Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
A corporate trust is closer to the system you are trying to define, where basically companies get so much power that they can abuse workplace laws with impunity and make it hard or impossible to get workers to unionize and collectively act against their interests. Protectionism in economics can refer at times to mild or neutral stuff like protecting cultural products, like France and UK like to protect cultural exports like Champagne and Scotch Whiskey by making them cultural and national products and so provided with caveats that spare it from market exploitation and so on. And some form of protectionism can co-exist fairly well with a free market economy.
But in the case of comics business where you have basically two huge companies, owned by mega-corporations, you have essentially a dual industry monopoly where two companies can basically abuse the principles of normal fair capitalism to maintain a thuggish form of exploitation of labor that you simply don't get in any other media industry.
Fundamentally the comics business doesn't actually run on normal ideas of capitalism, I mean this is the kind of stuff that Theodore Roosevelt, no socialist he, fulminated against on his bully pulpit. Comics have evaded the antitrust laws (which granted have been gutted and eroded steadily since FDR died) through a variety of ways but fundamentally the laws and contracts which the business has run on is gloriously illegal and fragrantly unethical.
The reason why this hasn't come to light is because of a cronyist culture, where essentially you have situations where artists and writers become editors and executives (Carmine Infantino went from artist of Flash to Editor in Chief at DC, Jim Shooter likewise), or in the case of Stan Lee you have a relation of the company president working as office gofer, and then as editor, and then as editor/writer (where Lee drew a check as a freelance writer while Kirby was just paid for the art). I mean at one point, Stan Lee had the unmitigated gall to actually propose himself as a member for a planned writer's union which people objected to because he was the boss. So that meant that many artists/writers become complicit and implicated in this system of exploitation which also kills and hampers unionization drives (of which there are many, all of them failed). There's also the fact that the comics business had no respect and attention...and people only bothered when the MCU and others became this moneymaking juggernaut. Because even people who care about art and stuff pay attention to the power of stuff that makes money. Then you have the fans...where the business found a readymade eternal supply of cheap disposable labor and strikebreakers, the kind of eager enthusiast who'd work for free and hey guess what, that's what you're gonna be doing.
So it's a kind of human centipede like industry where everyone's head is attached to rear ends in an ouroboros.
That's why I don't think fans have no power or don't have a part to play. Nor do I think they are innocent either. We are involved in this whether we like it or not. It may not feel that way but it's true.