Anon05/10/26, 02:38No.7937872
It's pretty bad. Being an indie comics creator basically mean you aren't going to make money. There's a lot of reasons for this, like comics distribution being absolute dogshit thanks to Diamond's fuckery relegating comics to specialty stores. Manga has more shelf space at stores like Wal-mart than comics(and the comics they do carry are big two slop), and there are no meaningful inroads to broad readership. When I was a kid, you could find floppies at EVERY checkout, from convenience stores to grocery and department stores and everything inbetween. Companies also don't make cheaply available comic anymore either; everything is printed on high-end glossy paper and costs upwards of $5 for 24 pages, half of which will be ads. And with the way suits look at stuff, creator owned comics that don't organically get big on their own first have no hope of ever seeing an adaptation that could bring more attention to them.
It's wild to me no one is making anthology comics on cheap newsprint, and pushing them at checkouts everywhere they can get them. Japan has shown it's a format that works, and the success of manga in the US shows there IS demand for comics, but no one seems to want to make it in a format that's affordable and accessible. So instead the big two are slowly spiraling the drain, with everyone else following them down.