The Embarassment of Riches

For today's independent artists, integrity can be financially rewarding. Can punk rock and alternative comics make peace with entrepreneurial capitalism?

Brian Doherty from the August/September 1997 issue

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Although Doran still owns her characters with Image, some of her fans did not approve of that compromise. In much of the indie world, self-publishing itself has become tied up in the "commerce sullies art" mentality. From the reaction of a vocal group of self-publishing acolytes, "You would have thought I'd raped someone's grandmother," she says. "The fans now perceive that self-publishing...is more important than our role as creators and the creation itself."

Self-publishing is "something of the '90s fad movement thing for hip creators to do," another former self-publisher, Matt Wagner, told The Comics Journal. To audiences used to consuming less-obscure portions of popular culture--television, movies, books--this whole issue might seem senseless. Who cares who sells or owns the cultural products you want? Besides, artistic self-production is almost unknown in other areas of pop culture, and is often considered disreputable.

In fact, when comic book artist Paul Pope began self-publishing in 1991, he created a phony persona to be his publisher. "My understanding was that self-publishing had this vanity stigma, and I wanted to avoid that," Pope says. "But when I started meeting other people in the comic business, I realized I was wrong. Literary self-publishing and comic self-publishing are perceived very differently." Not only is it not an embarrassment, there's an audience that considers it a definite plus. (Pope self-publishes his THB and also works for bigger companies, including the Japanese mega-publisher Kodansha.)

"Indieness" can be its own marketing tool. In the record field, many big labels create new subsidiaries to try to seem indie, emulating cheap-looking ad and promotion techniques that indies use out of financial necessity. (This same phenomenon can be seen now in the beer industry as well, where big breweries create new names to emulate hip microbrews.) And the small-press and self-published end of the comic market has been slowly gaining a larger market share--although that share is still small (about 5-10 percent)--of a rapidly collapsing market. (That share excludes Image, since its size and mostly superhero focus make it a slightly different animal, even though its characters are creator-owned. Even market leader Spawn has gone from a 1993 high of sales over a million copies to sales today of 160,000.)

Jeff Mason, who publishes Indy, a magazine dedicated to the world of self-published and small-press comics, explains the attraction: "It's very important to own your own thoughts. Selling your thoughts or signing away the rights to your thoughts is anathema. The idea that you can create something and it's not yours at all is bad. I want to give support to folks that are doing their own thing. If you don't own it yourself, you are at the whim of the person paying you. You aren't free to do what you want, you can't take risks, you can't create. Companies like Marvel and DC are like committees, and you can't create by committee. Committees don't tell stories, they just make demands." His magazine focuses not just on self-published comics but on any creator-owned comic.

Mason has a point--and provides insight into one reason why these audiences of pop culture cognoscenti fret over issues of ownership and corporate control. The world of small comics has delights to the discerning fan that one more fist fight between Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus just can't offer. The recent wave of deeply personal naturalistic autobiography in small comics--one of my favorite trends--isn't the sort of fare that adolescent-power-fantasy-oriented big companies provide. And Dave Sim's Cerebus, a self-publishing pioneer started in 1977, is doing something no big company has done: presenting a unified 300-issue-long narrative telling the entire life story of one character (a talking aardvark embroiled in the political and religious struggles of a mythical pre-industrial world), written and drawn by the same creator throughout.

But Sim is getting more out of self-publishing than creative freedom. Sometimes artists can have it all: integrity, freedom, and filthy lucre. Sim, for example, takes only $40,000 a year in salary from his company, but it owns a home for him to work out of, has no debt, and grosses half a million dollars a year. (Sim won't specify the net, but says it's "considerably" less.) His lack of debt, Sim says, "puts us well ahead of Time Warner, in my view." All this from selling his comic book to a monthly audience that has never topped 30,000 and now hovers around 12,000. The real money comes from repackaging his old comic books in large book collections. Sim is able to make sure that his entire life's work is always in print and always generating income for him. Even small niche markets can be lucrative when the creator controls all of the income stream (minus the distributors' and merchants' shares).

Sim, to his credit, has never played the traditional "artists should starve in a garret
for their art" role. He is known in the industry for his extravagant spending on travel and entertainment. A Comics Journal editorial once referred to him as "a man...who stays at the Savoy in London and serves his guests Beluga caviar while making pronouncements on such subjects as the greed of publishers." He regularly runs photos of himself in exotic vacation spots on the back cover of Cerebus.

Through much of 1995, Sim devoted both cover space--unheard of in a commercial comic--and long text pages at the front of his comic to advertising for the "Spirits of Independence" tour, a series of local conventions promoting independent creators and heralding the advantages and growing popularity of self-publishing among comic artists. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining control over how much of your work stays in print and available for sale. Even the large cash advances big companies can provide, Sim suggests, can pale in relation to the constant and long-lasting income stream total ownership of your work can provide.

Sometime self-publisher, sometime corporate employee Paul Pope agrees. He does see an aesthetic distinction between the comics he self-publishes and the work he does for bigger companies. "I put the more meaningful stuff out myself, the stuff that's important to me on a philosophical level as well as financial--the stuff I'm willing to take a 100 percent risk on. And with any investment, you're going to want to be able to get returns over time. The saving grace of self-publishing is that the decision about how long something stays in print and earning money is mine."

This is a lesson learned, in the underground rock field, by Mark Robinson, formerly of the band Unrest. Robinson has run his own label, Teen Beat Records, out of Arlington, Virginia, for 12 years. His band Unrest achieved popularity beyond his label's capacities--Robinson thought it too difficult to get the money together up front to pay for the recording and manufacturing costs that Unrest demanded. So he and the band signed first with a subsidiary of Virgin Records in the late '80s and then with a subsidiary of Time Warner in the early '90s.

Robinson ended up dissatisfied with the level of creative control over packaging he got from the Time Warner subsidiary--less than he was promised--and thought that in some cases he could have sold as many copies on his own as the bigger companies did. Now he doesn't own the music and has no say over keeping it in print. If he still controlled all of Unrest's records, Robinson says, he could still be making money off of them and attracting more wholesaler attention to his small label by offering the desired Unrest albums. (The rights to the Virgin subsidiary's records revert to Robinson after 10 years, though the ones with the Time Warner subsidiary are gone forever, he says.)

Robinson's dilemma limns a mostly unspoken truth about the indie ethos: "Selling out" can sometimes be less lucrative than the integrity of independence. This is especially true for the two most quoted avatars of independence from the corporate machine in rock, Ian MacKaye of the punk band Fugazi and Washington, D.C.'s Dischord Records, and Ani DiFranco, modern folk/punk troubadour.

If the Sex Pistols showed would-be punk kids that anyone could be a rock musician, MacKaye holds a similar place of honor in punk history for showing them that they could also control the production and sales of their own records. Looking over Fugazi's press clips, one finds MacKaye talking about "people who are into doing this music for life, not making any money out of it, but doing it because they have to" and how his label's goal was "not to make money, but to help as many of our friends' bands as we could." Fugazi has been the loudest and most steadfast holdout--especially in the post-Nirvana indie-rock feeding frenzy among the major labels--for strict independence and low ticket and record prices. The Washington Post once wrote that Fugazi's "rigid adherence to these precepts gives the band that most valuable of intangibles: integrity."

Still, that integrity has a very tangible reward: money. Fugazi alone has sold over 1 million records. While MacKaye wouldn't discuss total income for his label or band, I run a small indie rock label myself and have some sense of the costs involved. Even given overhead that's much higher than mine (Dischord has a half dozen employees who receive a full panoply of health and other benefits), I can't figure that Fugazi is netting any less than $2.50 per CD, and probably more. (The issue is complicated because Dischord's bands are paid a pure profit split, and MacKaye is both part owner of the label and a band member.) From there, the math isn't hard. Having the integrity to collect all of the money off your work leaves you with something more than just integrity to take to the bank.