Comics: Still living in 1996
I was a comic geek once upon a time.
From the time I was a little kid until almost a decade or so ago (was it really a decade since I was a college sophomore? Yeesh), I was an avid comic collector.
As a kid, I bought pretty much any superhero comic I could get my hands on—particularly anything with Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, or Superman on the cover.
As a young teenager, I discovered ElfQuest and learned the joys of longform comic storytelling—something I had never quite gotten the hang of with superhero comics. And by the time I was the aforementioned college sophomore, my comics intake consisted pretty much entirely of Strangers in Paradise, Books of Magic, and brief flirtations with Cerebus and Sandman Mystery Theatre, as well as Bone (which I loved, but I got into way too late at the time).
And then it stopped.
It wasn’t that I outgrew comics. It was just that… well, I was a college sophomore and money was in short supply. As important as comics had been in my early life, they weren’t quite as important as having something to eat other than Ramen noodles. Especially with all of the major publishers constantly raising their prices and increasing the number of ads, and with indie publishers having to raise their prices even higher just to stay afloat. Suddenly, 24 – 36 pages of comic entertainment didn’t seem all that important when the price hit somewhere between $2.95 and $4.95 a pop.
Plus, there were these:
If you’re a comic geek, those probably look familiar. They’re longboxes. And those aren’t the only ones I have. So, here I have massive amounts of moldering paper just sitting around in longboxes. I’m scared to touch any of them because 1) they might be valuable, and 2) they might have once been valuable, but now be in poor condition, which would be kind of heartbreaking.
Which also means none of them get read any more. Which is why I have come to love the idea of digital comics. You can read them. Again and again. Enjoy them consistently, and not have to worry about longboxes taking up floor space or comics getting damaged. Sure, your digital edition doesn’t gain value as a collectible, but wouldn’t that mean you just get the comics you love reading?
And here’s my current dilemma. My relationship and my love of comics is currently in a boom-bust-boom-bust cycle. Even as I rediscover time and again how much I love the medium by seeking out trades of comics written by people like Garth Ennis and Allan Moore, I keep having my love of comics smacked down again and again by an industry firmly entrenched in 1996. Witness the state of digital comics today:
Marvel Comics: The so-called “House of Ideas.” Once upon a time, they were the young upstarts who dared to take on the entrenched superheroes of yesteryear. In 2007, they launched their digital comics subscription. Comics had to be read on your computer screen in a proprietary reader, and nothing could be downloaded. New comics were posted twelve months after they had hit the stands. Critics and fans alike laughed. It’s two years later. Swine are still earthbound. Hell has a significant lack of snow days. Catholicism has yet to select a Pope who does not share their religious views. So, of course, Marvel has done nothing different except to change the lead time to a mere six months.
DC: The house that Superman built. The old war horse of the comics industry, but a company that lately has been given to flights of re-invention. And by “lately,” I mean, “ever since the early 90’s when Marvel took the lead in the market.” They arguably began the mainstream “For Mature Audiences” trend with adult-themed stories in Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing, then solidified themselves in that market by introducing the Vertigo line with comics like Sandman, Preacher, and, um, Swamp Thing. A while back, they offered some Vertigo previews in PDF format. Aside from that, DC seems to be waiting for this “internet” fad to blow over.
A quick note: Not every situation from every medium applies to every other medium. I heard somebody recently say that DC and Marvel didn’t have full archives available because “It’s tough to clear the rights on a lot of those old comics. You have to pay the creators.” This is true about music used in the original WKRP. But while DC and Marvel were creating comics as we know them today, they habitually screwed over their creators with binding work-for-hire contracts. DC and Marvel own pretty much everything published up through the end of the 70’s lock, stock, and barrel.
Image Comics: Rogue creators from DC and Marvel split off to create Image—a company founded on not ripping off the creators. Of course, they’ll be absolutely thrilled to avoid any further innovation. Image Comics offers the first issues of their series as free digital comics. Read them online—without a proprietary reader—and then rush to the store and buy paper. Yes, only the first issues are available digitally. Anything beyond that and you’ll need to shell out for a print edition.
And now, a sample of independents.
WaRP Graphics: Publishers of ElfQuest who, lately, have not had that much success with the print world. This past year, they finished putting online every issue of ElfQuest ever published. They’re intended to be read in your browser, but unlike Marvel they’ve actually been released at high resolution, and not in a proprietary reader. And they’re free. Still far from perfect, but a damn sight better than the big boys.
Aardvark Vanaheim: Love it or hate it, Cerebus is a significant work in comics history. A truly longform epic with a main character who aged in real time (most of the series). And creator Dave Sim certainly didn’t make any friends with his snide commentaries and constant bashing of the industry. So, certainly this rebel who constantly called to tear down the system that exploited creators and idolized merchants would jump at the chance to do away with the middleman and the archaic print distribution system for his new series, right? Oh, what’s that you say, Dave Sim’s official website for glamourpuss? “You can only buy glamourpuss in really, really good comic book stores (like these ones listed here) No single copy orders, no subscriptions, no exceptions?” Oh. Well. Settles that, then.
Boom! Studios: Boom! Studios sprang onto the scene in a big way by offering free downloads of their… first issues. But in cbr format! The most open and easy-to-use digital comics format—essentially the medium’s version of mp3. Of course, their follow-up to that was to encourage people to rush to the stores and buy more paper.
There are plenty of pirates stepping in to fill the gaps. And plenty of comic artists complaining about it—only to later be exposed as pirates, themselves. Whether they’re downloading gigabyte after gigabyte of Torchwood without sending the BBC a dime, or just drawing other creators’ characters at conventions.
So, where are the sources for (legal) digital comics downloads?
Well, you could try the fine folks at Modern Tales and their affiliate sites, all offering free, no-DRM .cbr files from their creators. The selection doesn’t change much, but they’ve got the right idea.
There’s Drive Thru Comics. Most of their content is in .pdf format, but their prices are reasonable. Too bad they don’t have much in the way of publisher support—but they do carry Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.
There’s Pullbox Online, which has the iTunes Store of digital comics interfaces (although they’ve skipped the pesky DRM phase), but has almost no support from publishers. Good ideas often have a hard time catching on.
Speaking of the iTunes store, if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can buy comics through the app store now. There’s the excellent ComicZeal which will let you download Golden Age (read: public domain) comics, and which can be fed with cbr files. And then there’s the seemingly infinite offerings from iVerse, who wants you to buy an app for every single issue of a series for $0.99 a piece (first issue free!).
The fact is that the comics industry, at a time they should be moving forward into a digital future by leaps and bounds, is still struggling with a mid-90’s mentality. They still want the digital to be a means to move paper. But paper was popular solely because it was the best distribution method of its time. Now digital is the medium that offers the most convenience and durability.
Don’t get me wrong—there will always be a market for paper comics. There’s a feel to a comic book that you don’t get reading it off of an iPod. But if comics companies are going to survive (and there’s some doubt to that), then they’re going to have to learn that digital is not a means of promotion—it’s a means of distribution. A fast, easy, and inexpensive means of distribution.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Similar issues going on for all print media, from newspapers to textbooks.