Today’s article: Publish And / Or Perish
by: Brian Hibbs
via: CBR’s Tilting At Windmills column

I read Brian Hibbs’s column fairly regularly; it’s a good resource if you’d like to know more about the innerworkings of the comic book direct market.  This recent column talks about TOKYOPOP’s decline as of late. TOKYOPOP has been the darling of the manga category for a decade now, but suddenly, the company is slashing production and letting work-for-hire folks go. What gave TOKYOPOP its competitive advantage was its ability to produce books that required very little work; since the company simply localized Japanese comics for the American market, all it had to do was hire some translators and re-letter its books. TOKYOPOP did release some original material as well (including the poorly done World of WarCraft books), but the company has had most of its success rooted in localizing manga.

Hibbs discusses the fact that the bookstore market itself is nearing saturation for manga and comics (which I would say is probably true) and that the days of growth are over. TOKYOPOP is feeling the sting the most because it’s spent so much time courting the bookstore industry and trying to get preferential treatment. But since TOKYOPOP has focused on the major stores (Borders, B&N, BAM!, Amazon), if those stores face problems, it does too.

Hibbs then goes on to outline a formula for success in the comic book “direct market”:

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Today’s article: Comicscape: 5 Successes In Mainstream Comics
by: Kurt Amacker
via: Mania.com

A little while back, I posted a commentary on an article about the 5 things wrong with today’s comic book industry. That article promised a followup about 5 things the industry was doing right, so I thought it’d be only fair to go through them.

This article is not nearly as insightful as the previous one, so let me sum up the points with some quick paraphrasing.

1. Marvel and DC are expanding genres while they continue to produce superhero books.
2. Marvel and DC have much better writers than they used to.
3. Comics and graphic novels are generally more available than they used to be.
4. Comic book companies are creating more mature comics now that they’re basically ignoring the comics code.
5. Comics are more legitimate than they used to be, and are showing up in mainstream media a lot more than they used to.

My response to these points? Wrong, somewhat, wrong, you missed something, and definitely wrong. But let me explain why…

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Thinking about publishing comic books? You might want to think again after you read this article. Comic books have a long and interesting history, and the format we read today is a result of many different choices that were made along the road.

Believe it or not, the format we use for comics today happened as much by accident as anything else. Prior to the 1930s, comics came in many different sizes, such as 7″ x 9″, 10″ x 13″, and the tabloid-sized 11″ x 17″.  But the current size, 6 ?” × 10 ¼”, traces its history back to a comic called Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics. Though this book is often erroneously called the first comic book (it’s not), it’s probably the first comic book that modern readers would recognize as such.

One story behind it is that a printing company called Eastern Color, Inc. was trying to find ways to keep the presses rolling during the Great Depression, and a sales manager named Harry I. Wildenberg was idly folding a newspaper broadsheet. He folded it once into the tabloid size, and then folded it again. It occurred to him that this produced a tidy little book in which newspaper strips could be printed. Another story attributes this idea to Maxwell “Charlie” Gaines, who is generally credited as the creator of the modern comic book format. Gaines happened upon some old newspapers in his mother’s attic, and started reading through the comics pages. As the story goes, he realized that people would be interested in reading reprints of these old strips, and he pitched the idea to Eastern, who’d published tabloid-sized books in the past. Gaines suggested that they fold the tabloid books in half and use a saddle-stitching binding to create a small book.

Whichever way it happened, the size of the book was a little bit larger than the modern format (reduction to the current size occurred years later), but the benefits were obvious: a smaller book allowed the publisher to cram more comics inside, and it was just as easy to produce a 64-page comic book as it was to produce a 32 page tabloid-sized book. Thus the modern comic was born. (Interestingly enough, this format an American convention; in Britain, comic books have traditionally been printed in full-size magazines.)

But the size of comic books isn’t the only thing that has its roots in industry history…

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Try your hand at anything in life, and chances are good that, before long, you’ll be told that you suck.

And most of the time, it’ll be true.

But there’s nothing wrong with sucking. Society has conditioned us to believe that we must be good at everything we do, or else we shouldn’t bother. We watch movies and television dramas where we constantly see actors and actresses behaving as if life is effortless; as if they will always triumph in any circumstance no matter how much the odds are stacked against them. We watch reality shows such as American Idol where we laugh at the silly fools who are kidding themselves, and we cheer on the folks who make pop music look easy. We love winners, and we shame losers; we make heroes out of those who triumph, whether or not they actually deserve it.

And that’s why we tell each other that we suck. And that’s also why we hate to suck. We want to believe that everything we attempt is going to turn out well. We want to believe that we’re all going to be successful because of our natural talent and abilities. We want to believe that just because we’ve worked hard at something, we’re going to be rewarded for it.

Unfortunately, that’s not how life works. The truth is that most of the time, we do suck, whether we want to admit it or not. Many parents that I’ve met suck at raising kids. Many artists that I’ve met suck at drawing. Many writers (many, many writers) that I’ve met suck at writing. Many educated people that I’ve met suck at thinking for themselves. Many churchgoing people that I’ve met suck at being genuinely nice to others.

That’s because sucking at something is the natural state of things. Being good, or even great, is something you have to work at.

But the first step is in being able to accept the fact that you do, indeed, suck.

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I rebooted my website almost a year ago to talk about publishing, and all the while, I’ve been promising that I’m applying what I’m writing here to my own business: a company I’ve referred to simply as “Army Ant Publishing.”

But why, you might wonder, has news about this company been so slow to come out?

First of all, it’s because I’ve been quietly working on the website for the company, which will have a lot of information about my upcoming books. It’s not live yet, and I have a fairly low-tech stand-in at http://armyant.seanjjordan.com. Eventually, http://www.armyantpublishing.com will take over as the site’s URL, and we’ll also have seperate sites for each of our books. Expect to see the site up by the end of July.

Second, it’s because I haven’t formally announced the company yet to the world at large. My reasoning behind that is simple; I want to announce the company when I’ve got work to show. And up until recently, I haven’t had anything more than a lengthy business plan and some ideas. Fortunately, I’ve got the cover and some preview pages in hand for our first book, and as soon as they’re completed and approved, I’ll have a reason to talk about this company. (You’ll see why after the jump…)

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In the winter of 2006, I made a bold decision: I quit a fairly good job and decided to return to college to finish my undergraduate degree.

One of the hardest things about this decision was that my wife and I would effectively cut our income in half so that I could be a full-time student; while we’d been able to afford many things when I’d been working, we had to make the decision to “scale back” on our lifestyle so we could survive on a reduced income.

A year and a half later, as I’m nearly finished with school, things have gotten tough. Like most people in the US, we’re getting hurt by the wildly increasing costs of food and fuel, but since we’re on a reduced income, we feel it even more than a lot of folks. It’s resulted in us cutting back wherever possible — while we ate out regularly when I was working, we can only afford to do so once a month now, and we often try to eat at places where the portions are large so we can take the leftovers home for a second (and sometimes, third!) meal. We avoid fast food altogether, and we’ve started to shop at discount grocery stores like Aldi and the Hostess/Wonder Bread Thrift stores to keep our day-to-day expenses down. We both drive low-frill, fuel-efficient cars, and we’ve tried to reduce our driving as much as possible; this isn’t easy to do, though, since I have a part-time job in St. Louis and have to drive 40 miles to school every day. (Fortunately, my wife’s job is right around the corner, which offsets my driving a bit.)

But all that cost-cutting still isn’t enough, because we’re still struggling to pay our bills. Under the old system, I bought a lot of stuff, whenever I wanted it — books, video games, DVDs and toys. Now, I’m faced with the task of packing a lot of this stuff up and selling it on Half.com, because I’m too busy to get any joy out of it, and too broke to be able to afford to keep it around. And it’s tough, because some of this stuff has sentimental value, while other items are just things I’d like to say I own, even if I never use them. For example, I’m selling off my graphic novel collection because I never read the things, but it bugs me terribly that should I want to read them, I won’t have the option.

All of this has put me into somewhat of a funk, because whether I like to admit it or not, I’m attached to my stuff, and I really hate to get rid of it. Never mind that it just sits around the house, collecting dust; never mind that I often forget that I even have it. It’s my STUFF, darn it, and I hate the fact that I’m so poor that I have to sell it off just so I can buy groceries, pay my bills and put gas in my car.

Now, my situation will improve once I start grad school this fall, so don’t feel sorry for me… hopefully, my suffering is merely temporary. But while I’m feeling sorry for myself and moping about how much it sucks to be poor, I’ve decided to try to learn from this experience and pass on some of the things I’ve realized in the process. Continue Reading »