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.

Comics Startup 101 is a quick guide to some of the most important legal and business issues comic book creators should be aware of as they start their careers. The book tackles the use of contracts, contract negotiation, business formation, intellectual property, and other key issues.

The Business of Freelance Comic Book Publishing is designed to help you develop a business model for your services, leverage the assets you offer to the industry, and transform your skill, time, and creativity into financial gain.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz's The City. There are no rules in the dark, no place to feel safe, no escape from the shadows. But to save the day, you must...Seize the Night. At no time does Moonlight Bay look more beautiful than at night. Yet it is precisely then that the secluded little town reveals its menace. Now children are disappearing. From their homes. From the streets. And there's nothing their families can do about it. Because in Moonlight Bay, the police work their hardest to conceal crimes and silence victims. No matter what happens in the night, their job is to ensure that nothing disturbs the peace and quiet of Moonlight Bay.... Christopher Snow isn't afraid of the dark. Forced to live in the shadows because of a rare genetic disorder, he knows the night world better than anyone. He believes the lost children are still alive and that their disappearance is connected to the town's most carefully kept, most ominous secret—a secret only he can uncover, a secret that will force him to confront an adversary at one with the most dangerous darkness of all. The darkness inside the human heart.

Comic Books Incorporated tells the story of the US comic book business, reframing the history of the medium through an industrial and transmedial lens. Comic books wielded their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business for half a century before moving to the center of mainstream film and television production. This extraordinary history begins at the medium’s origin in the 1930s, when comics were a reviled, disorganized, and lowbrow mass medium, and surveys critical moments along the way—market crashes, corporate takeovers, upheavals in distribution, and financial transformations. Shawna Kidman concludes this revisionist history in the early 2000s, when Hollywood had fully incorporated comic book properties and strategies into its business models and transformed the medium into the heavily exploited, exceedingly corporate, and yet highly esteemed niche art form we know so well today.

"Originally published in single magazine form as Skullkickers #6-11."