A Kiwi comic book hero

July 20, 2009 15:59

Amy Joseph caught up with Kiwi comic book writer and artist Dylan Horrocks when he was in town for the Design Studies Keynote Lecture Series last semester. Horrocks spoke about The Six Lessons That I’ve Learnt from Comics. “[It was] about stories and art and business; about how business can enable artists to do things, but it can also disable them from doing things … and it can also poison the process.”

Horrocks has always been obsessed with comics: “apparently my first words were Donald Duck.” While British and American mainstream comics were the most accessible in the days before comic book stores, Horrocks was most interested in European comics. “Tintin, for me, was the peak of comics when I was a kid; that was as good as it could be. And that was what I wanted to do – I wanted to make books like Tintin, but even more ambitious. I kind of wanted them to be adult novels … as serious as a serious novel.

“By the time I was a teenager I dreamed of being a writer and I dreamed of being an artist, and the great thing about comics is that I didn’t have to choose.”

It was his serial Hicksville that found Horrocks fame within the industry, especially after it was collected as a graphic novel by a Canadian publisher. “That was the last thing my publisher published before he went bust – I’ve got this long history of deceased publishers behind me! But it was Hicksville that got read by a lot more people, and particularly it was read by comics people, because it was about comics – it’s a whole book about the history and the potential of comics. So, comics people loved it, and that included some editors at DC, who then asked me if I could write comics books for them.”

“I did that for about four years, and over that time it just about killed me as a cartoonist.”

A violent case of vertigo

Horrocks started his stint at DC working for Vertigo, its “mature readers” imprint. He wrote for Hunter, a spin-off from comics legend Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic. Horrocks puts paid to any romantic notions one might harbour about Vertigo. “I think people imagine that Vertigo is somehow an alternative publisher, and it’s totally not – it’s still part of this corporation that wants to make a dollar out of everything. I think the people who run those comics companies … have no idea what makes a good comic. They’re prepared to try a whole bunch of things by hiring a whole bunch of people, but if something works, they just go, ‘Oh, OK, let’s take all the elements from that that we can see – like this one’s really violent, or that one’s really sort of pseudo-literary – and let’s try and make a whole lot of comics like that.’”

The key difference between Vertigo and its more staid parent company is that it allows “swearing, nudity, sex, and really graphic violence.” Well, perhaps ‘allows’ is too mild a word. “In fact, the more the better, really. Especially after Preacher became very popular, it was as if they decided, ‘That’s what people want, what the college kids want is really violent stuff.’ And none of those things are what I’m into with my own comics, so I found that quite difficult.”

Driven batty

After Hunter, Horrocks moved up to the big house to work on Batgirl for eighteen months. “I went into Batgirl thinking, ‘I’ll just write this for fun – and money,’ and I quickly discovered that the Bat comics are not meant to be fun. They’re meant to be grim and gritty and dark and violent. … What [Batman] basically does, is he goes and finds petty criminals and tortures them until they tell him where the Joker is, and then he goes and beats the Joker up. I saw online this fantastic thing – it was summaries of movies in one sentence, and their summary of Batman Begins was “Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill,” which kind of sums it up. The thing about those Bat comics is that they’re all about this vision of American cities being the classic urban jungle, with predators and prey. The innocent civilians are the prey, and they’re just trying to live their lives, but there’s all these nasty predators – usually black or Hispanic or on drugs or mentally ill – and they prey on the innocent, they’re nasty and brutal and wicked and evil, and the only way to deal with that is have someone who is just as brutal as they are – but he’s on the right side.

“The more I was writing these stories, the more I thought, ‘This is like Donald Rumsfeld’s wet dream; it’s like Dick Cheney wrote these things. It’s the War on Terror put into the streets of America.’ … So, I increasingly felt that these comics were destructive. It’s not that they were violent; I think there’s plenty of great, really violent stuff out there, that’s both good entertainment and good in other ways too. But something about these comics felt really sick.”

Eventually, Horrocks got out of mainstream comics and back to his own work. In his view, he was deserting a sinking ship. Sales of traditional superhero comics are “going through floor,” and the mainstream publishers have reacted to this by trying to create hype with big events. “‘Everything changes! Someone dies! Gotham City will never be the same again!’ And they do them as crossovers, so you have to buy everything. It’s a cheap trick, and it’s not working anymore. It’s not saving them. I think that whole industry is digging itself deeper and deeper into a hole, and they’re losing readers, and I can’t see them surviving much longer. Not in this form.”

Holy outmoded modes of distribution!

Horrocks also sees the comics publishing industry as one of many dinosaurs struggling to adapt to new forms of distribution and changing conceptions of intellectual property. After his stint at DC, he soon moved his serial work online, collecting the stories as graphic novels when complete. The free online content essentially acts as advertising for the published books.
One advantage of posting online is the motivation it provides. “‘I’ve got to do a page today so that I can upload it,’ is so much better than someone saying, ‘Sometime in the next three years, you’ve got to draw us a graphic novel.’”

But Horrocks is also excited by the distribution potential of the Internet. “When I was starting out doing comics, in order to distribute my work I needed to make copies of it on paper, and that was expensive and it was hard work, so it was necessary to charge people money for the book. But nowadays ... I can put it online, and if someone in Milwaukee wants to read it then it’s no skin off my nose if they do.

“I feel that the system of copyright was designed around that old distribution system, partly to protect the artists, but primarily to protect the middlemen who were that system of distribution – the publishers and the record companies and so on. They were the ones who were most involved in lobbying for those laws … and they’ve been the ones who’ve rewritten the rules every time something that they own was about to go into the public domain, and often they’ve done that at the expense of the artist.

“And that whole system is now preventing people from getting access to my work; it’s no longer enabling the distribution of my work. DC allowed Hunter to go out of print; they have no intention of reprinting it … but they also have no intention of letting anyone else reprint it, and if someone did they would come down on them like a tonne of bricks – and that includes me and Richard [Case], the guy who drew it. We do our own print run of it, we’re breaking the law. That to me is insane – it means that those companies’ primary role is to prevent access to work unless you pay for it, and I don’t want my income to depend on preventing access to my work.”

Publishers have long manipulated copyright to rip off comic book creators – most famously the creators of Superman, who were forced to sign away the rights of their character before they could cash their first paycheck. “Because I was aware of that history, I’ve always had this very uneasy feeling about copyright,” Horrocks says. “I would put copyright on my work as clearly as I could, not to prevent some 15-year-old in Dunedin from photocopying it – because I don’t give a shit about that. That’s great, good on you! – but so that the publisher couldn’t rip me off. And those same publishers are the ones who are now suing the 15-year-old kid who downloads it.”

Now, Horrocks uses a Creative Commons license for his work.

“I do think that new models of earning money out of these things are emerging, and the more the existing vested interests try and shut those down, the more they try and crush that bubbling-up of innovation that’s happening, the harder it is for us to get those new systems,” Horrocks says, citing Napster’s willingness to work with record companies as the classic example. “And now all the people who would be using Napster quite happily, and downloading music legitimately for a cent a song, instead they’ve all gone to Pirate Bay and Mininova, and the atmosphere is completely soured – people despise the record companies now. It’s too late now for those companies, they’ve blown it, and it’s out of their hands now. They’ve tried to crush the innovation because it’s competition, and they’ve created a situation that’s become a war. And they’re going to lose the war, because the technology’s not on their side. But it’s going to be a horrible process along the way.”

Kiwi Komix
Some recommendations around the web from Dylan Horrocks (after you check out his own site at hicksvillecomics.com, of course):

Kiwi Comics: wiki-style resource site on New Zealand comics.

Black River Digital: New Zealand comics discussion group

Adrian Kinnaird’s blog: Comics-related thoughts and musings, and reporting on the New Zealand comics community

Jared Lane’s comics

Timothy Kidd’s comics

Karl Wills’ comics

Department of Design Studies Keynote Lecture Series
Semester Two
All lectures are at 1pm in Archway 2, and are open to the public

Monday July 27
Paul Hansen and Alex Gilks
Departments of Economics and Design Studies
“The economist and the designer went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat: making choices for an innovative online business”

Monday August 17
Wendy McGuinness
The Sustainable Future Institute – Wellington
“Sustainable futures exploring a complex world”

Monday September 14
Nicola Bould
Designer, PhD Candidate and former Design Studies staff member
“Sustainable Design Education in New Zealand”

Monday September 21
Simon Velvin
Designer, The Church, Auckland
“How do you help raise the bar of New Zealand Creative Talent”