A Couple Of On-Line Comics Notes

There were a couple of passing news stories -- barely news stories -- that caught my attention as a tandem. The first was that The Comics Journal put its entire 300th issue on-line in what seemed to be a trumpet call as to its new on-line strategy, but then the issue went back to subscriber-only status via a decision from publisher Gary Groth. Johanna Draper Carlson notes this isn't a nice thing to do to customers and potential customers, and I don't think anyone would disagree. A more interesting question to me is whether or not the issue should have gone on-line in the first place (which I guess means I'm also asking whether it should have been taken off). I think the competing impulses and their supporting arguments are fairly well-known now. I had a pair of prominent comics people tell me flat-out that with the issue on-line they wouldn't have purchased it as planned, and I'm in that camp, too, so I'm sympathetic to Groth's point of view. In addition, as is the case with convention sales, I don't think you should tell people (retailers, subscribers) one thing (you'll have this exclusive if you pay me this amount of money!) and then do another (sorry about that; we decided to try giving it away for free). At the same time, there was genuine excitement there about having that much great material to read that they could have used to launch into #301, perhaps if they had made the decision earlier. I think the most interesting way to look at it is that there is still, after all these years, no real, 100 percent right way and wrong way to do things on-line, despite people very strongly asserting they have the one and only answer.

The other one is that if I'm reading this correctly the Immonens may no longer offer their ongoing collaborative graphic novel projects on-line for free, and that this happened after some douchebag used the RSS feed to gank it and stream it as an offering somewhere. The decision had already been made, it seems, so maybe this wouldn't have been enough on its own to move them in that direction, but they still felt it worth noting. Like a lot of people, I discovered that work on-line, so that someone took it upon themselves to decide how best to publish something by web-friendly, creative, smart people like the Immonens pisses me off a bit. I still think that creator's rights is the missing component in this endless argument of what works better, these empty confrontations of dueling fantasy outcomes argued with the fury of the real thing. The thing is, if you respect artists, you shouldn't decide for them how best to distribute and publish their work, the same way you don't walk into their house to clean their kitchen or order healthier food for them in restaurants. And with strong options for self-publishing and decent contracts at a lot of different levels throughout the comics industry, you should also respect the choices of artists you admire to afford that control to other people.
 
posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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