Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged: Comics, digital

Digital Dreams – A New Name For Digital Dump

Published Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:16:15 -0500

DreamTalk: Lawrence Rider writes for Bleeding Cool;

Does anyone remember the great rush of comics activism at the turn of the millennium? Graphic novels were going to allow a greater diversity of work and provide more and more control to creators over their work. Graphic novels were The Way, and would steam roller all before them. Anyone would be able to create comics, and the revolution would be in four colours.

A decade later, and this seems to have been hopelessly optimistic. Comics are just as beholden to the Big Two as ever before, and superheroes have come to be one of the driving forces in popular culture, not just in comics. Sure, there's more of a book store presence, but that's dominated by DC and Marvel. Graphic novels, it turned out, were not The Way.

Now there's a new future sitting on the horizon. Digital comics. Digital comics, downloadable anywhere there's a net connection, onto laptops, tablets and smart phones. Convenient, cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Could these be The New Way? Could this be the way of breaking the grip on the industry of the big companies and the spandex brigades? Yes and no. It all depends on how people choose to exploit the new system.

Digitally Delivered Comics (DDC) remove a lot of the traditional barriers to small press. Even the most basic small press venture has traditionally needed a reasonable sum of money, to pay for the printing and distribution of the actual product. DDC are therefore much easier to produce. They can be put together quickly, without printing costs and then uploaded to the likes of iTunes, Comixology or Graphicly. Payment comes off of the back end, remove the financial risk to the creators.

This in itself seems like a great revolution in comics, whereas the mantra of comics activism stated that 'Anyone can make comics', DDC makes it a reality. Anyone really can make comics and, importantly, stand a chance of making money from them. Get a writer and an artist together and, in many ways, self-publishing is easier than ever. Comics for the masses, produced by the masses. Who can argue with that?

All this is obvious. What is less obvious is the ways in which DDC can bring a real revolution to comics. Comics are produced on a monthly basis and generally fit a uniform size, one which has grown up to to fit the print market. DDC need not do that. The equivalent of a twenty-two page monthly comic could now be published in five to six page weekly chapters, with no real loss to the story telling. Similarly, large scale graphic novels can just as easily be created. All of these can have a flexible price structure.

Ah, pricing. Currently the biggest obstacle to DDC. If the price is the same as a print comic, then the incentive is there to buy the print comic out of preference. CDs and MP3 downloads are sold at different price points, and so should print and DDC be similarly different. What's more, the price of DDC can easily be adjusted to reflect the content. Weekly material can be cheap, inviting readers to take a chance. If you could read a short chapter for less than a dollar, wouldn't it be more appealing? There's also the possibly of subscription. Weekly or monthly chapters could be delivered directly to your reader on the day they go live.

That brings us to something that I've not seen a lot of commentary on. Moving to DDC removes one of the single biggest problems in the industry: Direct Market distribution. This form of distribution has a lead time of three months for any new product. Three months. Promoting a new independent comic from the time of solicitation to the actual print date takes a lot of time and effort. DDC doesn't need that. Once a comic is complete, it can online almost immediately. It's far easier to promote something that someone can go and buy once they've read about it.

This isn't to say that DDC will completely replace print comics. I fully expect collections of DDC material to be sold in book shops, particularly if the online version is successful. Going digital does provide a lot of advantages though, particularly on the lower rungs of the industry. The bigger companies have every incentive to keep the current model alive – it's safe and profitable. Any real innovation is going to come from smaller companies and creators.

Is the future digital, then, or is this just another false start? It depends. If the industry as a whole simply tries to emulate the existing industry, then no. But if there are people out there willing to think of new ideas and new ways of doing things, willing to embrace the idea that Digitally Delivered Comics can be different, exciting and above all else accessible, then there could finally be a revolution in comics. We could have a new industry where comics by great creators can reach audiences that wouldn't normally look at them, simply because they're cheap and easily accessible. That really is a digital dream worth having.

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