A USA Today investment advisor is asked the best way to make money in comics and he says…there isn’t.
The bottom line is that Disney and Time Warner are the only real ways for investors to get a piece of Iron Man and Batman, but investors should remember that comic books sales will have little influence on the future of these stocks.
§ Tom Spurgeon chats with translator/producer Anne Ishii about the US debut of Japanese Gay BDSM manga artist Gengorah Tagame and amazingly found a few panels that could be reproduced in a fairly SFW manner.
ISHII: Like a lot of literature, I suppose it forces you to slow down. There are stories I won’t forget inside that one story. I think it’s just the tools of a good storyteller. Maybe in experimenting with so many narrative threads, he’s rendered it literary. I don’t know, I’d like to know more about the story, too. Between that and several other stories, there’s a lot of voyeurism and his personal proclivities not withstanding I think that’s interesting, too. Not as a motive for eroticism, but I had taken for granted until reading this the idea of being watched by a bunch of people. That’s sort of pornography, isn’t it? It’s being read by a bunch of people. I don’t know. There’s something weird about a bunch of people watching the same sex act. A lot of his stories touch on that.
§ Jim Lee was on CBS News talking about Free Comic Book Day and said that Man of Steel made him cry. He meant it in a good way. I remember when former DC publisher Jenette Kahn said that the Superboy tv show made her cry, and that was in a very, very bad way.
§ They are remaking the Crow and Luke Evans is daring to take the part. F. Javier Gutierrez directs the reboot. The dashing Welsh actor will next be seen as Bard the Bowman in the next Hobbit movie, but he already was in a comic book movie, Tamara Drewe. The movie is based on the James O’Barr comics character and inspired one of the very first comic book movies with The Crow, a moody cult film that starred the late Brandon Lee, who died in a horrible accident on the set.
§ Former editor of the liberal magazine The Nation Victor Navasky delivers a nice primer on the history of political cartoons back to Duamier with 15 Historic Cartoons That Changed The World, including Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekerswho enraged the Germans following World War I. Navasky has a new book out called The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power
and that should be worth a look.
§ Fantagraphics has a reading club and they put together a bunch of discussion questions for Julio’s Day
The Umpteen Millionaire Club is our series which puts forth book club discussion questions for Fantagraphics titles. The Comics Journal interns Brooke Chin, Tom Graham and Toby Liebowitz put together this set of questions. As this is intended for those who have read the book and contains spoilers, questions can be found behind the jump.
These were good questions, and a good book to provoke them.
§ Reminder: One Piece Is Awesome
On the first link — it’s not that there’s no money in comics, it’s that there is no way to invest in any substantive way because the two biggest publishers are relatively small divisions in large multi-national corporations and that the next two (Image and IDW) are privately held. Saying that there’s no way to make money investing is a bit misleading. Anybody who reads the article will take that away.
Interesting thing I did learn is that IDW was acquired for their content licenses in 2007 when mobile content was just starting to take off. Given that I don’t see a ton of great apps based on IDW licenses, I wonder how much Zedge is making on that IDW purchase. They might have been better off to go after Comixology back then . . .
I find it interesting that “make money in comics” is interpreted by this article to mean “make money by buying stock in existing comics publishers”. I guess the idea of making money by starting a business, or putting money into a new one that needs capital to develop – things that could actually help the industry – is passe these days. No, “investing” is now mostly just placing side bets on whether a company’s stock will go up or down. Because even if you buy Disney or Warner stock, you aren’t doing anything to substantially help that company: they don’t get the money, the guy who sold it to you does. So what this article says isn’t that you can’t “make money in comics”, but that there isn’t a table at the casino that is Wall Street where you can gamble on comics stock.
So we put alot of time and effort into getting the kickstarter campaign for this project up and running from talking to special vendors to prepping special artwork and such, and have some great very cheap rewards(you can even get a comic for a buck, yep best $1 reward ever) share this around and let people know!!! Great way to get your pre-order in early!!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/283641002/an-american-horror-tale-brought-to-life-crowscare
One Piece is seriously awesome . . . I love that comic, Luffy is my favorite comic character in a long time . . . seriously funny, epic, and cool. I can’t read it fast enough.
It’s odd, in a way, to talk about making money from comics, since comic books comprise a medium (format). Would anyone wonder out loud how to make money from prose books or movies?
SRS
As I have in the past, I respectfully disagree with Jason’s assessment of how the stock market works. When you buys shares of a company, you own part of the company. How much of a percentage depends on how many shares. For most investors, it’s infinitesimal. So yes, you can invest in disney or time Warner or some other publicly traded companies tht also produce comics. And just to be open, I owned both MVL and TW stock in the past, and my daughter has some DIS stock now that has doubled in value since its acquisition. It’s still rated a strong buy, I believe, based on the movie slate and what the MVL And Star Wars acquisitions will do for the company and it’s merchandise at the Disney stores. It ain’t just princesses anymore, folks.
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