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Fandom is fun! It’s great when we celebrate our favorite characters regardless of whether it’s for an indie artist or the big comic companies. Cosplay and fan art are a great way to show our love for favorite characters. Unfortunately, what happens when fandom goes from affection of a cherished comic to a marketing strategy for building exposure, can be ugly. Fan art created for a desire to gain eyeballs rather than for personal joy, can have catastrophic results for independent artists and comics as a whole, even if it results in short-term gains. If you think this is just alarmist nonsense, read on.
Fan Art Of Established Content Franchises “For Exposure” Turns You Into Free or Cheap Labor
Saavy artists are aware that unpaid internships are generally a terrible deal, and do little for career advancement. Likewise, spec work is generally considered to be a horrible practice that drives down pay for artists while benefiting clients only. When you make commercially-motivated fan art of content franchises in the hope of getting exposure, you’re working as an unpaid intern doing spec work that undermines your intellectual property.
As was the case in the modeling industry, working for dubious exposure artificially drives down pay rates for creatives. This is because it’s almost impossible to compete with free. Now you might assume that commercially-motivated fan art that you create to gain a greater audience is only benefiting you, and harming no one. Heck, you might even make a living creating unofficial art. The sad truth is that reliance on existing content franchises to gain more fans for our work, has the opposite effect.
Not Down With O.P.P.
Focusing too much on other people’s intellectual properties, takes away time from developing your comic world. The assumption that churning out name brand fan art is the only way to gain exposure for your comic art is extremely toxic. It relegates independent comics to an off brand status that makes that type of work less attractive to mainstream audiences. If you want to develop a recognized name brand out of your comic work, you need to start having faith in what you create. If you aren’t confident enough in your creations’ potential for success, then you’ll need to make them into something that makes you proud to share and market them. Even if this means redrawing or rewriting your entire body of comic work, it’s better to put your energies towards gaining brand recognition for your work, rather than being exploited as someone else’s cheap or free labor.
A focus on fan art as a marketing strategy may get you a nice bunch fans on tumblr or deviantART, with perhaps some pay, but the ultimate beneficiary is not you. Big corporations know the value of marketing tactics such as evangelism, event or controversy-driven buzz marketing, brand loyalty development, brand ambassadors and psychographic segmentation. The reason huge conglomerates seem to have a high tolerance for the ethically dubious practice of fan art commissions, and fan art in general, is because they are saving millions in labor or marketing costs. Every time you devalue your own work to promote someone else’s content franchises, you provide them free or cheap labor.
Breaking It Down
For example, when you share your commercially-motivated fan art on social media, you are doing buzz marketing work that you should be getting compensated for. This is why companies like Influenster and Izea compensate me for my social media mentions of their client brands with either money or products. Fan art for exposure also makes psychograhic segmentation research a lot easier, which gives these corporations even more savings.
Brand evangelism is typically hard-earned and organic. Fan art resulting from these kinds of interactions can be downright spectacular and appreciated by creators, as is evidenced by the lovely fan art crossover that Charisma Kills Studio did for Rasputin Catamite. The non-commercial work Jessie Craig voluntarily gifted me with was so deeply appreciated, that I granted him an official license that legally allows him to use my characters and a publishing advance. A more famous example of fans and content owners mutually benefiting one another is My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Unfortunately, works of brand evangelism by fan artists whether motivated by love or money, can also be legally confiscated and commercially exploited by intellectual property owners without any compensation whatsoever. Disney is notorious for doing this on a regular basis, and in spite of creator bellyaching, they have every legal right to do so. This is especially amusing because Disney is specializes in creating new brands out of public domain properties. In other words, they make money from legal fan art. Copyright law can be extremely confusing and inconsistently enforced.
Sometimes fan art as brand evangelism can backfire horribly because of its nebulous legal status. Anne Rice, for example, is extremely aggressive about pursuing legal action against fan fiction, due to her strong personal attachment to her stories. Even intellectual property owners that are generally tolerant of fan art, send cease and decease notices when their work is used commercially in ways that are contrary to the creator’s intent.
Developing brand loyalty is both the path and the end game for any successful marketing strategy. It often begins from the time we are very young children. Entertainment conglomerates spend millions on crafting strategies to create perceptions that will lead to brand loyalty. We as creators, don’t have the kind of capital the counteract this type of aggressive marketing which aims to eclipse smaller brands from getting any kind of significant exposure. Yet, in our desire to be discovered, we create thousands of free advertisements for these gigantic competitors. Some fan work does go viral. Sadly, outside of fanfic and fan art communities, few people care about the names of the creators who made the works and more about the brands being promoted.
Even if your reputation for commercially-motivated fan art is recognized by fandom, that will rarely into mainstream success, unless you refocus your fan work into the development of your brand and comic universe. For example, if Fifty Shades of Grey would’ve remained fan fiction, E.L. James would not be filthy rich. Fortunately for her, E.L. was driven out of FanFiction.net, started her own website and used her own characters instead of the cast of Twilight. The rest, is history.
In the instances where people get paid for commissioned fan art or fiction, rates rarely compare to what the big comic companies pay their employees. If you are going to get paid $60 for a fully colored page of Big Comic Brand fan art that takes twelve hours to make, you’re much better off investing your efforts towards a job at Big Comic Brand, marketing your own properties, or making authorized work for a fellow creator who would legitimately benefit from that kind of great deal. There is no reason anyone should be making advertisements for Big Comic Enterprises for $5 an hour, with the potential risk of a copyright infringement fine and legal fees. Is this kind of risk really worth the rewards of getting paid peanuts and maybe getting exposure?
As if all of this weren’t depressing enough, it gets worse. Outside of South Korea, where web delivery of comics is cherished, indie comic-based movies are practically unheard of in the United States, outside of art house cinema. Free promotion of existing content franchises contributes to this problem and, it destroys opportunities for creatives. It takes away attention from fresh creative content. It enriches entertainment conglomerates by validating their use of existing content franchises, in favor of riskier and untested comics by non-mainstream creators. There is a reason why the mega-brands of comics dominate the market, and it’s not quality. It’s the same reason we get countless pointless reboots, shoddy sequels, and other derivative nonsense from the big name brand comics. We buy what we see. If all we see is the same old derivative junk, and we keep buying it, regardless of whether complaints filled with fan disdain for it arise, that’s exactly what we are going to get.
What The Solution?
The best way to break out of the toxic mythology of fan work being the best way for indie comic creators to get exposure, is for us to start having faith in our creations. If you don’t think that your work is good enough to garner interest from potential fans, refine it, rewrite it and redraw it until it is. Cosplay your own characters. Fall in love with your creations and start sharing your passion for them. This of course isn’t guaranteed to make you millions or even thousands, but it is guaranteed to make people more interested in the worlds that you create. Before the economy crashed, fan art marketing wasn’t even a thing. Indie artists got along without it decades before it was viewed as “essential” and frankly, we should consider trying to get along without it again. We need to remember this, if we desire to be and remain relevant as indie creators.
Fan art is fun. Parody is also fun and a bit more legal. Make derivative art because you love (or want to mock) someone else’s work. Don’t do it because you assume that it will get you discovered, unless you want to serve as someone’s free or cheap labor. More importantly do it sparingly, or do fan art and fanfic based on the work of creators that WILL grant you legal permission. Not only will this decrease legal risks and the dilution of your brand, but it will also free your mind to create the best comic universe that you can offer to potential fans.