Jim Henley has coined the wonderful term “Bubble Age” (a la “golden age,” “silver age,” etc), to refer to the comics that came out during the direct-market bubble, starting with 1981’s Dazzler #1 (the first comic book distributed exclusively to the “direct market” of comic book shops) and ending when the direct-market bubble burst in 1993.
While the direct market dominated comics, it created economic conditions that allowed a flowering of wonderful comic books than anytime before or (so far) since. Cerebus, Love and Rockets, Hate, Eightball, Zot!, Understanding Comics, Beanworld, Naughty Bits, Yummy Fur, Bone, Watchmen, From Hell, Sandman, Journey, Joe Sacco’s work, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Mars, Stinz, the Desert Peach, Palookaville, Mage, and dozens more.
Frankly, compared to the Bubble Age, the so-called Golden Age of comics was crap. In the Bubble age, for the first time, a critical mass of English-language cartoonists were able to make a (scant) living without either attempting to appeal to superhero fans, to daily newspaper editors, or to the denizens of head shops.
Since then, the comic book market has – if not entirely collapsed – certainly deflated into a sad lump on the ground. Established talents are still eeking out a living – and only some of them – but the direct market is no longer able to nourish new talents, and the readership seems to shrink every year.
The obvious solution for years has been to distribute comics via the internet – but the problem is, how to make a living off it? No one wants to pay $4 to read a comic on the internet – it’s simply not worth that much. But you can’t make money charging what a comic books is really worth – say, a quarter – because there’s been no way to allow payments that small over the internet.
Now that’s changed.
Folks, go check out Scott McCloud’s new comic, The Right Number. It’s an excellent comic in its own right, with a couple of wild ideas and Scott’s usual skillful cartooning (looking better than it has in years, in fact).
And it’s only a quarter. (There are also a few sample panels you can read for free).
If it works, this will begin the next age, and maybe – just maybe – a new flourishing of comics worth reading. Go get on the ground floor, why don’tcha?
UPDATE: In the comments to an earlier post, Scott Martens explains why he doesn’t find the average comic book worth buying: “$2.50 on something I’ll read in 10 minutes and may only be somebody’s idea of a prologue, or worse, the middle chapter of a story whose beginning I haven’t got.”
So the question is, are folks who aren’t willing to pay $2.50 willing to pay a quarter? We’ll find out….
Dunno about this.
I worked in the Comics industry during the bubble age, (ran a warehouse for FFD and FFC’s story in IN), and the two types of buyers were fanboys and collectors. Collectors would have no interest in this (a good thing), but I don’t think that fanboys would either. In my experience, the fanboys tended to be less than technically savvy (could very well have changed) and wedded to super-hero books (not likely to have changed). The problem is the same as its always been – how do you get mainstream readers interested in comic books. Doing it online adds the additional problems of why read instead of watch, how come I cannot take this to the beach with me, and the resistance to micropayments the public seems to have.
I don’t want to be a downer, really. I loved books like Sandman and Cerebus, but I just wonder if comics fit the internet medium. I would suggest two thoughts: monthly subscription option (probably need more than one book. Hint, hint Barry :)) and the ability to print the pages to someone’s printer.
There are some folks trying the monthly-subscription model; the problem is, to have enough page count to make it worthwhile, they need to include a large number of cartoonists, not all of whom may suit a particular readers’ tastes. See girlamatic.com and especially moderntales.com for more info on this experiment.
I’m hoping that the public’s resistance to micropayments has been, at least in part, due to the fact that past micropayment schemes have been too complex and hard-to-impliment.
An important note, which I’ll get around to blogging myself in a bit–
25 cents buys you 32 views over 6 months of this strip. It’s not 25 cents a peek.
So. –Barry, have you signed up for a Bitpass “card” yet? It’s nifty…
Yup, I signed up for one moments after I blogged this post. :-)
Only 32 views? That makes sense, but it’s also a little disappointing… I was figuring that a quarter bought you as many views as you wanted.
Hey, I spend the $2.50, so what do I know?
Then again, it’s really good odds I have the beginning of the story. I’ve been buying them for a while.
Some of them I pefer in collected, graphic novel form. That’s how I got Astro City and all Neil Gaiman’s stuff.
Y’know, yahoo bites. Sure, it’s pretty good at dumping most spam into a neat pile where it can be easily scooped into the rubbish bin. However, it insists upon not recognizing 3/4ths of the email addresses I’ve tried to plug into it. :o
So, Scott: You’ll have to read here that the comic looks pretty nifty. Cheers. ;)
(I haven’t had a moment to check out The Right Number yet, so I’m not sure if this rant applies to that particular comic or not, but I thought I’d go ahead and post it anyway.)
Perhaps I’m the kind of guy that comic book fans hate, but I’m not willing to fork over any money unless I’m sure that I’ll get the whole story, or at least a sizeable chunk of it. I loved the Sandman, but I wouldn’t have looked twice at it unless it was in “graphic novel” format. I’m not willing to drop $2.50 or even $.25 on something unless I can be assured that either it’s a book with a clearly defined beginning and end (or at least a clearly marked volume number like most manga compilations) or the issue is an entirely self-contained story. I don’t know anyone who would be willing to buy a book a chapter at a time, so why should we have to do this with comic books?
I didn’t mean to sound rude and abrasive, but it seems that this may be one of the biggest problems with comic books today. It doesn’t make sense to me why comic books can’t be written like non-graphical books. Any thoughts?
For the record, I’m not talking about comic strips but comic books. Come to think of it, though, does anyone else differentiate between the two?
PDP, you make perfect sense. Part of the malaise that has fallen over the direct market in recent years stems from the inbred, self-referential nature of “pamphlet” format comics. As to whether or not people differentiate between strips and books: you’re joking, right?
Kevin, you neglect the third category of people who buy comics: readers. People who are not fannish, who don’t have “longboxes” and Batman statuettes. People who read From Hell, Sandman, Safe Area: Gorazde, Jimmy Corrigan, Dark Knight, etc. in boook form.
I’m not really sure about how Scott’s venture will shake out. Let’s just say that I don’t think that the Web is going to be the great savior of comics. I don’t think there will be any one great savior per se, but I see the bookstore as the brightest spot in the gloom and doom of today’s market.
-Don
PDP wrote:
I didn’t mean to sound rude and abrasive, but it seems that this may be one of the biggest problems with comic books today. It doesn’t make sense to me why comic books can’t be written like non-graphical books. Any thoughts?
It’s a money thing, Don. It took Dave Sim a little over two years to write and draw a 500 page graphic novel like High Society – and that was working full-time. While he was working on it, he printed the book a chapter at a time in his monthly comic Cerebus.
Nowadays, Sim makes more money from the novels then he does from the chapter-at-a-time monthly comic. But when he was writing and drawing High Society, most of his income came from the monthly comic book. If he hadn’t been releasing it in pamphlet form, he would have had to do something else for rent money… and that means he would have been working only part-time on High Society, and it probably would have taken him four or five years, rather than two.
Novelists get around this with advances from publishers. But with a handful of exceptions, even established cartoonists aren’t able to get enough of an advance to live on for a year or two (or more – it took Howard Cruse five years to draw Stuck Rubber Baby). Publishers just don’t find us worth that much money, by and large.
For better or worse, the standard has developed that people sell comic book novels a chapter at a time, in “pamphlet” form, until the novel is complete; at that point the novel is reprinted in a collected book edition. This allows the cartoonist to have an income to live on while working on the novel.
That said, I agree with you that the book collections are the superior form of comics. For me, the ideal would be to have the chapter-at-a-time available online very cheap (a quarter or fifty cents a pop) for the hardcore comics fans to read, leading to the eventual collected book format that’s appealing (hopefully) to a broader audience.
Golden age of comics was “crap”? Tell me why my very large collection of .10 cent DC and early Marvel’s are worth a fortune. Superman, Batman, The Justice League, Fantastic 4, Spiderman, Hulk, Sgt Rock and his Howling Commandoes………….Your garbage can’t begin to compare. Yeah, I’m an old man now but I remember what comics used to mean to a kid. I’ve looked at modern stuff, wouldn’t take ’em for free.
First of all, some of that stuff (maybe all) ain’t golden age. I mean, there were no Spidermans or Hulks during the Golden Age… that stuff came later.
Calling it all “crap” is unfair, I admit. Some of that stuff had charm (like the early Supermans), and some of it was wonderfully drawn (anything drawn by Lou Fine, for example, or by Will Eisner). But I don’t think that any of those comics had anywhere near the sophitication in writing or characters that the better Bubble Age material had. I mean, is there a Golden Age comic as well-written as Love and Rockets? If so, I haven’t read it.
Wow, lots to comment on. Okay, first of all I think your friend’s delineation might more accurately be described as the Direct Market Age, when comics began tailoring themselves towards specialty stores visited by cognoscenti and away from mom-and-pop outlets (which of course began disappearing in the Reagan era anyway and, thanks to the WalMarts of the world, are continuing to do so) and casual readers. The bubble itself – with the speculeeches and ridiculous (but much missed!) royalties – pretty much happened in the early ’90s, and lasted about as long as the dot-com bubble did (which is to say a few years). You can call it the Image Age if you want, the Image founders were the ones who really came into their own at that time and made obscene amounts of money.
As far as online comics, it’s worth considering that their value-for-money competition is NOT print comics, but other online comics (syndicated, self-published, etc.) whose writers and artists don’t charge anything. Time was we’d put out zines and ashcans and expect to lose money; now we can put our stuff online for zero outlay other than our time and talent. It would be nice if Scott’s and Joey Manley’s models worked, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of incentive for any but the most dedicated readers to subscribe to online comics if they can get others for free. Heck, with all my blogroll reading and message board participation and print comics reading, I rarely get through the online Doonesbury once every couple of weeks!
“It doesn’t make sense to me why comic books can’t be written like non-graphical books. Any thoughts?” Would you pay the artist beforehand, then, for what might amount to 6 months to a year of work? The writer can busy him/herself with other projects or a day job; the artist usually cannot, as comic book art is extremely labor- and time-intensive. So a practical method of compensation needs to be structured before all-in-one graphic novels become the norm at the Big Two. Also, fans WILL balk at the price tags. They currently balk at the $25 hardcovers! Fans are used to thinking of comics’ value-for-money in comparison to prose books, when what they should be considering is a comparison to children’s illustrated books. The tendency to think of a comics story as “the words, with the art as an afterthought” has disabused many regular readers of the idea that a $25 hardcover is “worth it.” In short, most readers aren’t going to take a chance on the cover price of an original graphic novel. The “pamphlet” style sells badly enough as is compared to 10 years ago (and certainly to 25-30 years ago!), but still enough in most cases to recoup the investment put into its publication. This isn’t at all guaranteed with a higher-priced original GN.
I love Scott McCloud. I’ve paid $20 a volume for his work on many occasions.
I don’t think I’m willing to pay a quarter.
Why? Because it’s a new technology that requires registration. Ordinary old risk-aversion: Here’s a hoop you have to jump through, and you’ve never jumped through it before. I don’t like having to jump through hoops. Furthermore, I don’t know if it’s safe on the other side. Even furthermore, it’s a hoop with a time limit.
So I’m in the situation where $8 or $12 is the right place and a quarter is too much.
A couple of you brought up the problem of advances and how the cartoonists could make some money while working on their graphic novels. I can completely sympathize and understand; unfortunately, it’s a tricky situation without an easy solution.
There are a couple of models that could be used in order to insure that cartoonists had money to spend while they were working on their graphic novels.
The first of which is the one that Amp mentioned above; i.e., the novelist publishes his or her work in the issue format for hardcore fans until the story is finished and it’s compiled into a novel form and published for the rest of us.
The second business model is the “tough luck” model which is basically the model that dominates the novel-publishing industry at present. A new author receives no advances and is expected to find some other form of work while she writers her first novel. One could argue that graphic novels are more labour intensive than traditional novels and one would be right on a page-to-page basis. A 500-page graphic novel would normally take far more time and effor than a 500-page traditional novel. However, as near as I can tell just from browsing through the graphic novel sections at my local bookstores, the average graphic novel is not a 500-page behemoth. “The Dark Knight Returns” is a little over one hunred pages (if my memory serves me well) and one hundred pages is about the length of the average Sandman book. Traditional novels, obviously, aren’t around 500-pages either (unless, as is the case with Harry Potter, the font size and spacing gets screwed around with to make books longer) but are usually more like 300-pages in length. If on average the amount of work needed to produce a 100-page graphic novel is close to the amount of work needed to produce a 300-page novel, then I don’t know why one industry should provide advances for untested authors while the other does not. (Whether it’s right or wrong that authors are expected to write while holding down “real” jobs, I won’t say; I’m just comparing the two industries.) I can’t really comment too much on how much work it takes to produce a comic book, though, so feel free to chime in. I used to want to go into comic books professionally but got turned off to them for various reasons, wandered away from art, and it now takes me longer to draw a decent looking picture than it takes for Carbon-14 to decay.
The third model that could be followed for the graphic novel industry is, I’m loathe to admit, the Hollywood model, by which I mean that a cartoonist with a prospective comic would write a treatment of the story, write a certain number of pages of script, draw a few finished panels, rough out a certain number of pages, and then present their prospective comic to a comic company in the hopes that the comic company likes their book and is willing to pay them to finish it.
I’m not sure which of those models is best (probably the first) but they each have their merits and drawbacks.
???
I don’t see how buying a $3 card is any more “jumping through a hoop” than driving or busing to the comic shop/bookstore is. But I’m weird, right ?
Actually, I wouldn’t have $20 to spend on a book right now, but I might later. The online viewing is a decent compromise, and it’s easier on my eyes when looking at computer graphics to take them in small bites (no pun intended) rather than in novel-length chunks.
Oh, well…
re Ownership of Scott’s comic after you pay for it, the front page says you can view it 32 times in 6 months or download it to your computer at which point you own it outright.
I didn’t notice he suggested downloading it to disk, but I did anyway (not that I intended to share it or anything). With Mozilla browsers the easiest way is to go into Page Info, the Media tab, then select the Flash file from the list and click Save As.
I thought it was well worth $0.25; can’t wait for the two other installments. I don’t regularly read paper comics, but I do read web strips and I paid for Modern Tales for a few months. It’s great that he’s actually trying what he suggested in Reinventing Comics, especially after getting lambasted by Penny Arcade and Slashdot.
“If on average the amount of work needed to produce a 100-page graphic novel is close to the amount of work needed to produce a 300-page novel, then I don’t know why one industry should provide advances for untested authors while the other does not.”
You’re just talking about writers, though. It’s a whole different thing for artists. Like I said, most artists cannot hold down another job whilst drawing. Drawing is just too time-intensive.
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