Pure art, in this economy?
On trying to reconcile creativity and commerce
I have a new story out in Roadmap magazine on a subject I never shut up about: Comics. More specifically, it’s a story about the barbaric working conditions that most modern cartoonists (which includes writers, artists, letters, colorists, and folks who do all of the above) endure to create their comics. It’s a long piece — around 3,000 words — but these paragraphs are probably the core of my argument:
The comics industry has never been kind to its workers. One of the earliest historians of the American comic book, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, wrote in his 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes about the furious pace of work in the exploitative 1940s “schlock houses,” the only places where unknown artists could hone their craft and dream of a big break:
The work was relentless. Some men worked in bull pens during the day; free-lanced at night—a hard job to quit work at five-thirty, go home and free-lance till four in the morning, get up at eight and go to a job. And the weekends were the worst. A friend would call for help: He had contracted to put together a sixty-four-page package over the weekend—a new book with new titles, new heroes—to be conceived, written, drawn, and delivered to the engraver between six o’clock Friday night and eight-thirty Monday morning. The presses were reserved for nine.
Despite the bullpen image conjured by Feiffer and popularized by Marvel’s Stan Lee, the comics industry in the Anglophone world has mostly depended on a scattered workforce of isolated freelancers, rather than workers on a physical assembly line, which means the term “industry” is perhaps unsuitable. Yet the word’s connotations are fitting: Comics often involve unrelenting labor in unforgiving conditions to create products for mass consumption, human cost be damned. Among contemporary creators, precarity, overwork, and burnout are rampant, while work-related illness and injury, like chronic pain and repetitive stress injuries, are not uncommon.
“I've watched so many—dozens—of my friends and my peers start out so excited about doing comics,” cartoonist Kendra Wells told me. Wells, who has published comics online and in publications like The Nib for over a decade, has watched those same friends and peers be “systematically broken down to a point of physical exhaustion, physical injury, physical disability, mental issues—the whole nine yards.”
You can read the entire piece here.
Despite its length, there was a lot more about the intersection of comics and labor that I wanted to include but ultimately didn’t. One of my original ideas was to explore the way talking about comics as art or literature can obscure or erase the idea of comics as a form of labor. That’s not just a problem in comics, either: There’s an insidious tendency in the artistic and literary world to avoid talking about the work required as a job that should be properly compensated.
A few years ago, I realized I’d internalized the notion that genuine creative acts occupied a space outside of commerce. (I’m not sure when this happened, but it was probably back in high school when I learned about the publishing world’s distinction between “commercial” and “literary” fiction.) Sure, books and art are sold, they have dollar values attached to them, but I believed the process of creation needed to be pure. It was less about how an artistic object existed in the world and more about how that object came to be, and in my mind the desire for financial gain couldn’t be part of that.
I no longer believe this — at least not as fervently as I once did. The idea that art can be unsullied by financial concerns is naive, and it can lead to genuinely harmful outcomes if people try to live by that principle. As former UK comics laureate Hannah Berry told me in an interview for the Roadmap story: “There's that whole broken idea of the suffering artist . . . It needs to fuck off and die. It's ridiculous. People are hurting themselves in the pursuit of that.”
At the same time, I don’t want to embrace the position that art or writing is inescapably commercial. There’s a reason why aspiring writers are told “don’t write for the money.” The cynical take is that such advice is useful for a publishing industry dominated by gargantuan multinational media companies with a strong desire to boost profits by cutting labor costs — i.e., by underpaying writers. But that take cuts another way: Doing things just “for the money,” as for-profit publishing companies do, is soulless. It erodes the possibility that you can create something you are proud of and incentivizes the production of generic garbage.
The best current example of that creative erosion is probably taking place on YouTube, which I unironically believe can be a medium for artistic work. (Longform video essays are some of the most original, interesting creative media being made on the internet nowadays.) Over the weekend, the YouTuber Hbomberguy (real name: Harry Brewis), known for his commentary on video games, conspiracy theories, and other subjects, dropped a four-hour investigation into the video platform’s rampant plagiarism problem. The part that’s drawn the most attention is Brewis’s systematic demolition of a successful gay YouTuber whose “work” relies almost entirely on stealing from less visible queer creators.
But I wanted to highlight a less prominent moment from early in the video where Brewis talks about a plagiarism scandal at the film and video game review channel, Cinemassacre. Over the years, the long-running channel has evolved from the passion project of one man, James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) into a much larger operation. As a consequence, a once-beloved video series in which Rolfe personally reviewed monster flicks every October became a sloppy, soulless mess where Rolfe read scripts written by another person — a person, it turns out, who simply stole and reworded material from other reviews posted online.
Brewis attributes this drastic decline in quality to the fact that Rolfe’s YouTube channel began shoveling out content for the purpose of securing sponsors, rather than creating things that Rolfe was actually interested in making:
These videos used to come from a place of interest and care to entertain or share something. Now they’re made by a production line for only one reason: [Here Brewis cuts to a Cinemassacre sponsorship clip.] Internet video as as a business is at odds with internet video as a medium — dare I say, an artform. (Put the gun down.) The increased industrialization of videos doesn’t necessarily make the videos better, just easier to make. But if you want to make as much money as possible in the short term, you cut those corners and you make as much product as possible.
You can watch that moment, and the full video, here.
It’s true that video essays as a medium — or comics or novels or paintings or whatever your chosen medium is — are odds with the rapacious demands of running a business and making money. It’s also true that medium and business cannot be disentangled and artists gotta eat. I don’t have any solutions here, but perhaps what’s necessary is a little utopian naivety: Pure art is a fantasy, yes, but holding onto a little piece of that fantasy might be better than abandoning it entirely. I’d like to think that believing your work has value beyond money — even if you’re forced by capitalism to do it for money — can help preserve that little spark of whatever made you want to create in the first place.
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