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Answerable Content
Feb. 1st, 2009 03:55 pmJeph Jacques (whose name Ariella tells me I've been saying wrong for years; apparently, it's pronounced "Jeau Smythe") of Questionable Content has written a blog post which echoes much of what I feel about independent artistry on the internet, a subject I haven't said as much about lately as I once did.
(By the way, I know Pages Unbound is still screwed up. I'm going to be looking at that next, but maybe the lesson here is that I'm not meant to run anything more complicated than a blog. Sigh.)
He's looking at it through the prism of being a cartoonist, of course, but most of this stuff crosses media and genre boundaries.
He's responding to a blog post by Neil Swaab, a Serious Cartoonist that digresses from bemoaning the death of printed alternative comics to point out what's wrong with the webcomics model. (See my previous post about Andrew Wyeth for my prescient thoughts on this.) Jeph's got a great rebuttal to the contention that the average successful webcartoonist is simply a t-shirt designer using a comic to advertise their wares:
Actually, though, that's not my favorite quote from the post... that position is reserved for another one.
Here it is:
That right there about sums it up. When self-produced works fail to make any money, Serious Practitioners of the Art dismiss it as a hobby. "It's a sad thing, but we have no concrete measure of success except money... and you don't have any so HAHAHAHAHA." When somebody finds an innovative way to make their art pay so they can continue to produce it, it becomes a matter of "BUT... BUT... THAT DOESN'T COUNT!"
Jeph identifies the sentiment as sour grapes. I'm not quite sure I'd agree. The story it puts me in mind of is not the one about Aesop's fox but the one about the Emperor and his snazzy new duds.
I've said before that I think the reason people who are working their way up the ladder of success through traditional publication are the ones who react with the most hostility to my mere existence is because the idea that my success is valid diminishes their specialness at having been chosen by editors and publishers, and because the fact that I don't have to compromise my work in the same way they do makes them feel uncomfortable with the compromises they've made.
I'll confess to not knowing much about the world of syndicated comic strips, but I've never once read an insider's account that said "THE SYSTEM IS AWESOME! IT EXISTS TO BENEFIT ME! I FEEL LIKE I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD! EVERY WEEK I SEND OFF MY STRIPS AND THE EDITOR CALLS ME UP AND SAYS I'M CONCERNED THAT THESE DON'T REFLECT YOUR ACTUAL INTENTION ENOUGH AND WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO CUT LOOSE AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!", so I'm going to assume that it's similar in some regards to the world of book publishing.
But people really don't need to worry about the idea that hordes of independents and amateurs are going to diminish their specialness. One point Jeph keeps returning to is that the key to financial success for a webcomic is audience, and this is true. If your comic's audience is large enough, you will be able to make a living for it. If not... well, you might be able to recoup your costs or have money for ice cream every weekend, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.
But I think that's probably another side of what scares people. There's no such thing as an amateur syndicated cartoonist. Even if you're living in an airless garret or your rent's being paid by your SO or you're working two other jobs on top of it... when you get picked up by a syndicate you've made it. You have earned your Merit Badge. You might spend the rest of your life chasing the brass ring and never catching hold of it but you can introduce yourself at parties as a cartoonist, and when somebody asks "Where might I have seen you work?" you can tell them.
The self-publishing gig doesn't have anything like that. You can introduce yourself as a cartoonist, and when you get asked where people can read your work, you tell them "the web". And they go, "Oh." Because their twelve-year-old kid has a strip on comickeenesispotspace.blag and they're not sure how yours is different, and in your soul of souls neither are you because nobody has told you that you've made it.
And the bitch of it is, I can understand where they're coming from. When I tell somebody that I'm a writer, and they ask me, "What have you written?", I know they're expecting to be told the name of a book or a magazine that I'm published in or something like that, and I know that some of them are going to be less impressed when I explain what it is I do than they were prepared to be when they thought I was going to tell them about my book deal.
But, to quote the great philosopher Epictetus, "I don't know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I'm sure glad I don't live there!" Most people with book deals are living in garrets and working two jobs so their spouses can support them. Trufax, as they say dans la belle internet. It takes an average of ten years for a successful novelist to make a living at their craft, and most novelists aren't successful. So what I'm doing--what I've done--is damned impressive by any measure.
Jeph Jacques writes one of two comics for which I start refreshing spasmodically every weekday-preceding night at around 11:00 p.m. He's a successful artist by any meaningful measure of the word. As far as I can tell from his newsposts and twitterings, most of the t-shirts in his shop are there because somebody told him they would totally pay him money if he made it available to them.
Ignoring that wouldn't make him a better artist... just a poorer one. It's funny to me that Mr. Swaab can write a blog post that concludes by saying whatever successful business model web artists come up with will be the future when he would apparently advise artists to turn down an opportunity like that.
(By the way, I know Pages Unbound is still screwed up. I'm going to be looking at that next, but maybe the lesson here is that I'm not meant to run anything more complicated than a blog. Sigh.)
He's looking at it through the prism of being a cartoonist, of course, but most of this stuff crosses media and genre boundaries.
He's responding to a blog post by Neil Swaab, a Serious Cartoonist that digresses from bemoaning the death of printed alternative comics to point out what's wrong with the webcomics model. (See my previous post about Andrew Wyeth for my prescient thoughts on this.) Jeph's got a great rebuttal to the contention that the average successful webcartoonist is simply a t-shirt designer using a comic to advertise their wares:
"Saying webcartoonists are t-shirt hucksters is like saying Charles Schultz was an insurance salesman because Snoopy is on the Met Life blimp."
Actually, though, that's not my favorite quote from the post... that position is reserved for another one.
Here it is:
"I don't know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I'm sure glad I don't live there! Money is Money!"
That right there about sums it up. When self-produced works fail to make any money, Serious Practitioners of the Art dismiss it as a hobby. "It's a sad thing, but we have no concrete measure of success except money... and you don't have any so HAHAHAHAHA." When somebody finds an innovative way to make their art pay so they can continue to produce it, it becomes a matter of "BUT... BUT... THAT DOESN'T COUNT!"
Jeph identifies the sentiment as sour grapes. I'm not quite sure I'd agree. The story it puts me in mind of is not the one about Aesop's fox but the one about the Emperor and his snazzy new duds.
I've said before that I think the reason people who are working their way up the ladder of success through traditional publication are the ones who react with the most hostility to my mere existence is because the idea that my success is valid diminishes their specialness at having been chosen by editors and publishers, and because the fact that I don't have to compromise my work in the same way they do makes them feel uncomfortable with the compromises they've made.
I'll confess to not knowing much about the world of syndicated comic strips, but I've never once read an insider's account that said "THE SYSTEM IS AWESOME! IT EXISTS TO BENEFIT ME! I FEEL LIKE I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD! EVERY WEEK I SEND OFF MY STRIPS AND THE EDITOR CALLS ME UP AND SAYS I'M CONCERNED THAT THESE DON'T REFLECT YOUR ACTUAL INTENTION ENOUGH AND WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO CUT LOOSE AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!", so I'm going to assume that it's similar in some regards to the world of book publishing.
But people really don't need to worry about the idea that hordes of independents and amateurs are going to diminish their specialness. One point Jeph keeps returning to is that the key to financial success for a webcomic is audience, and this is true. If your comic's audience is large enough, you will be able to make a living for it. If not... well, you might be able to recoup your costs or have money for ice cream every weekend, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.
But I think that's probably another side of what scares people. There's no such thing as an amateur syndicated cartoonist. Even if you're living in an airless garret or your rent's being paid by your SO or you're working two other jobs on top of it... when you get picked up by a syndicate you've made it. You have earned your Merit Badge. You might spend the rest of your life chasing the brass ring and never catching hold of it but you can introduce yourself at parties as a cartoonist, and when somebody asks "Where might I have seen you work?" you can tell them.
The self-publishing gig doesn't have anything like that. You can introduce yourself as a cartoonist, and when you get asked where people can read your work, you tell them "the web". And they go, "Oh." Because their twelve-year-old kid has a strip on comickeenesispotspace.blag and they're not sure how yours is different, and in your soul of souls neither are you because nobody has told you that you've made it.
And the bitch of it is, I can understand where they're coming from. When I tell somebody that I'm a writer, and they ask me, "What have you written?", I know they're expecting to be told the name of a book or a magazine that I'm published in or something like that, and I know that some of them are going to be less impressed when I explain what it is I do than they were prepared to be when they thought I was going to tell them about my book deal.
But, to quote the great philosopher Epictetus, "I don't know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I'm sure glad I don't live there!" Most people with book deals are living in garrets and working two jobs so their spouses can support them. Trufax, as they say dans la belle internet. It takes an average of ten years for a successful novelist to make a living at their craft, and most novelists aren't successful. So what I'm doing--what I've done--is damned impressive by any measure.
Jeph Jacques writes one of two comics for which I start refreshing spasmodically every weekday-preceding night at around 11:00 p.m. He's a successful artist by any meaningful measure of the word. As far as I can tell from his newsposts and twitterings, most of the t-shirts in his shop are there because somebody told him they would totally pay him money if he made it available to them.
Ignoring that wouldn't make him a better artist... just a poorer one. It's funny to me that Mr. Swaab can write a blog post that concludes by saying whatever successful business model web artists come up with will be the future when he would apparently advise artists to turn down an opportunity like that.