We’re still finding interesting links about NYCC, and while we won’t bore you with them at this late date, this show was a real watershed. So many players from the bookstore revolution were in one place, and undistracted by movie glitz. The forward momentum was palpaple. Brigid addressed this in a must read called Missing the paradigm shift which addresses the retting over the lack of new readers that has been expressed in both the comics and mainstream press of late.

You wouldn’t know it from the posse of librarians at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference at NYCC last week, or the number of kids on the convention floor. I will grant that this is probably the last generation of superhero readers if the publishers don’t change the model, but the writer and interviewees alike seem to suffer from a peculiar form of tunnel vision. Look no further than their dismissal of manga as “only one slice of the comics business.”

What they’re not getting is that the comics business is made up of a lot of slices, and there are going to be more. The model is changing, as we saw at the ICv2 Conference, where the big news was that graphic novels now sell better than pamphlets. And at the NYCC All Ages panel, which I will be posting about soon, there was a lot of excitement about creating comics for kids,


Is she a hopeless dreamer? Read the whole thing for yourself and decide.

1 COMMENT

  1. There is a third market: literate adults. I sell CASES of what I call “New Yorker” titles. Fun Home. Cancer Vixen. American Born Chinese.
    I see the superhero genre shrinking. Perhaps titles will be “flipped” so that two separate titles will share one magazine. Or they go black and white on cheaper paper to keep them profitable.
    What was the last superhero trade to sell in big numbers? Hush?