Broken Frontier

How come, asked Gary Tyrell, the organizers of the New York Comic Con had put together a webcomics panel that, "featured no actual webcomics creators?"

New York 2007's webcomics panel was certainly like no other. Even the grammar in the panel's title-- "Web Comics" rather than "Webcomics"-- gave that away. The usual formula, repeated by many conventions over the last five years, has been to gather a group of writers, artists or writer-artists who speak to an audience of their fans. NYCC attempted, possibly for the first time, to represent a corporate perspective.

The results were hardly earth-shattering. No one had a dramatic change in business model to announce-- that would happen elsewhere at the con, later. (Marvel and Top Cow's initiatives, while still not earth-shattering, deserve pieces of their own and will get them in due course.) But the panel was an interesting look at a culture that has its eye trained on digital distribution, but shares almost nothing else with the independent cartoonists and commentators who often refer to themselves as "the webcomics community." Call it "the web comics community." If you like.

In attendance: Richard Bruning, senior vice-president and creative director at DC Comics, Jeremy Ross, director of new product development for Tokyopop, Scott Rosenberg, CEO of Platinum Studios, and Heewoon Chung, President of Netcomics and ecomixmedia. Announced, but not in attendance: Josh Blaylock, CEO of Pullboxonline and Regis Maher II, President/COO of Extreme Holdings, Inc. Milton Griep, CEO of ICv2, acted as moderator.

Bruning was caught between a rock and a hard place. DC continues to advertise for positions secondary to an online editor, but has yet to announce an online editor hire. As reported by Todd Allen, DC was planning an online initiative in December 2006-- yet in late February, no such initiative is in sight. DC seems to be taking one step forward into the Web and one step back, and Bruning's bearing did nothing to dispel that impression.

Nor did his comments: "We've released comics online as promotional tools, supporting the trade-paperback market, and released Keith Giffen's breakdowns so fans can see how our weekly comic is made... [But] DC being the size it is, and having the longevity that it has... we've had a long-standing relationship with the direct market and a recent relationship with the bookstore market which has done very well for us. We don't want to screw up a thing that's working."

Jeremy Ross was just as happy to talk about what was working for Tokyopop, but what was working tied much more closely to the Internet. Tokyopop's site includes an online magazine, interviews, how-tos, over 300 stories of user-generated content and a host of features Ross described as "manga meets Myspace." "We're trying to expose people to manga from creators that aren't as well-known," Ross said, "and the Web helps that along."

Ross even had a kind word or two for piracy-- if you can call it piracy. "Manga came to the attention of the American fan through scanlations, and to some degree scanlators are self-policing. Their purpose is to expose Western fans to things they're not getting, and if an official translation comes out, the scanlation usually goes down."

The others were more noncommittal, with Bruning the most opposed. "I can't condone it, I'd be foolish to do that. Clearly there are some benefits to file-sharing... but hopefully at some point we'll deal with it a bit more proactively."

Scott Rosenberg seemed the most eager to put a human face on the discussion, and did so again here, with some informal, counterintuitive user data. "Piracy seems to be a generational thing. My 11- and 12-year-old daughters have an iTunes allowance. We discourage looking for illegal downloads, but they don't seem to feel the need [because they're growing up expecting to get entertainment from the proper channels]. This kind of thing may displace piracy. It may take a generation, but it may happen."

Despite the slightly wary enunciation of a new English speaker, Chung appeared proud and confident, and not without some justification. His South Korean company, ecomixmedia, has over one million subscribers. All of its comics are online and roughly one-third are online exclusively-- a way of doing business familiar to independent artists, but completely alien to established American corporations.

Griepp briefly broke out of his moderator role to point out that South Korean broadband penetration is the highest in the world, so in some ways, "South Korea could represent the future." But such prognostications ignore the cultural differences between the nations-- the West has proven more reluctant to pay for content than the East. The American arm of ecomixmedia, Netcomics, has only been in existence one year to its nine, but so far, its growth has been less impressive than that of its counterpart.

Being asked for metrics appeared to make everyone a bit uncomfortable. Bruning ducked the issue entirely, though he and Rosenberg seemed to share a joke at Alexa's expense. "The dirty little secret," said Rosenberg, leaning forward as if sharing a confidence with the room, "is that Alexa data is very wrong." Rosenberg claimed tens of millions of pageviews, Chung claimed 2,000 daily visitors for Netcomics, and Ross claimed hundreds of thousands of uniques per month, with an average visiting time of 17 minutes.

If you thought the term "web comics" meant that any representative would be talking about original comics for the Web... sorry, maybe next year. But don't count on it then, either. The closest anyone came was Ross, who cited Tokyopop's efforts to bring their properties to cell phones. "Mobile manga needed a lot of retooling-- drawings were adapted and re-created."

"Yeah," smiled Bruning. "We get calls from cell phone providers who say, 'oh, we want to put Batman on the phone!' I show them a two-page spread and say, 'okay, how's that gonna look?'"

As things began to wind down, I asked the group whether the advertising model had a future in their plans. Rosenberg was sanguine: "Advertising is supporting our growth on the Web. For us, it doubles the sales-- it may be independent or it may be a sales driver, but it seems to be a driver." This seemed curiously at odds with his statement a few minutes later that the print sales of Web-based independent comics amounted to a charitable action by fans. Were Platinum's sales therefore charity? But Rosenberg's enthusiasm for ad revenue was unmistakable.

And distinctive among the four. Ross handled the question diplomatically: "I think we'll see more of it. We're trained to believe a lot of things should be free... We're a very creative culture when it comes to advertising."

Chung: "It could be a supplement."

Bruning: "We're part of Warner Brothers, so there's a different model there. Presenting the creator with a share of the revenue would be an administrative problem. It may not be worth the effort. We haven't looked into it."

Ross then tried to keep a poker face as he referred to a conversation he and I had had two years ago: "T Campbell, who's written a great book called A History of Webcomics, claims that there are only about ten or so artists supporting themselves full-time with the ad-dominated model."

I mumbled that it may have gone up to twenty.

What I should have voiced instead was the issue that brought me to the panel in the first place:

The rules are different for you than for small one-man operations. Your resources are far greater. You know this, yet each of your companies has forgone any Web-centered, freely available work-- and any chance they might have had to produce The Great Webcomic of 2007-- because of what's worked for them for the past eight years or more. Do those companies really want to surrender the initiative to the independents so completely?

But then again, they had already given me my answer.

That's why company executives continue to need independent artists. To take the chances they won't.

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Disclaimer: Broken Frontier is owned by Platinum Studios. I have interviewed for jobs with Richard Bruning and consulted with Jeremy Ross, and have professional relationships with DC and Tokyopop.