The Free Market Rules All... Even Fiction

The free market is a pretty simple concept to grasp, and it's almost impossible to refute by those who understand it. It makes you wonder, then, why so many people try to so hard to make money while denouncing the free market. Let's lay out a few principles.

1 - The market wants what the market wants. If the market wants comics full of busty women and masculine men, they will buy those books. If they want comics full of effeminate men and potato-shaped girls, they'll buy those books. If at any time you want to see what the market enjoys, you simply have to look at what the market is buying. I'm talking about actual sales to actual customers; books bought by stores or distributors that wind up sitting unsold on the shelves do not count as sales.

2 - If you demand the market buy something it doesn't want, and if you engage in name-calling or social shaming to try to force these sales, you will see backlash from potential customers and the burning of whatever good will you've previously built. To put it another way, if the market wasn't convinced to buy your product when they liked you, they certainly aren't going to buy it when you're acting like an asshole.

3 - Everyone's work has a particular value set by the market. If you're demanding a level of payment for producing a product that doesn't sell well, expect one of two things to happen: the people paying you will eventually get tired of losing money and will start paying you less for the same work; or, the people paying you will keep paying you the same but will demand you produce a product that sells.

If you think about these basic truths, you'll see why a company that appears to hate its core fan base, replacing their demographic with minorities instead of creating new minority characters, should not be charging much for the swill they produce. If your future is tied up with a company that does this, whatever your particular skill set or demographic checklist looks like, I recommend you have something ready to go on the side. It isn't hard to see the writing on the wall, and that writing says the mainstream comics industry is in real trouble. They're bleeding out, and it might be fatal. But that brings me to a fourth point.

4 - The market abhors a vacuum. Look at it as a supply/demand issue. Just because the mainstream comics industry are crapping on the fans doesn't mean the fans' demand for comics is fading. This is why crowdfunding is becoming such an important part of the indie comics industry. The market's demand isn't just for comics. The demand is for GOOD comics. The mainstream comic industry is supplying comics, but that doesn't match the category of the demand.

The bottom line: anyone who wants to create comics based on any topic should be free to do so, but the market is the ultimate arbiter of success or failure. If you create something nobody wants, it's probably not because the market if full of evil racist xenophobic gay-hating white supremacists. It's probably because you made a garbage product, and you don't like the market reacting to it by turning elsewhere.

-Ellis Novak

2025-04-14