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Marvel's Digital Comics Talk

Could digital replace print?

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Score one for the Il-li-nois! Of all papers, the Naperville Sun has a lengthy interview with Tom Breevort, Marvel’s Exec. Editor and one of its VPs, and Ira Rubenstein, the VP of its “global digital media group”, about the subject of digital comics. The talk they have is extensive, covering pretty much all facets of all these exciting digital breakthroughs, so if you want to dive to the bottom of the well, rather than just skimming its surface, by all means go on and check out the interview. For our purposes, though, I’ll take out just a couple choice excerpts…

So speaks Mr. Breevort…

"[When Marvel produced trades more often]a lot of fans expressed the opinion “This is it! The sky is falling!” That this is going to change everything and soon we’re not going to be able to publish regular comics because all of our readers were going to want to wait for the trades. And what we discovered is the opposite. There are people who want the monthly releases and want them right then, and there are also people who like the trade paperbacks and the hardcovers and they buy those. It’s additive to the business. It’s not a one-to-one replacement.

I don’t foresee any time in the near future when print comics are going to go away. The actual ratio of how much of our business they are might change from one year to the other, and how important digital delivery of our content is will only get greater as we see greater penetration of devices like the iPad and any other handheld reader that’s got a big enough screen to display what we need effectively and still be portable enough to carry around. As those become more ubiquitous, that’s going to be a delivery model that we’re going to be more and more interested in and get into more and more heavily."

  Tom Breevort
 Tom Breevort

I can get behind what he’s saying here. While, I myself, really prefer to read a comic in my cold, clammy hands, there are people who don’t, so it’d be bad business sense on Marvel’s part not to cater to them, as well. I don’t think this is going to be a case of digital comics replacing print so much as supplementing them and I’ve got no problem with that.

Breevort also talked a little about motion comics…
 

"The motion comics aren’t really inherently comics themselves. They’re some sort of intermediate step between a comic and an animated TV show. We’re trying to find out what that boundary is. Because you’re right: in a motion comic, you don’t tend to have one panel next to another panel. All of the closure that happens between moments happens from screenshot to screenshot, in camera pan to move to reverse. It’s directed like a film or a television show.

Certainly the language of the motion comic aspect of digital is different than it is on the printed page and is much closer to anything that’s motion pictures or television. I don’t know how that affects how we do that in print. I don’t know how it necessarily affects how we do more direct translations from what we do in print to what we do digitally."


I find it fitting that Marvel’s the one to be pushing comics as much as they have, since it’s a bit of bookend to the toons they had in the 60s. Think about it… limited animation, closely adapted storylines, art lifted directly from the comics? Hmmmm… sounds a little like a motion comic, doesn’t it? In a way, you might even think of the 60s shows as the first motion comics. Seriously, just watch this... 

  

Anyway, what do you think of these digital innovation, oh full-motion Comic Vine community? Do they get you excited? Or are they an annoyance?

-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Comics and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia Comics.   Watch out for the HYBRID BASTARDS! hardcover collection this March - - available for pre-order now on Amazon.com .