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Fun fact: The book market does not know how to promote collaborative creators as equals and - in world where quick and easy to remember social media bursts are the driving promotional force - it does not want to learn.
As comics shift towards the book market, certain industry conventions are in danger of being lost in translation. Traditional book publishing inherently see’s the writer as the one holding a vision, and the artist as support staff. Of course, this is not accurate.
Comics are not prose. The art IS story, and the artists that labor over every step in this arduous process are equals, NOT employees. This is important and often misunderstood.
Many publishers are addressing this by attempting to focus on single vision writer/artists. They want to promote the creator as the product - easier to build an iconic social media portrait around a singular visionary, hard to do when multiple people are at the helm.
As the book market absorbs the periodical market, and the size of your social media presence dictates your publishing opportunities, this becomes a point of alarm on many levels. Seriously. You work in comics and you want to survive this transition, understand these trends.
And if you work in book publishing - be it editorial or marketing or anything involved in the promotion of the books creators - look for ways to promote the creative team members equally. I know it’s much harder, but it’s also critically important.
How the book market adapts to being the leading edge in comics publishing will affect the lives of many, many artists. It’s not enough to try and shove the square peg of comics into the round hole of illustrated book publishing. These are not comparable art forms.
We need to build new ways of crediting creative teams and we need to do it yesterday. Ways that do not suggest a hierarchy. Because that hierarchy is absolutely an illusion.
Side note - reviewers, please credit and review the entire team. For better or worse, the internet has allowed an open field for critical discussion of art. The propensity to focus on writers as the driving force of a comic is often reinforced at the review stage.
