I have big thoughts about comics in general now that I've finished reading the book, and specifically about the failure of the american comics industry.

I long for a thriving comics industry.

In the US, at the dawn of the comic book, most comic books weren't single title comics, they were what we now called "mixed bag" comics, at least that's what collectors call them?

These are titles like BIG 3 and AMAZING MYSTERY FUNNIES

and they are home to some of the best things that ever happened in comics (and, often, also the worst.)

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=58403

These mixed bag comics featured anywhere from 3 to 10 unique stories per issue, often from different artists. Some of these mixed bag titles would stretch to 100+ pages.

Later, as super heroes took hold, it became more common for titles to just feature a single character, but even those were often written by more than one person.

And as the war raged on, page counts shrank. The combination of these two factors took us out of the "golden age" of comics and into the "silver age" (but look, the lines are blurry, don't worry too much about the names.)

Comics in Japan followed a trajectory really similar to comics in the US. They started with importing US Newspaper strips from King Features Syndicate (lots of Mixed Bag comics also syndicated at least one or two King Features titles), but unlike the US, comics in Japan tended to be published in Magazines, rather than Newspapers.

The distinction is small, but it's somewhat significant.

As comics became more and more important in selling magazines in japan, the number of non-comic items in each magazine dropped (but never disappeared completely)

While the US did away with the mixed bag comic book in favor of the slender single 24 page single volume, Japan embraced the idea of a Comic Magazine and the page count of those magazines ballooned to multiple hundreds of pages per weekly issue.

But in the US or in Japan, the end result was the same: A magazine that has multiple ongoing titles, in addition to the flagship that readers are buying the book for is more well suited to introducing readers to a new series.

A healthy comics industry depends on discovery! Without discovery, you've got people only reading the titles they know.

Weekly Shonen Jump or Shōnen Sunday or Big Comic Original or whatever... they were able to launch new titles from unknown artists to great success specifically because they were anthologies of multiple series in a single location.

The US comics industry wanted and needed the same thing, but couldn't do it in the same way. They had to do their anthology series with a single story per issue. "This comic book will be entirely different every month" is a *much* harder sell to a prospective buyer than "Here's the next chapter of the thing you've been reading *and* three new comics you might like."

If you look back on the most successful super heroes today, we have a *bunch* of golden age hangovers that permeated pop culture during the mixed bag era, or silver age heroes that debuted in an anthology series.
Superman debuted in Action Comics #1, he was on the cover, but it wasn't Superman #1.

Action Comics #1 was an anthology, and contained eleven features:
- "Superman" (pp. 1–13) by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
- "Chuck Dawson" (pp. 14–19) by H. Fleming.
- "Zatara Master Magician" (pp. 20–31) by Fred Guardineer.
- "South Sea Strategy" (text feature, pp. 32–33) by Captain Frank Thomas.
- "Sticky-Mitt Stimson" (pp. 34–37) by Alger.
- "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (pp. 38–41) by Sven Elven.
- "'Pep' Morgan" (pp. 42–45) by Fred Guardineer.
- "Scoop Scanlon the Five Star Reporter" (pp. 46–51) by Will Ely.
- "Tex Thomson" (pp. 52–63) by Bernard Baily.
- "Stardust" (p. 64) by "The Star-Gazer".
- "Odds 'N Ends" (inside back cover) by "Moldoff" (Sheldon Moldoff).

Or perhaps Marvel is more your thing. Spiderman debuts in a random issue of anthology series Amazing Fantasy.

Other characters did get their own series out of the gate, but often those characters took a *while* to reach popularity.

The X-Men, for example, were not a success upon debut.

The American comics industry really struggled through the 70s and 80s.

A lot of folks refer to this as "the bronze age" and also look back on it as the moment that comics started being respected as art, or at least, when mainstream art started to recognize comics.

But, by and large, the industry of the 80s and into the 90s was in a period of contraction. Comics moved out of newstands and gas stations and into specialty stores.

Some *good* stuff happened. A bunch of small, creator owned comics companies sprung up, but they were comics creators, not business people, and they mostly got eaten by DC and Marvel.