Today's guest blogger is Larry Marder. Marder started his Beanworld experience in the early 80s with Eclipse Comics.  He was present at the summit in the late 80s that produced the Creator's Bill of Rights, and in 1993, tried his hand at self-publishing with Beanworld Press. Larry was a close friend during those years and we spent hours and hours talking about comics in hotel bars and restaurants. Larry has a way of analysing a situation and being able to see things very clearly; something that made obstacles seem less formidible – - at least to me. Larry was the go-to guy for a lot of us; me, Dave Sim, and Todd McFarlane to name a few.

We lost touch after he disappeared into the depths of the toy industry while he was President of McFarlane Toys. It had been years since we had a really good talk about comics. Last year at SPX, he showed up with a bunch of new Beanworld pages and a new vigor for the art form, hints and teases of which you can find at his Beanworld blog. In Part 1, Larry takes us up to the beginning of the movement in 1993. In Part 2, he talks about why it failed, the legacy of the self-publishers, and where we're all going from here…

Larry Marder Part 1: 

Jeff Smith has initiated a conversation with several veterans of the Self Publishing Movement of the 1990s.

The questions at hand are:
What, if any, is the lasting influence of the Self Publishing Movement of the 1990s? Did we actually accomplish anything? Do we have a legacy that influences today’s new comics creators? Did the retail model that we worked so hard to change, actually change? Good questions.
And here are some personal anecdotes before I get to any sort of answer.
Over the summer of 1975, while nurturing a backyard vegetable garden, I was hit by a thunderbolt of an idea for a fantasy world that I called the Beanworld. I knew that these stories would be told in the comics format but I didn’t believe that anyone might actually publish it. Underground comics had already collapsed from greed, rising paper costs, and drug paraphernalia laws. There was nothing on the horizon to replace it.

Big deal.
I didn’t care. I labored at my day job in the advertising business. I spent my nights and weekends working on my Beans. By 1980, I was writing and drawing finished comic book stories. And by then, a new form of publishing had emerged from the ashes of the underground comics–alternative genre comics very unlike the super hero fare of Marvel and DC.

These new comics were Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest and Dave Sim’s Cerebus. I first heard about these “ground-level” comics in the fan press. I had little trouble finding copies in the comic book shops of my Chicago neighborhood. These self-published titles were distributed through the same companies that moved Marvel and DC comics into the emerging comic book store marketplace.

Pretty soon, two new trends were unfolding. Cerebus publisher Aardvark-Vanaheim began issuing other titles such as Journey, Normalman, Neil the Horse, Flaming Carrot, and Ms Tree. ElfQuest publisher WaRP Press offered A Distant Soil, Myth and Adventures, Fantagraphics, previously only known as the publisher of The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes, tossed their hat into the ring with the Hernandez Brothers' Love & Rockets. These black and white comics vigorously explored a vast array of genres.

Simultaneously, there was a new sensibility taking root and growing within the mainstream publishers, starting with Frank Miller's run as a writer/artist on Daredevil and his revisionist take on Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. Virtually at the same time, Alan Moore's reboot of Swamp Thing followed by Watchmen, had everyone’s attention, no matter what corner of comic book industry one was working in.

Something akin to the alternative comics spirit was bursting forth from new independent publishing companies. Rocketeer and Groo at Pacific Comics, American Flagg, Mars, and Grimjack at First Comics. Grendel at Comico. Nexus and Badger at Capital City. And I entered the business when Beanworld joined Zot!, and Scout at Eclipse Comics,

"Comics have grown up," we all told ourselves. "The sky is the limit!"
Well, it didn’t happen.

The success of the alternative and independent comics led to an incredible arc of greed and lunacy that is remembered as the Great Black and White Boom and Bust. Whole histories can be written about why it happened.
Doesn't matter anymore though.
 
The effect was that everyone working in alternatives was hurt, wounded, or eliminated in the awful aftermath.

The next few years were tough for all of us working in non-traditional comics. As Max Alan Collins, during his Ms Tree run, once said to me, “We are independent because we have no alternative.”

In 1988, Dave Sim decided to compile the entire High Society story into one fat volume. The format was so thick this it quickly became known as the “phone book.”. Dave announced that his intent was to sell High Society directly to Cerebus fans through mail order and not offer it through the distribution/retail chain.

The thought that a story arc consisting of several dozen issues of a comic could be sold in one package at a hefty price was a big new concept. The idea that the book would stay in print in perpetuity was an even bolder idea. The information that this new part of the business would be completely denied to distributors and retailers was simply put, revolutionary.

The particulars of how this all shook out is a story in and of itself, but, it triggered a chain of events that led to the Creators’ Rights Summit Conference. I was one of the creators who attended the two day event in Northampton, MA.

Scott McCloud brought a document he’d drafted that became the Creator's Bill of Rights. It was edited and ratified by the comics creators there. We had our eyes on the future. We knew that in order for the business of the comic book art form to prosper, it had to reform its Depression-era way of conducting business. Two decades later, it is hard to remember how radical a document this was for its time. Most of the rights claimed in the document are now standard business practices. But the idea that a creator should show a contract to a lawyer before signing it was considered a dangerous notion at the time by publishers of all stripes.
 
Another incredibly important event that occurred in the late ‘80s was distribution growth and consolidation spasms. Many distributors either went out of business or were gobbled up by aggressive competitors. By 1988, instead of a patchwork of interlinking and overlapping small regional distributors, there were now two powerful national distributors. Sure there were still reliable regional distributors, but they were playing minor league ball now.

In the early ‘90s I went into the retail end of the business when I became Marketing Director of a chain of popular culture stores in Chicagoland called Moondog's. I was shocked to recognize how little knowledge the individual links of the business chain had of each other needs.

They way I perceived it was:
Creators understood publishers.
Publishers understood creators and distributors.
Distributors understood publishers and retailers.
Retailers understood distributors and consumers aka fans.

Creators and fans always understood each other—they were, in fact, two sides of the same coin. But in between the people-who-created-comics and the fans-that-read-comics were all these business people with an incredibly limited understanding of the other people they were thoroughly dependant upon.
Am I simplifying here?
Not really.

It was during this phase of my life that I met Jeff Smith in the early '90s. He had a handful of issues of Bone under his belt and a “gosh-wow” attitude that was quite refreshing to us, the survivors of the '80s cataclysms.

Jeff joined us in the loose confederation of self-published creators that began hanging out together at conventions. Instead of spending convention nights lying to each other about how much money we had made that day; we compared notes about how we believed the money flowed through the comic industry.

It was a heady time. We knew we were onto something, but we were primarily focused on the business model of that time–creating and distributing 32 page comic books; the periodical pamphlets that were the backbone of the industry.

But we also spent a lot of time dreaming about the future of the trade paperback as a new staple of making our living. We started to envision a time when our trades would always be in print. Our books would always be available for a retailer to restock the shelves; evergreen stock that never goes out of season or fashion.

End of Part 1