Broken Frontier

Last weekend I was at the Bristol Comic Expo, the largest gathering of comics fans and professionals in the UK. I had a great time there, meeting up with lots of readers and catching up with old friends.

I’ve included a few photos of the event here along with some sketches from my son’s growing collection. Last year Alex discovered the joys of bugging artists to sketch in his book and he’s acquired some really nice drawings, as you can see.

Mike Allwood organises the event and this year he asked me to come up with a panel. The last couple of years I was on the Marvel panel and I thought this year I should even the balance a little, by talking about the independent press. I called the panel The Big 2 versus the Rest of The World because that seems to be how things are shaking down in the English-speaking world right now. I have yet to come up with a satisfying definition for ‘Independent’. Is Image independent? Dark Horse? Tokyopop? Certainly Top Shelf, Slave Labour and Fantagraphics are. It’s partly to do with the size of the publisher. DC are part of the Warner Brothers Corporation, Marvel are a division of Marvel Entertainment. These companies have the money and resources to publicise their products, pay creators a living wage and make sure their books get maximum exposure. The downside is that they own the characters and creators are working for hire, with limits on what they can do with the books and characters they work on.

Most Image books are creator-owned, but in my case I am working for hire on Spawn, a character created and owned by Todd McFarlane. I work for Tokyopop where ownership is equally split between creators and publisher. And I’m about to publish the monthly version of Strange Embrace through Image as a creator-owned book.  I guess that gives me a good oversight into the relative merits and drawbacks of the various publishers. Here’s how it pans out: the more independent the book, the more creative freedom I have. The more creative freedom I have, the less the book sells. It’s a sliding scale and it works like that for most people. The highest-selling book I ever wrote was Civil War: X-Men, which sold over 130,000 in the English edition alone. My worst-selling is going to be Strange Embrace , somewhere around 3,000 copies of the first issue. That’s not bad for an indie title but it won’t pay my bills. I’d love to be able to write and draw another creator-owned property but that’s financially impossible for me right now.

To all intents and purposes you can divide the specialist comic market into Marvel and DC, then the rest. Just take a look at the charts. In any given month, Marvel and DC will have around 95 of the top sales slots. The tiny minority of ‘others’ will include Star Wars, Transformers, Conan, Red Sonja and more recently Buffy from Dark Horse. And Spawn of course. Now you’ll notice that every one of those titles is a property that is known outside of comics. Every one of them is related to TV, movies and merchandising. Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s Walking Dead is the one glorious exception, and the example that will always come up. But this book is just that, an exception. One produced by a writer and artist who are already well-established in the mainstream.

Or panel line-up was: Paul Grist, David Lloyd, Tony Lee and Jamie McKelvie. It was interesting to hear how they each view the problems of publishing without the power of the Marvel/DC publicity machine behind them. The problem has become worse in recent years because the sheer amount of product form the Big 2 has almost doubled in that time. When a comic store manager sits down to order books, he or she has a limited budget. Most of them will open Previews and start by ordering every Marvel and DC title. That will be around 150 titles and some of them have to be ordered in massive quantities, especially the biggies like Death of Captain America and Stephen King’s Dark Tower. There’s nothing worse for the retailer than not being able to supply the demand for this month’s ‘hot’ titles. Equally they don’t want stacks of unsold books sitting on the shelves so they don’t want to take risks with unknown creators. By the time they have ordered those Marvels and DCs, the monthly budget will be pretty much spent. The few remaining bucks now have to be spread around The Rest. And you can bet most of the remaining orders will go on known quantities like Transformers and Star Wars . The more adventurous shops will order 2 or 3 genuine independent creator-owned titles, but only if they have seen previews or have heard of the creators.

Paul Grist has been writing and drawing Kane and Jack Staff for donkey’s years. The books are brilliant and have drawn nothing but praise and numerous awards. Paul used to self-publish. He is now under the Image umbrella. But even with all that, even though Paul has built up a substantial body of work and keeps that work in print through collections, he is still struggling to make a living.

So how do things work out for David Lloyd? Here’s a guy who drew ‘V’ for Vendetta, one of the mostly highly regarded comics of all time. After the movie adaptation the collected V has hit best-seller charts all over the world. The perfect time to release his own creator-owned property you would think. David certainly did. He has written and drawn Kickback, published in France by Carabas and in English through Dark Horse. It’s a great book by a creator at the top of his form and should have been a guaranteed seller. But the orders didn’t come in and David decided to find out why. He sat down and starting telephoning the retailers, asking the managers of comic retail outlets across the USA if they had ordered copies of Kickback . Time after time he was hearing that the store managers had no idea the book even existed. And this is David bleeding Lloyd for christ’s sake!

I’ve seen the Marvel offices. There are a lot of people working there and a lot of them are dealing with marketing. They do it very well. I’m in no way attacking the Big 2 for what they are doing. Joe Quesada in particular has done the most amazing job of putting comics back into the public gaze. People have been drawn back into the comic shops and sales are relatively high overall. But there has been no discernible ‘trickle-down’ effect. Very few of those sales have gone to the independent publishers who desperately need them. There is too much superhero product from Marvel and DC and it is literally swamping the shelves, pushing out the smaller publishers and creators.

Tony Lee, like me, has worked for Marvel and licensed characters like Doctor Who and Starship Troopers . He is now Group Editor of Markosia. His experience is the same. The only way to get any exposure for independent product is to go out there and personally plug the product at every opportunity. Without the internet to network and show previews, the independent press would roll over and die.

In case you’re getting thoroughly depressed by now, let me introduce Jamie McKelvie, artist of Phonogram. Phonogram is one of the success stories of the last year. Written by Kieron Gillen it’s a story of music and magic, focussing on Britpop, of all things. The covers are tributes to classic album covers, the art is clean and stylish, the writing is hip and intense. And sales are growing. The book has a number of things going for it. The talent of the creators is the obvious one. But it also has a unique style that makes it stand out on the shelves. And it has a music tie-in. Pushing this one to music retail outlets is a no-brainer and it may become one of the few that also makes the cross-over into the book market.

A final word about the book market. Paul Gravett noted that this is still one of the largely untapped but growing outlets for comics. Most bookshops now have a graphic novel section. The problem is that once again superhero product dominates and that isn’t what the wider public really wants to see. They’ve been told that comics is more than men in tights and yet when they head for that graphic novel section, men in tights is likely to be the first thing they see. It is also worrying to see that some graphic novel sections are shrinking or even disappearing. Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street had a large graphic novel section for a while. It has gone. There are rumours that Borders may be reducing the size of its graphic novel sections and even the Manga phenomenon seems to be in static growth.

Although bookshops will be more open-minded about selling non-superhero books, don’t think for one moment that as an independent creator you will be able to get your book into the entire Borders or Waterstone’s chains. They have buyers who choose the product they sell and they won’t waste their time on individuals pushing their own product. If you want to see your graphic novel in bookshops you will have to have a proven seller like Satrapi’s Persepolis, which was already a best-seller in France, or a line of books, like the 2000AD collections.

Our panel certainly didn’t come up with any solutions and the feeling was that it is still tough as hell out there for the indies. But against all the odds, there are still incredibly talented creators labouring away at their art. Cheaper printing and home computers mean that anyone can put together a professional-looking comic and there is an irrepressible enthusiasm for the medium. This is still one of the few ways that a creator with very few financial resources, can reach a public, no matter how small, with his or her personal vision.

Enough of the serious stuff! Here are my nominations for ‘Most Wasted Comic Pro’:

Rufus Dayglo	Steve ‘Two Pints’ White
Liam Sharp with the Mam Tor Hardest Drinker Award	Yes Ed, we know it’s you

And some sketches from my son Alex’s convention sketchbook.

Art by Frazer Irving	Art by Shaky Kane	Art by Gary Erskine

One of the highlights of the Convention for me was seeing my old buddy, Shaky Kane, the forgotten genius of British comics. Next week I’ll be talking to Shaky about Kirby, Insects, Dinosaurs and Hardcore Bondage and asking the question “Have you read any good comic books lately, punk?”