ITEM! Digital comics are the next big thing! That having been said, Dani Jones echoes my sentiments here: it is beyond stupid that DC and Marvel have their own apps for comic viewing on the internet. I’ve said before that comics seem determined to make every single mistake the music industry did enroute to finding a model for internet distribution that works, but really, I didn’t think they’d actually do it so literally – right now we’re apparently at the “every company wants its own service to beat all the other companies’ services” stage, which worked for music about as well as you’d expect given that nobody cared who Beyonce and Coldplay happened to be signed with; they just wanted to download the mp3s. Comics have a slight advantage over music in this regard in that some portion of the audience does care about which comic company produces what, but given that I’m pretty sure the majority of the population doesn’t know or care that Spider-Man and Batman are made by different companies, it doesn’t seem like a growth strategy.
Then again, it’s comics and audience growth is treated as sort of an optional extra. They seem to believe that internet distribution of comics are basically found money: put up comic on app for purchase, you’ve already paid for it, so if anybody buys the damn thing hey that’s five bucks in your pocket you didn’t have before. Until that philosophy changes I don’t think we’ll see a coherent one-stop “iTunes for comics.”
ITEM! Justice League: Lost Generation is actually quite good. No, really, it is. Most of the Brightest Day stuff is actively terrible schlock, but this book has been really upfront in saying “yeah, we’re doing a sort-of Justice League International reunion” and more importantly has a good deal of the tone you’d expect from that: it’s a good midpoint between the banter and the drama that were both emblematic of the Giffen/DeMatteis period. (Everybody remembers the BWA-HA-HAs and forgets that Giffen and DeMatteis had some truly scary villains in their run – the Gray Man, the Queen Bee and Dreamslayer were all really great bad guys, and let us not forget how awesome Despero was as the big bad of that comic.) Judd Winick is knocking his dialogue out of the park, the plot is interesting and non-derivative, and the new Rocket Red is hilarious. The only thing missing is Guy Gardner, but since he is busy over in the quickly-losing-steam Green Lantern books it is understandable that he is not around. I’m really enjoying this comic.
ITEM! Bob Harras is DC’s new editor-in-chief. I really have no opinion about this one way or the other. Some people are enthusiastic about it because they like him; others are horrified because his tenure as EIC at Marvel resulted in a number of creative disasters. At this point I think DC’s level of creative-disaster-ness is about maxed out, so even if the Clone Saga and similar things were entirely Harras’ fault, I don’t think he can make things worse, so why not give him a shot?
ITEM! Zack Snyder to direct next Superman movie. I considered doing a fake script for it, but then I realized all I would have to do is take a bunch of panels from widely-loved Superman comics and paste them together in rough chronological order.
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What made the Giffen/DiMatteis JLA/JLI era so great was that they struck a good balance between humor and drama, using the drama to keep the humor from becoming ridiculous and the humor to keep the drama from becoming overwhelming. As much as I usually don’t care that much for Johns, I have to admit that in Lost Generation he’s hitting on all cylinders.
Clone Saga wasn’t Harras’s fault (except maybe the ending); he became EiC about six months before it ended.
The question I have about digital comics is, would it actually be better to wait for someone else to make that marketplace for Marvel and DC? In the post you yourself linked, she noted that the default iBooks app for reading on the iPad is not the best format for comics. In that sense, Marvel and DC taking a first fumbling step towards digital comics distribution seems like a better idea than holding off until it’s just right.
However, as I am neither a computer expert nor a marketing guy, it’s quite possible there is a much more elegant solution that I’m missing, so I freely admit this comment is at least partially out of ignorance.
I actually have the Comixology app for my phone. It has both DC and Marvel comics available for it. The DC and Marvel apps are just rebranded versions of it; the same comics are available using the same program layout and the same panel-to-panel transitions. As an experiment, I just checked to make sure a random comic was available on both (the ten page Jimmy Olson story from Action Comics) and – yep. So Marvel and DC don’t really have their own apps – or at the least, they are not confined to their own apps in any significant way.
Comixology is also viewable on the web at comics.comixology.com – a good sign, since it means that the Comixology people understand that the most important thing for content delivery is getting a lot of content and getting it onto as many devices as you can.
That’s not quite how it works for the iPad apps. Yes, Marvel and DC have digital apps, but the Comixology app contains everything the DC one does (you can purchase in either) and most of what the Marvel one does (you have to purchase separately). The other Comixology-based apps (like Boom) work the way the DC app does. Plus, because the DC app is rated 12+ by Apple, things like Sandman can only be bought in the Comixology app (which is 18+).
Even weirder than Marvel’s separated content thingy are Dark Horse and IDW. Dark Horse only has the first Hellboy and Helm trades in Comixology. The rest of their stuff is available directly through iTunes, which I assume gives them more money per individual item sold, but maybe cuts down on their visibility (or possibly doesn’t). For iPad, it’s only Sin City and 300; for iPhone there’s more variety (Umbrella Academy and the Mass Effect tie-ins and whatnot).
IDW appears to distribute exclusively with iVerse, which I’ve found crash-happy in the past and whose store seems to not work as well; and then further fragments things by having specific apps for its big licenses.
For Superman, you left out a bunch of gratitous, stupid slow-mo violence dragging down the whole damn movie, boring me to tears. Oh, and Lois Lane will be extremely busty. Zach Snyder- Frank Miller for the film world. Ugh.
“Magic Love Hose” and “Mark Cook” both beat me to it, but Comixology does carry DC (and Marvel, but it is not available on the web). It also carries some other stuff like Image, Boom, Archie, and others.
Graphic.ly does carry Marvel, but only a few titles and I’m not sure wether it has an IPhone/Ipad app.
The Desktop App (using Adobe Air) works, but it’s really slow.
Hear hear, re: JLI Drama: “There will be no more deaths today, Despero. Except, perhaps… yours.”
Still one of my favorite all time lines of any comic book ever.
So wait, someone who’s more versed in this crap explain to me: if comics are available via iTunes, what app do you need to view them?
And is there an iPad app that would allow indie creators to upload their stuff for purchase?
Generation Lost is definitely the best thing to come out of Brightest Day (though a relaunched Birds of Prey is also quite nice and I have to give Tony Bedard props for finally doing away with the annoyingness that is the Alpha Lenterns over in the GLC book.)
@Prankster: If the comic is available directly on iTunes, then it is in the app store as a standalone application. For example: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/frank-millers-300/id377812038?mt=8
Otherwise, you need to get one of the many, many other Comic reading apps – Comixology, Comics+, Graphic.ly, etc etc.
I’m not aware of any app allowing an indie creator to upload their own stuff; they could always create their own app and submit it to Apple review, who may or may not allow it based on how a random reviewer is feeling on that particular day.
Actually, it looks like Comic Viewer supports CBR/CBZ format, so there’s that. All I, as a creator, would need is a PDF or CBR/CBZ viewer app that lets you download whatever and view it. The bottleneck appears to be comics apps that only allow certain content, which is insanely lame–isn’t the whole point of digital delivery that there shouldn’t be any gatekeepers?
Prodigal: Unless you meant to say Winnick or DeMatteis you don’t have to admit anything – Johns has nothing to do with it.
Love this post and the discussion. It is so on point. Right now, the digital market is a bit of a mess. There are two major vendors (Comixology and us-Graphicly), iVerse provides the IDW app, Comixology provides the Marvel and DC apps, they have some comics on the web, we have some comics on the desktop (we do have an iPad and iPhone app – soon Android and web).
It is exactly like early in the life of digital music. The labels didnt want to hurt the record stores or the direct market. They felt they could do it “better themselves.” And what happened? Napster. It completely changed digital music. It wasnt until Apple with iTunes that there was a real business model behind selling music.
So whats going to happen in the digital comics space? I hope not a Napster that disallowed labels and creators to generate direct revenue. I hope that publishers see the world as it is now, that digital sales could lead to many other revenue opportunities.
Until then, the only people that suffer are the people who want to get a comic that exists on only one platform. How is that good for the industry?
We need a “mp3” for the comic industry (not necessarily CBR/CBZ, which are nothing more than glorified PDFs). We need something that provides the level of protection for the creators that are producing some of the best content in years!
Would love to talk more about it – feel free to call me at 720-248-8499 or via GTALK at micah@graphicly.com
Harras’s Marvel tenure did have its highs and lows, even though a lot of people remember it really badly.
He DID reinvigorate a lot of Marvel’s non-X and Spider characters, and I appreciated “back to basics” didn’t mean throwing away characters that appeared after the 60’s.
Of course, it was also a major contributor in Marvel losing its way in the first place. Particularly, his Avengers run which took Jack Kirby mythopeia characters and turned them into quasi-grim and gritty 90’s heroes.
I also think he was way unfairly fired over the X-Men movie thing. As we can see, Marvel hasn’t exactly spent the decade doing a good job translating film to comic success, often with bigger hits than the X-Men series. (Which, while successful, often found itself in the mainstream’s blind spot)
To me, Generation Lost is just ruined by being focused entirely on the evil Maxwell Lord. I still don’t like how the character went from “ambiguous double-dealer” to “evil mastermind who would twirl his mustache if he had one”.
See I get the sense that while we probably won’t see Max redeemed in Generation Lost, we will be getting some justification for his shift in character.
We already HAVE a justification for his change in character.
Superboy Prime punched reality. This was a plot point during Infinite Crisis that also explained why he wasn’t a robot any more.
“This was a plot point during Infinite Crisis that also explained why he wasn’t a robot any more.”
You know, the sad part is that this kind of thing has started to spread beyond comics. “A wizard did it.”
“This was a plot point during Infinite Crisis that also explained why he wasn’t a robot any more.”
That was in Booster Gold, I think, toward the end of the Johns run. Getting a new body was in some way contingent on working with Checkmate, I think?
Micah:
Calling cbr/z files glorified PDFs is rather strange. Aren’t they just zip files filled with jpgs? That seems pretty different to what PDFs are.
But to be honest zip files filled with jpgs is basically all I want from digital comics.
Bob Harras as new EIC for DC? Since I think DC sucks, this fills me with joy. :p
CBR is a Rar file that has had its extension renamed, while CBZ is the same for a Zip file.
I don’t think there is any standard for the actual file types inside the compressed file. JPGs just happen to be a common file choice in general. But you can also find PNG, GIF, and probably anything else as well.
The whole “Max is evil” thing came out of nowhere and frankly makes Wonder Woman look like an idiot for not doing any research before she helped him cosplay as the Amazing Screw-On Head.
Max is a shady guy who has done some pretty nasty things for the sake of the greater good*. However EVERY SINGLE TIME** he’s done something outright evil he’s been brainwashed or possessed. Who’s to say he didn’t kill Ted and brainwash Superman while under the influence of Brother Eye? Isn’t Eye’s entire MO that he turns people into cyborg puppets? Max was already half way there!
*Mostly stuff Prof X does all the damn time and hardly ever gets called out on.
**You could make the argument that killing that guy in his backstory was free will but – considering that he immediately met up with that supercomputer that enslaved him for a year – you could just as easily make the argument that it wasn’t.
Also, what’s with blaming the Clone Saga* on people who aren’t responsible for it? The story was Terry Kavanaugh’s idea; not Howard Mackie’s**. Even then Kavanaugh conceived it as a six month story – not a two year story – and left before it was over. It was the editors under Tom Defalco’s regime that let it go on forever and it was the editors under Bob Harris*** that ended it.
*Which went on too long but wasn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.
**Also, contrary to popular belief, Mackie didn’t write the whole thing either. He wrote 20-25% at the absolute most.
***Granted those guys also gave us the Byrne/Mackie reboot which was far worse than the CS. The year in between the two was awesome though.