By the time
I'd hit my third year of university I was certain I wanted to be a
comic book writer.
It's hard to
put into words just how vibrant that land of opportunity looked back
then, in 2007. Marvel and DC had bounced back from their near death
in the 1990s, with DC's spin off Vertigo leading the way with a tidal
wave of adult focussed titles, while Image comics was quickly rising
to become an ascendant third party in the previous binary landscape.
Walk into
any comic book shop at that time and you'd see shelves filled with
literary mainstays. Preacher and Sandman were always in stock. Recent
series like Fables and Y: The Last Man would be seeing new volumes
every six months. Older titles and obscure series that hadn't been
seen in years were getting new print runs. Image itself was willing
to take a punt at putting out any number of odd and offbeat titles.
Girls. Savage Dragon. Army @ Love. Works like Jack Staff and
Strangehaven that had struggled in obscurity for years were finally
finding an audience.
Outside the
printed page, others were thriving too. Webcomics had become big
business, growing fandoms such that they could rival their printed
competitors, and it wouldn't be long until Penny Arcade and
Gunnerkrigg Court would find themselves sharing shelf space with
Superman and Dick Tracy. On the big screen, Sin City had captivated
audiences and brought the comic that inspired it a whole new
readership, while a big screen adaption of Watchmen was purported to
be right around the corner.
The way I
saw it, I'd spend my twenties working the small press, making
connections before breaking in some time in my thirties, giving me
the rest of my life to put together my magnum opus.
What
actually happened was I spent a decade dealing with depression,
unemployment, a pandemic and an environment of constantly unstable
social media sites that scuppered my ability to build a following.
Even with that aside though, I discovered that I had severely
underestimated how much work it would actually take to get my foot in
the door. Now, on the eve of my first time exhibiting at the
prestigious Though Bubble convention, I look at the comic book
industry and see what looks like an unscaleable wall.
In the run
up to Thought Bubble, I messaged Joe Glass, writer and creator of The
Pride, to find out if he'd be exhibiting at his usual table there
this year. What he told me was that he was basically ready to throw
in the towel. Sales were down. Interest was down. He figured he'd
have a better chance in the world of literature, and who can blame
him to come to that conclusion?
To me, Joe
Glass was a known guy. Someone who had been around in comics for a
long time. The Pride was constantly praised, as well as considered a
landmark in the history of LGBTQ comics. Damn, I thought, if
he's struggling to make it, what chance on Earth do I have?
Another
anecdote. I was at New York Comic Con in 2011. I sat in on the Image
Comics panel where they announced a rebooted run of comics starring
characters from Rob Liefeld's Extreme Comics line. (Rob actually got
boos from the audience when he came out, which, however you feel
about the man, was pretty disrespectful, and now looks like a grim
foreshadowing to the state that online comics discourse was heading
towards.)
One of the
titles announced was Prophet, written by Brandon Graham and
illustrated by Simon Roy. The series was met with great acclaim, and
praised as one of the best comics coming out at the time. It was
Roy's art in particular that was singled out as one of the comic's
greatest strengths. There was a sense that Roy had really made a name
for himself with Prophet, and that he would ride the wave to
mainstream success.
After
several years of his work showing up in places as varied as 2000ad
and the Halo comics, Roy would go on to create Habitat in 2016 and
First Knife in 2020, which should have gotten a bigger readership
than they did. The comics were very clearly passion projects, yet
didn't really get the promotion, coverage, or widespread release they
deserved. It was very clear that there was more to these fictional
worlds that Roy wanted to explore, but in the end, it took self
publishing to do it. He started a follow up, Griz Grobus, as a
webcomic, crowdfunding the physical release, before it was eventually
picked up by Image again for a retail market.
It's not
that I think Roy feels he got the short end of the stick. He's gone
on record about how satisfied he is with the stories he gets to tell,
but I look at what the world was like back in 2007 and I think about
how by all rights his "Grobusverse," should be a household
name, with an animated series and several video games by now.
Just like
Joe Glass, whose recent The Miracles I believe could have been this
generation's Invincible, I can't help but feel like modern comics,
far from cultivating new and exciting talent, is doing nothing but
stifling it.
How did it
come to this?
It happened in multiple fronts, but the most critical blow came from corporate
consolidation of the internet. At the turn of the decade, comic book
journalism was bright eyed, popular and vibrant. Comic Book Resources
and Comics Alliance both were constantly shining a light on new
talent, new stories, as well as branching out towards exploration and
analysis of the medium as a whole. I remember Comics Alliance once
doing a special "Sex Week" where they released seven days
worth of articles exploring the subgenre of erotic comic books.
Such an idea
seems unthinkable now, in an age where sites are forbidden from
straying from safe, corporate sanitisation. Indeed, both CBR and CA
would find themselves stripped of identity and ground to the bone as
they were bought out, sold, and bought out again by larger and larger
conglomerates. Now CBR is little more than a platform for big
industry press releases, while CA has been repurposed as a news
aggregate site, the cruellest of fates. Just visiting the site feels
like you're looking at a killer wearing the skin of it's victim.
The second
blow to comics came from, and I hate to say it, Hollywood. With the
booming, relentless success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, many
assumed that the comic book industry's ascent to becoming a dominant
cultural force was assured. However, in this instance, the rising
tide did not lift all boats. As surprising as it is to hear, sales of
Marvel comics have not significantly increased since the MCU came
onto the scene in 2008. Despite becoming one of the most profitable
franchises in history, audiences have not been particularly motivated
when it comes to exploring the source material that their favourite
films originated from.
And yet,
even though the comic book industry has gotten little from
Hollywood's success, more and more of their territory and space has
been ceded to it. While comic book conventions have always involved
partial coverage of film and TV, they have, at their heart, always
been COMIC BOOK conventions. You'd get a ticket, head down, meet some
writers, watch some announcements of what the next big events comics
were going to be, check out some shoe boxes of back issues, sit in
the Batmobile and maybe go get Lou Ferrigno's signature.
Now, so much
of the floor space at the big conventions have been given over to
Hollywood, and only Hollywood. News coverage out of SDCC or NYCC is
almost always "Here's what film is coming next. Here's there
cast of xyz. Here's some stuff about video games." The heart of
the cons, what made them what they are in the first place, is getting
pushed further and further aside. Now visitors get their ticket and
shove their way though to Hall H to find out that RTD is back to play
Doctor Doom, before they put on VR goggles to play the next Call of
Duty game and then spend the rest of the money they have on Funkos or
ten foot tall Pokémon plushies. If the mood arises, they might
consider taking a glance at a self published comic book while they
queue for an hour for Lou Ferrigno's signature.
Finally, the
coup de grace was delivered by the deadening of online spaces. As we
spent a decade migrating from our enthusiast forums over to the
shared spaces of Twitter and Instagram we were forced to tailor our
output to the broadest audience possible. We were forced to become
our own marketers. Our own brand managers. The work could no longer
speak for itself, because how on Earth was it possible for people to
even find the work?
Yet despite
all that, the algorithm crushed us anyway. Flighty and unknowable, as
though some kind of special combination of words and images will
chart the path to success, writers and artists were left like
passengers on a sinking ship, drowning and desperate, stepping on top
of each other in just the hopes of staying above water for one more
moment.
When I was
in a newly opened comic book shop in Chester I picked up a copy of
Local Man by Tony Fleecs and Tim Seeley, on a whim. I had frankly
never heard of it. I was astounded at how good it was when I had read
it, but what stood out to me more was how it needn't have been this
way. This is the kind of comic where once upon a time talk of it
would have been everywhere. It's the kind of thing Comics Alliance
would have been writing think pieces on for like a month. Now,
however, it passed completely under the radar.
Where do we
even start to solve a problem like this? Corporate media is now more
powerful than ever, and social media dominates. If we are to start
anywhere, it's got to be with each other. Writers, artists,
colourists and letterers are going to have to come together and
rebuild things wholesale. Personally, I honestly think we need to see
a comics media landscape that's run by creators for creators. An
independent, co-owned media that isn't going to sell out to
conglomerates or Hollywood. We need a resurgence in sites like
Comics Alliance, we need podcasts that garner a strong audience, we
need video sites like Nebula that can stand in contrast to YouTube's
dominance.
In the end
though I'm just some guy, who has yet to even get his foot in
the door. Best I can do is speak it, and try and will it into being.
Casting out a message in a bottle in the hopes that somebody will
find it. There are people like me all over the world with art to
create and stories to tell. The next Hellboy, Invincible or
Gunnerkrigg Court is out there right now and it's drowning on that
sinking ship. If all I can do is shout the alarm in people's face,
like Diogenes screaming from his barrel, then hell, that's what I'll
keep doing.
Though if
you are at Thought Bubble next weekend please consider buying some of
my comics, books or artworks. That would be appreciated.
Addendum
Some
comics you should check out:
The
Miracles by Joe Glass and Vince Underwood
Habitat
by Simon Roy (and then read the rest of his Grobusverse comics)
Local
Man by Tony Fleecs and Tim Seeley
Strangehaven
by Gary Spencer Millidge
O
Sarilho by Shizamura
Prism
Stalker by Sloane Leong
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Jack Harvey 2024
