Comics / Spotlight

Reflecting on Mark Waid's Thrillbent panel at San Diego Comic Con

By Dan Horn
July 19, 2012 - 17:41

Neil Gaiman once famously compared digital piracy to an online library. That conclusion was obtained after an independent study on the effect of piracy on book sales was conducted. It seemed that the more a book was circulated illegally, the more sales the digital and tactile copies of that book and other books by the same author increased. In other words, piracy was free promotion, and book retailers directly benefited from that if they were able to keep up with technological demand (e-readers, digital books, etc) while preserving good ol' fashion print books, diversifying business. The book torrents also presented an interesting advertising opportunity, getting ads in the hands of thousands of people that normally wouldn't be exposed to the ads in this way. We spoke of this at length with Graphic Policy's Brett on our first podcast.

Cut to San Diego Comic Con International 2012. The prolific and award-winning comic scribe Mark Waid has recently turned heads with his new Thrillbent digital business model and is delivering a one man panel explaining the manner in which Thrillbent operates. Even knowing Waid as the consummate writer, wanting nothing more than to get ideas out there without thought for compensation, his mission statement jarred me out of an ad-jaded, highly-monetized, consumerist daze.

Mark Waid and Peter Krause's current Thrillbent property, Insufferable, is a free weekly digital comic that can be read online without advertisements or can be downloaded as a zero-cost torrent that has a single sponsor's ad inside. The Thrillbent webpage itself has no advertisements. As Waid puts it, GoogleAds aren't worth destroying the aesthetic of his site. In effect, Thrillbent is the Sao Paulo of digital comic books.

So, how is Thrillbent funded? Perhaps most shocking of all, it is funded by Waid himself, who admits to selling bits of his Golden Age comics collection to front cash for his projects. He's dedicated to publishing independent of marketer and advertiser input and interference, and with new projects coming up for Thrillbent from other creators, he's foresworn to back them so that they might not reach into their own pockets if it is beyond their means to do so.

So, is Mark some benevolent, but foolish, patriarch of digital comics? I think many people would say that, but those people are either basing their assertion on market ignorance or on the nail-biting of their worried advertisers. The fact is that a creator can be just as successful promoting and publishing his own work as someone whose work is dictated by commerciality. There is a measurable virtue to uninhibited creativity, and that virtue is evidenced in works like Warren Ellis' Freak Angels, Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant, and Louis C. K.'s recent self-promoted comedy shows.

Freak Angels found print success even after being published free on the web. Fans always want something tactile to possess of a book they love, and readers who aren't exposed to that book on the web can purchase it in printed editions after hearing positive word of mouth about the book. In the case of Louis C. K., cutting out the middlemen, HBO and Ticketmaster, was a windfall. No one wants to be forced to deal with a third party. No one wants to pay the handling fees and surcharges necessitated by that third party's operation. Want to see a stand-up comedy special? Cool. Pay the comedian and go see the show.

Of course, many people see this as a kick to the chair for businesses like retailers, like digital books put Borders out to pasture, but if anything there is proof that flexible and forward-thinking enterprises will thrive with evolving products and distribution. As Mark Waid himself says, comic books are an unsustainable medium, especially as the audience for them grows older. The price of comics can only go up from $3.99, and many comic readers will eventually draw the line, younger readers drawing that line first; but lower prices keep comics off of newsstands, because sales of comics do not elicit the same kind of profits as sales of other magazines, and this marginalizes comics, relegating them to specialty stores which are seen by the general public as esoteric and uninviting back-alley locales. Something's got to give sooner or later.

So, in this writer's opinion, Thrillbent is one of the savvier ideas to be generated in the comic book community in years. Thrillbent is the future, and once that is proven, expect to see a lot more creators and publishers jumping on the bandwagon.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12