What I’m So Worried About, Anyway



This last week I've devoted a lot of time on the site to comics and a potentially deepening recession. Here are some of those posts.

I'll be honest with you. Part of my motivation in spending time on this issue is fear. I'm frightened of the next few years, and talking about these issues out loud allows me to at least wrap my mind around what may be coming. It's as if by stating a few possibilities over and over again I've at the very least reduced their foreign, awesome qualities to something that can be discussed and argued and mulled over and maybe eventually dealt with.

Another part of my desire to linger on these issues is prescriptive. I think it would be a generally good thing for the American comics industries and the arts communities that work near and within them that our discussions of the future include the potential for things to get bad for stretches at a time, that we deal with the wider world in which we all operate in a way more sophisticated than assuming x-percentage of growth and being mad or alarmed when that goes away.

What motivates me the most is a fear that a prolonged recession will have a severe, negative impact on the heart and soul of the American comics industries. Some of those potential outcomes are obvious and shared by dozens of similar industries equally at risk in the months ahead. A troubled economy may mean less business overall. People could lose their jobs. Artists could lose out on opportunities. Career arcs may be interrupted. Businesses with peripheral involvement to comics-making may be squeezed out of existence by internal and external pressures. Reforms may suffer because of the perception that all resources for now should serve a dwindling bottom line. These are all very real costs, and I'd never belittle them.

However, I think the biggest danger comes from the fact that for comics this period of potential severe market downturn follows a period of great success, and that both eras come at a time of epochal shifts regarding delivery technologies. The potential Dickensian shear may encourage companies to embrace strategies for this new world of comics that are hostile to its creative class. Expectations fostered in good times may find realization in hostile behavior excused by bad times, damn the consequences.

It may have already started. I don't understand how United Media can go free archives and free embedding without any way I can see to profit on the resulting increase in traffic and usage save for perhaps some banner sales and a future, amorphous publicity benefit. They waited all those years for this? Newspaper strips are different. Few newspaper comics exist as entities by themselves. Most survive as partners in a long-term, profitable relationship with the troubled newspaper industry. While an increase in traffic may be a boon to consumers and may subtly increase the popularity of a feature here and there, the profitability of free archives and embedding counts on driving attention to a broken system, not fixing that system or finding an alternative. As much as I think it's awesome to read all of these comics, I don't see how this benefits cartoonists and other creative participants. Not in the short run, not in the long run.

Similarly, I like hearing that Marvel is investing in digital initiatives, but when I hear a figure of $10 million over the next few years my first thought is how long it's going to take for a similar amount of money to go to the creators involved. I'm guessing a long, long time -- and that no one has really thought that much about it.

I'm increasingly worried that a period of economic decline is going to sharpen the friction between competing impulses within comics' industries. I'm further worried that some of those impulses are so weak within the overall comics framework that it won't be a fair fight. The business folks will work to protect the bottom line and as best they can their place reaping the benefits of that bottom line. The rest of us will be asked to think in terms of comics' greater good -- which in a lot of ways that count is a way to ask folks with their own legitimate interests to give up those desires in order to help protect someone else's bottom line.

We're leaving a period of artistic and industry revival where the greatest and most consistent winners in terms of profit have been, let's face it, businessmen. For every Jeff Smith that comes along, for every Randall Munroe, there seems to have emerged in the comics winners column a half-dozen film company executives and big-company board members. For every young cartoonist signing a solid book contract there seems to be a cynical project announced that has little to do with why long-form comics began to appeal to people again. For every new exhibitor at SPX putting their creativity on paper in order to share it with a couple of hundred fellow travelers, two young Hollywood functionaries descend on San Diego for the first time looking for idiosyncratic projects with a hook by which they get to justify their place on payroll. For every comic book creator that receives a modest royalty because their character appeared in a film there are screenwriters and television producers reaping significant incomes rewriting the best work of that creator and his peers. For every new market that emerges there arrives any number of people that insist it's in natural opposition to an old one, and should be avoided or pressed rather than simply given equal opportunity to develop on its own.

Does anyone doubt that if things come to a head as seems more likely in a recession, the benefits that businessmen and moguls derive from comics will continue even if it's at the expense of the more modest gains that have trickled down to artists? It's unconscionable to think that we may see an industry-altering shift in platforms and that for all we know now about the nature of exploitation and that for all the potential for control that's been placed back into the creative community's hands, we may be hurtling towards another fundamentally imbalanced system. My hope is that as new opportunities unfold and hard decisions are made that the values we use to encourage, celebrate or support such moves includes the notion that an arts industry should be judged by the excellence of its art and the way it treats its artists, not its overall size or the gaudiness of someone's bonus or the perceived significance of its all-too-general role in a world of temporary pleasures or the way it justifies someone's sad childhood. Comics shouldn't have to build yet another chain of outcomes where the last link brings some reward to its creators. It should start there. A deepening recession may bring with it hard times, but it should also divest us of the fantasy that none of that pain is self-inflicted.
 
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