Digital Comics

How has the digital revolution changed the way readers access comic books? Guest host Christian Sager joins the show to talk about digital comics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from dot com.
Hey then, everyone, welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and today I have a special guest host, Christian Saga,
writer and host extraordinaire. He's the guy who tells me
what things I should say on certain videos. Yeah, I

(00:27):
put the words in your mouth on brand stuff and yeah,
sometimes on lots of stuff. I don't know if you've
done want to know what the stuff scripts. So anytime
you see me on video and you think wow, Jonathan
seems in particularly well spoken, it's probably because Christian wrote
the words, Oh, I don't know about that. You add
the words yeah, well I you know, I just make
them up. So that's all it's. But when I asked

(00:49):
Christian if he would come on to the show, you agreed,
and you you know, I gave you the choice, like
can you want? You can pick anything you want that's
tech related, and you came back with something that was
really interesting. Because I know that this is an area
that you have followed quite a bit. I am sort
of only tangentially connected to this. I get a lot

(01:10):
of it through osmosis. I'm talking about digital comics, and
so the the the digital world. The digital um revolution
you might call it, really shook up a lot of
established industries, especially in areas like our own in terms
of content, yeah and everything. We've seen it so many times. Right.

(01:34):
We saw it first and foremost, i'd say, we saw
it with the music industry. UM iTunes was incredibly disruptive.
We saw lots of different companies resist that as much
as they could in various ways, often by putting terrible
DRM onto files, right yeah, which is something we'll talk about.
With digital comics, it's still going through those growing One

(01:58):
nice thing I'll say is that as far as I am,
a where no one in in digital comics has uh
installed d r M that would create a critical vulnerability
in your computer system, unlike what Sony did with their music,
right yeah, I don't think so. I have yet to
hear about anything like that. You know, I wouldn't put

(02:19):
it past some some publishers, right right. I would hope
they wouldn't do it on purpose at least, but uh,
you know, we've also seen it in film, We've seen
in television. We've seen it in publishing in general, with Amazon,
the Kindle and and and the Nook and all of that.
The publishing cure, but now we're seeing it also in
uh in comics. And when I think digital comics, are

(02:43):
two things that come to mind. Either I'm thinking about
comics that are produced digitally and then they may be
printed in hard format or they may be distributed that way,
or just strictly the distribution, and we're really going to
be talking about the disc tribution side today, right, yeah,
And so yeah, like digitally made comics started and probably

(03:06):
like the early nineties, I want to say, but that's
not what we're going to be talking about today. And
in fact, like almost all comics have some kind of
digitally made component nowadays. Pretty much everybody colors digitally now
um and letters digitally as well. But um no, yeah,
we'll be talking about the distribution, and I want to
clarify to that digital comics and web comics are two

(03:29):
different things. Digital comics are comics that you would maybe
find in a print edition, not always there are some
digital first editions, but that are distributed in digital means,
either through an app or PDF, and we'll talk about,
you know, the different means of distribution later. But web
comics are really comics that are hosted on websites and

(03:50):
are meant to be read on a desktop. Yeah. We actually,
way back in the day, tech Stuff did an interview
with Chris Straub, who's a web comics artist, and we
talked about web comics then. So if you guys are
interested in the subject of web comics, check that old
episode of tech Stuff out. But we're really going to
talk about this distribution model and the consuming like how

(04:11):
you consume the comics, right, So it's not just how
how they are distributed, but how the the audience is
able to experience that stuff. And uh, clearly, one of
the big things that has really fueled this is the
move to the mobile platform. I mean, yeah, I know
there are people out there who still will read comics

(04:34):
on their laptops or desktops, but that tends to be uh,
it's not ideal. Difficult. Yeah, when I am When I
was working on my thesis in college, it was about comics,
and I had to read something like three comics for
this thesis and it was before I had a mobile device,
so I was like flipping a laptop on its side

(04:54):
and reading a PDF, uh, like in my lap upside, Yeah,
that's not not ideal because as as you were pointing
out right there, just but from that description, the layout
of a typical monitor is where you've got You've got
that landscape layout rather than portrait. Yeah, and portraits really
what you need to experience a comic book in the

(05:15):
way the format that we're used to here in the
units of print format. Yeah, and and that is something
that both web comics and digital comment comics have and
are experimenting with. Um. There are some digital comics that
are designed specifically for digital and are in landscape format
and have an interesting design and that their panel to

(05:37):
panel transitions. You wouldn't be able to get away with
it in print because they would be so slow, but
like be the same image and all of a sudden
a word balloon would pop up as you scrolled to
the next one. So it's almost like a cross between
very slow animation and uh and and print comics, right right, Yeah,
it's I guess the next step will be interactivity, where

(05:58):
it becomes there there. Yeah yeah, yeah, well yeah, Marvel
is already they're all over it. Every south by Southwest.
They announced all this interactivity stuff that they're gonna embed
into their digital comics over the next year, and then
like half of it happens. I can't I can't wait
to get my hands on it, because I would love
to have the moment where I go on and on
to everybody about how the comics I have manipulated makes

(06:22):
so much sense and they're so consistent internally, and then
after three issues say this is hard. Yeah right, yeah.
If if comments, if comics only had the same comments
fields that our YouTube video has had, I can only
imagine how horrible that, I mean, people would write in
their readers did kill off Jason Todd. So there's there's

(06:43):
some there's some uh, some precedent for that. So now
that we have these mobile devices that are often in
the layout that at least are it can be um modified,
A comic can be modified to fit it, and perhaps
in a way that is closer to the print editions
that were used to in the States. Uh. They we

(07:04):
really started to see the dig digital comics industry kind
of take off, and we'll talk a bit about how
popular they've become. And I love that. In the notes,
By the way, guys, we're gonna be relying heavily on
Christians notes here and and he is an exhaustive note taker.

(07:25):
I I didn't have to lift a finger for this episode,
So I thank you for that. Yeah, no problem, I
mean it helps that, uh I. So I used to
write about comics for CNN before I worked at How
Stuff Works, and I did articles in interviews with people
in the digital comics world as it was sort of
starting up while I was over there, and also self

(07:46):
published my own comics also, and I've worked with digital publishers,
have kind of gone through the system from the back end,
and I understand how it all, the behind the scenes
of it, how it works. In fact, my graphic novel
is currently in queue at Comics Pology. I'm waiting to
try to get that up there for sale. That's fantastic. Yeah,
that's one of the things that's really cool about the

(08:06):
digital approach is that it opens up distribution process for
people who otherwise wouldn't have that access. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, So,
like without getting too far into because we could spend
hours talking about it. Most prit comics in the United
States are distributed through a company called Diamond Distribution, and
a couple of years ago, Diamond made a decision that

(08:29):
they would not distribute books unless they could guarantee that
they would sell I think it was at least I
want to say, fift undred dollars worth of copies, which
doesn't sound like a lot, but for some small press
people really is. And so they lost the ability to
distribute their small press books two stores around the country
unless they were local. Um. So yeah, digital has sort

(08:51):
of replaced that for them, that they can get eyes
all around the world on their books, no matter how
small and unknown they are, and it gives an opportunity
for discovery that wouldn't be there. Uh. And we can
talk more about the potential for discovery, I think towards
the end of this. So the first big one that
we need to talk about. The first big platform for

(09:14):
digital distribution is comics Ology. Uh and uh that's probably
want anyone out there who is familiar with digital comics
you probably probably have this app. Uh. It's it's one
of the most well known and uh, it's been around
for a while in various forms. The earlier ones were
more of a uh, kind of a discovery tool and

(09:35):
then became a digital reader further on in its existence. Yeah,
comics Oology the company, if I'm remembering this correctly, They
started off as sort of like a way to keep
track of the comics that you bought at the store
every week. And also it would allow you to know
what was on the pull drawers at various comic book shops.
So if you were if you were in the market

(09:56):
for a specific issue of a specific comics, you could
go on there check it and they would have a
database there. Essentially they would have all the comics listed
yeah right, yeah, and then giving you the addresses of
course in the stores so you can go find them. Yeah,
but it um. They released their app for digital comics
reading was called just Comics, and and no one that

(10:20):
I know in the comic book world, readers or creators
ever referred to it as comics. They always just called
it comics oology. And I think it was like maybe
a year year and a half ago that they finally
gave up and we're like, all right, find comics Sologna.
We're not going to fight it anymore. Yeah. So they
facilitated more than two hundred million downloads. That's a lot. Yeah, Yeah,

(10:44):
And that's through desktop, tablet, phones, you name it, yea,
through all the different platforms. It does not necessarily mean
two hundred million purchases. We are talking downloads here the
same sort of thing, Like if you ever read a
press release from company that talks about how many units shipped.
Units shipped and units sold are two different things. Uh.

(11:06):
But and Apple says that Comics Oology is the highest
grossing iOS app that is not a game, right, So yeah,
so like stuffitely, candy Crush is obviously like bigger than
Comics Oology. But in terms of content, uh, comics Ology
is killing it on iOS and has been for a
couple of years now, six billion pages of comic books

(11:29):
and graphic novels. I think it's a It's ranked eleventh overall,
or at least it wasn't. And we'll talk later about this,
but uh, comics Ology and their new owners Amazon had
a little bit of a kerfluffle with Apple earlier this year.
So I'd be curious to see at the end of
this year where they stand in those rankings. You know what,

(11:50):
I want to talk about that for a second. So
the kurfuffle you're talking about here is that the way
Apple's policy is is that if you have an app
and you allow in app purchases, Apple takes a cut
of those purchases of the fee. In the case of Comicsology.
I think that's it across the board for Apples, for
any in app purchase, for any app that's in the

(12:11):
Apple Store, Apple gets cut. And I don't know if
you guys know this out there tex stuff Land, but
Apple and Amazon are kind of competitors in many ways,
and uh, generally speaking, if you are producing something or
you're distributing something, you want to be able to get
as big a cut of that as you possibly can.
This also is tough on creators because if you look

(12:34):
at the slice of the pie that creators get from
print versus digital, you would think, oh, well, with print,
you take all those printing costs out, you take all
those shipping costs out, all the physical warehouse space, all
of that is gone. All you have is a file.
You must be breaking in a huge amount. Actually, no,
that's not true, right, Yeah, because you're looking at the

(12:55):
breakdown first between Apple and comics Oology, and then between
comics Ology and the creator. Yeah, and so by the
time you get down to it, it might be that
the creator is actually making less per issue than they
would with a print. That's a possibility, especially because usually
the cost of digital comics is less than it would
be for print. Yeah, and uh, so Apple and Amazon

(13:18):
are kind of butting heads in that sense. So Amazon
is looking at I think they've already done it where
they're uh, you would purchase the comics outside the app,
and then you could read them inside the app. So
they they they modified the comics Ology app. First of all,
Amazon bought Comics Oology, I want to say in March

(13:39):
of the spring, and maybe a month month and a
half later, Comics Oology announced that they were no longer
allowed for in app purchases with within iOS devices. Interestingly enough,
if you're on an Android device, you can still make
an app purchases. Um. Uh, and I would suspect if
you're on a Kindle Fire you probably can as well.

(14:01):
I would imagine it's encourage you. Yeah. Um. But it
basically works the same way as like an Amazon Kindle
app would work on an iOS device. In that like
the same way you can't buy your e books through
the kindle L app. You have to go to Amazon
site by your book and then when you go to
the Kindle app you can download it through your account.
So it works the same way now with comics Ology, right,
So that way they bypass the in app purchase and

(14:24):
Apple doesn't get that cut. So yeah, it will be
really interesting to see how that plays out politically, because
Apple could say, well, we'll just make sure that this
doesn't get featured in any way, so that exactly, it's
not that we might not necessarily remove it from the store,
but we don't have to, you know, we don't have
to profile it in the store either. And there are

(14:44):
a lot of people in the comic book world who
were up in arms about it when it happened as well,
because they felt like that the in app purchases allowed
for more sort of um, compulsive buying or impulsive rather buying. Uh,
while you were reading, like let's say you finished Holk
number twelve and you said, wow, I immediately want to

(15:04):
read Hulk number thirteen. All you have to do is
just hit a button and it would it would charge
your credit card. Yeah, totally, And now you have to,
you know, go to to the desktop version, pay for
it there, and then download it in. So they're worried.
I think they're worried about the money, but I'll be
I'm very curious to see what the figures look like,

(15:25):
because numbers were very high. Ninety million dollars digital comics made,
which was almost a thirty percent increase over the year
before that. If you look at year over year gains,
it looks the story seems to be negative if you
were to just look at the percentages, and it's only

(15:45):
because you don't realize how young this industry is. So
from year one to year two it was a seven increase,
and then you have like a two hundred something percent increase,
and then a hundred something percent an increase, and now
a thirty percent increase, and you think, wait, that increase
is going down, But you have to realize that that
year one that was like a million dollars and year
two was eight million dollars. So the figures, while while

(16:08):
the percentages are going down, the actual figures of money
are are much higher. We're talking ninety million. Now, that's
a huge amount of money for something that's still so
young as this this particular form of distribution, and it's
still a smaller percentage than print holds in the industry,
but it is gaining. At the end of every year,

(16:30):
when you see interviews with comic book creators or publishers
or editors and they say, you know, they're asked what
their prediction is for the following year. They usually say
digital is going to get bigger and it and it
always does, right. And the nice thing for for the
comics industry right now is that it does not appear
to be taking a huge like it's not taking that
chunk out of the print side. I think that for

(16:52):
one thing, the success of comics and other forms of media.
And granted, you know we should say comics are go
well beyond superheroes. Superheroes is what we always think about
because they are the high profile ones, but comics are
all sorts of genres, not just superheroes. But I would
say that the superhero successes at the box office recently

(17:15):
Marvel in particular, have really helped drive more interest in
comic books. UM yeah, And and interestingly enough digital has
had a hand in that as well too, So like,
for instance, UM, Guardians of the Galaxy just I think
I read today it just hit seven hundred million dollars
for for sales in UM. Before Guardians of the Galaxy

(17:38):
came out, they Marvel knew that that property was fairly
unknown amongst people unless they were like hardcore comic book fans,
and so through digital they started publishing digital first only
comics about the characters about Rocket Raccoon and Groot and
star Lord, trying to get people familiar with these characters
for they were either free or like super cheap likes

(18:02):
or something like that. So you would go, huh, I
heard this, Guardians the Galaxy thing's gonna come out later
this year. I'll click on that. Read that, and now
I sort of have an idea of who this raccoon
with machine guns is right going to the movie. Yeah, now,
and now I can understand how a raccoon can be
an action hero, right yeah? Yeah uh. And another interesting
note you have here going back to comics Ology is

(18:23):
the comics Ology Submit program, which allows the the independent
comics creators a chance at having their work featured and
carried by comics Ology. Yeah, so comics Oology Submit. I
think they unveiled that to two and a half years ago.
It was it was at a south By Southwest event. Um.
And yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier in

(18:45):
terms of small press being able to find a place
to distribute their comics since Diamond h raised their premiums Um. Yeah,
so basically what you do, I've done it with one
of my books. You submit your book, you upload the files,
you um create an account through comics Ology. You have
to have a an Amazon sinked payments account of course. Uh,

(19:08):
it's kind so far. Yeah, it is. It's a lot
like that, and um, they will review it and determine
whether or not the content is safe for them to distribute.
So um. For instance, Uh, one of my books actually
got ding for music copyright because we had lyrics from
a song in there, and so we haven't resolved that yet.

(19:28):
But for instance, they wouldn't carry a book for that.
But like I have a horror book that made it through.
It's pretty it's pretty gory, and they're okay with that. Um,
they format it specifically for their devices because they have
a specialized I guess it's exclusive to comics Oology system
of reading called guided view technology, which is basically it

(19:50):
zooms in on the panels no matter what you're on,
if you're on a desktop or tablet or a phone
or whatever. It scales the panel to fit the screen
of the device you're reading at the time, so it's
it's readable and you can go panel by panel as
opposed to page by page exactly. Yeah, I read a
person's account of that, and they said it took some
getting used to it first. It felt a little odd,

(20:12):
just because you know, there's there's a certain way that
you've become accustomed to reading comics. But once you get
used to it, you really see the value in it. Yeah,
I am definitely a convert. Um. I love Guided You, Um,
not just because comics Oology carries some of my books,
but I love Guided You because it zooms in so
close on the panels that I can really see almost

(20:34):
at life size, the artists renderings of how they're working
on stuff. Usually artists work at a much larger scale
than what's printed, and so you get to see it
at the scale that they were drawing it at, and
the fine details that you normally wouldn't notice. And I
really like that, um, and the it is it is interesting.
It sort of changes the language of comics if you're

(20:55):
talking about it in like a formalist perspective, because before,
when you're reading common because you were looking at all
the panels on a page simultaneously, but you were reading
the panels in sequential order, whereas now, depending on the
settings that you put in in in guided view, you'll
just see the first panel, and I'll scroll those second
panels so you won't necessarily see what's at the bottom

(21:17):
of the page that you want to. So you could,
in theory, as a creator, you could you could bank
on certain things actually being a surprise without it having
without requiring a page flip. Right, Yeah, like if you
write exactly what you used to have as page turn
cliff hangers, what you can now do within panel to
panel if you if you so choose, that's really cool

(21:39):
us as a storyteller, I really think that's neat to
give extra tools like that. So we've got some other
ones that you've listed here that we can kind of
mention some of the other platforms, some of which were
instrumental early on but never really stuck around someone, which
are still around today. So why don't we go through
some of those. Okay, So let's start with long Box,

(22:01):
which was created by a comic book creator named I
think he pronounced his name Rance Hoseley. He is most
known for being the editor of It's a book called
Comic Book Tattoo that was a compilation of comic book
stories based on Torre Amos songs, but he's done other
comics work. For a number of years now. He developed

(22:24):
the idea for long Box back in two thousands and seven,
and I remember being I was at the Hero's Con
convention in North Carolina pushing my books and he had
he had just done a panel about long Box, and
everybody who went to that panel came running down to
the floor and they're like, Oh my god, this is
going to be the next big thing, this is going
to be the big break for books. We've all got

(22:45):
to sign up with this guy. And then it completely flopped. Um,
it just I don't know if it was technology issues
or business related issues or what, but long Box didn't
come out at a pace that was competitive enough, competitive
enough with comics ology, and it was largely focused on

(23:06):
desktop reading rather than mobile and tablet reading. So I
think in the end that is probably what killed it.
Uh and and and it's I think he ceased running
it as a company in and in two thousand seven.
That's the year when the iPhone came out. So, I mean,
no one was predicting the huge move to mobile at
that time because there there had not been a smartphone

(23:28):
to take off, at least in the United States and
the consumer marketplace. I mean, you had executives running around
with blackberries, and that was and nobody was thinking about
reading comics on their BlackBerry and so. And then of
course the iPad, Like there had been tablet computers before,
but no one had made one that really appealed to
the general consumer. That iPad wouldn't come out until two

(23:50):
and when the iPad came out, comics Ology was already
in business. But I remember then too, When the iPad
came out, a lot of people were like, Oh, this
is going to kill print because everybody's going to move
to digital. They're going to prefer the tablet and not
having to have you know, actual physical lung boxes stacked

(24:10):
up in their basement or their closets somewhere, just having
their comics backed up on a hard drive. But that
hasn't necessarily happened yet. Most digital readers still read print. Yeah,
you can't really dismiss the like there are people who
really enjoy collecting, like they love to have the physical collection,
the physical representation of the thing they love. There's an

(24:31):
emotional attachment to that. Same thing is true for people
who really love books. There are people who will argue
till the end of time that a physical book is
going to be a superior experience than having something digital.
I used to be one of those people. Then I
moved into a house that has less space, and now
I trumpet the value of the electronic format. Yeah. I

(24:52):
actually moved completely digital with my comics other than uh
like hard bound ex exclusive editions that I can't download
onto my device. Uh but yeah, about two years ago,
I used to get all my comics through direct mail,
and then I did the math and it turned out
that it was going to be cheaper and faster for

(25:13):
me to get them digitally and I wasn't going to
have to fill up my closet anymore with all these
books on the shelf. Right. The downside being that you
can't uh one day end up selling your your collection
for something that Yeah. Yeah, even with some of the
DRM stuff that we'll talk about later, I doubt that
any of my the PDFs of my comments are going

(25:36):
to sell for anything. So another one that we have
here is Graphically. Yeah. Graphically is a really interesting company,
and again I had personal experience with them. They carried
a book of mine as well. Was started by a
guy named Michael Baldwin, who is largely known as the
guy who coined hashtag follow Friday on Twitter. But he um,

(26:00):
I've had some conversations with him, especially when I was
working with graphically and for distributing my book, and he's
he's a really cool guy, but he sees himself as
sort of like a startup mentor and helps out other startups. Graphically. Um.
They again weren't really able to compete with comics Ology
in terms of the publishers that they were getting exclusive

(26:20):
rights to and how the their comics were read, the
actual consumption of the product. So in April of uh,
they emailed all of their creators and I received this
email and said, Hey, we are turning into an e
book company instead, and so what we're gonna do now is,
rather than have a digital comics platform for devices, we're

(26:42):
going to offer distributing your comics to all of the
more popular e book platforms. So kindle, Uh, Cobo, is
Cobo even still around? I don't know that it's still around,
but I do remember it. Yeah, Cobo. They did Nook,
Google and iTunes, obviously, and so if you are already
one of their partners, they automatically did that for you.

(27:04):
But if you wanted to submit a new book. You
would pay a fee, you'd get an I sp N number,
and they would distribute it to those uh different systems.
That didn't work out so well for them. They tried
to sort of market it as a children's book market
rather than comics, and that didn't really work out for them,
and in May of this year they closed their doors. Uh.

(27:25):
The stories that I've heard are that, uh, they weren't
acquired by this company, but that six of their remaining
employees were hired by a company called Blurb that specializes
in print on demand books and then uh, sadly some
of the creators have been kind of left out. Yeah,
there have been uh a number of complaints that creators

(27:48):
who were expecting payment from Graphically never saw a check
show up in their bank account or their direct deposits
show up four books that they sold through graphic And
this this is kind of it's sort of a microcosm
of what you saw with the dot com bubble verse too.
You see like a flood of competitors and then h well,

(28:08):
with the dot com bubble, it was just suddenly confidence
totally was pulled away from the entire industry. Yeah, I mean,
in the same way iTunes rose to the top of
the MP three game. I would say that Comxology has
sort of carved itself out, you know, a niche for
for comic digital comics. Yeah. I like that you have
i Verse here because of course they they distribute my

(28:31):
favorite comic of all time, Archie. Yeah. Yeah, Archie comics
are getting to be awesome. Man, Like, there's been some
really cool stuff that's been happening in the Archie universe lately.
Like they have this horror book called Afterlife with Archie
that is just I love this stuff. But yeah, I
remember hearing about the one about like looking into the future,
and uh yeah, there's some pretty crazy stuff. Yeah, they've

(28:53):
been doing some really kind of progressive, interesting stuff with Archie.
But yeah, because you would not have predicted. No, it's
not the past of arch comics. Yeah, but yeah, they're
exclusively distributed through I Verse and their app is called
Comics Plus and I Versus another one that had difficulty
competing with Comics Ology. They haven't closed their doors yet,

(29:13):
and really like they're the niche that they're trying to
make for themselves right now is that they want to
distribute comics to libraries as um the same way that
like Overdrive distributes e books to libraries, and so they've
made a library edition of their app and their marketing
themselves pretty heavily to the library world. So we'll see

(29:34):
if if that play is out or not. A lot
of it's gonna depend on licensing with their publishers. Then
you've got dark Horse where they have their own app. Yeah,
dark Horse is interesting and that unlike a lot of
other companies who all just signed on with comics Ology
or i vers or graphically, dark Horse said hold up,
we're not going to just jump into this digital comics game.

(29:54):
And they waited and developed their own app. So again
they're not having to split person scentage write that distributor
there because they own the huge chunk of it. Yeah. Yeah,
And the interesting thing there is that, you know, this
is one of those deals that makes it tough to
be a consumer in the sense that you can't go
to a one stop shop and get all the things

(30:14):
you want. You have to have multiple apps. If you
are a true connoiseur of comics and you like lots
of titles across lots of publishers, it makes it more complicated,
like with reading the comics themselves. You have to really
be aware of the landscape and the almost continuity of
of where to get digital comics, yeah, because they're kind

(30:36):
of all over the place right now. Then you've got
Electric Comics that was just announced this year and they
haven't actually, as far as I know, distributed or produced anything.
But it's the claim to fame is that Alan Moore,
who you know wrote Watchmen and From Hell and Leak
of Extraordinary Gentleman, is widely regarded as one of the

(30:56):
best writers of comics. He is part of the team
that is putting together Electrocomics, along with his daughter Leah
Moore and her husband John Reppiano. And then we've got
this self published category here. Yeah. So some people have
decided that rather than sign on with comicsz Oology or

(31:17):
or any of these other distribution services, that what they'll
do is they'll put out their own comics, but they'll
do it as PDFs and uh. It's sort of like
the Radiohead model of distributing an album digitally. Uh. And
the the two guys who are really at the forefront
of this are Brian Cavan and Marcos Martine, who produce

(31:39):
a book called The Private Eye and their Their digital
distribution company is called Panel Syndicate. And so these are
d M free, DRM free downloads of their books. You
choose how much you pay for them, which is an
interesting model as well. And uh and basically you can
do whatever you want with the PDF. Once you've downloaded,

(32:00):
you can also get Sorry, there are other formats too.
I mean I primarily read PDFs, but there's CBZ, which
is a comics reader type type software. Yeah, it's it's
really interesting because it does display both sides of the
democratization of the web. Yeah. And but I would say this,
like with radio Head, the reason why these guys are

(32:23):
able to succeed is because they're both already big names
in the world of comics. Brian Kavon wrote for Lost
and like, uh, you know is uh it was fairly
successful with the books that he wrote for Marvel and
independently and is still writing. He still he writes an
independent book for Image right now called Saga that's incredibly successful. Uh.

(32:44):
And we'll talk about that later. Actually Saga actually ties
into some of those digital comics uh stuff. But the
thing that's really interesting about the Private Eye this is
like maybe only a month ago, is they announced that
they had made Uh they were vague about it, but
they said six figures in terms of dollars that they've
made off of their book and a number of downloads,

(33:06):
which is pretty big for an independent comic book. Well, yeah,
especially if you're with such a you know, dramatic different
approach to pricing. I mean the fact that it's one
of those things that that you the cynic immediately thinks.
So everyone's just gonna go for the lowest amount of

(33:28):
or they'll wait till they'll they'll they'll give their friend
a nickel and then the friend downloads in since it's
CRM free, that just copy. But that's not what we're seeing,
which is great. Um. I also like that it is
a great illustration, Like you point out, you know, these
are guys who are known, so the average creator is
not necessarily going to see any kind of success on

(33:49):
the same level as what they saw. And also it
shows that, um, you know, you can try and go
it alone, but it is often a lot easier if
you're using an established platform. We see this across all
sorts of media as well. YouTube is a great example. Right,
I could create my own video web video stuff, not
use YouTube but that's where the audience is, and that's

(34:12):
that's where I'm going to get the most eyes. Um.
And it's also they've already done a lot of the
work for me, so sure if I have I try
to monetize it, they're going to take a cut. Yeah,
And they have a pre built in monetization system where
the Brian Cavan and Marcos Martin are having to do
their own books on this too. I would assume or
pay somebody to do it right, right, which is another

(34:33):
that's another expense and another another thing that you're accountable for. Yeah.
Then we've got Marvel Unlimited. Yeah, so Marvel. Both Marvel
and d c uh distribute their comics through Comics, Oology
and other platforms. But Marvel has this thing called Marvel Unlimited,
which I'm a subscriber to. I just subscribed in the
last couple of months and I've been enjoying it. It's

(34:54):
ten dollars a month and you get access to almost
their entire lie very up to six months ago of publications.
So you don't get comics that have been printed in
the last six months, but everything before that. Um, there's
some obscure stuff that isn't in there. If you're really
hunting down for some weird comic Marvel published in or

(35:16):
something like that, you might not find it, but there
is a lot of content in there. And you know,
if you factor in that, like the average print comic
cost nowadays, uh, if you just read three books on
Marvel Unlimited a month, it's worth your money, right. Yeah,
it's interesting. I've seen. One of the biggest criticisms I've

(35:36):
seen toward digital comics is not any sort of limitation
that is due to the technology. It's that you actually
have the the potential to have and entire backlog available
for purchase. So for those so those folks who want

(35:57):
the complete collection of a title, uh, you know, it
may be prohibitively expensive or impractical for them to do
that with a print edition, and they may be they
may just want to have I just want this full story,
I want this character arc, or I want this uh
incredible storyline that that went through multiple issues from beginning

(36:18):
to end, and I can't find it in the physical format,
or if I do, you know, one of those issues
is ridiculously expensive. So item type stuff. Sure, yeah, So
this would be the opportunity for companies to actually continue
to make money off of old I p they have
in ellectual property that they have um, Because for the

(36:40):
most part, if you're going out to a comic bookstore
and you see a copy of a comic that you
really wanted and it happens to be a few hundred dollars,
here's the news flash. That few hundred dollars is not
going to the company published it. So this is a
way for them to actually make money off of stuff
they've already made aid um. I imagine that the rights

(37:02):
issues are probably pretty complicated with that too, depending upon
how the contracts were formed for the various writers and artists.
That is a story all on its own. For the
comics world. That would be a whole another public podcast. Yeah,
we probably a whole another show exactly, not an episode
that would be we could do comics stuff and have
just a and and arc episodes that all talked about

(37:25):
the complicated contract issues that have plagued the comics industry.
And as we're recording this last week, the Curbya States
settled with Marvel actually, which is pretty historic. Yeah, that
was one of those big stories for a really long time.
So this is uh, you know, it's not a huge
shock to me that the entire backlog is not available.

(37:46):
It is the dream right to have that that access
where you can suddenly say, like I've always been scared
to ask people, but now I can finally find out
what Secret Wars really was all about. Yeah, yeah, there
you go. Well it's very timely. They just announced this
week that there's another Secret Wars. They're doing a third one.
It would be the third one, right, they're not going

(38:07):
to call it Secret Wars three. I think it's just
being called Secret Wars. But yeah, at least that's if
they're bringing the Beyond Her back. I'm happy. Yeah, at
any rate. Well, so we talked a bit about the pricing.
The pricing can range from around the same price as
what you would find for the print book. Sometimes you'll
find it cheaper um. And we also talked about how
with the platform taking a cut and the distributor taking

(38:30):
a cut, and the creators getting a small cut, sometimes
a small cut, that it can sometimes be less profitable
for a creator than the print depending upon the actual
how that all falls out. Sure, And I will say
this though too, that like once you've put your book
on a platform, uh, there aren't costs involved. Actually for you,

(38:53):
you don't have to pay comics Ology to put your
book on their platform yet across your fingers. They just
take a cut of what you make, right exactly. Yeah,
so uh yeah, Like, for instance, my book that's on
there right now, I think I made like forty cents
off of it, like last quarter or something. I've I've
seen my dad's a writer. I've seen royalty checks about that.

(39:16):
So yeah, yeah, so I mean I'm not living off
of it, but at least people are reading it. But
the neat thing is that, you know, while you could
say the cut for a creator is smaller, the potential
audience is larger. Like the fact that you know you're
gonna find comic book stores that aren't going to carry
certain titles just because they figure that they're the readers

(39:38):
aren't that interested, or maybe they've only ordered a few
copies of them and therefore there's not a whole lot
for Yeah, that's definitely true. Um. There is some regulation
about what kind of comics can be distributed through comics ologies,
app um, but that is mostly content graphic violence or

(39:59):
sexuality stuff like that. But yeah, independent small press stuff
is in there just as much as Wolverine and Secret
Wars or whatever big you know, Superman, uh title that
you can think of, and they're by and large. Yeah,
you could say that it's an equal playing field, but uh,

(40:23):
those companies have part you know, handshake deals with comics Ology.
They're featured in the the really like hot click areas
on the site or on the app, and uh and
they also have great sales. Every Monday, Marvel does a
sale where some Marvel series is cents a book or

(40:44):
something like that. And pretty much every weekend there's a
big sale from a number of publishers. And what's what's
interesting there to me? As well as that, uh, you know,
we could we could see a lot of implementation of
especially now that Amazon has Comics Oology, seeing more implementation
of the sort of algorithms Amazon uses to suggest alternate

(41:07):
or additional titles, things that you would like based upon
the stuff that you already have shown an interest in. Yeah,
Comics Oology did do that and does do that. I
think it's going to get better as part of their acquisition.
And that's fantastic that that becomes a discovery tool. I mean,
discoveries like the big thing for a lot of different
apps out there, and you know, it was a real

(41:29):
buzzword for a while, but it's generally one of those
things that I rely upon, like whether it's Netflix, Amazon, whatever.
Pandora is a great example of of me discovering stuff
I did not know about. But because of my my
viewing habits or my consumption habits, I am I am
almost guaranteed to enjoy. So. And one of the things

(41:51):
that's really uh unique about digital comics as well, at
least in theory, is that we know that there is
a stigma for certain readers of walking into a comic
bookstore and buying a comic book, uh, and that they,
for whatever reason it is, they may feel uncomfortable about
doing that or and and and for that reason maybe

(42:13):
quit reading comics years ago. With digital comics, you don't
have that stigma because you're just sitting on your device.
And so in theory, we're getting back an audience A
large part of that, and I mean, you know, we're
we're kind of we were dancing around it right there,
but a large part that is the female audience. Yeah,
oh definitely, yeah, um they right, you see all kinds

(42:35):
of One of my favorite sites that focuses on comics
and sci fi popular culture is the Mary Sue, and
it focuses on it from a female perspective. Uh, and yes,
they often joke about the ideas of what it's like
to be a woman going into a comic book store, Um, like, oh,
you're buying this for your boyfriend. Yeah, and sometimes those

(42:56):
are stereotypical, and sometimes they are. It depends on your
local comic book store. Yeah, it depends on the culture
and environment that they build there. But yeah, yeah, a
lot of it is based more on on kind of
the generalized idea of what a comic store is. I mean,
we've we've seen that depiction multiple times in various forms
of media. There's obviously like the comic book guy from
the Simpsons. Yeah, exactly, that stereotype right there. Yeah, I've

(43:19):
actually been in those comic stores though, so yeah, that
was back in the eighties. Maybe they're a little better
than that now that We've got a couple of comic
bookstores in Atlanta that I've seen, uh, that seemed to
be pretty cool about that sort of thing. Atlanta has
a decent comic book community, both in terms of creators
and and uh retailers. Yeah, I wanted to talk about

(43:40):
this regulation issue that you've you've laid out in the notes,
because it is really interesting. It's one of those things that, uh,
when you first think about, you would think, oh, the
digital approach would be something that would free you up
from the restrictions that you might face in a brick
and mortar store. But that's not necessarily the case, right,
especially when you're working together with big companies like Apple.

(44:05):
Um So, Apple is very careful about what goes into
their ecosystem. Um I think most tech stuff listeners are
probably aware of that and how controlled the environment is
in terms of what apps you can download and what
contents of And what's interesting is that they don't necessarily
publish what the criteria are exactly. So it's kind of

(44:29):
like submitting a film to the m p A. A
don't you can never be sure if you're going to
get that hard are if you're gonna get a PG
thirteen that sort of thing. In a similar way with
the Apple app store, you don't you don't necessarily know
you know what things are going to be, uh, what
things are just gonna glide on by, or what things

(44:49):
are going to hit at a brick wall. It does
It really depends. And so what's interesting is that yes, Um,
comics Ology was reluctant to distribute some material for a
while and then UM back to this Brian Cavan, who
is a pretty well known guy and has a popular
book called Saga. In April, Saga number twelve came out

(45:13):
and it had a very small scene in it you
would you would miss it if you blinked um of
gay sex between two characters, and it was pulled out
of the comics Oology store the day that it was released.
People were furious about it, people meet being readers, I

(45:34):
mean m Brian Cavan himself issued a statement about it
and and thought that it was Apple, that it was
because of Apple's censorship. It turned out that actually what
was happening was that comics Ology, in anticipation of Apple's policies,
were doing their own presensoring before they were submitting stuff.
And so they saw that in the issue and they

(45:55):
said there's no way that's going to get past Apple,
and they didn't bother submitting it. And then I think
like within two or three days this admitted to Apple
and it was up in the store and everything was forgotten.
But it's one of those things where because of Apple's
reputation of the way they handle things in the App store,
I mean Comics Oology. When you look at it, it's
handling titles from so many different publishers. It's I mean,

(46:18):
this is a big business thing. If this were something
where suddenly the Comics Oology app was was discontinued in
the Apple Store, that would be catastrophic. So you can
understand a year catastrophy, you can. You can understand there
there there the way why they were being so conservative
in that sense, although certainly some communication from Comics Oology

(46:42):
might have been merited, I suspect that since then, so
that was over a year ago, that they have developed
a much better line of communication between their publishers and
themselves regarding content like that. But that said, there is
still content that's produced by fairly big publishers like Image Comics,
who were the publisher of Saga, that you cannot buy

(47:02):
in app through you know, you can't buy anything in
app anymore through iOS, but through Android or other devices.
Um so, like there's a book that's by Matt Fraction
and a guy named chips at are Ski called Sex Criminals,
has been pretty popular in the last year or two,
and a couple of those issues have been banned from

(47:23):
the the in app purchases. But if you go to
their actual site, comics Oologies actual site, you can purchase
them there and then download them later touch. It's just
not one that you can get buy directly from the
mobile device anymore. Well, uh one or the other. We
mentioned the idea of DRM as well. How how that's

(47:44):
a big issue. I mean, that's a big issue with
any kind of media that's distributed over the Internet. U.
There are of course outlets that are putting out files
d r M free so that you don't have any
restriction there. That seems to as a consumer, you want
that because it means that you have the freedom to
enjoy the content in whatever way you choose. UM. For example,

(48:06):
you know, I've got a smartphone, I've got a tablet,
I've got a laptop, I've got a desktop, and uh,
I want you know, I'm not I don't have a
big household, i don't have other people living with me
other than my wife. So it's really just gonna be
me looking at whatever the content is, and I want
to be able to do it wherever. However, from a
creator standpoint, a distributor standpoint. I totally understand the reticence

(48:29):
to allow someone to do whatever they want with it,
because what if I'm the guy who I live in
a college dorm and I've got this thing, and now
all the buddies that I have in my dorm, not
just my dorm room, but my entire dorm now have
it too, because I've made copies for them. That's the fear. Um.
As it turns out, the music industry kind of bore

(48:50):
this out. If you make something easy enough to purchase,
and you make it easy enough to consume, people purchase
it in the consume it and the the number of
pirates who are actually illegally stealing stuff is relatively low.
I mean that's a small number comparatively speaking. Yeah, it's
and it's shrinking too. Um. Piracy and comics was a

(49:13):
big deal before digital comics were, uh, you know, coming
around in two thousand and seven, because pirates comic pirates,
that's a weird word to say, but they were scanning
the pages in and then making their own PDF or
CBC files, distributing on the torrents and such. Uh but

(49:33):
so and and there was concern over that and how
that was going to affect the print industry. But you know,
everybody's still here. Um, But yeah, I mean, I'm sure
you could go online right now and still find a
bunch of piracy sites. However, Um, you're right in that
digital comics and the ease of purchasing it and the
better reading experience that you get through it. You don't

(49:55):
have to worry about getting a virus. Yeah, which is
another big deal that that actually is true for all
of the media as well. Yeah. I think I think
it's only when you see the resistance from the the
merchants side, or the distributor or the creator side. It's
only then when you start to see the rise and
piracy because people start to feel like there's no legitimate
way for them to get the thing they want, but

(50:15):
they still want that thing. There's actually a really cool story,
and I didn't put this in the notes, but I'd
love to tell it to you. So there's a guy
named Steve Lieber who is a comic book artust. He
lives in Portland, and he worked on an independent book
called Underground with a writer named Jeff Parker. And when
their book came out in trade format, Steve realized that

(50:37):
on four Chan people were distributing links to pirated versions
of Underground, and instead of getting upset and yelling at them,
what he did was he went over and he started
interacting with the community there and engaging with them and saying, oh, hey, like,
you know, I just like you to know, like, the
way that this book works out is that this is

(50:59):
how we you know, this is how I make my
money off of it. This is how I make my living.
Here's the breakdown. He talked about that traditional breakdown of
money between publisher and distributor and creator to them, and
Underground saw this huge spike in orders on Amazon that month.
I mean it was tremendous. The people said, oh cool,

(51:22):
we get it. This guy, you know, needs to make
a living off this stuff. We like his content, and
they went and paid money for it. Yeah. I've seen
that kind of story repeated in various forms of media.
And now where these days, like in other kinds of media,
you're seeing patron Patreon, and patrons and Patreon are supporting
directly supporting the folks who are making the stuff that

(51:43):
they love. And I'm a Patreon supporter of a couple
of different things. Yeah, I am too. Yeah, yeah, and
so we're starting to see that there really is this
this model there. The thing that needed to be there
was the support system for it to happen exactly, and
once it was there, it did. So it's interesting because
you had the companies vilifying consumers and the consumers vilifying

(52:05):
the companies, and then once the structure was there, everyone said, oh,
now we can work together, we can actually do exactly
and it turns out that it's ninety million dollars a
year worth of business. Yes. Now, to conclude this great,
great conversation, we have to bring up something that kind
of shows the the vulnerability of the comics ology approach.

(52:26):
I'm specifically talking about an event that happened back in
March two thousand thirteen, the beginning of South By Southwest,
when Marvel decided to do a big event by giving
away seven hundred first issues. Uh, and it turned out
some people wanted them. Yeah, a lot of people like
those Marvel comics, and everybody tried to download all seven

(52:50):
hundred of them all at the same time. Christian, let
me ask you something. When a huge number of people
try to access a limited amount of information on a
limited number of servers, what typically happens. Well, it crashed. Yeah. Um,
and it was not just the Marvel comics that were
for free that crashed, but all of the comics available

(53:13):
on comics Ology in total, which included the Comics Oology
Submit books that had launched also to by Southwest. So
there are a lot of independent creators who were like
I already have a hard enough time competing with Wolverine
and spider Man for dollars, but now because they did

(53:33):
this big giveaway, I think Comics Oology was shut down
for like three days, I want to say, and this
is this really goes to show the vulnerability of having
a cloud based kind of approach to anything. So people
even who had purchased stuff already, we're having trouble accessing things.
I couldn't access things. Yeah, and that's part of the
DRM thing too. That's been big with comic Xology this

(53:54):
year is that a lot of people argued against digital
comics for a while because, as they said, well, at
the end of the day, you're just renting your comics,
You're not you don't own them. You don't own a
file that you can turn to. It's off in the
clouds somewhere, and in the last year, Comics Oology is
twice i think, made announcements that a number of publishers

(54:15):
have gone DRM free, so you can actually download the
file as opposed to just accessing the po Yeah. I
mean I'm in the process of back downloading my entire
archive onto like one terabyte hard drive at my house
right now. Um. Yeah, I mean. The the beauty of
the cloud is that it allows you to to access
your content on whatever device you know that has been

(54:37):
authorized for it, wherever you are. That's the beauty. The
downside is that if the cloud service goes down, you
don't have access to that material. And uh, in fact,
a very similar thing we can mention. Uh, there was
a day, I think it was Tuesday, um, where Google
Docs had some issues earlier in the day and suddenly
we couldn't access Google Docs. And a lot of us

(54:58):
are using Google Docs now to help create show notes
like what we're doing right, and then suddenly you don't
have access to that and you realize this is a
brilliant tool until it doesn't work. Yeah. And and I
think we all have this kind of magical idea that
a company as big as Google could ever possibly crash,
but it happens, It does happen. It's it's again, you know,

(55:19):
not to put too much of a negative on cloud computing,
because obviously the same sort of problems can happen on
a single machine. If I had if I had all
these notes just stored on my computer and my computer crash,
I'd be just as you know, out of luck. Or
also like if a brick and mortar store said we're
gonna give away seven marble issues every person who walks

(55:39):
in the door, you know, like there'd be so many
people inside the store if it might fall over, the
same sort of thing, with the same sort of thing,
with a brick and mortar store saying we're not going
to carry this title because we object to the content exactly.
It's it's the sort of thing that does happen. So
when it happens digitally, we tend to react in a

(55:59):
very specific way. But if you think of it like, well,
what if we just had, you know, translate this into
an actual physical location, would we be as surprised if
it happened there? And often the answer is no, it's
just that we see that they think there's a different
set of criteria to judge the digital experience from the
physical it is that I want it now sort of

(56:20):
mentality that we've become accustomed to with our content is
the fact that the fact that digital can allow you
to have it now is you know, it'sn't like we
said and enabling. If I'm trying to watch Netflix and
the rings starts spinning ten minutes into a movie that
I'm watching, I get frustrated. At the same time, I
have to acknowledge, you know what, like there's how many
customers as Netflix have out there, and maybe my bandwidth

(56:43):
isn't so great or something. Yeah, I usually I just
get mad at my internet service provider. Yeah, that's a
common thing at my house. Well, Christian, thank you so
much for coming on the show and for suggesting this
this topic. It was really cool to get into this.
And uh, for people who are interested in learning more
about your work, why don't you tell them where to

(57:04):
find it? Yeah, the best place to find me is
at Christian Sager dot tumbler dot com. That's where my
personal work is posted, um, the comics stuff that I
work on, and also I have links to the content
that I work on here at how Stuff Works. Um,
but you can find me here at how Stuff Works. UM,
I write for and sometimes host brain Stuff. I'm currently

(57:25):
writing for our newest show, What the Stuff, which I
think your first episode debut was while I was on vacation. Yeah,
and I used to write for Stuff of Genius and
host new episodes of Bad, but that shows on hiatus
while we're working on new content. Yeah, but keep your
eyes up and never know when something that we put

(57:46):
on the back shelf comes back up. Well, Christian, thank
you again, and guys, if you have any suggestions for
future episodes of tech Stuff, please get intepted me let
me know what you think. Send me an email. The
address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or brought me a line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler.
The handle it all three of those is tech Stuff
hs W and we'll talk to you again really soon

(58:13):
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