Spurgeon on Digital Comics Business Models
by Joey Manley
Spurgeon has an excellent, thought-provoking post about the conversations surrounding digital comics business models today. Here’s a small snippet and a response (but be sure to go read the whole thing, if you’re interested in this subject):
It’s interesting to me that a lot of what gets argued on an issue like this is based on assertions of a rooting interest in either bottom-line revenues or in various facets of revenue distribution, interests I don’t always share and question whether anyone should. For instance, if you believe in an ethical business outcome that values, say, an artist’s control over her work and a fair shot of maximizing her profit off of it, you end up with a very different take on digital comics arguments which point to the bottom line as the overriding virtue.
I agree with the deeper premise that creator rights and remuneration should be at the center of business building, given the opportunity that the new digital marketplace presents for re-imagining the comics industry. Especially for those of us without a vested interest in the way things have always been, creating systems that allow creators to retain the most possible control, while earning the largest possible income (or fame, if that’s what motivates them), is both an ethical advantage and a competitive one.
But without revenue models capable of supporting career-minded cartoonists in lieu of dayjobs, creator ownership and control don’t mean diddly. Creators already own and control their work while it’s sitting in their desk drawers (or on their hard drives). You’re not giving them anything — unless you can give them the means to take their work to audiences, and to make a living doing so. If you run a business that is completely geared toward the cartoonist’s interests, but which doesn’t provide a meaningful income, then you’re just paving the way for some slick operator to come around offering Work for Hire deals that resemble the arrangements comic book creators had with their publishers in the 1940’s. I’m not being an alarmist. It’s actually started happening in webcomics. The biggest favor we can do to creators right now is to develop business models that actually work, and that still retain creator ownership at their heart. Hence the focus on revenue generation.
Further, the history of this conversation really starts with Scott McCloud and Reinventing Comics. Scott has told me (not in so many words, but this was my interpretation of his remarks) that he originally structured his entire business argument around trying to figure out what scenario would be best for the creator, and least comfortable for any middleman. Scott was roundly shouted down and derided for his “idealistic,” “pie in the sky,” “overly optimistic” business thinking, both from the print comics side of the ocean (see Groth’s review of Reinventing) and from the webcomics side (I guess this makes me a bad blogger, but I just don’t want to provide the litany of links where money-minded webcomickers relentlessly attacked McCloud, and anybody who was associated with him, during that period of time when it was fashionable to do so, because those people irritate and offend me, but google around a bit and you can find them for yourself). It is no surprise that nobody wants to open up that can of venomous, toothy worms again.
