Pop Geek

What Ben Folds found in William Shatner is a man with a genuine gift for lyrical interpretation, if not a gift for singing. Certainly Shatner's record from the sixties, The Transformed Man, has mockable elements, but only because you are stacking his interpretations up against the Beatles, Sinatra, and others. Taking a song sung by a real singer and then reassembling it as a staged reading is a process doomed to failure (although Shatner pulled it off pretty well with his "Common People" cover of a few years back). 

Here Folds creates a character for Shatner to play, writes out a monologue, then sets that monologue to a rhythm and a floating, keening melody. Shatner sinks his teeth into the performance to such a degree that the "character" he creates in this Conan clip is far different from the one he created on the record--more swagger, more cocksure, and in his way, more pathetic. Shatner feeds off the crowd, almost unable to keep from laughing, that same brilliant look on his face as always--like he's in on a joke you could never understand.

If you haven't already, you should spend a few moments reading David Brothers' exceptional piece on digital comics at Comics Alliance. 

He's right, so right it hurts, and he's saying things that many fans and pros alike have no doubt been thinking for months if not years. This is the "train already out of the station" argument, essentially, the one that got Mark Waid into so much trouble, and the same one that smart folks have already made about the music and film industries. 

To me, it's not even so much that the train has already left the station; it's that the train of "mainstream" comics is just one train on one track that is visiting stations it never even knew existed. I think the situation is even bigger than just the current landscape can suggest. I think it has the potential to go beyond just a direct market vs. digital playing field. It's potentially bigger than even the Big Two and the massive media empires behind them.

Digital comics--or hell, digital anything--is more than just a new delivery avenue for existing content. It's a new distribution platform in its own right. 

***

Let's just examine the Apple ecosystem. Yesterday Steve Jobs said that 120 million devices running iOS have been sold since the advent of the iPhone in 2007. For the sake of conversation, let's assume those are all still active & updated, even though they're not, but it gives us a big fun number. 

If just one percent of those people buy an app, you've sold 120,000 apps. That number rivals any current comic book sitting in Diamond's top ten. Keep selling new installments through that app, a buck apiece, and you may be clearing $100K per "issue." That's at conservative pricing and conservative estimates. 

Comics are second only to prose in the low cost of entry; paper and a pen, and a scanner to get it online. An app just needs to be sophisticated enough to scroll through pictures; any tablet device will provide an experience comparable to an actual printed book. So it takes a lot less to put it out there, which means it can in some situations require less to make it worthwhile. Certainly the margins are far more expansive than stirring into the mix print costs, distribution headaches, and the level of marketing required to get bodies actually into comic book stores to take a chance on something new. 

Perhaps more than any other form of mass entertainment, comics has the potential to equalize the playing field in the digital realm, to put the next megahit in the hands of a couple kids working out of a garage. That has next to nothing to do with the people who publish superhero comics and tend to massive IP farms. It has everything to do with the basics: Communication, entertainment, connection. 

Comixology is already doing it; through them, I've spent money buying comics on my iPhone and iPad that only saw actual physical paper printing after they were delivered to me electronically. They've got some nice genre titles that are a breath of fresh digital air, that deserve to sit alongside the best books put out by the big diverse publishers--IDW, Dark Horse, Image, BOOM.

How long before someone with a little money in their pockets comes along to start a true digital comics company, bringing in fresh talent and offering them infrastructure, marketing, and technology support in exchange for a cut of the profits from their sales? The right terms would bring some quality creators into that mix. The right ideas would turn a digital comic into a potentially huge moneymaker and (possibly, maybe, right?) a cultural phenomenon. 

***

Like David Brothers, I'm disappointed that digital comics--or at least, the translation of print comics to the digital medium--has started off on a half-step that is designed solely to pacify direct market retailers, even though the publishers and creators know as well as the retailers do that they're NOT really driving sales to brick and mortar stores. They're driving sales on apps that live on phones and tablets and laptops. It's an illusory shell game that everyone involved deep down knows is a con, but WE'RE ALL PLAYING IT ANYWAY. 

But it's not surprising. Marvel and DC have helped to create and nurture the ugly monster that is the comics direct market, so of course they have to keep it fed and surviving long enough for this digital business to catch up. It's a slowly shrinking insular world that becomes less relevant every day. 

What's crazy is that as much as digital comics are changing everything, they're really changing nothing at all. I wrote about part of this a year ago (jesus, a year ago); the direct market isn't just dying, it's dead. Digital is only one of the nails driving into the coffin's lid. Smart owners of comic book stores are already taking steps to diversify and insure their business continues, and chances are, they've been doing things right for years before the direct market began to implode. Everyone else is gonna have a hard time of it, but you know what? I bet railroad executives were seriously sweating it every time they saw a passenger plane fly overhead. 

*** 

The next Watchmen, or Walking Dead, or Scott Pilgrim may be an app. It may not be available at your local corporate superhero emporium. You may not see a five-page preview at Newsarama. 

You may jut open an app store one day, and notice one of the top apps is a cool-looking new story. You will take a chance, because the first taste is free or 99 cents. 

You will be transported. There may be fancy bells and whistles, like music or motion, but it's just as likely it'll be the same story delivery mechanism that's told so many brilliant tales over centuries--words and pictures, in concert. 

Then there may be movie deals, or TV series, or whatever other pop culture signifiers denote "success" and provide money. But it will originate wholly on a mobile platform.

At the same time, it's just gonna be good stories. Guys in spandex throwing punches, and more, of course so much more, every genre under the sun--crime stories, romance stories, twentysomethings-in-big-cities stories, horror stories, fantasy, and everything else. Stuff we can't imagine yet, or stuff we just haven't read yet, and we'll see it and say "where has this been all my life?" If you're lucky, it's always gonna be something that gives you a smile or a chuckle or a fist-pump in the middle of a crowded restaurant. 

We're still gonna get it, and we will probably still be getting it from Marvel and DC even when we're removing our teeth at night. But that ain't the half of it, not by a long shot. There are more things in heaven and earth, geeks, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Truly a milestone in the grand history of Shatnerica. 

This morning I spent a few hours yakking on yon Twitter about the upcoming slate of films from Marvel Studios: Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers. 

At the same time, I was listening to Matt Fraction's brilliant performance at w00tstock of "The Batman Dreams of Hieronymus Machines." (Okay, so I was also doing ACTUAL WORK, since I have an ACTUAL JOB. I multitask; it's how I do.)

It made for an interesting collision. Fraction's speech is about a great many things, and deserves to be listened to instead of just reading my shitty half-sentence summary, but it deals primarily with the unique alchmey of comics as a storytelling device--words, pictures, and whatever you bring to the table. 

I think that's amplified by the fact that they're always a personal experience; you can see a movie with 1,000 of your closest friends, and you can go to a concert and get beer spilled down your shirt while you listen to  your favorite song. But there's ultimately nothing communal about a comic; it's you and the work.

Except that often the second you're done, when you can log on and find dozens of places where your opinions, ideas, theories, and lame gags can get mixed into the meaty, frequently pungent stew commonly known as "online discourse."

I kid, I kid. It's good stuff, mostly. And sometimes, it brings the magical to a level that is fully mundane. 

I'm having this chat about The Avengers, which I am enjoying even though it's frequently frustraing me, and I'm listening to one of my favorite comic book writers talk about the fucking magic of stories, especially those told in comics form. (As opposed to the fucking magic of fucking magnets; for more on that, see here.)

There's this fine line geeks tap-dance upon, and it's the one between the possible and the all-too-real. The ambitions we have for the stories we love must often be reconciled with the disappointing actualizations of those stories. I want a $150 million three-hour feature film adaptation of Infinity Gauntlet, directed by Bill Condon and starring James Gandolfini as Thanos; it will not happen. 

So I start immediately reconciling in my brain, tap dancing along the line, thinking about what could be and what will be, excited and disappointed by both. It's probably gonna be an Ultimates adaptation, that's cool, I like those comics...but what about the Cosmic Cube? And Loki? That's awesome sauce to stir into the mix. And Janet and Hank Pym, I'd love to see them in the film, but Whedon's probably already told us it won't happen...but what if he's being obtuse, and when he says "Ant-Man," he doesn't necessarily mean Hank Pym?

Or the other ideas floated by my pals...Janet Pym on her own in a romance with Steve Rogers...the "death" of Bucky Barnes and the rise of the Winter Soldier somehow folded into the storyline...a Hulk that's still crazy but has just enough Banner to be dangerous...

The possible, the probable, banging heads incessantly until the movie is out, and we all go, and we all judge it. 

Then we start talking sequel. And so it goes.