This week sees the release by Dave Baker‘s Mary Tyler MooreHawk, being published by Top Shelf Productions. Mary Tyler MooreHawk is equal parts sweeping action-adventure graphic novel and dystopian detective story that weaves back and forth between worlds, touching on everything from corporate personhood to mutant shark-men to the meaning of fandom and reality itself. It’s a show you don’t remember… and a book you won’t forget.
We have an exclusive essay from Baker, “Physical Media And The Fallacy of Digital Ownership,” that looks at the shifting media consumption and what consumers really own. Check out the essay below as well as a preview of Mary Tyler MooreHawk.
I remember getting my first disk from Netflix in the mail. It was Green Street Hooligans, a soccer street-tough movie directed by the future Punisher: War Zone helmer Lexi Alexander, and starring Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam. My memory is that the movie is a fairly impressive piece of low budget work. Is that actually accurate? That’s anyone’s guess. I’ve only seen it the once.
This is a long and roundabout way to say… I remember the Before Times. The halcyon days when we all had physical discs of DVDs delivered to us by a company that just innocently wanted to make our lives easier and more convenient. Little did I know that this same company would pivot the entire cultural fabric of our country… and maybe the world. You’re probably saying, “That sounds a little extreme there, Davey Boy.” Just bare with me. Please.
The history of how media, specifically film, has developed is in two distinct revenue pipelines. The Theatrical Window and The Home Market. This is pretty self-evident, but I’m going to briefly lay it out, anyway. In the early days of the invention of cameras utilizing the Persistence of Vision phenomenon to trick the brain into seeing 24 still images as a single moving reality the only way to witness this was to attend a theatrical experience. You paid your nickel, or dime, or quarter to sit in a darkened theater or tent, and watch magic happen before your eyes.
And that was it. When the magic was done… it was gone. Like so much smoke or gossamer.
And this was the status quo of the burgeoning industry for close to a half century. Eventually, betamax, VHS, Laser Disc, and DVD revolutionized and recontextualized this experience. Gone was the fleeting momentary experience, and here was an on-demand live-in fount of entertainment. And it’s been this way for close to forty years. Almost as long as the fledgling medium took to truly develop itself into the rough bones of what artists use to create works today.
But here’s the catch, that you can all see coming a mile away. This system was too good. We took it for granted. We didn’t appreciate what we had, and like a cruel stepmother in a fairytale, we were stripped of our privilege. Or something. I don’t know. That metaphor got away from me. But you see the point I’m driving at. Before: things good. Now: things less good.
Physical media, whether they be discs or tapes or records, is an almost extinct thing. The streamers, led by the reborn Netflix, have taken convenience and weaponized it. They’ve proved that a click of a button enabling the screening of your favorite episode of Grey’s Anatomy today, is better than a disc purchased and housed in your home guaranteeing access for all time.
And while one element of this conversation is as ethereal and existential as the beginnings of the medium that the Lumiere Brothers pioneered, the other is exceedingly tangible and concrete. It lives in ones and zeroes. You see, the unintended side effect of physical media being replaced by servers and logins is that an entire secondary financial market has been decimated.
In previous eras of the film business, you would get two bites at the apple. One during the theatrical window, which was hopefully a big debut and then massive weak over weak attrition, and then the Home Video market, which in many cases could save a film because of the funds generated by word of mouth.
That secondary market just does not exist in the same way. As such, residuals aren’t structured the same, if they exist at all, and very few projects are able to generate the hype and awareness to gain a second life on these labyrinthian and often siloed streaming platforms.
But here’s the darkest part of all, one that’s not a Check Out The Big Brain On Brad business and industry discussion.
Just because your favorite movie or show is currently available on your streamer of choice, doesn’t mean it will be there tomorrow. The Streaming Wars should, in theory, be offering incentives that are one-upping the competition in the arena of iron-clad digital ownership. However, it’s almost a race to the bottom, in that respect.
Recently Sony Playstation users were greeted with a prompt informing them that as of December 31st, 2023 all content related to parent company Discovery, that had been purchased to own, would no longer be available due to “licensing agreements” expiring.
Revoking ownership due to terms and conditions changing sure doesn’t seem like much of an ownership stake, does it? But this is the Faustian bargain we’ve all passively agreed to in exchange for the effortlessness of being able to stream.
What is life if you can’t binge 34 hours of House of Cards in a single weekend, taking only minimal piss and shit breaks, am I right? Who needs to feel the wind in your hair on a cool summer evening when there’s 15 seasons of Ink Master? Why unstrap yourself from the content machine when you can have your phone feeding you TikToks, and your laptop streaming Loki Season 2, and your iPad pulsing Spotify’s most listened to New Bangers for Sexy Bitches for 2k23? Content is king, baby. And there’s so much of it, who has time to do anything other than ingest.
The most horrifying element of this irrevocable trajectory, to me, is that this is just the beginning. In the early days of theatrical distribution, producers used to joke that they were in the business of getting something for nothing. Today, streamers are in the business of selling us access to everything in exchange for next to nothing. The knock on effect of this is that almost every aspect of the industry has contracted or bloated to match this anorexic binge and purge business model. To make matters even worse we’re all permanently haunted by the idea that it could be taken away at any moment.
This media landscape and status quo is something that has affected nearly every creative industry. Film, TV, and Music, all permanently altered by the omnipresent specter of Infinite Access.
Surprisingly, one industry that has weathered the Streaming Era relatively still intact is the Comic Book industry, or rather the loose network of retail comic book store locations, often referred to as the Direct Market, specifically. People who buy comics still want books. They want to hold things in their hands. However, thanks to supply chain issues, rising paper costs, editorial mismanagement, and a fervent catering towards an increasingly diminishing crowd of “speculator” collectors, even this industry is struggling in recent times.
The previous primary shift that happened in the media landscape prior to streaming was piracy. Napster, LimeWire, and a bevy of other Peer to Peer file sharing torrent sites turned the idea of distribution and ownership on its head in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. And in many ways digital piracy of music and film projects is not nearly as persistent as they once were, due in large part to the ease of access the streamers offer. However, ironically, piracy of comic books is at an all time high.
Without naming any names, there are sites available online that house literal millions of comics, organized, collated, and cataloged. They’re ready for a readership of new and interested eyeballs. And they don’t require you to fork over 4, 5, or sometimes as much as 6 dollars for a single issue that can be read in 15 minutes. The price of admission is just some annoying popup menus and probably your cookies and personal info being harvested by weirdo alt-right mailing lists that are too pathetic to actually be able to organically generate the interest they need to survive in the cold light of day.
I say all of this, because living in Los Angeles you’re inundated by these ideas. The pressures of the fiscal realities of the time and the rapidly changing consumption habits of a population who doesn’t give two shits about how the sausage is made… they just want to be fed.
So, logically, what do you do with all this pent up frustration, fascination, and rumination? You write a book about it … sort of.
Mary Tyler MooreHawk took me four years to create. It’s a book split into two halves. The first section is an action adventure comic following a group of super-science adventurers as they attempt to stop the end of the world, and the other half is a novel, about a journalist who’s obsessed with a TV show that only lasted 9 episodes and was based on the adventures of the previously detailed family.
Here’s the simple truth, most people that read my book, if they read it at all, are going to be focusing on the fun action, quirky characters, and retro-futurist science vibes. Which is great. I like those things too. But lurking just beneath that surface is something a bit more sinister. You see, in the novel components of the book there are excerpts from a zine titled Physicalist Today. In these sections you’ll experience a glimpse into what the future could hold. A world where ownership of physical objects is outlawed, a time when we’ve forgotten how the idea of “story” functions.
In this future, collecting and nostalgia are a poison pill. They’ve been driven underground by an oppressive government. And as such only a scant few people care enough to attend basement illegal swap meets where contraband like comic books, VHS tapes, and old vending machines are sold for pennies on the dollar.
To me, there’s a connection between ownership and the virality of an idea. Sure, there’s the Dawkins idea of a “meme” as a DNA-esque building block element of culture, that self-replicates and spreads like wildfire. But, on top of that, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the way those ideas spread and a physical attachment that reader, consumer, or viewer can experience.
Comic books specifically benefited from this relationship. In the early decades of their existence they were sold by the millions and then traded by the hundreds of millions. Children from all walks of life benefitted from the fact that once one of their friends had bought the new issue of Lois Lane, Superman’s Girlfriend, it would be traded, borrowed, and stolen tens of times before it would quite literally fall apart.
These colloquial libraries were the backbone of how Youth Culture spawned in the United States. From bootleg recordings of your favorite bands to dog-eared copies of your that one subversive novel, every idea that has had true cultural staying power has had some rooted fixture in the physical world.
Which is why the direction we’re currently headed in looks exponentially more bleak. With the idiotic calls for censorship and burning of books growing louder every day, the mind wonders what the terminus of this highly dangerous cultural preoccupation we have is? It starts by aiming a megaphone and underserved voices and people from minority groups’ self-expression. And then it rapidly evolves from there, if allowed to fester unchecked. When are the priceless pieces of our cultural history going to be removed, censored, or destroyed simply because they don’t match with the purported moral compass of a vocal minority?
When all is said and done, things are either going to completely erode, and we’re going to have no physical releases of the pieces of media we love, which is ostensibly where we are by all reasonable estimations. Or, things will course correct. The system will go into Oh, Dear God, I Must Un-Fuck Myself mode. The cultural buying habits will run counter to the world we live in right now, and the idea of physical ownership will experience a rebirth, potentially something akin to what has happened with vinyl records.
Is this the most likely case? Tragically, this is the trajectory we’re currently on. It’s frustrating, scary, and dour. But, frankly, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to making books. I love books. I love the experience of holding them in my hands, turning the pages, and being sucked into some world that’s completely new and exciting. Which is exactly why I spent the last four years making Mary Tyler MooreHawk. I can’t say that when I started the project I anticipated it being so explicit about this exact topic, but, you know what they say, “all good art is autobiography.”
So, in conclusion, please don’t fall for the trap of thinking that digital ownership is a real thing… it’s not. It’s a mirage, propagated by corporate entities that work as stopgaps for our culture. It’s frustrating but, currently, there’s not much of a choice but to swim with these sharks. If you’re able to rebel against this new status quo in a minimal way, in your day-to-day adventures, please do so. I’ll consider it a personal favor to me. Not that you really owe me one… but, y’know, it would be nice. It’ll make me feel less alone as I’m shaking my fist at the clouds.
