Go, Read: Kiel Phegley at Last Thursday’s ICv2.com GN Conference

Although there will no doubt be more formal reports later on including at the ICv2.com site itself, I'd recommend anyone vaguely interested in the business of comics at least glance through Kiel Phegley's report from sitting in the audience that day. He strings together a lot of extended quotes and some back and forth exchanges in a way that feels more like sitting there than something tightened up.

It sounds like a hit and miss event. The social networking thing seems really unfocused -- split between the overt marketing mechanism and the really generic communication tool applications. I mean, recruiting for The Comics Journal became really different in the 1990s when everyone started writing on-line, but it's really obvious how and I can't imagine talking on a panel about it for more than eight seconds. I think Spiegelman is succinct and wise about on-line comics: they'll be their own thing a la comic strips vs. comic books, and they'll be a way to disseminate older material. Everyone is going on-line and everyone will be on-line, so I don't understand the continuing chatter that people are somehow resistant to going on-line and will soon die as a result. Paper comics will likely continue to do well enough that somebody out there will want them, too. I never get that antagonistic thinking -- comics needs all the markets it can get and seems suited to many of them. It's like when people shriek like loons that comics left the newsstands forever in 1985 and won't ever go back. Well, comics did go back to the newsstand. Just because it didn't look like 1947 when they did doesn't mean that hasn't been a viable business model for that company for a while.

There's harder news of course, and the belle of the ball there is manga's drop last year. I hope that the analysis to come doesn't leave out content issues. It seems less like analysis and more like PR when we're told the good years are driven by amazing content but the bad years are so because of teenage vampire novels.
 
posted 7:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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