THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE COMICS

David Dodd: What are your thoughts in terms of how online comics will be produced? In mainstream comics there’s a huge division of labor that’s been worked out to create comics as publishable pages. Take the stories of the Eisner-Iger studio. There are like fifteen guys in a room here, Eisner scrawls some stuff on this piece of paper, sends it down when it comes back it’s a finished comic page. Now that’s an extreme example, but while we speak there’s stuff getting mailed all around the country that’s going to come out in 8 months or whenever. So do online comics encourage more of a writer-artist fusion, or does it end up like animated cartoons for TV, where you send everything off to Southeast Asia and it comes back as a cartoon?

Scott McCloud: There’s always that possibility, but it should be noted that the division of labor is largely a product of mainstream comics, of the large producers. While I think there will always be people who only want to write or draw, who don’t want to do both, I think many people who would prefer to do the whole thing, don’t do so in the mainstream simply because that’s not how it’s done. Or because they don’t want to pour their heart and soul into something they don’t own. Right now my feeling is that on the web we’ll probably see more writer-artists emerge than we have now. In all likelihood, the large conglomerations are going to be less common on the web because of the direct connection between the creators and the audience. The ability to draw that straight line from A to B without anything in between. The large comics companies are to a large extent the products of the economies of scale. Saving on the price per unit, the ability to bridge distances more efficiently, the ability to cut better distribution deals, the ability to more successfully crowd out their competitors on the shelf. All of these things are based on the concept of limited resources, limited shelf space, limited catalogue space. Those don’t migrate to the web. The only real economies of scale left in web content is the ability of those who sell greater numbers to pour more money into production, to produce a slicker product, to produce something with more bells and whistles, to produce something that’s more professional looking.

Albert Boime: To push the star-system, the mainstream stars . . .

SM: That’s right, it’s really one and a half elements of the economy of scale, because promotion is an element also. I talk about the various pros and cons of scale vis-a-vis promotion in the book. It’s a little complicated to get into.

AB: But you think on the whole it will democratize the business in a way?

SM: Yeah, I really am one of those people who feels that the intrinsic nature of the web is a democratizing influence on business. I think that that message got lost in the late ‘90’s because people got caught up in merger-mania and the stock market, and everyone’s buying content. I think they mistakenly thought that that’s the way the new economy was going to go. That’s not the new economy, that just the old economy trying to leverage its influence on the new economy. But it’s a pyrrhic victory, these guys are pouring billions and billions of dollars into acquiring content and trying to highjack the web, and they just can’t do it! Because they cannot force you to go to their sites and they cannot prohibit you from going to someone elses. And in the physical world they can. In the physical world they can insure that the only retail outlets for a hundred miles do not carry the competitor’s product in any significant numbers. They can insure that if you want a comic or a drink or a particular type of clothing, that you are going to have to settle for theirs, because theirs are the only ones being displayed. That doesn’t work on the web. And I don’t think it ever will. Unless we literally have a violent overthrow of the government, I don’t think that’s going to work.

DD: Another thing I’m interested in is the idea of ownership of characters, of how fast Warners or Marvel goes after somebody if they use Superman or Spiderman for their own purposes.

SM: Well, if you want to display Superman or Spiderman, you’ll get sued and you probably should. If you’re going to do it without permission.

DD: But what the web still runs on is the need for people to pay attention to particular things. If you have a Britney Spears site, no matter how amateurish or ridiculous it is, the fact that Britney Spears is mass-marketed in this way is going to make this very appealing to large numbers of people. You get this kind of thing going on with Disney extending the copyright of Mickey Mouse . . .

SM: I don’t see the creative freedom from the democratizing influence of the web having anything to do with my ability to go out and do an original Mickey Mouse story. Or to do a Superman or Batman story without permission. They still own those characters. I think that the illusion is that there will never be another Mickey Mouse. That there will never be another Superman or Batman that perhaps you’ve created. We just have that illusion because these characters can leverage their dominance in perpetuity in the physical world. They can very successfully insure that anything less popular stays less popular. And they do so through the economies of scale primarily. Even so we have aberrations like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Which didn’t stay entirely in the hands of Peter Eastman and Kevin Laird, but at least as far as the revenue stream. But that was Siegel and Shuster in the eighties and nineties, a very different story.

DD: Let me try this from a different angle. I think my interests as an academic and your interests as a creator can come into conflict, in as much as a major difficulty people run into in doing comic research is the resistance of the big companies when they want to reproduce comic imagery in their work.

SM: Actually, I have the same problem. I have to be very careful now. Even since ‘93 when I did UC, I feel as if the window of fair use is closing as corporations are becoming more litiginous. I think fair use should be opened up considerably. I’ve always been very open about that sort of thing. Somebody wants to reproduce panels from UC, I don’t balk at that. If they want to reproduce five pages, I have to apologize and send them off to my publisher, because I’m contractually obligated to do so. I have to say, “I’m afraid you need to get permission from these guys, because they have purchased the rights to this material for a certain time, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to turn around and give them to you.” But who knows, if I owned them I might give permission, I might not even care at that point.

DD: But I think that a big part of the reason that the corporations are becoming so aggressive at this point is because the web is so diffuse. They want to own what it is possible to sell.

SM: They want to own enough space so that they can prohibit access to their competitors. And they haven’t figured out how to do so. Because you can’t. It’s like buying up phone lines so that no one can talk. It doesn’t work like that. You can buy frequencies on the radio dial until there’s no room for alternative radio. You can fill up shelf space at your local 7-11 or Walmart until there’s no room for alternative magazines. You can pay for shelf space at a supermarket or certain bookstores. There’s a limited amount of shelf space for you and your competitors, and if you have it all, your competitors have zero. But there’s no shelf space in cyberspace. There’s no limitation.

AB: But suppose Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster come up with an interesting character, get a tremendous amount of public recognition, but then there’s always the risk that Marvel or DC or somebody is going to come in and take over that character and use it for their own purposes.

SM: Only if they pay for it.

AB: Yeah, they’ll pay for it.

SM: Then it’s a matter of creator’s rights. It’s a matter of educating creators about what they’re signing away when they sign one of those contracts. I have no doubt that if I created an extremely popular character online, say I created a character that was even more popular than any of the characters in Marvel or DC’s stable, they might very well come to me, as they came to people like Dave Sim in the ‘80’s, and say, “Hey would you like us to buy that?” At that point it becomes a matter of what the creator wants. If the creator wants to say, “Sure give me $10 and you can have it for life, then that’s the creator’s prerogative. I just want creators to be educated about what they’re getting. In my case, I would probably never sell it. Just because I like the control, I like ownership, and I like sticking it to big, lumbering dinosaurs.

DD: Then there’s also the Captain Marvel scenario, where if you create anything popular that reflects paradigms that are in some way owned by somebody. . .

SM: Yeah, that’s the danger of a litiginous society. The funny part is is what that does is it gives a legal and economic incentive for lone creators to be as original as possible. To not just create a character that’s like Superman with different colors. In a way that may not be a bad thing.

But I do think that the court system is regularly abused by monstrous corporate bullies who just want to grind the life out of anything they don’t like. And I think a lot of people all around the world would agree with that. I don’t think that’s a unique view. I think it’s a popularly held view that we need reform in the courts. “Slaps” are becoming very common, those lawsuits that are nothing but nuisance suits to intimidate people. That’s gangster stuff. I see no difference between that and planting a bomb in your local greengrocer’s apartment because he won’t pay up to the mob. I think it’s the exact same thing, it’s just a matter of degree. It’s criminal behavior from an ethical standpoint. Next Page

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