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Kidman, Shawna Feldmar. Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2019. 
Added by: joachim (26/07/2019, 11:15)   Last edited by: joachim (13/01/2021, 15:31)
Resource type: Book
Language: en: English
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9780520297555
BibTeX citation key: Kidman2019
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Categories: General
Keywords: Adaptation, Comic book industry, Copyright, Distribution, Economics, Film adaptation, Historical account, USA
Creators: Kidman
Publisher: Univ. of California Press (Berkeley)
Views: 22/724
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Abstract
Comic Books Incorporated tells the story of the US comic book industry. In recent years, the medium has dominated the film and television landscape and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business.
This book argues that the best way to understand this dynamic and influential history is through political economic analysis and an examination of material details of production. This entails a focus on industrial infrastructure, and a closer look at aspects of our media environment that often lack public visibility—including distribution, copyright and contract law, organizational networks, and financing. An interest in the details of these systems yields a very different kind of narrative about what comic books are and how they came to be.
The story begins with the inception of comic book publishing in the 1930s, when comics were a reviled, disorganized, and lowbrow mass medium. Focusing on critical moments in the industry’s evolution—market crashes, corporate takeovers, upheavals in distribution, and financial transformations—it shows how industry structures and everyday business practices contained the medium’s growth and gave it shape. The story ends in the early 2000s, once Hollywood had fully incorporated comic book properties and comic book strategies into its business models. Comic books had transformed into the heavily exploited, exceedingly corporate, and highly esteemed niche art form we know so well today.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations (ix)
Acknowledgments (xi)

Introduction: An Unruly Medium (1)
1. Incorporating Comics: A Brief Transmedia History of the U.S. Comic Book Industry (18)
2. Comic Book Crisis: Public Relations, Regulation, and Distribution in the 1950s (46)
3. Super Origins: Authorship, Creative Labor, and Copyright in the 1960s–1970s (91)
4. Tales of the Comic Book Cult: Quality Demographics and Insider Fans in the 1970s–1980s (136)
5. Mutant Risk: Speculation and Comic Book Films in the 1990s–2000s (180)
Epilogue: A Powerful Medium (230)

Appendix A: Comic Book Adaptations for Film and Television (235)
Appendix B: Comic Book Film Adaptations, 1955–2010 (243)

Notes (249)
Index (303)


Added by: joachim  Last edited by: joachim
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