(All of) Comics has a usability problem.

Comics are absolutely everywhere these days, from the booming anime industry to the predominance of Marvel movies and games for the what seems like an eternity to my late millennial mind - it feels like comics are doing better than ever. So why is every single comics creator I know living in absolute poverty and despair? Even the big ones with Eisners and who's ideas went on to become blockbusters? How did it become a joke that mangaka break their bodies on the weekly schedule. It's beyond heartbreaking to see a man who worked on so much of cultural Zeitgeist relegated to literally begging for his life on Gofundme.

"It's all comics."

This past week, we all had the misfortune of learning the news that the iconic Marjane Satrapi had died. Her autobiographical comics series, the series of Persepolis 1 & 2 and the not-quite a prequel (but I consider it critically important to read with Persepolis as it features more perspectives of Iranian woman and Satrapi's grandmother specifically-) are a worldwide sensation that broke the mold of what comics "could be". And yet, when pressed to adapt a label - Graphic Novels - that was reserved for comics that seemed to break through to the academic elite, could be taught in schools and studied as great works of literature sitting next to the classics, she resoundingly rejected it.

“I don’t like ‘graphic novel.’ It’s a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating – it’s just a media type.”

-Marjane Satrapi

So you can imagine my absolute upset when I saw nearly every outlet reporting on her death, and even allegedly making tributes, unabashedly, ridiculously, referring to her work as a graphic novel.

But, what can I expect from a faux literate media press that only referred to her work as only against the current Iranian state and omitting the extensive history she laid out about how the Western imperial core created those conditions. Talk about fake fans.

In a sense, this is normal. The superhero folks allegedly hate the manga folks who hate the graphic novels people who hate the webcomic folks who hate the zine indie press comics who hate the fancomics- Except, Batman's on webtoon now, and Alan Moore wrote the comic that fucked up Batgirl way before he made V for Vendetta, and is The Boondocks manga, or a newspaper comic strip? Aaron McGruder is posting them on instagram now! They definitely fit the classic 4koma style. And who the fuck KNOWS what Homestuck even was or is nowadays?

Despite this, we're all suffering under the same conditions, and as creators, we need each other.

Also, and maybe more importantly, normies have no idea where the fuck to find any of us outside of the platforms (Derogatory)

Ideally, the explosion of internet, webcomics, and self-publishing should've created a creator paradise, and in some ways it has. It's in many ways easier than it ever has been to make a comic, you can monetize it on platforms like patreon and webtoon without publisher approval even. Except all it's done is make creators even more vulnerable - and for those who don't make the types of webcomics that are algorithmically advertiser friendly, it's nearly impossible to find an audience despite the fact that the audiences are bored to fucking death with modern mainstream tv shows and movies.

Yet there are vibrant, growing, genres of media that despite their own problems are continuing to grow - video games, music, books. Where despite an obvious advantage of one side, weird indie breakouts sit beside industry giants equally in wishlists of most users. Hell somehow, despite overall literacy in America going down , books are blowing up here . You'd think that the books with the pictures would be more appealing... accessible... and every comic artist would be absolutely drowning in money, awards, and industry recognition. You'd think we'd ALL be exclusively scrolling webcomics instead of arguing on whatever platform poison we're addicted to or at least double screen viewing them against youtube videos. You'd think you'd see more normies arguing over the best Batman storylines, hell just more comic accurate porn.

I know many people in many places, I've lived in one of those semi-abandoned warehouses. Spent a lot of my youth in a whiplash of moves up and down the east coast splitting time between freelance gigs, service jobs, and tech industry courses, schooling, corporate apprenticeships, start-ups, and eventually bursting into a prestigious professional development program in the advertising industry here in New York, where I had the chance to visit many of the most prestigious creative agencies in the world.

These were allegedly, the creators and connoisseurs of the global western cultural zeitgeist, in the capital of the world and even they had no fucking idea about comics.

In my (now fading and former) professional life, I primarily presented myself as a User Experience professional, but in this professional development was highly encouraged to embrace all of my multi-faceted creative titles - professional or not - in part to find a specialized industry fit. Many of cohort mates were multi-passionate creatives after all, singers, event producers, dancers, models, ect... and yet when I was discovered doodling comics in our industry talks I had an instinctive fear. This was not unfounded of course, many of the friends that I had made through tech or through political discourse were often bewildered that I often chased books about de-colonial theory and markets or Dostoevsky with magical girl manga or Wonder Woman. I had even been told,"You seem too cool to be into superhero stuff..." As though I didn't consider Bruce Wayne an annoying neoliberal father figure that I loved more dearly and saw about a thousand times more than the man walking the earth allegedly appearing to be my sperm donor.

AuDHD however, demands a good stim, and drawing is a fairly maskable one but exposed my interests as I couldn't help but doodle thumbnails and comic work in between notes about advertising and production. Professional mentors seemed to keen to stick me into an illustrator position, which I pushed against. (I hate doing commissions.)

Despite that I watched as agencies spoke about how they were desperate for new ideas, fresh narratives, and to catch the hot new thing. In between networking when folks dropped that they had more nerdy interests, even the more culturally dominant anime, comics were conspicuously absent. Even when mentioning literal comic book originated IPs like Marvel, musicians like MF DOOM, mentioning games like The Wolf Among US, or just how much they were getting into anime lately.

This isn't new, in every demographic I've spoken to, old and young, from the crackheads on the corner to my nerdier professional mentors who love Adventure Time and Star Wars a glimmer of light sparked when I told them that their favorite IP had a comic. That some of the best smut I'd ever read of their favorite CW show was a comic, that the Wolf Among Us was technically a prequel to a beloved multi-decade comic series, One Punch Man started as a silly goofy looking webcomic.

When asked why they didn't know, the most common response was lack of knowledge of the medium, lack of accessibility, followed by the inability of knowing where to start.

As a user experience professional, the wheels in my head couldn't help but turn.

"Piracy is not a pricing problem, but a service issue."

-Gabe Newell, founder of Valve.

A beloved resource was shut down late last year, leaving a gaping chasm in the holes of our hearts, where a gape should've been in the behinds of our blorbos. Batoto. The world's largest piracy index for manga, manhwa,and manhua with over 350 million visits globally at its peak, surpassing the entire US population.

To publishers and platforms like Webtoon and Kodansha, and even some indie creators - this may have seemed like a win, but for many in the community who may have not had the ability to access the content easily or even at all due to language barriers, censorship laws, or just poverty... these sites provided accessibility in a way that may have never existed in places where say... homosexuality is banned. Or historical events are censored.

But I don't deal in moralism, and access to blorbo will rank pretty low in the overall list of global problems to solve to the average human when there's multiple genocides going on.

The reactions to the closure of Batoto revealed a much more interesting and more importantly - actionable - insight. In nearly every discussion of the website, it was taken as a given that a successor would return - but what users seemed to be mourning far more was their collections of saved and recommended works.

In nearly every single upload on Bato.to there were notes from translators often with links to the official work to support the original authors, which is where for example, I learned of the existence of Dlsite - a site where independent Japanese creators published their works - often far more cheap than a physical published volume of manga or even comic e-books on sites like Amazon. Or in some cases, linked to a Patreon where I could just, y'know, just pay the author directly or shoot them a tip. Unlike platforms like Tapas or Webtoon, where they've normalized having to buy some sort of gacha currency as though I'm playing a cheap malware ridden mobile game, only to find out they're not even paying their fucking workers.

But even on patreon and itch.io where even as far back as 2019 , Mastercard pushed censorship policy so far down the throats of creators, even artistic nudity for the purpose of drawing gets you slapped with a label and reduced exposure.

But perhaps worst of all, is that platforms that originally had the biggest chance at curating a vibrant, diverse community of comics, have turned into a sweatshop of Clip Studio Paint asset flips in whatever is the vaguest hint of a trend to the point where I can often spot multiple brushes and assets from the very first page of Clip store. This isn't hate to any of these creators, at all, I'm sure they're likely being overworked. Not unlike their predecessors.

(I swear to god, I started learning 3D blending and building in video games because I legitimately cannot stand that mfin castle lol)

It's no wonder that these platforms immediately turned to image generation so quickly, all while squeezing their users in increasingly more opaque and labyrinthine payment schemes and fees.

Someone is making money, allegedly.

Despite the talk of low-wages, distribution issues, legal troubles, ect. You'd expect to hear of a dying industry, but, no, not really. The comic industry is fucking booming, and only projected to grow.

So what is to be done?

What first attracted me to the comics field was that it was ignored by culture and regarded as a trash medium suitable only for children or the working classes. It was cheaply mass produced, with tens or hundreds of thousands of copies distributed each month or week, and it seemed to me that in the right hands, comics could become a field where useful, powerful, potentially liberating ideas, represented in an attractive and engaging form, could be transmitted to young or poor people throughout society, quickly and captivatingly, to the people in society who most need those ideas.

-Alan Moore

As a comics creator, but more importantly, as a dialectical materialist and someone versed in human computer interaction, we've reviewed two major competing problems.

Ease of access to paying audience and user discovery.

For some reason, quite a few creators think the way to go about fixing this is either begging on the same algorithmic hellholes that have already discarded them through guilt based marketing, or creating lists of original undiscovered works that their virtually unknown friend groups promote to each other while reverting to the former action when the latter doesn't work, while sulking and hosting their works on the same platforms that won't promote them within their very tiny genres of algorithmically segregated friend groups.

Hey I never said I would be nice.

Everyone thinks that they're the next Hussie, or Viziepop, or CLAMP. But as one of my favorite creators once said,"This is not a motivational speech because I'm not a motivational speaker."

You need popular fandom and porn, sorry.

Your favorite mangaka started off probably making fandom doujinshi. The entire sci-fi convention scene owes a great deal to female trekkie Kirk/Spock shippers.

I would argue Paul Dini absolutely won fandom by marrying a stage magician that looked just like his blorbette - Zatanna , writing for the universe she's from and having a critical role shaping it, AND having his OC becoming one of the biggest faces of western comics - Harley Quinn.

And of most recent note, Lore Olympus, and popular webcomics built off the backs of a thriving fancomics scene. Even the first original webcomics to really create cracks in the mainstream were comics talking about fandom - I don't even think most people associate PAX with Penny Arcade, the video game comic the webcomic despite the crater sized impact it's now left on video game culture. Or the entire genre of sprite comics - comics made out of pixel assets from video games rearranged - which arguably made the genre as a whole viable.

So imagine my surprise when I wanted to make a fancomic, back in 2023 (after years out of fandom) when I found I had nearly no distribution channels for reasonable reach. Despite the boom of AO3, people had no idea it could be a discovery hub for fancomics to, and to be fair. It doesn't really advertise itself as one. So I resorted to making my own website - only to find that many of the webcomic rings and collectives, explicitly barred fancomic creators. And NSFW. And many of the fancomics that were left were paywalled only, which is... fine. But, odd.

In an interesting turn of events, the platform that pages of my comic did the best on were Facebook of all platforms in general fan groups. I couldn't even find general fancomics discords. While porn comics are fairly popular, I can't really remember a breakout hit like Sunstone in recent memory - which started on Deviantart. They're usually hidden in the annals of Patreons,where browsing is limited by the UX nature of the platform. Unlike Batoto where smut and fancomics are a fairly communal and collective experience (and hoo boy those comments always got me) patreons, ko-fis, and the like discourage the sharing and recommendation of other works, thus limiting discovery of similar works and concentrating power to a handful of well-known creators.

This has a downward effect on the entire ecosystem, less users are ever drawn to the comics ecosystem via newer creators who may start in fandom, more creators become discouraged and turn over more power to the whims of toxic platforms and algorithms in search of an ever diminishing spot of prominence and attention. Thus creators start to treat each other less as colleagues and a community and more as competition.

We need an COMICS WIDE Goodreads, now and really fucking bad.

In fandom culture, an interesting discourse and user behavior has started to form over the past decade - people are listing popular fan-fictions in certain fandoms on Goodreads. The largest reading tracking and discussion platform. I'm not that interested in the moral arguments about the sanctity of what this means for fandom here though - The reasoning behind this behavior is far more interesting for our purposes. The fandoms that seem to have done this the most are demographically the most privileged, stubborn, and older larger fandoms - Harry Potter, Supernatural, One Direction, and Teen Wolf. This indicates a friction issue, lack of motivation to move to a more desirable platform, and UX weakness within AO3 - people would rather lump their fanfictions within the rest of their reading when possible, because this makes sharing and discovery easier - especially because of the most recent trend hitting fandom. Fic on e-readers.

If there's a screen AO3 will be seen, as the children say. Apparently.

Despite being owned by Amazon, any book is able to be catalogued on Goodreads, and while they limit the books that are able to be on their market dominant Kindle e-readers to ones they sell, it's pretty easy to get around that without even cursory tech skills. Even smart capitalists know that you need the cattle to breed so that you can milk the population. It's only the really the stupid ones that tend to eat their young so early. Letterboxd exists for movies, there's many curation communities for music,

Goodreads is absolute dogshit for comics though, any type. Western or manga. It doesn't list multiple series, doesn't let you really sort by artist vs writer easily, and as many types of comics are read continuously page by page or issue by issue, or in some cases may be somewhat multi-media by nature, things get complicated very quickly. Then add the dimension of prequels, sequels, and side series that may be collected within things like omnibuses or colored ultimate editions with additional chapters or story or things like webcomics and app exclusives that may not have page numbers, percentages, all of which are far MORE common in all types of comics, it all gets so complicated, extremely quickly. This is further complicated by the fact that users are more likely to switch between digital and physical releases which are likely to have variants.

Sites like Mymangalist work well enough, but segment out the market and exclude growing international markets like China and Korea by design and sub-mediums like webcomics even in their own genre - How are you gonna list the original One Punch Man?

We deserve a universal portal for comics and a better reading experience for readers.

If you don't follow publishers or creators, it's often extremely difficult to keep up with their work with how slow comic releases can take. Even those that are passionate. This isn't exclusive to comics, but it is especially exacerbated by the particularities of producing the medium. The concept of a pull list is pretty foreign for many in the younger generations. The idea of downloading yet another app is obnoxious to people who are increasingly yearning to be more offline.

So what does this look like in practice?

A global catalogue that features a range of ways to catalogue works - from rare doujinshi to multi-generational, multi-timeline epics from various countries and a way to link them. Categorization yes, segregation no.

Easy ways for users to make recommendations and share lists of different kinds of comics that might fit whatever categorization they have in their head. Might be Queerness, or a specific IP, or a literary genre, or a canon or read order.

Most importantly: An easy way to track releases and directly access them through the catalogue - integrations with public release channels, local stores, and for web releases that may not be on platforms, RSS for easy tracking.

While this may seem challenging, may I present an unlikely inspiration: Weed.

Leafly, a cannabis strain cataloguing app that's integrated with local dispensaries and delivery services for cannabis. With recommendations based on a variety of human curated attributes. In the cannabis industry strains are constantly being invented and created, can be locale specific across a global industry with many combinations of attributes and familial relations and connections to other strains, with the possibility of existing in different forms (flower vs. edible. ect.). It allows you to categorize and favorite strains, and track when they're in stock.

Now replace this with a specific Aquaman inprint.

A suggestion and categorization system could be used, with products being replaced with various ways of reading.

Imagine a visualization system for canons and continuities.

I don't have all the answers, I don't think anyone does, but it's absolutely a start. And we can definitely figure it out together.

Publisher specific apps and even public library apps don't have the manpower to do this either.

I've tried Viz comics, DC universe, the new Marvel one, Hoopla, ect. It's simply very difficult to get the manpower to categorize decades of comics without the fandoms getting involved. While this might seem to be tied primarily to western comics, any user following a comic with multiple continuities or even publisher changes can get completely lost trying to just, find a fucking story to read. Just look at the 15 series list for Madoka Magica.

And what do we do for people who get introduced to Marvel through their manga or DC through their webtoon? Where do they start?

Those subreddits really hate women sometimes man!

Most people don't even seem to know that Sailor Moon is a sequel!

Unfortunately, you do kind of need the power of thousands of nerds to accumulate an understandable and quality catalogue of multimedia. Wikipedia exists and was built so quickly for a reason.

It cannot be bound to a singular publisher, it cannot be bound to single country. It has to be a collective, generalized effort. It will not be easy, but harder things have been done. Humanity has reached the stars many times and lived to tell the tale.

Comics deserves better than being the thrift shop of pop culture where our ideas are upsold on the Depop of mainstream audiences for hundreds of times of what they are sold for, but there has to be an acknowledgement that the world has gotten smaller, that genres might matter but less to audiences, and that we all succeed together, not apart.

There is no functional or meaningful difference between Osora or Nana or Persepolis or Captain Underpants or Homestuck or Red Sonja or Maus or any Fantagraphics titles or 8bittheater that justifies them being segregated at the cost of the entire medium more than what is the difference between The Room and The Godfather and A Bug's Life or Snow on Tha Bluff. Cuz they're all on fucking Letterboxd.

It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.

-Marjane Strapi