Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
So I was watching some old clips of The Electric Company on my lunch hour yesterday and saw a few spots featuring Spider-Man. As many of you may remember, the "Spidey" stories on Electric Company couched all of his adventures within the context of comic books. The introducing song ran over a clip of someone opening a Spidey comic, the episode itself was framed within a comic book panel, and the series ending with the closing of the comic.
Something I noticed in watching the clips was the artwork used for the covers...
Then there's this next cover, which is obviously a bit more generic and was used for multiple show introductions...
This was actually based on another piece of Romita art that was used, not on a comic, but on the cover to the Spider-Man: Beyond the Grave album from 1972. It was essentially an audio drama but the album cover included what were kind of like storyboards, i.e. comics but with no actual dialogue or captions. It featured Rene Auberjonois as the voice of Spider-Man. At the time, Auberjonois was probably best known as portraying Father Mulcahy in the movie version of M*A*S*H. He would later go on to memorable roles in the TV shows Benson and Deep Space Nine. Here's the first chapter...
Something I noticed in watching the clips was the artwork used for the covers...
Then there's this next cover, which is obviously a bit more generic and was used for multiple show introductions...
This was actually based on another piece of Romita art that was used, not on a comic, but on the cover to the Spider-Man: Beyond the Grave album from 1972. It was essentially an audio drama but the album cover included what were kind of like storyboards, i.e. comics but with no actual dialogue or captions. It featured Rene Auberjonois as the voice of Spider-Man. At the time, Auberjonois was probably best known as portraying Father Mulcahy in the movie version of M*A*S*H. He would later go on to memorable roles in the TV shows Benson and Deep Space Nine. Here's the first chapter...
But here's the weird thing that I think most Americans don't know: the crusade against comics wasn't just in the U.S. Let me pull out some book excerpts...
From John Bell's book on Canadian comics history, Invaders from the North...
In 1949 the crime-comics campaign gained substantial momentum as community groups across the country lobbied for passage of an anti-cromics law that had been drafted the year before by E. Davie Fulton. Among those who supported a legislative response to the crime-comics problem was Prime Minister Mackenzie King...From Anne Rubenstein's history of censorship in Mexican comics, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, & Other Threats to the Nation...
Conservative frustration with las historietas reappeared in public discourse not long after a new president, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, took office in 1952... Despite the governmental origin of this second movement against comic books, Catholic leaders sometimes spoke as if the government--rather than producers or consumers--was responsible for objectionable print media.From Frederik Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics...
In the late 1940s the American Occupation authorities took a dim view of all rhetoric and activities that seemed tied to the disasterous wartime mentality. In the comics this meant replacing the old system of censorship by a new one...And, lastly, from Paul Gravett's Great British Comics...
In response to his concerns that a minority of American comics available as imports or British reprints were exposing children to gore and sadism, [clergyman Marcus] Morris teamed up with [Frank] Hampson to offer a thoroughly wholesome alternative [in 1950].Now, all of these countries had obviously different approaches towards "cleaning up" comics and had varying degrees of severity. But what I find striking is that all of these countries were essentially reacting to the end of World War II, despite their level of involvement. And curiously, the countries that had the strictest regulations put in place, in the name of saving the children, were the countries whose children saw the fewest effects of war. Britain had the crap bombed out of it, and we mostly just see a preacher offering up a less fight-y option. Whereas Canada and the United States, separated from the primary conflict by the Atlantic Ocean, put up the greatest stink about comics' impact on children, and had the most legal actions. America was, in fact, so stringent, as noted by the quote above, they even instituted new rules for Japanese comics!
As I said, much has been written about the issues here in the States, and various authors have touched on similar issues around the globe, but I'd be curious to see a comprehensive summary of what EVERYbody was doing and how their reactions differed due to their cultural backgrounds and/or their involvement in the war. What happened in France? Australia? Italy? India? How did this seemingly world-wide comics backlash manifest elsewhere?
Webtoon announced earlier this week some leadership changes in order "to Accelerate Global Growth Strategy." Let's start with the high level stuff...
- President Yongsoo Kim is assuming oversight and will consolidate global operations, while the previous Chief Operating Officer role will be eliminated.
- Leah Goeun Yeon has been hired as Webtoon’s first Chief Business Officer. In the newly created role, Yeon will oversee Webtoon’s webcomic platform business (excluding Japan) "leading growth, marketing, content, and creator management."
- Teo Taeyeong Jang has been promoted to Head of AI. He is to be build on existing AI capabilities, including content protection and anti-piracy innovations, content discovery, and their new translation program.
- Sean Shinhyung Kim has been promoted to Head of IP Business, "strategically expanding its IP value chain in areas that can accelerate global growth." (Basically, he'll be in charge of obtaining and expanding licenses from other IP holders.)
Aside from the AI angle, there's also no reference to anyone in IT. Meaning either they are putting minimal-to-no effort towards improving their apps' functionality, or they are turning any/all of that work over to AI. For a tech company in particular, both of those options sound like a phenomenally bad idea. Further, it runs very counter to the messaging they were telling everybody as recently as December. They knew back then that AI wasn't popular, which is obviously why they weren't touting it in their public statements, but they've gone ahead anyway by not only embracing it, but creating an entirely new role just to try to plug it into everything in their business.
Even from a cynical consumer perspective, there's no focus here on their customers and there's no focus here on their product. They're talking about growth and increasing value. That's an exceptionally short-sighted, investor-focused approach, and one that will almost certainly lead to problems for both creators and readers as services and support get cut, ongoing maintenance falls to the wayside, and they put more effort into extracting more money from existing customers than bringing in new ones. I've long had the sense that many people looked hopefully at Webtoons as the solution for a single, functional webcomics discovery platform. But they're very much telegraphing that isn't their intention at all; they just want to suck up as much money as they can, sell the company for as much as they can, and walk away with as much cash as possible.
I mentioned back in January how Amazon completely axed my decades-long customer account with them. I lost my history of everything I'd ever ordered from them, all the comics I had accumulated on Comixology, my Prime account (which was set to expire only a month later anyway), all of my Alexa functionality, my affiliate links (which, because they kept changing the rules on payouts, earned me exactly zero dollars over two decades)... Also, I still haven't checked to be sure, but I don't think I can add any new content to my old Kindle. (I did do some work at one point to try to jailbreak it, but it's a gen2 version, and it's only gen3 versions and later where you can seemingly do that. Or at least that anyone's bothered to figure out how.)
I originally set up my Amazon account decades ago when they literally only sold books. The slow creep of their services meant that I'd add one service here or there as they became available until I eventually realized how embedded I was with their system. With the realization, I began trying to ween myself off starting about a year and a half ago. It was good timing, in retrospect, because once they did cancel my account entirely, I found it annoying only in their complete lack of any reasonable explanation. I responded to the actual loss of services mostly with a shrug.
But that's me as a consumer. Whether or not I'm connected with any of Amazon services doesn't impact my income stream at all. (OK, technically, I expect some of my books get sold via Amazon and I would lose out on some profits from that, but annual sales of all of my books under all platforms combined is a couple dozen at most. That's barely enough for a nice dinner out once a year.) What happens if your income IS dependent on Amazon specifically?
Tom Ray recently noted that Amazon completely shut down his account as well. More notably, though, he had been selling copies of his HomeMade Cartoons and "Bobert"comics through them exclusively since 2018.
Every book that he had made was specifically formatted for Amazon's platform so he could get paid on 'per page' basis instead of 'per title.' But now that income stream is just gone.
He has a very similar story to mine. He was just going along, doing his thing, and then BAM! Email out of nowhere that his account had been terminated with some unconvincing and generic explanation about "violating terms." Although his comic features nothing you could label as pornographic or excessively violent or obscene in any way -- I can't even find any mild cursing in it.
The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI. Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part. In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positives like Ray and could've seen their agent was too aggressive with flagging. Which suggests one of three possibilities to me:
Ray is obviously frustrated and annoyed with this. He kind of had all his webcomic eggs in the Amazon basket, so to speak. From what I can gather, though, it does sound like he's at least got some other income streams that are unrelated to Amazon. In addition to cartoons, he's also a musician and he seems to do a bit of dealing with re-selling vintage toys and collectibles. So the Amazon hit is significant, but he seems to have other income streams while he reformats his comics work for other outlets.
I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this going around, and I just happened to hear about Ray's. His is interestingly both a cautionary tale as well as a best practice. Cautionary because he put all his webcomics income into a single vendor, and became subject to their whims as to whether or not they're willing to sell his work. Best practice because he has other income streams to fall back on.
Regardless, this is increasingly the world we live in. Where they make so much money from so many other people that they don't care whether you remain as an individual customer or not. Whether you're trying to sell your comics online, or whether you just want to watch the latest episode of Invincible. Realistically, I don't know how much you can completely separate yourself from Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other monster coporations without removing yourself from society altogether and living in an off-grid cabin somewhere. But the more you're able to bring all your services "in-house" and actually own yourself, the better off I think you'll be.
I originally set up my Amazon account decades ago when they literally only sold books. The slow creep of their services meant that I'd add one service here or there as they became available until I eventually realized how embedded I was with their system. With the realization, I began trying to ween myself off starting about a year and a half ago. It was good timing, in retrospect, because once they did cancel my account entirely, I found it annoying only in their complete lack of any reasonable explanation. I responded to the actual loss of services mostly with a shrug.
But that's me as a consumer. Whether or not I'm connected with any of Amazon services doesn't impact my income stream at all. (OK, technically, I expect some of my books get sold via Amazon and I would lose out on some profits from that, but annual sales of all of my books under all platforms combined is a couple dozen at most. That's barely enough for a nice dinner out once a year.) What happens if your income IS dependent on Amazon specifically?
The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI. Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part. In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positives like Ray and could've seen their agent was too aggressive with flagging. Which suggests one of three possibilities to me:
- They didn't actually test the process at all. They just assumed it would work fine and pushed things into production. This is not only not a "best practice" but it would generally be considered a "worst practice."
- They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but felt that whatever loss of revenue they'd incur from false positives would be less than whatever they'd stop 'losing' from shrinkage. "Shrinkage" is what retail stores call theft, but in an online environment, there is no real shrinkage. If someone is able to somehow "steal" a digital file, it's not like Amazon has lost anything -- they could sell the file an infinite number of times before and they could sell the file an infinite number of times after. At worst, they miss out on the opportunity to sell one more copy, but studies have repeatedly shown that people who pirate files digitally were never going to actually shell out money for the file in the first place. But in the interest of pursuing a "not losing any potential opportunity" they rolled things out anyway.
- They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but said, "We're the 800 pound gorilla in the room here. F--- them!" and rolled the AI agent into production anyway.
Ray is obviously frustrated and annoyed with this. He kind of had all his webcomic eggs in the Amazon basket, so to speak. From what I can gather, though, it does sound like he's at least got some other income streams that are unrelated to Amazon. In addition to cartoons, he's also a musician and he seems to do a bit of dealing with re-selling vintage toys and collectibles. So the Amazon hit is significant, but he seems to have other income streams while he reformats his comics work for other outlets.
I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this going around, and I just happened to hear about Ray's. His is interestingly both a cautionary tale as well as a best practice. Cautionary because he put all his webcomics income into a single vendor, and became subject to their whims as to whether or not they're willing to sell his work. Best practice because he has other income streams to fall back on.
Regardless, this is increasingly the world we live in. Where they make so much money from so many other people that they don't care whether you remain as an individual customer or not. Whether you're trying to sell your comics online, or whether you just want to watch the latest episode of Invincible. Realistically, I don't know how much you can completely separate yourself from Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other monster coporations without removing yourself from society altogether and living in an off-grid cabin somewhere. But the more you're able to bring all your services "in-house" and actually own yourself, the better off I think you'll be.
I've also been trying to get more knowledgeable about European comics. I'd read a number of them as a teenager, but generally without the knowledge that they were in fact created on the other side of an ocean. Still lots to learn.
Same with Canadian comics. And Australian ones. And Indian ones. And...
One of the reasons I first looked at those Lone Wolf issues back in the day was because the covers were by Frank Miller. (Bear in mind that this was 1987, shortly after his Dark Knight Returns blew everyone's socks off.) I recall reading somewhere that Miller was happy to do the covers because he had seen some of those stories before and they were very influential on his Daredevil run.
And I think that's an interesting notion. That Miller's work on Daredevil and Dark Knight looked revolutionary to American audiences because it had a Japanese influence that most people in the States hadn't seen in any capacity at that time. When you distill that idea down even further, that's basically what creativity is: putting together two or more ideas that no one has before. Miller took elements of Japanese manga and merged them into an American superhero story.
I don't say that to diminish Miller's achievements on those works. He understood the power of Goseki Kojima's art style/storytelling, and figured out how to adapt some of those elements to what was essentially the Jack Kirby method of storytelling. Not an easy task, certainly a creative one, and Miller was able to execute on that very well.
And that's why I try to see what's going on (and has gone on) in comics beyond those created in the U.S. You never know when/where something really cool and useful will come up, or in what capacity. Different cultures approach problems (like storytelling) in different ways, and they could well have ideas and methods unique to their culture. And those might be perfectly valid and usable in my own work. Even though I don't actually write comics themselves.
The more you know, the more you're able to make those connections no one else is making.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
