It is, however, incredibly damaging to consumer confidence and not exactly what you might consider “putting the customer first.” The silence encourages speculation, and so, here we are. Amazon very rarely comments on anything, so their silence on the Comixology situation is not unusual. The first thing we all need to agree on is that we don’t really know what’s going on at Amazon at the moment. I haven’t been in the rooms at Amazon, but I can speak as someone who’s worked in the general space. Roberts at Marvel when I interned there in grad school. I’ve been attached to a couple of digital comics/publishing startups and once upon a time wrote, lettered and packaged a digital comic strip for the Chicago Tribune Media Group.
David Steinberger told me the first book was the only citation they could find to back up Comixology’s original business plan when they won that first pitch contest. I’ve been away from the site for a bit, so first a little background on why I got tapped to talk about the state of digital comics as the Amazon fallout is reigning down: As a semi-reformed academic (I’m speaking at USC about entertainment marketing and fandom next month), I used to teach eBusiness at Columbia College Chicago and wrote three books on The Economics of Digital Comics that have been taught at the college level. Because transparency is not a word that’s been uttered about Amazon’s plans for digital comics. It’s time to take a deep breath and look at what we do and don’t know. “It’s fantastic to be working with publishers across the spectrum to deliver great comics to comiXology and Kindle, offering fans stories that they can’t get anywhere else.With Amazon kicking the Comixology staff to the curb in a staggered layoff, there are a lot of wild rumors flying around. “Our mission is to make everyone on the face of the planet a comic fan, and with ComiXology Originals we’re excited to offer a range of content by diverse creators,” ComiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger said in a statement accompanying the launch announcement. Back in May, it announced the launch of a subscription program that offers content from indie publishers for $5.99 per month.
The program is the second significant new project this year from the digital comics company, which was purchased by Amazon in 2014. Even Valiant High - written by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert‘s Daniel Kibblesmith, with art by Jughead‘s Derek Charm - reimagines the publisher’s superhero characters in a high school setting, with heroes and villains becoming faculty and students. All three titles are intended to act as outreach for the comics medium in general, in addition to ComiXology specifically, offering alternative genres to the superhero stories that dominate the industry.
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