If you believe, erm, absolutely everybody, paper publications will be completely extinct within the decade. Newspapers, magazines, and comic books will all have either made the leap to the digital realm - either as websites or else downloadable editions of the existing format - or they will perish. As large as the implications are with regards to the latter two forms there are some particularly devastating implications for comic books, which are especially reliant on people with vast disposable incomes hoarding physical products. Collectors, basically. Before too long, the direct market - that is, the people who buy their funny books online or from brick-and-mortar comic stores, rather than on the newsstand - will have completely evaporated, or else have changed beyond recognition. Comic shops will have to diversify even further than currently, selling not only toys, merchandise and the like but also games, films and the like. Print comics, if they don't disappear completely, will end up being collector's items in the same way that vinyl records are now compared to CDs and digital downloads.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
