Tag Archives: comics

Friday Flashback – March 8th

Posted on by
Reply

2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Norman Rockwell Museum

Posted on by
1

We just returned from Stockbridge, MA and the Norman Rockwell Museum. There was a comic book feature artist, Alex Ross and his collected artwork. Alex Ross claimed one of his biggest inspirations was Norman Rockwell. The museum was wonderful, very nicely laid out and the area screamed New England at the top of its lungs. It was so picturesque that it made my eyes ache.

We both picked up a few small souvenirs to remember our trip.

I didn’t take pictures because it would have been tacky and gauche. So it’s just my words that will have to do.

Hopping on the Wagon

Posted on by
Reply

Comic Books. I was quite a fan of them before Mr. Johns sucker-punched me with the travesty of Brightest Day and then pushed me off the train completely with the New 52. That all being said, and in an effort to forgive some of that transgression I’ve decided to tentatively start buying comics again.

I’ve been not-reading for a very long while, despite it being very easy for me to start reading again since my Local Comic Book Store is actually in my basement, it’s all the comics that Scott has collected as he never fell off the wagon. No point in buying comics again!

Except, there is a reason to buy them again. And now we get to my three classes that I’m approaching comic books with. There are three, named, One, Two, and Three. What they mean has everything to do with how much I enjoy the books and my feelings on “rewarding” the comic book company with sales they wouldn’t have otherwise with my discretionary money.

Class Three – Comic Books I’m going to buy in digital format and catch up with. These books are my most favorite and I want to vote-with-sales the writers and artists attached to these books:

  1. Green Lantern
  2. Flash
  3. Nightwing
  4. Green Lantern: New Guardians
  5. Green Lantern Corps
  6. Red Hood and the Outlaws
  7. Teen Titans
  8. Atomic Robo

Class Two – Comic books that I want to read, but I don’t feel I want to pour money into. Since we already have these books on the premises I am going to read them. Is that theft? Reading another persons comic books? Technically I suppose if you wanted to be a huge anal dick about it you’d insist that selling a comic book has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the license to access the media and that license is expressly designed just for one person and not more than one person. So is reading a comic book I dig out of a white-box in my basement, theft? If so, all I really need to know is from the comic book companies, if this bothers you, please tell me and I will ignore these books below:

  1. Superboy
  2. Journey into Mystery
  3. Unwritten
  4. Wolverine and the X-Men
  5. AvX
  6. Extreme X-Men
  7. Blue Beetle
  8. Batman
  9. Detective Comics
  10. Batman and Robin
  11. Amazing Spider-Man
  12. X-Factor
  13. Avengers Academy
  14. Captain Marvel
  15. Ravagers

Class One – These are books I used to have but no longer want to read. Thankfully the ones on this list I haven’t bought in a long while and DC has actually come along and nailed them off for me. There aren’t any comics on this list.

Just in case people get really worked up about their favorite comic ending up on the Two list or the One list, know that if a comic really does well and touches me, that these are classes, not castes. I will always be open to pushing comics from One to Three or Two to Three. Just the same as comics from Three to Two or Three to One. Although it’s really quite something to ever leave Three, just so we are all on the same page.

Now it’s time for me to set up my order with Comixology. Still wishing they had a subscription model, but that’s an argument best left for another time.

Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition – C2E2

Posted on by
1

I have looked into the gaping maw of the start of Con Season and lived to tell the tale. We have just returned from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, forever known as C2E2 with a trunkful of treasures.

One thing we didn’t bring back with us is Con Crud. Perhaps people are more careful with their expectorations or perhaps it was a benefit of us traveling by car and not by airplane, so there was no prolonged exposure to bacteria or viruses that meant us ill-will. When I’ve been taken with the urge to sneeze I have made it a general rule that I will turn my head, and sneeze into the gap between my shirt and my undershirt, in the corner. It’s called a Dracula Sneeze because that’s really what it sort of looks like. Just like Bela Lugosi hiding his head halfway in his cape, except I swap out the cape which I don’t wear for my shirt, which I do. The mythbusters proved that sneezing that way greatly reduced the chances for the ejecta to reach anyone else. My sneezing isn’t carrying anything infectious, as for me it’s just a general low-intensity hayfever that I carry around with me pretty much at all times everywhere I go. A very mild allergic response to pretty much breathing.

I bought two new tees, the first with this image of Superman:

Superman
Superman

and the second with Nightwing:

Nightwing
Nightwing

I also sprang for a lead-cast figurine of my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner. I’ll be setting that up tomorrow at my desk and it will join a posable figurine already in place on my desk. At that point people should know that I like two things in this world very much, Polar Bears and Kyle Rayner. I suppose if I had enough money I could get a DC artist to draw me Kyle Rayner riding on a running Polar Bear. That would be hilarious.

Last but certainly not least I finally have a comic art commission that I hired an artist to complete for me back when I attended San Diego ComicCon in 2010. The artist’s name is Patrick Gleason and he’s one of DC’s mainstay artists. He did a lot of Green Lantern and drew a lot of my favorite GL, Kyle Rayner. Currently he does Batman and Robin for DC, but back in 2010 he had done a lot of Kyle. I hired him for a commission and time and life (and DC Comics) got in the way. I understand that work comes first, right alongside family, so I wasn’t piss-and-vinegar when it came to completion. I didn’t want my money back and I am a very patient fan, especially for artists that draw my favorite GL. So I waited. Yesterday I made contact with Mr. Gleason and I had fallen completely off his radar and he was very shocked and apologetic. He offered me my money back, or the sketch, and I reiterated my wish for the sketch and my willingness to wait, hopefully not so long this time. Today I got a call that he had finished my sketch and I went to fetch it. As always, his work is amazing. It was well worth the wait and I bear him no ill-will. As it turns out, I didn’t even notice that the sketch was extra-special on first glance. It took me a few moments to take it all in that I discovered that he had also included another GL (which I like a lot) named Mogo in the background. For those that don’t know, Mogo is a Green Lantern. Mogo is a sentient planet, and in the comics acts as a counselor for upset GL as well as the moral compass for GL rings to select new bearers. So not only did the sketch have my favorite GL, but it had really nice touches like various chiaroscuro GL symbols, and also Mogo! My next step is to have it framed and placed next to my other sketch of Kyle Rayner that I commissioned from Tyler Kirkham, another artist who does Kyle very well, for DC. This will be the second piece of artwork that I have on my walls from Mr. Gleason. A while back Scott commissioned him to render Kyle Rayner and Saint Walker standing back-to-back. That is hanging on the wall by my bedside and I go to bed and wake up appreciating his artwork every single day. Now that this commission is complete I do feel a sense of closure, and I do know that it won’t be the last bit of artwork I purchase from Mr. Gleason. The same sentiment goes for Mr. Kirkham, assuming he will be game for drawing Kyle in the future. Time will tell.

One thing that I do notice and I say this a lot, especially after conventions is a reminder to people on how to best handle their superhero tees after they get them home. These shirts seem like silly little things to most people, but for comic book geeks like us, they mean a lot more to us than a sport jacket or a fine suit. Remember everyone, that if you want your shirts to last you have to launder them carefully. Always turn them inside out, wash in cold water, and then right when they are done from the washer, turn them right side out and hang them up to dry. Never ever ever ever put them in the drying machine!

That all being said, most of the laundry is nearly done and I’m still up writing this blog entry. One of the curses of living in the eastern time zone and enjoying a con in the central time zone is that biologically speaking I’m off by an hour. This will continue until tomorrow morning when my internal clock is realigned with this time zone. Partially I’m waiting for laundry to finish, but really I’m relaxing here writing up the C2E2 blog post and being here for my boys, who both missed us terribly while we were gone. Now that we’re home, it’s time to plotz on daddy, whichever daddy ends up being plotzable. The condition to be plotzable has everything to do with sitting on a couch and not moving at all. 🙂

I will be taking more pictures and sharing them from the hall of honor for our comic book art. Scott has a commission in-progress from Jim Cheung, for Billy Kaplan, who is a Young Avenger in the Marvel comic book universe who’s codename is Wiccan. We already have a sketch of Billy in the hallway, but I’m looking forward to this new one from Mr. Cheung. I wonder if these artists ever expect their work to be framed professionally and hung so lovingly by their fans. It’s half the reason we go to conventions as it is, to meet the people who illustrate our favorite characters and put cold hard cash right in their hands. No middlemen, no DC, no Marvel, just artist and fan, and cash. A lot of cash. And each cent spent for this work is worth it. We have a lot of wall space and a lot of fandom.

Poor Comic Book Sales

Posted on by
1

I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:

  • Dullness – Many series, even some that I’m very fond of like Brightest Day from DC are rather dull. For Brightest Day I have faith that the chief writer, Geoff Johns, is simply warming up for some stupendous issues-to-come but so far it’s shaped a lot like a Stephen King novel, huge wads of detail with action all piled up at the end. There are some titles that I won’t even touch because they are monumentally bad. I won’t name any as to not injure people who feel passionately about their favorite comic and start a flame-out.
  • Impenetrability – Marvel Entertainment is chiefly centered when I bring up this point. Unless you establish serious time to your comic book experience you find the bleeding edge zooms away from you quite quickly. What I mean by impenetrability is that there are entire stories that I have yet to read, and by the time I’ve got both time-opportunity and funds-opportunity the number of comics you’d have to read to get the whole story is monumentally large. It feels a lot like it does when I wander through a library. A good metaphor for these feelings is the confusion/starvation of a shark in the middle of a cloud of tuna. There is no real place to start, there are too many options, there isn’t any handy map or checklist so you can enjoy a storyline as it was intended to be told, so you end up not reading anything. The entire oeuvre becomes impenetrable. I don’t start because I don’t know where to start and I don’t have the time or money to properly enjoy the unfolding story being told.
  • Digital Shrink – Comics are leaking out through channels that have nothing to do with the distributor or the publisher channels whatsoever. People are scanning comics and posting them for free online to the detriment of all the hard-working people who spent time and energy creating the material in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword and I’ve written about this in the past as well. These digital copies being free is only incidental damage, there is a lesson as to why these formats are so popular and it has very little to do with it being ‘free’. It comes down to format choice. Ever since April 2010, when I first laid my hands on my iPad, it became my go-to-device for reading both digital books *AND* digital comic books. There are companies like Comixology which are doing their best, but the publishers have to pay lip service to their distributors and their brick-and-mortar children, the comic book stores. The reason that digital comics haven’t been a cash-cow for comic book companies has everything to do with incomplete, inconstant, and inconsistent vending by publishers. I don’t want to buy paper comic books anymore. I want to subscribe to all my favorite titles digitally and I’m fine with coughing up a credit card number, setting subscription preferences (pull lists) and buzzing around the one central Comic Book app that ties everything together. That would get at least $20-40 a week out of me instead of my current $2.99 a week strategy.

Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.

You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.

Life as a Spring, or Housecleaning.

Posted on by
1

It’s not so much a post about the vagaries of housecleaning, which are rather dull, but instead the nature of the beast, which I envision as a shell-within-a-shell sisyphisian trudge. I have a plan, this plan goes hand-in-hand with my personal will towards simplification and forcing my house to bend to my designs. It is made of steps that have to be dealt with in a certain order for everything to make sense. You have to start somewhere and you need to cut out before you can reorganize.

Step 1: The Grace of Goodwill and/or the Salvation Army – This step is one of the biggest, but not the absolute biggest hurdles to my year-long plan for home order. The plan is to separate Fall/Winter wardrobes from Spring/Summer wardrobes and while selecting for that, also pitching clothes that no longer fit or are so surplus that I haven’t even thought of them in a year or more. This involves the purgation of all of our closets, which for a pair of gay men is as legendary as you imagine. There are 4 closet areas, the Walkin, Hobbiton, Hallway and Guest. All four have to be emptied and sorted, a pile heading to the charities and then the sorting of their seasonal appropriateness. The not-seasonal-now clothes will all eventually be stored in Hobbiton, as it is the largest closet I have ever seen in my life. Once the clothing is ordered properly we’ll have a clear bead on how much of Hobbiton was consumed and how much remains for secondary storage. Hobbiton is THAT BIG, and frankly speaking, I’ve never really looked very closely inside Hobbiton, so I imagine there are surprises lurking within, mayhap, even Hobbits.

Step 2: Organizing the Man Cave – Two gay men, a fully finished basement, and more electronics and gadgets than you can shake a stick at. This zone must be organized. DVD’s have to be sorted into alphabetical order and music has to be sorted into alphabetical order. The only variance to the sorting is the special thematic category of Horror/Thriller/Halloween movies, they will be on their own, sorted but segregated since they are the gory delight of every Samhain/Halloween celebration. The splatter must stand alone. 🙂 The music really ought to be digitized and the physical media obliterated, but that would be more trouble than it’s worth in the end.

Step 3: Organizing THE LIBRARY – I use all caps because the old master bedroom became THE LIBRARY. It’s where all our books are stored. Anyone who even is partially aware of Scott knows that his affection for books is beyond epic, beyond legend, it’s incredible. We don’t honor our Library nearly enough as we ought to and for this plan I can address some of it by alpha-sorting the entire structure. I need to dig deep into that room and purge off very old castaway technology and pitch much of what is my personal storage in that room. I haven’t seen it in a year, almost all of it, so keeping it is doing nothing for me, it has to go. The only thing that stays are the books, but for me personally, there are some books that will be landfill bound. Before we can address the Library we have to get our current lodger up and flying, so he can get his independence. Once that is done, the work on this room can commence.

In the end, of all these steps, our house will be more orderly and pleasant and I won’t have to feel awkward and bent about all these little nipping irritants, not being able to find the right clothes, the right movies, the right music or the right books to suit me. Also it would be nice to have a home again where I can sit where I please and do what I wish without having to contend with piles of drift-stuff that ended up malingering in corners. UP AND OUT. That’s the theme.

When will this grand plan be achieved? Maybe a year from now, maybe two. This simplification is vital and I can’t resist it any longer. All of this STUFF is stifling. When people mention this stuff, they sometimes use the word ‘trappings’ and that’s exactly what it is, stuff-based traps. I’m done with traps. Time to be simple.

Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies

Posted on by
Reply

Unlike the Death of Obsidian Butterflies, which is a neat little construct in the Exalted RPG, I am the unpleasant recipient of the Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies. First while making Guacamole for friends that are house-sitting for us while we are off to San Diego Comic Con I regularly, and in this last instance accidentally missed scraping the lime zest with my handy-dandy microplane grater and accidentally grated a bit of my ring-finger knuckle. Nothing to bleed over, but enough to make the rest of the Guacamole a trip through pain-town and dinner, which was Greek Lemon Chicken Orzo soup to be exquisitely painful as raw lemon juice soaked into my boo-boo. It is only aggravated today by TotalTech. I ordered a data cable that will allow me to move data from machine to machine without savaging the local ethernet network. The adapter came in a box and wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally scrape the same boo-boo against the staples that they use to secure the shipping manifests to the cardboard boxes. Just a little glint of sharp staple point, not enough to make me bleed, but lucky enough to hit me in the EXACT SAME SPOT.

They weren’t trying to get me, so I’m not, and can’t be angry about any of this, but ouch, the mild irritation of obsidian butterflies. 😉

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 4

Posted on by
Reply

After a little hiatus, back with the reviews:

  • Marvel – The Marvel App for the iPad is a wonderful taste of how good digital comics can be presented. The interface is slick, the payment structure is in place and the storage and actual use of the comic book really takes advantage of the power of the iPad as a comic book shaped device. Everything about this app screams awesome, you zoom along thinking you’ve found the perfect app and then you literally run right off the cliff. The problems? Where is DC’s content? It’s all fine that this is a Marvel app, but the structure of this app should be a standardized reader for all comics. Another problem is that Marvel is currently schizophrenic when it comes to their product path, you get a taste of comics, some are free, some are $1.99 but the principal problem behind all of this is that Marvel behaves as if this platform is just a showcase. I’ve spoken to people and I respect their opinions regarding this app and they agree with me, that Marvel is treating this as a teaser to buy actual comic books. That defeats the nature of the App itself. I don’t want physical comic books, I want virtual comic books! That’s the Achilles heel of this App, you can get started and fall in love with the app, but the love affair is short because Marvel isn’t taking it seriously. Do they print? Do they keep going with their digital flash-based comic site, or do they pursue the iPad market? Kudos for coming to the iPad market with their stellar app, jeers for starving the app and their fans of actual use of the app as a primary interface to Marvel. Currently it’s nice to show off the technology and the apps ‘promise’ but beyond that, it’s barely worth free, because there is no content once you rip past the shiny paper.
  • Reader – Google Reader for the iPad isn’t so much an App as it is a website with an icon created from it, which is a feature of the iPhone OS. It gives me access to the Google Reader interface, while it’s an acceptable method for consuming Reader news stories, I would really prefer a true iPad App, possibly one with an offline caching feature so that when my iPad is on-network it can soak up news so that I can look at items when I’m off the network. The bugbear here is that there is an App that does that, NetNewsWire, but I stopped using it because it’s syncing with Google Reader is broken. NNW is also a poor fit because it’s first and foremost an RSS reader with extensions to Google Reader. What I’m truly looking for is a Google Reader App for the iPad with caching. Maybe Google will, maybe they won’t. I would like it, and I would pay for it, but the web app icon is currently minimally sufficient.
  • Pages – This is one part of the iWork App Suite available for the iPad, the word processor. I used it while I was on a business trip to put together a document and the performance of the app is very solid. There are some very slight shruggable oddities such as not being able to bring up layout and page adjustment controls when in landscape display mode, but once you work out the kinks and actually learn how the App works, it’s well worth the price on the App Store to buy this particular app. The only glaring failure is the inability to print, but I have faith that either there will be an App that bridges the gap or there will be a printing feature in iPhone OS 4. It’s not enough to be a walk-away problem, and there is enough polish elsewhere in the app to make up for the lack of printing features. One of the big things about the iPad is the strong message it sends, that classic printing is dead. In that light I can get along with the lack of printing and appreciate the future that the iPad represents.
  • ComicZeal4 – Quite possibly the best App for my iPad, hands down. This moderately priced app swallows CBR, CBZ, and PDF files for comic books stored digitally in those formats. ComicZeal4 is my go-to-app for how I read comic books on my iPad. The presence or absence of certain titles in this app will have to be left up to your imagination however this app does represent a very dangerous thing for ‘old-school’ comic book companies like Marvel and DC. I’ve stated this before in other blog entries, but if you don’t innovate and cater to your customers they will innovate all by themselves, without you. There is an enormous collection of up-to-press comic books presented in a digital format that is exactly compatible with ComicZeal4 and the iPad that have nothing at all to do with Marvel or DC. Because these companies are asleep at worst or sluggish at best at reaching the iPad market, their customers can get what they want without Marvel or DC’s input, without gracing Marvel or DC with money for their work. It’s a natural result of being absent in a market that is voracious for your products. The longer Marvel and DC stay asleep and continue to not-be-present in this marketplace the more their products will leak out and their profit bases erode. What can Marvel and DC do to combat this? It’s completely obvious – enter the marketplace and bring everything you sell! There is a window of opportunity here for both companies, if they don’t take it they will be losing out on not only a multi-million dollar market but also the inevitable future – paper is dead, devices are next. iPad is just the start. If either Marvel or DC is going to enter the space, come with your A-game, not some lame half-hearted toe-wiggling.

Comics and The Bleeding Edge

Posted on by
3

After unboxing my Apple iPad and playing around with it pretty constantly I am reminded of an old argument I made a while back regarding the collision of technology and comic books. Specifically the two comic book companies (there are many more, but these two are the leaders) Marvel and DC are either totally asleep or schizophrenic when it comes to technology and “The Bleeding Edge”. It used to be in time long ago that content providers had a seamless lock on their entire business model, they hired creative staff, they created master-proofs, they printed them and distributed them to their customers. The delineation was delightfully cut and dried, producers would release on their schedule and consumers would loyally go and consume when the producer gave the wink and the nod. There was only one format, the locked-in format and there was no choice in the format. In comic books, everyone went to the comic book store, they had a pull list, they showed up loyally every wednesday and paid for their books and the world made sense.

Then technology came. Specifically in this case, the Apple iPad. This is the first device that has a display that is compatible with displaying comic-books (and manga for that matter) and is user-friendly enough and convenient enough for people to sit in their favorite chair or on their favorite couch and voraciously consume comic books. This new device enables the customer to see the content they want in the form they want it in. No more heavy longboxes, no more paper, no more dead-trees-and-ink. Now every comic book they own can either be in their device or on a USB Memory Stick dangling from their car keys. Whats more, it takes the printing and distribution middlemen out of the equation altogether, so now it’s just Comic Book Producer and Consumer, face to face.

Or at least that would be if people were concentrating on the bleeding edge, but they aren’t. DC has yet to even come up with an App, but Marvel has. This isn’t to crow at Marvel beating DC since Marvel is stuck in the corner being schizophrenic and quietly muttering to itself. “Do I print, I gotta print. I also gotta do flash, oh yes, the flash is pretty, but then the iPad, so nice…” and the customers are titillated but growing restive with the cliff-face of “Perfect… perfect… Uh, WTF?” The Marvel App is a glittering wonder, that leaves you like Wiley E. Coyote after he runs off the cliff, but before he notices the violation of the law of gravity.

The mantra for 21st Century business is “Adapt or Die” and in this sense, both Marvel and DC aren’t really showing signs that adaptation is foremost on their minds, from observable behavior. I’ve said this before and I will say it again, now that the customer is free *and* enabled with high technology they can and will actively compensate for the failures of their beloved comic book producers to provide a way for us to get what we want, when we want it. We don’t want it on paper, we want it in digital format. We want micropayments and we want subscriptions, and we want our comics pushed to us when they are published.

There are two worlds running concurrently:

In the first world you have everyone being upright and legal, this is a fantasyworld because so far the instrumentation doesn’t exist for us, the consumers to engage with this world yet. What do I imagine in this world? I see two apps on the Apple iPad. Marvel and DC. The trade images they put in their movies, it’s most recognizable. So lets tap once on the DC App (easier to imagine since it doesn’t exist yet). I see a system that closely resembles the Marvel storefront, a place to browse Comics, a Library of purchased content, and a Settings page. On the Settings Page is my preferred method of payment, my debit or credit card is on file, through the “Payment” button. Near that is “My Subscriptions” which is essentially my pull-list for DC. I want all GL, BG, WW, BM, and SM, also want Flash and I want to follow Brightest Day, for example. On Wednesday, around 2pm (throw a bone to the printed-comics people) I open the DC app and there is a list of all the issues on my pull list. I tap “Buy Issue” button and it downloads. I sync with my iTunes and it all gets backed up. DC could then turn around and sell me a backup application for $10 that allows me to back all my comics up on a storage medium of my choosing in some popular format, like PDF, CBR, or CBZ. Everyone is happy, I have my comics with me wherever I go, DC is happy because they are selling comics like hotcakes, it’s win-win all around.

In the second world, the world some of us inhabit, it’s a darker and less legal world. Our beloved companies have yet to publish any digital content in any reliable way and we’re patently impatient for progress so we strike out on our own to make things the way we want them. People go online and find, using BitTorrent each of their titles, scanned in beautiful color format, conveniently stored in CBR or CBZ files. People download this content without paying anyone anything, we click and drag these files to sync software and we place them on our devices. We get what we want, but it’s piracy, it’s unfair, and ultimately it’s harmful to the producers. On the other hand, even if it’s slightly annoying, the customers are happy. At least there is that.

What does it come down to? If you don’t make the effort to constantly expand and adapt your business model to suit technology your customers may innovate without you. The fact that we don’t have this kind of infrastructure in place yet is very stunning to me. For $1.99 an issue Marvel and DC would be able to skip PRINTING, be able to skip DISTRIBUTION, skip entire super-expensive channels altogether and engage in direct marketing with their consumers. No overhead means all that more profit to Marvel and DC. You would think that sheer greed would have driven both of these companies to have an Apple iPad app on the market the day the iPad was released. No. All we have is Marvel dipping their toes into the water, titillating us and leaving us stymied. DC isn’t even in sight, it’s mind-boggling.