Now there's a topic I find compelling. (it compels me to run for the hills!) Of course, on the surface I really LIKE the idea of thick comic books with masses of advertising at dirt-cheap cover prices.

'Shonen Jump' I think costs about $3 when converted from the Japanese Yen, the volumes come out once a week and they are an inch thick, filled with several dozen on-going stories in ten page installments. -The print and paper quality are unbelievably bad, but it's great value for your money. And if you like a given story you can go out and buy the collected volumes every six months or so which are printed on much better paper and cost, um...more.

The system works like firecrackers. Shonen Jump, back when I was taking stats and comparing these sorts of things, out-sold the American T.V. guide;that is, they moved Big Numbers;in the millions, weekly.

So several of the artists in Toronto, including me, talked at length about publishing colloectively a square-bound volume every two months.

The publishing advantages were these:

1. It is somewhat less expensive to print one thick book rather than several comics.

2. Since so few publishers have put out successful anthologies filled with highly readable stories, pulling it off might garner some good publicity and, if marketed well to the outside world, might possibly spark new interest in comics as a whole.

3. I can't remember any other immediate advantages, and number 2 is pushing it.

Anyway...As for the difficulties in making square-bound anthologies...

Whoa-boy!

To begin with, each of the artists, including myself, were all far too in love with the high levels of control self publishing provides to part with any of it in the form of compromises. We debated endlessly over the most minute points, and the best solutions were always watered down to something weak and half-baked. Committees are extremely frustrating when made up from lots of strong-minded people. Anyway, among the debates, these questions came up:

'I'm making a living from comics now. If I only get a cut of the cover price on an anthology, what assurance do I have that I'll still be earning enough to live on once the money is divided?'

'How do we decide who gets to do the cover in a given month? What if Joe's cover stinks and we lose sales as a result?'

'What if one of us is late with pages while the rest of us aren't? Do we go ahead and print anyway to avoid cancellation? - Do we have to change the cover price? How do we force each other to stay on time?'

'Which one of us is going to take care of the drudgery of finding advertisers? If we want to net the largest number of advertisers we'll have to provide graphic art and design services to potential clients. Which of us wants to spend their time designing ads instead of drawing pages? Do we hire more people to cover these extra tasks? With what money? We'd definitely need a big loan of some kind, and again, we'd need somebody right now to take time away from his or her book in order to go find all these people and put the whole operation together.'

And my favorite:'We're all friends here and we'd like to be in this together, but how so we tell Joe that his work doesn't cut it?' -And worse,'How do we tell Joe to get lost after we've been publishing his stuff for a year and people still aren't warming up to his work?'

These are just some of the problems. There were several others.

Essentially, it all boils down to this: To make an anthology work, it must take on a very similar profile to that of a newsstand magazine, with a large managing staff and pay structure. Control must be given over to a non partisan editor in chief, and the cover price could not go over about six dollars, so the advertising department would become the engine behind the book, not the reader's dollar. And that means trying to woo significantadvertisers with B&W comics. -And based on general B&W sales records in the industry, I think that would be VERY difficult. (Naturally at this point, the prospect of going 'color' comes up as the easiest way to attract big advertisers, but with that comes a whole raft of other problems and costs.)

All in all, it would be very difficult to pull off. -Books like Taboo and Negative Burn, while they had their own charm, were either too expensive or too obscure, or had too few reliable episodic stories to catch public interest and make a significant impact on the industry. On top of that, I don't believe any of the contributing artists were able to survive on the money they made from selling to either book. For an anthology to be successful, I believe it would have to go a lot further, and with entirely different company directors.

Yet, despite all these problems, I can't help but think the challenge would be exhilarating. I would LOVE to takle the launching of a really good anthology in the mainstream market. Despite the cultural biases of today, and despite the current lousy market structure, I'm absolutely positive it could be done. But it would require lots of time to find investors and a good production staff, it would take high levels of sustained personal energy and interest, and it would be impossible to write and draw your own comics while doing it. -There is no way I could lay aside the joys of writing and drawing Thieves & Kings in order to put together a successful anthology. (So that other writers and artists, clueless to the difficulties of publishing, could whine about how I mis-treat them by doing things like demand their best workk on time always or goodbye.) Yow. No thanks. I have trouble enough doing that myself!

The right kind of anthology could revolutionize the comics industry, but it hasn't happened yet. and unless somebody with enough zeal and influence and brains decides to take up the mantle, I don't think it will.