* Gamechanger: Marvel is releasing Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 digitally via their iPad app the same day it hits stores in print format. Day-and-date digital release has finally come to the Big Two–albeit in what strikes me as a judicious fashion. To wit:
* It’s only one book right now. It’s a major movie character people will recognize, and it comes from a run of comics that’s both quite good and seems appealing to fans of those movies. It’s going onto the very zeitgeisty iPad, Dirk Deppey be damned. And of course it can bask in the awestruck adulation that’s always generated whenever DC or Marvel is the first to do a particular thing–y’know, like kicking off your link roundup with words like “gamechanger.”
* More importantly, if you buy the comic for the iPad in its three chapter-long chunks for $2 a pop, it ends up costing you $1 more than the $4.99 print version. In other words, it’s a way to get people who don’t want or can’t go to a comic shop, or to whom the very idea of buying print comics at a comic shop is totally irrelevant, to buy the book without incentivizing the people who do go to the shops every Wednesday to pick up the print version to ditch the shop and buy it online instead. That’s a pretty neat way to square the circle. It doesn’t answer how they’ll competitively but not destructively price a book that doesn’t contain 66 story pages, and it certainly doesn’t mitigate against the already overpriced monthly pamphlet format in the first place, but still, it seems smart.
* Anyway, if you wanna get a picture of what’s at stake with the dawn of day-and-date digital release, here are some recent pieces to read:
* Me, and Dirk and Brian in the comments
* Finally, to reiterate something I allude to above, Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man run has been really good, and it makes me happy to be able to fully get behind a comic that will be making a big popcultural splash again–just like I was able to do when Ed Brubaker’s Death of Captain America storyline hit big.
* I have a half-day of work so I’m G’ing TFO of the city, but if you’re in Brooklyn, why not go see an exhibition of work by the talented (and extraordinarily friendly!) Brian Chippendale?
* Hope Larson has finished a 398-page draft of her A Wrinkle in Time adaptation! This’ll be something to see.
* Tom Spurgeon talks to the great retailer, convention organizer, and too-infrequent-these-days blogger Chris Butcher about various and sundry things. One thing I’ve always meant to say about Chris is that he and I tussled now and then in the earlier days of the comics blogosphere, but a couple years back I bumped into him in the Chicago airport as we both waited to transfer onto the same flight to San Diego, and he simply could not have been friendlier during the time we talked and ate lunch together, especially considering he was with a few people and I was all alone. Chris is an opinionated guy, and any opinionated person who puts his opinions on public display over the course of years is going to get in arguments with other opinionated people from time to time, by the very definition of being opinionated. But it’s the opinions that matter to a fellow like Chris, not scoring cool points on his own behalf nor kicking other people in the teeth, and I think that’s a good indicator of why his TCAF show is the success that it is. Dude cares about good comics.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and said it long before The Sopranos, because that’s how fucking awesome I am): Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” is basically Joy Division’s “Transmission” in terms of structure and sentiment, and both are incredible songs.
* My big problem with M.I.A. in that infamous Lynn Hirschberg profile, in terms of the thing that made me think less of her as a person, didn’t involve saying provocative and simplistic things about politics, which is par for the pop-star course a lot of the time, nor whether she did or didn’t order or eat fancy french fries, which I think anyone who either has enough money or is being taken out to lunch on the New York Times’ expense account might want to do–it was the part where she called Lady Gaga ugly. That’s just straight-up middle-school Mean Girls nastiness. Moreover, I think it comes from M.I.A.’s envy of Gaga’s career as the superstar arty weirdo of pop, which Gaga carved out for herself through talent and ambition and which M.I.A. has only been able to come within shouting distance of thanks to the commercials for Pineapple Express. I listen to a lot of musicians who have behaved abominably toward people–David Bowie’s entire career is littered with close friends and collaborators who suddenly found themselves summarily cut off–so it’s not a dealbreaker, but I think it’s a lot more revealing about M.I.A.’s personality and maturity than all the stuff about the Tamil Tigers and truffle fries.
* Check out “Mario’s Ladder,” a little video about Mario by Cory Godbey. Henry Benjamin Kammer’s piano arrangements of the Super Mario Bros. theme music and Star music sound gorgeous in this video, which also captures the sort of transcendent feeling that the Mario games have increasingly and delightfully tapped into now and then.
“bit and run” — Mario’s Ladder from Cory Godbey on Vimeo.
* I love Steely Dan.
The part of the MIA article that really irked me is when she said she doesn’t say “give peace a chance” she says “give war a chance.” I think at this point in human history war has been giving a sporting chance.
Goes without saying.