Notes on Comic Book Publishing in the New Millennium

Abstract

Will Eisner in 1978 published A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories and narrated masterfully combining with sign and words the habits and customs of the neighborhood where he had lived, enriching the narrative with significant autobiographical elements: powerful stories that unraveled the human ‘realities’ of a working-class apartment building in the New York Bronx, and in close relation to the author’s Jewishness. There he used for the first time wording ‘A graphic novel’ for his own work. Drawing the term from literature, he legitimized and popularized it with a story that depicted life and reality. In doing so, in the late 1970s and 1980s, comics changed course with difficulty but with great awareness. Tied to that season are works no less important than Contract with God such as, for example, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980). «Up to that point, the tangible concreteness of existence, in principle (and only in principle), had been evaded: the talking clouds had hardly ever crossed the thresholds of the comic, of action, of adventure». In measuring itself with life, reality, emotions and feelings of human beings on a par with literature, cinema, theater, only and only metaphorically, comics conquered maturity and the language reached an accomplished poetic dimension that had never been recognized to it. In the New Millennium in Italy the slow but solid affirmation of the graphic novel coincided with the adoption of the book format that allowed, and allows, penetration into bookstores. At the same time changed the way of working using more and more sophisticated software, the emergence of new authors, the activation of new channels of distribution on the web and the sale of digital versions and, ultimately, the birth of publishing houses that put, and put in crisis, the traditional ones that were mainly distributed in newsstands. So today the new ones publish graphic novels distributed in bookstores, in the numerous fairs, or through Amazon, or sold directly online; the historical publishing houses try to adapt to the new times by landing in turn in bookstores with series where also the graphic Novel appears; the big publishing houses (Mondadori, Rizzoli, Feltrinelli, Giunti...) absorb small modern publishers by starting new comic book series, insert the graphic Novel in the most modern collections next to essays and novels. It seems to us that the revolutionary change taking place in comics, at once a cultural vanguard and a popular product, invests the various publishing and communication sectors that need to be analyzed and understood.