Comic books incorporated: industrial strategy and the legitimation of lowbrow media

“Comic Books Incorporated: Industrial Strategy and the Legitimation of Lowbrow Media,” tells the story of the comic book industry over the span of eight decades. It explains how this once disreputable but immensely popular medium gradually transformed into a very niche product whose strong intellectual properties became highly valuable to corporate multimedia producers. As such, it provides a historical context for the media convergences that account for the proliferation of comic‐book‐based texts in Hollywood and beyond. Instead of attributing this medium’s dynamic history to changing aesthetics, taste, and public attitudes, it argues that industry economics and infrastructures, and the everyday practices that constitute both, actively shaped this particular media culture by cultivating the context of reception. While this dissertation draws on the growing subfield of media industry studies, the methodological approach is one of historical materialism. It demonstrates how major industry players—in comic books, and later, in television and film—were supported in their endeavors by a regulatory and legal regime that explicitly favored their success. These actors were able to use their resulting economic and political power to effect public attitudes about media. The resulting legitimation of media texts that had previously been considered lowbrow helped to invigorate and stabilize business operations, but also had the effect of containing the industry and therefore limiting certain possibilities within the medium and its culture. ❧ This dissertation is organized around the critical moments in the long history of comic books’ incorporation into multimedia infrastructures: the regulation of comic book distribution in the fifties, the rise of fandom and licensing in the sixties and seventies, and quality media’s embrace of comic‐book adaptations in the late eighties and nineties. Facing shrinking audiences, increasingly niche tastes, disruptions to distribution channels, and a concentration in ownership as early as the 1950s, the comic book business has for many decades confronted many of the challenges that today effect all media industries. In response, comic book companies developed strategic solutions to these problems that have recently been taken up across the entertainment landscape. As content increasingly moves across platforms with properties relying on longer lives over multiple distribution channels, the media industry's ability to push the legitimacy of certain products has become more important than ever and far more widespread. By tracing the history of these strategies back through comic books, which now take up a significant part of our media landscape, these case studies therefore establish a precedent for contemporary industrial strategy. In highlighting the fundamental and long‐standing interdependence of comic book publishing and multi‐media production, they also demonstrate the value of trans‐industrial analysis in media studies more broadly.