Timbales wrote:
If someone is producing for an audience, and is getting paid, it's commercial. Big or small, it makes no difference.
This is true. Non-commercial art is basically limited to the Henry Dargers of the world, and when he died his work was commercialized too.
We can presume The Bass is making the usual distinction between mainstream and independent comics, while The President is off on a tangent about Kinkos--do Kinkos even exist any more? Anyways, if you could sum up the advantages of independent & self-published over mainstream into one single word, it would have to be "freedom". Or as Pete Bagge said recently in an interview here:
PB: Just write and draw EXACTLY what you want to. Don't hold back, and don't compromise. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Mainstream has advantages too, of a different sort, such as a semi-regular paycheck and generally a larger built-in audience as long as they keep writing established properties.