3 ms·

I wonder if the big comics publishers have ever explored something like Jump. You have to fill a lot of pages with a lot of, honestly, garbage. Stuff that gets

by rtpg 4y ago

I wonder if the big comics publishers have ever explored something like Jump. You have to fill a lot of pages with a lot of, honestly, garbage. Stuff that gets cancelled in 3 months. Shipping all over the place costing up the wazoo. And you probably can't get away with as much massive exploitation as in the Japanese industry. There are of course a lot of short story magazines doing similar stuff, but given how labor intensive comics work is, the genre hyperfocus the major publishers suffer from, and the impracticality of the physical format for distribution in the US... maybe a digital thing could work somewhere.

hakfoo 4y ago
Digital as a subscription service has most of the good things about the Jump-style concept. * The pricing needs to be at a level where casual fans can say "I'm reading 2 or 3 things, and that's enough to justify the overall subscription." * The audience gets a regular drip of new series launches, so there's low-risk discovery. * A customer's tastes for individual series can change, and series can end, without having to change the overall product they're buying. They can probably get better analytics than fan surveys with an online product too. They absolutely need to present it as "the entire Marvel/DC/Top Cow/etc universe for $XX per month" though, to avoid silo-related frustration. Nobody wants to pay for a subscription to Batman and then hit a paywall that says "Batman went to the Utility Belt Accessories Trade Show in Metropolis, buy a Superman subscription to continue reading." Manga sometimes has situations where a story moves from one serialization to another, but that's less necessary when you aren't dealing with physical publishing constraints.