Editorial: Camera Obscura: Get Smart

It's all about alternatives with Alasdair Watson this week; alternatives to the comic culture, and alternatives to activism. Could push technology provide the shove that comic readers need?
31 January 2003

POWER OF INDEPENDENT TRUCKING

I'm about five years too old to be here. A rock club in Croydon, not a million miles from the sort of place I misspent my teenage years. There's three acts on tonight, but the only act with any serious audience is the one I'm here to see - the middle act, Set In Stone. They're my friends' band, so I'll refrain from going on about them at length - I'm genuinely a fan, but anything else I might say in review is suspect.

The reason I mention this bunch of up-and-comings here is their intersection with comics. Frontman Andy, putting me in mind of nothing so much as Julian Cope just before the drugs started to bite in hard, is working on a comic. There's a flyer for it on the table with the band merchandise. The drummer, Ciara, is a fan of Chester Brown. Spare the jokes - she's heard them all before. Fin, the bassist, devours Eddie Campbell and obscure French comics, and is working on a graphic novel.

No, of course you haven't heard of their band, or anything about their projects in comics. What interests me about their intersection with comics is precisely that they have no connections with the comic culture that's familiar to us, and so far as I can tell, they don't really plan to make any.

They're using unconventional promotion and distribution, at gigs and on the edges of London's alternative scene, because the comics 'scene' is no good to them. Not one of them is working on a thing that would shift in the comics mainstream, and so far as I know, they've no plans to move in that direction. Not everything in comics is about the comics culture.

SOMEBODY PUT SOMETHING IN MY DRINK

Activism's been on my mind lately. I bought Naomi Klein's new book FENCES AND WINDOWS the other week, and I've been thinking about what she's got to say. See, the notion of "Comics Activism" has irked me for a couple of years. Personally, I tend to the idea that if an industry needs "activists" to help it survive, it probably doesn't deserve to do so.

And y'know, I can think of a lot of other, better things to get 'activist' about. I worry about someone who has the energy to lobby for comics when others are lobbying for ethical globalisation, or against the evils perpetrated against the Third World by multinationals, the IMF and the WTO.

Klein makes some interesting observations about the anti-globalisation movement (I'm using that name as shorthand for a much more complex and diverse body of lobbyists - buy the book yourself to find out more). She notes that the movement has no leader, just a load of disparate people pulling in more-or-less the same direction. Not unlike people who want to make the comics industry better. She describes the movement as being like a series of spokes and hubs for distributing information about protests between loosely affiliated groups, who have interests or methods in common, using the internet and mobile communications. Smartmobs, to use internet community pioneer Howard Rheingold's term. I'm interested in this as an information and communications nerd watching the beginnings of a new communication model. And it occurs to me that, if we're going to have comics activists at all, then they'll need to evolve.

To my mind, magazines like Savant were simply the larval stage of any comics activist movement. Jumping up and down and shouting is all very well, but if you can't do something else once you've got people's attention, then you're going to loose it really quickly. Especially if all you're doing is jumping up and down and shouting on the internet. No-one's voice sounds good distorted through a modem.

So, how exactly would a co-ordinated mob of comic fans go about being activist?

Well, it strikes me that comics activism is actually still quite a passive thing. It requires its audience to turn up to websites, and read recommendations and activist screeds. Or it requires people to accost perfectly innocent members of the public in bookshops, and talk them into buying comics, and frankly, if anyone tried that with me a bookshop, they'd get told to fuck off out of it and leave me in peace...

Back in around 1996, one of the hot internet buzzwords was "push technology". The idea of forcing content down to subscribers, without requiring them to come get it. It dropped out of use after about six months, because no one could figure out how to make money out of it, or how to deliver it reliably to a wide audience.

Today, while no-one mentions push technology very much, there's plenty of it around. Syndicated content. SMS messages. RSS feeds on websites (yes, yes, I know - I'm going to build one for 9A in due course - leave me alone), while not strictly a push technology, come close - you may have to actively subscribe to them, but so many other technologies now bundle the facility to subscribe to RSS feeds into their make-up that the barrier to entry is so low as to be non-existant...

But it's SMS messages that are potentially the most interesting. Start small, within the existing comics audience, and arrange to have subscribers sent new recommendations direct to their phone ever Thursday (or Wednesday, in the states). "Never miss an issue..." Hell, with MMS, you could even throw in pictures of the cover.

Better yet, the SMS audience is already used to paying for push content, so you could even charge for it, if you were desperate. That said, I think you'd be better running it for costs only, and with the right set-up, costs could be tiny - I know at least one provider that'll let you bulk buy SMS credits in advance for 2 pence each. So that's a little over a quid a year, per user.

Add server space, and appropriate database and customisation technology, and I don't think it'd be unreasonable to say you could achieve this for a fiver per head per year. And you could get it paid via PayPal. Or, you could easily get your money back with advertising to your (highly desirable 18-35 year old male) customer base via SMS - say one ad per three "content" SMS's sent...

Go on, show of hands - how many of you would like to receive a (massively cut down) version of the Shipping Forecast every week? Or better yet, a configurable system that would alert you to news of a particular creator's books? Would you be happy to get that, with editorial recommendations? Would you put up with one advert SMS a week in exchange for two SMS's with useful content?

And that's without touching on the possibilities of a really clever PDA-based system, as more and more people adopt them, and wireless applications become smarter and smarter...

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

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