By all accounts, Valerie D’Orazio is a nice person, and I know from reading her blog that she’s a smart and articulate one, too. I have a lot of respect for what she does and, usually, for what she says. So this isn’t meant to start a fight.

But her recent post about webcomics, and how the business should (or will) evolve in the next five years, is just plain wrong.

I don’t say this to call her out necessarily, but to point to it as an example of the kind of thinking that I’ve been running into pretty consistently since becoming CEO of ComicSpace and meeting lots of people in the “comics industry” (quotes because the Marvel/DC axis is not the only comics industry — it’s one of several, and not even the biggest). This is understandable: Marvel and DC loom large in the imaginations of “comics industry” insiders because Marvel and DC are large. But it’s also kind of provincial. It’s like the residents of Hazzard wondering what Boss Hogg is going to do about these new Obama initiatives. I’m sure, in Hazzard, Boss Hogg (or whoever the local authority is in those parts these days) will figure out some way to profit from real-world trends. But all of us don’t live in Hazzard, and few of us want to.

I can’t say that the post is plain wrong and belittle it with 70’s TV references without at least explaining why I think it’s wrong. There are all kinds of reasons, but here’s one fundamental one: D’Orazio sees a day when the “top” webcomics are bought up by Marvel and DC, and the rest are discredited as amateurs. Her comments section filled up immediately with “top” webcomickers declaring that they’re doing just fine, thank you, and that it would be a very, very expensive proposition to buy them out. Which is true. Another truth: there are new “top” webcomics launching every day. It’s a slippery and ambitious field, with new xkcds popping up at an alarming (or delightful) rate and proceeding to take over the world. I picked xkcd as my example on purpose, by the way: what DC or Marvel editor would have picked that one up? No DC or Marvel editor would have, especially if he or she only had the first month or two of strips to go by. And the people who discovered xkcd and made it a hit? Most of them, I’ll wager, weren’t comic book readers, and would have been immune to any “anti-amateur” campaign waged by Marvel and DC’s PR machines. (I mean, come on: it’s stick figures for God’s sake).

The other “comics industries,” by the way, are: newspaper strips (King Features, United), manga (Viz, etc.), children’s and YA graphic novels (Scholastic, First Second, just about any multinational publisher you can name, etc.), and, yes, webcomics. There are probably some I have forgotten.

In the comments under her post, D’Orazio backs away just a little bit, saying that she isn’t hoping for Marvel and DC to absorb the top webcomics, but merely predicting that, in five years, it will happen (or maybe she’s predicting they will try — there’s a bit of ambiguity down there in comment-land, which happens, which happens, God knows).

I’ll make a prediction of my own. Marvel and DC are no more in a position to “take over” webcomics than they are to “take over” any of the other comics industries, but they will figure out some way to at least have a profitable presence in webcomics. And that’s fine. Webcomics is a big, big field — bigger than New York publishing insiders sometimes realize; bigger than the field they’re used to playing in — and has plenty of room for everybody. We welcome all players.

[Edit: my follow-up is here.]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 8:53 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.