Spurred on by this post over at the Newsarama Blog, I realize that yes, in fact, most indie comics do suck.
Don’t get me wrong: I like many indie comics. It all depends, though, on what “indie” means, a question that gets asked frequently on message boards all across the web. The best consensus anyone can come to is “anything not Marvel, DC, Image, or Darkhorse”, but even the latter two companies act pretty indie at times, seeing how they have to operate in the cracks left by Marvel & DC’s stranglehold on the direct market. Of course, every now and then someone refers to Art Spiegelman or Marjane Strapi as “indie”, which seems fairly absurd given that they’re published by Random House.
It’s just that the more “indie” you go, the suckier the comics seem to get. So, let me qualify my opening statement: Self-published comics suck.
There are probably exceptions. But I haven’t found any, and I’m not terribly inclined to look very hard. Because most of the self-published, or “published by a very tiny publisher located in some guy’s basement in Saskatoon”, comics I’ve seen have been terrible. The art is often generic and clichéd, and the stories are usually recycled concepts that have been done a hundred times over. We really don’t need more stories about superheroes or zombies.
The indie superhero market is particularly bizarre: Superhero fans are notoriously loyal to their properties. They don’t want superhero comics, or often even comics at all – they want the latest issue of X-men. I’m not even sure why DC continues to publish most of its Wildstorm titles, and those at least have a pedigree of star creators and used to be pretty hot stuff. Exactly why someone wants to publish a new superhero book when the superhero audience already has the books it wants completely escapes me.
Even some of the recent bigger indie publishers have been pretty bland: Neither Alias nor Speakeasy offered much of interest, and it seemed the books that were promising didn’t get any press until they moved to other publishers.
Even their websites are pretty sucky. Seriously: If you want to start up your own business, take a course in Dreamweaver or something. If you’ve got a tiny publisher with two books, there’s no reason for your site to be a cluttered mess that looks like a 13 year-old’s Myspace page.
So why do people self-publish, or start their own company? In the purest, most altruistic sense, perhaps they’re really committed to the book and want to maintain complete control over it. As admirable as that is, it’s also problematic: Creators who are their own editors/publishers are seldom doing anyone any good. (cf. Robert Jordan)
No, the main reason seems to be that people want to make comics but simply aren’t good enough to be accepted by existing publishers. Seriously: If your book is that good, why not pitch it to Oni or Slave Labor or Image or Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics or IDW? These publishers put out a lot of very good books, and that gives them something no self-published comic can offer: A stamp of quality. Every book they publish may not be gold, but they’ve put out enough good books that I trust them to adhere to a certain level of quality.
Oni & SLG in particular have very strong brand identities: I know what an Oni book is like. I know that these publishers have printed a lot of books I’ve liked, and that they’re likely to continue doing so. They may print some substandard crap from time to time, but it’s still crap I’m going to look at, if not buy. If New Indie Title looks like crap, I probably won’t give it a second look; New Oni Title may look like crap too, but I’ll probably at least flip through it because Oni usually knows what they’re doing.
Granted, these publishers didn’t build up their reputations overnight. But in most cases, they started up with specific aims and ideas. They didn’t (as far as I know) start with the aim of publishing their own books – they found other people’s books that they believed in to publish. And they had vision, even in the early days, that they were filling a niche that wasn’t being serviced by other publishers. The first SLG book I ever picked up was a copy of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, and as much as it’s kind of a juvenile philosophy-and-angst 101 comic, it still made a statement.
Most comics are pretty much crap. Perhaps your hot new self-published book puts them all to shame. But if it’s really that good, why not work with an existing publisher? Why not let someone else handle the marketing and production while you concentrate on making the book as good as possible, ideally while working with editors and publishers who have worked on many good books? It just seems masochistic to do otherwise.
On the other hand, maybe your idea really is just that good, and you’ve got a savvy and professional business plan to back it up. If that’s the case, then good for you – we need more comic publishers like that. But just take a look around and see if you can really compete with all the established companies out there: It’s a pretty high bar, and I’m only spending my money on the very best. If you think you’ve got the next Bone, you ought to sit down and consider just how awesome Bone was.