The embarrassment of riches.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

At the San Diego Comic Convention, an artist-rebel harangues a crowd of hundreds in a huge double hall in the convention center. His name is Todd McFarlane, and he is one of the most popular comic book artists of his generation. In 1992, he abandoned a safe berth with a giant entertainment corporation, Marvel Comics. McFarlane's art sold millions of Spider-Man comic books, and made him a wealthy man.

An insurrectionist and troublemaker, McFarlane enticed some of Marvel's other star attractions to quit with him, and set up a new umbrella company for their work: Image Comics. Image differs from big, traditional comic companies. The artists retain full ownership of their own characters and work. The business end of the company works for them, merely helping them with printing, promotion, and distribution. The creators are the bosses. In a field dominated for decades by two big companies - Marvel and DC (a subsidiary of Time Warner, the world's biggest entertainment conglomerate) - this was a truly revolutionary move: the independent creator at war with the big corporation.

Addressing the comics convention, McFarlane looks the part of the scruffy modern Bohemian, wearing a loose blue T-shirt, denim shorts, a dirty baseball cap, and a goatee. But as he swaggers and jokes, he seems to revel in demolishing some traditional preconceptions about the relationship between money and art.

Oh, money isn't important to him, this rich man assures the crowd, in the classic tradition of the artist rising above mundane concerns. Then the punchline: "The only good thing about money is, if you have enough of it, you can do whatever you want."

And he's doing it. Instead of licensing his popular superhero Spawn to some toy company, he started his own toy company. Sure, he's letting outsiders make movies and cartoons of Spawn, but he's keeping a close eye on them. He sounds like the traditional artist bashing corporations when he gleefully sneers that "the big corporations are bloated and fat. They can't catch a skinny little weasel like me." But then he makes a joke of the old cliche that to an artist, selling your creations for others to use and profit from is as bad as selling your children. "When I sell my kids," McFarlane jokes about his TV and movie deals, "I want visitation rights and some say in how they are raised."

Across the country, in another area of youth-oriented pop culture, Patrick Hughes tells another story of working outside the traditional corporate structure. Hughes runs an independent record store, carrying only small-label independent releases, in Gainesville, Florida.

"I got a call from these guys who had just put out a record by a local band," he recalls. "It was their first time doing this, so they had some questions about the business end of it all. They wanted to know things about distribution, standard prices, and such. I gave them some advice about how to price it in line with the usual market rate, which would allow them to make their money back plus some.

"That stopped them. 'Oh, we don't want to make any money on it,' they told me. 'You know, it just wouldn't be right, it would just feel weird.' I couldn't really pin them down to why they felt this way. I mean, what's the problem? Charge an extra 50 cents, sell a couple hundred, use it as seed money to make another record, to pay postage on mailing it to radio stations around the country so more people can hear it.

"They said, 'I guess that might be cool and all, but we really don't wanna get into that sort of thing.' But what if you don't sell them all, I asked, don't you want a chance at making enough money off the ones you do sell to break even? 'Oh, we don't want to make money,' they said. 'We just wanna get this music out.'

"I tried to explain, you can get the music out more efficiently, make it go farther, have money to put out more music on a later date, by charging enough to make a sensible little profit. The whole notion that they could make a minimal amount of profit to plow back in was distasteful to them, like it would sully the purity of what they were doing."

The idea that commerce will necessarily "sully the purity" of art is a hoary one, common not only in the highbrow arts that rely on government and foundation grants but in the underground popular arts fed by fan enthusiasm. As one man who works in the distribution of independent records puts it, "Nobody [in the independently produced arts] actually talks about the money because it's considered to be a very insincere source of inspiration, a dirty facet of a dirty business." While its sources are understandable, this attitude hurts artists, depriving them of both audiences and profits, and it helps infect the general culture with the sense that markets by their nature subvert important values.

As Hughes's and McFarlane's more balanced approaches suggest, however, something is changing. Increasingly, "indie" artists have the chance to marry commercial interests with artistic integrity - to get their art to more people without sacrificing their vision and, if they're lucky, to make even more money than they might by "selling out" to a big corporation. Entrepreneurship has become a real option for such artists, making trade not a vehicle for corruption but a way to communicate with fans.

Before the late 1970s, this was almost unheard of. Then, in the '80s, whole new ways of doing business arose in comics and rock, allowing artists to retain more control and ownership of their work. In both fields, new distribution networks and trade/commentary magazines developed to help sell and publicize these works, which appeal to a more limited audience than mass-market comics and rock. New technologies, such as desktop publishing and relatively inexpensive digital recording and manufacturing technologies, reduced the capital needed to enter the comics or record business. Today, starting a record company or publishing a comic book takes less capital than buying a five-year-old Honda Accord.

Some "indie" companies are just small, while others are actually run by the artists themselves. Either way, they're distinguished by their independence from big corporations. The large, traditional companies tend to take a more authoritarian hand in running artists' careers; retain ownership of all the...