Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett examines how digital delivery is changing his reading, and looks at the Marvel #1 promotion.
As most of you know all too well I got an iPad2 for Christmas which changed my life in all sorts of unexpected ways. For example, take the way I read magazines. Back when I worked at Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs, Ohio I made good use of their extensive newsstand and subscribed to those I could afford. But in recent years a lack of free time and disposable income combined with slowly declining eyesight has reduced the list of ones I still regularly read to Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide. Now thanks to the iPad2… I read the digital editions of Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide. I kid of course. I've also begun reading digital copies of Geek, National Geographic, Mental Floss and Esquire.
I read the digital copies of Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide for a couple of reasons; first, they're free to subscribers (you can download individual issues for $4.95). Second they're textbook examples of how you turn a text publication into a digital one; there are all sorts of added effects, like features that materialize onto empty pages or places you can prod the screen into revealing hidden text, etc. But far better than these added bits of visual excitement is the extra added content which includes music clips, scenes from TV shows and movie trailers. And, amazingly enough, the digital copy is usually available for download days before the print copy shows up in my mailbox.
Which makes the digital comic book as we now know it look more than a little… pokey in comparison. But last Sunday at Austin’s South by Southwest festival Marvel made a couple of announcements that could actually shake up that staid status quo. Like "Project Gamma, " which will add "music and other audio cues to select digital comics," and the news that Marvel's Infinite Comics will be going weekly. These being the comics that supposedly "treat mobile devices as a new canvas and take advantage of the technological opportunities inherent in them." Or so says Brett White, anyway, in a piece over on the Marvel site.
They may very well develop into that at some point, but so far instead they seem more like decompressed storytelling driven to its illogical conclusion where every scene is played out in "bullet time." It gets to the point where the reader (or at least this reader) ends up madly poking at the screen in desperate hope that something, anything will actually happen. As much as I would like to see some "extra added content" in digital comics I really can't see anything wrong with them that could be made right by adding a bunch of unnecessary gimmicks.
Although there are any number of things I would change about how digital comics are priced and sold, the major thing wrong with them, to my mind anyway, is that not enough people know they exist. So naturally the announcement from SXSW I was most interested in was the "Marvel #1" promotion that had the company offering 700 #1 issues for absolutely free including the initial Marvel NOW! titles (see "Marvel SXSW Promotion"). This was, without question, the most amazing attempt to reach out to new readers that I had ever seen.
I was especially impressed by a statement made by David Gabriel, Marvel’s VP of sales, digital & print:
"Do we expect folks to try and download (every first issue)? We encourage it! This is the perfect way to show everyone how much we believe in our material by letting them try the first issues for free, because we’re sure once they start, they won't stop,"
So, what could possibly go wrong? As I'm sure you all already know it was destroyed by its own success. The promotion was too popular, demand crashed the servers, the giveaway was suspended and vague promises were made that it would be reinstated at some future date. Which would be a nice because, here's a confession. I was one of those people trying to download some of those comics. Like a lot of people I was impressed with a lot of the Marvel NOW! titles and had managed to miss out on some of the early issues; "Marvel #1" was the perfect opportunity for me to pick up some of those comics and make a regular reader out of me.
The only thing that’s really left for pundits like myself is to decide is, what do you call "Marvel #1"? A tremendous success in spite of the fact that precious few comics were actually downloaded because it finally proves there really is a large, mostly untapped demand for comics among a mainstream audience? Or an enormous failure, unavoidable or otherwise? At this point I honestly couldn't tell you, but at the moment it sure feels a lot more like failure to me.
