Coming Soon To A Computer Screen Near You: Si Spurrier's Urban Fairytale

Earlier this week, Avatar announced Disenchanted, a new webcomic by Si Spurrier (he's having a big couple of weeks!) and German Erramouspe. The pair will publish twelve pages weekly, and then those pages will be gathered up and put into physical format about twice a year, a system that Avatar, and Spurrier, has already had a certain degree of success with. This sort of serialization is intriguing to me, because it doesn't follow the model of a syndicated newspaper strip, out of which grows the publishing strategies and schedules of most webcomics. Instead, Disenchanted will more closely resemble a weekly digital comic book; a certain number of pages with a clear beginning, middle, and end, comics serialized like television is serialized. This arrangement seems like it might be more narratively satisfying, somehow, although it will be interesting to see how exactly Spurrier and Erramouspe break their story up.

Anyway, Spurrier's description of the project should get you hooked, just in case you don't get off on the relationship between publishing strategies and narrative structure like I do:

Listen: I’m not going to lie to you. There are faeries in it. Actual one-inch-tall faeries with pretty wings, pale skin, a pathological obsession with knotting human hair, an addict’s approach to teeth and all the rest of that floaty pseudo-Victoriana pre-Cottingley arsewater. But don’t panic. What we’ve got here are non-glittery, non-wanky, non-wish-granting faeries. What we’ve got here are substance-abusing, bar-brawling, civil-rights-demanding, murder-committing faeries. The good kind. The old kind. What we’ve got here is a miniature city made of scavenged soda cans, cereal boxes, dirty syringes and condoms. A city hidden beneath the streets of London. What we’ve got here are pixies, brownies, kobolds, leprechauns, boggarts, goblins and all the rest of the twee “Little People” of yesteryear who, despite being forgotten by mankind, have been dragged along by time and trend into the unsentimental Urban Century.

Just like the rest of us.

Me Gusta Indeed

Well, here's our answer to yesterday's mystery:

Welcome to Panel Syndicate, where artist Marcos Martin and writer Brian K. Vaughan deliver original comics directly to readers around the world, who pay whatever the hell they want for each DRM-free issue. Our first new storyline is THE PRIVATE EYE, a forward-looking mystery we created with colorist Muntsa Vicente. Set in a future where privacy is considered a sacred right and everyone has a secret identity, The Private Eye is a serialized sci-fi detective story for mature readers. You can download our 32-page first issue right now, for any price you think is fair. 100% of your payments go directly into our greedy mitts and will help fund the rest of a story that we're both very proud of (we hope there will be around 10 issues total; an old-school "maxiseries!"), so thanks for reading...
                                                                                          BRIAN & MARCOS

Me gusta indeed. Its nice to see that I was about 75% right yesterday. More once I have some time to click through it, probably tonight or tomorrow. 

The Improvised Explosive Destruction of Quality of Life

"BOOM!", from CartoonMovement.com

A website now exists that is long, long overdue: CartoonMovement.com, a site solely for journalism-webcomics & webcartoons. (With an accompanying Twitter account! @cartoonmovement) The concept of journalism in the form of comics-- pioneered largely by the intrepid Joe Sacco (the comicsmith behind the brilliant and achingly painful "Palestine")-- has finally gone digital and there is fine work being done over there.

For example? The recent post entitled "BOOM!" written by David Axe (@daxe) and drawn by Ryan Alexander-Tanner (@ohyesverynice). A story about a single explosion on a lonely road in Afghanistan. Axe has done a marvelous job of reportage in recounting what it felt like to be isolated with only a few soldiers on a desert road and of the painful alienating effects drifting into his civilian life from the minor brain damage received as a parting gift from the incident. Alexander-Tanner's cartoony style is awkward at times but he translates Axe's experience into his rounded-black-lines-on-white world with grace.

The storytelling is focused and small when it needs to be small and encompasing and large when it needs to be large:

And effectively so.

The two tiny plates of metal colliding to create the circuit that sends the electricity to the cocktail that ignites and explodes. Action. Reaction. Panel 1. Panel 2.

The storytelling on the next page, in which we experience the explosion a second time, from within the armored vehicle-- and within the outlines of the "BOOM" sound effect-- is masterful. Not only dominating the page, but the six characters present in the main cabin of the vehicle, and the piece as a whole.

We must choose to care about these things, we must put our eyes on the situations unfolding from the choices of the few as they effect the many, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant the effect to one individual's quality of life. Comics like this one help me to do that better.

All of which leads me to the thought: Yes, this is good. Yes, this is important.

You should read it.

~ @JonGorga

Words and Pictures with Gabriel Hardman

At last weekend's New York Comic Con, I did some reporting for Bleeding Cool. They were kind enough to let me mirror some of the interviews that I did for them here at THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT! This is Gabriel Hardman, talking about his brand new Secret Avengers gig, why he loves drawing Beast and his work for the digital comics platform Double Feature. It was originally posted to Bleeding Cool on 10/16/11

JK: First, could you talk a little bit about how you ended up on Secret Avengers?

GH: I got a call from Lauren Sankovitch, who had been the associate editor on Agents of Atlas, which I drew a couple years ago, and she’s great, and I had worked with Rick Remender briefly on Doctor Voodoo, I did a little flashback sequence, so we had experience working together and I was interested in the group of characters and working with Rick again, and it was as simple as that.

JK: Could you talk about how you’re approaching the new series?

GH: I’m in the process of figuring that out right now. I mean, I’m drawing the first issue, and I’m always looking for a way to ground the characters in a real world, but then have room for it to go crazy and be big and science fiction.

JK: Is there a character you’re particularly excited to be drawing?

GH: I like doing Beast. There’s always something interesting about characters like that, that you have to make look real and work but not, you know, look mundane. It has to be exciting and fun. So, Beast and, to some degree, Hawkeye, as well. I read West Coast Avengers when I was a kid, and some of the other characters were in other Eighties books, the New Defenders and stuff like that that I enjoyed, so there’s a certain amount of familiarity and sentimental feelings about them.

JK: Can you talk a little bit about your work for Double Feature, the “The Liar” short story?

GH: Yeah. My wife and I wrote it, I drew it, and it's a kind of crazy espionage thing. It’s an eight-page story that you can get through the Double Feature iPad app, which has a lot of extras and extra functionality to it, you can see my process, the pencils and stuff like that, so you’re getting a lot for 99 cents. We want to do at least a couple more short stories and very likely there’ll be a creator owned graphic novel.

JK: Does the process feature of Double Feature make you feel exposed at all?

GH: Honestly, I don’t mind it. In general, I don’t like people seeing the process stuff, because I feel like it should all be sort of magic, you know? I think it's better if people don’t know how things are done. But the way that the Double Feature app works is so good and thorough that instead of being some half-assed sort of thumbnail printed somewhere that is out of context. This is everything in context, so you can really see the process of it. That made it feel like it was worthwhile.

Quote for the Week 6/2/11

Technology is inevitable... so we’d better look at it as a good thing and go with the flow—or better yet, stay ahead of the curve and master it.

~ Stan Lee (@TheRealStanLee) in an interview with Success Magazine

Timely advice, given the recent announcement from DC Comics concerning digital comics.

(And yes there was a little unintentional historical comics joke in that last statement. Try googling "marvel comics stan lee hired" if you don't get it!)

~@JonGorga

DC to Begin Simultaneous Digital Release for Major Titles

Today may be a big day in the history of the American comics industry. Just a few hours ago, DC Comics announced on their blog DC: The Source (and through their Twitter account @DC_NATION) that starting Wednesday, August 31st of this year the publisher will release "all of its superhero comic book titles digitally the same day as in print".

That is to say that anybody who doesn't live near a comic-book store (or anybody who doesn't want to bother WALKING to a comic-book store) will be able to download to an iPad or similar digital reading device the last issue of the "Flashpoint" mini-series and the first issue of the new volume of "Justice League" the day they are available in print. (This will be the beginning of a slow relaunch with new volumes of all of DC's major titles. A new series will be relaunched with a new #1 issue every week for a calendar year afterwards. [CORRECTION 6/2/11: All fifty-two new volume #1 issues will be released in FIVE WEEKS.])

[via @f_francavilla via @DC_NATION via DC: The Source blog]

My friend David Brustlin (@davidbrustlin) was just marveling last night at the fact that a prose novel he's pre-ordered will be available for him to read on his Kindle the second it goes on the market. The same is now true of DC's comics as it already is of publisher Archie Comics' titles.

When interviewed by Newsarama.com after Archie's similar announcement in January, Mike Wellman, co-owner of Manhattan Beach, California's store The Comic Bug said "If it was Marvel, DC or any of the other bread-and-butter companies, I'd be much more concerned."

Today's post from DC ends with the sentence: "This year, make history with us."

But, tellingly, the comments for the entire blog are closed and have been for the month of May. Could the company have done so in advance consideration of backlash from this major announcement? Certainly the brick-and-mortar comics retailers are not going to be very happy to hear this news. Marvel's and DC's weekly superhero releases form a large portion of their income and the approximate six-month-delay both companies held up has been perceived as the major barrier to the complete cannibalization of their print sales. That combined with the retailers' (and my own shared) belief that a great number of readers enjoy the tactile feeling of print too much to read more than a very few new titles in e-book form.

The next few months will tell us how true those perceptions are.

~ @JonGorga

Archie Comics Embraces Digital As Immediate Delivery System

In the world we are slowly creeping towards, print will be a niche market for alternative communication seekers, collectors, and history buffs. All mainstream media will be provided digitally.

Well, at least that's a distinct possibility. But if it is a possibility, and it is, the print publishers of the world would do well to branch out now and branch out bravely. One comics publisher is, and has been for several years now.

Quite honestly, this is some remarkable recent news we missed:

"Beginning in April, Archie Comics will offer digital versions of its comics on the same day that the print editions arrive on newsstands. The company will be starting with six monthly titles: Archie, Archie & Friends, Betty, Veronica, Betty and Veronica, and Jughead.

“We have a very exciting little business here,” said Jon Goldwater, the co-chief executive of Archie Comics. “We have to keep figuring out ways of pushing it forward.” ... “The more I thought about it, and the more I saw the sales, I realized these formats aren't competitive, they are supportive,” Mr. Goldwater said."

~ from The New York Times Arts Beat blog, George Gene Gustines, January 12, 2011

And the digital edition's price will be a full dollar less per issue. $1.99 instead of $2.99.

Those six titles are the series the company itself described later as "its 6 core titles" in the recent press release wherein it announced that the same material will be offered through the third-party digital comics publisher Graphic.ly as well as in Archie's own downloadable iPad app. ("Archie continues to lead the comics industry in embracing the digital medium, as well as making it easier than ever for our fans to get their favorite Archie comics." (ArchieComics.com blog, February 16, 2011.) Yeah. Pretty much. Couldn't have said it better.

The move to place their most popular titles in a digital format represents a seriousness in the purpose of this initiative. The fact that Archie Comics, among the oldest publishers of comic-books in America as well as the most often derided, has been the first in America to step up and accept digital is nothing short of remarkable.

That said, will there be a backlash from comics shops fearing a cannibalization of their sales? Probably not. Why? Because comic shops no longer sell many Archie comic-books. Archie has long been a mainstay of the newsstand, itself a shrinking market for the past twenty years. It was pointed out to me by a friend and manager of a NYC comics shop: 'Of course Archie has gone digital before everyone else. They had the least to lose.' This is probably partially true.

In his interview with Ron Richards of iFanboy, Co-CEO Goldwater said: "We value our partners in the direct market [i.e. the non-newsstand, comics retail shops market] ... We see the print and digital reader as two different groups, with some overlap. Some people enjoy going to the shop each week and picking up the hard copies of their titles. Others enjoy the convenience of downloading titles via their mobile devices or tablets." This is probably partially true.

I say: Remarkable nonetheless.

~@JonGorga

P.S. ~ By the way, again we had a big digital move forward announced on a New Comic-Book Wednesday, i.e. the day of the week new comics arrive at comic shops. I'm beginning to realize that's more than coincidence. Drive a few curious people into comics retail shops to see the physical copies on the day you announce your digital move? Very smart comics publishing world. Very smart.

The Digital Divide

I have fallen really and truly behind in my Captain America reading. Every month I buy Brubaker's monthly and somehow, some horrible how, I end up with it at the bottom of my pile and it never gets read. This is a great and true travesty- those Captain America comics are surely among the great comics of our time, as they have been since Brubaker took over the title five years ago. To be completely honest, I miss the Captain a great deal, and one of my comics related new years resolutions was to make sure I read as much good Cap stuff as there is, on time and monthly. I want to do this partially so I can review it and consider it critically (I do, after all, have aspirations towards being the world's foremost Captain America scholar), but mostly because I want to read the stuff; although I've mostly moved away from character based purchasing, in the case of Captain America (and sometimes Iron Fist) I just can't help myself from wanting to read all of it, even the bad stuff (and some of it is really bad). Luckily for me, some of the Cap stuff that's coming out appears both great and essential: I'm trade-waiting Mark Waid's "Man Out of Time" mini, although Gorga has had some great things to say about it, and with the upcoming movie and the character's upcoming 70th birthday, there's bound to be more good stuff to come.

Including, of all things, Jason Aaron and Ron Garney's Ultimate Captain America. Aaron has slowly and sneakily become one of my favorite writers: between Scalped and Punishermax he's written some of the best comics of the last couple of years and has even managed to get me interested in characters as lame as Ghost Rider and as ubiquitous as Wolverine (every time I pass a new issue of the current "Mr. Logan Goes To Hell" arc I have to try really hard not to break down and buy all the issues so far. On that day you will know I have failed, for the cries of joy and despair will be spread across the four winds) and I was pumped to see him write my favorite character. Even better? Ultimate Captain America was going digital day and date.

Some of you might already know this, but back in October I cracked the screen of my laptop by falling on top of it (the story is very short and pretty funny, but I'm not going to speak of the incident anyway) and solved my problem by hooking up my laptop to a monitor on my desk and buying an iPad for mobile use. It didn't hurt, of course, that I could buy and read comics on the thing. I'm not sure I could ever give up on physical format comics (I'm twenty, but I still buy vinyl!) and particularly not at the prices their being offered for at the moment, but I'm always up for trying something new and interesting- it helps that comics look great on the thing, without the limitations of printing and absurdly high-res.

In fact, I was so interested in the way comics look on my fancy new toy that it was inevitable, given my interest in the comics consumption problem, that I would also become interested in the differences between the two formats. I proposed to Gorga that we each review the whole of the series in one of the formats, and use it as a springboard to talk about the pros and cons of each format. I was more excited for this series of posts than I was for the comic itself, and so when the release date rolled around on Wednesday, I was pumped. I booted my iPad, logged onto the Marvel comics app and...

I found that Ultimate Captain America was missing.

And then I realized that Jonathan Hickman and Carlos Pacheco's seriously brilliant Ultimate Thor (featuring Ultimate Captain Britain wearing a lab coat and his costume AT THE SAME TIME!), also announced as day and date, hadn't shown up the last week in December, when it came out in physical stores everywhere. That comic has had some distribution problems of its own, so I wasn't that worried about it, but it hasn't appeared since either. I don't want to speculate too much on why this is, but I'm having trouble believing that Marvel is going back on their day and date announcements, particularly in the wake of the recent news about the death of Ultimate Spider Man. It's too bad, too: starting off their same day digital release program with two minis that were likely to be very popular was a smart move for digital readers, although it may have damaged some relations with physical retailers, but promising something that never appears is a good way to turn readership off of digital comics entirely, particularly given what seems to be a wide preference for comics you can read off of paper and prices that are simply too high for a product that only exists digitally.

I hope to see the minis soon- I would like to read them, after all, and am getting tired of waiting. It's a fast moving comics business and I wouldn't want minis that are deserving of attention to fall in the same spot in my stack as my poor ignored Ed Brubaker Captain America comics.

Marvel Day-And-Dates The Ultimate "Death of Spider-Man"

What does THAT mean? Just that Marvel Comics announced plans this morning for a further flirtation with simultaneous digital and paper release of a comic-book at the same paper cost ($3.99) and this time with all the issues in a short but high-profile crossover 'event': namely the "Death of Spider-Man" from their Ultimate Comics imprint.

Those easily alarmed take NOTE: The Peter Parker in "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" isn't the same Peter Parker in "the Amazing Spider-Man". "Twice the Spider-Man!" said the marketing people in the year 2ooo and we've had two separate ongoing universes ever since.

And in the words of those marketing people: "Marvel is proud to announce that every issue of the hotly-anticipated DEATH OF SPIDER-MAN will be available day & date on the Marvel Comics app, available via iTunes for the iPad, iPhone & iPod touch."

CBR.com's article by Kiel Phegley reprinted that press release with a few comments from the main writer of the upcoming story, Brian Michael Bendis, and the interesting comment: "the issues mark the first event comics – a driving force in comics retail for the past decade – to be offered day-and-date online, though Marvel has been experimenting with high profile releases in this format including the recent 'Invincible Iron Man' Annual and the 'Ultimate Thor' mini series."

The first issues in the "Death of Spider-Man" story are to release in comics retail stores and on the iPad, in February of 2o11.

[via ComicBookResources.com]

And what of those comics retailers? Should they be worried? The crossover 'event' has meant big bucks for them for a long time. I've written on this very site about how much better suited the crossover is to digital simply because it the eliminates the: "Damn! I won't know how this story ends without reading a DIFFERENT comic-book? What the HELL!?" Press a button, problem solved much faster. Or could this prove one of the failings of digital comics? No ACTUAL HUMAN BEING to point to a comic-book and say: "Oh, I've already flipped through that, if you want the whole story you'll have to read THIS first."

However, whether or not "Death of Spider-Man" is a crossover 'event' at all is questionable to me because one of their defining characteristics is the multiplicity of inter-locking comic-book series. Not just one or two. I think one character (or set of characters) appearing in another's book is a guest appearance, two sets of characters appearing in the other's books for one story is a crossover, but a crossover 'event' requires a wider net. Those definitions are far from all-encompassing, I know, but are worth mulling over if for no other reason than nobody else seems to! Why has Phegley specified that "Death of Spider-Man" is an "event" not a "crossover event"? What does he mean when referring to other comics as "high profile" as opposed to "events"?

Is the entire family of terms: crossover, event, and crossover 'event', just marketing hype pure and simple? Perhaps this is all best left to the comics historians of the next generation to worry about, because by just about any definitions you can't call it a crossover 'event' until it's over and done. We will all have to wait and see.

~@JonGorga

P.S. ~ Josh and I have a little plan in the works to probe the nature of digital day-and-date releases in a series of reviews in the coming year!

About Your Paper Renewal?

I wrote an editorial not a long while ago subtitled "The Death of the Great Prints" about the distinct possibility that within our lifetimes all comics publishing will be mainly digital in nature. Every single last publisher will have either taken a leap of faith into the digital ether or perished gasping in trying to sell a physical object to a market that's no longer there.

BUT...

At least one publisher is making that great leap BACK into print. There were about 150 issues of the original print comic-book since the inaugural issue of "Dark Horse Presents" in 1986. The company made a dramatic change when Dark Horse partnered with website MySpace.com to create "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" and there were 36 issues of the MySpace version of the anthology. The last one hit the web in July 2o1o and now, starting in 2o11, "Dark Horse Presents" will be a print comic-book once again after 3 years online. Editor Scott Allie said: "When we launched "MDHP," MySpace was the world's leading website, at a time that you could actually have a clear-cut world's leading website, and we felt that we had the opportunity to do something exciting and new. MySpace was the perfect place to get tons of attention" and publisher Mike Richardson said: "We were excited about [it] because it took comics to a much larger audience". Comics will be available (still for free!) on Dark Horse's website here.

[via Newsarama and CBR/CBR]

Presumably, the company thinks that without one website reigning supreme they would do better to bring the successful anthology back to its paper roots. Simultaneously, some independent creators have begun to take back the printing press as a means of disseminating underground comics, which is, of course, how they did it back when underground comics were called comix.

About two months ago the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) held a panel discussion about the comic-strip as a form and how it stands now in a world of newspapers closing down. The panel was called "The Future of the Traditional Comic Strip in the Era of Dying Newspapers". The solutions as presented were two-fold: become a webcomic or join together in a collective. Or both.

Yes, tremendously cleverly comicsmith Bill Roundy makes a comic called "The Amazing Adventures of Bill" that is posted as a webcomic (available at the previous link) and a newsprint comic-strip in a publication called "Coffee Talk", available in various Brooklyn locations. The newspaper comics-section without the newspaper. Brilliant, really.

"Dark Horse Presents" and "Coffee Talk" aren't the only comics enjoying the old musty smell of paper. Several examples of other comics utilizing newsprint were held up by "Coffee Talk" mastermind Tony Murphy at the MoCCA event: (1) a copy of New York City comic-shop Desert Island's local comic, a large-format newsprint comic called "Smoke Screen" and (2) a copy of Brendan Leach's comic: "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City" (the subject of one of my recent interviews here on The Long and Shortbox Of It), with a cover mimicking an old-style newspaper front page. Printed on newsprint.

Now I had this editorial all planned out in my head up until this point:

Both comics companies and individual comicsmiths have made a move away from the digital realm and back to newsprint. Plain, simple, interesting. Right?

That was before these double announcements from the day before the recent New York Comic-Con (@NY_Comic_Con):

DC Comics (@DC_NATION) will in January 2011 reduce the baseline prices of their entire line of 22-page comic-books from $3.99 back to $2.99.

and an hour later:

Marvel (@Marvel) will lower SOME of the prices of their comic-books from $3.99. Called a "partial move away" from $3.99, Marvel has stated that they can afford this because of the money they're making from their iPad app's digital comics sales.

[via CBR- DC announcement/Marvel announcement] (I really recommend taking a peek at CBR's DC article as they actually breakdown exactly which DC comics will now be $2.99.)

I was in the room at the "DC Nation" panel at Comic-Con where a huge screen displayed a defiant Wonder Woman in the famous 'Rosie the Riveter pose' with the famous statement "We Can Do It!" replaced with something like: "HOLD THE PRICE LINE!" DC Comics SVP and Executive Editor Dan DiDio also made it clear that although this means the back-up stories DC added to the books last year when the prices were raised are disappearing, the characters and stories in them will not.

What does this mean?

Well, obviously, it means we all get to save a little money on our monthlies AND more importantly it means when I recommend a monthly comic to YOU the readers, or to a friend in person, there will be a bit less 'sticker-shock' when we all say: 'Damn, comics used to be 10 frickin' cents!' In fact: 10 cents, 12 cents, 15, 20, 30, 35, 40, 75, $1, $1.25, $1.99, $2.99... I believe this is the first time in the history of the American comics industry that the baseline price has gone DOWN.

But, in the long run? What does this mean for paper?

I'm not sure if it's a vote of confidence in the format or a signal of its demise. Since people have been clamoring for the prices to go back down and the Big Two are giving them what they want, it shows that the big companies care about what their paper customers want. Theoretically they can now give it to them because, according to Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel, "We found that in a week's time, the download of the day-and-date [digital iPad app] comics were a little bit less than what [New York City's] Midtown [Comics] orders. They're one of the top retailers in the country, so it gives you an idea of where we're at." So are they giving the comic shop-pers what they want as a temporary appeasement as they phase them out? Meanwhile the guys like Brendan Leach and Tony Murphy are printing on the cheapest paper they can find to keep their decidedly not-corporate costs down.

It seems that if anything can be said about the entire comics industry in America from Marvel Entertainment right down to free comics newsletters at this moment, it's that while there is an ongoing serious flirtation with the digital format, paper still has a major, although changing, place in the distribution of sequential art.

~ @JonGorga

A New Downloadable Venture Forward?

iFanboy announced this week that Graphic.ly will begin offering Marvel's comics, not just for viewing, but for download and not just to mobile devices, but to desktops as well.

Could this be another step toward the fabled 'iTunes of comics'?

An application is now available for download to both Windows and Mac computers on Graphic.ly which can access a database of comics files available for permanent download to a personal computer upon successful payment of a set amount for each individual comic.

That does sound a LOT like iTunes' model of: permanent download of a music file, with paying per song.

According to iFanboy co-founder Conor Kilpatrick (@cskilpatrick), these comics files will be automatically available on your iPhone or iPad's Graphic.ly app... you know, if you have all that jazz too. This means that the files are compatible in at least some sense, but I suspect I wouldn't be able to read my old CD-ROM-store-bought-PDF-files in the program. -sad face-

HOWEVER, much BETTER and MORE IMPORTANT are the community features the service claims to have which I assume are designed to put people enjoying similar comics in touch with eachother as well as allow a user to recommend comics to their 'Friends', either personal or digital, i.e. comics social networking. Of which there is very little. This would effectively be a kind of 'Ping for comics'. Making the service, in at least one way, up to date with what iTunes offers its users.

[via Newsarama]

However, nothing has been said about day-and-date release, but nor has the announcement said anything about exclusivity.

In other words, you may see Marvel (and then perhaps DC at a later date) opening digital desktop publishing of their comics to other services such as Longbox and Panelfly, but you are still going to be making those weekly trips to your local comics shop unless you want to be limited to six-month-old comics.

~ @JonGorga

Bee in My Bonnet!

"bee in... The Ramble" from MySpace/Dark Horse

There was a unique and unusual pleasure to be had in hearing the comicsmith, Jason Little, read this comic out loud with accompanying music and a projection of the comic panel-by-panel to a small crowd at one of R. Sikoryak's (@RSikoryak) Carousel nights a few months back. Now the masses can be exposed to it as well since it has been published on "MySpace Dark Horse Presents". The experience of hearing this comic read that night (and then having it divorced from that experience on the web) was particularly surreal for reasons that will become clear over the course of this review.

Right from the start "The Ramble" is a hilarious tale of two friends meeting-up in the Big Apple's world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art for a... uh... unique tour. Oh man. You've really got to click the link at the top of this post and read it yourself to fully appreciate this. THERE ARE NO WORDS.

Speaking of there 'being no words,' one of the most fun elements of the comic is explored after they leave the MET, occasional pictographs in place of words. An element that starts out playful like this:










and this:


And later, after a few sausage jokes, crescendos into something brilliant, painful, awkward, and hilarious:



And that's the tip of the iceberg.

There's a sequence of photographs inter-spliced with drawings during a tour of statues and another one during a film [above], four panels in silhouette during a discussion about burlesque, and there's a panel in '3-D' color-separation style while talking about 3-D. A character attempts to better read the text in another panel by grabbing the panel borders! The piece does take Bee and friends through the part of Central Park called the Ramble and all over New York City, but really it's a ramble through different art mediums and styles Little finds interesting. (On his blog, Little refers to this as the practice of "putting it all in there". Which says everything.)

Actually, as far as Jason Little's career in comics, the whole piece is just the tip of the iceberg.

I first became aware of Jason Little (@Beecomix) several years ago when I suddenly found myself in possession of a copy of "Jack's Luck Runs Out" from Top Shelf Productions, a marvelous/crazy comic that's like a Tarantino action-movie but with a playing-card visual style set in the world capital of entertainment: Las Vegas. I first became aware of his rotund reoccurring character Bee, a little over a year ago when I discovered "bee in... Motel Art Improvement Service" on Act-I-Vate.com [Unfortunately, that link now only goes to a 10-page excerpt. Fortunately, that means that a collected print edition from Dark Horse is in the works!] a webcomic about sexual discovery and... a whole lot of other crazy things.

I had the pleasure of meeting the man himself a few months ago at the Carousel event at which he read "bee in... The Ramble" and his personal style is as warmly whimsical as his comics. The surreality of the story for me is that after a sequence in which Bee and her friend get thrown out of a silent movie for the above antics, they arrive at a Carousel event where a sequential self-portrait of Little himself reads the first half of the comic we were hearing! Reading this later on the web broke the 'this comic could be now' feeling, but added an exotic feeling of cluing you into this weird gathering of comicsmiths. Add to this, the fact that it's the last comic in the last issue of "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" and that's mighty strange right?

THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT?
The humor in the character interactions can be a bit 'precious' at times and the draftsmanship has a few uneven moments, but in the end the jokes are great, the art is smooth, plus it's colored fantastically, and the play with art medium and art-styles more than makes up for any faults anywhere else.

Really, all of Jason Little's work I've encountered so far is worth reading. Look him up at Beekeeper Cartoon Amusements' website.

~ @JonGorga

Thoughts on Digital Comics and Higher Price Points, Masquerading as an Iron Man Annual #1 Review

I really dug The Invincible Iron Man Annual #1. First and foremost, Matt Fraction here is at the top of his game- his hero is tragically brave, his villain is believably ego-maniacal, his story is dark and subtle, his facts are his fictions and his fictions are facts. All that, despite featuring one of the most flamboyant characters in comics- The Mandarin.

It would be easy to play up the villain, easy to make him overbearing and long-winded but Fraction resists that temptation. Instead, he gives us a villain aware of his own past but unwilling to remember it or, perhaps more relevantly, willing to rewrite it. This may very well be a reference to Fraction himself- this is something that the writer does very well and to great effect, particularly in his run on Immortal Iron Fist from a couple of years ago (incidentally, the book is littered with Iron Fist references and call backs. I'm hopeful that this foreshadows Fraction's return to the character, at the very least in a limited capacity). More likely it's a reference to the way in which certain writers feel free to retcon a character rather than to reinforce core principles.* Either way, it's a vicious piece of plotting, and it hits its mark beautifully by reminding us that no man is the villain of his own story, even if he knows that he is.

In fact, The Invincible Iron Man Annual is, in almost every way, more of a long Mandarin one-shot than an Iron Man comic. Tony Stark (or, at least, the real Tony Stark) makes only one, brief appearance- in a flashback. This is why it's so odd that Marvel choose this comic to try same day and date retailing with- this is a damn good comic (in fact, maybe the best all year), but anyone who's been observing the business for any length of time realizes that quality does not necessarily lead to sales. Recognition leads to sales. Iconography leads to sales. Sure, people who know comics know The Mandarin- but would a guy off the street (or dude with an iPad) looking for something more after Iron Man 2?

It's not impossible, certainly, but it is extremely unlikely. Why this comic, then? There are plenty of other Iron Man comics they could have tried, plenty of others more likely to hold the interest of a casual comics fan.

I think this is the key. I don't think that they're aiming for the casual comics fan- I think the comics companies are looking to hook people who were already into comics into digital readers. It's the only thing that makes any sense. Otherwise, DC would have published Batman #700, Superman #700 or Wonder Woman #600 rather than that JLI comic they've started out with. Marvel would have begun with an X-Men comic, or an Avengers one. In fact, they might even be trying to hook people who think they've outgrown comics- people who would be interested in JLI or the Mandarin.

People who might not otherwise be interested in paying $5 for a comic book might be willing to read about a character they remember fondly at a much cheaper price of $2 for the beginning of the story.

I understand why the Annual cost so much- it's a big comic book, and the ads are relatively unobtrusive- but I bet if we did a page by page analysis we would find that it's actually relatively inexpensive for the amount of story- I'm going to guess somewhere around 45 pages?- that we actually get. Not only that, I'm glad parts of it are accessible cheaply; it's a damn good story, and I suspect that no one who buys the first third will be able to resist buying the rest. What I don't understand is why today's issue of Thor costs so much for a normal sized comic. Or why Marvel insists on putting those lame "oral history" pages in the back of new Avengers issues.

I have a theory, though. I think we're paying for respectability.

It's true that, in purely physically aesthetic terms, the quality of comics has shot up over the last 20 years or so. Higher quality paper, more colors, etc. Although we're also paying for those things when we buy a comic these days, I think what we're really paying for is the right to look at something that might be high art. Consider this- things that are considered "great art" have limited accessibility. Plays and classical music cost money. So do movies. Literature, until very recently, we severely limited by the number of people who were capable of reading. This has always been comics' problem- too many people had access. Too many people could appreciate them, so they couldn't possibly be fine art- except now they can be, because they're expensive. Because they aren't as accessible as they used to be.

I have no idea if this is actually true, and the thought clearly needs some development, but it's curious, isn't it? And what if I'm onto something? How does that change the way we, as comics readers and intellectuals, understand our passion?

---------------------
*Consider the differences between JMS's attempts at the former (Spider-Man) rather than the latter (Thor).

Digital Comics 3.5 (update): DC Comics Joins the Fray!

So it took them a damn long time but, according to various sources, DC Comics has finally announced and released a downloadable app for the Apple iPad that allows you to read comics.......... wait for it.......... the same day they are released in comic stores. The slumbering giant wakes. (This was one of two possibilities I threw out in the middle of the last entry of my article series on digital comics.)

This 'day-and-date' digital option is a BIG step, even if it doesn't sound like much. This is the step Marvel only made in a half-hearted way with their announcement of a trial day-and-date release for one comic with an increased price-point on the digital version. DC's app will also be available in a different form on the Sony Playstation and supposedly everything will be integrated so that once a comic is bought over the Playstation Network you'll be able to download the same comic for free over the comiXology app.

Keith Giffen and Aaron Lopresti's "Justice League: Generation Lost" mini-series will be the first series to be released simultaneously in stores and for download.

I'm curious to know Clare's reaction to this because she loves DC Comics and finds the iPad very attractive for reading comics (as do I, really) but LOVES her comic shop. I suspect that when her boss learns about this he is going to have proverbial kittens. DC's press release claims that an affiliate program for comic shops will be integrated with their digital effort so that it is "additive" to current ongoing business models. Only time will tell on that one.

Most importantly, according to this video:
....it works like a digital comics reader should: page-by-page with a choice for panel-by-panel.

[via @Wildstorm via @gelatometti tweets via gelatometti blog via DC's The Source blog and Techland.com (who posted the video I embedded above)]

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ It's pretty wonderful that the first day-and-date mainstream digital comics distribution program came out on a 'new comic-book' Wednesday...

Digital Comics Part 3: Threat or Menace?

Okay. So I've talked about comics made FOR the internet put on the internet, i.e. webcomics, and the creativity they display in Part 1.

I've talked about comics made for print delivered THROUGH the internet by official channels: Digital Comics Unlimited, Wowio, Eagle Media and so on as well as the aesthetics of their presentation in Part 2.

But let's talk about pirates. (Arrr.) Then we'll talk about the positive implications of all this.

For quite a few years, people all over the world have been spending some of their free time scanning printed comics page-by-page into their computers with an optical scanner and then combining those image files into one 'zipped' file which merely retains the images and their correct reading order. Those files can in turn be read by specially designed programs that present two images at a time to imitate the recto-verso page-turn of printed comic-books and graphic novels. If you access any large P2P sharing network with one of the programs designed to do so like DC++ or Shakespeer and do a search for any popular comic-book series by name, you will most likely find a surprising number of these files. Then if you download one of the programs designed to read them like ComicBookLover or CDisplay all you've got to do is drag one of those zipped CBR files into one of these reader programs and you are bada-bing reading what is probably an illegally scanned-and-uploaded print comic for free. Nothing about the program is illegal, it functions just like iTunes used to (i.e. with no internet-ready iTunes Store function).

There is also a legal source of scanned print comics files. Marvel Comics and a few other companies (including Archie Comics!) released CD-ROM and DVD-ROM packages with a company called Graphic Imaging Technology INC. with tons and tons of scanned comics in PDF format. (Wikipedia has a list of these CD-ROMs.)

The most exciting of those, to me, were the ones which collected all the comics in a particular crossover 'event'. If you've read my old rant about the way these stories are collected, you'd understand. Marvel produced a "House of M" The Complete Collection Collector's Edition CD-ROM as well as "Civil War" The Complete Collection DVD-ROM. I'd try these out if they weren't so bloody expensive. Especially since Marvel unveiled Digital Comics Unlimited and discontinued these sets in 2007. This might actually be the best way to experience these highly splintered stories. Buying something in the neighborhood of 100+ comics to fully understand one big story is a pain in the neck!

This is why we most need an 'iTunes for comics.' I did receive one of these type of sets as a Christmas present. I'd like to be able to read those files on whatever I'm reading my comics on.

(The question that leaves is: Where the hell is DC Comics in all of this? Archie Comics can be bought digitally in two formats and DC/Warner Bros. does nothing? Perhaps the company that brought us the first comic-book with new material, the first superhero, and the first corporate webcomics site is biding its time to wait for the right solution to the entire digital conundrum and slap all the competition upside the head. Who knows?)

Of course like I said in Part 2, Marvel doesn't put out its brand new comics in digital form either in their old boxed DVD-ROM sets or on Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited or on Panelfly/the Marvel Comics app. They seem to have an unwritten six-months-or-older-only rule. They're protecting their interests. But that will only last as long as there is a sizable interest to protect. And the digital pirates get an entire new-comics-Wednesday's material worth of comics on the net for illegal download in a matter of hours anyway. Anyone in the world can read pretty nearly every single comic ever published for free. Illegally.

So will digital comics replace print comics?

The short answer is: Yes they will, but not anytime soon.

It was pointed out that I wasn't very specific in Part 2 of this article series. I should have written: as academics and creators, we should be prepared because comics will be largely digital within our lifetimes. As artforms move into the digital format, the relationship of dependence between the art-concept and the art-object (vinyl/plastic, paper/vellum) changes. A huge amount of music is available for download on iTunes. Prose of all kinds is available on the Kindle. And newspapers are moving digital, of course they really, really should as there's very little about their product that is dependent on visuals and even less that is dependent on layout. But a newspaper has images and a layout. A comic is images and layout. It may be a 'book layout' instead of a 'page layout', but it's still about organizing visuals into a sequence.

Comics = Sequential Art
Sequential Art = Art + Sequence

Comics = Images + Layout

You take away either of those elements? You no longer have comics. Moving comics into digital files is very problematic for this reason, among others. But these are formal concerns and not financial ones.

Let's talk about money.

Clare's father K. J. pointed this out to me: consider music. Only sixty years ago music first became available for affordable mass-consumption on Long Playing records, i.e. LPs. Forty years ago music became available on 8-Track. Wasn't a disaster, but didn't last. Lower quality and slightly higher convenience. Twenty years ago came the Compact Disc, i.e. CDs. Lower quality (compared to LP), but higher convenience. Ten years ago music became illegally available on Napster and the Recording Industry had a conniption in their general direction. Today music is available for download from various sources legally. Again at lower quality (when compared to LP), but with extreme convenience. Now iTunes is the #1 source of music, but CDs are slipping from the #2 spot. Vinyl outsells CDs in some markets, collectors and audiophiles want them more than ever. It's a niche market. I buy very, very little music: but I pretty much buy only vinyl. There are many collector edition LPs. There is an annual Record Store Day. Convenience and quality, right?

I can see a world that wouldn't be so horrible:

My comic arrives in my digital device. Maybe it is a 'comic-book' with multiple 'pages'. Maybe it is a 'comic-strip' with a single 'page' that I scroll smoothly through for a good hour. I read it on the same device I used to buy it with a credit card number, on which I can buy comics made by people from all over the world. I review and discuss it online when I'm done. I have a digital 'subscription' with a list of preferences which can be changed instantaneously. ('Would you like to subscribe to the new upcoming superhero crossover event: only the main title, all the tie-ins, or continue with your subscriptions as they are, sir?' 'Would you like to be alerted about new comics by this artist, sir?') I can read old files. Maybe I have pre-sets as to how I want to see panels, pages, splash-pages, balloons and in what order. Maybe if I really, really loved seven random issues, I follow a few links and pay again to buy a nicely printed trade-paperback collection to MY specifications. Maybe if I really liked a mini-series I wait a few months and then shell out big-bucks for the glossy hardcover at a bi-annual 'Comic-Book Store Day' where I meet some real people and have a nice time.

There is, in fact, already an annual Free Comic Book Day to be held this very Saturday May 1st! Its main goal is to drive people into comic-book stores. Go take advantage of the fact that many, many publishers will be putting out a free non-digital old-school print comic on Saturday!

There will still be people who will buy books and comic-books and vinyl for a long, long time. People will probably buy the things they want to keep forever in physical form. In the words of my friend Aaron LeBow: "a book can't get a virus". But we as a culture read/hear/watch a huge amount of stuff every day! In a complimenting sort of counter-point my friend David Bustlin is planning to go digital with his comics as soon as possible for very practical reasons: freeing-up closet space and reducing paper waste.

If we combine the physical promotion of Free Comic Book Day with: ComicBookLover

(Which is like iTunes, the program. Easy, flexible, and compatible with all kinds of image files.)

and with: Panelfly

(Which is like iTunes, the online store. Simple, inexpensive, and compatible with all kinds of publishers.)

Get it on ALL your digital devices, make it CUSTOMIZABLE...

And maybe we've really got something exciting there.

There is only one thing that can be said with definitiveness: Print comics will continue to be made as long as publishers continue to perceive it as a solvent business and as long as individuals continue to find comics challenging and exciting to work in. And digital comics (of all kinds) will continue to be produced/made available as long as publishers continue to percieve it as a solvent business and as long as individuals continue to find comics challenging and exciting to work in.

Like J. Jonah Jameson, the long-time persecutor of Spider-Man, you can choose to frame the question as: "Threat or Menace?" or you can choose to ask: "What can digital comics do for me?"

Simple as that.

UPDATE 5/7/2o1o: Apparently the days of the comics scanning pirate may one day come to a close: A press release can be read here about the recent joint effort of the F.B.I., a law firm specializing in intellectual property, the U.S. Department of Justice, and a coalition of comics publishers including Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Bongo Comics, Archie Comics, Conan Properties LLC, and Mirage Studios Inc. in the seizure of the servers propping up htmlcomics.com, one of the websites hosting scanned-and-uploaded comics.

Be wary pirates. Be wary.

UPDATE 5/8/2o1o: Marvel publicized here a long while ago about the various formats and devices its comics were becoming available on. The problem is all three of these devices use separate formats meaning none of these programs can swap files. Not very convenient.

Digital Comics Part 2: The Death of the Great Prints?

On April 3, 2o1o Apple Computing publicly released their latest... computing thing: the Apple iPad. Technologist Kevin Kelly called it "a portable portal" and said "Don't think of them as tablets. Think of them as windows that you carry." (WIRED, April 2o1o, Vol. 18, #2) Well, through the window of my iPhone's camera (ironies upon ironies) I saw a printed comic-book disintegrating on the wet concrete of New York City in a rainstorm and I fear that it may have been a portent of the world we shall see through this all-hailed 'window computer'.

Two days before the iPad's release (in what many must have thought was an April Fool's joke) Marvel Comics had its own special release. It deployed on the Apple 'App Store' (a web-based program that allows users to purchase 'apps,' i.e. small programs designed with simplicity in mind) its own Marvel Comics app for iPod Touch, iPhone, and, of course, the iPad. [It looks like the screenshot at right, on an iPad.] (IDW released one a long time ago, as did Archie Comics.) One iTunes Store app reviewer named "brianmhite" wrote: "I've looked for a place to buy comics in town. Wasn't sure if I'd enjoy them though. This app solved everything." This was echoed in another user's "No more trips to the comic store for my fix!" One "pixelslinger" went so far as to say: "Wow. Marvel just killed comib [sic] book stores."

The most amazing/inspirational statement was by someone going by "Jakeoster": "This may just get me into comics..."

The most terrifying was: "I'll probably never purchase a paper comic book again."

What a strange frickin' world, right?

Almost a month before the iPad's release, on March 11, Apple announced that they would soon begin to include comics and graphic novels for paid download in their iBookstore as a 'top tier category'. What this really ended up meaning for anyone or anything is still unclear.

Two years earlier, in November of 2oo7, Marvel announced Digital Comics Unlimited, a subscription service with a huge number of comics available for streaming, non-download-able reading on a PC. But that interface was pretty clumsy and slow. Worse, to some people's minds, is the fact that those thousands of streaming comics are inaccessible through the new app portal. Someone would have to pay for the subscription service AND download individual comics for a dollar amount per issue to read the same comic on the iPad and on their personal computer.

But what does this mean for comics? Or for print comics in specific?

A user named 'T. C. Ford' on ComicBookResources's article on Apple's March announcement commented: "From the publishing point of view, it's not Print vs. Digital, it's Print AND Digital."

Yeah, there's undeniably a time when they coexist. Like... now. Will these digital-comics-version of print comics programs kill print comics? Well, probably not. The fact that genuine webcomics and illegal digital scans of print comics have been available for years and the print comics industry hasn't keeled over yet is a good sign. Plus it should be noted that Marvel is not offering their brand-new weekly comics over the internet in either areas they are dipping their toes into. Certainly, having both sources of income simultaneously is what the publishers want! So they are going to be in favor of pushing one with the left hand and one with the right. But for how long? We won't know until we know.

I'd LOVE to tell you what's it like to read a comic on the iPad hands on. But I can't. Because it's a fucking $500 device, right? That's more than two-thirds of my rent, thank you very much. And upon visiting the 14th Street Apple Store here in Manhattan I discovered that the display iPads had absolutely no way to read comics and I was told I could not download new apps to the display devices. (There are video reviews, like this one from BoingBoing.net. Jump to 2:01 if you're just interested in what it really looks like to read a comic on an iPad. But before I would sink $500, I would want to feel it in my hands.) I can tell you that it's a pretty hot mess on the old iPhone. Marvel's app is actually an almost exact clone of Comixology's app "Comics", which has been around for a long time, but with Marvel characters sprinkled into the background. Worse, as it is a clone of Comixology's app it has the same features and defaults. The default setting is something called 'guided view' and I HATE it.

Essentially 'guided view' is a mode in which a virtual camera POV pans from a part of a comics page to another part of a comics page at your controlled pace. It often crops part of the image out and makes awkward choices as to what you should see when. It creates a little frame-by-frame animated movie out of the panels of a comic. I suspect you'll have to try it to really understand it. One of those iTunes Store app reviewers named "SullStyle" wrote: "Finally I can read panel by panel without seeing what's coming on the next page." Yeah, you control the pace of this little animation, but not the exact content. It's like the old pan&scan videotape to film trade-off. You can own the thing digitally, you can control the speed, but you've lost part of the picture.

I can also tell you that Panelfly, one of the competing programs, doesn't force the reader into any bullshit 'guided view' on the iPhone unless you want it to.
This is something I can get a little more behind. Comics being shown page by page and easily read panel-by-panel OR page-by-page. Best of both worlds. (It's also all done with a nice design sense.)

Using the iPhone and iPad and everyday computers as a delivery system for comics is a great idea. Maybe even 'the future' of sequential art, if such a thing can be said. If new people are getting interested in sequential art storytelling through these programs and devices that's fantastic. That's a win-win. Will it kill print off entirely? Yeah, maybe it will. Well, I think us comicsmiths have to be prepared for that possibility. But there's a much bigger problem:


While this is sequential art. This is not.

Note the lack of sequence. And that's a damn shame. Especially when the original panel in print looks like this:


You'd think this is just someone asleep at the switch, but this is the norm and the default setting! Losing visual information with so little an effort to retain it in digital form is sloppy at best and criminal at worst.

Now someone who's never read comics before may not have much of a problem seeing a comic cut-up to make a bad short movie, but people who read print comics and see this 'guided view' usually react with an immediate: 'Why would I read a comic that way?'

In this writer's opinion, this 'guided view' cannibalizes new and existing comics into a weird user-controlled movie of still drawings. The sequence of 'man's face' and 'awe-inspiring mountain' in visual juxtaposition creates the scene 'man stares at mountain in awe'. Losing that visual juxtaposition loses so much of the concept of 'the comics page' that has been evolving since Winsor fucking McCay!

Over 1oo years ago on July 26th 19o8, Winsor McCay printed this!

Now, if we let comics go from that to this:
...we've lost something huge there.

Scott McCloud was probably pitching a fit somewhere on April 3. And rightly so, as he believed that going digital would allow sequential art an expansion to an 'infinite canvas'. (See his TED Talk video here on YouTube.com. Jump to 12:50 for his demonstration of this concept. Note that he says: "look at the monitor as a window".) Not a regression to a badly animated single-panel-at-a-time!

For years, people spoke of a hypothetical 'iTunes for comics': a single free-to-download program that could allow people easy access to official digital copies of their favorite comics for a price and to read digital copies they already own. For my money, Panelfly is half of that equation. Marvel's stuff is on there, a bunch of the other big print publishers' stuff is on there. The only thing missing is the flexibility of the files themselves: I can't move a comic I bought on my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. Which would be great as it has a much bigger screen, doesn't it? Now the program ComicBookLover allows you to read files you may have already downloaded (more on this in the next part) and move them between your desktop and their app, but it has no system by which you can download new comics. Someone needs to combine these two platforms and develop a better system than the fucking 'guided view'. Then we may have the 'DVD' of comics, iTunes for comics. A digital comics delivery system that works.

Until these problems are solved, and something at least partially like McCloud's 'infinite canvas' is encouraged, I think digital comics on the desktop, on-demand is not much more than a mess. But technology is technology is technology. Paper printing combined with saddle-stapling makes a comic-book. In McCay's day, before saddle-stapling and before the comic-book, comic-strips were in large, folded pages inserted into newspapers. Before that they were woven into fabric or carved in stone or painted on walls. Graphic novels are now made more or less like prose books, with glue and binding and high paper-stock and all that nonsense. A digital delivery system is merely another step in the evolution of media. But for it to be an evolution and not a devolution it has to allow the medium to do more and not less. Print publishers would do well to take a harder look at how the webcomicsmiths do what they do.

Hopefully, the publishers will allow and encourage technological evolution to happen in all areas while striving to keep hold of the stuff that already works... on paper.

________________________________
One more section of this article is planned to wrap things up.

UPDATE 4/16/2o1o: I would be remiss in not mentioning Wowio.com, which works on an entirely different platform. You can download comics, graphic novels and prose books from their website for for very cheap or sometimes for FREE on a rotating basis because they have sold advertising 'sponsorship' to various brand-name corporations. Intelligently, all their files are PDF format allowing you to save them to your computer, move them to ANY mobile reading device.

Their comics main page is here.

Honestly, I forgot about them until they sent me a newsletter today.

UPDATE 4/27/2010: I just discovered ANOTHER one. Eagle One Media's store allows you to use a credit card or Paypal to buy and download PDF files directly from their website. Simple!

UPDATE 5/6/2o1o: Forgot this one. It's called Longbox and it appears to be not quite ready for prime time despite being announced years ago. The beta o.7 version can be downloaded here. I have downloaded one and will try it out and get back to you.

Digital Comics Part 1: People Make Comics on the Internet? You Don't Say!

Yes, our favorite art medium has made the jump, like its older siblings prose and visual art, from the two-dimensional paper/canvas to the two-dimensional screen and stands straddling the chasm between them.

Actually, it did it a long time ago. According to Wikipedia a few single-panel drawn-and-scanned cartoons first appeared on the early internet provider CopuServe in the mid-Eighties. They were followed by a few newspaper comics going online when their print existences were canceled.

[At right, the first "Argon Zark" web-strip by Charley Parker. The first true webcomic. June 1995. Believe it or not, it was still being updated as late as 2oo8!]

Real sequential art/designed-for-the-web comics first appeared in the mid-Nineties. Where were you? Pretty remarkable that the evolution from single-panel to multiple-panel mimics the birth of newspaper comic-strips and the parallel evolution from reprints or continuations to new material mimics the development of the comic-book. History repeats itself... as they say.

I was in the fourth grade in 1995, but there's really no excuse for taking as long as I did to start reading them. In 2oo6, in my sophomore year of college, something made me finally want to find a good webcomic. I cannot recall for the life of me what it was specifically but I do remember thinking: "Gee, a lot of my friends read webcomics. Print comics readers and non-readers alike. What am I missing?"

Among others, what I discovered was "Diesel Sweeties" by R. Stevens, a pixel-art webcomic strip about a robot who dates a former porn star and their wacky friends, some human, some robotic. Yes that's right. Robot. Former porn-star. Wacky friends, some human, some robotic.

I loved it. I stayed up and in one night read almost half of the then six-year-old archive. The characters are exaggerated without being caricatures and the situations are hilarious without necessarily being ridiculous. Indeed, the relationship between Clango and Maura could be seen as very forward thinking... You know, symbolically. Or like, for the future of advanced robotics.

The best one-stop-shop for webcomics is unquestionably Act-I-Vate.com. Home of the stories of Act-I-Vate's unofficial ringmaster Dean Haspiel and the ongoing adventures of his existential explorer/lover/brute Billy Dogma. Not to mention the work of one I've sung the praises of on this site before: Mike Cavallaro. Plus the brilliant Xeric Award winnng Jason Little and way more amazing comicsmths than I have space to list here!

Somewhere along the way, some brilliant and wonderful person or persons steered my ship into the harbor that is xkcd.com

"xkcd" is, in my humble opinion, the best webcomic on the net for one reason: It consistently does so much with so little!


Brilliance. Brilliance. Brilliance.

Sciency, romantic, hilarious brilliance.

Another comic I soon discovered and loved was "life with leslie" by Les McClaine. If all these robots and absurdist humor has you thinking the web has no comics of logical integrity or realism, well... that's because a lot of them don't. But it doesn't mean there aren't ones out there that do. "life with leslie" (available on EvilSpaceRobot.com, although sadly no longer updated because its creator has moved on to other work) is largely made-up of little celebrations of the simple moments of everyday life. Often done excellently!

There are probably literally millions of comics online. Most of them for free. All of them available from any computer, phone, or magical futuristic device with internet capabilities. (More on this in part two!)

Today, I actually make a webcomic myself, updated monthly at my site The ComicSmithy!

But I just recently took a different plunge. I connected several webcomics' RSS feeds ("Diesel Sweeties" and "XKCD" among them) to my Google reader account. So help me, I'm following these webcomics as they are updated in the same way I watch the solicits and visit my comic shop regularly. I have made the leap and stand with one foot in each world. Two worlds that are now far closer than they once were when the first sequential art was uploaded to the web more than twenty years ago.
_______________________________________

If the gods of time management smile upon us, part two should arrive in your longboxes tomorrow.