That's the problem with my only having a single page to deal with extensive thinking. After writing a treatise on politics, as was demanded by my internal 'write-or-explode' engine system, I then had to boila many-page monster down to a few paragraphs where all I found myself able to do was encapsulate my emotional response to what had been going on during the latest election up here in Ontario. My emothional response to the Conservative majority which got into power, and the unfair, thoughtless ways that majority was achieved, (everything from expensive media manipulation paid for by private industry to bomb threats), left me with little energy for anything but total condemnation of the conservative mind set..

Further, I realized shortly after the issue went to press that some people would probably not interpret the 'Two Kinds of Politician' thing the way I intended it. Some might think I was promoting the idea that Liberal politicians are entirely good while Conservatives are entirely Evil. Yeesh.

Here's how that works.

See, I believe that we each hae within us the facility for both good and evil,(few, I tink, would disagree); The Two Politicians I see exist only in the imagination because each are pure in their essence. Each represents the opposing potentials within us all. They stand on either end of the scale, the one on the Right thinking, 'I want to help Me. Nobody else is important.' while the other thinks, 'I want to help Everybody. I am not important.' This is the Right and Left I was talking about. -And several of you pointed out, just because Conservative parties are often greedy and treacherous, does not by contrast automatically make Liberal parties good and wholesome.

We do actually have a party up here which comes reasonably close to the Left end of things as described. The New Democratic Party (NDP for short) are very socialist.

I constantly find myself perplexed by the common notion that the Right Wing does not actually depise most of the populace, up to and including those who vote for it. -I have never heard the terms 'Big C conservative', and 'small c conservative' aptly defined, so I offer my own definition...

"Big 'C' conservatives are those who have money, power and the knowlege that when applied correctly, small 'c' conservatives, (usually the poorly educated,) can be manipulated into supporting them." And manipulation is easy. Small 'c' conservatives tend to be readily fired up about such issues as unemployed people receiving welfare checks, about new immigrants receiving the same benefits as any other citizen, and about young offenders not being hanged in public. (Naturally, there are always times when these sorts of issues really do smack of unfairness, but rarely do they make a dent in the larger scheme of things. Still, issues of unfairness can be very pwerful, touching old and deeply buries instincts.)

Generally, the more incomplete the education, the more prolific are hate-driven feelings which can easily be turned into Right Wing votes for politicians eager to get into office. (Coincidentally, once in office, the Right Wing politician often cuts education funding, which makes for even dumber and more easily manipulated people. -I recall when the Liberals got into power on a short-lived fluke during my youth, my highschool got new text books for the first time since the early fifties. For years, I had been taught from history texts written in a time when man had nt yet landed on the moon, and from science texts where the semi-conductor was not even a vague concept.)

And that's the main problm with Democracy.

People are under-informed, easily lid to and manipulated with very little effort. -By the Right Wing. The Left has a more difficult time, because it requires people be intelligent and well educated, which is a challenging state to achieve. Burning books is always easier than writing them. These days, it seems that democracy is less about people casting votes so that their opinion will be heard, and more about how the best way of tricking the largest number of people into voting for you.

Little wonder people at the top of the Right Wing despise those without power. It is difficult to respect anybody so easily fooled. Indeed, it seems to me only a short step before some believe that those with pwer are actually better than those they trample; superior in some fundamental way. I've met far too many people who think this way to ignore its impact on culture.
 
 

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.