The future is digital. No one knows exactly how digital it's going to get or how fast. Newspapers have certainly seen better days, but in 1999 many people would have predicted that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal would be bankrupt in 2015, or at least online-only. Comic-book retailers well might have thought that the first time someone bought a comic on the Kindle or the iPad would be the last time anybody bought one in the comic book shop. It hasn't really worked out that way, but things haven't stayed the same either. Sales of staples-and-paper comic books have been fairly robust in this century, but digital sales have grown and grown to represent a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Marvel's latest deal with Amazon isn't likely to make them any smaller. As of now, 12,000 Marvel comics are available on Amazon, ranging from the Marvel classics to material just released last week, from Spider-Man to Star Wars. This deal is possible due to Amazon's ownership of the Comixology app, which is the #1 distributor of digital comics and certainly benefits from Marvel and DC's active participation. Will this translate the dominance Marvel has often exerted over the print comic-book marketplace into similar control of the online marketplace? What does this deal mean for comics-- all comics, not just Marvel comics-- in the short and long term?
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
