Marvel Comics Online Debate

Once again, our good friend and fellow bloggette, Lisa at Sequentially Speaking, has brought up a great discussion on the industry and its future. I am going to post a comment there, asking folks to come here and read this post, because my response is pretty long.

First, go read Lisa's post... back? Okay:

With all due respect, I think she missed some of the key points involved here: first of all, the Internet is the "wave of the future" and there is no getting around that. It's hard for even me to wrap my head around because I have been online for basically 15 years now (if you kind of round-up and include the BBS years [1993-95 or so], which you sort of have to because the Internet simply did not exist in its current form then and BBSes basically were, then, what the Web is now); being online is such a regular routine, such a fixture in my life, that whenever I hear people talking about it being "the next big thing" or whatever, I flashback to the people who were telling me this in 1993, when I was trying to figure out how to set up FrontDoor and write my mailrun.bat to fetch my FidoNet mail for my Renegade BBS. So, what I'm saying is that, in my world, the future is now; discussions and (what are really) retroactive "advances" of this kind continually remind me that I am far ahead of the curve and the rest of the world is still catching up to us nerds.

Still, there is no denying that, regardless of how far behind the majority of the country - or world, in general - may be, more and more people are coming online everyday and young people comprise the majority of this growing audience. Comics have struggled for years to keep up with their changing audience, going through massive changes in the 1980s to gear themselves to an increasingly adult audience (the graphic novel, direct market, more adult-oriented storylines and titles, etc.), then comics changed again in the 1990s within the industry itself (culminating in the creation of Image Comics), and things really leveled-out after that. In the late 1990s through until, roughly, 2-3 years ago, the entire industry and hobby had all but died - the interest just wasn't there, the prices were (and still are) too high, and the market cooled completely. What revived the hobby this time was, of course, the success of the blockbuster movie franchises based on the comics, but even this new interest took several years to really get to the level it's at right now - and it will die right back down in another few years, mark my words.

I constantly say, because I have always heard from old-timers, that "people have been saying comics were dying since the 1930s." So, I don't think comic books in their current form are going anywhere anytime soon, but I know for a fact that most kids today - the ones who would have been drawn to the hobby in past generations - are more drawn to manga, video games, and the Internet in general. There are a lot of mediums and entertainment competing with comics for their attention - and all of this applies to role-playing games and other RPG-related hobbies, too.

All Marvel is trying to do here is reach a wider audience. But webcomics are a form all their own and if Marvel does not actually produce web-specific content as it is supposed to be, this is not going to go very far. Face it: comic books are a medium unto themselves. You can bring them to the screen, you can scan them into a computer, you can feature them in video games, but they never come through the same way because comic books are an entire thing unto themselves. There's the collecting aspect, the history of the characters and their relationships, the very form itself (the feel and smell of the pages, which the new printing format has completely done-away with to the detriment of the hobby), the artwork, the celebrity of the creators - the list goes on; you cannot capture comics as a medium or hobby in any other form, period.

Lisa's observations are insightful and I agree with them, but the real point here is that this is not going to dramatically change the hobby or industry because this is not a new form or medium - it is simply scanning comics into a computer and that isn't going to go far. Have eBooks dramatically changed the printing industry? No, they really haven't. But, in both cases, the Internet itself has cut into general interest in these media, so the publishers are having to try and carve their way into this arena and see what works and what doesn't. As I have been saying for over a decade now, their problem is that they see the Web as nothing more than a means of distribution, instead of as a full-fledged medium in and of itself.

Now, if Marvel decided to do premium online content - actual webcomics, with integrated mediums (art, sound, motion picture, interactivity, etc.) - I still don't think it would significantly alter the hobby, but it would definitely change the industry. Personally, I believe it would accomplish what everyone wants: bringing in more readers and general collectors and hobbyists. But the idea that the Internet is just a distribution method for the traditional medium is outdated and, again, reminds me of how far ahead of the curve we nerds are.