“When W.E.B. DuBois created the idea of the megascope in the short story The Princess Steel (1909), I wonder if he would ever have dreamed that he was giving us a gift of not just one future but myriad futures. The megascope functions as a lens through which so many unheard voices can be heard. I am so honored and excited to present this first slate of books that we have lovingly curated. It’s a very robust, diverse, extraordinary collection of narratives that, I hope, will foster conversation, celebration, and connection,” says Jennings. “The book is an empathy machine and ABRAMS has dedicated so much of its existence to making cutting-edge, well-designed, beautiful books for everyone. I am humbled by the talent and dedication that Abrams ComicArts has poured into this line of books. My hope is that our audience will see themselves and their commonalities with others in these graphic messages from the minds and hands of some of the most amazing creators working in graphic fiction today.”
When Megascope started, I made some comparisons to Milestone as perhaps the most recent, broadly successful attempt to run a comics line like this. It was a different time, the industry was wildly different, the business models were different... it's not really fair to compare the two, but Milestone's original comics line only ran for four years. So just the fact that Megascope has outlasted Milestone in that regard shows that Abrams has indeed committed itself to the project and, just by continuing to fund it, is doing more to promote diversity in comics that pretty much every other publisher.
They're not trying to be "the Black comics publisher." If you notice, the solicitation copy for most of their books don't even suggest that it's for people of color or specifically talking to the Black experience. Even passing references to the main characters' race are oblique at best. The stories are told by creators of color -- they're given the broad platform they're often denied -- and their stories are obviously going to be informed by their living in a not-always-tolerant-of-melanin society. But the focus of the stories isn't necessarily about that.
(Although their upcoming title, Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear, does seem to push against that trend.)
You know what Megascope reminds me of, as I think on it? The Black Panther movie. That was a film that was up/down/left/right/sideways Black. It was a Black-written, Black-directed, Black-acted, Black-designed movie about Africans set in Africa. But, it was sold to the viewing public at large as just another chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And most melanin-challenged people watched it in exactly that way. Which was fine. They saw some superheroics and cool CGI and witty catch phrases and all the trappings of another blockbuster Marvel movie. But the Black audience saw loads, loads more. I saw the movie on three separate occasions during its opening weekend and the audience reactions differed considerably from theater to theater, depending on what percentage of the audience was Black. A lot of references just sailed right over the heads of most white folks. That was okay, though, because there was still a solid story and characters for them to get into.
I actually know Jennings and several of the people on the advisory committee.
I was pretty confident that they would do some impressive work and, judging by the books they've put out over the past five years, I'm pleased to say that confidence was indeed warranted. I'll be honest that not every title was precisely my cup of tea but
that was a matter of taste more than anything; I could still see excellent stories with great storytelling even when I didn't personally care for the tale itself.
Back when Megascope first launched, I said
that I thought "there are going to be some really excellent books that will come out of there" and I was 100% correct on that front!
Congrats to John and everyone else at Megascope. Five years publishing a single line is no small feat, and I hope everyone involved takes a few moments to celebrate!
I've talked before about Dell's Lobo from 1966, and how it featured the first Black character who had the comic named after him. In that previous post, I included scans of the first issue and linked to where you could find scans of the second. So it's available to be read.
But I'm wondering... why hasn't it ever been reprinted? I mean, this is a significant comic -- why hasn't it been reprinted? Is it just a legal issue surrounding who owns the rights? Unlike many of Dell's comics, Lobo featured an original unlicensed character and there's no copyright notice to work with, so the question of who legally has the rights to the story seems unclear.
When I posted about this several years back, Britt Reid suggested that it probably is in public domain.
My guess is that no one has deemed that the expense of even just confirming the rights would be made up for by the reprint sales that might be generated. Which means that either A) we'll have to wait another half century to see it published again, or B) someone will gamble that whoever the copyright holder actually is won't take any legal action if it's published without their permission. I daresay the latter is a distinct possibility; I've seen similar stories reprinted in this manner.
It seems like an important issue that should be celebrated more than it is. But I suspect people downplay its sale-ability precisely because of the main character's skin color. And they'll claim it's not racist because it's just that sales wouldn't be very good, not realizing that the the biases that led them to that conclusion stem precisely from a system that discourages readers from seeing Black protagonists as worthwhile.
Racism in comics isn't always about whether Black characters are drawn into a comic enough. It's an entire culture (well, sub-culture, really) that has subtly, but unilaterally, placed more importance on Caucasian heroes than heroes of color. It's not accusing any single person of themselves being racist, but of an industry that, on the whole, has discouraged, overtly and covertly, the use of Black characters in heroic roles. And now that you're aware of that, and are willing/able to work against it...
Where's my Lobo reprints?
We saw a couple announcements this week that are worth examining jointly, I think. First, we have a relatively simple, not-especially-surprising reveal of The Art of The Mighty Thor reprinting art by both Jack Kirby and Walt Simonson. It's the third book in the Bullpen Books line, after one focusing on John Romita Sr.'s Spider-Man and another on Kirby's Fantastic Four. That it's the third book in the line and following the same basic format -- revisiting one of Marvel's earliest heroes with some work that is pretty universally lauded -- is why it's largely unsurprising.
It's also unsurprising in that we've seen a number of book treatments along these general lines for several years, reviewing classic works through an artistic lens with a somewhere-between-academic-and-popular critical eye. There are a number of "Artist's Edition" style books, of course, and things like Chip Kidd's panel-by-panel books; these are books that may not be overloaded with essays, but offer the artwork up from a perspective that's not simply just a nice reprint but a way to examine the art differently.
The other announcement I'd like to highlight is that Oni Press put out a press release noting that they will, beginning in fall of 2026, beging a series of new titles featuring a variety of characters from the Archie Comics stories. These will not be in quite the same vein as traditional Archie fare, and sound like a re-imagining not unlike the Riverdale television series. There will also be another more-YA-focused line of graphic novels coming in 2027, apparently unrelated to either the original Archie Comics or these newer ones from Oni. And, to be clear, the titles currently being published by Archie Comics themselves will continue as they have for decades.
Now, what both of these announcements have in common is that we have long-established comic book publishers not only licensing out their characters -- which both Marvel and Archie have done for decades -- but they're licensing them out to other comic publishers.
Not just for reprint rights, but for publishing entirely new material outside their direct editorial control.
In that respect, this is not new for Marvel. While the "Heroes Reborn" books from 1996-97 were farmed out, they still maintained a level of publishing control, but some of the more recent books from Abrams like Fantastic Four: Full Circle and The Avengers in the Veracity Trap are not.
I've made note before -- and I still see barely anyone acknowledging this -- that Marvel officially stopped being a comic book publisher and started recognizing themselves as a character licensing company back in 2000. Over the course of just a couple years, they changed their business model pretty radically such that, by the time they were bought by Disney, Marvel only earned about 25% of their revenue from actual comics. The vast majority of their money came from licensing. That is, in fact, why Disney bought them -- they saw that Marvel had "grown up" and began to see what their real stock-in-trade was. Not unlike the revelation McDonald's had that they weren't a hamburger chain, but a real estate company. (McDonald's, if you didn't know, is the fifth largest landlord in the world; over a third of their revenue just comes from rent.)
What's interesting is to see Archie Comics make this same recognition. MLJ Magazines and Timely Comics were both founded in 1939, both started branching out into animation in the 1960s, both started seeing minor success with live-action interpretations in the 1990s... yet it took Archie nearly a quarter century longer than Marvel to see where their real value was.
There was a period in the early 2000s where people would set up comic book companies as a specific means to sideways themselves into Hollywood. Platinum Studios was probably the most nakedly open example of this. The problem they had was very much one of putting the cart before the horse. They had built up nothing to sell to Hollywood but tried making money off high-concept ideas like "cowboys and aliens." Both Marvel and Archie spent decades building up their characters with a lot of trial and error. And while Archie Comics are sometimes knocked for a house style that is largely built around Dan DeCarlo's illustration style from the 1960s, they have spent decades honing their storytelling and style of the Archie universe such that virtually everybody knows what to expect, in much the same way that everybody knows what to expect with Marvel. (Which is largely built around the storytelling -- not illustrative -- style of Kirby.)
There's more to The Art of The Mighty Thor announcement that a cool art book, and there's more to Oni's announcement than someone-other-than-Archie-Comics-to-publish-Archie-comics. In both cases, we're looking at an expansion/update of comic publishers' business models and I see a future for them sometime down the road where neither company actually publishes comics at all any more.
Back in the day, the number of toys licensed from comics books was paltry (certainly by comparison today) and what was available was often made cheaply. Much of which had to do with the materials that were available -- you couldn't afford to make heavily articulated, plastic action figures. So what happened on occasion was that toys were made out of paper or light cardboard; those were materials that were pretty accessible, fairly cheap, and easy to transport. So you got things like the set of Marvel Family fliers pictured here. A little Tab A/Slot B action, and you've got yourself a Captain Marvel figure that fly around.
The thing I don't get -- and I've been trying to figure this out for a quarter century -- is why creators and/or publishers don't offer things like this as downloads today? Use them as promos for your new comic? A downloadable PDF that can be easily passed around and shared that people can then print out and put together some figures or a small playset or something.
I know Chris Schweizer has done some things along these lines for his Patreon backers, and Brian Fies did one at the conclusion of The Last Mechanical Monster, but I don't recall seeing someone try something like this as a promotional tool. There seem to be plenty of fans who put together custom-designed cubees of comic book characters, so it seems to me there's no real objection to the notion of papercraft or anything.
And while I get that there's some time and effort involved, a company like Marvel or DC literally has this material from years ago sitting in their archives. Back in the '70s, Marvel did a full playset featuring the Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and Peter Parker's apartment. There's the Captain Marvel fliers noted above, and I'm pretty sure both Marvel and DC later had similar versions for other characters.
Maybe it's just me. I think it's a clever, fun way to promote a comic and wouldn't cost anything more than a little time to design. Hell, I designed my own HERBIE the robot back when I ran my old Fantastic Four fan site. My point is that it's not that difficult. Just take a few cues from a half century ago, and put together some new promotional material that no one is else putting out there!
On Wednesday, Webtoons announced some more licensing arrangements. I wasn't going to comment beyond the quick Mastodon post I made, but then with their quarterly report coming out yesterday, I think the two speak to a larger story.
Their Wednesday press release seems straight-forward on its surface. It says Webtoon is partnering with Warner Brothers Animation to bring some of Webtoons' comics into animated form. The press announcement only lists some of the properties -- a standard marketing tactic is to spread out the announcements of specific properties over a longer period to keep interest ongoing -- and it also doesn't note the distribution venue at all. But it also states that "the companies intend to enter into an agreement" (emphasis mine) meaning they haven't actually finalized the contracts yet.
Now, as you may recall, Webtoons made a few headlines in September around some contract deals with Disney. Following that up so quickly with an announcment about making a deal with Warner Brothers struck me as a very cynical business plan. Those are two massive deals in a very short amount of time, but they're also both agreements without any actual content behind them. I mean, yes, there are specific titles involved but the announcements are all about plans and "forthcoming projects." They essentially don't have anything to show besides the contracts. And in one case, not even that.
That screams to me that Webtoons is trying to generate as much market buzz as they can. Without any content to back that up, the buzz is all about the company itself, meaning they are trying to drive up the stock price. And the only reason to inflate the stock price is to be able to sell. Either a good percentage of their shares or the company as a whole. Stock prices are intended to reflect the value a company has in bringing its goods/services to the market; the prices are an ancillary result of a business doing well. By intentionally driving the prices (in either direction, honestly, though most people focus on "up") that signals that you're business model is focused on selling stocks, not on doing business.
But then we also have their third quarter earnings reported yesterday. A single quarter loss of $11.6 million, down from $20 million in profit during Q3 2024. Despite a nearly 9% increase in revenue over the same period. That is, they brought in a lot more money but spent so much of it that they went in the hole.
They further forecast that their fourth quarter earnings this year would see a revenue decline of as much as 5%. This despite increases in both monthly users and monthly paying users.
Which is to say that they're going to continue spending more money than they're taking in even as they bring in more money!
Now, admittedly, the old axiom of having to spend money to make money has an element of truth to it. But it seems to me that Webtoons, since its IPO last year, has been spending more cash that it's bringing in and, more notably, has mostly been spending much of that on licensing agreements instead of content or app improvements. (I noted earlier this year how they've in fact actively made their app worse.) But yesterday's earnings report saw an immediate drop in their stock price by 25%!
Webtoons is not only spending much more money than they're making, but over the past year and a half, they've got nothing to show for it. A bit of vaporware and that's it.
There is nothing I'm seeing in Webtoons this year that doesn't strike me as a cynical plan to sell stock, and they're not doing all that great a job at that. When Webtoons was still part of Naver, we weren't privy to their finances, but rumors were circulating that that part of their business was continually run at a loss. While this year's news doesn't 100% confirm those rumors, they certainly lend a lot of credence to them!
If you've heard virtually anything about US politics over the past two years, you've probably heard something about the infamous "Epstein files." But on the off chance you haven't, here's a short summary. Between 2008 and 2019, Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused dozens of young girls. He travelled in high profile circles and forced underage girls into sexual relations with a number of celebrities. He was eventually arrested in 2019 for sex trafficking and died in his jail cell a month after being incarcerated. Officially, it was ruled a suicide but there are more than a few reasons to believe he was murdered.
Because of the seriousness of his crimes and the length of time he was being investigated, the US Department of Justice has an extensive set of files on him, including material confiscated from Epstein's home as evidence. This is noteworthy for two reasons. First, Epstein had extensive surveillance capabilities on his properties, specifically in order to capture unflattering material of his guests that he could use as a form of blackmail. Second, these people who he had video and audio recordings of included the likes of Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.
So the so-called "Epstein files" are not only things like datebooks and ledgers, but actual recordings of wealthy indvidiuals who -- given the great lengths they're going to in order to keep those files secret -- likely engaged in blatantly illegal and morally bankrupt behaviors. Given that Trump himself has already been criminally proven to be a rapist, has publicly shown himself to a weirdly sexual attraction to his own daughter going back to when she was a child, and seems to have fetish for watching women urinate, I can't imagine what levels of his depravity must be on those tapes that he refuses to have them released. (I wouldn't be surprised at what he's done -- I've been saying for years that there is no bottom with him -- just that he got recorded doing it.)
OK, so why the Epstein backstory here on a blog about comics? Because the whole sordid mess directly ties in with the comic book industry.
One of the women who Epstein abused when she was a child is Ashley Rubright. She's recently been speaking more openly about her experiences, notably in a CNN interview back in September. But this pertains to comics because -- as Rich Johnston just pointed out -- Rubright is a comic book dealer, selling comics alongside her husband Gary Attaway at BrokeAssComics.com.
I don't really have anything new to add. I'm pointing this out for much the same reason that Johnston did: that even if you don't follow this type of news very closely -- or at all -- because it's about immorally rich people who are so far removed from the reality of the rest of the world that they're even more two-dimensional that the bad guy on the worst Saturday morning cartoon
you've ever seen, it still has a touches actual, real people. The victims these wealthy assholes screw over aren't just names on a page. They're real people who've been emotionally, if not physically and financially, traumatized. People who have interests and hobbies just like you. People who thought nothing of being interviewed on the BBC with shelves of long boxes in the background, and stacks of Amazing Spider-Man and Punisher comics within arms' reach.
That is why this stuff is relevant. Because it affects real people. This isn't "abstract background noise that sounds nominally awful but hey it's just about rich, white dudes I'll never meet." These are the people you run into at conventions. The ones you chat with on social media. The ones who are just as excited about seeing Robert Downey, Jr. as Doctor Doom as you are. To assholes like Epstein and Trump, they might be namelessly disposable, but they absolutely are not.
Yesterday morning, I called up the custom comics page I created so I could read all the webcomics and newspaper strips I wanted in one place, and I found several of the comics were coming up as broken image links. Given that I coded the page myself, and a lot of it is reliant on each creator using a consistent file naming structure, it's not uncommon for a broken image link to show up from time to time. But yesterday, I had a dozen. I first thought there was something that interrupted the page load, so I hit 'refresh' but that just resulted in the exact same thing.
As I looked at things a little more closely, I did notice that all of the comic titles all those broken links belonged to were ones from the GoComics website. So I thought there might be something wrong with their server. When I tried calling up the comic images individually, I'd get a 404 error so I knew it wasn't a server problem at least. Maybe there was a formatting issue that screwed up how the file names were spelled out. Nope, re-typing the file name to match the day before's -- which I know for certain had worked because that's how I read all of them -- resulted in more 404 errors. I did some more checking. 404s for all the individual titles' directories. 404 for the directory all those directories were residing in.
I got a 403 error when I got up to the server level itself, which meant the server was still online. But the 404s meant that those individual files were gone. They didn't change acccess levels, they removed the files and directories entirely.
Thirty years ago, when newspaper syndicates first started putting all their comics online, they did so in a pretty basic fashion. They had a directory for each title, and uploaded each new strip with a file name that was a combination of an abbreviation of the title and the date. They needed to do something structured like that so they could keep all of their work organized and the whole server didn't become a jumbled mess after a week. The problem, though, is that structure was also easy to understand and therefore easy to develop a script for. This mean that just about anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of virtually any coding language could write a script to automatically take that day's comic and drop it into their own website. Which, if you make your money by selling subscriptions to that exact content, means you'll have more people linking to your content for free rather than paying for it.
They eventually realized this, and re-worked their website so that the images presented there were given a randomized file name when it was served to the user. They kept the naming structure internally so they didn't lose that organization, but they had a script that effectively anonymized that for public presentment. This would've been back in the late '90s, I believe.
However, I know they kept the old naming system internally because, back then when I first learned Javascript, someone had posted on some now-long-forgotten-forum a list of all the comics being hosted on a separate server than what was being used on the live site. Given the server domain was "synd.imgsrv.uclick.com" my assumption was that this was used to host images that news outlets could refer to when linking to the comics they were paying syndication rights for. The level of "security" being used by the syndicate itself was simply not telling anyone else that it existed. But someone -- who I presume worked for a newspaper at the time -- shared that info on a forum for the sake of anyone who wanted unpaid access.
My guess is that at some point, the syndicate told newspapers they were going to sunset that server and they gave them a window of a month or so to switch their websites to refer to the new server with anonymized file names. I expect more security was built in, so they needed a password or access key or something. And the newspaper all switched over because readers tend to get vocally upset when they can't read their comics, and there was no way an editor was going to risk that backlash over a stupid tech issue.
Except the syndicate never turned off the old server. Or the script that was copying files to it. It was no doubt set as an automated task, and maybe the programmer who put it together in the first place left; maybe they forgot about it; maybe they got busy with the next project...
Eventually, Uclick was fully absorbed by Andrews McMeel's Syndicate in 2009; I'm sure there was a massive staff shakeup and any of the folks who were even still left by then were likely let go.
So that old system just kept chugging along in the background, without any institutional knowledge at Andrews McMeel that it even existed.
It would have been pretty inconspicuous. Back then, there would've been few 'hackers' interested enough to do anything with the information. And you couldn't get access to EVERY comic they were running; mostly just well-established strips. So I'm sure most folks who did know about it eventually opted for other methods of getting to those comics. I know I certainly stopped referring to them on at least two separate occasions, and only returned when that new source broke and I'd find myself digging across old code I had written years earlier. So the amount of traffic that server would still be getting would be neglible at most.
And as hard drive space has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, the amount of space these duplicate image files would be taking up relative to their main sites would be rounding error.
So that server has been quietly hosting a slew of comics in the background, available essentially for free to anyone who knew they were there, for the past thirty years. "Hacking" access to those images wasn't even Web 1.0 levels of difficulty, so much so that I'm not even sure it even is considered hacking.
I've long since figured out other ways to get those strips I was reading, so it didn't take long to rework my personal comics page and drop in other sources for everything. And I don't really have a point other than to mark the very end of an era. There's very little in the way of Web 1.0 remnants floating around and still being updated -- the only comics outlier I know at this point is, fittingly, the Zippy the Pinhead website, which creator Bill Griffith still seems to update by hand every day -- and given the state of the world, that's a shame. Because that level of technologicial naivety was charmingly refreshing in an age when every website wants to track everything you do online and you get security alert notices on a daily basis about how this app or that website has been compromised, and all your personal information has found its way to the dark web once again. That that old system had been just doing its thing in the background, largely ignored, for three decades was amazing in its simplicity. RIP to the remnants of the original digital frontiers.
What happens when most comic books get cancelled? Generally, there's a vocal minority of fans who are disappointed, perhaps mad, but often most comic book fans shrug and say, "Meh."
There are a number of reasons comics get cancelled, but not infrequently, it's due to low sales. The publisher -- even if that publisher is also the creator -- has decided that producing the comic is simply not profitable enough (or at all). They've expended as much as they feel they can do drum up interest and support, but it's just not selling well enough to justify continuing. Now, maybe that's because the book sucks. There is certainly no shortage of crappy comics out there! But it's possible, too, that it was a good book, but just didn't make it to the attention of the right audience. Bad or insufficient marketing, you might say.
Now, when a book gets cancelled, whatever money was transferred in that process halts. The creators don't get paid, obviously, but now neither to the printers, distributors, anyone the publisher had advertised with, etc. I'm not saying these people necessarily get stiffed money they're owed -- though that does happen -- just that there's no future earnings coming to them because of the comic. In the cases of larger deals, like through, say, Marvel or DC, most of those people will be able to switch gears and find other similar gigs. The creators shift over to other books, the printers pick up additional customers, etc. Smaller folks might have bigger problems. Maybe the creators have to do freelance ad layout work for advertising circulars, maybe the printer goes out of business entirely.
But regardless of what happens to these people, they broader comic fanbase still gives a collective "Meh."
It's not that they don't care per se, but if an individual isn't invested in the book in any way, they don't have a reason to put much emotional stock in the loss. They look at the book in terms of, "What's in it for me?" (In business shorthand, this is often abbreviated as WIIFM -- pronounced "wiffum.") "What do I, as a consumer, get out of whether this book continues or not?"
If a person was reading the book, their loss is direct; they don't get to read the book any more. Whatever they got out of it will no longer be available. And because they had some emotional attachment to it, they have at least some modicum of concern over the people involved. "Good luck finding a new gig, Creator X!" Frequently, these fans follow the creator on to their next project, if possible.
I don't know that anyone gives much thought beyond that. To the printers, USPS/FedEx/UPS workers who deliver the finished books, the comic retailers... I don't know that most people make that connection between any one cancelled title, and everyone throughout the whole process. Not that it's easy to -- we never hear about the guy who delivered the books from the printers to the warehouse, or the admin at the printers who had to juggle a bunch of invoices for any one project, or the teenager who unpacked shipping boxes in the back room of the comic shop... I don't know if their namelessness is an active way to make things emotionally easier on us consumers, or if we're simply unable to make emotional connections along those more distant lines.
But the question still boils down to "What's in it for me?" And while I recognize that at some level we have to do that -- we can't be equally compassionate about all issues everywhere -- it's a shame that more people don't extend their interest in comics beyond the handful of books they actively read.
Kind of late notice, but ComicsPRO -- the comics professional retail organization -- is holding an online open house tomorrow and Friday. It's open to all industry professionals, not just retailers.
Personally, I find that the more I know about ALL aspects of comics, the better able I can understand what's going on in the industry, so I can judge not only the quality of a given comics' narrative but why it might be packaged the way it is, or marketed the way it is, or how it might tie in with other business decisions, or whatever. The greater the breadth of your comics knowledge -- beyond what's on the actual page -- the more you're able to appreciate why different decisions are made. I would urge everyone in comics to attend if they're able.
(Sadly, I have prior engagements. Namely, the day job.)
The panels begin at 8:00 am PDT tomorrow, and run through 2:30 pm PDT on Friday. Advance registration is required.
It seems that Humanoids Publishing has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In Chapter 11 bankruptcy -- which is what Diamond has filed under -- the idea is that, if you can get all the creditors to take only a percentage of what is actually owed them, then you can still run the business profitably. Marvel Comics actually filed under Chapter 11 back in 1996; they were able to restructure their debt payments and... well, you can easily see where they are today.
Filing under Chapter 11 is, of course, no guarantee you can become profitable again, but just that you convinced a judge that you theoretically can do it.
Chapter 7, though, is basically saying that's the end of the line; that no matter what you do, there is no chance you run the business and turn a profit. No amount of restructuring of debt, no amount of corporate reorganization, no buckling down is going to right things. All you can do is basically sell off whatever stuff you've got left, and let your debtors fight out how much money each one of them gets from that.
Obviously, Diamond's own bankruptcy earlier this year prompted all sorts of problems throughout the comics industry. Problems that, frankly, could have been much worse if several of the larger publishers hadn't switched distributors over the past 3-4 years. But we all knew there was going to be a ripple effect from Diamond's bankruptcy. Publishers would have problems distributing their books, and retailers would have trouble getting new shipments in to sell to readers. I haven't heard of any retailers closing because of this, but I've certainly heard plenty about several smaller publishers running into financial problems because Dimaond has held on to existing stock that should have been returned, and hasn't paid publishers for books they've already sold.
I also mentioned, back in June, that I was seeing concrete evidence that some publishers effectively halted production of everything while they looked for an alternate distributor to Diamond. They certainly didn't want to keep sending material to Diamond when Diamond wasn't paying what it already owed them. And while I've heard stories of several publishers running into cash flow issues because of these problems, I hadn't heard of a publisher actually shutting down because Diamond hadn't paid them yet.
I might be wrong -- there has been an absolute fire hose of comics industry news since January -- so I might have missed something, but
I believe Humanoids is the first publlisher formally closing because of Diamond's issues. Not only is this severely unfortunate for all the employees of Humanoids, but everyone who touched their books. And that is the real devastation of Diamond's bankruptcy... that it's started a number of dominoes, none of which will fall favorably for anyone.
I wrote the following back in 2009, so I've been sitting with these ideas for over a decade. I think they're all still perfectly valid, but I don't know how widespread this type of thinking is among comics folks, so I thought it might be worth coming back to it again. I've gone through and updated some of the topical references, but the basic points remain.
Cultural capital.
Attention economy.
Social media.
Three phrases that are rolling around in my head right now, and I'm trying to wrap my head around all three concepts as they pertain to comics. How about I start with some definitions so that we're all on the same page?
Cultural capital is a term that was introduced in the early 1970s by Pierre Bourdieu. He argued that there were three forms of capital: economic, social and cultural. Economic capital is what we typically think of when we use "capital." We're talking about money and assets. Social capital is a more analytical view of social standing; it's not unrelated to popularity, though there are some differences. Cultural capital is the knowledge, skill and experience one has tied to a particular culture or sub-culture.
In terms of comicdom, it's how well you know the Spider-Man mythos, whether or not you can recite the Green Lantern oath from memory, being able to determine who inked a comic just by looking at the style... that kind of thing.
Herbert Simon noted in the early 1970s that we, as a society, were beginning to experience information overload. People were bombarded by so many messages and ideas that the attention they could give each one was being substantially diminished. This information overload gave rise to an attention scarcity -- there's more information than attention to receive it. The problem wasn't so much getting your message out there, but filtering out everybody else's. You're battling for people's attention. The number of viewers matters. Your ratings matter. This is an attention economy.
Finally, social media are outlets which foster communities and personal interactions. It's easy to cite things like Facebook and Twitter which showcase popular social media, but old school BBSes and message boards certainly qualify too.
Here's where things get tricky. There seems to be a connection there, like all three notions are somehow related, but it's hard to verbalize cohesively. I think, though, that by trying to walk through a particular example -- in this case, comics -- might help facilitate some understanding. Let's start with social media, since that's probably what most people are most familiar with.
What happens when a creator puts a webcomic online? A group of people find the comic, and presumably some like it. Many, if not most, of the online comic publishing options available include some sort of feedback option, so readers leave a note about how they like the comic. Maybe the creator(s) respond(s). Maybe somebody else just says, "Yeah, I like that too!" Sometime afterwards, a small community develops around the comic in question.
People have a natural inclination to seek out others similar to themselves. It produces a feeling of self-worth and validation, certainly, but when you get down to it, it makes life more enjoyable when you surround yourself with people you're comfortable with. And the use of comics is essentially just a bridge to achieving that end. It provides a common ground for everyone to start from as they get to know one another.
"Hey, you like Questionable Content? I like it too! What do you like most about it?"
It provides a direction for your introduction into a group, as opposed to walking into a room full of strangers and being asked, "Tell us about yourself." That's a totally open-ended question, and anyone could go off in a million different directions. By focusing on one aspect -- your enjoyment of a specific comic -- you can introduce yourself in a more directed (i.e. less ambiguous, more comfortable) manner.
Now, as you probably know, any group is composed of individuals. And each individual is going to bring different knowledge and experience to the table. And what is the sum of our knowledge and experience but cultural capital? This means that, in a group of people founded on the enjoyment of a shared resource, a hierarchy of sorts will emerge as each person reveals their cultural capital relative to that group.
"Wha...?"
Let me explain via a personal example.
One of my favorite comics for years was The Fantastic Four. I read everything about them I could get my hands on, and I developed a pretty keen awareness of the characters and their fictional histories. In the mid-1990s, I started developing a website to collect all my knowledge about the FF. Some of it was strictly factual (who worked on what issues) while some of it was theoretical (how the story from issue #5 could be reconciled -- and expanded upon -- with very real accounts of the historical Blackbeard). I participated in FF fan groups and garnered a name for myself on various message boards and the like. Over the course of the next decade, I became relatively well-known as THE expert on the Fantastic Four. 
And I eventually came to be asked to assist on a number of official FF products; you can see me credited in Fantastic Four #500, Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 10 and the extended edition of the Fantastic Four movie DVD among other places. I was being sought after by others precisely because of the cultural capital I developed over and above what most FF fans accumulated.
Now those people with a relatively high amount of cultural capital in a given group? Those folks are what might be called influencers. The group has high regard for them, and are more likely to follow their lead on various opinions. "After all, they are experts, so they must know more than I do on the subject." This is essentially an old practice. Magazines devoted to a given subject are often given review copies of products related to that subject, in the hopes that the magazine will review it favorably and get others to buy it. In the 21st century, though, expertise has less to with having your name in print, and more to do with actual expertise. (Or, more accurately, perceived expertise.) The experts are now Twittering and Facebooking and YouTubing. They're accumulating their cultural capital through social media. Which means they're capturing people's attention.
(See where I'm going with this?)
The people who are out there, developing their cultural capital, are ALSO developing an avenue through which they can break through people's attention filters. People have ALREADY decided that those with cultural capital are attention-worthy, and allow those messages to pass through their filters. Regular readers of this blog have a pretty good idea what to expect when they come here. I've generated whatever cultural capital I have and become an avenue for a certain type/style of message. And if you, as a creator, think the people who typically receive that type/style of message overlaps with your intended audience, then it's a prime outlet to target YOUR message. I have obtained something of value (readers' attention) that can be exchanged for something else (money, comp. copies of comics, etc.). But, it should be noted, it's only of value if my audience, such as it is, is who you are targeting. While I certainly don't have data to back this up, but I doubt my audience has a lot of overlap with, say, The Beat's or CBR's. If you're trying to target the folks who read those regularly, it's probably not worth your time treating me like an influencer because, for that audience, I'm not.
Still with me? On to practical application.
Most comic creators don't have the PR budget of Marvel and/or DC. Options are limited because of resources. Whether we're talking about webcomics or pamphlet books, creators need to understand our three subject areas specifically as it pertains to their creation.
Who is the target audience? There is no comic anywhere that's for everyone. (Even yours.) So creators need to first identify what sort of people are likely to enjoy it. Are they people who read Fleen, fans of Cat and Girl, anyone who kind of likes the Hulk, what? It's crucial to understand who a creator is to speaking to (generally) to understand who a creator needs to speak to (specifically).
Once the general audience is identified, a creator then needs to determine A) who has significant cultural capital in that group (the influencers) and B) what social media does they tend to gather around. Webcomics have something of advantage here over pamphlet comics since most social networks are technologically oriented like webcomics delivery systems themselves. Pamphlet comics certainly can and often do use those same social media, but not necessarily, and not necessarily in as concentrated locations. Fans of Sinfest tend to hang out right there at the dedicated forum; fans of Action Comics have quite a few more locations available to them. But some extended research is probably required; popping up out of the blue and asking, "Hey, who's got clout around here?" isn't likely to garner the best responses. A creator might have to sift through messages for quite some time to get a sense of who might have sway over the group.
Once the influencers are identified, the creator then needs to assuage their attention economy. How much do they feel their eyeball traffic is worth? Are they happy just to look at any new work? Are they so swamped with other things that an extra incentive (like an original sketch) is necessary to stand out a little more? Are they small time and happy to speak to any creator, or do they operate more professionally and have a specific address for review material? A creator needs to do more research, essentially, on how to influence the influencer.
Bear in mind that winning over the influencers isn't a sure sign to financial rewards. It is likely to win some cultural and possibly social capital, but economic capital is another matter. Like it or not, we're still in a society that runs on economic capital and I'm fairly certain we won't be counting Whuffie any time soon. But without making exchanges in the attention economy, monetizing a comic is a lost cause. The greatest comic in the world, after all, has no chance of improving your bank account if no one knows about it.
I know we've still got essentially the entire weekend to go, but I'm going to say that the most important news to come out of New York Comic-Con this year is the announcement of Comic Knowledge for comics retailers.
Here's the thing... it's 2025. Selling comics has always been a rough business, but you absolutely cannot keep going deeper into the 21st century without a quick and accurate point of sale system to keep track of orders, invoices, deliveries, and all the other mundane crap that has to be taken care of in a shop. As a business owner, you don't have time to deal with all that personally and you can't afford to pay even the most meager of salaries to someone to do that manually. It essentially has to be run electronically.
Comic Knowledge is hardly the first such system, but this one is coming at a critical time. With Diamond falling apart, and publishers now going through a variety of different distributors, managing orders is suddenly immensely more challenging. For all the problems Diamond had before, its monopoly status at least meant that everything was in one place for the retailer. Now they've got to deal with different ordering processes and systems, and while, yes, you could probably set up a spreadsheet to handle things, that would become wildly inefficient after only a few months. You can technically put an veritable infinite number of sheets in a single Excel document, the app was never really designed for that volume of data. Having a single system like Comic Knowledge seems to be presenting will absolutely cut down on the amount of organization and work a retailer will need to perform just to keep up with the barest minimum of doing their job.
Add into this the payment processing -- until now, it's always been a completely separate setup almost entirely divorced from the actual sales -- and the possibility of having customers quickly and easily add/drop to their pull lists? That seems like a retailer's dreams! (It shouldn't be. This all should've been in place decades ago, but here we are.)
Clearly, there's going to be some upfront costs involved. Even if the hardware is offerred for free, just learning a new system is going to take time and will no doubt have many glitches and errors as it starts to roll out. Just because of... you know, technology... it's going to start getting installed in the field and we're going to hear a round of issues that retailers are having with it. But as they get accustomed to this new system, I expect it will make their businesses MUCH more manageable (and ideally more profitable!) in the long run.
This might sound like a boring, business-y nothing burger to your average comics reader, but if this does even half of what they're saying, it will be a game-changer for any retailer who starts using it!
Earlier this week, it was announced that Marvel comics will becoming available digitally on GlobalComix beginning October 15. The couple of news pieces I saw about it noted "Marvel joins DC, Image Comics, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios, Oni Press, Kodansha and dozens of other publishers of comics, manga and webtoons worldwide as part of Global’s growing catalog..." and "in addition to Marvel, GlobalComix now offers DC, Image Comics, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios, Oni Press, Kodansha and many more..."
This is inaccurate, however, as Oni and Boom! titles are no longer available as of October 1.
(Strictly speaking, the titles were still probably technically available when those articles were written, but they became out of date within hours.)
Over on Reddit last week, KodyCQ offered something of an explanation...
Due to recent changes with their distribution partners, their catalogues will be removed from GlobalComix on October 1st. While this is outside of our direct control, we’re actively working with both companies to restore access as soon as possible.
We can’t yet guarantee if or when their catalogues will return, but please know we’re on it and will keep you updated...
Thank you for your patience and support while we explore bringing BOOM! Studios and Oni Press back under their new distributors.
That sounds to me like there was something in Oni's and Boom!'s respective distributor contracts that either outright prohibits or puts some substantive restrictions on how their comics can be distributed digitally. Perhaps not exactly an exclusivity clause, but something restrictive enough that it conflicted with their agreements with GlobalComix.
Possibly there's nothing even conflicting at all, but the legal wording might be vague enough that they're seeking legal counsel before continuing to be on the safe side.
But I'm reminded of the announcement that Image made just over a week ago. They said they were going to release comics through the regular distribution channels as normal, but that bookstore and digital outlets would only come about a month later, allowing comic shops to have some degree of exclusivity. The point I made was that this was largely PR spin, and the likely explanation was that that month-long window was a supply chain constriant on bookstores that ultimately didn't impact comic shop sales anyway; the delay on digital was just a way to sell the 'comic shop exclusive' line as digital sales don't impact print sales much anyway.
I'm wondering if we're looking at the same situation with Oni and Boom! I bet that contract stipulation that KodyCQ alluded to had to do with release dates, and that their distributor contracts required a month-long exclusivity window for comic shops. So rather than go through all their catalog in GlobalComix one by one, they just axed everything with the intent of bringing it all back in 30 days, once everything that had been put online had also been in print for that long. At that point they can then start up with a regular posting-new-issues schedule that simply tails their print releases by a month.
That wouldn't be the most nuanced approach from a marketing perspective, but it would certainly be the easiest from a technical and logistics one.
My bet is that Oni and Boom!'s catalogues will be restored in early November. They'll make a big deal about it, maybe even doing some "thanks for staying with us" and/or holiday sales to mark everything down through the end of the year. But I'm certain they'll be back before long; I think this is more of an instance of not telling the audience the full story moreso than any actual legal challenges. I don't know the specifics of their timing, of course, but I'm sure it won't be much longer than a month, if that.
We got news yesterday that, starting in December, Image will be making their comics available exclusively to direct market retailers for nearly a month before they'll be made available to book stores and/or digitally. This comes, of course, after months of massive disruptions in the comics distribution network, due to Diamond's bankruptcy.
The distinction between brick and mortar retailers is hardly surprising and, frankly, won't amount to much. I strongly suspect that comic book consumers that are that keen to get the latest issues as soon as possible are the ones going to comic shops already, and the sales that take place in bookstores are to people who aren't particularly concerned with getting the story before anybody else. I would hesitate to categorize them as casual readers, just ones who don't place a high value on reading it first.
But the inclusion of "digital vendors" strikes me as much more interesting.
Back in 2010, when digital comics were still a pretty new thing -- at least for the larger comic publishers -- there was a huge debate on whether they should be released simultaneously with their print counterpart. Comic shop retailers were (understandably) scared that if readers could purchase either the digital or print version of the comic on the same day, they would spend their money on the digital versions, because they're cheaper. That meant that the comic shops would lose sales to Comixology (effectively the only digital comics retailer at that time).
But that debate was fifteen years ago. DC and Marvel did some initial tests with day-and-date digital releases in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and within a year or so, pretty much the entire industry was doing
same-day digital. Because what everyone quickly found was that digital sales didn't have an appreciable impact on print sales. The print and digital audiences don't actually overlap that much. At least in terms of ongoing sales. I think digital allowed print readers to sample more books and catch up on older stories that might otherwise be hard or expensive to come by in print.
The additional notion to keep in mind, too, is that the digital experience has gotten worse in the past fifteen years. At first, the issue was that Amazon purchased Comixology and then tried to force the content into their own e-reader. The Comixology app worked pretty well, but forcing everyone to switch to Amazon's format made things markedly worse. And while there are now other platforms available that do indeed present better than Amazon, you then face the problem of availablity. Where Comixology allowed readers to check out books from Image, Marvel, Archie, DC, and virtually every other comic publisher, the current landscape is decidedly more segmented. Global Comix has DC but not Marvel. Comics Plus has Dark Horse but not DC. Disney just signed a deal with Webtoon, but Warner Brothers has not. It's certainly not impossible to follow your favorite comics digitally... provided you don't care about the interface and you don't mind maintaining multiple accounts across multiple platforms, depending on whih titles you wnt to read.
So what does it matter that Image will now be offering a month's lead time on print comics over digital ones?
It doesn't. The initial split between comic shops and bookstores appears to come from logistics issues and, by leaving them split, Image is taking advantage of the situation to upsell themselves to retailers. They were likely faced with lesser-of-two-evils choice anyway that came about because of the supply chain issues. They could either cause themselves more hassle and paperwork on the front end by holding on to every issue until they could be made available to both types of stores (since the comic shop issues would need to be held and warehoused for an additional month) or they could cause themselves more hassle and paperwork on the back end by following two distribution schedules. Neither would've been a great option, so they went with the one that appears to show a little favoritism towards comic shops. I suspect, though, that that is mostly PR spin and the decision was driven more by cost; warehousing the bulk of their inventory for an extra month almost certainly costs more than doing some additional paperwork.
The digital option, then, was just thrown in to make things a little sweeter for the comic shops. As I suggested above, digital sales don't appreciably impact print sales so pushing them back a month doesn't advantage comic shops in any material way, but it does score some brownie points with a lot of retailers who remain concerned about digital comics eating into their sales. But since there are no warehousing costs to consider here at all anyway, there's effectively no downside in holding them back a bit.
I don't think this is exclusively a PR stunt -- I'm pretty sure they do have supply chain issues that are impacting distribution. But the angle and tone with which they're promoting it to retailers smells a lot like a fairly hollow PR move to me.
I stumbled across an old post of mine from 2010. It was the day after Dirk Deppey was let go from Fantagraphics and it signaled the end of ¡Journalista! It dawned on me that I hadn't heard/seen anything from Deppey in years, so I did a few quick searches to see if he had ever gotten back to doing something like ¡Journalista! elsewhere. It was a great resource for off-the-beaten-track comics news back in the day, and I don't feel I've had a good source for that for some time.
I couldn't find anything recent about Deppey, though. In fact, his entry in Wikipedia doesn't have anything more recent than 2010 either. Admittedly, I didn't do a ton of exhaustive research here, but I'd guess Deppey went on to get some other job -- we've all got bills to pay, after all -- and it unfortunately doesn't involve talking about comics online.
In that post where I talked about Deppey, I noted that comics 'news' was kind of bifurcating into broad, mass-appeal stuff talking about the latest Marvel movie or Scholastic's latest success with Raina Telgemeier or Dav Pilkey, or going the super-niche route where the site is pretty much entirely driven on the passion of a single individual. Essentially blogs like mine. Well, not unlike mine is probably more accurate. I went on to say that the danger of the latter is that...
...just as a guy like Deppey can lose his job, a guy like [Tom] Spurgeon can grow tired or disinterested. If his returns -- financial or emotional or creative -- drop too low, he can easily stop and walk away. And despite whatever sense of entitlement readers have, there's really no recourse but to search around to find others' voices that are interesting or insightful.
Spurgeon did not, as it turns out grow tired or disinterested, but he sadly passed away in 2019 so we no longer have his voice. But in that same post, I also referred to Jen Contino over at The Pulse, Ian Adams of Trade Reading Order, and Heidi MacDonald of The Beat.
I also made reference to Wizard, CBG, Amazing Heroes, and Comics Feature.
Of course, all of those print materials no longer exist.
Contino was let go from The Pulse and had to get a "real job." (I used to follow her on Facebook before I closed my account there; she seemed to be doing well, and maintained an interest in comics, but she wasn't doing any real writing about them.) The Pulse got bought/absorbed by the broadly pop culture Comicon.com and no longer exists. I've no idea about Adams personally, but it doesn't look like Trade Reading Order has been updated since 2013. MacDonald and The Beat basically remain as The Last Woman Standing.
I don't hold it against anyone whose voice about comics is no longer heard. We're living in an aggressively capitalistic culture, and that means you've got to work your ass off, however you can, just to get by. Frequently, that means setting aside what you're actually passionate about so you can earn enough to not be forced into homelessness.
For most of the voices you see/hear talking about comics, they're folks who are financially successful enough in non-comics venues that their comics work is effectively subsidized. That's certainly how/why I'm still writing this blog after two decades; I barely make enough writing about comics to go to Starbucks once a month. Rob Salkowitz's comics writing is at least partially subsidized by his teaching at the University of Washington. From Women Write About Comics, Nola Pfau has been working at a senior living facility for several years, and Jenna Ledford has spent most of the last decade working at the University of North Texas. My buddy Jed Keith from FreakSugar teaches high school social studies.
Again, the vast majority of comics "journalists" are writing about comics because they're passionate about the subject and feel emotionally and/or creatively rewarded. But because life in the 21st century is what it is, there's no real social safety net and "writing about comics effectively for free" isn't financially sustainable, that gets dropped when you suddenly find yourself having to take care of a family member or taking up a second job in order to make rent or just plain getting exhausted by the end of the day with the one job you do have.
So we see writers and commentators flit in and out of the comics "news" cycle, and we -- as readers -- are left having to continually find new voices and sources of industry information. I believe only two of the comics related sites I visit these days were even around back in 2010 when I wrote that original post (and one was barely a year old); most of the sites where I got my news are gone. Or so radically changed as to be an entirely new site.
Cultural capital is definitely a strong driver of whose voices are heard these days, but financial capital has more than a little influence on that as well!
So the big news in webcomics over the past month and change is that A) Disney and Webtoon announced a licensing agreement last month such that Webtoon would host comics from Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney-owned properties, and B) Disney and Webtoon announced yesterday that this would be done via a new, as-yet-unnamed platform. (Though presumably, it would look similar to Webtoon's current one.) There was a fair amount of hoopla during both announcements, and Webtoon's stock price rose markedly in the wake of each announcement.
What has largely gotten omitted from the discussion, though, is those stock bumps -- while pretty nice from a percentage point of view -- amount to very little. Webtoon launched their initial public offering (IPO) in mid-2024 at around $21 US per share. It dropped to almost half of that within the first month and spent the rest of 2024 hovering between $10-$13 US and the first half of 2025 just below $10 US. So the "huge" stock price bump of ~90% from last August meant they got as high as $18 before dropping back to $14 the next day. Better than they had been doing, but we're talking about four, maybe five dollars difference. Yesterday's announcement also cited a "soaring" stock increase of 55%... except that 55% is based on a month-over-month comparison from just before the first announcment. The stock price went from $14.27 US to $15.98 US. And within an hour, it settled back down to around $14.90 making the actual increase from yesterday's announcement... four percent. Not nothing, but it's a far cry from 55%!
Webtoon's quarterly report from August -- literally days before the first Disney deal was announced -- showed they ran a net loss of $3.9 million US for the second quarter, after a net loss of $22 million US in the first quarter. Their third quarter outlook projected revenue growth about equal to what they did in the second quarter, suggesting they'll probably be operating at a loss of ~4 million US again unless they somehow found a way to cut a boatload of expenses. We won't know for sure until they release their Q3 report, probably in mid-November.
Back in 2021 -- before Webtoon went public and had to disclose their financials -- I noted that Naver, who wholly owned Webtoon before the IPO -- was ostensibly running that part of the business at a loss. Naver had wrapped their Webtoon operations up among other business segments for Naver's financial reporting, so we couldn't see any details, but that was the rumor going around. While Webtoon rightly notes in some of their more recent financial disclosures that launching an IPO is expensive and that explains many of their loss numbers from 2024, that's not an excuse they'll be able to fall back on for long.
Now, Disney owns two percent of Webtoon per yesterday's announcement. (Or at least it will once a bunch of paperwork gets formalized.) Theoretically, Disney has a lot of talented accountants and lawyers that think this is a good idea, so there must be something to this, right?
Well, maybe.
My counter-argument to that is that when Disney sees something they have great confidence in, they will buy it outright. Marvel, for example. There was no "well, let's get a stake in the company and see how it goes before buying them." They saw Marvel had their shit together, had something of great value, and Disney just dropped a ton of cash to own it. They're very much NOT doing that with Webtoon. They easily could. A controlling portion of Webtoon -- before Disney announced any deals with them -- would've cost around $600 million US if they just bought the necessary number of shares on the open market. If they worked out an actual agreement, it probably would've been closer to $300 million US. Not chump change, but this is the same company that bought Marvel for $4 Billion US in 2009 (about $6 Billion US today).
So, in my mind, Disney getting a 2% stake in Webtoon is barely worth mentioning. Their bigger deal is whatever Webtoon is paying them to license Spider-Man and Darth Vader, and the 2% stake just means they get some extra profit if it suddenly becomes wildly successful.
Which is by no means a sure thing. In the first place, I'll refer to the news from back in May when Webtoon changed their primary platform by dropping their "Daily Pass" option and effectively charging more for less. Enshittification of the platform, which I had predicted several weeks earlier.
In the second place, if Webtoon is launching a SECOND platform for their Disney-related material, that means that they will have effectively zero crossover users. People who come to the platform to read Star Wars will not see or have access to any webtoons over on their 'main' platform. And any existing users likely won't bother trying to create a separate login with separate costs to read Disney material. Webtoon will be siloing their audiences. Granted, the two sets of audiences probably don't have a LOT of overlap, but by putting them in separate silos, there will be ZERO.
In the third place, my understanding is that this new platform will be hosting old material. Basically doing what Comixology did before Amazon bought it. You'll be able to read Amazing Fantasy #15 and Fantastic Four #256 and whatever else is in their back catalog. But none of that was created for the vertical scroll format. Yes, they can retroactively adjust the layouts and reconfigure things so they will work... but that's just another version of Comixology's "Guided View" option, which was okay for what it was but it still made for awkward reading since, again, none of those comics were designed to be read that way. Guided View made things less bad than just trying to sort through a whole page on a small screen, but "less bad" is not a great user experience.
I
don't wish ill against Webtoons, and don't want to rain on their parade exactly, but I think it's worth keeping some perspective here too. The Disney deal is significant but not enough to fully bridge the gap between the lofty IPO expectations and the day-to-day realities of running a business about webcomics. I think what we're looking at here is a company trying very hard to make things work, and they've thrown a crudload of time and money at it. But given their current operations, I don't think there's anything to be particularly excited about. This Disney deal doesn't strike me as likely to bring in a ton of opertaing capital -- if the licensing costs themselves don't increase their quarterly losses -- and I would just urge any creators posting through Webtoon to make sure that that isn't their ONLY venue for posting/earning money from their webcomic. You should never rely on a single source to begin with, and this setup with Disney doesn't strike me as being able to change Webtoon's direction.
Lately, I've been reading some files I found buried in my archives from several years ago. It was a series of text pieces written by comics retailer Robert Beerbohm called "Comics Reality." They were all written in 1997 and '98 for the Comic Book Network Electronic Magazine. There have an interesting look at comics retailing, partially being a history lesson, but also addressing some issues that were JUST old enough to no longer be current.
I think I first came across the pieces around 2001/2002, so they were slightly dated at the time. Still in the "just old enough to not be current" ballpark. But I vaguely recall thinking at the time that I'd save them and read them later when I had a chance. Apparently the chance didn't show up for over a decade, as I've didn't pull these out to start reading them until relatively recently!
I'm only on the fifth installment out of twelve. But all that "not quite current" stuff is now at least 25 years past and Beerbohm's writing about it with then-little hindsight is quite interesting relative to having a few years to reflect on things. History as it was happening, if you will.
I bring this up for a few reasons. First, I think it's fascinating and I'd like to highlight Beerbohm's work/research. I knew he'd been working on
a book about comics retailing
for a while, but I found several references to it in "Comics Reality", meaning that "a while" has been nearly three decades. To be fair, I've heard he did have at least a partial draft that was over 800 pages long when he passed away last year. I know his daughter Katy had expressed interested in seeing it eventually published
and I'd love to see that as well. While his writings could sometimes be a bit unstructured/disjointed -- Beerbohm even noted to me once that he needed a strong editor -- I don't doubt the information in his manuscript is invaluable.
I realize that it's only been a year since he passed and Katy had plenty of her own challenges even before then, but I do want to keep the idea of this book alive and floating in the ether at the very least.
Second, what he has written for "Comics Reality" is incredibly enlightening, if a tad unpolished, and I'd like to encourage anyone who has the remotest interest in comic retailing to check out at least the first two installments. Sadly, the only place I can seem to find them online is through the Internet Archive. There's a very good explanations of why Jack Kirby's Fourth World books were canceled despite their popularity and how/why Howard the Duck commanded such erratic pricing when it was first published.
Beerbohm was one of the few people who seemed actively interested in the history of comics retailing. And being one of the first generation of them himself put him in a nearly unique position to document that period.
Years ago, I'd toyed with the idea of writing that myself but only before know Beerbohm was already doing so. I've since come to realize, too, that it's very much the type of subject that I would be really bad at writing.
(Well, not bad the writing per se, but I'm bad at doing the first-hand research that it would require.) How many of those early retailers are left at this point? Bud Plant just retired at age 73. Chuck Rozanski is still going strong, it seems, but he's 70 himself. They're only still with us mostly because they started selling comics when they were teens; any of those early retailers who was even slightly more adult back then would be in their 80s now.
That's why I'd love to see something comprehensive of the history of comics retailing. Let's capture what we can before it's all second-hand heresay.
Back in 2020, I took a look at my history in backing projects on Kickstarter. How many were successful, how many of those delivered on what they promised, and so on. I thought I might take some time to revisit the notion.
I backed my first Kickstarter project in 2011. Since then, I've backed a total of 337 projects; four are currently still running and all but 24 of the remainder ended successfully.
Of all the successful projects I've backed, thirty-seven have not yet been fulfilled. Fourteen of those, however, have an estimated delivery date sometime in the future anyway, so I wouldn't expect those to be done yet. And two of the projects were not fulfilled but the creator provided a refund. That leaves twenty-three projects that ended successfully, but have not been fulfilled despite passing the expected delivery date. That means 92% of the projects I've backed that have supposed to have been fulfilled by now have been.
Of those twenty-three that remain unfulfilled, five have provided updates within the past month. Another four have offered updates at least sometime in 2025. I get it; there are wrinkles that crop up in the best of circumstances and this year has seen some massive, unpredictable disruptions for everyone. I'm not at all upset that they passed their 'deadlines' provided they keep me informed and tell me what's going on.
Of the ones left,
there is one confirmed case of intentional fraud. Seven of the projects provided at least some element of their reward, and in one of those cases, the "some" was due to the post office losing a unique/irreplacable piece of original art. That leaves six campaigns that have never been fulfilled and I just have no information about. With that one case of fraud, that makes seven campaigns that I feel I've been burned on. A shade over 2% of all the ones I've backed.
If you compare this against my 2020 numbers, they're definitely improved. I pointed out then that most of those projects I feel burned on were ones from 2017 or earlier, and that continues to hold true. Any more, I largely limit the projects I back to ones that don't require unique productions. You can take a comic book or graphic novel project to any of a huge number of printers and they can run it pretty easily, but if you're trying to build something that requires custom tooling, I'm going to be pretty skeptical and you're going to need a proven track record before I even consider backing a project like that.
I mentioned last week that I suspect we're going to see more KS campaigns fail as we fall into a recession. What I suspect that will also mean is that KS campaigns that are successful will also have a harder time hitting their deliveries, either running later than expected or not providing quite everything that was promised. Previously, I said any of the problems I experienced weren't on Kickstarter's shoulders, but on creators who basically got in over their heads. With everything going on in the world these days, I'm sure you've already found it's much harder to keep your own head above water, and the same will likely hold true for creators as well, so try to cut them as much slack as you can!
It's been a few years since I've mentioned Kickstarter on my blog, but I continue to back projects that look/sound interesting. There's four currently running that I'm backing and I've backed 312 "successful" projects to date. (Success here meaning that they got to their funding goal. Offhand, I don't know what percentage of those have been delivered. I did a breakdown study of that several years ago; I should do that again to get some updated stats.)
The vast majority of those projects have been comics or comics-related, although there have been a few outside that realm.
But something interesting caught my eye this past week. It was actually two somethings. Individually, neither are especially noteworthy but that they happened within a few days of each other, it's got me thinking.
The first something was a Kickstarter campaign that failed. The campaign ran to its full conclusion and only wound up getting 13% of its relatively modest $12,000 goal. I'm a little disappointed, but not surprised. The two creators did -- as far as I could tell -- very little promotion of the campaign after it launched, and it heavily overlapped with San Diego Comic-Con. So a lot of the potential audience had their attention elsewhere to begin with, and they didn't do enough to re-capture it. Also, I don't think they were even targeting what should have been their audience in the first place.
The second something was a Kickstarter campaign that was canceled by the creator with a smidge over a week left in the campaign. It was about three-quarters of the way to a $10,000 goal. He'd been doing regular updates and outreach, so it's possible it could've been successful but it likely would've only squeaked by if that happened. He noted that there were a number of canceled pledges over the past couple weeks, which obviously hurt, and there would no doubt be some percentage of backers whose credit cards wouldn't process if the campaign were successful. (My understanding is that there is ALWAYS between 1% and 5% of backers whose payments don't process properly.) I expect this creator had factored that in when setting his initial goal, but depending on what his actual printing costs might be -- and the estimates are likely changing for that daily thanks to the jackass-in-chief throwing all the wrenches into the economy -- that might be the difference between making a profit and eating it.
And that's sort of what struck me: that in the space of a few days, I saw two different projects fail. The last project I backed that ultimately failed was in 2022. Prior to that, I was seeing, on average, one failed/canceled campaign per year. Now I've got two in one week. Now you could argue that, if the last one I saw was in 2022, that I was statistically overdue and that they both happened in close succession was simply coincidence.
Or you could look at the apparently-noteowrthy number of canceled pledges as regular people seeing the prices of everything skyrocket because of unnecessary tariffs and layoffs because companies are investing absurd amounts of money into AI so they don't have to pay as many workers and people's friends and neighbors being illegally kidnapped by federal agents because their skin was a little darker or they had a vaguely foreign-sounding name. People are justifiably terrified right now. They don't know what's going on because some jackass in the White House drops new, random fiats every day, so they're holding on to more of their cash because they can't plan for anything.
My guess is that these (and other) failed Kickstarter projects are the canaries in the coal mines. Not many economists have openly predicted a recession yet because they're seeing these bat-shit crazy pivots every day as well. "Will tariffs have an impact? Maybe. Depends on if they're in place tomorrow or not." But whether or not a recession formally kicks off later this year, the point is that no one knows what's going on with anything and so people are holding on to what they can as a way to hedge their bets.
And unfortunately that probably means more failed Kickstarters, and more creators not being able to make the work they want or -- more significantly -- be able to earn a living by doing so. Keep your eye on those KS campaigns; I think they'll be more broadly telling that you expect.
