I am not generally known for my optimism about the sorry state of affairs in the comics world. However, I have been reading a lot of nonsense lately about the so-called crisis in comics, and I think it necessary to speak on the issue. The surrounding airs are stagnant and fetid, and need to be cleared. The crisis, essentially, is that sales of comics have plummeted greatly since their most recent peak in about 1993-4, and pundits in the comic book industry are predicting either a serious transformation of the art or its complete death.
This so-called crisis is not a crisis in the art of comics. Comics artists continue to create, and they always will, just as people continue to make lithographs and silkscreens. If anything, this is a crisis within the business of comics. That may sound o bvious. It isn't. It is not obvious largely because everyone involved in the industry has a warped sense of what constitutes the business of comics. Lately it is common wisdom (and therefore should be viewed with suspicion) that publishers and distributor s are culpable for all the woes of the industry. I think this is a bit presumptuous. It is probably true that most comics published are mediocre to abysmal. But this is true of any art. It is possibly true that comics are too expensive. But people will sp end twenty-five dollars on a hardback John Grisham potboiler. It is true also, I think, that comics are available in fewer and fewer places. But this does not explain why sales in comic book shops have plunged.
Each member of the comic book industry has countless pet theories about the causes of this "collapse." Most of them stem from the all-too-human desire to indict someone other than oneself. This will not do. It is absurd to continue on this track.
John Workman's recent pamphlet about the crisis and its spawn of dialogue have failed to touch the heart of the matter. They merely began further debate. Debate is not thinking, nor is it necessary at this stage; there are no ideas to debate that have not been debated before. The need right now in the comics industry is for new ideas. Gary Groth's notion that comics simply accept their fate and become a niche in the world of art is, I think, rather unoriginal and at any rate irrelevant to the problem. It is like telling passengers aboard a cruise that they should get used to the new slope of the deck where they play shuffleboard as the ship sinks into the ocean at the bow. Sadly, his is the only idea even slightly provocative. For all of the nattering abo ut the comics "crisis," I have yet to see anyone call the members of the industry together--artists, editors, publishers, distributors, marketers, retailers and readers--to do some real thinking about the issue together. It is obvious that no one else wi ll do the dirty work, so I am volunteering. As you read this, I am arranging to bring together members of the industry to do some real thinking about this comics "crisis." I want to see representatives of every single echelon of the comics industry. I wan t to see art directors, editors, distributors, writers, letterers, colorists, pencillers, inkers, printers, retailers, bookstore owners, clerks, publishers, stationers and, lest we forget (as we often do), readers. I call for some real thinking, not mere unimaginative debate, but creative thinking that generates ideas. No voice will be more important than any other; all will have ideas, and all will have their say.
So long as they are an art, comics will not die. Remember that. Businesses die all the time. Art does not die, it simply metamorphoses. In spite of their oft-pronounced death, painting and theater continue to live. Radio was supposed to have died as well. None has died. But each has changed. It is time comics changed as well. I look forward to hearing from all of you, and all of your ideas--especially the creative ones.
Ask most adults what they think about comics and you will get similar responses. "Comics" means garish colors, simple gags, men in circus tights flying around bludgeoning each other, funny animals that talk, fustian dialogue etc. For most people comics ar e childish, immature scrawls that serve no function other than naive diversion. Comics artists, dismayed by this, invent jargon to make their art more "respectable," which then makes matters worse.
The "graphic novel" is one phrase created by comics artists in their bid for false respectability. Graphics are respectable, novels are respectable, therefore graphic novels must be doubly respectable. There is more, equally absurd ameliorative language f or comics. Phrases like "drawn books," "graphic literature," "visual sequential art," and any other term Donna Barr invents next are all part of a piteous attempt to make comic books legitimate.
This sort of word wrangling has done nothing to improve the status of comics. It merely implies that anything good or serious or mature in nature cannot be a comic book. It must belong to some other realm. This reflects a similar claim that abstract art, for instance, is "not art," or that experimental films are "not movies." No one questions the notion that art or movies should fit neatly into categories of is/is not. Sadly, while the critical press persist with this bogus classification, pretentious art ists make matters worse by adopting the same notion and applying it to their own work.
Clearly this language game is a dead end. If comics are to gain their rightful status as an art, artists and the rest of the industry as it exists now need a different approach, not mere semantic revision. It is time to make other suggestions.
If former ideas have led the comics industry to its most dismal point in forty years, more of the same will not help. I have therefore assembled a list of ideas to improve the status of comics as art, and comics industry as business. Some of these ideas m ay seem far-fetched. But perhaps the industry needs far-fetched ideas. By comparison to recent efforts at improving the industry--assuming there have actually been any genuine efforts to improve the industry--even childish ideas are ingenious.
There would be no ordering of books by subject. When one needed to find books on a given subject, one could run back and forth between Pelican, Penguin, Ballantine, Signet, Ace, and University of Texas--all of which one could find by section in the librar y--to find six books on the topic. There would be no subject or author search, and a limited ability to search by title. It would be a daunting but rewarding task to find all the books of a single author, like Michael Moorcock, or on a single subject, lik e Chinese cooking.
Does this sound silly? If it does, consider how many comic book stores across the country are arranged exactly like this.
In 1998, comic sales are damned near their worst point in history. This is doubly sad, because artistically, I think, comics are at the maturest, finest point they've ever been. There is at present the greatest diversity ever in comics, a diversity that t he underground artists of the 60s and 70s would never have dreamed of. But someone has to get the material out to the audiences who will read it. Sales are not the purpose of comic art. But the art must operate at least partially in the realm of commerce. There is no sense lamenting that. One must simply deal with it. The goal of the comics industry should be to get all types of comics out to all people. Not just Marvel superheroes, but mystery comics, horror comics, literary comics, cookbook comics, thri ller comics, scientific comics, humor comics--everything: every subject should be available.
It is obvious to me this will not happen without new ideas. I have proposed mine. It is time for you to contribute.
Even when dealing with serious subjects, American comics rely almost exclusively on basic linear narrative and basic sequential array. This kind of array is as old as the caves, and so is the narrative style. Comics made their formal innovations years ago . Since then, the field has remained rather static. Yet the art of photography--only fifty years older than comics--continues to produce artists who refuse not to be innovative. Using kinds of description, narrative, sequence and array that make comics lo ok naive by comparison, their photographic work continues to push the limits of perception.
Ray Metzker has pushed limits of perception for almost forty years, and shows no signs of stopping. He has worked in the full range of black-and-white photography. He has covered the diapason, from heightened realism to extreme abstraction. He has designe d book-style sequences of single images, as well as the amazing arrays of the most recent Composites series. He has done some of the most important photography that deals with the psychology of perception, yet he remains virtually unknown.
Partly this is because Metzker has no disciples. He does not have students who have modeled their work after his, as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan had. He has taught photography only out of financial need, and has not taught at all in many years. Nor d oes he have the coterie of worshippers that Minor White or Ansel Adams had. Regardless of his lack of status and notoriety, Metzker has produced beautiful, vital photographs. From his first series, The Loop, through his most recent exhibition Wh en Darkness Reigns, Metzker has shown a truly tireless genius.
As Metzker told Anne Wilkes Tucker, his work "deals with the complexity of succession and simultaneity, of collected and related moments." This is most obvious in his highly elaborate series, Composites, but is noticeable even his subtler monograph s, such as Sand Creatures. In contrast to many serial photographers influenced by the photo-essay a la Life magazine, Metzker does not tell simple stories. His photographic series purposefully avoid traditional narrative and mere description. Instead of narrative, Metzker pr efers analogy. Instead of description, he prefers visual fragmentation. As Metzker said, "You have to break something down in order to have the parts synthesize. If something's complete, there is no need to synthesize--it's finished. In journalism the pho tograph is of an event, whereas in my later work, the photograph is the event."
The photographic events that Metzker creates are astonishing. Metzker's series, Double Frame, was the beginning of Metzker's complex approach to photography. In Double Frame, Metzker began to see the limitations of his former realistic appro ach. He began to see the limitations of simple printing of a single negative, and began to experiment. Finally, he hit upon the idea of using an overlapped image on the film roll, instead of a single negative. Most of the double frame images are uncanny a nd turn the familiar into the strange, but one that is especially interesting is the untitled image of Philadelphia in which an abstract form of a bridge truss overlaps with a cityscape view. Without using superimposition, the two images together disorien t one's vision. In fact, one of the pictures remains horizontal though the other lies vertically. This photography especially, I think, became the basis for the later work of Composites.
In his first Composites series, mundane subject matter acquires new meaning through Metzker's technique. The photograph Spruce Street Boogie is an excellent example.
In Spruce Street Boogie, Metzker takes a simple subject and transforms it into a revelation. The photograph reminds a viewer of the liveliness that even simple objects have, but which one often overlooks through complacent familiarity. Using multip le perspectives and superimpositions, the simple pattern of an iron fence and a sidewalk becomes an energetic essay about the rhythm of the street--a true boogie, a visual equivalent of the rhythmic variation in a James P. Johnson or Lux Lewis piano solo.
Spruce Street Boogie is certainly one of Metzker's most elaborate pictures. Because of his elaborate use of experimental photography, some people often label Metzker a formalist, unconcerned with anything beyond mere visual trickery. But Metzker's work remains astounding even when simple. In the same series are several pictures without any trickery whatever. Metzker's photograph of two sailors in Composite: Philadelphia, 1964 is a simple arrangement in a simple grid, that uses only two negat ives, one of each sailor. But the variation of light and tonal range differs widely from frame to frame. Some pictures are nearly pitch black and the figure can barely be seen, others are bright to the point of blindness. Even using the simple device of t onal printing, Metzker creates a striking sequence that is every bit as rhythmically interesting as his more elaborate work.
Photography has been a slave to realism since its origins. Much as comics remain bound to linear narrative, photography often remains the thrall of mere representation. Metzker himself started out by doing realistic street photography, very much in the ve in of his teacher, Harry Callahan. However, Metzker has never shown any desire merely to reproduce objects or moments. For him, "Unnecessary detail is the death of a lot of photographs. The viewer can see and get involved with every pebble, but the experi ence is only inventory-taking. No work is left for the imagination." In contrast to this, Metzker's street photography eliminates all unnecessary detail. His City Whispers series is a fine example of his approach to realism.
In City Whispers>, people often sit, stand and move in areas of extreme light and extreme darkness. Often Metzker will use light to barely illuminate a figure in the darkness, much the way a cinematographer like John Alton would create a film noir. Other times, a group of riders waiting for a bus will stand near an awning and be completely bathed in a square of light, as though they were on a stage. Even in groups, Metzker's Philadelphians are isolated, remote, sculptural figures.
Metzker's contemporary critics often decried his "lack of content" even as they noted his impeccable sense of design. But this misses the point. Metzker does not use photography in the service of any given thesis or cliched moral judgment. Nor is Metzker a mere formal decorator. Metzker's subject, throughout all his work, is the nature of light. Light holds a symbolic as well as artistic meaning. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his New Mexico series, and his most recent series, When Darknes s Reigns. In New Mexico, Metzker had moved from the urban canyons of Philadelphia to the vast barren expanse of light and sand that make up most of New Mexico. Metzker found the staccato, highly manipulated style of his earlier work insufficient. There are n o double frames, composites or Couplets here. The New Mexico series returns to presentation of single images in series. There is only the desert with its open, flowing rhythms and intense direct light. In contrast to the darkness of the city , where even a sliver of light from above is significant, the thing that is most significant in New Mexico is the darkness. Instead of a darkroom design, Metzker uses the natural interplay of light and darkness, and the natural repetition of the je june desert. Overall, light in the series makes even simple forms into abstractions, as in the Albuquerque, 1972 photograph. The darkness seems to define the print. Light is so blinding that it seems almost as though a piece of the picture is missi ng. Even at his most "realistic," Metzker's work tends toward abstraction.
Metzker's most powerful work, for me, is still his two series of Composites. Though his Couplets may have a more obvious general interest, Metzker's composite photographs are some of the most striking explorations of seeing in the history of photography. Much of his work remains in a grid-like structure, but Metzker clearly attempts to break out of the grid in several photos, notable especially in Chicago Rain Dance and MGM (short for "Metzker Goes Mad").
Well before the advent of postmodernist art (whatever the hell that is), Ray Metzker was creating fabulous photographs that responded to all the questions of postmodernism. Perception, representation, collage, assemblage--all these are themes of Metzker's work from very early on. From his early Chicago series all the way through When Darkness Reigns, Metzker's work has matured and grown ever more remarkable. His contributions to photography and the entire field of visual art have been immens e, and it is well past time he received greater recognition.
Jon Day and I sat down with a couple of talented young artists, Anne Moya and Ron McCain, and a retailer, Scott Stewart, to search for some new vision for and in the comics medium. Mr. Stewart has worked as a retailer in Bellingham, Washington so many ye ars we've forgotten. Ms. Moya has published her own comic, Battlebride, and Mr. McCain has worked for Marvel, DC, Caliber and other lovely companies.
Ron McCain: It's pathetic.
OW: It is pathetic. How many of the Top 100 are superhero titles? Eighty, eighty-six? And the others are sort of bad sci-fi fantasy or watery horrors, i.e. Vertigo.
Anne: They've kind of taken over that Eerie space, haven't they? The Warren titles.
Jon Day: Now you have Preacher.
Ron: Horror in my mind is a lost art. Nobody is doing anything close to what horror is. There's nothing that makes you want to turn a page in those comics, except the fact that you want to get it over with as soon as possible.
OW: Suspense inherently requires some element of surprise, and that's not what comics readers want. When they pick up an issue of X-Men or the like, people aren't looking for surprise. What they want is familiarity: to know the characters, to know exactly what they're going to do, to know what the plot's going to be, etc. And since that's what's overwhelmed the market so much, that predictability runs to every other genre. You know, Preacher is in its own way as predictable as any superhero comic. One issue may go by where people talk for awhile, but in the next you know that someone has to have their head blown off, or someone has to be anally raped, or whatever.
Ron: It's a problem in most comics. Everybody's grim and depressed, and it's not only in comics. It's the cool think to be hardcore and dark.
Anne: There should be a title that's just devoted to the psychotherapy of comic heroes. (laughs)
OW: There you go. That's what you have basically in comics. You have the very bad sort of sci-fi/fantasy Conan-derived comics, or the superheroes--about which the less said the better--and you have the people who read Vertigo titles, who think they're rea ding more artistic comics.
Anne: NOT!
OW: Vertigo carries by virtue of being dark and grim the illusion of being serious, even if it is totally false.
Anne: I was just talking to Ron about that. We were talking about how more people are turning to the alternative presses because the mainstream wasn't bringing them what they wanted. The way I saw it was that, the reason that DC brought in Vertigo was not because they wanted something better, it was that "there was a market to be had." That was the reason. There was definitely something lacking in the mainstream comics. Now there was this "alternative" that was sitting there. They think, "Well, it's alter native (because we say it is)." But it's still lacking. It just has a neato name to it.
Ron: Well, now we get into the whole subject of semantics, where the words they give us fit their definitions. Alternative is just a new word for grim mainstream. When Vertigo came out they were calling themselves "cutting edge," "New frontier,"--those wo rds are meaningless unless you relate it to their context. Cutting edge? Cutting edge of what? New frontier? Of what?
Anne: And they'll tell you what it is.
Ron: They'll be the first ones to define their cutting edge for you.
Anne: That's how they've trained us. The kids, the younger kids especially, just do what they're told.
OW: Lemme find this. There's a nice succinct part in Stephen Holland's Page 45 essay about alternatives. "No one can pretend with the best will in the world that a transformation could be executed overnight. But if the end goal is the patronization of 100 % of the population, the custom, the spending power of 10,000 times more people than currently visit our stores, don't you think it's well past time we made a start? Distributors who have the power to assist both sides (publisher and retailer) can make a start by giving over the covers of some of their catalogues to material other than superheroes. I hesitate to use the word 'alternative' because this material is only an alternative to superheroes. It's actually far more mainstream."
JD: Exactly.
Anne: The reason why they keep on getting superheroes onto the cover of Previews and what not is because of the pricing they have on it. For the cover of Previews magazine, it's $1,200. That's the way they've zeroed in on that in the industr y, the idea saying "Superheroes are cool," because they're on the cover. Well, they're the only ones who can afford to be on the cover.
OW: Of course. That should an editorial decision on the part of the people at Diamond. The cover of the distributors' magazine should not be for sale. The cover should be for the public benefit. You should not be able to buy the space on the cover, anymor e than you could buy the space on the damn cover of Time magazine.
JD: Will you ever see Cerebus on the cover of Wizard?
Anne: No.
OW: Certainly not.
JD: No matter how well Cerebus sells.
Anne: See, even though they say they do, Wizard does not tell you what the industry does. They try to sway what the industry does.
Ron: Just like the polls do.
OW: That's the natural impulse of a journalist, though. I try to sway what the industry does. I'm not averse to propaganda. I just make mine blatant.
Anne: But when it comes to swaying the industry, at least you are motivated by your own beliefs. As opposed to Wizard, where they are motivated by the sales of their ad space.
OW: Scott's got the story about this. You remember when Wizard started. You were still working at Pat's shop. What do you remember about Wizard?
Scott: Well, they were all in league with each other. Wizard was created by Image fans. It was essentially strange. It was like all the first interviews in Wizard were Image comics. I think there was some financial connection between them al so.
OW: And also Wizard, it seems, came out because there was only the Overstreet Price Guide for determining the value of comics.
Scott: And Wizard came out basically to boost the work of Image Comics, and the back issues of Image, which Overstreet wasn't paying attention to. It was also part of the big boom in the speculator's market.
OW: Right. Money and Fortune at the time were talking about comic books being the third or fourth best investment in the country.
Anne: But then it built up a false market.
OW: Sure, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why the industry went ptptptbpt. A giant sucking sound. Another thing: Pat's store in Bellingham had been there a long time already.
Scott: She was partners with Larry LaFanier. That was even before Kevin Keyes' shop was open.
OW: That would have been 1982 or '83? See, that's a fairly early direct market shop. We tend to lose that perspective. We take the direct market for granted, because we've grown up with it. There were very few comics stores in the country.
Ron: Now they're all over the place.
OW: But a whole stack of them have folded.
Ron: Yes.
OW: Which is a good thing, I think.
Anne: Thank Heroes World Distribution for that. And their own mismanagement.
Scott: You know Southcenter Mall has a comics shop in one of the aisle stations?
Ron: I know the owner. She's a great gal. She doesn't carry any comics anymore. She hasn't carried comics for almost two years. She's just trying to unload the crap that she's got stuck with.
Scott: It is crap.
Ron: She had to order that stuff because, you know, "My distributor won't give me a break unless I order x dollar amount's worth of stuff. So she had to order all this crap.
JD: It used to be that a magazine shop had to order a certain amount of comics through, say, someone like Adams News or someone.
Anne: What happened was that Fine Print Distribution went and monopolized the big companies. Borders, Barnes and Noble and B. Dalton's. When they started to send out stuff, they wanted magazines. Fine Print sent out the books with the magazines. The major stores said fine, we don't care, we just want the best deal. Now the way that Fine Print made their money was that they weren't paying the comics publishers. Finally, after about 10 years, they closed up with about $170,000 in debt to the comic publisher s alone. I feel that we should have comics in Barnes and Noble and the rest. We'd get better distribution. But they're worried that they're going to have to sit on them or throw them away. They won't. Parents bring in their children to the stores. And the kids just sit bored or run around. If you had a comics section in Barnes and Noble or Borders, they could sit there for hours and hours.
Anne: What's the place in Tacoma, St. Patrick's, or--
OW: O' Leary's?
Anne: O' Leary's. What do they get, a zero?
OW: Well, they're ghastly, for sure, but they have a lot of space.
Anne: But they don't know how to use it.
OW: True! And a lot of stores who don't have any space don't know how to use it, either! They just look worse for that. The old Comics Dungeon is a great example. It's extremely small, and narrow, so there's no room to move around.
Ron: Aren't they like officially the space between two buildings or something? (laughter)
Anne: The worst has got to be Gary's Comics and Cards in Everett. I swear, you go into the back of the store where the t-shirts are and you can smell the mildew. I mean, come on! And they're like, "Well, we'll knock off a buck or two." For a $1700 shirt? That I have to burn before I can get rid of the smell?
OW: Okay, what do we all want from comics? Do we want to see more people reading? I mean, wouldn't that be nice?
Ron: Yes.
Anne: I think my priority is to see better writers and artists so that there's actually something for people to read.
OW: Sure. But good writers and good artists exist but they're buried in a morass of garbage.
Ron: Well, let's take what we've got here, and what Omar was telling me about what's going on in Japan. It's a cultural thing one. First, because they're all over the place there. And not only that, it's an art. There it's an art.
OW: It's an art everywhere. It's just that they consider it an art in Japan, whereas Americans tend not to consider it an art except a very special coterie of people, like us. I'd like to see fewer of us as a special group, and more general readers.
JD: The other thing interesting is that they are totally anti-collecting. They'll finish a comic and then toss it away.
Anne: Even with our comics, we started out that way originally. It was cheap entertainment for kids.
OW: But at least we could read it.
Anne: Right.
Ron: Well, you bought it with your money. Neal Adams had a point when he said it's one of the few things kids will buy with their own money. Now it's not really possible at three or four bucks a shot. Forgo a couple of comics and you've got a day at the t heater.
OW: What if we started printing comics on cheap paper, in anthology format?
Ron: I'm all for that.
Anne: Sure, you could go and print in black and white. It's cheaper for the artists. For the specialty market you could always say it was "classic" and hike up your price.
OW: Hey, they do it with Swamp Thing. There's lots of reasons why the price of comics has gone up, most of which are fictitious.
Ron: Is part of it trying to preserve the collectors' market?
Anne: I think a lot of it is.
Ron: Because my old issue of Daredevil #19 is in "fine" shape. And twenty-five years ago they didn't have Mando format and Ultrabrite stock and glossy covers.
OW: No, in fact the paper turned yellow after a couple months.
Ron: But it was fine. I read it, then I threw it in a box. But it still looks good, and I can still read it. These are comics you'd read under a tree in the park, wad it up, fold it up, put it in your back pocket, tie up your Chuck Taylors and go play bas ketball.
OW: Manga are printed on paper almost worse than our newsprint. It's horrible paper. But you don't hear the artists bitch about it very often. But in this country, the way we print their manga is to reprint the whole thing on heavy cotton fiber paper and jack the price up. Who wants to buy a $1600 book they've never heard about, in a medium that they have virtually no familiarity with, that already suffers from a bad public perception in the first place? I tell you, if I'm a kid (even as an adult), I'm no t going to drop three bucks on a comic I've never heard of, and there's no way in hell I'm going to spend forty dollars a month on things I'm totally unfamiliar with. Hell with that. I go to a used bookstore. I don't care what condition my used books are in, as long as they don't have missing pages or pen marks in them.
Ron: It's the content. Right across the street there's a used bookstore going out of business. They're selling these black and white Savage Sword of Conan magazines in there for 75¢ apiece. You go to Golden Age or Zanadu comics and they're like fiv e, ten dollars.
OW: You're never going to get people to read something if they can't afford it, any more than their going to go pick up an original Paul Klee print.
Ron: Well, why would they? They got rich. How many retailers sprang up in the last five years?
OW: Over a third of the comic book shops that sprang up are now out of business. In some places, as many as two-thirds.
Ron: But I haven't heard of any new museums going up. (laughter)
OW: The direct market sales have been nauseatingly tied down to collectors. It seems to me that books should be available everywhere, for everyone. If you want a romance novel, you can pick up a romance novel at a gas station in the middle of Kansas. If y ou want Archie, you can pick up Archie on the old revolving stands. Archie sells ten times better on the newsstand than in the direct market. Doesn't that tell you something about the direct sales crowd? They're not children. So why l imit adults to unfamiliar specialty shops?
Anne: When I go to the Amtrak station, I don't see comics there. When I was in Edinburgh, in Scotland, you go to a newsstand, you'll see all sorts of titles. Not just the Time, Newsweek, main magazines. The whole bottom row is comics. I don't see t hat here. I don't see comics in airports, I don't see them in bus stations, I don't even see them on boats.
Ron: Could you imagine? What better place to kill time than the ferry station or on the ferry? It's thirty minutes to Bainbridge, an hour to Bremerton.
OW: You could easily read a comic in the half-hour to Bainbridge.
Ron: Well, the way they're written now, you could read four. (laughter)
OW: And these are close distances. The boat to Vancouver or Victoria is four hours. Why not use those ferry stations for public visibility? Why do we always rely on direct s ales?
Ron: You can advertise your market and sell at the same time, by creating a presence on your newsstands, and generate some retail income--in the same shot. Create a presence, and people will say, "Hey," even though they've never set foot in a direct sales store.
OW: Almost everyone in the world got their first comics from the newsstand.
Anne: I got my first X-Men from the newsstand.
Ron: I didn't know about the comics specialty shops back then.
OW: You didn't need to.
Ron: I'd walk down to the old drugstore, G. O. Guy or the Rx drugstore or Bartell's, and pick up my comics.
JD: I used to get my first issues of Fantastic Four, Batman, Superman, all from the drugstore.
Scott: 7-11 was my comics store of choice for a long time.
Ron: The first Spider-Man #125 and #126 I got from the 7-11. My dad picked them up for me. He said, "Hey, I found these at the 7-11," and took me back up there.
Anne: The first comic I got was from a comic book shop that someone won in a poker game. That's all there was. I realize now that was because of the distributors. You go to any store now that deals with different magazines, and every one of them has a dif ferent distributor. But the direct sales comic book stores go through one distributor--Diamond.
OW: I think a large central distributor is not always a bad thing. But if you control 98-99% of the market as Diamond does, you have a responsibility to each and every single one of the small companies and every single title. None of this just relying on DC, none of this relying on Marvel for your sales. Your relationship with every single publisher has to be pristine and equal.
Anne: Diamond aren't even reliable.
OW: Having a contract with Diamond ensures that you'll be able reach most of North America and England. It's peculiar if you're in the small press. You're fighting for a small part of the market with every other publisher, and if Diamond doesn't like your book, you are screwed.
Anne: Exactly. They give you three issues to work on it. They don't tell you even what the goal is.
OW: Who the hell put distributors in the position of evaluating artists?
Anne: They not evaluating the art per se. They're evaluating their risk, financially. How does an accountant know what's good for the public?
OW: What if all the magazine distributors did that? What if the magazine distributors had to sift through every single magazine ever published, to evaluate it for content? It would be impossible. That's not how to run a business.
Anne: But magazine stores don't pre-order.
Ron: The whole idea is that you're paying them to get your stuff out there. It's a given that if you want your stuff out there you're going to pay for advertising and distribution. But if they're going to get their money, why then this arbitrary evaluatio n system that says they won't deal with you, they'll deal with the guy who's selling twice what you're selling?
OW: Why should it be a matter of sales? Any decent accountant would cross-collateralize anyway.
Anne: Diamond just wants to have zero risk.
OW: It's impossible to have no risk if you own the whole damned market.
Anne: Of course. That's why they're isolating, specializing things. Even though they see they're sales dropping, they still consider Marvel, DC, Image to be no risk. Because they're trained to think, "Well, they've been there this long."
JD: What's frustrating is that it's the exact opposite of how people operate in the stock market. In the stock market you can't even think of making profit without some kind of risk. It's all a gamble.
OW: The "safest" investment there is, was a Series EE Treasury Bond. You can be assured the government isn't going bankrupt anytime soon. But in the ten years it takes that money to mature and double, any decent business person could have made ten times t hat with the same initial amount. If they're interested in profit, then they need to open up their market. They could easily triple their profits by improving the range and quality of material. And the publishers are the same.
Ron: Okay, let's take, say, an artist/writer team. What happens if someone like Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell decide they aren't going to go through Diamond?
Anne: Then they're locked out.
Ron: You don't think a retailer would bring their stuff in?
Anne: No, they won't consign because it's high risk. Especially for consignment, they want to have their money now, up front.
OW: Yet the retailers are already getting screwed by the distributors. Funny. If you're lucky, the retailer's working on a margin of about 20-30%.
Anne: When I was looking for a distributor for Battlebride, I went to Diamond, then I went to Capital City. Two weeks to the day, Marvel bought Heroes World. Everyone was panicking. I went to Capital and told them how much I was selling my comic for--$1.2 5--and Capital said, "It's not worth our while to carry it. Hike it up to $2.50." And I did. And I don't know why.
OW: Well, you can see where that $2.50 went.
Anne: Yeah. I went to a comics shop in Renton that had bought my book. It turned out that the shop was making about 30% on the comic, while the distributor had leeched the rest. Then the distributor tried to push ad space on me.
OW: Jesus. This is why small press does much better going directly to their customers. That's why they all go to conventions, because they want to cut out the middle man.
JD: Goblin Studios does that.
OW: They make much more money doing that than if Diamond distributed them. Assuming that Diamond was even "gracious" enough to distribute them.
Ron: That's what bothers me about having a third party decide the legitimacy of your craftsmanship.
JD: It's bad enough dealing with editors.
Ron: Well, there's another entity unto itself.
OW: We'll get to that one in a sec.
Ron: I can't wait.