DC and Marvel are more efficient at shutting out competition, not producing more books. The short answer to "why cannot new comic-book companies easily be created" is that it has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with the fact that nobody wants to be in direct competition with DC or Marvel.
In the late 80s, you had three different forces trying to push comic books (back) into the mainstream: speculators, graphic novels, and manga. I primarily covered the speculator boom because it's what ultimately killed off the big two, but concurrent with that was an indie comics boom. A lot of artists fled DC and Marvel the moment it was viable for them to do so and the indie companies they'd founded were actually giving the big two a run for their money for a bit. Some of those companies are still around, too!
The main problem is that indie comics didn't increase the standing of the genre. They were doing a lot of the same superhero comics as the big two, just with better terms for artists. As a result a lot of them wound up getting hurt by the big two going under rather than being able to capitalize on it.
There actually was a push to increase the range of comics being sold, too; that's what ultimately gave us the term "graphic novel". The problem is mainly that there isn't a hard distinction between "comic book" and "graphic novel". The latter was supposed to be for people why didn't want their work to carry the stigma of "comic book", but it ultimately wound up being used by the comic book companies anyway[3]. Still, there were some successful graphic novels, like Bone[0]; the main problem is just that it didn't usher in a wave of mass-market non-superhero comics. If you want to establish a medium you really need to carpet-bomb the entire market with it.
Ironically, part of the reason why manga got huge was because they had a decade head-start on this exact trend. In the 70s there were a lot of manga artists who called their books "gekiga" or "komaga"[1] and that spawned the entire seinen and josei demographic of modern manga. When companies started translating manga for the US they had lots of material to work with that western comics companies would never touch. Tokyopop cut their teeth with imports of girls comics, a thing that pretty much didn't exist in the US at all!
There's also webcomics - but that's not competition for comic books; it's competition for syndicated newspaper comic strips. (Japan calls these 4-koma.) One of the most irksome features of western comics is how much unnecessary fragmentation there is:
- A "comic book" is specifically a male-oriented superhero book sold in individual weekly volumes, which is predominantly but not entirely monopolized by DC & Marvel's rotting corpses
- A "comic strip" is any general audience comic distributed on a daily basis in newspapers, which is monopolized by Andrews McMeel Syndication
- A "webcomic" is a self-published[4] serialized work distributed online, usually for free, at high frequency (daily updates are common) and either in strip or book form.
- A "graphic novel" is a catch-all for any comic book that doesn't fit the comic book bucket, but sometimes it just means a collection of comic book volumes
- And "manga" is for import books from Japan (and "manhwa" for Korean books), which are far wider in scope purely because Japan's publishers had their shit together and America's didn't[2].
This fragmentation gets so particularly dumb that there is actually a thing called "original English-language manga", which specifically means any comic written in English but produced to manga standard. Because westerners who wanted to write comics that weren't superhero books dropped the graphic novel designation and started apeing the constraints of Japanese works. Oh, and this term also covers Megatokyo, a webcomic produced in a weird 2-by-2-koma standard specifically designed to split the difference between western comic strips and Japanese 4-koma. Confused yet?
If you want a good example of why categorization and taxonomy are dismal sciences, just point to this comment.
With that out of the way, you probably have also guessed that I don't think copyright plays a role in this. For the most part, it doesn't. But I do also want to point out that the big mistake a lot of copyright abolitionists make is assuming that copyright works like patents; i.e. that if DC owns Batman, then nobody is allowed to write stories about athletic rich guys moonlighting as superheroes. It's important to note, however, that copyright is actually really, really fucking narrow.
Fans chafe under copyright because fans want to do tributes and other things that don't strictly speaking step on the original creators' toes but are still legally problematic. But if you abandon the hope of, say, writing your own take on an existing superhero, you can actually still do a lot while not technically infringing. Toby Fox wrote two games totally aping the style of EarthBound[5], to the point where he's joked about how if MOTHER 3 came to the west, people would find out how unoriginal he is, and Nintendo's never bothered to sue him. Because there's nothing to sue over unless you're outright making a clone. Nothing stops you from writing your own superhero books aside from the fact that DC & Marvel have that particular corner of comics completely locked down and enshittified.
[0] Never underestimate the power of Scholastic to pump books into US schools.
[1] These literally mean "dramatic pictures" and "panel pictures" but I'd draw cultural parallels to "graphic novels" and "sequential art", respectively.
[2] There is an alternate universe where United Feature Syndicate realizes they can sell their own magazine full of weekly long-format comics and parallel reinvents Shonen Jump.
[3] Specifically as a synonym for trade paperbacks. No, I don't mean "upmarket paperback books", in comic books "trade paperback" specifically means "collections of previously published work" and sometimes they aren't even paperback. Manga calls these tankobons and most manga you buy in a store will be tankobons.
[4] Japanese: doujin
[5] Which itself aped the art style of the comic strip Peanuts, and was also aped by South Park
In the late 80s, you had three different forces trying to push comic books (back) into the mainstream: speculators, graphic novels, and manga. I primarily covered the speculator boom because it's what ultimately killed off the big two, but concurrent with that was an indie comics boom. A lot of artists fled DC and Marvel the moment it was viable for them to do so and the indie companies they'd founded were actually giving the big two a run for their money for a bit. Some of those companies are still around, too!
The main problem is that indie comics didn't increase the standing of the genre. They were doing a lot of the same superhero comics as the big two, just with better terms for artists. As a result a lot of them wound up getting hurt by the big two going under rather than being able to capitalize on it.
There actually was a push to increase the range of comics being sold, too; that's what ultimately gave us the term "graphic novel". The problem is mainly that there isn't a hard distinction between "comic book" and "graphic novel". The latter was supposed to be for people why didn't want their work to carry the stigma of "comic book", but it ultimately wound up being used by the comic book companies anyway[3]. Still, there were some successful graphic novels, like Bone[0]; the main problem is just that it didn't usher in a wave of mass-market non-superhero comics. If you want to establish a medium you really need to carpet-bomb the entire market with it.
Ironically, part of the reason why manga got huge was because they had a decade head-start on this exact trend. In the 70s there were a lot of manga artists who called their books "gekiga" or "komaga"[1] and that spawned the entire seinen and josei demographic of modern manga. When companies started translating manga for the US they had lots of material to work with that western comics companies would never touch. Tokyopop cut their teeth with imports of girls comics, a thing that pretty much didn't exist in the US at all!
There's also webcomics - but that's not competition for comic books; it's competition for syndicated newspaper comic strips. (Japan calls these 4-koma.) One of the most irksome features of western comics is how much unnecessary fragmentation there is:
- A "comic book" is specifically a male-oriented superhero book sold in individual weekly volumes, which is predominantly but not entirely monopolized by DC & Marvel's rotting corpses
- A "comic strip" is any general audience comic distributed on a daily basis in newspapers, which is monopolized by Andrews McMeel Syndication
- A "webcomic" is a self-published[4] serialized work distributed online, usually for free, at high frequency (daily updates are common) and either in strip or book form.
- A "graphic novel" is a catch-all for any comic book that doesn't fit the comic book bucket, but sometimes it just means a collection of comic book volumes
- And "manga" is for import books from Japan (and "manhwa" for Korean books), which are far wider in scope purely because Japan's publishers had their shit together and America's didn't[2].
This fragmentation gets so particularly dumb that there is actually a thing called "original English-language manga", which specifically means any comic written in English but produced to manga standard. Because westerners who wanted to write comics that weren't superhero books dropped the graphic novel designation and started apeing the constraints of Japanese works. Oh, and this term also covers Megatokyo, a webcomic produced in a weird 2-by-2-koma standard specifically designed to split the difference between western comic strips and Japanese 4-koma. Confused yet?
If you want a good example of why categorization and taxonomy are dismal sciences, just point to this comment.
With that out of the way, you probably have also guessed that I don't think copyright plays a role in this. For the most part, it doesn't. But I do also want to point out that the big mistake a lot of copyright abolitionists make is assuming that copyright works like patents; i.e. that if DC owns Batman, then nobody is allowed to write stories about athletic rich guys moonlighting as superheroes. It's important to note, however, that copyright is actually really, really fucking narrow.
Fans chafe under copyright because fans want to do tributes and other things that don't strictly speaking step on the original creators' toes but are still legally problematic. But if you abandon the hope of, say, writing your own take on an existing superhero, you can actually still do a lot while not technically infringing. Toby Fox wrote two games totally aping the style of EarthBound[5], to the point where he's joked about how if MOTHER 3 came to the west, people would find out how unoriginal he is, and Nintendo's never bothered to sue him. Because there's nothing to sue over unless you're outright making a clone. Nothing stops you from writing your own superhero books aside from the fact that DC & Marvel have that particular corner of comics completely locked down and enshittified.
[0] Never underestimate the power of Scholastic to pump books into US schools.
[1] These literally mean "dramatic pictures" and "panel pictures" but I'd draw cultural parallels to "graphic novels" and "sequential art", respectively.
[2] There is an alternate universe where United Feature Syndicate realizes they can sell their own magazine full of weekly long-format comics and parallel reinvents Shonen Jump.
[3] Specifically as a synonym for trade paperbacks. No, I don't mean "upmarket paperback books", in comic books "trade paperback" specifically means "collections of previously published work" and sometimes they aren't even paperback. Manga calls these tankobons and most manga you buy in a store will be tankobons.
[4] Japanese: doujin
[5] Which itself aped the art style of the comic strip Peanuts, and was also aped by South Park