Random Thoughts on The Composition of The NYCC “Webcomics” Panel
by Joey Manley
Representatives from Marvel and DC are sitting on a webcomics panel at the upcoming New York Comics Convention, during the “industry-only” first day, along with some other people most of us have never heard of.
That timing is significant — that’s the day the NYCC is supposed to be sort of more like a trade show, less like a consumer convention.
The differences between trade shows (like, say, the National Association of Broadcasters’ show) and consumer conventions (like, say, PAX) have been narrowing lately, as more and more consumers become geeks-for-business (think of some overly-informed Nintendo fanboy blogging the business prospects of the Wii vs. the Playstation 3, throwing out earnings reports and snarky references to obscure paragraphs in SEC filings, motivated by his intense love for, um, Zelda). But generally, the intended audience for a panel at a trade show is still quite different from the intended audience for a panel at a consumer convention.
For a nascent industry like webcomics, the trade show mentality and the fan convention mentality stand in jarring opposition to one another. I used to work for the Streaming Media trade show, so I’ve had some experience with this kind of thing. The online audio/video/animation industry in 1999 bears a lot of similarity to the webcomics industry in 2007. In both cases, you have a few grassroots success stories with legitimate, but extremely modest, numbers to crow about. Joe Cartoon was our PvP, NewGrounds was our Keenspot. (Lest we get ourselves into a flamewar here, let me clarify: by “extremely modest,” I mean, “compared to the bottom lines of mature entertainment industry companies, like Disney or Time/Warner.”) And you also have the big media companies promising to get in the game — but not quite doing so, just yet. In that environment, the grassroots successes will be viewed as “proof of concept,” and the big media companies will always get all of the attention. Deal with it.
At the Streaming Media shows, for example, we were always hearing from pop.com, a never-launched but undeniably promising online video and animation portal to be run by no lesser lights than Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard themselves. When you’re organizing a trade show panel, Steven Spielberg — or even his third-in-command, some heretofore-unheard-of Director of Development — is a much more exciting “catch” than Joe Cartoon. It’s just a fact. Even if Spielberg’s project has not yet launched, and even if Joe Cartoon is currently the biggest fish in the pond. Trade show panels are not designed to be legitimate journalistic overviews of the field they cover. They’re designed to generate hype — for the people on the panel, but, even more significantly, for the trade show itself. A panel with an announcement from a Spielberg/Ron Howard online venture will get coverage in every major press outlet. A panel with Joe Cartoon on it will get covered in hobbyist publications. Which is more important to you as a trade show organizer? It’s obvious. This is true even if the Spielberg/Howard project turns out to be total vapor, and Joe Cartoon goes on to make a living from his work for the rest of his life.
That’s why there’s nobody from the “real” webcomics industry on the panel. The people there have stories to hype — stories that could conceivably be picked up by major news outlets, which will reflect well on the NYCC itself.
This is not a bad thing. Well, okay, it is — but only inasmuch as you take trade show panels seriously.
I expect that the hype will ratchet up a few notches before it dies down. The more successes we experience in the webcomics world, the more attention we will draw from the “mainstream” business world. MySpace is a co-sponsor of NYCC, for example. How much longer before they make a real run against ComicSpace’s business? Or mine? Not much longer at all, I’d say. And the press — which includes the trade show circuit — will always bet heavily on the mainstream to win. I don’t blame them. Mainstream companies are easier to understand, because they spend more money marketing themselves in magazines, and at trade shows. A win for the mainstream is a win for the press.
In the case of streaming media, mainstream companies did not win (remember that Google was not a mainstream company at that time — Yahoo! was just barely a mainstream company, and everything they touched — Broadcast.com, Launch.com — failed miserably). History may or may not repeat itself. I don’t know if I want it to, or not, to be honest. The years after the crash were some pretty rough years.
Here’s what we know. DC and Marvel apparently believe it’s important to put some of their representatives in front of the press in the context of talking about webcomics. This doesn’t mean that they are actually going to do anything. It also doesn’t mean that they will succeed if they do. Maybe it means they have big announcements to make. Maybe it doesn’t. But it does mean something. And that’s what we don’t know.
