There are other ways to treat comics as a commodity rather than an art besides viewing them as product. Probably the most prevalent these days is to implicitly (or explicity) equate--or supplant--quality with popularity. Here's an example of that mindset from a letter to Tom Spurgeon from Winston Rowntree:

Your web site is focused primarily on print comics that Nobody Reads. There are thousands, like myself, who think of comics primarily as an online medium and we read online comics almost exclusively...We see the internet as the Future of comics, and are aware of emerging business models that support this theory by proving that online comics can succeed by selling merchandise and advertising associated with a freely-distributed webcomic. This is, in fact, The Future. Pretentious Art Comix from Drawn & Quarterly that 130 people buy are not the future. They are The Problem. Your website seems to ignore The Future...Granted, The Future of comics has not arrived yet, but you'll look really smart if you get on the bandwagon now before it fills.

Rowntree goes on to offer a mea culpa about his belligerence and manages to note the "high quality" of many online comics, but that last is clearly an afterthought. The point is that online comics get big ratings, and that they can make money, and that they are therefore (love the caps!) The Future. As I've frequently alluded to, you often see similar argumentation deployed in favor of manga or OEL. While not quite as vociferous, the enthusiasm shown when anyone signs a deal with a major New York publishing house, especially while still young enough to get carded at bars, even if it's to adapt some YA widget-factory novel series or something, is a related phenomenon. These cool, comparatively new, comparatively popular forms of comics, or at least their partisans, are here, they're hip, and they're banging their shoe on the table, so be warned, pervert-suit enthusiasts and sad-sack arthouse navel-gazers: They will bury you.

Curiously, however, audience size and financial success are not seen as points in favor of, say, superhero comics when Civil War sells more copies than anyone thought the Direct Market capable of moving anymore. And rightly so, because that's a crazy reason to get excited about a comic, let alone its entire genre or format. It's one thing, as an industry watcher, to be happy that this art form is finding a sizable audience beyond the strictures of the superhero industry, or that genres other than "extraordinary protagonist solves problems through violence" are at long last thriving, or that these new audiences are making it possible for creators to earn a decent living doing what they enjoy, or that this influx of cash and caché is persuading the arbiters of taste to treat comics with the seriousness it deserves. Long-time readers of ADDTF, from back during its first iteration as a comics blog, will likely remember me doing just that every time I saw those lovely rows and rows of tankubon trades at Borders or spotted a graphic-novel trend piece in any publication with the words New York in the title. But as readers or as critics or especially as creators, the second Drawn & Quarterly is dismissed as "The Problem" because Skibber Bee Bye is read by fewer people than Diesel Sweeties, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I've said this recently and so have others, but for serious: You just cannot care about keeping up with the Joneses if you want to make good comics, or want other people to make them. You can't. Naruto's Bookscan rankings, or the Flight kids getting a book deal during their sophomore year in animation school, or Penny Arcade's readership mounting a credible third-party presidential campaign or whatever--these phenomena may or may not involve good comics, but they don't replace good comics, or the need to apply all the usual standards in deciding whether they're good comics (and therefore good for comics in the way that really matters) or not in the first place.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 9:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)