Written By: Dave Baxter
Subtitle: The Consumerist Clout of the Creative Commons

Folks can talk all they want about the theory behind digital publishing and distribution, of free marketing and the economics of intangible e-products. We can argue the pros and cons and the realities and the pie-in-the-sky dreams until it’s no longer a debate but instead a cold hard reality, one way or the other. On the other hand, there are some that have already made this a reality, not waiting for the future to overtake them. The brave few that are riding the white water rapids of e-comic publishing without the comforting landlines of a pro print career or built-in fan base. We’re here now not just to philosophize, but to look at what’s realistically going on right this very minute with specific digital publishers.

Let’s take a moment to wrap our heads around this.

7 billion torrent files were downloaded in 2008 from one torrent site (though it’s statistically the most popular—Mininova.org This ten-figure number easily doubles when you include torrents downloaded on the smaller to mid-range torrent portals, and the number again triples when considering the non-torrent “file sharing” sites such as Rapidshare, Bodongo, FileShare, MegaUpload and the like.

Torrents deliver music tracks, software, .cbr or .cbz or .pdf book and comic scans, movies, popular hacks, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. In comparison, official download sites such as iTunes broke (and only just) the 1 billion mark of individual files downloaded in 2008. And worse, sales in brick-and-mortar stores went down by an astonishing (and unheard of) 25-30% in 2008 from 2007.

The number of music files available via online Person-to-Person (P2P) “file sharing” is approximately 79 million unique tracks. The number of music files available for legal download via official sites such as iTunes is approximately 3 million. And you have to pay.

Everything stated above has an explicitly analogous statistic when applied to comics, and you also have to pay. Hmm.

The major companies’ provisional attempts at offering products and services online have all been, frankly, pathetic. Not just within the music and book industries, but comic publishers are off to a bafflingly slow start to boot. Marvel is offering 6-month old product available only on their security-protected non-customizable “reader” and DC’s Zuda is fundamentally an American Idol-type competition that results in a handful of ongoing webcomics, to be cancelled at a moment’s notice due to poor response, and which may or may not ever see print (depending again on response), and the comics’ rights are locked away with DC for years before the creators can look into the ever-evolving, spontaneously sprouting, ground-breaking avenues of exposure that should be the right of any creator to pursue in order to sell more books. Beyond this then: unless a Zuda-spotlighted comic is picked up by DC, any story appearing inside a Zuda competition will have a mere 8 pages of material posted. That is, in a word, and to repeat myself, but what the hell let’s add a second word to spice things up: absolutely pathetic.

“Piracy” exists because readers have evolved into a state of independence exponentially intensifying and rocketing away from the major companies’ control with each passing year. At first, it seemed like a crisis—companies had to survive, didn’t they? And they had to be given a chance to catch up to the times without tumbling into bankruptcy due to sudden drops in annual gross sales. Now, nearly 10 years later, it seems far less a crisis and more a tragedy that’s gone eighteen Acts too many, stretching out and out and out. Companies are frustratingly obstinate. They are not “getting it”. They’re not competing. They’re not even trying. They’re looking for the “alternative” rather than the compromise. They’re fishing for hidden oil veins in Alaska rather than switching to electric. So it goes. But this means the unbelievably verdant ground of P2P is virtually un-trodden by those looking to actively, purposefully reach an audience for a work of print-style media.

Into this undiscovered country strode Hermés Piqué and Juan Romera, creators of the first ever comic to seek its readership by aggressively using the properties inherent in the Creative Commons License. We’ll explain that in detail a bit further down the line, but the primary effect of using the Creative Commons is that P2P becomes not just a viable source of distribution, but the quickest, freest, and one that reaches the highest potential numbers over any other.

The creative duo in question, Piqué and Romera, the writer and artist (respectively) for the digitally distributed comic Misery Depot, aren’t simply offering the book for free download via an e-comic marketplace (though it’d be utilizing cutting-edge distribution elements if it were) nor is it merely up for download on its own site (though it is). The extraordinary—and intriguing—aspect of Misery is that its creators are striving to find an audience by advocating the free proliferation of the book, or in other words, the “piracy” of the work itself. “We don’t want the money of our readers; we want to buy their attention,” says writer Piqué.

Misery Depot is distributed under the Creative Commons license, which allows the work to be reproduced for any and all non-commercial purposes. This means the comic can be legally shared via P2P networks: torrents, file sharing, even print publications so long as they’re freely distributed. It’s all fair game.

This practice is derived from the Open Source movement, which spawned free software megaliths such as Firefox and Wordpress.org. The concept is to allow absolutely anyone to download (or otherwise take) and then utilize the product at no cost (in this case, from the Misery Depot website), and then allow the user to continue the distribution of the product by uploading it for subsequent downloads onto forums, blogs, websites, torrent portals, you name it, it’s allowed. Word of mouth on these things are slow to start, but as can seen with the current state of the few-year-old Firefox and Wordpress platforms, give something a little time, and ensure that it’s a quality product and that future editions will appear, and the potential audience a creator can reach is nigh-unto unfathomable. Firefox browsers are currently borderline-tied (44%) with the number of Internet Explorer users (45%). That would be like an independent publisher (not a small press, but independent) gaining Marvel readership figures. Talk about potential!

Currently, downloads for Misery Depot are available at the main site in torrent form, a .cbz file, or alternately it can be read online in full. Even better, Depot has also made the move to iPhone/iComic format and—because the creators decided to use a Creative Commons license—iComics can and therefore is using Misery as their default test comic, so that all users will download MD first, before all others, in order to test their new iComic application out. That’s an entire chunk of the iPhone customer base that’ll receive Misery Depot for free and by default, a position that no other comic could achieve due to copyright issues, but issues that the Creative Commons License bypasses en toto. The reader may not ever read the free offering, and they may not care for it if they do, but the distribution numbers attached to such a move are, from a small press standpoint, gargantuan.

Marvel and DC spend a small fortune every year on lawyers and grunt internet-browsing gophers to do little more than try to squash P2P sharing of any and all kinds. Music and DVD distributors are desperate to find a compromise between free proliferation and a cost that can actually support their bloated mogul lifestyle. The plain fact of the matter: piracy is here to stay. And by “piracy” I mean free distribution methods, which, let’s face it, is the positive slant to the nice-try-come-again attempt on the corporations’ part to make freedom an immoral act. If the price isn’t right elsewhere, the price will be free wherever we want it. Piqué and Romera are the first to vocally rally behind the Creative Commons cause, and utilize it to see if an entertainment product can be as noticed and supported through the same free-will patronization as supports the major freeware developers of the world. If these two can continue to put out works that flourish and thrive in an environment of multi-media “piracy” that is steadily trouncing the standard business model of empire, then they will be the first to adamantly prove that the climate change of the print business world is a permanent one, and, thankfully, a positive one.

But why speculate? Let go right to the source and ask:

Me: Hey, Hermés! Glad to find some time to chat with you. I’ve been awed by your move to distribute Misery Depot via P2P and adopting the “freeware” or “shareware” software model via the Creative Commons license. Can you tell us what inspired or perhaps impelled you to go this route?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: The Open Source movement. I’m a Software Engineer and in my field we’re much more accustomed to “free” being a business model, than anyone in the entertainment industry. As you pointed out, the comic industry is particularly behind in this aspect.

I should also give credit to Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame (http://www.thelongtail.com) and his musings about free, and Cory Doctorow and his novel Little Brother, which was also released under a Creative Commons license. When I read how Doctorow encouraged his readers to translate his books and convert them into other formats, I realized Creative Commons was the way to go to reach the widest audience possible.

It should be noted that, as I discovered recently, some of Doctorow’s short stories were adapted by IDW in comic form (Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Doctorow also released this comic under a Creative Commons license (available for download at the Internet Archive), although his official site makes a timid mention of this.

Me: Whoa! Yeah, I reviewed nearly the whole 6-issue series of FTotHaN issues over at the Broken Frontier site, and the press release sure kept mum on that topic! His book = banner wave the CCL. His comic = well, you can say it, but say it softly. It’s nearly hair-pulling how resolute comic pubs are on absolutely not moving forward in the digital age, outside of traditional means of marketing and distribution. Even though, hell, they’re all bleeding money on their print comics: what difference could it possibly make?

Did you know that It’s A Wonderful Life was a complete theatrical failure, but whoever was in charge of filing the movie’s copyright fell asleep on the job, and so television stations across the world showed the sucker every single holiday season because it was free to do so. Now, the movie not only recouped its budget but has been a #1 seller ever since. Simply because everyone and their sister was able to watch it and let it become a tradition and a classic. How’s that for the power of “free”!

Anywho, how has reader response been so far? I’d be very interested to hear the torrent statistics, if you have them. Also, have the number of downloads and visits to the Misery Depot website been heartening at this stage?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: I have the torrent statistics. Sadly, I made the mistake of using The Pirate Bay’s tracker, which I later found out purposely resets its numbers to avoid sharing this information. Right now it says 0, for instance.

While I can’t know the total number of completed torrent downloads, I know the torrent was downloaded 1145 times from Mininova. That’s one thousand downloads just by publishing the torrent of comic with an unknown publisher, written by a newcomer, on a site that is not even specialized in comics.

Misery Depot was also released on the eMule and eDonkey network (ed2k). However, I can only know the number of downloads I seeded, not the total number of downloads.

The only statistics I know for certain are those of miserydepot.com. According to Webalizer, the site received 5685 visits since mid-October, when the comic was launched. Of those, approximately 23% are direct traffic (probably readers that found the comic through P2P networks or who returned to the site by typing its URL in the address bar), 18% come from search engines (most from people searching keywords related to free comics) and 59% from referring sites.

The site that sent most visits was the Spanish blog lacarceldepapel.com, perhaps the most popular comics blog in Spain. Unsurprisingly, Misery Depot didn’t get any mention on the popular American comic book sites yet, although it had a positive review on Ain’t It Cool News that garnered 40 visits.

Readers prefer to download the comic than to read it online, but not by far. The shocking discovery is that .cbr is not the most popular format on the site (I only distributed the .cbr version through P2P networks): as of today, .pdf wins by a margin of 4 downloads.

All numbers aside, I find fascinating that the life of Misery Depot is far from over. Each time a new language is added, the visits spike, and I’m sure there will be a significant increase when Papyrus Comics publishes more titles. If it were a floppy published by one of the big four, it would be dead exactly after the preorders were cut off!

Me: On the subject of the Creative Commons license, what other corners of the entertainment biz do you hope to wedge Misery Depot into, using the freedom of the CC license, such as the book’s current position as test comic for the iPhone’s iComic Application?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: I was recently contacted by an upcoming Spanish science fiction magazine (http://revista-exegesis.blogspot.com/) that wants to include the Spanish version of Misery Depot in its initial line-up. Since it’s a non-profit magazine, they already have my permission to do it, but they were nice enough to ask.

Being a test comic for iComic was a welcome surprise. Right now my focus is to translate Misery Depot into as many languages as possible. I received an offer to translate it into Portuguese, and I am trying to get help to translate it into French. I probably won’t stop until I see a Mandarin, Arabic, or Japanese version so Misery Depot can reach Asia as well.

Returning to your question, I prefer to be surprised by what the future holds for Misery Depot. CC really opens the door to anything: a Nintendo DS version for its homebrew comic reader, the thesis of a film student, or—why not?—a sequel, a prequel or another comic set in the same universe. I will support anything that is respectful of the original material.

A little review of the book: Misery Depot is a stand-alone one-shot, a somber sci-fi thriller constructed brilliantly for online reading. Piqué keeps the script text-light and minimal, allowing the story to run on ambiance and action alone. A sense of dread pervades the scene: an unspecified future, underground, within some sort of laboratory (or so it seems), when suddenly a liquid-filled preservation tank opens by accident, releasing the body of an elderly woman who had floated inside. Confused, she stumbles naked through an unrecognizable landscape, uncertain how she’d gotten inside the tank or residing in a future, unfamiliar time. Accosted by security guards, wild old men, and a world she’s never seen before, the woman makes her way to her last available memory: her daughter.

The story reads like Philip K. Dick writing for Alfred Hitchcock; it’s The Twilight Zone given a good kick of literary post-cyberpunk post-modernism (yeah, wrap your head around that). Being a book tailor-made for online reading, Piqué smartly keeps things visual. There was a study enacted a while back (which I’ll be covering in greater detail inside the upcoming, third Killing the Grizzly installment) which concluded that online readers naturally skim a page and do not “read” it exhaustively, as they would a printed page. Even a PDF document is considered a “content blob” and won’t be read like a book unless printed out. This means that, if chasing a purely online audience, who likely won’t, in numbers, print so costly a document as a full-color comic, the book itself must be legible to the “skimming” eyes of online readership. Misery Depot is a largely silent story, following the journey of the main lady protagonist, as she wanders and struggles to reach her daughter. Information is imported through images, labels, designs, and dialogue that are parsed out with a designer’s eye, placed at key moments that are effortless to read, even online.

But this leaves the lion’s share of the work to artist Juan Romera. His figures and backgrounds have the dark and liquid look of a 2000 A.D. sci-fi thriller, reminiscent also of Charles Adlard (The Walking Dead). His work is expressive, while maintaining the sterile and inexplicably sinister qualities that MD requires. Romera masterfully presents the inhabitants and their plights, laying-out each page with an intuitive choreography that taxes the reader not at all. Romera colors Misery as well, and his grey and drab-green palate fits like a formaldehyde-stained glove.

Misery Depot is a self-contained story and one that requires a short time (five minutes max—trust me) and minimal effort to digest. The story naturally, organically weaves its narrative beginning to end, and the story itself is memorable, disturbing and clever on more than just one tier of reader engagement. I’d be shocked to find a guy or gal that wasn’t intrigued enough to come back for more.

ME: Why did you choose the story of Misery Depot for the big first release of Papyrus Comics?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: You said it. Because it was a self-contained story that didn’t require much time to read (although a second reading might shed more light into the whys and wherefores).

ME: As I mentioned above, the story seemed designed specifically to fit an online reading environment. Is this just a happy coincidence, or were there elements you shaped to fit snug within an online reader/internet browser layout?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: I made a conscious effort to shut up and release just enough information to keep the reader’s attention. The pacing is also intentional. The story is in fact split in 4 acts of 6 pages each, so it could be published in installments.

Concerning the layout, I didn’t have the web in mind when I wrote the script. When we eventually decided to publish it online, we didn’t change the format because we didn’t want to rule out the possibility of a printed edition.

The next releases from Papyrus Comics will be similar, but we might experiment with different layouts further down the road. Juan has already made a couple of comics formatted to fit on a screen without the need of scrolling: The Fighting Stranger ( http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Fighting_Stranger) and Denia. Here’s an interesting post (in Spanish, although the images speak for themselves), about how he reformatted Denia when he decided to publish it on the web: http://juanromera.blogspot.com/2008/09/denia-para-la-web.html

ME: And how did you and Juan Romera come to collaborate with Misery? Will he be attached to future Papyrus Comics online productions?

HERMÉS PIQUÉ: Yes, I recently sent Juan Romera the next script. If he likes it, his next comic under Papyrus Comics will see the light in two or three months.

Juan responded to an ad I published at Digital Webbing seeking collaborators, back when I didn’t even know the existence of Creative Commons. He drew the fourth page as a test, which made it quite clear that he was the right artist to draw Misery Depot.

A final review note: One last aspect of Misery’s e-approach to note: 1) The book is already available online in both English and Spanish (Piqué being a native speaker) and plans are already underway to translate the book into as many languages as possible, calling on fans to basically enact a manga-style “Scanlation” of the work and continue its spread through the non-English-speaking communities of the online world.

ME: Have you tried putting Misery up specifically on Scanlation sites, to see if you can get some help directly? Or have you had any responses thus far from anyone outside of friends?

HP: No, I haven’t, and it’s a great idea. I did receive an offer of a member of the #comic-scans irc chatroom to translate Misery Depot to Portuguese. The rest are friends.

ME: What’s the future look like for Papyrus Comics? Give us a few tantalizing hints.

HERMÉS PIQUÉ : Papyrus Comics will release at least three free CC comics a year. Two more comics are being produced right now: a horror short story and a 48-page mystery, both written by yours truly, both color. Hopefully their serialization will start around April, as we won’t launch anything that is not completely finished. If there’s one thing I passionately dislike about the American comics industry, it’s late comics.

For those who would like to see more of the Misery Depot, there’s at least one more story in me set in this world. However, it won’t feature the same characters as I feel their story is done (that wasn’t a spoiler, by the way), and since only Juan can draw it, it will have to wait until he’s willing to do it.

I don’t discard distributing comics written by others in the near future. However, this will have to wait until I have learned enough of free comics distribution, to feel confident handling the work of others.

ME: Thanks for being with us, Hermés. I wish Papyrus and Misery and yourself all the best. There is no doubt in my mind that we’re on the ground floor of a very different kind of “publishing” (which in this new era will be synonymous with “distribution”) model. Using P2P directly may or may not be the answer, but it seems to me to be precisely the right direction. Which is more than I can say for most newcomers on the comic book scene (the wonderful peeps at Septagon obviously excluded!). Any closing thoughts?

HP: I invite all your readers to read Misery Depot ( http://www.miserydepot.com) and, if they like it, to support it by spreading the word or by following any of the recommendations that are indicated on the site. Thank you for the interview, Dave, and to your readers for their attention.

NEXT: Come back in two weeks’ time for the third KILLING THE GRIZZLY article, in which we’ll explore the fundamental reasons why, against all intuition, “Free” is the final frontier for future publishing. Until then!

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