Camera Obscura: Back To The Future

Sitting in a Starbucks that could be anywhere in the world, Alasdair Watson reflects on how the spreading stain of mainstream culture is pushing new discoveries ever further off the map.
11 January 2002

By the time you read this, it'll be the year 2002. This time last year, a lot of people I know were hit by the disappointing realisation that we were now living in the future, and that we didn't have flying cars or cities on the moon yet. We'd been taught to associate 2001 with the distant future, and here it was, and it was just like yesterday.

A certain amount of disappointment is understandable, but we've got other marvels, even if I don't own a jetpack. I am writing this in a coffee shop in Edinburgh, having just finished checking my e-mail, while uploading a photo of the Scott monument I took earlier to a website for some of my friends to look at. I am doing all of this with what I carry in two pockets of my jacket. I'm pretty impressed with that. Maybe the future's not so bad after all.

So I'm sitting here in Starbucks, which used to be my one of my favourite cafes, one that did scones with jam and cream that were just to die for, drinking my Gingerbread Latte, just like the one you could buy in your town, and thinking about Tomorrow. And nice toys aside, I don't like what I see. It's the same thing that has bugged me periodically ever since I was old enough to understand what the word Monoculture meant.

I'm on holiday. I've got two books with me. One of them is Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. It's part of the reason I'm a bit sensitive to monocultures at the moment. The other is a book that I'm willing to bet you've never heard of, called BANE, by a guy called Joe Donnelly. It stands as the best horror novel I've ever read. But it was written by an obscure Scottish author, and not given the sort of support and promotion that Stephenson's books get.

I know the book trade can be unforgiving - I've read Norman Spinrad's essays about the troubles he has, despite having written such prescient works as BUG JACK BARRON (visit his website here, and read his essays here and here for the full story) - so I'm not surprised that Donelly's book vanished without trace. But the fact is, as we move closer and closer to a true Monoculture, it's going to be harder and harder to find the little gems like BANE. If you're not backed by one of the Big Boys, you're sunk.

Here's the one that blows my mind, though - at the same time as the cultural mainstream is becoming more and more controlled by a few large media companies, the fringes are increasingly open to everyone. If I had the time, inclination, and willing partners, I could get whatever I wanted distributed worldwide. All hail the Internet, the great leveller.

Of course, there's a price to pay for being on the fringe. Let's be honest, there's not very much money in it. No matter what you're doing, if you're not tied up with big business in some way, you're not likely to see a lot of money from it.

This is the tradeoff. Creative freedom versus money. Comics, of course, are no exception. Sure, anyone can write a comic, find an artist, and put the damn thing online, but no-one is going to pay money in advance for works by people they've never heard of. Hell, very few people are going to even set aside their time to look at works by people they've never heard of. We're all too busy reading the same books and seeing the same films that everyone else is. If we don't pay attention to where the monoculture is today, then we can't take part in the discussion when we're drinking coffee in the same coffee shops everyone else is.

And this is the really frightening thing about this monoculture I see invading my life. My time is increasingly spent trying to keep up with it, to the point where I don't have the time to go looking for the gems on the fringes.

It's true in comics, too. I'm lucky enough to have friends even more divorced from the mainstream of comics than I am, who are willing to flag up the gems they find for me, leaving me time to look in other places. But still, I live with the gnawing dread that I'm missing a good horror comic somewhere in the ocean of the small press, just because no-one I know is reading it.

I'm not saying that the quality of work is better in the small press - very often, it isn't. Sometimes there's a reason that the big boys won't back something. And equally, there's usually a reason when they do. For every cultural abortion like FRIENDS, there's a show like THE WEST WING. For every YOUNG JUSTICE, there's a PREACHER. After all, half the reason that editors have jobs is that it's up to them to make sure the company is publishing the good stuff. To sort the gold from the shit in the submissions pile.

It's just that, in the small press, it's hard to get the word out about the good stuff. Not, perhaps, as hard as it is in the book trade, where Big Business has the distribution and media almost completely sewn up, but still, it ain't easy. How many people are going to visit a news-site and read a three-paragraph story about a new comic from someone they've never heard of, when they can spend the same time reading yet another interview with the boys from Marvel? Why should a retailer chance money and shelf space on a risky prospect when they could just order another couple of copies of X-MEN?

That's the danger in the monoculture I see coming - not that the fringe stuff will go away, but that the noise the monoculture creates will make the already hard task of finding the good small press stuff next to impossible, especially as the signal to noise ratio coming out of the small press grows worse. The drawback to enabling everyone to publish is that, inevitably, everyone will. And most people probably shouldn't be allowed to.

And since the mainstream draws most of its talent pool from the good stuff in the small press, how is the mainstream going to be refreshed with new talent it can't find?

My shiny toys are all very well, but I can feel the future stagnating all around me.

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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