So the new Internet Nerd War is apparently between the Livejournal community that used to be scans_daily and Peter David.
Short version of events: a scans_daily poster posted half of the pages to the most recent issue of X-Factor, which PAD had told the entire internet not to spoil because he wanted the ending to be a surprise. PAD showed up on the community and apparently got someone telling him he sucked ass in response.1 PAD told Marvel, and Marvel complained to Livejournal, and Livejournal (or their Abuse team, one or the other) suspended the community, possibly because of Photobucket complaining or something instead. (Personally, the idea that Photobucket would all of a sudden complain about s_d using it after, what, five years, seems unlikely to me, and it seems far more logical that Marvel said something to somebody. But if PAD says otherwise, I don’t see the point in calling him a liar.)
People have been asking me for my take on it, seeing as how this site exists primarily because I used to be on Livejournal before I was kicked off for copyright violations along the same lines (although with far less legal certainty about the merit of any said copyright violation charge).
Anyway. Basically at this point you have a goddamned avalanche of bad argument erupting out all over the place, both from scans_daily members and from PAD. The combined force of this stupid is so intense I almost expect Joss Whedon fans to spontaneously show up and tell everybody off for complaining about Dollhouse being a bag of crap and not waiting until episode six when Joss “really gets things going with an episode he wrote himself.” So here is my message to all involved.
Dear scans_daily members: Jesus Christ just shut the fuck up and stop throwing tantrums. This was going to happen sooner or later.
Your entire community – and remember, this comes from a former (haven’t really been to the community since I left LJ) and enthusiastic member – was predicated on copyright violation, and only existed thanks to the whim and good will of every comics company whose material you illegally reproduced. Yes, it may often have been in said companies’ best interests to let you illegally reproduce that work, but that in and of itself is not an argument for why you should get to keep violating copyright if they choose not to let you do that.
Also, do not start talking to me about fair use like you actually know what fair use is, because it’s pretty obvious almost none of you know jack shit about fair use.
If you did know anything about it, you’d know that amount of the work used is a vital component of determining fair use, and that traditionally the amount of work used before a use becomes unfair is fairly low. In Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, it was about 300 words of a 30,000-word Gerald Ford biography, which was found to be unfair because those 300 words – or one percent of the total work – contained too much of the vital core of the work.2
Now, consider that the scans_daily “posting limit” rule was half of any given issue of a comic.3 Gosh, do you think that half of the whole work is going to contain too much of the vital core of the work? Because I think that’s some pretty good odds right there. In practice, anything more than ten percent will generally set off alarms. Ten percent of a comic is two pages. I mention this for when the next scans_daily at whatever shitty LJ ripoff site gets nuked for exactly the same reason.4
Short version of above: s_d existed only with the implicit permission of the works’ owners, and you should have been able to figure that out going in. If you were deceived (intentionally or no) by people who told you that the s_d posting policies constituted fair use, that’s understandable – but they, and you, were wrong.
Also: your collective response to PAD’s complaints? Entirely grown up and not making you look like a bunch of spoiled children at all. No, really. The collective maturity being displayed on the Internet this weekend is impressing me no end. I especially like the re-occuring “Pompous Arrogant Dickweed” joke, because HEY THOSE ARE PETER DAVID’S INITIALS! The cleverness on the internet, it just never stops. Seriously, guys, I know something you liked and enjoyed was just taken away from you, but every time you open your mouths and act like you’re three, you just validate the senses of superiority of the people trying to shut you down.5
Dear PAD: A quote.
“My year-long goal is to try and triple sales on this book; putting up free scans of the entire issue so that thousands of fans can read it without having to pay a dime kneecaps that goal. It’s “wow, this issue is great, you should go out and buy it” vs. “wow, this issue is great, you should hit this link and read it for free.”
Ahem. From Paul O’Brien’s Marvel sales recaps at The Beat:
02/06 X-Factor #3 – 48,307 ( -8.3%)
03/06 X-Factor #4 – 48,183 ( -0.3%)
03/06 X-Factor #5 – 46,490 ( -3.5%)
04/06 X-Factor #6 – 45,220 ( -2.7%)
05/06 X-Factor #7 – 44,315 ( -2.0%)
06/06 X-Factor #8 – 76,150 (+71.8%) [“Civil War” crossover begins]
07/06 X-Factor #9 – 68,799 ( -9.7%) [“Civil War” crossover final issue]
08/06 X-Factor #10 – 44,603 (-35.2%)
09/06 X-Factor #11 – 43,431 ( -2.6%)
10/06 X-Factor #12 – 42,909 ( -1.2%)
11/06 X-Factor #13 – 42,844 ( -0.2%)
12/06 X-Factor #14 – 40,208 ( -6.2%)
01/07 X-Factor #15 – 38,693 ( -3.8%)
02/07 X-Factor #16 – 38,240 ( -1.2%)
03/07 X-Factor #17 – 38,067 ( -0.4%)
04/07 X-Factor #18 – 37,851 ( -0.6%)
05/07 X-Factor #19 – 37,898 ( +0.1%)
06/07 X-Factor #20 – 37,105 ( -2.1%)
07/07 X-Factor #21 – 50,227 (+35.4%) [“Endangered Species” backups begin]
08/07 X-Factor #22 – 52,627 ( +4.8%)
09/07 X-Factor #23 – 53,311 ( +1.3%)
10/07 X-Factor #24 – 52,085 ( -2.3%) [“Endangered Species” backups end]
11/07 X-Factor #25 – 79,066 (+51.8%) [“Messiah Complex” crossover begins]
12/07 X-Factor #26 – 84,219 ( +6.5%)
01/08 X-Factor #27 – 81,350 ( -3.4%) [“Messiah Complex” crossover ends]
02/08 X-Factor #28 – 61,173 (-24.8%)
03/08 X-Factor #29 – 54,832 (-10.4%)
04/08 X-Factor #30 – 51,447 ( -6.2%)
05/08 X-Factor #31 – 48,231 ( -6.3%)
06/08 X-Factor #32 – 45,104 ( -6.5%)
07/08 X-Factor #33 – 53,088 (+17.7%) [“Secret Invasion” crossover begins]
08/08 X-Factor #34 – 50,416 ( -5.0%) [“Secret Invasion” crossover ends]
09/08 X-Factor #35 – 44,481 (-11.8%)
10/08 X-Factor #36 – 38,552 (-13.3%)
11/08 X-Factor #37 – 35,754 ( -7.3%)
12/08 X-Factor #38 – 34,425 ( -3.7%)
Not to get all next-generation-of-media/Cory-Doctorow-at-a-copyright-lecture on you,6 but…
…unless the title of that comic becomes X-Factor Starring Wolverine And Spider-Man And Batman, the evidence is pretty obvious you’re not going to triple sales on it without a major crossover, and those sales will quickly vanish after the crossover ends anyway. (And even with the major crossovers, you’ve never done better than to roughly double sales in any case.)
The existing comics market has spoken, and by and large they’ve said “X-Factor? Yes, yes, decent stuff, but where is my comic with Wolverine in it? Ah, yes. Sweet, sweet Logan.” That means if you want to achieve this (ludicrous but admirable) goal of tripling your readership, you’re going to have to actually try and get readers who are new to comics to give your book a try. Now, these “new comics readers” might quite enjoy your comic, but let us be honest: X-Factor is a comic staffed with the B- and C-level castoffs from other Marvel mutant books and so you cannot just say “it is a comic about Madrox and Strong Guy and Siryn,” because Potential New Comics Reader will go “whuh?”
Furthermore, you can’t just point to five-page previews on Newsarama or on Marvel’s website, because nobody who doesn’t already read comics goes there and they’re lousy for actually explaining the ongoing premise of the comic to new readers. Again, you want new comics readers? The existing market has failed you? That means you need alternative sources of marketing, variant methods to hike potential reader interest in your – let’s be honest – niche product. scans_daily was honestly an excellent method of generating new potential reader interest, because there are approximately six billion young nerds – mostly female nerds7 – on Livejournal who would totally be into your comics if only they knew that your comics existed, and some of them are even willing to spend money on them!8
And it’s worth remembering that s_d provided an arena for those young nerds to learn about comics of which they were unaware without first requiring a commitment to becoming part of the “comics fan community.” This is really kind of a big deal, because most of comics fandom seems to think they are not as offputting as, say, LARPers or Trekkers or furries,9 and this is often only marginally true at best. s_d, despite its occasional crankiness, was far more inviting to a noob comic reader interested in comics education and discussion than just about any other avenue available to them.
This is something comics desperately fucking needs in order to survive in any way akin to what we have now, because we’ve seen the results of relying on the direct market and comic book shops to advance the popularity of comics and it just doesn’t work. The fact that s_d was both run independently of any marketing effort by the big comics companies and was hugely popular and successful was not an accident: they have a skillset that DC and Marvel and Dark Horse and Image’s marketing departments do not have and apparently either cannot learn or cannot be bothered to learn.
Now, I understand that you work in comics and are therefore seemingly obligated to mostly not understand or ignore the same market issues that the music and movie industries have been dealing with for over a decade now and also to endorse the repetition of their mistakes,10 and that’s fine, but there’s one fine distinction between those two industries and comics.11 In your comment above, you argue that comics showing up for free on the internet essentially distinguishes the comics audience into “people willing to pay for comics” and “people who would be willing to pay for comics but are happy to read them for free instead.”
This is mostly a fallacy. The comics audience really divides into a bunch of segments: “people who are willing to pay for overpriced monthly comics,” and “people who are willing to buy trades but don’t want to wait for the trade to come out to read the story,”12 and “people who might be willing to buy the comics in some form but don’t want to commit to monetarily jumping into the massive history of a licensed property without reading a reasonable amount of it for free first,” and of course there are “people who just like stealing shit.” Plus a few other categories, but those are the big important ones.
Conflating “people not willing to buy the comics upfront without reading them first in some form” with automatically lost sales is an argument that’s so out of date by now that I am pretty sure it can be found sitting next to cases of New Coke. Arguing that an unauthorized reprint of a work automatically decreases sales potential is contrary to just about all the anecdotal and statistical evidence we have available at this point. And complaining that the reason X-Factor is selling notso-hotso is because people are giving away the thrilling plot twists online is just nuckin’ futs.
Oh, Spoiler Puppy! Now you have ruined that comic book for everybody forever!13
Another quote:
There are plenty of reasons to excuse something that is, at its core, against the law. You can rationalize it all you want. You can explain good things that could come from it… [t]here’s always benefits to someone from theft. But theft remains theft, whether people try to enumerate the benefits or not. As a general rule of thumb, the way you tell the difference between right and wrong is that when it’s wrong, you have to make excuses for it.
This is a bunch of moralizing (remember that any penalties suffered for being found to infringe copyright will be civil ones, not criminal, a point that annoys me every time someone says the s_d folks were “breaking the law”) that overlooks the simple point that there is a proud history of creative types allowing fans to bootleg. The Grateful Dead did it all the time, and they were one of the most financially successful bands ever. Frank Zappa only got involved in “official” bootleg releases because he felt the bootleggers were profiting too greatly from fans’ desire to get copies of his boots. These artists and others like them understood that bootlegs only increased their fans’ loyalty and desire for their official product.
Now, of course you can say “well, the Dead and Zappa and all those others gave permission and that wasn’t the case here.” And that is totally reasonable, as any company whose job is essentially managing (and occasionally creating) valued intellectual properties would of course have no idea about the existence of a web community, reproducing portions of their intellectual property, with membership in the high four to low five figures and readership potentially even higher, that also had multiple working professionals counted as members of the community. As a matter of fact I am dead positive that Marvel and DC had no idea about the existence of scans_daily, a community widely known and occasionally mocked throughout the comics web for its particular peccadilloes, and that their noninterference with that community would of course be ignorance and not implied permission to exist at all.
Or, more succinctly, “yeesh.” Here is a far more likely scenario: Marvel and DC knew about s_d but preferred to turn a blind eye to it.
I don’t see the point in excusing the behaviour at s_d. It was technically illegal and they got pulled down, because Marvel (or DC) had the right at any point to do that. And that is perfectly proper in the legal sense. But that doesn’t make it well-advised to do so, because it isn’t. It’s just stupid.
—
Anyway, I don’t want to repeat previous arguments that I’ve made before. Suffice it to say that this whole kerfuffle boils down to the “professional does something within his rights but tactically stupid, fans react with unfortunately predictable bile, professional says something ill-advised, fans say more stupid things” vortex we’ve all seen too many times to count at this point.
Oh, and one more thing: without scans_daily, I never would have discovered Rex The Wonder Dog. I also never would have bought The Immortal Iron Fist, Fables, The Walking Dead, Runaways, Agents of Atlas, Gotham Central, Phonogram, Dr. Strange: The Oath, .303, Bizarro Comics, Usagi Yojimbo, Banana Sunday, Ed Brubaker’s Captain America, Rex Libris or Garth Ennis’ Punisher MAX. So there you go.
Top comment: That’s where all the female nerds are at? Dammit. — Pat
- According to multiple sources, it was Livejournal user “kali921,” who has A History Of Similar Behaviour. [↩]
- Granted, this particularly small excerpt was considered to be more revealing due to it having been reproduced before the actual publication of the work, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the United States and most countries with an existing fair use/fair dealing doctrine, the idea that excerpts have to be relatively brief to qualify as fair use/dealing is well established. [↩]
- At the new InsaneJournal version of s_d, it is apparently now one-third, which is still too goddamn high. Drop it to twenty percent and you’ll have a fighting shot at fair use, folks. [↩]
- Granted, you can argue instead that “the work” consists of, say, the entire history of Thor comics when you put up some scans of Thor beating up Loki or whatever. I don’t think this argument is entirely without merit, but I also think it’s reliant on there being less narrative cohesion in your selected sample; if the images in question present a cohesive narrative then I think, given the serialized nature of comics, that they would certainly contain a vital core of a selected subsection of the work. [↩]
- I know, I know – there are people in comics who enjoy feeling superior to other people? I can’t believe it either! [↩]
- This is blatant trolling to impress Cory Doctorow. Hi, Cory! [↩]
- Or “fnerds.” [↩]
- A side note: I know at least two local comics stores who both place steady re-orders for Warren Ellis’ Freakangels trade. You know, a comic which you can read entirely for free on the internet. Turns out people like paper books in their hand. [↩]
- Or anything, really, with a tradition of wearing costumes in public when it isn’t Halloween. [↩]
- See also the Big Two’s repeated argument that “the technology isn’t here yet” for full-scale digital delivery. You know, somebody should really tell all those comics downloaders that the technology isn’t here yet. Maybe that will make them stop downloading comics and reading them on their computers. [↩]
- Well, other than that those industries are relatively healthy compared to comics. [↩]
- I’m in this segment. I also have a full run of X-Factor trades, incidentally. Number of single issues of X-Factor I have purchased: zero. [↩]
- Now they will never get to experience the surprise of one of the main characters in the series predictably returning after a moderately brief absence! [↩]
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106 users responded in this post
Wow. You sure can write.
And you got me wondering. This is my original work, but it was published by Upper Deck:
http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/i-got-my-greatest-hits-2/
Can I sue MYSELF for blogging it?
Great post.
It always surprised me the rudeness of some s_d users.
Nice post.
The only thing I have to say in defense of PAD is that, if I hadn’t been following MGK since the LJ days, I would not have guessed LJ would shut down s_d because of a copyright holder complaining.
I suppose it’s not surprising that, if Marvel (or DC), sent a cease-and-desist order (or whatever, I’m not a legal scholar), the LJ Abuse Team might have looked and said, “Fuck me like a goat, there are a lot of Marvel (or DC) images on there. We can go home tonight and get hammered if we just shut it down.”
This is only tangentially related to the s_d issue, but I have to say that I’m utterly baffled by PAD’s thinking here. He wants to triple the sales of his title, and his plan for doing this is to try and get everyone who’s reading the book right now to stop talking about it in any meaningful fashion. How on earth does he expect to draw in new readers when he doesn’t want anyone telling them what’s going on in the book? “Man, you’ve got to read X-Factor #40.” “Why, what happens?” “Oh, I can’t tell you that. You’ll just need to take my word and drop $3 for it.” That is not successful marketing. Bringing back a well-liked character and not letting anyone promote that fact? Is not good marketing. It doesn’t matter how good the book he’s writing is, if he’s metaphorically burrying it in his backyard after every issue, there’s no chance in hell he’ll attract ANY new readers, let alone three times as many.
In reference to footnote #9, I would claim that high fashion does the same thing.
MGK,
That is entirely full of awesome and very, very true. I have spent literally hundreds of pounds over the years thanks to s_d, and not be be rude, but it reminds me of a quote from The Big Lebowski:
“You’re not wrong PAD. You’re just an asshole.”
Granted, that might be taking it a bit far but you see my point.
Wow, it’s spoiled that Marvel brought a character back from the dead, but radically changed (i.e. aged so she’s not so creepy). I mean, it’s not like they do that on a weekly basis or anything.
(IS Jean Grey dead right now?)
It does fix the tags problem, though…
I just wanted to mention that apparently X-Factor #39 sold out. I do not believe sales numbers have been posted yet, so I do not know how big of an increase we are talking about here.
The only thing I have to say right now is that the footnoting function here is REALLY COOL…
I’m not advocating a boycott or anything like that, and I wasn’t precisely a fan of PAD’s before this incident, but I find it hard to believe that I’m ever going to be able to see his name on the cover of a comic without thinking “hey, that’s the asshole that shut down scans_daily. Maybe I’ll buy something else.”
Also, the idea that hearing about spoilers reduces people’s willingness to buy comics is startlingly naive. You know the way movie trailers give away the plots? That’s not because the people who run movie studios are too stupid to know any better; it’s because market research has proven that trailers that give away the plot are more effective.
Nine times out of ten, storytelling is about the “how”, not the “what”. “Something shocking happens in issue #24, and nobody’s allowed talk about it!” is less effective a ploy than “Got No Legs Boy comes back to life in issue #24!” The former is too vague to be interesting; the latter immediately makes readers think “huh? How are they going to pull that off?”
The only correction I’d make to the article is that even if Marvel and DC didn’t know about the site per se, certainly some of the writers who wrote for them did know about the site. Gail Simone, Warren Ellis, and Kurt Busiek have mentioned keeping an eye on it in particular, with the first two being known to post there (Warren Ellis even posted his favorite panel of all time there.) I wouldn’t be shocked if there were other people who read the site but know enough to keep quiet and avoid this clusterfuck.
Also, from what I’ve heard about the Photobucket thing, it seems likely that a third party who is neither Peter David nor Marvel reported the copyright issues in that post to both Photobucket and Livejournal.
And, for what little it might be worth – I read your stuff on LJ via an RSS feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/mighty_god_king/
Technology makes a pretzel out of reality.
Regardless of the legalities or civil law issues which are too complicated and go over my head, I’m going to miss the place. The community and how fun it could get in there.
And the not so work safe stuff too, of course.
What really sucks (in my case, and in the promotional sense for an artist) is that it seems that I was very close to posting stuff by a Mexican artist that was -about- to break into the US industry, and the guy LOVES it when people post stuff from his books. Had I known this earlier, I would’ve tried my best to scan and post his stuff. His art and writing style isn’t… perfect, but it’s fun to read and watch. (‘Course all the references will go over most people’s heads – including me, and it’s -OH SO 90’s IT HURTS-, but it’s still cool!)
PAD got caught in the crossfire. He’s just the guy most people will point to as being the alleged killer. I guess the community was due to be killed anyway, PAD just said something at the worst possible, coincidentally timed moment.
Some of us -believe- that the community was killed on a weekend on purpose, just like that other one was killed last year, so we couldn’t even say anything to LJ abuse (weekend and all). I dunno, it just seems too fishy.
Anyway.
Were we doing something civilly uh, illegal? Yep. Were we hurting companies? Maybe a bit, maybe more than what we know. But for those of us who no longer posted stuff from newer comics and instead had decided to stick to out of print and / or rare stuff… well, it sucks a lot more.
(On another note, the amount of BILE being thrown at us by certain bloggers and LJ users is simply mindboggling. Some are even happy that we got deleted simply because -we got deleted-. I’m pretty sure that isn’t a healthy attitude…)
I will point out the clearest and most important thing to say in PAD’s defense: He’s said that all he expected would happen was that someone would pull the scans of that issue of X-Factor. LiveJournal pulled down the site all on its lonesome, in a response that could probably be described as “slight overreaction”. But really, they were bound to do it sooner or later because they seem to be kind of skittish about these things.
This is an entirely separate issue from my feelings on Peter David’s hatred of spoilers, which I think can best be described as “silly”. Maliciously spoiling a story for someone else? Mean. Deciding you want to find out the ending before you emotionally invest in a work? Unusual, but hey, whatever makes you happy. Demanding that everyone engage with your story on your terms? Silly. If your writing is any good, it will be good beyond the simple surprise factor of your plot twists.
And Layla Miller comes back, huh? I’m only up to Book Four, I didn’t even know she was gone.
I second that- you’re a helluva writer. (I think my favorite sentence is “…the amount of work used before a use becomes unfair is fairly low.” Try saying that three times fast.)
LiveJournal pulled down the site all on its lonesome, in a response that could probably be described as “slight overreaction”.
Or “absolutely predictable if you know anything about LJ’s usual mode of operation”. LJ effectively operates a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where TOS violations are concerned (it could hardly be otherwise given the volume of postings), but if somebody does tell, they don’t tend to give the supposedly offending parties a second chance.
Oh man, I’m going to link this everywhere. You sum it up pretty darn well.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with you regarding scans_daily’s usefulness as a marketing tool. I’ve seen a few other people make that claim this weekend, and each time it’s presented more as an article of faith than a conclusion backed up by data.
The sales numbers for X-Factor are (as I’m sure everyone here already knows) fairly representative of the industry as a whole; issue sales spike due to crossover events or new creative teams, then slowly decline. In five years, scans_daily hasn’t significantly altered that trend, and I’ve yet to see anyone come up with numbers showing that scans_daily had a measurable effect on any comic’s sales.
While I certainly agree that Marvel and DC need to come up with better approaches for Internet marketing and digital delivery, it does not logically follow that scans_daily is that better approach.
I was finding it easier to sympathize with P. David before I read his completely assinine post about race and Obama. Is he sixteen years old?
As the person who posted the scans and was therefore caught in the middle of it all: here’s my rundown of events:
http://airings.livejournal.com/168287.html
Man, the nerdrage that’s been going around could fuel a small town for a month.
All very well said. I doubt David was acting out of malice, but he’s still going to come out of this looking out-of-touch at best and an arsehole at worst. It’s also not hard to understand all the spluttering rage and anger being directed at David. S_D was violating copyright and was going to get shut down eventually, sure, but it was just about the most energizing online comics community out there. People have lost something that mattered to them and they want to lash out.
I’m wondering if it might be possible for a future community to draw up a formal agreement with comic publishers about things like number of pages, not including final pages, etc? I think it might actually be in the publishers’ interests from a community and publicity point of view, but I don’t know if there would be any negative legal implications for them.
[…] comics, was recently closed for copyright violation after the comic writer Peter David complained. Chris Bird has the best take on this. Speaking of comics, I’ve recently got a sense of ennui about […]
As usual, you take the prize for the balanced and sane sum-up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THE INTERNET, YOU SANE BASTARD, THAT’S NOT ALLOWED oh you have a lolpicture it’s okay now.
It’s regrettable, though of course practically goes without saying, that the s_ders who are getting the most visibility are the minority who are pitching idiot-fits. I think that by far the largest proportion has at least a basic grasp on the core facts, and is just deeply woeful about the whole thing.
I, too, have the list of Things I Would Never Have Bought Without S_D. I realize that even if you add up the entire population of the community it’s probably not a significant percentage of the comics-buying world, but I don’t think the industry is doing so terribly well that the Big Two should handwave off the bit of good we were doing for their business.
Thank you.
I may have a more eloquent response later, but for the time being… thank you.
Nice summary. As someone who has every issue of the current incarnation of X Factor (in single issue form, no less), I really couldn’t get my heard around PAD’s obsession with keeping spoilers about this arc hidden. Does he really think that there is ANYONE out there who thought Layla Miller WASN’T coming back? Of course, that’s a side issue, but his pleas at the start of the last couple of issues confused me greatly.
And as for S_D: Well, not to condone their behaviour or anything, but comics-fans-on-the-Internet do seem to have the same kind of hissy fit, spoiled toddler tantrum reaction to… well, pretty much everything. (Seriously, if I hear one more complaint about how Clint Barton and not Spidey being the one to go on the news to take on Osborn I’m going to start killing people. Is it really too much to ask for a NEW pairing of hero and villain?) So, while it’s still stupid, it’s not really out of the ordinary.
A very good summary and evaluation of things MGK, thank you.
I’ve lurked and occasionally commented on S_D for a couple of years, and there are definitely a bunch of trades on my shelf that would not be there if I had not been a member of the community. I’m not terribly surprised that it got shut down, sad yes, but not surprised.
I think the positive and negative effects of S_D on comic sales are overstated, but in the end the snaky calls for “numbers” from the anti-S_D crowd is stupid, you can’t prove either way how many sales were made or lost due to the community because the effects get lost in the general “noise” of industry ups & downs. You might as well try to prove that comic companies are losing sales because libraries buy comics and allow people to read them for free.
Ultimately I only regret two things. I really liked seeing the older and obscure comics that got posted, I feel that the people who were putting up silver age and underground comics were providing a much needed sense of history to the younger readers who would not otherwise have a chance to see such works.
I also regret that I never thought to save all the scans of Rex the Wonder Dog that were on the boards.
As usual, you take the prize for the balanced and sane sum-up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THE INTERNET, YOU SANE BASTARD, THAT’S NOT ALLOWED
Yeah, where’s Flapjacks when you need him?
Wait, complaining about that is a thing now? I thought that was great – with Steve Rogers and Wasp dead, Hank Pym useless as always, Wanda crazy off to the side, Vision now a young kid sort of robot, Iron Man in hiding and Thor kind of busy with the whole Asgard mess, Clint was the last of the “classic Avengers lineup” available to say “fuck you, Osborn, you’re not an Avenger.” It made sense.
I’d like to correct something, re Kali. Kali commented “DIAF” in irritation over something in X-Factor *before* Peter David showed up. When he posted his rant in response, she responded quite calmly and courteously, noting that she had been a long time PAD fangirl and explaining why she found the issue and recent X-Factor so exasperating.
PAD then responded saying ‘I’m not going to read that, because you are just some anonymous person on the internet’.
The fail was not Kali’s, here. And I say that as someone who has had a spat or two with her.
Myself, I just plan to never buy anything PAD puts out again. Which is unlikely to be much of a sacrifice, since he hasn’t done anything that I was more than mildly interested in, in years.
I’ve been looking forward to reading this post; it’s fair, informed and balanced, which is rather unusual this weekend.
Based on this, your future as one of thoselaw talking guys seems bright indeed.
I agree with just about everything here. Except for the fact that people should have expected this sooner or later. I wasn’t expecting it, because I figured that if either of the big two were going to do anything about s_d they would have done it before this. So I thought I had nothing to worry about.
Just a day or two before this whole thing happened, I read your essay on Luthor for the first time. If anybody hasn’t read that but is reading this, you should be reading that immediately after. 😉 But it included links to s_d, to what was actually a good story written by Mark Millar about Luthor’s reasons for hating Supes and to the Golden Age origin of Luthor’s hatred. It’s a good thing I managed to read those while they were still there.
Now okay…Layla comes back? THAT was the big spoiler which had PAD’s panties in a knot? Jesus, that hardly even qualifies as a spoiler! That is the kind of thing that Marvel has a history of announcing on the cover! (Boy, I sure do love my italics today.) You know, something like “The Return Of Layla Miller! Inside!” They announce that shit all the time.
The other thing is that I’ve seen what PAD usually does on the web when not posting on his own site, so here’s how the s_d exchange probably went (given that it’s down I can’t very well check):
Forget about my other problems with PAD, there’s still something about eavesdropping on people criticizing your work and then showing up unexpectedly and taking them to task for what they’ve said that seems…I can’t think of a perfect word to describe it, but it doesn’t seem like a great thing to do. Particularly if they’re only criticizing your work, as some of them are.
Will: Yes, because comic sales weren’t decreasing before S_D, and we can clearly and easily separate sales of comics made by people seeing said comics on SD and sales that would otherwise occur, right?
…right?
MGK: PAD didn’t get S_D shut down. It was a matter of time, as someone wh o ran a definitely not fair use, basically piracy version of S_D for OVER A YEAR before LJ figured it out. PAD just reported shit to Marvel, who said “someone already fixed it” and did nothing. And photobucket sure as shit didn’t complain, cuz they’re morons.
Creators like Simone, Ellis and now Busiek have come out in support of the community. Obviously they’re not the be all end all, especially when it comes to work done for hire versus creator owned, but all the same, it’s something.
Also, PAD has gone on record as saying if people wanted to post Fallen Angel 1, and I believe he said the whole thing even, and asked him – he would be ok and let them.
X-Factor, however, is out of his hands.
Coren: Yes, actually. If scans_daily is the valuable promotional tool some are claiming it is, we should see a recognizable uptick in sales for titles that get good press within the community. That’s what successful promotion means.
In comparison, line-wide crossovers are clearly a good promotional tool, at least while they’re going on. Just take a look at the numbers for X-Factor MGK included. Two issues for Civil War, numbers spike. Endangered Species brings a quick boost, Messiah Complex brings an even bigger one. Secret Invasion’s not as effective, but even then, sales go up.
I don’t believe scans_daily was hurting sales. I don’t believe scans_daily was helping sales either. And as yet, no one’s provided any data to the contrary.
#10 – see, what’s actually not ready yet is the technology to let them charge for it. Ideally, any time an eyeball flicks across a panel.
It was because of scans_daily that I too discovered Rex the Wonder Dog (and superdickery, I suppose), which in turn led to me hunting down every issue from about 30 different torrents and then sending them to MGK.
Wait, complaining about that is a thing now? I thought that was great – with Steve Rogers and Wasp dead, Hank Pym useless as always, Wanda crazy off to the side, Vision now a young kid sort of robot, Iron Man in hiding and Thor kind of busy with the whole Asgard mess, Clint was the last of the “classic Avengers lineup” available to say “fuck you, Osborn, you’re not an Avenger.” It made sense
Well, it’s not a big thing, but it still drives me batshit crazy. Of course, it’s from the usual “Anything Bendis does must be WRONG” crowd, but it is working from the logic that Goblin = Spidey villain = Spidey is only person allowed to confront him. Sure glad they didn’t see any of Ellis’ Thunderbolts.
(Also, Wanda is kinda back now, but she’s in Slott’s “Busiek-lite” Avengers book, which is rapidly losing my interest, and I loved Busiek’s Avengers).
WW: There’s another possible mechanism. scans_daily and other comic sites may, rather than increasing and/or decreasing the sales of featured comics, increase and/or decrease the sales of _all_ comics, through one or both of the following: people starting a comic hobby through the lure of “free samples”, and people valuing comics less because “you can get that shit for free so why bother”.
I think it actually performs all four of these functions at the same time. I’d also expect that trade paperbacks see increased sales because of free scans (because a trade is more comfortable to read than a .cbr) and “floppies” get lower sales (because a scan is much more comfortable than a single issue, and so is a hat made of live mice).
“…because a scan is much more comfortable than a single issue, and so is a hat made of live mice”
I want to know where you’re buying your single issues, so I can avoid it for all of time.
I only started reading X-Factor (And lots of other things) after finding out about them on S_D. Such a shame.
Agreed, BringTheNoise, and I’d also like to avoid the place where he buys his hats.
An excellent article, and full of- what’s this? Sense? Rationality? Are these things allowed on the internet anymore? Well, until they shut you down for it, keep up the good work.
On the point of tripling the sales of a book — which I’m assuming at this point is just hyperbole on David’s part, because if he honestly thinks he can get a title with friggin’ Multuple Man as the lead moving more books than New Avengers, then we may have living proof that comics rot your brain — what options would someone working for Marvel or DC have to promote their book that doesn’t include the usual interview circuit on NR/CBR/etc. and hyping the upcoming plots to the horizon and back? Obviously The Big Two do the solits, but it’s been often pointed out that a fair chunk of new titles get pushed out the door with little or no promotion to sink or swim among buyers who know what they like, probably feel that they’re paying too much for it already, and aren’t going to be overly receptive to anything new unless it brings more to the table than just itself.
The tragedy you hint at is that s_d could have been a place for new people to discover how truly well-written X-Factor is.
Instead, sales numbers will continue to dwindle until the book is canceled or relaunched at an entirely different audience.
[i]MGK: PAD didn’t get S_D shut down. It was a matter of time, as someone wh o ran a definitely not fair use, basically piracy version of S_D for OVER A YEAR before LJ figured it out. PAD just reported shit to Marvel, who said “someone already fixed it” and did nothing. And photobucket sure as shit didn’t complain, cuz they’re morons.[i/]
It’s not what he did, it’s the smug superior attitude with which he did it that’s putting many people off. To paraphrase John Goodman:
“He’s not wrong. He’s just an a–hole.”
That’s where all the female nerds are at?
Dammit.
That seems about right to me.
Why does the second to last link come back to this post?
Something that’s getting lost in the nerd-rage is that the whole thing ONLY came to Peter’s attention when his wife saw a terribly malicious, personal attack on him by a specific poster. It was in gigantic bold lettering: “FUCK YOU, PETER DAVID.” And then the net-ubiquitous “DIAF” which stands for “Die In A Fire.”
Maybe the phrase is used in a non-seriously-threatening way online these days, but one of the Davids’ friends DID die in a fire. It upset his wife, she said online how much it was upsetting her, and then people started attacking both the Davids even MORE. Because they’re CELEBRITIES! They’re not people with FEELINGS!
Guys, who did what is still up for debate. But one poster decided to attack Peter PERSONALLY, and not his work. It was the text equivalent of screaming obscenities in someone’s face. THAT IS WHAT GOT HIS ATTENTION TO THAT POST IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I’ve been called naive and retarded for asking people to mind their manners online. Don’t be a jerk. Think before you start spouting off obscenities at people you don’t know in person and wouldn’t say to their faces.
The co-host of my podcast* (it’s linked in my name) and I have started a Don’t Be A Douchebag On the Internet Campaign. If anyone wants to join up, make an icon or banner and send it to made_of_fail@yahoo.com, or simply post “Part Of the Don’t Be A Douchebag On the Internet Campaign” in your blog, message board sig or whatever.
It may be futile, but it’s worth knowing that polite people still exist in cyberspace.
*Pay attention to it if you like; we just recorded a show about this very issue and it’ll be up in the next couple of days.
“Maybe the phrase is used in a non-seriously-threatening way online these days, but one of the Davids’ friends DID die in a fire. It upset his wife, she said online how much it was upsetting her, and then people started attacking both the Davids even MORE. Because they’re CELEBRITIES! They’re not people with FEELINGS! … I’ve been called naive and retarded for asking people to mind their manners online. Don’t be a jerk. Think before you start spouting off obscenities at people you don’t know in person and wouldn’t say to their faces.”
Sounds to me like they need to be insulted a lot more. The correct amount of insults has been reached when they do what any net-savvy person does: stop reacting.
I would like to add this to the argument, though: MGK argues that Marvel and DC surely didn’t know that scans_daily existed, but I think that is not the case. In addition to Warren Ellis, at least Dan Slott and Gail Simone (that I know of) stopped in to make comments, and other creators (artists, inkers, etc.) whose names I’ve forgotten stopped in to post their own work. I imagine that, with this implicit show of support, the mods and participants probably thought they were in the right, and mods did try to correct things when they knew they weren’t. Whether or not what they were doing followed *U.S. Copyright Law* to the letter, the holders of those copyrights seemed to give their approval. I don’t think I would have been a part of the commnity for very long otherwise.
Also, I had no idea that Layla Miller *WASN’T* still in X-Factor. There’s the spoiler! lol.
Allow me to introduce you to this thing called “sarcasm.”
You still post on David’s site, Queen Anthai. Tell him that. Not the part about the obscenities because he generally doesn’t use obscenities, but more “don’t be a jerk.”
Here is Peter David being a jerk BEFORE the whole Scans Daily mess:
http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/12/27/box-office-watch-the-spirit/#comment-455508
Now one of PAD’s defenders said something like “the other guy started it by insulting Frank Miller and it’s okay to hit a bully back.” But it’s PAD who’s acting like a bully here, saying in essence that he’s important and this other guy isn’t so this other guy needs to STFU.
It takes two people to have a flame war, and something Peter David seems never to have learned is how to say to himself “I am going to calm down and see whether I can reason with this person instead of arguing and insulting them.”
For those that want to see “numbers” proving that S_D hurt/helped comic sales, here’s how much money I have spent on comics because of S_D: $2,880, so far, and probably more in the future. Now, that number’s a little low; I spend between $80-$100 a month on comics (I usually buy individual issues), and I’ve based the number above on the $80 amount, over the last three years.
Around graduation from high school, I gave up comics (that was in the early ’90’s). Then, years later, I discover LJ, and, eventually, S_D. I read all kinds of neat stuff up there, and it got me buying comics again, almost twenty years after I gave them up the first time. Everything I buy now is DIRECTLY linked to S_D; either it’s stuff that I discovered because of S_D (Punisher MAX, Thunderbolts), or it’s stuff that I learned to avoid because of S_D (“Rulk”).
I’m sorry PAD got his feelings hurt. Yeah, it sucks that somebody told him to “DIAF”. But, then again, if he doesn’t want people talking about him, he needs to step down from public life.
I tried commenting over on Peter David’s blog with many of the sales points you’re making here. I’ve had more fun, lol. Anyway, this is a beautiful post. Thanks for articulating many of my own thoughts so well.
’m not entirely sure I agree with you regarding scans_daily’s usefulness as a marketing tool. I’ve seen a few other people make that claim this weekend, and each time it’s presented more as an article of faith than a conclusion backed up by data.
Well, you know, I got curious so I started poking around. It’s really hard to find actual concrete sales numbers– or at least hard for me to find them, but I did find the Wikipedia page for Naruto, which has several cites about the Japanese comic’s high sales numbers. Now again, no concrete numbers, but judging from the numbers MGK cites above…there’s no contest. Mind you, it’s not entirely fair to judge the sales of X-Factor against arguably the top-selling comic in America, but I think it’s important to point out that Naruto has been available in ‘scanlation’ form– that is, as scans with translations provided by fans– for many, many years, and is, in fact, easily found by a quick Google search. And yet, it sells and sells and sells and sells.
I think it’s important to point out that Naruto has been available in ’scanlation’ form– that is, as scans with translations provided by fans– for many, many years, and is, in fact, easily found by a quick Google search. And yet, it sells and sells and sells and sells.
Of course. Because reading books of manga online is annoying as all get out. For $10-15 you can save your eyes a ton of strain, and have something that’s easy to throw into a bag and read on a bus or a train or in your dentist’s waiting room. And since it takes more than 5 minutes to read a manga collection, it’s something you might actually take somewhere to read when you know you’re going to be waiting.
On the other hand, your average single issue of an American superhero comic book can be read in about 5 minutes. Less if you’re reading purely for plot. X-Factor is a little weightier – it takes me a good 10-15 minutes reading the single issues in Borders every month – but still, not exactly something worth spending actual money on.
(I’ve recently come to the conclusion that if I can read your entire book in Borders while I’m waiting for my coffee to cool and you’re not selling it for a buck or giving it away for free, you have a lousy business model. I’m keeping an eye out for counter-evidence, but so far, nothing.)
MGK: Well said. I wanted to cheer.
To everyone claiming they want to boycott PAD stuff because he’s an asshole: IMO it really comes down, again, to separating an artists work from the artist. For example: I think Mark Millar is an egotistical overrated jackass, and every time I read an interview with him I roll my eyes and want to hurt something. However, he still occasionally writes good comics that I enjoy reading (The Ultimates are the first to come to mind)and even though I don’t care for the man personally, I don’t let that effect my decision on what to read. Likewise, PAD being a jerk or not (I’m uninformed on the particulars so I have no opinion either way)has no bearing on his writing ability, and in my opinion X-Factor is a generally well-written book and tends to be rather underrated (with the exception of when Stroman was doing the art and it made me want to puke. I seriously couldn’t read the book because the art was THAT BAD). Of course this is just my two cents and you certainly have every right to buy or not buy something as you see fit. I’d just hate for people to miss out on potentially great books just because the writer is a jackass. Hell, if that were the case the entire literary world would collapse in on itself. 😉
Don’t forget that boycotting the books would impact the penciller/inker/colorist/letterer, who one assumes have done nothing to personally offend you.
piranhtachew: It’s called a category.
Suzene: I find this version of Multiple-Man more compelling than most current Avengers. Here are the number of trades I’ve bought due to these characters:
X-Factor: 1 (and counting)
Avengers related titles: none unless you count Cap’s “Winter Soldier”
Admittedly I’m a fan of speculative examinations of identity like Battlestar Galactica, so the current Madrox would appeal to me.
Yeah, Jer, that speaks to a lot of flaws in the overall comics business model I didn’t want to get into! But I do know a lot of people who read scanlations and then buy the books later (though of course that’s just anecdotal). (I generally read scanlations when/if I’m trying something out, or in the case of Saiyuki I’ll read whatever the goddamned hell I can get my hands on, because I’m a junkie. Then I buy the volumes.)
Excellent, well reasoned post, as usual. I’m glad someone like you is out there saying these sorts of things.
Though I know a few law professors down the hall from my office who would disagree with your fair use analysis. 😉
Just wondering, since I am not particularly introspective: What are the peccadilloes of s_d that aren’t shared by the rest of the comics community?
Jesus Christ, typing Fuck You Peter David on the internet is not the same thing as personally insulting him. PAD is a public figure. People type criticisms of public figures on the net all the time. If his wife was truly searching the web for insults aimed at her husband (which is hilarious, and I’m sure she would have found plenty), then she’s got problems and needs a hobby.
Ah, the internet is one fickle bitch. One minute it’s shouting your praises, the next it’s demanding your blood.
Still one would think a comic book writer would have known better and not get involved in this. As MGK pointed out, s_d relied a lot on the leniency of the comic book industry, but I think the industry also does (or at least should) rely on the internet.
It’s common knowledge that geeks use the net. Geeks also buy comic books. Geeks – internet. Comic books – geeks. Internet – comic books? I think there’s a connection here!
Posting on a popular comic book site saying how you reported ‘illegal’ use of a comic to Marvel and indirectly causing that site to be shut down seems a sure fire way of shooting yourself in the foot. You mess with the nerds then you get the flames there Davy boy
My favorite thing to come out of this is the rampant justification (on all sides) for being a dick.
How about, it’s never alright to be a dick. Is that so hard?
Kyle: My choice of New Avengers wasn’t intended as a reflection of the quality of either book, but as an illustration that Peter David has pretty much set himself up for failure if his goal literally is to triple the readership of X-Factor. New Avengers is one of Marvel’s top-selling titles. As an Avengers book, it has more name recognition, it has a cast of characters that are more recognizable to the average comic buyer, and it gets more of an advertising push from Marvel. It sells about 90K per month. If David means to triple X-Factor’s current sales numbers, which, as shown above, are just a bit under 35K at present, then he’s essentially claiming that he’s going to make the book bigger than New Avengers and that’s just not in any way realistic.
MGK:
As a now-former member of scans_daily, I have to say that I agree with everything you said in your post. I am particularly disappointed by all the immaturity and name-calling the TOSing has inspired.
For the record, I only posted public domain scans, although, to be fair, this more out of convenience than any apprehension over the copyright violations. And I never harbored any illusions about the the legality of non-PD posts – which is why, as it has been already pointed out many times, scans_daily was lucky to have lasted as long as it did.
Chris:
No it’s never okay, and thank Insert Deity that there’s more than one of us out there with that opinion.
There is evidence that online availability helps boost sales – Mark Waid has an interview on Word Balloon where he talks about how Myspace Comics helped boost the sales of a Boom! Studios book to levels they never expected. Check the one where he talks about becoming the EiC at Boom! Studios.
So there are companies taking advantage of social networking and free content to boost sales outside of the existing audience. The evidence is there and there are companies filling the need, reasoning that whatever sales they gain are worth the bandwidth costs of putting the comic on their website.
That is, however, their choice – and it’s much easier to gather concrete data from your own web system than something a fan slapped together and stuck on Photobucket and posted. It’s also something you’re more likely to be at peace with if it’s something you do yourself. I know that I’d feel a bit uneasy if a fan took an excerpt from something I worked on and posted it online, even if it’s something I was going to do myself – just like I’d be uneasy if someone painted my fence, even if I was meaning to do it too.
Creative people take pride in their work and feel a sense of ownership of it, even if legally (such as with Marvel characters) they don’t really own it or have control over it. I don’t think PAD or other creators are being malicious here and trying to spoil people’s fun, I just think they haven’t been swayed by the argument. They see what they stand to lose, not what they stand to gain, and it’s their paycheck and their work we’re making these arguments over when the argument going one way or the other really means piss all to us.
Anyways it’s all over but the shouting, the oh so lovely shouting and insults and counter-insults that makes me want to travel back in time and choke Al Gore so that we’d all have to do this in person where we feel less invincible. I love the Internet, but I wish I could shake the shit out of it some days.
After reading this and other discussions of s_d v. fair use I can accept that it was illegal. I just don’t think it should be. It may have done some good; it certainly did no harm. In shutting it down what was halted was not infringement but joy.
I say that having only rarely ever looked the community, generally only when pointed at something specific.
Regarding s_d’s “peccadillos”: confusion over the comm’s purpose led to semiregular wank about the latest influx of whatever (“there’s not enough hoyay! there’s too much hoyay! why does everybody keep posting Young Justice and Runaways, does nobody read REAL comics? the next person to post superdickery gets a punch in the ovaries”) … and to be very fair, LJ’s clientele has a tendency to tl;dr. S_D was full of people doing the ten-paragraph or full LJ entry equivalent of someone over on another board going “omg that suxx :((((.”
It was also an awesome community full of sweet people who really loved and thought about what they were reading. Which, in a lot of cases, hasn’t been my experience in other comics comms. Because I am a fnerd, and we are few and heavily defended.
It was also an awesome community full of sweet people who really loved and thought about what they were reading. Which, in a lot of cases, hasn’t been my experience in other comics comms. Because I am a fnerd, and we are few and heavily defended.
Motto.
(For those that didn’t read s_d, that means “I agree completely”)
s_d was incredibly welcoming to both women and gays, and I am confident saying that a majority of community members fell into at least one camp. It was unbelievably refreshing to be in a community where I could be myself without some idiot going “OMG stfu fukin fagot.” The mis-spelling there was intentional, by the way, which leads me to something else I miss: most members have excellent grammar and actually took the time to use it.
As a side note: MGK, insanejournal seems to have a lot of the same capabilities as livejournal. Have you thought about looking into it to see if you could revive Improved_Archie?
I stopped buying his stuff around the beginning of the year after he blogged about how Israel was totally right to bomb the hell out of Gaza and said some things on that subject that I found pretty damned infuriating. For all he’s written against the Iraq war, I suspect that if Israel had declared war on Iraq instead of the U.S. he would have been all for it.
Civilian deaths are acceptable to him. Not only that, but in the comments to that post he said (among other things)
Real fucking nice. Another person on his site, Luigi Novi, actually went farther by saying:
So it seems that PAD was saying there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, and his butt boy there was saying that the Palestinians deserved to be killed by the hundreds because of who won their election.
I didn’t want anything by him around any more after that. I took almost all of it to my LCS and got store credit for it, and I’m probably gonna bring in the rest of his stuff one of these days.
I can’t separate the artist from the work if the artist or creator or whatever the proper title is takes a position like that. For the same reasons I do not care how good “Ultimate Iron Man” might be; I am not going to buy it because Orson Scott Card is a homophobic tool.
just another member from the lj community formally known as scans_daily chiming in
this post and gail’s post (http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showpost.php?p=8491921&postcount=104) are two of the best i’ve seen on the subject so far.
but just so all sides have their due time, here’s a link to kali921’s lj were she gives her side of the story: http://kali921.livejournal.com/287940.html
—
but, when all is said and done, i’m really gonna miss it
I think you’re overestimating the proportion of s_d members engaged in shit-flinging behavior. Other than that, I pretty much agree. My knowledge of copyright law is extremely limited (US copyright law? or is it international?) and so your specific comments about that are enlightening, to say the least.
As to whether or not PAD can triple X-Factor sales, that falls under “state of the industry”. I can’t recommend XF to non-Marvel-reading friends, and I wouldn’t. I’ve become a reader of superhero comics and so I’m willing to put up with sometimes not knowing what’s going on without reading a lot of recaps online. A few years ago I wouldn’t have, and neither would my novel-reading friends. But talking about the state of the industry bores me to death, so I’ll leave it at that.
*withdraws planned “Waits for Rob Brown to Bring up Israel” post*
*grin*
“Jesus Christ, typing Fuck You Peter David on the internet is not the same thing as personally insulting him.”
Sgt. Pepper: So if I wrote “Fuck you ‘Your real name here’ ” you wouldn’t consider it a personal insult? I don’t give a shit if you’re a public figure or not, if someone is saying shit like that, you’re going to take it personally to some degree. On that count I don’t fault PAD or any other writer, artist, etc. Being anonymous on the internet doesn’t automatically give you the right to be an asshole to “public figures” any more so than it would to walk up to them at a convention and say the same thing to their face.
“*withdraws planned “Waits for Rob Brown to Bring up Israel” post*
*grin*”
lol
Rob, like I said, you have every right to feel the way you do and to respond with your wallet. I, personally, just try not to let the creators personal views affect my opinion of their work. Especially since, as someone else mentioned, by not buying it it doesn’t only affect that person, but all the other people that work on the book who has nothing to do with that person being a jackass. I feel like I owe it to them to judge the work on it’s own merit.
Now, for me, it’s a different matter if their personal views leak into what they’re writing, as does happen. In those cases I may not want to pick it up because at that point those views are affecting the story (and often it’s quality *Cough*Winick$Loeb*Cough*) itself.
So much amen to this that I won’t even go into all the points I agree with. In fact the only thing I have a slightly different opinion on is this:
“Or, more succinctly, “yeesh.” Here is a far more likely scenario: Marvel and DC knew about s_d but preferred to turn a blind eye to it.”
I think you’re correct, but more specifically, *some people* at Marvel and DC, such as several creators, knew about it and chose to ignore it…but then *the legal dept. and/or bigwigs* were pulled in by Peter David’s report, and thus, the shutdown. And I’m saying this as an attorney, here.
scans_daily was the impetus for both my headlong dive into collecting Deadpool comics, and my return to regular visits to the comic book store, instead of just occasional jaunts. I’m curious how many others can specifically attribute purchases to something on scans_daily – I’ve actually posted an entry on noscans_daily to ask if others will share any purchases they made entirely because of scans_daily. Hm…
[…] also immature; emotionally stunted, even. Dislike David’s writing, loathe his blog posts, or roll your eyes at his plan to triple sales of X-Factor. But wishing him harm, even figuratively, is misguided and […]
Randy: I think that not buying a title because of the writer would have a lot more impact on the artist/inker/colorist if we were still in an era where an art team stayed on a book from the Big Two for more than a single arc (if that); it seems the closest we get to a regular art team these days is having two different teams taking turns on arcs, a la Land and Dodson on Uncanny. The artist isn’t tied to the book for the (comparatively) long haul in the way a writer is. If a book goes under, then there’s a smaller pool of assignments in general, but that’s as far as the decision not to buy affects a rotating component of a creative team.
Well played, sir. As a (hopefully) sane s_d member, I agree with the sum of what you have said. I think what happened here didn’t need to, on both sides, and I can’t BELIEVE PAD is making post after post about it to keep the argument going.
“Land and Dodson on Uncanny”: Is there any numbers for Uncanny that shows that when Land does art the book suffers? Cause that would be awesome.
Never had a LJ, might have been to s_d once. And as far as I can tell /co/ gets it’s scans from a seperate source. Viva la /co/mrades! Still, I understand why people are upset. There are a few series I’d never have bothered with had I not read scans posted online, even though I buy 95% of my comics because I flipped through it in the store. Immortal Iron Fist (first issue leak), Spider-Man Loves Mary-Jane (full run [at the time] posted), Deadpool (various pages), Marvel TV: Galatus (bought simply because someone said “best of the week”).
And that’s just comics, the industries need to start seriously thinking about try before you buy marketing. Netflix is (I believe) huge by charging a relatively small fee for unlimited rentals. Your only limit is how fast you can get it and watch it. Napster is the same thing: monthly fee, unlimited downloading. If the various media industries could do this in house, they’d make money had over fist. Something Marvel could do is offer three kinds of subscriptions: online only, online with floppy shippment, floppies only. Hell, if they really felt that “you need paper” the online edition might be an additional charge to your book subscription. I’m not saying a lot of people would fall for it, but if you give people an option to do something they want, they will often you along with something they don’t.
It’s the new Godwin’s Law in any discussion in which A) I’m participating and B) the subject is Peter David. If it goes on long enough, it’s only a matter of time. *sigh*
I’m glad you’ve got a sense of humour about it, though. I’m honestly a little embarrassed. I mean, I should be able to let it go.
Perhaps. I don’t think it hurts letterers and other people who play smaller parts quite so much, though; Joe Caramagna is ubiquitous in comic book credits, for instance, so if he ends up lettering one less book it probably won’t make a huge difference for him.
The other thing is that the primary reason I buy any book is because of who’s writing it. Back when I was still a PAD fanboy I bought She-Hulk just because he made a blog post saying “I’m going to be writing this book.” Even though art is important, I don’t care about the art if the story is good or bad. I bought the Larry Stroman issues of the current X-Factor because I wanted to read the story. Stroman’s art wasn’t that great, but I just ignored it. When the reverse is true, when I don’t care for the writing but like the art, I’m much less likely to buy the book. That’s kind of what happened after Nicieza took over for Busiek on Thunderbolts; Mark Bagley was still drawing it, and I think Bagley draws beautifully, but I found the story to be “meh.” Which is the reason I just don’t read those issues very much any more. If Bagley or another artist I really liked were teamed with a really awful writer, I wouldn’t want to buy that book.
So for me it’s the writer who makes or breaks a book, rightly or wrongly.
I was hoping there would be footnotes about K’s History of Similar Behaviour. That’s always worth a look.
Will: Who’s to say that the increase from S_D, if one existed, wasn’t outstripped by sinking sales from retailers scaling back non-selling books?
Suzene,
Good point, though even taking that into account it could still mean the life or death of a book, especially nowadays. If the book is quality why should it suffer just because the writer/artist/whatever is a jackass in his/her personal life/beliefs?
Let me be clear, I think you and Rob and anyone else who feels strongly about not wanting to support a particular creator, whatever their job, has every right to do so for whatever reasons you feel are right. To be honest I only buy comics in trade form anyway, so it’s not like I’m coming from a moral “support single issues” high ground- though I do buy trades I find to be quality regardless of who is working on the book. I’m just offering up another perspective for the sake of discussion. 🙂
“Sgt. Pepper: So if I wrote “Fuck you ‘Your real name here’ ” you wouldn’t consider it a personal insult? I don’t give a shit if you’re a public figure or not, if someone is saying shit like that, you’re going to take it personally to some degree. On that count I don’t fault PAD or any other writer, artist, etc. Being anonymous on the internet doesn’t automatically give you the right to be an asshole to “public figures” any more so than it would to walk up to them at a convention and say the same thing to their face.”
If I were doing work that more than 150 people noticed, then I would very much expect some of them to express to each other that I am an asshole. Hell, It’s likely that some of the 150 or so people who do encounter my work everyday call me an asshole behind my back for one reason or another. If you’re doing work that several thousand people see every month, some of them aren’t going to like it and some are gonna call you an asshole on a FANSITE (note: not oh his own personal site, not at a convention–he apparently went out of his way to seek it out ((and knowing his internet presence, wanted to start some shit))). That’s the world. And if you’re a public figure who happens to spout spirited opinions and angry comments on the internet on a relatively frequent basis, you know some people are going to talk shit about you (again, on a FANSITE). Being critical and even mean spirited about a public figure on a fansite is absolutely different than saying it in person.
Full disclosure–Some time ago, I posted a few critical comments about some She-Hulk plot points (I had also pointed out some things that I liked about the issue) on a general comics fansite. I thought I was just discussing the issue with some other internet comic geeks but then PAD showed up on the board and called me an idiot (note: my memory might be mistaken; he might have called me a moron). That was my first and only exchange with PAD on the net.
I saw PAD do a similar kind of thing with Greg Burgas over on CSBG.
Seriouly, PAD seeks these kinds of things out.
Forget the Israel stuff- that’s typical center-right stuff nowadays, what did PAD say about Race and Obama?
[…] One thing you’ll hear a lot from the community members is “fair use.” Posting eleven pages of a twenty two page comic is not fair use. I’m no expert, but even I understand that. MightyGodKing– a man much more versed in the subject than I– covers that at his wonderful site. […]
This was an awesome post. I wish I had something to add, but I wanted to tell you how well thought out and right on it was.
@sgt pepper: He did that to me when I compared a couple X-Factor panels to Battlestar Galactica. He’s a charming man that way.
@socraticsilence:
PAD’s post on race. Just skimming it, it seems to match up somewhat with Willinghams. That they’d LOVE to talk race with POC but POC are all so ANGRY and MEAN so they won’t…
[…] Brigid Alverson, Johanna Draper Carlson, Glenn Haumann, Tom Spurgeon, Christopher Bird (one, two — both getting my vote as the most insightful comments on the subject, not least of all […]
I have read, in the last decade, I think as many as three issues of X-Factor, all of them part of an X-books crossover–including, in fact, the issue in which Layla Miller “died”.
It was so painfully obvious that she wasn’t actually dead that I’m embarrassed for the author, both for the “death” and for thinking anyone would be surprised by her return.
PAD used to be a better writer than that, didn’t he?
Lister: I don’t think sales drop when Land’s up on Uncanny, but the reviews sure seem to get worse, for both the art and the story.
Randy: No worries! I’m enjoying the discussion.
I suppose it depends on how you view the work in relation to the originator. If you see the work as independent of the artist once it’s released out into the world, then boycotting the work for the artist’s views makes about as much sense as kicking someone’s dog because they said something jerkish. If you view the work as more an extension of the artist, then it’s like delivering a kick in the shin. Obviously, I fall in the latter category. 😉
More seriously, I do see the art and the artist as being irrevocably linked, especially when you’re dealing with commercial art like comics, where the creative team is almost always hyped as one of the main reasons to buy the product. Of course, an artist is perfectly free to say what he or she likes, but if one of the consequences of that outspokenness is that my ability to enjoy their output is compromised, I don’t think that the creator is entitled to my support, no matter the quality of the work. If I were to somehow find out that someone whose music I enjoyed supported Prop 8, I would stop supporting their work because by funding them, I’d be concerned that I was indirectly aiding a cause I abhor and, even aside from that, my ability to get full enjoyment from their work would be cut down because I’d think less of them as a person. The S_D debacle is of considerably lesser concern to me, but the same basic concept applies — I think David is coming off as a completely unpleasant person in this and there’s not so little entertainment in the world that I feel I’d be deprived by distancing myself from him as much as possible, including not buying his comics.
Suzene,
I can definitely see your point. I do tend to view the work as separate from the creative team that did it so long as their personal viewpoints don’t creep into the work itself- which does happen. That said, if a creator said or did something that just really pissed me off I’m sure I’d feel the same as you do- IE: feel like I can’t enjoy the work because I know the source.
This is why I tend to not read interviews and comments by comic folk when it doesn’t have to do with their work itself because I’d rather keep my distance and just enjoy the stories for what they are. Comics are my escape from reality.
[…] Christopher Bird vs. Scans_Daily and Peter David: Looks like a TKO for Bird. […]
The whole thing is a mess, and kind of points out the bad part about the semi-anonymous nature of the internet in general. I’d point at a particular Penny Arcade strip but that’d require a deal more surfing than I wish.
I do find there to be some small irony in the fact that I became fond of PAD’s work because of scans daily. I’ll be throwing my money elsewhere. There’s a load of indy titles that could use the love more than PAD’s.
Sometimes I hate learning about an artist or writer’s opinion. I still haven’t managed to read Ender’s Game after the tirade over gay marriage and the like that Orson Scott Card went into. Willingham’s right leanings make me a little uneasy and unsure if he can actually handle Obsidian in a way that I won’t cringe at when JSA starts up. I knew very little about PAD before this, but after reading other bits of his blog I cringe (nevermind the SD related ranting).
That said, the SD members threatening or otherwise being douches aren’t helping anything. Vote with your dollar and be done with it.
/Katherine Farmar said on March 1st, 2009 at 11:10 am
I’m not advocating a boycott or anything like that, and I wasn’t precisely a fan of PAD’s before this incident, but I find it hard to believe that I’m ever going to be able to see his name on the cover of a comic without thinking “hey, that’s the asshole that shut down scans_daily. Maybe I’ll buy something else.”/
I just want to chime in and say, word fucking word. PAD isn’t the only writer out there, in fact, I’ve read his book, “I,Q”, and the ending totally sucked, even though it was interesting, up to the ending, which sucked, perhaps that is why Peter David is so fearful of spoilers being leaked.
X-Factor can crash and burn. Of course, PAD isn’t the only writer churning out terrible work here, but thankfully, there are many alternative to Marvel’s stupid Dark Age, the Marvel Adventure is decent. There is always Alan Moore. …and, manga! It’s not just /badly/ written boylove or mecha.
[…] by most people, though denied by David himself. A kerfuffle quickly ensued, with little sane ommentary emerging out from amongst the people happily pissing on Scan_Daily’s ashes or wishing death […]
[…] showed up in last week’s mass tantrum responding to a pair of posts on Christopher Bird’s Mightygodking.com. The subject was Marvel writer Peter David’s perceived role in shutting down the Scans_Daily […]
LOVE YOUR SUMMATION!!!!
[…] presented opinions well worth a read. MightyGodKing’s fantastically footnoted weigh-in is here., Cissie_King tells the tale here, and over in that corner of the internet is grayarcadian’s […]
Peter David is a first class @$$#ole. I went with a friend who was a big fan, a guy who had served this country as an Army Medic in Iraq for a year and a half. A guy that saved people lives and now as a paramedic continues to save peoples lives and Peter David treated him like he wasting his precious time. My buddy has a big personality but he didnt deserve to be treated like crap. I asked the people that work at the comic book store later what Peter David’s problem was and they just shrugged and said, “He’s sort of known for being a bit of a jerk to fans.” He writes for comic books and thinks he is too important to be bothered by the fans that by his comics? Peter David is more than a jerk be is a first class a$$#ole.
[…] expect that outcome of his complaint. MightyGodKing actually explored this very issue in detail, and I can find no fault in his summation of things. It’s just that all of that makes things […]
[…] expect that outcome of his complaint. MightyGodKing actually explored this very issue in detail, and I can find no fault in his summation of things. It’s just that all of that makes things […]