Literay comics zine Eisner cancelled

cover of the first issue of Eisner Beeldverhalen

Eisner is a Dutch literary comics magazine founded in 2008 and published twice a year. So far five numbers have appeared, but there won’t be a sixth, as the publisher has pulled the plug. According to Michael Minneboo’s story (Dutch) even with a subsidy of 10,00 euro each for the first three issues sales never broke even. Eisner only managed to get around 250 subscribers, with about 1,000 issues sold to book and comics shops, though a lot fewer than that actually ever reached a reader.

A sad story for what, as far as I can tell from Michael’s post, seemed like an interesting magazine, an attempt to publish comics aimed at a proper literary audience rather than at grownup comics readers as classic comics zines like Titanic or Wordt Vervolgd (The Dutch edition of A Suivre) used to do in the eighties. As it turned out, this was much harder than it seemed and judging from the sales figures it never found its readers. The main question now is whether this is because that audience just isn’t there, or whether Eisner never was promoted properly to this audience.

One clue might be the first sentence in the previous paragraph. Michael Minneboo’s post was the first I heard about Eisner myself and if I’m not part of its target audience, who is? Somebody like me, who is or used to be seriously comics addicted, who no longer has collecting comics as a hobby, but rather reads comics like they read any other book, who doesn’t necessarily keeps up with comics news all that much but who would try a magazine like this if they stumble across it. Yet Eisner never reached this audience because I never knew about it, so it must have done something wrong..

That is the best scenario I can think of. The worst scenario is that there just isn’t an audience for good comics, or “graphic novel”s as we’re supposed to call grown up comics in the Netherlands now. It might just be that the sales success of a select few “graphic novels” was a fluke, that Persopolis or Logicomix sold so well because of their subject matter and a media hype rather than because these tapped a new literary audience that would be interested in more “graphic novels”. The flood of inferior comics packaged as “graphic novels” won’t have helped either in this regard.

Quite likely the truth lies somewhere in the middle: a magazine that only appears twice in a year and is fairly expensive (fifteen euros per issues) isn’t perhaps the best way to get potential new readers to sample the delights of comics. If you only appear once every six months you get lost in the flood of magazines and you need to keep publicising your existence. The price meanwhile, though obviously needed to break even, is too high for an impulse buy. So it had two strikes against it already, which need excellent p.r. and a bit of luck to find an audience that looks to be smaller than the sales of the few bestselling graphic novels might lead you to expect.

And of course most magazines, comics or otherwise, fail.

Light linkblogging

Learning to Read Adam Roberts and On Learning to Read Adam Roberts
How do you solve a problem like Adam Roberts, a writer every book of which I’ve read I’ve disagreed with and/or disliked? Whom, despite this, I still keep coming back to every few years or so. Bad writers you can dismiss, writers that you dislike you can dismiss, even writers you like and enjoy you can often set aside more easily than a writer that irritates you, like a piece of sand in an oyster.

Vuijlsteke brainstorms the right colours to use in a health check for some server or something
For now he’s settling on a scheme with five colours between dark green and dark red. Myself, I’ve more and more realised anything but three colours (safe, unknown/undecided and danger Will Robinson danger) is overkill and confusing especially to higher management. Really high management (or “overhead”) only needs two: “need to deal with this to be finally rid of this project” and “let the little people worry about this when we’re gone”.

Remember when Iron Maiden got a number one hit?
The discussion is a bit unfair on “Bring your Daughter …to the Slaughter” which is a better live than single track but interesting in seeing people’s opinions about who’s actually listening to metal. The consensus seem to confirm my own hunch that it was both the boys you wouldn’t trust in woodshop with a sharp knife and the more nerdy dreaming types with Tolkien posters and D&D habits as well as people like, well, Ben.

Somebody else fed up with the Holland Uber Alles message of much current advertising
Not to mention in current politics cultural commentary, popular culture… Holland is a decent enough country to live in, if it were not for a large part of the people living in it and their absymal tastes in everything. Dutch culture does not have to be inferior to anywhere else, but by and large we’ve mostly seem to haven given up competing with the big boys and retreated to celebrating our own mediocrity. As long as it drapes itself in orange and clogs and windmills any old shit can sell as shinola.

The Comics Journal has been redesigned and under new management
It keeps its worst aspect though: having to register to be able to comment. I hate sites that do that, especially when if you really feel the need to filter your readers, use OpenID and let people register with e.g. their Livejournal accounts rather than setting up your own crappy registring process. Tor.com does this as well and my comments nine out of ten times still get eaten. Doesn’t endear me to the fsckers.

Low rent but effective



The political commercial shown above was made for the provincial elections last Wednesday, by a CDA candidate who was put on a normally unelectable place in his party’s election list. It shows a man and woman together in bed, the woman asking the man what his tattoos mean. He answers he doesn’t know but just likes how they look. The woman answers that she would never put something on her body she doesn’t understand and tells him she has a tattoo too: cue closeup of her bum with the CDA logo on it…

It led to a bit of controverse (the CDA not being a party much given to using sex to sell itself) but it got the guy noticed enough to get him elected. Sex sells, even in elections normally ignored by the great unwashed.

More about the Dutch comics market

More grist on the mill for the idea that there’s something wrong with the Dutch comics market for adventure strips comes from Bart Croonenborghs:

Minck Oosterveer combines fluid brush work with high contrast black and white art and is best mostly known in US comic circles for his Boom! Studios work with Mark Waid on The Unknown. After The Exiles of Thoom debacle, Oosterveer just flat out admitted that at the moment the comic strip business in the Netherlands is not really worth the effort anymore. His popular Zodiac and Nicky Saxx newspaper strips both having been retired, Oosterveer finds the process of of actively hunting down new leads on projects tiring and time consuming, doubly so since payments are not what they used to be for these kind of newspaper strips.

Even Nicky Saxx recently winning the Dutch Oeuvre Award 2011 – the most important strip award in the Netherlands – couldn’t budge Oosterveer’s determination in abandoning the Dutch comics field. He has since revealed signing with an American agent, that he will be doing a new series with Mark Waid and is working on a creator owned graphic novel with writer Charles Webb. Having found the American comics work much more rewarding in terms of creator respect and payment, he has decided to focus his efforts on breaking through in the US comics market.

Word Vervolgd, Strip Leksikon der Lage Landen

Minck Oosterveer was the only Dutch comics creator still working in the long tradition of the adventure strip, that he has had to focus his efforts on the American comics market because Dutch comics paid too little to make a living is …not good. The comics market in the USA is after all godawful and has been for years, so to prefer that to the Dutch market means that for creators like Oosterveer at least the market here is worse…

And yet, as I showed last year, the market for “graphic novels” is booming, with books like the translated Robert Crumb Genesis or Logicomics selling well over 10,000 copies, something that for a normal book too would be very respectable in the relatively small Dutch book market.The graphic novel as a publishing phenomenom has indeed become succesful enough to become a bandwagon, with a flood of inferior work released as “graphic novel” which would’ve never gotten any media attention had they been called “comics”. Tonio van Vugt, editor of Zone 5300, Holland’s most prominent alt-comix zine, already warned about the detrimental effect this could and would have on the reputation of comics as a medium, when on the one hand you have an artificial divide in “graphic novels (literature, hip, available in quality bookstores) and “strips/comics” (pulp, oldfashioned, bought in strange little shops normal adults won’t go) and on the other hand much of what’s sold as “graphic novel” is crap, only able to confirm the stereotypes people already have about comics.

But there’s more going on. The Dutch comics market has always been very open to foreign comics, yet at the same time managed to have a strong comics industry itself as well, nourished through publication in a variety of weekly and monthly magazines, as well as newspaper publication. All these outlets slowly disappeared over time however, while the competition of cheaper foreign comics became stronger. There are so many good American, French, Japanese and other comics being translated that few Dutch cartoonists can competite with them. Who will take a gamble on Jan Janssen from Lutjebroek when they can publish e.g Charles Burns Black Hole quicker and cheaper and probably get a bigger audience? It’s the same as what happened to Dutch language science fiction in the seventies and eighties, when for a moment it did seem we could get a reasonable scene going (Eddy C. Bertin, Bob Laerhoven, Felix Thijssen, Wim Gijssen, the Gandymedes anthologies etc.) , but it turned out translating yet another Keith Laumer or Larry Niven novel was cheaper and more profitable too..

There are exceptions to this trend, like Barbara Stok or Maaike Hartjes (here reviewd by Branko Collin), but what they do is slice of life stories rooted in everyday Dutch life; not something you can easily find foreign substitutes for…

Portugal shows Holland the way

Nine years ago, Portugal decided to try and solve its persistent drugs problems through decriminalisation: the results are encouraging:

As the sweeping reforms went into effect nine years ago, some in Portugal prepared themselves for the worst. They worried that the country would become a junkie nirvana, that many neighborhoods would soon resemble Casal Ventoso, and that tourists would come to Portugal for one reason only: to get high. “We promise sun, beaches, and any drug you like,” complained one fearful politician at the time.

But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized — indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

Here in the Netherlands we’ve had this policy for much longer with largely the same results. Softdrugs like hash and wiet became generally accepted, as normal as drinkign alcohol and — surprise — turned out to be much less dangerous too. Meanwhile the greatest problem with hard drug users, especially heroine addicts, was that they were getting older and less healthy, as the existing users aged and few new people got addicted. Decriminalisation worked, but was awkward as no government ever quite dared to take the step to full legalisation. And now we have a rightwing government that is actively trying to hollow out decriminalisation by ill thought out measures like the “wietpas”. Ironically, it’s only now that other countries like Portugal have discovered the benefits of a more measured antidrugs policy…