SKTCHDxTINYONION: How To Keep Your Eyes On The Big Picture

The Year-Long Interview with David Harper continues, as we discuss how creators

Hello Friends!

We’re back with another entry in the SKTCHDxTINYONION interview series, where I’m letting David Harper from SKTCHD ask me anything and everything about what I do and why I do it. Our first conversation was free to read, but moving forward, these conversations are going to give free readers a little taste, but you’ll need to pay to subscribe to either this newsletter or SKTCHD to read the rest!

If you missed the first two conversations you should go read them right now.

• Part One: THE STATE OF THE UNION, 2023

• Part Two: IDEATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

This is a co-production, posted on both the Empire of the Tiny Onion or SKTCHD every month! We’d love it if you supporting one or the other, but if you’re here, let me just shout out that I think SKTCHD is the best comic book news site in the business right now, and I think David Harper is our best interviewer. If you want to follow this business, you should be reading SKTCHD and listening to each episode of Off Panel. I know I do!

Okay, let me throw some buttons at you, and then let’s get started.

PART THREE - SUSTAINING YOURSELF IN AN UNSTABLE MARKET

David: In our first chat, we talked about the state of the direct market and the comics industry, and how things have been a bit worrisome of late. Today, I want to talk about how that manifests itself for creators themselves. Is everything that's been going on, the uneasy feelings on the direct market, the problems at varying publishers, the constant changes in distribution, the slow motion car crash of Comixology, and everything else, is all that something most creators you talk to are keeping an eye on?

James: I think the key words in there are the creators I talk to. I talk to a lot of creators who sort of look at the industry in a similar way that I do. So, I don’t want to say it’s broadly true, but it’s definitely true in my immediate circle.

This goes back to the early days of the pandemic. I think the industry hit a bunch of shocks, and creators slowly realized that all these systems that were never particularly stable to begin with were actually even less stable than they were before. So, the idea of kind of putting all your eggs in one basket and putting your head down and doing the work was suddenly a more dangerous thing to do for your career. And the more that people became conscious of that, I think they started taking action to take better control over their careers.

What do you mean when you say take action?

James: It means a lot of things. I am someone who has never liked having all my eggs in one basket, even before the current moment. It has always made me a little bit uncomfortable. Nowadays we're seeing that if your only source of revenue is a mid-tier publisher, when you look around and see that mid-tier publishers are suddenly falling into situations where they stop paying creators for six months or that the entire global paper supply could vanish for a bit, you start realizing that you need to build a few other off ramps that allow you to make money and pay the bills. With that in mind, you see a lot more people building up their web presence in different ways.

That's another front that's not particularly stable these days. All the platforms where you can do that feel like they're going through such radical shifts. They are turning knobs on the algorithm so one day a system that works great no longer shares the art you post. That's how you get commission work, which is how a lot of artists make sure that theydon't have to worry when a company doesn't pay them for six months.

It's hard. It is a hard, hard time out there.