The Comic-Con phenomenon—and what it means for your business The annual trade show Comic-Con International isn’t just fun and games. According to award-winning business author and futurist Rob Salkowitz it’s a “massive focus group and marketing megaphone” for Hollywood—and in Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, he examines the business of popular culture through the lens of Comic-Con. Salkowitz offers an entertaining and substantive look at the show, providing a close look at the comic-book and videogame industries’ expanding influence on marketing, merchandising, and the entertainment industry. Rob Salkowitz is founder and Principle Consultant for the communications firm MediaPlant, LLC.

This three-volume reference set explores the history, relevance, and significance of pop culture locations in the United States—places that have captured the imagination of the American people and reflect the diversity of the nation. Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture serves as a resource for high school and college students as well as adult readers that contains more than 350 entries on a broad assortment of popular places in America. Covering places from Ellis Island to Fisherman's Wharf, the entries reflect the tremendous variety of sites, historical and modern, emphasizing the immense diversity and historical development of our nation. Readers will gain an appreciation of the historical, social, and cultural impact of each location and better understand how America has come to be a nation and evolved culturally through the lens of popular places. Approximately 200 sidebars serve to highlight interesting facts while images throughout the book depict the places described in the text. Each entry supplies a brief bibliography that directs students to print and electronic sources of additional information.

This compilation of essential information on 100 superheroes from comic book issues, various print and online references, and scholarly analyses provides readers all of the relevant material on superheroes in one place. The American Superhero: Encyclopedia of Caped Crusaders in History covers the history of superheroes and superheroines in America from approximately 1938–2010 in an intentionally inclusive manner. The book features a chronology of important dates in superhero history, five thematic essays covering the overall history of superheroes, and 100 A–Z entries on various superheroes. Complementing the entries are sidebars of important figures or events and a glossary of terms in superhero research. Designed for anyone beginning to research superheroes and superheroines, The American Superhero contains a wide variety of facts, figures, and features about caped crusaders and shows their importance in American history. Further, it collects and verifies information that otherwise would require hours of looking through multiple books and websites to find.

Contributions by Bart Beaty, T. Keith Edmunds, Eike Exner, Christopher J. Galdieri, Ivan Lima Gomes, Charles Hatfield, Franny Howes, John A. Lent, Amy Louise Maynard, Shari Sabeti, Rob Salkowitz, Kalervo A. Sinervo, Jeremy Stoll, Valerie Wieskamp, Adriana Estrada Wilson, and Benjamin Woo The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics is the first collection to explicitly examine the production, circulation, and reception of comics from a social-scientific point of view. Designed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about theory and methods in comics studies, this volume draws on approaches from fields as diverse as sociology, political science, history, folklore, communication studies, and business, among others, to study the social life of comics and graphic novels. Taking the concept of a “comics world”—that is, the collection of people, roles, and institutions that “produce” comics as they are—as its organizing principle, the book asks readers to attend to the contexts that shape how comics move through societies and cultures. Each chapter explores a specific comics world or particular site where comics meet one of their publics, such as artists and creators; adaptors; critics and journalists; convention-goers; scanners; fans; and comics scholars themselves. Through their research, contributors demonstrate some of the ways that people participate in comics worlds and how the relationships created in these spaces can provide different perspectives on comics and comics studies. Moving beyond the page, The Comics World explores the complexity of the lived reality of the comics world: how comics and graphic novels matter to different people at different times, within a social space shared with others.

Do you want to build a business publishing comics? Do you want a chance to create and own the next generation of iconic characters? Do you want to understand how the comic book industry really works? If you’re a comic creator who is building a business for your work, then you need to read this book. Written by a comic book attorney with twenty years in the business, edited by a senior editor for DC, Marvel, and AfterShock Comics, and enjoyed by hundreds of comic book professionals, The Business of Independent Comic Book Publishing offers the reader the chance to develop a unique business plan, guiding them from initial inspiration to being a professional publisher.

This collection of 13 new essays employs ethnographic methods to investigate San Diego's Comic-Con International, the largest annual celebration of the popular arts in North America. Working from a common grounding in fan studies, these individual explorations examine a range of cultural practices at an event drawing crowds of nearly 125,000 each summer. Investigations range from the practices of fans costuming themselves to the talk of corporate marketers. The collection seeks to expand fan studies, exploring Comic-Con International more deeply than any publication before it.

Pop Goes the Decade: The 2000s comprehensively examines popular culture in the 2000s, placing the culture of the decade in historical context and showing how it not only reflected but also influenced its times. Pop Goes the Decade: The 2000s starts with a timeline of major historical pop culture events of the 2000s, followed by an introduction describing what the U.S. was like at the beginning of the new millennium and how it would change throughout the decade. Next come chapters broken down by medium: television, sports, music, movies, literature, technology, media, and fashion and art. A chapter on controversies in popular culture is followed by a chapter on game-changers, featuring 20 individuals who made a major impact on the U.S. in the 2000s. Finally, a conclusion shows the impact that pop culture in the 2000s has had on the U.S. in the years since. This volume serves as a comprehensive resource for high school and college students studying popular culture in the 2000s. It provides a summary of total impact, plus specific insights into each individual topic. It also includes a wide swath of the scholarship produced on the subject to date.