by Neil Gaiman
Personally I think any comic shop that sells multiple copies of the same comic to any child under, say, sixteen, because that child has somehow been given the impression that he or she has just been handed a license to print money, should, if nothing else, get the child to read a form explaining that comic values can go down as well as up, and require it to be signed by a parent or guardian.
I think any organization or store that pushes comics as investment items is at best shortsighted and foolish, and at worst, immoral and dumb.
You can sell lots of comics to the same person, especially if you tell them that they are investing money for high guaranteed returns.
But you’re selling bubbles and tulips, and one day the bubble will burst, and the tulips will rot in the warehouses.
Which is why I want to talk about good comics.
I have a vested interest here: I write, or try to write, good comics. I don’t write collectibles, nor do I write investment items. I write stories, the best I can: I write stories for people to read.
But before I wrote comics I was a journalist. Like writing comics, journalism is another profession that doesn’t involve getting up in the morning. And I used to write, whenever people would let me, about comics.
A little digression, here: back in 1986 I was commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine, in England, to do a feature article on comics. I interviewed a number of people for it—Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Brian Bolland, and many others. I worked incredibly hard on it—this was going to be the first major national article promoting comics as a medium in England.
I sent the article in to the gentleman who had commissioned it, and heard . . . nothing. Not a sausage.
So, after a couple of weeks, I rang him up. He sounded oddly subdued. “How’s the article?” I asked. He told me that he had a problem or two with it. I suggested that he tell me what the problem was. I could rewrite it, get it better.
“Well,” he said, “it lacks balance.”
“In what way?”
“These comics.” He paused, then spat it out. “You seem to think they’re a good thing.”
He’d been hoping for something that Fredric Wertham would have been proud of, and that wasn’t what he got.
Well, we agreed that I had no plans to rewrite it in order to give it the balance he felt it lacked, and he sent me a kill-fee for the article that was twice what I got for getting articles printed anywhere else. And I would rather have had the article printed. Because I do believe comics are a good thing.
If I didn’t, I’d still be a journalist, or I’d be writing unproduced screenplays for mind-boggling sums in Hollywood, or growing tulips.
We’re living in what the Chinese curse described as interesting times, and I like that.
The landscape is changing, erupting, exploding. New lines and titles and universes appear and vanish, some comics are selling in numbers undreamed-of in 1986, stores spring up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.
It’s hard to tell what things will be like in five years’ time. But I’ll tell you this: stores that sell and push good comics will still be around. Because people who read will still be with us, and they’ll still want comics.
Another flashback: Philadelphia, 1990, and I’m attending a small American convention. It was followed by a meeting of the CBRI, Comic Book Retailers International, and I was asked to stay on and be on a panel discussion.
The panel discussion consisted of marketing reps from all the major publishers of the time, someone from Diamond, someone from Capital, and, right down at the end, more than a little bemused, was me.
So first of all everyone talked about bar codes on comics, and I learned more than any human being would ever wish to know about bar-coding comics. And then they talked about other things, racking, and pricing, and bar codes again—and I began to wonder just what I was doing there.
Steve Gursky, who was presiding over the whole shebang, might have thought the same thing. “We have a creator here, remember,” he told the assembled retailers. “Does anybody want to ask the creator anything?”
There was no sea of hands, no forest of waving arms. Just some puzzled faces. Eventually someone took pity on me, and asked a question.
“As a creator,” he asked, “what’s the difference between creating high-ticket items and low-ticket items?”
I suppose he wanted to be reassured that I was putting that extra three or four dollars’ worth of verbs and adjectives into the high-ticket items. I don’t know.
“There’s no difference,” I said. “What I try to do is write good comics.” There was a silence and, made bold by this, I added, “And I wish that you people would do more to push good comics.”
Three hundred retailing eyes looked very puzzled indeed. Many of these are retailers who’ve since come up to me and told me proudly of the efforts they’ve made since then in that direction, and the success they’ve had.
Someone wisely asked me what I meant by the good stuff, and I told them, and someone else asked me what I meant by pushing it, and I told them as I will tell you.
What I mean by the good stuff is the comics you enjoy.
If you yourself have stopped reading comics, and sad to say, many retailers have—there’s too much out there, or one day they found they no longer enjoyed West Coast Avengers and gave up on the whole field, disillusioned—then browse around. Ask friends, ask your staff, ask your customers.
But most of you have comics you like. And you should be pushing them.
How?
It doesn’t involve much—for example, you can put a rack near the door of things you’re proud of selling.
You can order just a few more copies of things you think are really good and try and sell them.
You could offer a money-back guarantee to anyone buying something you have faith in. It’s not a hard thing to do.
Pick a comic of the week and push it.
Suggest to the customers who don’t read what they buy that maybe they should read these things instead of just bagging them.
Try to familiarize yourself with what’s out there, and let your tastes influence your customers.
If your customers are mostly adolescent boys who go away when they tire of childish things, well, make sure they know that there’s life after Spider-Man. Put a little effort in and you have a customer for life.
This is a good thing.
We are living in a remarkable time for comics: there is more exciting material available now than ever before. I mean it: there’s more excellent material currently in print and available, going all the way back to Little Nemo, than at any time.
This is also a good thing.
Do I want any of you to make less money? Of course not.
I want you all to have Jacuzzis in your Cadillacs, more stores than you can shake a stick at—or indeed, more sticks than you can shake a store at, if that’s your idea of fun.
While we’re at it, I’d like you to be happy, healthy, and never again bothered by telephone salespeople. May your luggage always be first on the airport carousel, and may your pets never spontaneously combust. All these things I wish you.
But remember what it is that you’re selling people.
When I go on tour I like to ask people how they started reading my stuff.
Mostly it’s word of mouth. Friends tell friends. Friends force friends to sit and read it. And, in a lot of cases, store assistants tell customers they’d like it. Sometimes it’s sexually transmitted.
In stores where the salespeople like Sandman, and push it hard, we equal or outsell whatever’s “hot.” And the people who read Sandman buy a copy and lend it around. We get readers, and we get new readers.
And the new readers go back to the comic store and buy all the trade paperbacks, to catch up on the story so far, and then they buy an extra copy to give to their friends . . .
I have no desire to enforce my tastes on any of you. If I ran a comic store I’d be pushing Bone and Cerebus and Love and R
ockets, Sandman Mystery Theatre and Animal Man, Madman and Cages, Yummy Fur and Peepshow, Gregory and Groo—to pick a very few examples from the stuff I happen to like.
I’m not telling you to push those titles, although I wouldn’t mind if you did.
I want you to push the stuff you think is good. Push good children’s comics to children, and good superhero comics to people who like them, and good grown-up comics to adults.
I’m really just asking you to think of comics as a reading material. Think of comics as an entertainment. Think of comics as stories.
You aren’t selling investment items. You’re selling dreams.
Never forget that.
Comics are for reading and enjoying, like tulips are for planting and blossoming and appreciating.
And the next time someone tells you about comics as the hot investment item of the nineties, do me a favor, and tell them about the tulips.
* * *
A speech I gave at Diamond Comic Distributors’ tenth annual retailers seminar in April 1993. Delivered to a room filled with comics retailers at the statistical height of the bubble. It was barely applauded by a room filled with otherwise happy people, and I heard later that a lot of the retailers thought it was in bad taste. Which was a pity, because a year later the world of comics entered a recession it took almost a decade to get out of, and most of those people lost their livelihoods and their stores over the next few years. It gave me no pleasure to be right.
* * *
A Speech to Professionals Contemplating Alternative Employment, Given at PROCON, April 1997
To begin with, a confession. I hate writing speeches. When I was asked to give this one, my immediate thought was that maybe I could give a speech I’d already written, and no one would notice. Unfortunately I’ve only ever written one speech before, which I gave in the spring of 1993, and which compared the “investors boom” then going on with the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze and warned an audience of assembled retailers that if this kept on there was going to be trouble. And while events unfortunately proved me right, I really didn’t think that I’d get away with repeating that speech today.
When I was originally asked to come here and deliver the keynote address, I declined. I said I’d feel embarrassed and out of place. Right now—for the last fifteen months, in fact, since I finished writing Sandman—with the exception of a couple of short stories, I’ve stopped writing comics.
I told the person who phoned me that I’d feel like the kind of girl who dropped out of high school under dubious circumstances and was now returning, in a pink Cadillac, with big blond hair and far too much makeup, to give a graduating speech on the value of sticking to it and hard work.
The person on the phone—it was Larry Marder—said, “Well, these are weird times. A lot of comics pros are looking at the world outside comics and wondering if that’s where they’ll be making their living in a year or so. You could at least tell them what’s waiting for them out there.”
And I thought, Well, he’s got a point.
And, after I put down the phone, I thought, Well, it’s also the prerogative of the elderly and the retired to share their knowledge, to drive from the backseat, and to offer unsolicited advice. “And,” as a poet put it, “being good for nothing else, be wise.” And there are certainly a number of things I learned in the decade I was actively working in comics.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about. Other media, and comics.
Many of you have done comics for longer than I have, and have experiences or knowledge that contradict mine. Many of you will have toiled in the vineyards beyond comics and may have had diametrically opposite experiences to mine.
So these thoughts are being offered as one set of opinions.
I began doing comics, continued doing comics, and finished doing comics for the wrong reason. It’s a foolish reason, and a strange one.
I didn’t do comics to have a career, nor to make money, nor to support my family. I certainly didn’t do comics for awards or for notoriety.
I began doing comics because it fulfilled some kind of childhood dream and because it was truly the most exciting and delightful thing I could imagine anyone doing. I continued doing comics because it was fun, and because I discovered I loved the medium, and because I felt like I was getting to do things that were completely new, that, good or bad, no one had done before. And I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.
When I began writing Sandman, it would take me a couple of weeks to write a script, leaving me with two weeks each month to do other things. As time went by I got slower and slower, until a script was taking me about six weeks a month to write. Which didn’t leave much time for other things.
So there were a number of projects I wanted to do that I simply didn’t get the chance to. Which meant that once Sandman was done I could throw myself into them headfirst.
My experiences with the world outside comics so far since finishing Sandman—I’ve written a bestselling novel and a children’s book, written and cocreated a not-wholly-satisfactory six-part BBC TV series, and had lunch with an enormous number of people from Hollywood. I wrote the British Radio 3 adaptation of Signal to Noise, currently nominated for a Sony Award as best radio drama. I’m currently working on a bunch of stuff, including a couple of movies.
Bear in mind that these are not the opinions of someone who feels that any medium is more legitimate than any other, or that film or print somehow sanctifies or confers respectability on something otherwise grubby or unreal.
One of the delights of comics is that the price of ink and paper remains pretty constant, no matter what you’re drawing. Film and television are expensive media. Cheap productions cost unimaginable amounts of money.
Comics, on the other hand, are cheap. If you have an idea for a comic, the odds are good that someone will publish it. And if they won’t and you believe in it strongly, why, then publish it yourself. You may not get rich, but you will get read.
I have a friend who had an idea for a comic, and self-published it for a while, and certainly didn’t lose any money, and had, at the end, a dozen or so issues of his comic, which he was fairly proud of. Then he decided to try the same tack with filmmaking, with a cast of enthusiastic amateurs, borrowed money, and a willingness to max out his credit cards. At the point where the production crumbled, he had eleven minutes of film in the can and was forced to sell his house to stave off utter ruin.
Comics are unlikely to do that to you.
Film is expensive. This is why it’s such a crazy medium.
I remember an afternoon in London several years ago. I was staying in a friend’s flat, overlooking a canal. I was writing two different things that afternoon. One was a scene in which the Endless made a man out of clay, building him up from twigs and mud, and breathing life into him, before sending him to a hidden room in a monstrous underground necropolis. That was for Sandman. The other scene had an encounter, underneath a bridge in the fog, on a mud bank, between three travelers and some monks, during the course of which one of the travelers was pushed into the mud.
A few days later I had Michael Zulli’s pencils of the comics sequence pinned up on the wall, and they were exactly what I’d imagined, and just what I’d hoped for and called for in the script.
A year later I found myself sitting in a freezing cellar, watching a dozen actors being frozen stiff, breathing thick smoke, while about fifty crew, including makeup people, lighting people, electricians and so on, stood around shivering watching the actors doing take after take of getting knocked down into the mud.
I didn’t have my bridge. It wasn’t really the scene I’d had in my head, and mostly I just felt guilty that real people were being put to so much trouble for something that had seemed like a good idea in a warm room a year before.
In comics you are unlikely to have to lose a character halfway through t
he comic because he broke his leg. You won’t lose locations the night before you’re meant to be shooting. You won’t hand in a twenty-four-page script, and then be told that the artist drew it as a thirty-seven-page script, so thirteen pages have randomly been removed.
Most important, in comics there’s one of you, or at most two or three people, with one vision. As a writer I think I’d been spoiled by the “because I say so” factor. The point I realized that wasn’t there in the TV show was the point I looked at the costume sketches and realized that they bore no relation to what was called for in the script.
I think one reason one becomes a writer may well be to have a certain amount of control over a vision, and unless you are working with a director whose vision parallels yours, then the odds are probably against you.
And bear in mind that the TV series is from a show that everyone was at least on the same page about. The Sandman film, which I am happily not involved with, has gone through eight script drafts, three writers, and a director so far. And I heard the other day that they’re about to hire a new writer with instructions to make it a romance.
After Neverwhere was done, I told my agent to pull out of another TV series I was creating for the UK, because I didn’t want to do it unless I had more control than you get as a writer: in fantasy, the tone of voice, the look and feel, the way something is shot and edited, is vital, and I wanted to be able to be in charge of that.
I’ve agreed to work on the Death movie with the carrot being dangled in front of me that I could direct it. And we’ll see if that happens, and if I’m a good director or not when the time comes.
So that’s my wisdom on movies.
Books are a bit more straightforward.
A few years ago, when I still hung out on bulletin boards, I was on CompuServe’s comics forum, and I read a message by a writer of comics announcing petulantly that he was going to go and write real prose books because he wanted “an audience.”
