In the first part of the Cult of the Comic Book Creator, the issue of self publishing and the way it’s been elevated as artistry as opposed to a business endeavour was criticized. For marketing objectives, it was used to legitimize a business practice with the potential buying target market by promising readers more that more artistic controls over comic books lead to better products. While Image Comics’ founders used that argument to promote their comic books, they left behind them the genuine attitude that self publishing was the best solution possible for comic book creators.
Another solution exists allowing comic book creators to retain some or parts of their rights, while being published by existing publishers. In those instances, the risk is shared mainly by the comic book publisher and to a lesser some extent by the comic book creator. Yet, in the world of the cult of the comic book creator, it is acceptable that the creator should still benefit from full control over his comic book creations, while not bearing the brunt of the risks to publish his work. Although the publisher assumes most of the risks, it is often considered as a meddling middleman whose influence should be minimized.
In practice, not all publishers have allowed themselves to become subservient to comic book creators. Some publishers appear to keep part of the publishing rights of a comic book they publish, whether or not the creators keep their copyrights. This is probably how Dark Horse Comics operates. Some publishers, however, have offered generous advances to creators for projects that were never completed while trying to be as accommodating as possible to creators. This has probably happened to Oni Press several times. The practice of binding contracts that forces creators to complete the work they start with penalty measures does not seem to be prevalent in the comic book industry. Of course, it is hearsay for this writer to write such a thing. Pitch forks and torches will have been dug up by the time the reader finishes this article.
Since I’ve first written about the cult of the comic book creator, many have tried to interpret what I said and inserted their worst bogeymen. In other venues, I’ve been criticized for saying that copyrights should lapse earlier than they do in the United States and that companies and creators should lose their copyrights to the public domain earlier. But these have not been the most vocal critics. Adherents of the cult of the creator have been the most vocal. Denouncing abuses from comic book creators means that I must be anti-creator. It means that I’m against self publishers, against copyrights being retained by original creators, and therefore supportive of large publishers like DC and Marvel Comics. One blogger even wrote that I must be a lawyer for Marvel Comics.
One of the only sensible criticisms that I have come across so far is that in comparison to the heydays of self publishing in the 1980s that comic book creators have lost quite a lot of influence and that the market for comic books not published by DC and Marvel Comics is much smaller than it used to be. I won’t deny that or that if the American copyrights laws allow estates to trying to retrieve the copyrights of comic book creators that they should not prevent themselves from attempting retrievals. While the situation of creators has changed, the cult of the comic book creator has increased over the same period. As blogger John Seavey puts it, "the vast majority of small publishers in the industry don’t play nice because they’re legitimately principled, but because they lack the clout to do what Marvel and DC do."
One of the characteristic of the North American comic book industry is that many of the pundits have adhered to one perspective of the history of comic books. That perspective has pitted the creator versus the publisher from the beginning of the medium’s publishing history. It is a similar school of thoughts to the one about comic books being children literature or its flipped side about comic books’ growth being shunt by being juvenile material. Another related school criticizes the influence of the super hero in comic books and blames the lack of development of the medium on the dominance of super heroic literature. There’s also a school pitting the “mainstream” publishers versus “individual” or alternative comic book publishers. Somehow the smaller guy is deemed less evil than the bigger one. These debates about the nature of comic books and the industry created around it in North America still fight what I consider old battles about identity and how the individual relates to comic book. These are the dominant narratives in the comic book industry and this writer does not adhere to any of these schools.
What I’ve done in previous articles is elevate the school of the creator to cult status. It is a cult because those adherents automatically refuse to believe that their interpretation of comic books’ history has become a religion to them. So they perpetuate one narrative about comic books’ history that favours their quest to legitimize the comic book in opposition to what outsiders think of them. Historiography is the discipline that studies history and people who writes it. Looking at the historiography of the comic book industry, it is often written by people attempting to elevate comic books from popular culture to artistry. A lot of people that have written about comic books have focused on trying to legitimize them outside of the medium. They try to explain comic books to outsiders. They will focus on critically acclaimed creators like Art Spiegelman and Neil Gaiman to show that the medium can be taken seriously. Comic books thus become less a business and more artistic. Becoming an artistic artefact means that the creator behind the comic book must share some of the credits. Hence great artists, like in any other medium are revered for their work and for being ambassadors for the comic books. However, the majority of the comic book industry is not about pursuing artistic heights. It’s about putting a book in a reader’ back pack every month. But promoting artistic heights has merits businesswise. It’s called branding. Putting John le Carré’s name on a novel sells more unit than putting the name of some newcomer. The risk is reduced. What has happened to the North American comic book industry is that a branding practice to sell more units has taken a life of its own and become more than a tool for creators to bargain with their publishers. The name of the creator has become more important than the comic book he is working on.
Other creators, that have nowhere near the influence or track sheet of the popular creators often support this caste where the comic book creator is at the core of the comic book experience, whether they are successful or not. Branding has been confused for status. Instead of being one tool to sell units, branding by morphing into status has become the qualifier that defines comic books with adherents of the cult of the creator. Through the creator, comic books can reject claims of being juvenile literature. Status can be used to push new themes in comic books. Status can even legitimate super hero comic books. But what status does best is settle an old score with “mainstream” comic book publishers.
A lot of the people that criticize this author’s position fail to realize that I am also the publisher of The Comic Book Bin. I’m the guy that regularly criticizes Marvel and DC Comics’ business practices. I’ve called Secret Invasion racist and said that DC Comics' Zuda Comics’ deal with creators was problematic. I’m the editor in chief that genuinely feels that covering manga, European, Canadian and Web comics and a bunch of other topics in one place is important. I’m the writer that has spent a lot of time writing business plan articles for budding comic book publishers because I don’t want them to fail. But somehow, I’m the new bogeyman for denouncing an extreme position in the comic book industry. If I ask Archie Comics’ publisher, Michael Silberkleit about the treatment his company gave to artist Dan DeCarlo, few react. It’s ok to denounce “big exploitative” publishers. But if I raise the possibility that Jack Kirby’s estate is mistaken when it claims the rights over the Fantastic Four characters I become a company man and a rabid fanboy at best.
The worst fault of the cult of the comic book creator is how it has treated comic book readers. Readers are entitled to one thing in many circles of the comic book industry. They are entitled to buy a comic book and shut up. They are allowed to heap praise, but never criticisms. When they heap criticisms, they are rabid fanboys whose opinions must be dismissed. They have no rights to try and influence the direction of the material they read. If they do, they practice fan entitlement which is a sin in the cult of the comic book creator. “How could those lowly vassals that pay with their hard earned money for the privilege to read our work be so bold as to breach the sacred bonds of our caste and call the shots?” It’s amazing in a customer-oriented industry to witness the level of scorn toward the one segment of the industry that sustains the livelihood of all the others. In every other mature industry, the client is celebrated, treated with respect and the understanding that he counts more than all the other parties. In the comic book industry, the reader is at the bottom of the ladder and expected to remain there.
It is this contempt for the reader that makes me personally so motivated to denounce the cult of the comic book creator. For a while I preferred to use the word enthusiast rather than fan because I perceived the latter to be a pejorative term. I’ve since come around to thinking that being a fan is actually very important. Every other industry wishes it had evangelists and fans like the comic book industry has. Every other industry wishes it had customers willing to spend their disposable income every week on stuff they don’t need. The comic book industry has dedicated supporters yet proponents of the cult of the comic book creator dismisses them and treats them like vassals.
The cult of the comic book creator is but one head of this hydra that’s been dominating the comic book industry. This hydra seeks to legitimize the comic book in opposition to the perception held about the medium outside the medium as juvenile literature. That hydra is ashamed of the past of the comic book industry. It is ashamed that super heroes dominate comic books. It tries to correct the wrongs of the past by suggesting that publishers, although they take the majority of the risks, should be given less than then their dues. But while sticking to old fights and assumes that its position is the definitive narrative on the history of the comic book history, it fails to anticipate the future of the comic book in North America similar to the way a college professor or a soccer mom reading comic strips in the newspaper already perceive them without any negative perception. I'll focus on what the future of the comic book industry could be in another article.
I think its foolish to be ashamed that superheroes dominate comic books. Look at the stories that have been told using many characters, including the "big ones" from Marvel and DC and it's obvious that some very poignant and relevant stories are being told that speak volumes on our culture, politics, way of life, and how these things have changed over the years. There is no significant difference between certain "comic books" and certain works of "literature" on an artistic level except for the fact that "comic books" are often considered juvenile. I wouldn't consider Civil War, Sandman, or World of New Krypton to be juvenile...at all.
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