If there has been a dominant buzz word or phrase in comics the past few years, it has undoubtedly been “creator-owned comics.”
Between the advent of hugely successful creator-owned properties, the creative freedom they provide and the treatment of writers and artist both new and old by the main publishing houses, there’s been a stunning drive of talent moving to publishers like Image Comics and readers buying those books more than ever.
Let’s check the facts: you have giants of the industry like Grant Morrison and Ed Brubaker swearing by the experience while Image’s market share in overall dollars has nearly tripled over the past three years, going from 3.96% of the market in April of 2010 to 9.04% in April 2013.
As a comic reader of the past 20+ years, you see things like this pop up from time to time, and these trends tend to be cyclical. But is the creator-owned emphasis something more than that? Where did it come from? If it’s going to stick around for a while, what are its next steps?
I try to answer those questions with the help of some friends in today’s Multiversity 101.
“This is a movement, not a trend”
That line comes from Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephenson, a man who in many ways has become the public figure who stands over the meaning and message of creator-owned comics.
“Honestly, I think what’s happening right now is something more akin to a market correction,” Stephenson added in regards to the recent movement towards emphasizing creator-owned comics.
“It’s been happening for years, but it’s really starting to gain momentum now.”
And he’s right on both accounts.
While the firebrand moment for the creator-owned movement is looked at as the launch of Image back in 1992, this is not a new concept, nor is it something that suddenly became attractive for writers and artists.
Chris Roberson, another creator who has become something of a shining light to the power of creator-owned comics thanks to his tireless work at Monkeybrain Comics – a digital first comics publisher whose titles are all creator-owned – and his vocal departure from DC Comics due to the rather draconian treatment of some of the bigger names from the halls of DC, gave me a bit of an impromptu history lesson when I was preparing the article.
“Creators have always been interested in finding ways of owning more of what they create, back to the earliest days of the American comic book,” Roberson shared.
Kirby, a man known to much of the industry as “The King,” ended up being forced to return to work for-hire, eventually becoming the man who – alongside writer Stan Lee and others – created many of Marvel’s most popular characters.
Kirby, like many before and after him, was a man who had an urge to tell his own stories – of the fantastic, the uncanny and the astonishing – but spent most of his career toiling away his gifts (in truly wondrous fashion, of course) for a paycheck and not much else.
It was a living, but for a man with such a fierce imagination and sheer ability to create, he deserved more.
The result was one of the most buzzed about moments in comic history, a cultural touchstone that sold millions of comics and gave an entirely new generation a hope to tell the stories that they wanted to tell with the characters they wanted to create.
Continued belowOf course, the initial launch of Image was creator-owned, but it wasn’t quite the version we’re used to today. The majority of those books were seen as variations on some of the formulas and archetypes those very creators had left, and this led to giant sales but, for the most part, creatively uneven titles.
Image’s fast rise was fueled in part by the comic speculator movement, and deflated for a time along with a comic industry that was in turmoil.
Since then, Image and the industry have obviously taken a lot of turns in their paths back to solvency.
While the “Big Two” of Marvel and DC have seen a resurgence of sales thanks to (at least partially) the advent of successful comic films, events, reboots, relaunches, double-shipping, and increasing cover prices, Image has brought itself back from the edge thanks to some good old fashioned storytelling and one very big hit.
While many tout DC’s risky and (mostly) successful New 52 relaunch as the biggest reason for the resurgence of the industry (it certainly has been a big part of it), in the year after the New 52’s launch, Image – not DC – saw their performance increase the most according to Comichron’s John Jackson Miller.
As Miller revealed on Comichron, “Image’s post DC-relaunch orders of comic books and graphic novels are up by 36.3% in dollars over the past year,” before adding that “Image’s improvement explains 14%, or the second largest amount, of the industry-wide gains in the 12-month period.”
While you could chalk a lot of that number up to Image’s mega hit “The Walking Dead” – which managed to somehow be responsible for 2.8% of total industry market share in 2012 according to Miller – you have to look at Image’s choices as a publisher as largely setting creator-owned on the path they are on today.
Patrick Brower, co-owner of the Eisner-nominated retail shop Challengers Comics + Conversation, said, “I would have given Image a lot of the credit for shining a spotlight on creator-owned books in the past few years.”
“They didn’t invent the creator-owned title or anything; they are just focusing on it in a very positive way.”
Arguably the single most prominent person in the creator-owned game was, once upon a time, not a guy who appeared on talk shows or the brain behind the biggest show on television.
Robert Kirkman was a guy who self-published “Battle Pope” and created “Tech Jacket” at Image Comics, two entertaining books that never really found an audience.
But Image kept taking chances on his work, and first it paid off with “Invincible,” his teenage superhero book with Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley that has spent a decade being one of the best books in the industry, and then came “The Walking Dead,” a series that quietly entered the picture with first print orders of 7,300 or so (which, in April of 2013, would have placed it around #225 on the comic sales charts).
It has since become a giant, to the point when I asked Mark Waid –Eisner-winning writer and one of the men behind digital publisher Thrillbent – as to what he thought the biggest reason more established creators were increasing their creator-owned workload was, he had a simple three word reply: “The Walking Dead.”
But Image, and creator-owned comics, are more than that.
Image is armed with a litany of books that both sell well and are wonderfully crafted, like “Saga,” “Morning Glories,” “Chew,” and any number of other titles. They’re all undoubtedly major successes on multiple levels, even without movie or TV deals (although “Chew” almost was a TV show).
Sure, the promise of the megabucks behind selling your creator-owned property to become a huge TV show or film is alluring, but is that why someone like Sean Gordon Murphy works on “The Wake” instead of drawing a Spider-Man book? Is that why Jonathan Hickman writes books like “The Manhattan Projects” or “East of West” instead of even more iterations of “Avengers”?
It’s a good question, which is why we asked them to find out.
The Whys and Wherefores Behind the Creator-Owned Movement
Continued belowHickman, a guy whose career started when he wrote and illustrated the critically beloved mini-series “The Nightly News” at Image, has since become one of the biggest guns over at Marvel.
It’s understandable and even to be expected that this happened, as he’s a guy that is a futurist in the vein of Warren Ellis, has the continuity management skills of Mark Waid, yet fiercely stays true to his characters like Brian K. Vaughan.
That is quite the skillset, and it has helped him land gigs writing one of the greatest “Fantastic Four” runs ever, and now he’s guiding the future of the Marvel Universe with “Avengers,” “New Avengers” and the upcoming event “Infinity.”
He has brought his creator-owned sensibilities and refined storytelling to his for-hire work, something some creators struggle with, and that has helped him accomplish quite a bit in a still very young career.
I asked Hickman if, no matter where his career goes, creator-owned books would always be a priority for him.
“Of course. Career-wise, my primary motivations are both longevity and self-sustenance. I don’t know of any other way to achieve that beyond owning and publishing your own ‘properties.’”
“Saying that, I got into this because I wanted to tell stories that interest me, and it’s important that the business side of things always remain subservient to that goal.”
“But, you know, sometimes it rains.”
In many ways, for-hire work is a life preserver for some creators to survive those rainy days. It’s the work that, while often creatively satisfying, is designed to afford writers and artists the luxury of creating the stories they’re truly passionate about.
That’s not to say that someone like Matt Fraction cares about something like “Hawkeye,” a wonderful for-hire book, any less than he does about “Casanova” or either of his upcoming Image books.
And that’s also not to say that creator-owned isn’t an option as a sole form of income for even the newest creators to lean on.
Ales Kot, one of the most exciting newcomers of the past year, shared that creator-owned comics “(are) and will continue to be a commercially viable option” for new creators.
But if newer creators could sustain themselves purely from a creator-owned track, why would Kot be writing “Suicide Squad” for DC?
My theory was for the splash back of attention it would give the work he fully owns.
Kot shared that, yes, that is a factor, but not a key one.
“There were way too many factors, such as curiosity, excitement, finances and plain ol’ ‘let’s just make good comics and see where it lands me,’” he shared, before adding that he was really looking to just tell a good story, and everything expanded from there.
Even Kot, someone in a position that could be understandably bewitched by the for-hire game, says his heart is in creator-owned.
“Creator-owned work is very much in sync with who I am right now and also with who I want to be: an artistically, ethically and commercially successful creator.”
The aforementioned Murphy insists that by taking for-hire work over bringing something like “Punk Rock Jesus” or “The Wake” to life, he actually could be costing himself money.
“While working on corporate characters is a sure-fire way to get exposure and make decent money, for a small percentage of creators, there comes a time when you’re losing money by working that way,” Murphy insisted.
He then shared a pitch perfect example of how successful an alternative creator-owned could be, admitting that it likely is a “best case scenario” for writers or artists.
“Mike Mignola is talented as hell, and if he stayed in corporate comics without doing Hellboy, he still would have made a good living, but I doubt he’d be the millionaire he is today.”
Under that idea, the immediate sales funnel may be smaller because it targets less of an audience initially as an unknown property, but it is much longer and has far more room to grow.
The movement to creator-owned publishing hasn’t just been financially driven, as Hickman initially noted, but also creatively focused.
Waid, a man who has likely forgotten more about DC Comics than your average staff of a comic shop knows, also happens to be one of the staunchest supporters of the creator-owned side of the industry and it’s almost entirely for artistic reasons.
“I think it’s important to keep a hand in creator-owned material if for no other reason than it’s an island of creative freedom, a sanctuary to which you can retreat when you’ve had enough dumb notes by illiterate editors for one week,” Waid said, while also noting he’s only working with great editors right now, but he’s “worked hard to get to that point.”
While Waid still earns accolades for his work on “Daredevil” and “Indestructible Hulk,” his passion is his digital comic publisher Thrillbent that he co-owns with fellow writer John Rogers. He could live well off of just writing Marvel and DC’s characters, but that wouldn’t be creatively satisfying for him.
“Really, what matters in the long and short run is just that creator-owned is a place where you rise and fall purely on your own creativity and talent.”
Separating the Signal from the Noise
There’s the old adage, “where there’s a will, there’s a way,” but in comics, one of the issues that beset people as gifted as Kirby has always been finding a way to get the stories and the ideas inside of them out to a mass populace.
After all, the direct market in the comic industry has long been something that has kept everything going, but is limited in terms of flexibility of what works and what doesn’t in terms of sales.
The advent of creator-owned comics in the direct market has certainly helped. The success of comics is dependent on retailers believing in the sales potential of the comics they are purchasing, and its evident that there has been a notable turnaround in that faith.
Image itself and the direct market have seen impressive growth, but this story isn’t entirely theirs. They are a big part of the success, but the arrival of alternatives for publishing through both print and digital have opened the door for creators both new and old.
On the print front, creators like Becky Cloonan have found great success creating mini-comics and selling them through digital outlets like Big Cartel and her own Lounak Distribution (which she shares with Andy Belanger and Karl Kerschl).
But on the digital side, things are getting even more exciting.
Jim Zubkavich, a writer who has experimented as much with print and digital strategies as much as anyone has in recent memory, shared, “With the expanding reach of webcomics/digital comics, greater selection of quality publishers, new options for crowd funding or self publishing, and broader awareness of comic-fueled media it feels like there’s a renewed sense of creative energy in the industry.”
You can see that at both Roberson and Allison Baker’s Monkeybrain Comics and Waid and Rogers’ Thrillbent, two digital first initiatives that sprouted up over the last year or so but have since captured a lot of attention thanks to their quality stories, the innovative delivery methods they employ, and their home as a bold alternative to the print publishing world.
While all involved still strongly believe in print, they have worked as hard as they can to make their endeavors both a success and a compliment to the print world of comics.
Some retailers have taken digital first outlets like these two as near declarations of war, but that is simply not the case. Just like there is enough room in the industry for “Big Two” comics and creator-owned ones, “there’s plenty of room for all players in the industry” according to Waid.
Continued belowBoth publishers have built their houses around providing readers opportunities to read quality comics on digital readers – computers, tablets and phones included – at favorable price points.
Given the prohibitive nature of the vaunted $3.99 price point for younger readers, giving them options in terms of cost is both a necessary and refreshing move by both.
It’s not just price that makes these endeavors so appealing though. As Waid asks, “how much larger is the number of potential customers who have Internet access versus the number of those who have convenient access to a comics shop?”
I’m someone who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, a city with a population of around 300,000. I’ve grown accustomed to needing to go digital for comics that are underordered by the three comic shops in the city.
And I have it pretty good, as many potential readers don’t have comic retail stores within even an hour’s drive of where they live.
So for them, purchasing digitally is a godsend to their comic reading, as they are stuck to two real options without digital: traveling a long distance weekly to acquire their comics, or illegally downloading scans online.
Ultimately though, both Monkeybrain and Thrillbent are wonderful alternatives to even an Image when it comes to releasing creator-owned books, as they give creators access to a litany of potential readers but they also cut down on the cost upfront to release a book.
When a print book is released, the cost of printing has to be factored in to any potential earnings that may come from the book. That is a not inconsiderable amount, and when you factor in the time hours spent to craft the comic and to market it, many creator-owned books come in either barely making any money or upside down entirely.
But at Monkeybrain or Thrillbent? Save for the also not inconsiderable amount of money taken by Apple and the aforementioned time hours spent creating and marketing the book, there’s a greater potential to see a return on these comics in theory.
With both Monkeybrain and Thrillbent taking such a leap in the way original comics are released to customers, both had to be considered risky propositions. But everyone involved considers what they have seen in their first years a success at least to a certain degree.
Roberson exclaimed, “We were astonished that so many readers caught on so quickly,” underlining the fact that in its first year they earned four Eisner nominations (for Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s delightful “Bandette”).
Meanwhile, Waid admits he’s “slackjawed and full of pride that (they’ve) made this much of a dent in the industry already,” while still wishing he had more time to dedicate to it.
Roberson goes on to say “any conceivable future for a healthy digital comics market has more than enough room for quality creator-owned projects,” and we’ve continued to see that in progressively less traditional ways in 2013.
The most exciting digital effort of the year “The Private Eye,” an entirely self-published comic from two of the industry’s best in writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin.
This comic is released through their digital distribution center The Panel Syndicate, and it isn’t based on a cloud-reliant app like ComiXology (the home of Monkeybrain and Thrillbent), instead giving users the ability to download an actual copy of the comic in the format of their choice (PDF, CBR or CBZ) in English, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. (Updated: you can also download CBR/CBZ for Thrillbent at their site)
Not only is the immediate versatility and tangible nature (in that you get an actual file) of this endeavor atypical, but they’ve also released this book on a pay-what-you-like paradigm, allowing users to contribute as much as they want (including absolutely nothing) in exchange for the comic.
Continued belowVaughan told the New York Times he was “delighted to say that many more people paid us than didn’t,” adding that most people paid about $3, which is about as much as the typical print comic.
It’s hard to say how much Vaughan and Martin made off of this so far, but near as I can tell, they’re very satisfied with how it has turned out.
While this method, or even Monkeybrain and Thrillbent, are hardly sure shot options for your average writer or artist (especially with “The Private Eye” being such a huge hit thanks at least partially to a historically great creative team), it’s undoubtedly one of the best times ever to be a person interested in creating comics.
The amount of options available for a person to get their story out to a large audience – especially factoring in programs like ComiXology’s user-generated system “Submit” – are greater than they’ve ever been, and they are becoming more and more commercially viable in the process.
On the other hand…
While creator-owned comics have become a concept with much cachet in the industry, this is still an industry driven heavily by the success of the “Big Two.” They won’t necessarily always be the biggest driver of sales, but Marvel and DC are so entrenched in the culture of today that they will likely always have a place.
“I think there’s always going to be an audience for those old characters from Marvel and DC, just like there’s still an audience for things like the Lone Ranger and James Bond and Garfield,” Stephenson said about his industry competitors, before adding that he doesn’t “think they can maintain the same level of excitement over the long haul.”
In terms of the ecosystem of the comic industry, a healthy Marvel and DC is a good thing for comic creators of all varieties, and today is assuredly a healthy time for them. Marvel is the clear-cut leader in market share, while DC is far ahead of where they were before the launch of the New 52.
Additionally, they’re both creatively viable as well, as many creators continue to cultivate great stories out of these long-existing characters. As Ales Kot asked, “Is it possible to make good-to-great company-owned stories? Sure.”
“Kieron Gillen and his collaborators proved as much fairly recently on Journey Into Mystery, Matt Fraction, David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth and others are proving it on Hawkeye.”
That is, so long as they’re treated well by those who hire them, as some of the people I talked to cited a reason they’re more eager to work in creator-owned than for-hire.
“I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong about creators doing work that will be owned by others, so long as that isn’t the only option available to them,” Roberson said, “and the conditions under which the creators are working are fair and equitable.”
The main point is that company-owned by no means is defined as creatively irrelevant, just like creator-owned comics aren’t inherently of a higher quality. In an ideal world, both are crafted well and sell well.
As Brower, the retail store owner from Chicago, shared about the books they hand sell the most to customers, “we don’t (sell comics) because they’re creator-owned; we do it because they’re good books.”
The Final Point
There is only room for growth for creator-owned in the ecosystem of comics, but as part of a greater whole that includes both Marvel and DC.
As we move forward and more opportunities like your Panel Syndicates and Monkeybrains and Thrillbents arise, the chance to get your story out there and find your audience in the world of comics becomes increasingly possible. Will creator-owned comics ever become the dominant form of storytelling in the industry? Not likely.
Continued belowBut their role and position will likely only become more important to creators, from your relative neophytes like Ales Kot and Jim Zubkavich to long-timers like Mark Waid and Chris Roberson, as we move along.
The better the opportunity bright, creative people have to bring their stories to life and to a larger audience, the better the chance true greatness in the artform can be achieved.
After all, it’s not the characters of yesteryear that make a story great, but the writers and artists and inkers and colorists and letterers that craft them.
And don’t we want those creators working on the stories they most want to tell? The stories they themselves have inside of them, just waiting to be told?
The proof is in the pudding, as Stephenson noted.
“If we were to sit down and make a list of the best and most memorable comics of the last 20 years or so, they’re not corporate superhero comics, they’re things like Bone and Y: The Last Man and Blankets and Hellboy and Powers and The Walking Dead.”
“I see that becoming more and more of the norm as we move forward.”
