Comics are, by and large, a very incestuous medium. The reasons for this are many. Comics suffer from a stigma of inferiority, an unspoken consensus that the medium is second-rate and unworthy of the attention given to, say, prose or cinema. Many - probably most - of the people who make comics today, were in love with them in their youth. The customers of yesterday becoming the creators of today. The amount of time comics artists spend on a single issue probably outweighs the time commercial artists spend on a single advertisement by a factor of at least 50.

Comics are not a medium used by newcomers to become fabulously wealthy, and do not reach a wide enough audience to make even the most successful creators famous.

Because money and fame are, after all, what commercial art is all about. It is a common myth that 'true artists' don't care about money, and want to devote their attention to the quality of the end-product, and those who sacrifice supposed artistic integrity for a little bit of money are whores. The implication is that money has no value to an artist.

'Money is important. Money is status. Money is power.' Let's get one thing straight: money has value. Money is not bad or the root of all evil. Money is important. Money is status. Money is power. Money is a mark of competence and intelligence or, in some rare cases, of luck and ingenuity. In either case, it is a mark of accomplishment, of achievement. Money cannot fulfil every need in your life, but the things it will fulfil cannot be replaced by anything else: not ethics, not artistic integrity, nothing. This is just as true for comics as it is for any other enterprise.

This is the argument that needs to be made when trying to convince a comics publisher to support creator-owned properties. Forget creator's rights, integrity, all that. Publishers don't care about that, nor should they. When comic creators can't even form their own union, why should any publisher respect them? No, publishers care about that bottom line, and that is the pivot upon which the debate must turn.

Publishers need to be convinced and reminded that creators are more valuable than characters - even established ones. They need to be convinced that creators make more money, and it is the creators that ensure that bottom line. And this argument needs to be made now, when the industry has the most current evidence to support this thinking.

First we need to expose a few false or unjustified claims. One claim is that established characters have the advantage of name recognition. For example, everyone in the free world recognises Superman. SUPERMAN titles have the supposed advantage of being well-known and able to out-sell new titles. This is not a logical argument. Familiarity leads to over-exposure; it's unlikely that the number of people who recognise Superman is the same as the number that still care about him.

Another claim is that company-owned characters have the advantage of longevity. BATMAN outlived its creator, Bob Kane, and the suggestion is that had Bob Kane been the only person to ever work on BATMAN stories, no one else could make BATMAN stories today. Setting aside the utter tragedy of Bob Kane's estate failing to profit from the BATMAN franchise as much as it could have, this myth exists for one reason only: To encourage new generations of artists to see nothing wrong with profiting from the hard work of others, so they can spend their time feeding the machine and expending what original creative energy they have on giving SPIDER-MAN a new costume.

These are the false arguments long-time comics publishers will make to defend their sorry histories of theft and mediocrity, and we need to recognise them as the flimsy, pathetic excuses they are. And we need to ensure our counter-arguments are put in the only terms they understand: dollars and cents.

One: Creators are judged by sales profiles. Creators live and die by their sales. Whereas a character like, I don't know, AQUAMAN, has been resurrected and resurrected and resurrected despite ups and huge downs in sales, a writer or artist does not survive if they fail to bring in the dough. Every creator making a living in comics today has done so solely on the strength of being able to find a new audience or not alienating the existing one. The same cannot be said of every comics property currently being sold. Based on that, the only reasonable conclusion should be that companies should put their money on the tried-and-true creators, and bury the hit-and-miss characters.

'Companies should put their money on the tried-and-true creators.' Two: Those 'respected' fields everybody covets, movies and books, use big names to sell their products. Every movie advertisement has the names of the big stars listed more prominently than the title. Every novel has the name of the author sized appropriate to his/her popularity - Thomas Harris's had his name plastered in huge letters over the front of HANNIBAL.

Comics, on the other hand, make more effort to promote the names of their books than their creators, and retailers list their wares by title, or perhaps even by company, only very recently acknowledging the creators. Until comics follow the field they covet, they will continue to meet with defeat.

(Try this, Dark Horse: The next time Frank Miller does a new project, don't tell anybody what it's about. Just call it FRANK MILLER'S WHATEVER and put his name in huge, huge letters on the cover. Speculation alone might ensure that it outsold most other comic he's done!)

Three, and this one is the most important to stress, because so many people are in denial about it: The industry is shrinking. Badly. But if you look at the titles that are still healthy, you will see names that people recognise on the titles. Mark Millar on ULTIMATE X-MEN. Brian Bendis on DAREDEVIL. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon on PUNISHER. Even Kevin Smith on GREEN ARROW. Regardless of whether you enjoy the works of these creators, you cannot deny their name is bringing people in to look at the product, even people who had cheerfully left those titles years ago.

Look. In an industry as filled with screaming and hype as comics, it's hard to be subtle and still get your point across. So I'll shout it.

There is a war going on between characters and creators. And everyone needs to decide which side they are on.

The only way to change the face of the industry is to wake up to the very real, very large amounts of money waiting to be made, and to just go after it with shameless abandon. And the only way to do that is to get behind your creators 100%.

Mike Hendricks is a journalist and a tutor for disadvantaged children in Texas, USA.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.