Well, 2025 is finally behind us, and it wasn’t really the kind of year likely to have us wallowing in nostalgia. Fortunately, time marches on and 2026 beckons with a new set of opportunities for the industry. Here’s my annual set of predictions for the year ahead, followed by a scorecard recapping how I did last time.
Influencers as the next wave of licensed content creators. 2025 continued the strong performance of licensed content, led by globally-popular brands like Godzilla and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and megastars like Post Malone. As publishers continue to look high and low for the next sources of good material, I suspect we’ll see influencers and content creators from TikTok, YouTube, reality TV and elsewhere start to try their hands at comics as a way to broaden their base.
While this might seem trite and cheesy, it’s actually not a bad way to bring in younger fans and take comics into new directions, at least in the American market. Kim-Joy, a charismatic contestant in The Great British Bakeoff, provides a good template for how this is done. Her 2023 graphic novel Turtle Bread from Dark Horse is fun and charming, and Kim-Joy has unexpectedly become a regular fixture at comic cons, to the delight of many. The world of online creators and influencers is vast, and at least a few good projects are probably out there waiting to be discovered in 2026.
Print on demand finally gets useful. Print on demand has been the technology dog that didn’t bark, or at least didn’t bark as loudly as it could have. Back in the late teens, comiXology announced some vague POD plans that had people concerned about… I don’t remember what… but it didn’t amount to anything. That seems ripe for change, especially in an era of decentralized distribution.
POD for publications solves a bunch of problems for short run titles or crowdfunded projects that find a niche market as evergreens. But the bigger play is print on demand for art prints and one-off collectibles, especially at art-oriented conventions and manga/anime shows. I know of at least one major initiative in this direction that may break the surface in 2026 and I will be interested to see if they can make the economics work.
Direct and live-selling explodes. Direct-to-consumer live-selling on online platforms wasn’t just a flash in the COVID pan. It has, anecdotally, propelled the work of 90s-era stars like Rob Liefeld and Brian Pulido into some of the biggest sellers in the market. Those sales are not captured in direct market or distributor data, but they are putting dents in collectors’ wallets, and it’s about time the rest of us paid attention.
In 2026, expect at least a couple of mid-tier publishers to really lean into this, especially for titles and creators who are good at promoting their work or have personal brands that bring in the fans. There might also be opportunities for retail partnerships, to bring some of the sizzle of direct-to-consumer into the comic store ecosystem.
Niche genres continue to proliferate, fueling new content experiments. Both traditional comics and webtoons have been a breeding ground for new genres, genre crossovers, and experimentation. The past couple of years we’ve seen Dungeon Crawler Carl explode out from the LitRPG audiobook and digital book genre into a comics bestseller, with legs long enough to lure LitRPG publisher Aethon Books into an ownership stake in Vault Comics.
It’s easy to see how the LitRPG model, which brings the game mechanics and leveling-up momentum of video and tabletop games into books, can expand into other subgenres beyond fantasy and sci-fi. Vault and others would be foolish not to try.
Meanwhile, in the burgeoning self-publishing underground that gave rise to Romantasy, we’re seeing new cross-genre pollinations like Horrormantasy and Gothic Intimacy/Romantic Horror, both of which are easy ports to serialized webcomics. Then there’s the whole Cozy movement arising in reaction to the oversaturation of dark themed horror and hyper-angsty emotional drama, with offshoots extending into fantasy, urban horror, slice of life, mystery and other areas.
The fans of these kinds of literature tend to follow their passions and communities to whatever medium offers them new content to rally around. While the webtoon formats and platforms offer the fastest path to market for this kind of material, expect small and mid-tier publishers to sniff around for potential hits that further expand the palette of subject matter in both periodicals and graphic novels.
Financial uncertainties start to bite. Warner Bros being in play means things at DC Comics are technically up in the air, even if it would be madness for Netflix (or Paramount for that matter) to mess with one of their acquisition target’s most successful sub-brands.
We also got some unexpected late-year personnel moves at other top five publishers, potentially indicating either changes in direction or impending business moves. The aftershocks of the Diamand Comic Distributors debacle are still being felt, and even with the death sentence finally coming, it will take a while to unwind all the loose ends.
And in the economy at large, we still don’t know about tariffs, the outlook for global markets and global creative collaboration, and whether the AI bubble will burst or, even worse, keep tearing through creative industries. Fun times, as always…
Last year’s scorecard. Finally, let’s wrap up with a look back at the forecasts from 2025 and how they panned out (see “Comic Industry Forecasts 2025”).
- Policy changes ripple through the industry. Impact of tariffs and such, still speculative at that point. Yep, that was a thing.
- Distribution shakeout, including the possibility of Diamond “blinking out of existence.” Well, it didn’t take a crystal ball, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast or be so ugly.
- Crowdfunding boom. I don’t have the data, but I don’t sense 2025 was any bigger for crowdfunding than any other year.
- Licensed crossovers. Well, Godzilla stomped a path of destruction through Marvel, DC and IDW’s Turtles, so that counts. We didn’t see the kind of big, multi-license crossovers I was expecting through.
- Free speech and censorship. Again, not really a stretch considering what we all knew was coming to Washington, but the speed, severity, and lack of subtlety in the crackdown was still surprising.
Anyway, here’s to a healthy and happy 2026, and hoping every gloomy forecaster like yours truly is completely wrong about everything.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
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