Jul
22

Links of the Week: July 22, 2011 Edition

‘Wired’ Magazine Forecasts the Death of the Printed Monthly Comic

Damn decent analysis from Comics Alliance on the evolving debate over printed versus digital comics. CA’s Doug Wolk guest posts for Wired and puts a comprehensive evaluation on all sides of the issue, favoring the coming doom of the $4 monthly printed comic. I’ve been saying this ever since the iPad debuted, but DC Comics‘ recent announcement that all of its future titles will be released digitally the same day as print is a game changer. Moreover, digital comics provider Comixology recently sold Warren Ellis’ entire epic Planetary for a mere $25, a quarter of the price of DC’s Absolute Edition and on par with trade paperback pricing. It’s bold publication decisions like this that will continue to hammer away at the frayed, yellow pages of print comics, badgering the aging black shirted slobs of yore into submission and inviting new audiences to experience these AWESOME comics. Had they thrown in the Planetary specials that weren’t included in the Absolute collections, I may have forked over the cash.

Why Can’t We Preorder Digital Comics?

With more proof that Comics Alliance is becoming my go-to source for coverage on the digital comics debate, David Brothers offers a compelling argument for comics publishers who are trying to figure out to make money off digital offerings in this early stage. While the numbers on digital purchases are not so enticing to comics publishers today, they are trending upward (and will probably explode by the end of the year with DC’s “Great Experiment”). Brothers argues for setting up a preordering program for digital comics similar to how customers can preorder comics from their local comic book store. This could be a good way of tracking trends on digital offerings as well as marketing to the supposed “new audience” DC has cited is circling well outside physical comics stores. I think this isn’t a bad idea but ultimately for this to work, you have to bring the costs down on digital comics. I would pay a year’s subscription for almost any title if you could get each issue under $0.75. What’s more, publishers could also make some serious bank by preordering digital bundles of classic comics stories. I like where the thinking’s going; we just need to keep moving the football down the field.

Warren Ellis at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego

Warren Ellis. He braingasm you. Image via Wikipedia

 

A Collection Of Rambling On The Subject Of Digital Comics

Warren Ellis, writer extraordinaire and Mad Space Bastard, weighs in on the digital comics debate. A negative tongue from Saint Warren is a likely kiss of death for your product, so Graphic.ly better be paying attention to his UX concerns on their iPad app. Ellis counters comics publishers’ digital strategies with the simple yet elegant solution he devised for his web serial Freakangels: serialize a page a week online then collect finished stories into print editions for on-demand sales. To an extent, he plays to the Old Print Wankers more than those of us at the edge of the digital evolution, which I found odd, but then again, he’s seen the receipts come back on his own digital work.

Anonymous vs. NATO: Get your popcorn ready

So, remember when NATO was all like, “Donchu DARE come all up on mah porch!” and Anonymous was all like, “Bitch, PLEEZ!” and then the internet exploded??? Yeah. This was a topic of great interest at IO Europe a couple weeks ago mainly because no one knew how to deal with it. Purported “cyber-experts” were more in favor of getting their systems completely OFF the internet instead of figuring out creative ways of defending against attacks like LULZsec and responding appropriately. A large part of this fear, I believe, comes from simple inequity in information assurance professionals these days– they don’t know their Googles from their Farmvilles. So ignorant posturing of the kind seen in this article will just antagonize online attack groups like Anonymous. They don’t have to get an operation approved by 10 echelons of command like we do.

New 3D Looney Tunes Announced, Archive Mel Blanc Recordings To Feature

I’ve been fairly disappointed in Warner Bros’ revamped-for-the-21st-century Looney Tunes Show, which has earfucked me with simpering, inane impersonations of the Mel Blanc’s original character voices and insanely horrible musical numbers. So to discover that a creative animation director built new Looney Tunes shorts around archival recordings of Blanc has me giddy as shit. Hopefully, this provides the impetus for more AWESOME GENIUSES like this director to cut up and reinterpret existing Blanc recordings into new takes on his classic characters. I gotta believe the technology is getting close, right?

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Jun
10

Links of the Week: June 10, 2011 Edition

Been a while since I’ve stunk up your linkses. Lots popping in the world of AWESOME. Let’s see what’s up.

Welcome to the Glee Lantern Corps

I hate Glee. I love Green Lantern. Makes for an interesting mix.

10 innovative digital books you should know about

I haven’t audited every one of the digital books Peter Meyers lists here, but there are some fairly AWESOME looking concepts. I really think tablets are the future of transmedia storytelling and that the book experience needs to be redefined for them. There’s an incredible app listed here from the New York Public Library that’s downloadable for the iPad: every photo and article they have from the 1939 World’s Fair, which is an AMAZING experience on the iPad.

U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right

I don’t think people realize how huge the implications for this are. The U.N. is basically saying a human’s access to the unrestricted information on the Internet is equal to that same human’s right to be free. In the wake of the Arab Spring, this sets up immense shifts in the ubiquity of the global Internet, perhaps even paving the road for the persistent integration of web connectivity to human biology. This is a big moment that will appear on historical timelines decades from now.

ComicsAlliance Recaps The ‘Smallville’ Series Finale

I make no secrets about my loathing of Smallville, a television show that could have presented a thoughtful yet entertaining mainstream exploration of Clark Kent’s pre-Superman life to a wholly new audience. Instead, the show featured cheesy “re-imaginings” of classic Superman comic book stories, horrible dialogue and characters, and outright disrespect of everything that makes Superman special. And yet, it ran for ten fucking years. What insipid assholes actually thought this was a good show??? In any case, Smallville’s series finale retained the degree of silly ridiculosity established in the 10 years prior with everything from killer planets to Tom Welling never actually putting on the Superman suit. Chris Sims and David Uzumeri at Comics Alliance continue their horrified deconstruction of this television travesty in the wit-filled mockfest that any Smallville review deserves. Definitely one for laughs.

There’s Something Happening Here…

Futurist Venessa Miemis tipped me off to this dark, dark vision of the future, where the optimism of our modern social and technological advances is crushed by the realities of today’s economic and political downfalls. Dave Pollard, writer of the blog How to Save the World, presents an extremely well-researched and sourced assessment of the current state of the world and how he thinks we are all on an inevitable downslide into hopelessness and decay. Pollard notes several observations of evidence for this assessment that make a lot of sense despite my own personal hopes for a better world in the future. It’s a frightening punch to the gut that everyone should check out and comment on. This is our world we’re trying to save here, people.

Bleeding Cool’s Coverage of DC Comics’ Relaunch Announcements

Last week, I wrote about DC Comics’ ballsy move of relaunching its entire line of comics with new #1 issues and publishing them digitally on the same day they see print. This week, DC has slowly rolled out announcements of new creative teams and directions for their 52 new titles in September. The content is not as impressive as originally thought. Initially, this was presented as an opportunity to recast its universe into a more modern, future-looking and diverse playground for new audiences to discover. Unfortunately, the selection of creative teams for some of these titles is backward-looking, in my opinion. The Batman titles, for example, feature the exact same creative teams as they do now, just mixed up a little bit. They also include two titles written by artists who have since been unable to get their books out on time. I’m not sure how revolutionary this is going to be for modern audiences.

DC's rebooted TEEN TITANS #1 by Scott Lobdell and Brett Booth.

There are some positive indications, however. DC is taking this opportunity to indeed ratchet up the diversity factor in their books. We’re seeing more women, more heroes of color, and more international representation amongst team books. It also looks like a design edict has come down the pike from DC Editorial to ensure women’s costumes are much more appropriate for modern audiences, as opposed to the pervert suits we’re all used to. I think these are all positive steps toward modernizing the DCU for maximum appeal to that key young demographic that has proven so elusive to them over the past 20 years. I’m most intrigued by the inclusion of a brand new title featuring Batwing, the Batman of Africa:

 

BATWING #1 by Judd Winick and Ben Oliver.

Although, I would have been much more impressed in DC’s attempts to diversify their lineup had they given an ongoing title to the Muslim Batman of Paris:

 

Nightrunner – the Batman of Paris! He’s a Muslim, y’all!

 

Get clickin’, y’all!

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Feb
22

AWESOME Things To Watch in 2011

After enjoying JWT‘s roundup of radness from their 2011 predictive trendspotting BIZINT department, I inferred a couple of times that they my have missed some things to watch in the coming year. I struggled with whether or not I was going to do a 2011 predictions post of my own (especially with all of the other great [and TERRIBLE] ones out there). As I intimated in the JWT post though, it’s tough to maintain your street cred as an armchair futurist if you don’t make some play calls – good or bad. It’s not like I can go on TV and just fry motherfuckers with my brain like Jamais Cascio:

Image courtesy of orderofchaos.soup.io

Here then is the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! 2011 Predictive Tapdance:

The Elephant in the Room: Islam

For all the loveliness that “hope” and “change” brought us in 2009, 2010 saw a whole lot of retrenching when it came to comprehending and engaging Islam. Look for the debate about what constitutes Islam, Islamism, what various groups of modern Muslims want in today’s world, and popular revolutions in the Middle East to ratchet up. Also keep an eye on what the Muslim Brotherhood does in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation: they will telegraph a lot of the conflict about modern Islam.

More Mashups, More Memes

I don’t care what anybody says: mashups and memes will continue to provide ample entertainment to We People of the Internetz. Look for advertisers to begin capitalizing on meme-trending and mashup-producing. Performance indicators: the next acquisition/website startup from the I Can Has Cheezburger collective AND Wieden & Kennedy after hiring the creator of this AWESOME video–

Cloud Seeding

As gaming continues to seep into the popular consciousness through applications like competitive geolocation (i.e. Foursquare and Gowalla) and passive social gaming (i.e. Farmville), look for more creative approaches to “seeding” the cloud with various types of content. Be it for advertising or grassroots mobilization purposes, effective influence and content promotion campaigns of the future will unfold via a variety of platforms. StickyBits and other QR code scanning apps are good indicators of tactical implementations of a cloud seeding strategy.

Hacktivism Triumphant

If WikiLeaks has taught us anything, masses of anonymous hackers can make or break online footprints. With Anonymous’ mobilization against Amazon and other deniers of service against WikiLeaks, it is apparent that all-out online cyberwar can and will occur at a rate of minutes and hours. Government will continue to play catch-up to the independent entities playing havoc with cybersecurity. DDoS attacks will become typical tools of the trade, and countermeasures against such attacks will demonstrate a new “arms race” in evolving security and attack technology. We will also see cyberwars play out in days between entities if not hours and minutes, the extent of which will run the gamut from mere inconvenience to full-on revolution (there’s a reason why Mubarak shut off the Internet, yo). It is possible that a wild 4channer will crack U.S. cyber defenses in 2011 and perhaps provide a 9/11-like impetus for government to begin getting serious with policy and legislation to operate in the digital age.

Nobody Cares About Public Diplomacy

Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech demonstrated that the U.S. government will continue to centralize public diplomacy initiatives in the White House, leaving State Department assets twisting in the wind as hollow emperors in the field. U.S. legislators will increase the depths to which they could give a shit less in 2011 about PD because PD does not create jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, 20th century institutions of public diplomacy like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors will continue to wither and die in the digital age as on-the-minute social reporting and citizen journalism make them further irrelevant. Funding for PD initiatives will continue to stagnate while implementers will find more creative methods of achieving strategic PD goals, mostly via the private sector tech sector and citizen diplomacy organizations. China and some European countries will continue to lead with non-obvious but concerted national efforts in global influence, the effects of which will remain undiscovered by their targets (i.e., US) for years.

Passive Social Gaming EXPLODES

Related to my concept of “cloud seeding,” 2011 will see an explosion of social games in the vein of Farmville. Already, 2011 has seen Zynga publish a suster game to its masses-tranquilizing hit called Cityville. Transmedia, alternate reality gaming, and other episodic social gaming entities will experiment further with audience acquisition, retention, and profit conversion this year. Advertisers will cash in on these mechanisms en masse, driving ad-tired audiences from game to game and forcing ad strategists to begin thinking in different ways about social advertising. We will also see a continued harmonization of transmedia and ARGs cross-platform, online and offline, for social gaming experiences that will, for example, weave in and out of Facebook, Twitter, iPad and other mobile apps, and in-person performance art. More and more people will join longer term games socially as new genres are introduced on social networks. Performance indicator: keep your eyes peeled on LinkedIn for a business-based social game that trains executives in a number of administrivial and professional functions.

Location-based Services Get Profitable

Also related to “cloud seeding,” location-based app services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will rapidly get profitable this year. While many detractors continue to ridicule the small audience size these services carry, their growth will continue by orders of magnitude in 2011, so much so that advertisers and marketers for brick-and-mortar businesses will pay oodles of dough to access their users. Look for more unique rewards for users who check in to local places and events as well as the beginning of an actual value system based on fictional goods (i.e. Gowalla’s items).

People Begin To Realize All This Social Stuff Really IS Creating Socialism 2.0

Marx said it would take capitalism to run its course and fall out of favor before true socialism could take hold of the world. Macro-philosophers and economists will slowly begin to see that that is happening on a mass scale in 2011. Group buying services like Groupon and Living Social, crowdfunded charity programs, realtime crowdsourced news reporting, and near-realtime media curation will continue to prove that power really is all about the people. Democratization of content and price will, therefore, produce The New Socialism or Socialism 2.0. This will freak out conservatives and create performance indicators on conservative news networks that decry not only a socialist presidency but a socialist economy beginning to develop. Look for influencers that combat these conservative perceptions as the emerging leaders of the Socialist 2.0 movement (which in and of itself will never be referred to as an organized, network movement with a solid objective… it will just happen). Parallel to this, fortunes will begin to change hands as sales for various product areas crash: for example, the comics industry will continue to lose sales in print as consumers demand more digital, interactive content.

We Need a New Narrative

No more Harry Potter. No more Lord of the Rings. No more Star Wars. What’s the next big franchise? 2011 will see experimental repurposing of old ideas into new franchises. My money is on Thor and Captain America to be the starting point for a huge Avengers movie franchise in 2011 and 2012 (with reams of associated multimedia content) while Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon tank.

What Do You Think?

Got some predictions of your own? Think I’m off-base about some of these things to watch? Let me know in the comments.

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Jan
21

Links of the Week: January 21, 2011 Edition

Quote of the day: Mark Millar on digital comics;

The Not .99 Method

On the heels of my recent diatribe on digital comics, here are two interesting perspectives on the issue. Mark Millar, creator of Kick-Ass and Wanted, breaks down the numbers on digital comics, showing how creators like himself really aren’t making a whole lot off digital sales yet:

1/ Apple take 30% right off the bat.
2/ In the case of Wanted, Comixology then splits 50/50 with the publisher.
3/ Then the publisher pays the agent and creative team out of the remaining cash depending on their deal.

Millar’s description of this profit model provides justification for the naysayers who believe that digital comics simply aren’t profitable enough for creators and downright industry killers for retailers. On the other hand, at the second link, Warren Ellis shares a business model for digital comics that completely cuts out third party distribution and costs and enables comics creators to sell their work directly to consumers. Inherent in this approach, however, is a requirement by comics creators to completely rethink their publishings models and instead use free online tools like Google Docs, PayPal and others to set up their own direct-to-consumer publishing – all digital, all creator-owned. Ellis is right: 2011 may very well see tons of comics creators making money hand over fist jumping over publishers and retailers to sell directly to consumers.

Scientists Discover Time Teleportation

WTF???

Before, we knew that quantum teleportation works in space. Two identical particles at different locations are linked in such a way that, when you change the state of one, the other one instantly changes in exactly the same way, no matter how many miles or light-years are between them. This is a phenomenon that defies our understanding of reality, and it just got even more complex with this discovery.

University of Queensland’s scientists Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph claim that the quantum entanglement is a fundamental part of the universe, and it works both in space and time, so changing the state of particle today instantly changes the same particle in the future, even while the particle will not exist between those two points.

The presupposition here (I think) is that there has to be something/someone on the other end of the time pipeline conducting the same teleportation experiment. So we can travel forward in time but not back? Pity.

Shackleton’s 100-year-old whiskey unearthed in Anarctica, soon to be drunk

I’m little more than an amateur scotch and whiskey connoisseur, but I can tell you this with some authority: the older it is, the smoother it goes down. Cool story about how they found this whiskey preserved in an old wrecked ship.

The Batman Nightclub ‘Wayne Manor’ Revealed in 1966 ‘Life’ Magazine Article

Chris Sims at Comic Alliance – also of Chris’ Invincible Super Blog fame – has made a name for himself as the world’s only preeminent “Batmanologist.” He has pored through every aspect of Batman pop culture across all media, and his writing has reflected an intense investigatory passion for new AWESOME Batman finds in pop history. In this post, Sims found an old copy of Life Magazine (apparently the ENTIRE RUN is available FOR FREE on Google Books) that featured this spread on Batman nightclub called Wayne Manor. Wayne Manor was built at the height of the “Bat-craze” of the old Adam West Batman TV show in the 1960s, replete with camp but – as evidenced by this INSANE picture – also more popular with the general American public than at any other time in Batman history.

Courtesy of Comics Alliance. Y’dig?

And finally…

New Image Of Kermit, Jason Segel And Miss Piggy At Muppet Read-Through

Courtesy of Bleeding Cool.

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Dec
14

Marvel Digital Comics: An AWESOME Delivery Mechanism for Comics

I am a diehard DC Comics fan. I can remember all the way back to when my dad brought me to the E-Z Mart in Longview, Texas, and bought me my first few comics: a Superman comic; an old Star Trek adaptation; and Legion of Super-Heroes #311, the comic that forever changed my life and turned me into a Legion fan.

That said, I have to give Superfly TNT props to Marvel for its Digital Comics subscription program. I’ve grown lukewarm to the stories and shenanigans Marvel’s pulled over the years, such so that I barely pick up one or two series in print anymore. Because of this, I’ve missed out on a lot of stuff, and it’s great to go back through their digital archives and check out a lot of what I missed. Plus, at the price offered (~$40 on holiday discount for a year), I end up saving tons of cash on expensive hardcover collections I’d otherwise have to buy sight unseen. It’s the ultimate “try before you buy” program.

Image courtesy of dailyskew

Image courtesy of dailyskew

While there are some obvious gaps in the online archives (Marvel tends not to put a lot of new comics online, which I suppose makes sense from a business perspective), there are some pretty good runs on here. I recently finished reading Warren Ellis and Adi Granov’s six-part Iron Man: Extremis, and I’m glad I read it online instead of forking out the cash to buy a trade paperback. It was decent, but not up to the standards I expect of Ellis. But I don’t feel cheated about this since I acquired the story through the Digital Comics subscription.

The digital reader Marvel employs is a little clunky, and I find it crashes or slows down on browsers or systems it wasn’t designed for. Running it on an uncluttered Dell Latitude E5400 with a Chrome browser seems to work pretty well though.

Marvel’s foray into digital comics has had me thinking on the issue of comics distribution for the future. I tend to believe that comics are going to price themselves right out of the industry soon, so that only diehard fans pick up actual print books anymore. For periodical series to survive, companies must turn to digital distribution, where new audiences live. IDW Publishing has stepped up their game in this arena considerably lately by publishing comics directly to the iPhone.

This is good fodder for a future post on digital comics distro. More to follow.