The Current State of the Comics Industry

Comics Alliance chats with the head of Fantagraphics about it.

From the piece...

CBR News: The biggest change in comics in recent years is probably the shift from pamphlet comics to graphic novels. From your perspective, why has this change been occurring, and how has it changed opportunities for cartoonists, especially alternative and independent cartoonists?

Gary Groth: It's even more acute in alternative comics than it is in mainstream comics. They still publish comics at Marvel and DC and so forth. For alternative comics, the comic book format is pretty much dead. We publish literally three or four a year for unique and anomalous reasons. By and large, nobody publishes alternative comic books anymore. The reason is fairly obvious; since the reader knows it's going to be collected in a graphic novel, there's very little reason for them to buy a twenty-four page comic of something he's going to get a year or two down the line as a graphic novel, and in the way it probably ought to be published anyway, collected in a single work. I think it's just an inevitability of the rise of the graphic novel as the dominant form of alternative comics. I don't know how accelerated that's going to be for mainstream comics. It feels like it's headed that way. Mainstream comic books might last much longer. That's more of an addictive habit than alternative comics have ever been because mainstream comics come out on a monthly basis and alternative comics almost never did. Mainstream comics have that habitual angle going for them which is probably what's keeping them alive.