Any San Diego Comic-Con old-timer will tell you that the convention isn't quite what it used to be. Hollywood and videogame companies have taken over, pushing artists who work in old-fashioned ink to the peripheries.
Could the same thing be happening to Alternative Press Expo, the ancestral home of indie comics and zines? Boing Boing's Brandon Boyer noted in a recent post that videogames are beginning to creep into the expo, held October 17-18 in San Francisco.
Spelunky designer Derek Yu was onhand with illustrator Hellen Jo to show off a game they collaborated on. Indie game developer Martin Robaszewski demoed his team's new XBLA game. Brütal Legend developer Double Fine even showed up to sell shirts, buttons and comics.
Boyer suggests that cross-media savvy is a good survival technique for independent publishers, who usually scramble to break even on the art they produce.
But I see a potential downside – indie games could crowd out indie comics and 'zines.
It used to be that the folks who read indie comics were largely under-served by videogames. The stories and aesthetics of games have been mostly homogeneous for the past 20 years, focusing on violent plots spun around space marines, wizards and military squads.
But the new wave of indie games is changing the way games look and feel, and making them more accessible to the indie comics crowd. The aforementioned collaboration between Derek Yu and Hellen Jo didn't debut at a gaming conference but at the Giant Robot art gallery in San Francisco – a joint dedicated to grassroots comics and art.
It's never a bad thing when indie game makers find an audience. And the crowd at APE seem like a perfect fit for these creators. But in a time when it seems like the print medium clings to life by a thread, perhaps other considerations ought to be made. Indie games are enjoying a boom right now. Indie comics, on the other hand, remain the relative obscurity they've always been.
If indie games siphon even a dollar out from the shallow indie comics pool, they could be doing more harm than good. Maybe there's a good argument for protecting indie comics in their natural habitat.
Photo: lobraumeister/Flickr
See Also:
