Comicology

I’m a subsriber to Wired Magazine, and I have been for a damn long time, so I was a little bit susprised when I did a google search looking for infor that I could use for a blog post on how the idea of digital comics has reached its tipping point and I discoverd this article that I only sorta remember reading.

The article is very short, and very brilliant. It states…

There’s nothing quite like dropping 50 bucks on comics, gingerly flipping through the pages, then encasing them in Mylar, never to be read again. Yet today’s teens may never know the heady thrill. That’s because within 24 hours of going on sale at the local Android’s Dungeon, every new comic is available on BitTorrent, scanned beautifully for your downloading pleasure. Sound familiar? Just like with music, movies, and games, when content companies don’t give fans what they want in the format they want it, fans make it available themselves. But for the comic book industry, now may be the proverbial nick of time: It still has a chance to change digital distribution from a threat to survival into an opportunity for growth.

(Disclaimer: One of the reasons that I think that this article is brilliant is because I have said the many of the same things here and on several different podcasts.)

Also, as I’m sure that many of you have noticed Marvel Comics recently launched a digital comics service that allows people to read both new comics they want to expose to the maxium number of readers, and some of the comics in their huge back catalogue.

The user of this service has two choices:

1. Pay $9.99 per month for access.
2. Pay $59.88 per year for access (meaning the cost is about $4.99 per month).
*Please note that I DO PAY for this service, and thus I feel that any criticism I have is totally justified.

Marvel adopting this shows that the idea of distributing comics in a digital format via the net is something that is gaining more and more of a foot hold in the industry. Which I think is good, great even, but I believe that the service has three major problems:

1. The service does not offer enough content… The thing is that often Marvel only pusts up a few issues in a story in the digital format, which is better than nothing in the digital format, but it is clearly an attempt to give people a peek so that they will buy a trade. Being able to read only some issues of a series / story, but never a whole series / story sort of makes me mad. (If Marvel puts more and more content online, and it gets to the point where I CAN read an entire series / story than I’ll be much more happy.)
2. The service is a sort of library where I can walk in and read the books there, but I can’t check them out and take them home with me. In other words, I have to have a connection to the net to read comics. This is difficult if I want to read digital comics on a plane that does not offer internet access.
3. The resolution is not as good as .CBR and .CBZ files that people can get for free via Bittorrent. (Even though demonid which was the best place to get comic torrents is now gone they can still be got via other places such as mininova and iso hunt.) Lean from the record and film industry Marvel, much like HYDRA even if you take out one head another will rise to take its place! The silver bullet is to offer non DRMed high quality digital comics at a fair price.

Now I’m going to try my hand at being a futurist here and say somethings that I think might happen in the future, and hope that I’m right

Marvel will make some money selling subcriptions to their digital service. This will create a proff of concept showing that money can in fact be made and get the attention of DC.

The Virtigo imprint, which creates lots of content that readers consume in the form of trade paper backs anyway, will be the content that DC offers in a digital format first.

They will offer it in a different way than Marvel does with less flaws (if things go well in a more iTunes sort of model where you can buy and download a copy that you can read with out being tied to a computer with a internet connection).

Virtigo readers will embrace this service, because they are the kinds of readers who dig this kind of thing.

Comic book shops will get pissed off for obvious reasons.

Beyond that I can’t say…