Robot 6
Who can stop … the Cult of the Creator?!
Spawn
At Comic Book Bin Herve St.-Louis rails against what he terms “The Cult of the Comic Book Creator.” What exactly is this cult, you ask? And do they wear hoods and carry ceremonial daggers?
If I’m reading him right, he’s basically using the phrase as a springboard to rage against the fallacy that self-publishing your work will lead to you producing great art, or at least better art than what passes at the Big Two conglomerates. His Exhibit A in this treatise is Image Comics:
The problem this writer has with the cult of the comic book creator, as romanticized by Image Comics, is that a whole generation of creator believes that the ultimate way to reach ultimate self expression is through self publishing. However, self publishing is a business venture and business is not artistry. It takes a different set of skills to be a comic book publisher and a comic book creator. But the cult of the comic book creator has led many talented creators to get burn by an industry ill-prepared to support them. An alternative offered to comic book creators who want to keep the ownership of their properties, is to work with an established publisher. However, here again, the cult of the comic book creator has twisted reality and makes it more difficult for creators to serve their public.
Now, John Stanley spent most of his career working on licensed characters, and I’d much rather read his most lackluster work than any single issue of Spawn or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But so what? For every example St.-Louis gives I can counter with someone — like Jeff Smith and Terry Moore — who has made self-publishing work for them. More to the point, there are lots of cartoonists who don’t self-publish, work with small or even big-name publishers, but still manage to hold onto their copyrights or have significant involvement in the production of their books (Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, etc). I doubt that Robert Crumb will have any trouble claiming ownership of his Genesis adaptation from W.W. Norton.
More to the point, I don’t recall anyone ever saying during the big self-publishing boom of the 1990s that such a move would ipso facto lead to great art (although I’m sure some fool somewhere must have uttered this remark). What I do remember is people making the case that self-publishing would allow for the artist to have greater control over their comic, teach them about the business and get them out from under the thumb of “the man.” Any person with a lick of common sense would realize that a) not everyone is skilled in both business and art; and b) not every self-published comic is going to be good.
Honestly, I bristle when St.-Louis talks about “serving the public” because that smacks of entitlement to me, as though fans are owed something. Self-publishing, and indeed the ongoing issues of copyright ownership, at least as it pertains to comics, should be about the ethical and fair treatment of the cartoonists and their works, and not necessarily their asethetic value. If there is a “cult of the creator,” it’s because the artist/writer/cartoonist is the one creating the comics, not the publisher, and it has nothing to do with some Dave Sim-inspired movement. Whatever the merits or hazards of self-publishing are, they deserve better examination and consideration than what St.-Louis posits.
- October 6, 2009 @ 12:38 PM by Chris Mautner
14 Comments
Wraith
October 6, 2009 at 1:00 pm
In two words? Pretty much.
I’d say you have quite appropriately dispatched this particular barrel of fish with several well-aimed blasts.
Julian
October 6, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The Beat derided him in passing, but I’m glad to see someone rip this inane argument the new asshole it needed for all that shit its full of.
david brothers
October 6, 2009 at 1:53 pm
This guy is an idiot. Every time I read something he’s written, it’s some insane and ill-informed screed. I guess it’s good for pulling in hits. Spurgeon obliterated his “The Siegel Family is Greedy!” article.
Marc-Oliver Frisch
October 6, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I’m just jealous because he’s got a dot AND a hyphen in his name. For some people, it’s NEVER enough…
Rolando
October 6, 2009 at 2:07 pm
But people did believe that freed from “the man” and “editors” these artists publishing on their own would produce better work. All St.-Louis is saying is that this is not the case because the demands of publishing mean you will always have some kind of editor or other business partner influencing you creative decisions. That’s fair.
R. M. Rhodes
October 6, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I don’t think that self-publishers necessarily create better work. However, I do think that self-publishing provides a very important service – an alternative to the mainstream (read: superhero-dominated) product that is currently dragging the comics production and distribution industry down.
More importantly, self-publishing allows the room to prove that the more out-there ideas can sustain themselves. Further, it provides the “open mic night” environments that up-and-coming creators need in order to fail without taking down a major property with them.
Mark Kardwell
October 6, 2009 at 3:19 pm
I won’t be happy until Dan Clowes and Robert Crumb are working on the great Batman projects they’re both capable of.
seth hurley
October 6, 2009 at 4:37 pm
it’s not that they are capable of great Batman projects, it’s that they OWE US great Batman projects!
Alan Coil
October 6, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Well, he should be here any moment to attack people and call them names. At least, that’s what happened at The Beat until comments got closed before it could spiral out of control.
Matt Maxwell
October 6, 2009 at 10:02 pm
You could always get some accents into your name, Marc-Oliver. That might help get your mojo back.
And gee, “cult” is such a neutral, non-loaded term. Totally not asking for trouble with that nomenclature.
Marc-Oliver Frisch
October 7, 2009 at 11:08 am
Matt,
I’ll probably just add a semicolon: completely original, and it’ll screw up sentences even better than Portugal. The Man, Why? or !!! do whenever they release a new album.
I’ll be the +/- of comics bloggers.
Tom Spurgeon
October 7, 2009 at 2:50 pm
There’s an interesting point-by-point response here, too:
http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/10/07/creator-cult-crusade/
Also pertinent is the reply to linked-to post where the person talks about the logical fallacy being made in terms of presenting an inarguable thesis and then presenting the real thesis as a component leading to the inarguable one.
Pedro Bouça
October 8, 2009 at 8:06 am
Must I repeat here that in most places outside US ALL comics are at least partially creator-owned?
Tintin? Creator-owned. Asterix? Creator-owned. Corto Maltese? Creator-owned. I could go on.
They don’t suffer for that – and the creators of sucessful comics properties (like those I mentioned) usually become VERY rich. As they should.
Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)
Hervé St-Louis
October 12, 2009 at 3:16 pm
@Tom Spurgeon – RE: Logical falacy
‘St-Louis presents as his nominal thesis a basically inarguable point (”Creator-owned comics are not necessarily better than corporate-owned comics”) and sneakily presents his actual thesis (”creator-ownership is not better for comics and creators than corporate ownership”).’
That’s what the writer of this comment and you like to spin around. I have not written that corporate ownership is better than creator ownership. It’s you and a lot of other people that are stuck on the issue of corporate and creator ownership as opposed to focusing on the real issue that concerns the comic book industry.
@Alan Coil
At The Beat, I didn’t call anyone any name. People, however did call me idiot over there and other things. They also did above. The real reason Heidi McDonald shut the comments, where I clearly said that I would not post a second time, was because I outed the fact that in an email the same morning she wrote to me “OTOH, I’m sure I’ll get lots of traffic from posting about this.” I called her on her playing bait to generate traffic in my reply and she shut the comments because of that. She did change the context in the meaning of my article in her presentation as the writer of this blog has also done. For example she said I was against copyrights and anti creator. I don’t remember writing that. I wrote that I was against perpetual copyrights that never ended an were continually extended.
@Matt Maxwell and Marc-Oliver Frisch
If the best you can do is attack someone because his name is written in French then there’s little I can respond to. Attacking ideas is how you do it not names and ethnic attributes.
@Pedro Bouça
I agree with you and that’s part of my whole point. The cult of the comic book creator and the obsession with owning everything is a North American phenomenon. It’s mostly presented as a fight between the individual creator and the publisher when it shouldn’t have to, no matter what is the relationship between the creator and the publisher. I did address the concept of moral rights, but that one was too complicated for most to grasp and they preferred to claim that I am against creators owning their work.