decker, a comics fan looking for an interview, the dreaded doctor was delighted to discover the existence of comics fandom—self-motivated teens and young adults getting together peaceably to share their enthusiasm for comics. He wrote his last book about the phenomenon—1974’s The World of Fanzines—which contained this warning:
Comic-book collecting, which started as a nice nostalgic hobby, is in danger of becoming an overpriced, overcommercialized transaction…
Phil Seuling’s deal was never meant to last, or to become the new paradigm, but short-term gains blinded everybody to long-term effects. That deal turned comics from a faltering mass medium into the fucking Franklin Mint. It isn’t surprising that it finally crashed as spectacularly as it did; the only surprise is how long it stood, and how much we got out of it.
Quite possibly… comic books may emerge as the most natural, the most influential form of teaching known to man. They may jump boundaries of language; they may help to bind a broken world together.
—Coulton Waugh, 1947
There is a war going on today throughout the comic book industry. And the personalities interviewed for Comic Book Rebels are among those who have shot the most telling blows against the empire.
—Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette, Comic Book Rebels, 1993
Waiting for Superman.
“At this point, it won’t get worse,” says Peter Fagnant, owner of Excalibur. “We’re far from out of it, but it’s definitely reached bottom. The only question is whether this is the new status quo, or will it grow from here?”
There are signs that the industry’s freefall has slowed, and maybe stopped: Diamond claims that comics sales have held steady so far for 1998, and that enough new stores are now opening up to balance the current rate of closure. But let’s look around at where we are—
One company, Quebecor, prints 80% or more of all American comics. Canadian subsidies in paper and printing make it cheaper to print in Canada, and Quebecor has been aggressive in pursuing comics companies, being the only major printer with a department devoted to comics printing. One company, Diamond Comics, distributes up to 95% of all American comics to retailers. And one company, Another Universe, with its strong mail-order sales, accounts for 10% of all retail sales in the country.
This is not healthy. This is not viable. If something happens to any one of those companies it could trigger another round of freefall—and make no mistake, there’s a lot further to fall.
So we’re in a bad place, but maybe we’ve got some breathing room here, a chance to take stock and find a way out of this mess. And actually, there have been some suggestions.
A return to returnability. This one’s making the most noise right now; retailers want to turn over the basic precept of Phil Seuling’s deal, and go back to the way things were—at least part of the way. Most proposals call for partial returns, up to 25% of an order, limited to certain titles at the publisher’s discretion, good only 30 or 60 or 90 days after purchase. It’s too little, too late. It might’ve worked to take advantage of the flush times, and go back to 100% returnability in the late ’80s or early ’90s; that didn’t happen.
Plus, returnability will have some nasty repercussions. Publishers, already conservative, would take less chances with comics, and retreat into what they think they can sell: tits and spandex. And it doesn’t address one of the basic problems in comics marketing: they’re still sold as periodicals, when it makes much more sense to sell them as perennials. “Alternative” comics shops like Million Year Picnic, Quimby’s, Page 45, and Reading Frenzy have proven you can build considerable audiences for even “unsellable” books by leaving them on the shelves, where people can find them. Some comic books see a fifth to half of their sales carried by three or four stores alone. The people around those stores aren’t any different than people elsewhere; those stores just took the time to build an audience.
How can you do that if you’re returning unsold books after only 30 days?
The web. This is the wild card. Like everybody else, comics are looking to the web for answers, but they aren’t even sure what questions to formulate. It’s all too big. There are already comic strips being distributed on the web, and some interesting formal experiments in what comics would look like without the boundaries of paper or ink. And there’s a number of attempts to market physical comics on the web. Cartoonist Rick Veitch and Steve Conley have started comicon.com, an online comics convention, to allow folks to chat with pros and visit online booths where they can buy original art and comics. They’ve got some big names lined up: Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Moebius, Charles Vess, Shannon Wheeler, Batton Lash, and more, but it seems more like a neat feature for fans than a way to draw in new readers. Some dream of the day when all comics will be sold through the web, eliminating the middlemen between creator and audience; we’ve got a lot to do before that can happen. Secure electronic transactions, for instance, and getting everybody computers and modems, for another.
New formats and new venues. You can get comics in three different ways: in the newspaper, in comic books, or in trade paperback or hardcover collections of strips or comic books. Why limit ourselves to that? Why force people to follow stories in 22-page chunks once a month for $2.50 (or more)? Where’s the cheaply printed 200-page manga-style anthologies? Where are the book-length comics?
How about stores other than comics shops? The industry has been trying to crack the bookstore market for years, and there’s good news on that front: DC reports that its bookstore sales were up 70% last year; Fantagraphics sold 3500 copies of Dan Clowes’s Ghost World through bookstores; Dark Horse got 7000 copies of the new Too Much Coffee Man collection on their shelves. But these are all collections of stories reprinted from ongoing periodicals; to my knowledge, there’s only been two attempts so far to create and market comics the way books are created and marketed, by paying the author an advance to create a single, cohesive work that’s then sold as a single, cohesive work: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby. McCloud’s book did phenomenally well; Stuck Rubber Baby, though it hasn’t yet earned back its production costs, is still on the shelves, selling. “I hope to start earning royalties in a decade or so,” jokes Cruse. Both have reached more new readers than Superman’s death and change of costume combined. And Joe Sacco’s next story will be done as a book at Fantagraphics. Where’s everybody else?
Other ideas, other venues? Fantagraphics (again) has been slowly pushing its way into music stores; they have regular accounts set up with about fifty across the country. It’s a new venue, and it reaches new readers. How about newspapers? Glyph, a venture from Seattle’s Labor of Love collective, is taking the tabloid format of weekly alternative papers and applying it to comics: giving them away for free, and supporting itself through advertising. Its trial run of 10,000 issues has generated a flurry of enthusiastic phone calls and emails; it remains to be seen if enough advertisers will trust the new idea to keep it going.
And that’s pretty much it. The tenor for the most part is wait-and-see, looking for someone, anyone, to come flying in out of the sunset and set it right. The comics industry, rather than biting the bullet and changing a system that clearly isn’t working anymore, seems wedded to the idea of making it work the way it used to. That isn’t going to happen. (Almost forgot: Buddy Saunders, who runs the Lone Star retail chain in Texas, thinks the industry would be saved if every retailer bought his computer inventory software. And Brian Pulido, publisher at Chaos! Comics, is trying to sell product placement spots in his comics—which feature characters like Lady Death, Evil Ernie, and Purgatori—to shoe and car companies.)
“Maybe it’s time to let the industry rot on the branch,” says Scott McCloud, “let it fall and let the seeds scatter, to grow into something new, or several things.”
Maybe it is.
As visceral as film, as silent as a book, and as easy to produce as finding an idle photocopier, the comic book is inherently subversive.
—Pagan Kennedy, “P.C. Comics,” 1990
Great, I’m in the music industry and the comics industry. I’m getting fucked in both ends.
—Keith Knight, cartoonist and rapper, 1998
A room of our own.
When we talk about the “industry,” after all, we’re talking about the whole wheezing mechanism of the direct market. If it disappeared tomorrow, comics would still be made, and read, and appreciated; an idea as simple and powerful as comics can’t be killed.
“Instead of looking at what they can do, people are looking at how much they’ll lose or make. The greed is depressing,” says Shannon Wheeler, cartoonist of Too Much Coffee Man. “I mean, you can put out a comic now for $1300. You can put out hundreds of minicomics for next to nothing.” Comics have always been the most democratic of media; efforts of The Comics Journal notwithstanding, we haven’t been an “art” long enough to develop much snobbery.
There was a debate in the pages of the Journal last year which boiled down to whether or not comics should try to become a mass medium again. A better question is whether or not we can. A lot of money would have to be pumped into the industry, with no immediate return foreseeable, as whole new formats of comics are launched, and attempts made to educate the public, to inculcate a taste for comics. Where’s the money going to come from? Nobody makes long-term investments anymore.
And even if the industry gets the money, there’s an entertainment glut on. There’s more stuff to do out there than there is time to do it; new diversions sprout like mushrooms while the average working week, according to a Harris Poll, has increased from 40.6 hours in 1973 to 50.8 hours today, while real wages have either stagnated or dropped. Everybody’s feeling the pinch: movies, books, music, television, video games—comics just feel it the worst, because we’re so small, and we never had much of a chance to get big.
So do comics stay small, stay in their little niche, with only the occasional break-out success like Maus or Johnny the Homicidal Maniac? Problem with that is, cartoonists need rooms of their own like any other artist. It’d be nice to have that room paid for without having to take, say, a part-time job in a coffee shop, or scrounging free-lance illustration work. “If the industry is serious about shepherding the artform,” says Howard Cruse, “it’s got to solve the problem of making a living.”
There’s a growing trend in Hollywood these days. When a production team wants to shop a script around, they’ll commission a comic based on it. Apparently, they’re great selling tools for lawyers and producers. Which says a lot about comics’ ability to communicate a lot of information quickly and clearly, but doesn’t do much for their reputation as sub-literate trash. Still, there’s a lot of money to be made in animation and licensing deals; to a lot of cartoonists, it’s like hitting the lottery. And with the entertainment glut on, the other media are hungry for something to grab attention, and looking everywhere for it. Maybe that’s the future of comics: as the farm team for other media, a place for movie tie-ins and marketing ploys, a chance to try a concept’s street cred before risking it on more expensive, bigger things.
I’d agree with you on a good day. But not today. I’m afraid it’ll be something rotten. Hardcore pornography using funny animal faces. “Furious Familial Fucking Funny Animals.” Something like that.
—Jim Valentino, cartoonist, on the possible future of the industry, as quoted in Paul Pope’s journal, 1994
The Vamperotica Dare to Bare Special features provocative nude illustrations of Luxura. Also available in a Nude and Virgin Nude Edition. NOTE: The Nude Edition is not available in Hong Kong.
—one of the comics available in the Diamond Previews catalog, May, 1998
Why you don’t read comics.
But I’ve digressed. We were talking about why you don’t read comics.
I don’t know. There’s a lot of prejudice to overcome, prejudice that was built into comics from the start. It’s no wonder you think comics are disposable trash, because for the longest time that’s all comics were. Comic strips began in the 1890s as a marketing gimmick, a huckster’s shill to get more people to buy newspapers. Comic books got started in the late ’20s and early ’30s when somebody figured out a good way to make a buck off the downtime of the giant color presses every major newspaper had. Comics in America leaped out of the gate as a full-blown mass medium with no idea what they were or how they worked, and they’ve been falling behind ever since.
And yet. “My husband doesn’t read comics a lot,” says Martha Thomases, publicity manager for DC Comics, “but he has to put up with me bringing them home all the time. But he says there’s more good comics now than ever before. There’s more variety. We’re taking more chances.”
We’re doing something right. Artistically, as a medium, comics have never been healthier. It’s no wonder there’s a fascination about comics; enough of the good stuff has been leaking through, whether it’s Hate or Calvin and Hobbes or Dan Clowes doing a story in Esquire, that it’s bound to pique people’s interest. It’d be nice if the industry could somehow tap that interest, even a little bit, and climb out of its hole.
So why don’t you read comics? Heck, why do I read them? It doesn’t have anything to do with brain chemistry, or arrested development, or some weird, cult-like initiation. “I feel like a missionary for the cult of comics sometimes,” says Anina Bennett, and Martha Thomases says much the same thing; and I know what they mean. But really, it’s nothing like that. It’s quite simple:
Somewhere along the way, I acquired a taste for comics. You didn’t.
Do me a favor. The next time you think about it, go to a comics shop. Look in the yellow pages, or call Diamond’s comics shop locator number (888-COMIC BOOK). Don’t worry about looking foolish; nobody you know will see you. You can park you car on a side street, if you like.
Go inside. Don’t be put off by the posters, or the garish covers on the shelves. Ignore the tits and spandex. Poke around. Talk to the clerks. Let them know what you like, what you’re interested in. They’ll more than likely have a suggestion or three. Buy one. Take it home. Read it.
If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy another. I promise.
There. I’m done. That’s pretty much all I wanted to say. I’m going to go re-read Pickle now.
Let me know if something interesting happens.
Commenting is closed for this article.
Wouldn't this have been easier to write as a comic?
*ducks*
39,717 characters, 6,990 words. I'm tempted to count the words in Understanding Comics to compare. Sadly, cut and paste technology between paper and computer is lacking, as is OCR AI.
I'm not reading comics tonight because I've been catching up on reading my RSS feeds and friend's journal entries. And I wanted to read Orbiter. I made it through the foreword last night. Quite tragic timing. But at least I've been to Million Year Picnic and Reading Frenzy. But it's been a while. Maybe I'll stop at my local comics retailer on the way home tomorrow. So many comics, so little time...
Yes, but most of these words had already been written. So thhbbppbtppttptppttt.
I draw comics. I don't read them. I don't say that to brag, and I do exaggerate. Of course I read my friends' online comics. And if I'm in the mood, I'll hunt down a Waldo or Hunt Emerson collection. Now that I have broadband, I will probably read more online comics.
But still...I don't read them the way I pile books and magazines by the side of my bed. I was more excited about the arrival of the new Harry Potter than I have been about comics in a long time. (Go, Neville!) It could be just me. Or it could be that much of the comics world is shrinking, pulling back, in an aloof, stand-offish way. I certainly don't see outreach. Perhaps that's refreshing in an in-yo-face hype culture like ours, but it also means that in going about one's day-to-day comics are very easy to overlook. To forget. (Shudder.)
But it's nice to see your essay again!
You forgot the Joe Sacco, Donna Barr and Mary Fleener interviews we did.
Also, we ran Robberta Gregory's Bitchy Bitch strip a few times.
That would be because I was winging the retrospective off the top of my head. (And because we don't have a complete run of the dam' magazine in the house.) And heck--I didn't want to go on too long...
And don't forget my wife's gorgeous cover shoot.
Do you really think she wants to be called a cartoon?
Hey, didja' know the Italian Babel Fish setting turns me into: "sacchi del amy" ??
That is *so cool* !! I am so changing my name first thing next week !!
Hey, I've already read the article. Not much to add, except that I'll never again drink a Screwdriver without thinking of Fleener. Where the hell is she, anyway ?
Excellent essay!
I had to go back a few days in my notebook to find it, but here's a headline I'd like to see for a review of some intellectual movie: BLAM! HONK! CRASH! MOVIES NOT JUST FOR KIDS ANY MORE
Do you really think she wants to be called a cartoon?
After years of being married to one, her transmogrification is inevitable.
I draw comics. My girlfriend is a musician and while she supports my work and reads novels more ravenously than I've ever seen I can't get her to read a comic to save my life. I've tried everything: Sandman, Bone, Paul Pope, Scott Mc Cloud you name it. To my deep despair she loves Miyazaki movies (we have hundreds of dollars in stuffed Totoro and DVDs ) but I can't her to read the comic penned be Miyazaki's own hand, Nausica. She says comics are an uncomfortable middle ground for her. She doesn't get to imagine how the characters and universe appears in her minds eye and comics aren't as immersive as a movie. You'd think that comics would be the perfect middle ground between moving pictures and written language but maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe everyone (or a majoirty) of noncomics readers feel the same way.
There's always self-publishing to concider.
http://atoys.com/ujbook/
Sacchi di Amy: You're brill.
Dirk Deppey: Effusive as ever.
Kip W.: Snerk.
Kevin: Oh, behave.
Jason Briggs: Damn, but that's a troubling turn-around I hadn't before considered: comics as an uncomfortable middle ground between immersion and studied distance, rather than an ideal middle ground. Hmm.
DFG: Certainly, publishing on the web is pretty much self-publishing, and you're doing what I'd thought the web would mostly be doing, when I was thinking about the web back in 1998: using it to distribute physical books. But there's a critical mass of readers and capital necessary before that becomes viable; what's boggling to me, right now, is the number of people and the quality of the work that's put up for free, given away, hey, look at this, isn't it cool. It's a make-shift jack-leg DIY giftish economy based on small change and whuffie, and on a good day I can squint and see the future in it, and it's a bright and beautiful one.
On a bad day I wonder how long it will take to sell out already.
Great essay. :)
And great timing insofar as I'm concerned anyway. I used to be quite into comics/graphic novels when I was at uni, and at times over the 10 years since then I've poked around Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street and wished I'd had more money to spend on them. But I've not bought anything for years, mainly because of a self-imposed moratorium due to the awful state of my bank balance. It just seemed impossible to go into a comic shop and not spend a small fortune.
But with Neil Gaiman's 1602 coming out soon... well I think I might just start both reading and buying again. Despite my impecuniousness.
And once again I'll be forced to explain to my non-comic-fan friends 'No, no, think of it more as literature with pictures...'
I have a hard enough time trying to convince one of my coworkers that 'manga' does NOT equal 'porn.' (This from a girl whose favorite author has several volumes in the erotica section.) I'm not sure I could convince her to even try something like Nausicaa, or Inu-Yasha.
But despair ye not! Returnability is on the way... Borders has recently started carrying comics in the magazine section, and on the same terms as magazines. There are even staff members (at least at my place of work) who are as knowledgeable about the graphic novel section as they are about the literature section. While there is apt to be some ghettoization (how many versions of X-Men ARE there?) there does seem to be at least a little diversity.
Some stuff Ampersand is reading today
Four Color Hell likes a challenge Todd at Four Color Hell, a group comics-blog, mentions in passing that he'll be posting a defense of Dave Sim later this week. For those of you who don't know who Sim is, trust me; casually mentioning you're going to d...
Which Boston comic shop did you work at in '91?
Regarding the insularity and inaccessibility of comics to newcomers, did you read the recent review of Outsiders #1, and particularly the comments in response. You'd think some of these people didn't want new readers...
Really interesting piece.
The structure of it is a little odd, though. The speculation anecdote you opened with is vivid and scary, but then you don't talk about the direct market and speculation again till way later, so at first it seems unconnected to the rest of the article. The part right after that, with the quotes from Mason, Cannon, Hart and Spurgeon, is by far the weakest section and you almost lost me there... the first three are making valid points but the context is missing - they're obviously talking about a specific kind of comic and cartoonist, but it all gets reduced to this vague "they." And using Spurgeon's experience with "You Send It, We Read It" to say something about the overall state of comics is just silly. If you had to review heaps of student films or velvet paintings, you'd be cranky too but it would be odd to take that as a statement about "film" or "art" in general.
I liked Anodyne, by the way.
One more FYI. Libraries and librarians have discovered graphic novels and are starting to buy and promote them. There was an entire campaign recently as part of Teen Read Week, called Get Graphic with lots of cool promotional materials.
In publications for librarians, I've been seeing a lot of recommendations of must-have basic canon and reviews for new materials, so libraries are buying, at least. And if libraries have GNs, then new readers can explore safely and cheaply and buy if they like.
suw: Thanks, and 1602 does look like an old-fashioned heap of fun.
B. Durbin: Ooh... returnability in bookstores for comics-as-magazines. Any clue what publishers are participating? And is it just Borders?
Lis: Yeah, Jess Lemon is one of my heroes. I was at New England Comics--the Allston and Brookline stores, and, I think, the Malden location for a couple of weeks. 1990-1991l; then we moved to Amherst, and I went into telephone surveying.
Eli: Thanks. And yes. There's quite a bit I'd move around and shave and trim and just generally fix if I were--I mean, there were other quotes I could have gotten, and the prognostication section's a bit weak, and I could have dug up more specific sales figures, but--really, sooner or later, everything's got to be done and stand on its own, warts and all. (Even if the Spurgeon quote is foolish, yes. My only defense is that it made more sense in the context of the times, and the stuff he was reviewing, which hindsight suggests I should have offered up for the readers' benefit, were I to keep the quote. --I could have brought up some choice pieces from my own "Please review me!" slushpile, say: the Claus comic book with Santa as a gun-wielding hardcase and Mrs. Claus as a bad girl heroine fighting an invasion of I think it was orcs leaps to mind. But the piece is weighed down enough as it is with "bad" examples, and despite the enervation of it all I wanted to leave something of a good taste in people's mouths, a bit of world-weary and jaded boosterism, and Jesus it's over and done and finished, Kip, just be quiet and leave it alone!)
So. Um. Thanks, I guess, is what I meant. Glad to see an old Anodyne fan.
Lis, again: Arggh! I should have mentioned the library stuff in the "update" intro; that's some thrilling and exciting news there. Bad me. Total space cadet.
Ok, I lived about 3 blocks from the Allston store starting Sept. 1991, so browsed there regularly; maybe our paths intersected...
Speaking of women in comics, are you familiar with Sequential Tart? They've got some good (and witty) stuff on their site.
Dude, there is no New York Times Review of Books It's either the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books. It's slips like that that keep the East Coast intelligentsia from taking you comics dudes seriously.
(Kidding.)
Em, speaking as an avid reader of non-comic books who's always found comics interesting but never actually gone out of my way to read anything besides Understanding Comics, part of Giardino's A Jew in Communist Prague, and an old issue of Sandman (all of these, BTW, I borrowed/received as gifts from friends), the reasons I don't read comics are:
(1) there are so few self-contained comics;
(2) comics critics are completely useless;
(3) comics shops don't cater to people like me
Most of these are basically things that kip raises; but, to elaborate...
(1) As far as I can tell, almost the whole comics industry is oriented around franchises: an author develops a character or world and writes in that world for twenty episodes that you have to pay for individually. Dickens may have written serials, but authors who wrote novels this way today would be laughed at (and are---witness the contempt for Robert Jordan in SF fandom). I can't be motivated to read thirty pages of comics and then wait a month for the next installment, and I can't be motivated to track down twenty-odd books to read a single story. Why don't comic authors produce a complete story and then publish?
Television can only get away with its episodic nature because you don't pay for every episode individually, or even have to consciously decide to watch them---it's just a stream of stories that happen to be on sometimes when you tune in. And even individual TV episodes are usually self-contained (shows like 24 and Babylon 5 are the exception, not the rule, and I don't watch them anyway).
Even when a comics series is finished, it's typically not anthologized in any form convenient for readers who want the complete story. Nobody's producing any more Sandman books, but think about what I would have to do if I wanted to read the complete Sandman stories. Where's the equivalent of the DVD boxed set or short story anthology?
(2) kip's quotation of DiBacco re: the Silver Surfer is completely hilarious and a propos. I may be a pasty nerd, but I still have taste, or I like to think I do, anyway. When I read about comics on the web and reviewers heap praise on superhero comics, or when people talk about the "Golden Age" of comics and point to this ridiculous crap from waybackwhen, I roll my eyes.
If there were any source where I could count on reviewers who actually held comics to the same high standards that written literature is held to---i.e., where having a superhero wearing a cape who (gasp!) is also full of angst and inner pain is not widely held to be an example of penetrating psychological portraiture---then I might actually take a chance and buy comics based on reviews. As it is...
(3) When I walk by a typical comic shop here in Seattle, it's got big pictures of tits/ass/spandex comics taped up in the window. It's dark inside and the shelves are 90% full of crap that's screaming at you in a very visible way that says "This is the kind of person you are, if you're standing here inside this store."
It's true that non-comics bookstores are also 90% full of crap, but it's pretty easy to avoid Maxim magazine and "New Age Healing!" and the kitten calendars and the illustrated catalogs of assault rifles. The equivalent statement is not true of comic book stores: if you're standing inside, chances are that there are tits and blood in your field of vison. Why would I go into such a store?
(BTW, your description of Coyote Comics does not sound very enticing to me. Yay, pasty goth kids instead of pasty Spiderman fanatics. That's much better.)
Anyway, great article, kip. Maybe I'll go out and explore some of the writers you mention.
Do u know a good website to read online comics or a godd site to read Spawn comics online.
If u do email me back at ravidewitt_33@hotmail.com
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