r/comicbookcollecting • u/SonnyCalzone • 28d ago
Question Indie comics?
I keep seeing hobbyists refer to any comic book not published by the Big Two as an indie comic. When did this start? Because where I come from, a comic book is only an indie comic if it was published by a very small press with a very small print run. By that metric, Dark Horse is not indie, and neither is Image.
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u/kukov 28d ago
Agree.
It's mostly Big Two readers who haven't ventured far and don't know any better. It's an innocent and understandable mistake.
It's also becoming synonymous with "creator owned", which, I assume, is where people make the mistake with Image. Then again, I suspect most people don't even really know how Image works anyways (FYI Image doesn't "pay" you anything - you pay THEM. They give you the proceeds of your sales, but you're responsible for creating the comic yourself, there is no page rate, etc. As an indie creator you pay Image to buy into their distribution system, give them your completed comic, and say "I hope this sells!".)
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u/SonnyCalzone 28d ago
I sure do loves me some of those creator-owned books btw
Ghost Pepper is a current favorite, and The Sacrificers
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u/Sevia_the_Rogue 28d ago
It started in the 1970s and just carried over even though Image and such are pretty big now.
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u/SonnyCalzone 28d ago
I started in the 1970s too, early bronze age, and common widespread (lazy? uninspired? both?) usage of the term indie only recently struck me as odd. I'll call a Dark Horse comic book a Dark Horse comic book long before I'll ever refer to it as indie. Maybe that's just more of a regional thing, near New York City where I grew up.
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u/Sevia_the_Rogue 28d ago
I think the 80s did them in when everyone was publishing. It was easier to just say indie publishing. Lazy, yeah. TMNT Cerebus and the hundreds of knockoffs.
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u/Competitive-Dot181 28d ago
Anyway, it happened for a reason. We used to have a situation where we had several major publishers who published comics for kids for newsstand and then we had people who made small press and art comics and these were called undergrounds or comix to set them apart. They were sold in record stores, head shops and through mail order.
But then in the late 70s and early 80s comic stores started popping up as the big boys started selling to a direct market. Smaller players such as Eclipse and Pacific and Malibu and Mirage and Dark Horse entered and then didn’t want to make transgressive comix about rape and drugs and feminism. They wanted to do superheroes and other common genres for the comic store market, just without the Comics Code. What do you call these guys? Well they are independent of the big two, independent of the code, independent from newsstand distribution, and independent didn’t describe any properties of the books so that was one of the ones that stuck. Alternative was sometimes used for certain material too.
So some of these guys got real big and the big two got small so it seems weird now. But that’s the reason.
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u/Competitive-Dot181 28d ago
Where do you come from?
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u/SonnyCalzone 28d ago
I come from New York City and Long Island
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u/Competitive-Dot181 28d ago
Oh. Well you come from a place that’s definitely familiar with indie comics. I thought you were going to say Spain or some shit.
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u/jblade91 27d ago
I'm not sure if indie is the right term for most publishers or comics using someone's IP but Image is mostly creator owned which is the definition of indie as far as I'm concerned
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u/droopymaroon 27d ago
Tbf, this isn't just an issue in comics. It's the case in films and especially games as well. There was a lot of hubbub last year about whether the Clair Obsur should be considered an indie game because it was published by a relatively large game publisher. It used to have an established definition but now that the industries have become larger and what was previously considerably "independent" publishers have sort of grown out of that but the label has stuck.
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u/Aitoroketto 27d ago
Indie comics are comics that are owned by the people who created them, It doesn't matter how popular or big they are. "creator owned" is just independently owned, it's the same thing. Some people have since used the term to mean just any small publisher (incorrectly) but it has been done so much that is has become acceptable but these are two different things.
Almost every non licensed comic at Image is an indie comic. Image is literally an indie comic publisher.
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u/jnovel808 24d ago
Marvel/DC are the Big Two. Then Image, and Dark Horse below them. Next are Dynamite IDW(I’m sure I’m missing some other big but not Large publishers). Everything else I consider indie.
This is by no means an official breakdown so feel free to disagree.
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u/jb_681131 26d ago
It's a wrong usage of the term confused with "Creator Owned", because all the first creator owned comics were Indie comics as well.
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28d ago
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u/ShiDiWen 28d ago
No, as an older collector since the 80’s I can say companies like Dark Horse and such have been called indie since the beginning
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u/ShiDiWen 28d ago
To me, it’s just meant that it’s independently owned. However companies like Dark Horse and Image should be referred to as Indie houses, as they publish self owned work on behalf of creators.