The Comics Industry - What they said...

I used to work in comic books for a pretty long time. Eventually I got well sick of it and got out. Recently I’ve given up on working in advertising too. For a brief while I looked back on comics and dabbled around a little bit in its funny little world. I still didn’t like it much, I’m very saddened to say. But don’t worry, there will still be comics coming from Wow Cool – online and in print. This is still the best place in the US to get books by Simon Gane, and we’ll be improving and enlarging that collection and more. Please bare with the site until it is fully fixed in place. New stuff coming and going and shifting. Anyway, this bunch of posts from Tom Spurgeon, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell really summed up alot of my general reactions and feelings about the US comics industry. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.

Much as I love the medium, I despise the industry,” he says. “I've always despised it to a certain degree but after this last few years and all this nonsense with the films, I believe it to be a completely poisonous place that isn't really going anywhere. I did once feel I was part of a movement that wanted to change comics into something valuable to culture, but I don't really feel that kinship in the way I used to. – Alan Moore.

via The Fate of the Artist.

The fundamental tragedy of the American comics industry is that it’s built on core acts of exploitation and as long as there remains money to be made it will never get free of that original sin in a meaningful way. There are business executives with tangential relationships to the making of comics that may profit more in a quarter-year from certain creations than the creators will in their entire lives. This is seen as a good thing. Not only is this not a good thing right on the face of it, but the insistence that it at least arguably serves an overall good drives a great deal of the self-loathing, defensiveness and poisonous overcompensation that creators and company employees are forced to negotiate in some fashion or another every single day.

Read the rest of what Tom Spurgeon has to say on the subject at his The Comics Reporter blog.