Artists at drafting tables
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The Only Person Who Can Pop a Comic Book Artist

We have a systematic problem in comics.  And it’s not “Who Can Pop Comic Artists”, which is the weirdest turn of phrase on the internet in at least, oh, a week.

Let’s recap where the madness began:

 

Marvel Sticks Its Foot Square Into Its Mouth

I can’t imagine any sillier thing for the leader of a comics company to say than something like this:

 “It’s harder to pop artists these days,” [Axel Alonso] said.

OK, I can understand that part. There must be a frustration from the “glory” days of Wizard when one outlet held such mindshare.  We’ve gone from Wizard to a million blogs and websites.  Can’t herd those cats too easily.

But then he continued and dug way too deep a hole:

“There is no apparatus out there.”

If you have a soundboard handy, please play the sound of a record needle scratching to a stop for me, OK?

“There’s no apparatus out there.”

There’s no apparatus by which a visual artist might engage his fans, build his fanbase, and “pop”?

Quick memo to Marvel’s Digital Marketing Department: Please schedule an appointment with Axel Alonso for tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m.  He’s been Editor In Chief for awhile now. It takes up a lot of his time.

Alonso completely missed Instagram.  Facebook.  Tumblr. Twitter. SnapChat. And blogs.

Possibly the entire world wide web since the dawn of Netscape Navigator and the “IMAGE” tag.

But Wizard died a death that wasn’t fiery enough for the fate it deserved, so artists can’t pop anymore. (Honest question: Did anyone take those Top 10 lists seriously in the last five years of Wizard’s life? It was a retread of the same old list, punctuated by whoever they had an interview with recently and which company was buying the most ads…)

In any case, I hope the Digital Marketing Department can help.  Unless they’re too busy shooting videos with movie stars to remember that they make comics, too…

Uh oh.

Let’s Check Marvel.com

Wait, maybe that’s not fair. Let’s check the top stories on the Marvel.com website. Surely, there’s an artist they’re promoting to help him or her pop:

Marvel Dot Com Popping Its Artists

Movie, movie, movie.  This song sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

It gets slightly better:

Marvel.com home page featured story on their podcast

This is an ad for their podcast.  That’s a good start.  It’s a two hour show.  The fist hour discusses the comics of the day,with their talent relations manager, a marketer, and an intern.  The second hour focuses on the animated Guardians of the Galaxy.  So, fifty/fifty.

Still, I can name a half dozen podcasts off the top of my head that will offer you interviews with artists on a regular basis.

And, finally:

Marvel.com remembers it publishes comic also

Don’t expect artist credits on this video listicle.

The only thing Marvel really owns is its characters, so it makes sense to promote those.

They learned the hard way 25 years ago that they can’t keep artists, after all…

 

The Reality of Today’s IP Comics

Publishers can only promote what they think they can profit from. Their profit center is their intellectual property.  It’s all they own.

Why would Marvel want to “pop” an artist?  It would only succeed in making him or her popular enough to leave Marvel and creative something they own and make all the money from.

Marvel has no desire to create big name artists.  It’s counter-productive to their continued success.

They can deal with writers, to a certain degree.  Writers can write four scripts a month, so they’re not exclusive to Marvel. They can always be at Marvel even when doing work somewhere else.  If the writer gets ridiculously popular from their Marvel work, they don’t have to give it up to pursue their own thing.  It’s additive.

DC tried a few years back to start promoting its editors as the rising stars of the company, but it didn’t go very far.  Editors, though, are employees of Marvel and DC, so it would make sense to do everything the publishers can to keep them happy and make some hay out of them.

Writers/artists/letterers/colorists?  Freelancers, all. Feh.

 

Marvel/DC Don’t Hold All the Cards

We’re in the freelance economy with a wide open market. The rules are different. Creators aren’t employees of Marvel, excepting those who are under an exclusive contract and get all the benefits of being a full time employee for a year or two.

We’re in a world where Marvel and DC aren’t the be all/end all. Creators come and go, and not just between Marvel and DC, but also out to Dark Horse and Boom! and the rest.

They can go to Image and launch their own book and own everything and do what they want.

They can borrow the Marvel/DC spotlight for a little while to boost their visibility, then run somewhere where they’ll be better appreciated.

Somewhere, perhaps, where they might “pop.”

 

The Comics Creator as Brand

It used to be that the worst part of business for an artist was negotiating contracts, or not negotiating them at all because they just took whatever was offered because they didn’t know any better.

Every creative in the modern world will tell you today that the business end of things lays in creating a brand out of yourself.  Give your fans something to flock to.  Create something the fans can know, like, and trust.

Use social media to attract new fans and delight your current ones.  Have a mailing list to connect more directly to your most fervent fans.

Have something to offer them.  Ask for the sale. Post three times as much cool stuff as you do commercial offers.

Be consistent with your messages, with your style, with your art, with everything you offer.

Also, don’t hide behind the art.  People like people.  They respond to people.  As much as you may hate it, you’re the star behind the art.  Give your fans something to relate to. Show them you’re a “normal” person like them, and a fan of others as much as they’re a fan of you.

Share.  Give until it hurts. Do that and you’ll be surprised how receptive your fans will be when you pitch something at them. (See Peter David.)

 

The One Shining Example in the Comics Industry

Do you need an example to live up to on this?  There’s only one creator I can think of today who’s doing this right.

J. Scott Campbell

JScottCampbell.com logo

He draws pretty girls.  People like that stuff. They (men and women, both) flock to him for it.  So he specializes in it.

He chases down his animation origins and winds up drawing prints for Disney.  He’s got a huge fanbase in the animation world, not just in comics.  He draws video game magazine covers and gets fans from there.

He reaches out to the worlds outside of just the Wednesday Warrior crowd and pulls in new fans.

Then he offers exclusive covers for sale. He upsells with sketches and multiple covers in a set. A new release is an event to be teased and announced with great flourish.

He generates his own sketchbooks for sale, and collections of his published art.

Next, he promotes them across all his social media — Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter, Facebook, and maybe more. He has a mailing list that gets first notice of newly available merchandise.

To top it all off, he’s created a logo out of his signature.  It all ties together.

(Others who have distinctive signatures that serve as brands: Walter Simonson, Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld.)

How It Works

This branding allows Campbell a certain freedom to do what he wants to do and still make a living from it.  He doesn’t have to spend his time drawing back breaking interiors anymore.

Everything feeds into everything else: He draws covers for Marvel.  Then he sells books filled with images of those covers, and intermediate steps along the way to the finished covers.  He can take small parts of those covers in progress, then post them to social media.  I’m not sure if he sells his original art, but that would be a huge chunk of change there, too.

The J. Scott Campbell brand is strong, and it’s making him a living, even when he hasn’t drawn a comic book in more than a decade.

You can hear a little more about it in his interview on the Bancroft Bros. Animation Podcast.
 

How to Do This

Go read every book Gary Vaynerchuk has written.  Memorize them.  Make them your playbook.

    
The lessons of digital marketing are starting to show up in the comics world now.  Once you’ve followed the Pat Flynns and the John Lee Dumases and the Amy Porterfields and the Michael O’Neals of the world, you see their imprint everywhere.

Lessons I’ve learned from some of those people have even made an impact on this website. It’s not as blatantly obvious as it should be, mostly because I’m a bad student.  But it’s there.

Also: as Portland is the hub of comics creators these days, so San Diego is the hub of digital marketers. They just had their big annual social media conference down there at the same convention center as Comic-Con.  It’s weird seeing pictures of the convention center without cosplayers roaming around…

 

Who Pops?

There’s more to the world of making a living in comics today than just making comics.  It’s a new world, filled with new lessons to learn.

Sometimes, I wonder if Marvel and DC recognize that.  And now we hear stories that publishers are keeping their creatives quiet on social media, which is — well, we don’t know all the detail of it, but it could be the single dumbest move made by any media publisher who would do such a thing.  If they’re doing it.  Marvel has denied it.  Maybe this all a Hollywood thing, but — well, comics at the level of Marvel and DC are a Hollywood thing.

In any case, I hope comic creators realize what their jobs are in this day and age.  It’s more than just sitting behind the desk and drawing all day.  You need to do more to keep your profile high, and your work in demand.  Some are doing it without realizing it. Precious few are doing it at all.  You can’t expect your publisher to do it for you.

 

Are Artists Undervalued?

There’s another argument to be made about the devaluation of the artist in comics, in general.  That’s a more systematic issue than I think we have time or space to cover here.

The world of comics has changed significantly in the last twenty years, but nothing about the system publishing comics has changed.

That’s caused some friction that will only resolve itself with some radical changes.

And we all know how much the comics industry loves to change…

Maybe I’ll tackle that in the future.  It’s a big one.

(Credits for the featured image at the top of this post.)


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18 Comments

  1. Some mixed feelings about soe what you’ve said, but can’t deny that you really nailed some key points.

    Thing is … “popping” still doesn’t translate into comics sales.

    1. Thanks. And, yes, “popping” is a bit of a strange term. But there have been comic creators who’ve sold comics solely based on their name alone. The trick is in building that fan base, and making it vociferous enough that it translates into sales down the line. It’s a bit of a long term play.

  2. The 90’s were based on hyping artists for no good reason and gave birth to some dreadful books, as well as the ruin of many retailers. No one in their right mind would buy a comic solely for the art. Comics are sequential storytelling. Pretty drawings without a solid story competently told underneath is a frigging waste of talent and energy. Real great talents who emerged from comics like Frazetta or Steranko were smart enough to pivot to illustrating/painting, which is where the real money is. Sounds like a no-brainer.

    1. I interviewed Steranko in the seventies. He considered himself a graphic artist who did work in comics. I also visited Neal Adams/Dick Giodano’s NY studio back then. They were Madison avenue ad guy’s who did comics on the side.

      1. That’s the way to go — be a business person first. Recognize the realities of your market. Use the sharp tools you have to build the best business. Don’t rely on one stream of income. etc. Also, there’s always bigger money in advertising than comics. (And in storyboarding and animation and just about every other artistic pursuit shy of “gallery artist”, unless you happen to find a rich patron.)

        We have it in computer programming, too. You shouldn’t consider yourself a “Javascript Programmer” or a “Ruby Programmer,” but rather a programmer who can learn and work in any language. That broadens the scope of opportunities available to you.

        There are a lot of artists quietly and not-so-quietly working in other fields these days. Lots of toy designers and animation character designers and story boarders. They’re usually the ones you don’t see with Indie Go Go campaigns, too….

  3. “No one in their right mind would buy a comic solely for the art.”

    That’s a bit harsh. I think plenty of people (not me) are more interested in the art than the story.

    Certainly every time I buy a Tim Sale/Jeph Loeb collaboration it isn’t for the story.

  4. In that case, it would make sense to buy paintings, art prints, art books, even original art pages, but not comics.

  5. The look? What do you mean?
    I can’t think of anything in a comic that can’t be done better in a portfolio or a poster or a big art print, artistically speaking.

  6. It can be good to see a well composed comic page – and to see great storytelling skill on display. Even if the story is drivel, it can worth getting a Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale collaboration because of Sale’s mastery of the art. You would get some of that from a portfolio, but not all of it.

    1. I don’t think it came from either, though I’m not sure — I don’t spend time in either of those worlds. I’ve only ever heard it in the career-oriented circles. Someone should ask Grammar Girl where it came from. 😉

  7. Just ran across this.

    My $.02 is that “popping” is essential to keeping the publishing divisions and their retail partners afloat. Comics are, in general, doing better than prose books, in general, excluding runaway outliers. But it’s not a healthy market and the way you make it a healthy market is by getting more eyeballs on books, more foot traffic in stores.

    You can grow the readership but you REALLY need to grow sales beyond readership. I think there’s a sense of how to cultivate comics for speculators but NOT a terribly great sense of how to cultivate comics for investors. And, worse, for folks who are primarily into comics as readers or in the business side, they can’t tell the difference between investors and speculators.

    There’s an untapped art to trying to cultivate longterm investment from people who may or may not be avid readers and a lot of that DOES involve managing the content of books. You need to credibly be able to pin the next 5 or even 20 years on every book you publish. That’s a continuity commitment but it’s also an editorial commitment that Sideways #14 can matter and can impact other books. In some cases, it may mean going AGAINST retailer preferences. My LCS prefers variant covers that are 50:50, no minimum order. Nobody can visually identify a book with a 50:50 cover ratio. It means no generic iconic covers.

    And I think it DOES hinge on popping artists and writers because personalities sell things. This also, IMHO, means managing those personalities less. Ever since the mid-2000s, most interviews started going through corporate PR. If you want to pop artists, you’ve got to let them trash talk, including your own company’s work. You’ve got to let them say things that trend on Twitter, including negatively. Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, Rob Liefeld, Mark Millar — many of the big names have been unmanaged trash talkers at their height, including present tense employers. Managing them kills them. If the trash is trollish or insincere, that’s when you clamp down because it has limited benefit but sincere trash is part of how they pop.

    If you want an example of somebody who popped in showbiz over the last 10 years, look at Dan Harmon. And it relied on him being this crazy guy who’d confess to breaking down into tears at bosses and cussing them out. And I don’t necessarily think any of that is unprofessional. It’s unprofessional if it isn’t about the content of the work but somebody who cusses you out publicly over the content of the work is an asset and one who will connect with people.

  8. Hmmm interesting point of view.
    Albeit…
    investors?
    I have to confess I could never quite understand the 90s speculation craze. Back when I was heavily into collecting paper versions, I was buying mostly reading copies, G/VG/F in general.
    Do you really think slabbing pristine comics is a good idea?

    1. I actually do like slabbing books, said as somebody who once was pretty rough on his books, but as opposed to speculation (flipping a book for $500 overnight) I think much of what makes books worth reading aligns with what makes a copy worth slabbing.

      If you look at two of the pop culture standard bearers today, Hasbro and Lego, their flagship toys tend to be both noted for quality and resale. Lego bricks, Transformers Generations, and Marvel Legends toys tend to outperform the stock market, even loose, and moreso in packaging. Sure, some product underperforms. Some shoots up overnight. But the core probably goes up in value 12-15% per year, outperforming a stock index fund. That won’t make you rich. It may plateau. It probably wouldn’t retain that value if more people kept backstock. But a hobbyist with spare cash would be well served to buy two of everything.

      That felt true of comics for awhile. I feel the revamps and shift to movies as the core of the franchise has eroded the value of back issues. I see fewer places devoting extensive space to them and more disparity between the few gems and the average book.

      As I see it, comics might have a ceiling of 500k readers, at least traditional American style comics. From there, you have the question of how many different comics a reader can afford and if you can sell multiples to readers or have a non-reader collector market that is long term and healthy. At $4, fewer people can afford to read 20-30 books a month. Part of this ties to stagnant wages and increasing consumer debt. So that 500k readership is spread between 500 or so books more with less overlap. In a strong middle class economy in the 60s, an individual reader might read romance, funny animal, horror, and a few superhero books. I’d venture that among low income buyers right now, they read fewer titles. But the question remains if it’s better to buy 2 copies or to put the money into a student loan payment.

      Something like a spare copy of a favorite comic should grow in value faster than an unpaid student loan debt grows. That’s true for Lego or Marvel Legends or whathaveyou.

      1. This is a thought-provoking take on this trend. In the 90s, when the baseball card people ventured into the comic book collector market, I definitely remember the WTF moment. Your comparison with the toy market is interesting.
        I imagine, since less and less kids know how to read these days, preserving books in amber Jurassic Park-style makes more and more sense 😉