Wednesday, July 02, 2008

That dude better watch himself..


Awesome!

Posted by chrishaley at 10:24 AM

Labels: , , ,

7 comments:

Dylan Todd said...

I got all excited and thought, "Finally! Comics are taking the internet seriously and releasing comics you can read on your iDevices or something like that! Smart move, Comics!" And then realized it was cartoons.

[ sigh ]

This industry is doomed.

Still, the cartoons thing is pretty awesome.

1:49 PM
Jason Quinones said...

the day comics start going straight to i-type-devices will be a sad for me!

how can somebody enjoy the artistic beauty of the printed comic page on on a screen 1 inch big!

i'm still mourning over the loss of cool record sized album cover art.

fuck i'm old...

2:44 PM
chrishaley said...

Dylan - That was exactly what I thought at first!
Also, get a load of that sweet Bat-art. Unless I miss my guess, that's Ryan Sook.

2:50 PM
chrishaley said...

Jason - Selling comics directly via digital means wouldn't replace printed comics and collections, they'd just be nice to have access to..
Oh!
What if when you bought the printed comic in a store, it gave you a code to enter (say on DC's website) for a digital copy of the same comic?!
Wouldn't that be awesome?!

2:52 PM
Dylan Todd said...

Somebody somewhere posited an eMusic-type subscription package, which I think makes sense. The pamphlets (and more likely trades) can still stay (though they're expensive, hard to purchase and not exactly environmentally responsible, but I'll play along) for those romantics like Jason, but I think if you're going to get people's eyeballs on your product, you need to make it cheaper to purchase and easier to get to.

If I could pay 10 bucks a month for 10 digital issues, I could easily justify that expense. As it stands now, I can't really afford comics regularly, so I either catch up via trades from the library or through more ... nefarious methods.

As far as comics on an iDevice, I'd like to see somebody try and make something that works on them. Why not?

McCloud suggest something similar in Reinventing Comics, where maybe each screen as you click through is a panel. It's still sequential art. Again, why not?

And with the iPhone dropping in price and Google's phone hitting the street any later this year, it'll be bigger screens for everybody, soon. Or at least eventually.

Welcome to future. Evolve or die. Right, music industry?

2:12 PM
chrishaley said...

Dylan - I think Marvel's digital comics service is okay in theory, but I want to own my digital copies as well. I don't want it DRMed to death. (Does that even make sense?)
If I have a digital copy of a comic, I should be able to take a hi-res page into PS and make the word balloons say inappropriate things if I so choose. I don't want to only be able to look at the comics in some kind of weird lo-res Flash viewer thing.

3:02 PM
Dylan Todd said...

From the descriptions I've gathered of Marvel's comics thing, it sounds sort of like the same thing they were giving away for free a few years ago. Under Jemas? I remember reading a buttload of Ultimate X-Men comics through their digital comics reader. The ads were annoying, but it was free, so ...

I know the catalog is deeper with their program, but is this radically different?

I agree with your DRM thing, too. I think the music industry (or at least the distributors: eMusic, iTunes, Amazon) is realizing that people do not want these restrictions on their files. I am avoiding iTunes lately for that very reason. DRM=SUK

It's time to let go a little, licensing-wise. The genie is out of the bottle. You're not getting it back in there. Your best bet is to start making outlandish wishes and hoping the genie's bored enough to grant them. But let's wish big, cuz you never know, right?

The market has already decided what it wants: low-to-no-cost digital comics. It's now up to comics to stop pretending that the Internet doesn't exist and come up with a fresh approach to marketing its wares.

And fresh approaches are always in short supply in Funnybookland.

Until then, the scanners will continue to scan, the torrents will continue to, uh, torr? and the pirates will continue to pirate.

I probably should have just written this up as a blog post, huh?

PS: my word verification is "uhgnhh" which sounds like a (dirty?) comic book sound effect.

3:47 PM

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