Page 2 is done! This is definitely already a hard process, rewarding though. Creating a page a week is challenging.
Went to Comic-Con with the students today. We started the process of figuring out how we were going to display and setup our booth for The Graphic Novel Project. Saw some awesome artists and talked to some amazing people. I went immediately to buy the new Bob the Angry Flower Book “Rothgar” by Stevn Notley. As always it was a pleasure to talk to him.
I was also pleased to stumble across Jim Calafiore. His work on Marvel’s “Exiles” was nothing short of stellar. I remember loving the way that he captured the campy giant “Rob Liefeld” era muscle look, while actually achieving something spectacular – the comic was as readable as “Preacher” or “Y-The Last Man“. Granted Calafiore did mention that it had a lot to do with good writing, but tell anybody who has tried to draw something by Chris Claremont in the last ten years that. (I am convinced that Claremont was put on Exiles to get it purposefully canceled – but I might be angering the comic gods by saying that!)
We also were able to see a panel on Comics and Digital Media. Jeff Smith was there with representatives from PSP, Apple, Macworld Magazine, and IDW who were all talking about the evolution of comics into a digital media. The panel started as a promo for these companies launching their own digital comic media campaigns. When it came time for audience interaction the panel shifted to very interesting questions regarding Comics competing with pirated comics (like the format “.cbr” popularized for downloading and reading comics off the grid.) It posed some interested questions about how comics would adapt to lessening their resource consumption for print and also the idea of working as an industry to develop a file type like “.cbr” that would be universally recognized. Something in the way of how “.mp3” became a norm in the way of music at the end of the 90′s. The company people seemed to have little to say on the issue, of course, though Smith did talk about how he, as a creator, was ok with embracing changes because he just wants his stories to be accessible to more people.
I would posit that, as we all know, piracy is bad – but it was piracy that forced the big music companies to change and rework their ways. (i.e. the evolution of Napster to the advent of Itunes.) My question is – are the comic companies going to wait to be challenged by the ever increased piracy to their in-comic-shop-sales to start to look to their future in digital media? I am jumping on board now with the webcomics game because it is easy to do. But I am still wary of ever presenting final story-lines digitally because of the whole computer glare issue. I was actually surprised that no one even talked about the possibility of comics moving to e-ink formats or how far off that is as a possibility.
More to come next week as I head off to the great Northeast to attend the summer retreat at the Center for Cartoon Studies!
See you then!
~HeadComic
