Art Spiegelman (following Will Eisner) prefers the term sequential art to the mildly pejorative comics. When seen as sequential art, comics seem a logical avenue for exploring and communicating user experience. Artist Steven Frank bases each comic on real spam subject lines, although the site hasn't been updated with new comics in a long time. Even so, there are plenty of back-comics to sift through.

Manga has been evolving and adding to the industry. Manga are short, compact, Japanese style graphic novels that are read right to left. I gave him volume I to read for fifteen minutes after I put him to bed one night around nine o’clock. Manga is simply the Japanese word for comics. Any comic art produced in Japan, no matter the style or subject matter, is manga.

Diamond needs to once and for all abandon its remaining policies that reflect a time when there were many comics distributors and competition among them to place books on behalf of publishers. I think this should extend to a bunch of different things, but let me suggest one to start. Diamond's recent policy changes shut my own self-publishing imprint FWDbooks' doors by not fulfilling our orders and ultimately not listing us in favour of hero-genre work. That, coupled with blogging software that allows anyone to do any type of comic that you can imagine, suddenly levelled the playing field.

Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else. Superhero comics, by far the most popular type, account for 70 percent of that figure, followed by Japanese-inspired manga comics and other specialized genres. Periodical comics, issued monthly, bring in about 60 percent of retail revenues, and graphic novels (comic books in book form), which Griepp believes will one day surpass periodicals, account for the remaining 40 percent.