As an artist, liberal activist, civil libertarian, and general thorn in the ass of all authoritarianism, I've given much thought to the subject of "freedom of the press" and the guarantees of the First Amendment.
Once upon a time, I wrote hard-hitting editorial essays for a small newspaper in which I took on the Bush/Cheney assault on the living spirit of our Constitution, on the violation of our civil liberties in the name of some fantasy they called "safety" for some place I'd never heard of called "The Homeland."
I attacked and explained the utter immorality of torture, whatever one calls it -- and I did it well because I am a philosopher and was an ethics instructor at a university. I did it clearly, so normal humans could understand the arguments and issues: that there is something more important than survival for the human being, that we live and depend, not on biological needs, but moral ones, and that life without these virtues is not a truly human sort of existence.
I argued we could not define enemy soldiers or criminals as something outside the capacity of law to face and examine: there is no such thing as an "enemy combatant" devoid of human rights we can toss in a hole for perpetuity from sheer revenge; that habeas corpus is not something that can be abolished forever and have America remain America -- it might be "The Homeland" or "The Fatherland" or whatever, but it won't be the United States anymore.
And I attacked what was revealed of domestic spying: illegal, immoral, uncalled for, that reduced all citizens to de facto criminals before the commission of any crime. That is, citizens in name only.
I wrote these things and more in a community that was ultra right-wing and was impressed the editor allowed me to speak at length for 5-and-a-half years before I was banned due to pressure from 21 readers and who knows what else.
And it revealed for me, no matter how unjust I thought it was, no matter how frustrating, that, as I wasn't the editor, publisher, and printer, I had no freedom of speech without the owners of the press. Yes, I could talk on the internet or street corner, but I could not target the audience that needed to be faced with the ideas I presented. I can't force anyone to allow me to speak in the media.
And so, I moved on to making political comic books and satires -- underground comix as they are known in the trade. But that has its own problems, as I have found, as the times and the situation have changed since the first undergrounders published themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, problems I'll elaborate below.
I've given it long, hard thought: I need to become not only a publisher, but to own a printing press; a small used CMYK press that can be employed for my message and the messages of a small group of similar artists and writers. Targeted, niche print media isn't dead; you're just not going to become William Randolph Hearst with it, and who wants to be that son of a bitch anyway?
I have an Indiegogo campaign to raise cash for the press and for some truly free speech aimed at the people, not academics and specialists, something to play a small but effective role in counteracting hate radio and Fox misinformation and mindless entertainments towards no point. Something else needs to affect our culture, or just small pockets of it, and I have the antidote, or one of them. Read my campaign page and think about helping in any way you can.
Give us the tools; we'll do the job.
Underground artist and liberal activist needs to buy some printing equipment.
(This is the essay I wrote for my brothers and sisters in arms to convince them of the necessity of this project. It's an extended argument and will take a bit of your time, but will provide background material to explain our situation more clearly and why I need your help.)
I've considered the publishing industry and how it under-serves and even locks out alternative, underground, and independent artists for years. After turning the matter over and over in my head for all this time, some things have become apparent.
1. The American economic system is capitalist. It rewards people who play by its rules. Even if you believe these rules are unjust, unfair, stacked, or corrupt, that is the basic structure of the economic system.
I've beat my head against this system for most of my life, working jobs so I can make my art with no strings attached. But there are strings: The more I work for someone else to raise capital for my own projects, the less time I have for said projects. When I was young, I could work a full-time job all day and then stay up all night banging out art with my dream intact that someday, I, too, would someday have my dream recognized, lose the day job and make a clean living off my creativity.
I am now 48, going on 49. Like you, I have bills. I have responsibilities. I need insurance -- and the older I get, the more support along those lines I need. By the time you're 50, you cannot live as if you're 20, unattached, bohemian, with all the time in the world on your hands to get that dream accomplished. No, by the time you're 50, The system has got you: it monopolizes your time and can extort things from you, whittle that dream down to the level of a quaint hobby.
The very thing that defines who you are as an artist and writer and thinker is less and less what you spend your time on: and life is time. If you're working for someone else, who you are is an extension of someone else's dream, not your own. And more often than not, their dream is called "MORE": more money for them, more labor from you, more attention from you for a Byzantine system of rules designed to keep you in line, befuddled, passive, terrified of losing your spot at the money tit that drizzles less and less of that nourishing cash you started out seeking in order to be someone other than who you became.
The question becomes, at some point, will you make the effort to reclaim yourself or should you quit pretending you are really an artist? What are you willing to risk to get it done if you decide to subvert the system and become a capitalist in the service of your own work?
2. In America, we allegedly have freedom of speech; which, by and large, we do, I suppose. But one of the main points of the First Amendment is freedom of the press: In part, it reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." The fact of the matter is, you can go talk all you like on the street corner, usually, or you can run things off on your copier and pass them out in public if that floats your boat, but unless you own or have direct access to actual printing equipment or an organ that rolls off a printing press, your voice is stifled. In fact, an editor can cut you off or block you at any moment and for any or no reason whatsoever. It's their freedom to publish, not your right to be published.
Oh yes, you can use the almighty Internet. But go take a look on the thing if you've never made a good study of it. It's a trainwreck. Google will charge you cash to have the opportunity for a potential audience to, perhaps, click on it; and they may not be your niche.
Webcomics? Dear God. Yes, some of them are great, but do you think any of these people are making a living doing that? Damn it, people, this used to be a country where creative people made an actual living off their work and wits. The basic compact between audience and creator was this: the creator used her time and effort and mind to assemble something hopefully worth appreciation; she made her bet on that; the second part was, the audience experienced the work and showed their appreciation by paying the creator some cash so she could continue living and making things. Fairly simple arrangement. It's how things worked when I started out, lo these many years ago prior to the Internet changing the "business model."
Here's how it works now: The creator does a huge amount of work and probably has to dole out her own cash for a website and SEO optimization, etc. In return, the audience wanders on by and consumes her work... for free. They may not even have the good graces to Tweet or FB post a link to her site at the very least in return for the effort. Nope. Look, enjoy, move on to the next thing. Does her website get reviewed by any roving bloggers? Maybe... maybe not. Depends on if you beg them and send them free swag.
Advertising the material is difficult, if not virtually impossible. Especially if you have no cash to pay the Google monster. Because this is capitalism and you're really working for Google. See section 1 above for a recap.
So, how is the creator going to make any money at all? Put ads on her website and trash it up. And then you're really just working for Amazon and diverting your audience away from your site. Make it a pay site -- which works pretty well if you're a nude model or burlesque performer, but not so much if you're a visual artist and not well-known already.
Or you sell swag and printed copies of your comics. And that's not a terrible option: use your site as a sort of "see it before you buy it" extended showroom floor and opportunity to communicate with an audience. After all, if your comics were in a shop, chances are folks could look at a copy before buying it and that's fair. Like they say back in the mountains where I'm from, "Who wants to buy a pig in a poke?" I.e. buying things sight unseen is a pretty raw deal. Except now you're just dispensing with the middleman called a shop owner -- you are the shop owner. No one should be able to represent what you're about better than yourself, and there's no good reason in this age attempting to hide yourself or your work if you want to actually sell.
3. But I'm aiming this message mainly at indies, alternatives, and undergrounders. And I still haven't fully broached that "free press" issue.
So, let's do that now.
The stuff we do ranges all over the board in terms of content. We push the limits. Most of us are transgressive in one or another way; some make porn; some take controversial political stances; some explore uncomfortable cultural issues and gender politics; many of us are liberal, civil libertarians, or just plain out there and purely weird -- often all at once.
We deal with pot legalization, government overreach, social stupidity and white trash evil. Our pictures will involve everything from nudity to graphic sexual activity, anger, violence, raw depictions of contemporary life down in the guts of the cities -- the parts tourists avoid, and even more raw depictions of the neurotic/psychotic landscapes of the psyche. We satirize, we lampoon, we parody. We are rude, we are blunt, we are funny, we are obscene, we say exactly what we want exactly how we think and feel it ought to be said. We shock, we persuade. we defy.
Many of us are aging Gen Xers who are sick of the world we were handed and either want something better or think we're locked into an apocalyptic doom trip: optimists, pessimists, realists, idealists, nihilists, existentialists, or just plain confused.
All that said, finding mercenary printers who will willingly put our material on pieces of paper with saddlestitch binding is not easy. Finding said printers who will do it affordably and do a good job is a damned laugh. This is risky stuff. And most of us can't afford to make print runs large enough to tempt the bastards to take the chance without all sorts of content restrictions.
Distribution? Diamond ain't carrying this shit unless you can come up with about 1000 or two books. And getting shop owners to carry it for fear of getting busted is fairly difficult: Why take a chance on crazy underground madness when you can rake in the shekels on a good, safe stack of Batman or Robin, the Boy Wonder, or Archie? Or just get your hip creds in via Fantagraphics' books?
So far as bookstores go, Barnes & Noble is rumored to be on the skids and they aren't carrying our material nohow, noway. If Taschen published it, maybe, but none of us are in that league. Taschen will collect our things after we're dead and tell the tale as history.
Selling things through Amazon or Indyplanet has been, by my experience, a complete waste of time. Fan base isn't big enough for either to push your books -- and Indyplanet has content restrictions set at the level of readers who are 15 year-old striped assed baboons.
Those who own the presses have freedom of the press. Freedom to print whatever content they want within reason. Independent operators can do their own alternative distribution through something other than straight bookstores and comics shops.
We've got to reinvent the system and work it in our own favor.
4. I'm going to raise money by borrowing and a crowd funding campaign to buy a used cmyk printing press. I'm still looking for the right press at the right price I can run on my own, but I'll figure that part out. I'm going to print my own books, propaganda, and posters with it and make it available cheaply to other select undergrounders. Print your stuff more cheaply than these rip-off artists online and charge you mainly for the supplies and my time, which will be inexpensive as I'm not looking to get rich -- just live a normal life and keep the press running. Create my own job, help out the cause, and make this capitalist bullshit run in my favor for once. Maybe in yours, too.
As for distribution, I'm going to figure out where all these head shops get their stuff -- hell, I'll drive boxes of books out to them between San Antonio to Austin if I have to at the start. Work it and work it hard. You'll have to figure out your own distribution as usual unless I can figure out something more organized eventually and offer a catalogue. I'm only one state away from Colorado and the pot biz is going nuts up there -- getting hooked in to those shops would really be something, I'm thinking. A quick weekend plane trip to make some introductions and pass out samples might establish a beachhead. I'm thinking out loud just to show I think this can be done and isn't a totally manic freak out on my part.
5. What I want from you, as this is just in the plotting stage, isn't any sort of commitment at all. What I want to know is
a) Would you be interested in contributing a donation of ANY amount to such a project if I crowd source it?
b) Would you consider me as a printing source if I can get the thing up and running?
c) Do you think this is a good idea or is it a complete waste of time? If the latter, tell me why.
Thanks for your time,
Richard Van Ingram
www.losercomix.com
loser@losercomix.com