REINVENTING COMICS: So after that vast thing below, inspired in part by Understanding Comics, what have I got to say about the sequel, Reinventing Comics? Not so much! I basically noticed three things about the book: 1) McCloud has an engaging, visual sense of humor, which made both these books a real pleasure.

2) The thing about how comics might change on the Internet–how comics might continue to represent time through space when “space” is virtually unlimited–was very intriguing, though not so much directed at me since I have no interest in creating comics.

3) There’s a lot of anger toward the middleman here, in the sections on the comics business. I don’t really get that. McCloud seems to me to be much too harsh on, especially, publishers and retailers. I understand that it stinks to work really hard on something, make it well, and then have someone distort it, or get most of the profits from it, or refuse to see its value.

But middlemen exist for a lot of (IMO) fairly obvious reasons; they are basically paid to take risks, but if they take too many risks, too few risks, or the wrong risks, they go out of business or go bankrupt or can’t take other, better risks; even if you believe (as McCloud does) that the Internet will allow us to get the benefits of the middlemen without actual middlemen taking their cut and making their “what gets published/sold/promoted and what doesn’t” decisions, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense to blame publishers and retailers because that middleman-free day hasn’t yet arrived. It’s possible that there are comics-specific problems here that I just don’t know about. But the picture as presented in Reinventing Comics doesn’t justify the degree of blame the middlemen take.

I imagine my perspective here is somewhat distorted: As a freelancer, I am a) really, really grateful to every “middleman” (magazine or other publisher) who takes my work and presents it, nicely packaged and edited, to a broader audience; and b) in a decentish position to shop my work around and withhold it from publishers who don’t meet my standards. If nobody takes my really awesome piece on (subject X), I can blog it or hold out for a good offer, and in the meantime, I can knock out a couple book reviews. But even laying my own situation aside, I don’t think McCloud is right to present creator and audience locked in a pitched battle with the evil forces of the Middlemen.

But I should note that that’s just an occasional theme in the book that I happened to notice–the humor is much more noticeable. I have less to say about the humor solely because what can you say other than, it’s fun?