Pop Geek

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. 

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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.

My four-year-old took to it like a duck to water. I use it pretty much every evening for at least an hour or two. Older folks I know don't understand the point. They like books just fine, thanks.

But it's more than books, of course. It's the internet, and social media, and comics, and games, and movies, and TV shows, and yes books, and things we haven't even imagined yet, sitting in your lap on a small beautiful sheet of uninterrupted glass. 

Let's talk specifically about that "internet" part.

My college years seemed to have lined up with the emergence of the world wide web as a viable conduit for information and entertainment. I started in 1994, and the big scene was usenet. By 1998, I was checking out Harry Knowles every morning and publishing my own content online. The internet was introduced into my life as a multipurpose environment. I exchanged information, communicated for school and business...but also socialized and found plenty of material that functioned solely as entertainment. Heck, I remember times when I'd end up crowded around a computer with my friends actually surfing the web FOR FUN. It was new, it was exciting, it was chock full of weird. Still is. 

Like most of my peers and most who have come down the information superhighway since, I quickly viewed the internet as a recreational pursuit, in addition to a tool for communication and information gathering.

At the risk of speaking in broad generalities, I'd argue that for those in previous generations, the internet was introduced not as a multipurpose environment, but as a communication tool that also did all this other stuff that might be okay if you had any time to waste but that's really what TV is for anyway so back to work. E-mail became quickly ubiquitous, but it's not like alongside that our bosses and parents were also encouraged to check scores on ESPN.com or participate at a message board devoted to their favorite soap opera. 

I think buying into the value of an iPad means embracing the internet as a recreational pursuit. It's not that the iPad can't be used as a business tool or a device to Get Things Done, but when you sit down with it, you kinda have to know what you want to do with it already, and chief among those things should probably be some typical internet pursuits--not just e-mail but Facebook, websites and/or RSS feeds, and the like. If all you expect it to do is to help you read ebooks and maybe check your e-mail, you don't need one. You need a Kindle if you can handle it, or maybe even just a Barnes & Noble gift card.

If you're not participating in the internet on some level, at least as a regular consumer, then you won't see the point. But then, you probably already don't see the point. You probably don't have a Facebook account or if you do, it's not something you have integrated into your life. It's an add-on, something grafted onto an existing structure of communication that includes the telephone, the television, the newspaper, and maybe some e-mail and/or texting. 

NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Enjoy life, go with God, etc. 

But if the iPad has a "point," and it probably has several overlapping ones, I would argue that it's inextricably linked with the enjoyment of the internet as a recreational tool. A place you go not just because you have to accomplish a task, but because you want to be there. You enjoy spending time there. You always get something out of it. 

It was sometime in 2004 that I realized the following:

1) I owned several hundred music CDs.

2) I was rapidly acquiring a great number of mp3s, which I would then burn to CD-R, thus increasing the quantity of CDs in my life.

3) I could use an mp3 player to literally carry ALL of my music with me at ALL times.

So I bought one, a Creative Zen Jukebox, 60GB, and I returned it a few days later. Something told me something better was out there.

I got an iPod, also 60GB, one of the first video-enabled versions. I got it for Christmas one year and spent several nights after the holidays dilligently ripping all of my CDs as 192kbps mp3 files. The CDs went into a box; a few years later, I sold them all.

There was no looking back. 

**

I have an iPad, a decent Android phone, two laptops, several external hard drives, and a little iPod shuffle I use when I do yard work. 

My 160GB iPod Classic is the most important consumer electronic device I own. 

To most, the idea of 160GB worth of music on one's person at all times is insane. But if that idea makes sense to you, then it makes A WHOLE LOT OF SENSE. 

I have about 200GB of music on an external portable hard drive. It includes those several hundred CDs I ripped years ago, many bootleg recordings, stuff I bought from iTunes and Amazon, and albums I've acquired through a variety of not-quite-legal means. The "essential" material from that library lives on my iPod Classic.

If I'm driving, I usually start with playlists I have set up to capture all the songs I rate four or five stars. It's like a personal radio station that continues to grow its playlist as I explore records and find new great songs. 

If I hear a song that reminds me of a great album, or puts me in the mood for a certain artist, then a few spins of the click wheel takes me to that album, or that artist. That may not seem important to you, but to a music geek, it's invaluable. 

For me, music is like this endless constant conversation going on every day of my life. In the car, at the office, I'm frequently listening to something. Each song, each record, leads me onward to the next. 

The iPod Classic is what makes that possible. I hope it never goes away.