Thought Shrapnel

Warren Ellis comments on fractured and fragmented the world is now in terms of keeping up with what other people are thinking and producing. You can’t trust the algorithms any more, and there are precious few people doing the curatorial work across multiple streams — which is why I appreciate people like Jason Kottke, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Stephen Downes, Matt Muir and, of course, Ellis himself.

I was talking to a publisher friend last night about Patreon, on which he spends a lot of time looking at comics creators. I do not – I didn’t find out until last night that I still have an account on there, and I’m still not sure how that’s possible. Anyway. His thing was: he sees lots of work-in-progress and one page updates and stuff there, but how has it not become a primary delivery system for digital comics? Like, for your membership fee, or an extra dollar or whatever, here’s the first issue of my comic for you to read online or download, and the next one will be on this day next month, and so on. Maybe there’s a limited physical print edition that I’ll offer for sale a month later. And there’s no deal for collection, so maybe you’ll never see this again.

(It occurred to me this morning that any writer could do that with ebooks, too, and then whack them out to Amazon two months later.)

My thing was, does anyone really want to fracture common culture and a shared marketplace any more than it already is? And an hour later, I thought, common culture is a delusion of my age. Common platforms, perhaps, but platforms are contingent and temporary. We are all “creators” now.

Is there even a digital comics store and reading app that a majority of people use now?

(There is a supposed quote by Pericles I heard years ago but never sourced: “All things good should flow into the boulevard.”)

This note from my friend, which I summarise here to preserve it for myself, has gotten me thinking about that entire space. It’s less walled-off from the world than Kickstarter-style crowdfunding, perhaps? (I think Kickstarter and Backerkit et al are great: my concern over work crowdfunded in that style doesn’t transmit anything into the general culture. Again, probably a fixed idea from my age and background.) I’m always wondering how much great work I might be missing simply because I can’t find it browsing around real or virtual shelves.

Source: Warren Ellis Ltd

Image: Jonas Stolle