MattBrady
05-06-2003, 09:58 AM
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<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 17</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
Revolutionary Road
Michael Lewis was a year ahead of me at Princeton, but I didn’t know him. (It’s a big school.) Lewis made his name as a writer with the 1989 bestseller liar’s Poker, a colorful account of his year spent on the Salomon Brothers trading floor in the greed-is-good mid-eighties. It’s a cracking read, full of characters like the crude, old-line traders who eat fried chicken by the bucket -- phones glued to their ears the whole time -- and the hot-shot new employees whose goal is to make fortunes quickly, so they can become known as Big Swinging Dicks.
Since then, Lewis has written books on Japan, the 1996 Presidential election, and (out this month) baseball, all with a sharp eye for detail and a classic reporter’s drive to find the real story hidden inside his topic. There’s something else, too, that unites his work: a sense, common in writers of my generation, that the world is moving fast and you have to keep up. To make sure you understand what’s driving something like the World Wide Web, which didn’t exist ten years ago and now informs virtually every business and creative act in our lives.
So it was natural that Lewis would turn to the net as a subject. His book The New New Thing (1999) profiled Jim Clark, the eccentric founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics, in Clark’s efforts to build (a) a nationwide, for-profit, net-based medical-benefits network called Healtheon and (b) the world’s largest sailboat. While writing that book, Lewis saw another story: All over the world, young people were using the internet to enter domains that had formerly been closed off to people with advanced degrees and professional credentials. That story became his fascinating 2001 book, Next.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/nextcov.jpg" width="250" height="373" border="0" hspace="2" align="right">Like Lewis’s other books, Next paints a vivid picture of individuals caught up in a large social phenomenon. Jonathan Lebed, a New Jersey teenager who manipulated markets and got his entire school into heavy stock-trading. Marcus Arnold, a fifteen-year-old southern Californian who became a respected legal expert on AskMe.com -- and who took his duties very, very seriously. Daniel Sheldon, a working-class British teen who built a website and made himself into a file-sharing guru, all over a dial-up connection.
Throughout Next, Lewis points up the threat that these young enterpreneur/hackers posed to established institutions. Jonathan Lebed, for example, attracted the wrath of the SEC with his trading activities -- not because he was doing something large companies couldn’t, but because he exposed what they were doing: manipulating the markets. Marcus Arnold really did know enough about the law to give simple advice as well as the average attorney. (“After, like, watching so many TV shows about the law,” he says in the book, “it’s just like you know everything you need to know.” The book doesn’t lead us to doubt him.)
Comics went through a similar shift when the direct sales market opened up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Suddenly comics were easy to publish; one person could put out a black-and-white book pretty handily, and a small company like First or Eclipse could handle color titles without much trouble.
I’ve discussed the big-alternative companies in <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 4" target="_blank"> Installment 13</a>. But self-publishing also boomed at this time, and in a lot of ways it was an entirely separate phenomenon. Like the kids examined in Next, self-publishers were one- and two-man operations who often developed strong followings of their own.
There were precursors, but Dave Sim’s Cerbeus (1977) and Wendy & Richard Pini’s Elfquest (1978) really kicked off the self-publishing movement. The early Cerebus consisted mainly of (often hilarious) satire on comics and sword-and-sorcery topics, and Elfquest hit an immediate chord with fantasy prose fans and gamers. Both comics were labors of love, but they also became profitable -- at least enough so to support their creators. That was new.
As the big comics companies competed for the best of the new indy talents, self-publishing became less of a business option and more of a crusade. By 1995, Dave Sim regularly devoted a third of Cerbeus’ front covers to “Spirits of Independence Tour” ads for his own and other self-published books. Inside the book, Sim pushed his own stories back several pages to make room for an expanded editorial section called “The Big Picture,” which called for sweeping changes in the retail environment and comics in general. Sim’s general theme was that the comics industry was in trouble (1994-95 was when the speculator bubble burst) and that self-published books were the answer for readers, retailers, and creators. From his first column:
“Welcome to the War Room. Okay, here’s our situation: the goal is to replace the company-centered mentality with self-publishing. We are facing a much larger force. They are numerous but they don’t fight very well because, basically, they aren’t fighting for anything.”
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/cerebus199.jpg" width="250" height="374" border="0" hspace="2" align="left">Sim had the great advantage of leading by example: By that point, he’d published nearly 200 consecutive issues of Cerbeus on a more-or-less monthly schedule. (The early issues were bi-monthly, and in later years he sometimes fell behind schedule, but always caught up, in some cases actually publishing on a two- or three-week schedule.) But not all self-publishers wanted total control of their properties above all else, or believed that, say, Wandering Star (a fine book) was inherently superior to Hate just because the former was self-published, while the latter happened to be published by Fantagraphics. Some of the high-profile self-publishers continued on their path; others took their books to publishing companies; still others dropped out of the game entirely. A few, like Jeff Smith, went to Image and then back again, making careful business decisions at each turn.
By 1997, in an introduction to the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing, Sim looked back on the tours with a different perspective: “In reviewing the raw first draught for this volume…I was amused by the shamelessness of my politicking. Shameless because, as my Legions of Critics have pointed out, I made it sound as if self-publishing were the land of milk and honey and all other cartooning venues were analogous to Dante’s inner circles of hell. Well, such is the nature of politics.”
Anyone who produces quality work and then puts himself on the line through self-publishing deserves respect. Anyone who sets a goal of 300 issues over twenty-seven years and then completes it, as Sim looks set to do within the next year, deserves enormous respect. Sim’s recent scribbling-in-the-attic Christian rants and misogynist crusading shouldn’t wipe out the great work he’s done, both in helping to carve out the direct market and, much more importantly, through the better Cerbeus books themselves.
But crusaders like that are rare -- very few lone wolves stay focused that way for an extended period of time. Next was written on the cusp of the dot-com collapse, and its conclusions are not, well, conclusive. At this writing, Jonathan Lebed is running for town council in his hometown of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, suggesting a shift in priorities toward politics. (He’s pretty young for that, too.) AskMe.com, where Marcus Arnold practiced law, imploded along with the dotcom collapse. Arnold has kept a pretty low profile since then.
Capitalist revolutions, whether they’re technological or market-driven, tend to lose steam somewhere along the line. There are three main reasons:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/indys.jpg" width="300" height="225" border="0" hspace="2" align="right"> (1) Rebels get distracted and move on, especially when faced with the financial instability of this kind of work. You know who Dave Sim and Wendy & Richard Pini are, and you might remember Martin Wagner (Hepcats). But do you know the names Greg Wadsworth (Ismet, Dog Avenger), Tom Stazer (Spaced), or Doug Gray (Eye Of Mongombo)? All their comics were vital and critically acclaimed in their time, but they didn’t find the Pinis’ fantasy-community popularity or Sim’s cult following, and the creators eventually packed up shop and went away. (Sim has kept Cerbeus going by keeping the operation extremely lean and, in recent years especially, very sharply focused on the comic book itself.)
(2) When you’re dependent on an emerging, shifting marketplace, things can go wrong in a hurry. The Direct Market has endured twenty-five years of gluts and busts, each of which sank several small publishers. The dizzying size of the Internet, and the struggle of search engines to keep up with it -- not to mention pay their own way as they go -- makes it another dicey business operation. One DM distributor going under, or a bad link in Google, can put you out of business if you’re operating close to the bone. Which leaves things open for…
(3) Big companies, who are desperate to keep up with the next big thing. (You don’t think Pepsi executives signed Britney Spears because they just loved her musical style, do you?) Their M.O.: Jump in and co-opt a business, often after the little guys have cleared the path and worked out the technical obstacles. And when DC decides to start Vertigo or Wal-Mart decides it’s finally time for a full-service website, they have the dual advantages of brand recognition and financial security (see #2).
The Internet’s been billed as the ultimate open marketplace -- a giant bazaar where everyone can post their opinions or hawk their goods, and the public will sort it all out. But at a certain size, that ideal just doesn’t pan out in practice. It’s too much work for consumers; they end up gravitating to either (a) an established big company whose name they know (see #3 above) or (b) an intermediary designed to act as a publisher or distributor, to make sense out of the chaos. And once you have that person in place -- an “aggregator of content,” as the 1999 net jargon went -- you have another mouth that needs to be fed. The same economic rules come into play that happen with traditional publishers (or the equivalent businesses), and if enough money is floating around, there’s a temptation for those aggregators to adopt the same old bad habits: developing their own internal bureaucracy, keeping too much money for themselves.
Revolutions do leave behind lasting changes, even if they’re not as far-reaching or apocalyptic as their proponents might have wanted. Today, self-publishing is a continuing, viable option in the comics field, though it’s often a scrabbling, money-losing proposition at first. A single person can set herself up as an authority on the web -- if she’s got what it takes to get herself noticed, and then follow through. That’s worth a lot.
It doesn’t mean, however, that DC Comics (or Wal-Mart) is going out of business. It just means they’ve got more competition. And the big companies still have strong advantages. It’s not a level playing field -- and it probably never will be.
But it is a bigger playing field, with more opportunities. And that’s good for everyone.
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there’s no going back to Woolworth’s…but that hasn’t been a problem yet, because of…
My current comics work: Dark Horse’s Free Comic Book Day giveaway, ROCKET COMICS: IGNITE, featured a special 10-page stand-alone preview story of LONE, my entry into the new Rocket Comics line, along with two other great stories. More information at <a href="http://www.rocketcomics.net" target="_blank">http://www.rocketcomics.net</a> and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094</a> . Also: The beautiful trade paperback collection of ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, my epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press, is out now; ask for it by name! And coming soon: announcements about projects from three other companies -- keep an eye on my message board at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com." target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com.</a> See you in 14 days…
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 17</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
Revolutionary Road
Michael Lewis was a year ahead of me at Princeton, but I didn’t know him. (It’s a big school.) Lewis made his name as a writer with the 1989 bestseller liar’s Poker, a colorful account of his year spent on the Salomon Brothers trading floor in the greed-is-good mid-eighties. It’s a cracking read, full of characters like the crude, old-line traders who eat fried chicken by the bucket -- phones glued to their ears the whole time -- and the hot-shot new employees whose goal is to make fortunes quickly, so they can become known as Big Swinging Dicks.
Since then, Lewis has written books on Japan, the 1996 Presidential election, and (out this month) baseball, all with a sharp eye for detail and a classic reporter’s drive to find the real story hidden inside his topic. There’s something else, too, that unites his work: a sense, common in writers of my generation, that the world is moving fast and you have to keep up. To make sure you understand what’s driving something like the World Wide Web, which didn’t exist ten years ago and now informs virtually every business and creative act in our lives.
So it was natural that Lewis would turn to the net as a subject. His book The New New Thing (1999) profiled Jim Clark, the eccentric founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics, in Clark’s efforts to build (a) a nationwide, for-profit, net-based medical-benefits network called Healtheon and (b) the world’s largest sailboat. While writing that book, Lewis saw another story: All over the world, young people were using the internet to enter domains that had formerly been closed off to people with advanced degrees and professional credentials. That story became his fascinating 2001 book, Next.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/nextcov.jpg" width="250" height="373" border="0" hspace="2" align="right">Like Lewis’s other books, Next paints a vivid picture of individuals caught up in a large social phenomenon. Jonathan Lebed, a New Jersey teenager who manipulated markets and got his entire school into heavy stock-trading. Marcus Arnold, a fifteen-year-old southern Californian who became a respected legal expert on AskMe.com -- and who took his duties very, very seriously. Daniel Sheldon, a working-class British teen who built a website and made himself into a file-sharing guru, all over a dial-up connection.
Throughout Next, Lewis points up the threat that these young enterpreneur/hackers posed to established institutions. Jonathan Lebed, for example, attracted the wrath of the SEC with his trading activities -- not because he was doing something large companies couldn’t, but because he exposed what they were doing: manipulating the markets. Marcus Arnold really did know enough about the law to give simple advice as well as the average attorney. (“After, like, watching so many TV shows about the law,” he says in the book, “it’s just like you know everything you need to know.” The book doesn’t lead us to doubt him.)
Comics went through a similar shift when the direct sales market opened up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Suddenly comics were easy to publish; one person could put out a black-and-white book pretty handily, and a small company like First or Eclipse could handle color titles without much trouble.
I’ve discussed the big-alternative companies in <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 4" target="_blank"> Installment 13</a>. But self-publishing also boomed at this time, and in a lot of ways it was an entirely separate phenomenon. Like the kids examined in Next, self-publishers were one- and two-man operations who often developed strong followings of their own.
There were precursors, but Dave Sim’s Cerbeus (1977) and Wendy & Richard Pini’s Elfquest (1978) really kicked off the self-publishing movement. The early Cerebus consisted mainly of (often hilarious) satire on comics and sword-and-sorcery topics, and Elfquest hit an immediate chord with fantasy prose fans and gamers. Both comics were labors of love, but they also became profitable -- at least enough so to support their creators. That was new.
As the big comics companies competed for the best of the new indy talents, self-publishing became less of a business option and more of a crusade. By 1995, Dave Sim regularly devoted a third of Cerbeus’ front covers to “Spirits of Independence Tour” ads for his own and other self-published books. Inside the book, Sim pushed his own stories back several pages to make room for an expanded editorial section called “The Big Picture,” which called for sweeping changes in the retail environment and comics in general. Sim’s general theme was that the comics industry was in trouble (1994-95 was when the speculator bubble burst) and that self-published books were the answer for readers, retailers, and creators. From his first column:
“Welcome to the War Room. Okay, here’s our situation: the goal is to replace the company-centered mentality with self-publishing. We are facing a much larger force. They are numerous but they don’t fight very well because, basically, they aren’t fighting for anything.”
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/cerebus199.jpg" width="250" height="374" border="0" hspace="2" align="left">Sim had the great advantage of leading by example: By that point, he’d published nearly 200 consecutive issues of Cerbeus on a more-or-less monthly schedule. (The early issues were bi-monthly, and in later years he sometimes fell behind schedule, but always caught up, in some cases actually publishing on a two- or three-week schedule.) But not all self-publishers wanted total control of their properties above all else, or believed that, say, Wandering Star (a fine book) was inherently superior to Hate just because the former was self-published, while the latter happened to be published by Fantagraphics. Some of the high-profile self-publishers continued on their path; others took their books to publishing companies; still others dropped out of the game entirely. A few, like Jeff Smith, went to Image and then back again, making careful business decisions at each turn.
By 1997, in an introduction to the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing, Sim looked back on the tours with a different perspective: “In reviewing the raw first draught for this volume…I was amused by the shamelessness of my politicking. Shameless because, as my Legions of Critics have pointed out, I made it sound as if self-publishing were the land of milk and honey and all other cartooning venues were analogous to Dante’s inner circles of hell. Well, such is the nature of politics.”
Anyone who produces quality work and then puts himself on the line through self-publishing deserves respect. Anyone who sets a goal of 300 issues over twenty-seven years and then completes it, as Sim looks set to do within the next year, deserves enormous respect. Sim’s recent scribbling-in-the-attic Christian rants and misogynist crusading shouldn’t wipe out the great work he’s done, both in helping to carve out the direct market and, much more importantly, through the better Cerbeus books themselves.
But crusaders like that are rare -- very few lone wolves stay focused that way for an extended period of time. Next was written on the cusp of the dot-com collapse, and its conclusions are not, well, conclusive. At this writing, Jonathan Lebed is running for town council in his hometown of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, suggesting a shift in priorities toward politics. (He’s pretty young for that, too.) AskMe.com, where Marcus Arnold practiced law, imploded along with the dotcom collapse. Arnold has kept a pretty low profile since then.
Capitalist revolutions, whether they’re technological or market-driven, tend to lose steam somewhere along the line. There are three main reasons:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/indys.jpg" width="300" height="225" border="0" hspace="2" align="right"> (1) Rebels get distracted and move on, especially when faced with the financial instability of this kind of work. You know who Dave Sim and Wendy & Richard Pini are, and you might remember Martin Wagner (Hepcats). But do you know the names Greg Wadsworth (Ismet, Dog Avenger), Tom Stazer (Spaced), or Doug Gray (Eye Of Mongombo)? All their comics were vital and critically acclaimed in their time, but they didn’t find the Pinis’ fantasy-community popularity or Sim’s cult following, and the creators eventually packed up shop and went away. (Sim has kept Cerbeus going by keeping the operation extremely lean and, in recent years especially, very sharply focused on the comic book itself.)
(2) When you’re dependent on an emerging, shifting marketplace, things can go wrong in a hurry. The Direct Market has endured twenty-five years of gluts and busts, each of which sank several small publishers. The dizzying size of the Internet, and the struggle of search engines to keep up with it -- not to mention pay their own way as they go -- makes it another dicey business operation. One DM distributor going under, or a bad link in Google, can put you out of business if you’re operating close to the bone. Which leaves things open for…
(3) Big companies, who are desperate to keep up with the next big thing. (You don’t think Pepsi executives signed Britney Spears because they just loved her musical style, do you?) Their M.O.: Jump in and co-opt a business, often after the little guys have cleared the path and worked out the technical obstacles. And when DC decides to start Vertigo or Wal-Mart decides it’s finally time for a full-service website, they have the dual advantages of brand recognition and financial security (see #2).
The Internet’s been billed as the ultimate open marketplace -- a giant bazaar where everyone can post their opinions or hawk their goods, and the public will sort it all out. But at a certain size, that ideal just doesn’t pan out in practice. It’s too much work for consumers; they end up gravitating to either (a) an established big company whose name they know (see #3 above) or (b) an intermediary designed to act as a publisher or distributor, to make sense out of the chaos. And once you have that person in place -- an “aggregator of content,” as the 1999 net jargon went -- you have another mouth that needs to be fed. The same economic rules come into play that happen with traditional publishers (or the equivalent businesses), and if enough money is floating around, there’s a temptation for those aggregators to adopt the same old bad habits: developing their own internal bureaucracy, keeping too much money for themselves.
Revolutions do leave behind lasting changes, even if they’re not as far-reaching or apocalyptic as their proponents might have wanted. Today, self-publishing is a continuing, viable option in the comics field, though it’s often a scrabbling, money-losing proposition at first. A single person can set herself up as an authority on the web -- if she’s got what it takes to get herself noticed, and then follow through. That’s worth a lot.
It doesn’t mean, however, that DC Comics (or Wal-Mart) is going out of business. It just means they’ve got more competition. And the big companies still have strong advantages. It’s not a level playing field -- and it probably never will be.
But it is a bigger playing field, with more opportunities. And that’s good for everyone.
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999. Sadly, there’s no going back to Woolworth’s…but that hasn’t been a problem yet, because of…
My current comics work: Dark Horse’s Free Comic Book Day giveaway, ROCKET COMICS: IGNITE, featured a special 10-page stand-alone preview story of LONE, my entry into the new Rocket Comics line, along with two other great stories. More information at <a href="http://www.rocketcomics.net" target="_blank">http://www.rocketcomics.net</a> and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=000094</a> . Also: The beautiful trade paperback collection of ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, my epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press, is out now; ask for it by name! And coming soon: announcements about projects from three other companies -- keep an eye on my message board at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com." target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com.</a> See you in 14 days…