Stumblebum Studios Archives - Don't Call It A Comeback #4

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Don't Call It A Comeback

by Josh Dahl

Back in the day, the joke was that the guest of honor at every comic convention in the country should be “a friend at Kinkos”.
These unsung subversives were the backbone of the small press industry. Thanks to them, if you wanted to make comics, all you needed was your imagination, pen and paper, and a Kinkos guy who valued your creative expression more then his own job.

The results were varied, but not really that different. They were almost all black and white copies on 8½ by 11 sheets, folded and center stapled to create a small magazine format. Sometimes colored paper would be used for the cover. Sunburst Yellow or Cosmic Blue were two popular options. The two ends of the spectrum could be generalized as the “ashcans” and the “zines”. The difference between these two kinds of books, and their creators, really came down to which aspects of this level of self-publishing they were uncomfortable with. For whatever stylistic and philosophical, differences these two kinds of books had, they both did one wonderful thing. That was: they got comics printed. Ignore whatever else can be said about the pros and cons of the format and remember that they got work out there. They turned wild imaginings into ink on a page that could be seen, held, sold, and shared. These photocopied comics put publishing right in the hands of the creator.

That alone is pretty cool.

“Ashcan” is a publishing industry term. An ashcan is something like a printer's proof. It is run off at some point to test the print quality, or something. It is immediately discarded hence the term “ashcan”. In the gimmick-crazed 90s, someone got the idea that these ashcans could be sold as very limited editions of comics books. Well, I am sure that is how the idea got started anyway. What actually hit the shelves, and consciousness of the comic reading populace, were little more than cheaply printed sketch books that were used to promote upcoming projects.
It would be a cool thing to have if you were really into a particular creator or book, but otherwise it didn't have a huge commercial appeal. What the ashcan did do, however, was to give a hip-sounding euphemism to small pressers who were shooting for flashiness and falling slightly short. Now instead of marketing as “This photocopied comic is the best we could do, but it is pretty cheap!”, they could proudly proclaim “Limited edition ashcan, now only 2 dollars!”.

Ashcanners, and I am generalizing here, wanted to be big time.

I'll give you an example. When we were still in high school, and long before we ever started work on “Rapid City”, Micah Faulkner and I almost did a comic called “Wild Thing”. Looking back, almost everything about it is embarrassing, but it was good enough to have the high schoolers who ran DS Comics jump all over it. They wanted to add it to their slate of books, which at that time consisted of one book called “Predator”. This book was quickly, and for obvious-to-everyone-else reasons, changed to “Lethal Predator”. These guys were very uncomfortable with, maybe even ashamed of, the level at which they were printing and publishing. They wanted to be big time. But there was some level of conscious, or unconscious, cognitive disconnect. It went something like this:

“Todd McFarlane writes and draws a comic book, we write and draw a comic book. People buy his comic books, people will buy our comics books. "

What they were too naive to notice was all of the time, effort, and money that is poured into the crafting, printing, marketing, and distributing of those Todd McFalane's comics. From their -- and I really should be saying “our” if I am going to be fair -- perspective, they made the comics, the rest was up to the fans to notice. They had big plans, for the future of their books and the futures of their characters. They even had plans for alternate futures for their characters.

I don't want this come off as sounding mean. For high school kids, they were doing a good job. At that moment, they were ahead of what I was doing. They were far more grounded than the guys who we met up with later who had lined paper notebooks with every page divided into eight squares, with a different super-hero in every square. Every page, every square. They wanted to do a comic book featuring all of these characters, they had even drawn a map of the planets in the distant solar system where they all lived. At one point, in a discussion about how to get issues colored, they suggested that the coloring be done in magic-marker right on the original art. Oh, and these guys were NOT in high school.

These are the same denials, the inabilities to accept or understand that it takes more than making super hero comics to be able to do what the major publishers do. It is the same kind of denial, just in different doses. It ranges from defiant optimism to deep delusion.

Ashcanners and zine artists were both in denial to some degree, they just lived at opposite ends of the denial spectrum. While the ashcan guys tried to believe that they were a flashy big-time publisher, the zine guys were busy denying that they wanted that flash at all. The guys and girls who produced zine style comics were in love with, and maybe too comfortable with, the DIY, Road-Warrior-chic, of photocopying your own comics. They used Bics, Sharpies, and collage techniques. They had army jackets, “Crass” patches, and (infrequently) their own cigarettes. They scorned the retailer sections of conventions so intensely that they often branched out into their own sub-cultural shows.

These guys were pretty cool. They valued creativity, expression, and independence above all else. The quality and presentation may have varied greatly, but there was never any doubt that they loved what they were doing. No one went to a show specifically seeking out a comic about a cynical bunny rabbit who went to high school. But, when you were standing there talking to the guy who made it, you really wanted it. Their passion and love for the medium was infectious. So many people left these encounters determined to make their own, that mini-comics instructional clinics became a regular occurrence.

They loved doing zine comics, but not really for the zine aspect of it. Rather, in spite of it. For them, the zine was simply the quickest and least encumbered route to what they actually wanted to get out of the comics experience. They wanted to express themselves in their own way, on their own terms, and at their own pace. Pirated Kinkos cards made costs so little that it didn't even matter if anyone wanted to read them. They had completely removed themselves from the consumer focused business model that has always crippled comics.

If their art was driven by sincerity and passion, then why am I claiming that they were in denial?

I think they saw the creativity-kryptonite built into trying to make a product that “consumers” want, and they pulled a little too hard in the other direction. It is one thing to be satisfied with a black and white single-staple fold-over, but it is another to convince yourself that that is as high as your ambitions climb. I don't mean to say that these folks wanted to draw Green Lantern, I am just saying that they wanted all of the bells and whistles that money shouldn't-have-to buy. They wanted bright, shiny, super-freaky, foil-pressed, holo-covered, mega-zines of their own imagining. Finding all of those things completely out of reach, they quickly cut to the medium available at hand. The photocopy. And they used it and twisted it and stretched it and extinguished those artistic fires inside themselves with gas-o-zine. They loved the freedom of the zine format, but truly the freedom was the only thing to love. The proliferation of the functional home computer proved this, even as it hammered nails into the photocopied comics' coffin-shaped long-box.

For the DIY ziner, computers offered a shortcut to the production bells-and-whistles that they had secretly been yearning for. It was like a vegan who sneaks to McDonald's suddenly discovering a really good veggie burger. Computer production presented the best of both worlds. They had the hands-on creativity and control, they had intimate personal expression, and they had a limitless tool box of visual tricks and techniques to be exploited. The black and white photocopied book suddenly seemed dull and dinghy. Almost all of the creative impulses it had once fed were now being covered by digitally manipulated and proliferated images. And then a week later, all of those home computers were connected to the World Wide Web.
The day of the ashcan and the zine ended that week.

Any creative yearning not adequately covered by digital production were swallowed up by the community and communication potential of the Internet. With enough solitary tinkering in HTML, a would-be ashcanner could have his own web page and web community. And we all know that comics folks excel at solitary tinkering. Even at “basically free”, the cost of printing dirty little copies on a copy machine was greater than the cost sending complete PDF comics all over the world. While the photocopy format offered a shot at publication, it also presented mostly limitations. It is the artfulness with which these limitations were avoided which defined what kind of photocopyist one would become.

By contrast, digital production and publication seemed to offer only unending possibility. One thing, though, still remains the same. Ashcan, webpage, zine, inter-active 3D video-scape, online portfolio, or 200 other forms I don't even know about yet...in the end, they are all just tools which the artist uses to express what artists express. And we all know that no matter what the tools, they are only as good as the creativity, skill, and commitment of the artist who uses them.

Visit Josh Dahl at his website www.monolithllc.com