Andrew Salmond Interview

If you like com­ics and have ever been to Lon­don, the chances are that you already know of Gosh Com­ics. Andrew Sal­mond, man­ager of Gosh agreed to answer some ques­tions for the Snap­shot Interviews

1 / Can you intro­duce your­self? What is your back­ground? Well, I’m the man­ager of Gosh Com­ics in Lon­don, and I’ve been there in one pos­i­tion or other since August 2000, before which I man­aged a store called Graphic in Wel­ling­ton, New Zealand(my homet­own is a place just north of there called Par­a­pa­raumu Beach, but I’m sure we don’t need to go back that far). I stud­ied Psy­cho­logy and Crim­in­o­logy at Uni­ver­sity, but my entire pro­fes­sional life has been spent work­ing in comic shops, and I’m not sure if I should be pleased about that or not. I know my 15 year-old self would be. I have been for­tu­nate enough to spend all that time in progressive-thinking stores that have always been about push­ing the best that the medium has to offer, so as comic shop careers go I mustn’t grumble.

Image by D’Israeli

2 / What drew you to com­ics? Escap­ism, I sup­pose. When you’re grow­ing up in a sleepy sea­side town, escap­ism is import­ant for the ima­gin­a­tion. My first com­ics were ran­dom scat­ter­ings brought home by my mum from the spin­ner rack of the local shop (what you’d call a corner shop, but I grew up call­ing a “dairy”: fun Kiwi fact), or swapped around by the kids at school. This was mainly all the UK weeklies – albeit 2 months late — Mar­vel and Dis­ney. DC got very little impact into any of the book­stores or dair­ies of my youth. I was also a massive fan of Asterix and Tintin, and the other albums that were avail­able for a brief time, such as Iznogoud, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke and so on. It wasn’t long before I had latched onto the serial nature of the things (Buster first, then Amaz­ing Spider-Man, the relaunched Eagle and, of course, 2000AD), and that was that. I was hooked. Have been ever since, although of course my tastes have changed a bit.

3 / What do you think have been the major devel­op­ments in com­ics here in the UK since you first became involved?

2000 was still the early days of the recov­ery of the industry from the 90’s crash, so from a retail per­spect­ive it was an inter­est­ing time all around, cre­at­ively and com­mer­cially. As weary as people often sound about the cur­rent status quo at Mar­vel, par­tic­u­larly, it’s impossible to over­state how import­ant Joe Quesada (and Bill Jemas) were to the health of the industry at that time. There would be a whole lot more shops bur­ied in the ground now if they hadn’t taken the reigns. The intro­duc­tion of inter­est­ing, risk-taking tal­ent to main­stream books really shook things up, and I think inspired a lot of people to branch out in their read­ing, fol­low­ing cre­at­ive trails.

Of course we’ve also seen a huge diver­si­fic­a­tion in the mar­ket, and the rise once again of the gen­eral public’s under­stand­ing of the graphic novel, though I think in a much more sus­tain­able form this time. Mainly because the qual­ity and range is there to back it up.  Along those lines, I think one of the most import­ant occur­rences in the UK for the medium was the Guard­ian First Book award being given to Jimmy Cor­rigan. Because that was the point, I think, at which com­ics really caught the atten­tion of the main­stream lit­er­ary press, and not just the Guard­ian. Jonathan Cape’s impact into book­stores brought a huge num­ber of people on board, all of them look­ing for the next thing to read, and unlike the late 80’s shops didn’t have to revert to super­hero titles within three sug­ges­tions. It’s cer­tainly a lux­ury that things stay in print now. It’s hard to ima­gine any­more how lim­ited the range of GNs was even ten years ago.  Cape also paved the way for the book­shop pen­et­ra­tion of a wave of new UK com­ics pub­lish­ers and books pub­lish­ers branch­ing into com­ics in the mid-late 00’s. From old-timers like Blooms­bury through to the impress­ive tra­ject­ory of Self Made Hero, there’s a whole bunch of pub­lish­ers push­ing new mater­ial into the mar­ket. I’m sure not all of them will go the dis­tance, but it’ll still leave an impress­ive line of work.

I feel the last five years has seen a real shot in the arm for the small press scene, too, with a wealth of new tal­ent emer­ging from all across the coun­try pro­du­cing all man­ner of genres. There’s an amaz­ing pool of tal­ent here at the moment all pur­su­ing their own cre­at­ive urges, and I love that. I love that we have self-publishing that includes auto­bi­o­graphy, con­tem­por­ary fic­tion, fantasy, sci­ence fic­tion, com­edy and more, and that so much of it is good. And not just good, but well-presented, too. It’s a golden time for UK com­ics, if not for an actual UK com­ics industry.  Oh, and mustn’t for­get the rise and fall of manga, which brought whole new demo­graph­ics into comic shops, no small num­ber of whom have embraced the medium as a whole. There’s plenty of old CLAMP fans out there now read­ing Jef­frey Brown, or Bryan Lee O’Malley, or Brian Wood, etc. I say “fall”, but of course that’s all rel­at­ive. The manga read­er­ship is still kick­ing the hell out of what it was ten years ago.

4 / How import­ant do you think a sense of com­munity is to comics?

With regard to cre­at­ors, I think in any endeav­our where start­ing out relies on such a huge amount of effort for so little return, com­munity is vital. You need some­thing to keep you going, some sense of shared exper­i­ence and even com­pet­i­tion. You look at any explo­sion of tal­ent in any field, and there’s always talk about the people involved in those early bursts try­ing to outdo one another, about being inspired by the work of their peers. And of course any­thing that involves long, sol­it­ary hours sat at a com­puter or draw­ing board needs some kind of social vent just to keep the prac­ti­tion­ers sane. In terms of a read­er­ship, well I think the tra­di­tional com­ics com­munity was based around a shared hobby: a niche of know­ledge that most friends and fam­ily neither under­stand nor have any interest in, but could be shared among like– minded people. That’s morphed and changed over the years, and the rise of elec­tronic com­mu­nic­a­tion has evolved it so that the com­munit­ies we inter­act in are much lar­ger, and the kinds of mater­ial we’re exposed to is much broader. Not to men­tion that the divi­sion between cre­at­ors and fans is much blur­rier than it used to be. And although I don’t neces­sar­ily think it’s all that essen­tial, it is a great boon to the medium. I think it would be very dif­fi­cult nowdays for someone com­ing fresh into read­ing com­ics to be a slave to one com­pany or another, and I think the inter­net has everything to do with that. Every mon­key with an opin­ion on any given title has a plat­form to spread it, and as incred­ible as it may seem, many of those opin­ions are actu­ally quite good. One thing that should be said for the UK in par­tic­u­lar is the egal­it­arian nature of the rela­tion­ship between cre­at­ors and fans. Ming­ling together in the pub is a staple of any UK com­ics gath­er­ing and there are pre­cious few egos on dis­play. I’m baffled by the KAPOW convention’s idea of a VIP area where the stars can be sep­ar­ated from the hoi polloi. Par­tic­u­larly when said con­ven­tion is being held in one of London’s most vibrant night­life areas. Who’s going to stick around?

5 / In your opin­ion, what can people do to bet­ter pop­ular­ise comics?

Well, speak­ing from a retail per­spect­ive, it’s all about the gentle push. I loathe the hard sell, but firmly believe that a good retailer needs to be able to pick up on the signs when someone wants a recom­mend­a­tion. I also think that out­reach­ing is key. Find­ing titles that relate to people’s tastes out­side com­ics. It’s not some­thing we used to have the lux­ury of, so we should take advant­age of it. Like­wise, any retailer worth his or her salt should have a ready list of “if you like, then you’ll like” titles in their head.  From a read­er­ship per­spect­ive, just put the damn things out there. Leave them lying around your house. Lend them to people. I remem­ber the rise of Hate and Eight­ball as being almost exclus­ively down to people flick­ing through them at parties, or being intro­duced to them by a part­ner or friend. And if I had a dol­lar for every per­son whose Freak Broth­ers had been stolen by someone I’d be sip­ping moji­tos on sunny, exotic shores. Not that I recom­mend steal­ing your friend’s com­ics, of course, but I would hope I didn’t have to tell you that. Don’t be afraid to love the medium, or express that to oth­ers who you think might enjoy what you’re push­ing. That last it is import­ant. I know you loved Siege, but for God’s sake, don’t try and con­vince your mother that it’s what she’s been miss­ing out on in her read­ing habits.

6 / Whose work excites you at the moment?

I think Brandon Gra­ham and James Stokoe are two of the most excit­ing tal­ents around at the moment. They both man­age to effort­lessly mash together all kinds of influ­ences into fully-realised, wildly-imaginative worlds where any­thing can hap­pen, all rendered in styles which are utterly unique in the industry today. I can’t wait to see where they go next. The UK scene seems to be burst­ing with tal­ent too, and I can’t wait to see Stephen Collins get stuck into an exten­ded nar­rat­ive.  God, there’s too many to men­tion. All the old guard of inde­pend­ent com­ics seem to be get­ting a second wind right now, and there’s a wealth of new people com­ing up. And even on the main­stream side of things, although people are sick of the end­less stream of events that have been engulf­ing the out­put of the big two, there’s a lot of inter­est­ing people work­ing in there now. Nick Spen­cer is show­ing a lot of prom­ise, and Jonathan Hick­man is carving out his own little corner of the Mar­vel Uni­verse. Great artists at the moment, too, par­tic­u­larly at Mar­vel. Jerome Opena’s work on Uncanny X-Force is abso­lutely stun­ning, with pleas­antly demen­ted Rick Remender scripts. It’s a good time!

7 / What do you con­sider the main chal­lenges facing com­ics retailers?

Well, many of the chal­lenges facing com­ics retail­ers are the same as those facing all retail­ers. The biggest of which is: how do I get more people through my door and how do I get them to buy some­thing when they do? Espe­cially when places like Amazon can offer the same product at less than the cost price that many stores can source it at. An increas­ingly com­mon sight is people writ­ing down ISBNs or scan­ning bar­codes on their phones with a mind toward buy­ing some­thing online later. I don‘t actu­ally have a prob­lem with this: it’s their prerog­at­ive, after all. But a part of me hopes people put two and two together when all their book­stores start vanishing.

That being said, I do think the rise of online shop­ping (and digital, but more on that in a bit) are more the death knell of the lar­ger chains than the small, inde­pend­ent stores. By com­pet­ing on price point alone, Amazon is really hit­ting those out­lets where price has long been favoured over ser­vice. When was the last time you had a won­der­ful ser­vice exper­i­ence in HMV? Small stores have sur­vived in the era of the super­store in the same way they will now sur­vive in the era of inter­net shop­ping: ser­vice. Sure, Amazon might make recom­mend­a­tions based on your buy­ing his­tory, but it’s not a patch on the advice of know­ledge­able, friendly staff who can make recom­mend­a­tions based on your (or your gift recipient’s) tastes in com­ics, prose, film, whatever. And if you’ve got the kind of store where you treat your cus­tom­ers as though you are doing them a favour by let­ting them in the door, then you bet­ter start look­ing for another line of work.  Not to say there won’t be some kind of impact, but if you work to give your cus­tom­ers the best shop­ping exper­i­ence you can, and try to make sure that you either have what they need or, if pos­sible, offer to get it, then I think the future will be, if not rosy, then at least sur­viv­able. For com­ics in par­tic­u­lar, well, it’s tough to say. The industry is in a funny way at the moment. I think people are feel­ing a little bored with the status quo from Mar­vel and DC, and more than a little ripped off by end­less streams of spin-offs. There’s been talk in the past about the cyc­lical boom-bust nature of the industry, and I’m of the opin­ion we’re on the down­hill side of a trough right now. We’ll see where it ends.

8 / Why is it, do you think, that although we aren’t too geo­graph­ic­ally far removed from the rest of Europe, the cul­ture of com­ics there is so different?

Why is any cul­ture dif­fer­ent? The geo­graph­ical gap might be small, but the lan­guage gap is more than enough to cre­ate a huge divide between the UK and Con­tin­ental Europe (or indeed within the Con­tin­ent). Why, for example, are com­ics so huge in some coun­tries through­out Europe, but not at all in oth­ers? The coun­tries that made up the former Yugoslavia, for example, have a healthy com­ics cul­ture, but what about Ger­many? I guess it’s down to par­tic­u­lar turn­ing points in our his­tor­ies where one coun­try goes one way and the oth­ers go another. Some had crack­downs on con­tent while oth­ers did not. Same had a time of rigid social and cul­tural lim­its, while oth­ers had explo­sions of cre­at­ive free­dom. Whatever it is, at the end of the day lan­guage alone is a for­mid­able enough bar­rier for most people to stop the migra­tion of cul­tural trends, apart from per­haps music. Which is a great shame, because every time I set foot in a French comic shop there’s a depress­ing amount of mater­ial I would dearly love to read.  I think it’s worth keep­ing in mind, by the way, that as much as we would love to think of coun­tries where com­ics are a part of the cul­ture, as nat­ural as prose or film, as being havens of artistic bril­liance, most of what people actu­ally read, be it France or Japan or Italy, is pop­u­list fic­tion. I’ve no prob­lem with that (rather enjoy it, actu­ally), and it’s an amaz­ing range of mater­ial, but mass enter­tain­ment it is: the genre equi­val­ents to the Avengers or Bat­man. Of course it also means that the mon­et­ary rewards of the medium will attract a greater pool of tal­ent, and genre equi­val­ents to Kazuo Ishig­uro or Roberto Bolano can also find their audi­ence, but as in any medium in any lan­guage, real bril­liance is always in the minority.

9 / What are your thoughts on digital pub­lish­ing and distribution?

God, where do I start? To sum­mar­ise my feel­ings on the mat­ter: I think that digital con­sump­tion of serial con­tent as the future of media is a given. Com­ics are per­fectly suited to it. Bite-sized, eas­ily diges­ted chucks of story delivered weekly, or bi-weekly, or monthly will rep­res­ent a healthy future for main­stream com­ics. People who can­not get with the idea because they don’t like read­ing com­ics on a screen need to be think­ing a little broader. The next gen­er­a­tion are grow­ing up with digital as their nat­ural means of con­sump­tion. I’m not say­ing that phys­ical peri­od­ical com­ics will dis­ap­pear overnight, but slowly but surely they will dwindle until the lar­ger com­pan­ies will no longer be able to jus­tify the costs in their pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion. Let alone find places to dis­trib­ute them to. Many comic shops live on a razors edge, and the attri­tion of those comic book sales will sink a lot of stores.  But of course this is a little way down the track. The tech­no­logy for digital com­ics is nearly there, but the biggest prob­lem right now is the frag­men­ted delivery.

The suc­cess of plat­forms like iTunes or Amazon is that damn near everything you want can be found in one place. If the price is right and the action of pur­chas­ing is simple and imme­di­ate, then plenty of people will hap­pily pay for their con­tent. Hav­ing to do sep­ar­ate searches on sep­ar­ate apps to gather together 75% of what you want to read in any given week is just a pain in the ass. Digital com­ics won’t suc­ceed without some kind of uni­fied dis­tri­bu­tion. Ideally you would have a choice of dif­fer­ent deliv­ery ser­vices all in com­pet­i­tion, all offer­ing the same (or near enough) range, each with their own incent­ives for why you would shop with them. This publisher-centric dis­tri­bu­tion reflects an old way of think­ing, and I can’t believe that nobody in the digital side of these busi­nesses sees that.  Of course, effect­ively mon­et­ising them is also an issue, but one which I believe will right itself in time. For starters, the options out­side of Apple are open­ing up think and fast. And I still believe that multi-platform synch­ing applic­a­tions with built-in stores and read­ers, such as Graphic.ly and Long­box, have a lot of poten­tial, even if they’re still work­ing out the kinks. As for the bricks and mor­tar, well, smart stores will need to adapt and rethink how they are posi­tioned. Instead of think­ing of them­selves as comic stores, they need to be evolving into spe­cial­ist book­stores. Human beings are tact­ile creatures, even those little digital rugrats I talked about earlier. We like pos­ses­sions, espe­cially nicely presen­ted ones, and I firmly believe there is a place in the future for phys­ical books. My own exper­i­ence with a Kindle sug­gests that cas­ual read­ers (ie the bulk of the mar­ket) will become much choo­sier about what they keep, with dis­pos­able fic­tion kept digital, and re-readable or ref­er­enced books kept for the book­shelf. Luck­ily, com­ics are very re-readable indeed, and have far more of a visual ele­ment besides. The mar­ket might shrink, but there will be a place for good book­stores that spe­cial­ise in graphic novels.

10 / What is your over­all impres­sion of the health of com­ics in the UK here at the end of 2010?

Well, as I men­tioned earlier, there’s lots of excit­ing things going on in UK com­ics right now. It feels like there’s a massive pool of tal­ent bub­bling under, like we’re on the verge of a very excit­ing time indeed. It’s a shame that there’s such a dearth of out­lets for them, and I guess that’s why so many of them are actu­ally com­ing up through web­com­ics. But just a cas­ual glance through the small press antho­lo­gies that are float­ing around right now – Sol­ipsistic Pop, The Comix Reader, Paper Sci­ence – shows a great breadth of com­ics cre­at­ors out there who have worth­while things to say. I just hope the cur­rent burst of UK pub­lish­ing gives many of these people a place to be heard by a wider audi­ence. I under­stand Blank Slate are going to be doing some kind of antho­logy pro­ject, and I can’t wait for that.  The next year sees no sign of the range of UK pub­lish­ers slow­ing up, either. Self Made Hero, Blank Slate, Knock­about and Sweat­drop Stu­dios will all be pub­lish­ing new, ori­ginal mater­ial from UK cre­at­ors. Cine­book con­tin­ues to quietly pro­duce prob­ably the greatest range of trans­lated European albums from any pub­lisher yet. Jonathan Cape, Faber, Blooms­bury, Titan, Pen­guin and more con­tinue to bring UK edi­tions of inter­na­tional mater­ial into the pub­lic eye. It’s a good time for the medium. Let’s just hope the cus­tom­ers are there to back it up! Thanks Andrew. It shouldn’t need to be said, but please do sup­port your friendly local comic shop. Go and spend some real money every now and again instead of send­ing invis­ible ster­ling along the Amazon cables!