The book “offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings and big picture of this pop culture-lover’s convergence of super-hero geeks and big business. ‘The Con’ is a swirling vortex of brands, empires, celebrities, and the undead—clever, crazily, competing for your attention. It’s also become a window into the dramatically challenged comics empire, where marketers are through the comics backlist for source material, while the onset of digital publishing threatens its very existence. Meanwhile, pop culture and mass culture continue to converge here, the modern and the mythological, man and marvel.
“Salkowitz, who has been reading comics voraciously since he was a child, studies this transmedia convergence that pivots on the stories, characters, and geekitude of comics:
* How comics went from underground to arbiter of cool;
* The genesis of Comic-Con, launched in the 1960s so nerdy guys could trade issues and meet the creators;
* How the event has blossomed from a few hundred in 1970 to 130,000 last year;
* How comics is a pivotal point of transmedia convergence—with film, TV, books, games, (and zombies!) tagging onto it, to lucrative ends;
* The paradox of comics: At its heart, it’s creative, entrepreneurial, and free-spirited, yet it sits squarely at the heart of giant global mega-companies that reaps millions in profits;
* How the industry that got its start selling on magazine racks is now slowly and carefully tip-toeing into the digital age;
* Why Comic-Con is now a national and international phenomenon, with shows in Charlotte, Seattle, Algeria, and Dubai, among dozens of others.”
Salkowitz is “a futurist, experience book author, and self-professed comics geek. He speaks regularly on the convergence of digital media, technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, and social change. He attended his first comic book conference in 1975 at the age of 8.”