Nicholas Palmieri wrote and podcasted for Multiversity from early 2017 to early 2021. Nick was one of the many MCers to come to New York Comic Con and meet the gang.
Whenever tragedy befalls the comics community, one quote echoes throughout the minds and social media feeds of us fans and creators: “Comics will break your heart.”
A publisher is found to be withholding payments to its creators? “Comics will break your heart.” A creator, who established core character details used in billion-dollar blockbuster movies, needs to crowdfund for medical expenses due to royalty loopholes preventing them from benefitting? “Comics will break your heart.” An up-and-coming artist is revealed to be a serial sexual assaulter? “Comics will break your heart.”
It’s quick. It’s simple. It’s versatile.
I think it’s time to retire the phrase.
Attributed to Jack Kirby (and sometimes Charles Schulz), the quote was born of a time when a handful of major publishers retained all rights to every creation. A time when the creators of Superman, the character responsible for the initial explosion of interest in comic books as we now know them, had to agree NOT to contest the rights to their character, just so they could pay their bills. The pessimist will claim that little has changed in the 50 years since; even the optimist would have trouble refuting that claim. But that’s only one part, one small aspect, of the comics world.
Heartbreak comes when our love is unreciprocated. Kirby loved comics. But “comics” are an abstract designation which humans have given to a medium of storytelling through sequential art. “Comics” are incapable of expressing love, or any kind of emotion. Kirby knew this; we all know this. So what are we really saying when we say “Comics will break your heart?”
First, we have the business systems that try to utilize the medium and its creators for profitable ends. It’s well-agreed that the Direct Market system of comics distribution, while miraculously resilient, is outdated and often outwardly predatory to the small business owners who run local comic shops. Any healthy comic shop in my area has had to get creative to survive, typically by either pandering to speculators, or by expanding to gaming, toys, and all-around pop culture merch.
Beyond the Direct Market, most developing forms of comics distribution inevitably become consumed by some corporate beast, like the bookstore graphic novel market becoming just another subsection of big-five book publishing, or Webtoon taking over the webcomics space with its own set of predatory practices. However, it must be said, at least they have found a way to turn a profit.
In getting my own comic to print, while I’m very grateful to have had the passionate and supportive publisher I did, getting from script to print was a five-year process of avoiding scam publishers and trying to get anyone to pay attention, which still resulted in a net loss of money. All for a 20-page story! There simply are not enough consumers in the Direct Market to make things profitable for anyone except the top handful of publishers. And yet, as I discuss with a fellow comic writer friend during our weekly book club meet-ups, our love for the medium keeps us coming back, to publish and lose money anyways.
Business will break your heart, surely. So why are we so inclined to view comics as a business?
Comics are created by tiny teams of passionate creators. A large comics team is a half-dozen people; a small film team is several dozen at minimum. Creating a comic is a small communal effort, where each individual’s contributions are visible in the final product. You can immediately recognize what the letterer did, or the colorist, etc. In contrast, would you ever recognize the work of Second Unit Camera Operator #3? The scale of film and TV production encourages the viewer to ignore those smaller contributions, whereas they’re impossible to ignore in comics.
I think this leads to a greater connection to the work, and thus a greater passion. As fans, we notice all this work: on this site alone, we had several dozen annual lists to celebrate the work of just about every type of contributor in the medium. Passion is put on the page, and we pick that up and become more passionate ourselves. I’d argue that this reciprocal passion is the point, not any meager profit margins.
Continued belowThere’s also the fact that, due to their small scale, comics are far simpler to fund. A single person can create a comic that costs only their time and effort, and they can post it online for an audience. The loop of reciprocal passion doesn’t get much simpler than that: “I made a thing,” followed by an “I like the thing you made.”
Social media, and particularly X (formerly Twitter), are in an odd place in 2024. There seems to be an overwhelming sense of dread and vitriol in every online community, especially when any amount of bad news is revealed. With a community as decentralized as comics, it’s easy to think of this centralized meeting place as representing comics as a whole. But to me, X is NOT the comics community; X is an addictive microblogging platform that rewards its users for sending public inflammatory messages to one another. Here, it’s not comics breaking our hearts: it’s the format of social media. I reject the idea that this platform represents our community, even if some members fall for the trap.
So what is the comics community? It’s us, here, on this website, contributing our time and effort for free because we love comics. It’s me and my fellow writer friend, dutifully attending our book club every week and asking existential questions about why we choose to continue our doomed descent into comics publishing. It’s the organizers and supporters of crowdfunding campaigns who support creators even when the system doesn’t. It’s the owners of the local shops who, while making whatever business moves they need to survive, still happily discuss books with their passionate customers every week. It’s me, choosing to follow through with this weekly ritual even when my anxiety tells me not to leave the house, because I know this community is special and can’t exist if we don’t make it exist.
Maybe there is no business solution to making comics profitable, and any attempt to do so will end in heartbreak. And maybe that’s okay. We have each other, we have this thing that we love, and that’s enough.
The business of comics will break your heart. Maybe the community will at times, too. But ultimately, that same community has the power to mend it.
