Deconstructing Comics

[quarrel]

Scott McCloud retweeted one of his followers, who’d written, “Someone should revisit Gary Groth's attack on Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics and count the times he got it wrong.”

Here’s the thing. I read that criticism (which was not easy - Groth is abstruse, and his disquisition prolix). I don’t see a whole lot that Groth “got wrong”. Groth

Comments

[rowyn]

But if corporations have complete control over content creation and delivery, how am I reading this? n.n

Certainly they're _trying_. I think it's a stretch to say they have succeeded, or that they necessarily will succeed.

[quarrel]

They've influenced it heavily and threatened -- still threaten -- to do so a heck of a lot more. And it's not just hard rules on delivery. It's the market settling into a small number of major mass-market vendors like Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon, rather than McCloud's projection of an amorphous mass of niche services (which do exist, yes, but they're not in the public eye).