by Brian
Hibbs
I
think we all knew that this was inevitable, but now the other shoe
(or at least one of several shoes) has dropped – Marvel has announced
their Digital Comics program.
Let’s
get one thing out of the way, up front: it is absolutely inevitable
that the publishers were/are going to add digital delivery to the
channels that they use to try and reach the audience. While there’s
some infrastructure that needs to be built for the actual delivery,
the content itself is already digitized for trafficking within the
publisher, and prior to printing.
Certainly
most (but not all) comics still are produced in traditional ways
– an artist is in front of a drawing board, drawing on a piece of
paper with a pencil. But at some point shortly after that, virtually
all pages are scanned and dealt with as digital files thereafter.
Since
the material already exists in that format, it really does make
it a no-brainer to place this material on the web.
So
the question becomes what impact will this have on the physical
printed object, and, by extension, to the retail market?
There’s
no disguising the fact that I’m pretty much an old fogey on this
topic – I don’t believe that the computer monitor is the best way
to read material that isn’t reasonably short and concise. And while
we have an entire generation that’s about to grow up where the monitor
is going to be as natural to them as anything else, every study
I’ve ever seen suggests that retention and attention is lost from
the glowing screen. Will this continue to be true for the next generation?
Who really knows, but it seems to me that the brain parses certain
types of input in some fairly specific ways, and that few, if any
people, are truly enthusiastic about reading long-form work from
a monitor.
There’s
also questions about formatting, about how the eye “reads” comics,
about the use of “gutter” space and so on – one of the things comics
have that are unique to the medium is that much of them take place
between the panels. The comics page has a very different set of dimensions than a computer
monitor, so what flows and reads easily on one may have a completely
different aesthetic impact on the other. Particularly among artists
who design for the entire page – think of a Neal Adams 70s Batman
page, or anything by J.H. Williams today.
The individual panel is just a larger component of the page, and
the need to scroll around can, and probably will, blunt some of
the power of those storytelling choices.
Intriguingly,
the material probably best suited to the screen is the “classic”
material – material (largely) prior to the 1970s, where each panel
is meant to be a sovereign entity to itself. Reading a panel at
a time of Amazing Spider-Man #10 (1964) is probably a fairly
seamless process – the same probably couldn’t be said to be true
of any given issue of, say, Promethea.
But
even in the “simple page design” mode, I don’t know that I can say
that “on screen” is an equivalent reading experience. If one looks
at digital music, except for a slight degradation in quality that
I think that few but the most dedicated audiophiles can really detect,
“delivery system” matters very little – whether you’re listening
to a CD on your stereo, or an MP3 on your iPod, the music is effectively
the same. This doesn’t seem to be as remotely true for reading –
be it prose or comics. With reading, the physical boundaries of
the page partially shape your experience of the work. In fact, skilled
authors will often make use of those boundaries to control the pacing
and flow of the story, even in prose.
Further,
there’s the portability issue to consider – an iPod (or a Walkman
before it) fits in your pocket easily, making it easy to carry around
your entire library of music. As long as you have some output capable
of playing the music (be it speakers or a set of headphones), you’re
fine, and the device the size of a deck of cards will serve you
well. The same isn’t as true for reading material – even if there
was an “E-Reader” that was universally accepted and used, it would
have to be many times larger than an iPod, because there’s pretty
much a minimum size at which reading is comfortable. And even that
minimum size (say the size of a paperback) won’t read all that well
with most comics, which are designed for a much larger space.
Until
we hit the science-fictional point where there is stretchable electronic
“paper”, I think that reading lacks the “killer app” that a size-of-a-business-card
music player has.
So,
while, as I indicated, I think that several moves towards digital
comics are absolutely inevitable, I think we’re a really long time
from where that will be the preferred manner of reading for the
majority of people.
I
look upon most attempts to sell the digital comics libraries as
being largely additive to the sales of the physical objects – reaching
audiences that are relatively unlikely to naturally purchase the
physical object in the first place, and creating some measure of
interest for that physical object. Anecdotally, both Carla Speed
McNeil’s Finder and Phil Foglio’s
Girl Genius have reported greater sales on their collections
after placing the serializations on-line. And certainly the success
of hard-copy versions of Penny Arcade or the recent Heroes
HC seem to show that even material that originates as free can have
significant life as a tangible physical item..
I
do think that one of the things that publishers are going to have
to strongly consider and adjust to is in making the design aesthetic
of their physical objects that much stronger – the book may in fact
become a type of a “fetish object”, where the design, the printing,
the presentation, the extra things that you’re not getting free/low
cost as a digital item become the things that you’re buying the
physical presentation for, as much as the content. (or
at least relatively)
But
just like my thoughts from last month on the relationship of the
periodical to the “trade waiters”, I think this gives even more
imperative to create things in the physical periodical release that
add value, give compelling reasons to buy the material in that format,
and encourage a love of the tangible item.
Because
we’ve haven’t faced the acid test yet – A-list material that is
either available at the same time both in print and on the web (and
where the web version is almost certainly cheaper than the physical
object), or even exclusively on the web – and we don’t know what
that will do to retail sales.
As
I understand it, the idea behind the pricing model that iTunes uses
is that the cost of buying each song individually is more or less
the same cost of buying the entire physical “album”. And, again
based on what I understand, because of this pricing model very few
people seem to be buying entire digital albums, and instead just
purchase those songs that they really like. And I’m not sure that
this model would translate well to comics, where our “singles” are
usually just a chapter of a longer piece. While you might be able
to appreciate the formal exercise of “Fearful Symmetry” of Watchmen
#5 in an academic fashion, outside of the context of the entire
Watchmen story, it is fairly unsatisfying as an entertainment
experience on its own.
But
what happens if Marvel decides to launch Civil War II #1 on the
net, for $1.99, on the same day that comic is released in the stores
(for $3.99, as a physical object)? If there’s
a potential crisis point for the Direct Market in this, that would
be where we would face it. Because we really don’t know what
would happen at that point. In theory there are a percentage of
consumers that would switch to the cheaper format immediately, because
they are more cost-conscious than anything else. I would reason
that this percentage will likely be relatively low, because today
right now you can get pretty much every comic that came out this
week for free from the Torrent sites (illegally, but still), and
that the majority of the most cost-conscious customers are less
concerned about legalities than they are about saving money. Still,
it’s very likely that there is some percentage
that don’t want to steal, but care more about the reading
than owning an actual physical object. The question is,
how big is this segment of the audience? Losing even 5 or 10% of
the sales of a physical comic could cause many titles to become
unprofitable, while losing 5-10% of their gross could conceivably
put a significant number of comic shops out of business.
The
real risk comes from creating a spiral where stores lose business,
and go under, leaving the other 90% of their customers without a
place to buy comics, causing sales to go down further, causing more
stores to go under, and so forth. This is a real risk that I’d hope
publishers are thinking about carefully – despite the lack of penetration
that comics have in many areas (especially non-urban areas), the
Direct Market is still a pretty potent market – we’re well on track
to beating $400 million dollars this year (and yeah, that’s just
the DM, not counting bookstore sales), and that would be a whole
lot of $60/year subscriptions that would have to sell to make up
for that.
I
think what I’m hoping for from this is to reach out to people beyond
the existing markets, to draw more people into the hobby and medium
– but that will take a fairly large promotion and advertising initiative,
and Marvel has typically been adverse to spending money to make
more. But it seems to me that this program is unlikely to work without
reaching way past the existing readers.
And,
it seems to me, that if that can be done, then we’ve got a good
shot at creating new long-term readers who learn that they actually
enjoy the form of comics, and will seek out the physical copies.
That can’t help but be good for everyone.
Ultimately
the watchword is one of caution – to protect and preserve our current
markets, while making the digital one an additive one that can be
a feeder market.
Let’s
hope that can be done!
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated
Comix Experience in San
Francisco since 1989, and is a founding member of the Board of Directors
of ComicsPRO,
the Comics Professional Retailer Organization. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You
can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at
Windmills (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine)
from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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