You’re disagreeing with facts and lobbing back inaccuracies and false equivalents.
Compuserve isn’t even remotely comparable to the World Wide Web in terms of reach or accessibility. It was expensive, it required a computer and a modem, neither of which were cheap or ubiquitous in 1989. You couldn’t just walk into a library and get on Compuserve.
That’s not even addressing the difficulty in sharing images! (A typical 1991 dl time: 4 hours for a 1MB file.) You could tell people “go buy my comics” but what if there was no comic store nearby? Big bookstores didn’t carry floppies.
Diamond hadn’t swallowed all the other distros yet; OTOH, a lot of the other big distros were already gone.
And that totally ignores that you had to get a publisher to publish your book to begin with! I wasn’t looking to self-publish; I’d already self-published and knew I wanted someone else to do the heavy lifting. With being both female (perception of less competent,yo) and working in a style that publishers were (wrongly) convinced wouldn’t sell, I was fighting a very frustrating battle.
I like this comic too - but it seems to lack a narrative thread. One page seems to set up for it to continue with the next page, and then it doesn’t. Hopefully with the holidays over it will be out more consistently and a smoother story. I’m eager to hear her tales.
not really attempting a to make equal things that were not. it was a different time. I know what file sizes were like and how long it took to download images with a 14.4 modem( for example) over a phone line, or how much a personal computer could cost. I wasn’t trying to say that being able to self publish a web-comic, or host ones own website was remotely comparably to trading information via bulletin board services. It was a way to network (compuserv) , and it could be used effectively for those with access.Through a friend with a compuserv account I ended up getting a freelance illustration gig around that time for a missionary in Guam.
Guam. Are you saying you didn’t have a computer in 1989? If there was no Comic store nearby, only the most diehard of the diehards would see your work. Period.
not really the point though. The “Industry” has changed a lot in the past few decades, in some ways for the better, in some ways to its detriment.
Nor was I even attempting to touch the 3rd rail in what it was like, or is like to be a women in the comic/cartooning business. All I’ve witnessed has told me, no matter how much I’m on the side of women’s rights…nothing I say or observe will matter as I’m not gender qualified to comment. In the past even agreeing has gotten my head taken off.
but I will stand by my understanding that their certainly was a place in comics in 1989 for creator owned titles, and a growing place for Anime/Mana style art.
I can’t argue with your personal experience trying catch a break at the time, but I can recall what was selling or not selling in the Southwest U.S. at the time, as I was processing the inventory and back-issue orders for Diamond at the time.
These days, we are fortunate that creators can now directly communicate with their potential audience, and see if they can make a successful connection.
To be able to prove wether or not their is enough of a draw to convince someone else to put their money on the line and assume the risk for ones creative endeavors, while in 89 it was way more difficult to get someone to take that chance with an unproven product.
I don’t recall any publishers knocking down Mark Stokes door to pick up Zombie Boy at the time (yes he did eventually do a stretch through Antarctic Press after years of self publishing). Not all projects picked up traction. And most people I knew back in the day had to hold day jobs, until the post Burton Batman /TMNT era kicked in and “Hollywood” money started to change the nature of the business, even if it didn’t change the nature of the “don’t complain, don’t rock the boat” deal that I know you are far to familiar with.
anyways…
CSERVANT: Eastman is Eastman. my take is, shrewd guy. based mostly on anecdotal evidence of industry buzz, the way he worked his contracts, etc. Don’t know the man personally. Of course… the flip side to his business acumen would be his relationship with Julie Strain and all that “FAKK 2” damage…so I …grain of salt I guess.
Everyone participating and reading, please go back and read the full thread, then read this.
It’s taken me a while to sort out what’s troubled me so about Cris disagreeing with me about my experience in comics circa 1989, and I’ve got it: because he’s telling me I’m wrong about my own experience. That’s just patently ridiculous. Not only that, it undercuts what I’m saying, which is also troublesome. Cris has seized on two of three facets of what spurred me to take the Gainax job (those being the market for creator-owned books and manga style art).
My experience is a three-legged stool:
I needed a truly creator-friendly publisher that was also not flaky–so many were. I once was with a publisher that tried to get me to invoice for work I hadn’t done so they could present these invoices as their expenses to another company and get paid for the publishing rights for my work.
I was drawing in a manga-influenced style. Manga was still seen as a genre not an art influence, and if a publisher had one manga book, they typically felt they were covered. Moreover, manga and anime were, to most people, “big eyes and speedlines” or porn.
I’ll point out that even after the HUGE success of Sailor Moon and Pokemon, publishers were STILL reluctant to have more than one manga-style book/artist. Guess how I know this? I pitched to all of the publishers that had creator-friendly contracts. ALL OF THEM.
The fact that even after manga became a phenomenon in the late 90s-early 2000s, comickers working in a manga style flocked to TokyoPop and took ass-reaming deals to get into print says that even over a decade after 1989, there were still not a lot of places to get manga-style books published.
I’m a woman. At the time, I was also a young and attractive woman, which was another whammy: a lot of assumption that I was less intelligent and merely decorative. There were also shit tons of sexual harassment, ranging from pestering me for a date, to flat out sexual assault. (I have been sexually assaulted three times by people in the business over my career and creep-shot many times, and patronized, dismissed, had jokes made about my weight, had the fact that my house burnt down described as “karma,” and had my social circle utterly nuked because I wouldn’t stop talking about how shitty women creators were treated, female readers overlooked, and female characters written and drawn in ugly, UGLY ways.)
I spent time today with Deni Loubert, who goes about as far back in modern creator-owned books as you can. (She was the wife of Cerebus creator Dave Sim, and she ran the business while Dave made the comic.) She corroborated that the atmosphere of print comics was (and is) a boy’s club.
All three legs of that stool MUST be taken into account, otherwise you miss the full picture of what was happening. It’s smart to not tell me how it was for me as a woman, but it’s not right to ignore it to make a point that I’m wrong.
Speaking of corroboration: I recommend Yasuhiro Takeda’s (my boss at Gainax’s) autobio The Notenki Memoirs.
I was good for me to read; it made some incomprehensible things very clear.
It’s spoiling nothing to tell you Gainax was far more fucked up than even I knew. For example, Takeda-san was destitute for a period in the 90s. Secret of Blue Water was a hit, but Gainax was tens of thousands in the red on it. An employee went to jail for tax evasion.
Takeda glancingly mentioned Gainax/General Products USA, but says they never found the right person to run it. (My reaction to this will be covered in Bani Garu.)
no intent to diasgree with your personal experience.
my overall point , at least my intended overall point ,
is that your experience was not entirely universal for the time period. thats all.
as someone who self-published in the 1980’s, and was involved with TMNT, it was a licensing agent who saw the potential of mixing martial artist wisecracking turtles similar to Marvel superheroes who brought TMNT to the attention of PLAYMATE TOYS, and got them a week’s worth of animated children’s cartoons that led to the explosion of TMNT merchandising. If you read Licensing magazine at the time, merchandise companies fell over themselves thanking MARK FREEDMAN, agent for TMNT co-creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, for allowing them to get in on the miracle of the TMNT money pouring from consumers. Many many comic creators tried to copy Peter and Kevin’s B&W concept and crashed and burned, taking speculative comic shop owners with them, and leaving a lot of fans with a bad memory of those years. It wasn’t easy to be published, or distributed in those years.
Monica Sharp.
its an incredibly hard market now, let alone then. never claimed it wasnt. pretty sure I acknowleged that it was. there was however room in the industry for creator owned and manga styled work. sorry you , like a great many of us who were attempting a career in the field at the time, had a rough go. also sorry if you see discussing differing recolections of what was happeing back inthe day as a dis/slam/insult…or what have you. i walked away from the field awhile back because I realized Im not willing to stroke egos or play the “games” to get ahed for such meager stakes (finacially). wasn’t willing to look the other way at bad behavior just because people were “at con”. alot of the disgracefull shit that happened to you happened to many people, and I burned lots of bridges calling it out.
you dont have to be my friend, but at least understand, Im not your enemy.
and with that, Im out.
