Once again we have a week with no big stories but lots of interesting little stories. That might be different next week after the ComicsPRO Annual Meeting is over, as it looks like publishers are loading up on announcements. In the meantime, here’s another meal of snacks.
ComicsPRO: Consolidation or Expansion? ComicsPRO Annual Meeting, the annual retail summit, kicks off Wednesday in normally-lovely Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it does sometimes rain in southern California, and forecasts suggest any folks coming from the cold and wet rest of the country won’t be getting a respite as they plot strategy for the coming year.
Weather notwithstanding, this year’s ComicsPRO takes place under unexpectedly sunny market conditions. 2024 and 2025 saw several positive developments for physical retail, including a resurgence of periodicals in the direct market and stronger overall growth from direct market than in the trade book channel, reversing decade-long trends (see “Comics Sales Reach New High”).
The growth seems to be led, anecdotally, by an influx of younger customers hungry for physical product and in-person experience. This is mirrored in other markets like music, where CDs have seen a huge revival of interest 15 years after being knocked down, but apparently not out, by downloads and then streaming. Recent research shows 64% of GenZ consumers prefer shopping in-store to online. The same study shows that “GenZ want to be informed” and that brands should “establish trust and turn this generation of consumers into [loyal] customers.”
If this is a secular shift in market dynamics and not a weird blip, it behooves everyone in publishing, distribution and retail to line up around it.
One word of caution: there’s an art to stoking the fire without putting it out, and it’s not one that comics has historically mastered. If I were at ComicsPRO this year (and, sorry, I won’t be), one thing I’d be looking for is stronger strategies around customer retention, especially for new customers who haven’t necessarily grown up marinated in comics store culture. To me, this would look a little bit different from the “spruce up the store and put manga and kids’ stuff at the front” strategies that proved effective in the past 10-15 years: not necessarily abandoning the good practices that grew up then but augmenting them with new ways to turn “tourists” into “natives.”
The industry has not dared to hope that this kind of opportunity would return, but now that it seems to be here, let’s not blow it.
Kirby Awards incoming! One problem the comics industry does not have is a shortage of awards for excellent work. We just got a reminder of that with the annual dump of venerated elders into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame, in which Don Heck got an automatic pass and Todd McFarlane isn’t even on the ballot. Don’t ever change, Eisner Hall of Fame!
So now comes the Jack and Roz Kirby Awards, borrowing, with the family’s support and blessing, the names of the First Couple of comics. Bringing back a Kirby Award (it existed in the 80s, before being replaced by the Eisners and Harveys) has been the years-long project of Kasra Ghanbari, the CEO of Comic Art Fans, and his efforts will finally bear fruit at the OAX Show in Orlando (which he runs) later this week.
Kasra said he doesn’t want to “over-explain” the awards, but the general idea is that they honor the things that the Kirbys uniquely brought to comics beyond just the pencil-on-paper stuff: innovation, excellence and humanity in narrative communication. There are five main awards (Independence, Innovator, Newcomer, Visionary and Storyteller) and two legacy awards (Teacher and Creator).
Members of the Kirby family, sponsors, judges and members of the Advisory Board (including yours truly) will be there for what should be a fun, moving and relatively brief ceremony. One reason I won’t be at ComicsPro is that I will be at OAX helping Kasra hand out the hardware on Saturday night.
Good News and Weird News. If you told someone in 1926 that, a hundred years later, magazines like Collier’s, Redbook and The Saturday Evening Post would be defunct and long forgotten, but that a grubby little pulp called Weird Tales that specialized in horror and fantasy would be getting its umpteenth revival, they’d probably think you had had your mind melted by Elder Gods and reduced to gibbering nonsense.
And yet, here we are! According to an announcement Monday, horror publisher Monstrous (Dead Detectives Society, Shakespeare Unleashed, Kolchak: The Night Stalker) is launching a Kickstarter to bring out a Weird Tales Graphic Novel, featuring adaptations of new and vintage work from the magazine’s storied history. Yes, Lovecraft, Howard and Bradbury are all accounted for, along with comics versions of stories from Michael Avallone, Allison V. Harding, C.L. Moore, Anthony M. Rud and more. A great lineup of talent is involved in the adaptations, and Kelley Jones and Eric Powell are on tap to do the covers.
“A wonderful part of Weird Tales has always been our writers and artists taking inspiration from each other,” said Weird Tales publisher John Harlacher. “Since the iconic horror comics of the 20th century, like Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, were inspired by Weird Tales, it’s an honor to return the favor, and build on that legacy, as well as our own.”
I guess there are some advantages to living in the darkest timeline!
Digital platform BookWalker gets a Manga refresh. Finally, some more news on the still-active digital front. BookWalker, a longtime leading digital bookstore operated by an arm of Japan’s massive Kadokawa Group, announced an upgrade to their platform featuring, in the words of the announcement, “a new and improved experience optimized for faster and permanent access, with the exciting rollout of Lightweight Content Protection (LCP) DRM.”
BookWalker carries 79,000 titles from both domestic and overseas publishers. Apparently, its recent split with the Japanese version of the site has raised concerns from some readers about the disposition of books they already purchased due to DRM restrictions. The whole topic of DRM is fraught, especially on the manga side, where commercial apps compete with extremely elaborate, full-featured scanlation sites.
In the announcement, BookWalker sees their LCP as a solution, by enabling “permanent ownership of content within this rigid dichotomy of DRM vs. DRM-free… In a significant shift, readers can now escape the walled garden of being restricted to reading content only in the ecosystem from which it was bought, and creators and publishers can have the ease of mind that titles can be enjoyed flexibly and as intended.”
The announcement also promises “new apps, a revamped design, new searching and filtering, a coins-based system, and more on the way for 2026 and beyond.”
That about does it for me this week. Those of you going to ComicsPro, have a fun and productive weekend. Anyone in central Florida, please come by OAX for what promises to be a fun, low-key, art-centric show, highlighted by the first annual Kirby Awards.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
Source: ICv2
