For those expecting the tone to lighten in the second part of our discussion with The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon, you’re clearly reading the wrong year in review. At the tail end of 2008, few if any topics matter quite as much as the economy, especially for those fields concerned with product production, which, as much as we’d like to think of ourselves creating art for art’s sake, most certainly includes the world of comics. The discussion of the economic fallout on the comics industry continues well into the second part of our interview.

However, the latter half of the second part does take a turn for the—if not positive—then at least less negative, with a discussion of the industry’s future, as it pertains to online distribution, a topic of conversation that’s becoming even more key to the survival of the industry, as the production of a physical product becomes even less economically sound.

[Part One]

From time to time, the Marvels and DCs of the world love to mine the indies for “new” talent. Do you see that as a possible side effect of the economic slowdown?

Not really. I don’t see that there’s anything different in that than there was five years ago. They’re always looking for new talent, and if there’s a use for them to do that, they’re going to do that. Any way that they can subsume a creator for a new series, which is probably how they saw the new Omega series—not as a way to break sales records in the direct market, but something that the book sellers would find attractive in placing on the stands there. The thing that worries me about the big publishers right now is that I don’t think they were very good actors in the economic good time in a way that makes me think they might do well now.

They didn’t take advantage of what was presented to them.

Yeah. They’re such huge actors in the market that they control—that they own, basically, in a sense. The direct market. It’s so much about competition and maximizing the sales on specific books, and not so much about long term growth or the health of the market or developing more storefronts. I don’t know this to be the truth, but I hear rumblings that, despite these last few good years, the pay rates haven’t really increased to reflect that. So it makes you wonder if the measure of success for these companies for the last few years was just if they were able to put more money in the bottom line of their corporations, via licensing opportunities.

And if that’s the case, what will happen as it becomes harder to do that and they’re stuck making a decision that is not based on their being a good business partner in that market? They’ve been kind of abusing and exploiting that market. It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that, if you can get the same licensing effect out of publishing 80-percent of what you publish online and not have those same page rates, that’s not where you end up, five years from now. I’m very suspicious about their being good actors in economic bad times, because I don’t think they were good actors in economic good times.

There’s a long, storied tradition of underpaying creators in this business.

Yeah, underpaying creators and just kind of acting in a short-sided way. It’s a unstable market and very abused market for something that is so profitable and has led to so much marketing. You would have thought 20 years ago that at least we’d know what a bad contract is now, but, in a certain sense, it might even be worse from small publishers now. It may be harder for them to enter into the market. It doesn’t make me real confident. If it’s all about funneling money to a certaing group of stockholder or boardmembers, then that certainly brings about a whole different set of decision making criteria than trying to create a healthy long term market.

This is based purely on circumstantial evidence, but it seems like the world of mini-comics is as booming as ever.  Are these people who are just sort of used to being poor, so they don’t mind that there’s no money in the pursuit?

Well, you know, I make a joke on the site that, when the economic times get really bad, everyone will have to live like a cartoonist. I think it’s the cultural saturation of comics, to a certain point. You just have more people happy to do them. More people are willing to do them for their own sake, rather than making sure that they profit over all of those things, at all times. You can have a guy who is a very established creator putting out a mini-comic that he doesn’t expect to make any money off of. I think it’s more culturally encouraged to do those for the sake of themselves. That doesn’t mean that you want the industry to dry up and blow away, either.

Is 2009 the year that we’ll see people going full bore online?

It certainly looks like it, doesn’t it? The model that you can look at that is kind of a rising star, in terms of comics, are these online guys who have just hit that right niche of being able to provide a way of being able to facilitate online and merchandising sales. Versus a Jeff Smith model that is more interested in moving the comic as  product. I think you’re going to have, at some point, mainstream companies taking the plunge, and people will kind of head in that direction, whether or not they ever come to a good model. You don’t really know if you’re doing damage to your exiting model. I think it’s inevitable that people move in that direction, because they’re going to find the other direction either limited or even losing money.  I’m not really an expert, and I can’t really speak on the piracy issues, but it seems to me to be an inevitability.

Everyone’s dipped their toes in the online world a bit, by this point, even the larger companies, with initiatives like Zuda. Looking ahead, do you see one model being any more effective than the others? Is there, for lack of a better term, a “model of the future?”

Hm. Boy, I would be a very wealthy man, if I could predict that.

Give it a shot. These year in review stories are fueled by crazy predictions.

It’s almost like what drives the solution is the fact that that isn’t coming. Comics syndicates have been aware of online comics since the late 90s. The two models that they tossed their weight behind weren’t the ones they had been waiting for. They were the ones they adopted because it was time. I don’t know if there’s going to be a model of the future based on how awesome that model is and how obvious it is that everyone should adopt it. There will be models of the future based on everyone throwing their lot in and saying, “this is the one we’re going to use.”

So there will continue to be a number of unique approaches.

I think so. It’s not so much a unique approach, so much as everyone is going to need to have an approach, and something will rise from that. We’ve waited long enough for something to arise as the obvious one, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. There are people that will argue on all sides. One thing that irritates me about some new media thinkers is that they’re so certain about some beliefs and philosophies. “No one is ever going to pay for this,” or “everyone is going to demand this for free.” I think a lot of what develops is, you get models, and then buzz kind of exists around those models as well. Thought almost follows deed, in that case.

I used to edit The Comics Journal, and we got online really early on, and we found that, whenever we published anything online, it would just be copied everywhere, in really obvious places and in a really blunt way. We’d go and ask people to take it down, and would be lectured that this was bad, and we’d never be able to make it online if we didn’t give people the opportunity to copy it everywhere.

What year are we talking about, roughly?

’96. They would show up on newsgroups and guys’ individual sites, and sometimes they would be attributed, but most of the time not. Not to say that there isn’t copying going on now, but at the time, those people would argue with me, and they were so sure that everything online was going to be free in the exact way that they thought it was going to be free. And I think now, people don’t really do that kind of copying to that extent. There’s a certain acknowledgment that, if someone puts up a certain article on Time Magazine’s site, it’s probably not going to be copied as much, in as many semi-official places as it was, 12 years ago. I think that’s because there’s a certain developing ethos that comes when people start doing it.

A self-regulation.

Yeah, and I think, when people really have a model to deal with, it’s different than arguing about models that don’t exist yet. In other words, the comics online that we’re going to get are very different than the comics online that we think we’re going to get.

It’s a very roundabout way of saying that we can’t predict the future.

Yeah. I don’t think we can. You know how I know that? By studying the past. I think what we going to have is people saying, “screw it, we need to get something online.”

–Brian Heater

Sure it seems a bit early to get nostalgic about 2008—and heck, judging from the past 12 months, it seems a fairly safe bet that this year isn’t likely to considered a font of great memories for decades to come—but still, what would December be without a slew of year-end recaps?  Last year we spoke to The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald to help The Cross Hatch in welcoming in the new year. This time we’ve tapped a fellow industry veteran and highly regarded comics blogger, Tom Spurgeon.

These days Spurgeon is best known as the principle—and, really, sole—driving force behind the frequently updated and massively authoritative site, The Comics Reporter. Spurgeon also did time on the print side of the media equation, having worked as both the executive and managing editor of Fantagraphics’ The Comics Journal. He’s also the co-author of Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book and creator himself, having penned the short-lived Wildwood strip for King Features.

We sat down with Spurgeon to recap the 2008 and toss out wild predictions for 2009—naturally we spent the vast majority of our time together wallowing in recession freak out mode.

When people look back at 2008 in 10, 20 years, what are the big themes for the year going to be?

The big story at the end of the year is, of course, the economy, and how that’s going to affect the comics business. I think you actually go back and look over a lot of the stories from this year, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of movement on economic issues, even before it got on everyone’s mind. You have the Minx imprint that went down and Virgin comics. You have these kinds of stories throughout the year. Right now everyone’s kind of freaked out because we don’t know what the economic effect will be, down the road. That will certainly be one of the big stories.

This was also a big year overseas with the fallout from the Danish cartoon story. I don’t know if you remember the assassination attempt against one of the cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, and his wife. If you look at what the landscape was like post that original incident, back in 2005, 2006, when the assassination attempt became public, there was a sympathetic reprinting of the cartoons in a lot of newspapers and a not very nice reaction on the part of those who politically objected to those cartoons. It’s almost become iconic, I think.

It’s also interesting what happened over here, with the Obama New Yorker cover. The reaction wasn’t as intense, obviously, but it hit a little closer to home. The power of cartoons reared its ugly head, here in the States.

Yeah. No one rioted here, but I think that was a really fascinating check to see where everyone’s head was at, on that kind of issue. I think there are a lot of unresolved issues, as far as what’s appropriate and what should and shouldn’t be done. There’s a legal issue over in France with the Charlie Hebdo people and what they said about the president’s son. It was construed as an anti-semetic joke, which has steamrolled into a human rights hearing against that cartoonist and columnists. What’s interesting is that that magazine is one of those that was just exonerated from the charges having to do with the Mohammed cartoons. You see that, not only are comics kind of powerful, but there are some things that comics or cartoon imagery should or shouldn’t do, and people are willing to litigate over it and very much advocate for different political solutions and different outcomes regarding these issues.

The collapse of newspaper and editorial cartooning will also be a big story coming out of this year.

In terms of newspapers folding?

Newspapers folding, newspapers shedding staff. In the past year, I think it’s something like 20-30 full-time newspaper editorial cartoonist positions have been lost, which is about a quarter of what were remaining from a once proud tradition of every town having an editorial cartoonist on staff. Now it might be as low as 55 or 60 newspapers that have that kind of position and that kind of voice. It’s kind of been a weird year. You mentioned the Obama New Yorker cartoon, and I think what’s kind of interesting is that that was really the most memorable cartoon to come out of this historical election. And you can almost argue that editorial cartoonists as a group didn’t really show for themselves very well in this historical election year.

And it wasn’t even that great of a cartoon to begin with.

Yeah, it wasn’t a great cartoon, but can you name another from the year? I can’t, really. I think people did good work. [Pat] Oliphant was really mean this year, especially going after Sarah Palin. And Tom Toles is consistently good, but you’d think that, with such an historical event going on throuought the year, you’d be able to remember two or three cartoons. There really wasn’t anyone doing that. I don’t know if that’s just because we don’t have, as a group, the same kind of cartoonists they had 50 years ago—but there are a lot of great cartoonists, so I don’t think that’s the case.

You were talking about the newspaper collapse, earlier, and I think that’s the source to some degree. There are so many outlets now for this type of work that there isn’t really a centralized location that everyone can gather around.

Sure, and there are some regional cartoonists, but there aren’t really that many national cartoonists, anymore, outside of Toles and Oliphant and maybe [Paul] Conrad. It’s kind of been weird to watch this—it’s sort of like those stop motion things that we used to have of the Hindenburg crash when I was a kid. It’s kind of like watching comics and cartooning in newspapers, right now.

And then, on the strip side of it, both United Media and King Features came out with really big online initiatives, in that last month or so. And they were both radicially different. United Media, with Comics.com, has put the vast majority of its archives online, in hopes that it would drive interest and gain them an audience via the notion of free, whereas King Features has launched someothing called Comic Kingdom, which works with local newspapers as kind of portals, to provide content for those sites. We won’t know for a couple of years if either of those things will work out, but it just goes to show you how ar along we are, that those syndicates are kind of worried about newspapers and print surviving as the same source of economics and legitimacy that they have for so long. When those goes start to make movements, it’s kind of a scary thing.

When you rattled off the names of publishers that didn’t make it through 2008, you mentioned Virgin and Minx. I couldn’t help but think of those two imprints as examples of how, in a certain respect, the comics industry has become a bit bloated. Will this recession scare help to keep things in the industry in check to a certain degree?

Yeah, I don’t think, in either case it’s something along the lines of “Minx and Virgin are gone, how will we survive?” [laughs]. It’s horrible for people who worked there, but I think they were both predicated on a wealthier comic system that we had for a while, and they both had problems with their models, if you want to backseat drive what they were doing. But yeah, it does seem like there’s always a bit of bloat, and I think comics has always had a bit of a hang up about making tough judgments as to what is a legitimate business model and what isn’t. So you have a lot of great companies and creators out there, and then you have a lot of these companies that aren’t put together with the same kind of consideration.

They seem kind of like hustlers. Anyone who works in comics, if you do what I do, the bulk of your mail, you might get 20 or 30 percent from companies that everyone’s heard of, and then you spend a lot of time dealing with these self-publishers and guys who want to throw some money at the wall or want to get their next movie project up. The thing about economically tough times is that you’re going to see a lot of those companies not do as well. It’s not all of those companies that have problems, but there are certain companies that I’m not real sad about. In other words, I don’t feel that it’s an industry disaster that some of those companies don’t publisher, after a while.

The big two—DC and Marvel—have been hit pretty hard. Is there a way in which that’s to the benefit of smaller publishers?

No. What would you suggest the benefit might be? I’m kind of drawing a blank.

In terms of readership, I suppose. Those two publishers are sort of notorious for flooding the marketplace. Do you think people might possibly be turning more toward indie books if there are fewer mainstream titles?

I don’t know if that’s the case. I think there’s something in your example that bad economic times can sometimes work to curb bad economic excess. You’re not gonna flood the market if cost all of the sudden becomes a concern. You’re not going to sign people up onto cruddy limited series, just to keep the other guy from getting them. I think there’s that kind of thing, but some of the worse things have come from these bad economic times in comics.

A good thing that a lot of the indie comics companies have right now is that a lot of the guys who are running them are really hardcore. They’re very far along. I still think of Top Shelf as kind of a new company, and they’ve been around for a decade. Those guys have—if not a life-long commitment—a very serious commitement to do comics, and what they’ve enjoyed over the past couple of years, in terms of success, they’ve put back into their companies. The model used to be that when you got a big book deal or sold a movie, you would buy a car or a home, whereas now you hear about Drawn & Quarterly opening up a store.

That’s a much nicer story, if you’re a fan of the artform. It’s the same thing with retailers. We have a lot of savvy veteran retailers that can weather the loss of reatailers who are hounded out of business because eBay reveals that they’re not pricing according to market. A lot of bad practice retailers get hacked away, in bad markets like this. But these veteran retailers and comic companies have a lot of savvy people running their businesses.

That’s been in interesting trend in the past year or so—D&Q, Fantagraphics, and Picturebox all opened stores. It seems almost counter-intuitive move in this time when everyone’s buying their books online. What’s the impetus behind that move?

I think a lot of it has to do with event programming. It gives them a place to run local events, it gives them a place to their signings and have people come through town and give a focus to that publicity. I know in Fantagraphics’ case, Seattle has always good comic stores, but not a whole lot of great comic stores, so they’ve always been wanting to have a place to do those kinds of events. And now they have one, and it’s a real benefit in terms of making them a bigger player in their neighborhood and town. There’s a certain kind of person you get who would want to go to the Drawn & Quarterly store or the Pciturebox store, who wouldn’t want to go to a really good comic shop, as well. I don’t think anyone’s getting rich doing this.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater