(Graphic Novels) Writing in what must be the most aptly-titled column on the internet, Steven Grant has finally noticed what just about every non-lobotomized witness to the world of funnybooks has known for years: that the stranglehold superheroes have over the comic book industry is keeping it from reaching a wider audience. Surprise!
"I know a lot of people who’ve been very pleased by all this "attention," like it’s going to do something for comics. Who knows, maybe it will. Certainly the debut of BIRDS OF PREY got unprecedented interest, pushing the WB into a third place slot among the networks for possibly the first time in its existence. Maybe the "attention" will bring a new influx of readers to comics, but I doubt it. At any rate, money’s about the best we can hope for from all this. (Not that money’s bad, of course.) But it won’t bring the comics industry what it needs: more diversity, more creativity, and the means to adequate expose those to a buying public. It won’t encourage a wider audience to look to comics for their entertainment, unless their idea of entertainment is battling morons in gaudy outfits. Unless you walk to believe in trickle down theories. But the only trickles I see are us pissing on our own shoes, along with everyone else."
One hopes it isn't rubbing salt in too many old wounds to note that the complete essay, minus the references to current works of television, film and comics, could easily have come from a ten-year-old issue of The Comics Journal -- you know, the magazine that once referred to Grant as "a small, crawling thing" when, defending his then-bread-and-butter superhero gigs, he tried to bolster his "side" by spreading disparaging and untrue gossip about Gary Groth and the Hernandez Brothers in his publication WAP? That magazine. Boy times surely have changed, haven't they?
Which, actually, is rather my point: times have changed.
As I noted in my introductory essay to this weblog, art comics have always met with an almost unfathomable hostility within the comic book industry -- the very presence of books like Love and Rockets and RAW always seemed to have been taken as an affront by devotees of the superhero ethos to everything they ever held dear. Sales were never good; art comics spent years making their way in a network of readers who for the most part regarded their very presence on the stands with cliquish scorn. (The reverse was also true, of course, and one can spend days arguing the chicken-and-eggishness of it all, so I won't even try.)
For a brief period, though, it looked like the good stuff would make it anyway -- the runaway success of Art Spiegelman's Maus put "graphic novels" on the map for the first time, while over on the long-underwear side of the fence creators like Frank Miller and Alan Moore truly believed that their revisionary, apocalyptic works were putting the capstone on an artform that would at last go on to other things -- and planned their next career moves accordingly. Alan Moore went on to an abortive attempt at self-publishing, while Miller moved on to his creator-owned Sin City.
It didn't last. Curious readers attempting to check out this whole graphic novel business got a handful of crappy superhero books thrust back at them, "graphic novel" tags hastily affixed to the front covers like they were that year's pet rocks -- which in hindsight is exactly what they were. Art comics, meanwhile, simply hadn't built up enough of a backstock in book form to compete with the glut of crap Marvel and DC were cranking out, and promptly got drowned out in a sea of garishly-colored white noise.
The low point came in the early 1990s, when a series of financial convulsions within the direct distribution network left the retailers still standing with far less discretionary cash, which in turn led them to concentrate said cash on the reliable staples of their market (superhero comics by Marvel and DC) and avoid gambling their money on anything else. Diamond Distributors found itself the beneficiary of a bewildering chain of circumstances that left it the only distributor in the Direct Sales market. It was a fallow time for indy publishers, who quickly began dropping like flies; The Comics Journal's parent company for example, Fantagraphics Books, only made it through by subsidising their more reputable books with a line of pornographic comics.
So what changed? Single-minded determination and an accumulation of good works, basically. Art cartoonists continued to crank out work in a slow-but-steady rhythm, never seeing much in the way of rewards in the short-term but hoping against hope that the long-term would make the effort worth it. Slowly, a sizeable body of cumulative work did emerge, and began to get noticed beyond the comic-book fan circles. A trickle turned into a stream. Joe Sacco won the American Book Award. Chris Ware won the Guardian First Book Award. Slowly, the term "graphic novel" began to mean something beyond "big Batman comic" in the literary world. The press began to take notice, and these works began making their way into regular bookstores. And the sales to bookstores began to turn significant.
For many art-comics publishers, the distribution of their work by the LPC Group began to provide access to a market they had previously been unable to crack. Finally, an alternative to the comic books shops had been found.
For Fantagraphics Books, the turning point came when it attracted the attention of highly-esteemed book publishers W.W. Norton & Company, who began distributing Fantagraphics' line of graphic novels to bookstores just over a year ago. The difference has been palpable; the company now sells more products outside the direct market than within. Here's Fantagraphics Director of Marketing Eric Reynolds, speaking in the September 2002 edition of the trade publication Comics & Games Retailer (before you even click, the article in question isn't online):
"We sold more than 50,000 copies of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World last summer, for example. Fewer than 10,000 of those were through Diamond. The vast majority of them were through through our book trade distributor, W.W. Norton & Co., and were sold to independent booksellers and chains. The irony of this, of course, is that Diamond is the distributor with the theoretical captive audience of graphic-novel-friendly booksellers. Norton, on the other hand, distributes almost exclusively prose literature."
Reynolds goes on to allow, of course, that Ghost World's now-a-major-motion-picture status provides for skewed sales figures, noting that most average titles released by Fantagraphics in the last year or so sold "only" 10% to 50% better through Norton than Diamond -- but still.
It hasn't all been smooth sailing by any means -- the April 2002 collapse of LPC Group under a cloud of debt, followed in short order by a bankruptcy filing by the comics-friendly distributor Seven Hills, left a number of publishers scrambling for replacement representation (and briefly, in the case of Top Shelf, financial solvency). So far, every publisher affected has been able to weather the storm, even if some production schedules have been disrupted.
That said, the interest in graphic novels from book distributors and retailers remains. Drawn and Quarterly recently signed a distribution deal with Chronicle Books, a high-end book publisher whose name compares favorably to W.W. Norton as a producer of quality books. I'm predict big things for Chris Olivieros and company in 2003, myself.
So why is Steven Grant sounding so pessimistic?
Mostly, I suspect it's because the vast majority of comics fandom, centered as they are around the "mainstream" world of children's comics and the Direct Sales market, still have yet to grasp the full implications of all of this -- indeed, unless they've been reading the Journal, the Comicon Splash or the Reynolds interview in C&GR, chances are they really aren't even aware of it. This is why I'm calling this an Invisible Revolution. Make no mistake, though: a revolution is exactly what we're talking about here, a sea change of a magnitude not seen since Phil Seuling first founded the Direct Sales market back in the 1970s. Those long years of unrewarded toil by cartoonists unwilling to settle for what the status quo had to offer are about to pay off -- indeed, they've already begun to do just that. Put it this way: if, even as late as three years ago, Top Shelf had announced that they were having financial difficulties because any distributor besides Diamond had stiffed them of moneys owed, would anyone even have believed them? That they now have headaches over distributors (rather than "the distributor") is itself cause for celebration. The glass is half-full, I tell you!
The fact that Steven Grant is just now beginning to get hip to what the rest of us have known for years, however, is not cause for condescension so much as a reason for celebration -- he may be slow, but he gets there eventually. Not having any particular dog in past fights the man may once have had with the Journal, I would therefore like to take the opportunity to welcome him into the fold of arts-first comics activists. The question now: what plans does the veteran comic book writer have for creative participation? Got a Great American Graphic Novel in you, Mr. Grant?
