Welcome to COMICON.com, the world's coolest on-line comic book convention! We hope you enjoy visiting and chatting with the artists and publishers who have set up at the show and that you'll come back again and again to explore this new and exciting portal into the world of comics. Steve Conley and I are both self-publishing cartoonists and have a very definite goal in creating COMICON.com. Our hope is to utilize the inherent person-to-person capabilities of modern computer technology to cut through the recent chaotic collapse of the comic book industry in America. First and foremost, we love comics as a FORM, and are happy to report that some of the best comics we've ever read are being written and drawn right now. But you don't have to be a computer scientist to figure out that the BUSINESS of comics has crashed big time; all it takes is a trip to your local comic book store (if it's still in business) to see a glut of lousy books that no one wants forcing the really amazing stuff off the shelves. To understand how it got this bad, and to get in sync with what COMICON.com is setting out to accomplish, it helps to understand a few things from our perspective.

First Some History

Let's go back to the Dark Ages; long before the first comic book convention was even thought of, when comics were considered a hopeless dying backwater of American trash culture. It was the mid-1950's and the United States Senate had only recently conducted hearings into the 'dangers' of comic book reading, scaring parents and infuriating retailers everywhere. The publishers and distributors of comics replied to this crisis by pathetically saddling themselves (and the art form) with a heavy-handed censorship scheme, called the COMICS CODE, which regulated content to strictly juvenile levels. Comics were suddenly boring, and sales, which had been monstrous in the forties, were dwindling rapidly. Distribution was consolidating into the hands of a few outfits, most of whom were owned or controlled by the largest surviving publishers.

Enter The Superheroes!

Re-enter, actually, since super-heroes, led by SUPERMAN, had been a staple of comics before almost completely dying out at the end of the Second World War. In the early 1960's, comic publishers realized they could serve up a potent metaphorical mix of stylized sex and violence (and still get by the COMICS CODE) by jazzing up this hoary old genre with highlighted skin-tight costumes and choreographed fight scenes. Suddenly, comics became 'cool' again, spinning off a successful BATMAN television series and hooking a whole generation of college kids. Powered by the truly mythic creative vision of Jack Kirby, Marvel Comics rose from near-complete collapse to become one of the dominant players in the industry. Despite this resurgence of comics, the newsstands and Mom and Pop grocery stores that had traditionally served as retail outlets for comics sales were a dying breed, being replaced by big supermarkets who weren't interested in carrying low-margin ten and twelve cent comic books anymore. Comics were facing extinction, yet again!

Fandom To The Rescue!

The 1960's had seen the beginnings of organized fandom, but as the seventies rolled in this loose aggregation of like minded hobbyists blossomed into a real economic force. Comic book fandom was made up of readers who truly loved the form. They wanted to congregate, talk to the artists, writers and publishers of their favorite comics and find all the back issues they had missed. Thus the first COMIC BOOK CONVENTIONS were born. By all accounts, those early conventions were magical moments; people from all over the country were coming together to celebrate their favorite comics, and more importantly, to share their dreams about what the form might someday become. Out of those conventions, communities, careers, marriages, businesses and a vision was born. Comics would never be the same!

The Birth Of The Direct Sales Market

Arguably, the most important thing to arise from organized fandom was the DIRECT SALES MARKET. This was an entirely new and revolutionary method of distributing comic books, pioneered by fans, that bypassed the traditionally corrupt and inefficient newsstand distribution system that had served as a bottleneck for so long. More importantly, the DIRECT SALES MARKET created an environment not only ensuring that readers could find every issue of their favorite comic, but also providing greater profits for publishers and retailers alike. It also made it possible to distribute comics in America without the approval of the Comics Code censors. The result was an explosion of new and better titles, younger and hipper publishers, dynamic regional distributors and the swift growth of a large retailer base in cities all across the country. As the 1980's began, many people were certain that comics had entered a new golden age, and were at long last poised to rise out of the ashes of censorship and juvenilia to rightly take their position next to film and jazz as an authentic American cultural treasure.

The Greedy Age Of Comics

What actually happened was more like an authentic American tragedy. Young, idealistic publishers and creators, intent on stretching the form and increasing the audience by tackling new and cutting edge material, found themselves in competition with the same old big-time publishing houses whose goals had more to do with cash than culture. Leveraging their size and brand-name recognition, both DC Comics and Marvel fought a savage battle against each other and all newcomers for sales and market share. Both companies, now owned by large corporations, swamped the new DIRECT SALES MARKET with bloated lines of superhero books and used every means at their disposal to bankrupt the upstart competition by controlling the flow of product through distribution channels. The once-simple pleasures of collecting comics suddenly became a target for ultra-sophisticated marketing departments driven amuck by the smell of easy money, and the once-halcyon communal experience of the comic book convention was soon transformed into a sleazy circus of soft porn and hard sell. Many of the best and brightest comic book creators were routinely lured out of the field by fast-buck Hollywood dreams. By the late 1980's the scene had gotten really ugly, but the worst was yet to come.

Gordan Gekko Gets Comics

It wasn't long before Wall Street took notice of all this growth and stepped in to grab a share. The industry leader, Marvel Comics, was purchased by junk-bond king, Ronald Perleman who, by the early 1990's, had taken the company public and raised half a billion dollars on the public sale of its stock. This fundamentally changed the whole financial dynamic of the DIRECT SALES MARKET, because to keep Marvel stock prices up, Perleman had to show investors huge short term profits in his quarterly reports. He did this by tripling the size of the already bloated line he was publishing and by milking the collector's market for everything it was worth (and more!). Gimmicks and cover-enhancements became the order of the day. The once-heroic superhero characters suddenly became malevolently twisted and ultra-violent, while the stories they vamped through read like an incomprehensible mishmash with no beginning, middle or end. 'Collecting' comics turned into 'speculating' on comics. A shadowy side market of high rollers sprouted behind the scenes with wheeler dealers buying hundreds of thousands of copies of a title in hopes of cashing in on imaginary 'Collector's' prices foisted on the public by ersatz 'price guides'. The results were the same as the TULIP CRAZE in Holland in the 1600's: a terrifyingly quick and near total collapse of the DIRECT SALES MARKET from its peak in April 1993.

Musical Chairs

The DIRECT SALES MARKET might very well have survived and rebounded from this catastrophe were it not for Ron Perleman's final mistake before losing control of Marvel and sending the once-proud company into a prolonged bankruptcy from which it may never return. In a desperate attempt to increase his short term profits, Perleman purchased a small distributor and announced that Marvel would henceforth distribute its own books exclusively. Since Marvel's sales constituted over 50% of the volume in the DIRECT SALES MARKET, the results were apocalyptic; a complete meltdown among the eight competing distributors who couldn't survive without Marvel's volume moving through their systems. Within a year all but one had either been bought up or forced out of business.

The Situation Today

The lone survivor of this debacle, DIAMOND DISTRIBUTION, now effectively controls 95% of the DIRECT SALES MARKET. To get this monopoly status Diamond forged exclusive 'brokerage' agreements with the four largest publishers, DC Comics, Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics and Marvel (whose own distribution plan failed miserably). These special-status agreements, which are currently being investigated by the Justice Department, essentially allow the four largest publishers to control their own discount structure (Diamond dictates a higher discount rate to all other suppliers) and assures them the most and best space in Diamond's monthly product catalog. The end result is that, not only is it harder for retailers to order comics that aren't published by the big four, but there is less incentive for store to carry anything but Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse, since those companies get a preferred price advantage built into their discount structure. If you've noticed that your comic book store is carrying less and less of the good stuff and more and more of the same-old same-old, this is why.

What's Next

The future does not look bright. One out of every two comic book retail outlets has shut its doors in the last three years. Small and self publishers, who have traditionally provided a creative cornucopia of diverse product to the DIRECT SALES MARKET, are all being squeezed out of the business, while the big four exclusives, in monopolistic cahoots with the last distributor, continue to flood the market with lousy superhero books that don't sell. It doesn't take an Einstein to see that unless someone figures out a way to get customers back in the remaining stores, the DIRECT SALES MARKET will soon be facing its final crisis. Where these readers might come from is hard to say. Kids, who got ripped off badly during the speculator frenzy, are mad at comics and staying away in droves. Long time fans are fed up and disgusted at the lack of imaginative, intelligent books on the shelves. With little money to be made many talented artists and writers are moving into other fields. The ability of video games and film to deliver superhero fantasy with a bigger kick may have fatally undercut this traditional comic book staple. And the computer revolution is changing how we spend our time and entertainment dollars.

Our Mission

We at COMICON.com love comics. We think they have yet to realize their full potential. We believe the current system, which showed such early promise, has failed and is holding the art form of comics back. History has taught us that for comics to survive and grow, a new way has to be found to get them from the minds of the creators into the hands of the readers. We're not sure what this way is, but we do know that, despite all the recent excesses of the DIRECT SALES MARKET, there are many people out there who still love comics too. Our goal in creating COMICON.com is to provide a place where people who love this form can come together as a community; not for just one magical weekend a year, but anytime the spirit moves them. Not just to locate that impossible-to-find book or print or one-of-a-kind piece of art, but to exchange ideas; with each other and the creative individuals who have devoted their lives to making comics something more than a plus or a minus on a corporate ledger. If COMICON.com can provide a way to reignite the spark that those who attended those very first comic book conventions felt, then we will have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.

Thank you,
Rick Veitch
rarebit@sover.net

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