Memories of Things Still Alive

Not long ago, someone at an art school asked me this question:  “Are you ever afraid comics will die out?”

My answer:  “Nope.  At this moment my company’s doing well over FIFTY comics projects and over FIFTY non-comics projects  — animation, web design, magazine graphics, advertising, photgraphy, and so on.  Comics are half our business and they’re pretty good business, for what is for all intents and purposes a niche market.”

Here’s something to consider:  No form of entertainment media has ever died out when new things came along.  Think about it:  Radio didn’t die off when movies and TV came along, it merely adapted.  TV didn’t kill off movies or newspapers.  Videotape and DVD and Blu-Ray didn’t kill off TV and film and radio.  Pulp magazines adapted into paperbacks, and paperbacks continue serialized characters.  Heck, even the the Spider, the Shadow, and Doc Savage, not to mention Mac Bolan and others of his ilk, are still being published.  Hardbacks and paperbacks and magazines are still being published even though audiobooks and on-demand reading formats such as Kindle are flourishing.  And videogames haven’t killed comics or TV or film — and, in fact, some videogames have crossed over into BEING comics and movies and novels and such.

So as our planet holds more and more people, there are more and more opportunities to sell each and every medium of entertainment.  The limitation is only the level of genius of our distribution.  Get it into the hands of people who discover it, and they’ll buy it.  And I don’t just mean mail-order by internet, I mean actual flip-through-it-in-your-hands tangible.