"Carefull where you point that sonny." Or the Bad Retailer

Image head honcho and Savaga Dragon creator Erik Larsen posted a shot across the bow of many comic creators this week in his colum over on comicbookresources. Erik's arguemnt does have some validity in respect to owning what you do in the long run, to avoid the pitfalls of many of the Golden and Silver age artists who were forced out or had age/style chnages catch up with them, having worked like farmers on farms they never owned one acre of. Now old they are cast off,deemed old fashioned or uselss, and some end their days in bad financial straights having created work that earned the companies millions and billions. And while I agree with part of Erik's call to arms I also feel Erik's agrument is the wrong arguement altogether, I understand wanting to rally creators, shake em' up a bit, have new books, new ideas, new blood, but I just don't think his arguement, his war cry is really correct. His hundred creators charging Porkchop hill will be met with middling success at best. How many new Image books regularly sell over 10,000 copies, 20,000 copies? If you are selling 6,000 copies, you may continue to do your book, but nobody is gonna get rich, even get what you'd get at DC at a good page rate, which for most freelancers I know have stayed static since the mid 90's. So any real payday come way later in the form of other venues , liscensing deals for Movies etc. There are good books out there that sell like shit, not because they are bad, but because 90% of the retailers will never stock a single copy on their shelf.

I wonder if he'll turn the cannon on the real issue, where he needs to, bad retailers, the seriously F'd up direct market and no serious year-over-year effort on anyones part to get new readers into the stagnate babyman market? Even better to just go around it all together. The entire indutries lack of any real business plan to branch out beyond the babyman market, push back onto newstands in a way that modern readers will find interesting, accessable, digest formats, varied genres,entire books easy to get into and read the story, the entire fucking story, etc., is the issue to me. Again the manga publishers have soooo clearly showed us the way to go, along with Disney Adventures and Nicalodeon mag, they seem to know what works and are scoring with a wide demographic of readers who will in turn pass their comics down to the younger set, which is what our comic readers used to do as a hobby. Manga is clearing the Superhero crap right off the bookshelfs in Borders B&N etc. Deservidly so! Manga continues to grow and now at my local Borders the superjock stuff is down to one shelf! It was a half an isle a while ago. Kiss seeing fat money from trades good bye in the book chains.

I think it's wrong to say to us who have labored in the mines, hey take a chance, create a new book, work on it for a year with probably les than 40% chance it will return you any worthwhile $$. Easy to say, but again I see new books all the times and you know, not everyone wants to read or draw superjocks either. What happened to Warren mags, War, Mystery as well, they are all gone or seriously languishing. I've done it. I've self published, I even published two Action Planet books through Image 5-6 years ago.

I have done what Erik talked about. I took royalty money from the gravy days on Batman and spent 10's of thousand$ self-publishing my work and friends work, our second issue of APC captial city went out of biz and we never ever recoverd in numbers as half the people ordering my books went out of business. So I say creating a new Spidey will not do anything today, instead we need to create new paths to the new mainstream reader, impulse buyer, which is what comics and magazines are, impulse items. I really feel only that will allow any real chance of sustainable growth.

I don't live like a college kid, haven't for 20+ years, I don't live with parents or roommates, I have a mortgage and debt, so I can't just keep throwing things at the wall forever. I don't see it as creating characters as the problem, the problem we face is business, not creativity. Comics is a horribly run business not run by business men outside of the corporate boardrooms and people in liscensing, bean counters at the big two. The problem I see it is more the retailers than artists. there are plenty of decent books that can sell better except for the part that the retailers don't order the books and actually don't try to sell more comics.The 300-400 good shops are not enough, we need 3-4000 good outlets all over. Video stores, Wallgreens, etc. Time and time again I have people come and say they LOooove Draw!, but can't get it. Why? Becuse the fucking dumbassed retailer won't carry it! If he sells 2 he won't order 3 or 4 next time. Nope. Instead he will jut order more crisis DC crap. He won't try and advertise , none of the things normal businesses do. These guys are a bunch of retarded babymen!

They are for the most part are the worst businessmen we could have working for us sans those few good retailers we all know. Publishers will naturally concentrate on what sells, and the retailer too, this created a negative growth cycle of no risk, no chances, endless DC and Marvel retreads chasing the faint farts of the last hit, the 10th retread of the Beyonder's fart, the result being and almost no new kids reading comics in the direct market, nope, they are reading the new mainstream, manga. Why do back issues sales suck now? Duh, no new readers to come in and want to read Ultrons frist appearence, the babymen already have that stuff. No wonder Superman stuggles today, he wasn't designed to appeal to a 40 year old man, he was designed to appeal to a 7-10 year old boy. I bet they don't even sell 3000 copies to kids of any superman comic today.