Niiwa
I'm not sure how I feel about Kickstarter. I mean, I do really like it a lot, and I realize that xkcd bead me to it, but with that and just the internet in general, it makes everybody's ideas valid, and gives everyone the possibility of creating something, or being discovered. Yes, you don't always have to sell your soul now, but there's also a buttload more competition to make people look at your work.
This was the same argument I heard when webcomics first took off. "Now that anyone can make one, it'll be harder to get noticed." As if it were ever easy.
Here's the thing, though. The classical, top-heavy, executive-favoring, creative-exploiting production model Shouting Fox is so eager to drop his pants, grease up, and bend over for?
It wasn't doing a very good job.
Publishing on a large scale, meaning tens of thousands of books with national distribution, is cost-prohibitive and innovation-resistant. That means the people in charge need what they publish to make the most bang for their investment of time and money, and are far, FAR less likely to invest in untried, untested material. Thanks to a moral panic in the 1950s (Frederic Wertham,
Seduction of the Innocent, etc.) that brought on the tyranny of the Comics Code Authority, Comics is even LESS interested in innovation than prose publishing. Which is one hell of an accomplishment.
The print comic industry favors superheroes, because superheroes sell, and people buy superheroes. Not just any superheroes, of course; an established pantheon of fifty or so, created half a century ago. In comics, it's BIG NEWS when a character changes the color of long underwear he leaves the house it.
That is absurd.
And people don't buy superheroes like they used to... The industry's been in a steady sales decline since the speculator bust on the 1990s, and wasn't really doing so hot before then, either... but by choking off innovation in the genre because it wasn't The Devil They Knew, they've condemned themselves to selling increasingly fewer comics to increasingly fewer people, and guaranteeing a lack of new interest from curious outsiders. The best-selling comics out there aren't even by publishers who specialize in comics, anymore.
That is how bad they've gotten at this.
And I think we've all seen their laughable, half-hearted and condescending attempts to find new audiences.
In this kind of climate, imagine your favorite webcomic approaching Marvel or DC with their comic in their portfolio. They would be laughed out ofthe room, and not because they're bad cartoonists. It would happen because
they're not drawing superheroes. And that is ******** idiotic. it would be like telling Werner Herzog you won't finance his films, because they're not about cowboys.
The democratization of audience access hasn't been a hindrance. ********, I'd argue comics is currently experiencing a renaissance. Of course there's plenty of crap out there, but there's also
Pictures for Sad Children, Octopus Pie, Sinfest, Awkward Zombie, Gone with the Blastwave, The Jain's Death, Oglaf, and countless other fantastic comics that would have never had a chance in hell of being seen any other way.
And now, Kickstarter is democratizing monetization of those comics. That is
awesome.
And if a bunch of morons with awful comics put up bad, silly Kickstarters that're just embarrassments and don't make goal? Or if a comic you hate makes ten million dollars? So what. Seriously, I don't care. It's dumb to care.