What Are Comic Book Publishers For?

At The Beat, Heidi Macdonald provides an overview of the increasingly important role that crowdfunding is playing in comics publishing. This is one of those stories we all know at some level, but Heidi's coverage of several recent campaigns (both successful and unsuccessful) really hits the key trends and dynamics well.

One of crowdfunding's key promises is to cut out all the middlemen and gatekeepers in the publishing process. For creators who have struggled with the sometimes conservative and hidebound comics retail sector, this may look very appealing:

You could look at indie’s increasing reliance on crowdfunding as a rebuke to a retail system that doesn’t support challenging or truly independent work.

However, the rise of crowdfunding as a direct-to-consumer also raises an interesting possibility: what if it also obsolesced the traditional comic book publisher? While publishers of varying sizes (from Fantagraphics and Archie to Retrofit and Rosy Press) are making use of the crowdfunding model, are they still necessary? For instance, Heidi notes Wild Life as a successful example of the webcomic to Kickstarter pipeline. Soon, publishers may need crowdfunding more than Kickstarter-savvy cartoonists need them. While there are risks for artists of becoming entrepreneurial self-publishers, it's not like risk and entrepreneurialism are foreign concepts to freelance comic creators under the current model.

But publishers do more than provide capital and access to distribution channels. Publishers also traditionally act, by virtue of their gatekeeping role, as batteries of cultural value. That, in the final analysis, is what a publisher's "brand" and "list" is all about. This has perhaps been less evident in comics than literary publishing where the idea of the prestigious publisher is still relatively recent, but as we note in chapter 6 of our book, innovation in comics has often been associated with particular publishing houses and imprints: Marvel in the 1960s, DC in the 1980s, Image and Vertigo in the 1990s (see chapters 7 and 5 of our book), a very different Image again in the 2010s.

Fresh Romance from Rosy Press, one of the new generation of "crowdpresses." Artwork by Kevin Wada.

It is this symbolic role that individual, entrepreneurial creators may struggle to replace. A successful track record and a cannily leveraged social network (providing blurbs and endorsements as well as backer rewards) won't hurt, but I think the rise of the "crowdpress," i.e., the publishing venture that is really a series of Kickstarter campaigns under the hood, is very telling. The trappings of a traditional publisher communicate trust and stability and, moreover, allow these publishers to store up cultural value in their brand and re-invest it in future projects.

Comics “about” Comics

Jackson Ayres, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, explores the notion – one which I think has become basically commonsensical – that mainstream comics went through a "Dark Age" in the 1980s and 1990s characterized by increased violence and "edgy" interpretations of existing characters. This is typically understood as an effect of the "quality popular graphic novels" produced by Alan Moore and other "British Invasion" creators, which we discuss in chapter 5 of our book. Much as everyone is focusing on Deadpool's R-rating right now, many creators imitated the surface features of works like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. There's a lot of unpack in this essay, which drew my attention not only for discussing the "Ages" model of comics history (one of my longtime pet peeves) but also for writing about ’90s Aquaman in the LA Review of Books, but what I found most interesting was the way that Ayres understands the "grim and gritty" aesthetic as the flip side of camp. Indeed, he notes that the first use of that particular phrase in connection with superheroes was in an episode of the 1960s Batman TV series.

Cover artwork to Batman ’66 #18 by Mike Allred and Laura Allred. © 2014 DC Comics.

The Batman series is an interesting case. Its campiness hung like an albatross around the superhero genre's neck for many years, but Ayres suggests it has undergone a critical renaissance recently, a transformation of consensus marked by the inclusion of the Adam West Batman costume (though not the Adam West Batman body!) in the Arkham Origins video game, DC's Batman '66 ongoing series (initially a digital-only title upgraded by popular demand to print, as well) with gloriously poppy covers by Mike and Laura Allred, and a ’60s style Joker figurine from Funko's Pop Vinyls series, complete with Caesar Romero's painted-over moustache:

The revival of camp might be seen as marking the decline of grim and gritty, but it in fact underscores the intimate relationship between the two, the covert similarities linking them. The skepticism about superheroes and heroism associated with grim and gritty, for example, was already present in the campy Batman…. While the temporal distance separating contemporary comic book fans from the show allows a comfortable pleasure in its humor, make no mistake: it is underwritten by a deep and abiding disdain for its source material.

Both camp and grim and gritty, moreover, serve to displace such disdain by discovering new ways to invest cultural capital into a genre associated with crudeness and puerility.

How do camp and the "grim and gritty" aesthetic, each in their own way, make this "displacing" move? In Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value, Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen (2013) suggest that one of the key anchors for the regime of value that dominates contemporary art is the quality they call "aboutness." That is, the artwork isn't simply what it appears to be but is a knowing, informed exploration about what it appears to be:

To be a serious painter, you can't just 'infuse,' you have to be about infusion. In a given artwork, if the aboutness is directed at art in general, then it is theory—as is irony if it addresses the artworld, and meta-reflection if it is about art practice. The consequences for prestige are obvious: in the artworld, meta-reflection, 'aboutness,' generated prestige. (47)

That is to say, aboutness involves stepping back or distancing oneself from the object under contemplation. The reader of Bourdieu's sociological studies of cultural production and taste will recognize this as an expression of the "aesthetic disposition" that marks elite tastes: the preference for intellectual pleasures over sensuous ones, for engagement with form rather than function.

From "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?" by Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke, and Lee Bermejo. Action Comics #775. © 2001 DC Comics.

The seemingly radically opposed strategies of camp and "grim and gritty" relied on the same underlying principle: evading the conventional judgement of superheroes and comics books and childish by putting them in aesthetic scare quotes. Both assume that the reader knows the original source material being adapted or re-interpreted is silly, and so both insert distance between the reader and the object – in the one case, using irony and in the other heavy helpings of "seriousness." As a result, the background "condition of possibility" for most of the comics discussed by Ayres as tracking the shifting sensibilities of superhero readers – from Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns to Kingdom Come and "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?" – is that they are fundamentally about (or, at least, were marketed as and susceptible to being interpreted as about) superhero comics themselves and about the changing demands made on them by their audiences.

What's an 'Essential' Graphic Novel?

Cover by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado. 

Purchasing the latest issue of the DeConnick and Rios weird western Pretty Deadly at my local comic shop yesterday, I was handed a copy of DC Comics' new DC Essential Graphic Novels catalogue for 2016. Both a marketing exercise and an effort at self-consecration, it is a document worth exploring in a little detail.

On the first page no less an authority than Batman explains (when Nightwing understandably says he doesn't understand what this thing is), "It's a catalog to help guide new readers to DC's reading collection, starting with the essential 25 most culturally relevant graphic novels."

Sure enough, the catalogue's first section comprises twenty-five works dubbed "essential" by DC marketing, each one accompanied by a brief synopsis, ordering information (including both an ISBN number and a Diamond Comics Distributors product code), and blurbs from diverse sources, mostly outside the comics world. Are they "graphic novels"? Only two (Batman: The Killing Joke and Batman: Earth One) were initially released as stand-alone "original graphic novels," while eight are collections of limited series (including obvious choices like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns  as well as more recent works such as Superman: Red Son, All-Star Superman, and Daytripper). Fourteen out of twenty-five collect runs of on-going series, such as Sandman, Batman/Superman, Preacher, and Batman: Hush). Are they the "most culturally relevant"? I note that DC's critically acclaimed Vertigo imprint and its more ambivalently received New 52 books are equally represented with six titles apiece.

Following the "essential twenty-five" are seventeen, presumably optional, "Modern Classics." Twelve of them are superhero comics, with the oldest (albeit in a recent edition) being Morrison and McKean's Arkham Asylum and the most recent (I think) collecting the first issues of the "Batgirl of Burnside" arc, which began in October 2014.

The greatest comic book creator of all time? 

Of the forty-two "essential" and "classic" titles featured so far in the catalogue (really surprised they didn't go for another ten books to reach the magic number), the most produced by one creator (the writers repeat much more than the artists, reflecting not only the differing career structures of writers and artists but also the increased association of comics "authorship" with writers that is implicit in the "graphic novel" discourse) is the six books written by DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns. Grant Morrison follows with four titles, and Alan Moore and Jeph Loeb are tied at three each.

After the Modern Classics follows a section labelled "DC Comics Essentials," which features a character biography and some suggested titles for major DCU properties, including Batman and the Batman family (41), Superman (23), Wonder Woman (9!), the Justice League (21) and League members not prominent enough to warrant a page of their own (4), the Flash (13), Green Arrow (9), Green Lantern (14, 8 of which are written by Johns), and the Teen Titans (6). That several works from the first two sections are included again here perhaps suggests that the catalogue writers were aware of their two different audiences for this document, one oriented to cultural prestige and another oriented to character-based fandom. Notably, this section also includes some action figures, but presumably only the most essential ones.

The next section highlights media tie-ins, with repeated works again suggesting another possible audience for the catalogue. The properties highlighted include both the expected DCU superhero blockbusters – titles related to the upcoming Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad films and TV series like Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, and Supergirl – and Vertigo titles with television adaptations, such as iZombie, Lucifer, and Preacher. The Vertigo imprint is highlighted in the next four sections. The first two divide the Vertigo line between "Essential Series" (well, the first volumes of their trade paperback collections) and "Essential Graphic Novels," which collect limited series; Neil Gaiman and Bill Willingham's Fables have a one-page section each. Mad Magazine and all-ages titles come next, followed by four pages of "essential" collectibles (action figures and statues). The catalogue closes with detailed lists (in suggested reading order) for major and major minor characters and properties.

In chapter 5 of our book we discuss the way that writers of the "British invasion," typified by Alan Moore, led the way for the "quality popular comic book" at DC and, later, the Vertigo imprint under editor Karen Berger (see Julia Round's work on Vertigo and Berger). This is not to say that they are the "best" but that they constitute a particular generic category analogous to "quality TV" and "quality fiction." It is, we argue, a basically middle-brow position in any cultural field: simultaneously the most prestigious of the commercial works and the most commercial of the prestigious works. And that is, honestly, a pretty good place to be.

This logic is still evident in the Essential Graphic Novels 2016 catalogue, particularly in the overeager use of the "graphic novel" discourse and in the pride of place still given to Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, Miller's Dark Knight, and Gaiman's Sandman. However, its strategic function of activating DC's backlist (a competitive advantage against Marvel at a time of declining market share) introduces several other logics that disrupt and contest the otherwise straightforwardly consecratory project: promoting upcoming and ongoing titles, moving collections of New 52 books, realizing sales from synergies with adaptations, and selling action figures and collectibles, to name a few. Whereas the middlebrow "quality" comic book effectively reconciles the autonomous (prestige-oriented) and heteronomous (market-oriented) principles of cultural production, these two forces play against one another in the catalogue, ultimately undercutting the claim to cultural authority taken on by the persistent use of that word, "essential."