A very good analysis of what other factors, apart from piracy, may be responsible for causing the comic market to weaken. On my own site, I did an extended analysis on this argument; I suspect the problem is cyclical throughout all media as our range of options expands across the board. Everything is now becoming that much more competitive with everything else, with each media type becoming a differently-flavored incarnation of that struggle.
– Serdar Yegulalp
Interesting. I think both analyses missed a critical aspect – distribution, especially for companies that aren’t the Big Two. It is difficult to get titles to stores, either because the store isn’t willing to take the risk of the title or because the distributor just isn’t making the title available. It gets problematic here in the Great White North – I had trouble finding all but issue 1 of the Tek Jansen mini-series.
I’m wondering, though, if the problems looked at are just affecting the Big Two. Granted, again, it’s hard to get titles from smaller companies, but the Big Two have changed to an event-based model that leaves people just following one or two titles in the cold; half or more of the storyline continues in a series that isn’t interesting. Combined with some bizarre editorial decisions over the past decade and the Foil Age of the 80s/90s where gimmick beat storytelling, I’d say a lot of the comic publishing problems are self-inflicted.
One argument I heard is that piracy is at least partly a symptom of a larger problem as well as a problem in itself: it’s a sign that people have contempt enough for what you do that they would rather steal it instead of pay for it. That would explain why a lot of what’s gone wrong with comics is because of their own bad decision-making, with not embracing new media being one symptom of that.