An industry mainstay becomes an example of the lingering effect of economic decline on independent publishers and creators in the Motor City, and delivers a scathing dissertation on the comic book business.
Big movie deals, huge Disney buy-outs, licensing contracts, record
sales: In the current economic clime, it’s extremely encouraging to see the
comic industry doing so well, and even more inspiring to see the little guys
hog some of the limelight. But independent comic creators are often times just
“average Joes” funding their passion for the art of indie books with the meager
wages of a nine-to-five, not the budget of a conglomerate publishing house.
Clifford VanMeter, Editor in Chief of Arctos Media, Inc., is no stranger to the
austerity of the current recession. On March 4, the Michigan resident and
scribe of the free web-comic Orion: The Hunter posted a rather disheartening
announcement on the ArctosComics.com news blog.
He had been laid off.
But, it's not the first time Cliff has been in these straits. His first big career shift came while he was working for Valiant Comics.
Valiant Comics, a subsidiary of Valiant entertainment, had its fair share success. In the 1990s, the publisher was one of the biggest worldwide comic companies with 80 million comics sold in their first five years of operation. The publisher, founded by ex-Marvel Editor in chief Jim Shooter and powerhouse artist/writer Bob Layton, became the home of such established legends and up and coming superstars as artist/writer/Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada, artist Bart Sears, and writer/artist Barry Windsor-Smith. When the comic book boom of the early 90s subsided, Valiant's assets were purchased by the now defunct video game maker Acclaim, leaving many creators, like Clifford VanMeter who made contributions to titles like X-O: Manowar, Magnus: Robot Fighter, and Hard Corps (he also admits to "ghosting" a few pages of Marvel's X-Factor series while Quesada was overwhelmed with his Valiant projects), to search for other work.
"After I left, I founded Comicolor," Clifford says, "and we did lettering and coloring for books like Ash and Shi, some work for Image, [and] Cable and Blade for Marvel. We were one of the first digital coloring houses in the US."
And a year ago, before what VanMeter light-heartedly recalls as "The Summer of Ramen," he was laid off by an ad agency he had been working for.
"[After that] I landed a pretty sweet freelance gig, [and] then followed that up with a full-time offer from a company in Detroit. Good money as a multimedia and web guy and it sure beat the hell out of working for a living," he jokes.
In Michigan, Clifford moved in across the street from Detroit Comics in Ferndale and was reintroduced to the wondrous world of comic books.
Cliff recounts, "This was entirely too much to handle. Money AND a comic shop within spitting distance (not that I spit... that would be disgusting). Like the man said, 'Just when I think I'm out... they pull me back in again,' or something to that effect. I started using again. Just a taste at first. Brian (the owner of Detroit Comics) had a bunch of Alien Legion trade paperbacks. I couldn't help myself, over the course of a couple of paychecks I bought them all."
He tells me how he continued to amass more and more comics, but still hungered for more. That was when he decided to exhume from its grave of aggregate time a character he had created two decades ago while working for Valiant... Orion.
Cliff continues, "Brian put me in touch with Joe Querio, a local artist with the raw talent I was looking to bring to the work. I had the money to pay Joe a stipend, a pittance, a fraction of what his talent was really worth. He had the naiveté to accept. I had the knowledge of web publishing to put together the site. 'Hey kids, I’ve got an old barn. Let’s put on a show!' So yet another webcomic was born."
"I'd been following this publishing shift for some time, even before I started using again," Cliff says, once again referring to comics like an illicit substance. "The move to eBooks and web publishing: I was wondering when (or if) the big boys would catch on. It all fits in with the seismic economic shift the internet has rippled out through every facet of the publishing industry. It worked in a way that was contrary to the established norms of comic distribution -- norms which I've long believed have been killing the comics market -- marginalizing it into obscurity for more than a decade. Add to that the seeming endless wave of cluster-f**k crossover madness coming out of Marvel and DC and I could see the end of your basic 'good read' as clearly as the bright yellow 'Danger' signs you see on the side of the road in rock-slide country. I could see a future where you’d have to spend an hour on Wikipedia just to understand what the Hell was going on in X-Men, or the Hulk, where comics just weren’t approachable any more, driven by marketing rather than creative concerns. Already they have so tightly been targeted at their core audience of panties and capes enthusiasts that virtually everything else has been essentially driven out of the market.
"The internet gives us new opportunities, but at a cost. Chris Anderson coined the term, 'the long tail', to describe the future of selling on the web. Not selling more, but selling less of much more: Selling a few units of many, many things from an infinite online shop without the constraints of a brick & mortar. The problem is that the long tail works against the individual artist. Sure every single track in iTunes catalog sells something, but most individual artists can’t produce enough to live off that long tail. None of us are fast enough, productive enough. So it’s still only the hit makers that profit.
"Anderson talks about a paradigm shift brought about by the democratized access to distribution and the availability of new production tools. In the case of comics the new distribution system is the web and the new production tools are things like WordPress, Photoshop, and print on demand systems for producing your bound volumes. Sure, now anybody can make a comic. The problem is how to you distinguish yourself. Assuming you are as good as you think you are, assuming that your work is the rose amongst the garbage, how are you seen and heard?
"So it all comes down to money," VanMeter relents, now unemployed once again and in need of that very thing to carry on his work with Arctos Media.
"You can create products like printed versions, eBooks, sell a few ads, t-shirts and the like. You can do a little begging and put up a PayPal button on your site, as we have now done (we’ve made about $65 so far). Then hope and pray you can pull down enough cash just to keep things going. Just to keep the artist paid the trivial coin that lets you lay your head down at night and convince yourself you’re not just taking advantage of someone's passion, that you aren’t just slicing away little pieces of their life to fuel your dream. 'Yeah, it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do right now.' That's what you tell yourself so you don't start thinking what a s**t-heel you are for preying on the talent of another. Preying in exactly the same way you were preyed upon in years past, ‘cause that's the dirty little secret of our business. It’s built on the need of the creators to create. It feeds off their creative juices like a succubus. It feeds on their need to create, to share their talent with the world. We all get screwed. Some of us choose not to screw in return. Call it paying our dues. Call it what you will, but there is always someone listening when the talent says, 'I love comics so much, I’d do it for free.' [There’s] always somebody there who says, 'Oh really? Come with me little boy. Have some Kool-Aid.'"
Not to be deterred from his writing and lettering duties on Orion which is drawn and colored by the talented Joe Querio, Cliff soldiers on, a testament to the resilience found within the creator owned community. A creator will do almost anything for his or her series to reach the public. That doesn’t mean, though, that Orion and his other titles in the Arctos batting circle are unaffected by the writer’s job loss.
“The biggest casualty of this layoff is going to be [the series] Belter,” Cliff posts on his website, “which was almost ready to be launched. That will be postponed indefinitely. I plan to take the five penciled and inked pages I have as well as the twenty pages of script and offer them around to see if I can come up with a publisher. Wish me luck on that. [Artist] Karl [Altstaetter] and I are both willing to jump back in and finish this work if we can find an alternate funding source.”
Even with VanMeter’s determination to push forward, things are looking uncertain for the future of Orion: The Hunter as well. One thing that may not be clear to the casual reader is that artists have rates, and when those rates aren’t paid by a publisher, the cash is usually coming right out of the pocket of the creator himself.
In the blog entry Cliff writes, “As for Orion, again, I need help. I don’t want to ask Joe to go without payment for all the hard work he puts in. I’m already paying him far less than he’s worth. He’s far too professional in both ability and attitude for me to ask that of him. I’ve been there. Wanting it so bad, loving what you do so much, that you are willing to let yourself be taken advantage of. I won’t be the kind of publisher that does that.”
It’s this “death before dishonor” mindset that made Clifford VanMeter stick out to me. Unfortunately he’s gone from “famous in a five mile radius” to another victim of Motor City down-sizing.
So, what comes next for Arctos Media, Inc.? Well, that depends on the fans and readers. The comic is free, but Arctos has a bunch of cool stuff for collectors and fans alike. You can purchase some of Joe’s absolutely fantastic artwork, posters, t-shirts, or just click on a few ads on the site after you finish reading the latest installment of Orion: The Hunter. And, in a last ditch effort to keep his business afloat, Cliff has added a “donate” button to the ArctosComics.com webpage. Any gracious donations can be made via PayPal once you click that button. Anything helps.
“I’m not a whiner, nor usually a beggar,” Cliff writes of ceding to soliciting charity. “But I figure [I] best be honest about what’s going on and hope.”
You may be asking, “What is Orion: The Hunter, and why should I even care?”
Several weeks ago, I may have asked the same questions. But, upon discovering this diamond in rough, I’m completely hooked. Cliff gives me the elevator pitch for the series: “A half-alien peacekeeper of the newly formed Federation returns to his home world a decade after a devastating interplanetary war. There, his mere presence opens old wounds and stirs up new hatreds that threaten to tear away the facade of peace so carefully maintained over the years.”
Posted in page-long episodes (currently updated to Episode 15) and free to read, Orion: The Hunter is a welcome addition to my web-comic reading list. Joe Querio’s intensely gritty panels are an exhibition for any dark fantasy habitué. With a great sense of story progression and some sharp witticisms, Cliff ingeniously weaves a refreshing new tale from so many archetypal muses.
“The inspiration for the story comes from many sources,” Clifford explains to me. “Joss Wedon's Firefly (more in tone than direction), High Plains Drifter, and a movie called Bad Day at Black Rock all contributed something. Even Shakespeare tragedies and Kung Fu movies have some influence.”
All signs point to Orion being poised to join the pantheon of successful neo-westerns, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower, the discontinued but critically acclaimed Loveless, the triumphantly original (even if unpunctual in terms of deadlines) super-hero yarn Old Man Logan, and the fantastic Vertigo series Scalped just to name a few. There’s something to be said of the rekindling of interest in the genre, which seemed to have all but become an extinct dinosaur of film after Hollywood’s disenfranchisement, excluding several exceptions, of it in the late 70’s.
VanMeter’s dedication to his work can be seen in his “Arctospedia,” which is something of a detailed and visionary encyclopedia of the universe he’s created. Readers can use the Arctospedia on ArctosComics.com as a reference while reading the comic, though it’s probably more effectual to read the reference material prior to jumping into the pages of Orion: The Hunter. Much of the dialogue is saturated with allusions to events in Arctos’ well-catalogued history. Even listening to Cliff’s sum and substance of the series can be a bit overwhelming.
“Orion the Hunter is Marshal Geos Arion Rasas rel Pen Atha,” VanMeter tells me. “He is half human, half tir'a. A hunter, a Federation Marshal tasked with pursuing criminals across a scattered frontier of tir'a and human colonies. The Federation itself is less than a decade old, the result of a peace treaty between the humans (called "terrachians" by the tir'a) and the tir'a that ended a brutal eight-year war.”
Orion: The Hunter episode 15
In the current chapter of Orion’s story, we see him return to his home planet Rogue on leave with a surreptitious mission in mind, and the lawmen and lawwomen on Rogue are hard-pressed to find out what it is that the hunter is after. As seen by way of flashback in the first few pages, human miners had attacked and slaughtered the tir’a in a small mining outpost just outside of the human settlement on Rogue called Ore City. Orion, a boy at the time, had been left for dead on that “Night of Blood.” So, the big questions are, how did Orion become a Federation hunter, and what kind of justice is he after returning to Rogue? With High Plains Drifter cited as a major influence, I suspect some clever and manipulative vigilante vengeance is about to befall Ore City.
“The tragic anti-hero,” Cliff tells me. “It's all summed up by a saying from the tir'a… ‘Vengeance is a wheel rolling blindly. It crushes all in its path, innocent and guilty alike.’”
Check out the web-comic and the Arctos universe at ArctosComics.com!
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