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Michael Roberts
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 14857
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| Posted: 15 April 2013 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | 1
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I don't believe that there will be a total extinction of print media. We humans are tactile creatures, and there's a certain satisfaction with purchasing a physical product that digital products can't provide. And just as you point out, bookstores are useful as showrooms. A spinner rack introduces kids to the very concept and magic of comics. They can then look for comics through other venues, digital or comic specialty shop.
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B&N has maintained a healthy selection of comic book titles that are concurrent with the Direct Market for the last two years, as well as an entire aisle dedicated to trade paperbacks. Doesn't help. Kids have moved on to digital.
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Joe Zhang
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 12857
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| Posted: 15 April 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | 2
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Joe, I'm not sure if you have kids but 5 year olds today know how to use iPads. I'm not even kidding. If anything, the problem is supervising them to control the content they stumble across.
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Indeed, it's the "open web", where virtually anyone can come into contact with one another. The old Bell commercial jingle "reach out and touch someone" takes on a creepy new meaning.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 15 April 2013 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | 3
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Another place comics have made massive gains, on the plus side, is that libraries and bookstores have thousands of options for stocking their shelves that weren't available when I was a kid. If your town doesn't have a comic shop, there's a very good chance that you've at least got a public library (or a school library, at the very minimum), and there's a good chance that it's stocked with manga and graphic novels.
Kids may not be reading Daredevil, but they are devouring books like Smile!, Drama, Mouse Guard, Bone, Naruto, American Born Chinese, Avatar the Last Airbender, Calvin and Hobbes, Pearls Before Swine, and countless others. I barely knew any comics readers at my school, but most of my eight-year-old niece's classmates have at least a few favorite graphic novels, write and draw their own comics, and will have a ton of reading options available to them when they become teenagers. It's not all doom and gloom, folks.
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Felicity Walker
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 February 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 349
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| Posted: 21 April 2013 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | 4
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John Byrne wrote:
Too many COLLECTORS who would suffer seizures at the sight of the books bending forward, crammed into those wire slots!
I worked at 7-Eleven during university and I used to care lovingly for those comics in their wire slots, always having enough comics per slot so they were less likely to bend, but few enough that they would not get creased by the wires. (However, I had no control over how the customers treated the comics!)
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Felicity Walker
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 February 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 349
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| Posted: 21 April 2013 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | 5
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It sounds like the best thing for the comic shops and the industry would be if it could remain forever 1986: just far enough along to allow the explosion of styles and subject matter we saw at the beginning, but not so far along that the successful trends had spiralled into monotony.
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Felicity Walker
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 February 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 349
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| Posted: 21 April 2013 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | 6
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Re: e-comics:
I wonder if at some point the last print comic will have been sold. When that happens, print fans like me will only get new comics when we get old comics at conventions.
I'm old enough (and have experienced enough loss) that I don't feel like I really have something unless I have a permanent, local copy.
For something like a movie, you could argue that a file on my hard drive isn't intrinsically more temporary than a VHS tape or DVD; in either case it's a pattern of energy that requires some form of technology to decode and send to a screen.
Not so with a comic. A paper comic requires no hardware. It's easier to hold and carry than even the lightest tablet. Even with the inflated price of comics today, its entry price point is still lower than a tablet.
On the other hand, the biggest obstacle to digital comics used to be the resolution of the image and the cumbersomeness of the hardware (such as desktop PCs), and that has changed, so carrying a comic collection around on a tablet is now practical.
I'd still find it uncomfortable to read and would prefer the paper version. In another dying print medium--fanzine fandom--the standard answer you get to this is "So, print out the file, if you insist on a dead-tree copy." But that's just not the same as a properly-bound document. And even if you had a magic printer that could produce proper comics, how expensive would paper and colour ink be?
Maybe in some post-scarcity utopian future, tablets the size and weight and texture of a sheet of paper, that can be haphazardly crumpled up and stored in your pocket without damage, will be the answer.
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Clifford Boudreaux
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2012
Posts: 443
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| Posted: 21 April 2013 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | 7
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My eyes have gotten old enough that I find back-lit tablets an absolute god-send. I used to read comics while laying on my back and holding the book above my head, but I'm finding it harder and harder to read in low-light conditions.
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