This is a small, but deeply powerful part of a thoroughly wonderful
episode. I strongly encourage you to check out this series. It’s so good, and
pure, and wonderful, and restores my faith in humanity.
Roundtable: Re-Inventing Indie
Season 2, Ep1, on Project
Jody Houser: Eisner
nominated comics writer, including “Faith.”
Spike Trotman: Comics creator,
owner of comics publisher Iron
Circus Comics.
Scott McCloud: comics creator, iconic
15:56 Jody:
“There have been so many new voices coming in, telling different types of
stories that I think a lot of those stereotypes are starting to get broken
down.”
Spike:
“Well, they have no choice now because the demographics of the comic
readership are changing, too. So, the justification, ‘Yeah, I can’t see an 19-39-year-old
white cis male enjoying this story,’ no longer exists.”
Jody: “And I
know a lot of guys who are very much in the core demographic who want those types of stories. And I think
it’s really insulting to say, ‘No, they will only read about people exactly
like them.’ You’re not only just marginalizing whole groups of society, you’re
insulting your main readership, and saying, ‘Oh, they don’t want to read about
woman,’ and meanwhile these guys are like, ‘I’ll totally read about women if
it’s a good story and a cool character.’ It’s weird; it hurts both sides.”
Spike: “And
it’s sort of in denial about what caused the major, almost seismological, shift
in comics readership to begin with. Which was a ton of woman crashing into comics like a tidal wave. The manga
wave! It was really important.”
Jody: “Like
the Kool-Aid man.”
Spike: “Yeah,
women were the Kool-Aid man going, ‘MAN-GA!’ That’s what happened!”
…
[Things that happened in the early 90s: Tokyo Pop cuts a
deal with Barnes and Nobel, Marvel goes bankrupt, first graphical interface web
browser.]
17:30 Scott:
“And so, you had this conference. You had, at the same time, the exact
same time, all these girls are discovering manga and sitting in Barnes and
Nobel reading it, and they’re all able to talk to each other, and now all of a
sudden, these barriers that had kept every genre but one, and every demographic
but one, as the dominant one, all of a sudden, things could come in through the
side door. And someone could just, on their own, start putting up stuff on the
web that didn’t look like what was on the market, and people could find it. And
all the barriers fell apart. All of the things that had kept that penned in in
that little tiny superhero, sweaty locker…”
Spike: “That
gatekeeper.”
Scott:
“Yeah. It just fell apart all at once.”
Spike: “Yeah, they were just walking around
the gatekeepers, and to this day they continue. It’s bizarre when people still
treat their interest, like comics especially, like a special club that you need
their permission to be into.”
Jody: “It’s
like they forged their whole identity around it, and anything that violates
what their view of comics is, they’re seeing it as a personal attack.”
…
20:52 Spike: “The
dismissing of manga, again I talked about this before, it was this sort of
utterly not thinking, lizard hind-brain defensive maneuver. It’s like, ‘No!
Comics is THIS! And comics will always be THIS because this is what I’m used
to, this is what it was when I was 13, and I’m 35 now, and I’ll be damned if it
changes!’ But the most important things that people who are into the
older-school of comics need to understand, is comics don’t belong to you. They have never just
belonged to you, and you do not exercise
control over what other people make, and
other people care about. And you
cannot gatekeep comics because you will be walked around and ignored.”
…
26:56 Spike:
“And for all the talk of, ‘Girls don’t read comics, and that’s why Minx
work,’ well motherfucker, I’m sorry, but you’re completely wrong. And I have
friends who can lovingly recount squatting in the hall of a Barnes and Nobel
while mom is shopping, speedreading ‘Fruits Basket’ because they could not afford 15 books, and that is the quintessential
young creators story now. And a lot of those creators are woman, so no, it’s
not that ‘woman don’t read comics,’ fucker, it’s ‘woman don’t read your comics,’ and that’s a problem for you to figure out.”
Jody:
“And the weird thing is, growing up, the only people I knew reading super
hero comics were girls. It was me and
my friends in middle school having fights in the hallway over X-Men trading
cards that almost got really bloody. … But the thing was, if you told me at
that point, ‘Boys don’t read superhero comics,’ I might have believed it
because I didn’t know any boys who did, I just knew a lot of girls who
did.”
Critical Analysis 