Leadership in the Comic Book Industry

Spotlight
Leadership in the Comic Book Industry
By Hervé St-Louis
Dec 26, 2011 - 5:24

I was struck by a tweet by cartoonist Lea Hernandez on Twitter where she was asking comic book pundits Tom Spurgeon and Heidi McDonald “are the comics-related #SOPA supporters on your radar? (Marvel, Disney, Reid Elsevier, Scholastic, etc.).” Hernandez, obviously thought that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was important enough that it warranted some coverage by these two old stalwarts of the comic book industry. Under our ComicBookBin Twitter account, I responded to Hernandez “I don't think the blogs you mentioned care about SOPA.” Hernandez never replied to the Comic Book Bin’s tweet. If she ever responds to the tweet, it will be after she has read this article, and possibly after Spurgeon and McDonald have responded and dismissed this editorial by yours truly. This is how things go in the comic book industry and how many would like them to remain.

Comic book supporters that oppose SOPA will not find fair coverage and criticism of SOPA at Comic Book Resources nor Newsarama, nor any of the other larger comic book-related Websites. Only if comic book fans that oppose SOPA actually manage an effective boycott of comic books published by Marvel and DC Comics will the Comics Reporter, Comics Beat, Comic Book Resources and Newsarama stop dragging their heels and cover the issue, albeit reluctantly and with a lot of reserve. If it seems like SOPA becomes public enemy number one for Americans and opposition to the bill becomes a news item covered by mainstream media and some Hollywood stars take public stances against the bill, or get burnt magnificently by refusing to oppose it, you’ll see McDonald and Spurgeon become opponents of the bill. Don’t expect anything from Comic Book Resources and Newsarama.

This is how things happen in the comic book industry. I’ve got a lot to write about this issue and Hernandez’s tweet crystallized a lot of things that I have been thinking about the comic book industry. At once I finally put together a lot of what I oppose and find disgusting with the comic book industry. At once I understood why I keep publishing Comic Book Bin and why so many want to see it disappear. If The Comic Book Bin were to crash and burn tomorrow, few from the establishment of the comic book industry would shed a tear. Our disappearance would not even warrant one line mention in the blogs of Tom Spurgeon and Heidi McDonald. In fact, they might toast to that. So would Comic Book Resources and Newsarama. But others, many of them without any big name and prestige or recognized influence in the comic book industry would feel poorer for this. Obviously, The Comic Book Bin belongs to them. The Comic Book Bin is for comic book readers, not the people who make comics, publish them or try to make money from them.

I wrote it years ago, and will restate it today. The Comic Book Bin is for comic book readers. We at the Bin, hold the view, that comics readers are the most important people in the comic book industry. The publishers, the distributors, the marketers, the artisans, the media and the creators that make comic books are all less important to comics than the readers on whose backs the entire system has been built. An entire industry rests on the shoulders of people who support a hobby that everyday returns less and less benefits to the people whose lack of support would make everything crumble. SOPA is the kind of issue that will test this and will determine once and for all if all these comic book pundits get it. It’s the fans that matter, not the creators, not the publishers and not the distributors. Without the comic book reader we are nothing and will cease to exist.

Something else struck me last year. I read a review of the ComicBookBin app in the webOS app catalog. The user wrote something like this. “I like this app and wish a similar one was available for Newsarama. I wish Newsarama had put out this app.” After reading this comment, all I wanted to say to the guy that had downloaded the app was “Newsarama will never release an app for webOS. They just don’t care about this small platform. To their owners, even if they decided to get into the app publishing business, webOS is so small, so obscure, so inconsequential, they would not even entertain for one minute that thought. It would be dismissed quickly and with jest. One day, they might get around to publishing an app for iOS and maybe one for Android. Right now, as I’m writing this, the app adventure that the ComicBookBin began in 2010 is officially two years old. Our first app for the iPhone and iPod Touch was released in March, but it began as a project way earlier of course. It was released at least a month after the first working beta with all the raw features of the first release. In that two-years period, none of our competitors from The Comic Reporter, Comics Beat, Comic Book Resources and Newsarama have launched anything remotely similar. People ask me all the time if I think they will.

I don’t know, but one thing for sure, I personally have a two year lead on them. I get apps. I’ve become a product manager at work working on similar projects. I’ve got over ten apps, with another eight for my employer due in a few weeks. It’s a multiplatform app that will be released for the iPhone, Android phones, the iPad, Android tablets, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry 10, webOS phones, and the TouchPad. My first app was ComicBookBin for the iPhone. If I find the time this holiday, I will be able to put the final touches on the latest version of this app. I just need to compile a new version. I’m not stopping. Meanwhile, try to access Comic Book Resources on your smartphone. You will cringe. It’s painful. In 2010 Broken Frontier released an Acrobat magazine formatted just for the iPad. That made the news all over the comic book industry. Yet, the fact that the Bin has three comic book apps that include a listing of comic book conventions (free for convention promoters to get listed in), and the only comic book store locator that actually works in all of the comic book industry has never been covered. Bloomberg, MSNBC and Yahoo Finance covered it actually, but Comic Book Resources, Newsarama, The Comic Reporter and Comics Beat never mentioned it and unless they each react to this article, they never will. A few comic book news sites did cover the news and I personally thank them. So Broken Frontier who releases an Acrobat-based magazine fitted for the iPad got more news and coverage than Comic Book Bin which almost two years ago has released the first of three comic book apps for free for iOS, Android and webOS. In any other industry, this achievement would have been covered extensively. In the comic book industry, the media which get awarded every year for their outstanding journalistic creed have never even posted a single line about it. We supported Android before Comixology. We had three apps running before them. To be fair, Bleeding Cool would have mentioned the app, if it had features allowing users to download pirated comics. It doesn’t and it never will, therefore they did not want to cover our launch of the first ComicBookBin app.

What does all of this have to do with leadership in the comic book industry? I think it’s time people stop relying on the established guys I keep criticizing above for their news and independent coverage on comic books. But more than that, I think it’s time that they realize that the emperors have no clothes. There are issues that matter to comic book readers that they will never address or cover. There is a lot to be written about in the comic book industry and they just don’t want you as a reader to think about these issues and know they exist. For example, I wrote an article in 2008 on how Marvel Digital’s subscription's privacy policies. The article covered the protection how minors’ privacy aged 13-17 privacy was unsatisfactory. No one ever reacted to that. It wasn’t important. No one cares that a large company will sell contents online to minors with policies that at the time did not protect them fully. But if John Byrne and Peter David have a word fight in a comic book convention that will be the top featured news of the week. Tons of blog posts will be written about this and every one will take sides. Some people will call Byrne a prick; others will call David and idiot. It will go on for a week and Heidi McDonald will have a field day with all the gossipy bits.

There is a hierarchy in the comic book industry. Creators come first. Publishers, promoters and large vendors and distributors come next. In the news business there is also a hierarchy, and for many, The Comic Book Bin comes at the very bottom, just above one off blogs. It’s not because of our output. There was a time when we ranked higher in the pecking order. Apparently, my team and I wrote the right things, pleased many of the power brokers just enough. We criticized Marvel and DC Comics well enough and covered comic books from other publishers quite well. We also wrote seminal pieces, like a history of manga, the business plan for comic book creators series and our European comic book coverage in English to this day, remains the richest and most encompassing. We also did something many didn’t do well. We knew how to anticipate the next trend. Although our coverage was limited, we covered digital comics and understood their potential quite well. Before everyone had begun trying to sell their comics on the iPad, I went around one year in San Diego and asked publishers I met what they were planning. At the time most were just getting to terms with the digital paradigm introduced by Apple in 2007. We also questioned some of the darlings of the media such as Drawn and Quarterly who would get an automatic pass on anything they did without any critical review of the actual merit of the work they published. Drawn and Quarterly also said we infringed their copyrights. Copyrights holders often use that stick when they don’t like what the media writes about them, ignoring the protection the press has in both Canada and the United States about fair usage. SOPA would enable publishers like Drawn and Quarterly to shut down sites like the Bin who criticize them. Meanwhile, to this day, Drawn and Quarterly continues to post without authorization on its Website a full review we wrote years ago, ignoring that we have copyrights too and they actually infringe on our work while we do not.

But in 2008, I committed a cardinal sin. I wrote a piece on copyrights that made the teeth of Tom Spurgeon hurt. I wrote about copyrights in a way he didn’t like. He misinterpreted the piece but it didn’t matter. Overnight, The Comic Book Bin lost its prestige and he stopped mentioning us almost everyday in his blog. Heidi McDonald observed the power shift and accordingly stopped covering us too. Dirk Deppey from The Comic Journal opened a bottle of champagne that day. He didn’t like us very much before, but now he was officially allowed to hate and dismiss us. Although our coverage did not change, we still wrote the same kind of articles, overnight, that French-speaking prick up there in Canada with a weird French name no one can pronounce was on a black list and his pet project that would not die, The Comic Book Bin was too. Most of the writers at the Bin stuck with me. I thank them for that. My only regret is that their outstanding work does not get recognized anymore. I’m a shit disturber. But they are not. They are smart and talented folks. Most of them have university degrees; many of them have graduate degrees. Collectively, we still write the best reviews in the comic book industry.

But enough with the complaints. What I understand after germinating on the issue for years, is that there is a leadership crisis in the comic book industry. The people that have “the power” are reluctant to change. Do you seriously think that the Comic Reporter, Comic Book Resources and Newsarama care about digital comics? Do you seriously that all of these folks don’t long for the good old days when things were easier? When they didn’t have to compete with Facebook for hits, when they didn’t have to contend with an ever shifting comic book market place where the “bad guys and the good guys” are no longer who they were (if you are Newsarama and Comic Book Resources, the bad and the good guys are different than if you are Comic Reporter and Comics Beat)? Do you think that Comics Beat and Bleeding Cool are the place where you will see new ideas about comic books that challenge everything we know today will be discussed? Do you really think that they have the capabilities to anticipate change and even relish it? Some of these guys have been involved in comics for over 20 years. Many of them once worked with well-known publishers publishing comics. To them upstarts like the Bin, whose owner has never bothered to be a staffer at an established comic book publisher, take all of that for granted and just don’t know their place.

We need innovation in the comic book industry. We need fresh ideas badly. If those fresh ideas do not come forward, you the reader will leave. A capacity to adapt and change is important in comics, as it is everywhere else. Three years ago, I did not make apps for smartphones for my employer. I did other things. But the last year, I’ve been travelling back and forth between Calgary and Silicon Valley. I even brushed off an offer by another group to buy the Bin. The Comic Book Bin is probably more aligned to the world of the tech start ups in the Valley, in India and China, than the stuffy writing and gossip columns found at our competitors. I just don’t care about that stuff. It’s stupid. It’s meaningless. Fights between John Byrne and Peter David are not why I got interested in comic books. I bet that’s not what most of you got interested in the first place either. I want to read and write about real things that matter. When Marvel makes a subscription policy that is not safe for kid, I want to write about it and let you know. I don’t care if Marvel refuses to send us their press releases or will block every interview request with their creators. At the end of the day, I will have done my job. I will have informed you about stuff that matters more, like the protection of the privacy of your kids when you get them a subscription from Marvel Digital.

As The Comic Book Bin approaches its 10th anniversary, there are a lot of things brewing with us. We are on an ever continuing change plan. We actually have a plan. What I’m asking you the comic book reading public and those who care a bit less but want to stay inform, is to give us your trust and come visit us more often. If you are looking for people who will change the comic book industry and have already changed it, you need look no further. If we delivered three apps already, think of how much more we are working on. Think about it. A place about comics that’s not afraid of change. When an issue like SOPA that matters to you stop begging The Comic Reporter Comic Beats, Newsarama Comic Book Resources and all their clones to cover the issue and even take action. They don’t care about that. SOPA and other issues only reinforce them, it does not hurt them the way it hurts you as a citizen. They will defend creators and publishers first and will not care about comic book readers. Although they need you, they think you are dirty and greedy and ask too much. They think you should know your place, just like the Bin should know its place.

Who in the last year has created a comic store locator that benefits any comic book store in the world that can be discovered though the technology we use. We don’t rely on some old stuffy list where store owners have to pay high fees just to be listed. We use technology to find comic book stores for you and don’t charge a single dime for that. Who will list any comic book convention in the world (provided I can find the time) for free and will allow you to add a convention to the calendar app on your smartphone? Who has actively pushed for changed and tried to format its contents so that you could read our article on your phone without stressing your eyesight or zooming and panning nonstop on a page designed for a computer monitor? And you’re still asking yourself whether to back us or not? Come on. Based on the work we have done the last three years, who do you think is more likely to “get it?” How about helping a team who actually cares about the consumer for once? The least you can do is post comments when you enjoy or don’t enjoy one of our articles.

Comics are changing and The Comic Book Bin is changing with them. If comics are your thing, think about this op ed and react to it. From now on, visit the Comic Book Bin. When you see that we lack resources, and we do, offer to help. When you see that I haven’t updated the convention list in our apps in weeks, offer to help us update it. When you think we should be covering news that matter to you, tell us, or write the article yourself and we’ll post it. This here should be YOUR website. I’m the "official" owner but you can talk to me. You can talk to the writers. If you are a comic book creator, even if you’re pissed about our preference for readers, do send us your news and your review books. Stuff will be reviewed. We need help with everything. We are growing and want to change the world. I care about comic book stores a lot. I buy all my comics there. If you run a store, why don’t you advertise here instead? We’re dirt cheap and the money you spend on us will only go to improve on our apps which have been downloaded by thousands of readers and help you. This is the site for real people interested in comics. I’m not asking you to stop supporting the other guys, but do understand that there are many things they cannot and will not offer you in terms of news, and utilities that help you collect comic books and meet other people at conventions.

About my ranting, I don’t do nearly as much of that as I used to. I’m so busy leading the changes at the Bin. I like to focus more on actually reviews and news than rant about how screwed up the comic book industry is. I’m looking for solutions and would rather work on that than rant. This rant was a long time coming though. Many people don’t know me at all or they think they do but don’t. In the last three years, I’ve successfully defended an original thesis on Twitter and Iran. I read more tweets and analyzed the hell out of those messages Iranian protesters were posting on Twitter better than anyone else in the world. I’ve actually collected over 50,000 tweets and was even invited to Twitter to discuss my research findings. I care about stuff like that. I’ve created apps about TED. I care about ideas, change and promoting them. I’ve built the first suicide intervention app. All of that stuff was once a dream. But through my work and determination it all became real. I work really hard. Many times, because of time, I have wanted to end the Bin. But I cannot. It’s the longest running project I’ve ever had. In august 2012, the Bin will be officially 10 years-old. I’ve never committed so long to anything. I’m all pumped about the Bin and the good we can do for comics. I care about all comics, be they Archie, the Tintin, Batman, Love and Rocket. It’s this passion that has fuelled the Bin and kept a large project like this that many would have abandoned before stay on. But I’m not done yet and guess what? I want you to be along for the ride.

My best wishes for 2012.