American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood

Alisa Perren is Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and Co-Director of the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at The University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (2012), co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009), and co-founder and editorial collective member of the journal Media Industries.Gregory Steirer is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Dickinson College. A former National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and researcher for the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project, he has published extensively on digital media, comic books, and intellectual property law.

• Introduction: The More Things Change…: The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century1 Comics Pros Go to Hollywood: The Historical Evolution of the Comics-Hollywood Relationship2 Comic Books and the Economics of Intellectual Property Production3 Drawing Lines: The Place of Comic Book Artists and Writers in Hollywood4 Synergy in Theory and in Practice: Comic Books and the Contemporary Media Conglomerate5 Organizational (Dis-)Integration: Publisher-Hollywood Relationships in the Twenty-First Century6 From Dental Floss to Dental Tape: The Strange Case of Digital Comics DistributionAfterword: Days of Future Present: The View from 2020

The superhero team-up of Perren and Steirer reveals how the American comic book industry intersects with the world of film and television without losing focus on the unique business and creative culture that makes comics unique. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the 21st century comics business has—and has not—changed through its alliance with Hollywood. Yet students of film and television will find the book equally important as it reveals how those industries, too, might be transformed in turn by their relationship to comics. A must read for anyone interested in the amazing convergences, spectacular strategies, and uncanny mutations that define media industries.