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Todd Allen On CR’s Ten Unanswered Questions
posted December 17, 2008
 

1) Depending on your definition, alternative comics might be web comics now. A fair number of them have moved to traditional book publishers. (Persepolis, etc.)

3) Take a writer who's notoriously not on time. Add an artist who's very well documented pace doesn't indicate a snowball's chance in hell he'd be able to complete the art without lead time that isn't there. Add poor editorial coordination that, again, has been on display for a while. What happened makes a fair amount of sense. Most of the problem here is in editorial planning and communication. If that first issue was really written for a year (mind you, we don't know if it was heavily re-written closer to publication) and it wasn't shown to the editors and creators in charge of the lead-in books, then there are some "professional" issues. At a minimum, a realistic editorial staff would have tapped a (documented) faster artist or accepted that this book needed lead time and a different release schedule. Again, this is not counting drastic re-writes en route, and if there were, there's the question of were these rewrites where editorial waffled or the writer went on an unexpected tangent.

4) I've notice there have been a lot of new comic shops opening on the North Side of Chicago in the last year-to-six-months (sounds like 2 in Roger's Park alone). If this is happening elsewhere, there's your bump.

7) Traditional self-publishing doesn't seem to work unless your name is Jeff Smith or Terry Moore. You need to sell more books than people typically are, plus Moore and Smith didn't have the whole "back of the catalog" order barrier as a big force when they were starting out. Besides, self-publishing is much easier to launch online (Finder, Supernatural Law, Girl Genius, etc.)

8) Having written 2 editions of a book on this, it's a function of print comics people fearing the web. Disbelief over income comes from frustrated print artists. Inevitable and bored smacks of a low self-esteem form of denial. What is abnormal about web comics is the degree to which the main publishers are trying to ignore they exist. Marvel being the only publisher really wading into the situation in force. This is a lot like newspaper people being confused by websites and/or bloggers 3-5 years ago.

9) How many newspapers, as we know them know, will be around in 10 years? The last study on this I saw thought papers were safe for 5 years, but after that all bets were off. (Sun-Times was de-listed after the stock dropped to eight cents and the Tribune is contemplating bankruptcy to sum up a two-paper town.) News, like independent comics, is going to the web. I suspect a few papers will become news sites and the staffing of cartoonists will depend on their pageviews. Very possibly a syndicated function.