Gregory Steirer is a professor of English and Film Studies at Dickinson College.

Comics, which we will define here provisionally as non-animated series of hand-drawn sequential images, are one of the oldest modern media forms. Predating broadcasting, motion pictures, and sound recordings, comics emerged as a recognizable cultural form at roughly the same time that mass markets for printed work developed in the nineteenth century. Although comics have thus existed for well over a century, only recently have media and communication scholars begun to take the medium seriously as an object of study. In the field of media industry studies in particular, comics remain surprisingly under-researched, with little consensus having yet developed among scholars as to how the industry should be defined, how it should be studied, and why its study matters. In the only article on comics yet to appear in the journal Media Industries, Benjamin Woo (2018) even goes so far as to argue provocatively against the study of the comics industry, asserting that such a thing does not in fact exist.

For more information on the published version, visit Routledge's Website. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Media-Industries/McDonald/p/book/9780367225261

Steirer, Gregory, and Alisa Perren. An Industry of its Own? Approaching the American Comic Book Industry. In The Routledge Companion to Media Industries, edited by Paul McDonald, 153-161. New York: Routledge, 2022.

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