The Comics World

Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics

Benjamin Woo, Jeremy Stoll, Benjamin Woo, Jeremy Stoll

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496834669
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literaturkritik

Contributions by Bart Beaty, T. Keith Edmunds, Eike Exner, Christopher J. Galdieri, Ivan Lima Gomes, Charles Hatfield, Franny Howes, John A. Lent, Amy Louise Maynard, Shari Sabeti, Rob Salkowitz, Kalervo A. Sinervo, Jeremy Stoll, Valerie Wieskamp, Adriana Estrada Wilson, and Benjamin Woo The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics is the first collection to explicitly examine the production, circulation, and reception of comics from a social-scientific point of view. Designed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about theory and methods in comics studies, this volume draws on approaches from fields as diverse as sociology, political science, history, folklore, communication studies, and business, among others, to study the social life of comics and graphic novels. Taking the concept of a "comics world"—that is, the collection of people, roles, and institutions that "produce" comics as they are—as its organizing principle, the book asks readers to attend to the contexts that shape how comics move through societies and cultures. Each chapter explores a specific comics world or particular site where comics meet one of their publics, such as artists and creators; adaptors; critics and journalists; convention-goers; scanners; fans; and comics scholars themselves. Through their research, contributors demonstrate some of the ways that people participate in comics worlds and how the relationships created in these spaces can provide different perspectives on comics and comics studies. Moving beyond the page, The Comics World explores the complexity of the lived reality of the comics world: how comics and graphic novels matter to different people at different times, within a social space shared with others.

Part 1. Production

Where do comics come from? How, by whom, and under what conditions are they brought into being? In this first section, we attend to the work of making and the people who do it. Long before a comic book or graphic novel appears on store shelves, is reviewed in the comics press or finds a readership, the people involved in its creation constitute its first publics. Although the productive labor of writers, artists, editors, publishers, printers, and intermediaries has been a long-standing interest of comic book fandom, it has only recently emerged as an area of significant interest among comics scholars. As Brienza and Johnston argue in the introduction to their collection Cultures of Comics Work, this focus on labor is radically inclusive: it “is agnostic toward many of the shibboleths of the study of comics while also having the ability to work around and within them.” Comics work is “as applicable to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning epic Maus as it is to a 12-page, photocopied, hand-stapled zine given out for free at a small-town comics convention attended by ten people, never to be seen again” (2016, 6, 7). It is also an obvious initial point of contact with other fields that have brought social-scientific approaches to bear on the products of human culture, such as sociology of art and literature, book history and publishing studies, and the political economy of communication and media industries.

We begin with three chapters on comics creators working in different global and industrial contexts. In “The Comics Workforce,” Benjamin Woo offers a comprehensive picture of who makes English-language comics on the basis of a survey of 570 creative professionals conducted in 2014. Finding that respondents are roughly equally spread across publishing sectors and that relatively few make a stable living directly from comics, he argues that comics publishing “is not so much an industry as an ecology, a space where different kinds of comics making activities, many of them only semiprofessionalized, are taking place.” An ecological approach complicates our understanding of production, disarticulating the monolithic “Industry” of much commentary and opening onto more complex accounts of how comics get made. Amy Louise Maynard follows with a qualitative picture of comics production in a single city, examining the opportunities and constraints available to creators given the particular mix of local institutions in Melbourne, Australia. Next, John A. Lent draws on decades of interviews with women cartoonists in Asia to refute claims that there are not or haven’t been enough women making comics to represent them in historical retrospectives or awards programs. His analysis focuses on the genres and periodicals that have been coded as “feminine,” as well as the differential career opportunities available to women who make comic art in Asia. Thus, the conventional wisdom that there just aren’t very many women who make comics is not the unfortunate outcome of systemic forms of discrimination but an active contributor to these exclusions.

Once comics production is theorized as an ongoing social process, it becomes easier to see that this “system” is embedded in larger flows. Thus, Eike Exner and Ivan Lima Gomes ask how transnational forces and local politics together shape a comics world’s development. In “Bringing Up Manga,” Exner examines the influence of American newspaper strips on the development of Japanese cartooning in the prewar period, arguing that these strips in translation and their domestic imitators launched the Japanese comic strips that eventually became manga on a different formal and aesthetic trajectory. Where Exner is concerned with tracing influences, Gomes writes about an attempt to create an alternative comics world in the shadow of Dorfman and Mattelart’s (2018) manifesto against cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck. “Reshaping Comic Books in a Socialist Regime” recounts how Chile’s state publisher used comics as tools for popular education and public communication during the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73). In these chapters, the notion of “a comics world” productively crosses with that of “world comics,” revealing that no art world is an island.

So, although our account of the comics world begins with worlds of production, where various actors must work together for a comic “to appear as it finally does” (Becker 1982, 2), it is not limited to a narrow productivism. Production is only one moment in the life of a comic, only one entry point into understanding how it acts and is acted upon in the social world. Instead, we see the publics that orient to making comics existing in dynamic relationships with intermediaries and audiences throughout their respective lifecycles.

References

Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Brienza, Casey, and Paddy Johnston, eds. 2016. Cultures of Comics Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. 2018. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: OR Books. Originally published in Spanish in 1971.

1.

The Comics Workforce

Benjamin Woo

Sometimes a photograph can say what no one will put into words. One day, for instance, Roland Barthes (1972) famously found a copy of Paris Match while waiting at the barbershop. The photograph on the cover of a uniformed, saluting Black youth said to him, “France is a great Empire, [and] all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag” (116). At the mythic level of signification, this image symbolically incorporated French citizens of African descent in the national subject of the Republic, notwithstanding actual barriers to integration, and thereby assuaged white guilt over colonialism. But comics creators don’t need Barthes to tell them that images can be very powerful indeed.

Some forty years later, Image Comics lined a group of writers and artists on stage at their annual expo to celebrate the new series that would soon appear in comic book stores. When pictures of this moment circulated online, people noticed that only two were women and most, if not all, were white (Clemente 2014; MacDonald 2014). The people on stage were not entirely representative of the titles announced at the expo (Hanley 2014), but, as Allison Baker (2014) suggested at the time, “The issue with the picture isn’t that Image Comics is against diversity. The problem is the picture makes it look like they don’t care about it.” Absent clear, transparently produced, and publicly available data on who makes comics and graphic novels, these images perpetuated a myth that symbolically excludes women and visible minority creators from the comics world.

It has often been said that comic books are like our modern mythology. But mythology is presumptively unauthored; it is the gradual accretion of a culture’s oral tradition. Comic books, by contrast, are generally produced by named people who are trying to make a living from their artistic labor. The “modern-mythology” rhetoric erases the labor performed by these people in the context of a complex, multifaceted cultural industry. Yet myths, in something like Barthes’s (1972) sense, do indeed attend to their work. There is, for instance, no more enduring image of work in the comics industry than what Charles Hatfield (2012, 78) calls “the Myth of the Marvel Bullpen,” which portrayed making comics as a job for whacky cut-ups with goofy nicknames. More recently, a short documentary produced for AT&T’s U-verse Buzz tells a story about what it’s like to be at the center of a “hot” industry like comics. The comic book artists of Toronto’s RAID Studios are likened to rock stars; no less an authority than Alyssa Milano says, “They’re just cool, they’re fun to be around—and creative and inspiring” (Woo 2016). And we have the Image Expo photograph.

Comics readers don’t necessarily have a very clear idea of how comics get made or—beyond familiarity with a handful of marquee names—by whom, and mythic discourses take root in this persistent gap between media producers and their audiences. This chapter reports some findings from a large-scale survey of creative workers in the field of English-language comics production. While the survey addressed a number of different issues related to work in comics, I will concentrate here on the makeup of the comics workforce and on some of the conditions under which they perform creative labor.

CONTEXT

This project responds not only to a pressing need among cartoonists for more systematic information about the industry in which they work but also to a significant turn towards work and production in media, communication, and cultural studies. Authors such as John Thornton Caldwell and Vicki Mayer have used the term “production studies,” suggesting that it is time cultural production received the same thick description that cultural studies accorded to acts of reception and appropriation (Caldwell 2008; Mayer 2011; Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell 2009; Banks, Conor, and Mayer 2015). In the United Kingdom, the turn to work has been overdetermined by New Labour’s creative industries agenda of the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, it has been fueled by the creative industries’ failure to provide good work and social mobility to young people, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. For many of these writers, creative work has simultaneously served as both utopian model of unalienated labor and bellwether of actually existing trends towards casualization and precariousness in what Ulrich Beck (2000) has called “the brave new world of work” (Ashton and Noonan 2013; Banks 2007; Banks, Gill, and Taylor 2013; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; McRobbie 2016; Taylor and Littleton 2012). A third cluster of research focuses on the impacts of digital technologies (and the cultures of digital workplaces) on creative labor, including the digitally mediated immaterial labor of audiences and users (Deuze 2007; Fuchs 2014; Scholz 2013; Terranova 2000). The rise of the “produser” or “pro-am” not only impacts the nature of media-oriented leisure but also, in creating an army of people who do creative work for fun, may exert downward pressure on working conditions for creative professionals.

Determining who counts as a creative worker is an obvious conceptual problem. Most any job could be considered creative in some sense or another, yet, when one speaks of creative work in a cultural industry such as comics, one clearly has in mind some role that shapes content. However, in fields where much work is produced collaboratively, a notion of creativity is needed that can accommodate the contributions of both “above-the-line” and “below-the-line” workers, and high-status as well as low-status ones. It is also important that the definition of the population not screen out emerging or unsuccessful creators a priori. For the purposes of the study, I defined “creative workers in comics” as people who performed work, whether paid or not, that affected the content or aesthetic presentation of a comic book, graphic novel, minicomic, or webcomic that was made available to the public in English in 2010 or later. Because the contours of this population are unknown and an adequate sampling frame does not exist, probability sampling was abandoned in favor of generating the largest number of responses possible. A directory of active creators was constructed through two strategies: first, recent exhibitors listed on the websites of five major comic conventions (Comic-Con International in San Diego; the New York Comic Con; the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland; the Toronto Comic Art Festival; and the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds, United Kingdom) were recorded; second, three issues of the Previews catalogue, which comic shops use to order their inventory from Diamond, were randomly selected, and the credited creators of the five “premier” publishers (Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Image, and Marvel) were identified using the Grand Comics Database (GCD; www.comics.org). Publicly available contact information for both lists of creative workers was sought online.

The survey launched online in November 2013 and was accessible until February 2014. A total of 1,356 invitations to participate were sent by email. Additional creators were contacted through web-based contact forms on personal websites and DeviantArt accounts and through social media. Survey respondents were able to share a link to the survey through social media upon completion, and the survey launch was announced on a number of comics news websites. Finally, as a method of generating interest in the project, weekly updates based on preliminary data were posted on a project blog. A total of 570 completed surveys were collected, though respondents were able to skip questions they did not wish to answer, so some items have fewer responses.

FINDINGS

A relatively small field of cultural production, English-language comic and graphic-novel publishing nonetheless relies on the labor of a great deal of people. For instance, searching the GCD suggests that there were 5,531 comic books published in the United States in 2014, not including variants. Someone produced each of those comic books—usually several people working in a coordinated production process—and this is only a fraction of total output, as it does not include webcomics or minicomics/zines and may overlook other small-scale publishing activity. Sc...