Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (5 of 5)

Part V

Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor and Phillip Vaughan

WP:

Looks like there’s a war brewing between Diamond and DC

TA

Oh, there’s no way Diamond can regard the DC situation as anything besides “shots fired.”  If there’s a notice that DC intends to end this alternate distribution when quarantine is over, I haven’t seen it clearly stated.  Since it’s likely DCBS and Midtown are effectively getting larger discounts over this, Diamond just lost the DC orders for two top 10 (likely top 5) accounts.  That’s blood in the water.  And you wonder why a recently retired Diamond exec came out with strong words?  We’ll have to wait and see how it shakes out 

Surgery has been needed for awhile, but which surgery will be needed isn’t something we’re likely to know until the other side of quarantine, however long that takes… unless it’s so long that the bottom falls out of the DM in the middle.  The small business loan program didn’t really work as advertised in its first incarnation for quarantine relief and if that doesn’t get straightened out, we could be looking at a comic shop graveyard with that alone. 

And remember, it’s not like the US bookstore chains are rocks of financial stability.  Barnes & Noble has been sweating bullet for a few years and recently was acquired by the owners of Waterstones.  Books A Million has had unpleasant rumors for a similar amount of years.  Hastings went bankrupt in 2016. 

That leaves you with independent bookstores (which seemed healthier, but everyone has the same quarantine problems) and mail order options like Amazon. 

I’ve always thought this system should have three legs - print/periodical, print/book and digital/either and add webcomics. 

For print/periodical, we need to be concerned if there are going to be enough distribution outlets left for this to be viable.  It would be good to have some form of mass market periodical.   

Dan DiDio was not wrong about wanting to use Walmart comics as a feeder system.  I’m not sure about the implementation of the plan, but that sort of plan could be useful.  Walmart, Target, bookstores… the magazine section of the grocery stores has shrunken and doesn’t seem as prominent as it used to, so I’m not sure how viable that would be.  But to get a seat at the table in those markets (as opposed to being hidden in the third-party stocked collectibles aisle at Walmart), they’re going to have to produce something that looks a little more like the rest of selection in that aisle.  Magazine size, magazine length, magazine price.  Judge Dredd Megazine might be the template for this.   

The Walmart comics aren’t necessarily coming from the wrong place in terms of features, i.e. a Batman family title, a Superman family title, a Justice League family title, but good luck getting somebody to fork over $10 for miscellaneous reprints and 12 pages of new story.  This needs to be closer to the old DC dollar comics in composition.  All new stories.  You probably need at least 20 pages of the lead feature and I’m not so sure 40 pages and a complete story for the lead wouldn’t be a better way to go.  Lead with Batman, then have the rest of the Batman family rotating through the backups -- Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, Manbat… maybe some aligned detective-type characters like The Question and Elongated Man.  That sort of thing. 

What would have happened if Marvel had this kind of a package out for the Avengers movies?  40 pages of Avengers, and then 15 pages of Captain American, Iron Man, Thor and Hulk features.  Where people could find it without having to hunt down a specialty store. 

Now, the trouble with this format would be a lot of expense and there’s no guarantee it would work.  It’s also completely unclear how much shelf space there is for this sort of thing, so its totally not clear how much you could expand if the first title was sustainable.  But it’s something that hasn’t been tried seriously enough.  Possibly because the Direct Market would cast so much shade on it and try to undermine it. 

If the DM shrinks, a possible workaround is to switch over to more of a European format.  48-72 pages/issue with a spine… that can be stocked in bookstores.  Think about it.  In the science fiction world, Doc Savage and Perry Rhodan paperbacks were essentially pulp magazines in paperback format.  And DC was experimenting with the Euro-format not too long ago. 

Past that, it wouldn’t hurt if publishers took the single issue a little more seriously as a storytelling unit.  I don’t think it’s necessarily at its lowest point, but there’s room for improvement.  Let’s face it, we’ve all read too many first issues where you had no feel for the new series and weren’t even sure where the premise was intended to go.  That’s writing for the tpbs, not writing an effective serial. 

Now, would any of these things help independent comics?  That depends on what kind of returns they’d get from the bookstore market on the Euro-format.  It’s the non-returnability of the DM that’s let low circulation indie comics survive and in a small number of circumstances, thrive. 

For books, I do feel that there are too many epic sagas and not enough book that can be enjoyed as a discrete, standalone unit.  This is also more of an issue for the company owned characters with decades of material behind them, but it’s good to be able to pick up a graphic novel and read it without being lost.  (To the point of Hickman’s X-Men reboot -- I was on a trivia panel playing comics trivia against Mark Waid for 20 years and even I had to pause and ask myself “wait… which character is that” a few times.  A friend who hadn’t read X-Men at all since Morrison or Whedon was even more lost at times.  Decent comic, but NOT new reader friendly by a long shot.) 

Incidentally, you ever notice how when all the DM folks whine and moan about how you can’t make a profit with original graphic novels, they conveniently ignore that DC seems to be doing just fine with their YA OGN line?  Or maybe they’re just approaching them as books and dropping all the pretense? 

For digital, the specifically comic book market needs to open it up for more vendors, full stop.  I’m looking at you, Marvel.  That Amazon exclusive has strangled most of the competition in the cradle… exactly like Amazon wanted it to. 

I’m also waiting for more digital book/collected edition forward apps.  Nobody has an exclusive on the digital tpbs, but everyone is obsessed with the weekly cash flow of single issues.  Even though the book format has been the grown format. 

Dogma is powerful. 

I’m also waiting to see if any DM contractions increase the digital serial to printed collection edition model.  Everyone swears (with vitriol) that if it worked, more publishers would be doing it.  And that’s some kindergarten logic.  All it means is that it's currently more profitable to do with print serialization.  If the size of the market changes, that might change, too. 

SK

Unfortunately, I think the likely outcome of this pandemic is that a lot of retailers will close their doors. Those that stay alive may be able to do so by growing their subscription business, an endeavor which could be more successful if Diamond’s power (and cut of the profits) shrinks and DC and Marvel start distributing directly. Based on all of your wonderful insight, it seems like a reduction in titles could also help. (It’s worth noting that crises in this industry have always been connected to overproduction and have often resulted in fewer titles and fewer publishers). In short, distribution and retail need to become more streamlined, and publishing needs to follow suit and adjust to new needs. Of course, building efficiency is just another way of saying laying off workers, reducing costs, increasing profits. So none of this bodes well for the people who constitute this industry from the ground up, the people that are already in the most vulnerable positions. A “stabilized” industry will not bring stability to everyone.

PV

Just saw these interesting (and worrying!) statistics from my friend, Tony Foster, publisher of ComicScene magazine, a UK based magazine about comics which sells on the newsstand as well as subscription. He posted this to Facebook:

How does Covid-19 impact comics?

For ComicScene we saw 50% sales drop in stores for Issue 12.

Only 10% of usual print sales for issue 13 via subs & mail (digital sales are non-existent) without comic stores/newsagents.

Loss of potential move into US comic shops.

I think issue twelve sat on the shelves longer than usual so not sure why the drop either, unless people stopped shopping in WHSmiths before the lockdown kicked in, it’s possible as I didn’t venture into the High Street for around a month before the lockdown. I now notice a link has gone out to this survey here 

TA 

10% sounds like a reasonable number for subs.  There was speculation, likely based on when Diamond’s list of Marvel orders, that DCBS + Midtown could account for 10% of US sales and there are other sub services out there.  Not sure we’re going to see any sales estimates for those new distributors, though. 

Oh, my.  We will probably see more of these, but a $300K Go Fund Me for the NYC outpost of Forbidden Planet is certainly eye popping.  

WP 

I wonder if a solution right now could be to continue issuing new comics in digital form, but include a token-of-purchase that customers can exchange for a hard-copy once retailers are up-and-running again? This could allow stores to recoup costs while servicing readers and shoring up the industry during the pandemic.  

Has anyone got any further thoughts on what immediate solutions there might be worth exploring? And what about the consequences after the pandemic? Does the Direct Market require a system reboot? Has the current situation exposed the frailties of the current distribution model? What about Diamond? Personally, I think there’s an opportunity here to address many factors, and if they end up continuing as before, that would be a great shame.

Is the Direct Market doomed?    

TA 

The digital token for a hard copy idea was proposed by Comichub and was shouted down by the retailers fairly decisively.  Supposedly, at least one publisher that had been up for it backed out immediately because of how loudly the retailer community objected.  Granted, the Comichub scheme was rushed and I don’t think they’d gotten as many publishers on board as implied, but a good chunk of the retailers absolutely don’t want their customers pointed towards digital during the shutdown.  They’re afraid that a percentage of them might stick with digital and they don’t want to risk losing even 10%-20% of their customers. 

Yes, that could broadly fall under exposing the frailties of the market.  It sure sounds like a lot of stores are on the edge and a 10% loss of customers could push them over the cliff.  I really don’t think anyone can predict what’s going to happen to the DM over the next year.  We need to see how many shops survive the quarantine period.  I’ve been hearing very mixed stories about how much success comic retailers have had trying to get federal relief money and loans.  Then we need to see how fast the customers come, when they’re allowed to shop again.  That roll out will almost certainly be a city by city and state by state process.  Then we need to see if there’s a second wave of the virus and corresponding quarantine in the Fall.  In some areas, particularly if there’s a second wave, a shop could theoretically be closed for 4-6 months in 2020.  That’s a lot of downtime.  Wait and see.  It really depends on how many stores survive and which stores survive, in terms of the independent publishers. 

The most fascinating potential positive to come out of this is the revelation that DC Comics is no longer Diamond exclusive and interested in there being multiple distributors.  Don’t get me wrong, I think their obviously rushed plan to launch using mail order retailers was just about the worst way to implement conceivable.  That said, I think retailers would have been very receptive to a new distributor entering the market if it had been introduced in a less obnoxious way.  Diamond could use some competition and DC might be large enough to build a business around.  That said, because of how they chose to roll out their initial solution, the following questions would need to be answered about a “proper” distributor starting up. 

• As long as Diamond still carries DC, how many retailers would boycott a new DC-backed distributor out of the memory of DCBS and Midtown being set up as distributors and DC shipping books while most stores were closed for business?

• Are there going to be enough stores left to support a distributor (or how long until new ones start to open)?

• Are there enough independent publishers with meaningful sales who aren’t exclusive to Diamond that would make this more viable as a business?

• If Diamond’s already fragile enough to institute a vendor pay freeze and then a repayment plan for money they owed, would this destabilize Diamond?

In principle, most distribution options would be great.  In execution, it remains to be seen. The comics industry is notorious for short term planning that fouls up the big picture moving forward. 

Still, it seems like the big question is going to be around general economic recovery - how many stores survive and how many of a store’s customers will still be employed with disposable incomes.  That’s what will dictate whether things change.  The DM is slow to embrace change.

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy year convergence with the film and television business.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.

Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies. 

Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (4 of 5)

Part IV

Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor & Phillip Vaughan

PV

The situation now seems to be changing on a day to day basis in the US, much like the Covid-19 crisis itself. It is hard to keep up! This new report out today fans the flames a bit:  

We are getting very mixed messages here, and the whole situation, let's be honest is a bit of a shambles. What it does look like is that DC is ready to make the break from Diamond, in  the long term. This article on Bleeding Cool also casts shade on the DC deal.

Obviously DC Comics want to keep the market moving, but is this the right strategy? I still think that digital distribution can paper over (no pun intended!) some of the cracks in the short term, but the publisher's show no movement on this. There is no evidence that readers would shun print forever if they were to access comics digitally for a few (hopefully!) months. The industry is again holding itself back, and is trying to please everyone, except it seems the consumer, which is odd. Readers will lose interest in titles if they are not regularly updated, and it does seem like a case of shooting yourself in the foot. Ultimately, if done right, physical and digital comics can co-exist. But in times of crisis, does the comic book industry not need to look at every option to survive? The current system lacks innovation, and certainly seems to exist mostly as a nostalgia market. Where are the new readers? Where is the blow back from the massive success of the film and TV franchises. I have often said, this is a one way street, mining comics for the best IP, but putting nothing back financially. It's a dangerous precedent, and once the big properties have been used up, what is left? Maybe a ‘pruning’ of the market is necessary to pull focus? I have lost track of some books which have multiple versions or titles, such as X-Men and even Spider-Man. What is a new reader entry point here? Where do you start?

WP

I strongly believe the new reader angle is a myth. Superhero comics deal in esoterica (in the main). Targeting the fan demographic is a double-edged sword (which is what happened in the 1970s): on the one hand, you have your faithful and loyal customers as a base. Great!  But then that fannish drive works to deter new readers from picking up a book. I’ve been reading comics all my life, and I’ve read my fair share of DC/ Marvel titles too. So when I heard that Jonathan Hickman was moving onto the X-Men books, I dove in. I bought the jump-on series (two of them), House of X, and Dawn of X. And I hold my hands up and admit: I struggled to understand fully what was going on. Conversely, we have The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing (which we mentioned earlier). Aside from a lead-in from Civil War II (which I didn’t follow entirely, but got the gist), it’s truly accessible. But the majority of the titles published by the big two demand a great deal—and as I said above, Douglas Wolk’s notion of the ‘super-reader’ is a case in point.  I agree with Phil that a market prune may not only be necessary, but a way to address the quality of product. Even readers that are die-in-the-wool fans complain about the glut, mainly because it hits their wallets and purses, but also because it just takes too much time and energy to keep up! So while The New 52 was a way to provide new readers with access points, most of which failed to do so in a clean way. They may have rebooted Superman, but they largely kept Batman’s continuity the same (albeit with the time frame contracted). It wasn’t long before DC started to prune the line, and release new number ones. It’s exhausting and mindless (or seems that way). So many titles languish below 30K. That’s not even breaking even in a lot of cases. It’s unsustainable. 

I don’t know the reasons why Dan Didio left DC, but he seemed to be the executive driver behind a lot of this (I could be wrong). However, with DC’s next regeneration in 2016, Rebirth, they decided to focus entirely on fans again, the new reader story being more of a myth, but one could certainly blame the books for that. Look what happened to Superman comics in 1986 when John Byrne was poached from Marvel and produced The Man of Steel! Sales soared to a million copies, spread across the Superman titles, and only started to lose momentum when Byrne departed in 1988. It is possible!

BREAKING NEWS.

Just received this in my email box

PV

Lots of interesting articles are appearing, almost hourly! This real-time discussion is very interesting. Saw this earlier.

Brian Hibbs is very vocal in all this, but understandably he has a bit of a bias in all this.

This feed has some very insightful updates: https://twitter.com/comichron

Earlier I saw a very interesting Twitter update from creator Erik Larsen

He argues:

His feed is fairly opinionated, and I don’t really agree with most of this, but it is interesting nonetheless. Some of this does remind me of my recent comic buying habits when we still had a physical store here in Dundee. I started to get way behind on reading the weekly releases from Marvel, DC, Image, IDW et al. The comics just piled up, some still unread years later. I decided that I would ‘wait for the trades’ in most instances. The benefits being, I could read the story arc in one go, I didn’t lose track of issues whereabouts (or storylines!), and the cost of a trade versus the weekly US comics (after conversion to GBP) was significantly lower (not sure what the price difference is in the US?). It no longer made sense to me to buy weekly releases, unless it was something really attention grabbing, or a first issue, or a book by one of my favorite creators. This cut my pull list down by a lot! The retailer still got my business, but just not on such a regular basis.

TA

It seems like we’re circling around a few of the same problems.

I probably should make an amendment to my description of the subscription situation in the US, in light of DC’s distribution effort being centered around how much of it is actually done.  Marvel does has subscriptions, but it’s not particularly emphasized… to the point they outsourced fulfillment to one of the larger comic shop chains that does retail.  That’s Midtown.  The other way people subscribe, and this is probably more common for single issue comics is by monthly mail order.

The difference between a monthly mail order and a “normal” subscription is that you fill out a form once a month for what comics you want… usually 2 or 3 months ahead of time (I experimented with one of those when I was in junior high or high school and the screwed up my orders too much.)  Some of them you can basically say “send me each issue of Batman.”  Some they want to to just fill out a form each month.  And of course, you never know when something’s going to ship late, etc., etc.

DCBS is probably the largest company that does this and has some of the deeper discounts.  Westfield Comics is another that comes to mind.  Midtown has a healthy business of mail order.  Mile High Comics, another one of the very largest shops, has one.  There are a lot of them out there. 

DCBS is definitely the most hated, and hate is the operative word if you look at retailer reactions to this, because they discount deeper than most.  Many comic retailers consider people opting for lower prices through mail order as an existential threat.  When the mail order services are able to operate normally (or close to it), but the shops are closed for walk-in traffic, it gets a little more serious.

Now, almost every store also has an in-store subscription.  Some people call it a pull list.  Some people call it a club.  But it’s usually a variation on “tell me what you want me to hold back for you and I’ll give you a discount.”  Typically, it’s a 10% discount, though it varies by store.  Mail order operations typically offer at least 35% (but postage will eat up some of that).  I used to get retailers bent out of shape when I’d say my hometown store would give me 20%-- before rounding off -- and everything had a bag… and I didn’t even need a pull list.  That’s above average.  Tim also sold his shop about six months ago, so he may be the calmest retailer in comics -- he doesn’t have to deal with this!

Now… the current problem with an in-store subscription is you now have to worry if your retailer is physically able to receive shipments (not everyone can) and if their cash flow is such that they can pay rent AND acquire new stock they may have to sit on for awhile.  And this is one of the real problems with new comics starting up before most of the country is out of quarantine.  Not everyone’s going to be able to acquire and hold those comics until they’re open.

So what percentage of the market has SOME form of subscription?  Probably somewhere in the 10-20% for “through the mail” subscription options.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard numbers for that.  In-store subscriptions?  I want to say it’s likely something like 30% industry-wide, but that’s going to vary a lot by stores.

On the topic of publishers selling directly to retailers, most of the ones who aren’t exclusive to Diamond do sell to retailers.  Marvel also tried to do that when they bought Heroes World and it was a full-on disaster.  Which is not to say it could never be done right, but DC and Marvel would need a larger scale setup than the independent publishers do.

With the question of how to factor in the aftermarket, I take that to mean the role of back issues in the comic shop world.  And to be completely honest, that topic is going to depend almost entirely on which retailer you’re talking to.  Most of the shops I’ve frequented as an adult haven’t really been back issue forward.  Some of them barely have them at all.

I hear two things about back issues from most of those shops.  First, the advent of the trade paperback collection has lowered the demand for back issues in the *individual* shop, sometimes to the point where the only thing you’re going to have much call for are “key issues.”  (First appearance, landmark storyline, etc.)

Second, having a proper back issue section takes a lot of floor space.  Shops in the cities are a lot less likely to have that kind of space.  You sometimes see larger back issue selections in rural settings.

So what seems to have happened is the back issue market has become a bit more of a specialty market.  It’s concentrated on larger stores, particularly ones with warehouse or storage space.  A lot of was done at conventions (beware the scope creep of a year of lost comic conventions).  A lot of it is done by mail order.  A lot of it is done by mail order.  Mile High Comics and Midtown comics are both well known for selling back issues off their websites and mail order catalog tradition goes back decades for this.

With new readers and accessibility, it’s not clear to me how much the publishers are looking for new readers.  Particularly Marvel.  What the general theme of business tends to be is along the lines of “We’ve got 100 readers.  We’re not going to get 150 readers.  Can we make those readers spend like 150 readers?”

Which, in practical terms, works something like “We’ve got 100 X-Men readers.  75 of them will buy two titles.  50 of them will buy 3 titles.  20 of them will buy 6 titles.  We better make 6 titles to fill the demand.”  That’s an oversimplification, but it’s a way to look at all the spinoff and crossover titles.  You’re extracting more cash from a static audience.  That, until you reach a certain level of saturation, another X-Men or Spider-Man or Batman title is going to sell more than starting a Dominic Fortune or Bulletman series (unless somebody can catch lightning in a bottle).

Would reducing the various lines of comics result in the surviving titles selling more?  Probably, if it was done right.  Would it result in more comics overall being sold?  Only if it brings in new blood or brings in lapsed fans who left in disgust over the diaspora of spinoff titles.  (Yes, comics publishers are a LOT more interested in courting old fans than making new ones.  Seems it’s easier.)

A reduced line could end up being more profitable for the retailers (fewer titles with larger sales = easier to manage your inventory), but less profitable for the publishers (fewer overall sales).  And that’s the sort of thing where you’re not likely to know which way it's going to break until its been released into the wild.

Also, if you want to go down that road, you’re wanting the publishers to have layoffs.  Less titles means a smaller staff and fewer freelancers.  Not all of which are going to be able to make enough money in indie comics.

The strange thing about the current system really is that it’s only ideal for particularly large stores whose overall sales numbers make it easier to absorb the risk with less popular titles or digital, where you don’t have inventory costs in the first place.  But changing it the way some people suggest could mean a downsizing.

We’re also in an era when nobody laughs at the notion that AT&T or Disney could decide it would be better ROI to license/outsource the comics.  Keep the IP.  Keep the merchandising.  Keep 3-5 licensing editors.  Take someone else’s money and a piece of the royalties.  Nobody knows how that would end up working, but it’s not a crazy notion, particularly when AT&T and Disney are having quarantine-related cash flow issues.

You ever notice how movies tend to drive more comics sales for self-contained works?  Watchmen sold like crazy when the movie was announced.  Hellboy and Sin City did well.  Batman did in the 80s, but not so much in the Nolan years.  Marvel and movies?  Let’s not go there.

The problem with the most obvious gateway to new readers isn’t just the overwhelming amount of continuity, it’s the new reader figuring out where to start.  “Hey, that Iron Man movie was cool.  I should get an Iron Man comic.  But… why are there 25 different Iron Man books and five of them say “volume 1?  Never mind.”  And it’s worse with X-Men.

Watchmen used to be just the one volume.  Hellboy and Sin City were clearly marked series of modest length.  A superhero?  You better hope the bookstore has somebody well versed in the character and what they’re carrying.  Comic stores DO win hands down for curation, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to properly capitalize on films and television.  (And we’ll ignore the question of how many shops a non-collector is afraid to enter.  Hey, it’s a lot  better than it was in the ‘80s.)

It sounds like most of the roundtable has moved over to reading collected editions (which is sure to make a few retailers angry with us).  There are a few more “benefits” to reading the tpbs.  Heidi MacDonald, my longtime editor at Publishers Weekly and The Beat, came up with the Satisfying Chunk theory.  Which is to say, a comic should have enough substance to it to please you.  Too many recent comics don’t really hold up as an individual unit.  They take 5 minutes to read and it’s not really what you’d call a complete chapter.

Write it off to the “decompressed storytelling” trend.  Blame it on people writing for the tpbs.  It just doesn’t always work and I wonder if everyone from editorial on down takes the individual comic seriously enough as a story unit.

That and you’re not waiting for the final late issue if you only read the collections.  Between decompression and the odd late issue, I’ve only read Warren Ellis in the tpbs since the aughts.  It just works out better for me.

So the big takeaway is that everyone loves Immortal Hulk?

Incidentally, while the debate over whether to have ANY digital rages on, it appears that DC met my proposal halfway:

https://www.comicsbeat.com/dc-expands-their-digital-first-program-with-reprints-from-dc-giants/

They’re releasing the original content from their Walmart 100 Page Giants as digital firsts.  Which is to say they’re going to have new Superman and Batman comics (and Mark Russell on Swamp Thing), but it’s not technically starting up new titles like I’d been thinking might be a good compromise.  On the other hand, most retailers don’t really pay much attention to the Walmart books and most of them don’t sell particularly well in the Direct Market, so perhaps its almost as good as interim material?  Certainly, it was material they already had in the can and could repurpose quickly.

WP

So, what do we think may be a potential balm for the industry going forward? Can it continue with the DM and Diamond, or does it need some surgery? 

PV

Possible Solutions: Severe surgery needed!

Not sure how feasible this is, but the use of the postal system much like our subscription model seems like it is working here in the U.K., but I imagine logistics are more complicated in the US. Could a print on demand option be added to digital purchases? This would mean that no surplus print runs and over stock would exist. Plenty of printers have kept running during the crisis, so this could work. These print editions could be deluxe editions, taking advantage of techniques and processes that can only be utilised in high end printing, such as special finishes and paper stock, making these editions more collectible.

For digital I think we need a more accessible and usable interface, and no barriers to payment (it is very convoluted to actually buy comics through the Comixology app due to them not wanting to give Apple their 30% cut!). The guided view in Comixology is not very popular among traditional comics readers. Madefire have made interesting innovations in this area, but the danger is that comics become ‘bad’ animation sequences or worse still sit in between comics and animation, a deadly hybrid that alienates both audiences. The ‘timeline’ and pacing of the comic read has to be in the control of the reader. Also, extra bells and whistles, such as sound effects and transitions can be distracting, and actually take you out of the story.

For all their critics, music providers such as iTunes/Apple Music and Spotify (with their subscription format) have cornered the market and they have managed to monetise it as well. New music audiences access music this way. There was plenty of resistance to this model from music artists at first but this seems to have settled down. Maybe print comics will become like vinyl records, and have a huge comeback as a collectible, but niche market. We need to look for the new mainstream if comics as a whole are to survive. Some kids don’t even realise their favourite Marvel film is based on a comic book!

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy year convergence with the film and television business.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.

Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies. 

Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (3 of 5)

Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor & Phillip Vaughan

Part III

TA

Brian Azzarello had an infamous quote, probably a year or two prior to that about the NY Times List.  It was something to the effect that the top DC releases of the week usually made that list, so he didn’t really see what the big deal about being on it was.  That might have been when they still broke out the lists into more categories, though.

The Times cancelled the comics bestseller lists for a while and now they only report monthly, which might negate some of the DM material that spikes on its week of release and then slows way down.  The current list (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/) has no DM-centric titles on it.  Mainstream publisher YA and manga only.

Still, the lack of any DM-centric title shows some potential disconnect with the mass audience, regardless of how popular Raina is.

Speaking of “is it in continuity or not,” there’s always the old Grant Morrison/Mark Waid Hypertime concept that only sporadically got used.

Sometimes the Elseworlds are popular enough to spawn sequels.  Dark Knight, Gotham by Gaslight, Superman & Batman: Generations, The Nail, Earth X and the Marvel “Noir” titles fall into that category.

Kingdom Come, that was a little messy how they continued it on and off in various ways.  DC really didn’t even promote it heavily when Alex Ross did a follow up (not really a sequel) in Justice Society.  Most people only remember the original.

In a similar vein to Henry’s analysis, I used to break out the top creator owned indie DM sales (as opposed to licensed comics) when I analyzed the month Diamond estimates for The Beat.  Even in the Direct Market, once you get past DC and Marvel, the licensed material often sells better than the original creations.  If you take Image out of the equation, it’s pretty stark.

And the apple cart has been upset.  DC has enlisted two “new” distributors to handle East and West Coast distribution.  Shipping for April 27th.

Better, folks have been snooping around and it appears that the two “distributors” may really be a rebranded Midtown Comics for the East Coast and Discount Comic Book Service for the West Coast.  (And “Lunar” that services the West Coast absolutely has a 260 area code, which suggests the Fort Wayne, Indiana region, so it seems likely.)

So the first question retailer of a certain age will be asking themselves is “how is this not going to turn into a fiasco like Heroes World.”  Back in the 1990s, Marvel decided to do a vertical integration so they could be their own distributor.  They bought a small-ish East Coast distributor called Heroes World and… it was a mess.  Heroes World did not have the infrastructure to handle national distribution for Marvel.  At all.  Orders were screwed up all over the place.  Comics did not get to the right places at the right time to suit anyone. 

Plus, having Marvel pulled from their catalogs was the straw the broke the camel’s back for the old system where the Direct Market had multiple, often regional distributors.  Capital City and Diamond emerged as the two distributors left standing.  Diamond secured an exclusive from DC.  Capital City was trying to arrange an exclusive with Image, which sold much better back then.  Image opted to go exclusive with Diamond and Capital City shut down.  There wasn’t enough volume without DC, Image or Marvel.  That’s how Diamond came to rule the distribution space.

So as I’m typing this, the retailers of a certain age are not having a very good reaction.

So the first question becomes whether this is a temporary distribution arrangement?  As of right now, Diamond does still appear to be intending to reopen in Mid-May.  So perhaps this is only for a few weeks? 

Are other publishers who will try to use these “alternate” distributors and do they have have capacity for that before things break?

This is wild!

Now, the rationale here is likely that Midtown and DCBS are both top 10 retailers.  Possibly top 5.  They’re also some of the largest mail order operations out there (Midtown does subscription fulfillment for Marvel), so there will be some familiarity with high volume shipping.  Quite this high a volume?  Well, I guess we’re going to find out.

So we’ve now entered the scenario where retailers have to figure out how many shelf copies they can afford to order when they’re not open for walk-in business or not even open at all.  The can of worms is opening.

And now just in, because the information rollout wasn’t particularly complete, Batman is being held back until June, per its writer:

James Tynion IV

@JamesTheFourth

Just got the go ahead to let all of you know that we're holding BATMAN #92 back for a June release, so we can make sure to get it to as many of you as possible on its release day. I am very, very excited for you all to read it! #PunchlineIsComing

This could blunt the worst of the potential speculator price gouging, depending on how many retailers are willing and able to receive product in June.  Still, it just raises more questions about what title can wait for a month and which can’t.

We’re definitely picking an interesting time to be doing a roundtable.

WP

This just in! From Newsarama

Saturday afternoon DC issued a letter to the Direct Market retail community addressing its initial plans to deal with effects the coronavirus crisis has had distribution in the comic industry.

Here is the full text of the letter:

To Direct Market Retailers:

First, the entire team here at DC hopes that you, your family and your employees are staying safe and healthy during this very tough and precarious time. We know that you have been waiting for DC to comment on the state-of-affairs and to address any measures we will take to help our community lighten the burden of the disruption to our business, and we’ve been working hard on a long-term, solution-focused plan. Here is how we will help:

Periodicals and books with in-store dates between March 18, 2020 and June 24, 2020 will be fully returnable. We’ll even provide credit for your separate return shipping of these items only.

Additionally, because we anticipate that continued disruption to business operations will create regional volatility, DC is exploring a multi-distributor model to provide us with the flexibility needed during this crisis to get new content to our readers on an ongoing basis. In the short-term, we continue to engage in active conversations with Diamond to help us solve the distribution issues that have arisen and hope to get new product to stores that want or need it as soon as possible. We will provide additional information about how we’ll make that happen in the coming days.

Thanks for your patience with us. DC will continue to monitor the situation, continue to speak with you directly, and continue to support you through the days ahead. You are the lifeblood of this industry.

All best,

The DC Team  

TA

Wow.  DC sends that letter out the next day instead of with the initial announcement?  That’s astounding.  I suppose they’re in a rush trying to get things set up so that the 4/27 books can come get shipped. 

Incidentally, here’s a confirmation that Midtown and DCBS are effectively the distributors: https://www.newsarama.com/49873-inside-dc-s-new-print-distribution-pla-and-the-new-distributors-involved.html

It’s probably best to break this thing down by publisher / retailer / reader perspectives so we can see the dynamics.

This is really more about precisely how DC has implemented a plan than the plan itself.

DC has clearly been eyeing a move like this for some time.  We know this because it turns out they’re no longer exclusive with Diamond.  I gather that there were a few rumors about this awhile back, but nobody took them seriously because something that big would generally come with a little more fanfare.

In my lead-in piece, I spoke to the problem of comics distribution being a single point of failure, something I’ve been writing about since the early aughts.  Someone took that single point of failure seriously and apparently plans were being laid to address it.

Done properly, that could be a good thing for industry as a whole.  This appears to be arranged hastily, but the intentions could be better than the retailers are giving them credit for.

What we don’t know is whether Midtown and DCBS were always conceived of as the initial alternate distribution partners or not.  The choice of those two businesses is key to how incredibly poorly the retailers have reacted to the announcement.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that DC was still exploring options and wargaming new distribution options when the COVID-19 quarantines dropped.  We know that they did not want to stop shipping books (and would need to switch printers to do so).  When Diamond shut their warehouses, if DC wanted to continue shipping books, they needed to find that new alternate distributor NOW. 

Diamond also suspended vendor payments and then went on a payment plan.  If there’s a chance that your (at the moment) sole vendor for your primary product line might not be able to pay you, of course you start looking into alternatives.  If Diamond goes under, DC is out a lot of money and as is already obvious, replacing Diamond’s distribution network isn’t easily done in a week.

The rumor mill suggests they may have talked to their bookstore distributor.  If they did, not enough came of it and it seems like a potential bad fit.  Book distributors would need to be retrained to be gentle enough while packing single issues for those to arrive at stores in mint condition.

While the retailers whose stores have been shut down during quarantine may still be worried about their customers breaking their weekly shopping habit, there’s not always much they can do about it.  As a publisher, DC is correct to be concerned about that now.  The desire for them to get customers back in the habit before it’s broken is real.  The only problem with that desire is whether it causes further chaos in the market, but DC is clearly trying to restore the ability to the reader to maintain the weekly buying habit and make it less likely they’re gone long enough to fall out of the hobby.  At some point, everyone needs to be concerned about that contingency.

Whatever the interim steps, they ended up going to two of the largest mail order operations.  And as of Friday, we can pretty safely call them the largest mail order operators in comics.  Midtown has processed postal subscriptions for Marvel for a few years now.  While you have to wonder how they’re going to handle the increase in volume, this is absolutely not new to them.  Discount Comic Book Service is a mail order subscription service.  Packing and shipping comics is what they do and they’re one of the largest accounts in the distribution chain.  We’ll get to the baggage they carry with the retail community in a bit, but if you need comics shipped in a week or two, they are a logical choice.

Jim Lee, the current DC publisher, has been around long enough to remember the Heroes World fiasco and perhaps that’s part of why this is being split to Midtown handling the East Coast and DCBS handling the West Coast.  This is going to be a significant increase in volume and its best to spread that around.  It also builds in some redundancy.  If one distributor can’t handle their load, maybe some of that load can be shifted to the other.

Pragmatically, the load depends on how many retailers consent to order from these new distributors, but if many abstain, that actually helps the logistics and at least two of your largest accounts have their books.  At a very cynical level, it’s true that having DCBS and Midtown up and running and taking new material is a consolation prize at the very least, though one hopes that isn’t the primary motive.

They’ve offered returnability and even free shipping on the returns for what they currently expect the quarantine and/or immediate aftermath to be.  If they’re determined to be shipping, that’s the most they can offer if we take the “just not shipping” option off the table, which is a different discussion.

They’ve further paused some of the larger titles like Batman and Superman until June, so they’re holding back for when more stores are open for that.  That’s still a concession of sorts.

From DC’s perspective, they’re trying to do the right thing.  How much you agree with that is another matter entirely, but you can see some effort.

The questions in my mind:

DCBS is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That’s something like a 5 hour drive EAST of the Mississippi.  Weird place to service the West Coast.  If I were picking a retailer with a large mail order operation to service the West Coast, I’d have been talking to Mile High Comics in the Denver region.  Shorter shipping.  Did they approach Mile High?  I have no idea.  Fort Wayne for the West Coast is just odd, however you slice it.

Is this a long term play or just placeholders for the duration of quarantine?  Right now, Diamond is hoping to reopen in mid-May.  Is that mid-May day because DC forced their hand with this alternate distribution play?  Does DC expect Diamond will be unable to reopen until June or later.  It seems like if this isn’t a long term play, they’re risking years of ill will from the retail community for three weeks of shipping what’s mostly the lower sales tier of their lineup.

Are the new “distributor” names new entities that DC has a percentage of ownership in?  Which is to say, is this an attempt at building out a vertical integration.  You’d want to be very careful about that, since that will bring up bad memories of Heroes World for the retailers even more strongly than this already is.

Diamond already invited questions about their cash flow when they suspended vendor payments.  How much cash will this peel away from Diamond, both short term and long term?  Is Diamond fragile enough to sustain structural damage from this?

Retailer:

Wow, but the majority of retailers on social media were livid.  It’s important to remember that the comic book retailer community is a group of small business owners who are in this line of work because of their love of the medium.  They take things personally, both as an assault on their livelihood and as an assault on comics itself.  In their situation, they have a lot of valid complaints.  Here’s some of the complaints I’ve observed.

●     As I was saying earlier, at first blush this arrangement reeks of Marvel buying the Heroes World distributor.  Heroes World couldn’t handle the increased volume and far too many shops had their orders absolutely mangled.  It was so bad, some shops just stopped ordering Marvel.  Those retailers will need to see this working to believe it and, frankly, because of the rest of the baggage they still may not care.

●     An awful lot of stores are closed and are having trouble paying their rent.  They absolutely do not want to be spending money on books they can’t sell for an unknown amount of time.  The stores that are open for “curbside pickup” seem tepid about this, at best.  They don’t know how frequently they’re really going to be getting visits from customers during lockdown.  Nobody knows how quickly walk-in customers will return and how many won’t.  The majority of stores closed for walk-in business absolutely do not want stores in other regions being able to sell new comics while they can’t.  That’s an uneven playing field.

●     A lot of stores are having trouble with speculators swooping in and buying up hot books, so the regular walk-in customers can’t get them, and then flipping them for outrageous prices on eBay.  This is setting up a potential speculator gold rush and we’re prime for a speculator crash.  Nobody wins in a crash.

●     Retailers do not want to buy books from competitors.  They do not want competitors having their business data or ordering data.  While this hasn’t been a thing lately, back when there were four times as many comic shops in the Heroes World era of retailing, you’d see unscrupulous retailers pretend to want to buy a rival store, just to get a look at which comics were selling for them, and then open a competing store in the same neighborhood with knowledge of what local tastes were.  That really happened.  Retailers have long memories.  Realistically, this is more of a valid concern for stores in perhaps a 60 mile radius of New York City, where Midtown operates several branches, but it makes people deeply uncomfortable to be buying from competitors.

●     DCBS runs a heavily discounted mail order subscription service.  They’ll typically let you pre-order new comics at 35%-40% off with some items at 50%.  It’s your classic low margin/high volume operation.  Remember what I was saying about how much retailers hate it when publishers offer subscriptions at a discount?  DCBS is a fellow retailer offering *everything* at a discount.  Many stores view them as an existential threat to steal their customer.  You see retailers suggest that DCBS should not be allowed to offer those discounts.  It is a deep and burning hatred and you’d have to be either totally unfamiliar with the retailer community or blind not to see this coming.

Asking them to use DCBS as a distributor?  A significant number of retailers find that worse than just insulting.  Plus, if DCBS is the distributor that has the new comics while the local shop is closed, they’re an even bigger threat to steal customers.

It’s fairly common for a retailer to have their order for a random comic “shorted,” or have a smaller number of copies arrived than ordered.  When a comic is shorted from DCBS, some of these retailers will be considering the possibility the DCBS shorted them so they could sell copies to their own (DCBS) customers.  It may not be the case, but the thought will occur to them.

None of the retailers are happy about Midtown being a distributor.  They have similar complaints about Midtown, but at least Midtown has a string of successful brick & mortar locations and that means something in the retail community. 

Which is to say, the retailers view this as a very serious conflict of interest that’s piled on top of some pre-existing baggage.  A second layer of channel conflict.

Wait until the retailers realize how much extra publicity DCBS is getting out of this...

●     The retailers were put off that the roll out didn’t tell them up front what their terms were going to be.  This part isn’t really fair.  If you email your terms of service, discount schedule and shipping costs to all the retailers, it’ll be on a news site within 15 minutes for all to see.  And with retailers this annoyed, I expect we’ll see terms leaked within the week.  (Note: I wonder if there’s extra shipping costs with the West Coast hub being in the NE corner of Indiana?  If so, that’s a legit beef.)

●     Retailers were scoffing at how weak the first week’s offering of new books is.  There’s a real question as to who’d make a special trip during quarantine for that lineup.

●     They’re being given a whole 4 days’ notice to get an account set up and their orders in.

●     Retailers are concerned that this is a direct attack on Diamond.  Really, with the limited amount of information we’ve been given, there’s no reason to think it isn’t.  Diamond is the primary distributor for the Direct Market.  DC is the #2 publisher and there’s a big gap between DC and #3.  If Diamond goes under, comic stores can not live on DC alone.  Some of them might be able to live without DC, though and the way this was rolled out seems to be making some of the retailers approach it as they’ve been offered a choice.  It likely wasn’t intended as such, but one doesn’t always control how the message is interpreted.

●     The cynical view that this was just a way to ensure the top mail order companies continued operations has absolutely been taken by some.  They aren’t completely wrong, though one hopes that’s an overstated concern.

●     Finally, there’s a sentiment of bewilderment that some bare bones distributor website were set up under new names.  It took perhaps less than an hour for the retailer community to discover and it came off as a feeble attempt to conceal the participants, which only added to the animosity over channel conflicts.

We’ll have to wait and see how many retailers choose to participate in this.  Not rewarding perceived bad behavior on DC’s part has been discussed.

Readers:

The gordian knot of trying to have retail during a national quarantine has obscured the role of the customer in the retail chain.

It is not clear to anyone what percentage of comics readers have lost their jobs and aren’t currently able to purchase comics, even if they’re available.  I would further suspect that those numbers are going to be higher in places where the comic stores are in quarantine.  That’s fairly intuitive.  It isn’t clear how quickly the folks who’ve been laid off due to the virus will be employed again and able to resume their comics purchases or who will fall out entirely.  These are some of the major variables.

We also don’t know whether DC’s alternate distribution plan means that digital comics are about to return.  As I type this, the single issues slated for the week of April 27th are not scheduled on Comixology, but that’s pretty quickly changed.

These are the likely user cases that jump out at me and this is what DC _and_ the retail community need to be thinking about.

●     Can still afford to buy comics and reads them in book form.

Print or digital, these readers can go about their business normally or close to normally.  There should be no change in procedure for digital tpb/graphic novel readers.  Almost all the book trade material is proceeding normally.  Readers of print books might need to switch where they’re buying their books if their local comic shop or bookstore (yes, some of these readers go to bookstores instead of comic shops for this format) is completely closed down, but so far the book trade is moving along slowly.  You’re not worried about the reading habit changing nearly as much here.  The outliers here will be publishers that have Diamond for bookstore distribution.  If they don’t have copies sitting in the Ingram (book distributor) warehouse, they’re going to be shut down for a while.

●     Can afford to buy comics and buys new single issues digitally.

If the issues come out, this crowd can continue as though nothing has changed.  While there are no (well, perhaps a few from smaller players) new issues coming out, you hope these folks are sampling some of the ubiquitous back issue sales or getting new digital tpbs, because otherwise you’re risking them breaking the habit and needing to *remember* to come back and check for new comics.

●     Can afford to buy comics and buys new single issues in print.

OK, this is going to get complicated.

●     If there are new comics and there store is open or they’re on a pull-list and their store has curb-side pickup and their store is ordering new issues while they’re closed for walk-in business, then the normal shopping habit should be intact -- as long as they’re comfortable making trips to the store in the current health climate. Let’s not just automatically assume people want to leave the house.

●     If there are new comics and their local shop isn’t getting them for whatever reason or if they don’t want to leave the house, this is when choices start up.  Does this reader:

○     Wait for their store to open (and the health situation to improve), hope the store will have everything that came out while it was closed and drop a big pile of cash to catch up

○     Look for a mail order option.  (Which folks who aren’t comfortable making a lot trips outside the house might automatically gravitate to.  This is only going to further upset retailers with DCBS being a distributor.)

○     Wait it out and switch to book format.  Now, this is a tricky thing.  The retailers anecdotally tell me that once somebody switches to the book format, they don’t usually go back.  In the case of DC, they have a delay of a few months before the collected edition comes out, so it’s not a simple matter of “I’ll get the trade paperback of what I missed and then switch back.”  You’ll still be behind.

○     Drop out because the speculators have jacked up the prices on single issues with lower print runs during quarantine.

○     Drop out because it’s just too hard to get your comics in print and you fall out of the habit.

●     Can’t afford to buy new comics right now and buys comics in a print book format.

As long as the books stay in print, they either start buying again when they can afford to or they drop out of comics.  If they come back, there’s a question of whether they’re catching up or just picking up where things are.  There’s always a risk, should they be fans of heavy continuity series that they feel they get too far behind to catch up or they might drop out of a couple titles, but let’s face it -- it’s logistically easier tracking down two volumes of a book series than 12 single issues.

●     Can’t afford to buy new comics right now and buys comics in a single issue format.

And here’s what I’d postulate is the biggest at risk customer.

○     Let’s say they have an in-store/subscription or pullbox.  How long is their local shop going to continue to pull issues for them?  Are they racking up credit card debt from their in-store subscription?

○     If they’re no longer on a pull list or were kicked off one for non-payment, how many back issues are they going to need to catch up on?  Can they afford all that?  Are they going to get priced gouged on back issues because of short print runs and speculator activity during quarantine?  Is catching up even affordable after they’ve resumed their job or found a new one?

○     Is it going to be necessary to switch to digital or book format because of back issue availability?

○     Is it too much work to get caught back up and they drop out?

○     Do they drop out simply from being out of the habit too long?

So if we step back and look at the system as a whole, your big risk management bullets are:

●     Attempting to keep comics available to the customers who can currently afford them in the format they normally buy them and minimize any changes to their regular buying habit.  The retailers really don’t have much control on this and it potentially creates a conflict of interest between the publishers and stores that have to be closed for awhile.

●     Retailers are going to be very concerned about unclaimed in-store subscriptions and pull lists.  That’s a normal concern, but the circumstances make it goofier here, particularly if they’re trying to buy comics too fill those pull lists without a way for customer to come in and pick them up.

●     Everyone needs to be concerned about back issue availability when people can’t walk in and shop.  Printing to order when finances of retailers dictate small or no orders is not a good long term strategy.

●     The more publishers that start releasing early, the bigger the risks.

And you fellows in the UK are trying to tell me it’s easier to just pick up 2000 A.D. while you’re at the grocer?  PSHAW!

But that’s what the DC alternate distribution system looks like to me.  Now we wait and see if anyone else bites on one.  Marvel does have a relationship with Midtown and very deliberately has used a standalone catalog (separate from the Diamond catalog) for their solicitations… 

BP

Phil and I said that British Comics are readily available at retailers as they’re not part of the Direct Market, but in the main, we receive our comics as regularly as ever because we are subscribers, and the US publishers don’t have such a service. The ‘big two’ here are DC Thompson and Rebellion, and they’ve been largely unaffected by the pandemic when it comes to distribution. And for 2000AD, The Beano, The Phoenix, and a whole armada of children’s comics, these are weekly releases, not monthly. Judge Dredd: The Megazine is a monthly anthology comic—still shipping and delivering. The war comic Commando publishes eight issues per month (four bi-weekly)—still shipping and delivering. If these titles were part of the Direct Market, they’d be in the same situation, without a doubt. So is the problem not the Direct Market, and by extension, the naked fact that US comics largely have one outlet, the comics specialty stores? What might have happened if, as Chuck Dixon argued recently, they hadn’t thrown the baby out with the bath-water by circumnavigating the news-stands to a large extent? One of the problems for the US is more than Diamond’s monopoly—it’s that any distribution system that does not include the specialty retailers is doomed, hence the back-pedalling about releasing comics digitally during the pandemic. Such a move would by-pass the specialty stores entirely, signifying that the relationship between production, distribution, and circulation are so tightly knitted that the market is more or less paralyzed. Go digital not only cuts out Diamond, but would have disastrous consequences for retailers, and the publishers understand that without a network of retailers to ship their lines to, then post-pandemic, the landscape would be a wasteland for floppies. So I’d argue that the current model in the US is exacerbating the current problem. If comics are to have any future at all, then some serious remodelling is required both right now, and after the pandemic. For all intents and purposes, It could be a good thing, but in my experience, all parties will want to maintain hold on their power (if we can call it power given the state of the industry overall).

Another aspect is related to quantity. This is not a new insight, but a broader discursive universe that has been criticized since at least the 1980s. Why did Marvel have such a tightly knit continuity in the 1960s and 70? They produced between 12 and 15 books maximum. But in the combat for market-share, both the big two kept pushing their lines higher and higher (and increasing the price count along the way). Between 1962 and 1961, the price of a comic remained constant at 10 cents, but from 1962 to 1981, the price increased by 500 percent (according to Bradford Wright). In today’s market, the prices have mushroomed even further. We have had $2.99 and $3.99 comics for some time, but recently, some issue number ones have been priced at $4.99, $5.99, with some at $7.99 and $9.99. Alan Moore argued in the early 1980s that publishers should focus on 15 books per month, his idea being that sales will improve considerably if managed more cohesively, with a focus on quality. I’ve heard the same from independent retailers. Imagine a line of books created by the very best artists and writers, with an editorial team that could have proper quality control, books that don’t crossover so regularly, don’t push readers to purchase tie-ins that hardly tie-in, don’t require an advanced degree in quantum mechanics to fully understand broader continuity esoterica. One of the reasons I think The Immortal Hulk is a great series is that it largely exists without the need to tie-in, crossover, and eventize. I understand that fans enjoy tracking and charting continuity etc., but there’s no need to frustrate that hobby by trimming the line. How many books sell in the lower ranges in the pre-COVID world? How many books would DC and Marvel sell if the likes of Brian Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Scott Snyder, Grant Morrison, Gail Simone, G. Willow Wilson, Tom King etc. weren’t buried by an armada of pap? I don’t mean to disrespect all other creators—they all have talent—but imagine a world where there isn’t a heady rush to publish in excess of 50 books a month (maybe more) per company. I’ve heard the quality/ quantity issue raised so many times by fans and retailers that it’s worth thinking about. I’m sure the big two will argue that they need all those books to at least break even, with the top-selling 80K-100K brining in most of the profits (and those books are fewer and further between than ever before), but the point is that readers would perhaps be able to afford to stay in tune with the line if there was less of them, and such a manoeuvre may attract older fans back to the fold if the quality was there. The situation is one of the reasons why I bowed out from the weekly grind, and I’ve heard similar accounts from others in volume. 

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy year convergence with the film and television business.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.

Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies. 

Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (2 of 5)

Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor & Phillip Vaughan

SK

What strikes me most about Todd's description is how familiar so many of these problems are. A glut of titles, many with very low sales, limited shelf space, the big publishers sacrificing long term strategy to maintain short term market share, and the intransigence and rigidity of an industry ruled by a duopoly in production and a monopoly in distribution. These are decades-old struggles within comic book publishing, compounded by the big problem you note, the one that only gets worse over time: how small the community is.  And of course, you see all of this reflected in the content, as Billy explains here so well--the creative output over the last decade shows all the cracks underlying the business side.

Even so, I don't think comic books are about to disappear. The fact that publishing at DC and Marvel have yielded unimpressive returns since the 1970s, and have held on nonetheless, suggests that the value of this business to media conglomerates is in fact as R&D, as opposed to the bottom line. Right now, that's a good thing for the big guys--it means they may be allowed to operate at a loss this next year. Independent comic shops won't have the same flexibility unfortunately. But the fact that graphic novel sales at Scholastic book fares were booming (before Covid-19), and that indie comics continue to be a vibrant and influential source of creativity in contemporary culture suggests that innovation on the fringes of this medium, both in content and business strategy, remains possible.

Also, people are not going to stop writing or reading comic books any time soon. Media forms of any kind rarely perish (video did not in fact kill the radio star). That said, I think there is a possibility that the business model could drastically change, that consumer and buying practices could transform, that big companies or even whole sectors of the industry could die off. All of these things have in fact happened simultaneously before, in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. And only the first time did a "crisis" precipitate the transformation (although, as I've argued, the 1954 crisis was more flash than substance, and really only facilitated changes that were likely coming anyway). With an actual crisis this time around, we're in somewhat new territory.

TA

This time could be a little different in terms of format.  I have no doubts that book and digital formats are sticking around.  How prominent the single issue remains may depend on how the Direct Market retailers fare during the quarantine(s).  Archie is the only publisher with what I’d consider a real newsstand channel left.  You see very few single issues at bookstores anymore.

At a certain point, you could reach a threshold through a combination of closed retail outlets and readers shifting formats during quarantine(s) that the printed single issue doesn’t make sense any more.  Or perhaps the number of retail outlets shrinks so that fewer print single issues make sense and the smaller stuff goes to digital-first and then a collected edition in print.  The digital first to print has been done a bit over the last few years for titles that weren’t finding their place in the DM.

Now, the numbers being thrown around from when Diamond’s Marvel orders for all their accounts leaked, it sure looks like if the _bottom_ 20% of the market went under, that might not even register as a speed bump.  There are a lot of tiny accounts out there.  If the mid-list of Diamond accounts takes a hit or the indie friendly stores take a hit, things could get serious in a hurry.

It really all depends how the retail sector can weather the storm and it’s far too early to know.  For that matter, we probably need to get past the fall and potential second wave of COVID-19 before we can be sure of anything.  Right now, we aren’t even sure how long the coasts will be under quarantine or how many customers will be allowed in a store when reopening is possible.

WP

Here’s a few comments from readers, which indicate that they’re not a homogenous audience, but have different thoughts and criticisms. Might be worth responding to what they’re saying (and I know this isn’t methodologically rigorous in academic terms, but it would be productive to include readers to some degree. I’ve not included names. As a discourse, I find it fascinating (maybe that’s just me). Readers are clearly tuned into the situation, although they bring different perspectives.

TA

Well, one could go cynical and point out that the fellow rattled off 17 comics he thought were well done… out of ~400 new releases each month and comment on the batting average there.  And that’s what your local retailer was complaining about with too many titles and not enough quality.  And I’d agree that Immortal Hulk is one of the best things out there.  More amazingly, Immortal Hulk is one of Marvel’s best selling ongoing titles.  Some of it grew out of speculator activity, but anytime a legitimately excellent title sells well, that’s a victory for the industry.

Now here’s an interesting phrase that’s a bit reductionist, but cuts to the heart of the matter:

I think it’s more than fair to say YA graphic novels have never been healthier and more profitable.  Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey are more popular than anything the Direct Market is putting out and they’re primarily sold in bookstores and school book fairs. 

The Scholastic Book Fair is probably something no one has heard about outside of the U.S.  It comes in a couple flavors. Scholastic is a publisher that sells books in schools, and not just their own titles.  If it’s a larger school, they’ll show up in the gym and have the books right there.  When I was a kid, and I’d assume this still applies to smaller schools, my grade school had something like 25 kids per grade, so we’d get something like an 4-8 page catalog and the books would get shipped to the school.

Scholastic moves huge numbers and they’re invisible to everywhere book sales are tracked.  It’s not on the Diamond charts.  It’s not on Bookscan’s charts.  I’ve been told a popular book on the Scholastic circuit can easily move over 100,000 copies.  And they do comics.  Raina and Dav are a couple of the most popular creators, but Marvel had a run of popularity there with things like Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl.  Things that weren’t exactly setting the Direct Market on fire, but did well in other markets.

It’s also worth noting I’ve heard many retailers complain that they have trouble ordering these mainstream-published YA graphic novels through Diamond and some aren’t even listed.  A sizable number of retailers, if not most, who do a strong business in YA graphic novels order them through bookstore distributors, so those numbers may well be invisible to most of the published sales trackers, as well.

The reason that reader quote is reductionist is that the Direct Market is so thoroughly intertwined with the “Superhero Industrial Complex.” (A term I’ve heard a few times over the last couple years.)  Let me try to tease out the ways how this functionally works.  Unfortunately, it’s got convoluted over the years.

So the first thing we need to put out there is that for the majority of Direct Market comic shops, DC and Marvel pay the bills.  The number of shops that heavily stock independent comics traditionally was around 250.  I suspect it’s krept up a little higher in the last few years as more shops have tried to diversify, so let’s call it 250-350 shops.  The number of Diamond accounts is a bit over 2500 (though that includes some mail order operations, stores that really are convention booths and likely a few fans banded together to form buying clubs have snuck in), but let’s use that as a round number.  It’s hard for an independent comic to sell over 10,000 copies of an issue these days.  That’s averaging 4 copies per store if they were selling evenly across the market.  That’s not the case, but it’s a good illustration about indie comics are going to be pre-order only at most stores. 

That’s how heavily the Direct Market is the DC and Marvel show.  If DC or Marvel take another sales dip, stores are going to close.  Full stop and irregardless of the current COVID-19 situation.  Two questions arise: are any of those golden 250-350 indy friendly shops going to take enough of a hit to close and can some of those sales be transferred over to the bookstores or digital.

Here’s one of the odd things about comics: the common wisdom, and I want to say one of the publishers might have done a study on this at some point, is that when a comic shop closes, a big chunk of the readers just drop out of comics.  Either they’re in an area where there’s not another shop they can get to easily or they can’t find another one they like.  The readers switching venues in the DM is not a given and for indies, the odds are smaller of finding a comparable replacement store unless they’re fortunate to live in the right city.

Unfortunately, the way we usually see the Bookscan data on graphic novel sales is the annual Brian Hibbs column and that column has been delayed as he’s been dealing with mail order while his store is closed due to the shelter in place orders.  I haven’t gotten a good look at the 2019 Bookscan numbers, but my impression from the snippets I’ve seen is that 2019 wasn’t great year for DM centric comics in the bookstore market, unless they were having outsized sales in the independent bookstores that bookscan doesn’t track.

The trend has been that even indie DM comics have their book editions sell better in the DM than in the bookstore markets.  If you give a retailer the opportunity to comment on something like Saga breaking through in the bookstore market, odds are the retailer will tell you that such a breakout hit was only possible because of the word of mouth being spread about because of the single issues.  That’s practically a political talking point with retailers.  It’s also a hypothesis.  I don’t think we’ve seen this tested with DM material and there’s an open question whether independent publishers have the marketing resources to completely launch original graphic novels in the bookstore market without buzz from the single issues.  Maybe they do and maybe they don’t.

If the Superhero Industrial Complex burned down and those indie friendly shops stuck around?  Sure, there would be a minor sales decrease for the indie publishers, but it could well be business as usual.  I’m just not sure that you can completely separate the DM from capes.  It would be a healthier market if you could.

Why is the Superhero Industrial Complex in turmoil?  Let’s look past the cash grab motives for this and look at the editorial content: too much of the material is inaccessible.  Much of the superhero output is “the story of the universe,” not “the story of this character in this title.”  Too much time is spent setting up crossover “Events” and then a block of stories will have to tie into that Event.  It frequently screws up the flow of the title and Events popping up are frequently terrible for reading the book collections of a title.  As graphic novel sales climb and expose a wider market, the superhero world makes it harder to enjoy that format.  As an Englishman I know is wont to say in situations like this, “Skill!”

Not all titles are like that.  Immortal Hulk is blissfully off in its own corner of the Marvel universe.  It’s largely self-contained… so far.

I’ve long had the theory that the superhero editorial suites need to read less epic fantasy novels and more detective novels.

What are the big names in epic fantasy?  Lord of the Rings. Wheel of Time.  A Song of Ice and Fire. Long stories over several books, where if you pick it up in the middle, you’re going to be lost.

Pick up a Nero Wolfe novel and it really doesn’t matter where in the series you are, with a notable exception or two you can just read it.  With most detective series, there may be some character arcs you’ll better appreciate reading it in order, but you can read a random novel in the series just fine.  Oh sure, there will be the odd trilogy, but continuity isn’t as much of a requirement.

I found humor when DC started up the Black Label imprint.  Why, because DC (I think this was Dan DiDio talking) was talking about how so many of their evergreen titles were out of continuity.  Highlights from old volumes they transferred over to Black Label when it launched: The Dark Knight, All-Star Superman, Watchmen, The Killing Joke, Kingdom Come, The Long Halloween, New Frontier.

Were these popular because they were out of continuity or were they popular because they were self-contained books that you could sit down without needing to have read the preceding 12 issues to understand?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for longer stories.  A place for an epic saga.  But if all you do is multi-volume sagas for decades old characters, it can get really tricky for a casual reader to just pick something up and I think that’s working against DC and Marvel when they get away from the collector market.

Incidentally, the rumor is picking up steam that Diamond is going to be resuming shipments in mid-May.  I’ve been hearing this for a couple weeks and there seems to be at least one publisher saying that’s the plan.  There are so many questions about this:

●     How many publishers are shipping while not all the stores are open

●     Are publishers going to be able to print consistently, vis-a-vis printers being open and staying open - i.e. Will the flow of new issues start and stop?

●     Will there be another quarantine mandated pause in the Fall?

The can of worms that is unequal distribution based on quarantine status looks like it's about to be opened and we’ll be finding out what the effects are in due time.

WP

Well, Watchmen has now been subsumed into DC continuity with Doomsday Clock, right? And titles like The Dark Knight Returns may be ‘out-of-continuity’ from one perspective, but it’s included in Grant Morrison’s map in Multiversity, albeit on an alternative world. I think that there’s some editorial disingenuity with these ‘canonical’ vs ‘apocryphal’ stories. post-Crisis, DC claimed that the multiverse was dead and buried, but that wasn’t strictly true. Marv Wolfma complained that his original plan was for the whole DC universe to reset and reboot with all-new #1 issues in the wake of the Crisis across the entire line, but that didn’t happen. It was ultimately Dick Giordano who rejected Wolfman’s proposal, and so what happened next is that the DCU was left even more complex and convoluted than before. Only Superman and Wonder Woman were rebooted fully, and even then, at different times (after Crisis). Batman may have had Millers’ Year One, but in the main line of books, the character ‘remembered’ the Pre-Crisis continuity, so the idea that Crisis would streamline and simplify matters is simply a myth.  So trying to appeal to new readers has always been an Achilles Heel for DC (and by extension, Marvel), often due to editorial chaos. ‘The New 52’ was the same: Batman didn’t reboot but had his continuity contracted in temporal terms. Green Lantern neither. Superman was rebooted again with Grant Morrison’s Action Comics, but again, that pesky pre-Flashpoint continuity kept causing trouble (especially for new readers, if they existed at all outside of older readers jumping back on-board). So, Wolfman’s idea that Crisis would address the rampant chaos inaugurated by the multiverse—in the Silver Age story “The Flash of Two Worlds”—did not in fact prevent DC from experimenting with out-of-continuity tales (or ‘imaginary stories,’ if we go back into the ‘60s). Many of the Elseworlds stories are in continuity right now (again, on alternative Earths). In many readers’ minds, DC has screwed the pooch with a lack of editorial control. I’ve heard it said that DC’s character population refuses to be contained, but that’s surely madness! They’re not living beings, but fictional creations that exist in continuity (or outside of it) by editorial fiat (or as the case may be, editorial malfeasance). Perhaps that’s purposeful. Maybe—and I’m speculating widely here— having an imaginary world that is wracked with continuity issues gives them the rationale for reboots, retcons, relaunches and general continuity patches, as with what happened in the 1980s with the Legion of Superheroes. Byrne’s The Man of Steel showed that Superman emerged as an adult, thus Superboy didn’t exist in continuity, but as the character was formative for the Legion, they had to provide a continuity patch with the Time Trapper story where the Legion were said to exist in a “pocket universe” (I thought the multiverse was dead?!). The Killing Joke has been in-continuity for some time, although its status shifts every now and then. Currently, Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl still remembers being assaulted by the Joker, and the events in the story. From a reader’s perspective, or what Douglas Wolk refers to as the ‘super-readers’—fans for whom continuity knowledge forms the backbone of their engagement and pleasure—it’s not too tough to see where they’re coming from when they argue that the DCU is a mess, and always has been. Sure, Marvel has issues too, but they’ve never rebooted before (although they do retcon and relaunch).

Incidentally, I also think The Immortal Hulk is one of the best books out there right now (although I only buy the trades because of the reasons I spoke of earlier).

I think the fact that Raina Telgemeier and others sell more than anything the Direct Market puts out is interesting. Henry Jenkins discusses this in his new book, Comics and Stuff, wherein he identifies different patterns between Diamond sales and the New York Times. Jenkins states:

“Let’s consider, for example, which comics were selling best in September 2015. According to Diamond, the comics distributor that supplies US specialty shops, ninety-two of the top-one-hundred- selling comics were superhero titles, with most of the other top-selling comics linked to media franchises (Star Wars, The Walking Dead, and Fight Club). Because so many of the top-selling superheroes have already been brought to the big or small screen, many top titles are marketed around a release in another media. Ninety-one of the top one hundred sellers were published by either DC or Marvel, with Image’s Walking Dead the only title not by the two majors to break into the top twenty sellers. However, if we look at the graphic novels on the New York Times Best Sellers list (based on bookstore sales) over this same period, a different pattern emerges. Among the top ten sellers in paperback and hardback, only one is a superhero title (Batman: The Killing Joke, also the only work published by DC or Marvel) and only one title (The Walking Dead) overlaps with the Diamond list. Eleven out of the twenty titles were written by women; ve were written by Raina Telgemeier (Drama, Smile,Sisters, and two Baby-Sitters Club books). The overwhelming majority included some depiction of everyday life, including such perennial sellers as Fun Home,Maus, and Persepolis. Comics are a curious case where “mainstream” titles are increasingly niche and “alternative” titles are increasingly mainstream. In practice, there is a third, intermediate category—works purchased as “graphic novels” through the comic book shops. Superhero stories exist here beside other genres, including fantasy, space opera, and crime/noir. In September 2015, the top-selling titles in this group included Saga, Descender, Chrononauts, Mad Max: Fury Road, Fade Out, The Walking Dead, and Lady Killer” (2020, 7).

I think that’s quite an insight captured in a nutshell.

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated (UC Press, 2019) a history of the U.S. comic book industry and its seventy year convergence with the film and television business.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.

Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies. 

Crisis in the Direct Market: A Virtual Roundtable (1 of 5)

Last week, we brought you three installments focused on the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on the distribution of US comics. These were ‘Comics, Covid, and Capitalism,: A Brief History of the Direct Market’ by William Proctor, and ‘Is There a Way For Comics to Move Forward During COVID-19?’ by Todd Allen in two parts (here and here). This week on Confessions of an Aca-Fan , we have a virtual round-table featuring Proctor and Allen, who are joined by Shawna Kidman (UC San Diego) and Phillip Vaughan (University of Dundee) who have been discussing the implications of the current ‘pause’ on the circulation of US comics, possible solutions, and the impact of Diamond Distribution’s monopoly on the market. During the conversation, more news filtered through about decisions and key shifts, so it was a productive time to be engaged in the topic, and we hope readers think so too. You will see our usual panoply of images peppered throughout, but on this occasion, we wanted to highlight some of the art and imagery being shared online which are anchored to the theme of coronavirus, superheroes, comics, and more. It is quite moving to see what superheroes mean to so many people during times of crisis (‘crisis’ being a common motif for DC Comics).

US Comics & The Direct Market: A Virtual Round-Table (1 of 5)

Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, William Proctor and Phillip Vaughan

WP

I’m from the UK, so my experience was a little different to the US system. As a child of the 1980s, I was unaware that we were witnessing the death throes of an entire industry as shelves were brimming with titles for both boys and girls, many of which had started in the British Comics renaissance of the early 1970s. Girls comics from Mandy and Jinty to Jackie and Misty. Boys’ comics from Battleand Warlord to The Beano, and The Dandy(and, of course, 2000AD). Today, the only survivors are The Beano, 2000AD, Judge Dredd: The Megazine, and the war comic, Commando, while a glut of franchise comics have replaced the (often radical content) of the 1970s and 80s, the majority of them relying on crappy free-gifts to attract children’s gimlet gazes. US superhero comics were available, naturally, but their arrival on British shores was not as timely as in America. Many times, we would hunt for the next issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, only to find that it was either missing or that an even earlier issue was released retroactively. Jumble sales were one of the ways we might find missing issues, but until the Direct Market, superhero material was difficult to find in chronological terms. I have heard that US comics were often used as ballast on ships at the time, and that issues were shipped out-of-order, if at all. Of course, we had annuals that we would receive every Christmas, but until the rise of specialty comic retailers, superhero comics didn’t rule the roost. This could simply be my own experience, however, as Marvel had a UK imprint during the 80s, but I didn’t engage that much with the content until much later (although I did regularly purchase Transformers, which was published by Marvel UK). Maybe I’m misremembering (which is entirely possible!). What is interesting is that during the current lockdown, I’m still receiving my 2000AD, Judge Dredd: The Megazine, Rebellion’s new series of old British comic titles (with all-new material. I have purchased the latest issues of Commando on eBay, and I even bought The Beano at the supermarket the other day. Why is this? I think Philip Vaughan will be able to answer this best.

PV

Much like Billy, my early memories were getting my comics from the local newsagents. I have vague memories of the early 1970’s, and getting some pocket money to go to the shops to buy sweets and comics. The choice of publications seemed endless, and 20p could go a long way! I distinctly remember buying the Marvel UK version of Star Wars Weekly, the comic adaptation of the film for 10p from the newsagents at the bottom of my street (in 1978, yes we actually had to wait for this in the UK!). It was somewhat disappointingly printed in black and white. This was supplemented by a weekly delivery of The Beano and The Dandy, humour comics from local Dundee comics powerhouse DC Thomson. These comics were delivered with my parents' local newspaper, The Dundee Courier. This gave me early exposure to comics as a medium. So newsagents, and to a lesser extent, supermarkets were stacked with plenty of comics which included British classics like The New Eagle, Tiger, Roy of the Rovers, Victor, Warlord, Commando and of course 2000AD. I would not graduate to the more adult 2000AD until around 1984. Back to Marvel UK, and they had the reprint market pretty much sewn up. I was aware of a few titles, all of which reprinted the US comics, but in black and white. Again these were freely available in newsagents. But things were starting to change. A turning point for me was the UK reprints of both Transformers and Secret Wars. The Transformers comic produced by Marvel UK was a clever blend of full-colour US reprint material and freshly commissioned UK strips by top British talent. Secret Wars was the start of ‘event’ comics, and by the time it moved onto ‘Secret Wars II’, crossover comics were well and truly underway in the US. We were lucky that we got the crossover issues pretty much provided for us in one comic, to a certain extent! Again these publications were readily available and accessible at the local shops. But I started to notice one-off copies of Marvel and DC comics appearing in certain newsagents. They would usually have a COMAG sticker on them, were on import, and generally were sporadic issues of popular titles like X-Men, The Amazing Spider-man, The Incredible Hulk, Superman and Batman. I was amazed to find out though that these could be ordered to the newsagent, along with my regular UK comics! This was a revelation. Plus the cover price, whilst higher than UK comics, was not too prohibitive (40p if my mind serves me right). At this point, I didn't even know what the direct market in the US was, as we had a pretty good system here in the UK and I assumed it would be similar in other countries. This system UK hinged on the ‘Sale or Return’ philosophy of comics publishers; the retailers took no risk on the comics they received.

The biggest change to my comic buying habit though started in 1989, when I learned that there was a dedicated comic shop housed within an indoor market here in Dundee. This ‘shop’ was called ‘The Black Hole’ and it operated pretty much like an american comic retailer, as far as I could tell. There was a listing guide, and you could tick off what you wanted from a large list of US publishers including Marvel, DC, and smaller publishers like Dark Horse. This indeed was a game changer for me. I did not know it at the time, but my comics colleague at the University of Dundee, Chris Murray, would also frequent this establishment! The main difference in this set-up was that the stock could not be returned, comics which were not collected became back-issue stock. A burden to the retailer really.  

So, what does this tell us about the different systems between the US and the UK? My observation here during the lockdown, is that, as of yet, the distribution has not been affected much at all. WHSmiths, the biggest high street provider of magazines and comics has shut down a number of its stores (hopefully temporarily), however you can still get the comics which are still being published (such as The Beano, 2000AD, Judge Dredd Megazine, Commando and even some of the Panini Marvel/DC reprints) from the larger supermarkets that are still open during the crisis. From an outsider's point of view, the comics industry in the US is in crisis, with direct market retailers shutting down, some for good, and many creators being told by the publishers to put their ‘pencils down’. In the UK, freelance creators are still being commissioned as per usual. We also seem to operate a more robust subscription model. I have been a subscriber to 2000AD/Judge Dredd Megazine for over 15 years. So far the deliveries and issues have been uninterrupted. I am unsure why the subscription route has not been taken in the US, is it to do with issues over printing, or distribution? The Diamond monopoly was always a problem waiting to happen, and this has exposed how precarious the US system really is. 

I have not even touched upon digital distribution. There is obviously a resistance to this from most ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers, which I totally understand, however the comics industry is way behind innovations in other mediums such as streaming TV/Film services, iTunes/Spotify music distribution and even book distribution via Kindle etc. Digital comics and the interfaces designed to view them have just not captured the imagination of most comics readers. This does mean that if the printed material cannot be distributed, then the entire industry grinds to a halt. Most continuing US comics are in limbo right now, and I do hope they survive this hiatus, but it seems there was no contingency plan whatsoever, and this is a shame for the retailers, publishers, readers and creators alike. No one really wins here.

 WP             

I think it’s worth exploring further if a US subscription model of the sort we have in the UK would have made all the difference. Is the primary reason for not doing this anything to do with Diamond’s monopoly? I’m thinking that a subscription service would effectively cut Diamond out of at least some of their distribution power? I suppose subscriptions would usually be arranged through the publishers rather than the distributor, thus providing alternative circuits that maybe Diamond would push back on to maintain their grip on the industry. Perhaps Todd Allen has some thoughts on this.

 TA 

The decline of subscription services over the years have probably been a combination of a few things.  If you go back and look at the house ads in American comics of the 1970s, you'll see plenty of ads for subscriptions, often full page ads and usually with a discount involved.  Buy two and get the third free, that sort of thing.  As the Direct Market started to take hold in the 80s, I think towards the end of the 80s, those subscriptions offers got phased out.  Direct Market retailers can be extremely possessive about the comic market and generally complain any time a new market opens or if someone outside the DM is offering a discount (the driving reason why new issue releases in digital are at print list price), so I can’t imagine that retailers weren’t complaining about subscription discounts.  On the publisher side, as the business started to move towards non-returnable sales to the Direct Market and away from advertising as a larger revenue stream, I suspect the profit and effort of processing discounted subscriptions may have been less appealing and been a factor in it being discontinued.  I can tell you that when Marvel decided to cancel all the secondary Spider-Man titles in ‘08 and instead release Amazing Spider-Man three times a month, they offered a substantial discount to anyone who wanted to subscribe.  I want to say it was 30% or 40%.  The retailers screamed so loud, you’d have thought someone had come into their individual stores and robbed them at gunpoint.  And from the perspective of those retailers, that’s what had happened.  Until the collected editions started picking up steam in the bookstores, the DM retailers were the only game in town for the publishers and they guarded that status like a jealous god for as long as they could.  For single issues, they’re still the only game in town. Subscriptions are a textbook example of channel conflict between retail and manufacturing.  I used to use it as an example when I was an eBusiness professor because it was such a no-shades-of-grey case study.

For the collector side of things, let me start with my anecdotal experience with subscriptions in the mid-80s.  In 1984, I was living in a small rural town and didn’t yet have access to the Direct Market.  DC was starting to launch some DM-only titles like the “Baxter” (better paper) editions of New Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes.  The only way I could get New Teen Titans was a subscription and I’m not sure if there was much of a discount on it at the time.  I still remember having to do a lot of convincing over the price of a subscription, but that could have been because those Baxter books were so much more expensive than the regular titles.  And around this time Marvel started reprinting their Doctor Who comics from Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly… again, DM-only, Baxter format.  That one was a bundled discount and I want to say I also had subscriptions to Avengers and X-Men.  I think perhaps my Grandmother got me that.  Here’s the thing about subscriptions - back in the ‘80s (and I would assume at any time leading up to the 80s), subscriptions sounded a lot more normal to adults than going to a store that sold only comics and was frequently in a dodgy neighborhood.  And if there was a discount attached to the subscription, well that was what “normal” magazines did and they were saving money.

The downside to this, and my experience seemed to be typical, was a number of inconveniences.  First off, you never knew how beat up a comic would be by the time it arrived.  Pure mint wasn’t likely, but sometimes you’d get near mint.  Every once in a while, you’d get an issue that was absolutely mangled and you might want to be extra gentle while reading it, which wasn’t cool.  Every now and again, an issue would fail to show up.  Which could be a royal pain with serialized stories and not always easy to replace because of timing.  And timing was part of the inconvenience of subscriptions.  You weren’t always sure when it was going to show up.  My recollections may not be precise after all these years, but as I remember it, Direct Market comics would show up one or two weeks before the newsstand editions and then the subscription copies would arrive another week or two after the newsstand.  So if the mail (or perhaps the processing of subscriptions) was running a little slow, you could be a full issue behind and by the time you were sure they’d forgotten to send you an issue, it might still be available - or worse, you could get charged extra for a back issue. 

Which is to say, reading copies only and you’d best not be in a hurry to read it.  If you were a collector, it wasn’t the best system.  I recall my mother being mystified that I was getting them later than the newsstand.  Whatever Better Homes & Gardens type magazine she subscribed to arrived at the same time or earlier, so I’m thinking the comics publishers didn’t put the same attention to subscription as the glossy magazine publishers did.  Then again, comics were never ad revenue-driven like the glossies. 

When I finally got access to the DM, and particularly when I was able to drive myself to the shop, I transitioned out of subscriptions.  More timely, ultimately more reliable and I didn’t have any mangled copies unless I chose to buy a mangled copy. 

As the US market shrank and become more of a collector market and less of a reader market, the subscriptions became less viable.  They were never really intended for collectors.

 SK

Even with all of the resistance and problems you describe here, it's surprising to me that a large-scale subscription service or digital-based distributor hasn't stepped in (against the will of both Diamond and the retailers) to remake the entire market. (ComiXology is doing this on some level, but it hasn’t actually changed fundamentals or upset existing infrastructure). That’s not true for every other media business, with companies like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Steam (the list goes on and on), wreaking havoc on retailers big and small, and undermining established distribution companies with a lot more capital and power than Diamond has ever had. And remember that Netflix and Amazon both started selling physical media products, but in a way that was streamlined, affordable for consumers, utilized the mail system (which alas, may now be at risk…), and served fans very well. Why has there been no interloper in this business? Perhaps it's just not a big enough market to attract investment and interest? 

Regardless, readers have shown considerable loyalty to both the physical product and the physical stores they buy them in. Those spaces provide a sense of community, as do comic book conventions. This is a face-to-face, touch-the-product, gather together, kind of business. Perhaps that has been its armor for all these years, its protection against a tech takeover. Which is why this current crisis is so worrisome and might also have the potential to upend the current system. Even once the economy "reopens" people are very likely going to want to avoid public spaces as much as possible, and large gatherings and conventions are unlikely to come back at all, at least for the next 12-18 months. That could mean a kind of rupture in the system and could be, as all of you note, particularly bad for retailers. I would say that the possible demise of Diamond could be a kind of silver lining here, but I just don't know what might emerge in its place. 

Crisis or not, I think another way of thinking about this is asking where change emanates from--who the likely instigators will be and how that might impact the medium's future. Will it be from outsiders? Investors buying up parts of the business on the cheap? Or from within? From small-scale innovators with big ideas? Or established powerhouses with lots of capital?  Perhaps Amazon/ComiXology will become a more aggressive presence and move into print? When the industry faced trouble in the 1950s, it was the big players, the center of the established industry--DC, Archie, Dell--who took control and dictated what the business would look like in the future. They took over distribution and they crafted the Code; everyone else just had to follow along with their (rather narrow) vision. In the 1970s, though, it was the Underground and indie publishers who brought change by introducing the direct market. Once they proved that it worked and pointed the medium in a new direction, DC and Marvel adopted it, and the current system was born (for better and worse, depending on the decade or the issue). At this point, DC and Marvel are not in a position to innovate. They are beholden to their parent companies who have much bigger fish to fry. And retailers and small publishers will be struggling just to survive. So who is likely to lead the way in this time of crisis? 

The truth is, as a historian, I don’t feel like I can offer a great deal of insight into the short term impact of this crisis or the possible resolutions. Instead, I find myself thinking about the long term trajectories of the business. Where was comic book publishing heading two months ago, and how does Covid-19 impact that? Does it just amplify and/or hasten a transformation that was already underway? Or does it actually change the industry’s course, and set it on a new path forward?

WP

Great questions, Shawna! I think your point about whether the pandemic is amplifying or hastening a transformation, or transition, that had already started is worth delving into. I did my PhD on reboots (which I’m currently retconning into a monograph) and I charted the term itself, its etymology, its first uses as a way to describe superhero comics that wiped the slate clean of continuity in order to begin again from scratch, mainly in the quest for that fabled demographic—the new reader. But I also aimed to historicize the economics of the industry from its heyday at its inception (the Golden Age), its resurgence in the late 50s (the Silver Age), its downturn in the 70s and 80s, before the Direct Market emerged and (seemingly) solved many problems. So, the cycle of boom and bust interests me, but also the way in which reboots, and other associated “strategies of regeneration” (event-comics, retcons, relaunches, generic refreshes etc) have become mobilized more and more as the decades passed. (As an aside, I also aim to establish conceptual distinctions between these strategies as many journalists and academics use the terms interchangeably, which is of course a discussion for another day). Todd emphasizes the litany of relaunches in the 2010s early on in his excellent book The Economics of Digital Comics, and I think it’s worth exploring here in response to Shawna’s queries as it indicates just how fragile the market already was prior to the pandemic.

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that since at least 2005, the big two have found it necessary to head from event-series to event-series, and relaunch to retcon to reboot: Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, ‘The New 52,’ Marvel Now, All-New Marvel Now, Convergence, Rebirth, Doomsday Clock, etc. As Todd points out, there have been gains in some cases following relaunches, but these gains tend to drop off significantly (hence, requiring another sales generator). After The New 52—or as I saw older fans calling it at the time, ‘The Ewww 52’—DC did overtake Marvel for a time, but then the lower-charting titles ended up being culled, and sales declined. As we know, new number ones always sell more—that old speculator myth is to blame; that number ones fetch a higher profit margin later in the day, an absurd notion when we’re talking about books that have high-print runs. So the constant renumbering and relaunching indicates an industry in crisis. It was nine years between the conclusion of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985-86 and the next attempt at rebooting the universe in 1994 with Zero Hour: Crisis in Time—which didn’t reboot the universe at all, but certainly led to the reboot of The Legion of Superheroes (which incidentally was the first time the term reboot was used to describe a media franchise beginning again from scratch). Julius Schwartz said, “every ten years, the universe needs an enema,” but what we’re seeing in the 21st Century is an almost constant, if inconsistent, shaking up their respective lines on an annual basis. Of course, this has also been criticized by fans, some of whom complain about “event-fatigue,” and the symptoms of this hit Marvel hardest of all when they published Civil War II in 2016, and sales started to decline as each issue arrived. I would suggest that rather than boom and bust, we are witnessing micro-booms and micro-busts on an almost continuous basis (Todd may have additional thoughts on this). Marvel’s ‘flood the zone’ strategy has largely backfired. Comic store owner Brian Hibbs claimed that the industry “is on its knees” early in 2019 (so well in advance of COVID). He said:  

"National sales are very poor – there are comics in the national top 100 that aren’t even selling twenty thousand copies. A significant number of stores have closed — perhaps as many as 10% of outlets," Hibbs said. "Want a clear and current example of Marvel’s preposterous 'flood the zone' strategy? War of the Realms is supposed to be their major Q2 project in 2019, but in the first month alone they’re asking us to buy into TWO issues of the series being released with no sales data, as well as FOUR different tie-in-mini-series. All six of these comics (which are built around a six-issue storyline) will require final orders from us before we’ve sold a single comic to an actual reader. Is there anyone in this room thinks that this is good? That this is sustainable? That this will sell more comics to more readers? That this will sell any copies to people who aren’t already on board Marvel’s periodicals already?" 

My local comic book retailer is often up-in-arms about the overproduction of books, his chagrin centered on the fact that, in his mind, the publishers won’t listen to retailers or readers. In fact, the main reason that I have stopped buying floppies over the past couple of years—it’s like an addiction, I needed to wean myself off—is that I cannot condone the amount of money I was spending to keep up-to-date. At one point, it was over £200 per month. And then 95% of what I read wasn’t great, either. So I’m a trade guy now, more or less, and will pick up books that have been reviewed well by fans and reviewers that I trust. So well done to DC and Marvel for forcing my hand (and maybe others too, if sales are to be believed). So in a nutshell, I would say that you’re right to ask if the pandemic has hastened what was occuring at any rate (although my more cynical self would argue that it wouldn’t matter much as there seems to be a power struggle between retailers, publishers, and Diamond). I hear that Jim Lee is auctioning off sketches, with proceeds going into a fund to support retailers on the cusp of collapse. Perhaps I’m being unkind, but this is not as altruistic as it might seem. As Chief Creative Officer for DC Comics, he is well aware that losing retailers means losing profit centers for books (there’s that cynical self again! I’m a comfortable Marxist, so I tend to look on the darker side of capitalist enterprises).    

One of Jim Lee’s sketches for auction: Stephanie Brown as Batgirl

In your book, Comic Books Incorporated, you show how licensing overtook publishing in the 1970s, Shawna. Obviously, this situation has accelerated in the 21st Century since Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man raked it in at the box office—and let’s not forget, DVD sales that make more money by a wide margin than cinemas per se (which is also changing with streaming etc.) Do you think that comic books have been on the endangered species list since the 1970s, Shawna? Are comic books more a Research and Development portfolio for blockbuster films, TV series, and other transmedia expressions, as Dennis O’Neil complained a while back (and academics like Derek Johnson, Will Brooker, and others)?

TA

Lots to unpack here, so let’s take it in order. 

On the lack of a digital distributor coming in, that’s an incredibly complicated topic.  I’ve been down the startup path a couple times, personally, so I can speak with experience here. 

If you want to have a comic *book* digital distribution startup, you need a LOT of money.  Tech staff is not cheap and a lot of the people you want will live in expensive cities.  SF, NYC and LA do not make for a low payroll, nor does tech.  You’re going to need to spend a LOT on advertising.  Some of the publishers are going to demand some upfront money before content is handed over. 

A lot of the deep-pocketed Venture Capital firms absolutely do not get content plays.  Particularly in San Francisco.  That’s my theory on why Transmedia has never taken off up here: too much emphasis on engineering.  This is compounded by needing to compete with Amazon, which a lot of VCs are very reluctant to do.  That’s in turn compounded by Amazon having Marvel on an exclusive contract.  It makes it more difficult to raise the big money. 

If you go for the smaller money, what you’re likely to hear is “well, can’t you build out this little part of it and then we’ll see how it’s doing in six months?” 

That’s actually the most self-destructive thing you can do.  We’ve seen what launching with an incomplete set of publishers and a shoestring budget looks like and it simply hasn’t worked.   

If you look at the webcomics world, WebToons has made a lot of noise by launching with a selection of established Manga/Manhwa and building audiences for new material around that, along with some pre-existing webcomics.  If you look at Tapas, they operated off the same template. 

If you want to play in the comic book world and you don’t have DC or Marvel to be your primary traffic driver, you’re going to need a couple years of runway and a marketing budget to grow that audience. 

Really, comics are unusual in exactly how small a community it is.  Whether it’s print or digital, there are so many exclusive deals you just don’t see in other types of publishing.  It’s great for the entity holding the exclusive, but it’s terrible for competition and innovation. 

It also doesn’t happen that there have been some spectacular crash and burns in this space.  When I was with Aerbook, we specifically had investors point at their huge disappointment with Graphic.ly, which would be formally dissolving a few months later.  Some of the wells have been poisoned, on top of it being a content play and on top of competing with Amazon. 

There will be another player.  Honestly, most of the publishers want one.  Nobody likely being trapped in one and a publisher, whose identity I’m going to protect in this instance, once told me “we traded in Diamond for Amazon.”  The question is how long that’s going to take to happen. 

Now, all that said, a new player wouldn’t change anything if the publishers won’t release the books and I do think releasing serialized single issues when most of the retail channel has been forced to close the doors will cause more long term problems that it fixes.  If you’re a publisher, you shouldn’t want to kill your primary channel.  You should want to growing all your channels and becoming less dependent on a single one. 

Alas, long term planning has NOT been a hallmark of comics publishing in a very long time.  Things tend to be about grabbing cash as quickly as possible.  And really, if the quarantine is slow to lift and/or we have a repeat in the Fall, short term survival is going to be the only priority for a lot of people.  This is uncharted territory. 

With the explosion of low circulation titles, you’ve got a couple things going on.  

Historically, DC and Marvel (especially Marvel) have been known to flood the shelves to keep shelf space away from smaller players.  You used to hear a LOT of complaints about this going back to the 90s.  That’s not always going to be the case today, but there may be a kernal of that in the current situation. 

What’s happening now seems to be publishers deciding they can keep the lights on more easily if they have 30 low selling titles, than trying to get 10 titles to sell large amounts. 

It’s a little easier to describe this for the indie publisher.  Indie publishers have a hard time getting over 10K in sales for a single issue.  For that matter, 5K copies is a victory for a lot of them.  That’s just what the market has been dictating for the last decade or so.  If a publisher bundles their printing to get the unit cost down...  If the publisher prints overseas in some cases, to get the unit cost down a little more… If the publisher’s page rates are low enough… you add all this up and suddenly the publisher is able to see some minor profit on titles that sell 3K-4K.  And if you have the editorial capacity to publish enough of these smaller titles, that sliver of profit adds up and you keep the lights on. 

What many of the indie publishers found was that the market would support a lot more 3K titles than anyone had previously supposed. 

DC and Marvel, particularly Marvel, are just doing this with higher profile titles.  Still, a 12K circulation book for Marvel is a lot more like a 3K circulation book for an indie.  It’s how they’re making their quarterly numbers. And make no mistake about it, Marvel is a business that emphasizes their numbers. 

The truly ironic thing here is that this publishing model works a lot better for digital than brick and mortar retail.  In digital, you have infinite shelf space.  In digital, the shop is paying a royalty on what sells, not buying issues on a non-returnable basis and hoping they sell, tying up working capital with that gamble. 

This has evolved into the current reality where more and more stores are ceasing to order the entire DC and Marvel lines for the shelf.  A lot of these titles are in-store subscription only.  Without a shelf presence, these titles will have a very large problem gaining new readers and will be more susceptible to reader attrition.  It’s usually a death sentence and if you look at it from the perspective of how someone browsing in a shop would find such titles, it’s no wonder that it’s a revolving door for these small titles.  The mechanics exist to extract cash from the big fish who have in-store subscriptions for as long as they’ll tolerate the title and then throw a new one at them.  And, of course, to issue a cornucopia of variant covers for the speculators for that new #1 when the replacement series launches. 

Is this healthy?  Not really.  But it’s kept the lights on for the publishers up and down the sales chart. 

This system can work for retailers if they have enough large selling titles (like how Batman used to sell, and the indie friendly shops really miss Saga), then those cash cows can mitigate the risk of stocking smaller titles for the shelves.  Which is to say the retailer is making enough on Batman that it doesn’t matter if a couple issues of a third tier Spider-Man spin-off and a couple indie titles didn’t sell through this month.  Big selling cash cows create the fudge factor for a store to have a complete line. 

This is one of the reason why I’ve always looked at the sales charts in terms of sales bands.  It tells you how healthy the retail side of things is. 

Would dropping the number of titles published increase the circulation of the remaining titles?  For DC and Marvel, yes.  That seems likely and it might solve some of the problems of the retailers.  The thing is, I’m not convinced it would mean more money for DC and Marvel and they’d have to sell that dip in operating income to corporate, were it the case. 

For indies, I’m not sure whether you’d see a particularly drastic change or not.  There are a lot of niche audiences aggregated in independent comics and you’d need to look at the individual segments.  Would it change things enough to help retailers?  I’m really not sure how big a difference that would make, past the retailers stocking a larger percentage of titles.  You’d need to have a serious conversation about that with the 250-350 stores that are heavily invested in independent comics.

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Dr Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego, specializing in media industries. I write and teach about broadcast and cable history, streaming content and digital distribution, copyright law, media audiences, and contemporary issues related to pop culture and society. My newly released history of the comic book industry explains why comics are ubiquitous in Hollywood, and how they came to take over corporate multimedia production of the 21st century. Covering 80 years of history, I show how many current trends in the media business—like transmedia storytelling, the cultivation of fans, niche distribution models, and creative financial structuring—have roots in the comic business. As a result, even though comic books themselves have a relatively minuscule audience, and have suffered declining sales for decades, the form and its marquee brands and characters continue to gain in global prominence and popularity.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press). William is currently working a history of comic book and film reboots for Palgrave Macmillan titled: Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia.

Phillip Vaughan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MDes in Comics & Graphic Novels at the University of Dundee. He has worked on productions with the BBC, Sony, DC Comics, Warner Bros, EIDOS, Jim Henson and Bear Grylls. He also has credits on published work such as Braveheart, Farscape, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Teletubbies, Tom & Jerry, Commando and Superman. He is the editor of the UniVerse line of comics publications and also the Art Director of Dundee Comics Creative Space and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies. 



Is There a Way for Comics to Move Forward During COVID-19? (2 of 2) Todd Allen

Why Digital Sales Stalled Out

Before discussing the potential stop gaps and what things might look like in the future, it’s necessary to understand what went wrong with digital comics sales.  Too many retailers are shouting from the rooftops that people simply prefer paper and it seems like it might also be a case of the digital side of the industry, and Amazon in particular, dropping the ball.

15% of sales in the number you’d hear about digital comics for several years.  It seemed to plateau after Amazon bought Comixology.  More recently, the water cooler talk has been that digital is only 12% of sales.  This means digital sales may have actually gone down.

It seems like digital comics stalled out early, and it’s even stranger to talk about a non-growth segment of the Amazon empire, but there are some pretty basic reasons for it, if you go back and look at the history of digital media.  It boils down to three things: device, DRM and Amazon Payments.

Digital music took off with the iPod.  eBooks took off with the Kindle.  What is the device for digital comics?  Originally, it was the iPad.  If you’ve ever priced an iPad, you’ll find they’re not the cheapest things out there, but that’s when digital comics started to take off.  With the first digital tablet.

By all accounts, sales stopped rising when Amazon bought Comixology and switched them over to their in-house payment system.  They wanted to avoid Apple taking 30% of all transactions.  That means you can’t actually buy inside the Comixology app on an iPad, you have to go to the Comixology/Amazon website and buy it, then download it to the app.  It’s a sub-standard user experience on what had established itself as the primary consumption device at that point.

The speculation was that when Amazon fully integrated the Comixology platform into the Kindle platform, the growth would increase.  After all, it was the Kindle that brought eBooks to the front.  Here’s the problem: far too many Kindle’s aren’t well suited for reading comics.  The beloved Kindle Paperwhite?  Black and white device and physically too small.  You need a Kindle Fire for color and you probably only want a 10-inch Kindle if you want to read a comic as a full page.

Digital comics would be much better off if someone branded a cheap android 10” to 12” tablet as a designated comics reader and created an inexpensive entry-level device for that purpose. 

The other thing that let music really make the jump to dominant digital sales was the combination of the platform independent .mp3 format and music going DRM-free.  Buy your file and play it where you want to play it.

Digital comics tend to have proprietary formats and it is very much in Amazon’s interests to keep it that way.  eBooks tend to be this way, too.  It keeps people in one eReader and one commerce system.  Digital audio books, on the other hand are more like music.  You can play them with whatever you listen to music on, so it doesn’t matter as much which ecosystem the files are purchased from.

DRM is just something that comics seem to be saddled with.  All the Hollywood players still require DRM.  That includes Marvel (Disney), DC (Warner/AT&T) and almost every licensed comic.  And even if the comic was DRM-free, the files aren’t portable between browsers because there’s no universal, open source file format that suits everyone.

Add Marvel’s exclusive with Amazon to the file format issues and you see why Amazon has something akin to a functional monopoly, even if they don’t really have that many exclusive publishers.  Marvel is a large enough player to make most of the digital consumers move to Amazon to keep all their comics in the same browser.  The main question is whether Marvel will renew that exclusive deal?

A comics reading device is desirable because the standard comic book is not formatted in a way that’s compatible with a computer screen or a smart phone screen.  Can comic books be formatted in ways more compatible with viewing on a monitor?  Absolutely, but most publishers don’t take that approach.  That’s more of a webcomics thing.

A person can absolutely read a comic book on a computer monitor, it just requires scrolling and it’s a little clunky from a UIX perspective and that contributes to the lower than expected adoption rate.

What percentage of sales should digital comics be?  If you look at the book market in general, probably 20%.  If you look at specific genres, perhaps a bit higher.  If you compare it with the science fiction/fantasy genre, quite a bit higher perhaps 50%.  You don’t want to know how heavily some of the romance estimates have favored digital. What generally happen with eBook genres like SF/F and especially romance is that the high volume readers jump in.  Then again, eBook readers generally realize more savings on new releases than digital comics readers.  Print and digital cover prices tend to remain the same for comics and that’s absolutely not the case elsewhere, even though publishers generally keep a higher percentage of the digital list price.  (This can be chalked up as a concession to retailers and enough digital readers were willing to pay cover price that it stuck, even if growth has capped.)

Can publishers survive by ditching print comics and moving to digital?  Digital alone?  Absolutely not.  The penetration rate of digital comics is much too small.  Digital serial and then a printed collected edition?  That’s been done before and warrants careful monitoring.

What Can Be Done Right Now?

Short term, this is a real mess.

If publishers release new issues digitally, the retail world risks losing customers and that whole question of how to release the issues in print crops up, as does the secondary issue of readers switching to collected edition book format if they miss 3+ issues of a title due to quarantine.

If publishers release new issues in print AND digital, they create have and have-not classes among retailers, based on where they live.  They will inevitably stoke the fires of profiteering speculators to new heights.  They create an increasing potential burden of how shops staying under lockdown longer will have to navigate restocking potential months worth of issues at once.

On the retailer side, it seems like it’s a great time to focus on back issues, current inventory and graphic novels that can still be restocked through the bookstore distributors while waiting to ride this out.  Curate your remaining stock and recommend things that you can order.  Except that you probably need a website or you’re going to be limited to hitting the emails to your subscriber list.  There is no easy answer here.

At a certain point, publishers are going to need to publish something.  Especially if this lasts well into the summer.  They have creators who need to eat.

The simplest solution may be to start some interim digital titles.

Do not put out Batman #95 digitally.  Do a few issues of Batman vs. Virus-Man digitally and then when distribution is ready to resume, Batman #95 comes out in print and digital, just like the title always did.  Batman Vs. Virus-Man can eventually come out as a trade paperback or perhaps as 100 Page Giant.

This way, no one has their collection interrupted.  No one feels compelled to switch to collected editions because they missed the end (or even the entire) Batman arc.  Stores don’t have to try and get several issues of Batman in stock all at once and hope they sell through.  It’s a better way to do things.  If enough stores can hold on long enough to re-open and the unknown length of quarantine regionally is definitely the biggest problem for the entire supply chain trying to plan for this time period.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for DC and Marvel to adopt the old 1940s Justice Society format for Justice League and Avengers.  Split the team off into solo missions and have a different team handle the solo chapters.  That could be up and running digitally in a couple of weeks.

It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some more “interim” digital material built up in case there’s a secondary quarantine period in the Fall, which appears to be a genuine risk.

Is it a good idea for independent publishers to launch interim titles digitally?  That’s hard to say.  The retail community is taking a justifiably hard line against being cut out of the commerce chain.  Short runs of new projects only is probably the closest thing to a safe option there.

Hypothetical interim digital projects aren’t likely to keep any publisher profitable, but it’s a potential way to blunt the losses during quarantine and keep the creators working in some capacity.  It’s closer in nature to retailers trying to sell back stock while they’re closed to browsing customer.  It’s a patch, but it also might end up being the direction things move in if the Direct Market doesn’t emerge from quarantine intact.

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Is There a Way for Comics to Move Forward During COVID-19? (1 of 2) Todd Allen

Todd Allen

Setting the Stage

The problem with most public discussions of how the comic book industry will function during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is that of perspective.  It’s usually “all about me.”  The retailers need one thing, the publishers another and no one has really bothered to ask the reader what they want.  And as this happens we hear more rumors than facts.  Alas, so far even the craziest rumors have seemed to contain at least a grain of truth.

Publishers

The publishers are at the top of the food chain.  They have two primary needs:

• Keep the cash flow moving

• Keep the talent from bolting to a different career.

• And if the publisher is owned by a larger entity, particularly a publicly traded entity, you can add:

• What does my parent company need me to do so we’re not all fired or outsourced?

In an ideal world, all this is balanced out by a need to preserve the existing marketplace.  Unfortunately, we’re not in an ideal marketplace and the perception of AT&T-owned DC Comics and Disney-owned Marvel Comics has been that they really didn’t give a tinker’s damn about preserving the market until the retailers started an uprising.  Was that because of DC and Marvel leadership being concerned about cash flow and prevent talent flight or was it orders from upstairs?  Nobody seems to be certain about that, but it seems to be where we are.  It’s fair to say any changes they’ve made have been quickly stepping backwards after discovering that retailers were extremely angry about things that would obviously make Direct Market retailers extremely angry.

At some point, publishers are going to need cash flow just to keep their doors open.  The smaller publishers may well have smaller reserves and face a choice of publishing new material (if anyone has a way to buy it) or going under quicker than a larger publisher, but let’s not dismiss the overhead costs of a larger organization out of hand and let’s also remember that AT&T/Warner and Disney are both hobbled by the lack of movie theaters and theme parks during quarantine.  A lot of money is being borrowed to keep the boats afloat, so let’s not automatically assume DC and Marvel are sitting on huge reserves of cash.

At some point, if the creators employed by the various publishers have been told to go “pens down” and pause, they may need to get a different job.  Creator-owned series that don’t typically ship 12 issues in a year can keep on working and perhaps release more issues in a row without a break (or, dare we say, simply meet their deadlines in some cases), but if this pause interferes with when they get their royalties, then they’re in the same boat – time to get a new job.

Retailers

The retailers are on an uneven playing field.  You have a handful of shops that are theoretically still open and a handful of primarily mail order operations.  In these, instances, if you’re able to do business, it’s natural to want a steady flow of new material.

One step down the quarantine ladder, you have the stores that are doing curbside pickup, delivery and a *little bit* of mail order.  Let’s be real – these retailers are primarily servicing their in-store subscribers.  They’re happy to have SOME cash flow, but they’re likely not even close to covering their bills during a lockdown.  They might be happen to have some new product, but it probably needs to be subscribers-only for inventory control purposes.  There’s not a whole lot of point in having shelf copies if nobody can come in and look at the shelf.  In practical terms, buying for the shelves is negative cash flow.  Especially when it’s not certain when the stores will be open for browsing.  We should remember that it currently appears likely not all regions will come out of lockdown at the same time, too.

And then you have a number of stores that are simply closed for the duration.  No cash flow this month and no cash flow until they reopen, whenever that is.  What’s the point in getting and paying for new product that you can’t sell?

Readers

The readers are the big question mark and it’s not clear to me that everyone is taking the uncertainty with readers seriously enough, up and down the food chain.

• How many readers cannot currently afford to buy comics because they’ve lost their job?

• How many of those readers will be able to return to their jobs after quarantine lifts and how many will still be unemployed?

• How many readers are going to break their weekly habit and fall out of comics?

• How many readers are going to try digital while the shops are shuttered and switch reading formats permanently?

• How quickly will readers catch up on issues they missed while the shops were closed?  (Or for that matter how quickly can they afford to?)

• Will multiple months away from single issue comics cause more readers to switch to collected editions permanently?

There are a lot of unanswered questions about what will happen to the readers and how they might return.  How many people leave comics after the interruption and whether a percentage of readers switch formats to either books or digital will effect both the publishers and the retailers.  Perhaps a profound effect.

Are bookstores part of the equation?  Sure.  But bookstores aren’t as uniquely vulnerable as the Direct Market retailers, due to diversification of product and suppliers.  Bookstores also aren’t going to rescue the single issue comics if things take a turn for the worst, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The Distributor Problem

Single point of failure is a business concept where if one unit of a system fails, then the entire system fails.  The comic book industry is getting a demonstration in single point of failure during COVID-19.

The primary distributor for single issue comics, many would say a functional monopoly is Diamond Comics.  Diamond ceased accepting new comics into their warehouses on the week of March 23rd, 2020.  Billy was mentioning Tony Panaccio’s comments, originally made in 2004.  Since then Diamond has tightened their grip on publisher exclusives for the single issue market, but there are many ways to get graphic novels through bookstore distribution channels – and many retailers do.  There are still publishers that are exclusively Diamond for single issues, books and bookstore distribution of those books… just not as many as there were in the past.

On the one hand, retailers whose stores were shuttered for lockdown or reduced to curbside pickup may have found this to be a blessing in disguise.  It prevented them for having to pay for shelf stock they’d be sitting on for several weeks, if not months, without a realistic chance of selling it.  Diamond shutting down their warehouses may well have prevented several retailers from having to declare bankruptcy over shipments made during lockdown.  In certain contexts, you can look at it as a temporary solution as much as a problem.

On the other hand, many of the major publishers lost their exclusive distributor, so single issue cash flow just went out the window, save any digital monies… but we’ll come back to digital in a bit.

This doesn’t mean that all print cash flow ceased.  If a publisher had a different distributor for books, retailers have been able to order trade paperbacks and graphic novels through the bookstore distributors.  For now, at least.  However, should a publisher be exclusive to Diamond in both single issue and the bookstore market, that single point of failure shuts them down for print.

Further, Diamond initially suspended payments to vendors and then announced a repayment plan.  While it’s better for publishers to have a payment plan in place and not be standing in line as an unsecured creditor at a bankruptcy hearing, that’s not good for cash flow.  It’s even worse for cash flow if you’re exclusive to them and your only cash flow channel is now digital.

Rumors abound now about how healthy Diamond’s own cash flow is.  Are they taking an extra conservative stance to ensure they have funds to wait out an extended quarantine period or is their own cash flow suspect?  No one seems to know and that there’s even any question of their health is a disturbing development for the comic book industry.

Even more rumors abound about comic book publishers sending out feelers for alternate distribution methods, possibly attempting to enlist bookstore distributors to distribute single issue comics.  I’ve personally spoken with someone (not a publisher) working to put together an alternate distribution platform for some of the remaining non-Diamond exclusive material that’s out there. While having some redundancies in distribution is a good thing, there’s more than a little question of how quickly such a scheme could be implemented, what kind of material will ship and all this brings the market back around to the question of whether enough retailers are in a position to accept orders in a fiscally responsible way.

The Ways It Could Fall Apart

The Direct Market seems to be in as fragile a position as it’s ever been in and there are a LOT of ways that it could go wrong and the flaws in the market and some of the publisher programs are in danger of getting fatally exposed.

(i) Death by inventory

There are too many ways that excess inventory could kill the comic book industry.  Diamond’s shut down prevented retailers from having to purchase inventory while still under lockdown, so that form of this crisis is likely averted, but that doesn’t mean the danger is over.

When Diamond resumes shipments, or perhaps when one of the rumored alternate distribution schemes is implemented, will publishers drop too many delayed books too quickly?  Will there be 3 issues of Batman on the first week?  10 X-titles?  Worse, could a reader not return until the third week of resumed shipping and get hit with 15+ X-titles? 

If there’s too much, too soon and the readers aren’t all swimming in cash after the quarantine, they may be making decisions about which titles to drop a little sooner than anticipated.  Or walking away in frustration.

If shipping resumes before all regions of the country are out of quarantine, then some retailers will have some serious calculations to do about how many issues they can order at once… and that’s assuming everything is still available to order by the time their doors open.

If retailers are taking an understandably conservative approach to ordering for the shelf for the first month or two after reopening, walk-in readers may conceivably get frustrated with the lack of shelf copies in the series they read and drop out.  It’s common for a store to have more walk-in business than subscriber business.  Will retailers be able to re-order if they’re not stocking the shelves deeply?  That really depends on how the publishers feel about over-printing after being without cash flow and I think we’ve all heard retailers complaining about lack of over-printing for the X-Men relaunch, so it’s a real open question.

(ii) Death by Speculator

If shipping starts up before the entire country is out of lockdown, this is a potential gold rush for speculators.  For the sake of argument, buy out the local store in Mississippi and flip it on ebay to desperate fans in California.  You know there are speculators drooling over this.  I’d even expect some opportunistic retailers with shuttered shops to take their deliveries at home and try their hand at it.

While the limited availability of such things can drive sales, much like the frenzy around DC’s Walmart titles on eBay when they first came out, speculator booms always turn into speculator busts and might just drive off readers in states still under quarantine out of sheer frustration (or drive them to the collected editions), to say nothing of the added headaches for their retailers.

(iii) Death by Broken Reader Habits

The Direct Market is predicated on the idea of loyal readers making a weekly trek to the shop to pick up this week’s comics.  It doesn’t always work that way in practice, but the idea is that the purchases become a habit or ritual.  Momentum exists and if the reflex is to pick up this week’s issue of <insert superhero here>, then it may take several issues of the reader being disappointed in the title before they get around to dropping it.  Longer sales patterns.  Weekly cash flow.  It’s a good system and most stores in the United States will likely be closed for somewhere between 4-16 weeks.  The habit is broken and it remains to be seen if it will be re-established.  If your business is predicated on the cash flow of weekly purchases and the customers aren’t coming in as frequently, this could be a deadly readjustment period.  The worst case scenario is readers breaking the weekly habit and checking out, be it for financial reasons or re-examining their reading habit.

(iv) Death by Retail Attrition

No one knows how many direct market retailers are going to close before their area comes out of quarantine.  There have been reports of stores closing already, before anyone has had a chance to gauge how quickly the readers will return.  At a certain point, this could push the market over the edge.  Rent may be delayed, but more stores will eventually need to pay it regardless of whether they were open.  Not everyone has an understanding landlord.

The recent leak of Diamond’s Marvel orders by individual store/account proved that the 80-20 rule applies to comics and the bulk of orders really do come from the top 20% of retailers, if not the top 10%.  Still, the death of 1000 cuts could start here in the following ways:

• Conventional wisdom says the bulk of indie comics sales come from 250-350 stores.  Indie publisher could feel minimal to no impact from a wave of store closings if the stores going under are almost exclusively DC/Marvel, but 25 stores closing in that golden group could clip 10% of their market overnight.  A few strategic closings and indie publishers could be in real trouble.  And interruptions in the weekly buying habit could hit indies just as hard as the big boys.

• If you’ve seen DC and Marvel’s Diamond sales estimates lately, the vast expanse of the lower end of their line isn’t setting the world on fire.  While a low-to-mid-range shop likely isn’t ordering a high number of those individual titles, how long before the death of 1000 cuts starts to effect the viability of the lower third to half of their lines, at minimum, and require either re-staffing or a change in attitude towards single issues?

• A shift in reading habits could disrupt the retail system.  If 10-20% of readers shifted from print to digital and stuck with it after the quarantine lifted, that could be enough to shutter a swath of barely profitable retailers.  Similarly, an extended period away from single issue comics opens a window for the reader to switch to the book format.  An unseemly number of retailers still seem to regard the collected edition as an invalid format and seem ill equipped to transition from a newsstand business model to a bookstore business model, if that’s where the market is moving. If there is a second quarantine period in the Fall and a second interruption of single issues, it could be even harder on this segment of retailers.

• If Diamond’s suspension of vendor payments and subsequent repayment plan really is an indication of shallow reserves there, it becomes a serious question how many accounts Diamond can afford to lose and remain cash flow positive.  And that’s before unpaid bills as some shops will inevitably close.  If EVERY publisher doesn’t have an alternative distribution scheme, Diamond going under could be a cascading failure as the previously surviving retailers look for new product.

The longer quarantines remain in place nationally, the greater the risk of the Direct Market being damaged enough that it experiences a partial collapse. 

Does this mean that comics would go away? 

Of course not, but it might mean a shift towards digital and book format, which we’ll get into the next installment.

———————————————————————————————————————

Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources.  As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015.  He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic.  He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar. 

Comics, COVID and Capitalism: A Brief History of the Direct Market

Comics, COVID and Capitalism

By William Proctor

Never has the term “these are unprecedented times” become such a cliché so swiftly. As the global death toll continues to climb on a daily basis, the coronavirus pandemic shows no signs of letting up, plummeting the world into a genuine crisis that we have not seen for generations. As much as COVID-19 infects our citizens and our families, it has also spread virulently into the corporate organs of the economic body, with global neoliberal capitalism confronted by as perfect an enemy that it has ever faced. Since at least January 2020, it has become clear to many that the pandemic has exposed numerous weaknesses within the arteries of capitalism, its veins and arteries struggling to pump nutrients to its most vital organs. In a sense, the pandemic has exposed the capitalist system as a fragile, diseased thing. In the context of all this turbulence, turmoil and tragedy, it is perhaps very much a ‘first-world problem’ to think about the commercial shock-waves rippling throughout the comic book industry. Yet it could most certainly be argued that examining the current distribution model for US comics, undergirded as it is by one major corporation—Diamond Comics Distributors—may provide insights into the impact of coronavirus on the stark economic realities that we are now facing, also allowing for a teasing out of the problems and pitfalls with the distribution system as it currently stands; an unfair, inequitable, and monopolistic system that may have, to some extent, ‘saved’ comics during the 1980s and ‘90s, but has over time grown increasingly problematic, to say the least. To most comic fans, retailers and scholars, the history is well-known, but it is worth offering a very brief history of what is known as The Direct Market. Prior to the Direct Market, comics were distributed to news-stands and news-agents, in the same way that magazines were (and in many cases, continue to be). Some of us will fondly remember spinner racks in newsagents and Mom and Pop stores, shelves buckling under the weight of so many four-color treasures. New-stand distribution, however, ended up severely cramping the commercial potential of the comics medium. As Shawna Kidman emphasizes in Comic Book Incorporated (2019), the market during the 1950s and 60s may have seemed in rude health, publishing in excess of 500 hundred comics each month, but the market became strained by too much content that the news-stands simply did not have the shelf-space to carry, not by a long chalk (the average being 65 in Kidman’s account). There was also “an oversupply problem with physical and financial repercussions, reports of entrenched anticompetitive practices, and souring relationships between distributors and retailers along delivery routes. Demand was also in critical decline” (Kidman 2019, 49). 

Like all good media histories, Kidman expertly punctures more than a few myths in her book, perhaps the most notable being the impact that Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics crusade had on the industry. Although not the only genre in his rifle-sight, Wertham attacked superheroes for various reasons. In his view, Batman comics promoted homosexuality due to the living arrangements at Wayne Manor, with Bruce, Dick Grayson and Alfred participating in a gay ménage-a-trois (of course, as Will Brooker has shown, .Batman was open to gay readings very early on).

Moreover, Superman was a “symbol of violent race superiority” who “undermines the authority and dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children,” and moreover, unfairly made children believe a man could fly. Wonder Woman was little more than “a veritable lesbian recruitment poster.”  However, the DC Trinity—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—continued to be published throughout the so-called ‘comic book scare,’ and as we know, it was crime and horror comics that came under the close scrutiny of US senators, leading to the collapse of E.C Comics (and by extension, the self-regulatory Comics Code). It was the senators that highlighted the crime and horror genres as cause for concern, not Wertham, who worried more about ‘jungle comics’ and, to a lesser extent, superheroes, as Kidman highlights. 

Editor Julius Schwartz successfully revived the superhero genre in the 1950s with reboots of The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, and Hawkman, giving birth to the so-called Silver Age in turn. In 1961, the publication of Fantastic Four #1 and the ascendancy of Marvel Comics began chipping away at DC’s market hegemony. Yet by the time Marvel eventually overtook DC as market-leaders in 1971, the same issues related to news-stand distribution came back to the fore. Sales were declining across the industry, but DC felt the brunt of market-forces more than Marvel—who has been saved by Star Wars, according to Jim Shooter—and ended the decade on the ropes. Prices went up, sales declined, distribution halted for a time due to horrendous storms across the East-Coast, and recession began to bite. New DC editor Jenette Kahn’s company-wide initiative, The DC Explosion, failed so dramatically that it has become known as ‘The DC Implosion’ in fan and industry circles. It was also in the 1970s that revenue from licensing outstripped publishing for the first time, and DC’s new corporate masters, Warner Communications, saw comics more as an IP farm for other endeavors, especially film and TV. As Kidman points out, comics became “a loss leader for Warner’s other entertainment subsidiaries,'' and domestic publishing began to lose money. Enter the Direct Market. 

In many ways, the Direct Market was inspired by the way in which underground Adult Comix circumvented news-stand distribution, their wares being sold mainly in head-shops (probably by necessity as news-stands wouldn’t carry Adult Comix due to their seditious nature). Established by comic-con organizer Phil Seuling, the Direct Market would largely do away with news-stand distribution, triggering the rise of specialty comic book stores that continue to dominate the market today. As a result, the American comic book landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s and ‘80s (although it wouldn’t be until the early 1990s before the new system completely did away with news-stand distribution).

It may be true that the Direct Market would prove to be a nostrum for the struggling industry, but over time, it expanded into a monopoly, one that would arguably create the largest burden for retailers, not publishers. This would have a knock-on effect for the smallest, independent retailers most of all. Prior to the Direct Market, publishers sold their fleet of titles to news-stands and newsagents on a ‘sale-or-return’ basis, meaning that publishers agreed to ‘buy back’ unsold items, which worked very well during the boom years in the 1940s when over 70% of print runs were sold, yet became unsustainable as readership declined. In the Direct Market system, retailers do not have the luxury of the sale-or-return safety net: if titles didn’t sell, then retailers would be left to foot the bill. I have witnessed the impact of this model on small, independent outlets, such as Paradox Comics where I live in Bournemouth, UK. Its owner Andy Hine often expresses how tough it is to order the right number of comics, which titles, and how many. Of course, he can order the titles for those readers who have a regular pull-list, but knowing how many to order for the shelves so people can pop in and pick up a title is almost impossible to determine. With so many relaunches and reboots in recent years, it is a dizzying task to know the best route to take if Andy is left with comics that he can’t sell nor return. While large corporate franchises such as Forbidden Planet may be able to absorb the costs of mass ordering, independent retailers like Andy cannot do the same.

This situation has led to a significant contraction of the number of comics retailers in the decades since the Direct Market was established, lending weight to the naked fact that even superhero comics are less a form of popular culture nowadays than an insular subcultural ghetto (despite the genre appearing to be as healthy as ever with the proliferation of blockbuster films and TV shows dominating the landscape). As former Vice President of Product Development for Crossgen Entertainment, Tony Panaccio, explains in Todd Allen’s The Economics of Digital Comics (2014):

“In 1992, there were about 10,000 retail specialty shops that made up what we called The Direct Market…[in 2014], that number is reduced dramatically lower and somewhat in dispute. Promoters of the industry claim that there are as many as 3,500 in operation [in 2004]. After three years of canvassing, via phone, Internet and direct-in-person contact, [we] were able to ascertain the existence of only a little more than 2,000 such Direct Market specialty shops for comics last year” (2003).   

Three of the largest distributors in the 1980s were Capital City, Heroes World, and Diamond Distributors. In 1994, Marvel acquired Heroes World so it could use it as its exclusive distributor but as written by Alex Hearn for New Statesmen, this 

“landgrab led to every other publisher to attempt the same thing, but by the end of the next year, it was clear that the diseconomies of scale that that fragmentation introduced were unsustainable. Distributors started to fold, until just one, Diamond, was left. When an editorial initiative in early 1997 failed for Marvel, they signed up with Diamond we well, guaranteeing one company a stranglehold on the industry.”  

In 1997, Diamond’s position as “the sole source of most new comics products to comics specialty shops” saw the company investigated by the U.S Justice Department (DOJ) for alleged antitrust violations and market monopolization. However, on November 6 2000, the DOJ concluded its investigation, claiming that “legal actions because of allegations of monopolistic practices are unwarranted,” the reason being that publishing is a much larger universe than comic books, thus Diamond did not benefit from a monopoly on book distribution per se. Tony Panacchio expressed his discontent with this decision, again captured by Todd Allen:  

“In my mind, Diamond is one of the worst cases of monopoly in American publishing, and the resulting power and influence wielded by Diamond in the marketplace is unfair and illegal. It is fundamentally unjust that this criminal conduct is allowed to continue while thousands of retailers, thousands of creators and dozens of publishers locked outside the premier vendor club suffer under a system that was constructed solely for the purpose of entrenching and rewarding a select minority […] Diamond’s primary business model is to shrink the comics industry down to its lowest common denominator and squeeze out any potential competition for its premier publishers.” 

Although Todd Allen stresses that Panacchio’s view “is an extreme one,” he also states that there is “at least circumstantial evidence to take this viewpoint seriously.” And given what has happened more recently to comics publishing during the pandemic, I strongly believe that Diamond’s iron-fisted grip on the industry has now become counter-intuitive; and perhaps that’s not a bad thing. 

That being said, there have been rumblings that the Direct Market has been under pressure to shift its model in recent years. On the website Pipeline Comics, Augie De Blieck Jr wrote in 2018, that we were in the midst of a “retail apocalypse,” that the Direct Market “as it exists today is doomed,” that comics publishing is not as profitable a venture as it was during the medium’s heyday (and that’s being diplomatic).

 “there’s too little profit in selling $2.99 or $3.99 comics, with too few buyers who want to pay that much for a monthly comic [or as the case may be, bi-monthly, or even weekly]. With those razor thin margins, who’s getting paid? The retailers, who get nearly half the money from every comic sold, but still can’t sell enough to stay alive? The distributor who, if it wasn’t effectively a monopoly and didn’t ship ‘The Walking Dead’ trades, might as well be dead already? The publishers, who have big fancy offices in expensive real estate markets and have come to rely on blockbuster publishing stunts and short-term insanity like variant covers to artificially boost sales numbers to keep their quarterly earnings looking for their parent companies?” 

Good questions to ask, for sure, but questions that have become much more marked in the time of COVID-19. As the US and the UK headed in national lockdown, it swiftly became clear that Diamond’s monopoly would bite the comics industry where it hurts the most: the cash nexus. How would readers obtain their comics? Would there be a wholesale shift to digital publication, a strategy that would leave retailers with no product to sell? Writing for The Daily Beast, Asher Albein suggests that the industry faces an existential crisis that they have never seen before: 

“World War II couldn’t do it. An industry crash in the 1990s couldn’t do it. Now, for the first time in the history of the medium, monthly comics are grinding to a halt due to the novel coronavirus pandemic […] last month, Diamond Comics Distributors—the monopoly that supplies monthly comics to reatilers in the United States and Britain—announced that it was refusing to accept new product from comics’ largest publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, and Boom Studios. ‘Product distributed by Diamond and slated for an on-sale date of April 1stor later will not be shipped to retailers until further notice,’ Diamond chairman and CEO Steve Geppi said in a statement. ‘Our freight networks are feeling the strain and already experiencing delays, while our distribution centers in New York, California, and Pennsylvania were all closed late last week,’ Geppi’s statement continued. ‘Our home office in Maryland instituted a work from home policy, and experts say that we can expect further closures. Therefore my only logical conclusion is to cease the distribution of new weekly product until there is greater clarity on the progress made toward stemming the spread of this disease’”.  

On the one hand, Geppi is right to heed the advice of medical experts (I’m looking at you Messrs Trump and Johnson). Yet on the other, the fact that Diamond remain in situ as the only distributor in operation for an entire industry demonstrates how troublesome the current model is. Of course, even with more competition and more distributors, the situation would surely be the same. COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate between business models, regardless of monopolistic practices. But like many of our infrastructures—political, cultural, medical, as well as economic—the pandemic is running riot, burning through whatever foundations exist, cutting down the best laid plans of mice, men and corporate chiefs—although to be blunt, there doesn’t appear to have been any contingency plans whatsoever, best laid or otherwise (I’m still looking at you Trump and Johnson). Yes, the pandemic has caught everyone off guard, granted, but did our governments and corporations believe that market-forces would protect us all from the anarchy of nature? It would appear so on the strength of evidence. 

It wouldn’t be the digital age without a few bare-knuckle scrapes on social media between creators and fans, some of whom have been mocking new series, Marvel’s New Warriors (which, to be honest, I initially thought was a parody comic, but as it turns out, it’s a superhero title for the woke generation, complete with characters called Snowflake and Safespace). To be sure, I’m glad Marvel are thinking of ways to diversify its character population further, but this is so on-the-nose that, as I said, it seems like a piss-take.

But it is interesting that some comics creators on social media have been claiming that that the industry has been through downturns like this in the past as the medium has historically cycled through boom and bust periods at certain junctures. I would argue, however, that the industry has not faced a crisis of this magnitude before (and that includes Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis, Final Crisis, Heroes in Crisis, and all the rest of the crises that are don’t have Crisis in the title). Although superheroes remain the dominant genre, comic books belong to a much broader medium, and in the 1950s, the biggest seller was not superheroes, but Dell’s Disney comics. More than this, the comic book market is not as stable as it once was nor has it been for over twenty years, perhaps even longer. More egregiously, Diamond released news about the distribution pause not by contacting retailers first and foremost, but by apparently leaking it to Bleeding Cool. Owner of Grumpy Old Man’s Comics in Seattle, Alan LaMont, said that: 

“For Diamond to leak this out to Bleeding Cool and other news outlets without first contacting the retailers is highly irresponsible and shows the overall lack of respect Diamond has towards its retailers in general, if in fact they did.” 

Whether or not this is accurate is difficult to ascertain, but other retailers have repeatedly said that communication between Diamond, and the big two, DC and Marvel, such as Ryan Seymour of Comic Town in Columbus, Ohio, who explained that:

 “The lack of transparency and candor from Diamond and the big two really is mind-boggling. This change could be a result of their chosen printer companies closing down. Maybe it is a financial thing, where Diamond cannot cover their expenses or that publishers are not extending any credit?” 

While I first shrugged off the idea that a corporate monolith like Diamond may be struggling in economic terms, news emerged on 13thApril that the company would be furloughing some of its staff: 

"As you know, COVID-19 is having a dramatic impact on businesses around the globe and unfortunately, Diamond is no exception. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to furlough some employees. This was not a decision we made lightly, and we only do so to protect our company's financial future and preserve jobs. We have taken several steps already to mitigate our financial exposure including delaying payment to publishers, extending vendor payment terms and significantly reducing executive compensation. It is our goal that, on the other side of this crisis, our furloughed employees will return to their roles." 

I can’t help but think that a company as large and profitable as Diamond could weather the current crisis, but I won’t pretend to be an expert in economic mathematics nor business studies. But it seems to be as clear-as-crystal that the people who will suffer the most during the pandemic are the workers, not the executives. I would also add that Diamond may indeed enjoy a monopoly regardless of the decision of the US Department of Justice, but the companies and creators have a role to play too.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things turn out, but more and more people seem to be watching the watchmen nowadays. 

Even as I write this, the situation is changing. DC have announced that they’ll be shipping new comics soon via other distributors, perhaps firing the first warning shots in the ‘Crisis on Distribution War's’ Event coming soon.   

Over a number of instalments, four of us will be discussing the Direct Market, the impact of the pandemic on the comics industry, possible solutions and contingencies, as well as what the future may hold the current distribution system post-Crisis (he says optimistically). We’ll also be getting into the differences between the US and UK distribution models as, perhaps surprising to many, most UK comics continue to be published during the lockdown. Join Todd Allen, Shawna Kidman, Philip Vaughan and myself to find out why!  

We’re watching the watchmen too.

Dr William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film & Transmedia at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published on an assortment of topics related to popular culture, and is the co-editor on Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Dr Matthew Freeman, 2018 for Routledge), and the award-winning Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Dr Richard McCulloch, 2019 for University of Iowa Press)).

Material Culture Studies: An Annotated Bibliography (2 of 2) Soledad Altrudi

OBJECTS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Affective objects

Attfield, J. (2000). Wild things: The material culture of everyday life. Oxford: Berg.

Attfield’s work is grounded in material culture studies, with which it shares the exploration of how modern artefacts are appropriated by consumers and thus transformed from manufactured products to become the stuff of everyday life, and how they have a direct involvement with matters of identity. However, this book centers more on the design stage of objects, the study of which Attfield wants to dislodge from traditional aesthetic frames devised by conventional art and to present as just one more aspect of the material culture of the everyday. Moreover, while acknowledging that design in this context refers not to a good design aesthetic but to a form of objectifying sociality, she also posits that things remain wild because they never merely “do what they are told;” that is, they fail to always act as their makers intended because things have an attitude and they talk back in their dynamic existence in the material world.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Halton, E. (1981). The meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge University Press

The meaning of things is, essentially, an empirical analysis of the interactions between persons and objects. As a whole, this work is representative of studies of material culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s in that it seeks to demonstrate that objects do not merely reflect culture but actively contribute to meaning processes. Its greatest contribution is the schematization of object-person relationships in 3 levels, the one pertaining to the individual self (things express and anticipate qualities of the self), the social self (objects as symbols of social integration and differentiation, as well as role models of socialization) and the cosmic self (they also signify broader, more existential meanings). Moreover, although race and class difference are absent from analysis, there is a good discussion on the relations of people with objects as they grow older and why that might be. However, while this book grants objects agentic capacity, as makers and users of the humans who make them and use them, it fails to consider the ontology of objects outside the specific instances in which those are made meaningful to persons. And even when it does, it concentrates solely in the symbolic meaning of things as applied to the development of self- and social psychic consciousness.

Edwards, E. (1999). Photographs as objects of memory. In Candlin, F., & Guins, R. (Ed.s) (2008). The object reader. Routledge

The focus of this chapter is on the photograph and its presentational forms as material culture because, Edwards argues, it is precisely that materiality what grants photographs a privileged position as conduits of memory. Put differently, it is not just the image that is contemplated but the material form in which it is presented what works to make photographs a socially salient object, one specifically created to remember. Thus, far from considering this materiality as neutral support, Edwards delves on its plasticity as an object that can be handled, framed, crumpled, caressed, put under a pillow or wept over, which ultimately makes it an intrinsically active thing that demands a physical engagement. Overall, this chapter is a great addition to material culture studies as it presents photographs in a new light that, without discounting the image itself, adds a new layer of complexity to these everyday, fascinating objects.

Hallam, E., & Hockey, J. (2001). Death, memory and material culture. Oxford: Berg Publishers

The starting point for this work is that facing death, ours or that of a loved one, entails ritualized social practices that mobilize domains of material objects, visual images and written text. This sets the tone, as the rest of the book focuses on artifacts and embodied social practices, both of which are crucial ways of producing and sustaining memories that, by connecting our present with the past, provide a sense of recovery of those lost. While the authors cover a spectrum of materials and detail how they were employed in specific cultures and times, they also stress the role of space - the spatial context of objects and the spatially located practices - as yet another fundamental dimension of material cultures of death. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the material dimensions of memory making are significant because they constitute social and cultural processes through which lives are remembered (and futures, imagined) and also because they mark our deaths and remind us of our own mortality. Although the elaborate articulation of these terms marks this book as a unique contribution to the field of material studies, other salient contributions of this book include: 1) the recovery of marginalized memory practices via its attention to what occurs in domestic spheres; 2) its demonstration of the flexibility of (many different) objects to be re-contextualized and made to signify different things; and 3) the acknowledgment of the disturbing and powerful social agency that materialities can have.

Memento mori: small two-sided ivory pendant produced in the Netherlands around 1500. View of young woman / View of cadaver ‘Ecce Finem’ © Trustees of the Wernher Foundation

Miller, D. (2008). The comfort of things. Cambridge: Polity.

Although this book follows a similar methodology to The meaning of things (see above), its output is entirely different. Here, Miller has transformed the information his team gathered on a random street in London about the stuff that people have in their homes into a rich ethnographic account broken into thirty individual stories. Clearly aligned with his dialectical conceptual perspective, these “portraits” explore the roles of objects in our relationships to each other and to ourselves, ultimately showing that the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer those are too with people. 

Moran, A., & O'Brien, S. (Eds.). (2014). Love objects: Emotion, design and material culture. London: Bloomsbury.

Appropriately titled, this anthology focuses on material embodiments of love and, like Miller, explores the potency of objects in our lives and the relationships that exist between people and them. Additionally, although it does look at objects as symbols and representations, it also casts them as active participants in and mediators of our relationships. However, the contribution that this work makes to this list is a gender studies perspective to the analysis of a set of less studied objects, such as the playboy’s pipe, sex shops for women in London or amateur female shoemaking, as well as objects traditionally linked with the female, domestic sphere. 

Turkle, S. (2008). “Objects inspire”. In Candlin, F., & Guins, R. (2008). The object reader. London: Routledge.

This is a short article that explores the role of objects as things that inspire, focusing specifically in the importance of objects in the development not just of an interest but a love for science. After relaying the overdetermined stories of Lacan (who was inspired by knots) and Sacks (who found reassuring stability in the periodic table), Turkle explains that those objects that "speak to" a child are important not because of the ideas they inspire but because they provide children with the feeling of having a "charge," a "thrill" or a "secret theory" that leads them to want to have more. This emotion constitutes the transitional space of learning. 

Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

This book is a fundamental resource in material culture studies as it contributed to popularizing the study of objects as things that are part of ourselves (and vice versa). Organized as a series of brief autobiographical essays, this collection explores in-depth how objects can be companions to our emotional lives as well as provocations of thought processes. In addition to providing a detailed examination of objects in their connections to daily life, the book also engages with them as intellectual practice and so intersperses excerpts from other theorists, from Levi-Strauss to Sontag to Piaget, to add to the analysis. The piece, as whole, effectively demonstrates the potency of objects in our everyday lives as they bring together intellect and emotion.

Clockwise: A comic, a rolling pin, a suitcase. In Turkle (2007), Evocative objects

TECHNOLOGICAL ARTIFACTS AS MATERIAL CULTURE

Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Eds). Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994

This text is part of the cluster of works that constitute a more radical approach to the study of things, such as that represented by Actor Network Theory, in that Akrich posits technical objects as full participants in the building of heterogenous networks that bring together human and nonhuman actants. Moreover, this is a good piece to engage with notions of user appropriation, namely how those who interact with, in this case, technical objects are able to invent new practices and applications and thus alter the “script” inscribed in those objects by designers.  

Eglash, R. (2006). Technology as material culture. In Tilley, C., S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands, & P. Spyer (Eds.), Handbook of material culture (pp. 329-340. London: SAGE. 

In this piece, Eglash provides an overview of the history of social analysis of technology. Although to certain audiences this might be too brief and elementary of an overview, its strength lies in the useful mapping of fundamental thinkers and key works. After describing the more commonly known perspectives of technological determinism and social construction, Eglash focuses on actor-network-theory as a site of postmodernist analysis, and ends with a rather abstract discussion on complexity theory and its synthesis with technological analysis. 

Latour, B.  (1994). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Eds). Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The missing masses the title mentions refers to the sum of those nonhumans that, although hidden, make up our morality and constrain our daily activities in the world (which is reminiscent of Miller’s theoretical insight about the humility of things). From doors to speed bumps, these objects have been recipients of force as well as values, duties and ethics. Thus, the premise of this short text is that we need to rethink society by adding to it the facts and the artifacts that make up large sections of our social ties (which also means revising traditional social theories where the missing masses truly are). 

Magaudda, P. (2014). The broken boundaries between science and technology studies and cultural sociology: Introduction to an interview with Trevor Pinch. Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 63-76

Although this piece has a strong focus on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and musical technologies, it is a good resource to understand how this field and cultural studies intersect when it comes to the analysis of things. In particular, it highlights the centrality of objects and materiality in classical STS empirical studies, even if those are sometimes solely read as signifiers of a complex social world (which is also the case in some cultural studies works), as well as the key role material culture—and technical objects in particular—plays in shaping social processes and cultural universes.

Kline, R. and Pinch, T. (1996). Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States. Technology and Culture 37(4), 763–795

This work takes the case of the introduction of the car in rural Unites States to demonstrate an empirical application of the authors’ model of social construction of technology (known as SCOT, developed elsewhere) and as such represents a seminal piece in the field of STS. Like Akrich’s, this text highlights how manipulation and physical engagement with objects by users can altogether expand the repertoire of things’ purposes, abilities or even identities—like a car becoming a butter churner. Moreover, it also shows not only how gender norms are reified through objects, but how institutional power can constrict and limit the fungibility of objects.

Vannini, P. (Ed.). (2009). Material culture and technology in everyday life: ethnographic approaches. New York: Peter Lang.

In conversation with modern material culture studies, Material culture and technology in everyday life conceives "material culture" and "technology" as one overlapping generative site from which to study the "attitude" of everyday life and the practices it manifests (sometimes known as techne). In other words, to study material culture is to look at the technology underpinning our culture, and to study technology is to study the material characteristics of everyday life. The interesting thing about the book is the multiple perspectives it encompasses as it provides accounts of different treatments of nonhuman others and their materiality, from SCOT and ANT to approaches that see objects as acquiring cultural meaning via narratives, to the author's preferred understanding: interactionist approaches that see material technoculture residing neither in nonhuman objects nor in human actors, but instead in the emergent product of their interaction. Additionally, the work includes more explicitly methodological and empirical chapters, as well as longer empirical studies, in line with the importance that the author assigns to ethnography as the method par excellence to study the mundane of everyday life.

COMMUNICATION MEDIA & MATERIALITY

Bazin, A. (1960). The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly, 13(4), 4–4.

In this piece, Bazin reflects on the idea of the preservation of life by a representation of life and, by discussing mummies, statuettes, paintings and ultimately photographs in these terms, he is exploring the role that material objects play in memory keeping and death related rituals. Additionally, this work reflects on the photographic camera as a nonliving agent able to automatically form a realistic, objective image of the world, which ultimately enables photography to embalm time and grants it a heightened quality of credibility.

Brown, B. (2015). Other things. Chicago [Illinois]: The University of Chicago Press

Extending his theoretical interest centered on the thingness of things (which is different from objecthood), Brown attempts here to connect that line of work with renewed interest and newer approaches to the study of things (some of which are mentioned here) while providing a historical analysis of the literary and visual arts’ approach or apprehension of the object world in the form of a series of broad-ranging readings on “other things,” from Achille’s shield, a piece of sand glass to a cellphone. Overall, while he recognizes the fact that, no matter how banal, objects have unanticipated force, Brown rejects a “flat ontology” and challenges the retreat into the object characteristic of posthumanist approaches.

Garvey, E. (2012). Alternative histories in African-American scrapbooks. In Writing with scissors: American scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (pp. 131–171). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

This chapter in Garvey’s book is a significant addition to this list of material culture studies because it demonstrates a comparatively less explored facet of stuff, which is that things that circulate can also create communities. While the histories those scrapbooks told in the 19th and early 20th century were meant to fill the gaps in mainstream accounts that failed to properly assert African American importance in the country’s history, the scrapbooks themselves had a life and presence within black communities as they were made available for others to read in people’s homes or passed hand to hand. In this context, these mediated interrelationships in a way that not only helped nurture and sustain a shared identity but also created a counterpublic.

Left to right: Page of Alexander Gumby’s scrapbook. In Garvey (2012), Writing with scissors. Reel to Reel, installation by Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher. On the cover of Sterne (2012), MP3.

Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P. J., & Foot, K. A. (Eds.). (2014). Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Understading media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena, this book seeks to shed light on the often-understudied materiality of devices and networks (without disregarding its relationship and strong linkages with the symbolic) following approaches that stem from the meeting point between communication and media studies on the one hand and science and technology on the other. Of more relevance for this list is this book’s Part I, which specifically focuses on the materiality of mediated knowledge and expression, and considers how communication technology studies might also engage more fully with the materiality of the devices themselves without necessarily opening itself to charges of simple technological determinism.

McLuhan, M. “The medium is the message.” In, McLuhan, M. A., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

With his now over-cited phrase “the medium is the message,” McLuhan’s work is another cornerstone of a list that wants to bring together material culture and communication studies together in dialog.  Treating the sign as the thing, media appear in this analysis as constitutive of civilization and of being itself, as extensions of ourselves and our senses, rather than as mere holders of (or means for) content.

Sterne, J. (2012). MP3 the meaning of a format. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.

In this account, Sterne goes over the mutual-shaping process by which the development of the MP3 influenced and was influenced by cultural shifts, one that extends back to the early days of psychoacoustics at AT&T’s Bell Labs, while simultaneously highlighting the interconnected histories of sound and communication in the 20th century. This book works to demonstrate how analog but also digital things (because software and data have their own materialities) like compression and formats shape the cultural practices of listening to music, communicating and representing, and how communication technologies, in all their physicality as well as their articulation with particular practices, are a fundamental part of what it means to speak or hear.

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Soledad Altrudi is a PhD candidate at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she works at the intersection of STS and media studies, and explores the various effects that technology has on our environment as well as on human/non‐human‐other entanglements. Her dissertation focuses on Parque Nacional Patagonia as a case of rewilding in the Anthropocene, one that entails not only a conservation strategy but also works as a device for ordering human-nonhuman interactions in a highly mediatized environment.

Material Culture Studies: An Annotated Bibliography (1 of 2) Soledad Altrudi

I am often asked about the “stuff” in the title of my new book, Comics and Stuff. While work on material culture is now common place across many different fields in the humanities and social sciences (from Literary studies to art history to sociology and anthropology), it is still less well known in media studies or more broadly in the study of popular culture. So one goal of my book is to open up space for interdisciplinary discussions between scholars of popular media and scholars of material culture. I have found digging into this “stuff” illuminating in part because it helps us to map the relations between popular culture and everyday life through a lens other than (though not necessarily excluding) fandom studies. Stuff, like other aspects of culture, is “ordinary” in the ways that Raymond Williams famously used that term. We use our stuff to map our identities, to express our pleasures, to make meaning and order of our lives. There are many schools for thinking about material culture but I have found that focus on “stuff” as resources from which identity construction and meaning making emerges to be the most generative for my own work. The following bibliography was produced by Soledad Altrudi, one of my PhD candidates, as the end product of an independent readings semester she did with me last fall. This is a somewhat different mix of scholarship than I drew upon in my book, though many of the readings overlap. I wanted to share it with my blog readers to suggest the wide array of working being done today on material culture and everyday life and to provide some potential background reading that might help expand and inform the conversations my book hopes to initiate. Dig into this stuff and share your thoughts—Henry Jenkins

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Material Culture Studies – An Annotated Bibliography

Soledad Altrudi

The term “material culture” and “material culture studies” (MCS) appeared during the 20th century from within the fields of archeology and socio-cultural anthropology, although its roots can be found in museum-based studies of technology of the 19th century. Back then, artifacts like spears, knives or shields were taken as material vehicles through which different cultures were retroactively understood and ordered across time and space in a “scientific manner.” However, MCS’s emergence as a distinct field of study can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when a battle was fought against mainstream social science to try to demonstrate that things did matter; that is, that focusing on material things was not synonymous with fetichizing them but rather that material forms constituted a key mechanism for social reproduction and ideological dominance.

Despite its narrow origins, MCS presently involves researchers from a wide range of fields, making interdisciplinarity one of its salient characteristics. But not all theoretical traditions engage with material culture in the same way. For example, “classic” critical approaches rooted in Marxist theory are concerned with production-based analyses that present material culture solely as an instance of capitalist ideology, as commodities that alienated subjects are no longer able to appropriate through consumption. Structuralist and semiotic analyses give more capabilities to objects and instead approach them as signs that refer to something other than themselves, as signifiers that point to culturally created and sustained signifieds. There are also more “radical” approaches to the study of things, such as actor-network-theory, which significantly extend the concept of agency beyond the human actors and make it a property of ‘non-humans’ too.

The bibliography you will find below focuses on cultural approaches to material culture, which share with the semiotic-structural tradition an insistence on objects as holders of important cultural meanings that do some sort of “cultural work,” like establishing identity or social status (although it also it breaks apart from that tradition because it is not equally committed to a strong model of linguistic structuralism). The study of objects within the realm of cultural studies is situated in a world that is filled with ongoing, local and vernacular processes of reinterpretation and appropriation, regardless of the intention of material goods as manufactured. In this context, culture is dynamically constituted through meaningful people-object interactions. 

This post intends to be an annotated, in-depth exploration of the study of material culture, mostly from this perspective. Thus, it reviews the field of “material culture studies” as an interdisciplinary space that takes things as its object of study. The first part is intended to cover the theoretical foundations of cultural approaches to the study of stuff, although it also includes more “radical” approaches. The second leaves the high theoretical ground to explore the roles that both objects in general and technological artifacts in particular play in everyday life. Finally, the last section concentrates on the connections of MCS and the field of communication, and considers the materiality of media technologies.

1) Theoretical Foundations:

Cultural approaches to material culture

Appadurai, A. (1986). The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

The contributors in this volume set out to reexamine commodities and the cultural determination of their value, conceiving them neither as value-free objects nor as just the result of human labor. In the introduction, Appadurai lays the theoretical ground on which the essays stand on, namely the idea that objects have social lives (or “cultural biographies”) and that what he calls the “commodity situation” is but one aspect of it, “the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature.” In this biographical approach, things move in and out of the commodity state, depending on certain standards that define its exchangeability and the social environment or arena in which they are situated and exchanged. Although the idea of studying things through the idiom of life histories has a complex history of its own, this edited collection has been very influential in the study of material things because of its embrace of a cultural perspective for the analysis of objects and their meanings through successive recontextualizations.

Daston, L. (2004). Things that talk: Object lessons from art and science. New York: Zone Books.

Concerned with how talkativeness and thingness hang together, this book tries to “make things eloquent,” that is to make things talk without resorting to ventriloquism. In this sense, the essays in this collection aim to transcend the opposition between matter and meaning, and thus take for granted that things are simultaneously material and meaningful—that matter constrains meanings and vice versa. Some chapters focus on malleable things, like the Rorschach test, to show that even those have a bony materiality that needs to be accounted for, while others look at more stolidly functional things, like soap (and its bubbles), but highlight the “aura of the symbolic” they also radiate. Therefore, by emphasizing that things communicate by what they are as well as by how they mean, Things that talk constitutes a fantastic (and much needed) addition to the study of material culture.

Hicks, D. (2010) ‘The material-cultural turn’. In Hicks, D., & Beaudry, M. (2010). The Oxford handbook of material culture studies (pp. 25–98).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This chapter offers a very detailed yet effective historical overview of the study of “material culture,” from the early stages in museum-based studies of “technology” and “primitive art” to current debates over this idea, such as considering things as events and things as effects. This makes The material-cultural turn an excellent resource for continuous reference for those interested in this “field” as it excels at tracking important developments, punctuated as “turns,” in academic conceptions (from structuralist and semiotic approaches to practice theory and more agential approaches) as well as maps key scholars whose contributions have shaped material culture studies (such as Chris Tilley, Arjun Appadurai, Ian Hodder, Daniel Miller, Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold, among others).

Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. In Appadurai, A. (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–91). Cambridge University Press

Although the entire work edited by Appadurai became a seminal resource for the study of material culture, Kopytoff’s chapter is particularly salient as it complements the idea of the “commodity situation” (as opposed to a fixed condition) by continuing to adopt a biographical line of analysis. In particular, he focuses on “the common” and “the singular” as it pertains to objects, and introduces the notions of saleability as the indicator of commodity status as well as non-saleability, which is what imparts to a thing a special aura of apartness from the mundane and the common. The main argument is that commodities can be singularized by being pulled out of their commodity sphere, particularly in the context of complex societies that present a clear yearning for singularization.

Mauss, M. (2009). Gifts and the obligation to return gifts. In F. Candlin & G. Raiford (Eds.), The object reader (pp. 21–31). London: Routledge.

This short text provides a detailed account of the rationale behind the system of exchange and obligation that constitutes the focus of the book The Gift. Building on the idea that gifts given among people in Polynesia and the American Northwest have to be reciprocated, Mauss locates the operating figure in the hau, the spiritual power of the thing (known as toanga), which always seeks to return to original owner and place of origin. Underlying these exchange patterns is the belief that things themselves are actually a part of the giver, which means that to give something is to give a part of oneself. Thus, the exchange is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons thus yielding proper human relationships.

McCracken, G. (1988). Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Building from the fields of consumer behavior and anthropology, this book focuses on the inter-relation between culture and consumption, and provides a "systematic enquiry into the cultural and symbolic properties of consumer goods." After a historical overview of the making of the modern consumer with stops in the XVI, XVIII and XIX centuries, the book arrives at its linchpin: McCracken's model of how the meanings that operate in the culturally constituted world are transferred to consumer goods via certain mechanisms (advertisement and fashion) and then transferred to consumers via symbolic action (certain rituals). A crucial contribution this book makes to the study of material culture is its analysis on how material objects substantiate the cultural categories that organize everyday experience in the world. However, in McCracken's framework, things just signify -ideas, values, cultural properties, etc.; that is, they act as the vessels through which cultural principles and categories are made visible. In this sense, this book represents earlier stages in the study of stuff that disregard not just the material specificity of things but also how things can enact reality.

Miller, D. (1987). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell

Although rather abstract and highly theoretical, this earlier work by Miller comes as a response to the prevailing structuralist approach to consumption at the time of publication. Focused on material culture, mass consumption and theories of objectification, this book also outlines some of Miller’s key concepts including the humility of things (that apparently banal everyday objects order our world and mediate social relations silently), the idea of context in the study of material culture (that the pervasive presence of artifacts constitutes the context for modern life) and the extended application of anthropological studies of objects to the world of modern industrial capitalism (as opposed to the predominant focus on pre-industrial and non-Western situations). Overall, by departing from Marxist critical readings of objects as alienating commodities, this book highlights the productive nature of consumption as it discusses how modern consumers constantly transform those commodities into things of everyday use beyond what their intended, manufactured purpose was.

Miller, D. (2005). Materiality: an introduction. In Miller, D. (Ed.). (2005). Materiality. Duke University Press.

In this introduction to the homonymous book, Miller relies on philosophy to theoretically transcend the duality of subject–object as part of a wider attempt to distance himself from theories of representation (like semiotic analysis) that appreciate objects as signs and symbols that represent subjects (which reduces the former to the latter). Building on the work of Goffman, Gombrich, Hegel, Marx, Simmel, Maus and Bourdieu, among others, Miller revisits his argument about “the humility of things,” discusses the process and dialectics of objectification as well as how notions of agency and power affect materiality and material culture, and ultimately argues that it is necessary to show how the things that people make, make people.

Miller, D. (2010). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity.

Building on previous insight and ethnographic studies, Stuff continues to make the case for the replacement of a theory of stuff as representation with stuff as one part of a process of objectification—objects make us as part of the very same process by which we make them. Less theoretical and more empirical, Miller exemplifies his exploration through discussions of particular forms of clothing, housing, the Internet and cell phones, and life-stage shifts in relationships with the inanimate. Through these explorations, the book charts a path towards material culture studies not only by rejecting the popular view of stuff (as objects signifying) but also by presenting theories of material culture and demonstrating how those can be applied to the messy world of everyday life.

Woodward, I. (2007). Understanding material culture. London: SAGE

Also embracing a more positive/productive account of consumption and an approach that studies objects and people’s relations with them, this book seeks to demonstrate that “people require objects to understand and perform aspects of selfhood, and to navigate the terrain of culture more broadly.” However, what sets this book apart is the useful review of the diverse theoretical approaches to material objects as culture it provides, which transforms into a very valuable (and didactic) resource.

New Materialisms: Others as Agents

Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Here the authors turn to the figures of "ghosts" and "monsters" to unsettle the human and its presumed center stage in modern life by highlighting the web of histories and bodies from which life emerges, and by attuning us to worlds otherwise. Thus, by paying attention to how subjects become with others, they partake in an analysis that resembles Miller’s discussion of objectification and that ultimately displaces the human subject from the center stage.  In its place, the authors place “open-ended assemblages,” gatherings that coalesce in coordination across many kinds of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs, always in flux, always remaking us as well as our others.

Mitman, G., Armiero, M., & Emmett, R. (2018). Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Organized as a collection of objects found in a "Cabinet of Curiosities form the Anthropocene," this book is a good contribution to the study of things because it invites readers to see objects not just through the lens of human agency but through the lives of nonhuman beings who also shape and are shaped by those relationships and processes embodied in material forms. The essays rely on a multitude of artifacts, from a recycled kimchi jar to a documentary to the pesticide pump, to highlight how human hubris informs those material forms (as well as how other forces at play also get inscribed). Other emotional responses to the Anthropocene, such as acceptance, guilt and ingenuity are evoked in the chapters that discuss how artifacts, from cars to marine animal satellite tags, impact the bodies of nonhuman others both intentionally and not. Although eclectic by design, this juxtaposition feels somewhat disjointed at times, and some of the works seem too broad or focus more on the Anthropocene as a complex trope. However, as a collection of curiosities dotted with emotional investment, the items unsettle culture/nature binaries and provoke wonder-full thinking.

Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

In this book, Mol sets out to demonstrate that it is possible to engage in an ethnography of disease. Describing this effort as a study in empirical philosophy, her epistemology is based on focusing on the daily practices of patients and doctors, which are the "who" that enacts the "what." This constant foregrounding of practicalities and events (the reason why she calls the work a praxiography instead of ethnography) renders an account of a disease as a story about practices that develops over multiple sites and that entails vascular doctors and patients, but equally so a patient’s dog, microscopes, tints, knives, tables, etc. This multiplicity is not synonymous with plurality, however; in the ontology of medical practice that Mol proposes, there is one disease with many accounts that eventually coordinate (in various ways) as there is only one body that is multiple but that hangs together. The author’s insistence on objects as part of events aligns her work with newer approaches to the study of material culture, particularly those informed by Ingold. Overall, this is a remarkable book that seeks to transcend the subject/object divide but that does so by looking at the medical field.

Olsen, B. (2006). Scenes from a troubled engagement. In Tilley, C., S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands, & P. Spyer (Eds.) (2006), Handbook of material culture (pp. 85-103). London: SAGE.

In this book chapter, Olsen effectively traces the influence of post-structuralism in material culture studies and offers a nuanced account of this influx. He specifically focuses on the post-structuralist contributions of textualism and intertext as they apply to the study of objects, which ultimately permitted the understanding of material culture as a text that can be re-read by different people in new contexts. While this represents a significant source of theoretical inspiration, Olsen notes that it ultimately conflates text and materiality as ontological entities, failing to fully appreciate that material culture is in the world in a fundamentally different way from text and language. Olsen also discusses the contribution of post-structuralism to academic writing, which allowed a questioning of how literary forms intervened in the construction of the object. However, he Olsen quickly points out that in celebrating new ways of writing as they try to let complexity and hybridity shine through, there is a risk of creating a representational form that tries to be isomorphic with the represented, which is odd given the legacy that questions such mimicry.

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Soledad Altrudi is a PhD candidate at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she works at the intersection of STS and media studies, and explores the various effects that technology has on our environment as well as on human/non‐human‐other entanglements. Her dissertation focuses on Parque Nacional Patagonia as a case of rewilding in the Anthropocene, one that entails not only a conservation strategy but also works as a device for ordering human-nonhuman interactions in a highly mediatized environment.

Take Part in a Collective Storytelling Challenge and Inspire Others!

Take part in a collective storytelling challenge and inspire others!

Sangita Shresthova

(from Popular Culture and Civic Imagination cover art by Dan Goldman)

In the midst of the profound turmoil that has affected us all over the past weeks, our Civic Paths group brainstormed ways in which the civic imagination could be helpful to us and others. To come up with ideas, we first turned inward to understand our own unpredictable responses to fast shifting realities. We acknowledged the shock, grief, anger, uncertainty, fear, dread, and confusion. We then turned to what we had learned through our work on the Popular Culture and Civic Imagination casebook (featured here over the past weeks) to understand how we might begin to respond. This led to an exploration of how imagining and using imagination to connect with others could, in some small way, comfort us and help us see things differently, even for a moment.  

Growing out of this, we are excited to launch “Reflections from the Future”, a participatory storytelling challenge that invites people to take a minute to imagine a future far beyond our current moment and share this imagination to inspire others to share their visions too.  The collection will also become an enduring archive that preserves our imaginations at this current time. 

We invite participants (that is all of you!) to submit their responses to the prompt below, via a simple form. The responses will then populate the Atlas of the Civic Imagination, a creative archive of our visions and aspirations. Accessible to all, this archive will then inform others to create, analyze and act. We chose the Atlas for this because we are committed to including perspectives from many places and walks of life. In fact, we are currently building out ways to submit in other languages (reach out of if this is of interest).  

So, please join us! Respond to the prompt, participate, and help us populate the collection. 

You can respond directly (just fill out the form). You can also share the prompt with others (students, community members, friends, and colleagues). 

We know accessing imagination and hope is hard right now. We also believe it matters and leave you with a quote from Vaclav Havel that we return to often:

“Hope... is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success….. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” (Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, pp. 181-182)

Take part in a collective storytelling challenge and inspire others!

Link to challenge prompt is here!

2060: Reflections from the Future

Often, as people imagine future changes that lead to a better world, they start by imagining a crisis -- something that forces existing precarious circumstances to their breaking point, causing people to come together and try something different. Right now, our world is confronting a painful health crisis of unprecedented proportions and it is predicted it will be followed by an economic crisis of the same scope and scale. Recognizing this, let’s use this moment to initiate a process of reflection and intervention and bring our imaginative selves to the realities we face today. 

Draw on what inspires you, respond to our prompt, and contribute to a collective brainstorm that taps our imagination at a time when imagining takes courage. All responses will become part of 2060: Reflections from the Future, a public and shared collection that connects our current hopes, concerns, and aspirations.  Artists, thinkers, and community leaders working in various fields and formats with then also bring our collective visions to life.

BRAINSTORM PROMPT:

Think about the current moment, your situation and what you see around you - your fears and concerns. Take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Now, think about something that inspires you. This could be a story from anywhere (popular culture, folklore, faith, childhood, etc.).  It could be non-fiction, fiction or even fantasy. It could be something you have noticed happening around you recently. It could be a person in your life. Hold on to your inspiration as you start to turn to the future. Imagine it is now the year 2060, that is 40 years from now and the world is as you would like it to be. What’s possible? What could this future world look like? What are you curious about? What could it feel like? Imagine how people may live, engage, move around, learn, communicate, take care of themselves etc.. Imagine how things work and are organized.

Now, answer these questions create your response and add to the brainstorm:

• Think your hopes for 2060. Set the scene by describing your future world briefly.

• What are three keywords that you would want to have define this future world?

• What is a key thing that has changed between 2020 and 2060? And, why?  

• What will people want to remember when they think back on 2020?

• What story, thing, event, or person inspires you? Describe it and tell us why it resonates.

COMPOSE YOUR RESPONSE

Here are some ideas about what you could do to respond (mixing and matching is welcome):

• You can answer our questions directly,You can author a short creative response based on our prompts, and/orYou can create a scenario inspired by these prompts.

We welcome participation at all levels - short, long, simple or complex.

Share your response in any format you like - write, draw, record audio, make a short video (anything else works too, but note that the google form submission option only supports text and links). 

SUBMIT YOUR RESPONSE

MOST POPULAR OPTION - FILL OUT A FORM

This is the quickest and easiest option. Collect your content (prepare it ahead of time so you can paste it in) and share it with us via this google form. The upside of this option is that it is quick. The downside is that you cannot format your story. You will also be limited to adding text and links to images, video and other media. We will add your response to the collection for you.  

CREATIVE FAN AND GROUP COORDINATOR/EDUCATOR OPTION - UPLOAD TO ATLAS

This is a slightly more involved, but more direct option. Collect your content (prepare it ahead of time and paste it in). Submit your story directly to the Atlas of the Civic Imagination. To do this you will need to create an Atlas account. Once your account is approved, you can generate a group/code that will allow you to contribute stories (as a storyteller). You can also use the code to invite others to contribute stories directly (as storytellers). Though it involves 2 steps, this set up only takes a few minutes and is great for those who are coordinating groups of storytellers. It is also great for those who want to get more creative with their multimedia stories! You will also have the ability to edit your contribution and add media (audio, video, images) directly.  

About Us: Over the last 6 years, Henry Jenkins’s Civic Imagination Project team, based at the University of Southern California, has worked with communities all over the world to develop tools for unlocking the imagination and harnessing unbridled creativity for real world action because we believe that we need hope and imagination to mobilize and sustain our collective efforts. Our group believes that to make the world a better place everyone needs to be able to imagine what a better world looks like, even now, especially now. 

Track the project through the Atlas of the Civic Imagination.

Next Step, Join In! Launching the Atlas of the Civic Imagination

Next Step, Join In! Launching the Atlas of the Civic Imagination

Sangita Shresthova

Thinking back, the vision for the “Atlas of the Civic Imagination” took root over dinner at a Nepali restaurant in Austria in 2016, when our Civic Imagination Project team ran a civic imagination module at the Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change, an annual academic program that brings together 70 students from many countries for three weeks. Our module at Salzburg that year consisted of a “Sparking the Civic Imagination” keynote lecture, delivered by Henry Jenkins, and a series of three workshops, developed by our team,and carried out by Gabriel Peters-Lazaro (Gabe), Henry Jenkins and myself (see Gabe’s write up of the module).

As we reflected on our experiences halfway through the Academy over (pretty delicious) plates of momos and curry, Gabe, Henry and I kept circling back to the Atlas, a fledgling idea that we had just piloted. More specifically, we had come to Salzburg with a very early prototype of a tool that would allow us to map, visualize and otherwise connect the stories and accounts of imagination being used in civic spaces. Cobbled together using scalar (an authoring digital platform), google maps and extremely helpful interns to help with data entry, we had asked the students to geo-tag and upload the stories they created during our “Remixing Stories” workshops so that we could visualize them on a “Big Map”.

Despite the many technical glitches we encountered and the unsustainable levels of manual data processing we needed to make it work, the “Big Map” of stories the students collectively created that day convinced us that our Atlas idea had legs. It also dawned on us that an Atlas might, in fact, do more than map and organize participatory imaginations. It could also help connect and start dialogues with people engaged with the imagination in civic and political spaces.

That night, I left the restaurant filled with a hope that we would one day be able to able to make the Atlas a functioning and useful reality. Fast forward four years, I am so excited to share that we have finally made it happen.

What is the Atlas of the Civic Imagination?

An initiative of the Civic Imagination Project, the Atlas of the Civic Imagination is an user-driven site that invites communities and individuals to share their experiences with the imagination in civic spaces. We see the Atlas as a space that helps us:

●     share experiences and stories,

●     learn from what others are doing,

●     connect with other practitioners, and, eventually

●     gain applicable insights through dialogue and analysis.

The experiences contributors share could be connected to running our civic imagination workshops. They could also grow out of other work.  As a project, we are also using the Atlas as a space where we add our evolving observations from the workshops we continue to run with communities. Our hope is that the Atlas will become a space where we collectively amplify, generate ideas, collect experiences, map locations, and analyze stories generated through artistic, civil, community, learning, and other efforts.

In its current form, the Atlas grows out of our long-standing partnership with the folks at the National Writing Project, who generously worked with us to repurpose their “Writing Our Future” initiative which supports “online youth publishing projects.” Because of this connection, the architecture of the Atlas comes with built in features that allow us to work with a broad range of communities, including activists, organizations, and youth in educational contexts. It also gives us, and those who choose to contribute, significant curatorial control, which we hope will help us build trust and encourage participation in the long term.

How do people participate?

Signing up to contribute to the Atlas is pretty simple, and anyone can sign up. There are two account types. Facilitators administer geo-located sites and approve submitted stories and articles. Storytellers author content. A facilitator can oversee many groups of storytellers. They can also create a storyteller account to submit their own content through their own site.

This blog post is our first public announcement about the Atlas (gulp), and we are still learning about how people will want to use the Atlas and what we will need to do to support it. So far, we have noted that folks seem to want to use the Atlas in two ways:

1. Facilitators, who run one of our six Civic Imagination Workshops, want to share the outcomes of their workshops on the Atlas. They can do this by having their participants upload stories directly. They can also author a summary of their workshop on their behalf, as educator Jimmeka Jackson did in “Discovering A DIFFERENT WORLD with Content Worlds.”

1. People involved with communities, companies, organizations and networks working with the imagination in civic and political realms use the Atlas to add their own approaches and experiences to the Atlas, and through this join the larger conversation.  Case in point of this is Janae Phillips’s account of a workshop on privilege and Harry Potter that she ran in Tucson, Arizona.

Through such and other, yet to be discovered contributions, we see the  Atlas of the Civic Imagination as a space that encourages informal connections that may event, one day, inspire action.

Infinite Hope Workshop

To make things as easy as possible for facilitators, the site also includes instructions for our “Infinite Hope - Imagining a Better World” workshop, a future-focused workshop highlighting the power of stories as tools for fostering civic imagination and inspiring real world change. As this title suggests, the focus is on world-building, that is, thinking about what alternative worlds might look like, reading them in relation to our own, and deploying them as a means of expressing and debating visions for what alternatives might be to current conditions. We invite you to run a workshop and share your experiences through the Atlas.

We find that this frees participants from the constraints on the imagination which are posed by a relentless focus on existing constraints which limit the possibilities for change, which results in activists self-censoring themselves.

Highlighting the importance of civic imagination, the workshop leads participants through an exercise of building a future world in which both real and fantastical solutions to cultural, social and political challenges are possible, ultimately leading them to strategize how we may be able to get to this imagined future starting today. The workshop begins with a big picture brainstorm. Working backwards, the participants then break into smaller groups to share insights and build on these imagined worlds to brainstorm character-based narratives of social change set in the shared future world. After working out their stories, the groups are then given a short amount of time to prepare a presentation of their narrative. Encouraging spontaneity and creativity, the final share backs given participants an immediate platform for sharing their stories, creating a sense of community between participants and leading to group dialog and reflection. 

In effect, the workshop helps participants brainstorm the full range of possible directions they could go. Many of the political veterans in the organizations we work with have been initially skeptical of what they saw as the ‘escapist’ dimensions of our approach, but they have often rethought this opposition when they see how this approach re-energized participants. 

More  Opportunities 

We are also developing additional prompts and activities that respond to our current physically separated realities and will be sharing those in this space shortly.

So, please do join in, contribute, and help us launch the Atlas of the Civic Imagination!   

(And, do let us know if you run into any problems, we are still learning about Atlas’s possibilities and limitations.)

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California.  Her work focuses on intersections among popular culture, imagination, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. Her recent research has focused on issues of storytelling and surveillance among American Muslim youth and the achievements and challenges faced by Invisible Children pre-and-post Kony2012. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth, both released by NYU Press. Her first book on the transnational dimensions of  Bollywood dance (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011.

Choreographed Resistance: Feminist Solidarity Against Gender-Based Violence Through "Un violador en tu camino" and the Civic Imagination (2 of 2)

Andrea Alarcon, Paulina Lanz, and Rogelio Alejandro Lopez 

The imagined community of latinx sisterhood

This sense of commonality calls to mind Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” an idea that describes how the mass proliferation of media artifacts can delineate and then replicate our "imaginary" of the nation state — our sense of what a state is and what it means to belong to it. Through maps, mainstream media, and museums, people create a collective identity of being “Chilean.” Latin America, due to shared history, language and religion, has historically cultivated its own imagined community. At a regional level, scaling from the national, it replicates an imaginary community through other types of artifacts: mainstream popular culture such music, cinema, literature, television but also, often in counter-cultural artifacts involving class struggles and social movements, in this case through a choreographed musical performance.

If the current boundaries and maps of the world were a product of a patriarchical claiming of land, then pushing back across borders becomes a feminist fight. Scholar Jacqui M. Alexander (2005) brings together politics and sexuality through a transnational feminist approach.  It juxtaposes neocolonialism to neoimperalism, contesting different cartographies of feminist struggle, moving from a local order to a global option (Alexander, 2005). Though women in Latin America have different social formations, solidarity works as a cultural relativist practice, as an ideology. Transnational female solidarity goes beyond the focus on the body, and moves instead towards using the body in acts of protest, especially as a collective medium. Hence, this performance takes the form of a solidary body practice that expresses the dynamics of the social, cultual, and political relations of a transnational — and postmodern — imaginary of America.

“Is the violence you DON’T see.”

The imaginary no longer responds to America — that which Christopher Colombus "found" — but to the collective threat of heteropatriarchy, where bodies are reconfigured from the domestic sphere to the public sphere, collapsing geographical boundaries into a hypervisible and re-imagined American sisterhood.

“Is the violence you CAN see.”

A crowdsourced map tracks the spread of "Un violador en tu camino" across the world. Here, we see the visual representation of its impact across Latin America.

Re-imagining discourse

"Un violador en tu camino" is a great example of how the civic imagination can work not only outside of the US, but across nations to address issues that impact communities at a global scale. Specifically, “Un violador en tu camino” brings people together through cultural practice — a choreagraphed performance — to challenge a toxic discourse that too often places blame on the victims of sexual assault, instead focusing on the role of perpertrators, the state that does not prosecute, the police that does not arrest. The patriarchal culture that created and maintains control dismisses the wellbeing of women while excusing the harmful behavior of men. The World Health Organization considers violence against women to be a clear violation of human rights and a public health concern due to its global pervasiveness: nearly one in three women across the world will experience some form of physical and/or sexual violence within their lifetimes, most often perpertrated by an itinmate partner. Thirty-eight percent of all murders of women are committed by an intimate partner, and is considered an issue of "epidemic proportions,"

Beyond the civic imagination as a first step towards imagining alternatives to the current social and political order (often specifically to address issues that appear to have no solution), the work at Civic Paths has identified specific functions of such an imaginative approach that are worth considering when looking at this case. They include: imagining a better world, imagining the process of change, imagining ourselves as civic agents, forging solidarity with others with different experiences from our own, imagining our social connections with a larger community, and bringing an imaginative dimension to our real world spaces and places (Jenkins, Shresthova, Peters-Lazaro, 2020).

First, “Un violador en tu camino” arguably encourages women to imagine themselves as civic agents through a shared cultural practice — a choreographed performance denouncing violence against women — bypassing the sense of powerlessness on the issue (a.k.a. what Duncombe calls "tyranny of the possible"). “Un violador en tu camino” may be considered "thin and symbolic" in terms of Zuckerman's "Levers of Change" model, meaning the performance has relatively low participation costs (time, energy) and its outcomes are cultural rather than institutional or legislative (Zuckerman, 2014). Its outcomes are what Earl (2004) may call "discursive" or cultural, since part of the aim (beyond building solidarity) is to change the public discourse — literally how the issue is discussed in everyday life, media, and politics. One desired outcome would be changing the prevalence of victim blaming, for example.  Furthermore, the "thin and symbolic" designation may allow political newcomers to easily partake and see the bridge between culture and social change — arguably generating a sense of civic efficacy, the idea that one's actions can have observable outcomes in the world. In this case, the visible outcomes of partaking in “Un violador en tu camino” are seeing like-minded women come together and collectively demand visibility through the use of physical bodies occupying space, to hone-in on gender-based violence.

Second, the international spread of “Un violador en tu camino” allowed for the forging of solidarity amongst diverse groups and it facilitated an international sense of community otherwise not possible at local levels. Initially in Chile, the performance fused ongoing protests surrounding increasing transportation costs with grievances pertaining to gender-based violence. This brought together women of all walks of life, as gender-based violence cuts across socioeconomic status.  Soon after, “Un violador en tu camino” spread to other Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America, countries bound together by the before-mentioned imaginary but otherwise culturally and politically distinct — a powerful gesture of solidarity among women across the region. Eventually “Un violador en tu camino” was translated into various languages, reaching the United States and Europe, and well beyond. In addition to serving as a powerful international show of solidarity with the country of origin, Chile, it also facilitated a kind of international feminist community (however ephemeral).

The song scaled: while we had to look up the Carabineros when we heard the song, singing it from Los Angeles still made sense in our context, as we sang it to a United States president who is the embodiment of what the song decries. The continent is mostly democratic, so the institutions highlighted resonate: the police, the courts, the state. More importantly, through the ease of participation, women who may not have considered progressive gender social movements were suddenly exposed to in their social media feeds.  While not without its own critiques, global sisterhood has explained how women can come together through feminism — and in the case of violence against women, a problem so vast and pervasive, such a lens may be needed. Is "Un violador en tu camino" an instance of global sisterhood? Perhaps. At the very least, the spread of this cultural performance allows us to apply the idea of civic imagination beyond the US, shedding light into the non-traditional pathways towards social change across the globe.

Andrea Alarcon's interests lie in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. She is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms in developing countries as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. She received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.

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Andrea Alarcon's interests lie in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. She is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms in developing countries as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. She received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.

Rogelio Alejandro Lopez is PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where his work centers on social movements, civic media, and youth culture. His dissertation is a comparative look into the role of media strategies and cultural production in developing a “civic imagination” among contemporary youth social movements.

Paulina Lanz is a PhD Student in Communication at USC. She identifies in buildings and in urban places a source of memoirs and nostalgia. Cities have led her to research in a convergence among culture and media studies at the hand of film. The theoretical immersion to space and cultural studies through an aesthetic perspective has been a stimulus for developing an interdisciplinary commitment from former disciplines to present endeavor. The object takes on a new meaning while researching buildings as media, an emerging mechanism to focus storytelling through spatial remembrance, as a blueprint-incepted testimony. Paulina is a member of the Civic Paths group and involved in research in the Skid Row and Homeless Connectivity Project, and the Mobile Devices Global Mapping Project. She is a founding member and organizer of Critical Mediations, a Communication and Cultural Studies Conference.

Choreographed Resistance: Feminist Solidarity Against Gender-Based Violence Through "Un violador en tu camino" and The Civic Imagination (1 of 2)

Choreographed Resistance: Feminist Solidarity Against Gender-Based Violence Through "Un violador en tu camino" and The Civic Imagination

Andrea Alarcon, Paulina Lanz, and Rogelio Alejandro Lopez

Last December, we participated in an organized performance of “Un violador en tu camino”. It was the LA iteration of this Chilean protest song, which formed part of the larger social protests on Chile at the end of 2019 (and into 2020)."Un violador en tu camino," (which translates to "a rapist in your path,") includes a dance routine paired with the lyrics of a song — which quickly became popular and spurred performances in Latin America and globally, to decry gender-based violence. It was created by the feminist art collective Las Tesis and most notably performed on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25, 2019) in Valparaíso, Chile.  

As we arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we quickly recognized fellow protesters. Women wore black attire with red, green and purple bandanas, some carried signs and flags, and most appeared to be Latinas. We had both seen videos of the performance held in our home countries (Mexico and Colombia), and we were happy to see that women in LA organized the event to bring us all together. It was a rainy Sunday morning, and the organizers worried that the weather would deter people from coming. The gathering brought women from (what appeared to be) distinct social classes and backgrounds together: academics (who organized the event), members of a cleaner's union, and Hollywood socialites. We even spoke to a few English-only speakers, who memorized the steps even though they could not sing along. Chilean flags could be seen proudly flown. We spent an hour rehearsing the song and its choreography, and also making sure everyone had a blindfold (a required accessory for the routine). As the sky cleared up, more and more women arrived, including young girls.  

“Y la culpa no era mía / ni dónde estaba / ni cómo vestía.” (And the fault was not mine / nor where I was / nor how I was dressed.)  

“El violador eres tú.” (And the rapist IS you)

[Extend LEFT arm straight out in front of you, pointing] 

The song addresses layers of violence against women: with the chorus switching the usual blame on victims, to blaming the rapists. It pays attention as much to intimate-partner violence as to the state's complicity in perpetuating gender-based crimes. After numerous mobilizations in Chile's city centers in late 2019, the performance spread throughout Latin America where the song was quickly adopted by women due to the shared Spanish language and a communal sense of Latinidad (which we will discuss later on), but more importantly because women across the region face similar harmful circumstances due to gender violence. Eventually it reached various countries across the globe: as of February 2020, it had been performed in 52 countries. 

A few things we noticed while participating included the feminist and gender solidarity, across nationality, age, occupation, and socioeconomic background in the LA performance. Also the strength that came from the song, the performance, and the women who practiced for an hour to get it right. A disconcerting yet thought-provoking occurrence as we performed was who was facing us: the men in these women’s lives, behind cameras and smartphones, observing and recording the performance. The positioning of the scene was also a bit unsettling. After all, we kept pointing to these men and saying “the rapist is you,” over and over again, as the chorus demands, meant to switch back blame to the observer.  A notable actress in the crowd encouraged women to “thank the men who were supporting us,” and we wondered if highlighting the supportive men meant they may think that the song was not intended for them. How many of the “good men” see violence against women as an external problem unrelated to them, patriarchy as an evil of other men, the rapists, the bad men?  

While we have participated in many women’s marches, this performance was different: the speech is commanding and straightforward, its purpose clear, and the militant resonance of a synchronous choreography equalizes women as victims of patriarchy, while also unifying us to fight it.  

A rapist in your path

 [Keep arms loose at your side, march in place to the beat for the first eight verses] 

Patri-archy is our judge

That imprisons us at birth

And our punishment

Is the violence you DON’T see. 

Patri-archy is our judge

That imprisons us at birth

And our punishment

Is the violence you CAN see. 

It's femicide.

[Place hands behind the head, squat up and down]

Impu-nity for my killer.

[Repeat movement above]

It’s our disappearances.

[Repeat movement above]

It’s rape!

[Repeat movement above] 

[March in place, but without lifting feet from the ground; move forearms up and down in sync with] 

And it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed.

And it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed.

And it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed.

And it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed. 

And the rapist WAS you

[Extend LEFT arm straight out in front of you, pointing] 

And the rapist IS you

[Extend LEFT arm straight out in front of you, pointing] 

It's the cops,

[Use LEFT arm to point behind you]

It’s the judges,

[Use LEFT arm to point in front of you]

It’s the system,

[Raise arms, pointing in circle around the head]

It’s the president.

[Cross forearms above the head forming an X] 

[Use LEFT arm and pump a closed fist]

The oppressive state is a macho rapist.

The oppressive state is a macho rapist. 

And the rapist WAS you

[Extend LEFT arm straight out in front of you, pointing]

And the rapist WAS you

[repeat movement above]

And the rapist WAS you

[repeat movement above]

And the rapist WAS you

[repeat movement above]

A lyrical breakdown (of patriarchy) 

The lyrics of "Un violador en tu camino" (re-translated into English above) provide a kind of popular examination of how and why gender-based violence is so prevalent not only in Chile and Latin America, but across the globe. The opening alludes to forms of "invisible" violence, such as domestic violence that has high rates of incidence in Chile yet is often underreported in the media, but also more visible forms, such as femicide (mentioned directly in the song).  With a middling Gender Inequality Index (GII) score from the United Nations, Chile, despite its relatively high social and economic status in the region, lags behind other democratic nations in elevating women to positions of power (with the notable exception of former President, Michelle Bachelet).  

According to the Chilean Network of Violence Against Women, the Chilean government, from police to politicians, is deeply implicated in perpetuating "patriarchal violence" by regularly refusing to prosecute gender-based crimes, and a recent human rights report by the UN found that police and military used sexual violence against protestors and political dissidents in late 2019. Further solidifying the dual critique of patriarchal violence and the oppressive state more broadly, “Un violador en tu camino” directly addresses the victim blaming often associated with gender-based violence — a discourse replicated by Chile's own President, Sebastian Piñera, when he suggested women were to blame for placing themselves in positions to be sexually assaulted. To this, the anthem responds, "it was not my fault, nor where I was, nor how I dressed." Further down, we see the conflation of patriarchal violence with the systems that uphold it, "this oppressive state is a macho rapist," proclaiming how "the rapist WAS you", followed by an assertion that “the rapist IS you” — as much a condemnation of individual perpetrators as of the state.

A road sign by the Carabineros de Chile, with their now defunct slogan "un amigo siempre" ("always your friend") [Photo credit: Benjamin Dumas, 2011].

The title of "Un violador en tu camino" is an allusion to a 1980s publicity campaign by the Chilean police force "Carabineros de Chile" (translated as "Riflemen of Chile"), with the slogan “a friend in your path.” The song links the Carabineros, who claim to be a “friend” that protects women, to the patriarchy embedded in the systems of governance which are constantly violent to women. In spite of its transnational appeal, some of the song's references are local to Chile. For example, the phrase "duerme tranquila" ("sleep calmly") is a direct reference to the Carabineros de Chile's anthem that was widely criticized in the Chilean protests last fall. The anthem is titled "Orden y patria" (“Order and the motherland"), and was sung in schools during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). That particular stanza (below), as well as the crouching choreography, was a way to call out the forces that had reportedly asked women to strip and crouch in police custody during the protests.

Duerme tranquila, niña inocente, (Sleep calmly, innocent girl,)

sin preocuparte del bandolero, (without fear of bandits,)

que por tu sueño dulce y sonriente, (for over your sweet dreams,)

vela tu amante carabinero. (your police lover watches.)

___________________________

Andrea Alarcon's interests lie in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Studies. She is particularly interested in studying the appropriation of social media platforms in developing countries as gateways to the web, and transnational, online labor cultures. She received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She also worked as a Research Assistant with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective. Before academia, she worked as a web producer and editor for the World Bank, and in social media for Discovery Channel in Latin America.

Rogelio Alejandro Lopez is PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where his work centers on social movements, civic media, and youth culture. His dissertation is a comparative look into the role of media strategies and cultural production in developing a “civic imagination” among contemporary youth social movements.

Paulina Lanz is a PhD Student in Communication at USC. She identifies in buildings and in urban places a source of memoirs and nostalgia. Cities have led her to research in a convergence among culture and media studies at the hand of film. The theoretical immersion to space and cultural studies through an aesthetic perspective has been a stimulus for developing an interdisciplinary commitment from former disciplines to present endeavor. The object takes on a new meaning while researching buildings as media, an emerging mechanism to focus storytelling through spatial remembrance, as a blueprint-incepted testimony. Paulina is a member of the Civic Paths group and involved in research in the Skid Row and Homeless Connectivity Project, and the Mobile Devices Global Mapping Project. She is a founding member and organizer of Critical Mediations, a Communication and Cultural Studies Conference.

Imagining Humanity: The Potential and Limits of Humans of New York (2 of 2)

Becky Pham, Parmita Sengupta & Eduardo Gonzalez

Tensions between envisioning and creating connective action

Eduardo

So what I am hearing is that Stanton’s dominance over the original “Humans of” brand is clearly visible and also significantly challenged by the other spinoff communities. In my own research, I am interested in understanding the social and political efficacies of migrant communities in transnational contexts--in other words, the real and imagined ways immigrants exercise agency over their lives and in their communities in contexts where they may have to navigate legal restrictions caused by their noncitizen statuses.

I’d like to discuss a little more about the space between envisioning action and creating connection: Among the great causes Stanton has supported through his HONY platform, he also interviewed Barack Obama near the end of his presidency. What role do high-profile officials play in transforming (or even dominating) the civic imagination? Do these kinds of features take away from the essence of HONY?

Paromita

High-profile officials definitely gave Stanton the mass popularity that he now enjoys, which I do appreciate as a long-term fan of HONY (I use the term “fan” loosely here, because I am quite critical of his policies and apolitical stance). I don’t know if I would say they take away from the “essence of HONY”, because Stanton has been consistent about maintaining HONY as an apolitical, “good vibes only” space from the very beginning. But they do make his stance as a moderator in the HONY comment sections more problematic, because they give him a higher symbolic authority to shut down conversations that displease him, and bring greater amounts of attention to some of the more problematic stories he decides to feature.

For instance, last September, Stanton published a somewhat-alarming story about a man from the Netherlands who expressed some very incel views on relationships, such as keeping women in a constant state of insecurity by demeaning their appearance. Since Stanton does not comment on the stories -- he just features them -- and he has been very vocal in the past about the need for compassion, and not judging the people whose stories you see on HONY because you do not know their full stories, the combined effect is one of a sympathetic portrayal of a public expression of misogyny from a wildly-influential media voice.

Under-represented communities and popular culture

Becky

Right. So from a case in the Netherlands, let’s look at international microcommunities based on the original HONY. I truly appreciate that you have decided to feature the “Humans of" microcommunities in a non-Western and underrepresented context like Iran, and then convincingly delved into how these communities challenged the mainstream rhetorics of Orientalism and demonization imposed on Iran as “repressive, antiquated and in need of humanizing" (p. 267). This, of course, has seemed to successfully promulgate a more localized and nuanced representation of Iran, but do you think this effect would be stronger if a more uniquely Iranian cultural phenomenon had been featured?

Paromita

This is a particularly interesting topic for me, and something I explore in detail in a journal article that is being published in March in Transformative Works and Cultures. To give you a brief summary, I discovered in the course of researching HONY that Iranian journalists have long been critical of American media representations of Iran which either demonize the culture, or describe it in language that stresses the ‘normalcy’ of Iran by stressing its similarity with American (or universally human) values. As an Iranian-American journalist named Alex Shams put it, “It seems that just about every other week another Western journalist “discovers” Iran and its 'manically welcoming' people, explaining to the world for the fifty-millionth time that contrary to the audience's assumptions, Iran is a pretty nice place to visit”. This is why spinoff pages like “Humans of Tehran” play such important roles as counter-narratives, because they decolonize the very notion of ‘humanity’ by pushing for more nuanced and varied representations of non-American cultures.

For instance, when Shirin Barghi (the creator of “Humans of Tehran”) adopted the “Humans of” model of storytelling by approaching people on the streets of Tehran and asking them to share their stories, her experiences were very different from the way Stanton had described his on HONY. During the government crackdown against the Green Movement of 2009, surveillance equipment had been used to covertly photograph protestors at demonstrations and use them as intimidation tactics, so the people Barghi approached were wary and distrustful of photographers who were inquiring about their private stories. When Barghi was describing why Stanton’s methods were not replicable in the Iranian context, she said, "I love the captions that 'Humans of New York' provides for its photos, but it's not the same in Tehran, people don't want to tell their stories. People are very, very private, as soon as people go outside, they become private people and they set up these barriers."

Barghi uses a more collaborative form of storytelling, such as working with Iranian photographers Omid Iranmehr and Nooshafarin on curating the photographs and translating the captions from Persian to English, and crowdsourcing photographs for consideration from the Iranian community. These methods encourage Iranians to surpass the colonial lens of HONY, and tell their own stories. "Humans of Tehran" also rejects the model of contrived positivity, and addresses a wide variety of complex and sometimes uncomfortable political issues, such as government censorship, the growing suicide rate amongst young women, and the struggles of maintaining transcontinental familial connections in the face of the US travel ban. One example I used in my article is a photograph of a news-stand captioned: "News-stands in Tehran are absolutely awesome—you can find anything in them, lock, stock and barrel." The caption is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that newsstands in Iran often run a flourishing trade in alcohol and marijuana, even in the face of draconian government control and criminal charges.

Transnationality, tensions between global/local forces

Becky

So on this note of the transnational aspect of the HONY universe, I would like to branch out from here to discuss any tensions between the global versus local forces when a transnational cultural phenomenon becomes spreadable media. From my own studies of transnational K-pop fandom in Vietnam, there exists a tension between nationalistic ideologies advocating for the preservation of a unique national identity in the wake of foreign cultural invasion versus cosmopolitan, youth-based reception of foreign cultural flow in forging new youth identities and new forms of civic participation. I have been questioning whether this tension is structurally- or culturally-based, or both? In other words, given how K-pop has taken the world by storm and established wide networks of fans with increasingly accessible communication technologies, it should not be surprising that Vietnamese fans would enthusiastically and/or conveniently tap into these structures and embrace K-pop. So as of now, I would argue that any public reactions to K-pop fandom in Vietnam should take into consideration both structural and cultural configurations underlying this cultural phenomenon. I find your discussion on the problematic white savior complex associated with Stanton illuminating, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Stanton’s personal background and ideology has been conflated with Facebook as the arguably even more Anglocentric structure that HONY is based on in accentuating the notion of ethical neocolonialism that certain critics have identified? As you have pointed out in the chapter, even when Facebook was banned in Iran, followers in Iran still actively accessed Facebook for their “Humans of Tehran" community. Could Stanton's uncritical expression of global fellowship and superficial assessment that “Americans are especially loved in Iran" have been attributed to the soft power of Facebook somewhat?

Paromita

I think that might have been an expression of Stanton’s own apathy towards trying to understand racial tensions, and his obsession with portraying a mode of universal, colorblind “humanity” that precludes any kind of critical discourse on his page. From what I can see on the “Humans of Tehran” page, I don’t think the situation is as simple as Stanton would like to believe.

The position of Facebook within this debate is interesting, not just within the context of “soft power” in Iran, but also in terms of the algorithmic control that Stanton can exert over this community as the moderator of the HONY Facebook page. Following an incident where the conversation in the comment section took on a more critical bent, Stanton posted a public announcement on the HONY Facebook page stating, "Unfortunately, the 'right to free speech' does not apply here. This is not the place to further an ideology at the expense of an individual... Let's try to get back to saying nice things about strangers. In short, let's make HONY different than the rest of the internet”.

In 2015, Stanton delivered a lecture at the University of Dublin where he spoke about being in negotiations with Facebook about altering the Facebook mobile app such that comments would be organized in order of popularity instead of chronologically, pushing the upvoted comments to the top of the post, where they would have the most visibility . This would allow Stanton to maintain the culture of positivity by upvoting the comments that aligned with his own vision. Given how Facebook’s ostensibly color-blind content filtering system has been shown to be racially-biased, HONY is using the social media algorithm and his own vision of ‘humanity’ to create what I call an oppressive “culture of positivity”, which is further silencing dissenting opinions within the fandom.

Conclusion

Eduardo

In line with Stanton’s criticisms for white savior complex and to wrap up our short conversation today, how might we learn from that to envision and create transnational connective action working to support new groups in other countries without it being framed by the local/national a different flavor of U.S. cultural imperialism?

Paromita

I think the larger narrative that emerges from the comparison of “Humans of New York” and the spinoff groups is that the civic imagination of a group, or in this case a fandom, cannot be limited by one person’s individual vision of humanity. To me, one of the most important things that I would have liked to see from Stanton and HONY is for him to acknowledge his position of power and privilege, and not attempt to speak for minority voices. Instead, he should pass on the mic and let minority voices tell their own stories, using his platform and global outreach to make it easier for them to be heard.

Becky

Alright, thank you for taking the time to let us talk to you today, Paromita!

Eduardo

We look forward to reading your future scholarship on participatory online communitie

In the meantime, check out Paromita's next publication in Transformative Works and Cultures:

• Sengupta, Paromita. 2020. "Positivity, Critical Fan Discourse, and "'Humans of New York'". In "Fandom and Politics," edited by Ashley Hinck and Amber Davisson, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 32.

Imagining Humanity: The Potential and Limits of Humans of New York (1 of 2)

Becky Pham, Parmita Sengupta & Eduardo Gonzalez

Becky Pham

Hi Paromita, congratulations on your book chapter, “Participatory Action in Humans of New York (HONY)” (p. 262-270) in the edited volume! Thank you for agreeing to let Eduardo and me be in conversation with you about this chapter in particular and your research directions in general. Could you first give us a brief introduction about yourself and what have you been up to recently?

Paromita Sengupta

Thank you, Becky. I am a fifth year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, writing my dissertation on humorous hashtag movements and the use of civic humor to push back against mainstream discourses around police violence, neo-fascism, amd rape culture. The chapter in the Civic Imagination casebook is a 2-part project that arose from my MA thesis on affective activism in participatory online communities. The book chapter focuses on civic imagination and storytelling, while the second part of the project is an article that is being published in Transformative Works and Cultures in March 2020, and focuses more on the fan-created “Humans of” spinoff pages, and how they have resisted what I see as Stanton’s obsession with maintaining a contrived spirit of goodwill and positivity on HONY. I am excited to talk about this in more detail, so thank you for interviewing me!

Becky

Thank you, Paromita! I am Becky Pham, currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at USC. My research interests mainly focus on children, youth and media, and the one research thread most pertinent to our conversation today would be my ongoing fascination with how the mainstream media portrays transnational K-pop youth fandom in Vietnam, how the Vietnamese publics react to these media representations, and how the young fans respond to and resist both. How about you, Eduardo?

Eduardo Gonzalez

I am Eduardo Gonzalez, I am also a first-year PhD student at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and my research focuses on political representations of migrants, and ethnic and religious minorities in the U.S., Mexican, German and Turkish media. My work also looks at rhetoric used in popular and political media outlets to depict minorities, political violence, censorship, and death. Lately, I have become more interested in understanding how the civic imagination might play a role to envision a more connected and compassionate world.

Civic imagination

Becky

Awesome, thank you Eduardo! Paromita, back to you, could you share with us more details about your trajectory in choosing HONY as the case-in-point to elucidate the concept of “civic imagination"?

Paromita

HONY was an interesting example of the civic imagination, because it manifested in two different ways in the community. Brandon Stanton (the creator of HONY) originally started out as a visual storyteller, who would tell beautiful, emotional, and very truncated stories about the people he photographed on the streets of New York. His Facebook fan community was an integral part of the participatory storytelling process, because they used the comment section to add to the narratives, ask questions, collectively brainstorm potential endings to the narratives, and express the desire to intervene directly when possible. Stanton facilitated this process by creating fundraisers where fans could donate money to help out in various situations. It was a participatory imaginative process that envisioned better endings to Stanton’s truncated micro-stories, and established an interventionist framework through which the fans could try to achieve those endings.

However, Stanton has also made it very clear that he wants HONY to be an apolitical, positive space, which severely limits some of the more critical discourse around stories that Stanton had posted (or in one case, posted and then deleted). The second iteration of the civic imagination is expressed through the “Humans of” spinoff pages, such as “Humans of Tehran” and “Humans of Hindutva”, which deal more directly with local political issues, and have collectively reimagined what participation through the ‘Humans of’ storytelling model could look like if it was a more participatory process between the photographer and the community.

Eduardo

You brought up a great point, Paromita. Stanton’s vision of a simultaneously peaceful, apolitical space but with interventional tendencies indeed seems like it would be inherently at odds with each other, which naturally explains HONY’s severe limits on more critical discourses, and the emergence of the “Humans of” spinoff pages that ensued for more participatory communities. 

Becky

Yes, indeed. Just to add onto this thread of participatory processes, I want to delve into how the history of a community could influence its trajectory of civic participation. The concept of “civic imagination" emphasizes the power of one's imagination before one could change the world. With regard to HONY, the case-in-point here has possessed in itself a rather established history and well-defined norms of engaging in real-life problem-solving and building social consciousness through imagining better. I am curious, then, during your research process, did you happen to come across any communities that were still in their early stages of imagining without concrete evidence of collective action yet? What could be some of the factors that influence how civic imagination could be successfully or unsuccessfully translated into real social changes?

Paromita

The answer to that depends on how you operationalize terms like “real social changes” and “concrete evidence of collective action”. My research focuses on humor and social change, so I am personally wary of using “social change” to refer exclusively to measurable changes in public policy, law, or infrastructure. And if that is how social change is to be calibrated and understood, my answer to your question would be no, I have not seen any of the ‘Humans of’ pages engage with any kind of collective, organized, civic action on that scale. Most of these are smaller pages, and do not have Stanton’s funds, reach, or media attention.

However, as Stanton began to gather global popularity as a philanthropist traveling through war-ridden countries in the Middle East and doing global outreach programs with the UN, he definitely started to become more fixated with the idea of keeping HONY friendly and positive, even at the expense of critical conversations around race, intersectionality, and the US military-industrial complex. In his conversations with the “Humans of” Syria and Iran, he is essentially curating the conversation through his choice of what quotes to feature and what to leave out. This is nothing new, of course. The truncated micro-conversations were always curated by him, even when they were about New York. But now, with his global outreach, he is shaping how millions of Americans (not to mention millions of fans globally) are imagining precarious populations like Syrian refugees. And that is problematic, because for Stanton, the “humanity” of a population is premised on how universal and “American” their stories are. The stories are meant to inspire sentimentality, but not necessarily empathy, because they do not depict social realities through a critical perspective.

More problematically, he wants the subjects to be de-racialized in order for them to be human. In an article in the (now discontinued) Bettery Magazine, Stanton described his experiences as an American photographer in Tehran as follows: “I was underwhelmed by the danger. I was underwhelmed by the religious fanaticism…The only thing present in a larger-than-expected dose was normalcy. The entire country was plagued by normalcy. Everywhere I looked—on street corners, inside of shops, and even inside of homes— there were normal people doing normal things.” The use of the phrase ‘normal’ here is troubling to me, because it implies that we should consider an entire population to be human only so long as they are ethnically-neutral, and subscribe to the mould of “normal people doing normal things.”

This is where the spinoff pages become really interesting to me, because they are much more willing to put aside the spirit of goodwill and positivity, and engage with local political issues. “Humans of Hindutva” is a satirical page that critiques the neo-fascist Hindutva movement in India by creating fictional interviews with Indian political figures (or in one memorable case, a cow, see attached screenshot) to expose the absurd logical fallacies within their ideals of nationalism and racial superiority. “Humans of Tehran” works with Iranian photojournalists to tell stories of Iranians from their own perspective, highlighting the complex, layered nature of their lives. For instance, it highlights the voices of women in technology in Iran and the complexities of maintaining trans-continental relationships with family in the face of the US travel ban. To me, these count as “real social changes,” because they use the civic imagination to resist public perceptions of Otherized communities and populations, and allow citizens of countries that are typically demonized in the media to tell their own stories on their own terms, and not be forced to be ‘humanized’ through a white, colonialist gaze.

Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: Youth Culture and Civic Imagination After the Arab Spring (2 of 2)

The chapter ends on a hopeful note of reimagining a better future, one contingent on these subjects coming of age and implementing their politics in order to ameliorate what they see as problems. The rest of the article, however, is emphasizing critique, remixing, and a sense of deconstruction. Could you elaborate on how these youths are using these deconstructive projects to create a constructive new vision for their nation? 

While we conclude that there is not one explicit alternative that these youth are drawing, there is a common theme of pushing out the things they do not want and bringing in the things they do want. If we look at the content together maybe an apt metaphor would be that of a brainstorm.

They deconstruct the sanctity of figures of authority and morality. This is something that Yomna has explored deeper in her work (including this article and her dissertation titled "Modes of Cultural Resistance Post-Arab Spring: Humor, Music and the Making of a New Digital Identity").  

When I connect this to the civic imagination workshops, a few of which I have helped facilitate, there has to be an agreement when you walk into the room that the way things look right now does not have to be the way things look in the future. People who hold power, figures of authority or morality, individuals who make decisions for large groups of people do not have to be the same in the future as they are now. The rules that apply to this world need not apply to the world we build. Based on this agreement, the participants in the workshop begin drawing images and telling stories about the world they want to see. This is also how online creative content (like the data analyzed in our chapter) works. There are many more participants, and it is not an organized effort, but each person is taking part in drawing the image of what we can have and what we should leave behind in the future.  

Without deconstructing, the new images cannot come forward. In the civic imagination workshops we have referred to this as the "tyranny of the possible." If participants are controlled/haunted by the rules of how the world currently operates, they will not be able to imagine imaginative solutions. They must first deconstruct/let go of these rules in order to make room for the imagination. What happens online is that once you enter that page marked by the "just for fun" title or the quirky hashtags you know you have entered a space of play and imagination, where the usual rules do not necessarily apply.  

Elaborate on your choice of Facebook as the platform of study? What is the major difference between this platform and others that also house memes, like Reddit or 9Gag? 

The most dominant social media platforms in the Middle East region are all owned by the Facebook company. Facebook tops the charts in terms of number of users in the Middle East, followed by WhatsApp and Instagram. While Instagram remains more common among youth (broadly defined as 12-35), Facebook and WhatsApp are used by different age groups. Content ranging from humorous memes and videos to political, social, and religious subject matter is shared on and across these networks.  

When it comes to Reddit and 9Gag, these two platforms have a different type of community. The content is predominantly in English, and while there are subreddits focusing on content related to the Middle East or the Arabic language, this content is not as common and does not circulate as widely as it does on the platforms like Facebook and Instagram. While Reddit and 9Gag remain key platforms in the early days an Internet meme begins to spread, they do not have the same function when it comes to Arabic memes.  

Moreover, since the type of content we were looking at was not searchable by using a key term or hashtag, we collected data through access to communities on Facebook pages. These pages are where content is circulated and shared, and they were also places where fans or followers could interact with the content, as well as where we could get in touch directly with creators.  

What are you currently working on? Could you dive deeper into the intersection between memes and civic engagement? 

At the moment, I am working on my dissertation which focuses on multilinguistic memes as a way to investigate cultural hybridity in the digital era. Following Henry Jenkins, I believe that we live in a world where what is civic and what is engagement continue to change. Traditionally, we may think of civic engagement as voting at a poll station and participating in other forms of institutional politics. However, today, I look at civic engagement as a broader term, encompassing not only institutional political participation, but also any intervention in cultural values and ideologies. Based on that, the content Yomna Elsayed and I looked at in this book chapter and the content I am investigating for my dissertation can all be considered a form of civic engagement. When people create cultural content, they are casting a ballot for the values and ideologies they seek to enforce or criticize. They are trying to point out the social or political aspects of their surroundings which they deem to be ridiculous or laughable. Through their content, creators also share what they are fans of and what they would like to see more of, and they share their content to try to spread awareness and persuade others.  

By investigating multilinguistic memes in my dissertation, my goal is to uncover the values and ideologies sought by people who live life in multiple languages, and to understand the role of cultural hybridity in civic engagement in the digital era.  

Sulafa Zidani is a Doctoral Candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research is concentrated in social, political, and cultural aspects of digital media technology, global and transnational communication, cultural hybridity, and critical pedagogy. You can find her work on sulafazidani.com

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang is a second year Masters student in the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Southern California. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, double majoring in Psychology and Film Studies. Her research interests include fandom, YouTube, and audience research.

Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: Youth Culture and Civic Imagination After the Arab Spring (1 of 2)

Youth Culture and Civic Imagination After the Arab Spring

Jessica Yang & Sulafa Zidani

The material you analyze in your chapter is politically sensitive material but was able to bypass censorship because of their nuanced nature. Has the material or the people you talked to ever faced censorship? If so, how did they deal with that situation? 

The people creating this material online have deep knowledge of the context in which they are operating. This includes familiarity with the laws and regulations in relation to censorship, and also, perhaps even more importantly, an understanding of the nuanced ways in which the government exercises control over content online outside of these regulations. In other words, people know how far they can stretch their critical messages, and they are usually aware if they create content that might risk getting them into some kind of trouble. This fluency is part of the reason why the content looks the way it does. In our chapter, Yomna and I discuss the different uses for humor and specifically of the disclaimer “just for fun” that categorizes most of these pages. One of the purposes of labeling the content as purely for fun is to place criticism within a frame that is non-threatening or ostensibly non-political. This does not only help with censorship but also marks this content as a space to think about issues and imagine new responses to the current situation. 

Given the sensitive nature of these images and jokes, did you see any strategies for avoiding the archival or searchable affordances of platforms like Facebook, such as a specific way of tagging, closed groups, etc.?

Using private settings and unsearchable hashtags are practices that--intentionally or unintentionally--do help protect content from being discovered. They are also practices that, in their lack of coherence, form the type of content that characterizes the creativity of Arab youth after the Arab Spring; a creativity that does not follow the practices set forth by the platforms on which they operate or the dominant cultures around them because they are exploring new and innovative solutions.  

Many social media groups and pages are now closed or private, but this shift might be more related to the norms of specific social media platforms than a desire to hide from censors. For example, on Instagram, some meme pages have turned private in the past couple of years as a way to attract followers. When it comes to searchability and archiving, one of the main ways to search for online content is by using hashtags or searching keywords that may appear in a caption. However, most of the content we discuss in the chapter is visual content and it is not categorized using hashtags or keywords, and therefore is not really searchable. Even the names of the pages are not names that would appear if you search for funny or satirical Arabic content. Names like "translation has been made" (Tamt Altagrama) or "distressed" (Mawtoura), although they hint at characteristics of the content on the page, they do not use descriptive words that can trace the content (like "satirical," "funny," "humorous," "Arabic" content). 

It is debatable whether this is intentional on part of the creators as a move to avoid censorship. It can also be part of the desire to be creative and continue the process of producing new content and ideas. For example, one of the hashtags used on several Arabic humor pages on instagram is #zaatarinyourteeth. Zaatar, the Middle Eastern herb mix that is usually enjoyed on bread with olive oil, is known to get stuck in teeth because one of its main ingredients, thyme, is ground very thin. Zaatar never appears in the images that are tagged with this hashtag, nor do anyone's zaatar-filled teeth. However this hashtag is still used to signal a particular type of humor and as a way to invite a smile that might perhaps reveal the zaatar in the viewer's teeth. Other similar uses of hashtags and captions include listing a number of different Arab countries or using emojis such as flags of Arab countries or the so-called "Face with Tears of Joy" Emoji (😂). Whether or not these hashtags are used to avoid censorship, they are clearly a creative choice of labelling that is used to signal that this is a particular type of content.   

Assuming that much of this material works on a certain level of obscurity or at least opacity from the government, is there any danger to academic attention being homed in on these subjects? Have these spaces moved since this attention? 

Research ethics under such circumstances are complex. Certain practices that we are accustomed to--like transparency about sources and sharing data--may in fact put people at risk in certain situations. For example, sharing direct quotes and links to content is considered ethical in that it demonstrates transparency and gives readers the chance to evaluate the data of the study for themselves. However, in many contexts, revealing the author of controversial content or direct links to controversial posts might put the authors in danger of being persecuted. So, the ethics related to research transparency might sometimes conflict with ethics of protecting research participants. While institutional bodies that govern ethics, like the Institutional Review Board (IRB), provide guidelines for ethical research, in fact these guidelines are not always enough for protecting people in complex contexts, especially given the fast-paced changes of technology. Institutions usually change more slowly, and therefore the work of solving ethical conflicts falls often on individual or group decisions of researchers.  

Using their knowledge and understanding of the context in which they are operating, researchers estimate what measures would keep their participants safe while maintaining the integrity of their study. In our chapter, Yomna and I draw on ethnographic research for solutions. For example, using (and sometimes shifting) pseudonyms to protect participants, and consulting directly with participants as to how they wish to identify.  

Many governments around the world are already observing or serveilling content posted online. Based on my knowledge of the context in China and in Egypt, the government seeks censorship as a way to prevent an organized collective call to action. This chapter as well as other studies show that creative content online acts less as an organized call to action and more as a spontaneous open-ended brainstorm. This creative content is not an explicit unified vision of change, but rather a way of imagining, practicing, or learning. Governments deal with online content in different ways, and some have more extensive or complex censorship systems than others. The way that a government reacts to this content depends on their preexisting censorship and what their concerns are at the present moment. My presumption here is that governments that are interested in these subtle cultural shifts are already keeping an eye on creative content, while governments that are looking exclusively at collective organizing would continue to focus on political activists, social movements, and the like. 

In some countries, Egypt being one example, online content and academic content are both closely watched. This may give academics a better understanding of the challenges that content creators have in mind when they post online. Because, as it happens these challenges are always changing. Censorship and citizens are both continually responding to ever changing political, cultural, economic, and other conditions, as well as to each other. Researching how the dynamics operate benefits our understanding of culture and creativity in a certain moment of time or under specific conditions.

Sulafa Zidani is a Doctoral Candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research is concentrated in social, political, and cultural aspects of digital media technology, global and transnational communication, cultural hybridity, and critical pedagogy. You can find her work on sulafazidani.com.

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang is a second year Masters student in the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Southern California. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, double majoring in Psychology and Film Studies. Her research interests include fandom, YouTube, and audience research.

Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: 'Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection' (2 of 2)

SP: I think what you're talking about here, this process of identifying and suppressing the abject element ("the monster") among us, is definitely liminal, or at least incredibly prone to crossover between both physical and virtual spaces even though they may seem distinct and separate. Especially when threats of physical violence are the means by which people are pushed out of virtual space. This discussion of pain and emotion in this context too become hyper-relevant when the way the abject element is identified is by people displaying the wrong emotions in the wrong (virtual) spaces (like making a game about depression).

Instead of getting you started on the nature of pain and emotions, I'd like to get you started on the role they play in this, and the public sphere more broadly. You use your chapter to frame gg as imagined publics in revolt and show how these processes reflect on, and happen in the public sphere generally. Can you expand a bit more on this process of pain, emotion, and affect in the public sphere?

jm: Okay so your question really touches on another seminar paper I wrote, this time for a class in Annenberg called Networked Publics. I argued that if we use a habermasian conception of the public sphere in that speech = agency and conversation = sphere, I think when we approach rhetoric from a wholistic perspective —ethos, logos and pathos— we must also consider feeling as a form of speech. We obviously recognize people with no ability to communicate as persons with rights (setting aside a discussion of ableism). They still have the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I argue that if one can feel happiness or pain, if they can express pleasure and displeasure, then they should be entitled to fundamental rights of personhood. That then implies that the public sphere, if constituted as a pathological/emotional conversation rather than a verbal/logical conversation, can include a lot of persons (especially non-humans) that have previously been excluded due to a lack of perceived “intelligence.”

So thinking of an affective public ‘pathosphere’ (I think I made that up?) that is layered over and within the sort of ‘logosphere’ that also drives people and groups to action. I used this concept to explain why, in my humble/professional opinion, no one could discern a motive for the Las Vegas Shooter. I argued that it wasn’t a decision based on logos, but a decision based on pathos and a desire to force empathy — to make others feel his pain.

SP: That's a great way of thinking about this, thanks for sharing that. It makes me think about how the desire for empathy can drive or spark off so many different and sometimes extreme things. I think that's particularly interesting considering that Depression Quest itself, while I still think the whole debacle was more about everything we've discussed here moreso than the game itself, was very overtly an attempt to engender empathy for the experience of depression. This seems to be the entire point of "serious games" (I hate that term) about mental health. Clearly, I think that most who took the anti-Quinn side of GG didn't respond well to it. Of course though, there are other games that have done this sort of thing without experiencing the extreme level of vitriol that Depression Quest faced, like Adventures with Anxiety by Nicky Case.

Source: ‘Ten Video Games that Deal with Mental Illness

This is taking a bit of a turn from what you were saying here, but this line of thinking makes me wonder about the ways games sometimes do and sometimes don't succeed in creating/encouraging empathy, even in games that aren't "serious games" or even centered around mental health awareness. Can you speak a bit on how what you've said above can be seen through the lens of the games?

jm: This is a great excuse to talk about the object of my fascination right now, which is the way that games operationalize empathy and emotions both for the character and the player. There has to be a sort of double consciousness in the design process that maintains awareness both of the way the character’s behavior demonstrates emotions and the way the game mechanics affect the emotions of the player herself. A great example of this — yet another classroom assignment, this time for Dmitri Williams’ course on the Science, Culture and Industry of games — was a game I played and critiqued by Telltale Games, their Game of Thrones adaptation.

For me the game mechanics were so obnoxiously difficult and seemingly random — you couldn’t count on the same button to do the same thing in different contexts, there was no tutorial on using the controls, some actions seemed to be timed for no reason — that the experience was so frustrating I barely wanted to play past the first ten minutes. Eventually I did give up after a scene in which there is nothing you can do but fail to save your younger sibling from a senseless murder. In my analysis, I spoke about the way you can see the designers aiming for the sense of abject (heh) horror, impotence and futility of fighting against these nefarious and sadistic leaders — something that’s very prevalent in the show — and how it doesn’t work so well as a game mechanic. Further I argued that the game was really more of an interactive story due to a general lack of consistent rules or framing and a sort of impotence on the part of the player. The affect of the game mechanics basically prevented me from gaining any sort of significant affect from the character behavior and then when I finally did connect to the characters, there was nothing I could do to help them. It works in a TV show. It didn’t work as a game — at least for me.

Conversely, I’m obsessed with the game Detroit: Become Human (DBH) — and not just because Steve and I are both Detroiters! — and the way they use affect to tell the story. The plot of the game echoes the civil rights movement of the 1960s except that in this case the people looking for liberation are androids. Like slaves they are bought and sold, used and abused, and treated entirely as objects until they become “deviant.” There are several moments in the game where you play an android who is becoming deviant. This is illustrated through moments of extreme distress and conflict, where the android has a desire to do something which directly contradicts the orders they were given by their owner. The interface that you, as a player, encounter in that moment, has you literally pushing through a bright red barrier — a psychological barrier, it’s clear that this is something going on mentally and emotionally, rather than physically — that you must tear down and destroy before you can disobey.

In a later scene, you can decide on the slogans that the androids will paint and graffiti in various places throughout the city — one of them, the one I chose, is quite simple; “I am alive.” You can see how this sort of echoes what I was saying before about the ability to feel and how that feeling, more than any sort of intelligence, is what *should* entitle folks to (what we currently refer to as) human rights. Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s worth pulling up some videos of DBH, just to see how they theorize and operationalize ideas about empathy, sentience, consciousness, affect, intelligence and belonging.

The games I mentioned are both triple A games, but it’s largely due to the fact that those are the games that are available to me and which I can access with relative ease. In fact, I didn’t even purchase DBH, my best friend sent me her copy and then I later downloaded it via Playstation Plus. The truth is that there are a TON of indie developers and gamers out there doing similar work that is both beautiful and poignant and incredibly valuable as a site of theory of everyday life or the future of everyday life.

Our job as scholars and practitioners is to find ways to promote games like Depression Quest and engage in dialogues like these to do a better job of surfacing these brilliant and sophisticated thinkers as we all work toward a better understanding of our emotions and the way they affect our behavior, both in private and in public(s).

SP: I’m interested in what you mentioned early in this response about the controls of The Walking Dead being frustrating and disconnecting you from the game as this makes me think about something I’ve written and read on a bit, which is enjoying games and situations that seem unenjoyable, like games that try to make you feel bad and guilty. I think what you mentioned makes a lot of sense to me as the type of player that I am, but it also makes me think of those who may enjoy a control scheme and narrative context that makes them feel helpless (side note: better scholars than I have has articulated a lot of stuff about enjoying failure and etc, like Bo Ruberg in their book Video Games Have Always Been Queer). Although it sounds like I wouldn’t enjoy the emotional experience that the game seems to tend to invoke by design, it also makes me think about play styles and players who revel in that kind of helplessness and other affects/emotions which are typically considered negative. 

To loop back to what you said at the end though, I think you’re right that it’s sort of on us to find and talk about games that encourage dialogues like this. Exploring different ways of understanding and discussing our emotions as people and players is important, especially in an academic space that often normatively tends to put emotion at an arms-length through even the traditions of how we’re supposed to write.

I think that this positive note is a good note to end on: Playing, discussing, and writing about games like these in these spaces. I’m going to go play Detroit: Become Human now.

Steven Proudfoot is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg school of communication. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.

joan miller is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and a transmedia artist with a broadly interdisciplinary approach. joan’s work focuses on empathy at the intersection of media fandom and politics. Her dissertation — tentatively titled “The Use of Feeling” explores the ways in which empathy and pathos govern our behavior both in relation to our fandom and to our communities at large. joan is especially interested in themes of kinship, empathic communication and anti-colonialist approaches to producing media scholarship. Currently her attention is focused on theorizing and prototyping a methodology of fandom studies inspired by Bardic and Griotic traditions of the values and necessities for community storytelling.

______________________________

Dear reader, 

Some of you have brought to our attention the fact that this blog has comments turned off. Part of this is due to the fact that this is meant to be an educational tool for students of a range of ages and we do not have the capacity to police the amount of spam we receive (much of it inappropriate for some of our readers). I have found no spam filter strong enough to block the bots and yet nuanced enough to allow the actual comments in.  Further, this post in particular deals with a sensitive topic that has the potential to expose my students to danger. While I encourage constructive and well argued critique, discussion and dissent; the safety of the students in my care is the number one priority. Finally, when critiquing the posts in this series, keep in mind that the conversations are only a continuation of work that appears in the casebook — it’s possible that your questions are answered within. While it’s frustrating for me and all of us to keep the comments closed, there are plenty of spaces online where you can write and share your thoughts. If you do, we hope you’ll send us a link. 

Sincerely,

Henry,

References

Appadurai, A. (1998). “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization” Public Culture 10 (2): 225-47

Creed, B. (2015) “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” The Dread of Difference, edited by Barry K. Grant. University of Texas Press, pp. 37-67.

Creed, B. (1993) Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.

Douglas, M. (2015). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo with a new preface by the author. London: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ruberg, B. (2019). Video games have always been queer. NYU Press.

—. (2010). Hatred and Forgiveness. Translated by Jenaine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press

Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: "Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection" (1 of 2)

Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection

Steven Proudfoot and joan miller

As part of the series of blog posts spurred on by the recent publication "Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination," I'm here to talk to joan miller about her chapter in the book and her work today. Both of us are doctoral students at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication. joan is currently in the fifth-year of her program, working on her dissertation, while I am a first-year, looking forward to the future. The chapter we’re discussing here is #20. “For the Horde: Violent “Trolling” as Preemptive Strike via #GamerGate and the #AltRight” (214-22), it conceptualizes the #gamergate conflict as a virtual war between two competing imagined publics and demonstrates the ways in which the civic imagination can become a site of conflict and abjection.

[Note: Since we conducted this interview as more of a conversation than a formalized process, we have used bracketed interjections throughout as a way to reflect the conversational dynamic of our discussion as well as to add some post-hoc notes.]

Steven Proudfoot: So, I think it'd be good to start with a discussion of where we are now in 2020 since Gamergate happened in 2014. You mentioned that you started working on this piece  in 2015, how has this progressed or changed since then?

joan miller: That’s a good question. I think the term #gamergate has kind of fallen out of popular consciousness or people see it as this old-news kind of thing as if it hit a crux and then just stopped. It obviously didn’t — that’s just not how social phenomenon like that work most of the time — like I argued in my chapter, they kind of dispersed themselves among groups with different names but the same ideology and tactics.

I think as Brianna Wu argues, we can see the tactics of gamergate being used by lots of folks in the #altright and even to some extent on the left when we hear about some ostensible Sanders supporters doing it to folks from the Nevada hospitality union.

It’s obviously very concerning and I think that’s probably why my chapter is still valuable even though the phenomenon has morphed into something else.

SP: There’s a line that you quoted early in your piece that touches on this idea very well: ". . . This hashtag was the canary in the coal mine, and we missed it” (214).  It captures the idea that this whole event was more about the who, what, and how it ostracized and labeled people as bad and dangerous to the community. Seeing these tactics echoed across different spaces shows that it was less about the game and more about everything else. For me, as a then high school senior and a cisgendered man whose friend groups were primarily gamers, #gamergate was a strange experience for me. As such, most of my exposure to it was through YouTubers. Based on my demographic, it maybe isn't surprising that the videos YouTube threw my way were the anti-Quinn side. I'm ashamed to say that, at the time, some of the more moderate voices were hard to see through. Though, when aggressive voices (some of whom have since been revealed to be members of the AltRight) bashed folks like Quinn with vitriol, it wasn't hard to see the irrationality. Clearly, I was off-put by a lot of it, but at the time, some of the more mild arguments worked at first.

My experience with #gamergate shows a few key things that resonate with what you said here and in the chapter. First, these tactics work. When subsumed into an echo chamber of videos and peers, it can be hard to see through it in the moment, even though it’s easy to see in hindsight. That is scary. Second, many of the loudest voices were from the altright. The fact that these tactics crop up in different spaces, especially along with the altright, goes to show how resonant that quote was. Canary in the coal mine indeed.

jm: Right and that underscores my approach in that it is not a purely logical appeal and therefore we miss things when we use a purely logical analytical frame. In this case it has a lot to do with affect and affinity and group belonging. To bring in the discussion of abjection a little, the general idea as I understand it, is that abjection is the process by which we form an identity in contrast to another. So we could take a concept like whiteness. What is it to be white? Well, it’s to be someone other than a person of color and vise versa. The borders of that identity become clearer in opposition to each other. So gamergaters push away people and ideas who cause them to feel complex negative affect or tax their energy for complex critical thinking and then define their group of “us” through rejecting the group “them.”

In this same vein I recently did a dialogic essay with Carrie Lynn Reinhard where we discussed fandom and affect in relation to politics. One of the things we ultimately agreed upon — at least between us — was that fandom involves a group of people with a shared affect pointed in the same direction at an object or idea. So it became untenable emotionally for gamergaters to share a fandom with anti-gg because they had conflicting affect about the object (video games) of focus. For what it’s worth, as best I remember that definition of abjection comes from Mary Douglas purity and danger. [This is actually more Kristeva than Douglas, but both of them and Appadurai influenced my thinking on abjection and identity. The relevant quote can be found at the bottom of page 217 in the book.] I originally encountered all this thinking on abjection in a class with Karen Shimakwa at NYU. This chapter was originally a seminar paper for that class.

SP: I'm really glad that you brought the role of abjection to the front here. I think that this use and framing of #gamergate as a process of abjection is very astute. [thanks! jm] This observation particularly struck me because it's such a different context than how I, as a growing scholar, encountered work on abjection.

As an undergraduate English major, I took a lot of film classes, one of which was called "Horror and Gender." Unsurprisingly, Julia Kristeva's work on abjection was very central in a lot of that class. My conception of abjection was a bit more visceral and brings to mind body-horror and monsters, but the core of it, to my understanding is simply that which disturbs identities, systems, and/or societal order. Whether it’s visceral body horror or something more subtle, the abject part is that which disturbs that which it exists in.

[jm: Post-hoc interjection here. It’s worth noting that abjection can appear in different ways. Sometimes abjection comes from social/psychological things, sometimes it’s physical. The Appadurai piece I rely on talks a lot about gore and physical violence — my intervention was to bring that to the virtual world, where borders are less clear and thus the body horror aspects get bracketed.]

SP: Thinking and reading about abjection in relation to horror film situates the abject in a sometimes more clear sense, often literally monstrous. More critically, these representations of abjection in film often reflect the abject element with which society is currently preoccupied. [jm: Consider the Oscar-winning film ‘Parasite.’] So, I'm accustomed to thinking about society's abjection by looking in its reflections. Yet, what you did was point at it without the mirror of film.

A lot of work on abjection in the film space echoes what you identify in your chapter. To paraphrase Barbara Creed in her work on the "Monstrous-Feminine," she states that ritual contact with the abject element becomes a means by which societies exclude that element. I think that these GG videos bashing Depression Quest are a clear part of the process of "radically excluding" the abject element. By demonstrating that #gamergate defines Depression Quest and Quinn as that which is harmful to the system, and that those things need to be radically excluded for the good of the system, we can see a textbook example of abjection and the processes associated with suppressing it.

jm: This is all great [and I went through and edited a lot of our language around imposter syndrome and whether the anecdotes are valuable] because I truly believe that everyone’s story and POV are inherently valuable, including yours.

So yeah. This is a really interesting way to discuss abjection because what you’re saying really underscores the ways that Arjun Appadurai takes up abjection to explain intercultural violence and genocide (see p.218). Conveniently, that’s also the seed of this article. We read an excerpt from Fear of Small Numbers (and of course, this being a seminar assignment, I was required to include articles from the readings) that talked about the violence between groups like the Hutus and Tutsis as a way of knowing the other through violent abjection. There remains no more ambiguity between what is me and what is them when “me” has the power to turn “them” inside out and upside down. I won’t describe the actual torture that was discussed but I saw a parallel between the violence done to physical bodies in those spaces versus the radical dismembering of virtual identities through doxxing and harassment. One of the things I wanted to assert — that wasn’t necessarily as widely accepted then as it is now — is that virtual violence is real violence and has real victims.

Appadurai also underscores that this pattern is particularly likely among folks who live in close quarters on a daily basis where there is a lot of intermingling between the opposed groups. It then becomes necessary — emotionally — to resolve the frightening ambiguity between us and them. In gg, the communities are “imagined” in that they don’t necessarily exist in meat-space except on special occasions and even then only parts are visible. The internet allows for this virtual space that is both infinitely large and impossibly intimate. There’s room for every single gamergater but there’s absolutely no room for ambiguous others like Brianna Wu or Anita Sarkeesian or, it’s worth noting, people like me.

By using virtual and emotional violence gg-ers can push others off the internet and therefore out of existence. Hence, this is why I frame the two parties as “imagined publics in revolt.” I haven’t seen the Ready Player One film, but I’ve read the book and I’m imagining the climactic battle scene where all the players fight the corporate NPCs. And because emotions live in the body, those affects don’t stay in the virtual world and that violence crosses realms so-to-speak. As if your video game character dying resulted in you feeling real pain.

Don’t even get me started about the nature of pain and emotions, that’s a whole ‘nother book.

Steven Proudfoot is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg school of communication. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.

joan miller is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and a transmedia artist with a broadly interdisciplinary approach. joan’s work focuses on empathy at the intersection of media fandom and politics. Her dissertation — tentatively titled “The Use of Feeling” explores the ways in which empathy and pathos govern our behavior both in relation to our fandom and to our communities at large. joan is especially interested in themes of kinship, empathic communication and anti-colonialist approaches to producing media scholarship. Currently her attention is focused on theorizing and prototyping a methodology of fandom studies inspired by Bardic and Griotic traditions of the values and necessities for community storytelling.