Digital Comic Books - To Be, Or Not To Be? Is That The Question?

Where have all the good old analog times gone? Where is my VCR? Oh yeah I replaced it with my DVR. Where is my CD player? Oh yeah, I use my iPod all the time now. Where have my local record shops gone? Oh yeah, I buy my new music from iTunes now. Where are my books? Damn I forgot, they’re on my Kindle. It’s a big bad digital world now and if we’re not careful Comic Books are going to die an analog death.

I know it sounds crazy, but as technology expands so does our need for easier ways to get entertainment. Sure we still have CD’s and DVD’s, but more and more we are watching Hulu and On Demand, instead of actually purchasing the content ourselves. Almost every form of media has been digitized in some way or another. Even our newspapers are dying a slow analog death. Do we think something as niche as Comic Books is going to stand a chance when The New York Times is dying? I think not.

Let’s face facts, printing, distributing and paying artists/writers is where our $4 price point in comic books comes from. What if I were to tell you, I could cut out at least two of those costs? Would you be interested? This is why we are paying such a premium price for our stories, it’s not so we can pay the artists more money I can tell you that. Let’s eliminate the need for ink, paper, $1,000,000 printing presses, delivery trucks, gas money for those trucks and the local markup of our Comic Book Shops. If we do this right, we can save tons of money and have a much larger selection of comic books to pick from each week/month. No more delays for holidays, bad weather and printing mistakes.

This way we can concentrate on the artist and the writers and pay them the money they deserve and still get a great deal as the reader. It’s not like we have to digitize the comic books that are coming out, we all know everything is digital now. It’s not like Marvel hand delivers the original artwork and panels to the printer anymore. It’s all done via email or file transfer. The only cost for delivery is the cost of each locations internet connection. Then that digital file is sent to the printing press and out comes Siege #4. Why not just send that digital copy of Siege #4 to and iTunes type store so we can download it for $1.99 or even $.99? It’s because we don’t have a great place to store and read our comic books yet. Until recently that is.

Introducing the iPad and HP Slate. The first of what will surely be many full color high definition pre-made comic book readers. Sure, these devices were NOT intended to be used solely as comic book readers, but they sure seem perfect for the job. The beauty of these devices, no matter how infant the technology might be right now, is they can do so many others things for us, besides show us our comic book collection.

Does this mean that right now we should be giving up on Analog printed comic books, hell no. But it means that we should be preparing for the digital age and get ready to embrace it as a comic book collective. We don’t want to be left hold the bag of shit on this one. Let’s grind down and prepare for the total switch over. Sure this is going to eventually eliminate the need for local comic book shops, but let’s face it, they’re about to die anyways. Readership for comic books is dropping more and more each and every year. We are NOT getting new readers into the market, it’s just too expensive and too much work to get a comic book these days. Driving to the store, picking your books, finding a place to store them in your house and paying a premium price to do all that. For LOTS of people, this is just not worth it. I know many people that would read tons of comic books if it weren’t for all the trouble and pricing. I will use my brother in law as an example on this (I’m sure he’ll appreciate it), but if he could sit at his computer or on his electronic device and pick up comic books like he picks up music, he would read them! I know he would, and so would MANY other people.

The final point I have is, when was the last time anyone used a 35mm camera? Digital is the way to go. We have small devices that can hold tons of information and do so many other things that what they were designed for, that we should take advantage of this and digitize our comic books. This would also allow independent comic book publishers and even individual comic book writers and artist to compete directly with the big boys. There would no longer be this slick veneer of arrogance surrounding the Big Two. All comic books would be created equal, at least on the digital front. As long as the art and the writing was good, it would look just like the junk that Marvel shoves down our throat each month that sucks, and we pay $4 for it.

A device like the iPad is as big as 64GB and a normal 22-28 page comic book takes up about 15mb of space. That means for every GB, we can have roughly 65 comic books on our iPad, that’s nearly 4,000 comic books on an iPad. How many long boxes is that? 200 per box, 20 long boxes and remember each of those comic books needs a board and bag. I think the $600 price for the iPad is pretty cheap when you think about it. That and the iPad can do so much more than just let you read your comic books. It can surf the web, check email, show photos, play music, TV shows, movies and let you read your favorite new novel.

Now as these devices grow and get better, that space will increase. Right now it’s easy to have a 2TB drive at your house, which could store over 120,000 comic books, all in full color high resolution. These can then be transferred just like your iTunes library to your iPad for casual reading. I for one am excited about this revolution of digital comic books. I can carry around my comic books on one magazine sized device and read them in their natural format; one page at a time.

I for one am ready to stop over-paying for my comic books. Am I going to miss the touch and feel of a book, hell yeah I am, but if we don’t do something, we are going to miss more than just the touch of the books, we are going to miss A LOT of new material that just won’t be cost effective to produce for us to read. Yeah we won't have the rare copies of Y The Last Man anymore, but who cares, as far as percentages go, only about 1% of comic books are actually worth keeping in good shape, the others are throw away.

I’m sure Marvel is passing on a ton of books just because they aren’t doing 20,000 copies a month. Take Matt Fractions, The Order, which was canceled because it dipped below 20,000 copies a month. That was a good book, but it suffered from attrition, and died a slow analog death. If we were in the digital age, the number of copies it would need to sell to break even, would be at least ¼ less, if not more.

I hate enviromentalists, but imagine the paper and trees we can save? Imagine how much gas we won't use in our delivery trucks? Imagine the exhaust that these trucks won't create? It's all good across the bag and board.

Embrace the change. I’m getting ready to, so should you.

Michael