Beyond Watchmen: Feeding Ground Artist Mike Lapinski Suggests An Indie Summer

Mike Lapinski the artist behind Archaia’s Feeding Ground, has an insightful and productive idea for independent creators and the fans who support them: Organize.On his blog today, the artist suggested a collaboration between indie artists, distributors and the comics direct market that would allow them to create something of a counter-event to DC’s controversial, upcoming event series Before Watchmen.Responding to the volumes of text (much of it negative) written by comic book fans and professionals in the weeks since DC Comics announced Before Watchmen, Lapinski muses, “After everyone has made all of the clever, snarky, or insightfulcomments that can be made, what is to be done about it?”His answer, as it turns out, is quite compelling, and fairly comprehensive. It reads a bit like a marketing plan, except that the products he’s looking to sell aren’t all found in the same places or distributed by the same people.Lapinski writes, “One solution is to join all of our self-marketing efforts under one banner for the month or the Summer of Before Watchmen. There are plenty of innovative and industrious retailers that already plan displays and initiatives to answer trends. As DC tried around the time of the Watchmen movie release, the goal would be to help shine a light on work, here specifically creator-owned, that is worthy of renewed attention. Very few people will buy books based on a moral high ground alone but there’s plenty of entertainment worthy of their time and money.”The latter, of course, refers to the dozens of calls around the comics Internet to “vote with your money” by boycotting Before Watchmen and/or DC. While some have found that a tempting option, many others (such as Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, linked above in Lapinski’s first quote) have pointed out that targeting the publisher often results only in production staffers and editors being fired, and perhaps fewer risky titles being published; it’s more likely to be bad for artists and fans, than to actually lose any money for the company that’s ostensibly being targeted in the long run.