This is for those of you who are into comic books. I mean seriously into them like the guys on “The Big Bang Theory” are.
There was a blip on ABC News tonight about how the digital revolution was changing the comic book.
Some were for it pointing out having a comic book on an iPad is a good thing. Nothing the better colors, the greater avaliablity of it and such.
Others were against it, saying that it destroys the sense of community, how you can’t trade the comic books if they’re on an iPad and how the value of a downloaded comic is unlikey to change.
I was never into comic books so I don’t know but I thought it’d be an interesting topic for people “seriously” into comic books.
Well, I’m not a serious comic collector, but I see it as a good thing for everyone. Obviously this is one more way that comics can reach the readers, and will make back issues much more available to the readers who want to read them (via legit methods, and not-so-legit).
Are any comics released within the last 20 years or so actually worth anything? An Action Comics from 1938 is always going to be worth thousands of dollars. Nobody’s buying them to find out how Superman became Clark Kent, they’re buying them for the investment. Infact, as more fans embrace digital comics, as long as the printed kind are still being sold, there may be extra value or incentive to collect them, since their circulation will be lower.
I’m more familiar with sports card collecting. Mint condition cards from the 70s or earlier are still collectors items. Anything made after 1980, unless it’s one of those “super rare, have to find in a random pack” aren’t worth jack. I own 20 Ken Griffy Jr rookie cards. They’re worth maybe $10 a piece, not the hundreds of dollars we assumed they’d be worth when we bought them. And that’s the reason why collecting has gone down - too many people became aware of the value of collecting, and overcollected, and now, nothing is worth anything anymore.
Same way the 1970’s Star Wars toys are worth $, but the Episode 1 toys aren’t and won’t ever be (well, there might be a second reason for that…)
There are aspects of the experience that will change, but this is…highly inconsequential, and a sign of bad priorities.
The only issue I have with digital comics is I’m not sure anyone’s come up with a way to monetize it well - Marvel Digital comics seem to be pretty good, but…that’s one company doing their own thing…
On the other hand, if someone does work it out, I see prices dropping without having to rip off creators, due to lower production costs, which would be ultimately good for the industry.
The way I see it, the primary purpose for comic books is to read them, and their collectible value ultimately derives from that. If you want something that’s collectible just for the sake of collecting, then just collect currency, since that’s pretty much exactly what currency is.
It’s a mixed bag. It gives us the opportunity to read things that would be almost impossible to find before. At the same time, it is decimating the market for back issues, so those of us who actually like reading (and hoarding!) paper copies have fewer outlets to find them.
I’d hate for comics to go all-digital, because I wouldn’t be able to read them on Shabbos.
Aside from that, I think digital comics would be a fantastic idea. Wouldn’t it be great to have those mega-crossover type stories on one device rather than needing a big stack in order to read the entire thing? Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to click on one of those footnote boxes after a conversation in which Doctor Doom references teaming up with the Sub-Mariner against the Fantastic Four* and see the source it’s referencing? Or a hyper-link to a character’s Wiki entry by clicking on his or her picture?
I’m all for it, even if I need to stick to reading other stuff on Shabbos.
*Doctor Doom first teamed up with the Sub-Mariner in FF # 6, published in 1962! If you have a couple hunded dollars, you can get a cruddy-conditioned copy on eBay! Or for a mere $40, you can buy a copy of it plus 9 other issues as a hardcover “Marvel Masterworks” volume. Or for $20, you can get it plus 20 other issues in black and white as an “Essential”!
Comic books started out as cheap, throwaway reading matter for children and barely literate adults, distributed and sold in the millions. Somewhere along the way the collector/speculator mentality took over and what was once bought for a dime and shoved in the back pocket of some crew-cut kid’s Toughskins became a Sought After Double Bag Mylar Collector’s Item.
Now the damn things cost four dollars, are incomprehensibe to anyone without a master’s degree in DC Universeology, and have to be purchased in specialty stores crammed full of byzantine card games, marked up action figures, and pontificating, portly “experts” holding forth on Who Should Play Hawkeye In The Feature Film.
They’ve long since abandoned actually being mass-market periodicals, and yet are continuing to pretend it’s still 1960 and you’ve got to get the latest issue of Strange Tales shipped to drugstores and newsstands across America.
I say the sooner they face reality and give up on the monthly periodical format, the better. Wake up you Scientist’s!
Seems to me like maybe a good way (potentially) to get the comics back in front of kids. Which is the only thing that will give comics a future and keep the characters in them marketable in the long run.
As for the collector’s market, screw that. And I say that as someone with a sizable collection of old funny books. My collection will be worthless unless kids (who are the future collectors) get hooked on the characters. If this is a way to get the stories into their hands at a reasonable, kid-friendly price I am all for it.
Ah, but how can you beat that feeling of freedom that comes with a real pulpy comic book?
Just last week, I laughed because I was re-enacting a typical summer day that I’d had back in grade school:
I rode my bike down to the town square, parked it by the drugstore where I got a nickel Tootsie Roll, and jaywalked over to the comic book shop, where I got a Ditko-drawn Spider-Man for a quarter, rolled it up in the back pocket of my Levi’s, and set off looking for a cold Coke and a shady spot to read my latest treasure.
… Well, ok, not exactly the same: the Tootsie Roll was a miniature now, and the Spider-Man was dug out of a bargain bin (complete with a rip), but the sheer joy of lying down in the grass and pulling out a real comic book will never be as visceral as clicking DitkoDrewIt.com on an iPad.
Ah, but the “collectors” who worry about digital comics’ “future financial value” are the kind who will not show their copy of Death of Phoenix, first Spanish edition, because handling it will decrease its value.
I once was on a second date with a guy and when we were looking at movie posters to decide what to see, The Crow was in “my” list. He said that he had been to the preview, had won a signed copy of the book which was raffled there and hadn’t cracked it open. It was one of the reasons there wasn’t a third date.
I like reading my comics on paper, I like reading my comics on digital format (many of which would have been impossible for me to read if it wasn’t for digital formats, even if LFG or GG were published in Spain the distribution would be likely to suck), I just like reading comics.
It will be if you’re in grade school the first time you do it. It’s not the paper comic that made that experience so great, it was being twelve that made it so great. Changing it to a digital format detracts from the experience for you, because it removes it even further from what it was like when you were a kid. But for the kids who are twelve right now, reading Spiderman on their iPhone is every bit as great as reading it on pulp was for you back in the day.
A comic book writer I know pointed this out at the last sci-fi convention I attended - the cost has become disporportionate to the entertainment value. Four bucks for 15 minutes of reading material? Compare that to twelve bucks for two hours of movie entertainment. And as best I can recall from my youth, fifty cents bought a comparable comic book in 1982 (and dollar comics were still available) and a movie ticket was maybe four bucks.
Modern price of entertainment per hour
Comic: $16. Movie: $6
1982 price of entertainment per hour
Comic: $2. Movie: $2
Maybe being spared the cost of printing and distribution can bring digital comics prices back to early 1980s levels, adjusted for inflation. I dunno - seems to me the comics themselves are loss leaders. The real money is in merchandising and licensing the characters and their various logos for toys, posters, games, TV shows and movies. The publishers are more like holding companies for trademarks, who must regularly publish in order to maintain those trademarks.
Heck, I can imagine Warner keeping DC, and now Disney keeping Marvel (well, keeping Marvel Entertainment, which keeps Marvel Comics), even if physical comic-books go the way of old-timey stereographs and comics go straight from printer to ashcan. Marvel Entertainment’s fees from the Iron Man movie and related merchandise probably netted them more than Marvel Comics made from publishing the character for the last 45 years.
Note that although I made some research attempts to find income statements for Marvel Entertainment and its subsidiary, Marvel Comics, (and similarly, Warner and DC Comics) to back these statements up, I’m not willing to pay for the reports. I might be way off, but I doubt it.
That’s a false comparison. A movie you pay to see once, and if you want to see it again, you pay again. A comic book you own forever and can read any time you want.
Maybe a better comparison would be to the price of a movie on DVD. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that far off your price comparison for seeing a movie in the theater.
Well, DVD - theatre, whatever. The point is that printed comics have become disproportionately expensive, but that may not be a problem since the real money isn’t in selling comics, but licensing trademarks and characters and such. Going digital makes the distribution process cheaper.
Looking at my own physical comic collection ~1979 to ~1994, I see a lot of books that will never have any collectible value (or if they do, it’ll be after a global holocaust of some kind), so I’m getting ready to start culling them so my girlfriend can send ten or twenty at a time to her nephews in central Europe, where they will prove a colourful, fun and easy way (i.e. no electronic equipment necessary) to learn English.
The handful I’ll keep (Spider-Man 252, Web of Spider-Man 1, DC Comics Presents 26, etc.) will get tucked away back in the closet again, along with my Gretzky rookie cards - all five of them…
Look, the collectibility of comic books is a non issue, because anything created to be collectible is by definition not collectible. The only reason comic books were collectible is because nobody saved them, kids bought them and wore them out and Mom threw them away. And so there are only a few copies left from that era relative to the number of people who want to collect one, and so the extant copies have a high price.