“Writing for the Trade or Writing for a Trade?”

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay attends to “creator transitions” for serialized comic books: moments when a title changes hands in terms of creator or creative team. Tracing a history for how movements across creator runs are constructed within comics’ superhero genre, the essay contends that creator transitions are sites that disclose implicit assumptions about the nature of comics authorship and the terms of comics creators’ professional identity. Consequently, creator transitions can serve as an index for changing notions of comics’ authorship, which in turn bear not only on comics’ claims to symbolic value, but also on the labor statuses of comics creators. The essay ends by relating its account of creator transitions to ongoing patterns of casualization for comics labor.