The State of Comics Journalism

Originally published on Patreon.

Just yesterday, I was talking to an old friend and fellow veteran of the comics press. We discussed how ComicBook's recent shift from a news-forward organization that published dozens of stories a day, to a features-first site that prioritizes longform content, had left a gap in the comics news market.

ComicBook isn't the first comics news site to do this – it's following in the tradition of sites like CBR and Newsrama – but it has been the biggest and loudest voice for daily news in the comics space for a while. There are still some who do it – Bleeding Cool, for instance, and The Beat – but it's less and less common to get straightforward news stories in our space and more and more common to get...well...Screen Rant.

Obviously, there's a reason for that: Screen Rant and other sites like it perform very well. That's what a huge chunk of the audience want. Still, viewing everything through the lens of opinion pieces that prioritize casual superhero fans is a very limited way of looking at comics as an industry and an artform.

The Beat recently touched on this. Heidi MacDonald, who runs the joint, has touched on the issue time and time again over the years. And, yes, it looks bleaker than ever before right now. Journalism as an industry is on fire, and with recent Hollywood malaise, the entertainment industry is also in a pretty dire state. That means entertainment journalism has seen better days.

Reporting on comics books in particular requires a lot of commitment and passion – it's not generally profitable. During my years at ComicBook, the site started as a small one that specialized almost exclusively in comics, only focusing on movies, TV, and video games when they tied directly into specific comic books and their characters or creators.

As we grew, it became necessary to focus more on the multimedia stuff outside of comics themselves in order to stay afloat. I remember, in the early days, being told that the money they could afford to pay me every month would have to decrease when The Walking Dead went off the air and our traffic cratered.

The success of the site, not coincidentally, tracked with the rise of superhero TV and movies – and then the site managed to grow beyond just the superhero niche and become a relevant space – first for "geek culture" more broadly and finally for pop culture in general.

(I remember being told that Warner Bros. had loved my review of Creed, but couldn't justify quoting a site called ComicBook.com about a Rocky spinoff.)

MacDonald has assembled a great list of resources at her The Beat story, which is actually something I had been entertaining doing separately. I highly suggest reading it.

The story suggests MacDonald is also toying with the idea of creating a sidebar where she can link back and forth with other sites, blogs, and shows in the comics space. I think that's a cool idea, and if she does it, it's even more important that people support The Beat so that Heidi doesn't feel like supporting comics is cannibalizing her own traffic.

You can literally support The Beat on Patreon.

For my part? I've been writing exclusively about comics at Screen Rant but, again, not much in the way of straightforward news. I also haven't been doing a lot of original interviews, which are not only one of my favorite parts of the job...but something I have always thought I was pretty good at.

To remedy those issues, I'm (re-)launching Panel Discussions, a long-form comic book interview podcast. The first episode, featuring DC writer Jeremy Adams, will be up in the next few days. For those who have been around a while, you might remember that I ran Panel Discussions back during my days at Comic Related about 15 years ago. I also briefly revived it as a brand landing page to host archival episodes of Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast and some other odds and ends.

This time, you'll be able to find it on YouTube, Patreon, and probably a bunch of other places.

Keep reading comics. Keep supporting the people who love them. Be excellent to each other.

Other great comics folks to support:

•Comic Book Club
•iFanboy
•Off-Panel
•Word Balloon
•Comic Book Couples Counseling

Other recent stories to check out from Russ Burlingame:

•Cleveland Guardians Announce Superman Night In the Stadium
•Legends of Tomorrow Fans Are Holding a Virtual Convention
•Oni Press's Free For All #1 Features Bonus Content by...Me!

Buy ECV Analog Books:

•Best Movie Ever: An Oral History of Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont’s Josie and the Pussycats
•Getting the Fin Right: The Collected Savage Dragon Interviews vol. 1 (with Gavin Higginbotham) 
•A Legend In His Own Time: A Fast-Forward Guide to the Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of (with Kevin Allen)