I remember my dad bringing it home for me when he returned from work one night.  I know I also read TV21.  But it’s COUNTDOWN that sticks in my mind for some reason.  It was a science fiction anthology comic wherein all the stories were licensed from TV shows of the period, with one main exception.  That exception being the series within COUNTDOWN that was also titled COUNTDOWN, which licensed design work from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY:

The art on that strip, as you will have noted, is by the great John M Burns, one of the real unsung heroes of British comics.  As is this panel to the left.  For those of you who study comics, let me reiterate: this is commercial British comics art, mainstream sold-on-the-newsstand comics art, from 1971. Below is another bit from COUNTDOWN-the-series, a recap block from a later episode.  This is the bottom half of a single page, and I cropped it so you can also see the page furniture.  The pagination on COUNTDOWN counted backwards, from 22 to 1.  So 6 was towards the back of the book.

A cheerful moment from the DOCTOR WHO strip that ran in COUNTDOWN (these were the Jon Pertwee years).  It was a mild curiosity of the strip that it always called him “Dr Who,” not “The Doctor,” something that I think only other happened in the Peter Cushing film versions.

A piece of a UFO episode, based on the Gerry Anderson series.  They did like their jagged layouts – I’m not sure if that’s a Frank Bellamy influence or not.  There’s certainly still some of the British newspaper strip style in it.

Ah, but the other thing they did in COUNTDOWN…

…was articles.  I’m sure I wasn’t able to understand much of what was going on.  But somehow I think some of it sunk in…

And the problem with webcomics, as people said over and over again, was that there was no way to monetise them.

Way back in the day, in fact, people talked about how what the medium needed was an iPod for comics.  I, and probably others, countered that what was in fact needed was an iTunes for comics.  The delivery system, not the device.  Comixology, Graphic.ly, iVerse and all the others are in the business of trying to provide the iTunes for comics.  But, of course, with the iPad, we got the iPod for comics, too, the perfect device for reading them. 

(I am, for the purposes of this thought, ignoring the Kindle, and also Android tablets.)

But no-one seemed to have cracked the Season Pass yet.  I’ve talked to a few digital-comics services about this: if your service doesn’t allow you to buy a subscription that has your favourite comics automagically download to your device or your in-service locker, then I think you’re missing a huge piece of potential.

Of course, that function doesn’t strictly exist in webcomics.  For two and a half years I was doing this nearly every week:

And I think it was Tom Spurgeon who commented that the closure of my long-running email blast BAD SIGNAL meant that he wasn’t getting a notification in email every Friday that the new episode of FREAKANGELS was up, which made it the easiest webcomic for him to keep up with.

It occurred to me today – and my mind’s mostly been elsewhere – that digital comics and webcomics are not the same thing at all, and are not the same thing in ways other than the obvious.

There is no experience of broadcast in digital comics.  Digital comics are, in fact, the closest digital emulation of the store experience: they’re flung up on a virtual shelf.

Webcomics are broadcast.  From the moment they’re uploaded, they’re surrounded by an expanding sphere of URLs and shortcodes, of RTs and Likes and +1s, and are being opened on desktops and laptops and tablets and phones.

Yes, they’re hard to monetise.  Yes, you’ll probably have to sell something other than the comic, and hope that someone notices you and offers you a book deal of some kind, and that’s a high bar because chances are that you’re not as good as Hope Larson or Kate Beaton, and placing advertising is always dodgy (even Avatar Press, who funded FREAKANGELS, put Google Ads on the site in the last few weeks of the run.  And FREAKANGELS made a profit in print).

The focus is off webcomics right now.  People are looking at how to get into the digital comics services.  And quite rightly: they offer the possibility of bypassing the zero-sum game of serialising new and original material into the direct sales comics store market, a market that’s frequently been quite adamant about how it doesn’t want to sell new and original material.  If I had the ability to go into digital comics right now and attempt to access a paying audience for new work, I absolutely would.

(I’ve run out of both available collaborators and tolerance for the toxic shit of the business.)

But webcomics are where the reach is.  Webcomics are not the inferior option just because there’s not a payment system in place.  Webcomics, for some little time to come, are where you’re going to hear about new things first.  Not least because it’s tough to bit.ly or t.co into an in-app purchase.

(I can get you to Comixology’s webpage for CASANOVA: AVARITIA 2, but that doesn’t give me a buy link for the digital comic.  For that, I had to go into the digital-store website and do a search to find the comic’s digital-store page.  I’m not singling out Comixology: I use their service more than any other, in fact.  I’m just saying, this ain’t solved yet, even by the designers I like the most.)

Also, it’s a hell of a lot easier to take your time telling a story when you’re not charging people.

And, while there’s a smile in that comment, there’s also a degree of truth.  Compressing comics down to twenty pages, nineteen pages, probably eight or ten or twelve pages when people get to producing original material through digital comics services… while it’ll certainly make a nice change for a lot of people, after a decade of spacious and airy commercial comics, I’m compelled to point out that the crushed-in nature of commercial comics in the 1970s was one of the driving forces behind the big changes to the commercial medium that came in the 80s.  People were desperate for longer episodes and arcs that allowed them to tell stories more novelistically – and, in large part, they did that by using the then-new process of selling to the direct sales comics store market.

We’re all looking at compression techniques now, because we need them for commercial comics and we’re going to need them for digital comics.  Look at this Howard Chaykin page from AMERICAN FLAGG! in 1983, for instance:

In going back and studying this – for the millionth time since I bought this comic in 1983 – I found that I had somehow forgotten one thing about it.  This comic is 28 pages long.  The first 12 issues of AMERICAN FLAGG in fact form one graphic novel of some 330+ pages.  (And I’m telling you now, if you’ve never read AMERICAN FLAGG!, and you’re interested in comics and science fiction, then you need to sort that shit out, because this is the great lost commercial graphic novel of the 80s, and it should be racked with WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS everywhere.)

Some things work at a smaller page count.  FELL was 16 pages an episode, but those were just a string of little one-act plays.  People want to be able to do more than one-act plays in the medium.  People also forget that the Anglophone medium’s greatest graphic novel picaresque, some 6000 pages long, was serialised in monthly 20-page parts:

CEREBUS was a direct-market publishing phenomenon because, really, there was nowhere else Dave Sim and Gerhard could have done it.  The idea of the direct market supporting something like CEREBUS now is laughable.  The only place you could do something so massive and foolhardy would in fact be in webcomics: the lesson of the Foglios and the only comic sf fans seem ever to have heard of, GIRL GENIUS, now in its 11th volume, somewhere over 1000 pages in total by now.

AMERICAN FLAGG! is to digital comics – compression, jamming in as much material as possible to justify a purchase that still may not appear as valuable as an mp3 or a TV show episode while costing comparably much because people are fucking idiots – as CEREBUS is to webcomics.  CEREBUS, before many of us had seen manga, introduced us to new conceptions of pause and space.  It took its time, wandered and rambled (much as I am here, but I have the excuse of incipient senility).  Even then, the series’ audience was split into two overlapping sets: those early adopters who bought the book every month, and those who waited for the hefty “phonebooks” that collected the series every twenty-five episodes or so.  The entirety of FREAKANGELS would not quite fill two CEREBUS phonebooks.

FREAKANGELS’ audience came in three parts.  People who read it every week online.  People who’d come back to the site every few weeks to read a bunch of episodes all at once.  And people who didn’t read it online at all, and just bought the print editions every six months.  All of which allowed me to tell the story at my own pace – for the people who liked the pace and came in weekly, for the people who liked a bigger chunk, and for the people who wanted a sixth of the story all at once.  The free-broadcast to paid-print model let me tell a story any way I wanted.  There’s a degree of possibly unfounded trust that the nature of broadcast will allow the story to (eventually) find the people who like it, but we got away with it.

But, as I say, the focus is off webcomics.  Everyone seems to be eyeing the digital comics services, and I suspect that within six months it’s going to be a lot easier to get on to a digital comics shelf.  (Just as, right now, it seems to be very easy to get on to a Kindle.)  Which makes sense.  People like to be paid.  My concerns are that if you make it harder to look at something, then you’re making it harder to access the full set of people who might be prepared to spend money on it.  That, and…

…this is harder to make sense of, perhaps?  It may just be a weird personal tic masquerading as a concern, that is meaningless to everyone else?  But I always saw webcomics as the place where people could do huge, sprawling picaresques.  I thought webcomics had a great potential to be the place where you’d get graphic novels that read like Pynchon or Neal Stephenson or add your own discursive, meandering and circumlocutious author here.  And certainly some people got close to that – we could both write our lists of Really Good Graphic Novels Done On The Web here, although mine might have less of the “funny” stuff than yours.  But I have a feeling we may not see many more.

I’m sure it can be made a meaningless stat, but check out Wikipedia’s list of notable webcomics.  Look at the bulge, and look at how the list shrinks off by 2011.

I wished for an iTunes for comics.  And that was probably my first mistake.  For now I seem to have very few broadcasts to pick up for free on my iPod for comics, and it seems that there may be fewer by the day.  And I can’t help but think of that as another missed opportunity.

Luckily, ideas don’t die.  They just cycle around and come back again, like nineteen-page comics and doing things the way we did in the 1970s (when comics were shit).

If you made it this far, I apologise for how much closer you are to your death from old age now.

So DC Comic’s media-blitzed massive relaunch of its entire line in September got them this:

A half-point lead in dollar share over Marvel Comics (who had one high-profile launch in the September frame).

A five-point lead in units sold over Marvel Comics.

But all those units DC sold are returnable.

Thank god all those DC execs told everyone they weren’t interested in market share.  Otherwise someone might have come away with the notion that DC really intended to give Marvel a fight in the marketplace and make Marvel sort their own shit out.  What a stroke of luck for everybody.

Random and ultimately conclusionless jottings on the notion of rhetorical comics.

Which is an inexact and probably not useful term, but polemical comics seems even worse.

It’s an idea I’ve been interested in for years, but somehow never had the time to fully develop. It comes from having grown up with the extended televisual essay, also sometimes referred to as rhetorical television. The first one that really impacted me was James Burke’s CONNECTIONS:

You can throw THE ASCENT OF MAN into that bucket too, and probably COSMOS if you feel like it. And, most recently, the work of Adam Curtis, including this summer’s ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE.

The text overlaid on the image is termed a super, for superimposition. A fusion of the intertitle, the text card between sequences in the silent movie, and the lower third or chyron, the explanatory text overlays most often found in the lower third of the screen in news broadcasts. (“Chyron” comes from “Chyron Corporation,” the company most associated with their generation.)

I have a habit of staring at things until they unpack in my head.

It’s an awkward tool to adapt for comics, because it kind of relies on the motion behind it to ensure the whole thing doesn’t stop dead. I tried floating supers on a Marvel comic called ULTIMATE HUMAN once, just because these things should be used to try stuff out on.

When there’s a moving image behind the supers, running time isn’t necessarily being eaten. We can process the events behind the super as well as the super itself. Serial comics can’t match that easily. Real estate gets eaten.

Fraction and crew try supers in CASANOVA: AVARITIA 1. The super’s on a repeated image. They match the super with a hard change in visual tone, a stringed soundtrack descending for half a bar into a doom metal chord. It fits the general warm, organic, analogue feel of a CASANOVA comic, but to me it also opens up the path to the adoption of visual glitch for a similar effect.

[x]

Matt’s not going for a rhetorical feel: it’s narrative-diegetic, if you like. It’s in the same bucket, as, say, the end of ANIMAL HOUSE:

Actually, I’m going to correct myself. Fiction-diegetic, perhaps. Because a rhetorical piece obviously has its own narrative. The lyric essay, as pushed a year or two back by REALITY HUNGER, uses all the tools of fiction without being fiction. Which, again, isn’t a million miles away from the tenets of the New Journalism. The supers in CASANOVA don’t pop you out of the story. They serve the story.

In something that is broadly non-fiction, the expectations of being immersed in the text are a little different. A story is being told, but you don’t enter it with the desire to be wrapped up warmly in the internal logics of a new little world. Which is one reason why so many darlings get killed, in the writing of fiction: you can’t always brake to talk about something interesting to you without bringing on that business of “readers being thrown out of the story.” You can’t draw attention to the fact that the backdrop to the car journey really is just two stagehands winding a long paper mural to create the illusion of travel through the landscape.

Except, of course, when you can.

[x]

The essay has a different pact with the reader or viewer. The pact is that you’ll be taken from A to B and that there will be a point to the trip, but also that you’re probably going to get to B via C through Z. And not necessarily in abecedarian order.

Fusing that approach with fiction presumably loses you a lot of readers. People being taken out of the story. People who want the story to be the point. I guess an early Thomas Pynchon novel would kill those people stone dead. The thing to bear in mind is that those people already have lots of other books to read.

(A dozen years ago, I did a comic that was nothing but art and dialogue and brief supers, with the explicit intent of keeping people “inside” the book. No internal monologue, no box captions where I could possibly help it. Some of you will be more familiar with that style from Marvel’s “Ultimate” line, particular “The Ultimates.”)

There is a space where the narrative is the point, and the “story” is just one of the things that keeps it moving.

The examples I’ve used aren’t the only ones, of course. Just the ones that occur to me this afternoon, sitting out in the garden writing this. And there will probably be a few people I’m completely unaware of, working in webcomics or minicomics who’ve solved all these tools.

It’s all unlikely to be something I’ll ever get to fully develop, unless something very unusual happens, like the perfect trusted collaborators appearing out of nowhere and sometimes materialising with open funding. And also a few more hours in every day. But, with all the talk about commercial comics going back to the Nineties, or pricing themselves out of the market, or all the other shit-smoke that gets blown every day to stop people thinking about what their next move really *could* be…

…well, it’s just a pleasant thought to me, that a few people might say, “well, these old paradigms are all well and good, but maybe I just want to find new ways to talk about the things that are interesting to me, and people can either come along with me or not.”

It’s a rough ride. I don’t think, for instance, that as many people are as interested in old Smoky & The Bandit flicks as Joe Casey, but I love that Joe’s just saying fuckit and doing BUTCHER BAKER anyway. That said, BUTCHER BAKER intercut with a visual representation of the backmatter essays Joe’s writing, story interleaved with rhetorical comics, or even studded with supers about what Joe’s *really* talking about… that would have been something to see.

Most of us descend into the pop stuff, like BUTCHER BAKER or CAPTAIN SWING or whatever, because it’s where most of us came from. But it always comes with the auctorial request to the rest of the pop medium, I think: please be less boring. Please be less interested in your rules about what comics can and can’t do. Please just say something interesting.

How the hell did I end up there?

[send]

Over the spring, I invited a few friends and acquaintances of mine in the comics-drawing business to do me Three Panels for the site.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

In the general pursuit of keeping the site ticking over while I wrestle with the last chunk of GUN MACHINE, I thought I’d open the idea up.

Perhaps you’d like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can’t turn to mud when I run it at 640px.

The ones I like best will be posted here from 12 – 16 September.

Thank you for your time.

Announcement of a new comics project by Rufus Dayglo.  Facebook page.

At Bristolwhip.

Just saw this Wikileaks-released cable flagged on Twitter:

The real reason this contact has such trouble is that the most conservative Saudis oppose the celebration of birthdays as un-Islamic; however, the reasons Customs officers cite are typically more specific and bizarre. She said that during her efforts to gain the release of her most recent shipment from customs, she was told that Barbie (pictured on cups she hoped to sell) was a Zionist figure, while pictures of Spiderman on paper plates shooting webs really symbolized a crypto-Christian sign of benediction.

So Ed Brubaker, on Twitter, was talking about not starting a story until he knew how it ended, concluding with the thought:

This prompted the following thoughts by Brian Bendis:

If I’d been around at the time the exchange was happening, I might have pointed out that Brian’s favourite novels weren’t cancelled. They simply reached their natural ending. But I think that would have been unproductive, because on second reading I saw Brian’s underlying point.

Brian (and Joe Quesada, I guess) see digital comics as potentially doing to the serialised graphic novel what the mp3 did to the album. Digital comics services are still very much all about the single rather than the graphic novel. They’re not selling TRANSMETROPOLITAN as ten collections. They’re selling it as sixty singles. Mp3s are priced individually at most music services because people will buy the bits of an album they want. The days of being able to force the sale of a complete unit of songs, in a predetermined running order, are long gone. And I suspect what’s being said here is that there’s a belief that comics could go a bit like that. I also suspect it’s a bit of wishful thinking, hoping that waiting-for-the-trade will go away if you write technically infinite storylines that put the focus back on the individual single, and the individual single being the point of instant gratification that you load on to your tablet.

That said, if you deliberately write against collection as a method to embrace digital distribution…

…well, as I’ve said before, Archie Goodwin once told me that the only qualititative difference between superhero comics and soap operas is that superhero comics replace love scenes with fight scenes. And those shows only end when they get cancelled.

It’s an interesting discussion to have. It would even more firmly separate Marvel and DC (whom I imagine are on the way to this kind of thinking already) from, well, pretty much everybody else.

This is basically a half-baked capture of the relevant points that I’ll come back to at a later date. Have to take my daughter shopping now. For books.

Ken Reid’s FACEACHE.

#SCRUNGE

Related articles

• Sneaker Pimps (warrenellis.com)
• A Few Notes On Marvel Comics’ Digital Strategy (warrenellis.com)

Cover image from a forthcoming graphic novel called KETSUEKI by Richmond Clements and Inko, from Markosia.  I know nothing about it, just happened across the pretty picture.

Related articles

• Research Gem Of The Day (warrenellis.com)
• FREAKANGELS Vol 6 Announced (warrenellis.com)
• Here Are Some Things (warrenellis.com)

Matt Fraction. Gabriel Ba. September 7. Print and digital.

Probably the best science fiction series in the world right now.

Related articles

• A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics (warrenellis.com)
• Why I Love Katie West (warrenellis.com)
• Kickstarter, #3 Indie Comics Publisher? (warrenellis.com)

The New DC comics stuff looks so much like stuff I would never read that it oddly fills me with hope that they are targetting the core audience they want.  If a 43-year old man looks at most of this promo stuff and goes meh, then that’s very probably a good sign for them.  Best of luck to Dan D, Jim L et all for the imminent relaunch.

[edited to add: slow day on the comics news internets, eh?]

Related articles

• Sneaker Pimps (warrenellis.com)
• DC And Digital Comics Strategies (warrenellis.com)

Time was, back in the Nineties, comics editors who had a writing slot to fill on a mandated company owned comic would institute something of a foot race.  They’d contact several writers at once and ask them to write detailed pitches for the book.  Sometimes it paid, sometimes it didn’t.

I remember taking part in these on three occasions, back when I was a newish writer.

I remember being asked to pitch for a mooted BLACK PANTHER 2099 book at Marvel.  The book actually never happened at all.  I imagine none of the pitches were up to snuff, and they just killed the idea.  I dimly remember mine being a sort of terrifying “Fear Of A Black Planet”/Huey P Newton thing, with Black Panther Cells run from Marvel’s fictional African country Wakanda destabilising corporate-run America.  I think I used some of the stuff in there for my later DOOM 2099 sequence. I wasn’t happy at doing the foot race: I got paid, and my foot hadn’t been in the door that long, and I supposed this was just the way things were done.  But I had a feeling that maybe it wasn’t the best way to do things.

I also took part in a run-off for a BLADE comics series.  You didn’t always find out whom you were in competition with, but this time I’d discovered that I was running against my good friend Ian Edginton.  It was awkward, but we had a teddibly English gentlemen’s-manners thing about the whole situation, and I was delighted for him when he got the book.  Also slightly irritated, because I could have used the money, and as corporate jobs go it had some potential for fun and advancement.  But I’d obviously rather the gig go to a friend if it had to go to anyone but me.  I remember that Ian ran into problems on the book straight away.  And a few months later the editor phoned me and asked me if I’d take over the book.

I was young, and arrogant, and a bit of a prick, and I said to him, “No.  You should have got it right the first time.”  Which was offensive on a number of levels, not least to poor Ian, who did not deserve the inference.  But I didn’t get anywhere without having a degree of security in my own talent.  And I was pissed off.

The third foot-race I did was for HELLBLAZER.  My guts got in the way of my head.  I wanted to write that book.  I wanted a place to do British social fiction and work out a fusion of the British crime and mystery traditions, and, hell, I liked the idea of working on a property whose lineage included Alan Moore and Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis.  They are all greater than I am, by miles, and the little ego demon in my gut said “you want this.”

They gave the book to Eddie Campbell.  Which led to a comedy moment of me finishing up in a Glasgow urinal and Eddie, drunk off his arse, lurching into the room, seeing me, and staggering back saying “you’re not going to hit me, are you?”  Eddie fucking Campbell.  I still recall, quite vividly, the first time I read Eddie’s work, and my entire conception of comics to that point changing in sixty seconds.  Like I was going to complain about Eddie Campbell getting a gig over me.

A few months later, the editor phoned me and asked me if I’d take over the book.

And I said to him – and I considered that editor a good friend – “No.  You should have got it right the first time.”

Because, well, see above.  But also: what happened to the idea of thinking of a writer you like, and approaching that writer, and working things out with that writer?  If you need to put a body on a corporate-owned book, do you really want to do that in such a way that breeds several kinds of resentment at once?  Starting with the resentment born of having to knife-fight your peers for scraps in front of the landlord’s table?

So I said No, and I said No in a way that people would remember.  And probably talk about, since this is comics.  I don’t recall getting invited to any more foot races.  But I’d relatively quickly worked to the point I’d wanted to get to, where I could generate my own material and survive on it.  Of course, being in comics, I talked to people too, and it seemed like this method was going away.  I wasn’t about to take credit for it, but I liked not having to shout at people anymore.

(It still happened in videogames.  I listened to long spiels by at least two producers of major game franchises, asked them how many writers they were talking to, and then told them that when they wanted me to write for them, I’d take their calls.  Because I am older and hopefully less arrogant but, let’s face it, still a bit of a prick.)

Things did change in the 2000 – 2010 space.  (And when editors came to me with corporate gigs, they came because they wanted to talk to me.)  But you know what?  I’m hearing a lot lately about writers being put into foot races on gigs.  And not only do they not know who else is running for the job – but many of them seem not to be told they’re in a foot race at all.  Writers who assumed they were writing the gig are being told that they never had the gig at all, that other writers have been run parallel to them.  Even though they were put through multiple drafts.  They didn’t know they were in competition.

Not only are they fostering a creative condition where even Eddie fucking Campbell can’t triumph, but they are finding new and interesting ways to piss off more people than they’re hiring.  Now, comics has no shortage of resentful people –  but do you really want to create exponentially more?  People who can identify the exact individuals who fucked them over, and wait?

Commercial comics can be enough of a snakepit even in relatively benign times.  But bringing back a process both demeaning and creatively inferior, and just fucking lying to people about it?  I don’t like what that says about the next cycle in the field.  I guess the Nineties really are coming back.

Related articles

• DC And Digital Comics Strategies (warrenellis.com)
• A Few Notes On Marvel Comics’ Digital Strategy (warrenellis.com)
• Kickstarter, #3 Indie Comics Publisher? (warrenellis.com)
• A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics (warrenellis.com)

Corey Lewis, creator of graphic novels SHARKNIFE and the forthcoming SHARKNIFE DOUBLE Z (which I seem to remember writing a back cover blurb for) is up to something again.  Look at these:

Related articles

• DC And Digital Comics Strategies (warrenellis.com)
• A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics (warrenellis.com)
• American Comics Reader Facing Criminal Charges In Canada (warrenellis.com)

Related articles

• A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics (warrenellis.com)
• I Spy Bits Of The New CASANOVA Series (warrenellis.com)
• Kickstarter, #3 Indie Comics Publisher? (warrenellis.com)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Charles Brownstein
charles.brownstein@cbldf.org

CBLDF Forms Coalition to Defend
American Comics Reader Facing Criminal Charges In Canada

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today announces that it is forming a coalition to support the legal defense of an American citizen who is facing criminal charges in Canada that could result in a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in prison for comics brought into the country on his laptop.  This incident is the most serious in a trend the CBLDF has been tracking involving the search and seizure of the print and electronic comic books carried by travelers crossing borders.

CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein says, "Although the CBLDF can’t protect comic fans everywhere in every situation, we want to join this effort to protect an American comic fan being prosecuted literally as he stood on the border of our country for behavior the First Amendment protects here, and its analogues in Canadian law should protect there."

The CBLDF has agreed to assist in the case by contributing funds towards the defense, which has been estimated to cost $150,000 CDN.  The CBLDF will also provide access to experts and assistance on legal strategy.  The CBLDF’s efforts are joined by the recently re-formed Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund, a Canadian organization that will contribute to the fundraising effort.  Please contribute to this endeavor by making a tax deductible contribution here.

The facts of the case involve an American citizen, computer programmer, and comic book enthusiast in his mid-twenties who was flying from his home in the United States to Canada to visit a friend.  Upon arrival at Canadian Customs a customs officer conducted a search of the American and his personal belongings, including his laptop, iPad, and iPhone. The customs officer discovered manga on the laptop and considered it to be child pornography.  The client’s name is being withheld on the request of counsel for reasons relating to legal strategy.

The images at issue are all comics in the manga style.  No photographic evidence of criminal behavior is at issue.  Nevertheless, a warrant was issued and the laptop was turned over to police.  Consequently, the American has been charged with both the possession of child pornography as well as its importation into Canada. As a result, if convicted at trial, the American faces a minimum of one year in prison. This case could have far reaching implications for comic books and manga in North America.

The CBLDF’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to aid the case by raising funds to contribute to the defense and to help the defense with strategy and expert resources.

Brownstein says, “This is an important case that impacts the rights of everyone who reads, publishes, and makes comics and manga in North America. It underscores the dangers facing everyone traveling with comics, and it can establish important precedents regarding travelers rights.  It also relates to the increasingly urgent issue of authorities prosecuting art as child pornography.  While this case won’t set a US precedent, it can inform whatever precedent is eventually set.  This case is also important with respect to artistic merit in the Canadian courts, and a good decision could bring Canadian law closer to US law in that respect.  With the help of our supporters, we hope to raise the funds to wage a fight that yields good decisions and to create tools to help prevent these sorts of cases from continuing to spread."

Find out more on the case here. To help support the case, you can make a monetary contribution here.

About CBLDF
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community. They have defended dozens of Free Expression cases in courts across the United States, and led important education initiatives promoting comics literacy and free expression. For additional information, donations, and other inquiries call 800-99-CBLDF or visit them online at www.cbldf.org.

About CLLDF
The Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1987 to raise money for the defense of a Calgary, Alberta comic shop whose owners were charged with selling obscene materials. The CLLDF has since been maintained on an ad hoc basis to provide financial relief for Canadian comics retailers, publishers, professionals, or readers whose right to free speech has been infringed by civil authorities.  Largely dormant since the early 1990s, the CLLDF is reforming to provide support for this case, and reorganizing to ensure that help will be readily available for future cases involving Canadian citizens or authorities.  To help the CLLDF in this mission, please go to www.clldf.ca.

This will mean nothing to 99% of you beyond being an obscure cultural curiosity, but I have just discovered this gallery of covers from British small press comics of the 1980s, and now I seem to have something in my eye