For a long time, I’ve wanted to break into traditional comics publishing as an artist or writer. Perhaps because it was always (and always felt like) more of a challenge to succeed in commercial print bookstore and comics shop publishing than it did to succeed in digital publishing and webcomics, even though the latter doesn’t pay much if anything most of the time, and the former does. But with new media becoming increasingly more popular, and traditional media like books and comics losing sales, one has to wonder where the readers money actually is going: To digital or to print. Or are readers PAYING FOR anything at all? I’m not a commercial publisher. I don’t have tabs on this kind of information. It would make my job easier if I did, but I don’t, so like everyone else I read blogs, online articles, and the trades. But deciding where an upstart artist and writer like myself fits into the industry, be it manga, indie comics, or webcomics, is no easy task. If I can’t pinpoint it, I have doubts anyone else ever will.
