* The unearthed/uncut version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is playing in New York City!
* Rickey Purdin reveals the comics he’s gotten over the past few weeks. I think a purchase pattern that involves Wilson, G.I. Joe, Girl Fuck, Hellboy, Mome, Orc Stain, Invincible, FCHS, and Grickle is a pretty delightful one. Comics, Rickey is your audience.
* A He-Man & the Masters of the Universe art show featuring Matt Furie, Nick Gazin, Brandon Graham, Corey Lewis, Angie Wang, and that Adrian Riemann guy who did those awesome Hipsters of the Universe fashion illos a while back? Floating World, you have made me burn with desire.
* Mike Mignola talks to Kiel Phegley about Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain and the Mignola/Arcudi Hellboy/BPRD folklore/pulp divide. A regular interview series about the Mignolaverse is a real mitzvah.
* Jesse Moynihan’s GWC has wrapped up at Arthur magazine’s comics site. Cosmic absurdism. Read the whole thing.
* I think you will nevertheless enjoy Douglas Wolk’s interview with Grant Morrison about Batman if you enjoy Grant Morrison interviews about Batman.
* Speaking of Douglas and Techland, it was quite fortuitous that his piece on how the common-sense-defying policies of the Big Two comics publishers regarding same-day digital delivery of their products came out on the exact same day as Tom Spurgeon’s lengthy, meaty interview with retailer Brian Hibbs, in which Hibbs expresses as his overriding, number-one wish regarding digital comics that the Big Two publishers avoid same-day digital delivery. Simply put, I think that if Marvel and DC ever really get involved in digital comics, Brian doesn’t have a prayer of his wish coming true. In the wake of the iPad I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you see moves in that direction this year, in fact. And not a moment too soon. You just can’t expect publishers to throw money away forever, not when there’s a demonstrated demand for doing things a certain way that’s already being met by pirates. And I agree with Douglas that, contra Brian, it’s very much the “gotta read it by Wednesday afternoon!” crowd that will fire digital sales, not civilians looking for perennials. They’ll be part of it, but once they’re provided with an easy way to follow things as they come out, that’s what they’ll do, same as they do with TV shows and movies and music and whatever else.
“In the wake of the iPad I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you see moves in that direction this year, in fact.”
I would. Take the million iPads reportedly sold to date, divide it by the number of actual long-term customers Marvel would likely have (as opposed to the curious bystanders who downloaded a few introductory freebies or sampled a 99¢ comic or two out of sheer novelty), and I don’t think the remaining customer base is nearly large enough to justify the sheer rage that such a move would engender among retailers.
I’ll see you on January 1st, broheim. 🙂
Digital comics are obviously being aimed at the iPad market right now, but it’s not like digital comics must be read on such a device. Start putting out new releases for half the price (or even 1/4) of the physical copy, people will start switching whether they’ve got a tablet or not.
“Retailer rage” will almost certainly be a problem, but when it comes right down to it, what would the big companies have to lose? Seems to me that any retailer retribution is just gonna increase interest in digital and hasten the demise of those retailer’s shops.
I just hope that same-day digital comics only leads to all of the shitty stores closing down, rather than, say, all of the stores period.
What the big companies have to lose is hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, if they play their cards wrong. Remember, the music industry still hasn’t recouped the profits lost when digital trading ate their lunch, despite several years’ in sales on platforms like the iPod store.
Lost in all the iPad hype is that it still isn’t even close to being a competitor for the cellphone market, let alone the Web. Those channels are where all the eyeballs still are. Marvel and DC still aren’t remotely close to the tipping point that forced the record labels’ hand, which means that if they’re smart, they’ll be plotting for the future.
My guess is that the transition to digital won’t a sudden bang, but a slow trickle — less shooting a deer in the head than boiling a lobster in a pot. If I were Marvel, my next move would be to debut a few select titles three months after release, on both the iPad and the company’s online subscription service. Give it a few months, let the market get used to the idea and the customer base demonstrate the revenue potential and then, if it goes well, start transferring titles from that timeframe to digital until everything from three months ago is online. Wait, then repeat the process using titles from two months back. And so on.
Dirk, I can’t tell if you’re addressing Fake Pat or me, but in fairness to myself I didn’t say it’d be a sudden bang or shooting a deer in the head in terms of transitioning to same-day release. But I still think you’ll see some same-day stuff go down this year.
“You just can’t expect publishers to throw money away forever, not when there’s a demonstrated demand for doing things a certain way that’s already being met by pirates.”
The question is, I think, in regards to the pirating sites: IS there “demand” if there is ANY charge whatsoever?
If there are (I don’t know?) 100,000 downloads in a week of title x, on a pirate site for free, how many people-who-would-purchase-a-work if the legal download was 25 cents? 99 cents? $1.99? $2.99?
Can you map “will steal” to “will pay” in any meaningful fashion?
**
To me, and I didn’t get into this in the Spurgeon interview, but I will in this week’s TILTING, but it seems to me that what we want is for the digital version to function as “The Newstand”, where people can sample things and then, hopefully, be lead to a specialty store where they can find a wider/better range of material.
I think the reason we don’t have Day&Date yet, and probably won’t anytime soon in a super-sexy-attractive form is that, unlike music and video vendors, the DM doesn’t have an inherently antagonistic relationship with our vendors (Stop laughing, Deppey!), and we’re working together to try and find solutions that work for everyone.
We’ll see what happens, of course.
-B