For the past month or so, my wife and I have been trying to speed run several of the larger/pricier projects had loosely planned on for 2025. My old computer has been borderline unusable for a year now between several non-functioning keys and taking literally a full five minutes to switch between apps that are already open, so I have a new one that should be arriving later today. We have a new oven scheduled to be delivered on Thursday; our old one still works but it's the last major appliance that we haven't had to replace yet since moving into our home a decade ago, and we figure it's bound to fail soon.
We had some landscapers out here a week ago to put down a layer of mulch in our backyard that we'd normally wait until spring to deal with.
We've got an electrician coming in this week to replace the circuit breaker; there's a couple rooms where we can't run all the devices we need to without tripping a breaker and the panel we have in place is so old that they haven't made parts for it for at least twenty years. Our passports aren't due to expire until early in 2026, but we're getting them renewed now instead of waiting until late 2025. My wife is in the process of getting an updated social security card because her original one started literally falling apart.
None of this seems especially pressing, you're probably thinking, so why go to the effort -- and the expense! -- of trying to cram all that into a fairly short time-frame? And what does any of that have to do with comics anyway?
As you may know, the US held an election in early November and we will now have Donald Trump in the White House come January 20. And he's announced very clearly that he plans to fuck things up for everybody who isn't part of the 1%. He's announced that he'll be placing huge tariffs on everything imported from China, Mexico, and Canada. He's announced massive deportation efforts. He's announced cabinet picks who have in turn announced the various ways they plan to dismantle their respective agencies.
A lot of people have focused on the tariffs -- and I'll get to those in a bit -- but to address some of those other concerns first, I'll start by saying that however much you hate government bureaucracy, simply removing it without having any systems in place to handle the same tasks will result in, at best, government tasks becoming less effecient or, at worst, utter chaos. So my wife and I are trying to update any paperwork that requires federal processing (e.g. passports and social security cards) before any of these cabinet members start shutting down agencies wholesale. Secondly, whatever your thoughts on immigration policies, Trump has indicated his plans are of the "guilty until proven innocent" variety and the intent is to simply "get rid of" anybody who isn't a cis hetero white person and/or speaks with a 'foreign' accent. While the landscapers and electricians we use are American citizens, they do have Mexican accents and they could well get rounded up before anyone thinks to ask them for proof of citizenship.
By getting them to get work in now, I'm hoping that affords them a little extra cash for whatever they might have to deal with and, more selfishly, we'll be able to get that work done without having whatever contractors aren't immorally harassed that are left trying to squeeze us into their now-more-loaded schedules.
Am I speaking in hyperbole? If I am, then go tell my friends from Chile, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and South Korea that they shouldn't be worrying either because they're all terrified.
On to tariffs. You may have heard that a number of people and companies are making larger purchases now to beat whatever tariffs are imposed come January. Tariffs -- as apparently not known by many people -- are essentially taxes placed on imported goods. Taxes which are then passed along to consumers. That's all tariffs are: taxes. Taxes on imported goods. The effects of tariffs on other countries largely does nothing but raise prices on the country imposing the tariffs in the first place. (While theoretically, tariffs could be used in very specific circumstances to do very specific things, they are effectively never functionally used like that. Which means that tariffs never work as stated.) The new computer and new oven are specifically to beat tariff price increases.
All of which gets us to the comics industry.
Now, because of all of the above, I will admit that I hadn't given any consideration to how any of this might affect the comics industry, but I have really only seen one outlet mention it at all so far. Bleeding Cool has this piece from last week that rightly points out that most comics published in America are actually printed in Canada, using Canadian paper. If a blanket 25% tariff on all Canadian goods goes into effect -- as has been proposed -- that will mean basically a dollar increase for each and every comic book you buy, whether you're reading about Batman or Spider-Man or Luke Skywalker or Archie Andrews. The $20 you spend on comics every week will now be $25, even if you don't change your reading habits at all. Extend that to monthly: $100 a month on comics is now $125.
And that will basically come as an overnight change. I expect some publishers -- perhaps even all of them -- will look for US-based alternatives to avoid the imposed tariffs, but the US paper and printing industries are not at a size that they could absorb that overnight, if at all. Meaning many, if not most, publishers will continue using the Canadian companies they use now. And because of the nature of these tariffs -- all but guaranteed to be in place for at least four years -- I don't think any publisher could hold to a lower price for that long in the hopes that the tariffs would be lifted later. For the major publishers, I believe their profit margins on a given comic are in the 20%-30% ballpark (this would obviously change from title to title, and even issue to issue) -- which would be basically negated entirely by a 25% tariff. In order to keep the same prices, they would essentially be committing to making zero profit for four years minimum. Even with the backing of corporations like Warner Bros. and Disney, I don't think any publishers would be able to tolerate that. They're going to calculate that really quickly as soon as any new tariffs are announced and adjusted their prices accordingly. Fans will likely see the change the next time they pre-order books, and it'll hit their wallet two or three months later when those books actually land in stores.
Can readers, in general, absorb those additional costs? My guess is: not likely. Corporations used COVID-induced supply chain disruptions to gouge consumers with higher prices -- prices that have expressly not come down even after the supply chain disruptions faded away. You are no doubt painfully aware of the hit your bank account takes when you buy groceries now, comared to a few years ago. People can endure that to some degree when it comes to things like groceries that they need. They sacrifice in other areas that aren't so necessary and go out to the movies or sports events less often. Or they shift to cheaper options.
As pointed out in that Bleeding Cool article, that might mean shifting to digital comics. Or waiting for the trade paperbacks to show up at the local library. (Although TPB costs will likely increase thanks to the proposed tariffs on China, where many books are printed. "Wait, why would that matter if I get them from the library?" Well, they might not cost you anything but the library has to pay for them, and if they're paying more per book, that means they'll be able to buy fewer of them. And that's assuming their budgets don't get cut to begin with!) Or potentially just leaving the hobby entirely; I've known people to do that before when it becomes cost-prohibitive for them.
Some of those will be more/less problematic for publishers, but
none of which are things that comic shop owners want to hear.
I don't have a good solution for this. Publishers might be able to hedge things a bit by buying paper stock now, or switching to domestic printers now. I expect some of them are investigating those options already. But what can comic shops do? What can regular fans do? I suppose fans could switch to subscriptions where you lock in a per year price now before any tariffs are instituted, but that's only available for a small percentage of titles, and certainly wouldn't account for any new ones that come out later. Comic shops can't really do that, though, because they're buying for a changing number of people month to month, whereas the individual consumer is just buying for themself. The only thing I can think to help them would be shifting their business model, but given how many products are made in one of those three countries, I don't know how much that could help.
I said this a lot back when Trump was in the White House before: the best way to think of him and his cronies is to recall the most two-dimensional, superficial, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villain from the worst Saturday morning cartoon you ever saw, and that's pretty much what we're dealing with. He's not Lex Luthor. He's not Dr. Claw. He's not even Boris Badenov. Trump makes Snidely Whiplash look like a genius philanthropist. There is no amount of negative things you could say about Trump that would be hyperbolic. Be prepared for prices to jump. Be prepared for businesses -- notably local retailers and smaller publishers -- to go under. Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will bribe Trump enough to not go through with some of his stated plans. But don't count on it.
The 1966 Batman television show did not get released on any home video until 2014. Despite airing in syndication for years, a byzantine morass of legal paperwork kept anyone from actually putting it out on VHS tapes or LaserDiscs or any of the other formats that have come and gone since the 1960s. The rights were equally co-owned by 20th Century Fox and Greenway Productions until 1991, when Greenway’s owner died and left his share of the rights split among his kids and his lawyers. Nothing could be produced until and unless all five owners agreed on everything.
(As a curious aside, Fox was not involved in the Batman movie and thus there were fewer legal issues to deal with; it has been available in a variety of home video formats since 1985.)
I could point you to a piece detailing all the legal wrangling that happened to get the long-awaited release, but the short version is that, after countless hours scouring through decades-old paperwork, a fan named John Stacks was able to get some of that in front an eagle-eyed producer who found a legal loophole. It took a few years, but it was that loophole that eventually led to coalesce the ownership and thus make it possible to get the DVD/Blu-ray sets produced.
Stacks’ reward in all of this amounts to the satisfaction of seeing the series released. He received no compensation for his efforts — in fact, he had to spend a fair chunk of his own money to do all the research — and he’s not creditted on the discs anywhere. As far as I know, he was not even given a complimentary copy of the final set.
Of course, legally, no one owed Stacks anything here. But Fox (the current and sole owner) stood to earn a huge amount of money off the 2014 release, largely thanks to Stacks’ detective work — work that they had long since given up on, believing it would not be profitable to pursue. And it may well have been unprofitable if they had to pay a team of lawyers who-knows-how-long to sort through that paperwork to discover that loophole. But because that work was done for free, they were able to cash in.
That’s hardly uncommon. There are fans of all sorts uncovering esoteric tidbits for their own purposes, and corportations capitalizing on that. Sometimes they’ll offer a small token, but that seems to come most often from a specific individual at the company who appreciates the fan’s efforts, and is not a matter of company policy.
Is that fair for a corporation to take advantage of a fan’s love like that? Is that ethical? I suspect most people would say no. But that’s how corporations work; they exploit every financial advantage they can to increase their own profits. In some respects, it’s no different than a restaurant charging two dollars for 3¢ worth of sugar water.
For some, they might be okay with that satisfaction of knowing they helped their favorite book/show/movie gain a wider audience. And if that’s sufficient for them, fandom does indeed benefit. And while it’s disappointing that companies don’t generally reward fan efforts that earn them additional revenue, it’s hardly unexpected, so it might be worth considering by every fan who does work on/for/about an intellectual property owned by someone else.
Alvin Toffler wrote a book in 1970 called Future Shock. In it, he described how some people, particularly older folks, seem to suddenly wake up one morning and not recognize the society in which they live. As if they woke up in another country where everyone spoke a different language and had different customs. But the problem, he noted, was not one of culture shock, but what he termed future shock, though the effects are quite similar.
Toffler went on to lay out how and why this is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gist of his arguement is that, if it feels like society and technology are speeding up, it’s because they are. Quantifiably. Moore’s Law states that computer processing power will double about every 18-24 months, and that exponential growth has a direct and ongoing impact on society. Essentially, Toffler argued, that culture had to adapt and change at about the same rate that computers did in order to continue to function effectively.
Where future shock came into play was when someone did not or could not keep up with the technology, and are suddenly forced to confront the changes in a very dramatic fashion. The little old lady, for example, who’s been quite happy playing her VCR tapes suddenly finds that she can no longer get the machine repaired or replaced, and even the replacement technology (DVDs) is nearly obsolete.
This is relevant to webcomics in two ways. First, newcomers to the form can’t necessarily rely on advice from the old guard cartoonists. I’ve heard Scott Kurtz say repeatedly that, when someone mentions that they’d like to do what he did to break into the field, he tells them that they first would have to go back in time to when he first started because the landscape has changed so dramatically since he began PvP back in 1998. The culture is different, the technology is different, the audience is different. No one can replicate what Kurtz did now, not because he was that special and unique but because the environment he got started in no longer exists.
That’s not to say verteran webcomic creators have nothing of value to pass along to a new generation, just that their experiences might be wildly different based on when they’re starting.
The second thing to keep in mind is that webcomics, by their very nature of relying on technology for their distribution if not creation, are subject to the same issues as every other technology. Namely, that every 18-24 months, computing power will have doubled, allowing for new and faster ways of processing data. In the early days of webcomics, each strip had to be uploaded manually, typically through an FTP process, and hard-coded onto a web page written in very simplistic HTML. It worked at the time, but it was tedious. Trying to follow with that process now would put a creator a severe disadvantage, because they’d be spending much, much more time devoted to laborious technical aspects of their job rather than either actual content creation or promotion and marketing.
This means that a webcomic creator needs to be at least nominally aware of technological updates and shifts in the digital landscape if they want to remain relevant. Letting those types of changes slip by unnoticed can impact not only the effeciency of creating a comic, but can lead to a work that seems stagnant and out of date, both creatively and from a business model perspective. And if you don’t believe me, take a look in your local newspaper and see how the comics there compare to some of your favorites online!
One of the discussion points that periodically rolls through the online comics industry centers around how comic conventions have become terrible places for people to actually make money, apparently unless you’re the convention owner raking it in from all the folks who show up just to cosplay. But let’s take a look at this with a little more scrutiny, and from a webcomic creator’s perspective.
First and foremost, of course, is that not all comic conventions are created equal. Comic-Con International in San Diego is over twice the size of C2E2 in Chicago, which is a bit over twice the size of Fan Expo in Vancouver, which is probably several orders of magnitude larger than the convention at your local library. And every show, by the nature of where it’s located and who they invite as guests, is going to attract a different type of audience; for examples, Dragon Con is known for their particularly large cosplay presence, while Otakon focuses more on anime. Which means that whether or not a webcomic creator generates any sales at any given convention can be dictated, in part, by what genre their webcomic is. Not every type of webcomic is going to go over equally well (or badly) at every comic convention; even one creator with two distinctly different types of strips may find that they garner very different levels of interest, depending on what show they’re tabling at.
Another thing to consider is that tabling at a convention is business operation. Of course, creators are going to limit their expenditures due to their personal budgets, but what many seem not to do is approach a convention appearance as a set of business expenses. I’m sure most people factor in the actual tabling cost, and probably travel and such. But the tablers who are treating the show as a part of their business will be doing more than just what you might expect at a garage sale. Beyond just taking money from people who walk by, tablers have to advertise and keep track of income versus outlays and establish business contacts…
The internet has in many ways democratized commerce. People know they can compare pricing from several locations instantly, and know precisely who has sold out of what. Exclusive editions are less so now, since they inevitably wind up on eBay sometimes even moments after they’re first released. Even creators themselves are selling much the same set of items on their websites as they are at conventions. So, from a business perspective, a webcomic creator needs to establish a different reason to encourage fans to attend (and buy items) at shows. And what that increasingly means (not just from webcomickers, but for everyone) is experience — a personal interaction attendees can only get first-hand.
What kind of experience can a webcomic creator provide a fanbase that’s largely based around sitting and reading? Direct interaction. The creator can (and should!) try to make a personal, unique connection with everyone who walks near their table, and make the experience of meeting them that value proposition. Like I said, a reader can buy directly from the website already, so the benefit of buying at a convention is the added bonus of talking directly to the creator and getting a personalized experience along with a book or t-shirt or whatever. That experience might just be an autograph (preferably with a note referring to the specific conversation, or at least the show) but it could easily include jokes, anecdotes, photos, dance routines, and anything else that can only be conveyed in person.
The bottom line is that a creator can’t just go to a “comic” convention and expect to sell out. They’ll need to do homework first, to make sure they’re going to the right conventions, and then they’ll still have to hustle and provide a smaller version of a Vaudville show to attract potential patrons and get them to experience their comic, as well as buy it.
Years ago, I talked about the notion of personalized comics. You give a company your name and a handful of minor details, an they could drop those into a comic book story thereby making you a character in the story. I had a storybook version of this as a kid, but it had to be manually typewritten. I suspect it was a HUGE amount of effort and only worked finanically because they must have paid someone slave wages to type the whole script out for each and every book that was sold. Marvel attempted this in the 1990s, relying on their Captain Universe character as a stand-in for the customer.
(The whole Captain Universe concept is brilliantly ideal for this type of thing. Like, if I didn't know better, I'd like the character was specifically created for exactly a project like this.)
Up until maybe 2000-2005 or so, those types of stories were relatively rare because it did require a fair amount of manual effort. However, by 2009, when I wrote that post, the technology was far enough along that I felt it could be handled relatively easily. Databases meant you could plug in the inividual's name and details into the story quickly and effortlessly, digital lettering meant that dropping that now-customized script into art files was also automatic, and print-on-demand printing meant that there would be effectively no set-up prouction costs. You've removed virtually all of the manual labor involved with creating these beyond developing the initial basic story. So why was no one doing personalized comics?
Well, apparently someone has finally gotten around to it!
Poorly.
Well, poorly from a comic book art perspective at any rate.
There is now a Scooby-Doo framework where you can personalize yourself into a graphic novel version of "What a Night for a Knight," the very first Scooby-Doo cartoon from 1969. You plug in some basic details about yourself -- including a customizeable Hanna-Barbera-style avatar -- and they'll produce a hardcover book of the story with you inserted as a new character...
I'm of two minds about the result here. In the first place, the addition of a customizeable character is relatively well-done. I mean, yeah, there is some measure of looking like the additional character was just pasted into existing art, but it's not at all bad for a completely customized, entirely new character design to be dropped into an existing story automatically. Certainly a vast improvement over the generic art that just presented a generic character and only change the name in older books of this type. But whoever put this together doesn't seem to have much knowledge or familiarity with actual comic books. Setting aside that it looks like they basically just took screen shots of the original cartoon, the page and panel flow is clunky at best.
I learned about this project from Scott Niswander's recent video about his going through and getting one of these. He's the one who noted the panels look like screen shots of the show. (I'm almost certain they're not precisely just screen shots, though -- those wouldn't print well AT ALL. They must be re-drawn. Either new for this project or re-purpose from an old storybook based on the episode?) He also noted that much of the dialogue assigned to his character is just lifted from other characters in the show, mostly Daphne and Velma. All of which suggests to me that this project was almost entirely built out by the programmers and developers figuring out how to make all the backend systems run as smoothly as possible, and there was minimal effort on the creative/storytelling side of things. Which further suggests to me that this is more of a proof-of-concept product than anything else. They're testing this to see if it is indeed profitable to make these types of books on a more affordable scale that than used to be possible.
If that is the case, I hope this is successful. I'd love to see more of these types of things -- I'm genuinely disappointed these haven't been more prevalent given how ubitquitous the technology is. I'd just like to see them afforded some interesting and creative storytelling by professional cartoonists to make some results that are cool and interesting beyond just the fact of their existence and the potential they purport.
It would appear that Patreon is changing some of it's methodology again. Jennie Gyllblad posted a video this week explaining it from the creator side of things. Most of the video is her response and what she will be doing to adjust, but she covers the basics of what's happening in the first two-ish minutes if you want the basic gist of it...
Gyllblad's (and I suspect many other creators') concern is ultimately that the business model that they've been relying on for however long is being disrupted. If Patreon suddenly collapsed, that would be akin to your losing your job. This is perhaps closer to your employer saying, "instead of paying you every two weeks, we're just going to give you one big paycheck every quarter." Even if the end dollar amount is essentially the same, you would likely have to significantly alter how you handle your personal budget. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, but the point is that you have to find a way to radically restructure how you handle your income even though, on paper, it doesn't seem all that different.
Of course, Patreon is free to establish their rules however they see fit, and some of this is in response to Apple changing the rules of their app store. (Although I'm not sure why Patreon even needs an app. If you're giving them credit card an contact information for billing purposes anyway,
the app wouldn't offer much more useable data. I mean, yeah, technically it would have more data but how would they use it? I suppose they could read what other apps you use and try to suggest other Patreon campaigns based on your interests there, but I don't think they've ever pursued that. That would be more difficult and less accurate than just suggesting campaigns based on other campaigns you've already backed, which is what they do already. So ultimately, the app doesn't offer Patreon any functional advantage over just having a website that can be viewed on a person's phone. But hey, that's me thinking like a user.) I expect Patreon looked at their user base, saw that the majority of creators just use a monthly setup anyway and decided that they could save some money in development/maintence costs if they forced everyone into a single billing standard. The number of creators like Gyllblad who might find this problematic are inconsequential as far as they're concerned.
Crowd-funding was a major disruptor in the comics market. Not just Patreon, but Kickstater and IndieGoGo and all of them writ-large. They allow creators to work in regular, micro-payment systems that would be, at best, difficult to manage with digital funds-transfer options like PayPal or Venmo. However, there haven't been enough variants in the overall system that have become successful enough to offer competition. The problem with this type of market is that you're not just talking about a basic product alternative that you can cast aside if you ultimately don't like it; people are understandably more reluctant to turn over credit card info for regular payments to a company they're unfamiliar with. Which means competitors take longer to build up trust, and it takes more to get consumers to switch.
All of which means Patreon can "get away with" more significant changes with less impact than many other industries. They're likely counting on that. They pushed that limit a few years ago when they attempted to push processing fees down to the indiviual consumer (Gyllblad references this in her video) because that was a change that impacted literally everyone on their platform. I don't doubt that they're considering here that it won't get as much pushback because it doesn't impact nearly as many people.
I don't have a real solution or answer to any of this. I point it out mostly to spotlight that this is what 21st century capitalism looks like for comic creators. Companies have always been in business to take as much of your money as possible with the least effort/expense possible, and this is just the 2024 version of how that plays out. Independent creators are heroic in my mind for even attempting to carve out a living in this environment, and this type of thing is just one of the many challenges they have to face just to to make something that might not sell to the broadest swath of the population.
The concept of branding is relatively recent in the span of human history. For centuries, if you wanted to buy a horse, you’d talk to some guy like Wilbur Post and buy your horse directly from him. But by the 20th century, if you wanted to buy a car, you did not talk to Henry Ford; you bought it from a salesman who sold cars made by people that Ford employed. With several layers between the customer and the person(s) who created whatever it is they were buying, there was little emotional accountability and/or attachment. Add mass media on top of that, and you wind up with corporations so far removed from their customers, that they have to spend time selling their own image as well as their products.
The other reason for branding is for a single corporation to provide a consistent message. As soon as you start adding people to a group, the danger for sending mixed messages exponentionally rises. Each person has their own beliefs and values, of course, and they might not all perfectly align with the ones of everyone in the group. So people who run corporations use branding, in part, to help ensure that all of their employees are adhering to a single message.
But here’s the interesting thing: this applies to individuals as well. You might think that a lone cartoonist, just by the simple fact that they’re a single individual, would pretty much always project a pretty straight-forward brand presence. They might not have a logo or company uniform, but they would still, theoretically, present basically the same face to their readers. Their audience would grow accustomed to their update schedule, style of humor, speech patterns, etc.—all of which would help to make up the cartoonist’s own brand.
The problem with that is that we, as humans who interact with the rest of the world, are not single individuals. Think about this: how do you talk and act around your friends, and how does that differ from how you talk and act around your parents? Around co-workers? Around the clerk at the grocery store? Around the repairman who’s fixing your refridgerator? Around your significant other? You become a slightly different person in each of those situations/interactions.
What that means is that the presence a comic creator puts out online might run into conflict when they encounter someone other than their anticipated audience in that environment. A relative, an old bully from grade school, an ex… And though that interaction might be completely typical for those two individuals, it’s now on display for everyone else the creator interacts with. And if their interactions are radically different than what they’re seeing, that’s going to have a negative impact on the individual’s brand.
That’s how/why we’ve saw a rise in so many mea culpas in professional sports starting a decade or so back; viewers started seeing athletes in settings and interactions outside the normal playing field more often, and those interactions are at odds with the good sportsmanship ethos usually shown on the field.
All of which is to say that, while corporations pioneered the notion of broad-scale branding to unify how their audience sees them, it’s perhaps not a bad idea to try applying the same ideas at a smaller scale to coalesce the personal branding of comic creators. A set of rules and guidelines on how to act or respond online that can be referred to when an atypical interaction crops up. While cartoonists are less likely than pro athletes to be caught on video, they’re probably more likely to post something untoward online; and these days, both are equally likely to damage a reputation or, worse, a livelihood.
Let’s say you’ve started your own webcomic, and you’ve been successful in putting daily updates in place for over a year. You’ve generated a following of committed readers, and you’re starting to think about additional ways to get the word out about your comic and how you can start to make money off it. So you package a bunch of strips up into a book, print up several hundred, and sign up for a table at a local comics convention. You’re bound to grab the attention of a good number of those comics fans, right? And even if they don’t buy your book right off the bat, they might go back to your website to check out some strips, and maybe buy something down the road a bit. Perfect set up!
Eh, maybe not.
I met Bradley Potts a few years ago at a large mid-West convention. The show billed themselves as a pop culture convention more than a comics con, but they had a good sized Artists Alley, and there were plenty of retailers with rows of long boxes available for old school comics fans. Potts is the founder/owner of Gateway Comics, which published Stalker and Hellenistic Mysteries online. Not coincidentally, Potts also wrote both features.
I haven't seen/heard from Potts or Gateway since before the pandemic; I'm guessing he wasn't able to keep that going through the tumult.
In any event,
Potts was tabling at this show, selling print copies of Stalker and a variety of prints. He’d been working on that series for about a year at that point, I believe, and didn’t seem to have an illusions about where he stands in the grand scheme of webcomicdom. He noted, “I’m still small enough that most of the people I talk to are hearing about me and my comics for the first time.” So he was doing exactly what one would expect someone in his position to do: go to shows to drum up both interest and, hopefully, sales.
But you know what else he had to say?
I had a good time at the show, though it was not particularly successful from a sales perspective. Sales were slow for many of us in Artists Alley, and indeed the only busy place on the floor was the autograph area. If you don’t like crowded conventions, this was the place for you.
Despite an apparent undercurrent of snark, he did seem to genuinely have a good time. A good enough time for him to warrant returning next year? I would guess not.
But Potts problem wasn’t with his content; his problem was his location. Not that his table was in the wrong spot, but he was at the wrong convention. The audience at that show was more interested in actors from Doctor Who and Star Trek than in comics. Certainly a comic that isn’t already a known quantity for them.
Does that mean Potts should have limited himself to shows that focus on independent creators? Not necessarily. In fact, I dare say that some indie-type shows would also be less than successful for him, since Stalker did fall into the superhero genre. What Potts needed to find were conventions that are supportive of independent creators, but not to the exclusion of what’s popular. He needed to find where audiences who might be receptive to his work go, and hang out his shingle there.
It’s not just about making the work; you also need to figure out who might be interested in the work you’re making and where they might go. And, as Potts found out, that might not be where you first thought; you might need to dig a little to parse out how one show might be just a little bit different than another.
Pokémon has been an enduring media phenomenon for nearly three decades now, starting originally as a video game and reaching out into anime, manga, trading card games, and a host of other media. Theme parks and stores for the property are not uncommon. One of the iconic characters of the show, Pikachu, has even appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in multiple forms. It is the second-most successful media franchise based on a video game, behind only Mario. (Both of which, coincidentally, are owned by Nintendo.)
Back in 2014, Nintendo celebrated a new Pikachu distribution event by having 1000 Pikachu appear in Yokohama Minatomirai. Not 1000 actual Pickachu, but there will boats and Ferris wheels wrapped with Pikachu, Pikachu-themed cottages, and the like. Area visitors were able to download the new version of the character to Pokémon X or Y, and varied slightly depending on what part of the park it was downloaded in. Not to mention loads of giveaways. It sounded like an enormous marketing effort on the part of Ninendo, but one they can easily afford, given the property’s longevity and success.
This drew hundreds of thousands of fans, and Nintendo was able to run some press releases later touting how many people attended events in person, and how many downloaded which Pikachu, and generally try to show just how many people were interested in Pokémon these days. It’s all boils down to marketing. It’s a very expensive and elaborate campaign reminscent of the old “I’m a Pepper, he’s a Pepper, she’s a Pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too” commercials.
So if this is just a big ad campaign, why is it relevant to a discussion about fans and fandom?
If you think about it, most modern fandoms are commercial at their base level. The people producing the things you enjoy—whether that’s video games, sports, movies, comics, music, whatever—are doing so in order to make a living. Even if their product is free to you, the consumer, they’re trying to earn money in what they do. Maybe it’s by selling advertising space, maybe they’re giving away one product to entice you to spend money on another, maybe they’re giving away their wares and simply asking for donations, maybe they’re providing you with free materials now in the hopes that they’ll find a way to earn money later. Regardless of their specific approach, part of that includes interacting with fans. Both in terms of strategy as well as tactics.
And from the other side of the fence, that’s why it’s critical to look at who fans are. To find out precisely who they are and why they respond the way they do. It’s a bit cynical, but it also serves to allow someone creating this content to tailor it to their audience and make it a better experience for them. Will Nintendo sell more games because someone saw Pikachu on the side of a bus the same day they saw him on a water fountain or plastered on the side of a building? I expect that would be an almost impossible number to quantify, but I'm sure the success of that 2014 event will inform the IP's impending 30th anniversary in 2026. I don't doubt that many, many plans are already underway and, despte being an explictly capitalist approach, it will -- like before -- bring some entertainment and joy to fans. New, current and lapsed.
Two largely unrelated news items from the comics industry leave me scratching my head a bit...
First, DC announced an agreement with GlobalComix to distribute some of their books digitally while simultaneously announcing DC GO! as a new line of vertical webcomics. Digital comics and webcomics are different beasts, so that a company might simultaneously explore both options more or less independently makes sense to me. With the relative success of Wayne Family Adventures, doing new webcomics with DC GO! also makes sense to me. And with the ongoing enshitification of Comixology, DC exploring another digital delivery system like GlobalComix makes sense. The part that I don't get is that, with DC actively pursuing a new digital delivery system and focusing the initial launch of it with specific already-published stories (as opposed to new issue releases) why would they also try to force some of their older material into DC GO! simultaneously?
DC is mostly plugging their new series with DC GO! but they've also clearly stated they're reconfiguring old material to the new format. Some parts of MAD Magazine and Batman: Hush are already online, and they're already promoting
All-Star Superman, The Joker (2021), Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and Justice League (2011) among others.
As I said, digital comics and webcomics are very different beasts, so why are they trying to force digital comics into a webcomics platform while they're actively pursuing a new (to them) digital comics platform in GlobalComix? It seems like a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach, but this is 2024! That type of experimentation is at least 10-15 years out of date now.
The other decision I don't get comes from Marvel, who just announced a new line of "Premier Collection" comics. Basically, they're trade paperbacks but in a smaller 6" x 9" format. That part I get. What I don't get are the story choices they're leading with. We've got three volumes from the semi-recent past, but then the Daredevil story gets pulled from 1986. I know Marvel Studios is doing a show based on the "Born Again" storyline but that seems to be the only one of these books with a media tie-in. (The Winter Soldier comic is only tangtially related at best to the movie of the same name.) Additionally, the Fantastic Four story they've chosen is an expressly bad story for new readers. That was the story I happened to use to get back into reading the title after several years away and, despite being a huge FF fan previously, I had trouble understanding what was going on. At the time, I wrote...
I kept getting the feeling that I was trying to climb over the walls of some secret club that only really wanted people who were already members. There was a reluctance to letting outsiders in, even with my only having been an outsider for a very short time...
It seems as if that it's become SO insular and self-referential that there's a kind of comic myopia that's going on. Despite clear efforts to make sure there's sufficient exposition for new readers, there seems to be an inability to see that the larger story is inherently closed to outsiders.
I am, as always, not privvy to the discussions executives at Marvel and DC are having. I don't know all the factors at play, or what other plans might be bubbling under the surface that these might later tie into. Not to mention that I'm not even formally in the comic industry! But speaking as a fan who does have an MBA and has been in marketing for the past several decades, I do find myself wondering what these publishers are thinking with some of these decisions.
Have you heard the anyone advise you or someone you know to “fail often”? The phrase has been circulating in business sectors for the past several years, particularly among entreprenuers, but it’s an idea that goes back considerably further. At first blush, it seems counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t we be trying to do better? Shouldn’t we be trying to succeed? Why should failure be a goal we strive for?
Because failure is how people learn. Thomas Edison once noted, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” It’s through failure that we learn how to improve. “This didn’t work because of that,” sounds obvious on the surface but it really means, “this didn’t work because of that, which means something about that is a critical factor that I should pay closer attention to.”
The notion of “failing often” is not about trying to achieve failure; it’s about trying as many things as possible to achieve success. A key reason why more people don’t try more things is fear, often fear of failure. “What if I can’t?” “What if it doesn’t work?” “What if I don’t like the results?” The phrase “fail often” is telling you to not dwell on whatever scares you, but charge ahead anyway. You won’t know the results if you don’t try; fear keeps you from trying; not trying prevents you from learning the results. But if you try, and fail, then you can get back and try something else. That might succeed, or it might be another of 10,000 ways it won’t work. Either way, you’re closer to overall success.
There are several ways this concept is applicable to webcomics. Starting one in the first place, for example! If you have an idea for a webcomic, but you’re not sure if it will work or if people will respond positively to it, the only real way to find out is to put it online and start getting feedback. If you get nothing but negative responses, it’s probably not a great comic and probably not worth pursuing. But that means you can devote your time to a different webcomic, and maybe that’s the one that catches on.
The idea could also be applied to your update schedule. Maybe seven days a week is too much for you to handle. Maybe your story flows better if you publish five pages at a time. I know Dorothy Gambrell has made some very calculated decisions on how often she updates Cat and Girl, and determined she made the same amount of money updating it twice a week as she did three times a week. I haven't seen her explicitly note this, but I suspect she also saw
that she was making the same (or at least not significantly less, relative to the amount of effort she puts into the strip) updating only once a week as twice a week and that's why partially why she cut back even further.
But she saw what wasn’t working, and learned from it.
Speaking of making money, there are a number of ways people make money from their webcomics. They sell t-shirts, stuffed animals, printed books… some have taken to Kickstarter, others have started using Patreon. Not all of those avenues are successful, and what might sound cool or even seem successful in one instance might not be the same for another. But if your job is to earn money from a webcomic that you give away for free online, then it makes sense that you would want to ditch the ideas that don’t earn you money as fast as possible. But you don’t know which will work until you try. And fail.
The “failure is not an option” attitude of the early 1970s is outdated. With the technology that’s available—digital creation and delivery, print on demand, and now even 3D printing—it’s easier than ever to try a variety of different ideas quickly and with a minimal loss of time and resources. Very, very few people succeed on the first try. The ones who succeed are not the ones who never failed, but the ones who failed often enough to learn how to succeed.
Let’s say you’ve been working on your webcomic for the better part of a decade. You’ve learned a great deal about how to make comics, how to sell comics, how to market comics… You’ve gotten a decent amount of followers; some of whom have been reading since you started, and some only discovered your work a few months or even weeks ago. But ten years is a long time, and a lot can change; I’m talking about both the technology itself as well as the growth and maturity of the artist. So it’s entirely possible that, after working on a webcomic for ten years, you decide that it’s time to move on. Maybe you’ve been “discovered” by a large publisher who starts throwing wads of cash at you. Maybe you’ve realized that the stories you want to tell will no longer fit into your existing comic. Whatever the reason, let’s just assume that you won’t be working on your old webcomic any longer.
Now, it’s entirely reasonable to leave your old webcomic alone at this point. New readers can dig back through your archives easily enough, so the only real maintenance you might need to worry about is that your server is still up and running. But will newer readers do that? Will they bother combing through your archives if they know you’re not really paying attention to that comic any longer?
I've talked before about how webcomic artists can approach their changing style over time, but if they’re not overly embarrassed by it, one option that’s available after completing a work is to rerun it! Simply take the old strips and start re-posting them as if they were new.
It probably doesn’t make sense to re-post them exactly as they ran originally, though. There ought to be some reason a reader would want to look at these instead of just hitting the archives. In Danielle Corsetto’s case, she went back and colored all her original Girls with Slingshots strips that initially ran as black and white. (More accurately, she had her colorist Laeluu go back and color all her old strips.) Corsetto’s also providing some new commentary about why she made some of the creative decisions she did.
If Frank Page ever decided to move on (which I hope he doesn’t!) he would have the option to simply re-run his old Bob the Squirrel strips. While he’s been publishing the strip since 2002, his archives only go back to 2010. He changed his server set-up some years ago, and only re-loaded a few years worth of old strips, thinking it wasn’t worth the effort re-archiving all that work. But that means that newer readers can’t see those earliest strips, and re-running them, even unchanged, would be new material for many people.
I've discussed before how webcomic creators could repurpose their work to increase its longevity. Re-runs are just another option that webcomikers have that allow them to continue capitalizing off their work, even after they're finished working on it entirely!
I stumbled across this post of mine from 2007 in which I complain about the state of comic news. Namely, that I was making a few active attempt to follow as much as I could and I still missed even the basic announcements about some book releases. I've been noodling the idea again recently because I saw that Ryan Estrada posted a short video last week in which he and his wife are unboxing their latest book... which I hadn't even heard about yet.
He followed that up the other day with an entire song that he and a friend had written for the book!
I double checked many of the "usual suspects" when it comes to comics news and found nothing about the book at all.
(As a curious aside, many of the specific references in my 2007 piece feel incredibly dated. Wizard Magazine ended in 2011, Newsarama is technically still around but has been a shell of its of former self for at least a decade, Jen Contino stopped writing for Sequential Tart five years ago after two decades -- I don't know what she's doing now. Amazon had back then recently started their "You Might Also Like" feature which was nacent enough to be lousy, but it got better only to have since gotten much worse. Google Alerts is supposedly still a thing, but I haven't seen/heard of anyone who's found it functionally useful for a decade.)
I had a come to the conclusion some years back that my best option was to follow creators I was interested in directly on social media as there was by no means any guarantee that any 'normal' comics news outlets would have any coverage of what I'm personally interested in. That's proved challenging, however, since I dropped Facebook and Twitter (before it was rebranded as X), both of which started serving up more garbage than useful/interesting creator updates anyway.
I'm opting to pass on BlueSky since everything I've heard paints it as having all the same problems Twitter had before I left. I can't stand the TikTok and Instagram formats. I follow a few comics people on LinkedIn, but that's hardly a mecca of creator content.
I'm on Mastodon, which also isn't used very heavily by the comics community. As you can see, I've gotten some updates from creators on YouTube, although based on the trends I've seen in what they've been serving up over the past six months or so, I expect I'll be presented with more garbage than anything useful within the next year. I'm seeing more creators get back to email newsletters and re-adding RSS feeds to their own sites; I'm hoping those trends continue before we get to the point where social media becomes useless to me.
Logically, I get why all this is happening, and the basic challenge of being a creator and trying to get the word out about your next/current project in an absolute avalanche of information and announcements. It's all indicative of larger problems with news and communication more broadly and, as I've already suggested, a problem that I know I've certainly been wrestling with for several years now. And because I've been wrestling with it for so long already and haven't resolved it since the landscape has been constantly shifting, I don't expect to resolve it any time soon either.
I suppose my point here -- besides just taking some time to vent -- is to suggest that you keep an active eye/ear out for comics news beyond a handful of websites, and that you continue to search for news, that you don't assume it'll be served up to you through your favorite outlet. It is indeed more work on your part, but you get -- for my money -- better, more satisfying results. Because I can guarantee you right now that reading about a single night without a curfew in Korea is going to be more interesting to me than whatever it is the Justice League are doing.
If you look in comics from a few decades ago, they used to contain ads detailing how you could get a subscription to their regular titles. (The one I'm including as an image here was the version that I used when I got my first subscription.) I don't think it was ever a particularly lucrative side of comics publishing, but they did want to make sure people could still get their comics if their local grocery or drug stores didn't carry them. It would certainly be more work for them internally as they'd have to manage a bunch of individual addresses instead of just handing a huge batch of comics to a distributor. But the lack of a distributor meant they didn't have to pay one, and they could look good to readers by whacking that cost (or at least some of it) off the subscription price. Which lead to, in this example, an eight cent savings per issue for the reader! (And, hey, when I was 12 back in the early '80s, a whole dollar a year was note-worthy!)
The past couple of decades you've seen publishers shy away from subscriptions. They still have them, but they don't promote them nearly as much. In fact, you generally have to dig pretty deep to find anything about them on most publishers' sites. They're just as problematic as they ever were in terms of logistics, and their profit margins are even thinner.
Which makes this bit I stumbled across on DC's and Marvel's sites interesting. To get a subscription, there's just an online order form. Pretty standard, no problem. Fill it out with your credit card info, comics start arriving in your mailbox. Done! But if you do run into problems with your subscription for some reason, here's the contact info Marvel provides...
888-511-5480
marvelsubs@midtowncomics.com
DC's is similar. Check out the domain on that email address -- MidtownComics.com. Midtown, if you don't know, is a brick-and-mortar comic shop with three locations in New York, including one right in Times Square. You can stop into that, or any of their locations, just like any other comic shop, and pick new comics off the rack, or maybe some back issues, or some statues and action figures, or whatever. They have in-store pull lists, like most other shops, but they also have a subscription service where you can have all of your new comics delivered by mail anywhere in the United States. And they're shipped from their warehouse in New Hyde Park.
So it would seem that Marvel has, at some point, farmed out their subscription processes to Midtown Comics. I suspect the order form on Marvel.com sends the info directly to Midtown and bypasses the publishers altogether. Which would mean, while subscriptions are still available, Marvel and DC themselves have nothing to do with them any more.
This idea is reinforced with an offhand line in both publisher's FAQs stating, "You can order almost any comic you can name, though, from our sister service MidtownComics.com." That 'sister service' phrasing -- and the fact that it's identical on both sites -- highlights that both DC and Marvel are entirely out of the loop when it comes to subscription ordering.
That's not intended as a criticism, by the way; it makes complete sense from a business perspective -- that type of distribution is far outside their baliwick. But it's still an interesting change that I don't recall hearing anything about outside my own digging around.
My buddy Frank Page draws the Bob the Squirrel comic strip. He's been at it for about a decade now and has, by and large, been pretty happy doing it. It's never been a hugely popular strip in the way that, say, PvP or Penny Arcade became, but he's okay with that. He's met some really cool people through his comic, and he gets some touching responses to his work. Like one guy who tattooed Bob on his arm. Or the other guy who sent him a replica Apollo space helmet out of the blue.
But Frank's got a day job he likes well enough and, perhaps more importantly, pays the bills, so he leaves the strip intentionally as a side gig. He's got some strip collections available through Lulu, and some t-shirts through CafePress. He's got a Patreon campaign, and he sometimes takes commissions and sells his originals. Every now and then, I needle him about his work. Not the work itself, as he's quite talented, but how he markets and sells it.
His originals are dirt cheap. Last I checked, his Squirrelosophy originals were going for $40 each and his Bob strips are $65. I commissioned a piece from him as a Christmas present for a relative -- pen and ink, a realistic representation of two people, 14" x 17", cross-hatching out the wazoo... $100. Like I said, I've pestered him about this, but his response has always been that he'd rather undersell his work so that it gets out to the widest audience possible.
Now, let's turn to Chris Schweizer for a moment. Probably a more well-known name, so his work's probably in higher demand and he can charge more for it. He has prints and sometimes originals available through his online store. He had for a while the original of my favorite page from his Crogan series available... for $450. He noted that it was probably his priciest work, in part because it's apparently everyone's favorite page, "so I wanted to make sure it goes to someone who likes it enough to consider spending that much on it, if that make sense." Schweizer is basically taking almost an opposite tack. If you want his work, he's going to charge a higher amount essentially as a way to prove that you really want it.
Of course, a key difference here is that Schweizer is trying to make a living at cartooning. Frank is getting paid, too, but he's got a day job to fall back on. He's less concerned with income with regards to his comics work because he can afford to be. If Schweizer charged the same rates Frank did, I suspect he'd be living out of a 1978 AMC Gremlin.
I know a number of people who work in comics who used to charge like Frank does, but don't any longer. In most cases, it was almost out of necessity. They had a day job and did their comics on the side... until their day job went away. There were cut-backs, or the company closed down, or -- in one instance -- they just stopped paying everyone. The creators then looked at their options and decided that, given the economy and job market in general, they had a better shot at making a living if they dove into creating comics full-time rather than bust their ass trying to find another day job that really didn't have any more security than the last one. That's probably not an set of circumstances to alter your approach to pricing under, but sometimes we don't make changes unless we have to.
Sadly, being a cartoonist has almost never been an easy road to fame and fortune. While you can certainly point to huge success stories like Milt Caniff or Todd McFarlane, those are the exceptions, not the rule. For every Jim Davis out there, there's a couple dozen V.T. Hamlins -- guys who did good, solid work for their entire lives but never really achieved a particularly high level of financial success. One can't help but wonder, though, if they would have had better luck just by placing a higher monetary value on their work.
I'm pretty certain that I didn't catch wind of Athena Voltaire until after it had been around a few years. It originally launched as a webcomic in 2002, written by Paul Daly and drawn by Steve Bryant. I probably first heard about it in 2006 when Ape Entertainment published both a printed collection of the webcomics as well as a new adventure called "Flight of the Falcon." I also recall that what caught my eye was the Warren Ellis quote they got about the stories: "Imagine if the likes of The Mummy and Van Helsing were actually, you know, good." The concept is very pulp-inspired and has a lot of action/adventure in an Indiana Jones vein.
Now, what's interesting is that, after the Ape books were published and Daly and Bryant started working on another new story, Daly decided he wanted out. Byrant was still all for moving forward, but because they both contributed to the series, Daly had a say on what got published and how and why. The two were able to work things out so that Bryant could keep working on new Athena Voltaire material, but he basically couldn't use any of Daly's existing/previous work. (By the way, this is obviously the very high-level version of what happened. I don't have -- or want! -- any of the fine details about whatever agreement they worked out. Although Bryant's noted that there's no bad blood from the split.) Which means that Byrant is, in effect, starting over if he wants to get Athena published.
He couldn't go back to Ape because that agreement was with both him and Daly. And he couldn't take anything but his own new material when he talked with other publishers (Bryant had started shopping the book around before Ape folded) or even if he just wanted to republish it himself.
Where, then, does the Athena Voltaire Compendium that Dark Horse published in 2016 come from?
After Daly and Bryant parted ways, Bryant started reworking the stories they had already completed. Not only rescripting everything, but rewriting the stories by adding entirely new pages of art, as well as re-working some of the existing pages. A total of over 200 pages of rewrites, plus an additional 50 entirely new pages. When I finally sat down and compared the stories side-by-side, I was surprised to see just how different things were. The initial plane escape sequence from "Flight of the Falcon" for example now leads to an extended dog-fight with a giant, winged serpent.
While it took a lot of work (three years, working in and around other paying gigs) I suspect it was that level of passion and dedication that led to Sequential Pulp's Michael Hudson asking Bryant to publish through their Dark Horse imprint. And that's not to say that just putting in that kind of long-term effort is guaranteed to get you a book deal, of course
(indeed, Bryant has continued to publish Athena Voltaire stories independently though Kickstarter projects and on Patreon -- I believe at this point he's published more AV work that way than through 'regular' publishers)
but I mention it here as an example of not letting good work fall to the wayside. I think that's a lot of what people, freelancers in particular, need to keep in mind in trying to earn a living in the 21st century. Repurposing old material is... well, I wouldn't say critical just yet, but it's certainly very beneficial to keep your overall work moving forward, even if you have to look backwards occasionally to do it.
A while back, my local Half Price Books had a massive clearance sale. They rented out of the available retail outlets further down in the strip mall where they're located, threw in a slew of folding tables, and dumped books on them. Nothing was marked because everything was two bucks. Grab any book off any table -- two dollars. Every now and again, you could find a very small or thin something or other for one dollar or maybe even fifty cents, but by and large, everything was two bucks.
There were some broad categories like Biographies, How To, History, etc. but there was no real organization on the tables themselves. Everything was just kind of dropped wherever there was room. Understandable, of course, since so many of the books were so steeply discounted. That meant that most everyone there was going up and down the tables scanning every title and author; it's not an environment where you can really look for something in particular. And the whole time, employees were stopping by with cardboard boxes full of more books, which would get set on the tables quickly.
I wouldn't be mentioning all this if they didn't have a comics section, of course. Lots of comic strip material, especially Garfield , Dilbert, and The Far Side, and lots of manga. Some even in the original Japanese! I managed to find a few other things of interest (seen here).
But, on to my point!
The basic business model of Half Price Books is that they take books that are no longer viable as normal retail (bought back from individuals, of course, but also remainders and such from publishers) and sell them at a discount relative to the list price. They don't have a great selection of the latest books, but they do have a wide variety of titles you won't find in many other bookstores, many of which are long out of print. For readers, this is great because they can get more reading material at bargain prices. Those of an environmental bent also get something of a warm fuzzy in knowing that they're not contributing to additional deforestation and/or an ever-increasing pile of garbage in the nearest landfill.
Nothing really new there so far. Successful commercialization of (niche) flea markets and garage sales, right?
What struck me, though, was the volume of books at this clearance sale. This photo isn't from the event I attended, but a similar one...These are not just used books. These are used books that Half Price Books can't sell for more than two dollars. They deal largely with publishers' and individuals' overstock, which makes this stuff Half Price Books' overstock! Over-overstock? Kind of the last chance these books have before becoming landfill.
I suppose I'm mostly surprised at the sheer volume of material we're looking at here. Thousands upon thousands of books, all in perfectly fine condition, that even a bargain seller is having trouble getting rid of. That's a lot of overprinting of books. And it makes me wonder... for as many problems there are with comics' direct market, in particular the issues surrounding pre-ordering from solicitations months in advance that puts most of the responsibility on the retailer instead of the publisher or distributor, I wonder if there's something there that could be used to better serve the book industry as a whole. Because there seems to be literally tons of leftovers at this point that simply are going unsold. That seems like a huge waste of everybody's resources, so I wonder if there's something to comics' print-to-order approach.
Me, in a weird, pre-caffeinated headspace this morning: "Hey, I haven't heard anything about AfterShock in a while."
AfterShock Comics, as you may recall, was founded back in 2015. I noted at the time that they seemed a little better poised for success than many start-up comic publishers because, beyond just having a creative vision, they were starting with a strong financing team. Not having those people at the start has killed more than a few otherwise promising nacent publishers over the years.
However, in 2022, AfterShock filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bankruptcy sounds rather terminal, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the company. Marvel Comics filed for bankruptcy in 1996, for example, and they seem to be doing pretty okay these days. In fact, at Comic-Con in 2023, AfterShock had some repesentatives talk at the Diamond Comics Retailer Lunch and spoke to the progress they had made and were continuing to make. It was, from what I heard, not exactly a bountifully joyful celebration or anything, but it still seemed to express forward-thinking optimism.
Today, AfterShock is continuing to publish comics. The first issues of A Walk Through Hell and Bad Reception have debuted in the past month, while Fear of a Red Planet, Maniac of New York, Chicken Devils, and others are ongoing. But I can't seem to find any news about their financial situation. Their official website doesn't seem to have been updated since late 2022, and their Facebook page has been static since September of last year.
(I closed my Twitter account some time back, so I don't know if they're still posting anything on X.)
All of which only really talked about their publications anyway, with no real info beyond that.
So I'm curious. Where do things stand with AfterShock as a company right now? The past couple months' worth of dockets filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the
Central District of California are mostly around rescheduling or continuing hearings, which as far as I can decipher, just mean that the official bankruptcy proceedings are still just chugging along. There's also some monthly operating reports, but I can't see the contents of those, and I believe those are just standard operating procedures for any company in bankruptcy.
Does anyone have access to more details around those documents to shed light on how things are going?
As I have mentioned here before, I am a long-time fan of the Fantastic Four. But shortly after the "Civil War" storyline, I found the title so far removed from what I liked about the team and the book that I stopped reading entirely. FF #555 was my last regular issue.
I did read a few stories after that. My brother got me a trade paperback of some of Jonathan Hickman's stories, and I picked up a few issues around Johnny Storm's death to write a piece about it for MTV. But, for the most part, I stayed away.
Once the book had been cancelled in 2015, though, I thought, "You know, I could finish my collection. I mean, I've got every issue up through #555 already and I bet I could get the rest of them fairly cheaply." So I spent a little time rooting through quarter and dollar bins, picking up stray issues. After just three months, I had gotten 36 of the 49 issues from the original title, every issue of the 2013 title, all but three of the issues from the 2014 title, 15 of the 23 issues from the 2011 FF, and 10 of the 16 issues from the 2013 FF. Plus an assortment of the one-offs and limited series like Dark Reign and Secret Invasion.
It only took maybe another 6-ish months more to pick up everything else.
I never kept super-close track of how much each issue cost, but most of them came from dollar bins. A number of them from quarter bins. The most I paid for any one issue was about $1.70 (12 issues from a $2 bin, and the guy threw a thirteenth issue in for free.) For the sake of arguement, let's say the average was a dollar a book for the lot of them. It's probably a little less than that, but the math is easier if we go with a dollar.
If I would have bought those issues off the stands new, I would've paid $2.99 for each issue the first year, and $3.99 for each issue after that. Not including tax, that comes to about $387. If I bought the trade paperbacks those all came in, I would have spent $390. Essentially the same cost either way. (Though the cost per story would be cheaper if I had bought the TPBs because there are some issues included there that I already had in my collection.)
But at a dollar a book, my grand total was only around $130. That's almost exactly one-third the price of buying them new or taking a "wait for the trade" approach.
It wasn't at all difficult to find the issues I'd missed. I was clearly in no hurry to keep current since I was seven years out of date already, so I hadn't been particularly aggressive in hunting down issues. In fact, everything I purchased came from discount boxes that I happened across at a show/event that I happened to be going to for other reasons anyway. Admittedly, this was made easier by being in the Chicago area where a lot of events take place but I can guarantee you I missed plenty of issues that were in dollar bins I didn't even check. (I'm not going to spend my entire time at a convention bent over long boxes!)
My point is that in a matter of a few months, I picked up 75% of what I missed over seven years and got to 100% in less than a year, all for a third of the cost had I bought them new, with minimal effort. I actually tossed this idea out as a theoretical one several years back as a means to make your personal reading of comics a little more green and, now, putting it into practice seems to be working rather effectively.
I'm left to wonder about the financial impact on the industry. The retailers I was buying these issues from were largely just trying to recoup some costs from over-ordering the issues when they came out. In that sense, I suppose I'm helping to correct for some less-than-perfect earlier business decisions. (Which, by the way, I don't mean as a way to denigrate retailers! The pre-order system in comics is wicked complicated, and even the best retailers struggle with it every month.)
But that seems to encourage a bottom-feeder mentality for retailers. At the conventions I've been to over the past several years, even going back to pre-COVID days, there were a lot of dealers doing nothing but discount bins. I don't know how many of them have "regular" shops that do much of their business on new issue Wednesdays, but they certainly weren't bringing recent releases to these shows. Will that lead to some kind of stratification of retailers? We already have something of a distinction between new issue retailers and those who deal in the expensive Golden Age stuff; will we be getting another layer of retailers who deal in nothing but cheap, discount bin material? Or is that already in place and I'm just now noticing?
As you may know, the US held an election in early November and we will now have Donald Trump in the White House come January 20. And he's announced very clearly that he plans to fuck things up for everybody who isn't part of the 1%. He's announced that he'll be placing huge tariffs on everything imported from China, Mexico, and Canada. He's announced massive deportation efforts. He's announced cabinet picks who have in turn announced the various ways they plan to dismantle their respective agencies. 
