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Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Crisis on Multiple Morrisons or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love CDispaly
It took Dial B for Blog to remind me that DC basically took the above Animal Man cover and turned it into a book.
Not that I’m complaining. Quite the opposite, I think Grant Morrison should inspire more reprints from Time Warner’s red-headed step-child. If Seven Soldiers is inspired by DC books of the ‘70s then why not some “Spawn of Frankenstein” reprints or some of Kirby’s Demon stuff with good ol’ Klarion? If Seven Soldiers is, as Morrison says in this interview, a “personal hymn to the poetic imagination of Len Wein” then where’s his Phantom Stranger stuff with Jim Aparo (the Stranger did show up in Zantanna)? The previous Multiple Earths did publish Justice League of America #100-102 so there’s a start.
Hell, why stop at real books? Why not comics inspired by the fictional comic book history in Flex Mentello? Perhaps they could create a book for Secret Original from The Filth. Gideon Stargrave (either the early Morrison books or new stuff) anyone?
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From Tom Spurgeon here’s an article on how to deal with internet comics piracy. I say “deal with” instead of “combat against” because the plan isn’t Marvel and DC suing the people behind Z-Cult. They could do that and would succeed in stamping out one place for people to find comics. After that memories of Nick Fury’s enemies HYDRA will come flooding back. If you get rid of one comic book downloading site two more (at least!) will take its place. No, these two behemoths will have to defeat this threat the best way they know how, competing with them on an unfair pitch.
Perhaps Marvel and DC can offer their books on-line, both current and what they can attain from their back catalogue, and offer a far more reliable service than what the black market can. Perhaps they cannot as the reproductions and missing creator credits in some of these books can lead one to believe that these companies don’t have much of a handle on maintaining comics’ history. Current books shouldn’t be as much of a problem, but there is that nasty bit of how this will get paid for.
I know Marvel still offers subscriptions but I don’t remember if DC still does. Even if the latter doesn’t it shouldn’t be too hard to set up one for selling books on-line instead through the mail. Then there’s going for a route not unlike the much referenced iTunes, where one book or a collection can be bought for a far cheaper price than owning a copy you can hold in your hand.
I write about the two major companies that are being affected by piracy fighting it themselves. The nature of both of these companies is that one will do it and then the other will soon follow but do it under a different name. The Litwack article mentions Diamond as a candidate to distribute the books on-line. I don’t know if Diamond would but they might. It would be interesting if another company steps up and competes against Diamond on-line. Considering that someone needs to fight against comic book piracy and Diamond has a policy on cutting off lower selling books someone on-line can very likely kill two birds with one program by offering more than just Marvel and DC through the internet.
Whoever tries to this must learn from the pirates and use a program to read the books like CDispaly. Marvel used .PDF files for their Spider-Man CD-ROMs and that was far less inconvenient compared to what CDisplay offers. If this fight is going to be about offering a better product this will have to be a major point of order.
For more comics piracy read my article in The Comics Journal #269. Hey, that was a shameless plug!
Permanent Link: 11:42 PM |
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