Like a lot of comic readers with internet access, there's a few places on the web that I check up on right after I fire up the machine. One of those is the
¡Journalista! portion of The Comics Journal's website. Every monday through friday, Dirk Deppey churns out a daily grind of what's going on in all kinds of comics. I'm not sure how much introduction Mr. Deppey requires--he is, without a doubt, one of the primary reasons beyond luck that I ended up writing this column for comiXology in the first place, and I'd be surprised if you weren't already aware of him already, dear reader. That being said: Dirk Deppey is currently the online editor for the Comics Journal. He writes
¡Journalista! I'm a fan.
This Ship: What's your background with comics? What was the impetus behind making the change from a consumer to your current professional relationship with them?
Dirk Deppey: I've always been a fan of comics and illustration in some form or another, going back to the
Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, which I discovered in my local library as a small child. I guess you could say that my professional relationship with comics has been "serial accidental" -- after abandoning comic books in high school, I fell back into the medium after a comic-book shop opened up in my neighborhood, where I wound up working for a stretch. There is where I met an indy cartoonist who published during the black-and-white boom, for whom I briefly worked as an art assistant. But until this century, it was never a case of my having a plan to "get into the industry" or anything.
As for my current gig: I got the job at Fantagraphics by making fun of
The Comics Journal's website on its message board, basically. It was in the summer of 2000, and I had just quit a fairly lucrative dot-com gig a few months prior. One night, I noticed that TCJ.com had an ad banner for a CBLDF fundraising cruise that had actually taken place some six moths prior, so I started a thread entitled "Looking Forward to That Cruise" –
ha ha you lamers suck, crap like that – and the next day was surprised to discover that Gary Groth had posted to the thread, announcing that Fantagraphics was looking for someone with both print and Web experience who could, among other things, take over the
Journal website. (The person who'd previously maintained the site had departed the company months back, and there was no one else at Fantagraphics who knew how to update a webpage.)
At the time, I had just gone through a string of job interviews where I was being offered $50/60,000-a-year jobs by people who gave me no indication that they knew what they were doing – dot-com opportunists who had "venture capital," were getting into "business to business" and couldn't answer the simple question, "So how are you going to make your income once the venture capital runs out?" My friends at the time thought I was crazy, turning gigs like these down left and right, but I simply didn't trust them to still be in business six months later. Unfortunately, my severence package from the last gig was starting to run out, so it was looking like I'd have to swallow my pride and compromise if I wanted to continue swimming in those juicy corporate-idiot paychecks.
So I sent Groth my resume almost as a lark. On the one hand, Fantagraphics was offering less than half the money that I'd earned at my previous job. On the other hand, I've been reading the
Journal since the late 1980s, really respected Fantagraphics as a publisher, and figured I'd never again get the opportunity to throw away a promising career in the service of something that sounded like so much fun. It turned out to be an easy choice to make – Gary and I spent a week trading phone calls, and before I knew it, I was loading up a Ryder truck and leaving Arizona for Seattle.
Six months later, the dot-com bubble burst. Conclusion: I am a visionary.
TS: What made you decide to make the transition from the print version of the Journal to the Online Editor position?
Deppey: The stock answer is that our Advertising Manager, Matt Silvie, said that it'd be easier to sell ads on the website if I was doing
¡Journalista! again. There are really two reasons I jumped at the chance: First, I'd done just about everything that I wanted to do with the magazine, and second, I was really homesick for Arizona – nothing makes you appreciate a desert landscape like eight months of grey skies, it turns out. The one condition that I placed on going back to the website was that I do it from Tucson. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Gary said yes.
TS: How involved were you with the decision to create an online version of the Journal for subscribers?
Deppey: Well, it was part of the pitch that I made for revamping the website, basically. Say what you will about Gary's opinion on comics, but he's under no illusions when it comes to the future of print – as time goes on, digital readership is going to become progressively more important, and he agreed that laying the groundwork now for the
Journal was a good idea.
We've since begun offering online-only subscriptions. It hasn't yet resulted in a big wave of digital subscribers – such readers are still a small fraction of our print readership – but the trickle of new subscribers continues to flow in, and I expect that the accumulation of such readers will justify the effort over time.
TS: Besides Journalista and handling the online version of The Comics Journal, what responsibilities does your Online Editor position include?
Deppey: That's pretty much it at the moment. Every once in a while we'll post an MP3 or archival interview to the homepage, but honestly, the two primary tasks eat up so much time that I can't imagine being able to do much else – the first time I did the blog (before I gave it up to edit the print magazine), I was pouring so much effort into it that burnout seemed like a real possibility. I'm trying to guard enough of my free time that it's not an issue, this time around.
TS: What's your ultimate dream goal for Journalista and your online work for TCJ? How long are you willing to keep plugging away?
Deppey: As long as I possibly can. This is such a cool gig – I'm working from home and writing for thousands of readers that I'd never have been able to attract under any other circumstances. I'm not sure that I have any "ultimate dream goals" above and beyond what I'm currently doing.
TS: How do you determine what goes up in your Journalista pieces? It's obviously not an "all-in" approach, and the no-sales thing is clear too, but there's definitely some method of selection going on beyond "this happened."
Deppey: Well, it's certainly not an "all-in" approach, no.
¡Journalista! is a content aggregator blog, my attempt to sift through the sea of information out there so that other people don't have to – if you're reading the blog, presumably it's because you don't have time to read a lot of comics-news sources, and trust me (among the other bloggers that you read) to do the job for you.
I don't really have many hard, fast rules about what I select for the blog. Mostly, it comes down to one of two things: Does this interest me, or could I imagine it interesting me if I had an interest in that sort of thing? I've seen other bloggers refer to this sort of thing as being like making a mix tape, but having come straight off of the print version of the magazine, it feels to me more like assembling the table of contents to a new edition of the
Journal every weekday... except, of course, that I don't have to do any proofreading or payroll sheets, which makes the gig infinitely better than editing a print magazine.
TS: Do you have any interest in returning to longer reportage/op-ed style pieces on a more frequent basis, or are you content to just use the "above the fold" approach to deal with those yearnings?
Deppey: Yes and no. On the one hand, I love writing and can't seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you've noticed.) On the other hand, there's always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I'd already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it's a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you're talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.
There's also the fact that I only have so many things to say in a given period. The comic-book industry tends to be very conservative, insofar as it cruises along on the same set of business practices until circumstances force it from its collective lethargy. While it stands still, there's only so many ways you can describe it, and I strongly suspect that repeating yourself too often can bore a readership to tears.
TS: What comics are you keeping up with nowadays?
Deppey: The only series that I'm following these days tend to be manga titles –
Nana,
Mushishi,
Honey and Clover, that sort of thing. I've dropped comics pamphlets altogether, as they're a pain to store and simply not enough value for your money these days. I also follow a variety of webcomics, which I've discovered can compensate admirably for the regular print series that I used to follow.
Beyond that, my comics buying tends to be geared toward stand-alone graphic novels, which don't really qualify as something you "keep up" with.
TS: Are you still able to find surprises on your own, or does all your comics reading get skewed by the time you spend online?
Deppey: Well, my print reading in general tends to get skewed by the time I spend online, though I've been making an effort this year to reserve more time for both comics and prose books. Finding new things to read isn't a problem for me, if for no other reason than that the blog keeps me in touch with critics who I trust to point me toward new and interesting works. Actually sitting down and reading them, on the other hand, can be a bit of a struggle.
TS: Regarding DC Comics' recent foray into blogging (The Source, Graphic Content, The Bleed), where they are currently publishing their own version of a long-form press release, what kind of impact do you think that might have on websites like Newsarama and CBR that usually rely heavily on those sorts of articles?
Deppey: I don't think it'll have much effect, if any at all. The thing is, unless you're a hardcore fanatic who only buys DC comics and nothing else, you'd be better served by visiting sites that have a greater range of information, especially if those sites are going to feature the pertinent material from DC's blog anyway.
As Jeff Jarvis notes, the Internet exists in a link-based economy; the wider range of links a website serves up, and the more tailored they are to your individual tastes, the more likely you are to visit that site. There are undoubtedly a number of people who visit company blogs, but the amount of hits a given entry will receive is nonetheless almost certainly determined by the number of other blogs and content aggregators that link to it, saying "This is interesting; check it out."
TS: Do you keep up with any of the "news" portions of sites like Newsarama, CBR, Ain't It Cool, etc., or do you just stick to the column/interview stuff they publish?
Deppey: These days I use an RSS reader to keep track of them all, so I seldom "visit"
anyone's site save for those precious few that don't maintain such feeds – and every time I decide that I don't have as much time to complete a given day's blog entry, it's almost always the non-RSS sites that I skip in order to make up the time.
TS: Here's a big one, and you can go any direction you'd like: what are some of the positive and negative impacts that the internet has on comics from a business standpoint? In my brief experience, it seems to usually come down to two incorrect extremes--talking about blog reviews and republished press releases as if they have some notable effect on the industry seems a bit overblown, whereas the alternative, that it's all a big echo chamber that has no real effect at all, seems inaccurate as well.
Deppey: I think that blog reviews can drive
some sales for books, just not as many as some people want to believe. You can also create a cascading effect by building buzz on a bunch of different blogs, although the utility of this is likewise debatable. The real effect that blogs have is indirect, insofar as there are a handful of blogs that are followed by tastemakers whose influence goes beyond the Internet – newspaper journalists, editors for general-interest websites, industry professionals and the like. I've lost track of the number of times that I've stumbled across obscure websites while searching for something else entirely, and linking to them on
¡Journalista! only to watch the link fly across the blogosphere over the course of several days, eventually landing on sites like
Digg,
Boing Boing and
MetaFilter.
Commercially speaking, the big difference is in whether you're blogging about something online or something that exists in real space. Blogs are an excellent way to advertise webcomics, for example – just ask Kate Beaton – but once you're talking about something that requires you to get up from the computer and go somewhere to purchase something tangible, the chances of motivating someone into action drop considerably. It's just so much easier to click a link, especially if a financial transaction isn't involved.
But the Internet has an effect that goes far beyond sales; it's an enabler for aspects of culture that might otherwise have gone marginalized when the price of print-production was still a key factor in the dissemination of information. In the Direct Market, there's something of a Sharks/Jets culture between two rival factions: literary and superhero comics. (You can expand each group a bit, depending upon your definitions, but let's stick with these for now.) There's a
huge gulf between these two groups, which some have attempted to label as the "new mainstream" but might more profitably be referred to as "everything else."
Now, if you want to grow comics as a medium, this is a serious problem. Take a look at bookstores: YA series like
Harry Potter and
Twilight might be serious blockbusters – in the case of the former, a new release was sometimes the difference between an up or down sales quarter – but bookstores don't devote their entire sales strategy towards teenage fantasy novels. A good chunk of sales come from new books and perennial sellers in a wide range of genres and interest topics, which is why a wide range of consumers still shop in such places.
The Direct Market doesn't have this advantage. Thanks to the various sales and distribution fiascos of the 1990s, comics shops have pretty much been reduced to hardcore superhero fans and a smaller collection of art-comics readers for their bread-and-butter, which effectively cuts off the oxygen for publishers of most other kinds of books. And "most other kinds of books" is what most other people in North America tend to read.
(This isn't just a problem for "everything else," mind you – without casual shoppers wandering in for the latest romance/sci-fi/crime/whatever comic, your chances of picking up new readers for superhero and lit-comics in comics shops drops proportionally as well. The battle between Sharks and Jets therefore winds up hurting both parties without their ever being able to acknowledge it, since doing so involves admitting that the argument between them is an incomplete representation of market reality, and
neither side has a lock on the moral high ground.)
Mainstream publishers in the booksellers trade have begun picking up some of this slack, but the bookstore market presents a further problem for pre-existing creators and publishers – you can't really break into that market without a good distributor and excellent marketing, and without a sales base in the Direct Market, you don't have the clout to attract the former or the income to achieve the latter. It's a no-win situation.
This is where the Internet comes in. If you can't attract enough sales in comics shops to justify a series of comics pamphlets, then the barriers to online serialization drop away, allowing a given creator another outlet for getting one's work out there and attracting eyeballs. It's by no means a sure thing, of course – aside from Phil Foglio, Carla Speed McNeil, Spike Trotman and the Act-I-Vate crew, there aren't too many examples to which one can really point, at least if you're talking about extended stories rather than newspaper-style comic strips – but the very fact that there
are a few out there who've managed to buck the system using the Internet is by and of itself a potential game-changer, at least insofar as it points the way to another method of presentation and distribution. I mean, that's an option that wasn't there a decade ago, and it has almost unlimited potential for growth given the right work and marketing approach. You certainly can't say that about the Direct Market.
See what I mean about my tendency toward long essays? It's congenital – seriously, I wish there was medication for this sort of thing.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
