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Post by BubblesZine on Nov 18, 2023 23:30:14 GMT
The juice is still underground. Words to live by!!
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Nov 19, 2023 1:57:49 GMT
I don't know, I think the future may belong to Hollow Press; that roster might be who people are admiring as a collection of interesting, visionary artists in twenty years. If the publishing model of paying a premium to own original art pans out for the best, it could really help get those artists a foothold in whatever consensus exists down the line, assuming there's any consensus at all. Self-publishing is a powerful tool but sadly so much of the creation of a canon comes down to the curatorial vision of people with money to spend, and Hollow Press is on the forefront.
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Post by pentimento on Nov 19, 2023 6:14:59 GMT
Its all fucked up. There's no clear path or answer. The confluence of great art and popular success will never again occur in comics, intentionally or accidentally (organically).
Big Boy Spurgeon was fond of saying, in the last years of his blog, that the audience for sm(art) comics was - or maybe should be - a few thousand dedicated people, often comparing it to contemporary poetry. Well, turns out he wasn't so wrong, as some of the sales figures for FBI (to say nothing of the more esoteric publishers) bear this out. Even Marvel and DC sales are maybe 10% of what they were 25 years ago (and how many of those sales are the intertial residue of aging fans, or hate-reads?) and exist merely as copyright placeholders at this point.
And when you look at the numbers for, say, Blu-ray releases of cult (but well-loved and well-known) films from any label (of which there about three dozen in America alone) other than Criterion, you'll see that it's only slightly more than comics: generally 3 - 10,000 copies are pressed. And that's with existing, proven properties in a more popular medium - good luck pushing new comics work by new creators on readers.
Gone are the days when life-long gimmicks like Cerebus could sell 30,000 (!) copies a month, and carry along utter garbage like Martin Wagner's Hepcats in its wake. Even something like Elfquest, which you would think would sell like hotcakes in today's fantasy-obsessed pop culture, probably would sink like a stone, despite Wendy Pini's gorgeous drawing. Rare exceptions like Ed "Kirk Lazarus" Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree are a gross fluke, the result of Barnum-style hucksterism antics by its creator, and an indiscriminate audience of easy marks conditioned by hundreds of similar (though less well-crafted) "Wikipedia" bio comics (as others here have said here, using at term I first dropped in the comments over at TCJ).
Outfits like Hollow Press are niche, despite and because of their merits, and will lead nowhere, however fervent their fans. Sorry! What's sad is that in 1980, the same audience of hundreds of thousands who played Dungeons & Dragons, etc. would have dug shit like Matt Brinkman, et al. Today? There is some kind of disconnect, the audiences and fandoms are fractured and insular. I blame the internet. Fuck the internet.
The general audience just does not like comics. Heck, most of them don't even know how to read a comic book page, even if it's a simple as Kirby's six panels, or Ditko's nine, or as obviously rhythmic as Kurtzman.
...what was the question?
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Post by BubblesZine on Nov 19, 2023 14:01:47 GMT
I mean it's the loss of distribution over the past 30 years that's killed zines, underground music, alternative comics. That's part of it for sure. Sometimes I think about how a band like Carcass was a full time job band through the 1990s. Like completely uncommercial music that had enough reach that they made some money. It seems completely impossible to imagine a band making extreme music, or a cartoonist making underground comics, to be financially successful.
Big capitalism has gotten too good at eliminating competition through making it inaccessible in our broken ass system of buying. Shipping is a tax for people who want something that's not just streamed or at Target or available on Amazon Prime. Even the internet has been funneled down to like only 10 websites that people use. Completely embarrassing use of the internet.
I try not to get annoyed with where things are at, it's been like this most of my life I guess. I'm grateful that I exist in this world and don't spend my days talking about MCU or whatever shit is being streamed into my living room by some dickhead hollywood guy.
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Post by grubcubman on Nov 19, 2023 14:28:12 GMT
I mean it's the loss of distribution over the past 30 years that's killed zines, underground music, alternative comics. That's part of it for sure. Sometimes I think about how a band like Carcass was a full time job band through the 1990s. Like completely uncommercial music that had enough reach that they made some money. It seems completely impossible to imagine a band making extreme music, or a cartoonist making underground comics, to be financially successful. Big capitalism has gotten too good at eliminating competition through making it inaccessible in our broken ass system of buying. Shipping is a tax for people who want something that's not just streamed or at Target or available on Amazon Prime. Even the internet has been funneled down to like only 10 websites that people use. Completely embarrassing use of the internet. I try not to get annoyed with where things are at, it's been like this most of my life I guess. I'm grateful that I exist in this world and don't spend my days talking about MCU or whatever shit is being streamed into my living room by some dickhead hollywood guy. Can I ask about the distribution point? I don't understand the zine distribution system well at all -- were centralized distros more prevalent at some earlier point? Or was it just easier to buy one-offs because postage was so much cheaper?
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Post by BubblesZine on Nov 19, 2023 15:27:10 GMT
I mean it's the loss of distribution over the past 30 years that's killed zines, underground music, alternative comics. That's part of it for sure. Sometimes I think about how a band like Carcass was a full time job band through the 1990s. Like completely uncommercial music that had enough reach that they made some money. It seems completely impossible to imagine a band making extreme music, or a cartoonist making underground comics, to be financially successful. Big capitalism has gotten too good at eliminating competition through making it inaccessible in our broken ass system of buying. Shipping is a tax for people who want something that's not just streamed or at Target or available on Amazon Prime. Even the internet has been funneled down to like only 10 websites that people use. Completely embarrassing use of the internet. I try not to get annoyed with where things are at, it's been like this most of my life I guess. I'm grateful that I exist in this world and don't spend my days talking about MCU or whatever shit is being streamed into my living room by some dickhead hollywood guy. Can I ask about the distribution point? I don't understand the zine distribution system well at all -- were centralized distros more prevalent at some earlier point? Or was it just easier to buy one-offs because postage was so much cheaper? This is a great read: History of Zines by Mark Maynard (and honestly would make a great book if collected). But specfically the Doug Biggert Interview about Tower Records. Tower was responsible for zines like Cometbus, Dishwasher, Maximum Rocknroll, etc having thousands of readers. Now it's nearly impossible to imagine a big store reaching out to someone like Josh Pettinger and saying "can we get 10 copies of each of our 100 locations?" or whatever. I mean there's talk of 10,000 copies of Dishwasher #15 being printed in this interview and Tower paying in advance. Unreal! Anyways I probably don't have perfect perspective on it, I wasn't there, but the lack of good accessible distribution definitely kills. God bless the stores we do have.
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Post by pentimento on Nov 19, 2023 16:16:40 GMT
Dunno how old or young you whippersnappers are, and Bubbles Zine Mod seems at least old enough to grasp this, but I'm guessing I'm even older, and have first hand experience of the before/after internet (as a zine maker then, and someone who had a toe in mainstream comics [did some work for Image, etc.]) which also corresponds to before/after the comics industry collapse and the zine/record collapse (all of this mid-90s). I know Porcellino is my age and was in the thick of it as well. That fucker still owes me money, though!
Tower records was a big deal for companies like Fanta, and even more so for individual zinesters (though there's no shortage of stories about lost issues, no payments, etc.) and at one point Fanta even made a stated effort to target their books more to record stores than comic shops (which was shortsighted in my opinion, as music geeks are generally illiterate sub-morons). But even more important (potentially) were the dozen or so zine distribs who serviced the smaller mom and pop comics shops and bookstores (both used and new). Not all communities had Tower records - and thank God, because they were, in hindsight, part of the problem due to their size and dominance (however benevolent) - so these distros were able to get work into mid-sized cities across the rust belt and middle west (you know: "flyover country") where it was need the most.
Pick up any issue of Facstsheet Five and there would be five or six ads for zine distributors or wholesalers. Some doubled as storefronts (See Hear in NYC maybe?). The comic book industry had dozens of distribs (many regional, like Friendly Franks) in the late 80s, but that fell apart/collapsed with the rise of the speculator market and the consolidation of the smaller companies. It's worth noting that while individual mainstream comics had monthly sales (pre-collapse) in the mid six figures, zines never reached that big an audience (despite the subject matter being far broader and more inclusive to any number of demographics).
The internet was supposed to "democratize" all of this and allow access to "everything". But as BZ above says, now it's ten big sites, and the rest of us scurrying around the edges unnoticed. (One of the funnier and more biting jokes I've heard about the internet suggested that the "Dark Web" is simply page two of any search results, hahaha). Zines never collapsed like comics, but then there wasn't as rigid or reliable a system in place to fall apart. Maybe Spurgeon was right after all about that dedicated audience of 3000 sycophants, certainly more right than that nonsense BoingBoing was peddling a few years back about "10,000 true fans" - a number that seems impossible for challenging, subversive or simply idiosyncratic work. Fucking propellerheaded tech geeks ruined everything, as usual.
I bet clowns like Ed "Rachel Dolezal" Piskor and Jim Kayfabe make more scratch from their youtube videos than from their actual comics. Maybe that's the answer? Let's all make stooges of ourselves on camera! Problem solved.
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Post by pentimento on Nov 19, 2023 17:09:20 GMT
I mean it's the loss of distribution over the past 30 years that's killed zines, underground music, alternative comics. That's part of it for sure. Sometimes I think about how a band like Carcass was a full time job band through the 1990s. Like completely uncommercial music that had enough reach that they made some money. It seems completely impossible to imagine a band making extreme music, or a cartoonist making underground comics, to be financially successful. Big capitalism has gotten too good at eliminating competition through making it inaccessible in our broken ass system of buying. Shipping is a tax for people who want something that's not just streamed or at Target or available on Amazon Prime. Even the internet has been funneled down to like only 10 websites that people use. Completely embarrassing use of the internet. I try not to get annoyed with where things are at, it's been like this most of my life I guess. I'm grateful that I exist in this world and don't spend my days talking about MCU or whatever shit is being streamed into my living room by some dickhead hollywood guy. Can I ask about the distribution point? I don't understand the zine distribution system well at all -- were centralized distros more prevalent at some earlier point? Or was it just easier to buy one-offs because postage was so much cheaper? This covers that question to some extent, when Factsheet Five folded and any sort of centralization was up in the air: f5archive.org/64/
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Post by pentimento on Nov 19, 2023 18:11:05 GMT
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Post by alaird on Nov 19, 2023 21:14:48 GMT
Dunno how old or young you whippersnappers are, and Bubbles Zine Mod seems at least old enough to grasp this, but I'm guessing I'm even older, and have first hand experience of the before/after internet (as a zine maker then, and someone who had a toe in mainstream comics [did some work for Image, etc.]) which also corresponds to before/after the comics industry collapse and the zine/record collapse (all of this mid-90s). I know Porcellino is my age and was in the thick of it as well. That fucker still owes me money, though! Tower records was a big deal for companies like Fanta, and even more so for individual zinesters (though there's no shortage of stories about lost issues, no payments, etc.) and at one point Fanta even made a stated effort to target their books more to record stores than comic shops (which was shortsighted in my opinion, as music geeks are generally illiterate sub-morons). But even more important (potentially) were the dozen or so zine distribs who serviced the smaller mom and pop comics shops and bookstores (both used and new). Not all communities had Tower records - and thank God, because they were, in hindsight, part of the problem due to their size and dominance (however benevolent) - so these distros were able to get work into mid-sized cities across the rust belt and middle west (you know: "flyover country") where it was need the most. Pick up any issue of Facstsheet Five and there would be five or six ads for zine distributors or wholesalers. Some doubled as storefronts (See Hear in NYC maybe?). The comic book industry had dozens of distribs (many regional, like Friendly Franks) in the late 80s, but that fell apart/collapsed with the rise of the speculator market and the consolidation of the smaller companies. It's worth noting that while individual mainstream comics had monthly sales (pre-collapse) in the mid six figures, zines never reached that big an audience (despite the subject matter being far broader and more inclusive to any number of demographics). The internet was supposed to "democratize" all of this and allow access to "everything". But as BZ above says, now it's ten big sites, and the rest of us scurrying around the edges unnoticed. (One of the funnier and more biting jokes I've heard about the internet suggested that the "Dark Web" is simply page two of any search results, hahaha). Zines never collapsed like comics, but then there wasn't as rigid or reliable a system in place to fall apart. Maybe Spurgeon was right after all about that dedicated audience of 3000 sycophants, certainly more right than that nonsense BoingBoing was peddling a few years back about "10,000 true fans" - a number that seems impossible for challenging, subversive or simply idiosyncratic work. Fucking propellerheaded tech geeks ruined everything, as usual. I bet clowns like Ed "Rachel Dolezal" Piskor and Jim Kayfabe make more scratch from their youtube videos than from their actual comics. Maybe that's the answer? Let's all make stooges of ourselves on camera! Problem solved. i find it funny seeing simon and noah van sciver being called young bcuz i've considered them the older ones since getting into comics. i guess being a genuine whippersnapper in the scene (relatively), i have pretty little to no attachment or knowledge of how distribution for indie comics/zines worked in a pre-internet era. i'm sure there's stuff to gleam from it and im always down to learn more but we are also kind of fully in a new paradigm and have been for awhile now. i've discovered zines and artists through the internet, particularly the artists who were active in the 2010s. it was a really important time period even tho in retrospect it was like a big party at the edge of a cliff lol. but my big observation being young and naive and figuring this out on my own is that shit stinks for young artists bcuz of how the internet has developed in the last 10 years, despite all the new artists who have emerged bcuz of it (which attracted me to comics in the first place.) i think it worked for them for a very brief window and then it shut down again. everyone on this forum who are attempting to successfully maneuver around the realities of the internet are making it work despite it. personally i started organizing comic readings/zine fairs coming to the obvious conclusion (although not-so-obvious to me growing up on the internet) that you need to have events irl. i feel hopeful bcuz of how the good comics have become more and more truly independent. not even our "major" publishers can really fully help support the scene that's growing past them. it's one thing to put out big book projects for young emerging cartoonists, but supporting those releases, and more generally supporting the scene is kinda part of the deal also and it feels weird to me that that's not happening how i'd like it. the new paradigm is kinda forming as we speak, i know brian doesnt think of it like this, but bubbles is a big deal for people, and other small fanzines like comics blogger give me hope. distributors/publishers like dominos are a big deal also for obvious reasons too. i want to see even more going on though, with more people giving context for why the work being made right now is so important. i don't think it has to be a small 3000 person audience. there's definitely room for growth. i feel differently other days though lol. i think these are things that existed in a pre-internet world that people took for granted then that we are now trying to build back up. notice how i don't include cartoonist kayfabe. what they cover, and what they talk about is like so fucking mid and lame to me, i think they are a bad representation of what an actual audience engaging in exciting comics work could be lmao. i think more podcasts and discussion would be a positive thing, just from the right people.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Nov 19, 2023 21:51:01 GMT
I do think that there needs to be something in place to actually preserve the work people are doing, rather than just looking at the arts as a community or scene existing in a present moment. This is, as Frank Santoro has pointed out, one advantage to the traditional comic book format- that people read it and put in a longbox, and so it can be discovered again later, easier than some odd shaped zine. When people mythologize Fantagraphics, it's because of the artists, like the Hernandez Brothers and Daniel Clowes, whose work did well enough in the moment that there were book collections and a push and reprints of those books. They also, at the time, had a deep roster of work by artists many of whom, as the Fantagraphics history covers, wish they were given the same publicity or promotional resources. A few of those artists - Jess Johnson, Mack White, Renee French, Mary Fleener - continue to have people discover their work. A few of these people - all? - made zines/minis that I have never seen. Their legacy is maintained by what was printed in enough numbers to be found on Ebay, or else passed along from hand to hand. That's stuff from thirty years ago, but fifteen years ago, it was 2008 - there are plenty of people who have heard about Fort Thunder, Picturebox, Powr Mastrs, who have never actually gotten a chance to read those comics. As the generations change, the amount of people who have heard of them will diminish. The artists that made artsy work that pushed the medium forward, that you would find at a small press show have mostly rotated out. Beyond notions of "legacy," or preserving the work, it would also be nice if these people were able to benefit from royalties from their older work the same way their predecessors did. Being excited about younger people self-publishing and determining their own fate is all well and good, but Jenny Zervakis still needed Spit And A Half to do a Strange Growths collection. Live readings are great but man I have seen older generations come through town to promote their new book and no younger person gives a shit about them. While I dislike the institution of academia as a gatekeeper, we do need some sort of intergenerational relationships in order to maintain institutional memory, and a world of kids in their twenties looking to make friends and self-promote tends to look askance at artists in their forties they see on the internet, looking bitter because they have seen opportunities dwindle and now they have to beg for patreon bucks.
All of this is to say that I have not read that Other Eighties book but do want to know what's included and talked about there too.
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Post by dominocorp on Nov 20, 2023 1:27:04 GMT
Artists should start forming collectives. I can't say I have any idea what Cartoonist Co-Op does, but groups of artists pooling studio/printing cost, like an art comics version of Image, seems like the only logical path forward atm. Lets say three artists who live near each other with moderate followings all share the cost of the printing of their three books, offer them to stores/readers/etc as something that makes sense to check out together, and just go from there. When you work retail, you see how important this can be. Let's say you put random Jaxon book on the stands of a comic shop that is mostly X-Men stuff. It's gonna get buried. But you put Jaxon next to a Gilbert Shelton book? Ok...now customers are like 'what's going on here? Interesting.' Rather than let a publisher communicate this, with what advances/readership is currently, artists doing it themselves is far smarter.
this is where stuff like kayfabe actually is incredibly important as well. maybe they cover some books you don't like, but work a day in a shop after they interview Gilbert Hernandez, you see how much people are searching for some kind of context for these otherwise incomprehensible books in the shop that they know nothing about. Without context for the art beyond a lone artist (think what Clowes and Ware and Bagge and Doucet might have been if it was just one of them...an isolated phenomenon instead of something readers could ground as 'something' and want to keep engaging with) and some kind of promotion with a really trusting and dedicated audience, it's all random stacks of paper that WE all love but is totally foreign to even the most risk taking newcomer.
Sometimes the answer seems to be 'a kayfabe type thing without the mainstream stuff, more art stuff or only art stuff.' But that would never have the reach they have. Alternative comics might have had disdain for direct market superhero stuff, but when that stuff was popular, there were people in shops to randomly pick up a Jess Johnson comic as well. It's all one complicated holistic system that can't work unless everyone is working on every part of it...which is impossible to have any control over. All you can do is tend to the small areas you understand and be open/amennable to those areas communicating to other corners. but even then, the notion that you can make a living forever from making experimental comics is maybe not something to get too hung up on, because if that's what you're doing I think you have some wider notions about what art is for...I think the first focus should be 'getting the work read more widely'. So much comics activism seems hung up on the substantial payment first, which would be nice, but that's missing a step.
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Post by pentimento on Nov 20, 2023 4:39:17 GMT
But who on earth in this day and age doesn't already have context, or is unable to discover it online or via libraries? What I see is, frankly, two full generations of youngsters who are resolutely incurious about the past, and/or seemingly incapable of sorting it out without the "help" of gradeschool-level guidance like Kayfabe. Jesus Fucking Christ, by 1990 I had read literally every Marvel comic ever made up to that point, most of DC, all of EC, and dozens of independent publishers entire oeuvres, decades worth of two dozen major daily strips, as well as every single issue of TCJ, ten years of CBG, entire runs of dozens of other fanzines, 50 comics history volumes, and a good chunk of foreign work. Not to mention a good two dozen cartooning "how to" manuals. It wasn't hard, because I wanted to do it. And I didn't even live in a big city with scores of comic shops and bookstores and major library systems and universities. And I did all this while attending studio art classes 36 hrs a week, working two day jobs 20 hrs a week, and drawing comics for paid publication. And this was before I ever started drinking coffee or had other friends also into comics. You know, like Nadel said: Boots and bootstraps, something like that. Anyone who can't piece together the past (a mere 25-50 years history, in this case) with all the tools at their disposal right now, is beyond help. And anyone who refuses to do so "because olds" is beneath contempt. Autodidacticism is not difficult. Is it necessary? No - good work can be produced despite ignorance (sometimes the ignorance helps produce idiosyncratic work!). But the mouthbreathers who rush the shops after every episode of Kayfabe aren't even worth considering. They will contribute nothing to the medium. What Ed "Clayton Bigsby" Piskor and Jimmy Ruggburn need is a more distinct point of view. I like their craft talk, but they like too much shit (regardless of mainstream/art comics distinctions) just like Marty The Midget Scorsese and Guillermo Del Turdo, who seemingly have never seen a film they wouldn't gush over, or Jonathan Lethem, the Whore King of Book Blurbs. Franklin Santoros was on the right track with his "fusion comics" baloney, but what we have now is scores of mainstream books with "sex" in the title but no real sex in the book, or obvious political reacharounds in superhero junk, that sort of thing - so, yeah, the alternative has infiltrated the mainstream, but not in an intelligent or subversive way. And when Fanta publishes milquetoast greeting card BS like Lucy Knisley, we know the reverse is also true for indie publishers. Thanks Frank - comics are now as dull and awful as actual jazz fusion. I have spoken.
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Post by dominocorp on Nov 20, 2023 5:11:22 GMT
"Anyone who can't piece together the past (a mere 25-50 years history, in this case) with all the tools at their disposal right now, is beyond help."
Wait...what are we talking about then? What's interesting about comics as a whole being beyond Fanta/D&Qs scope? Gilbert Hernandez selling books and making a decent living? What do readers who "will contribute nothing to the medium" have to do with any of this? It seems more like you're saying the only people who matter in comics are the obsessives, people who have 'put in the work' though, God forbid, not in the wrong way. What do actual readers (people who aren't buying things as a duty but instead as a pleasure) need to contribute beyond reading the books and (hopefully) having some form of reaction to it? 90% of CK listeners will buy one Gilbert book and never read another, but 10% will have an opening (the other 90% helps the stores though, which is pretty important). I'm not interested in obsessives, they're the death of any artistic medium if that's all thats left. For people to support themselves modestly, and for artists/thinkers who have things to say artistically/critically beyond fetishistic appreciation of the form, the 10% that sticks around is pretty crucial.
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Post by mikesheawright on Nov 20, 2023 12:19:40 GMT
re: dominocorp I am 1000% interested in the collective idea, I have a color copier in my dang house, let's use it! Maybe a new thread for this.
re: arecomicsevengood I love the preservation idea, what would that look like? A physical library of bagged minis? A digital repository hosted on Archive or somewhere more specific?
The zine show at Brooklyn Museum was hugely inspiring to me yesterday. What a treasure trove of things that seem like they were destined to be read and tossed away, I have no idea how they compiled that show but people are clearly hanging onto this stuff.
Are we talking about ways to get self-published stuff into mainstream hands? I feel like I've lost the thread a bit at this point. I do think that getting small racks/shelves into places like coffee shops and thrift stores and weed/vape shops would be a step in the right direction.
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