About 10 Percent of the World of Comic Art Is Composed of Superheor and Fantasy Comic Books

May 05, 2022 Post a Comment

Abstract:

In an essay published in this journal's first volume, Jonathan Sterne provocatively argued that in that location is no music industry. This article uses the American comic book industry to farther suggest some limitations to taking supposedly discrete industries every bit objects of assay. Equally a label, "the American comic book industry" conceals a peachy deal of internal diversity, some of which tin can be recovered through mapping methods and by examining available sales information. On closer examination, it is not American, does not principally produce "comic books," and may not even be an manufacture.

Keywords: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Publishing, Maps, Sales

"Breaking into the comic book manufacture" is an idiom conventionally used to mean establishing a career in comics, usually with reference to creative occupations. A Google search for the term returns approximately 26,600 hits. Some are from creators' biographical statements (e.1000., "Since breaking into the comics industry . . ."), only many are either questions from or advice aimed at aspiring creative professionals. Much of this soapbox emphasizes the difficulty of "breaking in," although it typically assumes a particular kind of career in comics—that is, as a author or artist freelancing with a relatively professionalized publisher on a work-for-rent basis—with a particular set of gatekeepers and challenges. Like many comic book fans, I also once dreamed of breaking in. However, my idea of what this would actually expect like was withal profoundly shaped past what Charles Hatfield calls the Myth of the Curiosity Bullpen, the idea that comic books are fabricated by a grouping of like-minded peers working in close collaboration in their publisher's offices. But Hatfield calls this a myth for a reason.[ii] I did not understand that the Curiosity Bullpen never really existed in quite the form depicted in promotional paratexts such as "Stan'southward Soapbox," nor could I have known that near nine in ten comics creators piece of work from their own homes, typically in isolation. (This figure is fatigued from a survey of 570 creators of English language-language comics I conducted in 2013–fourteen.) Indeed, the "breaking in" discourse creates a false impression of coherence and solidity by figuring the comic book industry every bit a place one enters. Yet, compared with my childhood fantasy at least, it seems that the American comic book manufacture has no "there" there.

In an essay published in this journal's first volume, Jonathan Sterne argued that the "music manufacture" invoked past both laypeople and scholars "is an incredibly limited way to sympathise how media industries and music collaborate."[3] Merely put, the music industry is non synonymous with the record industry. Rather, music is produced past "a polymorphous prepare of relations among radically different industries and concerns . . . . There is no 'music industry'. There are many industries with many relationships to music."[4] Manufacturers of instruments and audio equipment, sheet music publishers, and concert promoters (among others) all seek to extract value from their appointment with music. Neglecting this fundamental fact means we greatly misunderstand how and by whom music—even narrowly defined as commodity musical recordings—is produced. Much the same could be said of the field of comics, where comic book publishing should non be mistaken for the comic book industry. Printing, distribution, and retail are comic book industries, too—to say aught of the industries that produce film and television, video games, and licensed merchandise based on intellectual property derived from comic books, or the manufacturers of art supplies and developers of computer software used in their production.

In this article, however, I want to push Sterne'south betoken the other direction, exploring the internal diversity that destabilizes any given notion of an "industry," for fifty-fifty the comic book publishing manufacture contains multitudes. I brainstorm with an exploratory assay, mapping the locations of about one hundred comic book and graphic novel publishers. This exercise reveals something of publishers' orientations to other cultural industries—to a sure extent, their self-conception as publishers of characters or books, respectively, is borne out in where they locate their businesses. To some extent, this replicates a long-standing stardom between "mainstream" and "independent" or "alternative" comics. Looking more closely at 2016 sales data for comic books and graphic novels, yet, we discover that these labels exercise not mean quite what nosotros take them for. Ultimately, I argue that the comic book "industry" teaches united states of america to be wary of that term. Information technology is an artifact of a mode of assay, not a pregiven object, and we must be careful about bold where one industry ends and another starts.

Which Comic Book Manufacture?

The American comic book begins in the 1930s as the product of two existing publishing industries, newspapers and the pulps.[v] Publishers had been printing collections of popular newspaper comic strips but presently realized they could make more money commissioning original content rather than paying hefty licensing fees to the newspaper syndicates.[half-dozen] Theoretically, the publishers creating this new cultural industry could have been located anywhere, merely they weren't. Most of the comic book publishers agile during the 1950s were based in New York Urban center (Figure i). On one hand, this seems like a textbook example of an industrial cluster. At a time when production methods were entirely analog, publishers relied on a localized population of freelance creatives, equally well every bit content "packaging" shops.[7] As Gordon suggests, creatives' physical presence enabled editorial control of the production process.[8] Indeed, several publishers' offices were within walking distance of M Primal Station, meaning freelancers could hands take their portfolios around from publisher to publisher and, once a job was secured, come in for meetings with editors as necessary. They could likewise conceivably observe employment in cognate fields such equally commercial illustration or advertising. Just, on the other manus, New York City is too symbolically charged, signaling the alignment of the early comics industry with the publishing industries and (much more weakly) the world of arts and letters in general. While never entirely centralized in the way suggested past the Myth of the Marvel Bullpen, comic book production had clear physical boundaries in this period.

Figure 1. Comic book publishers (1950s).

Note. Locations of comic volume publishers agile in 1950s. Comic book production is centered in New York City. Addresses originally compiled by Bart Beaty. The full data prepare is available online.

The complex spatiality of comic publishing today is mayhap best summed upwards by a response on Outset Second Books' FAQ page to the question, "Where is :01?":

The offices are in New York City, in the Flatiron Building where Fifth Avenue crosses Broadway, at 23rd Street. To be precise. But really, :01 comes to you lot from all over the earth, since its creators are scattered all around America, all over Europe, Asia and Africa. So far, no ane is making graphic novels for u.s. in Antarctica, although nosotros haven't checked the submissions pile today.

This reply encapsulates a common narrative about the deterritorialization of comics production. Not merely does First Second—an imprint of Macmillan and a major publisher of young-developed graphic novels—maintain a relatively ambitious translation programme for strange comics, merely, like many publishers, it can and does take advantage of a global market place in artistic labor:

By exploiting the possibilities of the electric current generation of microprocessors, of increasingly powerful small-scale computers, of electronic advice and data transmission via the web and satellite, of ever-more than-effective software, and of increasingly efficient overnight courier services, comic publishers accept redefined the places where work is performed . . .[9]

Contrasting comic book publishing with more densely clustered forms of cultural production, Norcliffe and Rendace suggest comics represents "an culling geography in which workers who are engaged in creative activities using sophisticated technologies . . . are comparatively dispersed." Publishers no longer need to be located near one another, either. This fits with a broader trope most the transcendence of space mutual in techno-utopian discourse, yet space remains an important organizing principle in this field.

I was able to locate street addresses or PO boxes for 101 publishers of comic books and graphic novels.[10] Although some of this information may exist out-of-date, the full general patterns mapped in Figure 2 are still suggestive. One of the map'due south nigh obvious features is a pronounced bicoastal clustering: Larger and more active presses are concentrated on the coasts of the United States, whereas presses located inland tend to exist smaller, less established firms. For instance, nineteen comic book publishers are even so headquartered in New York City. Notwithstanding Marvel Entertainment, publishers remaining in New York and its surround tend to be traditional merchandise presses (or imprints thereof) producing "graphic novels" for the full general bookstore market place. Notably, graphic novels stand for one of the few areas of significant growth in the volume publishing manufacture in recent years. However, if the original concentration of publishers in New York signified an alignment of comics with the world of publishing, the growth of Southern California–based publishers similarly represents a reorientation toward Hollywood.[11] All told, at that place were twenty-four comic book publishers in this 2d cluster, some of which literally share an accost with a film studio. Fifty-fifty for presses that are not part of an amusement conglomerate, a development deal for film or Idiot box may represent a significant boost in revenue. Further up the declension, there were vi publishers located in the Pacific Northwest, composing a third cluster of smaller only well-established companies, such every bit Fantagraphics, Nighttime Equus caballus, Oni, and Top Shelf, known for producing independent and alternative comics.

Figure 2. Comic book and graphic novel publishers (2016).

Annotation. Locations of 101 publishers with singled-out street addresses or PO boxes appearing in 2016 sales reports from Diamond Comic Distributors and Nielsen BookScan. Comic production is now significantly more dispersed than in the 1950s. Markers are scaled by sales revenue. The total data fix is available online.

Geography is not destiny, and this equation of location with "orientation" is an extreme simplification bailiwick to numerous qualifications and exceptions.[12] Nevertheless, recent moves past publishers seem to reinforce the logics I accept outlined. While Curiosity Entertainment's publishing operations remain in New York, Marvel Studios operates out of Walt Disney Studios. DC Comics took a more than extreme position in 2015, relocating lock, stock, and Batman to Burbank, California, a movement seen by many as cementing its subsidiary human relationship to its parent companies, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and Fourth dimension Warner. The move more than closely aligned DC with Fourth dimension Warner's Burbank-based film, television, and interactive divisions presently later the conglomerate divested itself of other publishing divisions, such as Warner Books (at present, Hachette Book Group) and Time Inc., both headquartered in New York. Conversely, although several of Image Comics' private imprints are located around southern California, the company's central headquarters recently moved from Berkeley, California, to Portland, Oregon, registering spatially the importance that "groundlevel" comics now have to the publisher's overall brand.[13] Moreover, these examples demonstrate that the orientations and trajectories I have sketched hither are tied upwardly in ideas of cultural value that deeply construction the field of American comic books.[14]

Volition the Real Mainstream Delight Stand up Up?

Naturally, artists, scholars, critics, and fans have long observed internal cleavages in comic book production in the United States, notably differentiating between "mainstream" comics—typically identified with the superhero genre, in general, and the publishers Marvel Comics and DC Comics, in item—and its diverse discontents—typically identified as "culling" or "independent" comics.[15] It is, notably, the former that is unremarkably conjured up by talk of the American comic book industry. Yet, these terms remain elusive, as can exist seen in the largely negative definitions of culling and independent comics as whatever mainstream comics are not:

Working in opposition to their mainstream counterparts, alternative comics are aimed at an educated adult audience that is willing to read what are oft very realistic stories in a medium normally devoted to heroic fantasy. These comics are oft political, criticizing social mores, cultural trends, and political issues. Others only offering a skewed view of the earth or give phonation to non- or even anticorporate stories.[xvi]

This is a highly tendentious definition, merely at to the lowest degree alternative and independent music, film, games, and comics have been the subject of several important analyses, whether as phenomena in themselves or as components of a broader "indie culture."[17] The category they oppose receives much less attention; as Eric Weisbard puts it, "'Mainstream' is a word we use without much questioning."[18]

One of the few explicit attempts to articulate an affirmative definition of mainstream comics instead focuses on their creation as a cultural commodity. A mainstream comic is "produced by for-profit businesses and distributed in routinized publication outlets."[19] However, these criteria would include most alternative comics, which are published past for-profit businesses and available in bookstores or on Amazon.com. Similarly, Mark C. Rogers argues that the simulated dichotomy between alternative and mainstream genres or styles should be replaced altogether by a distinction between "artisan" and "industrial" modes of production.[twenty] Such shifts in focus produce more stable objects of assay simply exercise not capture the mix of industrial, generic, and artful qualities people make salient when they try to make distinctions betwixt kinds of comics. Despite their centrality to comics readers' sense-making practices and industrial marketing strategies, these labels are not at all straightforward. They index of import differences but, as Doug Singsen argues, do so at the level of cultural practices, not objects: "what allows the categories to function is not any stylistic or other feature of the comics themselves, simply rather the discourse in which they participate."[21] They are, to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu, "position-takings" that enable artists, publishers, critics, and readers to locate themselves in a cultural field.[22] Nevertheless, the ground they stake out has shifted in contempo decades.

Comics were once a commonplace feature of the American media landscape. Surveys conducted in the 1940s found that almost all children and a not-insignificant proportion of adults were regular readers of comic books; those who did not read them would almost certainly come across them in newsstands and at drug stores.[23] Jean-Paul Gabilliet reports that a billion comic books were sold in 1952, garnering approximately US$920 million, adjusted for aggrandizement.[24] This was, however, their top. Despite the contemporary visibility of franchises derived from superhero comics, comic books are now principally oriented toward a relatively restricted, subcultural audition of fans and collectors. This audience is reached through the so-called direct market, a channel constituted by Diamond Comics Distributors and a network of approximately iii one thousand comic book specialty stores.[25] Are these comic books, specifically, in any way representative of "the prevailing trend of opinion, way, order, etc."? An examination of sales in the direct market, fifty-fifty at a time when comic books and graphic novels are once once more making significant inroads in pop consciousness, suggests that they are not, especially when compared with sales in general trade bookstores.

Table 1. Comic Book Sales in Directly Market Channel (2016) by Publisher.

Rank	Publisher	Units sold	Acquirement (US$)
1	Marvel Comics (Disney)	38,541,455	161,474,627.thirty
ii	DC Comics (Warner Bros.)	33,647,659	116,533,642.42
iii	Image Comics	vi,493,718	22,738,966.01
4	IDW Publishing	two,907,979	12,208,060.04
five	Boom! Studios	one,765,365	7,298,988.35
6	Dark Horse Comics	1,592,796	6,250,081.34
seven	Valiant Comics	951,491	3,835,492.09
8	Titan Books	732,564	2,931,958.36
ix	Dynamite Amusement	717,929	two,880,379.71
ten	Archie Comic Publications	653,838	2,664,521.62
eleven	Oni Printing	448,973	1,791,402.27
12	Avatar Comics	248,604	ane,296,812.96
13	Zenescope Entertainment	272,910	1,238,015.xc
fourteen	Aftershock Comics	265,998	996,346.61
xv	Bongo Comics Group	120,522	507,867.78
16	Blackness Mask Studios	115,828	472,515.72
17	Joe Books	149,291	452,605.09
18	Udon Entertainment	108,837	438,822.63
19	Benitez Productions	95,541	381,208.59
twenty	American Mythology Productions	88,331	359,857.69
. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .
l	215 Ink	2,634	10,509.66

Notation. Aggregated from John Jackson Miller's estimates of sales based on Diamond Comics Distributors' monthly Top 350 ranking. The full data set is available online.

Co-ordinate to sales estimates from John Jackson Miller's Comichron.com, Diamond sold just over xc-ix 1000000 comic books in 2016 and did approximately U.s.a.$581 million in sales beyond all product categories. Within this market place, a height ten comic book could be expected to sell only over 129,563 units in the month of its initial release.[26] Examining all titles for which Comichron has 2016 estimates, the average comic volume sold twenty-four thou copies, whereas the median comic book sold only a little more than thirteen thousand copies.[27] Tabular array one displays these data by publisher. (For comparing, Miller has also compiled circulation information from the annual Statements of Ownership required by the United states Postal Service from 1960 to 1969; in 1960, the average comic volume sold 306,652 copies, and two titles had an boilerplate circulation of one million.) Notably, Diamond has its own categories for organizing the field of comic production. It distinguishes between "premier" publishers Smash! Studios, Dark Horse, DC, Dynamite, IDW, Paradigm, and Curiosity, which grants favored terms as a event of contractual relationships rather than direct sales performance, and the rest. Other manufacture reports based on Diamond sales charts refer to "top ten" publishers, which can vary from calendar month to month and differ depending on whether they are ranked by units or acquirement. Nonpremier or non–top ten companies are sometimes described as "contained" or "small printing" publishers, although this nomenclature is based purely on sales performance.

As journal comic books are no longer widely sold outside of comic shops, a direct comparing with trade bookstores tin can but exist made for graphic novel sales. Although Diamond'southward top 120 graphic novels for 2016 (as a rough equivalent to the monthly top ten comic books mentioned above) sold just over twelve thousand copies on average and the acknowledged championship (book six of Saga [2016]) sold most forty-viii thousand copies, the typical graphic novel sold only over 1,700 copies to comic bookstores. All told, in the direct market, the boilerplate comic book outsells the average graphic novel by a cistron of fourteen to one in terms of units or (given the higher toll point of a graphic novel or trade paperback) approximately ii and one-one-half to one in terms of revenue. Withal, in the same year that Diamond sold an estimated four.5 one thousand thousand graphic novels to the straight market, Publishers Weekly reported that bookstores sold almost twelve meg graphic novels. In fact, based on the total 2016 Nielsen BookScan data, which involves some manual cleaning to correct misclassifications, Brian Hibbs reported 17.3 million graphic novels sold for a total of almost US$293.vi million in revenue. Given that there were over 20-g titles on offer, the bookstore marketplace's "long tail" drags averages down significantly (813 copies or US$13,786.48), nonetheless its best sellers also an club of magnitude more successful than the direct market place's.[28] Tabular array ii compares graphic novel sales in comic book shops and bookstores, grouped by publisher. (I take attempted to group the sales of publishers' various imprints together.)

Table 2. Graphic Novel Sales in Direct Market and Bookstore Channels (2016) past Publisher.

		Direct market		Bookstores
Rank[a]	Publisher	Units sold	Sales acquirement (US$)	Units sold	Sales revenue (United states of america$)
1	Marvel Comics (Disney)	1,404,311	38,651,333.48	555,715	12,088,275.00
2	DC Comics (Warner Bros.)	one,174,021	25,265,723.31	1,234,047	23,203,069.00
3	Image Comics	930,289	thirteen,667,338.eleven	908,655	22,917,759.00
4	Scholastic Corporation[b]	v,957	73,655.43	1,873,530	22,958,094.00
five	VIZ Media	176,060	ii,065,971.twoscore	1,487,641	20,230,497.00
6	Simon & Schuster[c]	1,402	26,860.08	602,111	9,198,618.00
7	Dark Horse Comics	179,984	3,538,345.78	266,296	iv,551,820.00
8	Penguin Random Firm[d]	59,529	866,393.37	372,125	5,874,514.00
9	Yen Press[e]	—	—	395,643	v,664,829.00
ten	IDW Publishing[f]	158,511	iii,491,577.56	157,661	3,664,001.00
xi	Kodansha Us	—	—	468,669	5,562,428.00
12	Andrews McMeel Publishing	—	—	432,262	4,507,300.00
xiii	HarperCollins Publishers[g]	2,336	42,019.42	195,179	3,497,885.00
14	Oni Press	61,783	1,241,188.17	46,437	1,212,723.00
xv	7 Seas Entertainment	—	—	166,793	2,434,724.00
sixteen	Macmillan Publishers (Holtzbrinck)[h]	33,920	471,242.80	129,663	1,716,834.00
17	Boom! Studios[i]	96,601	ane,620,718.99	33,385	473,842.00
18	Abrams Books (La Martinière)	1,237	nineteen,550.15	145,298	ane,693,471.00
19	Hachette Volume Group (Lagardère)[j]	24,228	355,561.79	66,098	1,308,790.00
20	Joe Books	8,482	100,263.18	117,596	one,322,664.00
21	Vertical (Kodansha / Dai Nippon)	—	—	73,099	ane,263,575.00
22	Fantagraphics Books	24,420	632,075.93	17,531	464,375.00
23	Dynamite Entertainment (Dynamic Forces)	37,705	780,818.95	9,211	230,183.00
24	Valiant Comics	55,211	815,767.89	—	—
25	Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)	—	—	45,470	687,374.00
26	Disney Publishing Worldwide[k]	—	—	34,881	575,607.00
27	Sky Pony Press (Skyhorse Publishing)	—	—	47,653	571,359.00
28	Archie Comic Publications	26,162	466,932.38	4,203	37,785.00
29	Drawing Books	4,916	73,494.20	9,504	379,685.00
30	Titan Books	22,984	433,131.16	—	—
31	Drawn & Quarterly	4,842	99,300.90	xi,326	247,671.00
32	Udon Entertainment	7,850	121,485.50	16,174	214,229.00
33	Regnery Publishing	—	—	xv,365	307,146.00
34	Humanoids Publishing	7,195	178,334.53	—	—
35	Benitez Productions	eight,554	159,738.46	—	—
36	Vii Stories Press	—	—	9,330	158,144.00
37	Avatar Press	vii,110	152,698.90	—	—
38	Abstract Studio	iii,156	125,702.60	—	—
39	Activity Lab Comics	9,595	121,310.05	—	—
40	Bloomsbury Publishing	—	—	6,368	120,992.00
41	NBM[l]	6,008	66,520.92	6,615	52,854.00
42	Aftershock Comics	6,213	114,292.87	—	—
43	Tokyopop	5,796	80,505.04	4,331	30,274.00
44	Black Mask Studios	4,523	94,281.77	—	—
45	Panthera leo Forge Comics[k]	4,355	80,690.45	—	—
46	Jet City Comics (Amazon)	—	—	5,304	79,295.00
47	Zenescope Entertainment	4,420	61,708.80	—	—
48	SuBLime (VIZ Media/Animate)	—	—	4,057	52,700.00
49	Hermes Printing	ane,029	46,976.74	—	—
l	Aspen MLT	iii,084	44,753.xvi	—	—
. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .
84	Concluding Gasp	389	1,945.00	—	—

Note. Directly market sales aggregated from John Jackson Miller's estimates of sales based on Diamond Comics Distributors' monthly Top 350 ranking. Bookstore sales from Brian Hibbs's cleaned version of the Nielsen BookScan Height 750 report for the comics category. The full data prepare is bachelor online.

a
Ranked by total revenue in both markets.
b
Includes Scholastic Printing, Graphix, Arthur A. Levine, and Blue Sky Printing imprints.
c
Includes Aladdin Books, Margaret Thousand. McElderry, Pocket Books, and Touchstone Books imprints.
d
Includes Alfred A. Knopf Books for Immature Readers, Ballantine Books, Crown Books for Immature Readers, Dial Books, Pantheon, Random Firm Books for Young Readers, Ten Speed Press, and Tundra Books imprints.
eastward
Includes Yen On.
f
Includes Top Shelf Productions.
1000
Includes HarperCollins, HarperTeen, and HarperTorch imprints.
h
Includes Beginning 2d, Square Fish, and St. Martin'southward Press imprints.
i
Includes Smash!, BOOM! Box, and ka-BOOM! imprints. As of Thursday, June 15, 2017, Fob acquired a "pregnant minority stake" in Boom! Studios.
j
Includes Grand Central Publishing, Hyperion Books, Little Brown & Co., and Running Press imprints.
k
Includes Disney Editions, Disney–Hyperion, Disney–Lucasfilm, and Disney Press imprints, but not Marvel Comics.
l
Includes Papercutz.
m
Includes the "Magnetic Collection," formerly Magnetic Printing.

Information technology is striking that of the eighty-4 publishers of graphic novels present in either the Diamond or the BookScan sales data, but xx-four appear in both, suggesting that the comic shop and bookstore markets establish ii solitudes, at least at the level of best sellers. Non i of the top 20 publishers by overall revenue appears in the Diamond data merely not in BookScan, whereas four are in BookScan data but not Diamond (Yen Press, Kodansha, Andrews McMeel, and Seven Seas, nos. 12, 13, 14, and 17, respectively). Of the remaining top twenty companies, only iv derive more revenue from the direct market than bookstores: Curiosity (76 percent), Blast! (77 per centum), DC (52 percentage), and Oni (51 percent). For comparison, Scholastic (#4) and Simon & Schuster (#6) both derive 99 percent of their graphic novel sales from the bookstore marketplace. At the other terminate of the list, simply two of the bottom fifty publishers past overall revenue (NBM/Papercutz [#41] and Tokyopop [#43]) appear in the sales information for both markets and 5 (Seven Stories [#36], Bloomsbury [#40], Jet Metropolis [#46], SuBLime [#48], and Graphic Library [#52]) appear simply in the bookstore data; the remaining forty-iii are only in the Diamond data set, suggesting they sell principally or exclusively through the specialty comic bookstore market.

All the same, comics publishing looks not only quantitatively but likewise qualitatively unlike when we leave the confines of the straight market place retail channel. Every bit Hibbs notes, the titles that are successful in the bookstore market (imperfectly represented past Nielsen BookScan information) requite a very different film than accounts of the comics field based on the subcultural audience of collectors and fans:

Eighteen of the Height Twenty are books aimed at younger readers . . . . Only five of the top twenty books are created past white men, and only three of them could be considered work primarily aimed or created through the Straight Market comic book system.

Moreover, the but superhero title in the BookScan tiptop twenty—Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke (1988/2008)—came in at number 8 with 130,907 copies sold. These data also show the significant presence of Japanese manga in the US bookstore market, with 9 manga publishers (some of which are American branches of Japanese publishers; others, independent presses that license content from Nippon) representing 26.6 percent of the bookstore market in terms of units sold and 22.6 percent in terms of revenue, compared with just 4 and 2.iii percent of the direct market, respectively. Undoubtedly, a more fine-grained analysis would uncover other metrics that would further delineate the differences between these two (or more!) comics cultures, but a case study of ane cartoonist may also provide some indications of the telescopic of comic book publishing outside and then-chosen mainstream comics.[29]

Raina Telgemeier is a towering figure in the contemporary comics field, but one who is perpetually overlooked because her work mainly addresses immature readers, especially girls.[30] When she was named Comics Industry Person of the Yr for 2014 by Heidi MacDonald'southward comics news website, The Vanquish , her books Smiling (2010) and Sisters (2014) had an estimated ii.9 meg copies in print, and she held multiple spots on The New York Times' paperback Graphic Books bestseller list, which she connected to dominate until the newspaper discontinued it in late 2016. As of that listing'south final appearance in The Times Book Review, betwixt her original graphic novels and adaptations of Ann M. Martin'southward Baby-Sitters Order novels, Telgemeier held five of its 10 spots, and those five works had been on the list for a combined 621 weeks. (Notably, none of the works on the paperback list were superhero comics, although one—The Killing Joke, in one case again—did appear on the final hardcover graphic books list on January 29.) In the BookScan data set, Telgemeier was the author of eight of the top 20 titles, representing 1.3 million copies and well-nigh US$10 meg in sales in 2016 lone. Given the fact that BookScan does not include institutional sales, such equally libraries or school book fairs, Telgemeier's actual sales are certainly underreported, simply this is however suggestive of radically different conceptions of success than those afforded by the straight-market publishing and retailing ecosystem.

If, as Pustz argues, mainstream comics will "tell any kind of story, whatever genre, will sell best . . . at any given time," then the success of trade volume publishers' graphic novel lists, of manga licensors, and of cartoonists like Telgemeier presents a challenge to inherited ideas about the mainstream.[31] Pierre Bourdieu suggests that every field of cultural production can be divided into two complementary subfields.[32] In the subfield of restricted product, typically associated with avant-garde works, culture is produced for an audience of other producers and for those consumers who accept internalized "producer-oriented" criteria of evaluation.[33] Here, the autonomous principle of legitimation ("art for art's sake") reigns supreme, and cultural capital is the most valued contributor to symbolic capital. In the subfield of big-calibration production, typically associated with commercial fine art and popular civilization, works are judged more by the heteronomous principle of legitimation based on external signs of success, and economic capital plays a larger part in determining overall status. As a event of the tension between these two subfields, prestige and economic success have an changed human relationship, and Bourdieu famously called fields of cultural production "the economic earth reversed" as a result.[34] The field of comics "reverses" the ideal-typical cultural field again. On i hand, although the heteronomous principle is indeed of import to mainstream producers, this sector does not accost large, mass audiences in the mode that commercial literature, film, television, and music do. It is, as Bart Beaty has quipped, "unpopular civilization."[35] Its scale is only also modest to stand for "large-scale production"—fifty-fifty its all-time sellers exercise not sell all that well. On the other hand, alternative and contained comics are not necessarily advanced. Genuinely aesthetically hard comics circulating in advanced art worlds certainly do exist, but they are rare amidst the most celebrated and canonical works of comic fine art, whether memoirs like Maus and Alison Bechdel's Fun Dwelling house (2006) or elevated genre fare like Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen (1986–87) or Vaughn and Staples'due south Saga (2012–).[36] These works as well, every bit we take seen, accept the potential for significant commercial success. This returns us to Singsen's point, and 1 Michael Z. Newman makes of "indie cultures" more generally, that "indie" is a discourse "whose meanings . . . far exceed the literal designation of media products that are made independently of major firms." This oppositional discourse ("alternative, hip, edgy, [and] uncompromising") can be mobilized and attached to quite unlike products, depending on the state of the field—including works that are, by any other standard, mainstream.[37]

So, what works and what audiences really stand for the mainstream of comics publishing and comics culture in the United States? The frame of reference chosen makes all the deviation. If the taken-for-granted notion of "mainstream comics" has enabled one subsector, and arguably just two publishing companies, to stand up in for the comics manufacture and, at times, the form in general, the view that Marvel and DC's superhero comic books are the norm against which all other comics production must be judged is increasingly hard to maintain. Just because these labels are mutually constitutive position-takings, it is not particularly useful to crown young-adult graphic novels (or any other genre or tradition of cartooning) as the real mainstream. Rather, we have to keep in view the range of different models in different formats and channels addressing different audiences that characterize the field of American comic books.

Decision: System and Fine art Globe

Many comic books fans take an involvement in the behind-the-scenes machinations that produce their comics, whether they are dedicated creators' rights advocates or simply desire to know why their favorite book was canceled. All the same, the emerging bookish field of comics studies has lagged behind. About comics scholars work or were trained in departments of literary studies, and formal and narrative features of comic art accept received much more than attending than their production, apportionment, and reception. This has begun to change. Brienza and Johnston's Cultures of Comics Work, for instance, collects recent work on the product of comic books and graphic novels. At the same time, media scholars increasingly acknowledge the importance of comics-derived intellectual property (if non the comic books themselves) to entertainment conglomerates' transmedia strategies, and comics scholarship at present appears in special issues, edited collections, and handbooks about media industries more generally.[38] I welcome this new attention to industrial and broadly sociological factors, whether inspired by the production cultures literature, the plough to labor in British cultural studies, or a more than traditional political economy of communication, but a "media industries" approach that attends to the limits and pressures exerted on cultural product past virtue of its commodity grade is different from ane that purports to take "the American comic volume industry" equally its object. As I have tried to demonstrate, that label disguises a great deal of departure. Indeed, it is wrong in nearly every respect: information technology is not American but integrated into multinational media conglomerates that employ a globalized workforce; it does not produce comic books merely intellectual property that circulates across multiple media, ranging from motion-picture show, tv set, and video games to licensed merchandise and even Broadway theater (e.g., It's a Bird . . . . It's a Plane . . . . It'due south Superman [1966] or Fun Home [2015]), and, finally, it is non an manufacture. Attempts to salve the term by, for instance, separating independent artists and presses from more clearly "industrial" publishers similarly wither nether scrutiny. Some "culling"/"artisanal" comics are released by presses that are subsidiaries of gigantic media companies and may fifty-fifty be the subject of Hollywood adaptations (e.k., American Splendor [2003] or Wilson [2017]), whereas many "mainstream"/"industrial" comics ostensibly produced for profit motive and nix more are struggling to proceed publication, and other forms of comics product exercise non neatly fit into either category.[39] The locus of creative cultural activity is non media companies but the "polymorphous ready of relations" taking place effectually cultural goods, only some of which are industrialized, and this diversity of models, methods, careers, and weather condition must be the starting signal of an industrial analysis of comics.[40]

Perhaps other media industries show more than systematicity than comic volume publishing. Yet, I suspect most will break down at their margins, particularly if failed careers, amateur and hobbyist production, "piracy," and alternative models of production, distribution, and remuneration are included within the frame of analysis. This is not an accident. As Bernard Miège argues, capital letter, in its efforts to extract value from cultural goods, cannot fully industrialize their production as commodities:

In our society, in fact, cultural products must continue to exist marked past the stamp of the unique, of genius, in order to be standardized . . . . On the ane hand the research laboratories attached to the major publishing houses are capable of producing success but they tin also meet with failure. But at the aforementioned time small production companies can attain swell temporary success. And since the development of a more and more than commonage labour process presents considerable risks in the event of failure, i understands why the process has been held back and why the major publishers, who by and large have at their command very skilful systems of distribution, prefer to distribute the successes of their less well organized competitors.[41]

Media industries enable certain forms of artistic production (though not, of course, creative production or creativity as such) simply besides stand up in a parasitic human relationship with fine art worlds and cultural scenes—the "overproductive signifying communities" from which new works, styles, genres, and forms emerge.[42] This is particularly true of Miège's "Type 2" cultural products, where individual, ofttimes precariously employed artists and authors deport the costs of "research" on behalf of cultural industries.[43] To put it differently, "system" cannot entirely colonize art world without destroying its ain principal inputs: symbolic creativity and the skilled labor that attends to it.

Because it lacks so much of the apparatus nosotros associate with larger media industries (trade and professional organizations, unions or guilds, a trade press, etc.), the "American" "comic volume" "manufacture" tin can remind us that industries are not a given. As a collective concept, industries are theoretical rather than empirical objects, although they manifestly have empirical furnishings. What we perceive every bit an industry is itself the upshot of boundary-drawing practices imposed on a fluid, complex field of social practices. It must be constructed before it can exist analyzed, but such processes of structure are never neutral:

The purlieus of the field is a stake of struggles, and the social scientist's job is not to draw a dividing-line between the agents involved in it, by imposing a and then-called operational definition, which is most probable to be imposed on him past his own prejudices or presuppositions, but to describe a state (long-lasting or temporary) of these struggles and therefore of the frontier delimiting the territory held by the competing agents.[44]

Rather, this "classification struggle"[45] over a field'south borders is shaped by values, interests, and unexamined prejudices: What objects practise we demand to study? Where do they come from? Where and to whom are they sold? The answers accept existent consequences for who and what counts when we study media industries.

Benjamin Woo is Banana Professor of Advice and Media Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). His enquiry examines contemporary "geek media cultures" and the product, apportionment, and reception of comic books and graphic novels. He is director of the Comic Cons Research Project, writer of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, co-author (with Bart Beaty) of The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, and co-editor (with Stuart R. Poyntz and Jamie Rennie) of Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective.
Charles Hatfield, Culling Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 78–79.
Jonathan Sterne, "There Is No Music Industry," Media Industries 1 (1, 2014), 50, http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/index.php/mij/commodity/view/17.
Sterne, "In that location Is No Music Industry," 53.
It remains entangled with other media industries for its entire history, representing a form of transmedia earlier "transmedia"; come across Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Printing, 1998).
Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), chaps. one–2.
The Eisner & Iger and Simon & Kirby studios are among the near famous examples of comic book "packagers," subcontractors hired by publishers to produce content and, in some cases, manage an entire line of comic books.
Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Printing, 2017), 100.
Glen Norcliffe and Olivero Rendace, "New Geographies of Comic Volume Product in North America: The New Artisan, Distancing, and the Periodic Social Economic system," Economical Geography 79 (2003): 241–63, 243.
Publishers featured in this map are those appearing in Comichron 2016 Diamond sales estimates and 2016 Nielsen BookScan Top 750 graphic novels study for which an accost could be determined. Addresses were sourced from data posted on publishers' websites, diverse online lead-generation and business intelligence directories, and occasionally the WHOIS domain name registry. If a separate address could not exist determined, imprints and subbrands were collapsed into their parent company.
Another potential indicator of this orientation is the use of descriptors such every bit "Productions," "Entertainment," or "Studios"—versus "Press," "Publishing," "Books," or fifty-fifty "Comics"—in publishing visitor names. (Marvel and DC, notably, have information technology both ways.)
Neither does a publisher's location determine where its artistic workforce lives. Even so, despite their potentially global dispersion, 72 per centum of the respondents to my survey of creators resided in the The states and 14 pct in just New York or New Jersey. The benefits of living near vibrant cultural scenes may outweigh college living costs in the coastal hubs where publishers tend to headquarter, and the location of educational institutions that offer preparation in comics may likewise shape patterns of settlement.
"'Groundlevel' was a term used [in the 1970s and 1980s] to draw comics produced past small, independent publishers, more often than not in the genres of scientific discipline fiction, fantasy, horror and superheroes." Doug Singsen, "Critical Perspectives on Mainstream, Groundlevel, and Alternative Comics in The Comics Journal, 1977 to 1996," Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, eight (2016), 156–72. On the relationship of groundlevel and independent comics, see Roy T. Cook, "Underground and Alternative Comics," in The Routledge Companion to Comics, ed. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin (NY: Routledge, 2016), 34–43, 42.
Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Volume of All Time: Symbolic Upper-case letter and the Field of American Comic Books (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Civilisation: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999).
Ibid., x.
David Hesmondhalgh, "Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre," Cultural Studies 13 (1999): 34–61, doi:ten.1080/095023899335365; Alisa Perren, Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: Academy of Texas Press, 2012); Bart Simon, ed., "Indie, Eh?" Special issue, Loading . . . 7 (xi, 2013); Hatfield, Alternative Comics; Michael Z. Newman, "Indie Civilisation: In Pursuit of the Authentic Democratic Alternative," Cinema Journal 48 (iii, 2009): sixteen–34, doi:10.1353/cj.0.0112.
Eric Weisbard, "How Do You Solve a Trouble Similar a Mainstream? Charting the Musical Middle," American Quarterly 67 (2015): 253–65, 253.
Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon, "Introducing Comics and Ideology," in Comics and Ideology, ed. Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon (NY: Peter Lang, 2001), 7.
Mark C. Rogers, "Understanding Production: The Stylistic Impact of Artisan and Industrial Methods," International Journal of Comic Art eight (1, 2006): 509–17.
Doug Singsen, "An Alternative by Any Other Proper noun: Genre-Splicing and Mainstream Genres in Alternative Comics," Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5 (2014): 170–91, 173.
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Product, or: The Economic World Reversed," Poetics 12 (1983): 311–56, 312–xiii.
Harvey Zorbaugh, "The Comics—In that location They Stand up!" Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (1944): 196–203, 197–98.
Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men, 29–xxx. Encompass price at the time was 10¢, which was equivalent to US$0.92 in 2017, co-ordinate to the Usa Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Computer, https://www.bls.gov/information/inflation_calculator.htm.
Diamond has held a de facto monopoly on the distribution of periodical comic books since the 1990s. Matthew P. McAllister, "Ownership Concentration in the Usa Comic Book Industry," in Comics and Credo, ed. Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon (NY: Peter Lang, 2001), 15–38, 24–26; Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 20–23; Dan Gearino, Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave The states a New Geek Culture (Columbus: Ohio University Press/Consume Press, 2017); Benjamin Woo, "The Android'south Dungeon: Comic-Bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences," Periodical of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 (2011): 125–36.
These data come with several caveats: First, straight market sales are sales to comic book stores rather than to readers. Second, unlike in the book trade, most comic books are sold on a nonreturnable ground; some publishers have experimented with taking returns on selected titles, and Diamond adjusts these titles down past x per centum across the board. Third, Diamond only reports sales for titles that perform to a higher place a certain, variable threshold. 4th, Diamond reports sales equally an index where a reliably selling title (ordinarily, Batman) has a value of 1.0.
Because Diamond but releases information for titles surpassing a sure sales threshold, these averages are inflated.
Although Hibbs discusses the complete BookScan report for the comics category, he has only released the Peak 750 comics written report, which provides the basis for the post-obit assay. BookScan compiles bespeak of sale data, significant that these numbers reflect copies really sold to customers. They practise not, however, include all sales as some retailers do non report to BookScan, and BookScan does non track schoolhouse and library sales. These are, therefore, unreliable but very suggestive figures. Cf. Colleen Doran, "Inaccurate BookScan Stats and the Plight of the Midlist Author," http://www.adistantsoil.com/2013/01/01/big-fatty-lying-book-stats-and-the-plight-of-the-mid-listing-author/.
For ease of reference, I have compiled Miller's direct market sales estimates and Hibbs's cleaned BookScan written report in a single Microsoft Excel workbook, http://dx.doi.org/x.5683/SP/R5ISLU.
Beaty and Woo, Greatest Comic Book of All Time, chap. 9. Aaron Kashtan has also recently argued that Telgemeier's career demonstrates the limits of manufacture analysis focusing on the direct market; "'Those Aren't Actually Comics': Raina Telgemeier and the Limitations of Direct-Market Centrism" (paper, International Comic Arts Forum, Seattle, WA, Nov 3, 2017).
Pustz, Comic Book Culture, 10.
Bourdieu, "Field of Cultural Product," 319–xx.
Herbert J. Gans, Pop Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. Rev. ed. (NY: Bones Books, 1999).
Bourdieu, "Field of Cultural Product."
Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Printing, 2007), 15.
Beaty and Woo, Greatest Comic Book of All Fourth dimension, chaps. 2, five.
Newman, "Indie Culture," sixteen.
E.g., Ian Gordon, "Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Ownership of Serial Narratives by Multiple Authors," in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 221–36; Alisa Perren, "The Fox of the Trades: Media Industries Studies and the American Comic Book Industry," in Production Studies, The Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, ed. Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer (NY: Routledge, 2015), 227–37; Benjamin Woo, "Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics World," Spectator 35 (2, 2015): 57–64.
Rogers, "Understanding Production."
Sterne, "There Is No Music Manufacture," 53.
Bernard Miège, "The Cultural Commodity," trans. Nicholas Garnham. Media, Civilisation and Society 1 (1979): 297–311, 305.
Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Scroll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 122. On art worlds, see Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84. doi:10.2307/2022937; Howard Southward. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). On cultural scenes, see Will Straw, "Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music," Cultural Studies 5 (1991): 368–88; Will Harbinger, "Cultural Scenes," Loisir et Société / Lodge and Leisure 27 (2004): 411–22; Benjamin Woo, Stuart R. Poyntz, and Jamie Rennie, eds, Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective (NY: Routledge, 2016); Daniel Aaron Argent, and Terry Nichols Clark, Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life (Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 2016).
Miège, "The Cultural Commodity," 308.
Bourdieu, "Field of Cultural Production," 324.
Pierre Bourdieu, Stardom: A Social Critique of the Sentence of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 481.

Bibliography

Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Civilisation: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Printing, 2007.
Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Uppercase and the Field of American Comic Books. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Becker, Howard Southward. Fine art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Academy of California Press, 1982.
Boltanski, Luc. "The Constitution of the Comics Field." In The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, 281–301. Leuven, Kingdom of belgium: Leuven University Press, 2014.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Stardom: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Field of Cultural Product, or: The Economic World Reversed." Poetics 12 (1983): 311–56.
Brienza, Casey, and Paddy Johnston, eds. Cultures of Comics Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Melt, Roy T. "Underground and Alternative Comics." In The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin, 34–43. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Danto, Arthur. "The Artworld." The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84. doi:ten.2307/2022937.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Printing of Mississippi, 2010.
Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Civilisation: An Analysis and Evaluation of Gustatory modality. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford Academy Press, 2012.
Gearino, Dan. Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave The states a New Geek Culture. Columbus: Ohio Academy Press/Swallow Press, 2017.
Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Civilization, 1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.
Gordon, Ian. "Comics, Creators, and Copyright: On the Ownership of Serial Narratives by Multiple Authors." In A Companion to Media Authorship, edited by Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson, 221–36. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Gordon, Ian. Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Hesmondhalgh, David. "Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre." Cultural Studies 13 (1999): 34–61. doi:10.1080/095023899335365.
Kashtan, Aaron. "'Those Aren't Actually Comics': Raina Telgemeier and the Limitations of Direct-Market Centrism." Paper presented at the International Comic Arts Forum, Seattle, WA, Nov 3, 2017.
McAllister, Matthew P. "Ownership Concentration in the US Comic Volume Industry." In Comics and Ideology, edited past Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon, 15–38. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
McAllister, Matthew P., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. "Introducing Comics and Ideology." In Comics and Credo, edited by Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon, one–thirteen. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Miège, Bernard. "The Cultural Article." Translated by Nicholas Garnham. Media, Civilisation and Social club 1 (1979): 297–311.
Newman, Michael Z. "Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Accurate Democratic Culling." Cinema Journal 48, no. 3 (May 14, 2009): sixteen–34. doi:10.1353/cj.0.0112.
Norcliffe, Glen, and Olivero Rendace. "New Geographies of Comic Book Product in North America: The New Artisan, Distancing, and the Periodic Social Economy." Economic Geography 79 (2003): 241–63.
Perren, Alisa. Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.
Perren, Alisa. "The Trick of the Trades: Media Industries Studies and the American Comic Book Manufacture." In Production Studies, The Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, edited by Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, 227–37. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Evolution: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: Academy of Texas Press, 2016.
Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Printing of Mississippi, 1999.
Rogers, Mark C. "Understanding Production: The Stylistic Bear on of Artisan and Industrial Methods." International Journal of Comic Fine art 8, no. 1 (2006): 509–17.
Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Curl Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Silver, Daniel Aaron, and Terry Nichols Clark. Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Simon, Bart, ed. "Indie, Eh?" Special issue, Loading . . . 7, no. 11 (2013).
Singsen, Doug. "An Culling by Any Other Proper noun: Genre-Splicing and Mainstream Genres in Culling Comics." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics v (2014): 170–91.
Singsen, Doug. "Critical Perspectives on Mainstream, Groundlevel, and Alternative Comics in The Comics Journal, 1977 to 1996." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8 (2016), 156–72.
Sterne, Jonathan. "In that location Is No Music Manufacture." Media Industries 1, no. 1 (2014), 50–55, http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/index.php/mij/article/view/17.
Straw, Will. "Cultural Scenes." Loisir et Société/Club and Leisure 27 (2004): 411–22.
Straw, Will. "Systems of Joint, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Pop Music." Cultural Studies 5 (1991): 368–88.
Weisbard, Eric. "How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Mainstream? Charting the Musical Eye." American Quarterly 67 (2015): 253–65.
Woo, Benjamin. "Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics Globe." Spectator 35, no. 2 (2015): 57–64.
Woo, Benjamin. "The Android's Dungeon: Comic-Bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 (2011): 125–36.
Woo, Benjamin, Stuart R. Poyntz, and Jamie Rennie, eds. Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Zorbaugh, Harvey. "The Comics—At that place They Stand!" Periodical of Educational Folklore 18 (1944): 196–203.