Yesterday’s post on the death of American comics elicited its fair share of comments. One reader who decided to offer his two cents ended up contributing gold when he turned out to be an industry veteran.
Consider commercial sculptor William Paquet‘s insider account of the US comics industry’s collapse:
Heads up: This isn’t the last time we’ll hear a firsthand account of Vertigo’s shenanigans. The foregoing was only one slice in comics’ death of a thousand cuts.
To follow up, I asked William if anyone else on the inside realized what was happening.
And Vertigo rears its head again.
At that point, I flashed back to my misspent years of reading Sandman. And something about that lead editor’s name struck a chord.
A paradox: How does one demand to speak to the manager when one is the manager?
On the subject of impossible statements …
Behold! Oldpub legalism in all its glory!
Speaking of that other collapsing industry, OG readers will remember way back in the day when rock star Vertigo writer Neil Gaiman disavowed Sad Puppies after they helped Sandman: Overture win a Hugo.
Anyway, jaded as I am, Karen’s critique of William’s Hellblazer sculpture made me do a double take.
Sane art director ftw!
Which highlights another destructive trend that American comics and oldpub have in common.
By now it’s a familiar story: Artistic failures beget business failures that soften up an industry for Death Cult infiltration. Competent men interested in the business’ purpose are phased out in favor of women mainly interested in themselves.
That’s the death of a thousand cuts.
If you see it happening in your field, it might be time to start planning your exit.
Thankfully, newpub has arisen to fill the void and serve the forgotten male reader. And that service doesn’t get any more personalized than in Neopatronage, where you decide what kinds of entertainment you want made!
Get first access to my works in progress each month. Join my elite neopatrons now to read the first draft of The Burned Book as it’s written.
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The only thing I will say to comic makers today is to offer what the mainstream does not. The entire point of an alternate industry is to give audiences said alternative. The last thing we need is this crap to continue on even longer past its expiration date.
One feather in newpub’s cap is that indie authors figured out pretty early on that catering to underserved male readers was a winning strategy.
All this raises the question, where do alternative/”indie” style comics publishers like, say, Image fit into all of this? I know some people with bugman tendencies who are very into these kinds of comics like The Walking Dead, Y The Last Man, Invincible, and so on, and pay no attention to Marvel/DC stuff. Were these originally groundbreaking alternatives that rapidly went the way of their predecessors?
Kind of off topic, but the one comics thing I regretted never reading (yet, anyway) was the Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi series from the 90s, which predates the OT by thousands of years and would inspire the (much less visually interesting) Knights Of The Old Republic games. I had the Star Wars Essential Guide to Vehicles And Vessels when I was a kid and just the oddball designs of the ships from this series was enough to fascinate me. It’s from what is, to me, the golden age of Star Wars, when the Expanded Universe was thriving, before the Prequel Trilogy came out.
You are a man after my own heart. Dark Horse’s ‘Tales of the Jedi’ line are among my all-time favorite comics. They had a major influence on my writing. If you can track down any of the trade paperbacks, I can’t recommend picking them up enough.
Nice! Sounds like I should finally get around to that.
Image only qualifies as “indie” on a technicality. It came about when the rock star artists that took over Marvel Comics in the wake of Jim Shooter’s departure realized they could trade on name recognition and decided to stop splitting the proceeds with Marvel.
A big part of ComicsGate’s woes stem from other ex-establishment artists attempting with neopatronage what Image did with indie. In both cases, they couldn’t get past the oldpub mindset.
Whether or not Image is “indie” doesn’t really matter. What matters is that most of the creators of their books own the “media rights” to their creations.
Is it just me, or does the face on that Hellblazer statue look like David Bowie?
Add a hair metal wig, and maybe you could pass it off as tie-in merch for Labyrinth.
@Hermetic Seal
Independent comics get confused with the ’90s. Image was a latecomer to the game, not the innovator. The ’90s was pretty much the nadir of the mainstream superhero comic and the deadzone for Indie distribution near the end of the decade.
The height of Indie comics was about ’79 to ’88. There were some incredible works going on in this space in the pre-Image time. The difficulty was they were predominantly Direct Market, so you couldn’t get these in your local drug store, grocery, or bookstore. If you had a local comics store, this was the golden Indie age.
The external pressure on Indies was Marvel attempting to secure an exclusive Direct Market distribution channel for itself by buying Heroes World Distribution in ’94/’95. By ’97, Marvel had killed its distro business. It was dead, and it also killed every other distributor but Diamond. That meant that the over half dozen distributors that carried much of the Indie trade were dead as well.
1997. Hmmm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_World_Distribution
Internally, Indies were also suffering from no Comics Code or any moral controls, meaning pr0n eventually had invaded hard before the early ’90s. The Heroes World debacle just pushed most of them over the edge into oblivion. With Diamond the only distributor in the game, getting into the Direct Market meant getting space in the catalog with the Big Two.
Indie comics were much, much more than the ’90s fading tail. Check the list of Indie comic companies from the mid-70s to 1997. Note how many of the ’70s, ’80s, & early ’90s companies lasted for 3 to 8 years. Compare to post-1997 how many Indie companies were around and how long they lasted, other than those bought out by the Big Two. Many just for a year or two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_comics_publishing_companies
Good insight, thanks for the detailed response.
What have you got against Sandman and Vertigo? Sandman sold millions of comics. Vertigo produced some great comics.