BLAKE BELL'S
REPORT
(9/10/03) - The Small Press Expo (known as SPX) took place from Friday to Sunday this past weekend in Bethesda, Maryland. Everyone from Frank Miller to Craig Thompson (Blankets) to Charles Burns (Black Hole) to Carla Speed McNeil (Finder) was in attendance. The extremely intimate convention featured critical darlings of the small press world and up-and-comers looking to make a dent in the "can't-make-a-living-at-this" world of alternative comics. Given the attention paid by the mainstream media in the past year to graphic novels and comics, the show had a palpable edge of anticipation. A hopeful nervousness dominated the air, as a segment of the industry grappled with the dichotomy of the Team Comix concept of supporting thy fellow creator versus the industry and the artist's responsibility to produce the best material in the glow of the perpetual Positivism inherent within the concept.
THERE’S NO “TEAM” IN “I”
Critics of the industry lament the divide between the "art comics world" symbolized (however fairly) by the Fantagraphics canon of material versus the "mainstream" publishers of superhero fare led by Marvel and DC Comics. What is known as the Direct Market (the shrinking number of specialty comic stores fed by the distribution monopoly known as Diamond) has a history of catering only to the “sure” money of superhero comics. A small percentage specializes in art comics, but this leaves a wide gap in the middle that most industries fill with millions of paying customers. Books like Batton Lash’s Supernatural Law, David Lapham’s Stray Bullets and others are left to wonder why they bother. If a Direct Market comic store isn’t stocking their books after thirty-plus issues, chances are they never will.
Blake with Supernatural Law co-publisher and Eisner Awards guru, Jackie Estrada.
(Photo by Jackie Estrada)
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But the rest of the world has spoken with their wallets. The industry, and maybe even the Direct Market, inches towards the inescapable conclusion that hopes for expansion lies only in producing a far ranging scope of material that the Direct Market has little clue of how to market. The bookstore market dominates sales figures for the largest small press companies like Fantagraphics and Top Shelf. Craig Thompson’s Blankets scored a laughable 1700 pre-ordered Direct Market copies earlier this year, while Top Shelf now launches a second print run of 10,000 copies thanks to mainstream book store distribution. Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson states that seventy-five percent of sales of the recent Chris Ware book, Quimby The Mouse, came from outside the Direct Market. What the hell is the Direct Market missing?
The nervous giddiness present at this year’s SPX comes from a realization that material other than art school hijinks and spandex heroes may have unlimited potential outside of the Direct Market and that they are on the cusp of this alleged vast new world of potential sales. The question in front of the industry is how to drag itself into this “New Mainstream” and what kind of material will claw away at years of belief that comics are an illegitimate art form for kids and adults with puerile power fantasies.
Unfortunately, even the small press sector can't even agree on how to move forward, or if they even need to agree on how to create an environment that will produce the best possible work, the best “soldiers” to send ahead. Have they positioned themselves into such narrow extremes that they won't be able to find the balance every fledging business needs to push the great oak chair up to the dining table of mass culture?
Nothing spoke to this greater than the atmosphere at the Sunday night gathering called the Ignatz Awards, rewarding excellence in small press material. Host, and co-owner of Top Shelf Comix, Chris Staros stood in front of a table of Fantagraphics employees and bashed the anti-Team Comix movement. Fantagraphics’ monthly periodical The Comics Journal has published essays on the destructive nature of the Team Comix concept and were written off as living up to their "fox in the hen house" reputation within the comics industry. Staros praised the camaraderie of Team Comix and the prevalent spirit at SPX as a positive step towards greater mainstream acceptance.
The implication from Staros was that this spirit would produce better material. More motivation to produce more material unquestionably, but better? And does The Comics Journal degradation of the Team Comix spirit guarantee that an inclusive industry such as comics (with an inability to compete financially with mainstream pop culture product) will lose its one definable strength: the ability to pull together in one direction at a time? Fantagraphics can attest to the financial spirit of Team Comix. Recent financial concerns were solved with help from a massive influx of capital by a company call to fans who were more than willing to immediately shell out money and support to see the Institution survive. Will infighting and inclusiveness capsize the ship and leave comics destined to retreat into irrelevance like its pulp forefathers? The “rah rah” cheering of Team Comix versus the “nah nah” fingering point of the anti-Positivism movement forces one to look for a solution elsewhere.
THE ONLY TWO IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
Two groups will create an environment for material to be discovered by the New York/L.A. mainstream media who will push it into the mainstream: the consumer and the fellow creator. At an intimate show like SPX, if you are a consumer, you can stand right in front of a person who has bled for the work in front of you both. Your wallet is your judge, jury and executioner. As a fellow creator, the bond created between you and the person whose table you’re inspecting to see if their work has merit (of its own, or beyond your own) allows you to have a magnificent impact on your peer’s view of his own work.
Both the consumer (who claims to care about the comic book industry and its push towards legitimizing acceptance by the mainstream) and the fellow creator owe it to every creator or publisher they stand in front of to ask two simple, but powerful questions: “Why are you doing this?” and “Why makes you think you should?” If the person - the creator - behind the table can’t answer both questions, they are not a creator. They are a hack - an imitator and they will be added weight to the anchor pulling down the industry. You’d call them irrelevant if their impact of their negation weren’t so profound.
Frank Miller & Paul Pope signing for the CBLDF, while Blake (right bottom corner) screams at camera, "Don't make this as fuzzy as the last one!"
(Photo by Heidi McDonald)
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Frank Miller, who gave rebirth to Daredevil and Batman in the 1980s, was a keynote speaker at the Awards ceremony and all weekend he tiptoed around this call for a greater burden to be placed on the creator. He came close with his demand for greater immediacy by comics (as is capable by a hand-to-pen-to-paper-to-stores-in-mere-months industry) in its response to current sociopolitical issues, but he is hampered by a politically correct audience uncomfortable with his emphasis on politics. Engaging the world face first for an industry dominated by quiet fans who exist historically in isolation, and creators who work in isolation, is equivalent to sticking your head over the rail at a luge track: they saw what happened to Dave Sim and they don’t want to “take one for the Team.” The irony is, as nerds who grew up reading their superhero comics in their bedroom before they (may have) graduated to alternative comics, they don’t like the idea of a one-man island. They crave acceptance too.
Steve Ditko, Spider-Man co-creator, was derided by a liberal audience in love with the O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Arrow strips for introducing reason and rationality through his Ayn Rand Objectivist philosophies into his work back in the late ‘60s. Sim felt the same wraith when he challenged the prevailing domination of feminist thought on late twentieth century social and political mores. Both artists may have qualitatively degraded their material in search of a response from the general comics’ populace. But the knee-jerk reaction by a massive majority in the industry isn’t leaving any creator running to his drawing board to produce works of Captain America landing in Saudi Arabia to wipe out terrorist-funding princes, or dropping into the Gaza Strip to annihilate the suicide bombers of Hamas and other Muslin extremist groups.
There’s little balance in an infant industry struggling with each extreme. Are both sides more interested in promoting their own “we thought of it first” viewpoint rather than promoting solutions beyond the “buy more of our comics” cry? The New Mainstream stands in the middle and seems most interested in pushing through the pop culture barriers and stereo-types. But they must be asked to face their own culpability in delivering their product in a timely, consistent fashion, figuring out how and where to deliver it, and how to change the culture of thought that the Direct Market and the Marvel/DC/Image axis of comics evil is preventing them from wide-spread market penetration.
The benefit that all sides have now that comics didn’t in the mid 1980s with the release of Art Spiegelman’s tale of the holocaust, Maus, is that just enough creators have asked themselves the Two Important Questions. They are laying brick upon brick before the cement dries on the former. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan steps in to fill a hole left once Clowes’ Ghost World passes. Craig Thompson’s Blankets grabs the baton and gives hope to the idea that comics can keep entrants into the relay race to mainstream acceptance (or enough of it to keep cartoonists with food in their mouths).
The bottom line is that if you are not asking any given creator of comics the Two Important Questions, you are insulting yourself, the work, the eager-for-constructive-criticism creator (as opposed to the mindlessly-accepting-of-a-positive-response hack/imitator) and the industry. If you can’t ask the Only Two Important Questions, you’re not on anybody’s team.
- Blake Bell
CALCULATED MUSINGS FROM
THE FLOOR OF SPX
Xeric Awarding-winning cartoonist Justin Hall, Blake's head, "How Loathsome" co-creator Tristan Crane and SPX director Greg McElhatton.
(Photo by Ed Mathews)
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It should stand as no surprise that a minority industry like comics (in terms of its financial foothold in the North American economy) should have its most interesting discussions provided by minorities and their place in comics. The “Queer in Comics” panel hosted by Ed Mathews, co-editor-in-chief of popimage.com, featured creators at all end of the spectrum of queer comics. Perhaps “mainstream” comics are ignored by the masses because they just aren’t as darn much fun as comics by people and groups on the periphery of mainstream culture.
Mirrored with society's current struggle of gay marriage acceptance in North America, the queer comics community is at a threshold of deciding who they want to be, can they be all things, and to all people, and why the hell would they want to be?
Every minority group, whether it be an officially demarked groups like queers or a self-made collective like comic fans, juggles their desire for mainstream acceptance with the loss of its own identity upon absorption. Two items during the Queer in Comics panel brought worrisome points to bear. The first revolves around whether the need arises in storytelling to be conscious of a queer “short-hand vernacular,” how and where to apply it, and its impact on broadening the audience for the work.
Beyond the issue of the loss of a group’s identity when trying to attract an uncharted audience, the greatest risk is the devaluing of the fundamental strength any work of revelance must retain: the strength of its storytelling. Whether queer, straight, black or white, a creator must bow before the altar of storytelling and not put up a self-conscious wall between the creator and reader with the insertion of propaganda in even the slightest form. The smartest thing Dave Sim may have said is not everyone is your audience, but if a creator first attention is to storytelling, the audience stands the greatest chance of growing regardless of the signposts provided by the sexuality / gender / race of the creator. Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby novel was a benchmark for a book that crossed every demographic without sacrificing (or being a slave) to its queer identity. Queer Comics’ panelist Tristan Crane’s new book, How Loathsome, for NBM Publishing is a strong example of a book that put story before propaganda and would be a good example to follow.
The panel also deviated into discussing the need for more gay iconography; the greatest trap any burgeoning minority can fall into. Iconography is used for two purposes: to dumb down and to be twisted into propaganda. Both stand against the greatest asset a storyteller has: their unique point of view they can impose on a story. If members of the queer community have an interesting story to deliver, much like comedian Dennis Miller’s use of arcane references, few will be bothered by the little details that only the queer community might recognize. They will be overlooked/forgiven.
A good salesman knows the balance between wanting you to buy their book and ramming it down your throat. It’s particular skill and many can frighten off potential buyers in such an intimate environment. When you said to a creator at a table at the San Diego Comic Con, “I’ll stop by your table tomorrow” it was a reality. In SPX, you felt like an idiot saying goodbye to someone because you’d probably be passing the table in another hour. Overanxious sellers can force you to keep your eyes plastered to the table as you walk by.
In relation to above topic, you experience a unique facet of personality found up close at a show like SPX, a creator’s ego or lack thereof. False modesty, lack of confidence, or belittling one’s own work in (allegedly) humorous ways is a serious detriment to a creator’s process and ability to sell their wares. Yes, the presentation of your work may not match Chip Kidd’s design standard, you may not have the finances to market your work with the authority of Fantagraphics or Top Shelf, and you may be no Charles Burns today but you can show me you know the value of your work and that if I stick with you, the rewards will be worth it. The comic book industry is famous for allowing creators to learn on the job. It’s a patient industry, but it needs to feel like you believe you have something to offer and are working on it with all that your worth. When you're getting paid this little, I can't be impressed if you don't believe your product ranks with the best of its level, and how you'll slog through another year of issues without a massive ego to sustain that belief is beyond me. There's never been a creator of note without a huge ego. Only the jealous and lazy classify "ego" as a negative term when it should be embraced.
Much consternation has arisen post-SPX about the Sunday night choice for the Ignatz awards show. While still crowded to these eyes, many suggest the numbers were far lower than past years and blame the fact that most had to leave Bethesda before the awards could take place. The awards must be moved to Saturday night. I don’t buy the two arguments that the main room couldn’t be stripped down Saturday night, after 7pm, and then rebuild in time for the next day. The Sunday portion ended at 5pm and the crew had that place stripped and rebuilt in a hour-and-a-half tops. What makes this year’s choice for Sunday night worse is that the Awards - that were supposed to start at 7:30pm - didn’t seem to begin until 8:30pm. All of this leads me to believe that you could stop the Saturday portion at 7pm and start the Awards show at the same time it was started this past Sunday or, at worst, a half-hour later. As if any of the attendees would give a damn about hitting the hotel lobby bar a half-hour later. You’d have a captive audience on Saturday night. The other argument was that the Awards are voted on by the attendees and this made a two-thirds-into-the-show Awards ceremony difficult. Poppy-cock, I say. Just get on people’s asses to submit their ballets within a certain time frame and they will do it if they care about voting at all in the first place. The small percentage of votes that would be lost would be offset by people actually attending the show (if an Awards show fell in a forest and nobody heard it, would it have actually happened).
The New Mainstream will not lock out women like “mainstream” comic book companies have done so. The ratio of male to female creators (and male to female fans) at SPX was stunning. The variety of types of strips being produced is fascinating as well. From the mini-comics of Diana Tamblyn (That Thing You Fall Into) to novellas by Sara Varon (Sweaterweather) to strip artists like Danielle Corsetto (Rambles), every comic genre was represented. I’m still waiting for a benchmark female graphic novel to appear (and no, I don't mean collections of previously released material like the best-book-I-may-have-read-all-year A Child's Life and Other Stories by Phoebe Gloeckner) but the amount of women dipping their feet into the pool is fascinating and will continue to pay off. What do women want to talk about? What do they have to offer? Who will step up to the plate?
 
Things are looking up for Rambles strip cartoonist, Danielle Corsetto.
(Photo by Evan Forsch)
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