You can walk into most any generalized bookstore and find comic strip collections. Peanuts has been perennially available for decades. Garfield and Dilbert, certainly. The past several years, we've seen some more upscale collections of older strips like Pogo and Little Nemo.

But not every strip gets collected. As far as I can tell, despite having been in syndication since 1965, The Born Loser has never been collected in any form. Presumably, it's popular enough for a newspaper audience, but not popular enough for a more concentrated book audience. (The costs of adding a comic strip to an existing newspaper are considerably lower than printing an entire book so, while your book audience wouldn't need to be as large, they would have to be more willing to pay a significantly higher price.)

Then there are other strips that are collected for a time, but the strip's popularity wanes and the collections are discontinued. Heathcliff enjoyed many collections over the years, but as far as I can tell, nothing new has showed up in book form since around the time the original creator, George Gately, retired in 1998. Again, the same price and cost logic from the previous example applies here; it's just that the book audience that was once in place, for whatever reason(s), no longer is there.

The first and last examples make the most sense to me. I mean, if you decide to put out a book and it sells well, then why not put out another one? And if it sells poorly, then you stop. That's kind of a basic business logic. That middle example, where you never release a collection at all, I'm a little fuzzy on. I don't quite get how you might determine whether there's a sufficient market for book, based on newspaper popularity. I mean, why did The Lockhorns get several book collections but The Born Loser didn't?

Now, to throw something new and interesting into the mix, some of the newer strips out there have allowed the creators to retain the rights to publish reprint collections themselves. Darrin Bell has done several print-on-demand collected editions of Candorville as has Keith Knight with The Knight Life. And Bill Amend did several digital-only collections of Foxtrot, which is already published in dead-tree collections by Andrews McMeel.

Now, more than likely, these guys aren't selling enough books by themselves to earn a living. And the publishers have determined that the books wouldn't be worth the effort to produce them themselves. Not necessarily that they wouldn't be profitable, just that they wouldn't be profitable enough by whatever metrics they're using. But that means that A) the syndicate isn't confident the strip is popular enough currently, and B) the syndicate isn't confident the strip will be popular enough in the future. Which seems to me like a very strange bet to make. I can understand, conceptually, that they might want to put a strip out in the not-terribly-expensive-for-them newspaper circuit, but not in the considerably-more-expensive-and-less-likely-to-be-profitable book collection circuit. But then to make an agreement which removes the possibility of future income (for the syndicate) if the strip becomes more popular? I'm not sure I see the business logic there.

Maybe it's a way to compete with webcomics, who generally own the rights to their own work lock, stock, and barrel? Syndicates can only pull in new talent only if the creators don't have to give up reproduction rights?

Maybe this is why I'm not in the syndication business!

I had a conversation a couple weeks ago with a comic creator who is a white male. He's done more than a few stories over the years featuring other white men, including brief takes on Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hulk, and Iron Man. He does prefer working on his own creations, not surprisingly, but those aren't always guaranteed sales, so he sometimes does work-for-hire pieces as well.

But when it came to one of his co-creations, his collaborator -- also a white male -- wrote in a Black protagonist. He raised a metaphoric eyebrow because the story was set in the late 1800s and he didn't feel either of them were qualified to tell such a story. Although this was a few years prior, he was afraid of a reaction not unlike what Mark Waid saw when Strange Fruit came out last year. He felt that, as two white men, they had no real place to tell the story of a Black man in the 1800s. It was a topic that they couldn't have any insider knowledge on, and thus they'd be seen as mis-appropriating a history that wasn't theirs.

I think this is something a number of creators struggle with. In light of so many creators getting their work ripped to shreds when they attempt to include some minority character(s), those same creators are reluctant to make further attempts at inclusion. They'll be content to "write what they know" and stick to their own white-privileged experiences, rather than try to bring a spotlight on some other group.

And since the industry, in general, doesn't do a very good job including minority creators, we're left with a glut of stories about white cishetero men. Which obviously doesn't help matters any since it just continues to promote the status quo.

Here's the thing about that story with the Black hero, though. Ultimately, there was no backlash against it. Now, granted, these guys don't have the name recognition that Mark Waid has, but they have been published by Marvel and DC so they're not exactly unknowns here either. Their story came out, tons of people read it, and there was no great outcry screaming, "You don't have any right to tell this story!"

Part of it came down to research. The writer here spent a lot of time -- literally, years -- doing his homework on the era. He was very well-read when it came to how life was different for Blacks versus whites at that time and place in history. Naturally, he drew on that research when writing the story, and that informed how their character talked and acted, as well as how others talked and acted around him.

But almost as importantly, he was making a sincere effort to understand where that might put his protagonist emotionally. He wasn't simply lifting some words and phrases he'd come across, and he wasn't trying to overlay his experiences on top of his characters. He was trying to show the character as a real person, and he was trying to sympathize as much as he possibly could with the circumstances the character was in and to portray that in as an emotionally honest way as possible.

Now, whether or not he was entirely successful is a matter of opinion, but the point is that he was making a very sincere attempt to get to the "truth" of the character and his circumstances through a great deal of research. And that sincerity shows through. The results of that research show through. It's not a matter of watching 12 Years a Slave and saying you get it. I think it's a matter of trying to be honest and sincere with your approach. I think that, even if you get it wrong, if your attempt is genuine, you'll get corrected but not flayed.

My point is that creators shouldn't shy away from Black or Latino or gay or trans or any sort of minority characters because they're afraid of a backlash. A backlash will only come if they seemingly haven't made a genuine attempt to portray the emotional honesty and truth of those characters. In short, just make them people, not stereotypes.

• Hannah Brunelli reports on a CSUN talk Shawnee and Shawnelle Gibbs, and MariNaomi "the struggle of giving voices to multi-racial comic book characters".
  
• Frank Page recently had a show of some of his Bob the Squirrel work. He spent a little time reflecting afterwards.
  
• Neil Cohn dispells several myths of comics understanding.
  
• Lucy Bellwood gives a "rambling" talk about her career in Viborg, Denmark. Also boats.

I happened across a pair of Lucky Luke books in an O'Hare airport bookstore (of all places!) yesterday, and quickly snatched them up. I'm nominally familiar with the character and his significance in French comics, but I really haven't read almost any of those books. Only one, in fact: The Stagecoach, originally published in 1968.

I was surprised, though, as I read through The Painter that Luke was not brandishing his trademark cigarette. Rather, he had a piece of straw/hay in his mouth. I thought perhaps that the art had been altered for the U.S. printing, much like how Sanji's cigarette was changed to a lollipop in some editions of One Piece when it was imported from Japan. But then I came across a scene in which Luke turns down smoking a peace pipe with an unnamed Native American chief because he "quit smoking a long time ago."

(I'm going to deliberately gloss over the inherent racism and stereotypes in these stories for now. It's not an insignificant issue, to be sure, but I haven't researched that angle very well yet to speak on it. So that'll have to be another post for another time!)

Now, it's certainly possible that whole panels were redrawn here and the script was altered in the translation to accommodate that, but that seemed unlikely. Doing some digging, though, apparently Luke's famous cigarette was discarded in 1983 and this was indeed done to better accommodate American markets. The Painter story I came across was first published in 2001, so Luke had indeed quit smoking nearly two decades earlier.

Interestingly, though, in going through the cross-sell pages in the back of these books, they sport the covers of the other 50-some Lucky Luke books that current American-rights-holder Cinebook has out. And in none of them is Luke smoking. He's either shown without anything in his mouth at all, or with that same piece of straw/hay. But, in comparing those covers to the original French versions, though -- many of which use the same art -- we can see that Luke was in fact smoking originally and that, for the covers at least, Cinebook opted to edit out the cigarettes.
Lucky Luke debuted in 1946, and appeared smoking for 37 years. We're now 33 years away from when he stopped smoking, and many of his most visible cigarettes (i.e. the ones on the book covers) have been retroactively removed. Despite this, and the fact that I've officially read more stories of him not smoking than ones where he did, I can't shake the iconic image of Lucky Luke and his cigarette out of my head. That is some powerful imagery!

I was recently reminded of this interview with Frank Zappa from the 1980s.
Now, rewatch it again but replace any references to music executives with comic executives.

Although it was specifically how Marvel handled many of its primary characters that initially got me off "mainstream" comics (which, by the way, is a term I really hate since it's horribly inaccurate on several levels, but I don't have anything comparable to replace it with) there was already a lot of stuff I avoided because it wasn't very interesting. Re-hashes of other stories I'd already read.

What's more interesting, to me, is to see these small, independent creators using their own voices to craft their own stories, not because they think they'll get rich off them, but because they have a burning passion to tell them. The business model is riskier for them; their works are far from the sure bet that Batman or the X-Men are. They're also riskier for the audience; I have a pretty good idea what I'm getting when I pick up a Spider-Man comic -- not so much when I get one by an unknown creator about an unknown property.

People have been making analogies between the comics and music industries for years now and, while they're not exact parallels, there's often something we can learn from looking at one and applying the thinking to the other. Zappa wasn't talking about comics at all, but he may as well have been.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: RFID at WonderCon
http://ift.tt/1WSGcKO

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: 2002 Danny Fingeroth Interview
http://ift.tt/22XEdIX

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/1RqvnPK

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Playing Favorites
http://ift.tt/1TiypXB

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Spider-Gwen
http://ift.tt/1TkOYCi

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: The Great Comic Strip Switcheroo
http://ift.tt/1ZQlaOP

One this day, back in 1997, the comics pages in the newspapers looked a little different. Forty-six syndicated cartoonists swapped strips for the day. Jim Davis drew Blondie, Bil Keane drew Dilbert, Bill Griffith drew Bizarro... It was dubbed The Great Comic Strip Switcheroo and was the brainchild of Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. Most of the artists applied both their own illustration style and personal sense of humor to the new strips, which led to some very unusual twists on well-known comics. The comics' mastheads retained the original creators' bylines, but only some creators signed the strips they actually worked on, leading to some early internet discussion of who exactly worked on what. (Universal even sponsored a contest to correctly guess all the swaps.)

Kevin Fagan was unable to find a partner to switch with, so he simply drew Drabble with his left hand that day, as noted in the strip itself. Charles Schulz was scheduled to switch Patrick McDonnell, but ultimately decided it wasn't a good idea, so both Peanuts and Mutts ran normally.

Offhand, I can't seem to find all of the strips from that day online, but here are all the ones I've been able to locate, so you can see for yourself whose comics were improved by the switch!