The Comics Reporter

April 30, 2008

Please Consider Donating To A Fund To Aid Hospitalized Retailer David Pirkola

The comics retailer David Pirkola was shot last week; he has no health insurance. While the industry pulls for Mr. Pirkola's full recovery, it's now possible to aid on what may be the tail end of a very long process -- alleviating some of the pain of the costs incurred. Please consider joining me in donating some money.

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Another Great Writer Comments: Bob Levin on Wertham and Ten-Cent Plague

Hey, no matter how you feel about the book, between Bart and Ben and Bob we're hearing from all the great current writers about comics on this subject, too.

posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink

A Pair Of NYCC 2008 Follow-Ups

My last essay on New York Comic-Con 2008 brought a personal response from Reed Exhibitions official Lance Fensterman, who was nice enough to answer a pair of questions in follow-up that I wondered about while I was posting that original essay. I wanted to get them up as a resource for future articles.

TOM SPURGEON: First, what was the NYCC's position on the charge that people were being exploited for booth costs? Was that really happening? Was there a miscommunication between con and exhibitors on what they needed to bring or buy at the show?

LANCE FENSTERMAN: I am not aware of any specific "charges" to this end, so it's a little tricky to provide any official response. Based on your question it sounds as if you are referring to costs of doing business at the Javits Center for things like labor, electric (if needed), furnishings, etc. Every exhibitor at NYCC had personal and email contact with NYCC staffers before the event in an effort to communicate requirements, procedures, what to expect, etc. It is obviously our desire for all of our exhibitors to have a great event, we do our very best to prepare our customers for the unique experience of doing business at the Javits Center. To that end this year we paid for labor for any exhibitor wishing to carry in items for there booth which meant direct savings for them. Now, having said all of that, NYC is an expensive place to do business, we take no profit in this, it is simply a fact of NYC and it's the price you literally pay for being in NYC. If the show were done in a second or third tier market those costs would be lower, but the magnitude of the show would also be different.

SPURGEON: Second, and this may be a stupid question, but Reed's a big corporation and the NYCC is an increasingly successful trade show. Why haven't you been able to put together a consistent string of dates?

FENSTERMAN The Javits is full, plain and simple, there is more demand for the space than there is space. It's a matter of moving the Auto Show, moving the boat show, moving the Vision conference (each event attracting as many or more customers than NYCC) -- they too are paying customers with large annual events that have had the same dates for many many years and that already have the venue booked through 2020! On a regular basis I sit with Javits officials and we literally go through giant calendars, year by year, looking for more space, looking for consistent dates. Trust me, this is a point of frustration for us as well and in fact I was just at the Javits Center this week going through those calendars again. We are exuding all of the muscle we can to get dates and space, but you can't cancel someone else's show because it is more convenient for us. I'm optimistic that this will improve as the con gets more and more successful we can make a better argument for "stealing" someone else's dates, or using our corporate muscle to move someone, but it is a very tricky proposition but one that I am working on regularly as I hate shifting dates too!

posted 8:05 am PST | Permalink

Go, Download: Petals, A Spell

petalsaspell.pdf

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Go, Read: How The Hulk Got Cartoonist Jeremy Eaton On The Radio

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Go, Read: Sad Song In A-Flat

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Go, Look: Mari Seikkailee

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Go, Look: Mats!? At SHQ

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Go, Look: Bill Mauldin Slideshow

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Go, Look: Fred Hembeck at NYCC '08

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Go, Read: Vietnamese Batman Comic

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Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* this site received a smattering of notes objecting to an anonymous professional's take on last weekend's Pittsburgh con. That professional punted on the ExpoMart being closed, and I regret running it without a more exacting double-check. Turns out they are closing part of it: they're closing one end to build a sporting goods store. However, the con is still scheduled to take place in the part it traditionally uses next year. In fact, that they're scheduled to make a go of it next year is news in and of itself. A couple of people closer to the show objected to the "Murder Con" designation -- while it's not something I'd use in casual reference, the fact is that's what some people have been calling the show, and the con's perceived link to Michael George has a significant role in how it's going to be received, so I don't mind its use there.

* I updated this site's review of Hope Larson's Chiggers to represent the fact that she did actually hand-letter the final product.

* the cartoonist Jason Lutes is blogging now.

* I believe if you download the PDF for Arthur, you'll see the new Buenaventura Press-edited comics section.

* the prominent comics blogger and retailer Chris Butcher talks to Marc Weidenbaum about Viz's original graphic novels effort in a fact-stuffed article of the old-fashioned streamline the quotes in variety. It's probably the must-read of the day. Related, sort of: Matt Fraction and Abhay Khosla discuss the creative landscape in terms of independent publishers and whether or not they deserve that appellation if they take the same battery of rights that the bigger companies do.

* random travel note near completion of a trip one: man, Portland has a really nice-looking airport for an airport of that size. The unique group of vendors is what makes it, but it's nice in other ways as well. LaGuardia, however, remains a shithole. Random travel note near completion of a trip two: a guy behind the desk offering to unlock his manager's office to let me fax something isn't a business center.

* the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler would like you to know that he was not at Stumptown to wear a hat and provide humorous fodder for this site's con report, he was there to publicize his book Postage Stamp Funnies.

* the writer Peter Sanderson has for years written crazy-long San Diego reports which were always fun to read because they were drenched in detail about such things as taking a ferry to the show or who Sanderson engaged in conversation. This pathetically-formatted article (even I don't usually forget the simple smart quotes cut and replace) takes the same approach to the recent New York Comic-Con, with I think mixed results. Still, it's worth reading if you're interested in convention culture or reaction to the 2008 New York show specifically. On the one hand, Sanderson really embodies a kind of New York-native enthusiasm for the show that's been awesome to behold; on the other hand, his approach here isn't specific enough to give his arguments as to NYCC's awesomeness a lot of weight, and you sort of have to figure out what standards he's applying in order to figure them out.

posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink

Happy 33rd Birthday, Ben Catmull!

posted 7:15 am PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Nat Gertler!

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Quick hits
Craft
On Hercules Covers
Matt Baker Mondays
Frank Santoro Apologizes
Mike Manley's Self-Portrait

Exhibits/Events
Life Lessons At NYCC
New Cartoon Contest

History
Bill Finger's First Wife
Please Respect John Byrne
Don't Take Comics So Seriously
Spider-Man Artwork to Library of Congress

Interviews/Profiles
RBN: Mike Carey
Overspill: Kenny Penman
ComicMix: Grant Morrison
ComicMix: Paul Southworth
Comics Waiting Room: Alex Robinson
ComicMix: David Gallaher, Steve Ellis

Publishing
Liberty Comics Is Coming

Reviews
Steve Duin: Goodbye
Richard Krauss: Ed #4
Andy: The Spirit Vol. 1
Don MacPherson: Various
John Mitchell: Jessica Farm
Don MacPherson: Caliber #1
Richard Krauss: Cavaliers #1
John Mitchell: Kaput and Zosky
John Mitchell: Benny and Penny
John Mitchell: The Clouds Above
Don MacPherson: White Picket Fences

April 29, 2008

CR Newsmaker Interview: Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF

*****

With a big win announced in the long-running Gordon Lee case announced at New York Comic-Con several days ago, and a bonanza of fundraising and publicity opportunities over that same period, I wanted to talk to Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Charles Brownstein about his group's recent string of successes. I caught him between the end of NYCC and the beginning of Stumptown.

*****

TOM SPURGEON: Tell me how you found out about the Lee win and what you felt as you both heard it and had the opportunity to tell other people. That was probably the biggest win of your tenure.

CHARLES BROWNSTEIN: It felt terrific to know that Gordon's ordeal was over, and that all of the financial, intellectual, and emotional investment that the comics world put into defending him had paid off.

I probably should have known it would happen this way. In the six years I've been at the Fund, major case developments always tend to happen when I'm away at a convention. This was no exception.

I received an email at about 4:00 on Friday afternoon from Cory Begner, one of our lead counsel, telling us that Patterson's office was finally pushing the dismissal through. My initial feeling was, "Great news!" At that moment I was in a green room at the Javits getting the final logistics sorted for our VIP Reception with Neil Gaiman. I interrupted Neil's meeting and said, "Sir, I think you want to read this," and handed him the phone with the message on it. He read it and said, "Great news, can we announce it tonight?" And then it was another piece of logistics.

So while we were sorting the line, getting the VIP gift bags delivered, nailing down the last of the A/V, saying no to various people trying to sneak into Neil's green room, getting badges to approved VIPs, and all the other detail oriented things that happen at a large event, I was also running around calling the lawyers to get verification that Judge Salmon had actually signed the Nolle Prosse (dismissal) documents and we were good to announce. At around 4:50 or so I got the call verifying that we could announce. Then, maybe a minute later, Stan Lee walked into the green room to wait for his panel to start and our photographer, Steve Prue, called me over to shoot a pic with Stan and Neil. The expression on my face in that shot probably best sums up how I felt when I heard the final word and knew we could announce it to the world. That was truly one of the most awesome and surreal moments of my tenure.

SPURGEON: Why did the Lee case resolve when it did? Did you expect it to be over so soon?

BROWNSTEIN: I don't know that "so soon" is the right phrase in the context of the 3 and a half year struggle this case represents. But, as I indicated in the PR we released yesterday, I did know that we were close to the end, I just didn't know when it would actually happen.

The sequence of events that led to this win really began moments after the mistrial. Gordon, his wife & mother, Alan & Cory Begner, Paul Cadle, and I went back to the hotel after court and started dissecting the day's events. After a healthy amount of venting, and much analysis, we decided that a misconduct motion should be brought, and that it should cover everything up to and including the mistrial. Cory went to work on it, and filed in December. And it is a work of savage legal beauty. Cory is one of the best legal writers I've ever known, and she really earned her pay on this one.

The day after the mistrial, Patterson was quoted in the Rome News Tribune, vowing to put this case on the next trial calendar. We knew the next misdemeanor trial calendar was to be in February. So, we submitted the misconduct motion, and in January I started getting our team of experts prepared to mobilize again. As the clock ticked closer, there was no move from the prosecutors to put this case on the docket, so I kept our team on standby. Eventually, the misdemeanor calendar came and went. The DAs offered no response to our motion, and never put us on the docket.

Shortly after the calendar passed they contacted Paul Cadle and said they'd be willing to drop the case if Gordon wrote a letter of apology. Gordon was willing to do that from the start, and frankly, we've been saying all along that this case should have been solved with an apology and not a prosecution, so we didn't object. Gordon submitted his apology letter and we waited for Patterson to drop the case. Weeks went by without response and it was making everyone a bit edgy. So, last week the Begners sent a letter to Patterson requesting that she honor her end of this agreement, and dismiss the case before we had to go to court to seek relief. On Friday she had a conversation with Alan Begner and finally did authorize the charges to be dismissed.

So, it resolved when it did, because we felt that Patterson had waited long enough to honor her end of the agreement. I didn't expect it to be over last Friday, but I did expect that it would be over within this period of time. And, just looking at the topsy-turvy history of this case, I also was prepared for the agreement to fall through, in which case we'd have pushed the misconduct motion into court this summer during the peak of Patterson's re-election campaign.

SPURGEON: Is everything settled now with the Lee case from your end? Are there still administrative tasks to be done?

BROWNSTEIN: There are still a few invoices that need to be paid, but for the most part it's all done.

SPURGEON: Is there a review process by which you find out the total expenditure and/or go through a case to analyze the strategies that worked and the strategies that didn't?

BROWNSTEIN: We keep good records and have the total expenses to date at any given time. Of course, I'm writing you while I'm on an airplane to Portland for the Stumptown Festival, so I can't give you the amount to the penny, but I can tell you it's in excess of $100,000. In terms of strategy, we've been doing post-mortems every step of the way with counsel. I try to be as hands-on as is useful with counsel, so always have a good sense of where we are in the case. I think that what worked can be boiled down to three factors:

1) We hired the best attorneys for the case. I've always seen it as the CBLDF's job to find the best counsel for a case and to go out and find the money that they need to do their jobs. For this case, we literally could have done no better than Alan & Cory Begner and Paul Cadle.

2) Our lawyers had access to terrific experts. Our legal team had access to pioneers including Burt Joseph, our retained counsel, and Mike Bamberger, Media Coalition's counsel, who have waged the cases that set the precedents in harmful to minors law. We also had access to tremendous educators and creators who were willing to testify and provide background. At various points we've had John Lowe, Scott McCloud, James Sturm, Nick Bertozzi, and Chris Staros on point to testify when needed. And throughout the process, I brought the institutional knowledge of this sort of case to the table when working strategy with our team.

3) We had the money to do the work. Though there was always a bit of message board dissent about this case, we were fortunate to have a steady flow of donations to be able to pay the legal bills as they came in. And while I keep a tight watch on how much things cost, there was never a point where counsel wanted to perform work and we were unable to let them do so because the ready cash wasn't there for it. If donations weren't there, that may not have been true, especially when we were forced to go completely back to square one at the midpoint of the case.

SPURGEON: How did Gordon take the news? How did his business do throughout this ordeal? Do you know if he's back up to where he was before all this happened?

BROWNSTEIN: I called Gordon and asked, and here's what he told me:

"When I finally got the phone call from Paul [Cadle] I was stunned. Finally. It didn't sink in until Saturday that it is finally over."

His business did suffer, and there were noticeable dips after articles appeared in the newspaper characterizing the book as pornographic. That happened almost every time this case was reported on over these last three and a half years. He told me that this made it very hard to cultivate new business.

He told me that business is still down,"but we're hoping as the news hits and it sinks in that we were telling people the truth for the last three and a half years that things turn around."

SPURGEON: Do you think there will be a chilling effect on this kind of case because of the dismissal and the way that popular local opinion began to turn against the prosecution, or do you think this might be the case where the harassment of a case being pressed in this matter might be seen as an effective and useful political tool in the future?

BROWNSTEIN: I don't think I can venture an opinion either way. History shows us that sole proprietor comics retailers are easy targets for prosecution, and I think they will always be, because they just don't have the resources to scare away a prosecutor.

That said, I do hope that as news gets out about this case that prosecutors thinking of going after a comic store recognize that while the shopkeeper may not have the resources, his industry has an organization whose job is to protect people in those circumstances. And that this organization gets the best defense team and wages a very aggressive fight.

It looked to a lot of people that Patterson's office was trying to spend us into folding. In the end, we weren't the ones who blinked, and if we went to trial, I'm confident we would have won. I think it's good for comics that the CBLDF is in that position, and I hope that can help discourage future prosecutions of this nature. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

SPURGEON: Otherwise, how was your NYCC?

BROWNSTEIN: It was great. It really was the best of the New York Comic Cons. Reed did a fantastic job organizing the show. They brought the people in, and they wanted to spend money on comics. The crowds really couldn't have been nicer or more engaged. I met a lot of supporters who expressed congratulations on winning Gordon's case, and whose congratulations I passed along to Gordon and our team. My crew did a really terrific job of running our booth and the education table where we co-presented the ADL's exhibit of Will Eisner's The Plot. All of our events came off as planned, and were a lot of fun for the folks attending. We were profiled in the New York Post and New York Times on the opening day of the show. And we won the Georgia case. It really couldn't have been a better convention.

SPURGEON: Can you quantify or perhaps more explicitly qualify what major news organization coverage of a CBLDF really means for the Fund beyond the fact that it's just nice to have that kind of coverage?

BROWNSTEIN: It moves the needle towards greater visibility, which translates to greater mainstream awareness, respectability, and, ultimately, support. The Times & Post articles brought a lot of people by our booths and to our programs to learn more and drop some coins in the jar. I think we saw a similar phenomenon when Y: The Last Party was picked up by all the news outlets that covered that. When people see that there is a professional organization dedicated to defending and advancing the growth of comics, especially when they have a love for free expression or comics, they want to help support it.

SPURGEON: Can you provide some detail beyond a general appraisal that might give us some understanding of how your weekend's fund raising events went?

BROWNSTEIN: I don't have final numbers, but inclusive, our week's events are projected to gross around $40,000. That represents about $17,000 in donations from merchandise premiums & membership, about $19,000 from the Neil Gaiman events, and $4,000 from our pre-convention events. Our expenses are probably going to come in around $10,000, which represents venue rental, catering, guest accommodations, event A/V, load-in and load-out, transportation, drayage, furniture, and some printing costs. That's a good week. It's about half to two-thirds of what we typically gross at San Diego, which says a lot about how quickly New York Con has become a substantial presence. Even removing the Gaiman events and our New York Comics Week run up events, this show beat our performance at all previous New York Comic Cons and is solidly our #2 event of the year..

The other thing that came out of this weekend was an awful lot of new fundraising opportunity. At least one awesome new event for May came out of it. I hope to nail all the details down on that event to announce by the end of next week, but it involves hosting a book premiere for one of the most influential writers of the moment. We also gathered a really cool auction of collaborative original art by Neil Gaiman & about a dozen other artists. There's a Jeffrey Brown/Neil Gaiman jam piece in there that may be the best piece of art I've ever seen Jeff produce. So, a lot of good future business was accomplished, which, now that I have such an incredibly good staff, is where I'm spending a lot of my time when I'm onsite at conventions.

SPURGEON: How's the state of the Fund resources right now, post-Lee? Could you handle another case right now? Could you handle two at a time?

BROWNSTEIN: We have enough money in the reserve fund to wage one straightforward case. Two cases or a complicated PROTECT ACT case could probably clean that out if donations slowed down.

What really makes me lose sleep is the prospect of getting a case under the PROTECT Act's horrifying provisions equating drawings of teen and juvenile sexuality with actual child pornography. I've seen a couple of convictions for anime and manga that was ruled to be child porn. These were dirty people who also had real child porn, and who deserved their convictions for that material, not for repugnant art. There's a difference between photographic evidence of a crime and drawings.

Those are the cases where we really need the community to stay firm in their support of the First Amendment. I think a lot of the content in the sexually oriented manga is pretty repugnant, but it's lines on paper. The thing that raises my ire about PROTECT and the current slate of child pornography laws is that in attempting to create stronger resources against sexual predators, they create categories of thought crime. Child pornography is photographic evidence of a crime. To lower that bar to include dirty drawings and uncomfortable, if not repugnant, ideas muddies the waters in a way that disrespects the severity of the crime, and the victims of it.

Those cases also frighten me, because the very nature of the content is such that the case will be unpopular. And the logistics of child porn laws determine that it is illegal to possess the images in question, so if a yaoi title, for instance, were to be the cause of such a prosecution, the lawyers and our staff would run a risk possessing the title in question as part of our defense evidence. Yet, if it's just lines on paper, no matter how revolting, it needs to be defended.

All of this stuff is complicated by the fact that at least one of the manga ratings systems appears to be inconsistent with several state harmful to minors statutes, and throws out the artistic merit prong of the Miller test with its definition of "fan service." So, those cases will be costly, and unpopular if they happen. But if you turn your back on MPD Psycho or Berzerk then you are more likely to lose the fight when they come for A Child's Life and Awkward.

SPURGEON: You've been there a while now, Charles. How much of our recent strength do you owe to the continuity you've been able to provide the Fund?

BROWNSTEIN: I'm the product of a Jewish and Catholic marriage, so I do poorly when asked to publicly identify my own strengths. But I think it's fair to say that the fact that I have six years of experience at the Fund – the longest tenure of any Executive Director – means that I was able to wage a case from start to finish, and to offer counsel an uninterrupted institutional memory for this sort of work. I also think that the length of my tenure has allowed the Fund to move the needle into new areas of fundraising and education, because we didn't need to go back to start with a new ED. Lord knows, it took me at least a year to figure out how our machine worked, and another two to make it work better. It's really only in the last two years that we've really been able to execute the new areas of fundraising and mission work that we set out to perform when we had our last Board summit in 2004.

I think the biggest reason for that is that I have a great staff. For the first 3 and a half years that I was at the Fund, I was the only full time employee, and I had part time staff for the home office work. Which meant that I spent about 20 weekends a year at conventions bringing in the money we needed to do the work, while the home office staff sorted the money, cut the bills, and kept the mail order going out properly. When I was able to hire Greg Thompson as our Deputy Director in early 2006, and was able to promote Elizabeth Schreck to being our part-time Fundraising Manager last fall, the Fund at last had a staff that could divide up the labor so we could do even more work. Greg & Elizabeth took a lot of the road and merchandising fundraising off of my plate (thank goodness), which frees up my time to do more in the way of event and business development fundraising, and to work seriously on teambuilding for larger education work. Which I am grateful for, because that's the kind of work I prefer doing. The Fund has gone from functionally having an Executive Director who serves as some sort of administrative OMAC, which was true of every ED from Susan Alston up to me, to having a small, but strong team. And we're a better organization for it.

SPURGEON: Is it easier to run Fund activities when participating in them has a perceivable publicity or community benefit to those who choose to do so? Is there anything cynical we can say about the nature of some creators' participation now as opposed to when things were tougher?

BROWNSTEIN: Sure, it's easier to hold successful events when those events have positive momentum. We're fortunate that just about every party or reading or speaking event we've held in the past year (that is, since we really made them a priority) has been met with positive turnout and publicity. But I think those events are successful, because they are undertaken with two sincere agendas: 1) Educate about the power of free expression by celebrating free expression, and 2) Foster community amongst comics professionals, practitioners, and readers. CBLDF events aren't designed to sell a copy of a book, they're designed to gather the community around our shared love of comics and free speech.

I don't have anything cynical to say about the support we get from the author and business communities. The truth is that all of our supporters, and supporting businesses, give to the Fund first and foremost because they believe in the work we do on their behalf.

But I also operate under the understanding that what we do is protect the First Amendment rights that the comics field depends upon to do business. And there's a certain amount of idealism that is entailed in that, but it's coupled with a realism that without the CBLDF, a lot of the work that these entities rely upon to make a living would have a harder time existing.

To me, fundraising is about finding the win/win/win. It needs to be good for the organization supported; good for the company or author leading the community into supporting the cause; and good for the individuals gathering around both. It's great to receive big checks, but it's better when those big checks have a positive net effect for everyone involved.

SPURGEON: What's the status on your various shared brief responsibilities and other Fund involvements on an advocacy, brief-filing basis?

BROWNSTEIN: Utah's Harmful to Minors Internet case hasn't advanced much since the last time we spoke. It is still under preliminary injunction while we await State's response to our most recent motion. On Monday we are announcing our participation in a challenge to a new and unconstitutional harmful to minors law, but I'll need to withhold further details until our partners are ready for us to announce.

And we have urged the Media Coalition to support a challenge to Indiana's new harmful to minors store registration law. The law, H.B. 1042 would require any new retailer or any existing retailer that relocates after June 30 which sells or intends to sell even one item which is harmful to minors to register with the Secretary of State. Notification would include a list detailing the types of material sold or intended to be sold. The Secretary of State would then notify local governing bodies and any appropriate zoning authority of the retailer's registration. There is a $250 fee to register and noncompliance is a class B misdemeanor. The law goes into effect July 1. This law is a clear and present danger to comics retailers throughout the state, and one we intend to fight. We will have news about our involvement in a challenge soon.

SPURGEON: Is there any particular thing you want to see the Fund accomplish by the end of 2008?

BROWNSTEIN: I want us to have a 21st century web presence, and to have made the first strides towards a comprehensive education program for libraries aimed at assisting in graphic novel collection defense and development. We are taking steps towards both, and will hopefully have something to show by mid-summer, especially now that some of our time is freed up by the Lee win, and I can devote more time to these important educational components of our work.

*****
*****

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Go, Look: Rodolpho Damaggio

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Go, Look: Meg Hunt

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Go, Look: Joey Weiser's Site

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Go, Look: Berenice

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Go, Look: Unknown Covers

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Go, Look: Random Hal Foster

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Ben Schwartz Responds To Bart Beaty on David Hajdu's Ten-Cent Plague

I just read Bart Beaty's April 24th piece on David Hajdu's Ten-Cent Plague. I read the book and interviewed Hajdu at an LA Public Library event and think Beaty is somewhat one-sided in his accounting of Hajdu on a couple of subjects. While I defer 100 percent to Beaty on the history of that period (in which I'm a tourist at best) I can speak to Hajdu's book in specifics.

First, Beaty's feeling that Hajdu smeared Wertham: Hajdu does give Dr. Frederic Wertham credit for a number of good works in his life pre-comics crusade, such as opening his free clinic in Harlem for psychiatric care, at the time the first and only such clinic ever devoted to the mental health of African-Americans in the USA. He also credits him as a forward thinker re: jazz (if memory serves). Hajdu creates a much more complex image of Wertham than I have ever read. Perhaps it's not as in-depth as Beaty's own study of Wertham and comics. But it still presents Wertham as a person of substance, to be taken seriously, until he takes on the comics debate in the badly researched way that he did. If Wertham is remembered as as the #1 anti-comics crusader, we have to at least give him his due -- he did volunteer for the job. He wrote the key intellectual tract on the subject and publicly testified to the Senate (on TV? I can't remember). Wertham's research is flawed, and if it overshadows the rest of his reputation today, well, he did blow it in a big way. He never renounced it or corrected it, as far as I know (again, I defer to Beaty on that) but Wertham demolished his own image in comics history, if not his whole career. As to Beaty's feeling that Hajdu presents Wertham as the sole reason the comics business faltered: I disagree. Hajdu details the criticism of comics, massive community bonfires to eradicate them, and growing Church pressure allleading up to Wertham -- who does become the greatest single figure speaking out against comics. Hajdu makes clear that Wertham personified an already fierce movement. Wertham supporters, like the US Senate and Wolcott Gibbs at The New Yorker, also single him out as the leader in the movement. Hajdu discusses many, many local comics crusaders and politicians -- even adults who burned comics as kids -- but Wertham made his name on the issue in a widely reviewed book, in national magazines, and on TV -- and disgraced himself in doing so.

Secondly, Beaty faults Hajdu for not writing up the deplorable working conditions in the comics industry of the era. No, he doesn't dwell on it as much we've seen in other places, but a) maybe he felt it had been done,which it has, and b) he specifically set out to tell a story of a culture war, a pre-cursor to the cultural debates that would dominate the post-WW II era and soon move on to rock music, and still felt today. You might as well fault others for not recounting the bonfires, anti-comics laws, and anti-comics letters to the editor disputes in local papers as much as Hajdu does. It's simply not the point of his book. Hajdu does make clear that people like Charles Biro and Victor Fox were awful, and portrays Gaines as a step up, but still a liar. Hajdu shows Gaines making all sorts of promises on creator royalties and other issues in meetings with talent, but when it came down to the paperwork, he went by the same old sweatshop work-for-hire contracts his dad used. It's also pointed out that Sheldon Moldoff came to pitch Gaines comics suspiciously like those Feldstein edited a year later. Gaines even had an unsigned contract in his desk for Moldoff when he went with Feldstein, so, I certainly didn't come away thinking Hajdu's book oblivious to working conditions or making Gaines out a hero (or even reliable narrator).

Third, as to Beaty's claim that Hajdu romanticizes artists taking pride in their comics work: I disagree. Hajdu quotes critic Stanley Kaufmann, a comics writer in the 1940s, who says he did know co-workers who felt this way. Kaufmann then calls them "fools." Will Eisner is not complimentary of the majority of the comics business, mostly to set his own work apart, I imagine -- but the idea that comics was a stepping stone job is not left out. Hajdu does spend time on those who loved the medium, despite, or because of, its low rent status and relative creative freedom. By the 1950s, the first generation of artists who grew up on comic books, and specifically wanted to work in comic books, came along. They wanted to do good work, pitched all sorts of high minded projects, but were cut short by the anti-comics crusade. Why focus on them? I imagine, to emphasize that we lost a generation of ambitious people, not just a few star talents like Kurtzman and Kriegstein who we know today.

posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink

Quick hits
First Few Posts At New Blog Mindless Ones
* Various Reviews
* Various Reviews
* Look Back at Hellblazer #51
* Anal Retention and the Comics Fan
* Look Back at Cloak and Dagger
* On the History of Superhero Comics
* Initial Post

A Sampling Of Threads At Barbelith Underground
* My Letter to Frank Miller about Batman and Robin
* New Vs. Mighty Avengers
* Casanova
* Stupid Comics Questions
* Ed Brubaker
* All-Star Superman
* My Letter to Diana Schutz and Matt Wagner about Grendel
* The Impact of Image Comics
* The Goddamn Batman
* Jack Staff
* Transmission-X
* Bleach
* Yotsuba&!
* Grant Morrison's Batman
* Ultimates 3
* Buffy Season Eight
* Otherworld
* LoSH: A Critical Perspective
* Fun Home
* Serenity: Better Days
* Grant Morrison Interview Archive

April 28, 2008

Stumptown Comics Fest 2008 Report

By Tom Spurgeon
There are several types of comics conventions in North America, and many of them bleed into various hybrids of one sort or another. The two show varieties that see the most national press attention are the major industry cons and the regional arts festivals. The major industry cons (Comic-Con International, New York Comic-Con, WizardWorld Chicago) tend to feature the bigger comics businesses and those related hobby companies that wish to reach their shared demographic, interspersed with hobby retailers and several of the smaller companies who can count on enough of a mass audience that their demographic is ably represented, while any cracks get filled in by artists and professionals who work with those companies at all levels. They can be big or simply bloated; suffused with junky energy or stuffed with slough-like junk.

Arts festivals (Stumptown, MoCCA Festival, SPX) tend to be smaller in nature and feature either a limited array of publishers or none at all. The artist and sometimes the artist-serving publisher is the star here, as if the Artist's Alley of the larger comic book conventions leapt up from its backroom ghetto and took the bigger space like so many vampires at a scary, metal mesh-floor blood disco. At its best, a small press show can fire the imagination of the local audience in terms of comics' possibilities and the power of creative expression over corporate positioning. At their worst, it's a way for small-press artists and others ignored at the bigger shows to feast on a Station Casinos-level version of the Wynn-class ego buffet where more popular artists occasionally dine, only in many of these cases the small pressers do so without the a la carte order of craft.

Stumptown is most significantly distinguished by its being in Portland, Oregon. Portland was North America's last great city of the 20th Century and its best, thus far, of the 21st. Unlike many resurgent cities of the modern era, Portland's climb into laid-back livability has been as much about bottom-up and middle-across improvements as it has been top-down floods of corporations making it rain. It's a city of small houses, brightly colored on the inside, owned by hipsters 25-45 and families both large and small, near neighborhoods of rough buildings and slight, pungent urban decay. Young couples hit a foodstand in an empty lot in a mixed-race neighborhood on a Sunday morning. Two older men in tracksuits laugh and one of them points to say hello on a Saturday afternoon walk. I can't imagine getting out of college right now and wanting to go anywhere else. It's kind of the anti-Dubai.

Portland is also the home to dozens of cartoonists, a good sign for a city as comics folk can live practically anywhere and are drawn like flies when a comfortable and cosmopolitan city reaches that tipping point where it's discussed on chatboards and in the blogs of early adopters. What's interesting about Portland's assumption of the Comics Town USA title is that it does so without offering a gigantic number of hometown opportunities the way New York, LA or even Kansas City might. There is a small set of newspaper illustration gigs and a few proud local comic book companies where one might assume proximity could be helpful in gaining their attention, but for the most part the comics outfits here in town think nationally/internationally and just live here like everyone else. Comics thrives in the Rose City because Portland fits comics people, and because the large number of working artists has given them a voice and provided their city with another identity in a time when those kinds of things are still important.

Stumptown took place in a convention room exhibit hall or two connected to the Doubletree at Lloyd Center. The core room was a main hall about six aisles wide with front and back aisles completing a square around the floor. Dark Horse anchored the area along the front wall; Fantagraphics could be found along the back. Scott McCloud and Larry Marder anchored a mini-'80s independent comics portion of the show to the upper right from the door. About seven or eight people down a long row of tables from McCloud, Portland-area local and mainstream comics icon Brian Michael Bendis met fans. Among the more prominent multiple-artist set-ups were Sparkplug and a row of Periscope Studios artists. There were scattered appearances from artists from out of town. Shaenon Garrity and Andrew Farago, planning to attend this year's Reubens in a few weeks, were there from San Francisco, as were a group cajoled into attendance by Matt Silady; Jim Blanchard and a few of his astonishing prints made the trip down from Washington state. Los Angeles provided the show with Josh Simmons and Robert Goodin.

The best features of the show were the incredibly mellow vibe, like a very nice Saturday morning arts bazaar, and the general sound of money exchanging hands at a respectable although not intense rate. The crowds were friendly and on the average a bit more than good-looking (not something I'm ever able to figure out, but people kept mentioning this so I assume it's true) young people in the 20-35 year old age group. The crowds failed to skew towards any one set of tendencies common within the art form as much as they were capricious and even idiosyncratic in a way that you usually don't see at comics show. At approximately 4 PM, a group sitting with their backs against the wall where much of the crowd was visible noted that Brian Bendis was speaking to a group of three men while Scott McCloud held court with a crowd of six. Fresh indy faces like Tim Sievert were shaking hands about 20 feet away from where early '90s alt-comics mainstay JR Williams was selling some of his bright, attractive newer artwork. (Hopefully someone will reprint and collect Crap soon; Williams is a natural, greatly underrated cartoonist.) Fantagraphics fielded maybe the youngest team I've ever seen the publisher send to a show; heck, even their late-Sunday surprise alumni guest visit was from someone who'd been gone from the publisher less than a half-decade and who looked 15: former FBI art director Carrie Whitney, who told me which fellow, one-time employee she'd gladly run over in her car were she old enough to drive.

There was a smattering of publishing news, but I'm not sure how much of it could be made official. Larry Marder announced at his panel he would be partnering with Dark Horse on the upcoming re-launch of his Beanworld properties. This includes old work and new, merchandising and publications. Speaking of Dark Horse, Mike Richardson walked by and I grabbed him to talk for a bit. He was very gracious about his guest-blogging role here last week, and is currently in the midst of advance PR for the movie Hellboy 2. The aforementioned Robert Goodin is doing a book through Top Shelf. A lot of people caught up with various comics and trades from the Sparkplug group, including new, full-length books like Alixopoulos' The Hot Breath of War. As far as I could tell, Karl Stevens took a six-hour smoke break. Kip Manley was sporting a seersucker suit on Sunday afternoon. Someone needs to hire Jesse Hamm for comics as well as illustration work. Colleen Coover claimed she was mixing it up with Marvel fandom assembled through her latest contribution to X-Men: First Class. T Edward Bak has moved back to Portland after a period of time in Vermont, Jeff Parker baffled the younger generation with airline jokes, and Douglas Wolk spoke in very quiet tones.

I got to meet the talented, far-too-infrequent-writer-about-comics Steve Duin, who just penned this piece about Bob Levin's Most Outrageous and found the book as remarkable as I did. I tried to praise an older work of Duin's by quirkily insulting it first ("a lot of people thought this and avoided that book, but then they discovered this great thing about it"), and pretty much failed with that in spectacular fashion; too much insult, too little quirk and far too little reward. Sorry, Steve! Duin made an interesting point about how many of the good comics he found at the show he simply wasn't seeing before running into them at a show like this one. And he lives and works in the comics store-stuffed Portland area!

Many people I spoke to liked the new, "cute" Comics Journal. I quite liked the Scott Campbell prints on sale, even if they were out of my price range. Vancouver's Jonathon Dalton probably had the closest thing to a buzz book, a full-color work in an accordion-style format that other cartoonists kept promoting. Josh Simmons had buttons featuring personalities in his forthcoming work, including Rosie O'Donnell and Paul Lynde. Shannon Wheeler was sporting a jaunty cap and I encourage everyone out there to hand him a camera and ask him to take their convention photos because watching him do it while muttering under his breath is pretty darn funny. Scott McCloud -- happy about the recently released cover to the forthcoming Zot! collection -- pointed out the difference between panels that are helpful and panels that make people think they're experts and never use an offered service. Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Executive Fund Executive Director Charles Brownstein was there without a booth, although his suit generated its own, overpowering New York vibe.

Tom Devlin once made the point that the best thing about shows like Stumptown is the 15-25 year olds considering making comics that have this kind of show as one of their early exposures to the form. This, Devlin suggests, should be a better experience than the Holiday Inn basement StinkCons people of our generation had burned into their eyeballs at a tender age. I think he's right.

In general, Stumptown 2008 was a low-key show with low-key participants and low-key results. I found most people working the con to be attentive and professional. Part of that is an old-fashioned booth strategy that emphasizes face-out contact with people as they arrive at your table, and part of it is likely that folks are simply relaxed and doing their jobs as people come to them instead of making a presentation or wrangling a number of meetings or herding elements on an empty floor space. Stumptown does what it does a lot better than most shows do what they do, and at a manageable cost for most cartoonists. Portland's big independents show provides a modest showcase for a variety of talents and allows those hard-working folks access to a marketplace that serves a surprisingly significant array of needs. It could all go away in a single year, with an unfortunate facilities move or a different mix of creators, but right now it's the kind of show that Scott McCloud pointed out likely generates lifetime memories for many of its participants and I imagine makes for a pleasant Spring afternoon arts experience for much of its audience.

*****

Also Recommended: Steve Duin's coverage

*****

* Rob Goodin's art
* Brian Michael Bendis
* Karl Stevens
* Shannon Wheeler
* Graham Annable and Scott Campbell (below)

*****

*****
*****

posted 8:20 am PST | Permalink

CR Newsmaker Interview: Travis J.I. Corcoran of HeavyInk.com

*****

This interview was pitched to me rather than something I came up with on my own. As I explained briefly last week, I try not to do a lot of CEO/businessman-type interviews. First, I'm more interested in art, and when I apply the questions I find interesting about art to businessmen, they tend to have a lot of very slick-sounding answers. Second, while I like exact figures, and I sometimes think business folk are genetically vague on those kinds of thing, I also understand why some information needs to remain proprietary. Third, I lack the kind of background that allows me to easily check a lot of the claims made or to automatically catch a leap in logic that maybe shouldn't be made.

All that said, I liked talking to Travis Corcoran about his social networking sales site, HeavyInk.com, and I think this interview can at the very least be valuable in establishing a baseline for comparison with what Corcoran might say in future years, and in putting his thoughts out there for others to scrutinize. – Tom Spurgeon

*****

TOM SPURGEON: First of all, can I get some background on you in terms of your relationship to comics?

TRAVIS CORCORAN: I grew up reading "real" books, and never comic books. If I thought of them at all, I thought of them as sad cousins to "real" reading.

... and then in college (this is around 1992), an apartment-mate loaned me Watchmen, and I realized just how serious, and exciting, and artistic comics could be. Pretty soon I had borrowed Give Me Liberty, and then I moved on to Ronin, Concrete, and before too long I was going to a comic book store to pick up new issues of Concrete, Cheval Noir, whatever I could find by Moebius, etc.

... and, speaking of comic art, probably my favorite possession is a framed signed print by Moebius (so what if I had trouble buying food that month?)

SPURGEON: Of what kind of comics and which cartoonists might you be a particular fan?

CORCORAN: Even after getting involved in comics, I looked down on superhero comics...until I discovered The Authority. Now I'd say that there's no kind of comics that I totally avoid, but my interest is still a bit outside of the spandex-and-superpowers stuff: right now I'm subscribed to two dozen or so comics, including my absolute favorites:

* Ex Machina
* Walking Dead
* Pax Romana
* Atomic Robo
* Mouse Guard
* Nearly Infamous Zango
* Newuniversal
* The Flight anthologies
* pretty much anything by Warren Ellis

You can see the whole list at my profile page at HeavyInk.

SPURGEON: What was the impetus for starting your original on-line company SmartFlix?

CORCORAN: I've done a bit of woodworking, and was interested in metalworking (lathes, mills, that sort of thing), but didn't have any way to learn those skills. I found out that there were some instructional videos available, but (a) they cost $70 each, and (b) there were no reviews, to tell me if they were even worth it. I decided that there should be some way for folks to rent these videos for a lot less. I started SmartFlix on sort of a whim, with no huge expectations for it. The first month it was up, I rented out one video. A few months later, I was renting perhaps 10 or 15 videos per month...and now, it's an 11 person company, with customer support, a fulfillment team, and a four person engineering team... all of which put me in a perfect position to do something really interesting, like HeavyInk.

SPURGEON: Where in that particular market did you see a need and for an outsider, how would you describe your basic strategy in servicing that market?

CORCORAN: SmartFlix launched a little while after Netflix, and I was inspired by their model, and copied the customer support ethos from acknowledged great companies like LL Bean. From a customer's perspective, our SmartFlix strategy is pretty simple:

* grow the inventory
* provide great service

From our own perspective, though, there are two more bits of strategy:

* continuously do A/B tests of the service and the website
* relentlessly mine our data to figure out how to serve customers better

Let me explain each of these points in turn (these may seem a little boring, but bear with me, because each is highly relevant to the comic book world!)

A/B tests: If you come to the SmartFlix website, you see a certain graphic design, a certain navigation scheme, certain language, etc. ...but another customer coming to the site might see a slightly different version of this: we might have a different navigation scheme, or the pictures of the videos might be smaller, or whatever. We keep track of all of these semi-random changes, and then we see which ones made it easier for customers to find the videos they were interested in. We thus continuously tune the website to make it easier to use.

Datamining: we look for correlations which allow us to make recommendations, or suggest better choices.

You can already see how this applies to HeavyInk: first, we can tune our website over time to make it easier to use, and second, using information about how you rate comics, and authors and artists (yes, you can rate and leave reviews on lots of things besides just comics!), we can start to make predictions about new things that you might like, and recommend them to you.

The recommendations aspect was actually one of the core features that I wanted to deliver in HeavyInk: because I'm a comic book fan with slightly out-of-the-mainstream tastes, I often find it hard to get good recommendations for new things to read (the owner of the local comic book store that I used to go to had "The Fantastic Four" as an
answer to every question)...so I really wanted to deliver this feature.

SPURGEON: What does "inspired by their model" mean? To my uninformed ear, that just sounds like you ripped them off, Travis.

CORCORAN: After Netflix pioneered the model, a lot of folks followed in their footsteps: Blockbuster, GameZnFlix, Redbox, GreenCine, CinFlix, etc., etc., etc., all the way down to a bunch of niche folks renting out, say, just martial arts DVDs. So, we were one of this crowd, but more successful than most, and I think the reasons that we were more successful were:

* excellent customer support
* good bargains for customers -- rent a $90 dvd for $9.99.
* willingness to be bold and really take bets on expanding into the space (mortgaging my house and buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory)
* doing something somewhat different (the whole how-to angle -- not just another clone of Netflix offering nothing but mainstream movies)
* good online advertising
* a blog and newsletter with interesting stuff -- customer interviews, vendor interviews, a column by humor writer James Lileks, etc.
* lots of experimenting with the website to see what works best for people
* fiscal discipline in ramping up the company (although this sort of contradicts the "willingness to be bold" up above!)

SPURGEON: Travis, can you provide some actual figures as to what your goals were that you claim to have met?

CORCORAN: Sure.

We wanted to have 100 customers in November, and then get 70 percent growth in December, then 30 percent growth in January, February, March, and April (so that by the end of April we'd have a bit less than 500 customers).

In fact, we've got just short of 2000 customers.

We're exceeding our sales goals as well -- this month's sales annualize to $120k/year -- but by a smaller margin. All in all, this is great news. Those customers who are signed up, but aren't (yet) buying are deep in the sales funnel: we've got their interest, we've got their names, they've opted into our newsletters and our social network, they stop by to read author interviews, etc.

SPURGEON: Are you in the black on the project overall at this point?

CORCORAN: The plan from the get-go was to break even on sales (sale price minus cost of goods, shipping labor, envelopes and postage) for the first two years, and consider requiring minimum shipments size for free shipping in 2010 or so.

In fact, we're slightly exceeding that break-even goal.

Of course, there's a significant engineering effort involved, and 2000 customers don't let us pay the salaries of our engineers ... so we're deep in the red on that score (which was the plan all along). This is a long-term investment, and we'll earn back the cost to build the site after we've grown a fair bit. Two years from today we expect to have 18 times the volume we have right now, and at that volume, if we can tweak shipping expenses or negotiate a slightly better deal on purchasing our inventory, so as to increase our profit from roughly 1 percent to roughly 10 percent, then suddenly we're not just paying our engineers, we're making a profit, and paying back our initial investment.

Of course, that's an audacious goal -- not many comic book stores are doing $2 mil/year in revenues... but given our experience, our customers' enthusiasm, and our growth to date, we're quite confident we'll hit that goal.

SPURGEON: How much volume do you have to do in a sales month to pay overhead and operational expenses while offering 20 percent discounts and free shipping?

CORCORAN: Because of our volume, we're getting a pretty nice discount tier on our inventory and on our shipping supplies (50 percent off of list for boxes, etc.), and because of our experience in shipping and our facility with navigating USPS regulations (having a USPS permit imprint account, a USPS business reply account, knowing about pre-sort discounts, etc.) our postage costs and labor costs are lower than those of most folks in this business.

Because HeavyInk is the second venture of an existing firm, we don't have fixed overhead -- if HI uses 10 percent of the floor space, and uses 10 percent of the labor of our fulfillment staff, we just pay for what we need. This is a nice situation -- if we had to go out and rent space, and/or hire someone for 40 hours/week, then we'd have a fixed overhead that would really suck the money down. Instead, we're in the nice position of being able to ask folks for a few more hours each week, and paying for just what we need.

Anyway, the direct answer to your question is, "As long as we're selling a couple of hundred comic books and graphic novels each month, we can break even -- and we're well beyond that."

SPURGEON: When coming up with your basic set of strategies for HeavyInk, what was valuable about the SmartFlix experience that could be applied and what did you know was very different?

CORCORAN: Great questions.

There are a lot of different things going on in the online comics world, from discussion boards to online sales and subscriptions, and more.

The core idea of HeavyInk is "as you deliver each of these features in turn, the next feature is simultaneously easier to implement than the last one, and delivers more value because it ties into a network of existing features."

If you've already got a comic book store, then you add a social networking feature to that, suddenly I can learn what my friends are subscribed to.

Once you've got a history of my orders and subscriptions all in one place, then with a bit of work, you can help me manage my collection.

Once you've got social networking and collection management, then I can see what graphic novels my friends have that they can loan to me.

Once you've helped me organize my collection, it's easy for me to rate everything I own, which gives my friends information they can use.

And so on and so on.

That's what we intend to deliver -- and we've already rolled half of it out, and we're still ramping up hiring to help us deliver the rest -- but you asked "What's the basic set of strategies?"

What we did at SmartFlix resulted in a very enthusiastic user base, and we want to replicate that.

* Customer support is our first priority. We don't care if we lose money on a given transaction -- our first goal is to make sure that the customer is satisfied with his or her experience. If we deliver a good experience, the customer will be back, and will tell friends.

* Continuously roll out new features, and perfect the old features.

* Listen to what the data tells us. Why send a one-size-fits-all newsletter, if we can tell from your subscriptions, or your ratings, or your circle of friends that you're more interested in this kind of interview or news item than that kind ?

* Work with new artists and authors, small publishers, and independents (including those without Diamond distribution) to get their products out where comics fans can see them ... and can buy them. Diamond often serves as a bottleneck -- at one point, the demand for Red5's Atomic Robo was growing and growing, and most comic book stores were sold out, and Diamond had no inventory, and -- it seems -- no answers. We got on the phone with Red5 and ordered several hundred copies of all the issues. We had them in hand two days later, and they went out to hundreds of Atomic Robo fans later that day. That's the level of service that I, as a comic book reader, want, and it's the level of service that all comic book readers deserve.

SPURGEON: Can you provide information as to which copies of Atomic Robo you ordered and at what time so that I may potentially double-check that it was not available from Diamond at the time you claim? With whom did you work on this matter at Red5? At Diamond?

CORCORAN: We started having problems with Diamond having stock of Atomic Robo around January 3rd. Our software automatically checks the in-stock status of things at Diamond and tries place orders daily. From January 3rd through mid March, Diamond didn't have copies in stock.

We placed several orders with red5.

January 5th, 2008:

Robo Issue #2 -- 50 Copies
Robo Issue #3 -- 50 Copies
Robo Issue #4 -- 25 copies

January 16th, 2008:

Robo Issue #2 -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #3 -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #4 -- 100 copies

January 24th, 2008:

Robo Issue #1 second printing -- 100 Copies

February 4th, 2008:

Robo Issue #1 second printing -- 20 Copies
Robo Issue #3 -- 50 Copies
Robo Issue #4 -- 50 copies
Robo Issue #5 -- 80 copies

March 13th, 2008:

Robo Issue #1 third printing- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #2 second printing -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #3 second printing -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #4 second printing -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #5 second printing -- 100 Copies
Robo Issue #6 second printing -- 100 Copies

We also started ordering other stuff from Red 5:

March 27th, 2008

Neozoic #1 -- 20 copies
Neozoic #2 -- 20 copies
Neozoic #3 -- 20 copies

Abyss #1 -- 15 copies
Abyss #2 -- 10 copies
Abyss #3 -- 10 copies

Our data on Diamond stock levels came from their retailer website.

Our customer support rep at Diamond is Kathy Flemming, but I don't think we spoke to her on the topic -- at that point we were already fully up to speed on using Diamond's retailer website, which is how we continue to do reorders daily.

SPURGEON: Are you aware of the failure of Next Planet Over, a failed on-line retailer from the previous Internet business age?

CORCORAN: Before I made the decision to launch HeavyInk I did extensive investigation of the marketplace. We did competitive research -- purchasing comic books from the top 10 or so online stores, checking out both the strengths and weaknesses of local comic book shops, talking to comic book creators, doing an online survey of 500 + comic book fans, working up lots of spreadsheets, etc.

I can't speak to the details of Next Planet Over, but I will say that we went into HeavyInk with

* our eyes wide open

* a first class team that can do more with less

* a boatload of experience hard-won from the process of launching SmartFlix and growing it to a very nice size without a single dollar of venture capital

* a good knowledge of what our technical and other strengths are (and what they are not)

* a fiscally prudent attitude that "web 1.0" startups were not exactly known for.

I can say that when I look back at old press releases, I don't quite understand why a webstore selling comic books needed to have a CEO, a vice president of merchandising, a general counsel, a vice president of business development, and a vice president of information systems.

In the Marine Corps, every marine is a rifleman.

At SmartFlix / HeavyInk, every employee is a do-er, not a manager.

SPURGEON: How has it gone so far? Has the bottom line met your expectations for this early date?

CORCORAN: Our plan has always been to discount nicely (20 percent off all orders) and ship for free (yes, even if you order just one comic book)...and use our recommendations engine and social features to show folks some of the great stuff that they really want to be reading, but they don't know about yet. Our online survey of comic book readers showed us that a lot of people are ready, able, and willing to spend more on comics, if only they could find more stuff that they like.

That being said, our plan was aggressive: we had certain targets for the first month, and then 70 percent / month growth for a while, and then 30 percent/month growth for a while after that.

So far, we're six months in, and we've matched or exceeded all of our goals.

...and, frankly, that astounds me. Eisenhower once said "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." With that in mind, I fully expected the plan to be garbage...but, amazingly enough, it's been a perfect road-map.

SPURGEON: Is there anything that's been particularly surprising about your first few months out of the gate in terms of fan reaction?

CORCORAN: I feel a bit like I'm in a job interview: "What's your biggest weakness?" "Either that I work too hard, or I care too much..."

I really hate answers like that, but -- seriously -- the biggest surprise has been how much our customers are pulling for us. When we roll out a new feature, we get customers stopping by our personal profile pages, or leaving posts in the forum thanking individual
developers by name.

Before SmartFlix and HeavyInk, I was a software engineer writing big server applications, and I never heard of someone sending an email "Hey, guys, the new caching code in the NFS bridge is teh r0x0r!"

So...the great fan reaction was a surprise, but of the very best kind.

SPURGEON: What's the greatest issue facing the site right now? Is it just getting your name out there? Working out the kinks? Improving content? Finding out which features work and what don't?

CORCORAN: One thing I've learned about working at a small, self-funded company -- there are always three dozen greatest issues!

We've got all the usual bug fixes -- we've coded up handling for alternative covers, and incentive covers, but then we find out that there are also rare high-list-price incentive covers, and our code doesn't handle that.

We've got a list of features as long as your arm -- we want to ship worldwide, we want to deploy collection management tools, we want to give authors and artists more tools to manage their talent pages, we want to host previews of issues, etc.

We pride ourselves on doing data-backed decision making, but we haven't (yet) deployed the full set of tools that we developed for SmartFlix -- the corporate dashboard (easy insight to all our data), the A/B testing, the data mining, the statistical significance and correlation tools, etc.

We want to make available related products that customers are asking for: figures, card games, posters, etc.

We've got people begging us to do an affiliate program.

Will we get it all done?

We will.

Coolidge once said:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."

I hope it doesn't disappoint Coolidge, but we're not setting out to solve "the problems of the human race"...but we are setting out to solve a lot of the problems of the retail comic book world.

We've got years of hard work ahead of us, but we're up for it.

SPURGEON: At what point do you think you'll be settled on a model for the long haul, or are you already there?

CORCORAN: Our front page gives our five word mission statement: "HeavyInk is learning, shopping, sharing." There's a ton of work to be done there, and a ton of value to be delivered to our customers.

That mission statement is our guiding star for the long haul.

SPURGEON: In theory, how does the social networking aspect of the site lead to more sales?

CORCORAN: It's not that we want to just make more sales -- we want to make better sales. If I could either browbeat you into taking on one extra comic book subscription this month, or tempt you into taking on the right comic book subscription one year from now, I'd far prefer the latter. You're going to be enthusiastic about the right comic. You're going to love that comic, and recommend it to your friends, and maybe buy the graphic novel when it comes out.

The social networking, then, isn't about selling you more stuff -- it's about exposing you to the right stuff.

SPURGEON: Let me rephrase the question about social networking and sales, then: if it is not intended to lead to more sales, how does social networking lead = to better recommendations? My friends are aesthetic morons with terrible taste in art.

CORCORAN: Ha! Yeah, I've got a few of those myself.

SPURGEON: More importantly, how is social networking as a vehicle superior to all the other ways of having stuff recommended, or simply looking at stuff either on-line or in a comic book store.

CORCORAN: OK, good questions.

Obviously, if you've got access to a comic book store that stocks absolutely everything that's in print, and you've got the time to flip through everything there, then that's the absolute best way to find out what you like.

Or, falling short of that, if you're into comic books enough to know who your favorite authors and artists are, then you can make pretty good guesses (although, even there, HeavyInk can help you -- we give each community member a personalized RSS feed, and let them add and subtract things from their feed -- for example, you can add Paul Pope alerts to your feed, or Warren Ellis, or Walking Dead, and then get a feed that tells you of new things in each of these areas).

Next, we can do a traditional recommendation engine -- based on how you rate things, we can say "people who liked X and Y also liked Z." And, in fact, we've got such a system in place, and we're updating it with a newer and better version this week or next.

Using social networking data gives a few things above and beyond the traditional reco engine:

* for folks who don't know where to start, getting some information on what their friends are reading at least gives them a pointer, saying "you don't have to buy it, but at the very least, be aware that person X thinks that there's something good about Y." This may not be that interesting for someone like yourself who knows the comic world inside and out, but our surveys show that there are a lot of comic neophytes who are interested in reading more comics but want better ways to learn about titles.

* there are studies showing that adding independent data sources to a recommendations engine can increase the accuracy of the prediction results much better than merely increasing the quantity of the first type of data. Which is to say that we can use the social networking aspect to augment the other data, and do an even better job.

And, of course, your point about "I have friends with terrible taste" is well taken, and at some point, we want to allow you to mark a friend as "a friend, yes, but not someone who I'm interested in hearing the opinions of"...but it may be that we can do this algorithmically (if you have a friend with horrible taste, and we know that you've disagrees about a few things, we can actually use his recommendations in a constructive way).

And, regarding your point about "looking at stuff online or in stores," we have plans to host online previews. We've already locked down permissions from a few publishers, and plan to deploy this later this year.

SPURGEON: Doesn't your model depend on a system over which you have no quality control? Isn't social networking an unwieldy mechanism for a simple transaction?

CORCORAN: If by "unwieldy" you mean "computationally expensive," then yes...but from the user's point of view, how hard we work to dig up recommendations and such isn't really an item of concern -- what the user cares about is the validity of the suggestions. If you look at how Google determines page quality (the page rank algorithm, as modified by 10 years of research, machine learning, etc.) it's also hugely baroque...but it gives excellent results. The fact that Google has to spider the entire web and do an almost incomprehensible amount of work to generate those results isn't relevant.

SPURGEON: Is the editorial content simply there to draw people to the site or is there a PR aspect to it as well?

CORCORAN: It's part of an integrated strategy:

* the interviews make our site more interesting, which results in folks mailing around links to the interviews.

* the interviews make authors and artists more aware of us, and often lead to inquiries as to how we can work together

* and, finally, that's the kind of thing I want at the store where I buy my comic books. It's like those horrible "Hair Club for Men" commercials -- I'm not only a HeavyInk employee -- I'm a HeavyInk customer!

SPURGEON: How are you supplying your comics -- through your own warehouse? Diamond? Amazon?

CORCORAN: As of today, we buy most of our inventory from Diamond.

SPURGEON: What's the most hopeful endgame for you in terms of how your company develops from here on out? What might be the next sign you're on the right track?

CORCORAN: Getting back to the distinction I drew between "web1.0" startups and us: we didn't get into this thinking "we'll acquire two hundred customers, sell $1,000 of comic books, and then IPO for a bazillion dollars." There's one sure-fire way to build a company, and that's to provide real value to your customers, and improve a little bit each day. If Amazon or Barnes and Noble offers us a private island, a pile of gold, and a gift certificate good for being Best Friends Forever with all of our favorite comic book authors, yeah, it's not impossible that we'd sell...but that's not going to happen, and that's not what we're building the company for.

We're in this for the long haul. Ten years from now -- heck, five years from now -- HeavyInk is (still) going to be the best place to buy comics online, or off. We'll have all the features we have now, all the features that are already on the wish-list, and tons of other features that we haven't even thought of yet (but our customers are busy dreaming up).

You asked about the endgame -- there's no fixed place we want to be. Right now, we can see what "learning, shopping, sharing" means a few years out. Five years from now, we'll be able to see what "learning, shopping, sharing" means a bit further out.

Constant improvement, and constantly delivering value to our customers -- that's what we'll be doing.

We'll know we're on the right track next month, and next year, the same way we know it today: people write emails or forum posts saying how much they love us... and then they tell their friends the same thing.

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