The purpose of The Comics Page is to dispense trade secrets to every comic book, manga, and storyboarding enthusiast looking for answers on the web.
Maybe you’ve noticed (and it’s no accident), the business of comics is hard to get into, and the answers that would-be creators need are notoriously hard to come by? The truth is, comics are famously difficult to get work in for three kinds of reasons: good reasons, bad reasons, and stupid reasons. One good reason it’s hard to find a job in comics is that potential creators really do need to develop a quality trade skills that are difficult to come by. One bad reason is that comics jobs are media jobs: media jobs for production — and these kinds of jobs are dealt out sparingly by a few people in the position to hire professional media pros. However, the stupid reason that comics work is hard to find is that even the companies that own the largest comic book licenses in the world can’t find a way to sell comic books, even though the superhero movie market is worth $3.19 billion dollars a year.
The comics business is hard to get into for good, bad, and stupid reasons, but only two of these (good reasons and bad reasons) are obstacles. The stupid reason comics are hard to get into (that none of the comics companies can figure out how to sell comics) is actually your advantage.
You can sum up the crisis of 21st century comics in one short sentence: the companies who own all the titles have no love for the art form, and the people who love the art form have no way into the industry.
For 25 years comics themselves have wasted away as an artistic medium because of this apathetic stalemate. The big companies have spent nearly 100% of that time trying to change comics into something none of their fans want. Comics movies have been grossing billions annually from 2003 to 2021. During the same time, first class titles like X-Men and Spiderman have gone from selling 675,000 issues every single month, to print runs so small that the “Big Two” (Marvel and D.C.) have stopped publishing some sales figures. Suffice to say, these very same titles are selling well below 50,000 or even 30,000 copies, even as comicons are booming and box office sales skyrocket.
Does it start to seem clear that people like and want to read and make comics, without finding a viable path to do either? What’s in the way? Hmm…
So what happens when people want something and they can’t get it, and the companies they can get it from offer very little of substance, quality, and appeal? That’s where you come in.
The simple truth is that besides owning all the big licenses, nobody involved with creating, publishing, or reading comics actually needs the large comics companies for anything. If anything the opposite is true: people who read comics and people who create comics, specifically do not need the large comics publishers. I don’t need Marvel and D.C., you don’t need Marvel and D.C., comics readers don’t need Marvel and D.C., and least of all do Spider-Man and Superman need Marvel and D.C. Whoever has the knowledge and the skill to write a story and illustrate a comics page, does not need any of them.
You don’t need these gatekeepers. No one does.
If you get the sense that there are thousands or millions of dineros for grabs with nobody guarding the goal posts, you’re basically right. If you look around you’ll notice an entire publishing industry in decline for the same reason comics publishers have continually collapsed despite unparalleled interest and desire for content.
And there’s a reason they’re in decline: because they should be. Publishers are and should be in decline because they’ve shown themselves to be faulty gatekeepers with deteriorating literary and artistic standards, desperately clinging to a handful of valuable titles for other industries to develop, while passing out the few vital positions that could sustain their industry using a method of selection that has little to do with the benefit of the comics or (more importantly) the readers.
Publishers largely are divvying out a shrinking bounty while squeezing every last drop out of over-leveraged titles, and begrudgingly marketing the books out to the few fans who will still read them, while using even that paltry opportunity to display their seemingly endless disdain for an art form that everyone seems to care about but them.
But don’t worry about comics publishers. They’re not your problem.
The appeal of comics for creators today is the same as it was when American comics companies were selling millions of issues per month: they’re cheap. The value of working as a creative in comics is that you can afford to try anything — literally anything at all. The cost of failure is negligible, but the rewards for succeeding are limitless.
The Comics Page is founded on the belief that all you as the creator need are the tools: learning the process and method of designing comics for print and the web.
You’re going to find out a lot of things quickly, and our goal is to make sure that every answer you’re looking for is contained in these pages. Our message to future comics creators is simple:
Here are some answers to get you started:
today is the same
Rhetorical question:
In concludsion, the film industry teaches us that the appetite for comics titles is almost universal, while sparking the desire in millions of fans to search out more content, even while thousands of creators have been inspired to get into the industry, and then what happens? Fans run to the comics store and find nothing worth reading, while enthusiastic artists and writers flock to the large comics companies and find no way into it.
which has sparked the desire in thousands of artists
If you’re starting to get the sense that the appetite for these comics titles is almost universal
Maybe you’re starting to get the sense that
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