There’s an interview at Mania.com with Alan Moore that’s causing a big stir out there in Geekland. In it, he goes off on his usual anti-comic industry rants. But the controversial thing to me is that a lot of it is right on the money. In a series, we’ll be analyzing some of his points. In this third installment, let’s take a look at the fate of the monthly comic book:
We are seeing the death of comics publishing as we know it. The pamphlets—the individual issues—are not selling. They haven’t been selling for years. The companies using them as a way of financing the eventual trade paperback. I don’t really see the traditional fare of the comics industry—which is, regrettably, superheroes—I don’t see that as being best suited to survive in a serious bookshop environment.
I agree with that. I haven’t bought an actual monthly issue of a comic book on a regular basis in years. Besides the annoyance of spending ten minutes reading fifteen pages, then waiting another month to find out what happens, there’s no way to justify the price at over three dollars a pop. That’s true, especially when you could rent a two-hour movie for the same price. Besides, we all know the full run of any good stories will be collected in a cheaper and uninterrupted format in a year’s time as a graphic novel.
Where is the future of comics headed? I personally think it can and should go to the digital format. Should have been there years ago. That, plus, stop publishing monthly comics. Publish graphic novels with full storylines, instead.
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Now this one I actually had to think about for a few minutes. Alan Moore is right. Graphic novels are the future of the media, although the tradition of monthly storylines drive the industry. The event comics always sell better than the individual issues.
As for the future of digital comics, I started going digital a while ago, but still miss paper. Marvel's digital library is an excellent start. http://marvel.com/digitalcomics/