"And focusing on Marvel and DC at the expense of the dozens

[Vertical Inc]

"And focusing on Marvel and DC at the expense of the dozens of other publishers in comics, and then..."

“And focusing on Marvel and DC at the expense of the dozens of other publishers in comics, and then declaring comics a failure at San Diego Comic-Con, is incredibly myopic. It’s a mistake to think that Marvel and DC are all that mattered, that their new events or announcements dictate the future of capital-c Comics. Marvel and DC are comics, just like the other publishers, and they make some great ones when they let the creators do their own thing. But at this point? You can’t treat them like the entirety of the comics industry, or even two companies that can dictate the future of comics. They run the movies, and that’s cool, but running comics? It’s just not true any more. Image in particular outsells Marvel in the book market as far as trade paperbacks go, and that holds true in the comics market lately, too. That’s no coincidence. People enjoy Marvel and DC, but they want more than Marvel and DC.

If the announcements from the Big Two felt lackluster, but the fans still had a great time, how did comics fail? That sounds like a Marvel & DC problem. Vertical debuted Moyoco Anno’s brand new book In Clothes Called Fat at the show, a comic geared toward adult women. They sold out of Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday?, a romance/cooking comic. At Image, we sold out of Greg Tocchini & Rick Remender’s Low, an aquatic sci-fi tale, and Nick Dragotta & team’s Howtoons, a comic geared toward getting kids interested in the science through practical play. Boom! burned through Lumberjanes, a comic about girls at camp. These aren’t your normal comics, and people were eating them up.” - After two bad “Comic-Con was bad for comics!”/”Comic-Con was good for comics!” pieces, io9 lets iamdavidbrothers do his thing, and the result is—surprise surprise—a great piece that’s head and shoulders above the traditional (print) comic coverage on the site*.
-great piece as usual by my brother David. And yeah, Vertical with a Big V killed it at SDCC. People ate up josei comics and gay comics up! They were all over our mecha manga. And as usual cat comics dominated like few pet genres can. We didn’t have a huge booth with huge lines. But we had a steady stream of hungry and knowledgeable readers, including many new ones introduced to us thru social and visual media.

I wanna thank all our readers for their support. And then give a special nod to our publisher friends - Image, Fantagraphics, First Second, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, Viz, Seven Seas, Funimation, Dark Horse and Oni Press - for their support. They were all winners at SDCC!