Alas, the industry is in a deadly slump; if it weren't for the boom in graphic novels and manga, they'd be damned near invisible to most people, save for the multi-million-dollar feature film adaptations, which have nothing to do with the MEDIUM of comics. The American comics industry is fucked, pardon my French: the 'boom' of the direct-sales market in the 1980s and early '90s led to the false bubble that peaked with the launch of Image Comics and the notorious 'multiple covers' speculative market economy, which had publishers and retailers selling comics as 'junk bonds' to collectors and speculators. That peaked and crumbled, but in effect drove away an entire generation of young readers who weren't buying comics to read them any longer, they were buying them as investments -- and they got an early life-lesson in being royally ripped-off, which was a perversely perfect mirroring of the rip-off Wall Street mogul Ron Perlman managed during his tenure owning Marvel. But for a couple years, it was 'fat city,' and that in turn accelerated the rush by the major publishers to control distribution -- which began with Marvel pulling out of direct-market distribution as it was, to align themselves with Heroes World as their sole distributor with disastrous consequences for all -- resulting in the collapse of the direct sales market. Once the dust settled and it was all down to a sole distributor -- Diamond -- managing exclusivity contracts with the major players, the market quickly contracted and was in ruins, and has never really recovered. I left comics shortly after that. I had worked hard for twenty years to finally self-publish my own work (TYRANT), only to see it all evaporate in the wake of Diamond's seizing control of the market. The forces of consolidation and greed at work have really strait-jacketed the industry, and the sucker-punches keep coming: a couple of years ago, the sudden implosion of a key book-market distributor amid the boom in graphic novels in that market left every publisher juggling monstrous fiscal losses, which had major consequences for all, particularly the smaller publishers. It was also telling when the comics industry suffered the one-two knockout punch in the mid-1990s of the Oklahoma City comics bust and teenage cartoonist Mike Diana becoming the first artist in U.S. history found guilty of obscenity in his home state of Florida. The Mike Diana case [continues]