New forms of cultural production: The case of the North American comic book industry

Two theoretical foundations are brought together to construct an understanding of how a number of cultural industries operate. The recent literature on social economies recognizes the need for social interaction, often in flexible and elaborate social networks encompassing many divisions of labour and skills, for creative activities to occur. The older literature on periodic markets identifies the possibility, in certain situations, for exchange to occur only periodically. A case study of comic book production is used to explore this conceptual framework.

The comic book industry consists of a scaled down “mainstream comic” sector, and a fragmented “alternative comic” stream. Production in both streams has been transformed over the last twenty years from one that operated in a rigid manner and centrally located in New York, to a more flexible style consisting of geographically decentralized freelance workers who work in comparative isolation for long periods of time, followed by shorter periods of intensive social activity at various comic and zine conventions.