| Posted: 07 March 2021 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | 3
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I suspect that the traditional comic book, in "pamphlet" form (bad term, but better than "floppies") is not long for this world. I can't imagine a comics biz without Marvel and DC, for better or worse. But sales of "pamphlets" don't make much money for Warner Bros./AT&T and Disney. I presume they lose money by printing comics, albeit not much money, since they make up the costs by owning DC and Marvel characters as intellectual property that they use for movies, TV shows, merchandising.
Even if the Big Two suddenly tried to get very accessible superhero comics into the hands of tweens and teens via newsstands, I doubt that would have much effect. Do Gen Z youth even know what a newsstand is?
Even if the Direct Market hadn't "taken over everything," I doubt that comic book history would end up very different from where it currently is.
(Forgive me for reiterating what some here have already said, I suppose I'm not saying anything distinctive here.)
This won't mean the end of sequential art-based storytelling. Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly and other graphic-novels-for-adults companies will still send original graphic novels to bookstores. Young people will still buy manga and maybe even superhero-based OGNs. Maybe Image Comics will survive and still publish OGNs that once would have been published by DC's Vertigo imprint, or Dark Horse, or some other company.
But the age of the superhero comic book may be over, and with it the Direct Market. Other than what I said above, I'm reluctant to make predictions.
The last time superhero comics died it meant the rise of EC Comics -- and those comics were much better than the generally one-dimensional and badly drawn comics of the "Golden Age." We know what happened afterward.
Who knows what will happen now.
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