To Robbie Conal, “America’s foremost street artist” and staff caricaturist to the LA Weekly, on the publication of your profile of Portland᾿s own Mercury Studios (and guests) in Portland Monthly—
(A preface: this is long and self-indulgent, but since when is that new on the pier? It is, though, based on a piece that’s not online. So: no link that you can read and check for yourself. Pick up a copy if you’re in town, if you must; the strips they run along with it all rock. If you’d like a glimpse of Mercury Studios, this Oregonian article is much better, and the classy photos that put faces to names are over here.)
First: hey, thanks. There’s nothing so cool as seeing people you love and things you know through someone else’s eyes. Always a treat. And while some might knock the gonzo excess of your prose stylings, well, I’ve always been a fan of exuberance, myself. Give me a voice that knows what it wants and goes after it full-tilt: I might wince at the occasional typo and grammatical misstep, but at the end of the day I’m going to like it better and remember it longer than bog-standard A1 clarity. Just a word of advice: I know they made it look easy, those gonzo guys, like all you had to do was live through it and then sit down with some liquor and stimulants and, you know, type, but it’s hard, gonzo is. Harder than bog-standard A1 clarity. Injecting yourself into your journalism requires a delicate balancing act between self-indulgence and self-awareness, and just because you’re subjective as all get-out, that’s no excuse for slacking off on the underlying facts. (Just because bog-standard A1 is fucking up on that front these days is no excuse, either.) —Oh, hell, you’re tempted to tell yourself; they’ll get the gist of it, even if the facts aren’t all that. Any publicity’s good. Don’t listen: down that road lies the devil.
But we’ll get to that.
As for myself? Well, I’ve got no complaints with how I’m handled. “Build[s] databases for corporate lawsuits.” Pretty much. I might quibble at being called an “adult,” but that’s my hang-up, not yours. (On the other hand, while I’m hardly the best there is at staining and varnishing, I’d like to think our new front door looks slightly nicer than something you’d pick up at the Home Depot.) —But! I never met you, or spoke with you directly, and anyway, I’m only in the thing for a paragraph and a half. Which, granted, is more than Craig Thompson got. So I’m good as far as that goes.
The rest? —At least, the bits I can speak to authoritatively?
Well, first, it’s Dicebox. Not Dice Box. —A small thing, but the devil’s in the details, such as the title of the comic by your subject of the moment. Or the fact that it’s not available exclusively at dicebox.net (rather than jennworks.com—but hey, URLs, who reads ’em?). It’s also and one might even say primarily available at Girlamatic. And while the checks she gets from Girlamatic might only be enough for some beer and the occasional software upgrade, it’s still not entirely accurate to say that Dicebox is “not capitalized, at all.” There’s no action figures, granted; no T-shirts or posters or stickers or tchotchkes. Yet. (We’re still trying to get her to sell the notecards she does.) But Girlamatic does sell advertising on the site; and if your readers manage to make it there, they might well be unpleasantly surprised by the subscription fee they’ll have to pay to read the archives. (We will leave out the plans for eventual print publication; a distraction.)
I know, I know: this messes with the whole “heady Northwest Linux brew collides head-on with the soy-lentil-green-indie arts scene” riff, which I’m sure tested well in the bullpen. But sometimes we must kill our favorite children to make the overall piece.
Moving on: Anodyne is not a parallel project to Dicebox. Anodyne, in fact, died back in 1999; Dicebox took off in 2002. Nor is it entirely clear to your readers that Anodyne was a freely distributed local arts monthly, not a—well, I’m not sure what they’d think, coming out of that paragraph, but it reads like an editor’s blue pencil took a bad fall in the middle of one of the sentences and never recovered, so we’ll let it slide. (But: neutrinos? Mathematical constructs that conserve energy in the equations that describe half-life decay. No half-life themselves to speak of, much less a blisteringly fast one. —I know, I know, they’ll get the gist of it. Yes yes. Moving on.)
As to the aura Jenn that exudes—“blushing rose,” at one point, shading to “purple” when she says “It’s a public form of self-expression”—and her “Buddha-esque” stature as the “gravitational center in that ethereally radiating alternate reality that is so genuinely precious and fiercely protected in the sweet funky neighborhoods of Portland”? —Well, it’s hard to quibble with someone who says something so sweet. And her “transcendentally radiant, gently surreal inner sanctum” is pretty much spot-on, as anyone who’s seen her studio can attest. (Still: “Buddha-esque”?)
But! You’re being genuinely subjective, there, expressing what you saw, as you saw it. I’m not going to contest you on those grounds. It’s when you try to do the same thing through the supposedly objective means of quoting someone directly that we get, well, iffier:
Why stay on the Web? “Distributors! The comics industry is slowly collapsing on itself. Most retail comics stores in North America that want to carry popular comics deal with Diamond Comics Distribution. It has a virtual monopoly. It sells through its catalog, Previews. If a publisher wants its product to be listed in Previews, it has to pay for ads in the catalog—no problem for the majors, but small publishers can’t afford the extra costs. Now Diamond has a rule that it won’t list any comic that doesn’t sell 2,500 copies per month. I haven’t wanted to bother with it.”
Now, granted, I wasn’t there to hear what was actually said, or in what context, any more than I know what’s actually your writing and what was inserted or amended by an editor. So I don’t know how many of the inaccuracies in the above are due to your own misunderstanding of an abstruse and marginal business plan, granted, and how many are due to Jenn hazarding guesses at some placeholder stats in the service of a more fundamental point, but when your subject of the moment says “Don’t quote me on this,” and “You need to check that before you say anything about it” and goes to the trouble of warning your fact-checker, too, well.
Can I kick off a tangent here, just for a moment? It’s germane, honest. —See, I’ve never taken a course in journalistic ethics myself, but I have written my share of feature articles and personality sketches back in the day, and I always tried to keep in mind the case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Jeffrey Masson was a psychoanalyst who, while serving as Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, grew disenchanted with the father of his art; Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker that proved less than flattering. A libel suit was filed. And, while she quoted him at length saying words she couldn’t prove with notes or tape recordings that he’d actually said, Masson lost the suit. —At one point, in fact, she says he described himself as an “intellectual gigolo” when the closest the court could find to that in his actual words was “much too junior within the hierarchy of analysis for these important . . . analysts to be caught dead with [him]”—and still, he lost.
So congratulations! As journalists, we’ve got great power: we can make shit up and stick it in other people’s mouths. (Specifically, “the common law of libel overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon substantial truth.” But that’s in America, bucko; don’t try it overseas.) —But as you should have realized the moment you set out to write about comics, with great power comes great responsibility. (It’s in the pamphlet they give you at the door.) The law sets forth the bare minimum: you can elide stuffily tedentious self-descriptors down to snappily inaccurate soundbites so long as you don’t violate substantial truth. Beyond that, well, we’ve got to call on ethics. (Do keep Malcom’s own snappy self-descriptor in mind: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”)
And at this point you’re asking yourself what the hell the fallout from a contentious multi-million dollar libel suit can teach us about a freelance puff piece on cartoonists in a $3.99 glossy ad-horse. Hell, you’re probably saying, I never elided anything! I didn’t make anything up at all! That’s what she said! I’m pretty sure! What gives?
Let’s step through it:
You’re interviewing someone about their webcomics publishing venture and you ask them, why the web? And they tell you there’s a lot of barriers to traditional print publishing. And you ask, like what? And maybe they say something like industry collapsing, Diamond monopoly, ads in the catalog, 2,500 copies. —And you do some research, and you find out that the industry has been through a rough patch, but sales in some quarters are showing signficant upticks; that Diamond in the mad bad days of the late ’90s pretty much had a virtual monopoly, yes, and it’s true that almost every direct-market comics shop in the country still has to deal with them, but there’s a number of competitors now, and new if untested markets cropping up all over, like manga in Borders and strips on, hey, the web; that no, you don’t have to buy ads in the catalog to get listed, just glancing at the thing will tell you that, though if you ask around you’ll hear dark mutterings from some quarters of preferential treatment for those who buy ads (then again, this is a business: what’s new?) and if you do more than glance at the thing you’ll note the listings are so small that it’s pretty much impossible to get noticed at all without buying some real estate to strut your stuff; that Diamond (it’s said) prefers sales of $1,000 a pop with a reliable growth curve over the first few issues, not so much a firm floor of 2,500 copies.
Given that you can make up whatever you like and stick it in their mouth, so long as you don’t violate substantial truth, what do you do?
Well. That all depends on what the substantial truth is, doesn’t it?
And this is why journalism is morally indefensible, and this is why ethics are paramount, at the end of the day. —Are you writing a drily witty, razor-keen hit piece? Well. What you’ll want to do is polish what was said until minor inaccuracies reflect the subject of the moment’s ostensible paranoia and aggrandizing sense of self-importance—conspiracies, projection, sour grapes. Ethically impeccable, morally indefensible, but hey, substantial truth, right?
Are you digging into something as an investigative reporter? Grilling a government spokesperson on the record? In that case, the substantial truth is what, precisely, was said, and when, and how; you won’t want to change a word. But you will want to hold what was said up against the actual facts—or at the very least present those facts, as if they were the other side of an argument. You know?
But if it’s a freelance puff piece on cartoonists for a $3.99 glossy ad-horse? Whose basic point is opening up a genuinely precious and fiercely protected demimonde to latte-sipping shoppers cruising the Pearl? —In that case, your subject of the moment is hardly a hostile witness. Your goals are in synch. The substantial truth is there are obstacles, yes. Your great power is to put words in their mouth. Your great responsibility is to make sure they get the job done.
So: you can change what was said to congrue with reality as you’ve found it. Don’t look at me like that. You can do this. It’s perfectly allowable. Granted, if you’re a mensch, you’re going to call them up before it goes to press and vet the quote with them, word for word, but time is short, and there are so few mensches left in this world. But that’s one thing you can do. Drop the bit about the monopoly; massage the sentence about ads until it says “to get noticed”; correct the number. Morally indefensible; ethically impeccable. Hey presto.
Granted, most writers are going to feel uncomfortable doing this. I’d balk at it myself: I’ve played fast and loose with quotes from time to time (you’ve never heard the fury hell hath none like until you’ve vernaculared the verb of a persnickety grammarian), but not with something so central to a point. In that case: well, they did say there were obstacles, right? Sin by omission: cut the quote there, drop out of their voice and into your own, lay down the facts as you’ve found them to be. —The substantial truth, after all.
(Is the substantial truth that they’ve got some particulars wrong, off the cuff like that? Is that what’s important to note? —Especially when they’ve told you “Don’t quote me on this” and “You need to check that before you say anything about it.” What morals are you trying to defend, again?
(Just be sure whatever you do that the truth you’re citing, in their words or yours, has some little substance. It does no good to say to yourself that the gist of the matter is there are obstacles and the facts merely illustrate this, accurate or not, when your readers take home a gist that says Diamond won’t list your comics unless you also buy an ad.)
But what you don’t do, and I realize I’ve blown through about 2500 words here and you’re probably getting tired of the sound of my voice on what is really a tiny problem in the grand scheme of things, but the devil is in the goddamn details, it’s all small stuff, so bear with me: what you don’t do is pretend that writing it down as if they’ve said it absolves you of the responsibility of finding out for yourself. Putting facts in other people’s mouths is a great way to humanize a story, but it’s also a cheap-ass way to dodge the bullet. “That’s wrong?” you say. “Well, gosh. It’s what they said. I can only write what they tell me.” That’s morally indefensible and ethically questionable, and what’s more, when people turn the page and read this:
The pop-culture industry has already thrown the first brick or two—and they’re gold, baby. There are 2,500 independent bookstores and 3,000 chain stores in the United States, and guess what: book sales are as flat as Nebraska—with the single exception of comics and graphic novels. How does $105 million in sales for 2003 sound?
Like a data point without context, but aside from that: who’s right? “The industry is collapsing,” or “Sales leaping buildings in a single bound”? I mean, I know how to square this particular circle, and Jenn knows, and everyone you talked to for the article knows, because we all know the shape of this thing we call comics. I can’t tell from this piece whether you do or not. But I do know that most of your readers don’t; and after finishing this thing, they still won’t.
They will have missed the gist, basically.
—Damn. I did go on a bit about a piece that’s mostly about other people, didn’t I? Chalk it up to youthful enthusiasm. (I’d sure like to.) And I’m not sure what might (or, granted, might not) be misspelled in Pete Woods’ curriculum vitæ, or out of synch in Matthew Clark’s résumé, but I can tell you that the Wendy-and-the-Lost-Boys riff you pull with Rebecca Woods is almost as old and inaccurate as the idea that cartoonists live out a delayed adolescence that escapes the rest of us benighted souls, but maybe another time. —I had a different point to make, and I hope I have: gonzo’s right, and objective journalism is a myth, yes yes: but this makes it all much harder, not easier. Far from absolving us from the responsibility of checking into the truth of what we’re living through, it goads us all the more into chasing something we’ll never reach—or it ought to, anyway. Only then can we make it all look like we popped the pills and drank the booze and just sat down to type. Easy as pie.
Even for a freelance puff piece. Even for a $3.99 glossy ad-horse, only picked up by power shoppers down from the West Hills. —If we don’t do the right thing, even in the least of what we do, who will?
(One last thing: not to snark overly, but you don’t even know who Craig Thompson is, do you. —No, wait, one more last thing: “Hey, sorry, we gotta refuel the fairy.” What?)
Commenting is closed for this article.
bravo.
The weird thing is I heard that P-M got rid of the woman who was initially assigned to work on the article and flew the writer in from Los Angeles to restart the whole thing from scratch. Thank heavens. Really, who knows how many pointless digressions or pre-masticated cliches she might've neglected to include.
Testify!!!
Side note on this piece, Very little info on the ACTUAL art being produced or even mentioned
The article was some of the most god-awful writing I've ever seen. Read the guy's bio. Wanna bet he doesn't think comics are REAL art?
I was pleased to see the coverage in PM (which I stole from the gym, full disclosure), though I did think it seemed more about soap operas than about comic art and graphic novels and why the artists here are doing something vital and exciting. Which is disappointing. But I am seriously disappointed that off-the-record conversation was "quoted". Man!
I'm looking forward to checking out the Snoregonian article...