You mean comics...

 

I enjoy that the comic industry crashing was something that was long overdue.

 

That man is positively terrifying. Do not fuck with him.

 

One way you can support your local comic shop is to go and buy a gift card there. This will give them cash in the moment and you will use it later anyway.

 

So will comicbooks still be released digitally? I could really use the reading material during this quarantine...

 

So if comics are still going to come out digitally, what does that mean for the physical versions? Not coming out or just a massive dump when everything is back up and running? If they don't release the physical ones, that piss the living shit out of me having a collection and having a gap in the collection with no hopes of filling it.

 

2018 was a record setting sales year for the industry. 2019 numbers aren't all in, but there's no reason to assume it won't be more of the same. The comics industry is doing great.

Your local comic shop needing help or an individual publisher having an issue, while never good, isn't a picture of "the industry." Anyone trying to skew numbers to tell you otherwise has a bone to pick that's about something else or just flat out doesn't know what they're talking about.

 

And yet a giant juggernaut like DC is beyond fucked and making excuses to say they’re fine.

If someone like DC is having trouble in a record high for the comic industry, then that says a lot on where it’s heading.

Edit: First off, I wasn’t aware the link you provided existed. So kudos on you for that. Second.... Lol, I like that people pointed out that graphic novels and comics are lumped together to make it look good.

 

"McDonald's counts the sales of chicken nuggets AND hamburgers. Fast food is done for!"

 

Happy meal toys have a better chance than comics.

 

With Marvel putting out comics like the New Warriors and Children of the Atom, they seem intent on driving the comic book industry to death without help from the coronavirus.

 

If they’re still around later.

 

The comics industry painted itself into this corner by allowing Diamond to have a distribution monopoly. It will be painful, but perhaps the companies will see fit to develop their own distribution methods as a result.

 

Yes on the bright side of things perhaps this will get books back into grocerary stores and gas stations and other convienant store type places.

 

Before there were LCSs, there were still hundreds of indy comics. From Underground all the way to Kitchen Sink and Cerebus the Aardvark. They started mostly by direct mail or local record shops to stock their goods. The publishers sold directly to the shops or they formed smaller publishers. Peter Simeti is doing direct sales to shops without a distributor as well as working with Diamond. They have direct to customer mail order and even have a printing partnership program to help smaller creators print their own comics for huge discounts. You just need to use newsprint. He was also working on a small press distribution network apart from Diamond. He's small enough that he can still come back from this and probably get those plans going by 2021 sometime, even if the number of LCS are cut in half.

That's one way comics survive. Another is crowd funding. You don't need to offer bionic frogs to make that work. Creators and smaller publishers are already doing this. I expect more of this to go on. Again, this is direct to customer marketing.

We'll also continue to see book stores selling manga (25% of all US comic sales) and children's comics from traditional book publishers (again, around 25% of total US comic sales already).

Web comics have already begin to replace the newspaper strips. We'll see more of this as well. Webtoons are already huge in Asia. Comics strips meant for mobile phone consumption.

Most existing publishers will not adapt and will go away. That's been the case in every single decade of this industry. Look thru comic book history and you will see publishers and titles that you've never heard of. The comic book instrusty survived the death of Dell and Gold Key. Comics can withstand the eventual end of Marvel or DC publishing, to say nothing of the ends of Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, Boom or IDW.

Those little publishers in the back of Previews that you mostly skip over and have never heard of will be what keep doing comics because they love comics. They'll find a way to do it. Comics as a medium will be fine, without the dedicated Wednesday driven LCS or Diamond.

Magazine sales are actually up now, but only two or three publishers even bother to offer their comics to those markets.

 

oh hell yeah let's blame the death of the comics industry on TEH ESJAYDUBYEWS and not Diamond having essentially an illegal monopoly on distribution for the better part of twenty years lol

Seriously, though, COVID is also about to start affecting *printers* at this point - you may have the comic all ready to go and nowhere to print the damned things, much less a store to sell them in.

 

personally id be fine with them switching to digital

 

This. Even worse, if comics were still being delivered, most shops are closed due to "shelter-in" ordinances as comics are hardly "essential." There would be no way to distribute the books short of shop owners going to the post office, which isn't viable.

 

Whos ready for Diamond to not open back up and creator comic shops.