A five years follow up study of Lithuanian comic book culture and industry development

Abstract

This paper is a follow up study that analyzes how situation related to comics in Lithuania changed in the last five years. The results of the previous study identified that comic related situation in Lithuania was at very least dim. Comic book medium was suffering from many miscon-ceptions and comic book industry was having a misfortune of commercial and critical flops. However, five years later situation could not be more different. Comic book culture is blooming. Authors conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with majority of cartoonists from Lithuanian comic book industry. Drawing from empirical evidence, it was found that the overall situation in local comic book industry is considerably improved. However, it is still challenging to fully embrace comic book artist’s profession. Findings as well have shown that most of Lithuanian comic book artists believe that it is considerably more chal-lenging to get state support or investment from local publisher if comic book project is outside historical or biographical genre.