To be honest, My Comics Year was as good as expected, I got to read great books that I loved and we all in Multiversity Comics loved, and you can read our Year-in-Review articles here. But I wanted to take a moment and reflect on the business side of comics, and a big thing that happened this year: the Substack Migration.
We have been seeing big changes in the comic-book world after the pandemic. Diamond stopped being the only distributor on the Direct Market, with Penguin Random House and Lunar taking a piece of the cake. We also have the Comixology Originals movement, the big rise of Webtoon and Marvel and DC responding to that. The comic business is changing, and we can only hope that it’s for the best – – after all, the readers are only growing in numbers.
Then enters Substack.
If you don’t know, Substack is a newsletter platform with a subscription model, “a Netflix for newsletters,” and it recently gave grants of their “Pro” program to a lot of comic creators. The most well-known of these creators are Nick Spencer, James Tynion IV and Jonathan Hickman, who left big books to make their own “imprints” in Substack. Other creators include Molly Knox Ostertag, Jeff Lemire, Chip Zdarsky, Donny Cates and Scott Snyder.
When I first heard of Substack (Tynion’s departure from “Batman), I was excited to see what this new model could bring. Creators were promised big grants (up to six figures) and full ownership of their work. What an amazing offer! Then, the first caveat came: for each creator you had to give around 7-8 bucks a month to see their content, which is a luxury for a big portion of their fans. Then came another caveat: this benefits the creators, yes, but affects the comic shops that gave them their fanbase in the first place. But supposedly this is not a big deal because surely, when the title is done, a publishing house will print collections of the books, benefiting the shops.
But then, it turned out to be a whole mess, and some creators were critical of Substack’s move. Alex Schumacher criticized it as “just another company exploiting and catering only to established names while neglecting up-and-coming/independent creators” and Alejandro Arbona saw it as creators “cashing a big payday and asking you to sign up so that substack won’t take a bath on their deal.”
The platform sells itself as a “tool” for writers, and not as a media company or a social platform. But they have used algorithms to detect popular creators and offer them grants to publish through them, effectively creating an editorial policy without the ethical responsibility of journalism. And it is important to talk about who they choose to pay: a bunch of transphobic persons and full-blown hate speech and harassment. Jude Doyle made it clear: “Substack Is Not a Neutral Platform.”
There’s also the feeling that it works as a complicated pyramid scheme. Substack got seed investment from a bunch of places, and offered popular journalists and writers big money, but no censorship and no legal protections, to lure in more creators that gave the platform free content and the hope of monetization . . . eventually, if you play your cards right and your newsletter gets popular enough. This changes my earlier metaphor: this is not “the Netflix of newsletters,” it’s more equivalent to Uber drivers, as The Guardian states.
The business of comics is changing and evolving, with plenty of new platforms for getting and consuming comics. But I think that Substack is not the the right road, at least until they change their policies, which will allow the less popular creators without grants start seeing money.
And you might ask me, “then, Ramon, what is the correct way?” Well, to be honest I don’t know. But you might want to look what Shortbox is doing as a start. It evolved from a subscription box into a digital fare with a 100% of earnings going directly to the creators (minus fees), Zainab Akhtar’s work made an impression on us with Shortbox getting a place on our favorite small press this year. Surely we will have to keep an eye on her model as a possible future of comics.
