A Few Random Notes on Digital Comics

There's a lot of talk about digital comics in the air, from commentaries by Steven Grant and Augie DeBlieck to interviews with SLG's Dan Vado about his company's Eyemelt store to random notes of interests like Emo Boy moving from print to digital through Eyemelt. It has me thinking, and although I'm still drastically under-informed and not sure what I have to say makes much sense, I do have some initial thoughts.

* It's interesting to me that a lot of what gets argued on an issue like this is based on assertions of a rooting interest in either bottom-line revenues or in various facets of revenue distribution, interests I don't always share and question whether anyone should. For instance, if you believe in an ethical business outcome that values, say, an artist's control over her work and a fair shot of maximizing her profit off of it, you end up with a very different take on digital comics arguments which point to the bottom line as the overriding virtue.

* I can't for the life of me figure out why all the comics companies haven't pursued this more aggressively. All comic books should be available in digital form by now. When the notoriously conservative newspaper strip business is years ahead of you, you're moving too slow. My only guess is that media companies may be resistant to change by nature and it's only when an undeniably effective application drives the business in a certain direction that businesses follow. It's worth noting that what we have in comics right now isn't a breaking through a wall driven by a super-great way of reading comics that is years ahead of what we thought possible, but a slow thinning of a membrane in areas like speed of downloads and screen size that make reading comics through existing applications increasingly pleasurable.

* Another guess is that no one can figure out a cost that makes sense but still allows for the generation of equivalent -- or worthwhile supplementary -- revenue.

* I don't really buy arguments that companies should protect existing ways of doing businesses by not pursuing other sources for revenue. If comics companies made this their religion, we'd never have had all these wonderful trade paperbacks because reprinting a comic could be seen as cutting into back issues sales. Further, I find it hard to believe that the big comics companies have suddenly become solicitous and caring when it comes to a system with whom their historical relationship is a decades-long country music song of abuse and neglect. I can see it with the medium-sized companies, who are invested enough they could suffer a backlash (many smaller companies don't have enough of a foothold to be punished this way), but not the big ones.

* It could be that the big companies believe that pouring resources into a new market would be an overall negative. If the audience for digital comic books has a ceiling that falls short of current revenues, and yet that shift in revenue is enough to critically wound any number of comic book shops by taking away a certain percentage of business they need to survive -- a debatable notion, I know -- then in a few years you might have an overall negative. It could be that comic shops may be seen as a greater growth market than downloadable comics, either because of the Direct Market's specific virtues or perhaps even because of dysfunctions that serve the companies' bottom line. Even when a market is in historical decline you don't always abandon it, a lesson we've learned from newspaper strips' cautiousness in entering the digital arena.

* Even though he seems much more educated on this general issue than I am, my gut says to reject a notion from Steven Grant that seems to suggest some outcomes are inevitable. For one, I think this is less true in comics than in, say, music, because we haven't experienced a tipping point yet or the rush of momentum towards a certain outcome driven, say, by a popular application. I understand the argument that there's no use arguing with folks that what they're doing when they illegally download and there's a certain historical inevitability at work in widespread consumer values and buying patterns and that it's good strategy to stop pushing against the tide and start fashioning a surfboard in order to ride it. At the same time, I think public statements and pleas that run counter to widespread popular belief can inject a healthy dose of counter-argument that may help to shape future options.

* I do think you can tweak an emerging culture's assumptions. Ten years ago I spent some time every week on the Internet asking people to take down articles they had posted from my then-employer The Comics Journal, and in about 95 percent of the cases those people screamed bloody murder that I didn't understand how the Internet worked, and that they were doing me a favor, and what I was attempting was hopeless, and this was the future and so on. Today, while some blogs and message board posters may over-zealously cut and paste, you don't see entire articles reprinted the way you used to, and there seems a widespread assumption that if Dirk Deppey writes an essay, then it's the Comics Journal's right to have that on their site in a way that helps them sell advertising. I don't think that would have evolved the same way without the persistence of people objecting to what they were told was the universal culture.

* Except for that minority of people who can't stand to read any comics at all on the computers, and what assumes is another minority out there that all hate paper comics, the bulk of the argument has pushed far past the simple paper vs. computer screen binary. There are a variety of different comics-reading experiences, some of which are best served for people on a computer screen and some of which are best served on paper. There are also some where it doesn't matter. There are a lot of comics I'd be happy to get as a download -- I'd have loved to have seen that Captain America gets shot comic book the day it came out, and would be happy to have others around for research -- and a metric ton of comics I can't imagine buying that way. I think it's a more complex market than the way it's usually argued, and it's not one we may understand until ten years after companies and creators are fully invested in it.
 
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