Why I Don’t Respond to Macro-Essays

Every so often I'll get an e-mail or two asking me to respond here to someone's essay or a vigorous message board thread about the future of all things comics. A bit less often I'll get an e-mail asking me why I chose not to. There are several reasons I tend to find these kinds of think sessions frustrating or outright counter-productive, and since it's a reasonably slow news Friday thus far, I'll indulge myself in putting a few of them up here.

* Very few people listen. A lot of people who participate in discussions of how to save the comics industry bring up arguments that have been discredited or at least questioned, and in their fervor to be heard, choose not to acknowledge these arguments have a history. Sometimes such people will strongly assert an argument that's been discredited or damaged right there within a discussion as if their fervent desire to believe in whatever slogan or assertion they're offering up is good enough for it to be taken seriously, and anyone that stands in the way of their reformist zeal is a hater. There's very little give and take.

* Very few people know or pay attention to history. This is not only frustrating, but it makes those of us who have to bring up an appropriate historical example -- often of the rudimentary "they already did this" variety -- feel really old.

* It's too easy to play with other people's money. A lot of called-for solutions are flat-out unreasonable, both in that they'll call for the abandonment of hundreds of millions of dollars for some sort of idealized expectation of same, and that they call for massively high risk that no one in their right mind would take or be allowed to take. This is fine for a role-playing game where the suffering and discomfort caused by bringing about change exists only as a verbal abstraction or in a video game where you can hit the reset button, but in actual industry reform institutional resistance is a huge factor and has to be considered.

* Shifty arguments. This is a big one now that there are easily-defined multiple markets for comics. Someone might start arguing about the Direct Market of comics shops and then suddenly bring in certain realities of the bookstore market to buttress their position. Or someone might argue the excellence of a small percentage of high-quality comics shops but bring up numbers pertaining to all comics shops to give that argument weight. It's exhausting.

* Overconfidence. I think a lot of comics arguments are a bit too certain when it comes to linking an achievable situation to desirable outcomes in art and commerce. Comics is an industry of ironic achievement. The undergrounds may not have happened without the Comics Code. Marvel may not have happened without late-'50s distribution collapse. The Direct Market allowed for the existence of arts-driven micro-publishers while at the same time capping their likely market penetration. And so on. A lot of reform calls count on sticking the landing, and that's not always going to happen.

* Disagreement over standards. People in comics have a bottom-line fixation that I think may come from years of poor performance and a real belief that making distinctions over what succeeds and what doesn't is an elitist, unforgivable position. Personally, I would suggest that if hundreds of millions of dollars more are made in comics, but 99.9 percent of this cash goes to bonuses for big-company board members rather than creators and if the resulting industry landscape doesn't favor a continued opportunity for quality art, this is not a desirable outcome. Everyone knows that if you don't agree on the goals, you can't really have an argument. But it doesn't keep comics people from trying!

I admire the passion and zeal that comics fans have for their art form and attending industries, and I'm with them in the notion that in the end, many things are possible that don't have to be locked into any other industry's way of doing things. I just find it increasingly difficult to have the same arguments over and over again.
 
posted 12:02 am PST | Permalink
 

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