First Off

Lately, I've been at the angle of certain works. Take your average thriller, you can almost bet that you have the setup, a next-to-final confrontation, and then the "twist" final confrontation. This comes up far too many times to count, and you can guess the outcome from the tone of the work. Either the good guy wins, a la a James Patterson work (Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider, etc.), or it's a tragedy, as with Se7en.

Now, this leads to some really trite crap, and some revolutionary stuff, no matter how predictable the entire work is. Superhero books fall prey and succeed due to this over and over again. Indie books will, too, according to subject matter. The easy rationalization of this is the old '7 base conflicts' rule, that there's only seven distinct stories to tell, and so craftmanship comes with how the story is told. Fair 'nuff.

So yeah, comicbooks will be comicbooks will be comicbooks. Now, when you hit the 'industry,' you can start beating your head against the wall, because as of yet fans don't differentiate between the trite and the revolutionary. They're willing to stagnate, just like the popular music industry, with the trite crap, the same-old, same-old, the comfortable. Sometimes I really wonder what the average X-fan thinks of Morrison's run, or Milligan/Allred's X-Force/X-Statix. I like to think that, to most of them, picking up the new ish of X-Men is akin to picking up the new N'Sync record, a habit that's maintained with no mind towards quality, substance, or relevance.

In the comics industry it's just a much smaller scale than the record industry, but it's the same none-the-less. I'm not going to feel bad about picking up the new X-Men, just as I'm not going to feel bad about picking up the new Weezer or Korn album. But, I will go out of my way to pick up the Filth, or XXXLivenudegirls, or Finder, or TMNT, or any of a dozen others, just as I'll go out of my way to pick up the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the new Mindless Self Indulgence, or the new Tech N9ne, or the new (international) Noise Conspiracy, or any of a dozen others.

But then, I'm not your average comics fan, just as I'm not your average music fan, but you'll always be playing against the average. Sure, one day works like the Watchmen and Sandman, Strangers in Paradise and Ghost World, etc, might handily outsell the tights-club-of-the-week book, just as the Beatles (should) always outsell the flavor of the week pop phenom. And your average fan ain't gonna fucking understand that there's more to the world than Superman or Britney Spears. Well, fuck, if you've got any taste and you didn't get over that sad fact by the time you were out of high school, then you've got some problems that I can't help you with.

But, if you're willing to grab all of your friends and scream at them that there's this awesome new (or old) work that's full of cred and resonance and craft and CAPITAL-A-FUCKING-ART, then we've got something we can work with, and we always will, and we'll always be able to make sure that the cream of the crop gets recognized as such, no matter how popular the bubblegum flavor of the week is. People will remember and worship Transmetropolitan or Eightball just as they are wont to worship Mudhoney or Sonic Youth. And the world will be a better place for it.

Selah,
Ian
I hope to see you there

Woo, the Napster debate. I chime in thus:

I am an avid digifansub, mp3, and scanlations downloader. Digifansubs are anime videos encoded and subtitled by fan groups.
Illegal.
Scanlations are manga issues and volumes scanned in and translated by fan groups.
Illegal.
Now, most of these series that are being translated are not yet available in an English language version, although with the growing popularity of manga and anime, they are usually liscensed by various US vendors concurrent to their release in Japan. This does nothing to help the once tenuous legality issues that fansubs were subjected to. It makes the process downright illegitimate and illegal in most cases. Most of the mp3s I download are illegal as well.

Now, the rationalization.

As the supreme ruler of my own little universe, only my rationale exists, and so it applies to everything. I don't give a lick about the artist in question, because of my rationale. Now,

I'm of the firm belief that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you're getting one, you've done something to deserve it (see: karma). The reverse is true as well. The way I see it, if I grab your mp3, your movie, your comic, etc, for my own personal use and enjoyment, I'm not affecting your pocketbook at all. If I like it, I'll buy it anyway, and if I don't like it, well great, I didn't spend any of my hard-earned dough on your sack of crap. I almost blatantly refuse to buy any album released on a major label today, due to the way the RIAA and the major labels run their business, and the short shrift they give to the people who are responsible for the art. BUT, I will in an instant go see these bands perform live, buy their tshirt, buy them a drink or lunch if I'm in the position to do so. If I think an artist deserves my support, they will damn well see it.

I expect the same of my stuff. As soon as I have stuff to show (which I'm already working on, a bit. see the ::serial:: section of my website, and mp3s at the bottom of the page), I'll give it away for free as well as sell it, because if it's any good, it's gonna come back around. Someone will buy my lunch. If it's crap, then I'll flounder, and I'll spend a lot of time sucking. But I'm not going to blame my lack of success on the assholes that 'steal' my work and give me nothing in return. Hell, even assholes have friends, and if they play my 'stolen' music, or loan my 'stolen' art to those friends, then maybe they'll buy it, or maybe the next friend down the line will. This shit works. Fugazi and Ani diFranco have been running on the same kind of support for years, thriving on it. Admitedly, they're cheap and not free, but it still works. I'm so sick of whining about this and that 'but my work.'

Now, there are extreme cases. I'm gonna be righteously pissed if Disney lifts my work, near verbatim, and uses their power to sell millions of copies to people who have never heard of me. The laws are there to keep that kind of thing from happening, outright theft. But if (ohgodpleaseletitbeso) the Invsbl Skrtch Piklz or Fatboy Slim or Wu-Tang Clan wants to lift my stuff as a piece of sound collage, great. That's spinning my art to a new level, a different direction. That's not theft, that's creation. Creation is nothing if not the use of available materials to create something else. I don't serve my dinner guests sandwiches and milk with the addendum that the milk is by Borden, the bread by Wonder, the jelly by Welch's, the peanut butter Jiff. Filmmakers don't typically go out of their way to thank the architect of the building that frames a key scene, or the automakers that built and designed the cars in that awesome chase scene, or the manufacturer of the firearms used by the hero. Van Gogh didn't have liner notes that came with his paintings detailing the canvas maker, or the paint brand, or the brush maker. I could go on.

The way I see it, a lot of artists are just uncomfortable with their own level of craft, and feel that misuse of their material is a good enough reason to place blame as to why they aren't "making it." Put up or shut up, if you can show me that you're the second coming of Lennon, and that l33t J03 H4XX0r is ruining your burgeoning career by spreading mp3s of your opus on the almighty equalizer (read: Internet), then I'll change my tune faster than an altar boy evading a pederast priest. But if you're just Brand X (pick a fucking target), dropping another piece of brain-dead, derivitave, talentless, self-referential, indulgent, cliched crap, then back the fuck up and take stock of why you really aren't 'making it' as an artist, and find another hobby. I hear politics is a rewarding field.

Selah,
Ian