Shaenon Garrity on the future of comics

Ten Things to Know About the Future of Comics

Deals with both print and webcomics. Interesting predictions. Thoughts?

I didn't write any of that.

Quite a few of them sound plausible, and point 7 echoes some of Scott McCloud's musings on manga as well.

An useless name, a forsaken connection.

Coooool

I like "fat comics".

edited 26th Oct '10 9:28:22 PM by Tzetze

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

I think she's mostly right on the mark. Particularly with regard to syndicated newspaper comics going the way of all flesh. I sometimes wonder whether, if it weren't for The Comics Curmudgeon, any non-newspaper subscribers (which is more and more becoming synonymous with "any people under sixty") would still be reading them. As for monthlies/floppies/pamphlets, although sales have indeed been in decline, I'm not sure it's time to pronounce them dead. (I myself have moved on to "waiting for the trade," but that's besides the point.) A commenter on the Comixology article argues that monthly comics are still important, at least to the major publishers, because they subsidize the trades and OGNs, both by providing creators with monthly income and by selling ads. It's possible, though, that monthly releases may change in length or medium somehow from the form they've taken since their origin in the 1930s.

edited 26th Oct '10 9:31:05 PM by ChevalierMalfait

Interesting. Of course, I come from another culture than Garrity, which means that monthly comics never existed, and 6 has been true since about when I was a teen (i.e., the neolithic, as far as kids are concerned). But I am rather intrigued by it all, except 1 which seems to be a given these days.

Also, I think that pamphlet comics can work if entirely limited to self-contained adventures with some inflections of an arc in the background, instead of multiple installments of a single story.

Casanova is one such, as are the Marvel Adventures.

edited 27th Oct '10 4:41:38 AM by krrackknut

An useless name, a forsaken connection.

I disagree on the exclusion of superheroes from the main canon, they're always going to be in the comics, simply because it's where they came from and they won't be leaving soon- they haven't in the past 70 years.

It seems overly optimistic, to be frank.

"Everyone wants an answer, don't they?... I hate things with answers." — Grant Morrison

Oh, yes. A manga editor at Viz says monthly comic books are dead. Forgive me if I roll my eyes.

Most of the points she brings up are interesting tho.

Sometimes life just sucks. You have to learn to take the good with the bad. Why should you expect anything different in the mediums?

They have been in a slow decline for a long time. Either something will be done to reinvigorate interest or they will fade away eventually.

To everyone who says monthly comic book is in decline - yes they are. Same as newspapers and magazines are. It's not a comic-book industry crisis, it's a printed media industry crisis. It,s worse with the comics cause they target a very specific market that is very at ease with the internet and its possibilities.

And newspapers and magazines put all their stuff online anyway, so declining sales of the dead tree format stuff isn't such a big deal to them.

Comic publishers really need to embrace selling issues online. I know I keep harping on about how awesome 2000 AD is, but Rebellion's approach here is perfect. Individual issues are be downloaded from their website for less than the cost of the paper edition, and it's DRM free, so you can freely make backup copies.

Apparently, they also store info on who downloads what so that once someone has bought a copy once, they can re-download it for free as often as they like, which is useful if they run into problems with their hard drive.

The issues are apparently supposed to go online a week after they hit newsstands in the UK, though the shop is currently several weeks behind. Don't know what's going on there, though it's probably still ahead of the comic shops for Americans.

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I seem to remember reading on Comic Book Resources that IDW also had a strong digital distribution system, but I couldn't find any references on their own website.

Ukrainian Red Cross

Have you considered that maybe she chose to be a manga editor because she believes monthly comic books are dead?

"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko

I disagree on the exclusion of superheroes from the main canon, they're always going to be in the comics, simply because it's where they came from and they won't be leaving soon- they haven't in the past 70 years.

Note that the canon is not based on what Garrity *thinks* should be the canon, it is the comics that young people she gets in contact with in various ways all seem to have a clue what they are about. As in "even if they dont like this stuff they have a grasp of it". She notes that her generation (younger than mine) had a Bat-filled canon, because that was something that they all had read.

It is descriptive, not proscriptive. The description might be wrong (she might have insufficient data, so to speak) but she is not saying what should be the canon.

Erik

I disagree on the first one for people who still watch TV and whose parents bother to buy TV programs magazines: I remember that at all ages, I've picked up the week's magazine, read the funnies, and given the magazine back to my parents.

So, in short: Newspaper Comics don't appear only in newspapers. For me, they may as well be called TV Programs comics.

edited 2nd Nov '10 4:08:10 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I think Shaenon's right although some of the points are a little off. Mainly number 5. And I know nothing about manga so I disagree with a lot of the points relating to it.

The most interesting point is that superheroes are no longer comic book characters. That's mostly true. I mean, when you think about, the most well known superheroes are the ones with movies and tv series. Sure, a comic fan knows that they're comic book characters but a non-comicbook reader probably doesn't know or care.

edited 2nd Nov '10 1:35:53 PM by Gvzbgul