Amid all the cheers, back-slapping and flying confetti over the growing presence of graphic novels in bookstores and comics shops, our attention has been diverted from what seems to be a growing absence: the alternative comic book.

The threat to alternative comics was suddenly brought to the foreground in July by the faltering of Alternative Comics, Jeff Mason's one-man publishing house, which had been pumping out fringe-appeal comic books since 1993. On July 12, Mason sent out the following press release/appeal:

Alternative Comics is suffering some very dire cash flow problems and I am turning to you for help. In the spring of 2002 our book trade distributor, LPC, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy owing Alternative Comics a lot of money. I had hoped that I could weather the storm by taking money from my savings and by borrowing on credit until receiving the agreed-upon 42% of what LPC owed us. Now over two years later, LPC is still in bankruptcy proceedings and I am completely out of savings and credit.

In the past (prior to LPC) I had ample working capital -- I had great credit terms with my various printers. Now (post LPC) I have absolutely no working capital and must pay up front to print every book.

For each publication, I now wait for all of the retailer advance orders to come in to Diamond, then I contract Diamond to assign the payment they'd pay to me to my printer to print the book. This contractual agreement costs money and cuts into our razor thin margin.

Lack of cash on hand has also caused me to have to shrink print runs on some books. This increases the cost per unit of each book, and speeds the looming reprint costs.

I've been increasing my publishing schedule over the last two years, and in hindsight, I expanded too quickly. Alternative Comics is moving forward with a much more reasonable, much more foresighted publishing schedule, with some really amazing projects in the works!

Alternative Comics' cash flow problems have been the only reason for not yet reprinting Bipolar #1 and Humor Can Be Funny as well as having been the only reason a number of books have been arriving late or re-solicited.

Alternative's problems are the latest in a series of aftershocks, delayed reactions to the failure of LPC, the most prominent distributor of comics-related material to the book trade at that time. When its assets were seized by its own bank March 28, 2002, it sank into bankruptcy, taking with it hundreds of thousands of dollars of its client publishers' sales revenue and inventory. Among those affected were Alternative, Image, Dark Horse, CrossGen, Top Shelf, TokyoPop, Marvel, Todd McFarlane Productions, IDW, Highwater, Oni, Drawn & Quarterly, Humanoids, Belier Press, ComicsOne, Redlight Manga, Westhampton House and AIT-PlanetLar. The timing was catastrophic for the comics industry, which was just beginning to enjoy a blossoming market in the book trade and several publishers, both big and small were rocked by the loss of their pipeline to bookstores. About $6,000 of the proceeds from the Alternative-published 9/11 benefit anthology for the Red Cross was among the funds tied up by the bank's seizure. Mason said he sent the money to the Red Cross even though it had not been received from LPC.

Partly as a result of distributor failures, both Top Shelf in 2002 and Fantagraphics in 2003 also made appeals to their readers, who rose to the occasion by drastically stepping up orders and seeing the publishers through the rough patch. Now it seems Alternative is taking its turn as one more needy independent publisher. But there are a number of important differences between Mason's situation and that of Fantagraphics and Top Shelf.

For one, even if all of Alternative's customers were prepared to buy up every comic Mason had in print, his one-man operation is incapable of filling the orders. Instead, he urged readers to buy Alternative comics from their local comics shops as a way of supporting the comics-industry infrastructure. Posting on The Comics Journal message board July 13, he said, "I've sent out the missive to everyone, including retailers. If this is going to work, it needs to be a long-term solution. I want readers to buy books on a regular basis from retailers. I want retailers to buy books on a regular basis from distributors."

As well-intended as Mason's motives may be, his gesture is not likely to be a major boon to retailers. With titles that rarely sell more than 3,000 copies, Alternative's impact on the bottom line of retailers is negligible and likely to become more negligible if Mason cuts back to a title a month, as he told the Journal he plans to do.

Because he's not in a position to sell directly to consumers, there's no way for him to tell how much of a response his appeal for help has gotten from readers. The only sign that his appeal has had an impact will be if reorders and advance orders from retailers pick up for the next month, indicating that shops have sold out of previously ordered Alternative titles. So far, he said, "it hasn't had much of an effect that I can see. There's been some increase in advance orders but nothing spectacular. Anecdotally, I've gotten lots of feedback from retailers and readers. Lots of retailers are setting up displays and handselling the comics."

Its small size, however, also means it isn't threatened by the same financial collapse that could have befallen Fantagraphics or to a lesser extent, Top Shelf, or for that matter, Marvel Comics. Mason has no overhead and therefore no serious debts. By trade, he's a lawyer -- a day job that provides him a comfortable living with enough left over to put some comics he likes into print.

Mason didn't start Alternative Comics because he wanted to make money; he got into comics publishing because he could afford to lose money. At least in the beginning. "The big fat nest egg that I started out with has been dwindling down to nothing," he told the Journal. "I grew too fast. I learned [the comics market] doesn't want three or four comics a month from Alternative. When I was putting out more than that the comics were starting to cannibalize each other's sales."

The motto for Alternative has always been, "If it will lose money, we will publish it," but without the buffer of a nest egg, Mason can no longer afford to lose money at the rate demanded by his recent publishing schedule which has featured as many as six titles a month. Unlike most publishers, Mason has no protective legal barrier between his own and his company's debts. But where most publishers must keep up a steady revenue stream in order to maintain their facilities and staff, Mason has no staff or facilities to maintain. Whereas most publishers lose more money the less they publish, Mason loses less money the less he publishes. Therefore, the worst-case scenario for Alternative Comics is that it will have to slow down production to one or two titles a month.

Perverso and Matt Madden's A Fine Mess #2 have been delayed and the second Hickee anthology was pushed back from its originally scheduled June release to September.

As a result of this cutback, Mason's company is not the outlet for new talent that it once was. "Back in October, I started realizing that I needed to slow down, and I stopped looking at unsolicited submissions." Even so, Mason said he still gets two or three unsolicited submissions a week.

Finally, and perhaps significantly, Alternative Comics differs from most other alternative publishers in its loyalty to the comic-book format. Where publishers like Fantagraphics and Top Shelf have focused increasingly on book publication, comic books continue to represent at least half of Alternative's output. Which raises the question: Are Mason's financial problems symptomatic of a larger marketplace trend away from alternative comic books and toward trade paperbacks and other, more prestigious and ambitious formats?

If there is such a trend, Craig Thompson is its poster boy. One of the biggest alternative success stories in the past year is his Blankets, a work that bypassed the formerly ubiquitous practice of comic-book serialization, arriving full-blown before the public as a graphic novel. Chicago Comics manager Eric Thornton told the Journal, "It's harder for a reader to keep track of serialized comics, and by the time issue #4 comes out, issue #1 is out of print. If Blankets had been released as a 12-issue miniseries, we would have ended up with a bunch of Blankets comics [from late in the run] gathering dust."

Comics industry consultant (ICV2.com) Milton Griepp, said, "We can't really track comics releases by that kind of category, but it's certainly true that there are more alternative comics that are going straight to trade paperback rather than to serial comic books. Top Shelf is almost all trade paperbacks. There's more money in that."

Mark Herr, director of purchasing for Diamond Comic Distributors told the Journal, "New alternative comics are having a hard time getting attention for the retailer and consumer dollar, and those that publish 'lines' rather than self-publishing are clearly not publishing as many comics as they used to. From what I am told, most are getting stronger sales with original graphic novels than they would if [the graphic novels had been] released as comics first. Even quasi-mainstream publishers like Oni Press are doing more in the way of original graphic novels than periodical sales."

An Alternative History

The 1960s ancestors of the alternative comic embraced the cheap, pulpy presentation of the 10-cent comic book, but underground comics died out in the late 1970s along with their head-shop distribution system. A new wave of alternative comics geared to the burgeoning comics-shop market appeared in the early 1980s, led by publishers like Fantagraphics and surviving underground publisher Kitchen Sink. In the mid to late 1980s, a boom in black-and-white, independently published comics was sparked by the phenomenal mainstream crossover success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The mainstream publishers countered with their own proliferation of titles and overwhelmed retailers didn't have the space or the capital to keep up with the bulk of independently published titles, leading to a black-and-white bust. By the early 1990s, however: Fantagraphics had solidified its position with a reliable line of regular creators like the Hernandez Bros., Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes, as well as an erotic comics imprint; Slave Labor Graphics had survived the black-and-white bust with its own slate of popular creators, including Evan Dorkin and Jhonen Vasquez; Drawn & Quarterly had made a strong start with creators like Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Seth and Joe Matt; and, in 1993, Mason began publishing Indy Magazine, which would spin off into his Alternative Comics line.

When the bottom fell out of the comics market as a whole in the mid 1990s with the mass exodus of speculator-consumers and the failure of the newsstand market, alternative comics were relatively insulated because their sales had not been artificially buoyed by collectors. Instead, as the 1990s progressed, alternative publishers continued to launch, including Top Shelf in 1995, and Oni Press and Highwater Books in 1997. The late 1990s comics-shop closings, however, eventually took their toll on alternative comics along with the rest of the industry. Then, around 2001, the bookstore market began to open up to graphic novels in a big way. With the collaboration of high-profile book distributor WW Norton, Fantagraphics, especially, found a growing audience for trade-paperback collections and graphic novels just as the comics-shop direct-market appetite for alternative comic books seemed to be retracting.

Taking as a sample the output of Alternative Comics, Slave Labor Graphics/Amaze Ink, Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics Books, Highwater Books, Last Gasp, Oni Press and Top Shelf Books, it's clear that trade paperbacks, hardcovers and graphic novels are on the rise. It's less clear whether comic books are losing ground or simply remaining stable in contrast to the growth in book production. Slave Labor Publisher Dan Vado told the Journal, "I have not decreased my comic-book output at all, but I have increased the rate at which we collect material. At one time when we only had the direct market to count on, a comic needed to attain a certain consistent sales level to justify the expense of doing a trade. Now, the TPB is part of the business plan. We have gone from doing maybe five or six trades a year to doing two or three per month. Our comic-book sales relative to TPB sales are not as strong as they might have been a few years ago, however that is accounted for by our expansion into the book trade."

The month of October in the years 1992 and 2004, nevertheless, provides a stark illustration of the way that alternative books and alternative comic books have reversed themselves: In that month in 1992, the above alternative publishers released 12 new comic books and four new books; during the same month in 2004, the above publishers have solicited five new comic books and 12 new books. It has not been a particularly gradual or steady shift. As late as December 2000, the sampled publishers released 12 new comic books and five new books. 2001 was the first December in which new alternative books (13) outnumbered new alternative comic books (8). The ratio has vacillated in recent years between months in which comic books have slightly outnumbered books (11 comics versus eight books in December 2002), months in which the two formats were virtually identical (11 and 11 in December 2003), and months in which books far outnumbered comic books (16 books versus four comic books in October 2003).

If it can be said at least that alternative trade paperbacks and graphic novels have outpaced alternative comic books, then the question of why this has happened must be directed at three categories of suspect: Have readers shifted their allegiance from comic books to graphic novels? Have alternative comics creators developed a preference for the longer format? Or have publishers and retailers found graphic novels and trade paperbacks to be more economically expedient than comic books? Or is it some combination of all of the above?

[To read the rest of this article, please see The Comics Journal #263.]

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