3444

Sometimes when a topic is too big for just one of us, we take two and make a thing go write, and form the mystical and elusive Double Team!

Today, we’re talking about Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson’s ComicsPRO speech.

———-

A Sales Pitch, Not A Call to Arms

by James Leask

This morning, I loaded up Twitter to hear people talking about a speech Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson gave at [INSERT EVENT NAME], an event for direct market retailers, where he spoke at length about the comics industry – its current state and its future. A friend described it as Stephenson dropping the mic on the industry. The consensus seemed to be that it was the kind of speech he does best: incendiary, challenging, focused on building up comics without having to suffer fools. I eagerly checked out a transcript.

My first thought: Really? This is kind of safe.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Stephenson is necessarily wrong about a lot of what he says. The comics industry’s relationship with the direct market is a fairly unique one. The level of interaction and mutual reliance – dare I say, partnership – between the two is almost unheard of in other media industries and for better or worse, the single issue comics market lives and dies by comic book shops. In that regard, a lot of the advice for and reiteration of how the direct market can shape the comics that get made and succeed through their ordering practices is very appropriate, because it’s an affirmation of the power of the market to ensure good stuff gets made and succeeds. And that’s true. The problem starts with what he’s telling people to buy.

“We have trained the world to think of comics as Marvel and DC superheroes. And the world has stayed away,” Stephenson said. Of course, when superhero movies, TV series and video games are making billions of dollars, saying that superheroes aren’t good business with room for growth is a problematic statement. That said, I do agree with the idea that comics are more than that; comics are a medium, not a genre, and the best comic shops celebrate this, pointing eager and new readers towards horror, crime, autobio, fantasy comics and more. But again, the quibble comes with which non-superhero comics retailers should promote.

“They want the real thing,” Stephenson intoned. And what’s the real thing? Well, it’s not just non-superhero stuff. He lists some comics, a lot of which are published by his independent competitors. They’re also all licenses, which Stephenson repeats over and over again aren’t “the real thing.” The biggest problem here is that Stephenson is defining what “real” art is for people. I get where he’s coming from. Get new stuff created whole cloth by talented creators. I can vouch for the quality of Image’s work, as someone buying the majority of the series they’re currently publishing. But the reason why I’m doing that now? Because 10 years ago I bought a licensed comic and then looked around the shop a bit more on a later visit. Licensed comics aren’t “the real thing?” Tell that to the five year-old girl whose first ever comic was a My Little Pony comic I bought her and who wants more, or to the kids who like BOOM!’s Cartoon Network comics. Licensed comics aren’t the be-all-and-end-all, but they’re a lot of people’s way into comics. That’s as real as it gets, period.

Here’s the thing: what Eric Stephenson means is that real comics are Image Comics, and people should buy Image comics. Almost every comic he tells touts is one he publishes, and that’s fine. They’re great comics! You should check them out. But let’s not mince words: Stephenson’s speech was a sales pitch, right down to the text of it being issued to the media. He’s not talking about how to build up comics as a whole; he’s talking about how his company can make more money.

And like I said, he should be touting what he’s publishing, because Image is better than it’s ever been, and it’s putting out Best of the Year contender after Best of the Year contender. As a result of his sales pitch, however, he says or implies a few things I can’t agree with. First, that the comics women like aren’t superhero comics. And I’ll tell you right now, that’s a flat-out lie. Lots of women love superheroes. There might be a problem with the specific products at times, but not with the idea. Second, the idea that comics needs the direct market. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: comics preceded the direct market, and they’ll outlive it, at least in its current incarnation. It used to be, if you wanted a single issue, you basically had to go to a comic shop. Now, you can learn about a comic from Tumblr and buy it on ComiXology without ever having to find a comic book shop and show up on Wednesday or risk the place being out of stock. Webcomics are still vibrant, innovative and thriving. The direct market hasn’t been this unnecessary in years. Don’t get me wrong, I love the comic shop I go to, and Brandon and I are friends because his shop is excellent. I want to keep shopping there, and I will, but if I moved tomorrow and had to go all digital, I could do it. The best shops adapt, make themselves both vibrant and act as the beacons Stephenson says they are, and they’ll keep living on. But the bad ones will die, and that brings me to my final, real problem with Stephenson’s piece: it’s a wasted opportunity.

Again, I get it: he was talking to an audience of retailers and he decided to couch his sales pitch in telling them how great they are. It was smart and almost inevitable. He’s not Mark Waid at the Eisners, spitting truth about digital comics. He was trying to convince them to do something, and he went with a spoon full of sugar. He spat fire, but it was at his competitors; it was less about changing comics than selling them. The retailers weren’t his real audience, just the vehicle. If retailers are the main thrust of a talk about the future of the industry, there’s one message that Stephenson tiptoed up to at the very end of his speech but ultimately backed away from:

A lot of comic shops are hurtful, harmful places for many readers, and comic culture protects them by talking about how important and great they are.

You can see him getting close to it at the end, when he encourages shops to be parts of their communities. “I’ve been to a lot of your stores, and some of you are doing amazing work already,” he starts. Then he fizzles: “But there is always more that can be done.”

That’s true, but it’s maybe the nicest possible way to put it, and it doesn’t challenge anything. The second half of a sentence that starts with some of you are doing great isn’t some of you are only good. It’s some of you are doing bad things. It’s some of you are terrible and you disgust me. It’s not like it hasn’t been part of the conversation recently. Noelle Stevenson, a rising star in online and print comics, published an autobiographical comic recently about how she’s an industry professional who doesn’t shop in the direct market because she was alternately intimidated, ignored and flat-out insulted to her face by shop employees. In the last two weeks, women and men alike have been sharing their negative experiences about comic shops. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re an epidemic. A friend of mine was called a “broad” to her face by employees at one comic shop in my city. An employee at another one – a nationally-known, award-winning shop often held up that I saw someone hold up as an example of the right kind of shop in the wake of Stevenson’s comic – looked at her pile of comics and asked her if she was buying them for her boyfriend, because of course a woman wouldn’t be buying comics for herself. That’s actually more attention than I’ve ever gotten at that shop; after numerous visits, staff have never acknowledged me. They’ve ignored me when I approached them. And that still puts them ahead of other stores in town that either lied to my face or tried to charge me 1000% markup from the sticker price on a comic. Out of the multitude of shops in the city, there’s exactly one that I would call “not terrible.” Luckily, it’s also good.

Why do so many women read The Walking Dead and Saga instead of superhero comics? Sure, some of it’s that those two series are so great. But it can also be because lots of women (or kids, or other newcomers) like Batman and want to read those comics, but readers and especially shops treat it as a clubhouse where you have to paradoxically show up knowing everything about comics just to be able to read them, and shop employees especially ignore their duty to help people wade through an overwhelming shelf to find stuff they can like. And if you’re new to comics, or god forbid, a woman, you have to pass the Fake Geek Girl Test to be taken seriously, and the test is rigged. New series without continuity present an easier place to jump on, and there’s less chance of being called a fake fan if you’re buying Saga than somebody on the front of an employee’s shirt. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, and a lot of people choose to opt out of that rather than risk being insulted to their face because they wanted to read Lobo. Comics shop culture is very often poisonous, a dwindling base making itself smaller, and Stephenson’s speech stops right before the part where that’s the next sentence.

I imagine retailers left Eric Stephenson’s speech feeling pretty good about themselves. He empowered them to affect change by giving him money and ended with a compliment. He should have told them to buck the fuck up, hoss, because the dark times are coming and we’ll leave you in our dust if you don’t.

That is the future of comics. Not a passive-aggressive sales pitch.

———-

Wonderment

by Brandon Schatz

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. My grade one teacher thought that was an excellent idea, and told me that I could be whatever or whoever I wanted to if I just put my mind to it. This wasn’t true, but I didn’t have to know that. I could just ride through the remaining days as a six year old dreaming about the stars without consequence, because… well, that’s the point of being a kid, isn’t it? Not only do you have the capacity to imagine anything, if you’re lucky, you are afforded the ability to believe in it, even for the briefest of moments before life does what it will to you. When you grow up, you’re ability to imagine the grand and almost impossible tends to dampen. What’s worse is the fact that even if you’ve somehow managed to remain boundlessly optimistic and starry-eyed, the world often doesn’t afford you the opportunity to believe in the near impossible. Reality has a way of greying everything around the edges, and keeping you grounded.

The speech Eric Stephenson delivered on Friday was a hodgepodge of reality butting up against a bit of child-like wonderment. He began by stating that he was going to deviate from the norm, taking this opportunity to talk about the direct market’s merry band of retailers, rather than pounding the pavement for his own company. Viewing the proceedings with a bit of wide-eyed wonder, you could certainly say that’s exactly what he did. Stopping briefly to talk about the current state of the industry as a whole, he extolled the virtues of the direct market and the retailers who keep it churning. He talked about how books like Saga and The Walking Dead would have surely died on the vine if it wasn’t for the direct market. These weren’t lies, much like how the adults telling me I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be weren’t exactly lying to me. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

The reality is this: while the direct market is surely responsible for the majority of comic sales at the moment, the system is probably still doing more harm than it is doing good - and a good chunk of that harm is coming directly from retailers themselves. Stephenson inadvertently hits on this harm when he skirts against the idea of gatekeeping. He claims that superhero comics are gatekeepers that have been keeping women out of the industry, and points to his company’s own books as examples of books with relatively high female readerships. He intentionally skips over the fact that these comics can be gatekeepers if and only if the retail body attempting to sell them is doing a shitty job. Can superhero books be hard to get into? Absolutely - but ascribing difficulty to women in particular discounts a woman’s ability to comprehend and enjoy stories on their own merits.

I know quite a few women who have yet to read Fables because it’s the book every guy will recommend to them as a book women enjoy. Nobody took the time to ask them “what kind of stories do you enjoy”, they just assumed that, as women, they would enjoy Fables, much like Stephenson inadvertently did with Saga. Generalizing by gender is a very harmful form of gatekeeping, one that emboldens the idea that the superhero genre is not for women, if only through the fact that there are people out there telling them not to bother with the entire genre, regardless of taste.

The other area in which Stephenson skirts against gatekeeping, is where he discounts the output of certain companies through the claim that their products aren’t “real”, due to their nature as extensions of licensed properties or what-have-you. In balking at the presence of licensed books in front of those who would order them, he’s attempting a bit of gatekeeping himself. Would the industry be better off without superheroes and concepts from other media gumming up the works? Maybe - but it would be similar to the situation Image would be in without brick and mortar retailers. They are at worst a necessary evil that allows the industry to have the strength it currently enjoys. Superheroes and licensed properties help shops obtain easy money to use speculating on untested concepts and products. Without them, Image doesn’t exist. Which brings us back to the direct market.

As easy as it would be to believe Stephenson when he extolls the virtues of the direct market, we all know that he isn’t telling us the whole truth. While they are the reason the comic industry currently exists, they are also the industry’s biggest obstacle to success. Far too many retailers conduct their businesses as clubhouses which are, by nature, exclusionary. It’s this mentality that has stunted the industry for years, and is also the reason why Image isn’t a bigger publisher than both Marvel and DC right now. Using Stephenson’s own logic (and hell, using my own buying habits), Image should be making more money than Marvel and DC combined right now, based off of the sheer quality and variety of their books - but it’s not. When he talks about The Walking Dead becoming the hit it is today through the help of the direct market, he’s saying it through gritted teeth, knowing full well the real truth of the matter: The Walking Dead became a hit despite what the direct market did. Had retailers been directly responsible for it’s success, that title would have been selling the numbers it’s moving today back around issue seven or eight. As it happened, the title saw a slow and gradual increase in sales over years and years, instead of jumping to the level it could have sustained all along. It did this because retailers were reluctant to give the book a chance, but readers wanted copies, and so their orders slowly trickled upwards and upwards, never quite meeting demand until recently, where the book has found a solid level of sales.

That said, I understand why Stephenson said what he said. He wasn’t lying beyond the part at the beginning where he said he wasn’t there to talk about Image Comics. He was. Everything he said made his company look good, right down to the part where he started swaddling the assembled masses in cloth and rocking them gently to sleep, telling them not to worry about the big scary future. He told them they were all special snowflakes, capable of anything, when in reality, some of them were going to fail. Eric Stephenson might have playacted many of them by saying they were on their side, but in reality, that won’t always be the case - not in a world where readers can get their comics at the touch of a button, without being hassled by the jerks at their local shops - and the moment they can support themselves without the help of the direct market, the swaddling will end. Everyone will have to find their way through the world on their own. Some of them will fail. Others will not. Rest assured, change will come. I wonder what Stephenson will say when it does.