The one about comics journalism…again

Comics Journalism is dead. 

I wrote about it in 2014: The Beat is 10 today!!! 

I wrote about it in 2015: The Beat is 11 today! Which contained a variation of the sentence that every one of these posts included: “While I often feel like sh-t too, I’m too dumb to quit and too stubborn to walk away. “

I wrote about it in 2016: Comics Journalism: You get what you pay for

I wrote about it in 2023: Inside the CBR layoffs and bad week

I wrote about it in 2024: I guess I’ll never get to wear my Eisner Awards dress again

I wrote about it in January: Women Write About Comics (WWAC) is going on hiatus

I talked about it for two hours with Atom Freeman

I wrote about it several more times – probably once a year like clockwork!  – but didn’t tag the posts properly and I don’t have a week to dig them up, but rest assured I said the same thing every time.  

Comics Journalism – like every other kind of journalism – was killed by social media, Google, Meta and the Race to Create A World Made of Ai Slop™.  

But last week, I had a bit of a shocking discovery: The Internet Comics Community (ICC) is also dead! I realized this when I ran the news that Hiveworks was mostly shutting down. Hiveworks is a business that has touched hundreds of webcomickers over the years, and Back In The Day™ this would have released a flood of tweets from people giving their thoughts, elegiac or accusatory, for at LEAST a day or so. How many times in days of yore would I check out the Beat’s slack and see someone say “Oh my a discourse on XXX is kicking off!” 

Nothing kicks off any more. 

The primary reason is that we’re living in an Unprecedented Hellscape™ in which a remake of Jojo Rabbit or an episode of Black Mirror could break out in our living rooms at any moment. It’s distracting. 

Part of the reason, as I discussed with Atom, is that The Discourse™ has moved to Reddit – where it’s hard to kick things off because (IRONICALLY™) many subreddits prefer LINKS TO PUBLISHED STORIES – and Discord, which is a big secret mystery land, like a Casper David Friedrich painting. 

And creators have their newsletters, which have become enjoyable bedtime reading for me, but the innately promotional nature means you have to go through a lot of “Out this week!”

Of course there are roughly 89 trillion YouTube channels, podcasts and TikToks. But I still like to read about things. I like being informed with new ideas and excitement and people Who Went Somewhere and Saw Something And Shared It With Us. Like this Broken Frontier report on a kids comics fair in the UK: “It Oozed Creativity, Comics Community Spirit and FUN” – Yo Comics! Proves that Kids Can’t Get Enough of Comics

The other week I was lucky enough to volunteer at the wonderful Yo Comics! – “a comic fair for kids and by kids”. Organised by comics advocate and educator Helen Jones and small press creators Hannah Lee Miller and Lauren O’Farrell (Deadly Knitshade), it took place at Stanley Arts in South Norwood – the site of the utterly joyous (but currently resting) South London Comic & Zine Fair. The exhibitors ranged from A-list creators to local school and community groups, and the all-day programme of workshops was full-up within minutes of bookings going live.

An on the scene report about an event from the real world! So cool!  I also like discovering or rediscovering creators, like this piece by Trevor van As, Black Star: Star Wars Through An International Lens

Sometimes, the European comics scene gets overlooked by the English-speaking world. Yes, many classic stories have been translated and celebrated. But when you zoom out, you’ll notice plenty of comics have yet to be translated. Alien Books has been plugging in the holes of the late great Argentinian artist Juan Giménez catalogue, best known for his European work such as Metabarons with Alejandro Jodorowsky. The publisher recently published I, Dragon, one of Giménez’s final works. Now they’re heading back to 1979 to one his earliest in Black Star – a richly rendered comic that will feel very familiar.

The Beat also covered Black Star, BTW – whaddaya know, it’s a classic comic in English for the first time. Trend watchers take note!  

Another reason I like writing about comics – and not social media about comics – is that social media is iffy. So many platforms have come and gone. In one of the pieces I found while researching this, I found this note from 2015: 

The priceless Deb Aoki has created yet another masterful Storify called Twitter for Comics Creators – Do’s & Don’ts and rather than embed here, it just go read it. But here’s the nut graph:

Be someone who gives/shares information and ideas, makes people laugh, makes them think, gives them exposure to a point of view that they may not have considered before. Be a friend and you’ll make friends — this is true in Twitter and in “real life.”

Storify is long gone, but Deb is still priceless and she was right. 

BlueSky has become the campfire for the refugees, and there were a couple of posts, which were appreciated: 

Comic Book Yeti, you rock! 

Graphic Policy also rocks, and I don’t think Brett Schenker gets nearly enough praise or attention. He’s been at this nearly as long as I have, and he deserves a lot of credit for what he does. 

In my piece from 2016 I listed 11 comics related Patreons which I suggested people support (including my own.) The Beat’s is the only site that is still going. One person passed away, one person is still writing, and Alex Hoffman and Zainab Akhtar have transitioned to publishing – which is awesome. But 2 for 11 is a .182 batting average. Comics journalism is below the Mendoza Line. 

In response to the above skeets, some people mentioned other sites or writers who deserved attention so here is the list, with a few I threw in:

ICv2

Popverse

ShelfDust

Rob Salkowitz

Graphic Policy

Broken Frontier

AIPT

Comicon

Fanbase Press

Pages and Panels

How To Love Comics

SKTCHD

From Cover to Cover

The Comics Journal 

NEW! Solrad

NEW! ComicsXF

Some oddities: 

I wondered what an old standby Comicbook.com was up to and they do have Comics coverage,  but it is not pretty. 

Tiffany Babb is kickstarting the second issue of the print-based Comics Courier (yay!) but she is also blogging about baseball at The Fan Files, which I also recommend. I told her she needs to do a deep dive on Jesse Winker. 

Among the other outlets mentioned in BSky comment, The Comics Blogger is actually a small press distributor, I think? (An awful lot of people don’t put links to their sites in their BSky profiles!) The delightfully named Hall H.com is a podcast. San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog is not about comics PER SE but it is S-tier. 

Other folks were podcasters or BSky posters or I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. And that’s okay. But I just don’t have the time to investigate. 

I realize that if most people who are interested in comics get their news and excitement from YouTube videos, then that is just where they will go and information and excitement over new creators and books will be communicated there. That is also Ironic™ in that sometimes when I check out a YouTube video about a topic I am interested in it is OFTEN SOMEONE READING A STORY ON THE WEB AND COMMENTING ON IT. It’s like AI: there has to be some spark to get the fire going. 

And y’see, that spark is often called “reporting.” Or maybe “knowledge.” There is so much going on in this Unprecedented Hellscape™, I hardly know where to start any more. And I can’t just report on what other people reported because….hardly anyone is reporting anything. In addition to following the aftermath of the Diamond Bankruptcy, just last week I learned important, urgent things about potential tariffs, why we won’t see foreign creators at cons this year or maybe for years, many things about the comics economy in Asia, heard rumblings about many companies that we have reported on here many times, and oh yeah, even comics sales being strong in 2025. All things that people deserve to know more about. All things I will eventually be covering, if I can survive long enough. I’m sure my fellow journalists reading this (all 12 of you) know of other things I don’t know about. There is a lot of news out there, people. I think? Maybe no one actually cares? That never stopped me before. 

Is comics journalism dead? Yes, sort of. But it was never truly alive. It was always like Swamp Thing, part curiosity, part love, part swamp. 

At any rate, keep those emails, DMs and phone calls (yes) coming. Like I always say, I’ll stick to this until they drag my body out under a sheet. But there may/will be some changes. I may switch to doing more video form reports: it’s all anyone wants to watch, and as my two hour podcast proved, I’m a blowhard who likes to yap. The Beat will probably set up more of a paywall for a few things; everyone else does it and people have been telling me to do it for a decade or so. When you give things away, no one thinks they have value. I have more ideas about all of this of a more pragmatic and upbeat nature but let’s keep this doom and gloomy for now. 

Please consider supporting and praising my colleagues, listed above, and consider supporting their Patreons, if they have one. If you’re REALLY ambitious, consider starting your own blog or newsletter. I truly believe that there is always room for new voices in this curious love swamp, and I look forward to discovering them.