COMICS AND REINVENTING COMICS
Sunday, 5 June 2005

This debate rears its head from time to time in the pathways of the Internet I traverse regularly, and this time it’s Scott Kurtz over at PVP and Tycho and Gabe over at Penny Arcade that have brought it up again this week (in my little universe, anyway).

Apparently there’s some kind of documentary about some revolution in digital comics in production and they decided to vent some steam in its direction. For some reason this time I felt compelled to chime in on the subject with a few cents, mostly arguing in favor of relaxing about it and not getting so damn upset because, really, why?

Just for the sake of saying this off the bat, I’ve met these guys, chatted with them. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for what they do as comics creators. They’re great guys and real professionals at their respective crafts. Their comments got me thinking and I just couldn’t get on with the rest of my life until I had written something about it. Feel free to acccept or reject anything in here, write me with questions or contentions.

First off, can I make an argument to dispense once and for all with this affectation “Webcomics," please? I suppose at some point it was useful to clearly distinguish between comics published in newspapers and comics published on the Internet, but I believe that time passed some years ago and the distinction does nothing so much as muddy the argument these days. For that matter, appending the modifier “digital” to comics no longer serves a useful purpose either, so please drop that one as well. The shift in both publishing and production of comics by digital means is done now, it happened already.

Let us not confuse the content for the container. There are comics, and there are publishing models. Currently, the comics I read are distributed via three distinct processes: the Web, comic books, and newspapers. Some are published in more than one of these, and there are some that are available in all three.

The differences between these have everything to do with the business side of publishing, of course.

Newspaper Syndication

An entrenched publishing industry where all the power is in the hands of those who run it and is nearly impossible to break into at any rate, even with a quality comic strip. It’s suppressive, not necessarily because the people who run it are evil, but because the industry model makes it nearly impossible to gain entry and the process seems rather arbitrary from the outside.

Creators must submit collections of finished strips to corporate Syndicates who then want to own the creation pretty well outright. This model of publishing has been acceptable in the past mostly because it was the only game in town – the few syndicates available all played by the same set of rules. Additionally, the newspaper’s attitude toward comics (cutting as many costs as possible out of the comics page without getting rid of it entirely – they’re perfectly aware that it’s one of the few reasons people even read newspapers) and the corners they have cut over the decades (as well as payments for comics themselves) makes this an increasingly bitter pill to swallow for creators. Ostensibly, this weeding-out process is supposed to serve the purpose of raising the quality of the comics page, separating the wheat from the chaff. But a survey of what actually does make it to the comics page generally belies this preconception. Sure, there are some gems, some true classics. But I would suggest that some 80 per cent of newspaper-published comics are monotonously amusing at best, and completely ignorable at worst.

One of the inherent problems with this model, just to belabor the point for another paragraph, is that there are so few outlets (especially now that newspaper competition in major cites is practically non-existent) that the comics pages that do still exist must try to appeal to all comic-reading publics. This is a basic marketing mistake – trying to serve every possible public with one product is a recipe for spreading yourself too thin in a market and you wind up pleasing no one in the longer run. So there are three good comics that you read, and four that your kids read, and four that your grandparents read, and so on. Out of thirty comics, no one bothers with more than a small few. But get rid of any one of them, and the newspaper gets letters from angry readers (the avoidance of which response seems to be one of the primary motivating factors for newspaper editors, right below selling ad space).

And even when you “make it” into the paper, only a few creators make a decent living from that, and the syndicates take most of the ownership of the creation. From a creator point of view this situation really starts to look unattractive.

When there are no outside forces to knock an industry on its collective butt once in a while, those running that industry start to think their business model is the correct one. If you’re not losing, you must be winning, right? They start to think that what they’re doing is so right, there couldn’t possibly be a different way to do it, otherwise someone would be doing it. So when a sea change does come along, a real paradigm shift, this entrenched bureaucracy is oblivious at first, right up to the point where the shift starts to affect their survival, their bottom line, their future. By then it’s usually too late to do anything about it and they wind up coming apart at the seams trying to change the way they’ve done business for the last hundred years.

In my estimation, the newspaper comics syndicates (and newspapers in general) have been coming apart at the seams for well over ten years, and would be in trouble even without an Internet to erode their foundation, but that’s a whole different argument.

Anyway, newspaper syndication is a mess.

Comic Books

Another example of an entrenched bureaucracy, except that this one is farther along on its curve of paradigm shift. For comic books, the shift came in the ‘90s when the combination of consolidation of distribution channels and overspending into a market bubble that finally collapsed actually threatened to economically destroy it (or parts of it anyway – Marvel is still climbing out of that hole; it’s one of the reasons they’ve been aggressively pursuing so many Hollywood deals lately).

But this industry isn’t really in the same league as the newspaper syndicates when it comes to stagnation and suppressive models. Independent and alternative comics have been around for a long time – I have personally seen two explosions in alt comics, one during the ‘80s that didn’t last, and one during the late ‘90s that seems to still be going strong(ish). To my observation, they’ve always been around, more or less.

My first problem with mainstream comic book publishers is their tendency to jump on bandwagons. I remember when I first saw Todd McFarlane’s artwork on a Spiderman cover. In very short order every hot new artist looked like a McFarlane clone (Lee, Liefeld, Silvestri, ad nauseum – and the trend continues to this day in Michael Turner and others) and it just got old, seeing such a similarity of style across the board. Personally, I think this was one of the contributing factors of the bubble bursting, but I’m an artist and may just be seeing coincidences where I should be seeing causal relationships. That said, homogenenization is usually bad for the survival of any system in the long run, as it makes it harder to deal with environmental shifts and exterior problems – diversity within the system is its own kind of survival mechanism.

Comicbooks in their current state, from my point of view, look like a pretty healthy system, mostly. If I don’t care for superhero stuff, I can find innumerable high-quality titles at a decent comic book shop, and even a pretty good selection at a good bookstore. The real trick is finding the right publisher for the work, a problem compounded by the fact that each publisher only has so much money to spend, especially on new projects. So, there’s still a squeeze through the front door into this club, but it’s far more accessible than newspapers.

Now, one thing that has changed is the fact that few publishers want to find “talent” anymore, and most are looking for complete, finished products they can package and put on a shelf. This has everything to do with how they make their money if they allow creators to retain as many rights as they do. I think this is generally a good thing for the quality of the work, and the retention of rights is well worth it, but it does raise the barrier to entry for this part of the industry. It should be noted that, if we’re talking about publishing collections of strips then an obvious requirement is a collection of finished strips available to publish.

So, on the one hand, the industry itself is easier to reach than newspapers, but the up-front production is still considerable. Welcome to the world of print publishing.

If you’re going to argue that the comic book industry is hungry for original, creative work, you also have to qualify that by adding ”that they want to publish” or “that they can afford to publish.” If there’s no concerted effort to crush creativity, then there are certainly industry models and perceived market forces that make it seem to be the case sometimes. If it’s rigged at all against new, original, creative voices, its because of the economics of the resources involved.

Publishers are out to make a buck, partly because they must in order to survive, but also because they get some successes and it’s a little addictive, this “making money” thing. If a publisher finds massive success in a Calvin and Hobbes, they’re going to start looking around for the “next Calvin and Hobbes” and worry less about finding little gems to nurture into the marketplace. Publishing works this way. Hollywood works this way, too, as an alternative example (didn’t Miramax used to make small movies?).

Publishers also generally proceed from the assumption that their market will only buy products with particular qualities. A “family friendly” publisher will not be interested in a comic strip that swears or that features nudity, etc. There are exceptions to this, of course, and comic book publishers in particular have started expanding their considerations and therefore their catalogs. I think many of them did this out of necessity after the collapse of the market, but the net result is mostly worthwhile, regardless.

So, comic books are easier to get into than newspapers, but there are still normal publishing forces at work resulting in a certain barrier to entry and the problem of finding the right publisher for the right work.

The World Wide Web

So, what’s the big damn deal? What is it about the Internet that people think is so revolutionary, particularly regarding comics? Depends a bit on your point of view. There are two ways to look at a Web page: either as an artistic medium or as a presentation medium.

If you look at it as a medium of creativity, akin to paper or canvas or a blank wall, then it looks like a potentially limitless page on which to draw. Scott McCloud called it an “infinite canvas.” Imagine a piece of paper that stretches as far in every direction as you want it to, on which you can write and draw pretty much anything you want. In this regard, the amount of new freedom is almost too much to confront. It removes all of the limitations placed on the art form by market forces and publishing – you’re not limited to paper size, how much space a newspaper will allocate, ink prices, advertising, etc.

If your goal is to expand your creative possibilities, it’s an amazing amount of new potential just waiting to be tapped.

Maybe.

The one unavoidable physical limitation still imposed on this brave new medium is the screen itself. So you wind up with an infinite painting that can only be viewed one page-size at a time. Well, for some people this is not that big a deal, but for others it imposes a barrier to the art that is hard to put up with, all that scrolling and zooming. If you designed a regular Website like this, it would be excruciatingly poor design.

And if your creative goal has always been to publish a normal comic strip, often this limitation on the infinite canvas looks completely intolerable. It might even just piss you off a bit to hear people go on about it when there’s clearly so little practical benefit in the real world of creating and reading comics.

We’re talking about a collision of creative purposes here — two different approaches to the potential that actually have little to do with each other.

Those who talk about an infinite canvas are not making comic strips so they can publish them on the Web. They’re doing something different, something experimental that tries to take advantage of this really big piece of paper with a little window to it. It’s quite a challenge, actually, and good luck to them – they have a lot of assumptions to overcome about how things are “supposed to work.”

If you’re making comic strips, though, you’re interested in the Web page as a presentation medium, and that’s it. That’s what it’s good for, and that’s what serves your comic best. Well, on your side you have the vast majority of the Web-browsing public – that’s how they see the Web page as well, as a medium of presentation that helps them get to the good stuff.

So it’s the difference between seeing the Web as an artistic medium or a publishing medium. So far, it seems to work better as a publishing (presentation plus distribution) medium, but it’s interesting to see how the other side of the coin works to make its point.

So, how does the Web stack up against the other two publishing mediums? Pretty well, actually, up to a point. The primary revolution of the Internet as publishing medium is the reduction of the barrier to entry to nearly nothing. You need a computer, an Internet connection, and that’s almost it. It’s beneficial to have your own Website, but that’s pretty cheap, too (and not absolutely necessary, considering options like Keenspace, et. al.). All you need then is something to publish, and you’re on.

This has proven to be both good and bad, of course, as it is any time you democratize a communication medium broadly. It allows good work to be presented to a wide audience easily, but it also allows an enormous amount of low-quality work out in the wild as well. I’m not sure what the real ratio is, but I’m guessing it’s something on the order of a thousand to one, coals to diamonds.

This delivers the primary problem of publishing directly into the lap of the creator, which is “How do I find my audience and get them to read my work?” The Web has worked out some clever ways to overcome this, mostly word of mouth, banners, cross-promotion, etc., but there is no centralized communication line between the creator/publishers and their audience. In the real world, this line is the distribution/retail channel – it serves both the audience and publisher by providing a known, specific source for this information (the trade-off being a more limited selection than the Web presents).

It also presents the second problem of publishing to the creator, which is “How can I get people to pay me for this?” And this may ultimately be the rub, the core of the problem. Arguing this one point probably causes more upset among creatives on the Internet than any other one. Creative people tend to want to make their living doing creative work. Traditionally, they found a publisher who would pay them for their efforts, and the publisher would then handle the problems of marketing, presentation, and distribution. It doesn’t really work this way on the Web though, not for the creator/publisher.

So, what works, then?

As I recall it, there were three core points made or presented in McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. One was the Web as a publishing medium, bypassing the entrenched bureaucracies of the comics industry because it was built in such a way that made it nearly impossible for a creator to be successful. The second was the idea of the Web page as artistic medium in its own right, his infinite canvas. The third was the concept of micropayments as a means to achieve a solution to that second problem of publishing, above: getting paid.

I’m not sure why this last idea of micropayments causes so much upset among those who disagree with it, but it really seems to engender its own antagonisms. Perhaps it’s McCloud’s enthusiasm for the concept in the book versus its subsequent degree of success. I’m not even suggesting that this particular game is over, it has achieved a certain degree of success, but micropayments are much more the exception to the norm. It could be that the idea is one killer application, or one massive implementation (if it was somehow built into AOL, for example, or a major browser) away from broad success, but that hasn’t happened yet and it’s kind of pointless to argue such a thing. Not that people haven’t tried.

And that may be the thing that causes such upset. The PVPs, Penny Arcades and Blank Labels of the world want a real, working means of making a living from their creative work (and a decent living at that, these people have families and everything). Micropayments, as elegant a system as it seems on paper, simply hasn’t worked out as the thing that solves that problem. And it rankles when someone fresh out of reading the book (or people who should know better by now, five years after the book was published) holds it up as more of a bible for such things than it should be. Particularly when McCloud himself described it as a “full-blown manifesto for radical change.”

Perhaps if it hadn’t been presented so emphatically, it would be seen less as a manifesto, and more as a set of speculations and theories for the future of comics publishing on the Internet. Because that’s how I see it, at this point, after the Internet has had some time to grow in the directions McCloud was gazing at the time.

Web-published comics have exploded in the last five years, and many really decent works have risen to the top as a result. I personally loyally read about fifty comics on the Web at least once a week, which is about forty-five more than if I was getting a newspaper alone. I don’t ever buy newspapers anymore, for all the same reasons lots of people have stopped buying them, and they don’t contain anything I cannot find better, faster and cheaper on the Web.

So, assertion number one – the bypassing of old-guard traditional print comicstrip publishing – continues to come true for the most part. PVP is successful because of this, as is Penny Arcade, and any other Web-only comic that is being successful to any degree. McCloud hit this one on the head and for the right reasons.

The second (the infinite canvas) and third (micropayments) seem to have developed into niche applications or noble experiments by those with the right ideas to attach to them. However, in 2005, people are still mostly averse to all that scrolling, and the idea of paying ten cents for something (in a world where ringtones are selling for four bucks, no less) on the Web just hasn’t caught on in a big enough way to make an effective argument for it most of the time.

But, as I said, the game’s not over, and these things may yet prove themselves out. In theory.

So, again, what does work?

It’s something I’ve kept my eye on over the last three years. I’ve had conversations, both e- and live, with various comics creators and have generally just paid attention to things as they’ve developed. I’m no expert, and things are very much still in flux, but here are some observations I’ve made, in pretty much the correct sequence, as I’ve figured it:

1. Find an audience. Create something, put it out there, let people know about it, get people to help you (as you return the favor) with promotion and word of mouth. But find your audience. The most successful way I’ve seen to do this is by publishing your comic on the Web and allowing people unrestricted access for free, including the archives. Free access hooks people because that barrier to entry is reduced to nothing. Giving them an archive to read through is the surest way to hook them on your characters and stories.

2. Sell some ad space, but not too much. I think PVP’s combination of banners and Google ads is about as much as I can tolerate. Penny Arcade’s banners work well. One of the more genius things a comic can do is to create custom banners with their own characters, or fully developed mini-comics for special promotions.

3. Have some merch available for sale. I love being able to buy the occasional coffee cup or t-shirt with favorite characters on it. So do other people. It’s a way for your readers to participate in your world, to carry a little piece of it with them, and it allows them to promote something they’re a fan of. Personally, I’m not always that impressed with CafePress’s products and their color and printing limitations turn me off sometimes, but they’re a good place to start. But you can control the production and make much more money per item if you produce your own or find a real licensing company. Again, it’s a scale with CafePress on one side (low barrier to entry, high compromise (limited options, they keep most of the money)) and self-publishing on the other (high barrier to entry, low compromise).

3 and a half. I’ve seen some sites provide electronic collections (in pdf form, usually) of strips for sale, a sort of digest form of the comic that has the added benefit of the particular advantages of pdf (full screen size, sharp images, very little cost of delivery). The cost should be kept low. This appeals to those readers who are willing to pay a couple of bucks a month or so for a higher-quality, concentrated dose of the comic.

4. Have printed items available for sale. Posters, inkjet prints of individual strips, postcards, books, whatever. Something I can put on my wall or on my bookshelf. People love things they can touch and have, and the Web is a poor substitute for this sensation. Sign everything when possible.

5. Sell original work. Not necessarily the comics themselves, but sketches and commissions. Definitely sign these, of course.

6. Once you have an established readership (this should build over time) and an archive of material, you can start looking into print publishing options. Publishers love complete packages, especially when that package includes an audience. The clever thing about this is that since you own everything, selling the rights to publish a book or two gets you a little money, but it can potentially increase the traffic to your site and flood in a whole new audience who might be interested in your prints or whatever. This is perhaps the one time when you will hear me use the word “synergy.”

7. If you’re still interested in micropayments for the sake of it, think about what you could offer in exchange for small amounts of money. Background screens for computers, phones, PSPs. Bonus strips. A member section. The aforementioned pdf collections. Something.

Will that do it? I’m not making any promises. But it seems to me that the sites that have become successful little industries in their own right have followed this path, more or less, over the last three years.

I think the real legacy of Reinventing Comics is that it brought the subject up in the first place, held it up to the light so people could start talking about it in a very open way. To that end, I think McCloud can be proud enough of the effect he’s caused, even if some people (on boths sides of the fence) take it more seriously and more literally than they should.

Anyway, that’s what I think about that. Thank you for reading this far. I hope it was worth it.

Sincerely,

-Allen