Not Comics: Remember When The General Media Landscape Began To Feel Stable? Me, Neither…

It's been rough predicting the relative stability general media landscape in which comics operates for twenty years now. The last five to seven years has been particularly interesting in that we saw the first widespread mini-meltdown of an industry that supports comics (the newspaper heave and shudder of 2008-2009) as well as the rise of some specific tools and strategy -- if only by default -- for how comic books might distribute themselves digitally.

This article suggests that everyone is baffled right now as to the general future of media, which should be a concern for comics but also a mesuare of comics' relative insulation from a lot of these factors. One thing I like about the article is that it questions the profitability of media sustaining some semblance of its longtime support industries as opposed the a specific medium surviving or not. One of the reasons the comics part of the newspaper industry didn't suffer as much as other parts of the newspaper industry to the specific pressures of 2008 and 2009 is because the companies that serve that expression were far more ready in terms of things like staffing levels and wider media footprints to survive a drop in profitability.

If there's one glaring problem with the article, it's that I don't think it does enough to suggest that industry should conform to the new realities rather than shift strategies as a way to sidestep potential damage. In every industry there's a potential for trouble when if you were to build a company from scratch to do the same thing as a company that's been around for decades the two companies look very different. I think everything might be questioned over the next few years, particularly if there are limits to how many people find sustainable levels of success with newer versions of the old models.
 
posted 11:15 pm PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives