The Future of Comics

[bcholmes]

2 Monthly comic books are dead. We all know this, right? Again, it's a format with a lot of good qualities that will be sorely missed (foremost among them the ability to sample a story cheaply before investing in an entire book), but the direct market is a mess and pamphlet-style monthly comic books now barely work even as loss leaders. Among younger readers, "waiting for the trade" is the default position, to the point that most teenage fans seem only foggily aware that the monthly format even exists.

The comic book could have survived if the direct market hadn't been run, since the 1990s, like a less competent and smellier version of one of those fly-by-night outfits that hawk gold on the Glenn Beck show, but, as Kurt Vonnegut said about the fate of the planet Earth in general, we were too damn lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap.

— "Ten Things to Know About the Future of Comics"