I've chatted with enough creators to get a feel for what you are saying.

Let me play devil's advocate on the debate. Let's say the creators can live and eat for the months or years it takes to produce a full graphic novel. It hits the market and flops. The creators have invested a lot of time and resources into a product that still provides little income. You get the popularity or success feedback sooner with a monthly comic. Also, monthly comics are a reason for a customer to walk back into the store every month. If you take that creator away from the market for a year while he produces comics, his fans are going to get out of the habit of shopping every week. When I got fed up with mainstream comics, I was still buying titles like Optic Nerve and Strangehaven. The problem is that the delay got longer and longer between issues. The creator's work was out of sight and out of mind. Since I'm not shopping every week, I don't see Previews anymore. I'd still buy certain indy titles if I new when they were hitting the shelves but I don't. Comic shops are running on such tight margins that they can't afford to pay 50% of cover for a title and hope I'll walk in months later and see a product that I don't know exists. One of the biggest problems for comic shops is unsold and flat out dead inventory. From a marketing standpoint, your best chance of getting the sale is if you can get the customer to commit when they first learn about an item. If I make excuses for not buying something on my first exposure to it, the chances are that I'll keep making excuses not to buy it. Customers don't need more excuses to save their money or find cheaper and more timely ways to spend their entertainment dollar.

Defiant1

You are building your argument on the habitual buyer at the comics specialty shop model. This model is prone to failure, for the reason you're stating, and many more — buyer grows out of an interest in comics (probably the most common example); store owner grows out of an interest in actually reading comics and orders only the stuff in the first half of Previews (before he nods off to sleep); the shop provides some negative element that creates an impasse to a buyer's patronage (at one otherwise good shop I visited, the owner insisted on playing AM Hate Radio all day), etc.

Prose novelists don't have a serialized format to present their work in monthly chunks prior to collection in novel format. How do they live only putting out a novel a year, or less? One way is that most novelists also write other things besides novels — magazine and newspaper articles, ad copy, political speeches, etc. Many comics artists don't consider that they should maybe diversify, and develop a drawing style that is only suited for one thing — comic books.

The other major contributor to leveling the playing field for prose novelists is the publishing model. Since the 20's and 30's, when comics books began, the comics publishing model has been built on this periodical fix of cash, in exchange for no long-term rights for the creator(s). No one (save perhaps Will Eisner) has ever seriously challenged this model. The creators are conditioned to this monthly fix, as are the readers. That is the problem.

Every famous and successful comics creator I've ever read an interview with has given the same answer to the question of advice for newbies: Get a real job instead.

You're simply wrong. It's a product of the fact that few people are capable of producing both writing and artwork of a high enough quality. Grant Morrison collaborates. Warren Ellis collaborates. Neil Gaiman collaborates. LOVE AND ROCKETS was a collaboration. So was Superman, MARVELMAN and CEREBUS.

If we're talking about comic books and not comic strips, cartoons or the doodling of children, collaboration has been the norm far more than the exception.

Mike

Except, as I pointed out, the evidence is that he's getting paid little to nothing for that previously created material because it isn't selling.

Mike

And if you talk to anyone in the prose business, they'll probably tell you they'd cut off their left nut to have a serialized format for their work the way comics still do.

Mike

No, but we’re also not likely to find out, given the state of the comics industry. Fortunately we live in a decade where it’s easy to ignore the comics industry in the first place. Thirty+ years later, whether you delicately crafted that story over an agonizingly long period of time or cranked it out between lines of coke and partying with Vinnie Colleta, I can’t see how anybody involved would be better off for being shackled to it for all that time like Marley’s ghost (only not yet a ghost).

Don’t believe me? Two words: Miracleman. Ok, one word. Several generations of US copyright law combined with several generations of UK copyright law and a number of creators who fought to keep their rights has left us with… Work that’s been out of print for decades. In theory Neil Gaiman could take whatever film he has to a printer and put out a book saying this is a start and he’ll fight the legal side afterwards. He’ll handle the headaches of paying royalties and soothing nerves of the creators, and setting up a proper “complete Miracleman” version for the ages. Or he could contract Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW to do all that for him.

Hell, Alan Davis or John Totleben could scan their copies of the comics, clean them up with photoshop and print “The Best of Alan Davis” or “The Best of John Totleben” because they still have rights to what they created, right? If Gaiman and Buckingham have any spare time, they could be working on new pages now, because the work is the important thing, and it’s a start. But all of them are held back – in public at least, by the chains to work they, or somebody else, did decades ago.

To give someone a job, there has to be a job to offer. From Fawcett and Len Miller (original publishers of Captain Marvel and Marvelman) to Dez Skinn, Eclipse and Todd McFarlane, as well as Marvel in 1978, standard practices include a definite end to a commitment. For most of comic book history, that has been “sign the paycheck, surrender your rights, and see if the editor has another job for you.” That sucks, and a lot of people have worked very hard for a very long time to change things for the better. But now the audience is informed and the victories have been won and the jobs are nearly gone.

Victories would be things like Garth Ennis signing with DC for “The Boys” and then taking it to another company after six issues were published. An unhappy relationship was terminated by one party and both were free to pursue other interests. In a recent interview to publicize #50, Ennis proclaimed himself utterly satisfied with the results. He had been worried that he’d have had to make do with a watered-down version since DC would keep all the stuff he created. No worries, they didn’t. The success of the series has created jobs for John McCrea and other artists to work on the best-selling independent title that’s not about zombies. Its collections are available in Borders and hopefully will be making money for everybody involved for a long time. and anybody involved could decide the relationship isn’t working and back out. Could Ennis do the same thing with “Preacher”? Who knows. If he’s unhappy with how DC treats his work, well, he signed the check a long time ago. It sucks, but it meant DC had jobs to offer through Wildstorm which led to “The Boys” in the first place, even though DC has no claim to the latter. Darick Robertson’s participation in “The Boys” was not hampered by working for Marvel, DC or “Transmetropolitan.”



Without the companies existing, there are no jobs to offer. Without the companies being able to rely a regular source of material, they don’t exist either. Comics creators have also fought hard for reputations as being unprofessional, and their views on creator’s rights also vary. To the creators who can do the work, it’s in their interest to be able to decide on an end point in professional collaboration, even if that end point is a work-for-hire stamp on the back of the check. To the companies who do not create the work but do pay regularly for others to do it, there’s no reason to do business with herds of comics creators with dozens of different conditions that need to be filled before they’ll consider doing work in the future.

"High enough quality" is an arbitrary and unsupportable standard. You've simply got your head up your ass.



Except, as I pointed out, it is indeed more than nothing because you don't have all the data.



And that is conjecture, no "probably" about it.

So, let's see where your fanaticism on this subject has led you.

1. You're denying AGAIN that some people are better at writing than drawing and vice versa.

2. Continuing to argue a point, even though you have NO evidence to support it. I at least went out and found the Direct Market figures for EMPOWERED. You're offering dick.

3. It's not conjecture. I have seen and heard people from the book industry lament the fact that they have no practical way to sell prose on a serialized basis. You could find the same statements with relatively little effort. You won't because you don't actually care about reality, just the picture inside your head which is up your ass.

Mike

Sadly, since there is little or no market for comics outside of specialty stores, a creator must use the tools which are available to them. The Print on Demand option has not proven viable. The comic shops are the easiest and most accessible way to reach potential customers under the current market conditions. Ideally, Marvel & DC would actively pursue other means to get their product to consumers. Geppi is floating debt and has been in numerous large dollar lawsuits. Gemstone owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their printer. Crossgen owed in excess of a million dollars when they filed bankruptcy. You suggest that creators turn instead to a far riskier venture. Bookstores might be a viable option if the product was not returnable. What publisher can risk a retailer overordering and then returning a high percentage of the unsold product when their gamble fails? People like to compare the US market to the Japanese market and that can't be done. Comics are not a primary thought in most American's lifestyle. When something is out of sight and out of mind, people aren't going to go looking for it. I just got through reading a thread on a messageboard where 100% of the comic collectors other than myself said they rather read a book with just words than read one with pictures. Having a dedicated shop interested in marketing (not just selling) comics is the only advantage comics have over other printed materials. The problem with comic sales has very little to do with with content and everything to do with marketing. Marketing is the psychology behind motivating people to buy. If you market dirt properly, you can make money selling dirt. Just go to a garden supply store and watch people shell out money for dirt. If comics made an attempt to penetrate a person's everyday life, people might actually start looking for them. The problem is that Diamond and the publishers think it is the retailers job to market the product. The retailers think it is the publisher's responsibility. Rather than allocating money towards promoting the product, they are holding onto it and it's hurting the publishers, the distributor, and the retailer combined. They've been doing it for over 15 years and everything will eventually hit the point that comics are simply not a viable product for making a profit. Why should I pay $3.99 for a modern comic when you can go to a comic book convention and walk out of it with boxes of "like new" comics with better writers and better artists for a quarter a piece? Why buy a Watchmen trade paperback when I can watch ebay and pick up one for less than it costs to print the book? Quite often that is the case. Publishers are quite honestly hoping they can find consumers that are paranoid or impulsive enough to think that they absolutely have to have it now. With a large majority of printed material, all they have to do is wait, see how long it takes the company to lose money, and buy the product on clearance. The direct market assures that the product is bought from the publisher before they product is manufactured. Comic Book Shops offering subscription services does the same. One you remove those assurances, it becomes a stand-off between the consumer and the retailer to see who is more desperate for the sale. Currently, retailers are losing the stand-off and there is no reason to expect that to change because the product is not a necessity.

Defiant1

As defined by WHOM? You?



I bought three copies of the entire series yesterday on Amazon to give as gifts. Do you suppose Adam Warren got absolutely zero from that?



And I have seen many examples of those who would never want to do that, because it would not only limit interest in the completed work, but also limit the ability to go back and re-think earlier pieces and how they fit into the greater puzzle. But this is anecdotal.

As opposed to your conjecture which is, of course, anal-cephalic.