In 1999, I wrote an essay for this magazine in which I decried a "Team Comics" mentality, an implied social contract whereby it is asserted that everyone from comics professionals to readers is obligated to help raise the profile and sales levels of the comic-book industry. Team Comics members in good standing might buy an extra copy of a comic they believe in, shop only at their local comic-book store rather than seek out the best bargain, give comics for presents, loan them to friends and provide a good personal example through attention to personal hygiene and use of pro-comics rhetoric. Negative reviews or even pointed commentary aimed at a specific portion of the comics industry are a total no-no, and the person who insists on them must selfishly wish to keep the industry small and inconsequential. Team Comics believes that the American comic-book industry can be willed out of any sales decline no matter how extended, and perhaps even return to some hazily asserted utopia of mass-medium status it enjoyed in the 1940s.

I thought this was horseshit then, and I still think so now. Stripped to its essentials, Team Comics is a meta-marketing gimmick by which fans and artists are flattered and appealed to on behalf of a hobby they enjoy. Team Comics switches between two basic modes of entreaty: duty, by suggesting someone who really loves comics would do his best by them; and self-esteem, where one is flattered into believing he has the power to create a world in which his choice of entertainment reflects favorably upon him. The first asks for a cynic's acceptance of standard business practices, while the second requires an optimist's imagination to see the current day's output as the medium in full flower. Stan Lee seized on both ideas to galvanize hardcore fans behind Marvel's efforts in the 1960s. Today's Team Comics booster resembles a Marvel Maniac with a slightly broader reading palette and industry-wide ambition.

The biggest change between when I wrote the Team Comics editorial in TCJ #211 and today is the reduction in communitarian pressure emanating from the big companies, particularly Marvel. In case you missed it, Marvel is now run by swaggering, barrel-chested men, the kind that argue by poking your sternum with their fingers. The new Marvel's model for the comics industry seems to be less about Team Comics than about a really vicious game of licensed-property dodgeball. It's hard to imagine Joe Quesada or Bill Jemas suggesting readers remain loyal to the industry. In fact, it's hard to imagine them suggesting a goodwill campaign on behalf of one of their own books. Today's Marvel is much more likely to slap the table in front of you, demand recognition that Marvel comics are the greatest comics in the world, and strongly suggest that if you prefer anything else, you're kind of a boob.

Marvel isn't alone. CrossGeneration's Mark Alessi seems cast from the same mold, bellowing out predictions of his company's ultimate victory in the comics market at the 2002 Wizard World convention in Chicago like a professional wrestler saddled with the world's nerdiest gimmick. Other voices are conspicuous by their absence. DC's Paul Levitz sits quietly at his desk reading inter-division memos and mopping his brow, while Image continues its slow, silent transformation into Caliber Comics. The day belongs to the blowhards. This new testosterone movement in corporate competition has all sorts of downsides, including the publication of some of the most depressing and noxiously cynical comics of all time. But in terms of Team Comics rhetoric, it's a refreshing albeit superficial change.

Warren Ellis

The most interesting recent fan movement involving Team Comics also came from sort-of mainstream comics: the online communities and resources spawned around writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary). Ellis ran the popular chat forum at Delphi bearing his name before finally placing a pillow over its head in September 2002. He inspired a few of his readers to start Savant Magazine (promoting "comics and activism," still active) and punditry of their own. Ellis also wrote a column for ComicBookResources.com from Dec. 3, 1999 to Dec. 29, 2000 called Come in Alone, which acted as a declaration of principles for his change-comics movement. Reading the column, particularly the Mar. 31, 2000 entry called "The Old Bastard's Manifesto," an idiosyncratic, ego-driven but not unsympathetic vision for the comics industry takes shape. Ellis' theory seemed to be that the bottoming out of the comics market in late 1999 and early 2000 represented an opportunity for wholesale industry reform. Go after adult readers by abandoning superheroes and promoting individual creators, transform comic-book stores (a viable marketplace, if only by default) from within and recognize the graphic novel as comics' best and most utilitarian format. Only then will comics be prepared to join the general cultural dialogue and lay claim to its place within it.

The problem for Ellis came in figuring out how to implement this vision. As an active creator and forceful public personality, Ellis was in a unique position to comment on the comics market and scowl at anyone who disagreed with him. But he was in a horrible place from which to affect real change, even on a trial basis. Other than hosting several progressive conversations about the realities of comics retailing on his forum and browbeating the holy shit out of readers, Ellis' contribution to practical change seemed limited to the occasional reader-distributed press release designed to be left in comic stores. The Warren Ellis of Come In Alone was an idea man whose arguments were an angry bellow demanding comics readers and professionals change the way they thought about their industry and art form to better suit him -- an attempt to change comics culture through a series of barroom jeremiads. What Ellis eventually discovered is that comics readers and professionals aren't all that interested in changing the way they think, and that many true believers aren't interested in thinking at all.

Warren Ellis' aggressive rhetoric caused him trouble in both directions. Because his ideas were critical of several standard industry practices and dominant genres, readers and fans that felt they had a place in that status quo reacted with defensive virulence. Why couldn't Ellis be more positive? How dare he not wholly support our right to enjoy our choice of reading material! Who the hell does he think he is? Plus, as a writer who works with the major comics corporations, what Ellis often admitted was also self-criticism was taken as proof of the greatest crime in pimply fandom: hypocrisy. On the other hand, advocates of the Ellis way of looking at things were hardly inspiring, less soldiers of the cause than rubbery recruits reminiscent of King Blozo's feckless troops. Many seemed perfectly happy to accept Ellis' arguments and ape the fury of his put-downs until it came time to alter their own consumptive habits or contribute an actual idea of their own. Others seemed less convinced by the content of Ellis' arguments than eager to avoid a Steinbergian put-down of capital letters and grim-faced shaking of the head -- they weren't believers; they just feared being labeled Someone Who Didn't Get It. It's a brave man that marches to battle with that army.

What's clear now is that Warren Ellis wasn't offering up a new form of Team Comics as much as practicing personality-driven industry advocacy of the Dave Sim variety. But Ellis lacked Sim's certainty of how that vision is best applied, or even a Groth/Thompson put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is publishing laboratory. Warren Ellis' style of argumentation eventually overwhelmed any of the subtle, stand-alone merits of his initial vision by pushing vague industry initiatives that, reflected back at him from a circle of fans and fellow travelers, seemed to increasingly view the solution as more Warren Ellis and friends of Warren Ellis. Ellis had become the Carvelli to a thousand devoted Murrays. Fighting the battles, with its rallying cries and trench camaraderie, seemed much more important than trying to win the war. Ellis also failed to match the tenacious fury with which Team Comics sticks to its core value of non-confrontational inclusiveness. The Old Bastard never really stood a chance. Many comics readers danced on the grave of the Warren Ellis Forum. One imagines that Ellis may have danced a half-jig of his own in blissful abdication.

[To read the rest of this essay, please see The Comics Journal #250.]

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