New Book Solves The Equation "Comics + Hollywood = $(?)"

With a surprisingly unique perspective and thorough academic rigor, a new book on the synergy between live-action adaptations and sequential art gives a timely and vital understanding of the mechanics behind the capes and masks. Fueled by the perspective of a former comics retailer and a media studies professor with close access to one of the industry's most influential artists, The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood could likely join the seminal Scott McCloud book Understanding Comics as a primer on how the sausage is made.

One half of the team creating this work is Dr. Alisa Perren, an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film and Co-Director of the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI) at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include television studies, media industry studies, and US film and television history. She is also the partner of artist Cully Hamner, whose influence on comics includes designing the latest version of the Blue Beetle, a storied run as an original member of Atlanta's legendary Gaijin Studios and co-creator of Red, which ended up on the silver screen starring Bruce Willis.

The other part of this authorial duo is Gregory Steirer, associate professor of English and film studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2017-2018 in support of his monograph on intellectual property law and the history of the narrative-based franchise. He was also the owner of Endicott, New York's own Centerfield Cards & Comics in the 1990s, so he has clearly seen things that might shock and amaze.

Together, the two of them use the lens of the comics crossover to open the door on how Hollywood affects comics in many areas: financial, hierarchical, critical, and more.

If you're looking for a compare and contrast between the Secret Wars of different generations or which Crisis had bigger stakes, this isn't that kind of work. From its first chapter …

"Readers will note that we devote very little attention here to narrative studies of either individual comic-book or film texts or to 'transmedia' universes … we have found in our research that narrative-based approaches to comics and comics-based texts often produce a slightly misleading picture of the industrial processes that determine how these texts are actually made. This finding is perhaps not surprising, as media industry studies as a field has, in recent decades, distanced itself from narrative-based approaches for just this reason."

With more than forty professional sources, some who spoke on condition of anonymity, The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood delivers a focused analysis of the conditions on the ground that can be like tea leaves in showing what could happen moving forward.