Michael just hit some great points about the webcomic process and ‘doing it yourself’ in his earlier post, and it got me thinking (late at night after a long day of drawing thinking can be a bad thing!). I was going to respond, but then I remembered, “hey, he’s right! I own the site and can start my own damn post on the thing!”
Most of Michael’s points there have to do with artistic control and monetization. I’ve put some thoughts about that into bullet points to take the conversation further. These are hard topics for everyone working in and enjoying web-based content so, please, jump into the waters of the discussion and I’ll make room in the bath.
-Monetization in relationship to comix, or any kind of personal expression, is always a hard topic. But the chance for an artist to spread his work to a wider group of people through the internet has now presented new wrinkles to the old problem. We can find like-minded individuals to enjoy our work without agents, theater overhead, printing costs, shipping costs and all the other miscellaneous expenses. There’s simply less controlled space between the artist and his consumer these days, but the time spent making the actual product, in comix particularly, hasn’t really changed.
-The internet is free and should, I believe, stay that way. Keep in mind that I live about four blocks from the Philadelphia Free Library. People as individuals and culture itself are invigorated by the free access to information and art. The internet is the big leap in allowing people the freedom of unrestrained thinking. -Any form of fiction, reporting or personal expression worth knowing about takes time, energy and some money to make. How artists and journalists should be paid for that personal expense is always a tricky concept. Joyce himself used to frequently lament how Picasso and other leading painter of their day could be so richly rewarded for the handful of hours he spent making a painting while authors, of equally undeniable genius, might work tens of thousands of hours on a novel of great importance that might never be printed.
-The argument of material value for art is long-standing and crosses into every field. Do we treat it as a surplus commodity and pay for the enjoyment it brings us, ten dollars for two hours of movie-watching experience, or do we pay for it based upon it’s rarity, thousands of dollars for World Series ticket that might take up three or four hours at most? Is thinking of it as a commodity in this sense devaluing the artwork itself?
-Both Picasso and Joyce are different from baseball and movies in the sense that they make a plastic art rather than a performing one; essentially, the art can be found in the objects they make rather than the experience of watching them. This also means that these objects can make a “continuous return” on the time the artist has invested selling well past the moment they were made. In this sense writers of fiction like Joyce do much better than painters of single images like Picasso. Joyce’s novel, prior to the internet and things like Project Guttenberg, sells over and over again to every user who wants to experience it while Picasso has only the one time sale to count on. When an authors work becomes a popular idiom it sells continuously to libraries and schools. When a painters work does the same it is recorded in books, postcards, magazines and t-shirts that the artist and their estate seldom receive money from. Any painter knows, print-making is the way to protect that the audience for your work is in fact paying you.
-Comix are print-like. the work we do in them might conceivable sell in “continuous return” for the artist. MAUS still does extremely in many different kinds of markets. As for webcomics, we might read them on-line, but recent market indicators show that readers still like to buy and own the comix they enjoy and believe in. In the same way that photography didn’t ever kill painting and audio books didn’t kill the novel, webcomics haven’t killed the graphic novel. If anything, the success of some webcomics have enriched the book market by providing them with assured purchasers; if a webcomic does well in to a certain on-line demographic it’s easier for the book publisher to put the printed product in their hands.
-In webcomics it’s possible, as Michael points out, for an artist to really take control of his own project. Frankly, I don’t think we’ve seen such an opportunity for that since the heyday of self-publishing and experimental comix-media like RAW MAGAZINE in the ’80’s. Most of my favorite American comix artists come out of that generation; Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Seth and Charles Burns. All of them show a certain fussiness about object that webcomic artist, most of which never dealt too often with the old-school print problems, are just starting to embrace.
-But it’s free. No one should be charged to discover the art they like.
-Should artists then have to wait until they’ve built a strong enough audience, people they might hopefully turn into a collectorship or an “established fan-base”, before they can expect to get paid?
-How do we find ways to support the men and women behind the notion of free-media that they might give us more? That they might get the very basic amount of money they need to make work they believe in rather than take side-jobs that offer very little. Is there a way to do this without saying, “hey, you want to read this? It will cost you so much a month because the artist needs to eat”?
-I don’t want to make work like that. I don’t want to be part of, let alone designer of a site that people have to pay to see. But I like to eat. Suggestions for balancing these problems are definitely welcome.
-How do good, well intended works of web-based art get supported while everyone chases advertising?
