Well, Marvel Comics dropped the hammer, and the interblogs are abuzz over their fancy announcement of offering comics online. And rightly so, considering this is something many of us – certainly including me – have agitated for for quite some time.

Things about their model are good and others are not. They’re only dipping their toe in the pool right now (2,500 comics is a drop in the pond, and “twenty new issues every week” doesn’t even cover a week’s worth of new releases). That makes sense considering how bold a move this is, but it’s disappointing to see such a small initial offering being treated as a holy-shit big deal. Wisely, it looks like Marvel will be offering a portion of the content for free in the first-hit-is-always-free method.

And the reader? Yeah, it could be awesome, but I’m not big on a web-based Flash app for something of this nature. I understand that Marvel probably doesn’t want to go big with their own downloadable application expressly for browsing comics stored at a central database – at least not yet – but again, it’s a case of “I understand their caution; it’s just irritating” because this sort of move is now long overdue for the Big Two. (And heck, Dark Horse and Image too, although they don’t have the capital required to really do this on their own. If Marvel is smart, as soon as is possible they’ll be offering other companies the opportunity to E-publish their comics on Marvel’s comic database.) It’s a shame, though, because I was hoping that when this happened, there’d be an option for e-reader tablets.

But the most important element of this model, the one that was absolutely key for it to be a going concern, was pricing. And in this respect, Marvel has done exactly the right thing by offering a relatively cheap subscription model for access to the database. Ten bucks a month for unlimited access, five if you go longterm? That’s a book and a half per month. If they get, say, a mere five thousand subscribers (and five thousand is a very conservative number for initial signups for this service, I think), that’s fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue, which is more than Marvel takes home from most of their individual mid-sales-range comics.

I know people wanted “iTunes for comics,” but reasonably that just wasn’t likely at a price people were willing to pay and would likely require some sort of at least minor protection (a la iTunes) preventing people from easily trading comics online amongst themselves. And, once that was in place, Marvel would also have to figure out a way from killing the secondary market entirely (and likely with it a large number of comics stores).

Bottom line? The service is priced right once the library expands, it can be expanded as Marvel sees fit, and the technical issues (such as comics availability and browser interface) can be tinkered with easily enough when necessary. It’s not quite a slam dunk, but I don’t think this ends up being anything but a winner for Marvel in the long run.

My weekly TV column up at Torontoist, as it is every Monday until month five of the writer’s strike and all I have to talk about is Return Of Farmer Wants A Wife 2.

Less amusing than my column is the debate I participated in re: voluntary black-only schools in Toronto, but it’s worth reading.

Found in a Pyjamas Media column’s comments:

I’m not sure you do. Hollywood has made utter garbage at least 90% of the time for at least 10 years, if not more. I will provide just one factoid. In the last two decades, more actresses have won the academy award for portraying a prostitute than for portraying any other profession. Why do current Hollywood writers have such a obsession with prostitution?

First off, I went and checked, because I was pretty sure that “factoid” was not actually, like, true. And of course it isn’t. Only one woman has won an Academy Award in the last twenty years for portraying a prostitute, and it’s kind of a stretch to say that because the woman in question was Charlize Theron for her work as Aileen Wuornos in Monster, and the most distinguishing aspect of the character was not that she was a prostitute but that she was a serial killer.

In comparison: two cops (Helen McDormand in Fargo and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs) and three rich British ladies (Helen Mirren in The Queen, Emma Thompson in Howard’s End, and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love). WHY does Hollywood continue to glamourize cops and rich British ladies? WHY?

Secondly, though, I wanted to just make my general disgust with this line of argument known. You can argue against the strike in good faith (and Brad Fox has done so, both here in the comments and at his own joint), even though I won’t agree with you. But the line of argument advanced above – and it’s easily the majority opinion among those (mostly conservative) commenters is “I don’t like it so they don’t deserve anything.”

And that’s just abhorrent. It doesn’t matter if you think Hollywood makes a lot of crap; they also make about a trillion dollars a year in revenue, so the question of whether you personally are invested in the product is moot. It’s both stupid and insulting to think that you have to like a business to determine whether or not its practices are sound.

The question is simple: do writers, having helped to produce a product that is financially successful, deserve a share of that financial success? Answer that question. Jesus, how is this hard?

Let me be plain as possible before I start giving you links:

The WGA writers’ strike is practically the definition of a just strike. This is a battle over corporations earning billions of dollars and unfairly refusing to give those most responsible for the creation of the content which mandates their profits their proper due.

Most screenwriters aren’t rich. Yes, the average salary of a Hollywood screenwriter is $200,000. However, that figure is overinflated by the high end of rich screenwriters, the tiny minority who make millions per picture, the Tina Feys and the Steve Carells. (Both of whom, I might add, are striking.) The median salary for a screenwriter is about twenty thousand dollars. So this isn’t a battle between “billionaires and millionaires,” much like the last actors’ strike, where everybody focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary and ignored the fact that most actors, stunningly enough, are not Leonardo DiCaprio.

So, links:

– John August explains the basics.
– John Rogers lays out some excellent metaphor (“that tiger went tiger“) and some mild prediction.
– Ken Levine provides some perspective.
– Rick Schimpf quotes Micah Wright’s now-infamous “Screwed Over For Spongebob” post and adds some commentary. Also, he provides a link to this informative Youtube.
– An account of what happened at the eleventh-hour negotiations.
– Chris Kelly explains residuals.
– Related to the previous item: Mark Evanier explains why residuals aren’t just fair but also encourage writers to perform better.
– Brian K. Vaughn weighs in.
– And finally, Craig Newmark asks the pressing question on everybody’s minds.

Uh, my weekly television column at Torontoist has been up for two days…. just pretend I posted this on Monday, will you?

As the American healthcare system continues to disintegrate, people are forced to make life choices that might otherwise seem foolish.

(Seriously: she has brain lesions for which she cannot get treatment. What the hell.)

…but I’m not sure if this guy pulls it off.

The brilliant and original XKCD is currently trailing the hackish, never-ever-even-remotely-funny (and often disturbingly sexist) Day By Day in the 2007 Weblog Awards by about 400 votes, and this cannot be borne.

Go now, and vote for XKCD. Vote every day. Tell everybody else to vote as well. Because a comic strip that is actually funny should win the damn award.

(For those wondering, Penny Arcade isn’t even close.)

Well, this game would probably be very addictive to me if I didn’t have Team Fortress 2.

Ah, sweet, sweet Team Fortress 2. I do so love shooting people.

So you say to me, “I like search engines and all, but what I really wish is that I could have a search engine endorsed by KISS. I bet KISS would provide me with an excellent search engine.”

And I say “have I got something for you.“

If you’ve been looking for a good summary of scholarly opinion on the political future of Iraq, you could do a lot worse than this post by Marc Lynch.

Warning: the conclusions derived are, for the most part, not good. But they’re thorough and well-written.

UPDATE: Also, this thorough explanation of whywaterboarding is torture and therefore both immoral and useless should be considered required reading.

Dozens of lobsters escape a supermarket in Germany.

After a skip week due to dental pain issues (like “being high on codeine for most of a week”), my TV column at Torontoist is once again up and running.