Atomic-Robo.com

Begin the countdown to cosmetic mutilation. It’ll be the ubiquitous tattoo-ing of the late 21st century. You heard it here first.

If you follow print comics at all, then you probably already know about Diamond’s Big News. The short version is that they’re increasing the minimum amount a title must earn in order for Diamond to continue carrying it. This makes good economic sense for Diamond, but it’s unquestionably going to destroy independent comics publishing as we know it. The first third of this article goes into a little more depth on the issue, but basically when the monopolistic distribution system makes it mathematically impossible for the majority of independent publishers (and all yet-to-be-founded independent publishers) to be distributed, that’s it. Game over.

Let me put it plainly. The basic model of getting new independent comics into shops is dead.

Oh, it’ll do fine for Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, and maybe one or two others. But everyone else? Everyone out there working on a new project for publication right now? The old model no longer applies.

The good news is that this isn’t bad news.

I’d been wondering when comics would go digital since around 2002. That’s when 8BT officially became my job. I started going to conventions and the difference between webcomic money and small press money was so obscene it made me feel bad. Seriously. I was making more money by giving away my comic online than everyone I ever saw who self-published their comics or who went through smaller independent publishers and Diamond. It’s a basic question of overhead. If you print, you have to pay to print the comics; to ship the comics; to store the comics; to ship the comics again to Diamond, or the retailer, or the customer. And that cover price? I know the customer feels like $2.99 is a bit much for one issue (nevermind the $3.99 that will become the standard price later this year), but that’s got to go toward paying the printer, the shipping, the storage, the shipping again, Diamond, and the retailer. What pittance is left over is then split between the creative team and the publisher. That’s a lot of ways to slice $3 especially since the retailer alone keeps $1.50. And mind you, this is if you get a sale. Print comics customers are not merely inclined to not buy things they don’t already buy, they actively fight it. Good luck out there!

Let’s compare that to the cost of distributing a webcomic. You pay about $20/year for a domain name and then a monthly fee for bandwidth, the cost of which will range from negligible to obscene. If you don’t have much traffic, then chances are you can afford to swallow bandwidth costs through your own disposable income. That alone is a huge advantage over producing a print run that barely sells (no matter how small the print run) — you’re still out all those printing, shipping, and storage costs that don’t exist for a webcomic. If your traffic starts to increase, then yeah, your bandwidth costs will go up. But it’ll always be a cost you can make disappear by selling sketches, original pages, and/or advertising space. Any revenue beyond covering those costs (plus art supplies where needed) goes straight to the creative team. No retailer. No Diamond. No publisher. And this doesn’t even get into the revenue you can generate through merchandising or print collections once you have an established pre-order-hungry audience. It’s just insane.

Basically: there was no reason to go into print. The only difference is that it’s now official Diamond policy to laugh at you for trying.

One might look at the above and ask, “Brian, if you love webcomics so much, then why did you go into print with Atomic Robo?” Mostly, I think it was the need for 1. legitimization followed by a little bit of 2. ignorance and 3. arrogance. In more detail:

1. 8-bit is basically a work of piracy and it has no future beyond exactly what it is: some free online comics. Having sunk my entire adult life into producing it, I felt that whatever came next needed an external source of legitimization to be taken seriously as an intellectual property with any kind of future. Not because web based properties are not on their own legitimate (look no further than Penny Arcade, PvP, Applegeeks, and on and on), but it tends to take individual online titles longer to establish that legitimacy than it does a print title. The assumption is that if a work is published, then a certain baseline level of quality and marketability has been vouched for, so the property in question is a safer investment from external sources. A webcomic needs to prove it has that, and it can only do so if given enough time (again, look at how long it took PA, PvP, AG, etc. to find traction outside the internet: years). It’s the difference between looking for something to read at Barnes and Noble and fanfiction.net. I already put in/wasted my years of webcomic time, I couldn’t afford to start all over at thirty.

2. Though I knew webcomics require far less overhead to produce, I failed to anticipate just how great the gulf really is between the online and print markets.

3. I figured more 8-bit readers would pay a trivial amount for a physical product of new content from an author whose work they enjoyed. Individual issue sales for Atomic Robo are high for a book of its position in the print market, but not so high to require significant sales from 8BT-readers to explain them. Even if we assume most of those sales are from 8-bit readers, and realistically they aren’t, that inflated number would still only represent less than one percent of the 8BT-reading audience. Then again, someone’s buying the trade like crazy, maybe it’s them?

But, hey, this is business. The death of one model is the birth of a new one. Quoting myself from Oct ’07:

The music industry fought to keep distribution the same after mp3s hit and in doing so they gave iTunes the opportunity to make billions. The numbers are smaller in the comics industry, but Diamond brings in $500 million every year. Even a piece of that is nothing to sneeze at should a small team of software developers swoop in and do for comics what Diamond could have done five years ago. In their fight to keep their jobs, Diamond and the mail order shops are going to let someone else make the millions of dollars any one of them could have made by thinking ahead.”

Look at that, I predicted iVerse (with more info over here). I believe ComiXology is working toward including a similar service with their app, but don’t quote me on that. If we don’t see even more services in this direction as 2009 goes on, that’s just stupid.

I’m not saying iVerse is the future, or that their model will be a success for them or someone else. It’s just too early to make those kinds of calls. But it is an elegant and attractive alternative for indie publishers who are suddenly tasked by Diamond to increase their sales by a factor of two overnight.

If you’re a new creator, why should you seek to be listed with iVerse or a similar digital distribution network? They charge for your product when you could just as easily put up a website and release the same content for free and to a larger potential audience.

Well, remember my concerns about building legitimacy? You can do it much faster in print than you can online because there’s no minimum assured level of professionalism or quality in webcomics as a whole. An iVerse-like model is an interesting compromise between the advantages of both print and digital distribution — you can have the built-in legitimacy of the print network and the greatly reduced overhead of the digital network. Whether or not a given creator or team should seek to join an iVerse-like model or to strike out on their own is ultimately up to them. Both offer distinct advantages and disadvantages, you just gotta go with the one that best fits your project. The important thing is that Diamond is not the only game in town.

The future of comics may well depend on linking “comics” and “portability”. Portable mp3 players and the services that provide them content are such a huge success because of the inherent universality of music: you can listen to it without being occupied by it. I mean, are you mp3 player people are really listening to your music as anything other than background noise even 50% of the time? You can half-listen to a song in traffic without feeling cheated by the experience, but half-reading a comic on your drive to work is a great way to kill yourself.

So, y’know. There are hurdles for anything that’s “like iTunes, but comics.” But we’ll find ways around and over those hurdles. What’s important now is to attach the ideas of convenience and accessibility to comics; to make it feel as natural to read a comic on a portable screen as it is today to listen to music on a very tiny hard drive. The iPhone is a great way to plant those seeds, so it will only make sense for comics to become an integrated part of next generation phones and other portable, personal devices with big fancy screens.

It’s a weird time to be in the comics industry, but I think it will be a better industry for the changes that will come as a result of Diamond’s new policy. New business models will emerge and be explored. More content will be more available in more ways than has ever been possible. This is how an industry thrives.

A core of occultism ran straight through the Nazi movement. It only makes sense: fascism all but requires an abundance of magical thinking as there’s no other way to justify absolute rule by a “chosen” sub-group. See also: monarchies and divine right.

There’s a line of argument that says Vril: The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was among the occult influences on the Nazi Party. I don’t pretend to know Lytton’s mind, but it seems unlikely he was any kind of Nazi sympathizer or particularly embraced their ideas about racial superiority (at least no further than your average rich, white, 19th century European man). I mean, he died long before the political movement began. But, like Nietzsche, Lytton wrote down ideas that would have an unfortunate resonance with a certain kind of desperate maniac several decades later.

The short version of the book: there is an ancient utopian society under the Earth made up of superwise beings, the Vril-ya, who possess advanced technology to access an esoteric energy source, Vril, which allows them to manipulate reality by thought alone. It is posited that, eventually, the Vril-ya will run out of places to live underground and spill into the surface where mankind will have to make room or be obliterated. Or, more accurately, humanity will make room by being obliterated, as the Vril-ya don’t need the permission of a lesser race to expand their territory. The funny thing about this book is that it’s an early piece of science fiction; so early, in fact, that the genre’s tropes were not yet well enough understood by readers for them to identify it as fiction. Yes, a great many people took this thing seriously. If that seems silly, let’s remember that people ran screaming from early movie theaters when a train was shown zooming toward the camera; or that many people took Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds broadcast to be true. An audience is less able to identify fact from fiction when a new medium’s tropes are not yet fully grasped or developed. See also: early reactions to lonelygirl15; any internet rumor, lie, or April Fools joke you’ve ever fallen for; and some ARGs.

So, the growing Nazi movement had a rabid hunger to justify their unjustifiable ideas about their racial superiority and their destiny to rule the world. Is it any wonder that a book, widely regarded as true, about a race of supermen who are destined to rule the world through the superiority of their heritage, which also makes vague reference that this superior race counts Aryans among its ancestors (and, even further back, frogs, but shhhhh), appealed to elements within the Nazi movement? I mean, the Vril-ya will literally take over the world in the name of “lebensraum” — “living room” or “breathing space”. What better fairy tale could the Nazis have asked for?

Something about the Vril-ya hit me earlier today. They’re a precursor of The Singularity. It’s almost as hard to nail down a definition of the Singularity as it is post-modernism, but I like how this describes it:

…the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. -John von Neumann

Now, exactly how, when, and why the Singularity is supposed to happen differs about a dozen different ways for each definition. But the basic idea is that we will be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than any human could ever be, if only by a little bit. This machine will then be clever enough to make itself (and/or new machines) far more intelligent than we could ever make them. This process will go on and on until the machines reach some kind of maximum saturation beyond which no further innovation can increase intelligence per millimeter of processing strata due to sheer limits of the laws of physics, at which point it will become necessary to transform more and more matter (the Earth, Solar System, galaxy, universe) into processing material to achieve greater intelligence. Even within this one schema of the Singularity there’s differing opinions over how long each phase would take or if some of them could ever be achievable.

In any event, you don’t see “humans” mentioned in the events listed above. I mean, it sounds pretty cool for the machines, but what does the Singularity do with people? There are those who claim the Terminator scenario. You know, the machines will advance to the point where they want to get kill us. It makes for a fun plot, but I’ve always found that a little too pat to actually play out. We’re projecting a particular habit of our own, i.e. resources and killing things to keep them, onto beings without the billions of years of evolutionary baggage that gave us that habit. A counter-argument to the Terminator scenario is that it will not make sense to differentiate humans from machines. That is to say, we will already be incorporating machines into our bodies, so by the time the machine intelligences advance beyond our own, they will already be a part of us and we will advance together. In this scenario, it is likely that there will be those individuals who do not wish to incorporate machines into their bodies, or who wish to do so to a lesser degree than that which will augment their intelligences. These people will be at the mercy of the superintelligent the same way an ant hill is at the mercy of anyone who walks by it.

The narrative of the the Singularity is the same as the Vril-ya: the “lesser races” are obliterated by the superior technology of an “advanced race” exercising its “right” to breathing room. So, is nerd heaven a fascist intelligentsia dressed up in sci-fi clothes?