Remember 2015?

2015. Ten years ago. Let me rattle off a few tidbits, with varying degrees of significance, about what we started 2015 with... 

•  At the beginning of the year, the only TV show related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was Agents of SHIELD 
• The only movie DC had produced in the wake of the MCU's success was Man of Steel
• While Amazon had recently purchased ComiXology, it was still a stand-alone app
• Ask Shagg, Dilbert, and Spider-Man were still ongoing newspaper strips
• The Nib was still part of Medium
• The CXC show in Columbus, OH hadn't been launched yet
• Diamond was the comics distributor in the US, full-stop; there was no other company even toying with the idea of competing 
• DC was still a year away from rebooting its entire line with "DC Rebirth"
• Marvel had just announced it was cancelling the Fantastic Four comic; it would not be restarted until 2018
• The Ringo Awards were not a thing yet
• The Eisner Awards had no Webcomics category; webcomics were lumped in with Digital Comics
• Neither Tom King nor any of his works had won an Eisner Award; same for Marjorie Liu 
• Olivia Jaimes had not yet worked on Nancy; R. K. Milholland had not touched either Popeye or Popeye's Cartoon Club; Dan Schkade had not started on Flash Gordon 
  
• Stan Lee, Joe Sinnott, Denny O'Neil, Gahan Wilson, Marie Severin, Steve Ditko, Ed Piskor, Flo Steinberg, Keith Giffen, Trina Robbins, R.C. Harvey, Carlos Pacheco, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Justin Green, Darwyn Cooke, Richard Thompson, and Tom Spurgeon were still with us
  

How many of those items do you discuss the same way now as you did in 2015? There's been recent discussion about that documentary about Stan Lee's final days. The Ringo Awards are just a regular part of awards season now. When planning which conventions to attend, how many different choices do you consider? With Fantastic Four: First Steps just a couple months from being released, can you imagine their NOT having a comic actively published? If a syndicate suddenly pivots into a wildly different direction for one of their legacy comics, does anyone bat an eye any more?

My point is that, in all likelihood, your thinking about the comics industry has changed pretty radically in the past ten years, whether you realize it or not. What you consider normal now was viewed by many with skepticism or even outright fear just a few years ago. More significantly, however, is that these changes in the overall industry mean that individual businesses need to change as well. You can't continue to operate in an environment that's changed without making changes yourself. Remember the old adage about being the town's best buggy whip manufacturer in an age of automobiles?

What's more, while people typically think of these shifts in terms of business, they not surprisingly apply to individual creators as well. When it comes down to it, most creators are operating as small businesses unto themselves, so that makes sense, right? But it also applies to readers/consumers. How you read comics is impacted by how they're created. How you buy comics is impacted by how they're distributed and sold. How you relate to comics is impacted by how they're marketed.

Ten years. It doesn't seem like it should be an especially long time, but things can alter pretty dramatically. (Even setting aside something like COVID throwing everyone for a loop in 2020.) You don't necessarily have to jump on board and embrace each and every change that comes along -- some will be short-lived failures, of course -- but be aware that things ARE changing, and you need to think about and react to them; you can't just assume that what worked five or ten years ago will continue to work today because the environment is constantly changing around you.

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