Comic Book Resources

That’s what I never listen to podcasts or watch video pieces : they’re nowhere as good a way to make a point as a text (or comic) piece. No real emphasis on the important parts, no possibility to skim, a chore to navigate through, none of the conciseness. Also, as a non-native English speaker, they’re much harder to understand.

I found myself interested for the first few minutes, then grew bored and eventually stopped about 2 minutes from the end. It definitely could’ve used some editing. And no offense to Kirkman, but he doesn’t really have much of a screen presence.

And with Marvel’s “exclusive” guys putting out Icon books, I don’t see the problem either. I generally like creator owned books, but I generally like big two books by good writers too. Except Kirkman, who I mostly didn’t like at Marvel, but aside from Tech Jacket, I’ve loved all his Image stuff.

I prefer text pieces myself when it comes to things like the news or what amounts to statements/documentation… I like having control over the pace at which I assimilate the information I’m getting. I only ever prefer audio and/or video if the medium can add significantly to the information-gathering and assimilation process.

But I suppose the younger generation raised in the current media-rich environment are better than I am at parsing relevant information from things like podcasts and video statements.

Here’s a thought: Kirkman was serving up a parody of modern comics — talking heads, precious little action, meandering, poorly edited, and with an info-dump at the end upon realising that his story hadn’t actually reached a satisfactory conclusion.

Isn’t it best for the big 2 if they convince creators to create their best characters for them so that they will then have full ownership of said characters and be able to put them on underoos?

Erik Larsen could say the same thing Kirkman did in a four-paragraph column.

But on that note, I agree with Brian — what major comic writers (except Geoff Johns) don’t dabble or otherwise in creator-owned work? Do we really need creator-owned work from, say, the B-list and C-list writers who can’t string together a good superhero book? I’d imagine that would just flood the current market of mainstream superhero comics with “creator-owned” superheroes or “non superhero” books that contain, well, thinly-veiled superheroes.

I always thought that, bar some of the Image founders, having the freedom to do creator-owned work was a sort-of reward a writer got from cultivating a body of good work and a strong fanbase. Of course, that’s not a concrete rule, but personally I am much more likely to a creator-owned project by a “proven” quality writer than experiment on someone who can’t hack a good Superman story.

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I can’t speak for Robert, but the way I understood his editorial was that it’s not enough to just “dabble” in creator-owned work. Why do three or four Marvel / DC books and one creator-owned book? Why not do the opposite, and put the emphasis on creator-owned work? Guys like Kirkman, Ellis, and Vaughan are able to do this, and make a fine living off of their creator-owned work.

That mission statement was a complete joke.

Wow. Not impressed with where Image is headed. I think they’re gonna miss Larsen.

“Erik Larsen could say the same thing Kirkman did in a four-paragraph column.”

Yeah, but Dave Sim would have done it in six words, three lines and three exclamation marks…

SELF PUBLISH!
SELF PUBLISH!
SELF PUBLISH!

“Why do three or four Marvel / DC books and one creator-owned book? Why not do the opposite, and put the emphasis on creator-owned work”

It would be cool if that happened, but comic creators don’t do it for the same reasons that most of us work for large businesses and corporations rather than starting our own small businesses: security, ease, and financial reward. Self-published, creator-owned series take a lot more work, have a much higher risk of failure, and generally offer a much lower paycheck.

We all should probably only read creator-owned series so we won’t have to have meltdowns when an artist or writer we don’t care for gets assigned to the title. Oh, wait: that didn’t work with ‘American Flagg’ twenty-some years ago. Never mind.

Yeah, but Dave Sim would have done it in six words, three lines and three exclamation marks…

SELF PUBLISH!
SELF PUBLISH!
SELF PUBLISH!

Touche! Too bad there’s only one Dave Sim…

Of course, like gopher pointed out — the security of working on a DC/Marvel character is probably too good for creators to pass up, even if they’re not very suited for it. Fables is one of my all-time, must read series, but Willingham’s mainstream DC stuff (Shadowpact, Robin, and the horrid War Games/War Crimes garbage in Batman) really does the man no justice. But I am sure it was monetary beneficial — the same reason why comic writers will forgo comic work to write television or movie screenplays.

On the other hand… some creators probably really like writing the mainstream characters. Like the aforementioned Geoff Johns. Heck, Geoff Johns would have to create his own continuity glitches to fix in his creator owned work.

And I second or third the text-is-better-than-video motion.

I can’t speak for Robert, but the way I understood his editorial was that it’s not enough to just “dabble” in creator-owned work. Why do three or four Marvel / DC books and one creator-owned book? Why not do the opposite, and put the emphasis on creator-owned work? Guys like Kirkman, Ellis, and Vaughan are able to do this, and make a fine living off of their creator-owned work.

I think that’s probably a fair assessment of what Robert WANTED to get across in the piece, Jay.

I don’t think that really came across, though.

The problem with video mission statements is that I can’t be arsed to sit through poorly shot video or audio podcasts.

If Kirkman wants creator-owned work, fine! I hope this means Image will publish whatever I send them.

“Erik Larsen could say the same thing Kirkman did in a four-paragraph column.”

Did Erik Larsen ever write a four paragraph column? I always thought his columns on CBR were long and rambling.

One thing that irks me is the rally to “save the comic book industry”. What does that mean? Comics as a medium are not going anywhere. Printing and paper may fade away in a generation or two, but the art of words and pictures in sequential storytelling isn’t going anywhere. If self-publishing is a profitable as Kirkman says, then people who want to create will create. Ergo, nothing to save.

Brain thank you so much for posting this column.

Kirkman’s delivery was so poor that his message was lost on me until I read his text on CBR.

Creator’s creating only self owned work will not ‘save’ the industry. What will ‘save’ the industry? Good distribution. No one can find these wonderful pieces of art.

“Here’s a thought: Kirkman was serving up a parody of modern comics — talking heads, precious little action, meandering, poorly edited, and with an info-dump at the end upon realising that his story hadn’t actually reached a satisfactory conclusion.”

That doesn’t sound like Robert Kirkman.

Less pontificating on cloying mission statements, more Eric O’Grady scripts. NUFF SAID

Didn’t Alan Moore & Warren Ellis go back to work-for-hire stuff because their creator-owned work wasn’t generating the income they needed? If I’m wrong, fine, but I remember Ellis saying he wouldn’t go back to work-for-hire, then stating he needed the stable income for a little while.

Geoff Johns did a series called The Possessed, I think, (drawn by Liam McCormack-Sharpe?) which I’ve seen but never read. I think that was creator-owned.

I started a thread on the CBR comm board about this video yesterday, basically saying just because you can make a video, doesn’t mean you should.
Not only did his ‘message’ not need a video (or utilize the medium in anyway), it actually made him seem pretty amateur hour – less a partner at Image comics, more like some git on youtube.
Hardly a manifesto that will go down in the history books.

Alan Moore hasn’t done strictly work-for-hire for about ten years, right?

Since he began his ABC work (which isn’t STRICTLY creator-owned work, but close enough, I’d say), he’s been creator-owned all the way.

And Ellis went back to work-for-hire as a favor, but the noted that doing work-for-hire work raises his profile, causing his creator-owned work to sell better. Ellis, in particular, seems to be the example Kirkman is referring to where he says creator-owned work would sell better if other people were doing it, too.

When Ellis leaves to do just creator-owned work, he effectively “disappears” from the comic book consciousness, and has to do work for hire to be on the public scene again. Now if creator-owned work was more common, Ellis wouldn’t HAVE to go back to do work for hire to get back on people’s radar – and I think that’s Kirkman’s goal.

Unless I missed it, all the creators listed so far in the comments are writers. There are some mainstream artists I’d like to see doing creator-owned work, too.

Ah. I knew I couldn’t trust my memory! Thanks for clarifying Ellis’ position. I still think Moore did Image books in the ’90s to pay bills, though.

I disagree with the notion that creator-owned work being more common = writers & artists. staying on the radar. I hate to think this way, but I believe many people who read Marvel & DC comics only want Marvel & DC comics. Otherwise, creator-owned work would sell a lot more. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying things, but Criminal doesn’t do Captain America numbers.

Oh yeah, Moore definitely did work-for-hire to pay bills in the 90s. I’m just saying he hasn’t had to do that for over a decade.

As to the whole sales thing, what Kirkman is arguing is that until we see it, we won’t know. During the early 1990s, Marvel and DC sold well but Image Comics were ALSO selling comparable numbers to Marvel and DC.

In the 60s to 70s, DC and Marvel did gangbusters in sales, but so did Dell/Western (and before them, Lev Gleason, etc.).

Creator-owned works currently sell a lot, but it’s generally just on the TPB side of things – who’s to say that if more creator-owned single issues by big-name creators were out there, as opposed to the handful we have now, they wouldn’t be selling?

Of course, the “problem” here is that Kirkman’s plan involves Marvel and DC just letting their best-selling creators walk, which he argues will be better for the Big Two in the future, but even if that were true, it sure as hell would screw them in the short term.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, on the whole, creator-owned works sell as much as Marvel/DC, especially when you add in all the indie crowd, but no individual creator-owned piece seems to be in the same sales league as the big two.

Single-issue-wise, I think Marvel/DC combined still sell more than all the other single issues out there.

But all the other companies I’d say are about equal to either one of Marvel or DC.

If I want to know what someone has to say, I want something to read. Video on the web is good for the occasional skit or to refresh my memory of some music video I haven’t seen in years. Anything released in podcast or video-blog form is something I’ll just have to miss out on.

While I see your point, Brian, I don’t know how valid it is to compare creator-owned work in today’s market to previous conditions/ companies. Dell/Western- didn’t they sell a lot of licensed comics & funny-animal comics, in an era when such comics sold in the hundred-thousands? I know they had Turok, Solar, & Magnus, but they didn’t come out until DC had sucess with its Silver Age properties. Gleason did crime comics and super-heroes (original Daredevil?), right? My Golden Age/ post-Golden Age history is fuzzy.
Image was the perfect storm of “rock-star” artists and surging interest in comics. I don’t think we have many current artists who can sell over 150,000 copies of a book (events, yes, but not creators). We haven’t seen early-Image sales in anything in the last ten years, have we?

I don’t know how well creator-owned books sell, and I’m happy to take your word that many tpbs sell well. I know Mignola’s Hellboy, Powell’s Goon, Invincible & Walking Dead, Astro City, various creator-owned or semi-owned Vertigo series, and a several I’m not thinking of, sell at, or close to, the Marvel/ DC range. I don’t know if enough creator-owned books could sell enough to keep their owners away from work-for-hire.

Anyway, I’m not saying you’re wrong, or Kirkman are wrong, just that (as you point out) Kirkman’s ideas aren’t necessarily practical. As great as it would be to see more creator-owned work, I don’t know if it’s feasible in the current market.

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Anyway, I’m not saying you’re wrong, or Kirkman are wrong, just that (as you point out) Kirkman’s ideas aren’t necessarily practical. As great as it would be to see more creator-owned work, I don’t know if it’s feasible in the current market.

Well Kirkman himself is living proof that this isn’t the case, and that one can do creator owned work and make a living off of it – even when you take on ‘the big two’ at their own game of super heroes.
That said, he’s also proof that you’ve got to have something unique about what it is you’re doing.

[...] who writes (and owns) several Image titles, tries to add some clarity in the comment section of this post: I can’t speak for Robert, but the way I understood his editorial was that it’s not enough to [...]

“Why do three or four Marvel / DC books and one creator-owned book? Why not do the opposite, and put the emphasis on creator-owned work?”

Because, ultimately, this generation of creators is still the one raised thinking they want to get into the industry to write the big names – Batman, Superman, etc. That *may* change, but fundamentally most people who were comics fans growing up get into comics writing to play with their favourite characters.

Somewhere out there, there’s a kid reading Invincible (okay, older teen… Kirkman has the most gory idea of “all ages” I’ve ever seen) who is thinking up stories for Invincible, and will get into comics to get a chance to tell those stories.

Oh, and as a follow-up: there’s a limited window of opportunity to take on a job writing a book. Imagine someone who turned down writing Flash in, say, 1992 in favour of a creator-owned mini-series. It would have been eight years before he got another chance, at which point his career might have totally changed and it might not be possible to get a second chance at the title.

“Now if creator-owned work was more common, Ellis wouldn’t HAVE to go back to do work for hire to get back on people’s radar – and I think that’s Kirkman’s goal.”

Wouldn’t work except in the rarest of circumstances – say, if someone had the profile of Lee or McFarlane when they went to form Image.

Now, people say that “oh, the Image books sold 150k” and think those were spectacular numbers… but remember what the sales figures were of the books those guys did beforehand. First issues selling in the *millions*. That’s the clout it would take to be able to move to a creator-owned book and not have it hurt your marketability, because no matter what you lose you’re starting from a position so far ahead of everyone else that coming back to earth just turns you into an ordinary, rather than under-the-radar, title.

“Because, ultimately, this generation of creators is still the one raised thinking they want to get into the industry to write the big names – Batman, Superman, etc. That *may* change, but fundamentally most people who were comics fans growing up get into comics writing to play with their favourite characters.”

I know … I was one of those guys. For the longest time, I wanted to get into comics specifically to write the characters I grew up reading about. And I did! I got to write the Titans and the New Warriors, and some X-titles and some other stuff along the way. And it was fun, but ultimately not fulfilling. Mainly because I had the mistaken impression that the writers were the ones who came up with stories, and at DC and Marvel, that’s just not the case. Sure, writers have input (some more than others). But the main decisions about what you can and can’t do with a character comes from editorial (or sometimes, writers on more popular books).

Here’s an example. When I was writing Titans, Arsenal was one of the characters in the book. I specifically wanted as many characters as possible that weren’t appearing in other titles, so that I (and my editor) had control over how they developed. Well, this was right around the time Kevin Smith was launching Green Arrow, and he decided he was going to use Arsenal. Overnight, Arsenal suddenly belonged to the Green Arrow office. Despite the fact that he hadn’t been part of the Green Arrow series in, what, decades? To me, he was a Titans character. He’d been appearing most often in that book over the years, so it made sense that he fell under the Titans jurisdiction. But obviously, I didn’t get to make that call.

Then I met Anthony Bozzi (who was Image’s marketing director at the time) and a bunch of Image creators, and my eyes were opened to the idea of creating my OWN characters, where I’d be in charge of all of them. I’d never have to ask permission to use a character, or have a character yanked away again. And it literally changed my life. Sure, I’ve still got a big appreciation and fondness for the Teen Titans (to pick one example), so I created Dynamo 5 — my own take on the teenage super-hero team. I’m able to incorporate elements I enjoyed about the Titans, but also add in other influences and character dynamics and plot lines that I want to write about. The end result is something unique, and I own it. Well, co-own it with artist Mahmud Asrar, but you get my point.

Anyway … I know this is turning into my own editorial, but I just wanted to say that I certainly understand the desire to write the Marvel and DC super-heroes we grew up reading. It’s not like I can’t imagine why someone would want to do that. I was very much of the same mindset when I broke in. But in the end — for me, at least — it became much more rewarding to create my own characters.

“Because, ultimately, this generation of creators is still the one raised thinking they want to get into the industry to write the big names – Batman, Superman, etc. That *may* change, but fundamentally most people who were comics fans growing up get into comics writing to play with their favourite characters.”

Admittedly, coming after a well-respected writer like Jay (whose work I actually liked on Titans for what its worth), my statement won’t be anywhere near as strong but oh well: I feel like that statement is broken. Its as if, basically, you’re saying that people don’t really want to write superheroes–they just think they do. That mainstream comics have brainwashed me and once I get in the business I’ll snap out of it and become a “real” writer.

To the contrary, aside from a token idea for Batman or Superman (who don’t even rank in my Top 5 favorite characters) I have every now and again, I don’t have that many ideas FOR my favorite characters. I feel like any story I would come up with has been done already. Most of my ideas are for completely original stuff when I’d like just as much to write superheroes.

As far as this “mission statement”, well…bah I’ll leave it. There are too many snarky fans that have made comments on it already, I’m sure.

“Yeah, but Dave Sim would have done it in six words, three lines and three exclamation marks…”–And those would have been:
WOMEN SUCK!
WOMEN SUCK!
WOMEN SUCK!

“Fables is one of my all-time, must read series, but Willingham’s mainstream DC stuff (Shadowpact, Robin, and the horrid War Games/War Crimes garbage in Batman) really does the man no justice.”–That’s the biggest problem I have with creator-ownedy types like Willingham doing superhero stuff: they clearly don’t give a crap about the work they’re doing, and it ends up being awful. It’s like putting Garth Ennis on any superhero title that isn’t Punisher or Hitman.

“One thing that irks me is the rally to “save the comic book industry”. What does that mean? Comics as a medium are not going anywhere. Printing and paper may fade away in a generation or two, but the art of words and pictures in sequential storytelling isn’t going anywhere. If self-publishing is a profitable as Kirkman says, then people who want to create will create. Ergo, nothing to save.”–I’m tired of this sentiment. When people are talking about saving the comic book industry, they’re talking about saving the comic book (the “pamphlet,” for snobs), not the computer screen. As Grant Morrison said, you can’t take your computer into the bath with you. Get over your smug self-importance and faux futurism. Read all the eBooks you want, I read Kurt Vonnegut books with hard covers on them, and I take my comics the same damn way.

“Well Kirkman himself is living proof that this isn’t the case, and that one can do creator owned work and make a living off of it”–Well, sure, as long as you’re also doing work for the Big Two or getting hired as a partner at Image Comics.

I’d like to agree with everything Robert Kirkman said, as I see his heart’s in the right place. To often these “calls to arms” seem like shockjockery by someone looking for attention. Kirkman’s however seems like he’s genuine.

Like I said, I’d like to agree… but, in my opinion… there’s only one way to make comics accessible to the next generation, and the one after that… LOWER THE PRICES.

A Spider-Man comic book should NOT cost as much as a Spider-Man action figure… or a used copy of a Spider-Man video game.

It’s sad, that all the great writing, and great writers wracking their brains on ways to improve the industry… when the main (only?) stumbling block is the horrendously high price tags these books carry.

I agree there should be conferences, and folks should work together… unfortunately, their common enemy at this point is the fact that prices are only going to go up.

Anyhoo… ‘ats all I got. Props to Kirkman for being so bold.

Well, sure, as long as you’re also doing work for the Big Two or getting hired as a partner at Image Comics.

He got his work at Marvel, and his Image partnership, after the break out success of Invincible and The Walking Dead.
The creator owned books being successful caused the other two things to happen, not the other way around, hence him being the proof that creator owned books can be a living.

“Well, sure, as long as you’re also doing work for the Big Two or getting hired as a partner at Image Comics.”

Kirkman wasn’t “hired” as an Image partner. It’s not a paid gig, and doesn’t increase his income by a dime. It just gives him some say in what the company does, as a whole. None of the Image partners make any money from Image. They make money from the comics they create (and spin-off toys, media, etc.).

Maybe that’s not what you meant by “hired,” but that word seems to have a certain connotation, and I wanted to make sure it’s understood just what being an Image partner means.