Sorry, Comics, But You’re Screwed

How Privateering, Not Piracy, Destroys Commercial Art & Media

At C2E2 over the weekend, a bunch of people were running around showing off how awesome comics look on the iPad. I have to agree, comics on the iPad appear to be way more enjoyably readable than I had anticipated. No one seems to be quite sure if this is great news or awful news. Well, it’s both. It’s great news for comics junkies who aren’t yet overstimulated by too much digital content and for comics creators who see their stories as loss leaders for movies and action figures… the rest of you are screwed.

Oh I’m no Luddite about this, but I do have more than enough anecdotal reference material to make the call here.

Here’s a list of a few retail shops I worked at during my teens and early 20s:
- Tower Records (Huntington, NY)
- Tower Video (Lafayette & 4th, Greenwich Village NY)
- Kim’s Video (Bleecker Street, West Village NY)
- Two Boots Video (Ave A, East Village NY)
- See Hear Zines (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- St. Mark’s Comics (St Mark’s Place, East Village NY)
- Village Comics (Bleecker Street, New York)
- Mama Mia What A Pizza (Broadway & 8th, NY)

The only one on that list who’s likely to see the next decade is Mama Mia What A Pizza (or whatever it’s called nowadays) because you can’t download a pizza (yet).

Tower Records was put out of business by iTunes.
Tower Video, Kim’s Video, and Two Boots Video were put out of business by Netflix.
See Hear was put out of business by Blogger.

I hate to put a deathwish on great indie businesses, but the iPad has me concerned about the future for St Mark’s Comics and Village Comics.

There’s a reason why I attribute the death of music retail and video retail to iTunes and Netflix rather than Napster and PirateBay. Here’s my unique take on all this: Piracy doesn’t put companies out of business, Privateering does.

For my purposes here, a Privateer is a legal Pirate… let the historians argue the nuances of that. Privateers were essentially pirates with a government issued right to attack, capture, and plunder enemy ships. These days, there are people who receive government protection (in the form of corporate status) to plunder other businesses (in this case, media creators). Businesses like iTunes and Netflix have figured out how to make a dollar by costing other people three dollars. They are not creating value, they are accruing revenue by lowballing the value of other people’s content.

The reason Piracy isn’t the problem is because Piracy is an unreliable, unsustainable pain in the ass way to consume content… and people are lazy consumers of entertainment. Sure, you’ll get a bunch of stuff for free and then you’ll get a virus and then you’ll get free stuff but then you won’t be able to find what you want and then you’ll get free stuff and then the people running the site get jobs and it shuts down. Piracy alone is too difficult to manage.

The problem comes from the union of Piracy and Privateering.

Before iTunes & iPods, we were all downloading thousands of songs that we had to burn to CD-Rs if we wanted to listen to them anyplace other than our computers. It was a huge hassle. Suddenly we all had more music than we could fit in our CD wallets and our mixes were too long for a mix CD. A new demand occurred in the marketplace: “give us a way to organize all our stolen music.” Apple responded with the iTunes/iPod system. The iPod didn’t replace the walkman simply because mp3 players were cool, there were plenty of mp3 players in the marketplace. And it wasn’t the iTunes store either… it was the system of managing a tremendous amount of digital music that most people had accumulated through piracy. Privateering… Apple benefited legally by managing the illegal sharing of content.

Netflix is a bit different and I’ve already beaten that horse to glue, so for right now I’m gonna stick to Apple.

So what does this have to do with comics? Well, the iPad is a very impressive device… and based on the fact that there’s a Kindle app on there I’m assuming Apple’s business model is not to shave revenue off ebook sales. No, the iPad is going to be a fantastic means of managing stolen comic books.

My friend has the first few hundred issues of Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Captain America on his computer as .cbr files (all obtained legally I’m sure… or maybe they were cracked out of the PDFs on those Marvel CD-Rs from a few years back). I tried reading one on my iPod and it was annoying. It’s also not a great experience to read them on a laptop or desktop since the monitor is landscape not profile. Well… the prospect of reading them on the iPad is downright exciting.

There is already rampant scanning piracy of comics, but until now there was no ideal way to organize and read those pirated comics. Well, it’s here… and as soon as the iPad (or a similar device) takes hold, there will be a blitz of comic book scanning that will begin a cycle of the iPad causing increased comic book scanning which will lead to increased sales of iPads and then more people scanning and so on.

The piracy of comics will be uniquely ubiquitous because so many back issues are simply not available, so fans will consider it a service to share their back issues. The publishers will want to cash in by making digital back issues available, but at $2 a pop how many people are going to actually buy 1,000 or so back-issues of the various Spider-Man series? Instantly, there will be too much content available and that will diminish the value of the individual books… smart publishers will offer blocks of content cheaply (Spider-Man issues 1-100 for $20 or something) and then suddenly new comic books will be competing directly with classic back issues for the time, attention, and dollars of each comic book reader. The digital comics New Release Rack will be as glutted as the rest of the internet.

The drop in perceived value for comics will have massive repercussions for comic shops and especially comic con dealers who specialize in back issues, but also for publishers in general… especially indies.

My advice? Open a pizza shop. Or buy stock in Apple, I guess. The rise of the iPod didn’t exactly make the music business more lucrative but it sure helped Apple’s share price.

But I actually don’t think comics are as screwed as other types of digitized media, because comics have a unique advantage over film and music in that they’re fundamentally periodicals. I know a lot of people will get pissed at me for saying that because there’s been a big push in comics to get away from being periodicals in favor of amassing libraries, but if there’s one thing every industry can learn from MGM and Miramax it’s that the media library business model is a bust… digital media ubiquity demands periodicals. The internet loves nothing more than ongoing, serialized, branded content that keeps issuing forth new releases. So that could wind up making all this hugely favorable to the comics business… but either way it certainly won’t be business as usual.

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