jQuery

I've been building websites for over a decade now. The web has changed a lot, and yet somethings stay the same.

jQuery is one of those.

I just finished a fairly thorough tutorial along with several practical examples. A lot of the things you can do with jQuery are the same kind of things people have been doing on the web for years. jQuery makes some of them quicker, and it makes some of them less compatible than the old way.

While looking at examples of Web 2.0 (or html5 or dynamic html or whatever name people will be using tomorrow), I'm reminded of a comment I read on the web six or seven years ago: Web 2.0 is the Flash of the future. Flash came our around the turn of the millennium. It's big draw was offering great motion, animation, and sound that could be sent over the Internet and viewed consistently on several browsers. Sites built with it looked pretty cool.

But there were issues.

For one, search engines couldn't properly index the sites which led to some awkward workarounds.

Another problem was time it took to load. One had to wait for the entire site to load to view it. Some people started building sites modularly which helped.

Another problem was all that sound, animation, and motion became gratuitous--they didn't really add to the site or make it more useful. A lot of people abandoned their Flash sites like they were landing pages and went back to the "old" way. This was helpful when Apple decided to not support Flash and move to a new set of technologies that others have followed.

Today html5 offers the same types of gratuitous decorations. And people are jumping on the band wagon left and right. But do these really add value?

Some of them do. Sorting my queue in Netflix by dragging instead of typing numbers is much nicer. DeviantArt's ability to drag an image in is slicker than using the browse button. I'm all for new technologies that are well supported and improve the user experience.

I just wish people would stop there.

Why don’t Comic Book movies sell Comic Books?

Comic Book Movies have dominated the box office for the last ten years bringing lesser known characters such as The Spirit, Thor, and the Green Lantern into mainstream consciousness. But it has done little, if anything, to improve declining comic book sales. Why is that? If the movies are popular, won’t people want to rush out and buy the comic? It works for movies based on books which is funny, because Tim Burton's Batman movie did lead to a long-term spike in sales. No one knows the reason why (despite their claims), but here are a few likely possibilities:

Accessibility

Movies are designed for people who know nothing about the characters or their history. A single issue of a comic book assumes you’ve read dozens (maybe even hundreds) of previous issues. New readers haven’t and most don't want to.

Completion

Movies have a definite beginning and ending--you can walk away satisfied that you saw a complete story. There may be a teaser for a sequel, but the story itself is finished. Comic books are only 22-pages (or 20 from DC) and tell a small part of the story (kind of like watching 5 minutes of a movie). You have to buy several issues over the course of several months to read the whole story, but by then the flow has been broken up and the excitement has gone down. This may be one reason Trade paperbacks are so popular--you get the whole story in one sitting. People like their instant gratification.

Coolness and Quality

Movies have big budgets, state-of-the-art special effects, 7.1 surround sound, art directors, costume designers, plus a team of people working together over the course of years. Comics have one or two artists and a pen. In the 1940s that was enough, because four-color printing and costumed characters were unique and had little competition--movies were black and white and the pulps were mostly words. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, the Todd McFarlane’s, Rob Liefeld’s, and Jim Lee’s were cool, because they brought new life with their dynamic artwork, panel layout, and improved printing. Today comics have gone back to boring panel layouts, dumpy figures, and boring colors. Compared to a video game or a movie, they just don’t stack up. And coming out on a monthly basis doesn't allow the creators sufficient time to craft their best story or do their best artwork. It also means they are going to run out of stories pretty quick and have to start repeating themselves.

Distribution

Movies are shown in cinemas around the world. Comic books can only be purchased in hard to find specialty stores and a few bookstores. Movies have multiple showings so everyone who wants to watch them can. Comic shops try to sell every copy of a comic they order, so if you aren't there Wednesday morning, you could easily be out of luck.

Price

Movies cost $7-16 depending on where you are and how you choose to view them (2D, 3D, IMAX). Comics cost an average of $4 per issue, but each story is going to run an average of 6 issues for a grand cost of $24 per story. It doesn’t take an economist to tell you which is a better deal.

These may not be all the reasons, but they seem to be the most likely. Many people think going digital is the answer to saving comics, but they tried that in 2000 with Dark Horse's free motion comics online, and that didn’t do so hot. Current motion comics sold thru iTunes and Amazon did a little better, and digital comics thru Comixology are not doing nearly as well as eBooks.

Maybe the whole comic book form needs to be reexamined and reinvented. It is a century old. After all, children’s storybooks are very different now than they were a hundred years ago.

What do you think?

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How Technology has changed the Illustrated Story: Case Study 1 - Pulps vs. Comics

Matt D. Williams, the author of Jak Phoenix, invited me to write a guest post on his site. I look at the early twentieth century and examine how advances in printing destroyed one genre but created a new one. It also changed the way certain types of stories were told.

Read the entire post at http://jakphoenix.com/2011/04/13/how-has-technology-affected-the-illustrated-story-a-guest-post-by-jeff-thomason/.

As you can see, it is only one case study. The topic interests me so much that I plan to make it a whole series of posts. Don't hold your breath, because I have a lot of other things I'm working on first.

This image is a drawing of Wandering Koala^TM, and I think I'll use it for the title pages of all future stories. It's fitting, because I consider Wandering Koala to be a 21st century pulp hero who also appears in comics.

A few thoughts on Digital Comics

I use to be a big time comic fan, then I stopped reading them for a while, then I started reading them again but not with the same enthusiasm.

Recently Comixology released a few numbers about the growth of digital comics. They are growing, but more slowly than other media that went digital like music, movies, and books. It’s too soon and the data too scarce to make any definitive statements about them, but here are a few of my thoughts.

Why do people buy Digital Comics when they can get them on paper?
1) Price – Comics cost $2.99-3.99 per 22-page issue. When I started buying comics in 1989, most comics cost $1.00 while Superman comics cost 75 cents. That means they’ve increased in price by a factor between 3-5. Paperback books haven’t even doubled in price during the same period. Paper comics are pricing themselves into oblivion. The current diehard fans that are willing to spend too much and buy multiple copies for variant covers are the main thing keeping the current system going; very few new fans are entering the market threatening its survival. Digital Comics are currently sold for between 99 cents and $1.99. I feel this is the main reason digital comics are growing--the print market is so far above market price that it is forcing competition to emerge, a phenomenon that has been observed in the past and been misinterpreted by courts as a lack of monopoly instead of the result of a monopoly.

2) Coolness Factor – With the launch of the iPhone, Android phones, the Kindle and other eReaders, and the iPad, downloading digital is the current “new and cool”. People download apps they’ll never use, books they’ll never read, and music they’ll never listen to a second time. Why? Because it’s cool, and this has led many people who don’t read comics to start downloading digital comics. This is one reason certain titles have seen growth in digital sales without any loss in sales for the paper version.

3) Availability – Every year more and more comics shops close their doors. Fewer and fewer newsstands carry comics. And while the Direct Market was set up to over order comics so they’d have back issues to sell, the current goal is complete sellthrough so the shop isn’t stuck with unsold issues. Digital issues in theory should always be available in whatever quantity they’re demanded. This is probably the least compelling reason.

So are digital comics the future? Maybe. I personally like paper comics better, but I won’t be able to afford to buy them for much longer at current prices. And many times I’ll wait for the trade paperback and buy it at a discount at Amazon, which doesn’t help the Direct Market system or local comic shops.

Of course, there are challenges:

1) Collectablity – A digital file is unlikely to increase in value.

2) Readability – While one can read a comic book on a giant computer screen, it’s not a pleasant experience. People like to download and consume content on their iPhones and Kindles and iPads and other gadgets, but their screens are too small to read current comics. Some have tried to cut up the comic into individual panels, but that usually results in odd configurations and cropped artwork. Others have tried to zoom from panel to panel, but then you lose the “page as a whole” design the artist intended and again miss out on some of the artwork.

3) Technology – Anyone who has tried to download and read a digital comic knows it takes a lot of time and processing power. It’s kind of a buzz kill waiting and waiting and waiting only to have the comic crash.

4) Price - Digital comics are currently sold for between 99 cents and $1.99. I’m not sure these are the right prices, being a creator and seller of digital comics myself. At 99 cents you don’t make enough profit to sustain or grow the business unless every issue is a blockbuster which it won’t be. As a consumer I’m resistant to spend $1.99 on something that isn’t physical and that is hard to read.
Is there anyway to overcome these challenges. Of course!

1) Focus on complete collections over the one “hot” issue. Make having every issue seem as great as that limited first issue going for $40 on eBay. I don’t know how well it will work though. But if people actually read the comics instead of storing them in Mylar, it may.

2) In the 80s it was common for action figures to come packaged with a mini-comic. They were usually aroung 5” x 6.5” and would be easy to read even on a smart phone screen. In Brazil they sell comics in digest sizes with three issues per book. This makes the cost per issue much lower than it is in America, and they have to translate the dialogue anyway so adjusting it for the smaller space has to be done anyway. (In case you haven’t guessed, I’m proposing creating new comics as mini-comics; that way you still get the total effect of the page while maintaining readability. Plus you have fewer panels per page, so there are more pages and it appears to be a better value. Of course, this isn’t helpful for older comics. There is no good solution for those.

3) The technology problem will solve itself as Internet speeds become faster and devices become more powerful. Of course, better coding would speed up the process.

4) $1.50 seems like a good price to me. That’s what I sell a lot of comics at, and they sell as well as the ones I price at 99 cents, but I’m actually making enough money to make it worth my while. Of course, the packaging multiple issues together would allow for lower per issue prices and may be the way to go, especially for long stories that can’t be wrapped up in 22 pages.

I don’t see digital comics ever completely replacing print comics just as digital music hasn’t replaced hard media and eBooks haven’t replaced print books. There are things print can do digital can’t, and if the industry takes advantage of that, then print can have a healthy future.

But I have my doubts they will.