Making the Move to Digital

[Newsbot]

Code: Select all

LOS ANGELES - Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.

ADVERTISEMENT
 
It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.

Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet. Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman -- become increasingly visible in pop culture through new movies and video games, old-school comics publishers rely primarily on specialized, out-of-the-way comic shops for distribution of their bread-and-butter product.

"You don't have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime any more," said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. "We don't have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to."

Translate "kids' lifestyle space" into plain English and you get "the Internet." Marvel's two most prominent competitors currently offer online teasers designed to drive the sales of comics or book collections.

Dark Horse Comics now puts its monthly anthologies "Dark Horse Presents" up for free viewing on its MySpace site. The images are vibrant and large.

DC Comics has also put issues up on MySpace, and recently launched the competition-based Zuda Comics, which encourages users to rank each other's work, as a way to tap into the expanding Web comic scene. Company president Paul Levitz said he expects to put more original comics online in coming years.

"We look at anything that connects comics to people," Levitz said. "The most interesting thing about the online world to me is the opportunity for new forms of creativity. ... It's a question of what forms of storytelling work for the Web?"

For its mature Vertigo imprint, DC offers weekly sneak peeks at the first five or six pages of upcoming issues. The publisher also gives out downloadable PDF files of the first issues in certain series, timed to publication of the series in book or graphic novel format.

The Web release of DC's "Y the Last Man" sent sales of that book collection soaring at Bridge City Comics in Portland, Ore., the shop's owner Michael Ring said.

"They really do tend to be feeder systems," Ring said of online comics. "They give people that initial taste."

For Marvel, the general public has often already gotten its initial taste through movies like "Spider-Man" or the "Fantastic Four" franchises.

The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers." Comics can be viewed in several different formats, including frame-by-frame navigation.

Ring expects Marvel's effort to put a slight dent in the back-issue segment of the comic shop industry, where rare, out-of-print titles sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay and at trade shows.

Though most comic fans are collectors, some simply want to catch up on the backstory of their favorite characters and would no longer have to pay top dollar to do so.

About 2,500 issues will be available at launch of Marvel Digital Comics, with 20 more being released each week.

A cursory examination reveals that not all the comics that Marvel claims are online, are actually online. We here at the vynsane.com news team chalk that up to Joe Quesada just being full of shit again.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

The next step is to make them little flash animation comics.

Then progress into full animation comics.

Then get rid of those pesky word balloons in favor of digital sound bytes, so the comics "speak".

Then basically, you'll have little weekly animated cartoons.

BUT, OH WAIT, THEN THEY WON'T BE COMICS ANYMORE. FUCKTARDS.

[anarky]

It looks like all of the recent titles listed have seemingly random issues. Like 2 and 3 of a 4-part limited series. Huh? How's that going to get new readers?

Y'know what I've been thinking? We keep hearing that the traditional comic is a dinosaur, that manga and video games are killing it, that kids don't want the backstory, superheroes are passe, and that comics will have to go online to survive. Well, first, doing them online is such an overpriced, sporadic fashion, uh, of course kids won't want that. If they can afford it, why would they, to only get bits of the story.

Second, manga is a fucking comic. Like it or not. The difference is they're translated from Japanese (and normally read "backwards" because of it) and the publishers were smart enough to get collections in bookstores long before the major American publishers were really pushing that. It's less a case of there being more manga because people like it more than a case of people liking manga more because it's more easily accessible. How many non-comic shops do you go to now that have comics? Okay, scratch any that only carry Archie and Veronica for some inexplicable reason off the list. Remember when even gas stations and some restaurants sold 'em?

Video games are huge. But video games are interactive. Interactivity is awesome, but people still like stories. You never hear anyone talking about the great story of a video game. They're far more likely to wipe out toys than comics because, face it, video games are sophisticated toys.

Kids don't want the backstory? Isn't that like saying kids don't want articulation in toys? Why does everyone forget how they were as a kid? You read a new issue, saw an editorial note referring to another issue, and you went out of your way to find that one. Then to get every issue referred to therein, and all issues in between. But the editorial note was axed (can't figure that one out, since, with eBay and online retailers, back issues are actually easier to find!). Yeah, maybe back issue sales are down, but I have to wonder if it's partly because there's no good reference as to which issues are important to which current stories. (You'd think that, with these full page intros that are essentially a wasted page, they could at least give "suggested reading" tips.)

Superheroes are passe? Don't they realize all this shit is cyclical, and dependent upon the quality? No one told David Chase that mobsters were passe in 1997 (which, seriously, they are--how powerful do you reckon the mafia is now?). Or maybe they did and he didn't listen. But we get Sopranos as a result. Fifteen years ago, I kept hearing Superman was passe because everyone wanted Punisher and Wolverine. And then those two died out (literally, in one case) a few years later. And then they came back a few years after that. If superheroes are so fucking passe, why does every superhero movie, no matter how shitty, end up in the ten highest grossing movies of the year every year?

Eh, I'm off on another tangent. Marvel's taking a first baby step here, one they probably should've done two years ago or so, but it's a start. The setup would be nice if you could download them, and nicer if stuff was actually cross-referenced (like a list of all Daredevil appearances in order, or all the chapters of the Clone Saga, or anything other than a stinking alphabetical list).

[RoIIo Tomassi]

I miss the *Editorial Note. I did exactly that; hunted down older issues to get the full story.

Avengers was doing something like that about five years ago. On the back page was a blurb box from "Jarvis" which broke down the issue by page and referenced every remark in a historical context.
IE Page 22-23. Beast is referring to the Attack of Graviton in issue 74 of Avengers. Black Knight's steed was originally Valkryie's. Stuff like that. It was a great idea, but was discontinued.

Wolverine:Origins was doing something similar when the book started, but got dropped about 8 issues in.

In this new age of hotlinks and cross referencing, I don't understand how bios at the comics websites aren't this intuitive and in depth. If you have a paragraph or a sentence about how Spider-Man fought Black Fox and stole his butter churn, then have a quick link imbedded so you can SEE the issue , when it was published, who wrote it, drew it, etc. For bigger characters with extensive publishing histories ( IE Spidey), do this

1. Quick massive overview hitting only the highest hilights of his career/life.
2. More extensive breakdown by decade, showcasing changes made from one editorial reign to the next.
3. Extensive breakdowns by year covering multiple books character had.

At each step, cross reference it with what was going on in the rest of the Universe. ( For instance, while [THIS] was happening in Spider-Man comics, [THIS] was going on in Avengers, and [THIS] was happening in X-Men, etc).

I've oftened thought it would be cool to do a comprehensive Historical Linear monthly title, recapping every year of the Marvel Universe, start with 1962 ( or actually have a couple of issues dealing with stuff "before" the first year) and breakdown every title they had showing the 12 monthly issues, plus limited series, and have slug boxes with retconned continuity titles like X -Men First Class, Untold Tales of Spidey, etc. Sadly, a book like this would start strong, then get cancelled somewhere in the 70's due to poor sales, and you would have only a slice of what would be a great compendium.

Fuck it, do the whole thing as a CD-Rom. It would be like one of those DK books but about a thousand times more all encompassing.

[anarky]

marvel.com doesn't even have bios anymore. They have a wikia. I'm totally serious. Goddammit, if I want info from the fucking publisher's site, it had better be from the publisher's mouth, and not a bunch of fanboys. Editable encyclopedias are fine for some things, but directly from the publisher?

Dude, if they don't know their own history (as it often seems they don't), they could have a contest where a fanboy gets a copy of every comic they've done (okay, probably mostly in reprints) in exchange for scouring the comics and developing the info for a kickass database within a year. Crazy as it sounds, I bet a lot of fans would jump at the chance.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

The glitch with that is, nobody wants to research and collate data on the more obscure characters, especially from the 70's and 80's. Or post visual images of the characters. Everybody wants to do hyper accurate Gambit profiles "And then on panel 6 of page 13, Gambit picks his ass, which is a direct reference to the 3rd panel of the 17th page of the previous issue when he was leaning up against the wall of..."

And then who at Marvel double checks the accuracy of any of the bios submitted by fans? Everybody raves about how the internet is the vanguard of this new age of communication, but nobody wants to staff properly to take advantage of it. Marvel! just hire a handful of guys to create a database that you won't be ashamed of.

[anarky]

This is going to sound nuts, but the internet is going to fizzle out within the next decade.

(Huh? Did he say that?)

It's not going to be gone. Not by any means. But, right now, for the first time in recorded history, there is a form of mass media that isn't run by a small group of rich people. People are posting stupid shit like blogs and youtube videos, thinking people give a shit about their million reviews on amazon.com.

The keys to the kingdom have been handed out to everyone, and they're using them. At some point, people will realize that 99% of the internet is stupid. And then no one will care about that 99% anymore, and it will be back to what it was before: a few rich and/or talented folks controlling everything except for localized conversations among groups of friends. Sure, if it works out, the groups of friends won't be restricted to an area of a few miles. The plus will be that the "few" will still be a fuckload more than the "few" of ten years ago, or even of today. And the talented among those will eventually overpower the rich ones who just want to shove crap down everyone's throats. One of the mega-conglomerates is going to crash hard within our lifetimes, and I wouldn't be surprised if several of them do.

If you think I'm totally full of shit, well, you might be right. But I'm going to point to e-mail as an example. Do you get as many stupid e-mail jokes as you did ten years ago? If you're like me and most everyone I know, you don't even get one-tenth as many. It was a novelty, but it outlived its usefulness. Already I hear that myspace is passe. Which is next: youtube, facebook, or google?

Just my prediction. No one can be sure right now what the long-term results of a sudden globalization of media (in terms of creators, not just viewers) will be.

I hope brick-and-mortar stores of all types will be able to find a niche. I don't want to do nothing but sit in front of a computer for the rest of my life.

[anarky]

So comic companies are finally, cautiously, embracing technology.

So why are most of them that are only offering their comics on the iPhone? Despite the hype around it, aren't you still just getting a relatively small niche market?

[vynsane]

i can see the logic. iphone iphreaks are looking to download whatever apps they can get. if it gets a comic in the hands of someone who never before considered reading a comic until it was in their phone, well, that's one more reader.

[anarky]

Yeah, but if you're going to go digital, why offer only one format? Oh yeah--iPhone apps can't be copied.

[vynsane]

ah, interesting... hadn't heard that. yeah, that makes sense, then.

[anarky]

I'm jumping to conclusions, so I may be wrong.

[vynsane]

but you're probably not wrong.

[anarky]

Because they're stupid.

It was announced earlier this week that the new Iron Man annual would be the first Marvel comic to be available digitally on the same day as the print comic (albeit on the iTunes Marvel app, since it seems everyone in the publishing biz thinks everyone has an iPad or iPhone, and no one has anything else).

Looks like the pricing was confirmed today. The comic will be $4.99, just a dollar more than many Marvel comics.

The digital version will be $1.99... per chapter. And broken into three chapters. In other words, $5.97, or $0.98 more than the physical, collectible comic book.

I'm guessing they want to point to this later and say, "Well, it didn't do as well as everyone anticipated, so, hey, we ain't doing it."

[Rollo Tomassi]

I don't know why the "brick and mortar" retailers are in such a tizzy. The comic book collecting community has been steadily shrinking over the past couple decades. Where print runs used to be in the hundred thousands for even poor selling titles, even the hottest books every month barely breach 100K, and on average are less than that. And for books that aren't the Big 2, there are probably only 10-20,000 copies of any book. If you factor in that most collectors buy more than one book a week, and that not every copy gets sold, the number of collectors in the U.S. is like 1/1000th of 1% of the population. So the people that are still going to the stores every month are pretty hardcore readers, and most likely won't change their purchasing habits based on something availible online or on the iPad. I doubt digital books are going to drive significant numbers of the 150,000 people who actually still collect monthlies out of the stores.

If anything, a wider availibility will pique curiosity levels and actually lure people back into stores.