What if the path to open social media runs through creators, not communities?

In 1991, the comic book market was booming. Comic book stores were opening all over the US and industry revenues had skyrocketed. Marvel Comics was at the top of the heap, publishing 90 of the year’s 100 top-selling issues. Top artists were becoming mainstream celebrities. X-Force artist Rob Liefeld made almost a million dollars a year, and Spike Lee featured him in a Levi’s jeans commercial. The debut of X-Men #1 (as distinguished from the original series, called Uncanny X-Men) sold over 8 million copies thanks to five variant covers by Jim Lee, which inspired this week’s cover illustration.

Despite all the fame and fortune, in 1992 Liefeld, Lee, and five more of Marvel’s biggest artists quit to start their own company, Image Comics.

Why? Money. (Duh.)

Since the beginning of the comics industry, the business had run on a work-for-hire system. Writers and artists were paid per-page, and Marvel or DC insisted on controlling all of the intellectual property rights. This made the companies rich while creators got peanuts. Notoriously, in the run-up to the first Superman movie in 1978, the New York Times reported that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, were almost destitute. DC eventually relented and granted them an annual stipend plus a credit in every Superman comic, but it was a miniscule fraction of the money their creation had earned, and DC certainly wasn’t about to give back the rights they had bought for a pittance in 1938.

The Image Seven made more money than Siegel and Shuster because Marvel had granted them a royalty on comics sales, but that was only one slice of the expanding pie. They made nothing when Marvel re-used their art on t-shirts and posters. They got nothing when hit characters they co-created, Venom and Deadpool, became movies that have brought in a staggering $4.75 billion.

Some comics creators always knew this was a bad deal and self-published their own comics, notably the one-time genius turned proto-manosphere crank Dave Sim. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started as a self-published black and white comic before going global, which showed that creators could become popular and rich without the corporate muscle of Marvel or DC. The Image Seven did the math and decided to follow suit.

At first, it worked. Image series like Spawn and The Maxx sold millions in their own right and got movie and TV deals. The good times didn’t last, however, and the industry crash of the mid-1990s almost killed the company. Improbably, Image has survived and continues to be a home for creator-owned comics. This adds up to serious money. Robert Kirkman, creator of both The Walking Dead and Invincible (both published by Image) is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2017, Netflix bought Millarworld, the creator-owned properties of Mark Millar (including Kingsman and Kick-Ass) for over $50 million. Other successful movie and TV properties based on creator-owned comics published in the wake of the Image revolution include Hellboy, The Boys, Road to Perdition, and The Umbrella Academy.

[Footnote: Marvel has obviously become a cultural juggernaut, but it’s been mostly on the strength of characters created before Image. The few post-Image characters to jump from Marvel comics to Marvel movies are derived from older characters, such as the Winter Soldier (reborn Bucky from the 1940s Captain America comics), Miles Morales (a new Spider-Man in the Spider-Verse movies), and X-23 (the teenage Wolverine clone in the movie Logan). Creators now tend to hold back their original ideas for comics they own and can profit from.]

I dwell on the Image Comics story for two reasons. First, because I’m a huge comic book nerd and could easily write a spin-off newsletter entirely devoted to stuff like this. [I didn’t even mention how DC screwed over Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen.]

On topic for Platformocracy, however, is how the rebellion of the Image Seven echoes the Barons’ revolt against King John that led to Magna Carta, or Parliament’s Civil War against King Charles and the divine right of kings. In all three, change was driven by disgruntled elites, rather than an uprising of the masses (such as in France 1789, Russia 1917, or the various color revolutions of the 21st century).

Elite rebellion feels distasteful to modern democratic sensibilities. Nobody feels good about rooting for rich and powerful people to win a war against even richer and more powerful people. In an ideal world, I would agree. An inclusive democracy is better than an oligarchy. But I am also a pragmatist, and oligarchy is a clear step away from absolute monarchy.

Open social media today reminds me of the comic book self-publishing movement before Image – worthy, interesting, but marginal. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the social media equivalent of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will cowabunga their way out of the Fediverse or ATmosphere. But recruiting today’s biggest creators to the cause could take the movement mainstream sooner than waiting for a hit.

If today’s biggest creators got together, they would have the same kind of clout as the Image Seven did back in 1992. Studies (2018, 2024) estimate that the top 3-4% of YouTube Channels and videos account for 85-95% of all views. These are just estimates because YouTube doesn’t publish this data. It’s even harder to find comparable numbers for Instagram or TikTok. I suspect that platforms don’t want their top creators to know just how important they are to their audience and revenue.

I’m not an expert on the creator space, but from what I can tell, there have been a few attempts to harness this power, but nothing has stuck. VidCon co-founder Hank Green started the Internet Creators Guild in 2016 but it had very low membership and shut down in 2019. A creator-owned video streaming service, Nebula, was founded in 2019 but has a miniscule audience. German YouTuber Jörg Sprave (maker of videos about exotic slingshots) started the YouTubers Union in 2018, which partnered with the huge German union IG Metall to launch the FairTube movement. While some sources give them credit for pushing YouTube to make policy changes, the group seems to have become moribund by 2022. 

This has not stopped people from trying. SAG-AFTRA, the major US actors’ union, set up an influencers committee in December. And Divine, a revival of the Vine 6-second video platform led by Rabble and backed by Jack Dorsey, is making a major play to build a network on creator ownership first. It’s too soon to say if either will work any better, but I wish them luck.

An elite rebellion requires stakes big enough to be worth the risk of losing status or money in the fight. The English uprisings started when kings overtaxed their citizens and abused their power beyond all tolerable limits. Creators have shown that they will fight back if platforms try to shrink their earnings. For example, Twitch tried to impose a payout cap in June 2023, but had to pull it back by January 2024 after widespread protest.

Instead of waiting for a platform CEO to make a fatal blunder, perhaps creators can also be inspired by the upside opportunities that drove the Image Seven. Creators make good money from platforms today, but do the platforms really deserve to keep around half, as they frequently take today? Platforms make sure to let creators retain ownership of their work, but why should platforms get to lock down creators’ followers and social graph?

Put more bluntly – how much more money could hits like Hank Green, Mr. Beast, and Call Her Daddy make if they had full control of their followers list and revenue? Is that worth threatening (or actually) breaking away from the big platforms like the Image Seven did in 1992?

And if they did, could that bring due process and credible exit along for the ride?

The creator economy is not my area of expertise, so I’m not sure what might work to inspire big creators to fight for freedom, or at least more money with a side helping of democracy. Do you have any ideas? Please let me know. I’m all ears at [email protected].