For the past fifteen years or so, there’s been a black cloud hanging over the comic book industry. After the speculation bubble burst in the nineties, the outlook for the industry has seemed grim. Granted, there was a bit of a reprieve in recent years when comic sales seemed to trickle up from year to year – but now we’re back on a slippery downward slope, with the economy and other various factors contributing to demised sales and increased prices across the board. (And yes, I realize both Marvel and DC are re-attempting to encamp at $2.99 – but the fact is, $2.99 is still up quite a bit from what comics used to be. But I digress.) Because of this, you hear over and over that the comic book industry needs saving – and maybe that’s true. Maybe the whole system needs is a few people ballsy enough to make a few changes to ensure a brighter future for our beloved medium – but before something like that happens, I think we all need to be clear on what our jobs are going forward, as some people seem to have them a bit confused.

THE READER

You like comics. You read them in your spare time to unwind, and it brings you joy to your life. Sometimes you tell people about the books you enjoy in an effort to spread the love around. Your job: read the books you like, don’t read the books you don’t. And that’s it.

In a few different instances (the most recent of which being Eric Powell’s creator-owned call to arms), you’ve been charged with the task of changing your tastes – the supposition being, if you want to keep reading your Superman comics, you should read some other books too, in order to keep the industry healthy and afloat. That way, other comics will get more of a foothold and thrive, thus offering people a wider range of flavours to try. Which would be great, but you absolutely can’t be held accountable for what you like to read. If you only read superhero books, and don’t see the appeal of a book like Scott Pilgrim, that’s perfectly okay. This is your hobby and the only thing you should be concerned about is enjoying your comics. The only requirement to doing so should be purging your life of the book that you do not enjoy. When you don’t buy a book you hate, not only are you freeing up your list for more books that you will enjoy, you’re telling the people who make comic books what you think of a specific offering. If enough people aren’t enjoying the book, it will either change direction, or disappear, depending on what you are communicating through your purchasing habits.

And so that is your first, and only job: buy the comics that you love. If you want to go above and beyond that by recommending your favourites to others, by all means, do so! The more people enjoying comics, the better – but don’t work yourself up about it. That’s not how hobbies work.

THE CREATOR

You like comics. You create them in what time you have as a creative outlet. Something about the medium speaks to you, and you can’t help but want to share that with the rest of the world. Your job: create stories that you legitimately enjoy telling. Why should you be crafting something that you couldn’t care less about? Whether we’re talking about superhero books or books of a different genre, it is not your job to make sure the industry is diverse: it is up to you to communicate the ideas that you’re passionate about.

Now I realize that this can be hard. I have never created a comic of my own, but as both a fan and a retailer, I know the vague shape of what it takes to produce a comic. I know that it’s hard to get new ideas to stick in the current industry, and that can directly affect the amount of food your family gets to eat – and so I don’t blame you when you have to hew to the business end of this medium, and go where the money is. The little scenario I’m mapping out doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the current realities so much as it has to do with areas each group should be pushing towards – and the goal of the comic book creator is to enjoy their work, and love the stories they are telling. If you’re already doing that, the congratulations! You’ve accomplished your goal. Endeavor to keep in that kind of space, and you’ll continue to do right by the industry.

THE CRITIC

You like comics – or at least, you admire the craft. You can take a comic, and reverse engineer it – pulling out separate bits of writing and art, judging them as singular parts of a whole. You can also see how and why all of those separate components combine to form something more than its parts. Your job: bring a critical eye to the medium, judging books by their artistic merit – and that alone.

While you’re a fan, it is not your job to ascribe your own prejudices towards the work itself. And I’m not talking about your basic opinions about the comic – everyone, everywhere is free to like whatever kinds of stories they like. That said, it is very important to not bring those opinions too far into a critique; while you might not be a fan of romance comics in general, that fact should not keep you from recognizing and praising actual craft. Are the characters well realized? Does the art tell the story well, adding a different dimension to the writer’s script? Does the colouring work? Do you have problems following the text or parsing the areas where the action goes across the length of two pages, instead of sticking to the confines of two singular pages? If you can answer these questions (and quite a few more) in positive ways, then the book is creatively successful. This should be something you note, alongside the fact that, as a whole the genre is not something you particularly enjoy. Despite your personal opinions, make sure quality does not go unrecognized and give it a recommendation for people who enjoy those kinds of things - and don’t dismiss the act of creation for a different genre as something less than.

A note before continuing: if you are not paid to act as a critic, or have been given a copy of the work to critique objectively, you are not a critic – you are just a fan doing extracurricular work. Which is fine. Hell, this entire blog is the product of two fans talking about comics that we genuinely enjoy. We slap the “review” label on the things we talk about, but seriously? Those are not reviews - not in a real critical sense. The fact is this: you cannot be objective when you are using your own money to fund your critical efforts. You are announcing your opinions on books that you are predisposed to like – or worse, you are spending your money on books that you already know you will not enjoy, with an eye towards ignoring even the barest bit of craft present in them. You are out to eviscerate based on opinion alone, holding yours above all others in terms of importance. Not only are you actively supporting books that you do not like by spending money on them, you are telling people who otherwise might enjoy said product to look elsewhere. This is something we actively try not to do here at the blog because… well, comics aren’t made for our enjoyment specifically - and we are in no position to judge what you find enjoyable. We’re just fans, and we want to tell you about the books we enjoy reading. Nothing more.

THE PUBLISHERS

You like comics. People might say otherwise, but there’s a reason why you chose to work in comics, and not movies – and it sure as hell isn’t because of the money. You make comics because you love them, but by virtue of your fancy pants job, you have to deal with the fact that comics aren’t just an art form – they’re a business. Your job: publish the books that make you money, while looking into ways to make more money.

Look, I’m not going to lie: the publishers have it rough. Not only do they have to attempt to maintain a sense of artistic craft, they have to do so while making money at it. At the end of the day, I would have loved it if Rick Remender and Tony Moore had been allowed to ride the Franken-Castle train for more than an arc or two – but the fact of the matter is, people were not buying it. So Marvel drew that particular era to a close, and started publishing the far more lucrative Marvel Universe Punisher once again – and they should not feel bad about that.

While it’s great to see both Marvel and DC and every other publisher try new things every now and then, they can’t be blamed for cancelling titles that aren’t making them money. After all, they need to have money to try these kinds of things in the future, when the market might be more open to a few new tastes – and if they start losing money on silly dreams that aren’t catching on, they are doing no one a service.

And so yes, Batman has several ongoing series. Wolverine is on a whole lot of teams. Those are things that won’t change, because something about those characters speaks to a far greater amount of people than something like Casanova or Morning Glories. The publishers are doing their job, and by virtue of the fact that they have not already shut down like so many newspapers, they are doing something right.

THE DISTRIBUTOR

You might not actually like comics. In fact, this could very well just be a means of feeding your family for you – which is fine. Distribution doesn’t actually require passion – just business sense. Your job: make sure the product can get to the retailers who want it.

In your capacity as “Distributor”, you are just a means to an end – a middleman between the publisher, and the retailers. When orders are placed, you just need to fill them to the best of your ability, and get them out the door, in such a way that doesn’t leave you penniless. So yes, you’re going to have to charge if a retailer wants an extra shipment, because that’s how business works – you want something? You gotta’ pay for it. That said, if you are not doing your job effectively, you are doing the entire industry a disservice – and eventually, it will lead to your closure.

For example, if a shop orders 50 copies of Avengers Academy that is meant to be delivered to all markets on a specific day, it behooves you to make this happen. If you happen to miss packing this title in a particular store’s shipment when all other locations get their product without complication, you are causing sales to be lost. Again, the fans only have one job: they need to go out and buy the comics they want to read. Their job description does not call for “waiting at a store for the product to come in” – it just involves purchasing. And while a shop certainly appreciates it when a customer is willing to wait for a book to come in, it is not something they have to do – and a store that does not have an issue of a specific comic on time will and should lose sales because of this. While that’s not fair, that’s business - albeit quite bad business on the distributors part.

Now the way the system is set up now, the distributor doesn’t see the direct results of mishaps such as these. The effect takes a while to trickle outwards, but it almost always does. Much like theft, missing comics affect a business. If a comic is not available at one location, money is wasted – both on the week’s total sale tally, and in general when the book finally ships, and does not move like it would have on the week of release. Because of this, a retailer has a little bit less money to work with. As these mistakes pile up, so does lost revenue, which can and will eventually lead to the loss of that retailer’s business, either when they find another means of distribution, or when they end up dying the death of a million little cuts they weren’t prepared to deal with. Be good at your job, that’s all that can be asked of you.

THE RETAILER

You like comics. Or at least you should. You are the place from which all the money in this industry is generated. You pay for the product. People pay you for the product. You are the hub of it all, and as such, you have to be a bit of everything. Your job: be a fan, be a business and be a critic, and know how to measure out doses of all three.

You can’t run a comic shop without making money. While it would be great if a shop could run on passion alone, passion does not take care of you physically. When you’re ordering books, you need to order with a critical eye – looking at what the book is trying to accomplish, and the creators behind the accomplishment. You need to place orders based on what your customers like, eschewing personal taste for that of everyone else’s. Many stores don’t accomplish this. For the most part, their time amoung the profitable is short-lived.

At the same time, you cannot let the business aspect rule the store. After all, you’re dealing with selling art, and doing so requires intimate knowledge of the product itself. And while not everyone will share your taste in books, you should not discount the positive effects of being passionate about your product. When you see a person whose tastes line up with yours, make sure you tell them about books they might have been missing out on. Similarly, if you see a person whose tastes don’t line up with yours, make sure to tell them about books you’re not into - because they will almost certainly enjoy them.

And don’t get lazy when it comes to creative changes. While a book’s numbering might continue to go unabated, that doesn’t mean the same audience will exist from storyline to storyline. To go back to Franken-castle, when that book morphed out from The Punisher, a lot of people dropped the series, as it didn’t match their tastes. As a retailer, you have to watch for when the circle of influence shifts from one group towards another – and you need to be there, selling that book to the new people that book will appeal to. In that instance, I tossed that book into the files of everyone who was getting Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider at the time – because those two circles of influences matched almost perfectly. In doing so, our sales of Franken-Castle eclipsed that of the Punisher book from whence it came. Without considering the fan aspects of the book, this wouldn’t have happened. Without considering the business aspects of the book, this wouldn’t have happened. And as the numbers began to trickle down across the industry, it was clear that somewhere along the line, there was a communication breakdown. Fans were not finding the product. No one was showing them where it was.

THIS IS THE JOB OF THE RETAILER.

Not only are you there to sell comics to the people who read them, you are there to make sure everyone is doing their jobs. You need to make sure that fans are reading books that they genuinely enjoy. If you start to hear complaints about a book week in and week out, do not let that fan continue to buy that book. In the short term, you will end up with a bit of extra shelf stock, but in the long term, you will have a customer who genuinely enjoys every book they purchase - and who will listen to you when you offer advice on what books they might want to check out in the future, because you are genuinely concerned about their enjoyment.

In doing this, you can make sure that the publishers are doing their job. Books will sell based on what the public wants to read, and they can adjust their publishing strategy accordingly. Invariably, this will lead to more readers exploring more corners - which will lead to more stability when it comes to books that are a little ways off the beaten path. This will give creators more of a chance to tell the stories that are just burning inside of them, rather than focusing on hitting a specific targeted sweet spot… and more families get fed properly on passion projects.

This is your job. This is my job.

This is how we’ll lay the groundwork. And then, we can save comics.

Now get to work.