Comic Books Incorporated

Comic Books Incorporated tells the history of the US comic book industry. For twenty years, the medium has dominated the film and television landscape and defined contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business. 

This book argues that the best way to understand this dynamic and influential history is through political economic analysis and an examination of material details of production. This entails a focus on industrial infrastructure, and a closer look at aspects of our media environment that often lack public visibility--including distribution, copyright and contract law, organizational networks, and financing. The book analyzes in depth: particular regulatory acts and court rulings and the particular legal regimes that rise up around them; patterns of ownership and the corporate bureaucracies they organize; distribution networks and the demographic configurations and consumption habits they construct; and accounting practices and approaches to funding that determine what content makes it to the market, and what remains unseen and perhaps unmade. An interest in the material details of these systems yields a very different kind of narrative about what pop culture means and how it comes to be.

This story begins with the inception of comic book publishing in the 1930s, when comics were a reviled, disorganized, and lowbrow mass medium. Focusing on critical moments in the industry’s evolution—market crashes, corporate takeovers, upheavals in distribution, and financial transformations—it shows how industry structures and everyday business practices contained the medium's growth and gave it shape. The story ends in the early 2000s, once Hollywood had fully incorporated comic book properties and comic book strategies into its business models. Comic books had transformed into a heavily exploited and exceedingly corporate medium, simultaneously doubling as a highly esteemed niche art form.