Google: threat or menace

Civil liberties, geekdom
Published on 1 Comment on Google: threat or menace

It’s a bit self serving, but this Torrentfreak article about Google censorship does raise a genuine concern about its power as the world’s number one search engine:

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

If you’re not on Google, you’re effectively invisible on the internet. Google therefore has an inordinate amount of power, yet barely any accountability. As a commercial organisation, their only responsibility is to their bottom line, fluff about “not being evil” notwithstanding, Yet having say a nationalised version of Google would not fill me with confidence either. Google is one of the ‘net’s natural chokepoints and what we need to get if we want to keep the internet free is a decentralised Google. Think what might have happened had Google censored the news of the Egyptian revolution.

More about the Dutch comics market

Comix, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
Published on

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…

Reassuring to know Martin Amis remains a knob

"Literature", Numpties
Published on 1 Comment on Reassuring to know Martin Amis remains a knob

Wild horses couldn’t drag me in front of the television to watch Sebastian Ffaulks on fiction and fortunately it’s also forbidden under the Genevea Conventions to force people to watch his self-satisfied smug face, which is why I missed Martin Amis being a knob again. When asked if he would ever write a children’s book he said “‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”:

Remarks about children’s books made by Martin Amis on the BBC’s new book programme Faulks on Fiction, broadcast this week, have caused anger and offence among children’s writers.

“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book,” Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. “I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”

“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,” he added.

These remarks led to the usual (justified) outrage by those he targeted, but they’re really nothing more than unthinking snobbism from a has-been, a somewhat desperate attempt to remain “controversial”. Of course Amis would be disdainful of children’s books: he wouldn’t be Amis if he didn’t look down on anything that wasn’t written by him or his mates like Ian McEwan. It’s pointless to get angry at him or try to reason him out of his prejudices; he only says these things for the publicity and the image.

“Holland lacks a tradition of realistic comics”

Comix, video
Published on 3 Comments on “Holland lacks a tradition of realistic comics”


Daily Webhead: Hal Foster Award 2011 from Michael Minneboo on Vimeo.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Hal Foster Award before Michael Minneboo posted about it last Tuesday, but it turns out to have been established in 1982, to honour people working in the margins of the comics industry. Last year’s winner was Klaas Knol, for his work with Lambiek comics shop, who is seen in the video above handing over the award to Mat Schifferstein, this year’s winner. Schifferstein is the co-owner and founder of Sherpa, a small press high quality publisher founded in 1985 which has both encouraged local talents like Bert van der Meij and Lian Ong, as well as translated new work from creators like Muñoz and Sampayo, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Sherpa has also been important as a reprint publisher, e.g. reprinting the newspaper science fiction strip Arman & Ilva (Thé Tjong-Khing & Lo Hartog van Banda), in my opinion one of the best sf strips ever created. Sherpa’s catalogue tends to lean towards a traditional sort of comic: well crafted, realistic art, proper storytelling.

Other than you might expect, this sort of comic is not very commercial in the Netherlands. Most people think of comics as, well, comic: the three panel gag strip from the newspaper, the weekly Donald Duck magazine or even series like Asterix being what most people will encouter as comics. There is a market for action-adventure comics here, but it’s dominated by translations, usually from France, with titles like Largo Winch, XIII or Thorgal.

In his acceptance speech Mat Schifferstein decries this lack of a naturalist tradition in Dutch comics. He argues that the Dutch always went more for humouristic strips than for the sort of realistic adventure strips Hal Foster is a good example of, that while even twenty years ago there were still artists like Hans Kresse or Thé Tjong-Khing creating this sort of work and finding an audience for it, this is no longer the case today. He hopes therefore that his win, with the help of “the well-oiled Lambiek P.R. machine”, will be a clarion call for attention within the Netherlands for the realistic adventure comic.

I would hope so too, as I do like that sort of comic, but I can’t really think of any current Dutch artist working in this tradition. The people he mentioned came out of the world of the newspaper strip where, just like elsewhere in the world, there’s no little room for adventure strips. As far as I know the only Dutch creators still doing this sort of strip are Minck Oosterveer and Willem Ritsier, on Nikki Saxx and Zodiak, both for De Telegraaf and both having to make do with the usual three panel space alloted any comic. They work wonders in this limited space, but it hardly compares to a Hal Foster…