T Campbell's Blog

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
--Dick the Butcher, Henry VI Part 2 by William Shakespeare

No more Presidents, and all the wars will end, one united world, under God.
--White Lion, When The Children Cry

Eliminate the middleman.
--common aphorism

Lawyers and presidents get a lot of smack-talk, but they at least get TV shows to lionize their profession as compensation. Middlemen, it would seem, don't get no respect. Not from efficiency experts, not from CEOs, not from bottom-level employees and not from Joey Manley or Scott McCloud:

"There are too many cartoonists coming onto the webcomics train every day, and the readership is growing exponentially. The ‘middleman’ structure can’t bear the strain of that kind of growth. There’s got to be this guy in there who touches everything. It slows you down. That’s not the way the web works."

"I've always liked the whole idea of drawing comics on a bigger canvas. I wanted a direct link between reader and creator. With iPods, you have a much smaller canvas and the mother of all middlemen—iTunes."

I haven't talked to Scott about this yet (he's a bit busy with the book, don'tcha know), so I don't know if his concern about iTunes is founded in fact. (Many seem to feel that iTunes gets a percentage of podcomics sales-- this is not true and would in fact be quite difficult since most podcomics will be free.) But his and Joey's impression of middlemen is one that many people and particularly Web-savvy people share.

It's gotta be rough to be a middleman and hear people talk cheerfully about "eliminating" you-- presumably by downsizing, though you get the feeling some of them wouldn't mind using a sniper rifle.

Fortunately, you either don't know any middlemen, or if you know them, you hate them.

Depending on which camp you're in, Stan Lee was either an all-around great guy or a fiddling middleman who took all the credit from Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and put them in chains and beat them with sacks of his money and laughed.

One of the figures in the Watergate scandal tries to minimize his involvement by calling himself "a mere middleman," i.e., too pathetic to be really evil.

The first result in a Gsearch for middlemen is a USA Today editorial about evil dealerships: "Middlemen squeeze shoppers."

It's time to restore a bit of nobility to this profession, because the simple fact is that we need middlemen-- and not just because our tech is not all it's cracked up to be, either.

The average webcartoonist would rather produce than promote. I'd rather write another Penny and Aggie strip than spend hours plugging a new T-shirt design. What's more, I know that by creating a T-shirt marketplace of my own I would be needlessly duplicating the efforts of hundreds of other T-shirt sellers-- some of which may be dishonest, sure, but many of which might indeed be good partners. These days it's a lot easier to check, and there are many more potential partners available.

I've spent a great deal of my career to date working with middlemen or helping companies or programs act as middlemen-- better, more efficient middlemen. I think Joey's definition of "middleman" is where we part ways: Joey feels that WCN eliminates the middleman. I say that WCN becomes the middleman and we should recognize this is not a bad thing.

OhNoRobot is a middleman: it's designed to add search functionality for cartoonists that don't have time to do it themselves, and to collect search results in one database for searchers who don't have time to search eleven skillion strips.

Clickwheel itself is a middleman, and so are Modern Tales and Keenspot. These companies are enablers, doing things for cartoonists that cartoonists prefer to outsource to them.

Make no mistake. If a middleman gets too much power and too little scruple, he starts looking like the newspaper syndicates circa 1970, a Boston strangler that sneaks up behind creativity and garrotes it in the dead of night. I am careful and concerned not to wake up with my hands around anyone's throat.

But to deny ourselves the benefits of middlemanning just because "DIY" is somehow more "pure" is, I think, to deny our own potential. I have too many people to reach to limit myself to the ones that I can reach acting entirely on my own.

Between the new Modern Tales, the new Clickwheel, Webcomics Nation, OhNoRobot, Lulu, Comixpress and I don't know what else, I agree with Eric Burns that the biggest word of 2006 will be something like "modular services." Except I don't like "modular services." It sounds like a Decepticon investment brokerage.

I raise my New Year's glass to middlebots, middlewomen, and middlemen and their dedicated service. But I do have to reluctantly concede that the word "middleman" is still too loaded, with too many negative connotations-- and perhaps too un-P.C.-- to be a standard to rally round. I hope I've given it back some dignity, but we need a better word, a word that encompasses what I consider the major benefits of middlemannery and its promise for a better future.

A word like... empowerers.

That is what I want to be in '06, with OhNoRobot, Clickwheel, Graphic Smash and all my projects. I think it's what Eric wants to be too, and thanks to a recent hiring, he's getting his chance.

Welcome to the middle, Eric.