Comics Courier Needs Readers Because Publishers Won't Pay

The Comics Courier launches its fifth issue on Kickstarter today. The fact that it needs to crowdfund at all is the story worth examining.

The contributor list reads like a census of serious comics criticism — scholars, journalists, longtime practitioners — and yet the journal cannot sustain itself through institutional subscription or advertiser support. Instead it returns to the reader, asking them to fund the thing they want to exist.

This is not a statement about quality, it's a signal that an entire category of cultural analysis failed to build what it needed. In the 1970s, American newspapers lost their film critics to television faster than editors expected. Television gave film away immediately and completely, making everything review-and-done and consumable rather than durable.

By the time editors realized what happened, there was no institutional base left to recover. Film criticism's infrastructure had to rebuild from the reader up, which is why Criterion, Letterboxd. The Ringer exist. They are not the natural forms of film criticism, they are the forms that survived. Comics criticism is moving along the same arc, just slower.

When a form has to choose between reader-funded criticism and no criticism at all, it stops getting better.

For decades it lived in specialist magazines and university presses, genuine but small. The internet promised to scale it, instead making comics visible to more people while making comics criticism visible to almost nobody. What separates comics from film's recovery is one crucial variable. Film eventually had companies with incentive to invest in critical infrastructure because it moved tickets and built prestige. Comics publishing has never built that relationship with serious criticism. The publishers who profit from the work do not fund the people who think about it most carefully. The Comics Courier asks readers instead. And which means your appetite for this work determines whether it survives. That asymmetry, where the people who benefit financially from a form never fund its serious analysis, is worth noticing in your own work, whatever that is. When a form has to choose between reader-funded criticism and no criticism at all, it stops getting better.